Joseph Stalin
On the year's shortest day, 60 years ago, in Gori, near Tiflis, a son was born to a poor, hard-working Georgian cobbler named Vissarion Djagushvili. The boy's pious mother christened him Joseph, after the husband of Mary, mother of Jesus.
But names were not to stick very long to this newest subject of the Tsar; he was to answer to Soso, Koba, David, Nijeradze, Chijikov and Ivanovich until at length he acquired the pseudonym of Stalin, Man of Steel.
Last week, as another Dec. 21 rolled around, the little town of Gori was a mecca for 450 Russian writers, "intellectuals" and students sent to gather material on Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili's birth place and early surroundings. Newspapers printed sentimental poems and stories about the "little house in Gori" and latest photographs showed that it had been enclosed in an ornamental stone structure and turned into a Soviet shrine. A Tiflis motion-picture studio started filming Through Historic Localities, a cinema intended to conduct the spectator through every part of the country associated with Joseph Stalin's name.
In Moscow 1,000,000 copies of President Mikhail Kalinin's biography, A Book About the Leader, were issued, while sketches by Defense Commissar Kliment E. Voroshilov and Commissar for Internal Affairs Laurentius Pavlovich Beria are soon to appear. In a twelve-page edition of Pravda, Moscow Communist Party newsorgan, only one column was not devoted to Joseph Stalin on his birthday morn. In an editorial called "Our Own Stalin," Pravda declared: "Metal workers of Detroit, shipyard workers of Sydney, women workers of Shanghai textile factories, sailors at Marseille, Egyptian fellahin, Indian peasants on the banks of the Ganges--all speak of Stalin with love. He is the hope of the future for the workers and peasants of the world."
In his honor the Council of People's Commissars founded 29 annual first prizes of 100,000 rubles ($20,000) each for outstanding achievements in medicine, law, science, military science, theatre, inventions, while 4,150 Stalin student scholarships were announced. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet conferred on Tovarish Stalin the Order of Lenin and gave him the title of "Hero of Socialist Labor."
Shop committees, laborers' clubs, soviets, Party and State functionaries felicitate Hero Stalin, but among the congratulations from abroad one came from an old enemy now turned friend--Adolf Hitler: "I beg you to accept my sincerest congratulations on your 60th birthday," wired the Fuhrer. "I enclose with them my best wishes for your personal welfare as well as for a happy future for the peoples of the friendly Soviet Union." The Nazi press meanwhile carefully eulogized Mr. Stalin as the "revolutionary fuhrer of Russia."
The Man. In all this wordage over Comrade Stalin's 60 years of life only six-line communiques on the progress of the Red Army in Finland were printed in the U.S.S.R. Obviously, the hammer- sickle propaganda machine preferred that Soviet citizens pay as little attention as possible to a scarcely encouraging military campaign. Much, however, was written about Joseph Stalin's enormous effect on world affairs in the last twelve months.
The penultimate year of the 20th Century's fourth decade will not go down as one noted for athletic records, medical discoveries, great works of literature or other achievements in the realm of the intellect, muscle or spirit. It will be remembered, in Europe particularly, as a year in which men turned or were forced to turn their attention almost exclusively to politics.
The whole post-War I period was preoccupied with politics to a degree matched only by the 16th Century's preoccupation with theology. So thoroughly was Europe inured to political shock that the transition last autumn from war of nerves to war of guns was accepted by most of its millions with an extraordinary calm. The calm was tempered with some fear, but also with nostalgia, for few men believe that Europe will ever again be the Europe of Aug. 31, 1939--just as the July of 1914 never came again. Whether Europe's new era will end in nationalist chaos, good or bad internationalism, or what not, the era will be new--and the end of the old era will have been finally precipitated by a man whose domain lies mostly outside Europe. This Joseph Stalin did by dramatically switching the power balance of Europe one August night. It made Joseph Stalin man of 1939. History may not like him but history cannot forget him. As for his contemporaries on the 1939 scene:
-- By early last year Adolf Hitler had already shown the world that his bag of tricks was not bottomless. Instead of winning another bloodless conquest in Poland, he ran his land empire at last afoul the sea empire of Britain--and into an expensive, probably long and debilitating war which may well end disastrously for him and his country. The Allies have not cracked his Westwall--but he has not cracked their Maginot Line. His vaunted air fleet has not leveled Britain, as advertised, and once again Germany finds herself dangerously blockaded by the British Fleet.
