Fifty Years After Stalin
Ivan Dziuba — once a model for the movement to defend human and national rights in the Ukrainian SSR, now full member of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, and still the conscience of his nation — wrote in Dzerkalo tyzhnia that fifty years after Stalin is not the same thing as being without Stalin. As he rightly pointed out, today’s Ukraine is still with Stalin in the sense that it continues to bear the attributes that he forced upon it. Khrushchev might have removed the deceased dictator’s mummy from its place next to Lenin’s, but he could only ameliorate the system he had inherited from his predecessor, not fundamentally alter its essence.
For all the worship with which Stalin liked to surround himself, he remained fond of modestly portraying himself as Lenin’s pupil. He was a follower of the Lenin of 1919 when the state first tried to control everything: taking over industry, forcing peasants into communes (Stalin ameliorated this at least in name to collective farms), viewing all who wanted to exercise their officially proclaimed right of national self- determination as class enemies, and keeping the whole thing going by means of the Red Terror, which Stalin adapted as what one scholar once called a permanent purge. Of course, it is impossible to control everything, and the system evolved into one whose demands could not be met without breaking the rules of the system itself. People evolved the survival strategy of thinking one thing, saying another, and doing yet a third. Law was rehabilitated in name and destroyed in fact. For what is law, if not a set of rules compulsory on everybody and backed by the punishment of those who violate these rules by the state? Yet, when everyone is forced to be guilty of something and in theory deserves punishment, who gets punished in reality (at least at the top) ceases to be a matter of enforcing rules and becomes a matter of sheer arbitrariness. Once Khrushchev stopped Stalinist mass terror and the resultant universal fear, the structures and interests molded within the confines of the system Stalin created could congeal into powers immune to any official injunctions. Under such circumstances it becomes misleading to even speak of corruption and criminality, for when practically everybody breaks the rules, the rules themselves lose any reality. In this way Stalin accomplished what Lenin in 1919 could not.
Stalin’s success in creating a Soviet people to supplant individual nations has also left the Ukrainians (and not only them) with a deep crisis of identity. Last week I took part in a memorial soiree marking seventy years since the Great Manmade Famine. More and more are beginning to become conscious of the enormity of the national tragedy suffered and damage done Ukrainians as a nation. Still, most Western scholarship of the period continues to view the period of a single Soviet history just as nineteenth century German nationalists condemned the Czechs and other “small” nations as being without histories and thus without any future. In the Soviet context, this was called the great friendship of peoples. Friendship is fine, of course, but when it involves the loss of one’s own identity it becomes transformed into something else.
In short, while Stalin has long since ceased to be canonized and his corpse gone from the Lenin Mausoleum, his legacy is still very much a part of postcommunist reality, and the period of convalescence will remain long and painful.