Stalin and Our Times

The paper considers how a number of features of Stalin’s rule that appear most pointless or counter–productive from a present day standpoint, summed up as “futile repression”, can be understood as the rational choices of a dictator optimising his regime. The same reasoning may be applied to those aspects of Stalin’s legacy that are most commonly seen as positive, such as the industrial and military policies that saved his country in World War II. Were these outcomes ends in themselves or did they also optimise his regime in the given time and place? I speculate that if Stalin had ruled a much smaller country half a century later he would have left it looking not unlike North Korea or Iraq. Stalin and Our Times Paper to the annual conference of the Irish Association for Russian & East European Studies, University College, Cork, 9–11 May, 2003: “Stalin and His Times”. First draft 3 April 2003 Does Stalin belong to history or the present day? Dead only fifty years, he is alive enough that some still wish to condemn him. In a recent interview Robert Conquest has asked us to note “‘a curious thing: Stalin comes out worse than we thought ... You wouldn’t think it possible.’ To Churchill’s description of Stalin as unnatural, Conquest adds his own: unreal. [Stalin’s] will–power proved strong enough to project the illusion around the world, blinding the west to the true situation ... In the end, it is Stalin's almost pointless cruelty, and the stupidity of his apologists in the west, that lingers” (“I Told You I Was Right”, Financial Times, 1 March 2003). At the same time others wish to bring him back. A poll of 1,600 adults conducted across Russia in February and March 2003 to mark the anniversary of the dictator’s death found that “53 percent of respondents approved of Stalin overall, 33 percent disapproved, and 14 percent declined to state a position. Twenty percent of those polled agreed with the statement that Stalin ‘was a wise leader who led the USSR to power and prosperity,’ while the same number agreed that only a ‘tough leader’ could rule the country under the circumstances in which Stalin found himself. Only 27 percent agreed that Stalin was ‘a cruel, inhuman tyrant responsible for the deaths of millions,’ and a similar percentage agreed that the full truth about him is not yet known” (“More Than Half of All Russians Positive About Stalin”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline, 5 March 2003). Thus despite the best efforts of Conquest and many others the “unknown Stalin” is still with us. After sitting silently through my economic history course this year, a young Russian student told me she registered for the class expecting an advantage of prior knowledge gained from her background. Instead, she found how little she knew. Perhaps, however, the failure of Stalin’s criminality to pervade popular consciousness is not so surprising. Many may find it hard to accommodate to the information that a monster effected evil pointlessly and on an incredible scale. Some may find it, well, incredible. Others who are willing to accept it as a fact do not know how to integrate it into their understanding of societies and human nature. A persistent fear among those who give primacy to the moral tasks of history is that to understand a little more may mean to condemn a little less. Rather than risk the contagion of understanding they now prefer to mock: thus “to Conquest, the depravities of the Stalin era and the wreckage of the Soviet Union resonate like some