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PARTISAN RE'llEW
mediocrities who can't see farther than their noses. Their strength
lies in their political blindness, like the mill-horse that thinks that he
is moving up when really he is only pushing down the belt-wheel. . ..
The strength of Stalin was never in himself but in the apparatus; or,
rather, in himself so far as he was the most consummate embodiment
of the apparatus. Apart from the apparatus, counterposed to the ap–
paratus, Stalin is nothing, a mere cipher."*
To supply naturalistic detail, Trotsky stresses that: Stalin comes
from a low petty-bourgeois, not proletarian, social origin; he was a
native of Georgia, culturally backward province; he was educated at
an inferior seminary of the intellectually debased OrthodoK Church;
he was distrusted from the beginning by his party colleagues; he was,
prior to 1917, never elected but only "co-opted" to the Central Com–
mittee; he was never, prior to 1922 or 1923, numbered among the
outstanding party leaders ("he always seemed a man destined to. play
second or third fiddle") ; he was not a close friend of Lenin's; he
was not a "mass leader'' but confined
his
work to conspiracy and the
inner-party routine; he never initiated or sponsored decisive political
"theses" ; he never wrote influential books or pamphlets. In the
finished part of the biography, long sections are designed to give ad–
ditional proof to Trotsky's often expressed contention that Stalin was
an incapable military commander.
Boris Souvarine, in his history of Stalin and Bolshevism, a book,
if less brilliant, more scholarly and careful than any of Trotsky's,
underwrites the net estimate. Souvarine is particularly indignant at
Stalin's literary style, which he finds of a degree of dullness-at–
tributing its form in part to the influence of
his
seminary days at
Tiflis-almost beyond endurance.
With this evaluation of Stalin's style, which has not changed with
the years, we may, I think, still entirely agree. It must be that Stalin
dispenses with that bourgeois luxury, the ghost writer, for there is too
dreary a consistency in the banal periods of his infrequent speeches
' and written declarations. Never have they been illuminated or graced
by a bright image or touch of wit or exciting shift of syntax. We,
however, who are intellectuals and writers, breathing normally aver–
balized atmosphere, tend by a professional bias to overjudge the
weight of words. Politics, Hitler reminds us, are not conducted to
satisfy "a few scholars or aesthetic sickly apes."
If,
moreover, we make
a suitable dissociation of political from aesthetic sensibility, we may
*
Cf. Konrad Heiden's similar estimate, false from the same cause, of Hitler: "A
human nothing, a gray personality even among soldiers.... The void . . . had
disguised itself as a man."
