http://frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/ideological-sociopath-stalin-reads-machiavelli/
Author’s note: This essay is written in memory of Yelena Bonner (1923-2011) who, together with Andrei Sakharov and other heroic dissidents, held truth, dignity, and liberty as non-negotiable values.
At the end of the documentary film “Stalin Thought of You,” Stalin’s favorite cartoonist, Boris Efimov, over one hundred years old, brother of Bolshevik journalist Mihail Koltsov (killed during the Great Terror), who had been a friend of Hemingway and of Malraux, expresses his gratitude for not being executed like his sibling. But he adamantly refuses to unequivocally condemn Stalin: “He was not a man, he was a phenomenon.” Ilya Ehrenburg, another famous survivor of the Great Terror, most probably had similar thoughts on the subject. Explaining such situations, such human cataclysms, remains a moral and intellectual duty if we wish to avoid their repetition. The fact that so many Russians continue to worship Stalin’s memory is equally disconcerting, revolting, and revealing. But Stalin was not only a Russian phenomenon. Similarly to Hitler, he embodied, in an extreme and criminal fashion, modernity’s pathologies. This is what I have in mind when, following Leszek Kolakowski’s line of thought, I talk about the presence of the Devil in History.
I know that it might sound shocking, but one cannot deny the fact that Stalin had a Weltanschauung and that he was, in his own way, an intellectual. A self-taught, homicidal, liberticidal, and fanatical one, but an intellectual nevertheless. Wasn’t Engels a self-taught philosopher as well? Similarly, one cannot ignore the affinities between Bolshevism and the tradition of political and philosophical radicalism, Russian and European. Marxism was the apotheosis of ethical relativism; it suspended traditional distinctions between good and evil, it defined the good in utilitarian fashion, instrumentally and pragmatically, as all that served the cause of a Messianic proletariat, the alleged redemptive class. In fact, this was a recipe for what Alain Besancon (echoing Vladimir Soloviev) coined as the falsification of the good. In several annotations, long kept secret, Stalin defined his own table of values, he signaled out what he considered vice (or, sin, if you want) and virtue.
In Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, the main character, an Old Bolshevik, Nikolai Rubashov, declares that “Number one” (Stalin) kept Machiavelli’s The Prince as his favorite night-table book. Here we are witnesses of a sui generis Machiavellianism, not the recognition and cultivation of the humanist dimension of the Florentine’s work. Historian Robert Service was allowed access to Stalin personal library and he could check Lenin’s volume Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, the 1939 edition, with the annotations of the his “most faithful collaborator and disciple.” At that hour of history (il faisait minuit dans le siècle, wrote once Victor Serge), the general secretary had no significant rival. The Great Terror had reached its genocidal aims; a year later, Trotsky, his unforgivable nemesis, was assassinated in Coyoacan, Mexico, by the NKVD agent Ramon Mercader. In 1939, the Short Course of the History of CPSU (b) was published – the ultimate codification of the Stalinist cosmology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and demonology.
