MARXISM AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC
Plekhanov, whom we have already quoted, wrote that if historical circumstances create the need for a certain political function to be performed they also supply the ‘organ’ capable of performing it. If the need for the ‘function’ is deeply rooted in the conditions of an epoch, the epoch is sure to bring forth not just one but at least several individuals with the minds, the characters, and the wills needed to perform the function. As a rule, circumstances allow only one or, at the most, a few of a whole group of potential leaders to move to the front of the stage; and so the historical record contains the evidence only of their capabilities and deeds. The fact that one individual has already filled the place of the actual leader debars other potential leaders from revealing themselves — they are condemned to remain in obscurity.
Plekhanov applied this theory not only to politics. He argued, for instance, that if Leonardo da Vinci had not lived to produce his masterpieces, this would not have altered the broad trend of the artistic ideas of the Renaissance, because this trend had sprung from the social conditions and from the intellectual and moral climate of the age. Only the ‘individual features’ of the trend would have been different. The same is true of the great scientific discoveries which bear the name of a single man. Such discoveries are the outcome of the stage of development which a certain branch of science has reached at a particular time, and it is more or less a matter of chance which individual actually makes them. Indeed, it often happens that several leading scientists make a discovery almost simultaneously and independently of one another.
To return to political history: if, for instance, a certain General Bonaparte had been killed in a battle before he had time to become First Consul and Emperor of revolutionary France, another general would have filled his place with essentially the same effect. There were in France at that time several military leaders capable of this. Bonaparte's rise prevented those potential Napoleons from becoming actual ones. The ‘organ’ capable of performing the historical ‘function’ had been supplied; and there was no room for duplication. That ‘function’ consisted in giving an authoritarian and yet revolutionary government — the rule of a ‘good sword’ — to a nation which had tried out and abandoned the republican-plebeian democracy of the Jacobins but still refused to countenance the restoration of the pre-revolutionary order.
Plekhanov's argument has given rise to considerable controversy, into which it is not proposed to enter here. Suffice it to say that even among Marxists, who broadly accepted Plekhanov's view, there have been many ‘deviations’ from it.
Trotsky, for instance, in his History of the Russian Revolution, attempted to strike a balance between the general Marxist philosophy of history — which sees the collective forces of social classes and groups as the decisive agents in any historical process — and his own view that Lenin's individual role in the Russian revolution was unique, that is to say that no other Bolshevik leader would have been qualified to perform it. However, Trotsky ‘deviated’ even further from the classical Plekhanovist view. In a private letter to an old Bolshevik friend which he wrote from his exile in Alma Ata, he stated bluntly and without inhibition: ‘You know that without Lenin the October Revolution would not have won.’[5] Thus, while in his published writings he tried to adjust his own view of Lenin's role with Plekhanov's theory, privately he appears to have taken an attitude diametrically opposed to it.
The story of Stalin's career seems calculated to resolve the controversy in favour of Plekhanov.
Hardly any of Stalin's contemporaries, comrades and rivals alike, regarded him at first as in any way suited to the role he was to play. He appeared to them to have none of the gifts which make a great leader, Bolshevik or otherwise. His ascendancy came as a complete surprise. Trotsky wrote of Stalin that he detached himself like a shadow from a Kremlin wall to succeed Lenin. This impression was shared by Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Tomsky, Bukharin, and also by nearly all the leaders of the non-Russian Communist Parties.[6] Lenin alone was more discerning in his appraisal of the man, for although eventually he advised his followers to depose Stalin from the post of the party's General Secretary, he nevertheless described both Stalin and Trotsky as the ‘two ablest men’ in the Central Committee.
Why was it that nearly everyone who had known Stalin before and during his rise was so utterly wrong about his chances?
The typical Bolshevik leader of the Leninist era was, as a rule, a Marxist theorist, a political strategist, a fluent writer, and an effective orator, in addition to being some sort of Organizer. Stalin did not count at all as a theorist.[7]
He was to the end a political tactician rather than a strategist: he showed his mastery in short-term manoeuvre rather than in long-term conception, although his genius for tactics did more than compensate his weakness as a strategist. He was cumbersome and ineffective as a writer and speaker. Only as an exceptionally gifted organizer had he made his mark in Lenin's lifetime. His contemporaries and rivals had reason therefore to think that he was unfit to be Lenin's successor.