-- Generalissimo Francisco Franco won his civil war in Spain, but his country was so exhausted at the war's end that Spain's weight in international affairs remains negligible.
-- Most vigorous character to arise anew in European affairs was Britain's Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, but he was not the head of Government. Doubtful it was, moreover, if Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain would go down as a great war figure. History would probably regard him as an example of magnificent stubbornness--stubborn for peace, then stubborn in war.
-- Benito Mussolini was caught bluffing with his Nazi- Fascist "Pact of Steel," and when the Allies called his bluff, Il Duce rather awkwardly last fall backed down and declared "non- belligerency." Grumbling at home last autumn and a major shake-up among his top officers indicated that Mussolini's Italy had to do a lot of sail-trimming.
-- After seven years of Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. was still in the dumps, offered no example to the rest of the world as to how to get along. Best Roosevelt deeds of 1939 were his earnest but unheeded plumpings for peace.
Joseph Stalin's actions in 1939, by contrast, were positive, surprising, world-shattering.
The signing in Moscow's Kremlin on the night of August 23-24 of the Nazi-Communist "Non-Aggression" Pact was a diplomatic demarche literally world-shattering. The actual signers were German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Premier-Foreign Commissar Molotov, but Comrade Stalin was there in person to give it his smiling benediction, and no one doubted that it was primarily his doing. By it Germany broke through British-French "encirclement," freed herself from the necessity of fighting on two fronts at the same time. Without the Russian pact, German generals would certainly have been loath to go into military action. With it, World War II began.
From Russia's standpoint, the pact seemed at first a brilliant coup in the cynical game of power politics. It was expected that smart Joseph Stalin would lie low and let the Allies and the Germans fight it out to exhaustion, after which he would possibly pick up the pieces. But little by little, it began to appear that Comrade Stalin got something much more practical out of his deal.
-- More than half of defeated Poland was handed over to him without a struggle.
-- The three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were quietly informed that hereafter they must look to Moscow rather than to Berlin. They all signed "mutual assistance" pacts making them virtual protectorates of the Soviet Union.
-- Germany renounced any interest in Finland, thus giving the Russians carte blanche to move into that country--which they have been trying to do for the past four weeks.
-- It is widely supposed that Germany agreed to recognize some Russian interests in the Balkans, most probably in Rumania's Bessarabia and in eastern Bulgaria and the Isthmus.
But if, in the jungle that is Europe today, the Man of 1939 gained large slices of territory out of his big deal, he also paid a big price for it. By the one stroke of sanctioning a Nazi war and by the later strokes of becoming a partner of Adolf Hitler in aggression, Joseph Stalin threw out of the window Soviet Russia's meticulously fostered reputation of a peace- loving, treaty-abiding nation. By the ruthless attack on Finland, he not only sacrificed the good will of thousands of people the world over sympathetic to the ideals of Socialism, he matched himself with Adolf Hitler as the world's most hated man.
The Life. While the new Nazi-Communist partnership may have surprised those whose Russian reading had been confined to the idealistic utterances of such Soviet diplomats as onetime Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinoff, Stalin's life reveals numerous examples of cynical opportunism and unprincipled grabbing of power. Sent to a Greek Orthodox seminary at Tiflis at 13, young "Soso" Djugashvili was expelled at 18 from the school because, said his priestly teachers, of "Socialistic heresy."
Thereafter, he led the life of a Russian professional revolutionary. He took part in a railroad strike in Tiflis. He was an organizer in Batum and Baku factories. He had something to do with the series of spectacular robberies that the "revolutionists" engineered. Once a Government-convoyed truck was bombed in the Tiflis main square, and 341,000 rubles ($170,000) in cash was taken from it. Maxim Litvinoff, incidentally, was later caught in Paris with some of this money on his person. "Soso" wandered from town to town in the Caucasus, using numerous aliases. Five times he was arrested and exiled; four times he escaped.
