impending attack by the capitalist nations; just as
disastrous was the possibility that their own impe-
rialist rivalry would start a second world war
involving Russia in the maelstrom. Any one
problem was, in itself, gigantic; together they
were truly baffling. And there were no models to
follow. Marxism was based on revolution in an
advanced industrial nation, not an overwhelm-
ingly peasant society. Lenin, when confronted
with practical problems, had made bewildering
changes of policy, justifying each with fresh doc-
trinal pronouncements. The mark of the domin-
ant leader was his capacity radically to change
policy and retainpower. After Lenin, only Stalin
as it turned out could do that. But this does not
mean that he changed policy merely for the sake
of discrediting his rivals or that he had plotted in
advance first a policy to the ‘right’ and then to
the ‘left’.
Stalin’s own uncertainty about his ability to
hold on to supreme power in the face of the poli-
cies he felt it necessary to pursue is, indeed, the
basic explanation of his murderous purges of the
1930s. He linked the survival of the communist
regime with his own survival as undisputed leader.
He wanted to be regarded as infallible; for proof
he presented an unending stream of wrongdoers
who, in public trials, confessed their errors and
were shot. Their confessions to foreign conspira-
cies were intended to underline the mortal
dangers to which the Soviet Union was exposed,
but saved from by Stalin’s vigilance. At the same
time an understanding of Soviet policies is not
possible without the assumption that there were
deep and genuine problems, that more than one
plausible option of action presented itself; and
even granted that Stalin never lost sight of his
tenure of power and would stop at nothing to
maintain it, he was also concerned to discover the
right policy to follow.
Stalin had reached the leadership group
through Lenin’s own selection and Lenin had an
eye for remarkable men to act as the founding
members of the new state. Unlike Lenin and the
rest of the Bolshevik leadership, Stalin spent the
years of preparation not in comfortable and
argumentative exile, but in Russia, in constant
danger and engaged in organising the party when
not in tsarist prison or Siberian exile. In Stalin,
the cobbler’s son born in Georgia in December
1879, Lenin saw a hardened, totally dedicated
revolutionary leader, painstaking, and an effective
organiser. Stalin showed a total disregard for
‘conventions’ of the law and civil rights when they
impeded what he deemed necessary. As a young
revolutionary in tsarist days he was lawless in a
cause; in power he became lawless without
restraint, filling the prisons, the places of execu-
tion and the labour camps in the 1930s and later
with millions of people innocent of any crime
except to arouse Stalin’s suspicions. The appar-
ently benign, modest and down-to-earth leader –
it was easy for the Stalin cult to portray him as
the father of his people just as the tsars before him
had been – had turned into a monstrous tyrant.
Stalin was a consummate actor who could hide his
true nature and, if he chose, charm those who had
dealings with him, just as he was to charm
Churchill and Roosevelt when the three leaders
met during the Second World War. He was
capable of carefully weighing alternatives, of cal-
culating the risks and proceeding rationally,
of outwitting his enemies at home and abroad.
Secretive, suspicious, malevolent and lacking
Lenin’s intellect, he made himself into Lenin’s
heir and saw himself as such. His crimes were
immense. His mistakes brought the whole country
close to catastrophe in 1930 and in 1941, yet both
he and the Soviet Union survived. During the
Stalin era, there occurred the decisive shift that
was to propel the Soviet Union from being a back-
ward country to a state capable of grinding down
and, during the latter part of the Second World
War, overwhelming Germany. He achieved the
industrial and military transformation of Russia,
the creation of tens of thousands of technically
proficient men, of administrators and doctors
from a backward peasant society. The other
legacy: millions of dead, victims of collectivisation,
deportation and the Gulags.
That the New Economic Policy had to be a
‘transitional’ phase in the construction of com-
munism was obvious, unless communism itself
was to abandon its Marxist goals. NEP had
brought about an amazing recovery but was it
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