Their mistake lay in the assumption that Bolshevik Russia after Lenin needed the type of leadership which Lenin had provided and which Lenin's dosest associates might have provided collectively or individually. They misjudged the changing circumstances and the new need of the time; and so they failed to see that the man who might not have been qualified to act as the leader in one phase of the revolution might be eminently suited for that role in the subsequent phase.
We know that among those changing circumstances Bolshevik Russia's political isolation in the world and mental self-isolation from it were the most important. The isolation was not of Stalin's making — it was a consequence of events preceding his ascendancy. He merely took the situation as it was. He was reconciled to it and inwardly free to act within its framework; and therefore he thrived on it. Most of his rivals were unreconciled to Russia's isolation, incapable of overcoming their internationalist habits of thought, and not disposed to frame policies consistently within the context of isolation. They were at odds with the root fact of the new time; and they were undone by it.
The same is true of Stalin's as against his rivals' attitude in the dilemma of proletarian democracy versus autocracy, the other crucial issue in the transition from Leninism to Stalinism. It was not Stalin who had destroyed the proletarian democracy of the early phase of the revolution. It had withered even before 1923-4; at most, Stalin delivered the coup de grace.
His rivals, however, could not shed their democratic habits. They were not inwardly reconciled to the fact that, struggling for the preservation of its revolution, Bolshevism had deprived the working classes of freedom of political expression. They were entangled in their own regrets, scruples, and second thoughts. They looked back longingly to the democratic origins of the revolution. Stalin did nothing of the sort. They were therefore not fitted to act effectively within the new, undemocratic framework of the Bolshevik State. He was. They were crushed by that framework, while he proceeded to build around it his autocratic System of government.[8]
The trend of the time found in Stalin its ‘organ’. If it hadn't been Stalin it would have been another.
A similar view when expressed about other historical figures may seem implausible; but it is exceptionally convincing in the case of Stalin.
When it is said that the general trend of the Renaissance would not have been different without Leonardo da Vinci and that at the most some of its ‘individual features’ would have been different, one immediately thinks of the ‘Last Supper’ and ‘Mona Lisa’, and one wonders: Would the trend really not have been different? Was the contribution of Leonardo (or of Michelangelo) merely one of its ‘individual features’?
When one is told that another French general of the period of the Directory could have filled the place of Napoleon, one cannot help thinking about Napoleon's elan, intellectual brilliance, and romantic appeal; and one wonders just how much Napoleon's individual characteristics counted in the general course of events.
But when one contemplates Stalin, that grey, inconspicuous, almost faceless character, one is more than inclined to see in him but the vehicle of anonymous forces at work in the background. He appears as the embodiment of Anonymity itself, Anonymity which rose to the pinnacle of power and fame and even there remained true to itself — utterly impersonal and therefore utterly elusive.
When the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky is viewed only in terms of individual gifts and talents, Stalin's victory over his rival remains inexplicable. Stalin had not a single gift that Trotsky did not possess in the same or in a much higher degree; in addition Trotsky had conspicuous talents which Stalin altogether lacked. It was no exaggeration when Lenin, a great judge of men, described Trotsky as ‘the ablest’ of all the Bolshevik leaders.
It is often said that Trotsky did not have Stalin's flair for organization. Nobody who has studied the history of the Red Army can seriously entertain that view. In so far as any single individual may be credited with this achievement, Trotsky was the true organizer of the army. He created it ‘from nothing’ after the old army had collapsed, dissolved, and left a military vacuum. To fill the vacuum with a new army demanded a genius for organization and administration superior to that required for making even the most effective use of an already existing and well-established army. After the Red Army had come into being there was hardly a military authority, Russian or non-Russian, Bolshevik or anti-Bolshevik, who did not describe Trotsky's feat as ‘truly Napoleonic’.[9]
It is also said that Stalin was superior to Trotsky as a political tactician. Again, it is enough to study from original sources the tactical manoeuvres which Trotsky carried out on the eve of the October Revolution, and during the revolution itself, to realize that this too is incorrect. As the operational leader of the Bolshevik insurrection, Trotsky almost alone — Lenin was then in hiding — lulled and hypnotized all the enemies of the Bolshevik Party into a state of utter inactivity, and even into complicity with the Bolsheviks. He won the insurrection almost without firing a shot: its most hostile eye-witnesses did not put the number of casualties on both sides at more than ten.
