Historic Force

Barring the possible existence on earth of undetected saints and major prophets, about the most important person in the world last week was Joseph Vissarionovitch Djugashvili. He was better known to the world as Joseph Stalin, Marshal and chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.

In Poland and the Reich, his gigantic armies were (in Winston Churchill's feral phrase) "tearing the guts out of the German Army." In the world at large, his ambiguous political purposes were giving the creeps to practically everybody except professional Communists and those men of good will for whose professional unrealism (when it turns up among Russians) Stalin had always saved his most scathing barbs.

Not since the Red Army burst into the Balkans had there been such a surge of Allied gratitude and respect for Russia as followed its Army's burst into the Reich. There was not only respect for the drive as a military feat--for mass and power and accomplishment, no Allied campaigns of World War II compared with it.

There was also a sporting pride in the fact of Russia's comeback: in two years the Russian nation in arms had climbed back 1,300 miles from retreat (finally halted at Stalingrad) to crashing victory on the Polish plains.

There was immense admiration, too, for the skillful powering of diplomacy with military might which had enabled the Russians within five months to knock out of the war four Axis satellites (Rumania, Bulgaria, Finland and Hungary) and, with the help of Marshal Tito's Partisans, to liberate most of Yugoslavia and force the German withdrawal from Greece.

To the plain fighting men in the Allied armies, who know at firsthand that the bills of victory are footed in blood, the Russian success meant the shortening of the war by months--meant, in one word of universal longing, home. To those at home, waiting for the return of sons, brothers and husbands, it meant new hope. To all it meant peace--peace, in the sense that Abraham Lincoln had said it--"wonderful, wonderful peace."

There was still the war against Japan--no one knew how long that would last. But against Japan, too, Russia might well play a decisive role. And there was also the possibility that German resistance might slow down the Russian advance. But at least it did not seem too much to hope that, if this Russian drive was not the last, it was the next to last, that a joint summer offensive from east and west would completely shatter the power of the Reich to wage war.

Bisection of Europe. And yet, even as Britons and Americans followed the Red Army's advance on their war maps, they could not escape at least a visual uneasiness. The line of Russia's 800-mile military front practically bisected Europe. How much farther west was it going to move? And what went on behind that line, where the western Allies had no effective power and little real information?

Britain had staked out a formal claim to interest in the affairs of Yugoslavia. She still recognized King Peter. But the Yugoslavs seemed about ready to jettison their King. In Belgrade the Government was dominated by Marshal Tito, a Communist.

From Bulgaria came disquieting reports of complete Russian domination through the Red Army and the Minister of the Interior, Anton Yugoff, veteran Communist. In Rumania there was an almost total news blackout, punctuated by occasional reports, like rifle flashes, of political strife between Communists and the Government.

Hungary and Finland were under Red Army control. Even Czechoslovakia, which had long been Russia's friend, was threatened with the incorporation of its only liberated province, Ruthenia, into the Soviet Ukraine.

Now the question of the future control of Germany was at issue. And since Germany was the strategic and economic key to Europe, so was the future of Europe and the world. Who would control the conquered Reich -- Russia and the western Allies (who so far had barely dented the German frontiers) or the Russians alone (who might soon be in Berlin)?

Already the Sofia radio reported that Moscow's Free Germany Committee was preparing to move into East Prussia on the heels of the Russian troops. There was talk, still unconfirmed, of a Provisional German Government. Reported Sofia radio: its head would be Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, captured commander of Germany's Stalingrad armies, who last year joined the Free Germany Committee. Over the Sofia radio he was calling upon the Wehrmacht to end the German ordeal by surrendering to the Russians. Meanwhile ABSIE (American Broadcasting Station in Europe) broadcast that the first Russian governor of occupied Germany "has taken up his functions in the East Prussian town of Gumbinnen" near the Lithuanian frontier.

Crisis of Civilization. Facts, as Lenin liked to say, are stubborn things. These facts ran, like an obbligato of doubt, under the great gunfire of victory. But what chilled every thoughtful American and Briton and warmed every watchful German was the knowledge that with military success in sight the Big Three were split apart as never before. The stubborn fact of Allied relations was that Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin were preparing for a second Big Three meeting,* not because it was convenient to hold that meeting now, but because the crisis among the so-called United Nations had reached such a pitch that a face-to-face ventilation of their differences could no longer be postponed.