In this early life his colleagues sometimes suspected Koba or Ivanovich of buying leniency for himself by handing over their names to the police. Another strange coincidence they noted was that frequently when the comrades got into a tough spot with the police, and had to fight their way out, Koba was rarely on hand.
He joined Russia's radical movement in 1894 and aligned himself with the Social Democratic Party in 1898. He was astute enough to choose the Bolsheviks rather than the Mensheviks when the Party split in 1903. His first contact with revolutionary bigwigs came when he attended a Party powwow in Vienna. Leon Trotsky noticed him in passing; Nikolai Lenin, who had first met him in 1905 in Finland, set him to work writing an article on the Marxist theory of governing minorities. It was in signing this article that he first used the signature "J. Stalin." "We have here a wonderful Georgian," Lenin wrote of Stalin at that time. Thereafter the "wonderful Georgian" was to be the Party's recognized expert on the 174 different peoples that made up Soviet Russia.
One of Lenin's favorite ideas was that if 130,000 landlords could rule Tsarist Russia, 240,000 determined revolutionists could rule a Soviet Russia. Lenin's efforts before the revolution were to build up a professional revolutionary machine experienced in organizing workers and able to dodge the police. Almost all the big revolutionists of necessity lived abroad; Stalin and Molotov were the only two who were able to brag in later years that they stuck it out for the most part inside. At World War I's start Stalin was in a prison camp just below the Arctic Circle. He got out when a general amnesty was proclaimed at the Tsar's abdication in 1917.
In the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, he was a relatively unimportant member of the Party's steering committee whose greatest service had been as exiled Lenin's go-between with colleagues in the 1913 Duma and as an assistant on the Petrograd Pravda. In numerous reorganizations of the governing structure which took place after the Bolsheviks came to power, Comrade Stalin always had a high post, but his work was also invariably overshadowed by the spectacular showings of Lenin, the Party's chairman, and Trotsky, the War Commissar.
Since J. Stalin became the supreme power in Russia, much of the Revolution's history has been rewritten to magnify his part in those stirring events. Trotsky's part has been completely erased from Soviet textbooks. Meanwhile, Stalinists claim that their hero:
-- Fought off the White Russian forces in Siberia.
-- Defended Petrograd against White General Nikolai Yudenich in 1918.
-- Saved the Donets coal-mining region from General Anton Denikin's forces.
-- Was responsible for early Russian successes in the Polish War of 1920.
-- Saved Tsaritsin (now called Stalingrad) from capture in 1918.
At Tsaritsin there began one of the bitterest political enmities of modern times--the Stalin-Trotsky feud. Trotsky claimed that Stalin, a political commissar at that time, was insubordinate. He demanded and got from Lenin an order recalling him. Thereafter, Comrade Stalin patiently and calculatingly nursed his grudge against Comrade Trotsky.
In 1922 Trotsky was offered the post of Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, but turned it down. All except Stalin thought it was a mere routine job. Stalin eagerly grabbed it. Stalin saw in it the chance to become something resembling a Soviet Boss Tweed. The Communist Party was growing by leaps & bounds. Comrade Stalin appointed the new secretaries of the expanding organization. Comrade Stalin could not directly punish a recalcitrant secretary, but one who showed too much independence could easily be shifted, without explanation, from a nice post in, say, the Crimea, to a cold outpost in Archangel. By the time of Lenin's death in 1924 Stalinist bureaucracy was already in the saddle.
Probably the most debated point in post-war Soviet history was the "last testament" supposedly left by Lenin. Most salient point in the alleged document was a proposal to get rid of Stalin "because he is too crude." Stalinists have long denied its genuineness; best Trotskyist argument is that Stalin once quoted it and that Stalin once admitted: "Yes, I am rough, rough on those who roughly and faithlessly try to destroy the Communist Party."
