Stalin: A Biography полностью

This was hardly Marxist in style or content. Was it perhaps a residue of Stalin’s extreme attitude to his upbringing in Georgia where, at least in the mountains, the traditions of the blood feud persisted? This cannot be the exclusive explanation. Although Georgian traditions may have encouraged him to seek revenge for any damage, they did not involve the assumption that the destruction of entire extended families was desirable.¹⁹ A more plausible influence was Stalin’s reading of early Russian history — he had long been an enthusiastic reader of R. Vipper’s biography of Ivan the Terrible.²⁰ Dedicating himself to exterminating not only individual leaders but also their relatives, Stalin was reproducing the attitudes of Ivan the Terrible.

He continued to ponder the springs of human endeavour. He put one trait of character above all others: ‘Lenin was right to say that a person lacking the courage to act at the crucial moment cannot be a true Bolshevik leader.’²¹ He wrote this in a letter to Kaganovich in 1932. Two years later a similar sentiment surfaced in one of his brief messages to his mother: ‘The children send their respects to you. Since Nadya’s death, of course, my personal life is heavy. But so be it: a courageous person must always stay courageous.’²² Probably Stalin was expressing himself sincerely. (Perhaps he was also trying to convince himself that he was valorous.) All acquaintances were impressed by his will power. Even the wilful Kaganovich was bendable to his purposes. But this was not enough for Stalin, who wanted to appear not merely strong-minded but also courageous. Such a virtue was to remain a dominant theme in his thinking; he was to emphasise the need for it in the very last speech he improvised to the Central Committee in October 1952, just months before his death.²³

His style of thinking can be glimpsed in the jottings he made in the 1939 edition of Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism. Stalin studied this dour work on epistemology despite all the practical matters of state he had to decide. He scattered a commentary in the margins. Stalin savoured Lenin’s polemical attacks, scribbling down phrases such as ‘Ha! Ha!’ and even ‘Oi Mama! Well, what a nightmare!’²⁴ His mental fixation with Lenin was evident from the way he repeatedly copied out Lenin’s name in Latin script.²⁵ Yet the most intriguing thing is what he wrote on the flyleaf at the end of the book:²⁶

Of all the reactions to Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism this is surely the oddest. It is hard to believe that it was the reading of the book that provoked Stalin’s comments; probably he simply used the flyleaf as a convenient space for ideas that came to mind.

Stalin, communing with himself, used the religious language of the spirit and of sin and vice. Human endeavour apparently could be encapsulated only in such terms: evidently Marxism would not fulfil this task by itself. Stalin was reverting to the discourse of the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary; his early schooling had left an indelible imprint.