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Understanding Stalinism: The 'Orwellian Discrepancy' and the 'Rational Choice Dictator'Author(s): Vincent BarnettReviewed work(s):Source: Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 58, No. 3 (May, 2006), pp. 457-466Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20451207 .Accessed: 01/05/2012 20:11
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EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES Routledge
Vol. 58, No. 3, May 2006, 457-466 Taylor&FrancisGroup
Discussion Article
Understanding Stalinism-The 'Orwellian Discrepancy' and the 'Rational Choice
Dictator'
VINCENT BARNETT
Abstract
This discussion article examines the logical bases of the arguments often encountered in the literature that compares Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism. It analyses the 'Orwellian discrepancy' between Marxist ideals and Soviet reality, the comparative differences in numbers of people that were murdered by the Stalin and Hitler regimes, and the distinction between 'murder' and 'execution' that is sometimes applied to the actions of the two tyrants. It then examines the notion of Stalin as a 'rational choice'
dictator who, through the use of state-sponsored terror, was simply ensuring the survival of his regime, and suggests that a better model for Stalin's government would be that of 'pseudo-rational choice irrationality'. Arguments that imply that 'Team Stalin' should not be seen as a totalitarian corporate form of government because of some attempted reforms and recently revealed institutional complexity are also considered. It concludes by reaffirming the importance of understanding human belief and intellectual factors to a comprehension of historical development.
THERE IS AN ONGOING DEBATE IN RUSSIAN STUDIES CIRCLES regarding the nature of
Soviet totalitarianism/collectivism/socialism as a system and whether the Hitler and
Stalin regimes are directly comparable. As part of this debate, there is an ongoing
dispute about the numbers of victims of Nazism and Stalinism, and whether
comparing these numerical estimates is a legitimate activity vis-a'-vis characterising the
nature of the regimes concerned. Some of the key protagonists of this debate have
been Robert Conquest, Stephen Wheatcroft and Steven Rosefielde (Conquest, 1997,
pp. 1317-1319; Rosefielde, 1996, pp. 959-987). Conquest and Rosefielde exhibit a
political hostility and a deep moral revulsion to the Soviet terror of the 1930s that
might be taken to equate it in a general sense with the Nazi Holocaust, whereas
Wheatcroft (and others like R.W. Davies) deny that the Soviet terror is directly
comparable in moral terms to its disputed German cousin.
One of the themes underlying this debate is the question of the role of the individual
in historical development, against the role of the 'vast impersonal forces' sometimes
evoked by historians. Davies for example has concluded that in the twentieth century,
ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/06/030457-10 ? 2006 University of Glasgow DOI: 10.1080/09668130600601982
458 VINCENT BARNETT
circumstance was 'far more important than personality' in the formation of individual
world outlooks, suggesting that historical conditions explained more about the nature
of Stalinism than Stalin did himself.' However, Davies might recall one E.H. Carr
arguing that it was actually not possible to separate out the individual from society,
stating that 'the development of society and the individual go hand in hand, and
condition each other' (Carr, 1985, p. 32). Individual personality and historical
circumstance are thus both equally important to explaining societal change, in fact one
might say that they are 'dialectically interrelated'.
Related to the debate over comparing Nazism and Stalinism is the question of whether
Stalin's actions as a dictator were in any sense 'rational', that is, were the mass purges
and executions designed and carried out with specific logical aims and through 'rational
choices', and if so, did they achieve these goals? Mark Harrison has raised this issue
explicitly, but it also underlies much of the debate about 'was Stalin really necessary': were
Stalin's actions in the 1930s guided solely by the logic of the situation he found himself in,
or were they the result of irrational hatreds or the consequence of political folly or even
madness? This discussion article attempts to clarify and expand upon some aspects of
these two related topics in relation to existing scholarship on this subject by focusing on
the logical bases of the arguments often rehearsed. The first part of the article focuses on
what will be called 'the Orwellian discrepancy', the second part on the notion of Stalin as
a 'rational choice dictator'. The aim is not to diminish detailed empirical scholarship on
these topics but rather to place it on a more solid philosophical foundation.