At any rate, Lenin's proposal could scarcely be carried out against Stalin's strong organization. During this and the subsequent crucial period the chief members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee, the Party's ruling body, were Stalin, Trotsky, Grigori Zinoviev, Leo Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, Nikolai Bukharin, Mikhail Tomsky--seven little bottles hanging on the wall. In 1928 Trotsky was exiled from the U.S.S.R., in 1936 Zinoviev and Kamenev were tried for treason, found guilty, shot. Tomsky attended the trial, committed suicide. In 1938 Rykov and Bukharin went before the firing squad.
In twelve years of Stalin absolutism the world has had many conflicting reports of how Socialism in Russia got along. There were accounts of big dams built, large factories going up, widespread industrialization, big collective-farming projects. Five-Year plans were announced. Free schools and hospitals were erected everywhere. Illiteracy was on the way to being wiped out. There was no persecution of minorities as such. A universal eight-hour and then a seven-hour day prevailed. There were free hospitalization, free workers' summer colonies, etc.
To be sure, the collectivization program in the Ukraine resulted in a famine which cost not less than 3,000,000 lives in 1932. It was a Stalin-made famine. The number of wrecks and industrial accidents became prodigious. Soviet officials laid it to sabotage. More likely they were due more to too rapid industrialization. Millions in penal colonies were forced into slave labor.
Moreover, Russian officialdom began to experience a terror which continues to this day. For the murder of Stalin's "Dear Friend," Sergei M. Kirov, head of the Leningrad Soviet, who had once called Comrade Stalin the "greatest leader of all times and all nations," 117 persons were known to have been put to death. That started the fiercest empire-wide purge of modern times. Thousands were executed with only a ghost of a trial. Secret police reigned as ruthlessly over Russia as in Tsarist times. First it was the Cheka, next the OGPU, later the N.K.V.D.--but essentially they were all the same. Comrade Stalin recognized their function when, one day, he viewed that part of the walls of the Kremlin from which Tsar Ivan IV watched his enemies executed, was reported as saying: "Ivan the Terrible was right. You cannot rule Russia without a secret police."
After his death Lenin was sanctified by Stalin. Joseph Stalin has gone a long way toward deifying himself while alive. No flattery is too transparent, no compliment too broad for him. He became the fountain of all Socialist wisdom, the uncontradictable interpreter of the Marxist gospel. His dry doctrinal history of the Communist Party is a best-seller in Russia, just as Hitler's turgid but more interesting Mein Kampf outsells all secular volumes in Germany. He goes in for Nazi-like plebiscites. Hitler won his 1938 election by 99.08% of the voters; Stalin polls 115% in his own Moscow bailiwick. Stalin's photograph became the icon of the new State, whose religion is Communism.
But Joseph Stalin is not given to oratorical pyrotechnics. Only two or three times a year does he appear on the parapet of Lenin's tomb in Red Square, wearing his flat military cap, his military tunic, his high Russian boots. He attends Party meetings but rarely public gatherings. He has made only one radio speech and is not likely to make many more. His thick Georgian accent sounds strange to Russia.
Three Rooms. His life is mostly spent inside the foreboding walls of that collection of churches, palaces and barracks in Moscow called the Kremlin. His office is large and plain, decorated only by the pictures of Marx and Engels and a death mask in white plaster of Lenin. His private apartment, once the dwelling of the Kremlin's military commander, is only three rooms big.
Joseph Stalin has been married twice: first, in 1903, to a Georgian girl named Ekaterina Svanidze, who died in 1907, and then to Nadya Sergeievna Alleluieva, who died in 1932. By his first wife he had a son, Yasha Djugashvili, now in his thirties, and obscure engineer in Moscow. Father and son do not hit it off. By Mrs. Stalin No. 2 he had a son and daughter: Vasya, now 19, and Svetlana, 14. Good-looking Daughter Svetlana is the apple of her father's eye. The two children go to school, but live in the Kremlin. Joseph's cackling, gossipy mother, old Ekaterina Georguvna Djugashvili, whom Soviet and foreign journalists used to dote on interviewing, died in Tiflis in 1937. She had for several years lived in an apartment in the former palace of the Tsar's Georgian viceroy.
