He acted on his own. Among the arcana of Soviet administrative correspondence is a report of the NKVD in 1940 which Beria relayed to Stalin. The main conclusion was that the Gulag more than paid for itself as a sector of the Soviet economy: ‘The entire system of camps and labour colonies is fully paying its way and no subsidy for the prisoners (1,700,000 persons), their guards or the camp apparatus is needed.’14 Beria was on the make and may already have known that the opposite was true. But the regime was being consolidated; Stalin would not consider any basic alteration of what he had built. He was powerful and confident. He was overworked. He had strengthened the state as the prime lever of political and economic change. He had never believed in the spontaneous positive potential of the people. He wanted workers and peasants to support the regime, to work to their physical limit and to denounce ‘enemies’. He was jovial about the usefulness of the camps and executions. At the Eighteenth Party Congress he exulted that whereas 98.6 per cent of voters had supported the regime after Tukhachevski’s trial in mid-1937, the proportion increased to 99.4 per cent after Bukharin had been sentenced in March 1938.15
This was the comment of a man who felt he had largely succeeded. He had achieved enough of his objectives to know that his personal despotism and his design for the Soviet order were secure at least for the foreseeable future. He and the Politburo were to make minor modifications in future years as they sought to bind the walls together in the face of unanticipated storms. The basic design stayed intact; and those observers who have interpreted the modifications in terms of fundamentally separate periods are scarcely convincing. If it makes sense to talk of ‘late Stalinism’ or ‘high Stalinism’, the date of demarcation should be set at the end of the Great Terror in 1938. Stalin went on tinkering with his architect’s drawings. Relations among party, people’s commissariats and armed forces underwent alteration before, during and after the war. He fiddled with the scope allowed for Russian national identity and for cultural and religious expression; he also adjusted his cult to the social atmosphere of the time. Economic policies were repeatedly modified. Foreign policy was frequently amended. Stalin did not refer to his architecture as Stalinist but was not averse to others using the term. This order prevailed until the day he died — and in many respects it was to outlive him.
Stalin the Leader was multifaceted. He was a mass killer with psychological obsessions. He thought and wrote as a Marxist. He behaved like the more ruthless Russian rulers of earlier centuries. He was a party boss, administrator, editor and correspondent. He was a paterfamilias and genial host at his dacha as well as a voracious reader and intellectual autodidact. Depending on circumstances, he displayed all these aspects at once or hid some while exhibiting others. He had the capacity to divide and subdivide himself. Stalin’s multitude of forms left his associates impressed, baffled and fearful — and indeed this was one of the secrets of his success in maintaining dominance over them.
His record as an international statesman has always been controversial. The jury of history has offered a majority verdict that his preoccupation with Soviet economic development and political consolidation deflected his attention from foreign affairs. Some have accused Stalin of knowing and caring nothing about events abroad. The building of ‘socialism in a single country’ was among his main slogans, and the General Secretary’s advocacy of this priority fostered the misperception, both at the time and later, that he was not bothered by what happened in the rest of the world. The general assumption has been that he and his Politburo comrades had ditched the project of worldwide socialist revolution. His opponents Trotski and Bukharin said this, and their view has attracted the nodding heads of most subsequent commentators. About Stalin’s concentration on the situation inside the USSR there is no doubt. But this did not mean he overlooked foreign policy. Nor did he allow it to be formulated without his active intervention: he continued to give it the high priority it had had for him in the 1920s.