The Orwellian discrepancy
In a 1996 article Stephen Wheatcroft took the view that the victims of Stalin's purges
and the labour camp system were neither morally nor numerically equivalent to the
victims of Hitler's attempt at racial genocide. Whilst not wishing to whitewash the
Stalin regime, Wheatcroft wanted to make a clear moral distinction between the mass
deaths associated with the Soviet policies of forced industrialisation and forced
collectivisation, and Hitler's policy of eliminating the Jewish people as a race
(Wheatcroft, 1996, pp. 1319-1353). Wheatcroft even went as far as to characterise
Hitler's policy of racial genocide as 'murder', against Stalin's policy of mass political
culling that was merely 'execution', clearly implying some sort of moral distinction.
Wheatcroft also distinguished between the victims of the labour camp system in the
USSR, the victims of famine, and the victims of mass executions: he numerically
equated only the latter with the victims of the Nazi-created Holocaust.
In a 2002 book chapter, Wheatcroft slightly hardened his attitude to the Soviet
terror, admitting that it involved 'mass killings' rather than just 'executions'. However,
he still maintained that there was a distinction between the Soviet terror and the Nazi
Holocaust as follows:
The Holocaust and the Ezhovshchina were both cases of mass killings, but there was a difference in as much as the Ezhovshchina did involve a kind of execution that was supported
*See Davies (2000, p. 445). Whether Davies would want to extend this 'circumstantial' approach to
explaining the rise of the Nazis and Hitler's own attitude is an interesting question to ponder.
UNDERSTANDING STALINISM 459
by some degree of legal process, although a non-judicial process. The Holocaust made no pretence at any degree of legal process (Wheatcroft, 2002, p. 139, fn. 1).
To many of those of a traditional left persuasion, these sorts of distinctions might seem appealing on first examination. However, this section attempts to play devil's
advocate by examining the underlying assumptions of these sorts of distinctions. It is often argued by some that Stalinism was not as 'morally reprehensible' as
Nazism, as the stated goals of the Stalinist variant of Marxism were in the long run
admirable, whereas the stated aims of Nazism were indefensible. This type of argument
relies upon a notion that can be called the 'Orwellian discrepancy': that the stated aims of Marxism were not those realised in the Gulag, but the very opposite. Supporters of this position are giving some credit to Stalin for the apparently laudable declared aims of Marxism, even if these aims were totally distorted in practice (Wedgwood Benn, 1999, p. 156). Is this a reasonable position to take? If it is, then the same reasoning
should apply to the Nazis, as a level playing field must apply to the analysis of both systems. That is, if instead of preaching racial hatred, Hitler had instead preached racial
harmony, but then still attempted to eliminate all Jews in the manner recorded by
history only as an 'aberration', this hypothetical Nazi regime should be regarded as less
'morally reprehensible' than the actual Nazi regime. Does this comparison make any sense? By framing the argument in this way it is clear that this position does not make
any sense whatsoever. If I kill someone in cold blood, but then claim that I was acting with some sort of long-run moral concern, is this any better than if I had killed someone
simply for the fun of it? The law makes no such distinction in principle. There is another argument against the moral non-equivalence position. Let us
accept, for the sake of argument, Wheatcroft's case (which is heavily disputed by both Rosefielde and Conquest) that the Stalin regime was responsible for only one million
deaths which can be directly compared with the five million that the Nazis were
responsible for in terms of Wheatcroft's category of 'mass purposive killings'
(Wheatcroft, 1996, p. 1348). The implication might be that killing one million in this
way is 'less morally reprehensible' than killing five million. On the face of it this comparison appears rational. However, this type of judgement is neglecting to explore the question of whether Stalin would have been willing to accept the killing of more than one million, if he had to do so. Consider the counter-factual possibility that the Stalin regime needed to order many more executions than it did, in order to achieve its aims. Is it reasonable to maintain that Stalin would have responded: 'killing one
million is morally acceptable, but killing more than one million is not, therefore I shall halt the executions at the one million level'?
