At the June 2019 G20 Summit, Vladimir Putin condemned liberal democracy as obsolete, declared that a homogenous nationalism was preferable to multiculturalism, and added that immigrants and refugees from Syria and Central America were rapists and murderers. This chilling worldview merely confirmed and amplified the widely-held perception of the Russian president as a narrow-minded authoritarian. Moreover, when he condemned secularism and claimed that the world lives by biblical values, the claim that he has been gradually assuming the mantle of the pre-1917 tsars crystalised a little more. Yet Putin is also on record declaring that Joseph Stalin was no different from Oliver Cromwell and has praised the communist tyrant for his patriotism. The rehabilitation of Uncle Joe inches forward daily in Russia it seems. How can we reconcile this admiration for two historical regimes apparently diametrically opposed to each other? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that Stalin and the tsars were not really so very different in some major respects. Putin’s policies and actions are nothing like the murderous, paranoid rule of Stalin, and he is a populist rather than an autocrat. However, he aspires to a type of rule and embodies a variety of narrow nationalism which were evident in both tsarist and Stalinist Russia.
The term ‘Red Tsar’ was used in the title of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2004), its intention being to portray him as autocrat and blood-soaked villain. This article does not disagree with that. Stalin’s regime was as undemocratic as the one overthrown in 1917. It relied upon central control, terror and murder for its existence and to carry out its goals. Sebag Montefiore also suggested there was a hypocrisy inherent in a socialist/communist regime oppressing its own people and being ruled by an autocratic or totalitarian leader. This article argues, however, it was not so much hypocrisy as Stalin hijacking the Russian Revolution and creating a system whose structure and principal function was to keep him in power. Stalin redefined socialism until it was unrecognisable from the aims of not only Karl Marx and the wider socialist movement, but also at odds with the Bolshevik revolutionaries of 1917 and Lenin.
The differences between the rule of the Romanovs and Stalin’s regime are principally threefold. Firstly, Stalin did not set up his family to inherit his position; in fact he treated his children very poorly and did not involve any of them in his governance. Secondly, the Orthodox Church lost its influential role in Russia, and all religion was treated at best as nonsensical superstition, at worst as a sign of hostility to the state. Thirdly, there was no heritable aristocracy, land-owning class or property-owning bourgeoisie, although there was a self-perpetuating political elite known as the Nomenklatura. Large land-owners had been dispossessed before Stalin came to power, while industry and commerce were increasingly taken into state control, a process which intensified with the introduction of the Five-Year Plans. This meant there were no classes of powerful individuals whose own wealth constituted their power-base which would give them a degree of independence and autonomy. The power of the Nomenklatura derived wholly from the Soviet system, thus creating a dependency on its survival and upon avoiding incurring the hostility of Stalin.
The similarities displayed by the Romanovs and Stalin are manyfold. Rule by a supreme leader with the power of life and death over subjects/citizen was exercised by both tsars and Stalin. Each was an exalted and worshipped figure with a devoted following based on divine claims by Russia’s tsars and by the cult of the personality in the case of Stalin. Stalin liked to compare himself to Peter the Great, dragging a backward Russia into the modern age by uncompromising methods. The practices of Stalin actually resembled those of another tsar, Ivan the Terrible, each killing with impunity those who stood in their way or those who might oppose them. No dissent was tolerated, while disagreeing with the leader was not just disloyalty, but treason. Each carried out their relentless killing, bypassing any judicial process, with a clear conscience, vindicating their crimes by citing the national interest. Stalin and most tsars believed that the ends justified the means. This arose from two underlying assumptions. The first was that ‘little people’ were of small consequence in the greater scheme of things and in the leadership’s vision of Russia and its role in the world. The second was that their actions were sanctioned by divine providence in the tsars’ case, and in Stalin’s by historic inevitability or dialectical materialism.
In the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, the Russian state was the principal promoter of economic expansion and the development of the national rail network. The lack of a middle class meant that economic initiatives largely emerged from above and their guiding principle was to foster Russia’s ability to expand and protect an empire. Beginning in 1928, Stalin instigated a crash-industrialisation program carried through by successive Five-Year Plans. The ‘Great Turn’ has often been called a ‘revolution from above’ and was a highly-centralised state-controlled program focussing on heavy industry to the exclusion of much else, particularly the living standards of ordinary Russians. In the countryside, forced collectivisation reversed the land-distribution policies of Lenin and created a peonage system arguably as onerous as serf-society pre-1861 and marked by man-made famines. Stalin and the Soviet state did not own any serfs but the peasants were controlled just as effectively and brutally as under tsars and aristocratic landowners. Stalin’s purpose in imposing collectivisation and state-controlled industrialisation was to turn Russia into a first-rank military-industrial power, self-sufficient and capable of expansion when the time was ripe.
In the early eighteenth century as part of his reform program aimed at strengthening Russia, Peter the Great instituted a powerful state bureaucracy. He made it mandatory for nobles to serve either in that institution or the military. The resultant vast administrative edifice enabled tsarist power to reach into the furthest extents of the ever-expanding Russian empire, but it also proved sluggish, inefficient and chronically corrupt. Stalin essentially harnessed his position within the administration of the Bolshevik Party to rise to power, and once in power he completed the amalgamation of state and Party, exercising his will through a bureaucracy even larger than that of tsarist times. Within this bureaucracy too, there was widespread corruption and graft, often most prominently among Stalin’s placemen whose power could be substantial and arbitrary, especially in regions well away from Moscow.
