PARTISAN REVfEW
taking immediate advantage of every weakness, he succeeds. His tech–
nical genius is conspicuously evident in the history of his consolida–
tion of the monopoly of power. His liquidation of the various op–
positions, not all at once-which would have been disastrous-but
over many years, primarily by getting them to destroy each other
and then to commit suicide, is classically moulded. The Moscow Trials
have stood the test of action.
Stalin's political techniques show a freedom from conventional
restrictions that is incompatible with mediocrity: the mediocre man
is custom-bound. Often it is the scale of his operations that sets them
apart. It is usual, for example, for men active
in
practical life to en–
gineer an occasional frameup. But to carry out a frameup against tens
of thousands of persons, important percentages of whole strata of
society, including most of one's own comrades, is so far out of the
• ordinary that the long-run mass conclusion is either that the frameup
must be true-at the least "have some truth in it"--or that power so
immense must be submitted to-is a "historical necessity," as intel–
lectuals put it. To deport some hundreds or even thousands to the local
Siberia is commonplace; but hardly anyone believes it when you de–
port fifteen or twenty millions. There is nothing unexpected in letting
a few individuals starve for reasons of state; but to starve, by deli–
berate decision, several millions is a type of action attributed ordinar–
ily only to gods. During the present war, there have been numerous
other acts showing their novelty through this same quality of scale:
the arrests in Poland and the Baltic States, for example, or the mass
transfer of industry to the Urals, or the rate at which Stalin has been
willing to use Russian lives in battle.
In his diplomatic variations, Stalin has also demonstrated an
emancipation from traditional forms. One device, in particular, has
been a recurring motif. Traditional usage in diplomacy calls for a
"friendly atmosphere" during the process of negotiations; and, in
the past, this convention was usually accepted in Soviet practice, so
that the existence of negotiations between the Soviet and other gov–
ernments
(e.g.,
France, Italy, the United States, Japan, Germany)
was indicated by the favorable adjectives used in the Soviet and the
world communist press. For several years, however, Stalin has
frequently been conducting negotiations (with, for example, the
Vatican, Bulgaria, the London Poles, Finland and the Scandinavian
nations, De Gaulle, even England and the United States) against an
accompaniment of denunciation from
Pravda, Re'd Star, War and the
Working Class,
and their international echoes. Nor can it be denied
that the counterpoint is effective. The negotiating plenipotentiary
