Abstract
Reviewed by: Ian D. Thatcher, Ulster University Coleraine, Northern Ireland
Violence was common to numerous regimes in the twentieth century, whether democratic, authoritarian, totalitarian, communist, fascist and so on, in which the executive successfully claimed a monopoly of violence, chiefly through the command of police and armed forces. Governments, such as the Russian Provisional Government 1917, collapsed because they failed to establish control over violence. Baberowski’s book focuses exclusively on violence in Stalin’s Russia. It is published in the Yale-Hoover series on authoritarian regimes. It is not an institutional study of the broader governmental and party structures, nor is it placed within the wider context of Soviet and international history. A student thus gleans no knowledge of the size and budget of the repressive organs of state, such as the NKVD, in comparison to other branches of the bureaucracy, let alone how the USSR was managed in its republican and local settings. The violence that continued into the post-1945 period is not contextualized in the emerging Cold War and the establishment of Soviet power in Eastern Europe that was far from a simple and singular process.
Baberowski’s concern is largely on the figure of Stalin, who alone must bear responsibility for the millions of deaths in the USSR under his rule – ‘The violence was a product neither of the system nor of social conflicts. It was a product of Stalin’ (179). The author recognizes a movement called Bolshevism, but it had no commitment to ideas and to Marxism: ‘the Bolshevik vocabulary was not taken from the dictionary of scholarly Marxism but from the handbook of violence … The Bolsheviks prevailed … because they were the most violent’ (37, 41). Bolshevism was the perfect political home for a man such as Stalin. For Baberowski, Stalin could not live without murder: ‘… the dictator himself had a passion for violence … Every murderous action was performed in full knowledge that it would please the despot in the Kremlin’ (17).
For Baberowski, Stalin kept the USSR in a permanent condition of violence and terror, in which citizens were transformed into emotional cripples and massive harm was done to the country’s economic, social and cultural landscape, for one reason only: ‘for him it held the promise of total power’ (3). The major policies of the Stalin period, such as collectivization, had nothing to do with replacing the market or of diverting resources from agriculture to fund rapid industrialization, for in these terms they all failed. According to Baberowski, ‘serious economic considerations played no role’ in Stalin’s agricultural policies, for collectivization ‘plunged the Soviet Union into the throes of chaos and anarchy. It drove the agricultural system to ruin, unleashed a devastating famine in the countryside, and even threatened to lead to mass hunger in the cities’ (143). Collectivization was ‘an improvised orgy of violence … For Stalin the state of emergency that he had imposed on the Soviet Union was a chance to give violence free rein’ (141, 158).
Given the level of destruction and depth of the terror in the 1930s, by which not one Soviet family was left untouched, one wonders how the USSR survived the onslaught of fascism. Why would citizens rally to the defence of Stalin’s Russia? Violence came to Stalin rescue: ‘For Stain and his cronies, violence was once again the only solution … Stalin was a despot, and he killed because he took pleasure in killing. He did not require a moral justification for his acts of violence, and although he was well aware that killing prisoners of war violated international law and the Geneva Convention, this did not interest him’ (331, 334–5). Indeed, the Great Patriotic War enabled Stalinism to reach its full potential for violence: ‘In the midst of war the regime lost all inhibitions, not only when it came to exercising excessive violence against the enemy, but also when it came to the merciless use of terror against its own soldiers and civilians’ (361).
Baberowski’s interpretation of Stalin and his motives is therefore quite narrow. Stalin was a ‘malevolent and pitiless man of violence’ (156); ‘economic policy was just one more of Stalin’s many methods for increasing his personal power’ (167); Stalin was a ‘psychopath’ (180, 266) who had a ‘lust for murder’ (193, 205) and enjoyed the ‘role of master over life and death’ (260, 267). Baberowski does not draw any further conclusions from this, but it appears that Stalin was a remarkable political leader. In late imperial Russia, he joined a marginal political movement that one day would enable him to unleash his murderous nature, not personally as he undertook none of the torture or murder himself, but through the numerous ‘sadistic violent perpetrators’ (288) that did his bidding over a whole empire. Such was Stalin’s power that in March 1953 Baberowski has it that that ‘A god had died’ (426). But, it was a god that nobody genuinely liked and obeyed only out of fear, so the repression ended and the security organs were brought under control. As soon as 1957 ‘Stalinism was gone’ (432).
Baberowski is quite honest about how the book’s focus on violence affected the author. ‘The violence came to haunt me in my sleep. It preyed on my mind … And yet, writing about life in the midst of violence also imbued me with a deep sense of gratitude … I … never had to experience the things that Stalin’s victims had to endure’ (ix). Any reference to achievements under Stalin is an anathema to Baberowski.