STALIN, IOSIF VISSARIONOVIČ (Džugašvili). - Russian statesman, born in Gori, a small village in the Caucasus, to a Georgian cobbler, on 21 Dec. 1879. From 1893 to 1899 he studied at the Orthodox theological seminary in Tiflis, where he became enthusiastic about socialist ideas and secretly engaged in revolutionary activity. Subsequently, his main occupation consisted in dedicating himself to political action in favor of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, to which he had belonged since 1898.
He was not as successful in literary or theoretical works as he was in executing bold revolutionary projects, such as raids on prisons and notorious expropriations to obtain funds for the party. This activity earned him imprisonment twice and exile to Siberia six times, from which he managed to escape five times, though he always had to return and was only freed during the February 1917 Revolution.
After the October Revolution, Stalin gradually ascended to increasingly important positions under the friendly shadow of Lenin, who appreciated him as an energetic executor of his plans: in 1917 he was People’s Commissar for Nationalities, in 1919 People’s Commissar for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, a member of the Politburo and the Orgburó, and finally, from the XI Congress of the Party onward, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. With skill, he used this key position to gradually fill the entire Party apparatus with loyal individuals: it was systematic and coldly calculated work, consisting in proposing men devoted to himself for the compilation of candidate lists, sending suspect individuals to distant regions before elections, appointing proven loyalists to the leadership of the Communist press, and so on. The stroke that befell Lenin immediately after the XI Congress proved very advantageous to him. Just before his death, Lenin had expressed in his famous Testament his indignation at the turn of events and had harshly criticized Stalin. However, since other Party leaders had also been criticized, this document was never published by the Party leadership.
Stalin’s first opponent eliminated in the struggle for power was Trotsky. Against Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, he opposed the theory, usually attributed to Lenin, of the possibility of socialism in a single state, which took greater account of the fact that the masses were weary of war and revolution and could therefore be more easily implemented. In the struggle against Trotsky, Stalin formed an alliance with Zinov’ev and Kamenev (the Troika), and later with Kalinin, Tomsky, Rykov, and Kuibyshev (the Semjorka). After Trotsky was sidelined, at the XIV Congress of the Party, held toward the end of 1925, Stalin broke with Zinov’ev and Kamenev, who, together with Trotsky, formed the bloc of the Left Opposition. Through a new alliance with Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky, he succeeded in defeating this most dangerous internal opposition within two years: in October 1927 Trotsky and Zinov’ev were excluded from the Central Committee, and on 18 December of that year, Trotsky was expelled from the Party by unanimous vote of the participants in the XV Congress and exiled to Turkestan with ten of his supporters on 19 January 1928. However, when Stalin, not long afterward, under pressure from the worsening political situation with foreign countries and the threat of war, launched the first Five-Year Plan, pursuing industrialization and collectivization and thus implementing the very plans for which Trotsky had been persecuted, a rupture with Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky became inevitable. The third and final opposition, the Right Opposition, formed, opposing forced collectivization and the abolition of the NEP. Yet the penetration of Stalinist elements into the entire Party apparatus was so advanced that this opposition was easily overcome. The XVI Congress of the Party marked the victory over the Right Opposition and the full triumph of the new direction: all speeches were delivered by Stalin’s supporters, not a single word was heard from the opposition, only declarations of submission recited by the defeated adversaries, most of whom were executed in the great show trials from 1936 to 1938. Then Stalin could dedicate himself without hindrance to the implementation of his plans. After industrialization, he imposed the collectivization of land on reluctant peasants during the five-year period 1930–35, and in 1936, with the introduction of the new Constitution of the U.S.S.R., he proclaimed the achievement of socialism, the first stage toward communism. The non-aggression pact concluded with Hitler in 1939 contributed significantly to the outbreak of the Second World War. The treacherous attack launched by Hitler against the Soviet Union, his tactical error of waging war not only against the Bolshevik regime but also against the Russian people, and finally the substantial material aid coming from the Allies—all this Stalin adroitly exploited to derive the greatest benefit from the victory over Germany. With the agreements of Yalta and Potsdam, and with the Sovietization of the territories occupied by the Red Army in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union obtained a territorial expansion and political importance never before achieved by Russia.
