In a fit of manic fascination, I took out ten biographies out from the library, nearly all of which are well over five-hundred pages. After three weeks of Jewish holidays and an automatic renewal, I'm finally finishing biography #2 - Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore. I'm disappointed to say that it's a rather dull book which I've persisted with for fear of the precedent it will set that I can start still more books without finishing them. I don't know the actual figure, but I like to say that I read 400 books a year and finish seven.
Scholarly writing is, by its nature, a little dry. There are only so many ways to make a subject interesting to the layman when a scholar is beholden to the truth. The truth always conspires to make reality duller than we inevitably wish. There's usually no great conspiracy, no grand illumination, no sudden explicator which sets the truth out to us in a lacerating revelation of fire. Yet simultaneously, reality grounds a book to the point that our flights of fancy can weed out the true believers.
And yet the very dryness of scholarship allows pseudo-scholarship to easily masquerade. The dullest books in the world can excite a cult of the initiated who perceive thousands of meanings the rest of us with our mundane bullshit detectors would never perceive. If you hold your nose at a cult's behest, you can perceive an endless litany of hidden meanings in any text at all, and spend a lifetime uncovering them. Only a bought and paid for member of the cult would endure the endless tedium of conceptual jargon it takes to master in order to grow excited by the hidden meanings, and by the time time we have mastered everything about the cult, the cult warps our thinking about everything else. Smart or stupid, such texts must have something to say about the state of the world, so the sacred text becomes the filter through which the wider world is perceived to its most devoted readers. To the rest of us, there is often no more boring experience. I suppose, given whom we're talking about right now, the obvious example of this phenomenon is Karl Marx, but I could name dozens of other writers and thinkers for whom this process is equally true, and I'm sure many listeners could do the same.
But what I like about substantial biographies is that by their nature, they're generally as grounded in the mundane realities of the moment as any book can be. So if the subject is exciting, the biography gives ample opportunities for a writer to conjure exciting scenes. You would think that the most effective mass murderer in European history would give ample opportunities for this kind of scene-building, but no, this biography is completely concerned with the little details of Kremlin intrigues - who was up, who was down, why Stalin had this or that one shot. So told is this story from the inside that one often forgets that this clique killed up to 25% of their own population!
The service biography performs is to prove something scholars of all kinds have gone to enormous lengths to disprove - that Stalin was a dictator in every sense. who did not delegate unless it was something so time sensitive that he could not find a twenty-fifth hour of the day to figure out the policy himself. He controlled everything. He read everything. His instructions on every subject were detailed to the dotted i.
Stalin was just as evil as Hitler, and in many ways just as unstable a personality. But if he lasted decades longer than Hitler, no small reason is because he made himself a meticulous authority on every subject in the purview of a head of state. Hitler, as Montefiore notes and many before him, was a political gambler who gained power by daring the most enormous risks during a period when World War I left his opponents congenitally timid. Stalin, on the other hand, was a man who inhaled thousands of details before he made any decision at all. He ascended to power by being Lenin's General Secretary, basically a Chief of Staff, but as he was Chief of Staff to a Premier and not a mere President, he had no legislative or judicial oversight, and therefore much more powerful than any Haldemann or Baker, and also much more free to create his own portfolio, his own policies, and most importantly, his own staff. By the time Lenin died, so many of Lenin's advisors were Stalin appointments that by the time of Lenin's death, a majority of his inner circle owed Stalin their eminence, and therefore supported Stalin as Lenin's heir, even though Lenin warned in a memo against Stalin's election in the most ominous manner. And therefore, beginning with Stalin, the Communist Party's 'General Secretary' was the de-facto dictator, a precedent also adapted by China, Vietnam and Laos. It was also used by Mongolia until their communist dictatorship fell in 1992, and by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, you probably know the rest of that story...
Stalin was many evil things, but his evil compounded itself exponentially by the fact that he absolutely was a genius. I had generally assumed it a myth that Stalin took it upon himself to personally guide the development of every major artist in the Soviet Union, but after reading this biography, there's no question: it's no myth at all. Most dictators, perhaps most politicians, fancy themselves intellectuals. But eyewitness accounts state that Stalin read something like four-hundred pages a day on average, probably not including government memos, and he was extremely eager to
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discuss his reading with the country's most distinguished intellectuals, whose work he of course watched like a hawk to ensure intellectuals came to the conclusions he desired. Intellectuals, probably out of Stockholm syndrome, consulted him all the time, and the more terrified they were of him, the more often they wrote him. Stalin, like a true Orwellian dictator, occupied their thoughts, and the more thoughts a person has, the more thoughts among them totalitarian can occupy.
This is where I should mention that famous dictum from Thomas Carlyle in 'On Heroes' where he introduced the 'Great Man Theory of History' which states: 'Find in any country the ablest man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, and loyally reverence him; you have a perfect government for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit."
In the Age of Trump, this theory begins again to look better than risible. If democracy ends up giving us an authoritarian anyway, who in their right mind would not give up an election or two to ensure that the dictator is at least competent.
Yet at the same time, intellect has many, many limitations. And there is no better example of this than Stalin - who famously said: 'Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.' Stalin and Lenin both were men of colossal intelligence, they understood that if they wanted to completely remake a society, they had to liquidate the people within it. But you cannot remake society without destroying it. How was Stalin to know how to properly arm for war against Hitler when he'd liquidated his entire general staff? How was Stalin to meet his farm production quotas when he'd liquidated the entire merchant class twice over who knew how to manage the farms? And how was Stalin to survive the sickness that killed him when he'd liquidated all the best doctors in the USSR? In so many ways, the greater the intelligence, the greater the capacity for stupidity.
Stalin was as meticulous as a human being becomes, but his pathological need to understand every detail was due in part to the grand sweeping theory of historical materialism that attracted him to the life of the mind to begin with. As the man who went further to put Marx into practice than any human being ever had, and ties with Mao for ever did, he had to master the details that not even Lenin concerned himself with nearly as much. But when so much mastery and control is put into the service of an overarching theory so obviously wrong, the detailed mastery can only serve to warp people's lives still moreso, not less. And this is why, (discover concluding sentence...)
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