The Mystery of Stalin

One of the ongoing passions or interests I have in my life is the mystery of Stalin. I wrote about it here at rambling length. (And I highly recommend reading all of those comments … they are amazing.)

Stalin is such a mystery – an aberration, if you will. A glitch in the human experiment. There are many “glitches”, people who are born lacking certain things (like compassion, or a conscience) – but very very few achieve such a degree of power as Stalin did. Most people lacking compassion end up messing up … their egos get in the way, they are serial killers who grow sloppy, who need to be congratulated or recognized … and so they end up leaving a trail of clues which lead to the electric chair. Stalin didn’t get sloppy. Ever. He covered his tracks. A Soviet official who knew Stalin (and somehow escaped the purges) said that Stalin had a deadly (and rare) combination of attributes (if you want to call them that): patience and capriciousness. Obviously, a serial killer (I’m using that as the most obvious example of a human being lacking compassion or restraint) very often has capriciousness but has no patience. Their lack of patience gives them away. There was a stealth about Stalin, a calculating mind at work. He did not appear to suffer from psychosis, or any kind of mental problems – he is not diagnos-able. It’s terrifying. He knew what he wanted, he actually SAID what he wanted … it’s just that nobody believed him. Robert Conquest, in his masterpiece The Great Terror says over and over, “His comrades did not understand Stalin yet.” This puts a chill through my bones.

John’s comment to that old post of mine deserves to be brought to the forefront now, so I hope he doesn’t mind … Here it is (oh, and the reference to “s”s is self-explanatory to anyone who has read me for a while. John has been particularly sympathetic to one of my phobias. If you want to know what an “s” is, think about “Charlotte”, and you should get it. I do not allow that word on my blog):

I think, Sheila that monsters undergo a process of self-discovery just as the rest of us do throughout life, and that gives lie to the simplistic explanations put forth by historians for the root causes of monstrosity. Stalin started out as a little git, suspected of betraying his companions in Baku to the Tsarist Okhrana. At least some of his proclivities to purging probably sprang from his guilt over this betrayal. Once he discovered a means to getting rid of the Old Bolsheviks with memories of those rumors, he became bolder and more depraved. But was he sociopathic to start with? Certainly, at least to some degree.

One facet of his character was humorlessness. I once translated an article written by one of Stalin’s assistants. He mentioned that Stalin only told one joke in his presence over years of service. Stalin came out of his office, looked at a high ranking party functionary, and said “you know, my Grandmother had a goat that looked just like you”. “Goat” is a mild insult in Russian. One joke over almost a decade, and it was demeaning. Says a lot, doesn’t it? This same article also mentioned Stalin’s quest to dress up his purges in ideological terms, while the assistant noted that everyone in the Party hierarchy knew it was the struggle of “ ‘s’ in a jar”. That turn of phrase stuck with me. Stalin as the biggest, baddest ‘s’. Fitting (especially, to you, I’d imagine).

Stalin was lazy, certainly, but he put his efforts where they counted most. When Trotsky, Lenin and the rest were studying Western languages in exile, he studied Russian to get rid of his accent. Lazy, yes, but calculated. He knew that his thick Georgian accent would not be welcomed in a leader by the Russian peasants. I’ve heard recordings of him, and his accent was there, but not bad, certainly better than most Georgians. (Writing that, I had aural hallucinations of Jimmy Carter speaking Russian with a twang, but I digress…;-)

I think it was von Moltke who wrote about recruiting officers to the German General staff who had a certain kind of indolence, but who had energy when the circumstances called for it. Otherwise, the overly ambitious worry their staffs and soldiers to death. A good commander knows when to leave well enough alone. A lot of creative types and scientists have this personality trait as well. A scientist sits and mulls over the literature, observations in the lab, and it looks to an outsider as if the researcher is doing nothing. Then, suddenly an idea hits and you’ve got a fiend on your hands working 120 hour weeks until the experiments are done. Then quiet for a week, then repeat experiments (more slowly and carefully), and then the writing process begins.

I think Stalin had that kind of indolence. A cat’s indolence, sleeping 80% of the day, then springing, claws out, onto his prey.

