Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich (Džugašvili)

STALIN, Joseph Vissarionovich (Džugašvili). - Russian statesman, b. at Gori, a small village in the Caucasus, to a Georgian shoemaker, on 21 Dec. 1879. From 1893 to 1899 he studied at the Orthodox ecclesiastical seminary of Tiflis, where, having become enthusiastic about the socialist idea, he secretly carried on revolutionary activity. Subsequently, his main occupation consisted in devoting himself to political action on behalf of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, to which he had already belonged since 1898.

In works of a literary or theoretical kind he did not succeed as well as in the execution of bold revolutionary projects of the sort involving assaults on prisons, the notorious expropriations to provide the money needed by the party, and the like. This activity earned him prison twice and deportation to Siberia six times, from which he managed to escape no fewer than five times, but to which he had to return, only to be freed from it on the occasion of the Revolution of Feb. 1917.

After the October Revolution, S. sought to rise slowly toward ever more important positions, in the friendly shadow of Lenin, who valued him as an energetic executor of his designs: he was in fact People's Commissar for Nationalities Affairs in 1917, in 1919 he was People's Commissar for the Control of Workers and Peasants, a member of the Politburo and of the Orgburo, and finally, from the 11th Party Congress onward, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. With skill he made use of this key position to occupy little by little the entire party apparatus with trusted people: it was systematic work and cold calculation, consisting in placing men devoted to himself in the offices that drew up the lists of candidates, in sending suspicious persons to distant regions before the elections took place, in appointing communists of proven faith to the direction of the press, etc. The stroke that struck Lenin immediately after the 11th Party Congress was meanwhile very favorable to him. Just shortly before his death, Lenin had expressed in his famous Testament his indignation at the turn taken by events and had violently censured S. But since other party leaders had also been criticized in it, this document was never published by the party leadership.

The first adversary whom S. eliminated in the struggle for power was Trotsky. To the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution he opposed the one that is usually attributed to Lenin, namely the theory of the possibility of socialism even in a single State, which took greater account of the fact that the masses were tired of war and revolution, and could therefore easily be put into practice. In the struggle against Trotsky, S. allied himself with Zinoviev and with Kamenev (the Trojka) and later with Kalinin, Tomsky, Rykov and Kuibyshev (the Semjorka). Having torpedoed Trotsky, at the 14th Party Congress, held toward the end of 1925, he broke with Zinoviev and Kamenev, who formed with Trotsky the bloc of the left opposition. By means of a new alliance with Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, he succeeded in two years in defeating this most dangerous opposition within the party: in Oct. 1927 Trotsky and Zinoviev were excluded from the Central Committee; moreover, by unanimous vote of the participants in the 15th Party Congress, Trotsky was expelled from it on 18 Dec. of that year and exiled to Turkestan with ten other supporters of his on 19 Jan. 1928. But when S., not long afterward, under the pressure of the worsened political situation with foreign countries and of the danger of a war, drew up the first five-year plan, giving effect to industrialization and collectivization and thereby carrying out precisely those plans for which Trotsky had been persecuted, the break with Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky became inevitable, and the third and last opposition was formed, the right-wing one, opposed to forced collectivization and to the abolition of the Nep. However, the penetration of elements favorable to S. into the entire party apparatus was so advanced that this opposition could be overcome without much difficulty. The 16th Party Congress marks the victory over the right opposition and at the same time the full triumph of the new course: all the speeches were given by supporters of S., not a single word was heard any longer from the opposition, but only attestations of submission recited by the defeated adversaries, most of whom were executed in the great show trials from 1936 to 1938. Then S. was able to devote himself without obstacles to the implementation of his plans. After industrialization, he had imposed on the reluctant peasants in the five-year period 1930-35 the collectivization of the land, and in 1936, introducing the new Constitution of the U.S.S.R., he proclaimed the realization of socialism, the first stage toward communism. The non-aggression pact concluded with Hitler in 1939 contributed essentially to the outbreak of the Second World War. The treacherous assault launched by Hitler against the Soviet Union, his tactical error of entering the field not only against the Bolshevik regime but also against the Russian people, and finally the effective material aid that came from the Allies, all this S. knew how to shrewdly exploit, in order to draw the greatest profit from the victory over Germany. With the agreements of Yalta and of Potsdam, and with the sovietization of the territories occupied by the Red Army in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union obtained a territorial extension and a political importance never before attained by Russia. The distinctive features of S.'s policy in the years following the war are: division of the world into two clearly separate spheres of influence with the so-called "iron curtain"; unleashing of an ideological campaign against cosmopolitanism, against the inferiority complex in the face of bourgeois culture and in favor of a Soviet and even Russian chauvinism; effort to increase Soviet prestige in the countries west of the iron curtain through the so-called "Peace Movement"; tightening of the party's dictatorship in all sectors of life, not excluding the cultural and scientific one; and finally the propaganda or, at least, the permission of a true cult of the person of the Great Leader. S., according to an official communiqué of the Soviet government, died on 5 March 1953.

