Apropos Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili
In a recent viral debate the figure of ‘Stalin’ made a fleeting appearance. This debate between Kanhaiya Kumar and a BJP spokesperson provides us an opportunity to revisit 20th century political history, and the many crimes of Stalin, and how these crimes continue to haunt the Left, as well as being used as rhetorical weapons against the Left. History shows us, however, that strands of the political Left that did not fall in line behind Stalin had suffered grievously at his hands, and that opposition to Stalin came from the Left itself. The article also attempts to show why Hitler and Nazis are used more often as examples of totalitarianism rather than Stalin. This is done through a discussion on the relationship between Stalin, language, political dissidence and dissident humour.
“Like worms his thick fingers are fat,
His words like pound weights are correct,
His cockroach moustache is full of laughter,
His army boots shine, he is sought afterBy a mob of thin-necked leaders, half-men,
He uses their service, manipulating them:
Some are meowing or whistling, or whining,
He alone is poking, booming, and whiffing.
Like horseshoes, he grants his every decree
Poking some in the groin, in the brow, in the eye.
His executions are like cakes and ale,
His broad chest of Ossete eclipses the jail”
The Kremlin Highlander (1933), by Osip Mendelstam (translated by Ian Probstein)
The figure of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, or Joseph Stalin as he is better known, has made a brief and fleeting appearance in Indian political conversations, courtesy a debate between the All India Student Federation’s (AISF, the student wing of the Communist Party of India) Kanhaiya Kumar and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Abhinav Sinha. In a debate centered on the recent attacks on the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus by masked goons, Mr. Sinha tried to pillory the student leader, formerly of JNU, in a particular heated exchange by identifying Mr. Kumar as a communist and Stalin and Mao as communism’s ‘ideals’. Mr. Kumar’s retort involved Hitler and Mussolini. Mr. Kumar has had to face similar charges back in 2016 when he rose to prominence during the case of sloganeering in JNU, when multiple commentators on the political Right had brought up the human cost of communist regimes. This time around, however, Mr. Kumar deftly turned the tables around on his opponent, and chanted ‘Stalin Murdabad, Mao ko hum nahi maante’ (Down with Stalin, we do not follow Mao). He followed this by challenging Mr. Sinha to say ‘Godse Murdabad’, which Mr. Sinha failed to do.
Such exchanges between political actors on the Left and the Right, with barbs over Hitler and Stalin and moral equivocation being traded, are not restricted to India. Jean-Pierre Faye’s horse-shoe theory (which claims that the political far-left and far-right are analogous) holds a lot of sway in public conversations, but it obfuscates much more than it reveals, especially in historical terms. Political philosophers such as Hannah Arendt have been wrangling with the twin specters of Nazism and Stalinism since the middle of the 20th century.
Dr. Ambedkar had presaged the problems that Indian communists would run into on the question of caste, and subsequent currents of Ambedkarite thought have a rich history of intellectual and political contestation with Marxism (some have sought to intertwine the two schools of thought as well). While Gandhi took a dim view of Soviet communism, Nehru was favourably inclined towards it, even delivering a eulogy upon Stalin’s death in the Parliament. Stalin had reservations about both of them. After Khruschev’s ascent as Soviet Premier Indian communist parties have taken up various positions regarding Stalin and his depredations, some distancing themselves from him while others justified his actions as necessary to defeat the Nazis.
It is not expected that the figure of Stalin would be of any significance whatsoever in the Indian electoral politics. It does, however, provide one an excellent opportunity to pause and reflect on Stalin’s totalitarian regime, its relationship to other streams of Left-wing politics, its relationship to language, dissidence and humour, and what it tells us about our own predicaments, especially at a time when the erosion of democratic norms has led to many a furrowed brow (an account of Mao would require another piece).