This is obviously absurd, as Stalin would have been very unlikely to respond in this
way. The Stalin regime killed the one million either because this was (in Stalin's
particular mental state) the amount thought necessary to eliminate at the time, or
because this was the level that circumstances at the time allowed or generated, not
because there was a numerical level of mass slaughter beyond which Stalin would not
go for ethical reasons. The same reasoning applies to Hitler. Assume that there were
only one million Jews in existence in Nazi-occupied Europe in 1940, and that a
hypothetical Hitler regime then killed all of them. Would that make him 'less morally reprehensible' than the actual Hitler who was responsible for killing five million?
460 VINCENT BARNETT
Framing the question in this manner reveals that playing the comparative numbers
game with 'mass purposive killings' is not something that can be done with precise
moral accuracy.
Wheatcroft also attempted to make a distinction in descriptive labelling between the
'mass purposive killings' caused by Hitler and those caused by Stalin. The following
passage appeared in the conclusion to Wheatcroft's 1996 article:
the purposive deaths caused by Hitler fit more closely into the category of 'murder', while those caused by Stalin fit more closely the category of 'execution'. Stalin undoubtedly caused
many innocent people to be executed, but it seems likely that he thought many of them guilty of crimes against the state ... Hitler, by contrast, wanted to be rid of the Jews and communists simply because they were Jews and communists (Wheatcroft, 1996, p. 1348).
Wheatcroft appeared not to realise that Nazi ideology provided reasons for the
elimination of Jews and communists-totally erroneous and mistaken reasons, and
producing an utterly horrific and completely unjustified outcome-but reasons
nonetheless. Wheatcroft's underlying assumption was perhaps that we should allow
Stalin some license for his erroneous reasons for ordering mass executions in the
USSR, but not acknowledge at all that Hitler believed in his own (totally
unwarranted) reasons for racial genocide. In truth, both the Nazi reasoning regarding
the need to eliminate Jews and Stalin's reasons for ordering mass executions were
similarly erroneous. Unless, of course, Wheatcroft wants to argue that there was
indeed a sympathetic case for Stalin's 'mass purposive killings'?
Put still another way, does it make sense to consider a victim of Stalin's purges
thinking to themselves in the afterlife: thank goodness I was only hounded,
interrogated, tortured and then executed; those poor Jews who were murdered in
Germany! As correctly characterised by Michael Ellman, the mass repressions in the
USSR in the 1930s were actually a 'series of crimes against humanity' (Ellman, 2002, p.
1164). Wheatcroft's previously quoted attempt in his 2002 book chapter to distinguish
between the Soviet and Nazi mass killings by stating that the former held to some type
of legal process again holds little significance. Would anyone seriously alter their
evaluation of the Nazi genocide if Hitler had ordered a more fully encompassing sham
legal process that actually formally convicted Jews of conforming to the racist
stereotypes that the Nazis promoted, before sending them to the concentration camps?
There is still another argument against the moral non-equivalence position.
Consider which enemy you would prefer to face: one that explains his or her ideology
'honestly' in its own terms, or one who consistently lays down a fog of moral-sounding
rhetoric in order to cover up their actual base actions. It could be argued that Stalin
was worse than Hitler because Stalin implemented atrocities and then justified them by
reference to socialist ideals. Hitler's justification was racist ideology. It is true that the
full extent of the Nazi genocide against the Jews was a shock to some observers after
1945, but it cannot be said to be against the spirit of Fascist propaganda. And while
many lies were certainly told to Jews themselves about their eventual fate during
WWII, these lies were a purely practical inversion in order to ease their passage to
destruction. Stalin's use of Marxian utopianism to throw a smoke screen around an
entire system of slave labour and mass murder has to be one of the most, if not the
most, incongruous perversions of an initially declared egalitarian intention ever
UNDERSTANDING STALINISM 461
accomplished in the entire history of humanity. This is especially significant when the
effect of Stalinism is considered internationally after 1945. Nazi aims died with Hitler,
but Stalin was held up as a hero for socialists to follow for many years after 1945.