On the ideological terrain, the importance of S. was equated by the Soviets to that of Marx, Engels and Lenin. In reality it must be said that, as regards dialectical materialism (v.), he contented himself with systematizing the doctrines of Engels and Lenin. As regards historical materialism (v.), S. instead came to overturn the materialistic conception of history upheld by Marx, because of the great prominence given to the influence that cultural superstructures would exercise in reflection upon the economic base. Since the communist party as a political institution is itself also part of the superstructure, it follows logically that the dictatorship of the party or the personal dictatorship of S. receives a theoretical basis. Also on other decisive points S. departed from Marx. He rejected the Marxist principle of equality as "a reactionary petty-bourgeois nonsense, worthy of a primitive sect of ascetics, but not of a socialist society organized in a Marxist manner"; to Marxist internationalism he substituted, from as early as 1934, with ever more marked hints, Russian Soviet patriotism; he set aside the theory of the gradual disappearance of the State by underlining the necessity of strengthening it, as long as the danger of capitalist encirclement lasts; to the collective direction of the State he substituted his personal dictatorship. If Lenin still permitted oppositions and free discussions within the party and exhorted not to shed fraternal blood, S. instead eradicated every opposition within the party with bloody "purges," bound the worker to the factory and the peasant to the kolkhoz, and introduced the internal passport, the work booklet and severe punishments against violators of labor discipline.

It must be conceded that S. obtained a great deal with these methods: from an economically backward country he made a great economic and military power, which occupies one of the first places in the world. To this, however, one must counterpose the enormous price paid: forced collectivization in the years 1932-34 provoked a famine that cost the lives of several million men (3 million, according to the declarations of the people's commissar Petrovskij; 5 million, according to the prudent calculations of the Menshevik organ Socialističeskij Vestnik; 8 million in Ukraine alone, according to the statements of Bolitzkij, head of the G. P. U.). D. Dallin and B. Nišolaevskij calculate at approximately 12 million those condemned to forced labor (cf. Forced labor in Soviet Russia, New Haven 1947). In the ten years of the liquidation of the Opposition (1920-39) approximately one million people were shot, among whom there were not only class enemies. During the "purge" of the years 1917-38 there died shot or were made to disappear in other ways: 5 of the 7 presidents of the last Central Executive Committee, 9 of the 11 central ministries of the U.S.S.R., 43 of the 53 secretaries of the central party organizations, 90% of the foreign communist leaders who lived as exiles in Moscow, 54% of the generals, the majority of the general staff of the G. P. U., the majority of those charged with elaborating the new constitution, etc. Of the 22 members of the party's Central Committee in office in Oct. 1917, only S. and comrade Kollontai survived the "purges," 17 had been shot or assassinated, only Lenin had died a natural death, while Dzeržinskij and Uritzkij had died mysteriously.

Regarding religion, neither in Marx nor in Engels nor in Lenin can one find so few unfavorable declarations as in S. Moreover in his writings there is little that is explicit against religion; his best-known declaration is the one made to a delegation of American workers in 1927: "The party cannot be neutral with regard to religion... since it takes its stand for scientific progress, while religious prejudices are against science." Nevertheless, since the time of the ancient Roman persecutions, Christianity has never been forced into such a harsh struggle for existence as that imposed upon it in the name of this man.

Gustavo Andrea Wetter