Stalin: Apostate, terrorist, tyrant . . . philosopher

Realizing that there’s more sand at the bottom of my life’s hourglass than at the top, I’ve been reflecting on that life’s inflection points. One was my conversion to Marxism.

I’ve been thinking about Josef Stalin (1878-1953) for over fifty years, that is, for about as long as I’ve studied philosophy, by which I mean the pursuit of answers to questions of the greatest generality (being, knowledge, goodness), whether or not my philia of sophia (or, as has too often been the case, moria) has ordered that pursuit. 

I had rebelled against my Christian inheritance to embrace Stalinist Marxism while attending a Catholic military high school—just as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili—whom the world knew as Joseph Stalin—had given himself over to Marxism at Tbilisi Seminary in Sakartvelo (Georgia to Westerners, Gruzia to Russians). He had succumbed to Lenin’s malign influence; I, to that of Herbert Aptheker, who came of age in the decade following Stalin’s consolidation of power at the end of 1929.

The Seminary expelled him in 1899, the year he embraced Marxism and became an acolyte of Vladimir Lenin. Lenin visited London in 1902 to work on the launch of Iskra, the party organ, and again in 1903 for the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). Stalin was in London for the Fifth RSDLP Congress in 1907, a key gathering of Russian Marxists.

That’s where Stalin and Lenin met for the first time. This brief meeting lacked much personal interaction, but Lenin probably spotted the usefulness of the talented organizer from the Caucasus. This Congress aggravated the split between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Julius Martov’s Mensheviks. Lenin advocated for a tightly organized revolutionary party, while the Mensheviks preferred a broader, more inclusive approach. Stalin naturally aligned with Lenin’s views and began positioning himself within Lenin’s faction.

Forty years later, having been bitten by the philosophy bug, I discovered dialectical materialism, the philosophy of Marxist revolutionaries (among whom I had begun to number myself), and I formally joined Communism’s American branch in 1972. Stalin, history’s most influential dialectical materialist, had rebelled against his Orthodox Christian upbringing to tyrannize over the Soviet Union from 1929 to his death in 1953 as Marxism’s supreme pontiff, the final arbiter of Communism’s magisterium. Here’s a taste of his philosophical style:

If there are no isolated phenomena in the world, if all phenomena are interconnected and interdependent, then it is clear that every social system and every social movement in history must be evaluated not from the standpoint of “eternal justice” or some other preconceived idea, as is not infrequently done by historians, but from the standpoint of the conditions which gave rise to that system or that social movement and with which they are connected.

The slave system would be senseless, stupid, and unnatural under modern conditions. But under the conditions of a disintegrating primitive communal system, the slave system is a quite understandable and natural phenomenon, since it represents an advance on the primitive communal system

The demand for a bourgeois-democratic republic when tsardom and bourgeois society existed, as, let us say, in Russia in 1905, was a quite understandable, proper and revolutionary demand; for at that time a bourgeois republic would have meant a step forward. But now, under the conditions of the U.S.S.R., the demand for a bourgeois-democratic republic would be a senseless and counterrevolutionary demand; for a bourgeois republic would be a retrograde step compared with the Soviet republic.

Everything depends on the conditions, time and place.

It is clear that without such a historical approach to social phenomena, the existence and development of the science of history is impossible; for only such an approach saves the science of history from becoming a jumble of accidents and an agglomeration of most absurd mistakes.[1]

Stalin wrote this in September 1938 after eliminating his enemies, real and imaginary, in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of which he was the General Secretary.

Yes, Stalin was a genocidal monster. I hope you don’t suspect that I think his philosophical arguments were cogent. However, what occasions my writing today is the truth that Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin impressed upon me in an interview with Peter Robinson on Uncommon Knowledge: the tyrant was a thinker.[2] Not a deep thinker, but a thinker nonetheless. From an early age he nurtured his mind with reading, debating, and writing, albeit a mind that was perverted (demonically, in my view).