Stalin, on the other hand, made no mark as a tactician in 1917; and, as the records of the Bolshevik Central Committee show, he did not put forward a single tactical idea throughout that year.
Yet it is true that in his struggle against Stalin Trotsky was always tactically inferior.
The question must therefore be asked: What made Trotsky, the genius in tactics of 1917, into the inferior tactician of 1924-7? And what made Stalin, the indifferent tactician of 1917, into the master of the later years?
The answer may be found in the different general conditions of the two periods, in consequence of which Trotsky, not Stalin, was in his element in 1917, while Stalin, not Trotsky, was in his some years later.
Stalin was fitted for his role not merely and not even primarily by his great talents for organization and tactics. His background, his experience, and his cast of mind had prepared him to lead Bolshevism in the break with its democratic origins and through the decades of its isolation and selfisolation. For the ‘function’ of such a leadership he was the most perfect ‘organ’.
He had spent all his years inside Russia, mostly in his native Caucasus on the borders of Europe and Asia, where he had been insulated from the direct influences of Western European Marxism. This was his weakness during the Leninist period, when Bolshevism was staking its future on revolution in the West. But this was also the source of his extraordinary strength when the revolution was withdrawing into its national shell. He, who had hardly ever looked beyond that shell, found little or no difficulty in divorcing Bolshevism from the Western Marxist outlook.
His rivals had, like Lenin, lived as emigres in Germany, France, and other European countries. There, for many years, they listened with enthusiasm to the great seeches of Jaures and Bebel, the pioneers and prophets of French and German socialism. They absorbed the teachings of Kautsky and Guesde, the leading expounders of Marxism. They viewed with admiration and envy the scores of great socialist newspapers and journals, which were openly published and read by the million, while the Russian revolutionaries could bring out only a few small clandestine sheets, which they smuggled into Russia with much difficulty and great danger to themselves. They watched with rapture the parliamentary strength, and the political and educational institutions, of Western Marxism, the massive trade unions, the ‘powerful’ and openly conducted strikes, the May Day demonstrations, etc., etc. They were held spellbound by the ‘might’ of European Marxism.
Then came the great collapse of 1914, when, despite all the previous professions of anti-militarism and internationalism, the power of the Western parties was harnessed to the war machines of the belligerent governments. But the Russian emigres still believed that the inherent ‘class consciousness’ and power of the Western proletariat would overcome this ‘betrayal’ and its consequences. They found it hard to shed this belief even some years after they had themselves become Russia's rulers.
Stalin had known none of their enthusiasms and none of their illusions. He had never sat at the feet of Jaures, Bebel, Kautsky, and Guesde. He had never had any first-hand impression of the apparent might of the Marxist movement in the West. Even during the Leninist era when he too expressed hope for the spread of the revolution, he was merely adopting what was then the conventional Bolshevik idiom. When that hope was shattered, his inward balance was not upset. Unlike many old Bolsheviks, he did not feel that the Russian revolution and its makers were now suspended over an abyss. Even as early as the beginning of 1918 he had expressed icy scepticism about the revolutionary movements of the West, and brought upon his head a rebuke from Lenin. Paradoxically, Stalin's ignorance of the West led him to a more realistic appreciation of its revolutionary potentialities than that which other Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin, had reached after many years of first-hand observation and study.