Stalin’s depredations and the Left
Christopher Hitchens, in his appraisal of Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread in the Atlantic magazine in 2011, mentions that Stalinism is for him ‘among other things, a triumph of the torturing of language.’ Thinking along these lines is perhaps not irrelevant in these times when accusations of ‘sedition’ and ‘anti-national’ acts through speech fly thick and fast. One can here consider article 58 of the Stalin-era criminal code which dealt with ‘anti-Soviet conversations’, using which hundreds of thousands of people were jailed for telling jokes behind which ‘there may lurk a Menshevik, Trotskyite, class enemy’.
In his piece, the flamboyant New Atheist of recent memory and champion of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ (and erstwhile Trotskyite), takes issue with Martin Amis’s accusations hurled at him and other Leftists of knowing ‘Auschwitz and Belsen, Himmler and Eichmann’, while ‘nobody’ knows of ‘Vorkuta and Solovetski, Yezhov and Dzherzhinsky’. Hitchens points out
‘….that the crucial questions about the gulag were being asked by left oppositionists, from Boris Souvarine to Victor Serge to C.L.R. James, in real time and at great peril. Those courageous and prescient heretics have been somewhat written out of history (they expected far worse than that, and often received it), but I can’t bring myself to write as if they never existed, or to forgive anyone who slights them.’
While one may indulge in speculation over counter-factual history as to whether the Bolshevik Revolution might have taken a different, humane route, Hitchens goes on to write:
“Excuse me, but nobody can be bothered to argue much about whether fascism might have turned out better, given more propitious circumstances. And there were no dissidents in the Nazi Party, risking their lives on the proposition that the Führer had betrayed the true essence of National Socialism.”
Interestingly enough, Hitchens goes on to mention the self-apologetic question of ‘Where was your Kronstadt?’ among older Leftists, referring to the rebellion led by sailors, trade unions and members of the local ‘Soviet’ against the dictatorial Bolshevik regime, which in 1921 was crushed brutally by the Red Army under Leon Trotsky. Similar was the fate of the Nestor Makhno and the left-libertarian movement he led in Ukraine in the aftermath of the Bolshevik takeover of power and centralization. A long history of labour and student unrest against Communist regimes propped up by the Soviet Union was witnessed across Eastern Europe stretching from East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 and the more celebrated dissident movements led by the likes of Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel in the 1970’s and 1980’s. As early as 1918, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman bore witness to the terrifying potential of the nascent state police (Cheka) and other ‘internal organs’ of the Bolshevik regime in ‘purging’ social-democrats, anarchists and other dissidents that didn’t fall in line. The Spanish Civil War that started in 1936 was led by anarchist groups such as the C.N.T.-F.A.I. and the trade union militia P.O.U.M. in the Catalan region until they were (from all accounts) systematically destroyed (several of their members killed and tortured by the then NKVD, which later became the KGB) by the forces backed by Stalin, who took a dim view of any ‘revolution’ not running on Moscow’s lines. Stalin, which means Steel in Russian, considered himself and himself alone to be privy to the immovable laws according to which history unfolds, and sole arbiter of where and when a ‘revolution’ is to occur. In spite of all the effort put in by the International Brigades and others the damage was done; the Republican side lost the fight to the fascist Gen. Francisco Franco. Of course, Stalin does not bear the entire responsibility for the defeat of the Republican side; fractious in-fighting and a total lack of support for the Republicans from the Allies (Nehru called the Allies inaction ‘the supreme farce of our time’) coupled with massive support from Hitler and Mussolini for Franco also played its part.
The Soviet Union under Stalin was one of the few countries to send arms, ammunitions, soldiers, pilots, tanks and fighter aircraft to the Republican side. However, the anti-fascist forces paid a heavy price for this ‘support’ on two counts. On one hand, Stalin sought to control of any possible socio-political transformation according to his will so as to install his followers as eventual leaders in a Spanish state that would serve as a Soviet satellite. This led to sectarian violence on the Republican side as the various groups of the Left that were not beholden to Stalin refused to act according to his diktats. One the other hand, Moscow overcharged the Spanish Republic and swindled them of its gold reserves as payment for the arms and ammunition provided.
