Stalin on Stalin

The world's dim picture of Joseph Stalin as a human being was sharpened up a little last week. The twelfth volume of Stalin's collected works, issued in Moscow, contained an unpublished letter--a warm, personal note--that Stalin wrote in 1930 to his friend, Author Maxim Gorky (TwentySix Men and a Girl), then ill with tuberculosis in Italy.

Stalin opened his letter with the same limping apologies that non-Marxist non-dictators resort to. "Dear Alexei, Maximovich!--A heap of excuses and a plea that you won't abuse me for my late (too late!) answer. Besides that, I was a bit sick. This, of course, cannot excuse me. But it explains."

Stalin ended the letter in a similar vein:

"Kamegulov's request [who he was and what he requested, the Soviet editors tantalizingly fail to explain] I cannot fulfill. No time! Besides, what the devil, what kind of critic would I be! That's all. I firmly shake your hand and wish you good health. Thanks for your greeting.--J. Stalin.

"It is being said that you need a doctor from Russia. Is that true? Whom would you like to have? Write. We'll send him. J. St."

"Have No Doubts." The revolution was only twelve years old, but it was already being gnawed by the political cancer that results when people fear to speak out. Stalin had a strong sense of the blighting effect. "We cannot do without self-criticism," he wrote. "We cannot, really, Alexei Maximovich. Without it [will come] immediate stagnation, rotting away of the apparatus, growth of bureaucratism, undermining of creative initiative in the working class.

"Of course, self-criticism gives good material to [our] enemies. You are perfectly right about that. But self-criticism also gives material (and a push) for our advancing, for competition, for shock brigades, et al. The negative side is covered and super-covered by the positive.

"It is possible that our press gives too much space to our defects and sometimes even (involuntarily) plays them up. Possible and even probable. And this of course is bad. You insist, therefore, that we should balance (I would have said overlap) our shortcomings with our achievements. We shall without further delay fix that up. Have no doubts about that."

The press was "fixed up" and the "stagnation" which Stalin feared was intensified.

Stalin was too busy to deal with another question Gorky had raised about the newspapers. "You are absolutely right," he wrote, "when you say that our press is all mixed up about the problems of anti-religious propaganda. Terrific stupidities get in sometimes . . . We still have a long way to go in that field ... I have had no time yet to discuss your propositions with our anti-religious comrades. I'll write you."

Some Wars Are All Right. Gorky had proposed the founding of a special magazine to be called On War. Stalin rejected the idea, and in doing so gave a predated lecture to those 1950 U.S. liberals and scientists who, by making the most of the horrors of a new war, think they can somehow exorcise it. Wrote Stalin:

"After having seriously discussed the problem, we came to the conclusion that there are no reasons today for publishing such a magazine. We think that it would be much more reasonable to treat the problems of war (I speak of imperialist war) in the existing political magazines. Especially because of the fact that problems of war cannot be separated from problems of politics, of which war is an expression.

"The short stories about war will have to be published with great care and discrimination. On the book market there are a great many stories picturing 'the horrors' of war--which make people disgusted with any war (not only with imperialist but any war). Those are bourgeois-pacifist stories without great value. We need stories which would lead the readers --by means of the horrors of imperialist war--to feel the necessity to overcome the imperialist governments which organize such wars.

"Besides, we are not against any war. We are against the imperialist war, as being a counter-revolutionary war. But we are for the liberational, anti-imperialist revolutionary war, despite the fact that such a war, as is well known, is not free from the 'horrors of blood shedding,' but rather is full of them."

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