[CivilSoc] Views of Stalin on 50th Anniversary of His Death

[Moderator]

>From RFE/RL (Un)Civil Societies Vol. 4, No. 3, 5 March 2003. "RFE/RL
(Un)Civil Societies" is prepared by Catherine Fitzpatrick on the basis of
reports by RFE/RL broadcast services and other sources. It is distributed
every Wednesday. Direct comments to Catherine Fitzpatrick at
catfitzny at earthlink.net.
For information on reprints, see http://www.rferl.org/requests/. Back issues
are online at http://www.rferl.org/ucs/.
ANNIVERSARY OF STALIN'S DEATH. The 50th anniversary of Josef Stalin's death
on 5 March is an occasion for an old Russian woman to remember going to a
transit camp in Arkhangelsk at the age of 12 in 1937 to peer through the
knothole in a wooden fence to catch a glimpse of her father, arrested after
a police search of his home turned up a small icon. Catching sight of the
girl, the prisoner tried to throw a matchbox weighted with a rock containing
a note over the wall. He missed, and his ardent appeal to Comrade Stalin,
whom he was sure would deliver justice if only he could learn about such
abuses, fell into the space between the fence and the barbed wire,
dangerously visible to the guards. The girl ran home to get a poker from the
stove to try to skewer the note, but failed. Then rain washed mud over the
letter, and her father was hauled away, never to be seen or heard from
again.
The girl and her mother laboriously copied out appeal after appeal to Stalin
and his ministers, never losing hope. Her sister was forcibly taken to a
factory to work at the age of 14. Later, she married a man who was small in
stature, his growth stunted from the Ukrainian famine. His family had been
"dekulakified" when the Soviets picked out their humble home from dozens of
others with tin roofs, because his father had painted it red against the
rust. Eventually, he volunteered to serve at the front.
The couple served the state faithfully for many years, for a time losing two
rebellious sons to the system of labor camps known as the Gulag and
appealing to Stalin's successors. Through the years, the man proudly
preserved his war-time medals and marched as a veteran in parades. When he
died, his widow lovingly mounted the medals with the portrait of Stalin on a
pillow by his coffin. To this day, she only rarely recalls the terrible
years when most of the able-bodied men in her town were arrested under a
quota defined by Stalin and embellished by local commissars. If she does
speak of it,it is to recall an era when at least there was work, cheap food
and rent, far less crime -- a time when people looked out for each other.
To understand the grip that Stalin and the totalitarian system founded by
Lenin which he institutionalized still have over Russia and the other former
Soviet states (and even the world) is to recognize the complex emotions of
this woman and countless others who yearned to be a part of the great
project of communism, who believed fervently in social justice and repelled
fascism, and yet became victims of a system they actually helped to
perpetuate, in some cases even going on to victimize others.
In a national survey conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Foundation on
22 February, 36 percent of 1,500 persons polled said that Stalin did more to
benefit Russia than to harm it, lenta.ru reported on 27 February. Only 29
percent of the respondents said Stalin did the country more harm than good,
and 34 percent were undecided. Those who view Stalin positively most often
cited his role in the Soviet victory in World War II and the "law and order"
he maintained in the country (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 28 February 2003).
In the survey, while 61 percent did recognize Stalin's "large-scale
repression," 8 percent said "everyone was afraid of each other," and 3
percent accused him of the country's lack of preparation for World War II,
nevertheless, 35 percent lauded him for victory in the Great Patriotic War,
18 percent credited him with order in the country, 16 percent said average
people lived a prosperous and stable life and the social system was just,
and 8 percent said he industrialized the nation, Interfax reported on 27
February. "There has been no de-Bolshevization comparable with the
de-Nazification in Germany. The issues aren't even being talked about,"
former Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev, now a historian of
totalitarianism's archives, told "The News International" of Pakistan in an
interview published on 28 February. The Russian public "appears unable to
absorb this knowledge. It's as if they don't want to know."