Novelist Maxim Gorky was a good friend of Stalin, but perhaps his dearest friends were Commissar for Heavy Industry Grigori Konstantinovich Ordjonkidze and Soviet Executive, Committee Secretary Avel Yenukidze. Ordjonkidze died "of a heart attack," Yenukidze before a firing squad. Defense Commissar Voroshilov has enjoyed the master's friendship and lived longer than anybody. Best pal of late years is said to be Leningrad Party Boss Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov, regarded as Stalin's heir. Last week rumors flew thick & fast that Comrade Zhdanov was on the skids. His birthday testimonial to Stalin failed to see the light of print.
Few foreigners have met Stalin, none has come to know him well. He has been interviewed by U.S. Newsmen Walter Duranty, Eugene Lyons, Roy Wilson Howard. Author Emil Ludwig and Professor Jerome Davis each once had long, serious sessions with him. Playwright George Bernard Shaw and his friend, Lady Astor, went on a lark to Moscow and saw him, too. "When are you going to stop killing people?" asked the impertinent Lady Astor. "When it is no longer necessary," answered Comrade Stalin.
Despite the disastrous purges, despite the low opinion that J. Stalin & Co. held of human life, Soviet Russia had definitely gained some measure of respect for its apparent righteousness in foreign affairs. It had supported against reactionary attacks popular Governments in Hungary, Austria, China, Spain. But last year, in three short months, the Man of 1939 found it expedient to toss that reputation out of his Kremlin window.
For long Russians have been obsessed with the nightmare of a combination of capitalist nations that would turn against her. Perhaps it was this haunting fear, rather than any innate sympathy for the Nazis, that led Tovarish Stalin to take measures to insure the Soviet Union against easy attack. He was not astute enough to see that such measures as he has taken in Finland were more likely than ever to unite the world against him.
Once in a plea for greater industrial, and hence military power, Joseph Stalin said: "Old Russia was continually beaten because of backwardness. It was beaten by the Mongol khans. It was beaten by Turkish beys. It was beaten by Swedish feudal landlords...It was beaten because of military backwardness, cultural backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness...That is why we cannot be backward any more." Last week, as the news of a Russian rout in upper Finland was broadcast, it began to look as if, temporarily at least, Soviet Russian efficiency was not essentially better than that of Old Russia. It began to appear as though Finnish democrats could be added, temporarily at least, to the Man of 1939's list of those who had laid the Russian bear by the heels. And that the Man of 1939 was making a very poor start on 1940.
Joseph Stalin: Die, But Do Not Retreat
The year 1942 was a year of blood and strength. The man whose name means steel in Russian, whose few words of English include the American expression "tough guy" was the man of 1942. Only Joseph Stalin fully knew how close Russia stood to defeat in 1942, and only Joseph Stalin fully knew how he brought Russia through.
But the whole world knew what the alternative would have been. The man who knew it best of all was Adolf Hitler, who found his past accomplishments turning into dust.
Had German legions swept past steel-stubborn Stalingrad and liquidated Russia's power of attack, Hitler would have been not only man of the year, but he would have been undisputed master of Europe, looking for other continents to conquer. He could have diverted at least 250 victorious divisions to new conquests in Asia and Africa. But Joseph Stalin stopped him. Stalin had done it before--in 1941--when he started with all of Russia intact. But Stalin's achievement of 1942 was far greater. All that Hitler could give he took--for the second time.
Men of Good Will. Above the heavy tread of nations on the march, above the staccato uproar of the battlefields, only a few men of peace were heard in 1942.
Britain's William Temple, who made his pilgrimage to Canterbury in 1942 and became the new Archbishop, was one of them. His church-approved program of reforms brought religion closer to the center of British national life than at any time since Cromwell's Roundheads. Temple challenged all Britain's well-established institutions of economic privilege, espoused the cause of mankind's economic freedom (which Britain loosely calls socialism), probably to leave a lasting mark on British history.
