STALIN AND WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN
Simon Seebag Montefiore ‘The Young Stalin’, ‘Stalin 1878 -1939’, ‘Stalin 1939 -1953.’ Phoenix Books
There were protests in Germany a couple of years ago concerning the portrayal of Hitler in the film ‘Downfall.’ Amongst other things in one scene he is seen demonstrating considerable kindness to his nervous new secretarial assistant, Trudy Lange. The problem being that these scenes demonstrated a palpable humanity, something which he was not supposed to possess. In short he is shown to be human. I never understood the protests; it always seemed to me important in attempting to understand a mass murderer such as Hitler to explore all the complexities of his character, even discovering that;
‘Love made him weep his pints like you and me.’
All added to greater knowledge, representing a struggle, an attempt, albeit probably doomed, to gain an understanding of what motivates such monstrous individuals.
Having just finished reading Simon Seebag Montefiore’s three volume biography of Stalin I am not sure how much nearer I am to understanding a psychopathic personality like Stalin, or even if clinical terminology like psychopath is appropriate. Moreover crimes on the scale of Hitler or Stalin require literally thousands if not millions, of accomplices, by the very nature of things they all cannot be fitted into such narrow clinical definitions. What does emerge from these volumes is the reality of a much more complex figure than popular images have allowed. Perhaps one of the, possibly more beautiful, ironies of history is that it is Trotsky’s portrait of Stalin that has lodged in the popular imagination, i.e. a dull witted thug. The reality presented here is much more complex. Stalin was highly intelligent, bi-lingual, very widely read, an accomplished poet in his youth, an autodidact who never stopped studying right up to the time of his death.
He could also be extremely charming. He certainly charmed Churchill and Roosevelt and respecting the latter Stalin seems to have been genuinely very fond of him, was indeed moved by his death. There is a poignant scene toward the end of the third and final volume, Stalin is in his late sixties wondering about the house late at night and discovers a comrade who is unwell lying upon a couch and gently pulls the blanket over his sleeping comrade, tucks him in. A couple of days later he orders the murder, the murder understand not the arrest, of a leading member of the Jewish community, it is intended that this be made to look like a car accident. Pure Chicago, pure Mafia, the act of a common or garden gangster and of course the diligent family man, the genial host, the exuberant life and soul of the party, all aspects of Stalin’s personality, can equally be applied to many of the American gangster set, the characters of Goodfellows or The Godfather. Yet somehow scale changes things.
“When men die like flies, that is how they die,” or as Stalin is supposed to have stated. “One man’s death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” This mirror’s the scene in The Third Man, atop the big wheel Orson Wells looks down upon the moving dots below speculating how easy it would be to stamp them out like ants if each dead ant had a monetary value.
It is supposed that this is what made mass murder possible, you are no longer concerned with individuals but dots on a page, a million here, another million there and pretty soon your talking serious numbers! There may be some truth to that. Certainly Stalin never thought of the ‘Kulaks’ whom he massacred on an industrial scale in anything remotely approaching human terms. However both Stalin and Hitler were perfectly comfortable ordering the murder of close friends and associates or even, in Stalin’s case, members of his extended family. Indeed on being approached by supplicants pleading for the lives of their own loved ones Stalin would indicate that members of his own family circle were suffering in the same way. What could he do?
Both Stalin and Hitler took sadistic pleasure in the suffering they caused; Hitler had the slow murder of the July plotters filmed for his own pleasure. Stalin found accounts of the dying moments of his own former acolytes highly amusing, accounts of them pleading for their lives had him in stches.
At times I found these books uncomfortable reading, like peering into a moral sewer. However if one rules out the existence of the amoral Nietzschean superman one needs to explore ones on psyche, not only to illuminate those aspects of Stalin that exist within oneself but much more importantly to reflect upon the aspects of Bukharin, Zhadnov or one of the innumerable other accomplices of Stalin’s crimes that lurk inside our own psyches. Of course it is nice to imagine that we would be the Andrei Sakharov of the drama rather than the minor snitch or the fearful drawer of curtains of the communal block. The odds however are not good.
Nor is it good enough to heap all responsibility upon Stalin, Lenin was well aware of Stalin’s gangster methods and approved of them and it was Lenin who launched the terror. Trotsky introduced the charming practice of hostage taking and had more than his fair share of blood on his hands. Stalin merely inherited and developed this methodology.
Whatever else these books demonstrate it is clear that Trotsky never could have won the power struggle with Stalin, ironically he lacked the humility required and more importantly he did not really understand the psyche of the people he was governing. Stalin a peasant by birth and Priest by training was much better equipped to do so. He understood that what was now ‘required’ was a new Tsar and throughout his time in power he constantly compared himself to Persian kings and Russian Tsars, most appropriately he saw clearly the parellel with Ivan The Terrible. Stalin managed to square all this whilst still describing himself as a Marxist, albeit with the suffix Lenninist attached. I am not sure about the old man turning in his grave, copious vomiting in the afterlife is however imaginable.