Russian nationalism was an essential pillar of tsarist power. Basically a dynastic enterprise concerned with their own family’s interests, the Romanovs fostered loyalty to themselves through a symbiotic relationship with the Orthodox Church and identification with the Russian nation. Because Russia was expanding and absorbing non-Russian peoples throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a policy of Russification was increasingly applied to create a sense of identity with the regime. This was intended to bolster patriotism, and was transmitted as a form of exceptionalist, bombastic nationalism (Corin & Fiehn, 2002). Stalin saw himself not only as the leader of the international communist movement, but the head of a Greater Russian nation. He was a chauvinistic Russian nationalist despite his Georgian origins and he too embarked on a ruthless policy of Russification in the 1930s. He co-opted the ideology and language of Marxism to this end, declaring in 1930,
The whole world recognises now that the centre of the revolutionary movement has shifted from Western Europe to Russia… The revolutionary workers of all countries unanimously applaud the Soviet working class, and first of all the vanguard of the Russian working class, as its recognised leader… The leaders of the revolutionary workers of all countries are avidly studying the most instructive history of the working class of Russia, its past, the past of Russia. (Tucker, 1992, p.43)
Lenin and the old Bolsheviks had viewed the tsarist past as devoid of value. Stalin, however, rehabilitated Alexander Nevsky and Peter the Great to demonstrate a heritage of Russian greatness. This contradicted the 1920s’ declaration that people were Soviet citizens, and the Communist Manifesto assertion that “proletarians have no fatherland”. The designation ‘Russia’ was abolished in 1922 and replaced by the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. Stalin did not reinstate the name, but in 1934, Izvestia, the official state newspaper, published an editorial urging people to love their fatherland. Films and plays with patriotic Russian themes began to proliferate, while the glory of Russian history was reintroduced into school lessons, including in the non-Russian regions.
In the later-nineteenth century, internal passports were introduced as a means of controlling people’s movement. This helped prevent political dissidents spreading their ideas. Abolished after the 1917 Revolution, Stalin reintroduced them in 1931. These now included ethnic origin, a factor which facilitated the deportation or liquidation of certain ‘suspect’ national minorities during the Great Terror. These measures were carried out by the secret police, the OGPU which became the NKVD in 1934. This was a direct descendant of the Okhrana, founded in 1881 by Alexander III, one of the most reactionary of Russian tsars. The secret police and other state agencies were instrumental in repressing free speech and censoring political comment, literature, plays and films in both tsarist Russia and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Censorship, however, was the only the tip of a repressive iceberg since anything deemed contrary to Stalinist orthodoxy meant arrest, exile or death during the years of the Terror.
It is clear there is validity in comparing Stalin’s rule to that of the tsars, and arguable that his regime was more repressive, and certainly more murderous, than any previous one, including Ivan the Terrible. While that is generally agreed by historians, there are some, like Sebag Montefiore, who see the term ‘Red Tsar’ as encompassing greater meaning than simply comparison with the Romanovs. These tend to be right-wing and anti-communist writers who are not satisfied with merely condemning Stalin. They want to discredit the entire communist/socialist project and concept, which often involves making a case for Stalin being Lenin’s heir. The implication is that Stalin’s barbarity was a continuation and escalation of a process which Lenin set in motion and would probably have carried out himself if he had lived past 1924.
Robert Daniels (2007, p.211) suggested that Stalin turned “Marxism into a system of ‘false consciousness’ in the original Marxian sense of the word.” He distorted Marxism and Leninism while claiming to be faithful to these doctrines. ‘Socialism in one country’, Russocentric nationalism, and the oppressive treatment of non-Russians were all contrary to what Marx and Lenin believed in. Similarly, Stalin’s reinterpretation of the function of the state contradicted Marx who said, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the world bourgeoisie.” Lenin wrote a pamphlet, The State and Revolution, condemning it as an inherently oppressive instrument. Stalin, however, was a committed centraliser who expanded the state and used it to accrue to himself control of the economy and society. He justified this by drastically altering Lenin’s understanding of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, a concept describing a transition from private to collective ownership. Stalin insisted the dictatorship of the proletariat was essentially the rule of the Communist Party, which implied the Party should comprise and control the entire state apparatus. The dictatorship of the proletariat became the dictatorship of the Party, then the dictatorship of the state, and finally the dictatorship of Stalin. Stalin also treated with contempt the idea of income and wealth equality, the very foundation of socialism. In the 1930s, the egalitarian trends of the 1920s were reversed and a deliberate policy of wage differentials was instigated.
Stalin as Lenin’s successor.
Stalin claimed to be Lenin’s true heir to give himself credibility as the successor to the Revolution’s sanctified hero. Strangely most anti-Communist historians who assert he was a dishonest manipulator, accept this particular conceit of Stalin. As well as ideological differences, Stalin diverged on a political level. Lenin’s Democratic Centralism permitted discussion and dissent among the Bolshevik leadership before a decision was formulated by a relatively collegiate body. Only afterwards was no deviation allowed from policy. The worst that could befall anyone disobeying this was expulsion from the Party. Stalin, however, had the ultimate say on everything, and even trivial dissent could lead to arrest, exile or execution. Communist party congresses were held annually during Lenin’s leadership, but once Stalin became leader, only three were held in the next 25 years.
The term ‘tsar’ describes well Stalin’s type of leadership, although it may actually understate the degree of control he exerted which exceeded that of any Romanov and has led many to call the regime totalitarian. He certainly aspired to absolute power. The ‘red’ in the phrase is apt if it means blood-stained because he was responsible for the murder and starvation of several million Soviet citizens. However, if it purports to cast him as representative of socialism or even communism, then it is a polemic distortion of the actual beliefs and ideology of Stalin, which had nothing to do with equality, emancipation or the brotherhood of man, and everything to do with self-interested power and an imperialist Russian nationalism.
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