The distinctive features of Stalin’s postwar policy are: the division of the world into two clearly separated spheres of influence with the so-called “Iron Curtain”; the unleashing of an ideological campaign against cosmopolitanism, against the sense of inferiority toward bourgeois culture, and in favor of a “Soviet, indeed Russian, socialism”; the effort to increase Soviet prestige in the countries west of the Iron Curtain through the so-called “Peace Movement”; the imposition of Party dictatorship in all sectors of life, including cultural and scientific; and, finally, the propaganda, or at least the toleration, of a veritable cult of the person of the Great Leader. Stalin, according to a communist, derives his name from the Russian сталь, meaning “steel.”
On the ideological terrain, S.’s importance was equated by the Soviets with 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.), however, S. went so far as to overturn the materialist conception of history upheld by Marx, owing to the great emphasis he placed on the influence that cultural superstructures would in turn exert on the economic base. Since the Communist Party, as a political institution, is itself part of the superstructure, it logically follows that the dictatorship of the Party or S.’s personal dictatorship receives a theoretical foundation. In other decisive points, too, S. departed from Marx. He rejected the Marxist principle of equality as «a reactionary political nonsense, worthy of a week of ascetics but not of an organized socialist society»; in 1934, with ever more marked hints, he replaced Marxist internationalism with Soviet Russian patriotism; he set aside the theory of the gradual disappearance of the State, instead emphasizing the need to strengthen it as long as the danger of capitalist encirclement persisted; and he replaced collective leadership of the State with his personal dictatorship. Whereas Lenin still permitted opposition and free discussion within the Party and urged that no brotherly blood be shed, S. eradicated all opposition within the Party through bloody «purges», bound the worker to the factory and the peasant to the kolkhoz, and, by introducing internal passports, workbooks, and severe punishments for violators of labour discipline, ensured their immobility.
In its essence, his action resolved itself into a clarification of the obligations incumbent upon the believer by virtue of his voluntary membership in the supernatural society founded by Christ. If in every social body freedom is limited by its specific end and by its internal laws, this must be all the more admitted with respect to the Church, within whose bosom the freedom of the individual must submit to the exigency of the unity of faith, which is its constitutional principle, and to the necessities of salvation, its essential end.
II. FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND GOVERNMENTAL CENSORSHIP
The question becomes somewhat more complex with regard to civil society.Freedom of speech was first affirmed in England in 1695, when the Commons refused to approve the restrictive measures then in force, aggravated in particular by the Licensing Act of 1662. The concept was carried by the colonists to North America, where it received its first legislative formulation. The Bill of Rights incorporated an amendment to the federal Constitution, presented by Virginia and other States, and this was included in the Constitution. With it, any law that might restrict freedom of speech and of the press was forbidden. The principle was affirmed in Europe in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 (art. 11); it received juridical formulation in the Constitution of 1791 and that of 1793. It has found its way into almost all modern constitutions. The Statute of Charles Albert of 4 March 1848, in art. 4, declared that «the press is free, but the law represses its abuses». The Statute promulgated by Pius IX on 14 March 1848 followed the movement begun by the French Revolution, inasmuch as, in art. 11, it abolished preventive or political censorship of the press, substituting for it repressive measures to be established by law. On the same lines has continued to move contemporary juridical thought, of which the most recent expression is the International Declaration of Human Rights approved by the United Nations Organization (v. HUMAN RIGHTS).
An examination of even the most recent constitutional texts shows how they invariably combine the affirmation of freedom of the press with the determination of certain restrictions, to prevent its abuse, whether fixed by reference to morality and good customs or specified in a particular law. This greatly facilitates the speculative question of the right to freedom of the press and its limits.
