[In the late 1940s the temptation to make sense of
the seemingly senseless brutality of the Stalin led Gustav Bychowski, a
clinical professor of psychiatry in New York City, to make the first explicitly
psychoanalytic reconstruction of Stalin’s early life. Basing his analysis on
Ioseb Iremashvili, Bychowski argued that Stalin’s reach for power was a
‘struggle of the son against the father,’ a repetition of the kind of struggles
that go on in ‘primitive tribal societies. His Stalin was a man driven by a
deep pathology, an identification with his native land’s enemy, a thirst for
flattery, whose inner impulses were shaped by the violence of the revolution.
About the time that Bychowski was writing, a young American diplomat stationed
in Moscow was himself engaged in psychological investigations. While still in
the USSR, Robert C. Tucker repeatedly read Karen Horney’s Neurosis and Human Growth and was impressed by her concept of the
‘neurotic character structure.’ Tucker’s Stalin wanted political power in order
to become the ‘acknowledged leader of the Bolshevik movement, a second Lenin.’ His
rise to power and his autocracy were to be understood as the outcome of four
major influences – Stain’s personality, the nature of Bolshevism, the Soviet
regime’s historical situation in the 1920s, and the historical political
culture of Russia (‘a tradition of autocracy and popular acceptance of it’).
The rough treatment by his father and the great love of his mother created a
psychological tension in the young Stalin, simultaneously ‘the feeling of a
conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success’ and
‘anxieties and threats to self-esteem.’ It was only a small step to the
militant Marxism of Lenin and to a psychological identification with his new
hero. ‘Lenin was for Djugashvili everything that a revolutionary leader ought
to be, and that he too would like to be insofar as his capacities permitted.’
Rather than a psychoanalysis of Stalin, Tucker’s work used psychoanalytic
insights to discover Stalin’s deepest motivations. On the whole the work is
redeemed by the care and tentativeness of the psychological speculation and the
more traditional reliance on other factors. But at times one has the feeling that
Tucker, like other practitioners of psychohistory, “comes to the past with an
understanding already in hand; the understanding and explanation do not emerge
from the past itself but are the products of a theoretical model. In short, it
is often less accurate to say that the model is applied to the past than that
the past is applied to the model.”]
___________________________________________________
Like most successful politicians Stalin was a
practiced performer. He leaned to play numerous roles as he moved from
provincial poverty to state power. The journey he traveled was a painful
educational odyssey. Skills were acquired as the hard experiences of an outlaw
life toughened him. Stalin grew up with models of a weak, irresponsible father
and a strong, principled mother. Beso Jughashvili was a failure as a husband and father; he could not reliably
provide for his wife and son. Alcoholic and abusive, he was not a ‘true man’ to
his family or society. A katsi gained
respect as much by restraint, in using
violence or in drinking, as he did earning a living, entertaining friends, and
being loved and obeyed by his wife and children. Beso failed in all respects,
while Keke took over the role of the man in the family, became the head of the
household, protected and promoted her son, and provided an example of hardness,
strength, stubborn insistence on and faith in her chosen ideals.
Already in the Gori church school Soso Jughashvili showed devotion, even
fanatical dedication, to his system of belief, at the time the Orthodoxy of his
mother’s church. Once committed to a faith he did not easily display doubt.
When he shifted beliefs he did so abruptly, radically, decisively, as when he
gave up Christianity for Marxism. From his school and seminary he picked up
elements of his own pedagogy: explanations could be, should be, conveyed in
plain language. He sought clarity, simplicity, not theoretical complication.
With Marxism, particularly in its Leninist version, he believed he had
discovered how the world works. More than that, he acquired the means to change
it.
Stalin’s political education took place largely in the bowls of the party
underground, in the intense partisan infighting between the Mensheviks and
Bolsheviks. Here he sharpened his polemical tools, deploying what minor
oratorical skills he had, but largely relying on simple exposition of
fundamentals. His own lack of conceptual facility actually aided him in presenting
a reduced message plainly to plain folk, and he gained a following that
appreciated this quality. Stalin was able to tell a comprehensible story, a
clear narrative, repeating themes or words over and over again that made him
intelligible to his audience. He instinctively grasped what political
psychologists have noted: that a simple idea repeated, no matter how absurd or
untruthful, has a greater impact than a more sophisticated but complicated
conception.
