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Understanding Stalinism: The 'Orwellian Discrepancy' and the 'Rational Choice Dictator'Author(s): Vincent BarnettReviewed work(s):Source: Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 58, No. 3 (May, 2006), pp. 457-466Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20451207 .Accessed: 01/05/2012 20:11

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EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES Routledge

Vol. 58, No. 3, May 2006, 457-466 Taylor&FrancisGroup

Discussion Article

Understanding Stalinism-The 'Orwellian Discrepancy' and the 'Rational Choice

Dictator'

VINCENT BARNETT

Abstract

This discussion article examines the logical bases of the arguments often encountered in the literature that compares Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism. It analyses the 'Orwellian discrepancy' between Marxist ideals and Soviet reality, the comparative differences in numbers of people that were murdered by the Stalin and Hitler regimes, and the distinction between 'murder' and 'execution' that is sometimes applied to the actions of the two tyrants. It then examines the notion of Stalin as a 'rational choice'

dictator who, through the use of state-sponsored terror, was simply ensuring the survival of his regime, and suggests that a better model for Stalin's government would be that of 'pseudo-rational choice irrationality'. Arguments that imply that 'Team Stalin' should not be seen as a totalitarian corporate form of government because of some attempted reforms and recently revealed institutional complexity are also considered. It concludes by reaffirming the importance of understanding human belief and intellectual factors to a comprehension of historical development.

THERE IS AN ONGOING DEBATE IN RUSSIAN STUDIES CIRCLES regarding the nature of

Soviet totalitarianism/collectivism/socialism as a system and whether the Hitler and

Stalin regimes are directly comparable. As part of this debate, there is an ongoing

dispute about the numbers of victims of Nazism and Stalinism, and whether

comparing these numerical estimates is a legitimate activity vis-a'-vis characterising the

nature of the regimes concerned. Some of the key protagonists of this debate have

been Robert Conquest, Stephen Wheatcroft and Steven Rosefielde (Conquest, 1997,

pp. 1317-1319; Rosefielde, 1996, pp. 959-987). Conquest and Rosefielde exhibit a

political hostility and a deep moral revulsion to the Soviet terror of the 1930s that

might be taken to equate it in a general sense with the Nazi Holocaust, whereas

Wheatcroft (and others like R.W. Davies) deny that the Soviet terror is directly

comparable in moral terms to its disputed German cousin.

One of the themes underlying this debate is the question of the role of the individual

in historical development, against the role of the 'vast impersonal forces' sometimes

evoked by historians. Davies for example has concluded that in the twentieth century,

ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/06/030457-10 ? 2006 University of Glasgow DOI: 10.1080/09668130600601982

458 VINCENT BARNETT

circumstance was 'far more important than personality' in the formation of individual

world outlooks, suggesting that historical conditions explained more about the nature

of Stalinism than Stalin did himself.' However, Davies might recall one E.H. Carr

arguing that it was actually not possible to separate out the individual from society,

stating that 'the development of society and the individual go hand in hand, and

condition each other' (Carr, 1985, p. 32). Individual personality and historical

circumstance are thus both equally important to explaining societal change, in fact one

might say that they are 'dialectically interrelated'.

Related to the debate over comparing Nazism and Stalinism is the question of whether

Stalin's actions as a dictator were in any sense 'rational', that is, were the mass purges

and executions designed and carried out with specific logical aims and through 'rational

choices', and if so, did they achieve these goals? Mark Harrison has raised this issue

explicitly, but it also underlies much of the debate about 'was Stalin really necessary': were

Stalin's actions in the 1930s guided solely by the logic of the situation he found himself in,

or were they the result of irrational hatreds or the consequence of political folly or even

madness? This discussion article attempts to clarify and expand upon some aspects of

these two related topics in relation to existing scholarship on this subject by focusing on

the logical bases of the arguments often rehearsed. The first part of the article focuses on

what will be called 'the Orwellian discrepancy', the second part on the notion of Stalin as

a 'rational choice dictator'. The aim is not to diminish detailed empirical scholarship on

these topics but rather to place it on a more solid philosophical foundation.