I’m fascinated by Stalin’s political evil. Who knows how much was natural and how much was learned? The best psychological portrait I’ve ever seen of Stalin was in Anatoly Rybakov’s novel “Children of the Arbat”.

As for the henchmen, I see a lot of parallels with the secular fanatics of today (including the humorlessness). Many of these people are looking for something higher than themselves to devote their lives to, and lacking faith in God, they transfer their devotion to a cause. Once the devotion is transferred, the cause can not be questioned, or it calls into question the self-worth and morality of the questioner. So many in the upper circle (lower functionaries were more likely to be defiant at trial) accepted their fate without argument because it was the Party judging them, and the Party is always right (that’s not my analysis, rather it’s that of Conquest and Roy Medvedev). A few fought back, mostly the soldiers in the Red Army, men of action, rather than ideologues.

He added, in another comment:

I saw a play based on “Children of the Arbat” in a little town in southern Russia. The dude who played Stalin was a “national artist”, the highest rank in Soviet arts. (Can you imagine being ranked as an artist just as if you were in the Army?) His performance was spine chillingly correct in every detail.

A great coda to all of this:

A couple weeks ago, I met John in the sweltering morning of an awful heat-wave in New York City … It was DREADFUL weather. He had a copy of “Children of the Arbat” that he wanted to give me. I didn’t bring it on my vacation because, frankly, I needed to chill out, and plumbing the depths of the monster that is Stalin is not really lite-fare … but I can’t wait to dig into it.

He and I met on a street corner in the garment district, so that we could do the pass-off of books. We were both DRENCHED in sweat. The garment district is feckin’ nasty, anyway … and the weather was abominable. You breathed the dirty garbage-scented air in and felt pollution fill your very soul. But there was John, coming towards me, grinning as though we were in air-conditioning. I only had a couple minutes to spare, as did he … and what did we do? Standing there on the sidewalk? We talked about Stalin. hahahaha I LOVE BLOGGING. We got right into it, in the 15 minutes we had available. Gorgeous. I can’t talk to many people about Stalin.

I met John once before, a while back … but again: with blogging … it’s like we talk every day because I read him every day, and we comment on each other’s blogs … It’s a beautiful thing, the Internet, ain’t it? There are a ton of people on my blog-roll I feel that way about (and also – people who don’t have blogs, and who read my blog … mustn’t leave them out!! People like: ricki, Jay – I love Jay!!!! – susie (although she might have a blog), DBW … the list goes on and on). Like, it’s strange to me that I haven’t actually met RTG or Anne or Big Dan or Michele or Val or Jimbo or Tassy ( er- her live journal is rarely work safe – just a heads up. And Jimbo: I can’t help it … I always think of the two of you as a pair! You’re how I found her) or Serenity …. There are a million more. Also: is it true that I only have met Emily twice???? That CAN’T BE RIGHT!! Same with CW. I met the dude only once? You gotta be kiddin’ me, right?

This is a tangent – all coming out of two things: 1. meeting Dan this past week and having such a nice time with someone I had never met – beautiful!! and 2. out of the beautiful (to me) image of John and I – sweltering on a sidewalk in the garment district – discussing Children of the Arbat and the mystery of Stalin. Surrounded by concrete and orthodox Jews and rolling carts of clothing. The beauty of blogging.

All of this (this post, I mean) is because this morning I read the following quote, and of course – it set off a stream of assocations in my brain:

“Pity the biographer who takes on Josef Stalin. The challenges lie somewhere between daunting and impossible. Stalin took great pains to cover up the facts of his childhood and youth. Aided by state hagiographers, he revised the events of his life multiple times, making it nearly impossible to determine what role he played in the crucial events of the October Revolution and civil war. Airbrushing by state hagiographers added extra layers of obfuscation. Inconvenient witnesses tended to disappear. Secretive, introverted, and paranoid, Stalin made an art of concealing his motives and his methods.”

– William Grimes

It seems to me that Grimes’ comment is pretty accurate. Sometimes fiction (or theatre, I might add) is FAR more qualified to get at the heart of things than an actual biography, or history. History has to stick to the facts, the things that are visible. Fiction can plumb the depths of psychology (think of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In my opinion, if you have a question about the criminal mind that is not answered in Crime and Punishment, then it is not a question worth asking.)