In the short space of two months this crisis had twice come to a head. The first time had been in Athens, where for six shameful weeks liberating British troops had fought a bloody miniature war with liberated Greeks. The second crisis had come just before the Red Army's drive, when the Soviet Government had recognized a Kremlin-controlled Government of Poland that denounced as a "lackey of Hitlerite Germany" the Polish Government in Exile which was insistently recognized by Britain and the U.S.

Behind Russia's drive and Russia's political aims was the stubborn fact that the Soviet Union had emerged as the greatest power in Europe, able (and probably willing) to fill the political void which would be left by the crushing of Germany, and which neither weakened Britain nor weakened France could hope to fill. But instinctively Americans and Britons sensed that this was more than the usual political crisis. Instinctively they sensed that the hands of the clock of history had suddenly bumped ahead to a later hour, that that crisis in western civilization of which World War II had been the organic symptom had reached a new stage. Before the impending Big Three conference lay the alternatives: peace--as lasting a peace as men could contrive through the adjustment of differences between the only three great powers which after World War II would be capable of waging effective war; or the alternative which most Americans preferred not to think of, even in the privacy of their own minds--World War III. The success or failure of the meeting was in a large measure up to one man--Joseph Stalin. Who was this man in whose hands, for good or evil, lay so heavy a responsibility for the world's destiny?

The Face of History. He was a little man (5 ft. 5 in.), two inches taller than Napoleon. But most Americans discovered this fact (to their surprise) only after the Teheran conference. For some 20 years before that, Americans had known Stalin chiefly from a few carefully posed photographs which made him look tall, and from Soviet statues and paintings which were invariably heroic. To the western world Stalin was chiefly a face and a focus for disturbing rumors.

It was the kind of face that was more disquieting when it smiled than when it was sober. Over the years it had slowly changed. In Stalin's youth his face had been delicately handsome, but revolution, war, power and, above all, will had abraded it into somber strength. The hair, which had been purplish black like most Georgians', and grew far forward on the low forehead, had turned grey. The eyes, which had once peered out from velvety depths of unfathomable distrust ("Lenin trusts Stalin," old Bolsheviks used to say, "and Stalin trusts nobody"), had acquired an expression almost of authoritative benevolence.

Americans would have done well to ponder upon that face, for it was something new under the sun. The stubborn fact about the face of Stalin was that it was less the face of a man than of a historic force. It was the face of the first proletarian Bolshevik to become unquestioned lawgiver and dispenser of dogma to a party whose 4,600,000 members were bound to absolute obedience by an iron-clad discipline. It was also the face of the absolute ruler of some 180,000,000 people of 170 nationalities, living in one-sixth of the earth's surface, in a socialist empire spilling across Europe and Asia from Poland to the Pacific Ocean, and threatening to spill farther.

The Youth. The man who (with Lenin) embodied this historic force was born (1879) in a small village near Tiflis in Georgia. For the new age, his family status was equivalent to a patent of nobility: Stalin's father was a semiliterate shoemaker who had been a peasant. Georgia is one of Asia's few Christian countries ("I too am an Asiatic," Stalin greeted the Japanese Foreign Minister in 1941). So Stalin went to a Jesuit seminary to become a priest. But he soon left. At an age (15) when Winston Churchill was at Harrow and Franklin Roosevelt at Groton, young Joseph Djugashvili was organizing revolutionary cells.

"Bolshevism," Bolsheviks liked to brag, "has peopled half the jails of Europe with philosophers." In almost no time Stalin became one of these philosophers. His first arrests were for organizing illegal strikes and Marxist groups. Later he was jailed on more colorful charges. When Lenin split the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (1903) into a minority (Mensheviks) and a majority (Bolsheviks), Stalin followed Lenin. But times were hard. The Bolsheviks were only a handful of zealots. Their work was hampered by comrades who eked out lean livings as revolutionists by spying in their spare time for the Tsar's police. ("Thanks to Zhitomirsky's treachery," wrote Lenin's wife indignantly, "Comrade Kamo was caught with a suitcase containing dynamite.") There was little money with which to carry on. Stalin, always practical, undertook to make the Tsar finance the revolution. He organized a series of profitable holdups (called "expropriations") of Imperial Bank trucks. One such attempt netted $75,000, resulted in the death of 20 people when one of the comrades, in the heat of expropriation, tossed a bomb. Besides, the expropriated bank notes had been in large denominations, and all over Europe comrades (among them Soviet Foreign Vice Commissar Maxim Litvinoff) were jailed for passing the hot money.

