The content of the commentary, though, is deeply unChristian; it is reminiscent more of Niccolò Machiavelli and Friedrich Nietzsche than of the Bible. For Stalin the criterion of goodness was not morality but effectiveness. Individuals were to be judged for their inner strength, assiduity, practicality and cleverness. Any blemishes on the escutcheon of a career were forgivable if accompanied by substantial achievements in the service of the cause. Furthermore, the fact that the characteristics despised by Stalin were weakness, idleness and stupidity is revealing. Stalin the mass killer slept easily at night. Not for him the uneasiness of wearing the crown of state: he adored power. But he was also self-demanding. He wanted action and wished it to be based on sound judgement, and he could not abide sloth and lack of intelligent commitment. He was offering himself the plaudits of history. Judging his own long and bloody career in revolutionary politics, he found nothing to reproach. But like a sixteenth-century Calvinist he felt the need to keep asking himself whether he really met his own exacting standards. Gruff and blunt as he was among his associates, he had episodes of introspection. But he did not torment himself. The very process of laying out the criteria of judgement apparently allayed such doubts as he had about himself. He grew into his own myth.
The fact that he jotted down his remarks in a copy of a work by Lenin may not have been an accident: Stalin measured himself by Lenin’s standard.27 The influence was not merely ideological. Stalin had seen Lenin at close quarters and abidingly respected and even revered his memory. But the language used in the jottings was not especially Leninist. Possibly Stalin’s style of amoralism came not from Marxism– Leninism but from a much earlier set of ideas. He read Machiavelli’s
His was a complex mind. He had a personality prone to mistrustful fantasy and, tragically, he had the opportunity to act out his own psychological damage by persecuting millions of his people. He perceived enemies everywhere; his whole cognitive tendency was to assume that any slight problem in his personal or political life was the result of malevolent human agency. He was also drawn to suspecting the existence of plots of the widest nature. He did not limit this attitude to the USSR. Contemplating the anti-British Indian National Congress in 1938, he assured a reception of newly elected USSR Supreme Soviet delegates in 1938 that more than half were ‘agents bought up by English money’.29 That the British government possessed paid informers is beyond dispute. But the idea that so large a proportion were regularly denouncing Mahatma Gandhi is without substance although it may indicate the state of mind of its advocate. In the USSR, where his word was law, Stalin was seldom content to allow for the possibility that a particular victim might have been acting alone. His preference was to link his ‘enemies’ with a conspiracy spread out across the world and connected with the intelligence services of hostile foreign powers. His associates reinforced his propensities. They had always felt politically besieged.
It was a feeling that increased after they drove out the party oppositions and undertook campaigns of immense brutality in the country. They treated all people who resisted or simply criticised them as rubbish to be annihilated. Not all of them lusted after terror, yet some did and many more were willing collaborators. Every one of these associates had reason to be fearful. The deep resentment across Soviet society was real, and they could not be confident that an alternative political leadership would not arise and overthrow them.