Another man who may leave a similar mark is Henry J. Kaiser, the man who launched one of his Liberty ships in four days and 15 hours and, more important, preached as a practical businessman "full production for full employment." His gospel challenged U.S. industry to lead the post-war world out of depression.
A third man who left a mark was Wendell Willkie, whose world-circling trip as the politician without office had an effect perhaps more lasting than the U.S. yet realizes on U.S. relations with Russia and the Orient.
But Willkie's accomplishment was dimmed by his failure to command the firm support of his party, and the plain fact was that in 1942, a year of war, men of good will had no achievements to match those of men of arms and men of power.
Men of War. Flamboyant Erwin Rommel and cold-mouthed Fedor von Bock were Germany's two top generals in a year whose laurels were reserved primarily for fighting men. Rommel, who drove to within 70 miles of Alexandria before he was stopped by the British, established himself as one of the great virtuosos among field commanders. Bock directed a brilliant campaign which reached the west bank of the Volga, but the final spark that would have meant victory was not in him.
The greatest military conquests of the year--although not against the greatest forces--were those of frog-legged Tomoyuki Yamashita, who blasted the British out of Singapore, the Dutch out of the Indies and the U.S. out of Bataan and Corregidor. Yamashita in one year successfully seized a great empire for his country. On his side were advantages in numbers, in preparation, in the stupidity of the Allied nations, but Yamashita successfully capitalized on them.
Quite different were the military triumphs of Yugoslavia's General Draja Mihailovich, who capitalized on a conquered nation's unconquerable urge for freedom to fight when fighting seemed impossible. But before the year was out thousands of his countrymen, probably distrusting the Yugoslav Government in Exile more than they did Mihailovich, supported the rival Partisan guerrillas who were carving out their own fighting front. From high on the crags of southern Serbia, Mihailovich, a great fighter, saw, instead of the unification of his country, a preview of rival aims and clashing ideologies which may bring out a rash of civil wars in post-war Europe.
As for the military men of the U.S., 1942 offered them few opportunities for great achievement. General Eisenhower's able occupation of North Africa only placed him on the threshold of his real test. Douglas MacArthur, whose brilliant skill and courage raised him to the rank of hero while he fought an inevitably losing fight, still lacked the means to win the crown of a great victory. Outstanding among Americans for accomplishment in battle stood the name of Admiral William Halsey, who, not once but again & again, took his task force into swift encounters against the Japs to deal them telling blows.
Yet no military man from Rommel to Halsey was the man of 1942 for a good sufficient reason: there was no military victory of the year which showed signs of being conclusive.
Men of Power. There was perhaps no more unlikely place to look for a Man of 1942 than in prostrate France. Yet two Frenchmen, both of whom the U.S. disliked and distrusted, rose to the top of a soiled political heap. One of them was Pierre Laval, who rose to the honor of a meeting with Hitler to which the tragicomic Benito Mussolini was not invited. If Hitler wins, Pierre Laval may yet be a successful man. Jean Francois Darlan's deal with General Eisenhower might have profited him eventually, but his award was an assassin's bullet.
A far greater step to power was taken by a Japanese. From behind his horn-rimmed glasses and the ask-ack of his cigar smoke, Premier Hideki Tojo emerged as a character worthy of his nickname: The Razor. He, like Stalin, was tough. So were his people. He took the major political risk of the year in tackling Britain and the U.S., and, for the year, it turned out to be a good speculation. His armies conquered Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies and Burma. Never in history had one nation conquered so much so quickly. Seldom had any nation's fighting abilities been underestimated so badly. Tojo, or Emperor Hirohito, in whose name all Japanese wage holy war, might well have been the man of the year, if the explosive Japanese campaigns had not shown signs of burning out.