The Orwellian discrepancy

In a 1996 article Stephen Wheatcroft took the view that the victims of Stalin's purges

and the labour camp system were neither morally nor numerically equivalent to the

victims of Hitler's attempt at racial genocide. Whilst not wishing to whitewash the

Stalin regime, Wheatcroft wanted to make a clear moral distinction between the mass

deaths associated with the Soviet policies of forced industrialisation and forced

collectivisation, and Hitler's policy of eliminating the Jewish people as a race

(Wheatcroft, 1996, pp. 1319-1353). Wheatcroft even went as far as to characterise

Hitler's policy of racial genocide as 'murder', against Stalin's policy of mass political

culling that was merely 'execution', clearly implying some sort of moral distinction.

Wheatcroft also distinguished between the victims of the labour camp system in the

USSR, the victims of famine, and the victims of mass executions: he numerically

equated only the latter with the victims of the Nazi-created Holocaust.

In a 2002 book chapter, Wheatcroft slightly hardened his attitude to the Soviet

terror, admitting that it involved 'mass killings' rather than just 'executions'. However,

he still maintained that there was a distinction between the Soviet terror and the Nazi

Holocaust as follows:

The Holocaust and the Ezhovshchina were both cases of mass killings, but there was a difference in as much as the Ezhovshchina did involve a kind of execution that was supported

*See Davies (2000, p. 445). Whether Davies would want to extend this 'circumstantial' approach to

explaining the rise of the Nazis and Hitler's own attitude is an interesting question to ponder.

UNDERSTANDING STALINISM 459

by some degree of legal process, although a non-judicial process. The Holocaust made no pretence at any degree of legal process (Wheatcroft, 2002, p. 139, fn. 1).

To many of those of a traditional left persuasion, these sorts of distinctions might seem appealing on first examination. However, this section attempts to play devil's

advocate by examining the underlying assumptions of these sorts of distinctions. It is often argued by some that Stalinism was not as 'morally reprehensible' as

Nazism, as the stated goals of the Stalinist variant of Marxism were in the long run

admirable, whereas the stated aims of Nazism were indefensible. This type of argument

relies upon a notion that can be called the 'Orwellian discrepancy': that the stated aims of Marxism were not those realised in the Gulag, but the very opposite. Supporters of this position are giving some credit to Stalin for the apparently laudable declared aims of Marxism, even if these aims were totally distorted in practice (Wedgwood Benn, 1999, p. 156). Is this a reasonable position to take? If it is, then the same reasoning

should apply to the Nazis, as a level playing field must apply to the analysis of both systems. That is, if instead of preaching racial hatred, Hitler had instead preached racial

harmony, but then still attempted to eliminate all Jews in the manner recorded by

history only as an 'aberration', this hypothetical Nazi regime should be regarded as less

'morally reprehensible' than the actual Nazi regime. Does this comparison make any sense? By framing the argument in this way it is clear that this position does not make

any sense whatsoever. If I kill someone in cold blood, but then claim that I was acting with some sort of long-run moral concern, is this any better than if I had killed someone

simply for the fun of it? The law makes no such distinction in principle. There is another argument against the moral non-equivalence position. Let us

accept, for the sake of argument, Wheatcroft's case (which is heavily disputed by both Rosefielde and Conquest) that the Stalin regime was responsible for only one million

deaths which can be directly compared with the five million that the Nazis were

responsible for in terms of Wheatcroft's category of 'mass purposive killings'

(Wheatcroft, 1996, p. 1348). The implication might be that killing one million in this

way is 'less morally reprehensible' than killing five million. On the face of it this comparison appears rational. However, this type of judgement is neglecting to explore the question of whether Stalin would have been willing to accept the killing of more than one million, if he had to do so. Consider the counter-factual possibility that the Stalin regime needed to order many more executions than it did, in order to achieve its aims. Is it reasonable to maintain that Stalin would have responded: 'killing one

million is morally acceptable, but killing more than one million is not, therefore I shall halt the executions at the one million level'?