Consequently people who tried to campaign for socialism were frequently tarred with
the brush of the Gulag, and hence opponents of socialism used the Orwellian
discrepancy against progressive aims.
This connects to another argument often put forward to suggest that Stalin was
preferable to Hitler: Stalin sided with the Allies during WWII, and hence we should
praise Stalin for his judgement in this respect. In truth Stalin did not eventually side
with the Allies for moral or ideological reasons, but for purely practical and survival
reasons-the USSR was invaded by Germany. We should not forget that the Nazi
Soviet pact was negotiated by V.M. Molotov and Stalin was clearly willing in principle
to form an alliance with Hitler, although Stalin's motives for this are contested.
Remember also that the Stalinist variant of Marxism condemned Nazism and
'bourgeois democracy' to the dustbin of history, and analysed both of them as variant
expressions of the same underlying forces prevalent within capitalist production.
Within this framework Nazism was (after 1941) accepted as the more immediate threat
to Soviet survival, but this was a purely contingent judgement; the USSR would still
have to defeat the UK and the USA in the medium term.
Consequently, by trying to differentiate between the moral significance of Nazism
and Stalinism, some scholars are pushed into adopting arguments that rely on paper
thin distinctions that collapse on more detailed philosophical examination. In truth it
is senseless to try to compare the moral depravity of Hitler and Stalin with arguments
of the type 'dictator X killed less people than dictator Y'. Of course, if Stalin had
accidentally killed only 100 people, and Hitler deliberately killed five million, then
there would be a clear moral distinction, but once you get into the ballpark level of
millions of planned deaths on both sides, precise numerical comparison loses any
underlying ethical rationale. This does not mean that historical investigation into the
exact number of people killed is not a worthwhile pursuit in itself, only that such
investigations cannot be used to suggest that one dictator was 'less morally
reprehensible' than another, or to validate illegitimate distinctions between 'murder'
and 'execution' in a tyrannical context.
The rational choice dictator
Again, to those of the traditional left, the temptation to see Stalin only in a positive
light led to the attempt to try and find something 'rational' within the horrific melee of
the USSR in the 1930s. A more recent expression of this tendency is Mark Harrison's
claim that several features of Stalin's rule such as the mass repressions can be
understood as the rational choices of a dictator optimising his regime: a 'rational
choice' Stalin (Harrison, 2003). Here it is necessary to consider what is actually meant
by 'optimising his regime'. If by this phrase, laying the foundations for the long-term
continued existence of the USSR in a hostile world environment is meant, then Stalin
clearly failed to 'optimise his regime', as the USSR collapsed at the end of the 1980s, in
part due to a lasting revulsion to Stalin's legacy. However, Harrison might mean
something more specific, such as securing Stalin's personal dictatorial rule within his
462 VINCENT BARNETT
own lifetime. In this more limited sense Stalin did indeed maintain his own position of
power until his death by natural causes, but it might still be possible to question the
idea that this was a 'rational' strategy or that it was accomplished by means of
'rational choices'. Was it really essential for Stalin to engineer (in Harrison's own figures) 20 million
passing through the forced labour system, six million arrested for political crimes and
(Wheatcroft again) one million actually executed, in order for the Soviet dictator to
behave 'rationally'? If we assume that only 750,000 were deliberately executed, would
this have made a substantive difference to Stalin's personal reputation as a vicious
tyrant? I leave readers to make up their own minds about this. It might be more
reasonable to conclude that Stalin's attitude to political executions suggested a power
mania with deep-seated psychological, sociological and intellectual roots, not a
'rational choice' dictator playing a mathematically modelled game of 'chicken' using
the latest inventions of game theory at an instinctual level. This does not mean that
Stalin was 'mad', but the opposite of 'mad' is not 'rational', it is 'sane'. But someone
can be sane and still act irrationally or through ignorance, either in one specific
instance or over a significant period of time. To suggest that Stalin rationally
calculated the minimum level of murderous terror that he had to generate in order to
maintain his own position within the Soviet 'nested dictatorship' (Paul Gregory's
term) is stretching the meaning of the word 'rational' into its opposite. Would
Harrison suggest that Hitler also made a similar calculation in Germany, and hence
Hitler was also acting 'rationally' by murdering Jews?
