(The Nationalist, 17 January 2003)
Coming up soon is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of one Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, better known by his self-appointed nickname of “Stalin”, literally, the man of steel. He died on 5 March 2003.
Following the death of Lenin, the father of Soviet Marxism, Stalin gradually took control of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the Nineteen Twenties, and was its undisputed leader until his death.
Stalin borrowed from Lenin the phrase, ‘All morality is the morality of the class struggle’. And he was faithful to that premise. In order to collectivize agriculture he deliberately created a famine in the Ukraine which starved to death some six million small farmers in the late Thirties. This was in pursuit of the goal of a classless society.
He was equally ruthless in suppressing any actual or perceived opposition to his personal authority. He extended a system of penal camps in Siberia, called the Gulag, where millions of people were worked, starved or beaten to death. Robert Conquest, in his book Kolyma: the Arctic Death Camps, Macmillan, London, 1978, states that, in 1952, there were between 12 and 14 million people in the Gulag, with an annual death-rate conservatively estimated at about one-third of a million. These latter were deliberate, in order to keep numbers under control. In pursuing these policies, Stalin was true to his own saying that ‘One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic’. Isn’t it hard to believe that these things were happening only fifty years ago?
One of the points made by the Russian writer and Nobel prize-winner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is that the Gulag was not an incidental or irregular by-product of Soviet policy but its necessary foundation and logical outcome.
In the West, Stalin was known as “Uncle Joe”, an affectionate title bestowed on him by Churchill and Roosevelt during World War Two, when the need for a united front against Hitler and Nazism caused a blind eye to be turned against his misdeeds.
In contrast to Stalin’s attitude towards the individual, I think of the Irish writer, Piaras Ó Feiritéar, who wrote, ‘Is fearr duine ná daoine’. (The person is more important than people.) The person always has a primacy, an integrity and a centrality which may not be shunted aside in the interests of some proposed good of “the masses”. Individual human beings are the foundation, the cause, and the end of every social institution.