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ho chauvinist as the Georgian, Iosif Djugashvili. We shall not try, here,
to guess at the drive
to
which this can be attributed (whether, for
instance, it was a national inferiority complex sublimated into the
great-power nationalism of another people or a feeling of responsibil–
ity toward the Russian imperial tradition).
At the outset, the Russian Revolution seemed to have achieved its
goal when it overthrew the Russian empire. Almost all of the peoples
who made up the empire-Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, the peoples of the
Baltic littoral, the Caucasus, and Central Asia-fled from that "prison
of peoples," as Lenin called it.
It
cost Stalin a great deal of labor to
bring all those prodigal sons back under the constraining shelter of the
paternal roof.
It
was not for nothing that the official propagandists
called him "the father of peoples."
It
would take a psychoanalyst rather
than a historian to explain the attitude toward him of the subjugated
peoples (including the Russians). Was Stalin an anomaly in Russian
history? Or was he summoned forth by Russian history as a counter–
weight to those destructive revolutionary forces that were inimical to
it?
In
any case, it was under his hegemonic dictatorship that the
Russian Revolution countermarched, destroying its own model
en
route.
The Revolution and the Civil War in Russia were not so much
political struggles as fights among heirs at the bedside of a dying man.
And perhaps it was not even the identity of the heir that was at issue,
but the nature of the heritage. Perhaps if the Mensheviks, the Social
Revolutionaries, or even the Cadets had been in the place of the
Bolsheviks, they would have behaved like Bolsheviks, under the
ideological and political pressures of Russian history. After all, even
though when the Bolsheviks were in the opposition they clamored for
Russia's defeat in the imperialist wars, once they got into power they
waged such wars no less successfully than their predecessors had. When
Stalin was still alive, the Russian philosopher, Georgy Fyodotov wrote
that Stalin deliberately built his power structure on his heritage from
the Russian czars and atamans. And he added: "The ideas of the Black
Hundreds triumphed in the course of the Revolution, and they will no
doubt outlive us."
The context in which Stalin now appears in novels, poems,
memoirs, and journalistic writings is significant. That context is either
World War II , when Stalin-as Solzhenitsyn accurately put it–
discarded the rotten scaffolding of ideology and unfurled the old
Russian banner, or it is Russian history more generally. The following
excerpt is from a poem published in the early seventies-a time when
Stalin was still appearing in literature incognito, under the transparent
