The Icon and the Axe

Yet for all these links with Russian tradition, the age of Stalin introduced industrial development and social changes that should not be compared lightly with anything that preceded it. His effort to destroy the free creative culture of Russia was more sweeping than that of his authoritarian ancestors, and was launched against a culture that had attained unprecedented variety, sophistication, and popular support. He enlisted in his campaign all the cynical manipulative techniques of modern mass advertising, lacquering over his atrocities with a veneer of misleading statistics and insincere constitutional guarantees.

Behind it all lay untold human suffering and degradation. The peasants' hopes-rekindled during the era of the New Economic Policy-for a better life and greater freedom from their traditional urban exploiters were dashed by Stalin's determination to collectivize. The burning of grain and slaughter of livestock by the protesting peasantry at the beginning of the thirties launched a chain reaction of unnatural death in the human realm. Peasants perished as kulak "class enemies," repopulated forced laborers, or victims of artificial starvation from bad planning or forcible grain collections. The "leftist" activists who perpetrated this horror in the countryside were the next to perish in the purges of the mid-thirties; and, then the executors were themselves executed to placate the masses and insure the safety of the supreme assassin.

Deaths were recorded not individually or by the thousands but by the millions. More than ten million cattle were slaughtered in the early stages of collectivization, perhaps five million peasants in the social upheaval of the thirties. Membership in the Party elite provided no refuge, for 55 out of its 71 Central Committee members and 60 of 68 alternate members disappeared between the Seventeenth Congress of the party in 1934 and its Eighteenth Congress in 1939. Indeed, all but a very few of those who had made the Revolution and launched the Soviet state were purged in the thirties. Then came Hitler and the terrible suffering of the war, in which twelve million Russians perished.

Always and umemittingly, Stalin suspected those flights of the imagination and experiments with form and idea which lay at the heart of creative culture. None was more suspect in Eastern Europe than the large Jewish community, with its intellectual traditions and international perspectives. Jewish Bolsheviks were deprived of their revolutionary names and sent to the anonymous death that was shortly to become the fate of the Jewish masses under the more systematic and distinctively racist totalitarianism of Nazi Germany. The final reprise on the totalitarian age was Stalin's effort to cut out "the ulcer of cosmopolitanism" by obliterating the

survivals of Yiddish culture and the new interest in Western Europe that appeared in Russia in the wake of World War II.

Stalin's most important contribution to world culture lay in his perfection of a new technique of governing through systematic alternation between terror and relaxation. This "artificial dialectic" required the building of a manipulable and "cast-iron" apparatus totally dependent on the dictator, and the determination to make "permanent purge" a calculated instrument of statecraft.58 The true homo sovieticus was the disciplined and secretive professional officer of the dictator's sprawling police and intelligence apparatus.59 Just as technicians in the infamous Special Section of the Ministry of the Interior found that one of the simplest ways to "break" a reluctant prisoner was by a blinking alternation of total light and total darkness, so the servants of Stalin sought to disorient and subdue the outside world with an incessant and bewildering alternation between smiles and scowls, amity and threat.

In the remote apex of this society stood the solitary dictator, regulating the ebb and flow of mood, ingeniously playing on the masochistic and xenophobic impulses of a populace long accustomed to collective suffering and feelings of inferiority. Whenever rewards were in order or respites to be granted, the Caligula of collectivism suddenly emerged smiling from inside the Kremlin. When terror was loose, even the victims tended to speak of it as the creation of an underling: Yezhovshchina in the thirties, Zhdanovshchina in the forties.

In his last years, Stalin kept about him such shadowy figures as Beria, a fellow Georgian and Yezhov's successor as head of the evergrowing police empire; Poskrebyshev, his private secretary; and Michael Suslov, a lean and ascetic former Old Believer who bore the name of the founder of the flagellant sect.