Harrison brings into the discussion a quite different question which certainly did
concern Stalin in the 1930s, that of modernising and industrialising the Soviet
economy. Stalin might very well have implemented various policies such as the five
year plans and agricultural collectivisation with this concern in mind, but this is a
separate question to that of maintaining his own personal dictatorship. It is logically
possible to conceive of Stalin maintaining his own political position whilst accepting
far lower rates of industrial growth as planning targets, although I accept that in the
atmosphere of the frenzied political debates in the USSR around 1930 these two
factors were partially linked. However, Stalin was also influenced by ideas about the
relevance of planning to industrialisation strategy, ideas that had specific origins and
impetuses. But a key point that both Harrison and Davies often neglect is that a
socialist economy (as outlined initially by Marx) had absolutely nothing whatsoever to
do with industrialisation. Socialist planning was supposed to be about improving the
quality of all human life by means of overcoming exploitative social relations starting
from an advanced capitalist economy, not manufacturing vastly more iron and steel
by means of a tyrannical forced labour system starting from a backward semi-feudal
peasant-dominated economy.
Consequently, it is false to suggest, as Harrison does, that those who view the Stalin
era as 'surreal' necessarily see it as incomprehensible (Harrison, 2003, p. 2). Surrealism
as a movement was a rational response to the irrationality of the First World War, and
the imagery of surrealism deliberately and sanely utilised ideas associated with the
burgeoning psychoanalytic movement. Commentary on irrational events is not
necessarily irrational itself. What those who describe the Stalin era as 'surreal' actually
mean is that the Orwellian discrepancy was bizarre, in that socialist ideas had led
UNDERSTANDING STALINISM 463
into the Gulag. And one of the reasons for this 'economic surrealism' was that Marx's
basic ideas about the necessary preconditions for creating a socialist economy were
being totally ignored.2 Unsurprisingly, the collapse of the USSR was eventually the result.
Thus, for those of the Harrison - Davies school, the final line in the sand for
defending Stalin's 'rationality' relates to the development of the Soviet economy.
Davies (with Melanie Ilic and Oleg Khlevnyuk) has recently written:
The collectivisation of agriculture and forced industrialisation brought definite achievements as well as tragic consequences, and seemed to Stalin and his colleagues to justify the path they were following (Davies et al., 2004, p. 131).
No specific evidence for the notion that Stalin thought the 'achievements' of the Soviet
economy justified mass murder on a gigantic scale is directly cited, but let the idea be
taken at face value. What is being claimed is actually truly extraordinary. It is being
suggested that Stalin believed that mass murder was somehow a 'tragic consequence' of collectivisation and/or industrialisation. This means that the latter two goals could
not have been achieved without the given mass murder. But why not? Forced
collectivisation was not unambiguously assisted by mass political culling, nor was
increasing the rate of industrial growth. In fact, Holland Hunter has calculated that
the forced collectivisation itself had negative consequences for the Soviet economy, let
alone the mass murder (Hunter & Szyrmer, 1992). Furthermore, as I have shown, the
people that Stalin characterised as supporting lower rates of economic growth, such as
Nikolai Kondratiev, were actually arguing for an alternative path of industrialisation,
not for less overall growth in the long-run (Barnett, 1998). Hence their destruction also
did not enable sustainable development.