The young Soso did not have the full, extended support of a close and loving
family, as did Lenin, but he acquired successive circles of friends, comrades,
and subordinates on whom he depended for help as he made his way through two
decades of outlaw life. He was able to evince devotion from others, like the
fanatical Kamo. Yet his relationship with friends was instrumental, based on a
calculation as to their usefulness. He could feel deeply about those who he
needed, like the Alliluevs, and had a soft, erotic side that he showed to the
many women who passed through his life. But he could turn hostile quickly, hold
grudges, and callously dismiss those whom he considered his enemies.
Revolution was his profession, and through his work in the party underground
and with workers in Baku and Saint Petersburg, hardened by the violence of
1905-1907 and his suffering in prison and exile, he arrived in 1917 a man who
had preserved his own ideals and was prepared as a pragmatic Marxist to use the
means necessary to further the Bolshevik cause. Sentimentality had largely been
suppressed. Empathy had eroded. In their place was a Machiavellian calculus –
discipline, toughness, violence, even cruelty in this bitter political battle.
In the Georgia in which he grew up violence was an everyday occurrence – in the
family, from the state, against the state. There was the arbitrary, unjustified
violence, like that suffered from his father, and violence sanctioned by
tradition, by the great epics of Georgian literature and the stories of modern
writers like Qazbegi. Revenge could be a necessary, even ennobling, pursuit,
the effecting of rough justice, the righting of an unbearable wrong. For a
revolutionary violence was simply a basic tool of the trade. Without it came
defeat; with it, victory.
From his earliest years in Gori he was ambitious, anxious to change his place
in the world and willing to take risks to do it. He wanted to stand out, to
succeed, but his was a controlled ambition, concealed under a diffident
demeanor. He did not announce himself but lurked, hid behind a sly smile,
waited for others to expose themselves first. Many people remarked on his sense
of humor, his love of jokes, but many more noted how he stood apart or sat
silently to the side, watching, observing, and sizing up the situation. His
smile was ironic, sardonic, not engaging. He governed his emotions carefully.
What passion he had was reserved for his work and the cause to which he had
given his life.
In the years leading up to the revolution he was willing to work with those he
admired and respected, like Lenin, but he was contemptuous of those elders like
Zhordania or Plekhanov or movement veterans like Trotsky with whom he
disagreed. Stalin was endowed with self-confidence that passed beyond the boundary
into arrogance. His disdain for those with whom he disagreed extended even to
Friedrich Engels, whom in the post-revolutionary years he would refer to
privately as incorrect or ‘foolish.’ While Lenin was flexible and changed his
mind about people, able to ally with Trotsky or contemplate working with
Martov, whom he valued even though they had fought against one another for over
a decade, Stalin found that kind of compromise difficult. Whether it was
resentment, jealousy, or disgust, he was unable to subordinate his affective
disposition towards such people to what might better serve the movement. He did
not appreciate refinement or gentility but preferred a rougher manner,
affecting what he took to be a proletarian toughness. He operated best with
acolytes like Soren Spandarian or Kamo, but was less able to get along with
more independent people like the genteel Stephan Shahumian or te punctilious
Iakov Sverdlov. His relationship with long-time comrades like Kamenev or
Orjonikidze was even more complicated, as the power and position of each of
these men shifted within the Bolshevik hierarchy. Like Lenin he could be
contemptuous of intellectuals, even though in the scheme of things he was an intelligent. His intellectual interests,
however, were directed towards confirmation rather than questioning. He was not
introspective like Sverdlov. He appreciated the plainness of ordinary people.
His nature was narrow, not as open and generous as Lenin.