This is obviously absurd, as Stalin would have been very unlikely to respond in this

way. The Stalin regime killed the one million either because this was (in Stalin's

particular mental state) the amount thought necessary to eliminate at the time, or

because this was the level that circumstances at the time allowed or generated, not

because there was a numerical level of mass slaughter beyond which Stalin would not

go for ethical reasons. The same reasoning applies to Hitler. Assume that there were

only one million Jews in existence in Nazi-occupied Europe in 1940, and that a

hypothetical Hitler regime then killed all of them. Would that make him 'less morally reprehensible' than the actual Hitler who was responsible for killing five million?

460 VINCENT BARNETT

Framing the question in this manner reveals that playing the comparative numbers

game with 'mass purposive killings' is not something that can be done with precise

moral accuracy.

Wheatcroft also attempted to make a distinction in descriptive labelling between the

'mass purposive killings' caused by Hitler and those caused by Stalin. The following

passage appeared in the conclusion to Wheatcroft's 1996 article:

the purposive deaths caused by Hitler fit more closely into the category of 'murder', while those caused by Stalin fit more closely the category of 'execution'. Stalin undoubtedly caused

many innocent people to be executed, but it seems likely that he thought many of them guilty of crimes against the state ... Hitler, by contrast, wanted to be rid of the Jews and communists simply because they were Jews and communists (Wheatcroft, 1996, p. 1348).

Wheatcroft appeared not to realise that Nazi ideology provided reasons for the

elimination of Jews and communists-totally erroneous and mistaken reasons, and

producing an utterly horrific and completely unjustified outcome-but reasons

nonetheless. Wheatcroft's underlying assumption was perhaps that we should allow

Stalin some license for his erroneous reasons for ordering mass executions in the

USSR, but not acknowledge at all that Hitler believed in his own (totally

unwarranted) reasons for racial genocide. In truth, both the Nazi reasoning regarding

the need to eliminate Jews and Stalin's reasons for ordering mass executions were

similarly erroneous. Unless, of course, Wheatcroft wants to argue that there was

indeed a sympathetic case for Stalin's 'mass purposive killings'?

Put still another way, does it make sense to consider a victim of Stalin's purges

thinking to themselves in the afterlife: thank goodness I was only hounded,

interrogated, tortured and then executed; those poor Jews who were murdered in

Germany! As correctly characterised by Michael Ellman, the mass repressions in the

USSR in the 1930s were actually a 'series of crimes against humanity' (Ellman, 2002, p.

1164). Wheatcroft's previously quoted attempt in his 2002 book chapter to distinguish

between the Soviet and Nazi mass killings by stating that the former held to some type

of legal process again holds little significance. Would anyone seriously alter their

evaluation of the Nazi genocide if Hitler had ordered a more fully encompassing sham

legal process that actually formally convicted Jews of conforming to the racist

stereotypes that the Nazis promoted, before sending them to the concentration camps?

There is still another argument against the moral non-equivalence position.

Consider which enemy you would prefer to face: one that explains his or her ideology

'honestly' in its own terms, or one who consistently lays down a fog of moral-sounding

rhetoric in order to cover up their actual base actions. It could be argued that Stalin

was worse than Hitler because Stalin implemented atrocities and then justified them by

reference to socialist ideals. Hitler's justification was racist ideology. It is true that the

full extent of the Nazi genocide against the Jews was a shock to some observers after

1945, but it cannot be said to be against the spirit of Fascist propaganda. And while

many lies were certainly told to Jews themselves about their eventual fate during

WWII, these lies were a purely practical inversion in order to ease their passage to

destruction. Stalin's use of Marxian utopianism to throw a smoke screen around an

entire system of slave labour and mass murder has to be one of the most, if not the

most, incongruous perversions of an initially declared egalitarian intention ever

UNDERSTANDING STALINISM 461

accomplished in the entire history of humanity. This is especially significant when the

effect of Stalinism is considered internationally after 1945. Nazi aims died with Hitler,

but Stalin was held up as a hero for socialists to follow for many years after 1945.