In truth the mass killings were not a consequence of any issue related to the economy, but were a consequence of the particular tyrannical form of government developed by the
Bolsheviks, and of Stalin's own individual beliefs and motivations, in association with the
group of colleagues around him-what Wheatcroft has called 'Team Stalin'. It is revealing
that in the (generally excellent) chapter on economic decision making in the Politburo by Davies, Ilic and Khlevnyuk, from which the above quote originates, the reader would
have to look very hard indeed to find mention of any economic principles, concepts or
ideas which were discussed in the Politburo and used to assist in decision-making. The
actual reason for this was that 'Team Stalin' did not really understand economic ideas (by this I mean theoretical principles), either 'bourgeois' or socialist, and hence substituted
analysis based on concepts with naive fact-worship. As Davies, Ilic and Khlevnyuk illustrate in the chapter, Stalin's most pressing desire in regards to understanding the
Soviet economy was factual reports on grain collections, not ideas about transforming social relations (Davies et al., 2004, p. 123). Davies, Ilic and Khlevnyuk claim that the
Stalin - Kaganovich correspondence is revealing of 'Stalin's economic logic', but in all
honesty I could not find any genuine 'economic logic' in their presentation of the archive
material that they have discovered. Of course there is what passed for 'economic logic'
amongst 'Team Stalin', but this was actually neither 'economic' nor 'logical' it was more
2Some aspects of how this distortion was able to occur are discussed in Barnett (2005a and
2005b).
464 VINCENT BARNETT
akin to the analysis of committee-bound bureaucrats haphazardly reacting to events using
reasoning common to second-rate politicians.
The irrational voice dictator
In contradistinction to all of the above analysis, this author would like to suggest a
different way of viewing Stalin's alleged 'rationality' in this regard. Put simply, the
model is that of a subset of pseudo-rationality within an overall system structure of
irrationality. Remember that the basic purpose of revolutionary socialists achieving
political power in 1917 was to construct a system of rational planning based upon real
human needs. Most commentators would agree that such a fully rational and complete
system was not in place in the USSR in the early 1930s, and hence Stalin was operating
within a system of (partial) irrationality, or lagged institutional overhang from the
Tsarist and World War I periods. As Davies and his group of co-workers have usefully
shown, the Soviet economic system was constantly evolving throughout the 1920s and
1930s. This evolution had its own internal political and bureaucratic logic. It was not
generated by the attempt to conform to a previously established model of a rationally
planned economy, as no such model existed. After 1929 Stalin himself engineered the
destruction of the cadre of brilliant Russian economists who might have provided such
a rational model, as an integral part of the 'mass purposive killings' that were
discussed previously.3 Reformulating Harrison's description, it is better to view Stalin's actions in the
1930s as characterised by 'pseudo-rational choice irrationality', or apparently
rational actions that only appear rational from the point of view of a dictator
paranoid about his own position, paranoid about the position of the USSR
internationally, and having a very tenuous grasp of economic theory, the intellectual
genesis of Marxism and the consequences of tyrannical rule for the Soviet state and
governmental institutions. But this is not real 'rationality', nor did it involve
genuinely rational choices. Charles Bettelheim has usefully highlighted what he calls
'the cult of the chief, which was close to the Nazi's Fuehrerprinzip, as being contained within the Stalinist ideological formation (Bettelheim, 2001, pp. 244-245).
Stalin's personal authority was (in part) what he was preserving through the terror.
Trying to square this amount of centralised personal power with socialist-inspired
egalitarianism is not something that Stalin ever tried to accomplish 'rationally'.
Arguments of the type that 'somewhere over the rainbow' in the distant future
Stalin-type tyrants might reform themselves into true socialists are not convincing
the ends do not justify the means.