Through the years of revolution in Caucasia and the long odyssey through the
underground and in exile his earlier idealism fell away before what worked in
practice. A realistic calculation of means and ends eliminated his youthful
romanticism. But he was more than a simple pragmatist. By the time he was Koba,
he had a reputation within Georgian Social Democracy both as a talented
organizer and an untrustworthy intriguer. He acted on his impulses, personal
and political, and was ready without much reflection to deceive or lie or turn
on his comrades without consideration of what he may have promised or committed
to earlier. His self-assurance led him dogmatism. In contrast to Marx or Lenin,
doubt was foreign to him. At age twenty-five he had strong opinions that were
resistant to change. Yet when faced by strong opposition to his convictions, he
was able for practical reasons to shift quickly and decisively, as the incident
over his ‘credo’ demonstrated. To rejoin the movement and win over Tskhakaia, his
patron, Koba abandoned his ‘Georgian Bundism’ and accepted with little hesitation
the party’s position against autonomous national political units.
Russia became more important to him than Georgia. His conviction that Russian
culture and society were more modern, more proletarian, and therefore superior
to the cultures of the people of the periphery, particularly those of the southern
and eastern borderlands, grew stronger in the post-revolutionary years of civil
war. Nation was subordinated to what was thought to be internationalism but
would in time evolve into empire, the inequitable rule of some over others. In
a variation of the theme proposed long before
by Marx and Engels, that some small nations were geschichtslose**, Stalin accepted the imperial notion that selected
nations were on the right side of history and others were fated to be pulled by
force into the light of modernity.
His pragmatism led him to moderation rather to any extreme. The early impulsiveness that had resulted in the massacre of workers
in Batumi and Soso’s first arrest may have tempered him. Although there were
moments of exuberant militancy, as in the revolutionary years 1905-1907 and
1917, a degree of caution overlain with suspicion preserved him while on the
run. The underground required a cool deliberation as well as wariness in
choosing one’s companions. Prudence and watchfulness were necessary qualities
for survival. In his years in power Stalin would raise the practice of
‘vigilance’ (bditel’nost’) to a
supreme virtue for Soviet citizens. By that time, the novelist Alexander
Solzhenitsyn mused, suspicion became his ideology. Rather than being the most
radical of revolutionaries, until his fiftieth birthday Stalin was (with a few notable exceptions) a man of the
middle, ready to compromise, to accommodate others in order to achieve the goal
at hand. Uncomfortably, he distinguished himself from Lenin in the squabbles
over the Bolshevik left – Bogdanov and the otzovisti
– and was not convinced that the philosophical arguments that Lenin considered
so vital were important enough to divide their faction. IN 1917 he was at first close to his moderate
friend Kamenev, and only after Lenin’s return to Russia in April did he shift
his position and recognize that young Molotov had been more correct than
he in the principal strategic questions.
Unlike Lenin he usually emphasized the need for party unity, for bringing
various factions and sub-factions together. Lenin, in contrast, was ready at
times to split the party when he saw differences of principle, even to stand
all alone against those whom he considered misguided. Yet it would be Lenin’s
tactics that Stalin would employ after the revolution. At one and the same time
he would speak about unity only to divide, isolate his adversaries, and
solidify a core around himself. When he considered it necessary or
advantageous, he adopted the most extreme and radical measures against his
opponents, resistant peasants and officials, in 1928-1932 and again in
1936-1938. In the name of unity he would carry out the massive, murderous
elimination of those labeled ‘Enemies of the People.’
More than any other episode, the crucible that forged him as a revolutionary
was the first revolution, the one that ultimately failed, 1905-1907. Talk of
violence gave way to the actual exercise of terrorism. The imperial government
was determined to crush the rebellion and preserve the empire, and a sanguinary
civil war tore the Caucasus apart. The revolutionaries took up arms, first in
self-defense and then more aggressively to punish their enemies and make a
desperate effort to take power. Tsarism responded to the rebellion of workers
and peasants with sanguinary repression, demonstrating that the state and those
who benefited from the existing order would never surrender their privileges,
property, and power without bloodshed. Like other Bolsheviks Stalin read the
defeat not as a need to be more cautious in the future, but as a bitter lesson
that carrying the fight to the finish, however ferocious that might be, was the
only road to victory.
