(The following short
quotation is from the book Conversations About Stalin, based on
Ekaterina Glushik’s conversations with my father Artem.----)
Artem: “Stalin was
never carried away by a specific theme. He was a man of a comprehensive grasp.
When there was a conversation about something, it gradually acquired a broad
significance, the circle of subjects broadened, so that many problems would
become involved. Thus the conversation would never stay narrow around the
initial subject, but it would grow around it into a discussion of all factors
impacting the problem: those which helped its solution and those which impeded
it.”
From my personal “conversations
about Stalin” with
my father, I clearly saw that Stalin’s thinking pattern was that of a
natural-born philosopher, or at least of a very serious deep philosophizer.
Aside from the rather primitive explanation Artem gave to Glushik, his
explanation to me was far more sophisticated. Among the many reasons of my
father’s admiration for Stalin was the philosophical universality of all
Stalin’s notions. They represented a complete self-contained mathematical
system, where everything, even nonsense, made a lot of sense.
Stalin saw this ability
as consummate statesmanship. “A statesman does
not build rockets, like an engineer, nor does he sew boots like a shoemaker,
but he possesses the knowledge and skill to make the engineer and the shoemaker
work to the best of their abilities and with the greatest efficiency for the
needs of the State.”
In Stalin’s system,
all human knowledge could be reduced to a small number of basic principles.
Once these principles, whatever they were, had all been grasped, you had
attained a penetrating insight into the whole wide range of problems facing
humanity. Like an honest magician, always loyal to his trade, Stalin never
revealed what exactly those principles were; as a practical application of his
philosophical discovery, however, he prided himself in his ability to provide
very simple solutions to very complicated problems. In this authoritarian
approach to life, he was, once again, like Peter the Great, who, each time he saw
someone with a swollen jaw, would reach into his pocket for his
tooth-extracting pincers... “Now, open your mouth! ...et voilà!” It was
a sheer matter of principle for Stalin to deal with the people who had not
measured up to the expectations, like Peter had dealt with those rotten teeth.
His method of “cutting
through the crap” was indeed extremely effective. Whenever he appointed
people to positions of national responsibility, especially in the
military-industrial areas, the rewards were always great (best housing with
almost decadent comfort, best foods, a personal limousine, household servant;
all other needs promptly taken care of, at government's expense), but the tasks
were superhuman and the punishment for failure was swift and merciless. If you
had agreed to accept the job (was there a choice?, I wonder...), but failed to deliver, you and your family were
instantly stripped of all your privileges, you were most likely declared a
saboteur, an enemy agent, and sent to the gulag for minor failures, or else,
for major ones, tortured and shot.
And, quite understandably,
Stalin’s method worked like magic. Russia became an industrial power in record
time, propelled to the unprecedented heights by the superhuman effort of her
citizens, fueled by sheer mortal fear.
Cruel? Yes! Unusual? Yes!
Great? Yes! Quoting my father once again, “But look at
what we achieved under Stalin, and what we have achieved since then!”
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