On a related point, it sometimes seems to be tacitly implied in the literature that, as
has been usefully shown by Davies and his co-workers using new archive materials,
because the Stalinist system is now seen to be much more complex than had been
previously described, involving some attempts at reform and many examples of inter
and intra-institutional conflict, it should be regarded as somehow less totalitarian, less
dictatorial, less utterly horrific or less comparable to Nazism. But in truth, the idea of a totalitarian system does not mean that there were no examples of disagreements, no
3See Barnett (2004) for a discussion of the work of economists in this regard.
UNDERSTANDING STALINISM 465
cases of attempted reforms, or even no internal examples of people rallying against the
leader's pronouncements that can be given. It is how these elements were dealt with
that constituted totalitarianism, not the complete absence of such elements themselves.
Scholars should guard against the meaning of the word 'understanding' as it is used in
this context from sliding from 'neutrally comprehending the factual particulars of the
subject' to 'some hidden sympathy for Stalin's predicament'. Wheatcroft's character
isation of the earlier totalitarian approach as modelling the Soviet system as a 'lone
dictator reserving for himself jealously all decision-making functions' is a straw man
eating a red herring (Wheatcroft, 2004, pp. 101 - 102). Totalitarian corporatism is that
system that has been invaluably documented in detail by Davies, Wheatcroft,
Harrison and their colleagues.
Nor does the fact that, as outlined by other examples of recent scholarship, the
Soviet terror involved constituencies and group alliances and also zigzags of 'excesses'
and 'normalisation', mean that Stalin was not ultimately responsible or that he was
not a tyrant on a level with Hitler (Rees, 2000, pp. 446-447). As Harrison no doubt
knows full well, Hitler himself did not initially start out with a fully developed plan to
murder all Jews in concentration camps. Rather, this policy developed over time, but
this does not make Hitler any less responsible. As a valiant example of someone who
does not let his detailed archival work cloud his critical faculties, E.A. Rees concluded
correctly about Stalin that 'the only logic in the terror was the logic inherent in a
deeply irrational, tyrannical system of rule' (Rees, 2000, p. 450).
Conclusion
Hence it should be accepted that Stalin was not rational, but neither was he mad: he
was just ignorant and corrupt. He was ignorant of conventional economic theory,
ignorant of the real long-term consequences of the terror, and blind to the original
impetus of Marx's egalitarian vision of a communist economy.4 He was also paranoid
with regards to maintaining power, as any dictator must be. The implications of all
this are that it is ignorance, paranoia and dictators that must be overcome; their actions should not be surreptitiously justified through the attempt to interpret them as
'rational' or as 'more complex than previously thought' or even as 'generated by
difficult circumstances', no matter what their nominal political affiliation might have
been. This does not mean that studying the detail of Stalin's rule is not a completely
legitimate activity for historians, only that the temptation to use this detail as
valediction should be resisted.
And in case readers are wondering, a similar characterisation also applies to Hitler.
He was not mad, he was not evil (there is no such thing), and he was not rational; he
was just a man twisted by hate who believed very strongly in totally false and irrational
ideas. That is why, as a historian, it is so important to focus on the history of ideas and
intellectual developments, rather than only on empirical or 'events' history. By
4In a recent review article, Ian Thatcher usefully surveyed some recent scholarship on Stalin and
Stalinism, writing about Eric van Ree's (2002) book that 'Most of Stalin's key ideas... were merely
adaptations from some of the most familiar aspects of the leading Marxist thinkers of Stalin's time'
(Thatcher, 2004, p. 908).
466 VINCENT BARNETT
focusing too much on the latter, the erroneous impression that structural or
circumstantial factors always explain historical developments can be left unchallenged,
and the idea that no alternative path was possible appears to form an impenetrable
tunnel-like prison. In truth the importance of individual belief is central to all human
history, both positive and (as in the two parallel cases under review here) horrifically
negative. And if human belief is crucial, then it could have been different.
Middlesex, UK
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