LENIN'S HEIR
63
conclude that Stalin's rhetoric, grasped as political rhetoric, not
literary,
is
both appropriate and in its own genre distinguished.
Surely it would be a functional monstrosity to decorate with an elegant
linguistic filigree the sledge-hammer content of Stalinist policy. The
rhythms of Thucydides would be not even an aesthetic virtue
if
used
to express a world outlook that reduces human nature to G.
P.
U.
equations.
2.
However plausible Trotsky's sketch of Stalin the Man m<J.y have
been up to five years ago, the evidence of these war years requires us
now to reject it as false, and in the new light to reconstruct from the·
beginning. Stalin proves himself a "great man," in the grand style.
The accounts of the banquets, staged in Moscow for the visiting
dignitaries, set the symbolic tone. With their enormous menus of
sturgeon and roasts and fowl and sweets, their streams of liquor, the
scores of toasts with which they end, the silent unmoving secret police
behind each guest,
all
against the winter background of the starving
multitudes of besieged Leningrad, the dying millions at the front, the
jammed concentration camps, the city crowds kept by their minute
rations just at the edge of life, there is little trace of dull mediocrity
or the hand of Babbitt. We recognize, rather, the tradition of the most
spectacular of the Tsars, of the Great Kings of the Mcdes and Per–
sians, of the Khanate of the Golden Horde, of the banquet we as–
sign to the gods of the Heroic Ages in tribute to the insight that
insolence and indifference and brutality on such a scale remove be–
ings
from the human level.
How can we any longer believe that Stalin is not a great mili–
tary
captain? By an act, required no doubt by political necessity, but
also of great personal courage, he accepted in his own person,
in
the
darkest days, full and open responsibility as military chief. And the
Soviet strategy has been admirably conceived-prodigal of life and
space and human well-being, indifferent to suffering at and behind
the lines, but in all this planned in terms of what was possible and
what was needed. There
is
no strategic plan which is best for all na–
tions and times. Stalin chose, or better accepted, a strategy demanded
by the resources and nature of the Soviet Union, and which alone
could win.
Long ago, Stalin proved his mastery of practical political tech–
niques. Basing himself on a low rating of human intelligence, courage,
and
especially moral integrity, yielding temporarily when he must,
