Stalin полностью

Gorky’s ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall. Stalin afforded Andreyev, his apparatchik for culture, the honor of placing the urn. The regime seized the writer’s archive (Yagoda especially was in for infuriating surprises).³⁴⁸ Rumors circulated of poisoning. One of those accused was Gorky’s former mistress Baroness Moura Budberg, who got her surname through marriage to an Estonian aristocrat, started an affair with H. G. Wells, and was thought to be a double British and Soviet agent. But the main suspect in the whisperings was Stalin.³⁴⁹ In fact, Gorky, who was sixty-eight, had been extremely sick, and was properly diagnosed and treated by a battery of top physicians.³⁵⁰ His autopsy revealed bronchitis, tuberculosis, and a damaged left lung. The writer had smoked nearly three packs of cigarettes a day, and needed an oxygen tank. Pravda gave the cause of death as “a cardiac arrest and paralysis of the lungs.” Gorky had never spiritually recovered from his son Maxim’s untimely death.³⁵¹ “What has brought you to the Bolsheviks?” Yekaterina Kuskova, Gorky’s lifelong friend, recalled asking him once, in an obituary published in the emigration (June 26). “Do you remember how I began to read Marx with you in Nizhny Novgorod, and you proposed to throw the ‘German philistine’ into the fire?”³⁵²

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THE MARXIST-LENINIST REGIME that emerged in the blood and fever dreams of the years 1929–36 was buffeted by global structural forces, from fluctuations in commodity prices to innovations in tank designs, and by the deepening of a new historical conjuncture, the mass age. The most powerful countries achieved and maintained their great-power status by mastery of a set of modern attributes: mass production, mass consumption, mass culture, mass politics. Great Britain had not only powerful ships and airplanes, engineers and trained military officers, but also a broad-based political system, an integrated national culture, and a deep degree of societal cohesion. Every other aspiring great power had to achieve its own mass-based version of modernity, which imparted new impetus and form to their geopolitical rivalries. That competition took place not just across the liberal-illiberal divide but among the democratizing parliamentary countries Britain, France, and the United States, and among avowedly authoritarian regimes: fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. All of them either had to match the others in some way or risk becoming, like the rest of the world, colonies. Modernity was not a sociological but a geopolitical process.³⁵³

Stalin forced into being a socialist modernity, presiding over the creation of a mass-production economy, a Soviet mass culture, an integrated society, and a mass politics without private property.^{354, 355}

This upheaval, in addition to geopolitics and ideology, reflected Russia’s long-standing sense of world-historical destiny combined with profound insecurity and relative weakness vis-à-vis the European powers. This gap had long goaded Russia into catch-up acquisition of Western technology to protect the country’s non-Western identity, borrowing not ideas and institutions of liberty but technology for industry and techniques for administration of resources and population—the social-engineering part of the Enlightenment. But even as Russia advanced, the West did not stand still and remained richer, more advanced, more powerful. Still, under Stalin the Soviets had imported and copied Western technology and skills, enforced deprivation on the populace, and created a massive land army and air force that would be the envy of other powers—just as imperial Russia had done.³⁵⁶ Stalin’s use of the state to force-modernize the country was far more radical and violent than that of his tsarist predecessors because of the Great War conjuncture, which accelerated the use of violence for political ends, and the anticapitalism, which coercion alone could achieve. Thanks to the Great Depression, Stalin was also able to secure technology transfer with greater independence from foreign desiderata.³⁵⁷