The lingering ill-feelings among the various streams of Left politics when it comes to the Spanish Civil War is captured well by these lyrics by Against Me!:
‘Do you remember ’36,
We went our separate ways,
You fought for Stalin,
I fought for freedom’
In the aftermath of the Second World War, Stalin was busy carving up Europe into zones of hegemony along with Allied powers, and in places such as Greece, his fellow ‘comrades’, communist partisans who had fought the Nazis, were left to fend for themselves (they were either killed, tortured or shipped off to prison camps by the new Greek regime).
What is of interest here is the fact that ‘Leftists’ (often from outside the official ‘Communist Party’ structures) seem to have not only borne a significant section of the brunt unleashed by totalitarian regimes represented by the Hammer-and-Sickle insignia, they have also been at the fore-front in resisting many of these regimes. If one were to include dissidents who stood for what is understood to be a ‘Left-Liberal’ position the list grows even longer. It thus also leads one to question the efficacy of an argumentative foundation which stands upon the example of Stalin to berate anyone who self-avowedly falls towards the Left in the political spectrum. This, of course, should not be read as an absolution of those sections of the Left that indulge in uncomfortable squirming and hand-wringing when the crimes of Stalin are mentioned (as eminent a historian as Eric Hobsbawm was regularly heckled over his lack of condemnation of Stalin). Stalin’s face is, regrettably, still found in posters across the sub-continent in campuses, in walls and political rallies.
Stalinism’s legacy in Eastern Europe
In addition to political actors from the Left, Stalin’s repression and extermination of poets (such as Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mendelstam) and other ‘enemies of the people’ are well documented. So are the gulags (forced labour camps) meant for political dissidents and the holodomor, the artificial famine engineered by his regime in Ukraine that led to millions of deaths.
Nor was Stalin a paragon of the sort of progressivism associated with Left-wing politics; Renata Salecl documents how he outlawed abortion in 1936 as Soviet women were expected to play the role of mothers and give ‘the nation a new group of heroes’. (Salecl also illustrates how the complete domination of the state over all coordinates of social life under the Iron Curtain left the population with only the family, religion and national identity as means of political resistance, which has been determinant of much of the politics in the post-Communist era Eastern Europe).
This is not to say that the more religious and morally conservative sections of society had no role in resisting Stalin and others of his ilk. But here again, Hitchens’s stern castigation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn proves instructive. Solzhenitsyn, Hitchens believes, had
‘descended into a sort of “Great Russian” spiritual and political quackery, replete with nostrums about the national “soul” and euphemisms about pogroms and anti-Semitism’.
Across Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain there has been a rise of reactionary, moral majority governments allied with the respective national church that have been as paranoid as the Stalinist regime (and also xenophobic, now that the ‘class enemy’ has been replaced by the ‘Other’ which corrupts and pollutes the pure, organic nation). In Poland, Lech Walesa, the former Polish President and the leader of the ‘Solidarnosc’ trade union that was instrumental in bringing down Communist rule in Poland, has battled charges of being a spy for the secret police in the erstwhile Communist regime thrown at him by the increasingly paranoiac Catholic conservative regime led (for all intents and purposes as the Chairman of the ruling Law and Justice Party) by a former mid-level leader in his Solidarity organization, Jarosław Kaczyński, who has a penchant for seeing Communists and ‘enemies of the nation’ at each turn (not to mention xenophobic tendencies against immigrants). The Russian Orthodox Church has aligned itself with Putin’s authoritarian regime and has proven itself to be highly homophobic, among other charming qualities. Stalin has been resurrected as a national hero under Putin, shorn of all his ‘communist’ trappings.