For the great leaders of the United Nations 1942 was another story. China's Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek struggled on stubbornly against China's internal problems and the invading Japanese. Britain's Winston Churchill, Man of 1940, delivered victory in Egypt after standing on the verge of defeat. Franklin Roosevelt, Man of 1941, shouldered mountainous problems, solved some, left others still crying to be solved. He successfully brought the weight of the U.S. to bear against the Axis. But the 1942 accomplishments of Chiang, of Churchill and of Roosevelt will not bear fruit till 1943. And, worthy though they may prove, they inevitably pale by comparison with what Joseph Stalin did in 1942.
At the beginning of the year Stalin was in an unenviable spot. During the year before he had sold over 400,000 miles of territory at the price of saving most of his army. Gone was a big fraction--how large only he knew--of the precious tanks, planes and war equipment which he had been hoarding for years against the Nazi attack. Gone was roughly one-third of Russia's industrial capacity, on which he depended for replacements. Gone was nearly half of Russia's best farmland.
With all this gone, Stalin had to face another full-weight blow from the Nazi war machine. For every trained soldier the Germans had lost in the previous year's battles, he had probably lost as many and more. For every bit of valuable experience which his soldiers and commanders had gained, the Germans had had the opportunity to gain an equal amount.
Stalin still had the magnificent will to resist of the Russian people--who had as much claim to glory as the British people had when they withstood the blitz of 1940. But a strong people had not prevented the loss of White Russia and the Ukraine. Would they be any better able to prevent the conquest of the Don basin, of Stalingrad, of the Caucasus? The strongest will to resist can eventually crack under continued defeat.
Only one new resource had Stalin for 1942: the help of the U.S. And, as events were to prove, that was to come late and to be bottlenecked by German attacks on the North Sea route and the Caucasus.
With these reduced resources, Stalin tackled his problem, trying to pick abler leaders for his Army, trying to improve its resistance, trying to maintain the morale of his underfed people, trying to extract more aid from his Allies and to get them to open a second front.
Only Stalin knows how he managed to make 1942 a better year for Russia than 1941. But he did. Sevastopol was lost, the Don basin was nearly lost, the Germans reached the Caucasus. But Stalingrad was held. The Russian people held. The Russian Army came back with four offensives that had the Germans in serious trouble at year's end.
Russia was displaying greater strength than at any point in the war. The general who had won that overall battle was the man who runs Russia.
The Man. In his birch-paneled office within the dark-towered Kremlin, Joseph Stalin (pronounced Stal-yn), an imponderable, soberly persistent Asiatic, worked at his desk 16 to 18 hours a day. Before him he kept a huge globe showing the course of campaigns over territory he himself defended in the civil wars of 1917-20. This time he again defended it, and mostly by will power. There were new streaks of grey in his hair and new etchings of fatigue in his granite face. (Stalin was 63 on Dec. 21, a date not recorded in the Soviet Encyclopedia and not mentioned in the Soviet press for the past three years.) But there was no break in his hold on Russia and there was long- neglected recognition of his abilities by nations outside the Soviet borders.
The problem for Stalin the statesman was to present the seriousness of the plight of Russia as an ally to Western leaders long suspicious of Stalin and his workers' State. Stalin, who had every reason to expect the city named for him to fall shortly after its heroic siege began on Aug. 24, desperately wanted aid from his allies. Stalin the politician made these desires the hope of the Russian people. He made them think that a continental second front had been promised to them, and thereby strengthened their will to hang on.
For his armies Stalin coined the slogan Umeraite No Ne Otstupaite (Die, But Do Not Retreat). It had been shown at Moscow that a strongly fortified city can be held as a strong point against attack by mechanized forces. Stalin chose to make Stalingrad another such point. While Germans and Russians were booting each other to death in the bomb-pocked streets, Stalin was organizing the winter offensive which burst into the Don basin with the fury of the snowstorms that accompanied it.