The existence of such a right has never been questioned by Catholic doctrine, which respects the human person and could not but recognize the faculty of communicating one’s ideas by means of oral or written speech. Indeed, language and its specific function have been adduced as one of the principal arguments for demonstrating man’s natural sociability. The right, therefore, to communicate thoughts or opinions by means of suitable means of expression is rooted in man’s rational nature and in his original destiny for social life: it is consequently incontestable. Catholic doctrine has merely combated a particular interpretation of it, deduced from the false concept of freedom defined as total autonomy of the will. In practice, all legislations have sided with it, none having codified freedom without limits; theoretically, however, not a few have accepted it, resorting to the external limit of the law.
Here lies an error that must be corrected. Freedom, not in its physical aspect of self-mastery of action but in its moral aspect, is the faculty of determining oneself independently according to the immanent laws of rationality, and since the human being has an innate tendency towards society, necessary for his full development, a double series of laws is intrinsic to him: that which imperatively regulates private conduct and that which in the same way guides him in public life. Freedom is consequently a faculty intrinsically limited both by morality and by justice, which includes the imperative exigencies of the political community. The law is nothing other than the positive determination of these limits, already existing prior to its formulation, and it finds its raison d’être not, as has been affirmed, in a supposed general will, a mere expression of the majority without which juridical force is not conceded, but rather in another source. Freedom of the press, therefore, is a fundamental right of the person, but a right intrinsically limited, which leaves room for the regulating intervention of political authority.
The individual criterion for concretely establishing such a limit is derived from the natural end of oral and written speech, which is intrinsically ordered to the manifestation and propagation of truth; the social criterion is the common good, in which must be included not only the rights of others but also those of society as such: the preservation of public order and the positive protection of human, moral, civil, and religious values, part of its highest spiritual patrimony. The only question remaining with regard to freedom of the press is whether political authority may resort to preventive measures—censorship, police seizure, authorization—or must restrict itself to adopting repressive measures: punishing abuses.
Theoretically, it is impossible to deny its right to prevent evil, if it can, and that prevention is better than punishment. The false reason often alleged against this right—that the State is incapable of knowing the truth in order to protect it from error—does not stand, since certain moral, juridical, and religious principles are so evident and so deeply rooted in the common conscience that public authority cannot ignore them. The objection presupposes a State that is morally and religiously agnostic, which is both a speculative and practical absurdity. More weighty are the objections drawn from the impossibility of effective enforcement, the lack of impartiality, and the danger of tyranny inherent in preventive measures. In the concrete realm, where recourse to the prudential rule of the lesser evil is always permissible, the following conclusions may therefore be accepted.
Preventive censorship is to be excluded due to the ease with which it lends itself to abuse and the danger of establishing a tyrannically oppressive regime. Sequestration, particularly of immoral and obscene publications that offend decency and public morals, is both appropriate and lawful; any potential abuses can be avoided if it is followed by regular denunciation to the judicial authorities and a proper trial. Preventive authorization shares, though to a lesser degree, in the dangers of censorship. Exceptional conditions, such as war or a particularly grave internal disturbance, may suggest derogations from these norms and justify a broader precautionary intervention by the State.
The duties of the press can be summed up in the word truth. Only by serving truth can it achieve its immediate purpose, to which the use of the written word and means of expression is essentially subordinated, and contribute beneficially to public education and the formation of opinion. The service of truth does not, however, exclude objective and constructive criticism of political authority. It does, however, forbid unrestrained campaigns of the press aimed at subverting order and fomenting and spreading hatred through falsehood. Unrestrained propaganda that does not shrink from distorting the truth was pointed out by Pius XII in his Christmas address of 1940 as a source of international discord. Such propaganda must be condemned as a political vice contrary to the social good, to the duty of honesty in criticism and opposition, and to the tasks of a press conscious of its lofty aims.
Antonio Messineo
PRINTING (GASPARA - MISSIONARY PRINTING)