Stalin полностью

2. “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder,” Campbell wrote. “Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, 30.

3. One of Bukharin’s works, “Toward a Theory of the Imperialist State” [1916], which influenced Lenin, had argued that a “militaristic state capitalism” would produce a “new Leviathan, in comparison with which the fantasy of Thomas Hobbes seems like child’s play.” He denied socialism could lead to this result because “socialism is the regulation of production directed by society, not by the state.” Needless to say, his new Leviathan (“absorbing within the domain of state management everyone and everything”) had turned out to fit the Soviet state. Bukharin, “K teorii imprialisticheskogo gosudarstva,” 5–32. See also Harding, “Authority, Power and the State,” 32–56. Daniels, “The State and Revolution”; and Cohen, Bukharin, 39–40.

4. A typical absolution of Marx from the Soviet outcome is Dalrymple, “Marx and Agriculture.” The distance between Stalin and Marx was one of time period and context. “Everyone who contradicted him, he treated with abject contempt,” one of Marx’s fellow radicals, Carl Schurz, a student radical from Bonn (later a U.S. senator), wrote of their first meeting in Cologne in 1848. “Every argument that he did not like he answered either with biting scorn at the unfathomable ignorance that had prompted it, or with opprobrious aspersions upon the motives of him who had advanced it.” McLellan, Karl Marx, 15 (1909 memoir).

5. Self-styled socialists in the nineteenth century, initially, had employed other terms—“the anti-social system,” “the system of bourgeois property”—but then hit upon this single all-encompassing notion whose essence (property relations, a mode of production), if replaced, would supposedly alter not merely the economy but the entire world, delivering abundance, social justice, and peace. The invention of “capitalism” was a stunning achievement for the socialists, in a way, but a tragedy for humanity, and ultimately, for the entire left, too. Unlike Leninists, Social Democrats were never sure whether this “capitalism” would implode on its own, could be peacefully overcome inside parliaments by large worker-majority parties, or in the end required revolutionary intervention, but it had to go. Those Social Democrats who came to believe that “capitalism” was amenable to becoming more humane—capitalism with a human face—opened themselves up to accusations of being accomplices to exploitation and imperialism.

6. Hegel stated in a series of lectures published posthumously (1837): “But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench [Schlachtbank] at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.” The answer was not Hegel’s Reason or World Spirit but misbegotten ideas. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Hegel’s lectures were published in Russian translation in 1932 as vols. IX and X of his Works by Partizdat.

7. In Marxism-Leninism, only one set of interests can be legitimate, the “proletariat’s,” the rest are ipso facto expressions of the “wrong” class interests, a stricture that effectively excludes lawful politics. But politics is how different groups, interests, and opinions are represented and allowed to compete via peaceful means, and with institutional restraint. Crick, In Defence of Politics, 28. More broadly, the idea that a self-appointed elite has the right, even the duty, to coerce a population for the latter’s benefit is beyond pernicious. That the destruction of whole “classes” can somehow produce freedom is beyond folly. Systemic prevarication and political murder in the name of some supposed higher humanity get institutionalized. Chamberlin, Evolution of a Conservative, 13.

8. Carr defended Stalin’s bloody revolution from above because it was the only way to build socialism (a system not based on private property and markets), which was true, but also because it enabled the socialist state to defend itself in the rapacious international order. A self-styled realist, Carr understood he was defending a morally repugnant system, but in his eyes capitalism had failed, while state planning and collectivization had appeared to succeed, against expectations. It also helped that socialism’s extreme violence and waste could be attributed to inevitable birth pangs that would pass, while capitalism’s crisis was seen as permanent. Wohlforth, “Russian-Soviet Empire,” at 226. See also Jonathan Haslam, “We Need a Faith,” 37.