Consequently people who tried to campaign for socialism were frequently tarred with

the brush of the Gulag, and hence opponents of socialism used the Orwellian

discrepancy against progressive aims.

This connects to another argument often put forward to suggest that Stalin was

preferable to Hitler: Stalin sided with the Allies during WWII, and hence we should

praise Stalin for his judgement in this respect. In truth Stalin did not eventually side

with the Allies for moral or ideological reasons, but for purely practical and survival

reasons-the USSR was invaded by Germany. We should not forget that the Nazi

Soviet pact was negotiated by V.M. Molotov and Stalin was clearly willing in principle

to form an alliance with Hitler, although Stalin's motives for this are contested.

Remember also that the Stalinist variant of Marxism condemned Nazism and

'bourgeois democracy' to the dustbin of history, and analysed both of them as variant

expressions of the same underlying forces prevalent within capitalist production.

Within this framework Nazism was (after 1941) accepted as the more immediate threat

to Soviet survival, but this was a purely contingent judgement; the USSR would still

have to defeat the UK and the USA in the medium term.

Consequently, by trying to differentiate between the moral significance of Nazism

and Stalinism, some scholars are pushed into adopting arguments that rely on paper

thin distinctions that collapse on more detailed philosophical examination. In truth it

is senseless to try to compare the moral depravity of Hitler and Stalin with arguments

of the type 'dictator X killed less people than dictator Y'. Of course, if Stalin had

accidentally killed only 100 people, and Hitler deliberately killed five million, then

there would be a clear moral distinction, but once you get into the ballpark level of

millions of planned deaths on both sides, precise numerical comparison loses any

underlying ethical rationale. This does not mean that historical investigation into the

exact number of people killed is not a worthwhile pursuit in itself, only that such

investigations cannot be used to suggest that one dictator was 'less morally

reprehensible' than another, or to validate illegitimate distinctions between 'murder'

and 'execution' in a tyrannical context.

The rational choice dictator

Again, to those of the traditional left, the temptation to see Stalin only in a positive

light led to the attempt to try and find something 'rational' within the horrific melee of

the USSR in the 1930s. A more recent expression of this tendency is Mark Harrison's

claim that several features of Stalin's rule such as the mass repressions can be

understood as the rational choices of a dictator optimising his regime: a 'rational

choice' Stalin (Harrison, 2003). Here it is necessary to consider what is actually meant

by 'optimising his regime'. If by this phrase, laying the foundations for the long-term

continued existence of the USSR in a hostile world environment is meant, then Stalin

clearly failed to 'optimise his regime', as the USSR collapsed at the end of the 1980s, in

part due to a lasting revulsion to Stalin's legacy. However, Harrison might mean

something more specific, such as securing Stalin's personal dictatorial rule within his

462 VINCENT BARNETT

own lifetime. In this more limited sense Stalin did indeed maintain his own position of

power until his death by natural causes, but it might still be possible to question the

idea that this was a 'rational' strategy or that it was accomplished by means of

'rational choices'. Was it really essential for Stalin to engineer (in Harrison's own figures) 20 million

passing through the forced labour system, six million arrested for political crimes and

(Wheatcroft again) one million actually executed, in order for the Soviet dictator to

behave 'rationally'? If we assume that only 750,000 were deliberately executed, would

this have made a substantive difference to Stalin's personal reputation as a vicious

tyrant? I leave readers to make up their own minds about this. It might be more

reasonable to conclude that Stalin's attitude to political executions suggested a power

mania with deep-seated psychological, sociological and intellectual roots, not a

'rational choice' dictator playing a mathematically modelled game of 'chicken' using

the latest inventions of game theory at an instinctual level. This does not mean that

