The Icon and the Axe

It is hard to know how Lenin would have reacted to all of this. He suffered his first stroke in 1922, just a little more than a year after the end of the Civil War, and was virtually incapacitated for nearly a year before his death in January, 1924. He never had time clearly to indicate how fully he would have applied to a society at peace the totalitarian principles advocated earlier for a revolutionary party in times of war and crisis. Cultural problems had always been peripheral to his interests. Despite his party-centered

perspective, he had many friends among non-party intellectuals, many years of exposure to Western society, and a fairly rich grounding in the nineteenth-century Russian classics. There was, to be sure, a foreshortening of intellectual vistas from Marx, who knew his Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, to a Lenin steeped largely in the civic poetry and realistic prose of his native land. But Lenin's vistas were still ranging compared with those of Stalin; and Lenin must at least be given credit for belatedly warning against the "rudeness" of his successor in his long-suppressed political testament.45

Born into an obscure cobbler's family in the mountains of the Caucasus, educated in the seminaries and tribal traditions of his native Georgia, Stalin shared none of the broader European perspectives of Lenin and most other Bolshevik leaders. This small, pock-marked figure never knew the life of the Russian intelligent, did not even write in Russian until late in his twenties, and spent only four months outside Russian-occupied territory-during brief trips to Party congresses in Sweden and England in 1906 and 1907, and to study the national question in the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1912 and 1913.

The qualities that Stalin professed to admire in Lenin-"hatred for snivelling intellectuals, confidence in one's own strength, confidence in victory"-were those which he attempted to instill in himself. To these were added the compulsive chauvinism of the provincial parvenu, the scholastic dogmatism of the half-educated seminarian, and a preoccupation with organizational intrigue already noticeable during his revolutionary apprenticeship in the world's largest oil fields in Baku.

Stalin's only god was Lenin; yet in Stalin's depiction the god acquires a bestial if not satanic form. Stalin compared Lenin's arguments to "a mighty tentacle which twines all around you and holds you as a vice"; Lenin was said to have been obsessively concerned that the enemy "has been beaten but by no means crushed" and to have rebuked his friends "bitingly through clenched teeth: 'Don't whine, comrades. . . .' "4e

Stalin's formula for authoritarian rule was experimental and eclectic. It might be described as Bolshevism with teeth or Leninism minus Lenin's broad Russian nature and ranging mind. Lenin, for all his preoccupation with power and organization, had remained, in part, a child of the Volga. He had a revolutionary mission thrust upon him and took his revolutionary name from one of the great rivers of the Russian interior: the Lena.

Stalin, by contrast, was an outsider from the hills, devoid of all personal magnetism, who properly derived his revolutionary name from stal', the Russian word for "steel." His closest comrade-and the man he picked to succeed him as formal head of state throughout the 1930's went even

further--shed his family name of Scriabin, so rich in cultural association, for Molotov, a name derived from the Russian word for "hammer." No figure better illustrates the unfeeling bluntness and technological preoccupations of the new Soviet culture than this expressionless bureaucratic hammer of the Stalin era, who was generally known as "stone bottom" (from "the stone backside of the hammer"-kamenny zad molotovd).

Yet for all the grotesqueness, gigantomania, and Caucasian intrigue of the Stalin era, it may in some way have had roots in Russian culture deeper than those of the brief age of Lenin. Lenin benefited from the St. Petersburg tradition of the radical intelligentsia, studied briefly in St. Petersburg, began his Revolution there, and was to give his name to the city. When Lenin moved the capital from St. Petersburg and entered the Moscow Kremlin for the first time on March 12, 1918, he was uncharacteristically agitated, remarking to his secretary and companion that "worker-peasant power should be completely consolidated here."47 Little did he imagine how permanent the change of capital was to prove and how extensive the consolidation of power in the Kremlin. The year of Lenin's death brought a flood to the former capital, newly rebaptized as Leningrad. It was an omen perhaps of the traditionalist flood that was about to sweep the revolutionary spirit out of the Leninist party. With Stalin in the Kremlin, Moscow at last wreaked its revenge on St. Petersburg, seeking to wipe out the restless reformism and critical cosmopolitanism which this "window to the West" had always symbolized.