Without Stalin there would have been no socialism, and without socialism, no Stalin.9 That said, his demonic disposition, which the experience of this kind of rule in this place heightened, never overwhelmed his ability to function at the highest level. Physically, he continued to suffer from frequent bouts of flu and fever, stomach ailments, dental problems, and severe pain in his joints, but he proved hearty enough to be a hands-on ruler of one sixth of the earth’s surface. His capacity for work was prodigious, his zeal for detail unquenchable.10 He received 100 or even 200 documents a day, some of substantial length, and he read many of them, often to the end, scribbling comments or instructions on them.11 He initiated or approved untold personnel appointments, goaded minions in relentless campaigns, attended myriad congresses and ceremonies bearing the burden of instruction, assiduously followed the public and private statements of cultural figures, edited novels and plays, and prescreened films. He pored over a voluminous flow of intelligence reports and lengthy interrogation protocols of accused spies, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, traitors. He wrote and rewrote the texts of decrees, newspaper editorials, and his own speeches, confident in his abilities. Very occasionally he made grammatical mistakes in Russian, his second language, but he wrote accessibly, using rhetorical questions, catchphrases, enumeration.12 The fools were the ones who took him for a fool.
Pravda taught Soviet inhabitants indebtedness to the state and to Stalin personally, depicting everything they had—food, clothing, education, joy—as gifts (“Thank you, comrade Stalin!”).13 In newsreels he came across as the epitome of wise leadership, photogenic in his signature tunic. “In his speeches Stalin was categorical, but simple,” recalled the loyalist writer Konstantin Simonov (b. 1915). “With people—this we sometimes saw in the newsreels—he conducted himself simply. He dressed simply, identically. There was nothing showy about him, no external pretensions to greatness or a sense of being chosen. This corresponded to our impressions of how a person standing at the head of the party should be. Altogether this was Stalin: all these feelings, all these positive traits, real and drawn by us, of the leader of the party and state.”14 Stalin’s leader cult was manufactured—acquiring the character of an arms race, as proponents strove to outdo one another—but not artificial.15 If Hitler, despite the forelock that fell into his face, the near ridiculous mustache, and the constant chewing of his fingernails, could hold his country in thrall, the reason lay at least as much in the German people as in the Führer’s gifts. Stalin, too, possessed a weird magnetism, derived from his ability to personify socialist modernity and Soviet might, to inspire and validate people’s aspirations. The cult’s power was that it was not just about Stalin; it was about them.16
• • •
LOOKED AT SOBERLY, Stalin’s anticapitalist experiment resembled a vast camp of deliberately deprived workers, indentured farmers, and slave laborers toiling for the benefit of an unacknowledged elite.17 But the Soviet Union was a fairy tale. Unrelenting optimism spread alongside famine, arrests, deportations, executions, camps, censorship, sealed borders.18 Newsreels that showed Stalin also featured belching smokestacks—Soviet inhabitants came to know factories by name and sight—tanks and bombers, giant icebreakers, fecund farms, the friendship of peoples, and vigorous, marching, smiling masses, a tableau of modernity, progress, socialism. Many Soviet inhabitants—especially, but not only, the young—craved a transcendent purpose, and in the swirl of ambition, fanaticism, and opportunism they willingly endured hardships, finding personal fulfillment, even liberation, in submission to the state-led struggle in the name of social justice, abundance, and peace. The relentless demands for public professions of loyalty risked eliciting playacting and sullen obedience. But the cause offered the possibility of belonging. Many embraced violence and cruelty as unavoidable in bringing about a new world, and they keenly soaked up the propaganda. To manage contradictions and conscience, they had the transcendent truth of Marxism-Leninism, and the personal example of “comrade Stalin.” People of this era who were looking for a brighter future, a chance to be part of something larger than themselves, found it.19 “The tiniest little fish,” one woman would enthuse in her diary, “can stir the depths of the ocean.”20