Stalin was 'mad', but the opposite of 'mad' is not 'rational', it is 'sane'. But someone

can be sane and still act irrationally or through ignorance, either in one specific

instance or over a significant period of time. To suggest that Stalin rationally

calculated the minimum level of murderous terror that he had to generate in order to

maintain his own position within the Soviet 'nested dictatorship' (Paul Gregory's

term) is stretching the meaning of the word 'rational' into its opposite. Would

Harrison suggest that Hitler also made a similar calculation in Germany, and hence

Hitler was also acting 'rationally' by murdering Jews?

Harrison brings into the discussion a quite different question which certainly did

concern Stalin in the 1930s, that of modernising and industrialising the Soviet

economy. Stalin might very well have implemented various policies such as the five

year plans and agricultural collectivisation with this concern in mind, but this is a

separate question to that of maintaining his own personal dictatorship. It is logically

possible to conceive of Stalin maintaining his own political position whilst accepting

far lower rates of industrial growth as planning targets, although I accept that in the

atmosphere of the frenzied political debates in the USSR around 1930 these two

factors were partially linked. However, Stalin was also influenced by ideas about the

relevance of planning to industrialisation strategy, ideas that had specific origins and

impetuses. But a key point that both Harrison and Davies often neglect is that a

socialist economy (as outlined initially by Marx) had absolutely nothing whatsoever to

do with industrialisation. Socialist planning was supposed to be about improving the

quality of all human life by means of overcoming exploitative social relations starting

from an advanced capitalist economy, not manufacturing vastly more iron and steel

by means of a tyrannical forced labour system starting from a backward semi-feudal

peasant-dominated economy.

Consequently, it is false to suggest, as Harrison does, that those who view the Stalin

era as 'surreal' necessarily see it as incomprehensible (Harrison, 2003, p. 2). Surrealism

as a movement was a rational response to the irrationality of the First World War, and

the imagery of surrealism deliberately and sanely utilised ideas associated with the

burgeoning psychoanalytic movement. Commentary on irrational events is not

necessarily irrational itself. What those who describe the Stalin era as 'surreal' actually

mean is that the Orwellian discrepancy was bizarre, in that socialist ideas had led

UNDERSTANDING STALINISM 463

into the Gulag. And one of the reasons for this 'economic surrealism' was that Marx's

basic ideas about the necessary preconditions for creating a socialist economy were

being totally ignored.2 Unsurprisingly, the collapse of the USSR was eventually the result.

Thus, for those of the Harrison - Davies school, the final line in the sand for

defending Stalin's 'rationality' relates to the development of the Soviet economy.

Davies (with Melanie Ilic and Oleg Khlevnyuk) has recently written:

The collectivisation of agriculture and forced industrialisation brought definite achievements as well as tragic consequences, and seemed to Stalin and his colleagues to justify the path they were following (Davies et al., 2004, p. 131).

No specific evidence for the notion that Stalin thought the 'achievements' of the Soviet

economy justified mass murder on a gigantic scale is directly cited, but let the idea be

taken at face value. What is being claimed is actually truly extraordinary. It is being

suggested that Stalin believed that mass murder was somehow a 'tragic consequence' of collectivisation and/or industrialisation. This means that the latter two goals could

not have been achieved without the given mass murder. But why not? Forced

collectivisation was not unambiguously assisted by mass political culling, nor was

increasing the rate of industrial growth. In fact, Holland Hunter has calculated that

the forced collectivisation itself had negative consequences for the Soviet economy, let

alone the mass murder (Hunter & Szyrmer, 1992). Furthermore, as I have shown, the

people that Stalin characterised as supporting lower rates of economic growth, such as

Nikolai Kondratiev, were actually arguing for an alternative path of industrialisation,

not for less overall growth in the long-run (Barnett, 1998). Hence their destruction also

did not enable sustainable development.