Revolution was not normal politics. It quickly became something beyond
compromise and negotiation. Revolution was war, in fact the most devastating of
wars, civil war, war within society and against the state, in many ways war without
mercy. Such a war carried its own imperatives: the clear defining of enemies;
the willingness to kill so as not to be killed; the subordination of feeling to
what was needed to achieve victory. This logic of war –we versus them,
destroying the enemy while preserving your own –became fundamental to his thinking. Once politics or any conflict is conceived as
war, the most extreme means, including killing ones’ enemies and those who might
support them even in the future, is legitimized and normalized.
Before coming to power Russian revolutionaries had
very different motives from those after the October victory. Before 1917 Stalin
was animated by a complex of ideas and emotions, from resentment and hatred to
utopian hopes for justice and empowerment of the disenfranchised. Social
Democracy universally was about democracy, the empowerment of ordinary working
people and the end of unearned privileges of the well-born. The revolution at
hand was a bourgeois-democratic one until the imperialist war of 1914 opened the
way to a more rapid transition to a proletarian-socialist revolution. That
project of democracy, revolution, and socialism empowered a poor young man from
the borderlands of the empire, and combined with the anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist
program embedded in Marxism erased the disadvantages of the ethnic Georgian or
Jew or Tarter. Soso Jughashvili imbibed the democratic and socialist humanism
that he discovered in both the Russian intelligentsia and the heroes of Georgian
and Russian literature, while Koba came to appreciate how cruel the struggle to
change the world would be.
Over time the humane sensibilities of the romantic poet gave way to hard strategic
choices. Feelings for others were displaced or suspended and were trumped by
personal and political interests. What originated as empathy for the plight of
one’s people (the Georgians), a social class (the proletariat), or humanity
more broadly was converted to a rational choice of instruments to reach a
preferred end. Empathy was replaced by an instrumental cruelty. Once in power
those earlier emotions and ideals were subordinated to the desire to hold onto
to the power so arduously and painfully acquired. Power became a key motivator
as the imperatives of the new conditions in which Bolsheviks found themselves
forced them to make unanticipated choices. ‘Possession of power,’ wrote Immanuel
Kant, ‘debases the free judgment of reason.’ But power was seldom simply about
personal aggrandizement or advancement. Based on convictions derived from
experience, history, and Marxism, power also served the commitment to a certain
vision of the future.
The boy from Gori became a ‘great man’ – that is, a powerful arbitrator of the fate
of millions. His decisions as head of state and party decided who would live
and who would die. He explained to his aged mother, regretful that he had not
become a priest, that he became something like a tsar. That ‘greatness’ was not
prefigured in Gori or Tiflis or Baku.
But the passage trough those places, as well as Petersburg and Siberia,
fashioned the man who in a world he could not have anticipated was determined
to stamp his will on the Soviet people. He was the product not only of the
circumstances in which he had been born and grew up, the excesses of imperial
rule in the Caucasus, but also of his own ambition, his desire to move somehow
beyond the limits that poverty and empire have imposed on him.
From his earliest days Stalin understood that education was the road to
emancipation. With Marxism and the Social Democratic Party he found the way to change
his world. Whether it was fate or luck, he survived the trials of the
revolutionary outlaw and emerged a tempered leader. The trials ahead –civil
war, an unexpected political rise to unchallenged autocrat, a revolution
initiated by the state against the bulk of the population, and another world war
– damaged and destroyed others, but Stalin survived. History had hooked and
lifted him high. A revolutionary made by revolutions, for the remainder of his
life he became the maker and breaker of revolutions
*(quote from Thomas A. Kohut, ‘Psychohistory as History”, American Historical Review, XCI, 2 (April 1986) p. 338)]
** Land, Stadt with no history; Zeit with no historical records; Volk with no sense of history, ahistorical; Politik, Weltanschauung ahistorical
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