Stalin was spending a few years in an Arctic prison camp when the democratic Government of Alexander Kerensky liberated the Bolshevik prisoners from whom, six months later, Kerensky was fleeing for his life.

In November 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power. Said Lenin, at the second All-Russian Congress of the Soviets: "We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order." The most stubborn fact in modern history had turned up: in a country continental in size, one class (the proletariat) had repudiated democracy and, guided by a monolithic party, rushed in the name of Communism toward the totalitarian state.

The Man. The facts of young Djugashvili's early biography are scarcely more relevant than those eagerly reported from wartime visitors to Moscow: that Stalin speaks Russian with a thick Georgian accent; that he has been thrice married, that his present wife, Rosa, is the sister of the Vice President of the Council of the People's Commissars, Lazar Kaganovitch; that Stalin is rather formal with his sons (one of whom is a German prisoner) but occasionally romps with his rugged daughter; that he works at any hour of the day & night; that he prefers his office in the Storaya Ploshad to his offices in the Kremlin; that he rests up three days a week in the country house where Lenin died; that he travels in a bulletproof automobile.

There are the stories of his bearish manners (if he is angry or suspicious), of his bearish humor (if he is pleased); of his ability to drink 22 vodka toasts with no audible thickening or loosening of the tongue. And there are the stories of his adventures with the English language, which he does not speak. But he sometimes memorizes phrases by heart. Thus he once surprised some English and American guests by suddenly saying: "The lavatory is on the left, gentlemen." General Pat Hurley (now U.S. Ambassador to China) taught Stalin the English phrase which he sprang on Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt at Teheran. Coming into a room, where they had their heads together, Stalin loudly asked: "What the hell goes on here?"

Acme of Aristotle. But the late anecdotes, like the early ones, only scratch the surface of Stalin. The stubborn fact about Stalin's life is that, in one of the most political ages in history, he is a political animal to a degree never imagined by Aristotle. The stubborn facts of Stalin's life are political facts of world importance.

They may be dated arbitrarily from the Bolshevik Revolution, in which Stalin played an obscure but active part as a member of the Revolutionary Military Committee. They included his job as People's Commissar for Nationalities in which he first applied his program for federating Russia's national minorities--a program that had taken on new importance as Russia enveloped new European minorities. Later he asked for (and got) the one job that nobody else thought worth having--the post of Secretary General of the Russian Communist Party. Patiently he packed the Party offices with his henchmen. In a lucid moment just before his death, Lenin read a report of Communist affairs. He muttered: "The machine has got out of control."

He was seldom more mistaken. The machine had never been in firmer hands. The "best disciple of Lenin" had overtaken the master. Lenin had cherished the classic Marxist doctrine that, as socialism increases, the state will "wither away." Stalin perceived that the dynamic of socialism is toward more & more total control by the state. And he saw that the way to control the totalitarian state is to control the only legal party. Until four years ago he ruled the Soviet Union as Secretary General of the Communist Party. Then he proceeded to organize Russia into a modern socialist state.

The stubborn facts of that organization included the defeat of the Communists who opposed him, by expulsion from the party, jailing or exile; the industrialization "of Russia through successive Five Year Plans; the collectivization of the peasants; the physical liquidation of the prosperous peasants (kulaks); the starving to death (by withholding wheat) of at least 3,000,000 peasants who resisted the collectivization; the physical liquidation (in the Great Purge) of at least 1,000,000 Communists who opposed Stalin's policies.

Snapped Lady Astor: "When are you going to stop killing people?"

Said Stalin: "When it is no longer necessary."