In truth the mass killings were not a consequence of any issue related to the economy, but were a consequence of the particular tyrannical form of government developed by the

Bolsheviks, and of Stalin's own individual beliefs and motivations, in association with the

group of colleagues around him-what Wheatcroft has called 'Team Stalin'. It is revealing

that in the (generally excellent) chapter on economic decision making in the Politburo by Davies, Ilic and Khlevnyuk, from which the above quote originates, the reader would

have to look very hard indeed to find mention of any economic principles, concepts or

ideas which were discussed in the Politburo and used to assist in decision-making. The

actual reason for this was that 'Team Stalin' did not really understand economic ideas (by this I mean theoretical principles), either 'bourgeois' or socialist, and hence substituted

analysis based on concepts with naive fact-worship. As Davies, Ilic and Khlevnyuk illustrate in the chapter, Stalin's most pressing desire in regards to understanding the

Soviet economy was factual reports on grain collections, not ideas about transforming social relations (Davies et al., 2004, p. 123). Davies, Ilic and Khlevnyuk claim that the

Stalin - Kaganovich correspondence is revealing of 'Stalin's economic logic', but in all

honesty I could not find any genuine 'economic logic' in their presentation of the archive

material that they have discovered. Of course there is what passed for 'economic logic'

amongst 'Team Stalin', but this was actually neither 'economic' nor 'logical' it was more

2Some aspects of how this distortion was able to occur are discussed in Barnett (2005a and

2005b).

464 VINCENT BARNETT

akin to the analysis of committee-bound bureaucrats haphazardly reacting to events using

reasoning common to second-rate politicians.

The irrational voice dictator

In contradistinction to all of the above analysis, this author would like to suggest a

different way of viewing Stalin's alleged 'rationality' in this regard. Put simply, the

model is that of a subset of pseudo-rationality within an overall system structure of

irrationality. Remember that the basic purpose of revolutionary socialists achieving

political power in 1917 was to construct a system of rational planning based upon real

human needs. Most commentators would agree that such a fully rational and complete

system was not in place in the USSR in the early 1930s, and hence Stalin was operating

within a system of (partial) irrationality, or lagged institutional overhang from the

Tsarist and World War I periods. As Davies and his group of co-workers have usefully

shown, the Soviet economic system was constantly evolving throughout the 1920s and

1930s. This evolution had its own internal political and bureaucratic logic. It was not

generated by the attempt to conform to a previously established model of a rationally

planned economy, as no such model existed. After 1929 Stalin himself engineered the

destruction of the cadre of brilliant Russian economists who might have provided such

a rational model, as an integral part of the 'mass purposive killings' that were

discussed previously.3 Reformulating Harrison's description, it is better to view Stalin's actions in the

1930s as characterised by 'pseudo-rational choice irrationality', or apparently

rational actions that only appear rational from the point of view of a dictator

paranoid about his own position, paranoid about the position of the USSR

internationally, and having a very tenuous grasp of economic theory, the intellectual

genesis of Marxism and the consequences of tyrannical rule for the Soviet state and

governmental institutions. But this is not real 'rationality', nor did it involve

genuinely rational choices. Charles Bettelheim has usefully highlighted what he calls

'the cult of the chief, which was close to the Nazi's Fuehrerprinzip, as being contained within the Stalinist ideological formation (Bettelheim, 2001, pp. 244-245).

Stalin's personal authority was (in part) what he was preserving through the terror.

Trying to square this amount of centralised personal power with socialist-inspired

egalitarianism is not something that Stalin ever tried to accomplish 'rationally'.

Arguments of the type that 'somewhere over the rainbow' in the distant future

Stalin-type tyrants might reform themselves into true socialists are not convincing

the ends do not justify the means.

