STALIN AS A PHILOSOPHER KING

(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!”