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Making Sense of Stalin
| Article
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10167 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1986 |
6,556 Words |
| Author
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Alexander Shtromas
Alexander Shtromas is a reader in politics in the Department
of Politics and Contemporary History at the University of
Salford, United Kingdom. |
STALIN AND THE SHAPING OF THE SOVIET UNION
Alex de Jonge
New York: William Morrow & Co., 1986
542 pp., $19.95
Many traps await anyone bold enough to under take a study of Stalin. One is easily tempted to treat him as a paranoiac whose acts were both unnecessary and irrational from any politically or ideologically coherent point of view. One could accept uncritically the influential views on Stalin of his former associates, Trotsky, and Bukharin as the prominent historians Isaac Deutscher and E.H. Car have done. Trotsky thought that Stalin was "the outstanding mediocrity in the party," and Bukharin claimed that Stalin was "not interested in anything except power." He achieved that power, Trotsky argued, through his domination "of an impersonal bureaucratic machine. . . which had 'created him,'" and used him as a champion of a thus newly created privileged caste of bureaucrats.
Alex de Jonge has happily avoided these temptations. His Stalin is a rational and careful Bolshevik politician, who knew exactly what he wanted and who pursued his goals with remarkable farsightedness and consistency. De Jonge demonstrates that Marxism gave the Bolsheviks "a monopoly upon the truth" which meant that for them "every thing was permitted." They saw themselves as an "enlightened minority acting on behalf of the majority ignorant of its best interests… It behooved them, in the interests of humanity, never to relinquish their grasp. There could never be any question of 'consensus politics'… [T]here could and can be no question of permitting a diversity of political opinion or seeking a popular mandate… The party could never expect popular support, and it recognized that given the chance, an unenlightened populace would tear its leaders limb from limb; hence the need for the tightest of controls." All this was supposed to be a temporary malaise, lasting only until the Bolshevik Party, in accordance with its scientific Marxist vision, could eventually build the "radiant future" for all the people to enjoy and, with hindsight, also to appreciate the party's once unpopular efforts to bring it about. "In the meantime," therefore, "for the party t relax its powers would be to betray a trust." Within this frame of reference, de Jonge rightly notes, "readiness to kill for the cause was a sign that one was a good Bolshevik, free from bourgeois morality and ready to sacrifice the means to the end." And in this sense, as in others, Stalin was indeed a perfect Bolshevik, in no way different from Lenin and Trotsky, both of whom "from the outset held terror to be a crucial instrument of
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