On a related point, it sometimes seems to be tacitly implied in the literature that, as

has been usefully shown by Davies and his co-workers using new archive materials,

because the Stalinist system is now seen to be much more complex than had been

previously described, involving some attempts at reform and many examples of inter

and intra-institutional conflict, it should be regarded as somehow less totalitarian, less

dictatorial, less utterly horrific or less comparable to Nazism. But in truth, the idea of a totalitarian system does not mean that there were no examples of disagreements, no

3See Barnett (2004) for a discussion of the work of economists in this regard.

UNDERSTANDING STALINISM 465

cases of attempted reforms, or even no internal examples of people rallying against the

leader's pronouncements that can be given. It is how these elements were dealt with

that constituted totalitarianism, not the complete absence of such elements themselves.

Scholars should guard against the meaning of the word 'understanding' as it is used in

this context from sliding from 'neutrally comprehending the factual particulars of the

subject' to 'some hidden sympathy for Stalin's predicament'. Wheatcroft's character

isation of the earlier totalitarian approach as modelling the Soviet system as a 'lone

dictator reserving for himself jealously all decision-making functions' is a straw man

eating a red herring (Wheatcroft, 2004, pp. 101 - 102). Totalitarian corporatism is that

system that has been invaluably documented in detail by Davies, Wheatcroft,

Harrison and their colleagues.

Nor does the fact that, as outlined by other examples of recent scholarship, the

Soviet terror involved constituencies and group alliances and also zigzags of 'excesses'

and 'normalisation', mean that Stalin was not ultimately responsible or that he was

not a tyrant on a level with Hitler (Rees, 2000, pp. 446-447). As Harrison no doubt

knows full well, Hitler himself did not initially start out with a fully developed plan to

murder all Jews in concentration camps. Rather, this policy developed over time, but

this does not make Hitler any less responsible. As a valiant example of someone who

does not let his detailed archival work cloud his critical faculties, E.A. Rees concluded

correctly about Stalin that 'the only logic in the terror was the logic inherent in a

deeply irrational, tyrannical system of rule' (Rees, 2000, p. 450).

Conclusion

Hence it should be accepted that Stalin was not rational, but neither was he mad: he

was just ignorant and corrupt. He was ignorant of conventional economic theory,

ignorant of the real long-term consequences of the terror, and blind to the original

impetus of Marx's egalitarian vision of a communist economy.4 He was also paranoid

with regards to maintaining power, as any dictator must be. The implications of all

this are that it is ignorance, paranoia and dictators that must be overcome; their actions should not be surreptitiously justified through the attempt to interpret them as

'rational' or as 'more complex than previously thought' or even as 'generated by

difficult circumstances', no matter what their nominal political affiliation might have

been. This does not mean that studying the detail of Stalin's rule is not a completely

legitimate activity for historians, only that the temptation to use this detail as

valediction should be resisted.

And in case readers are wondering, a similar characterisation also applies to Hitler.

He was not mad, he was not evil (there is no such thing), and he was not rational; he

was just a man twisted by hate who believed very strongly in totally false and irrational

ideas. That is why, as a historian, it is so important to focus on the history of ideas and

intellectual developments, rather than only on empirical or 'events' history. By

4In a recent review article, Ian Thatcher usefully surveyed some recent scholarship on Stalin and

Stalinism, writing about Eric van Ree's (2002) book that 'Most of Stalin's key ideas... were merely

adaptations from some of the most familiar aspects of the leading Marxist thinkers of Stalin's time'

(Thatcher, 2004, p. 908).

466 VINCENT BARNETT

focusing too much on the latter, the erroneous impression that structural or

circumstantial factors always explain historical developments can be left unchallenged,

and the idea that no alternative path was possible appears to form an impenetrable

tunnel-like prison. In truth the importance of individual belief is central to all human

history, both positive and (as in the two parallel cases under review here) horrifically

negative. And if human belief is crucial, then it could have been different.

Middlesex, UK

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