The lingering after-effects of Stalinism are most evident in the very lack
of a name for this phenomenon of mass murder and abuse on an unprecedented
scale. Robert Conquest called it the "Great Terror" in his book by the same
title, although people who lived through it do not use the term. Most of
them speak evasively about "the repressions" -- a bland word that in fact
aptly captures the twofold act of eliminating or marginalizing people, and
then also compelling them and others to repress their own experiences and
the collective memory.
While anti-Stalinist expression surged in the late 1980s with the
publication of many hitherto [un]disclosed files and memoirs, many now
prefer to keep the subject buried. Also missing from the national and
international understanding of Stalinism and the entire project of Soviet
totalitarianism is a readily conceded number of victims. They range from 10
to 20 to 60 million, depending on the political affiliations and research
capacities of the scholars or the public figures making the claims. The
Memorial Society of Russia and its affiliates in the former Soviet states
shy away from giving total numbers of victims for the whole era, citing
incomplete records and lack of access to archives and the dying out of the
generations of victims. They prefer to make concrete reports of specific
mass graves and camps and publish eyewitness testimonies. Students of the
"Great
Terror" often seem to rationalize the deaths by saying not all of them were
immediate, deliberate executions; people died of exhaustion or disease in
forced labor camps or artificially induced famine.
No other world-class criminal guilty of killing his own people seems to have
an affectionate nickname like "Uncle Joe," nor are his lapel buttons sold as
a form of kitsch memorabilia on the streets of Eastern as well as Western
capitals. In "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million" published in
2002, Martin Amis strove to fill the public knowledge gap about the
appalling dimensions of the crimes of Stalin. His uneven effort was slammed
by critics who singled out gaffs like his inept comparison of his colicky
infant's screams to those of the inmates of Butyrka. Christopher Hitchens,
attacked by Amis in the book as soft on Stalinism, objected in a "Harper's"
review that "everybody already knew" about the horrors of Stalinism and Amis
himself was coming late to the discovery. Anne Applebaum (see "Recommended
News Links), reviewing the book for slate.msn.com on 13 August 2002,
wonders: "Why did so many Western liberals fail to absorb the full horror of
Stalinism while it was happening? Arguments among the comrades on the far
left notwithstanding, why does Stalinism still not inspire anywhere near the
same kind of horror as Nazism today? Hitchens writes that Amis occasionally
makes us wince at things we 'already know' -- but who really does already
know them? And who really cares? Certainly they aren't part of what one
would call popular knowledge, or popular culture, or public debate."
A popular Internet game called "The Sims Online" has filtered out the names
"Stalin," "Hitler," "Osama," and other mass murderers so that players cannot
use the names in their in-game personas or dialogue. That isn't surprising,
given the increasing tendency of companies to restrict hate speech on the
web, but the action puzzled players. "Why is a 20th-century leader of the
Soviet Union banned from the game?" asked a "Sims" player on a message
board. When another player explained that his two grandparents had died at
Stalin's hand, the first player objected, "But there isn't any neo-Stalinism
cult so there isn't a danger of hate speech."
A crude but popular assessment of the recognition factor for Stalin on the
50th anniversary of his death turns up 628,000 references at google.com,
contrasted with 1,700,000 for Hitler. Today, Stalin is remembered less for
his own awful deeds than as a yardstick for other modern tyrants. Stalin's
famous comment summing up the machinery of repression, "there is a person,
there is a problem -- no person, no problem" is noted in descriptions of
Saddam Hussein, an admirer of Stalin, responsible for an estimated 1 million
deaths in wars and terror against his own people.
Stalin's sayings are even compared to the speeches of leaders of
democracies. In a 10 February "Comment," Hendrik Hertzberg of "The New
Yorker" associated what he described as Hussein's favorite maxim, "no
person, no problem" (unattributed to Stalin) with a passage in President
George W. Bush's State of the Union he characterized as "tasteless": "We've
arrested or otherwise dealt with many key commanders of Al-Qaeda.... Let's
put it this way -- they are no longer a problem to the United States and our
friends and allies."
The millions of unrecognized victims of Stalin would know the difference.