Finally as I read more and more descriptions of the activities of those whom Montiofere describes as ‘the magnates,’ I became convinced that Orwell yet again got it spot on in characterising the Bolsheviek aristocracy as pigs, only perhaps that this characterisation is a little hard on pigs, animals whom I am given to understand posess some rather benign qualaties
There were protests in Germany a couple of years ago concerning the portrayal of Hitler in the film ‘Downfall.’ Amongst other things in one scene he is seen demonstrating considerable kindness to his nervous new secretarial assistant, Trudy Lange. The problem being that these scenes demonstrated a palpable humanity, something which he was not supposed to possess. In short he is shown to be human. I never understood the protests; it always seemed to me important in attempting to understand a mass murderer such as Hitler to explore all the complexities of his character, even discovering that;
‘Love made him weep his pints like you and me.’
All added to greater knowledge, representing a struggle, an attempt, albeit probably doomed, to gain an understanding of what motivates such monstrous individuals.
Having just finished reading Simon Seebag Montefiore’s three volume biography of Stalin I am not sure how much nearer I am to understanding a psychopathic personality like Stalin, or even if clinical terminology like psychopath is appropriate. Moreover crimes on the scale of Hitler or Stalin require literally thousands if not millions, of accomplices, by the very nature of things they all cannot be fitted into such narrow clinical definitions. What does emerge from these volumes is the reality of a much more complex figure than popular images have allowed. Perhaps one of the, possibly more beautiful, ironies of history is that it is Trotsky’s portrait of Stalin that has lodged in the popular imagination, i.e. a dull witted thug. The reality presented here is much more complex. Stalin was highly intelligent, bi-lingual, very widely read, an accomplished poet in his youth, an autodidact who never stopped studying right up to the time of his death.
He could also be extremely charming. He certainly charmed Churchill and Roosevelt and respecting the latter Stalin seems to have been genuinely very fond of him, was indeed moved by his death. There is a poignant scene toward the end of the third and final volume, Stalin is in his late sixties wondering about the house late at night and discovers a comrade who is unwell lying upon a couch and gently pulls the blanket over his sleeping comrade, tucks him in. A couple of days later he orders the murder, the murder understand not the arrest, of a leading member of the Jewish community, it is intended that this be made to look like a car accident. Pure Chicago, pure Mafia, the act of a common or garden gangster and of course the diligent family man, the genial host, the exuberant life and soul of the party, all aspects of Stalin’s personality, can equally be applied to many of the American gangster set, the characters of Goodfellows or The Godfather. Yet somehow scale changes things.
“When men die like flies, that is how they die,” or as Stalin is supposed to have stated. “One man’s death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” This mirror’s the scene in The Third Man, atop the big wheel Orson Wells looks down upon the moving dots below speculating how easy it would be to stamp them out like ants if each dead ant had a monetary value.
It is supposed that this is what made mass murder possible, you are no longer concerned with individuals but dots on a page, a million here, another million there and pretty soon your talking serious numbers! There may be some truth to that. Certainly Stalin never thought of the ‘Kulaks’ whom he massacred on an industrial scale in anything remotely approaching human terms. However both Stalin and Hitler were perfectly comfortable ordering the murder of close friends and associates or even, in Stalin’s case, members of his extended family. Indeed on being approached by supplicants pleading for the lives of their own loved ones Stalin would indicate that members of his own family circle were suffering in the same way. What could he do?
Both Stalin and Hitler took sadistic pleasure in the suffering they caused; Hitler had the slow murder of the July plotters filmed for his own pleasure. Stalin found accounts of the dying moments of his own former acolytes highly amusing, accounts of them pleading for their lives had him in stches.
At times I found these books uncomfortable reading, like peering into a moral sewer. However if one rules out the existence of the amoral Nietzschean superman one needs to explore ones on psyche, not only to illuminate those aspects of Stalin that exist within oneself but much more importantly to reflect upon the aspects of Bukharin, Zhadnov or one of the innumerable other accomplices of Stalin’s crimes that lurk inside our own psyches. Of course it is nice to imagine that we would be the Andrei Sakharov of the drama rather than the minor snitch or the fearful drawer of curtains of the communal block. The odds however are not good.
Nor is it good enough to heap all responsibility upon Stalin, Lenin was well aware of Stalin’s gangster methods and approved of them and it was Lenin who launched the terror. Trotsky introduced the charming practice of hostage taking and had more than his fair share of blood on his hands. Stalin merely inherited and developed this methodology.
Whatever else these books demonstrate it is clear that Trotsky never could have won the power struggle with Stalin, ironically he lacked the humility required and more importantly he did not really understand the psyche of the people he was governing. Stalin a peasant by birth and Priest by training was much better equipped to do so. He understood that what was now ‘required’ was a new Tsar and throughout his time in power he constantly compared himself to Persian kings and Russian Tsars, most appropriately he saw clearly the parellel with Ivan The Terrible. Stalin managed to square all this whilst still describing himself as a Marxist, albeit with the suffix Lenninist attached. I am not sure about the old man turning in his grave, copious vomiting in the afterlife is however imaginable.
Finally as I read more and more descriptions of the activities of those whom Montiofere describes as ‘the magnates,’ I became convinced that Orwell yet again got it spot on in characterising the Bolsheviek aristocracy as pigs, only perhaps that this characterisation is a little hard on pigs, animals whom I am given to understand posess some rather benign qualaties