To an English newspaperwoman who asked him about the millions of peasants who had died during the collectivization drive, Stalin answered with a question: "How many died in the Great War?"

"Over 7,500,000."

Said Stalin: "Over 7,500,000 deaths for no purpose at all. Then you must acknowledge that our losses are small, because your war ended in chaos, while we are engaged in a work which will benefit the whole of humanity."

The most stubborn fact of Lenin's life was that he had achieved the world's greatest political revolution. The most stubborn fact of Stalin's was that he achieved the world's greatest economic revolution. It was a long way--the span of a crucial epoch of world history--from the Tsar's jails, police files and fingerprints to revolutionary triumph and apotheosis.

Some critics charged that Stalin had ceased, paradoxically, to be a revolutionist, at the moment when the Communist revolution was most successful. If it suited his present purposes, Stalin might have reminded his critics that he was the author of Russia's two official volumes of orthodox dogma: The History of the Communist Party and Leninism. Leninism is a best-seller (3,000,000 copies were sold a week after publication).

As proof of his undeviating orthodoxy, Stalin might point to the definition of democracy in Leninism: ". . . The dictatorship of the proletariat is the domination of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, untrammeled by law, based on violence, and enjoying the sympathy and support of the toiling . . . masses. . . . Democracy under the capitalist system is . . . the democracy of an exploiting minority. . . . Democracy under proletarian dictatorship is . . . a democracy of the exploited majority."

The Stubborn Factor. This was the Stubborn Factor with whom Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill would one day soon sit down to review the stubborn facts that were bedeviling the Big Three.

There was the stubborn fact of Russia's entrenched power through half of continental Europe from Finland to Greece. Did Russia mean to exclude her allies completely from this sphere?

There was the stubborn fact of Yugoslavia. If reports were true, when a small British liberating force landed in Dalmatia last November, Marshal Tito disarmed them and threatened them with internment. Then London ordered them to withdraw. Now people close to Tito were talking about a Yugoslav Federation which would include Albania, parts of Greece and Bulgaria.

There was the stubborn fact of Greece. In the fighting between the British troops and ELAS, the Greek Communist Party had been the most aggressive section of the EAM. But no Communist Party undertakes an important action without Moscow's advice. The Soviet Government had remained scrupulously aloof from the fighting in Greece but Moscow could not escape the suspicion of having had some hand in the revolt.

There was the stubborn fact of Poland. Having recognized the Polish Government at Warsaw, it was unlikely that Russia would accept any major changes in it at the insistence of Britain and the U.S. Poland was a test problem of the Big Three meeting.

So was Germany. Did the Russians intend to occupy eastern Germany alone? Anything short of an agreement for the tripartite occupation of Germany would proclaim the Big Three meeting, whatever fancy talk it used to cover up with, a failure.

But perhaps the most stubborn fact of all was distrust. If the western Allies distrusted the aims of Russia, few could blame Marshal Stalin if he distrusted the aims of the western Allies. Europe was seething with social unrest. As the result of the war, immense political and social dislocations had taken place. Time & again Russia had demonstrated that she had a program, the will and the means to deal with this unrest. But neither Britain nor the U.S. had one.

But until this mutual distrust could be allayed, a specter was haunting Europe--the specter of World War III.

What did Russia want? First & foremost she wanted peace. Peace, it had been widely proclaimed, Russia must have--to restore her depleted manpower, to build up her devastated factories and farms, to complete the socializing of her economy. To do this, she also wanted a $6,000,000,000 credit which she last week asked the U.S. Government to extend her on a long-term basis at low interest. What would she give in exchange? The graves of her heroic dead? If so, it was no deal, since bargains are made for the future, not for the past. A just and durable peace? If so, how did Russia propose to render it just?

Perhaps Marshal Stalin had decided that the most stubborn fact of all was his allies' inability to decide what to do in Europe. Perhaps he thought that if he simply waited while his armies drove on, all Europe, including Germany, might eventually drop into his lap because there was nowhere else for it to drop. But his allies, too, were driven by a historic force, for they knew that if they failed to persuade Joseph Stalin to a united peace, even their united military victory would be a defeat.

* The first: at Teheran, 1943.

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