Stalinism, humour and dissidence
The fact, however, remains that Hitler and the Nazis are used far more than Stalin and Soviet Union as metaphors in general parlance for authoritarian and dictatorial regimes of various hues. Iain Lauchlan, a Professor of History from the University of Edinburgh, provides us a provisional reason behind this in his work on humour in Stalinist Russia (titled Laughter in the Dark: Humour under Stalin). He too quotes from Amis’s Koba the Dread –
‘Pace Adorno, it was not poetry that became impossible after Auschwitz. What became impossible was laughter. In the Soviet case on the other hand, laughter intransigently refuses to absent itself.’
Why? One reason could be the fact that the Nazis extermination campaigns had a brutal efficiency whereas Stalin’s purges, while being brutal, were also epitomes of ineptitude mixed with callousness. Here is one such subterranean joke:
‘After receiving a delegation from the provinces Stalin loses his pipe. He orders the chief of his secret police, Beria, to conduct an investigation. Half an hour later the boss phones Beria to inform him that he has found his pipe down the back of the sofa and so he can call off the search. ‘But I have already arrested ten culprits,’ replies Beria. ‘Well release them then,’ says Stalin. ‘We can’t,’ says Beria. ‘Five of them died during interrogation and the other five confessed, so we shot them.’
Lavrentiy Beria was Stalin’s next-in-command and a notorious chief of the Soviet secret police, responsible for the torture and execution of dissidents. He continued the ‘Great Purge’ started under his predecessor, Nikolai Yezhov. Yezhov, in rather tragic-ironic fashion, was himself purged and executed for being ‘anti-Stalin’, and his photographs with Stalin were later air-brushed to remove all traces of Yezhov from the pictures. This incident has occasioned some grim online humour:
A compelling reason behind Amis’s statement, Lauchlan contends, could be found in the wider appeal that Soviet dissident humour can provoke laughter because they satirize the ideals that wider modernity is understood as having in common with Communism: materialism, rationalism, technology, ‘progress’ etc. while Fascism, on the other hand, is seen as a rejection of reason altogether.
It is not for nothing that Slavoj Žižek wrote:
‘…it is not only Stalinism which is a linguistic phenomenon, but language itself which is a Stalinist phenomenon‘
The victims of Stalinist show trials were asked prove that they were ‘good Communists‘ by demanding that they be given the death penalty for their crimes which would help consolidate support for the Revolution. This was to be done by confessing their guilt at the level by professing their love for the bourgeoisie and the ‘counter-revolution’. This, for Žižek, was due to the fact Stalinism, in a perversion of Enlightenment tradition, considered even ‘traitors’ of being capable of having access to the ‘truth’ and bearing responsibility for their actions. Martin Amis captures this as well:
‘… torture, among its other applications, was part of Stalin’s war against the truth. He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.’
Show trials of Jewish people were not necessary for the Nazis, for they were considered guilty by dint of their biological-genetic constitution.
Lauchlan points out that one can easily replace the ‘Communist’ in dissident jokes with one’s boss in the office and still provoke laughter. While the relationship between the Nazis and its targets of enmity and extermination was that of ‘Otherness’, Stalinist regimes were far more obsessed by the inner potential of its citizens of becoming ‘enemies of the people’ than in hunting the ‘Other’.
One sees an enforced labeling of any dissenting voices in India today as ‘anti-national’, ‘tukde tukde gang’, ‘urban Naxals’ etc. On the other hand there exists the very real possibility that bureaucratic error in the typing of one’s name in citizenship registers could send one to languish in detention camps. It would, therefore, perhaps be appropriate to end with another dissident joke:
‘A Russian rabbit flees to Poland and meets a Polish hare. ‘Why are you running?’ asks the hare. ‘Stalin has just ordered the arrest of all elephants.’ ‘But you are not an elephant,’ the Pole points out, ‘you’re a rabbit.’ ‘I know,’ the rabbit replies, ‘but I can’t prove it!’ ‘