The democratic orientation of the early Bolshevik leaders was also up to a point bound up with the Western Marxist tradition. Under the Tsar Bolshevism could exist and work only underground. Any underground movement, if it is to be effective, must be led in a more or less authoritarian manner. It must be strictly disciplined, hierarchically organized, and centrally controlled. Nearly all Russian revolutionary movements (and all the Resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe of 1940-5 as well) were characterized by such features. The chiefs of any clandestine party must exalt the idea of strict discipline and strong leadership on which survival of such a party largely depends. In his time Lenin exalted the principle of strong leadership with all the emphasis and over-emphasis peculiar to him.
Yet even the underground Bolshevik organization of Tsarist days was by no means the monolithic body the Stalinist legend depicted.
The Bolshevik emigres had before their eyes the example of the Western labour organizations, in which free debate flourished and democratic procedures were strictly observed, even if in fact most of those organizations too were effectively controlled by centralized and self-willed caucuses. The Bolshevik emissary who, on a false passport, travelled between Western Europe and Russia, was often torn between the democratic outlook of the Western parties and the clandestine authoritarianism of his own movement. He dreamt of the day when his party too would emerge into the open, freely debate its affairs, adopt democratic procedures, and freely elect its leaders. Whenever the Bolshevik Party did emerge into the open, if only for a short spell as in 1905, Lenin did indeed infuse democracy into it. And from 1917 to 1920 inner party democracy flourished in Bolshevik ranks.
Stalin's political outlook had been formed exclusively by clandestine Bolshevism. He had been one of those disciplinarian committee-men who had jealously guarded the Bolshevik organization from infiltration by alien elements and agents provocateurs. In a clandestine organization the rank and file could not freely elect their leaders — often they could not even be allowed to know who the leaders were. The committee-man not unnaturally sensed in any attempt at democratization the threat of disruption and the danger of exposure to the political police.
This outlook of the old underground leader remained with Stalin throughout his lifetime. He regarded, as he himself said later, the turbulent, open debates in which the party indulged between 1917 and 1920 as a waste of time and a drain on the party's efficiency and striking power. Of course, he too had to speak occasionally, in deference to precept, about the need for inner-party democracy. But he never even began to realize that genuine freedom of criticism and the open clash of opinion might be a creative ferment keeping a party mentally alive and vigorous.
Having risen to power, he carried the habits of clandestine Bolshevism to a grotesque extreme, and transplanted them into the Soviet State and into the life of a whole nation, in which, anyhow, all democratic impulses had become atrophied.
Finally, Stalin was as if predestined to become the chief mouthpiece of Bolshevism when it was absorbing the Russian ‘way of life’ and the sombre heritage of the Tsarist past. In that heritage the Greek Orthodoxy was a dominant element. Stalin had imbibed it in his youth. True, many a Russian revolutionary received his education in an Orthodox Seminary, especially in the Caucasus. Nor need a revolutionary trained in his youth to be a priest preserve the theological cast of mind for the rest of his life. But Stalin did preserve it in an extraordinary degree.
Before he imposed the Greek Orthodox style and manner upon the Bolshevik Party, that style and manner had in his own mind imposed themselves upon his Marxism and atheism. He presented the Marxist and Leninist formulae in the accent, the intonation, and sometimes even the idiom of Greek Orthodoxy, which made those formulae sound less alien to the ‘backward’ Russian masses. Indeed, he made Bolshevism appear as something like a new emanation of the old and indefinable spirit of the Church, long before he rehabilitated the Church itself for reasons of expediency.
It is enough, for instance, to read Stalin's famous oath of fealty to Lenin, that strange litany which he intoned after Lenin's death and in which he began every invocation with the refrain ‘We swear to Thee, Comrade Lenin’, to feel with almost physical immediacy the expupil of the monks, trained in the delivery of sermons and funeral orations, emerging in the disciple of Lenin and overtopping the Marxist.
This is only the most striking instance of that amalgamation of Marxism and Greek Orthodoxy which was characteristic of Stalin and Stalinism. Even in his most sophisticated writings, up to his last essay on the ‘Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.’, he gave his arguments an inimitable scholastic twist, as if he
were dealing not with the realities of political power and social life but with the theological interpretation of dogma.