To keep his home front intact, Stalin had only work and black bread to offer. He added a promise of victory in 1942 and called to his people to sacrifice collectively to preserve the things they had built collectively. Children and women foraged in the forests for wood. A ballerina canceled one performance because she was stiff from chopping wood. Production norms were increased, apartments went unheated, electricity was turned off four days a week. At year's end the Russian children had no new toys for the New Year's celebration. There were no red-cloaked wooden replicas of Dyed Moross (Granddad Frost). There was no smoked salmon, no pickled herring, no goose, no vodka, no coffee for the grownups. But there was rejoicing. The Rodina (Motherland) had been saved for the second time in two years and now victory and peace could not be too far off.
The trek of world dignitaries to Moscow in 1942 brought Stalin out of his inscrutable shell, revealed a pleasant host and an expert at playing his cards in international affairs. At banquets for such men as Winston Churchill, W. Averill Harriman and Wendell Willkie, Host Stalin drank his vodka straight, talked the same way. He sent Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov to London and Washington to promote the second front and jack up laggard shipments of war materiel. In two letters to Henry Cassidy of the A.P., Stalin shrewdly used the world's headlines to state the Russian case for more aid.
Stalin did not get his continental second front in 1942, but when a new front was opened in North Africa he publicly approved. On the 25th anniversary of the Bolshevist Revolution, Stalin, in his big state speech of the year, reviewed the past and for the future struck the note of statesmanship.
The Past. The Revolution that was begun in 1917 by a handful of leather-coated working men and pallid intellectuals waving the red flag, by 1942 had congealed into a party government that has remained in power longer than any other major party in the world. It began under the leadership of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, on Marxist principles of a moneyless economy which challenged the right to accumulate wealth by private initiative.
The world reviled and caricatured the early Bolsheviks as bush-whiskered anarchists with a bomb in each hand. But Lenin, faced with hard facts and a war-beaten, superstitious, illiterate people, compromised with Marxism. Stalin, succeeding him, compromised still further, concentrated on building socialism in one state. Retained through the years of Russia's great upheaval was the basic conception that the ownership and operation of the means of production must be kept in the hands of the state.
Within Russia's immense disorderliness, Stalin faced the fundamental problems of providing enough food for the people and improving their lot, through 20th-Century industrial methods. He collectivized the farms and he built Russia into one of the four great industrial powers on earth. How well he succeeded was evident in Russia's world-surprising strength in World War II. Stalin's methods were tough, but they paid off.
The Present. The U.S., of all nations, should have been the first to understand Russia. Ignorance of Russia and suspicion of Stalin were two things that prevented it. Old prejudices and the antics of U.S. communists dangling at the end of the Party line were others. As Allies fighting the common enemy, the Russians have fought the best fight so far. As post-war collaborators, they hold many of the keys to a successful peace.
The two peoples who talk the most and scheme the biggest schemes are the Americans and the Russians. Both can be sentimental one moment, blazingly angry the next. Both spend their money freely for goods and pleasures, drink too much, argue interminably. Both are builders. The U.S. built mills and factories and tamed the land across a continent 3,000 miles wide. Russia tried to catch up by doing the same thing through a planned program that post-pioneer Americans would not have suffered. The rights as individuals that U.S. citizens have, the Russians want and believe they eventually will receive. Some of the discipline that the Russians have, the U.S. may need before the end of World War II.
The Future. In his 25th-anniversary speech Stalin emphasized that the most important event in foreign affairs, both for war and peace, was Allied collaboration. "We have the facts and events," he said, "pointing to a progressive rapprochement among the members of the Anglo-Soviet-American coalition and their uniting in a single fighting alliance." This was a frank approach to the post-war world, as realistically sensible as Stalin's expressed ideas on dealings with Germany. "Our aim," he said, "is not to destroy all armed force in Germany, because any intelligent man will understand that this is as impossible in the case of Germany as in the case of Russia. It would be unreasonable on the part of the victor to do so. To destroy Hitler's army is possible and necessary."
What other war aims Stalin has are not officially known, but there are reports in high circles that he wants no new territories except at points needed to make Russia impregnable against invasion. There is also a story in high places that, in keeping with the "tough-guy" tradition, credits Stalin with one other desire: permission from his allies to raze Berlin, as a lesson in psychology to the Germans and as a burnt offering to his own heroic people.
