Stalin: A Biography

Since the late 1980s it is has been possible to make a closer analysis. Stalin’s private life and entourage have been investigated by Simon Sebag Montefiore and Miklós Kun.¹⁴ His preferences in food and leisure were not drastically abnormal, at least until he achieved despotic power. Many in his entourage felt that his enemies had exaggerated his defects of personality. Such information provides an avenue towards understanding his public career. I make no apology for intensifying the examination of him at school, in the seminary, in early party groups and in the intimacy of his family. His medical condition and psychological profile also deserve attention. Such material contributes to an assessment of his motives and comportment in his public career.

Another theme of the book is the degree of Stalin’s influence before Lenin’s death. No biography fails to depreciate his already developed skills as a politician. This book benefits from the political and psychological insights of Robert Tucker, Adam Ulam, Robert McNeal and Ronald Hingley.¹⁵ Yet even these works assumed that Stalin did not count for much among Bolsheviks before 1917. Tucker contended that Stalin’s attitude to Lenin amounted to mere hero-worship through to the 1930s.¹⁶ Lenin’s unchallenged dominance is also the key theme of the study by Robert Slusser, who characterised Stalin in 1917 as ‘the man who missed the Revolution’.¹⁷ Purportedly Stalin was Lenin’s errand boy before and during 1917. The same approach has been maintained with reference to the years after the October Revolution as biographers have insisted that Stalin was a dour bureaucrat in the backrooms of Bolshevism. At most, he has been depicted as Lenin’s trouble-shooter — the man who was sent into emergency situations with a specific brief from the Kremlin. But credence is rarely given to the possibility that Stalin’s membership of the supreme bodies of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet government shows that he was already an established member of the communist ruling group. The following chapters question this long-established historical opinion.

And the biographers, while rightly stressing that Stalin came to wield enormous power from the 1930s, have usually omitted to note that he was not omnipotent. He had to operate the machinery of the system of power he inherited. He could modify it, but he was unable to transform it without shattering the basis of ‘Soviet power’. In the Great Terror of 1937–8 he strove to eliminate tendencies in politics that restricted the impact of central commands: clientelism, localism and administrative passive resistance. He also tried to liquidate the obstructive trends pervading Soviet society which counteracted the Kremlin’s policies. Not only administrators but also workers and collective-farm labourers found ways to defend themselves against Moscow and its requirements. Stalin’s introduction of fresh policies from the late 1920s was accompanied by adjustments to the communist order. But these adjustments induced a syndrome of interests which obstructed further basic change. It is conventional to depict Stalin as an unimpeded despot. Without doubt he could introduce internal and external policies without contradiction in the Politburo. But I shall show that his personal rule depended upon his willingness to conserve the administrative system he had inherited. He also had to assimilate himself in many ways to the mental outlook of the people of the Soviet Union if he wanted to go on ruling them without provoking revolt.

Stalin, custodian-in-chief of the Soviet order, was also its detainee. In order to rule despotically through the communist dictatorship, he had to restrict his impulse to eliminate practices which inhibited the imposition of a perfect system of vertical command. Powerful though he was, his powers were not limitless. This consideration is not a fine scholarly point but helps towards an understanding of the vicissitudes of his career. To the end of his life he sought to keep the Soviet order in a condition of controlled agitation. Aiming to conserve personal despotism and party dictatorship, he strove to disrupt trends towards a stabilisation which might conflict with his larger purposes. But constraints of power existed even for Stalin.