If the trend of the Russian revolution was towards national self-centredness, autocracy, and quasi-ecclesiastical orthodoxy, then Stalin was its ideal agent. But these political formulae, correct in themselves, have not yet touched the innermost psychological springs of Stalinism, which may have to be sought far below political consciousness, in the imagination and the instincts of a primitive people.
The Russia of the early and middle 1920's was at an extremely low level of civilization. Barefoot and illiterate muzhiks, most of whom tilled their tiny plots of land with wooden ploughs, still formed the overwhelming majority of the nation. There were also the tribes of mountaineers in the Caucasus, and the nomad-shepherds and semi-nomads of the Asiatic provinces — all sub-merged in an even more ancient way of life.
The sheer weight of these elements was great. True enough, in the events of 1917 the industrial workers of Petrograd (Leningrad) and Moscow were the decisive actors. But their political ascendancy came to an end with the ebbing of the revolution and with the physical dispersal of the metropolitan working class during the civil wars. In the years of Stalin's rise the upsurge of rural Russia and of her Asiatic and semi-Asiatic fringes was one of the most striking features of Russian life.
Much of the thinking and imagination of rural Russia was still below the level even of Greek Orthodoxy or of any organized religious thought. It was immersed in the primitive magic of rudimentary society. We know from the investigators of the earliest phases of civilization and from the Freudists how many remnants of primitive magic may be traced in the imagination and behaviour even of modern and relatively educated nations. But we also know that primitive magic expressed man's helplessness amid the forces of nature which he had not yet learned to control; and that, on the whole, modern technology and organization are its deadliest enemies. On the technological level of the wooden plough primitive magic flourishes.
Under Lenin Bolshevism had been accustomed to appeal to the reason, the self-interest, and the enlightened idealism of ‘class-conscious’ industrial workers. It spoke the language of reason even when it appealed to the muzhiks. But once Bolshevism had ceased to rely on revolution in the West, once it had lost the sense of its own elevation above its native environment, once it had become aware that it could only fall back on that environment and dig itself in, it began to descend to the level of primitive magic, and to appeal to the people in the language of that magic.
In Stalin the world of primitive magic was perhaps even more strongly alive than the tradition of Greek Orthodoxy. In his native Georgia the tribal way of life, with its totems and taboos, had survived into his own day. The Caucasus had been the meeting ground of Oriental and Greek mythologies, which had permeated native poetry and folklore. We know even from official Soviet biographies how strongly these worked upon the mind of the young Stalin; and, according to all the evidence, his deeply emotional, unsophisticated sensitivity to folk legend remained with him to the last. Quite recently, Mr. Budu Svanidze, Stalin's nephew, has told us what a strong hold some of the tribal Georgian taboos had on Stalin in his mature years. Incidentally, Mr. Svanidze, who was once his uncle's courtier and is still his admirer, relates this with the tribesman's pride rather than with any intention to detract from Stalin's greatness.
He dwells in particular on the fact that Stalin was powerfully swayed by the Georgian traditions of blood feud. He describes, for instance, a pre-revolutionary incident when Stalin refused to sing a certain song in the presence of two Georgian party members, because the song was about a blood feud in which the ancestors of his two comrades had been involved as enemies. When someone remarked that his scruples were ridiculous and that the two Georgians ‘were no longer savage mountaineers or feudal princes’ but members of the same revolutionary party, ‘Stalin replied: "It makes no difference. We Georgians have our own code of a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye, a life for a life — the law of the Khevsures, which obliges us to take vengeance. Revolutionaries or not, comrades or not, the law still binds us. No Georgian ever forgives an offence or an insult to himself, to his family, or to his forebears. Never!" ’
Mr. Svanidze goes on to say that in the great purges of 1936-8 Stalin was influenced once again by the traditions of ‘the tribe of the Khevsures, who gave to Georgia its basic customs, above all the law of vengeance and vendetta’. While Stalin was brooding over the decision to start the purges, he went to the Crimea, retired into solitude, but took with him his nephew in order to have by his side, again in accordance with the primordial Georgian custom, a man of his tribe before embarking upon the blood feud.
It is difficult to dismiss all this as petty gossip, as one might otherwise be inclined to do, when one considers how much of the spirit of primitive magic Stalin brought with him into Bolshevism.
The most characteristic landmark of Stalinist Moscow, indeed of Stalinist Russia, was the Lenin Mausoleum in the Red Square, to which long queues of Russian peasants and visitors from the most remote Asiatic corners of the U.S.S.R. made their pilgrimage to see the mummy of the founder of Bolshevism. The Mausoleum had been set up despite the protests of Krupskaya, Lenin's widow, and of other members of the Central Committee. To old Bolsheviks its mere sight was an offence to their dignity, and — so they thought — an insult to the maturity of the Soviet people. The Mausoleum was the monument which primitive magic erected to itself in the very heart of the Russian revolution, the totem pole and the shrine of Stalinism. It had its fascination for the Soviet people; it was for them a place of pilgrimage during nearly thirty years. (And Stalin's oath of fealty to the dead Lenin had all the undertones of a funeral homage to a deceased tribal chief.)
Under Stalin the story of Bolshevism came to be rewritten in terms of sorcery and magic, with Lenin and then Stalin as the chief totems.
In the tribal cults there can be no graver sin than to offend the totem; and so in the Stalin cult whoever had at any time disagreed or quarrelled with Lenin was guilty of sacrilege. (Stalin himself, of course, was quite cynical about this. He knew the real history of all the inner party controversies; and he himself had had his disagreements with Lenin. But this was the manner in which the story of the party had to be presented in order to help to secure his own immunity from criticism and attack.)
Stalin's opponents, Bukharin and others, had to be charged with the attempt to murder the ancestral totem — the cardinal sin in primitive magic. They were indeed accused of having attempted to assassinate not only Stalin but Lenin also; and the charge was brought against them twenty years after the alleged attempt. The whole atmosphere of the purge trials, with their countless accusations, their incredible confessions, and all the violent curses thrown at the defendants by prosecutors, judges, and witnesses, can never be fully explained, whatever the plausible political explanations, in terms other than those of primitive magic.
And what was Stalin himself, the remote, inaccessible ruler, the Life-giving Sun, the Father of all the two hundred millions of Soviet Citizens, if not the totem whom the tribe considers as its forebear and with whom all the members of the tribe must feel themselves in a close personal relationship?
Something like a belief in the transmigration of the political souls of great leaders was essential to the Stalin cult: Lenin was the ‘Marx of his time’, Stalin was the ‘Lenin of his time’. This motif too sprang from the inner recesses of the primitive imagination.
In recent years the world was taken aback by the irrational campaign designed to convince the Soviet people that the Russians, and the Russians alone, had been the initiators of all the epoch-making ideas and of all the modern technical discoveries. The campaign may have been dictated by cold political calculation, by the desire to enhance Russia's self-confidence in the conflict with the West. In respect of its claims, the campaign has by no means been unique. Almost every Western nation has at one time or another boosted itself by means of chauvinistic self-adulation. But the grotesque form which the self-adulation has assumed in Russia transcends the experience of any modern chauvinism. It goes back to that remote epoch when the tribe cultivated a belief in its own mysterious powers which set it apart from and above all other tribes.
Similarly, the fear instilled in Soviet citizens of contamination by contact with the West has been in its violence and irrationality reminiscent of the taboo — it suggests the savages' dread of incest.
Stalinism is a complex phenomenon, which needs to be viewed from many angles. But when it is seen from the angle from which we are now viewing it, it appears as the mongrel offspring of Marxism and primitive magic.
Marxism has its inner logic and consistency: and its logic is modern through and through. Primitive magic has its own integrity and its peculiar poetic beauty. But the combination of Marxism and primitive magic was bound to be as incoherent andincongruous as is Stalinism itself. Stalin was exceptionally well equipped to embody that combination and to reconcile in some degree the irreconcilables. But he did not himself create the combination. It was produced by the impact of a Marxist revolution upon a semi-Asiatic society and by the impact of that society upon the Marxist revolution.