Stalin actively engaged in philosophical debates, advocating for his views and documenting them in his writings. While it’s important to acknowledge that he had people executed simply for suspected dissent, this doesn’t make him a hypocrite. He genuinely believed Marxism was the ultimate truth that paved the way to a better future. As Kotkin points out, we know this because Stalin’s private statements aligned with what he and other Bolsheviks said publicly.

A mass murderer like Hitler, Stalin rose through the party ranks “gangsta style,” fundraising for Lenin at his behest by helming crews of bomb-throwing bank robbers.[3] Yet this same man, fluent in Russian, Georgian, and even Church Slavonic, wrote on complex, abstract subjects, as evidenced by the excerpt above. (Some thugs did his bidding because they were enthralled by his poetry.) He trafficked in philosophy as well as “wet work”; Hitler was adept at neither.[4]

And so Keke, Stalin’s mother, was thrilled when the aforementioned seminary awarded the teenaged Ioseb, whom she had raised Eastern Orthodox, a scholarship to be trained for the Russian Orthodox priesthood. (She even dreamt of his being consecrated a bishop.[5]) We don’t know what courses he took, but they likely included Bible studies, Russian language and literature (the main language of instruction), Latin and classical Greek, church history (emphasizing Eastern Orthodoxy), theology, moral philosophy, and liturgical music. There was no analogous academic path for Hitler.

You might not put much stock in the classical Marxist theory that a society’s economic “base” determines its cultural “superstructure,” and neither do I. But can you think of another psychotic megalomaniac capable of addressing whether human language fits into one of these categories, or neither? Here’s what Stalin, at 71, wrote on the subject in 1950:

The superstructure is created by the base precisely in order to serve it, to actively help it to take shape and consolidate itself, to actively fight for the elimination of the old, moribund base together with its old superstructure. The superstructure has only to renounce this role of auxiliary, it has only to pass from a position of active defense of its base to one of indifference towards it, to adopt an equal attitude to all classes, and it loses its virtue and ceases to be a superstructure.

In this respect language radically differs from the superstructure. Language is not a product of one or another base, old or new, within the given society, but of the whole course of the history of the society and of the history of the bases for many centuries. It was created not by some one class, but by the entire society, by all the classes of the society, by the efforts of hundreds of generations. It was created for the satisfaction of the needs not of one particular class, but of the entire society, of all the classes of the society. Precisely for this reason it was created as a single language for the society, common to all members of that society, as the common language of the whole people. Hence the functional role of language, as a means of intercourse between people, consists not in serving one class to the detriment of other classes, but in equally serving the entire society, all the classes of society. This in fact explains why a language may equally serve both the old, moribund system and the new, rising system; both the old base and the new base; both the exploiters and the exploited.

It is no secret to anyone that the Russian language served Russian capitalism and Russian bourgeois culture before the October Revolution just as well as it now serves the socialist system and socialist culture of Russian society. . . .

It cannot be otherwise. Language exists, language has been created precisely in order to serve society as a whole, as a means of intercourse between people, in order to be common to the members of society and constitute the single language of society, serving members of society equally, irrespective of their class status. A language has only to depart from this position of being a language common to the whole people, it has only to give preference and support to some one social group to the detriment of other social groups of the society, and it loses its virtue, ceases to be a means of intercourse between the people of the society, and becomes the jargon of some social group, degenerates and is doomed to disappear.[6]

Stalin here presupposes a materialist worldview that accepts certain things as given, one of which was man’s innate capacity to form language. Without this capacity, Stalin couldn’t conceive, express, or defend Marxism, or critique an opposing worldview. While a specific language can be learned, the capacity to learn and use language is inherent. It operates “a priori,” that is, before and independent of alleged “class” motivations. Without this natural capacity (which in turn requires explanation), no language could either exist or be created as Stalin blithely takes for granted.[7] Needless to say (I hope!), Stalin couldn’t account for his knowledge of language or anything else. He forfeited that ability when he forfeited Christ.

As a Marxist, Stalin took a bold stance by arguing that this innate capacity for language transcends class distinctions and unites human beings anthropologically. I mention this to stress that, however one views Stalin’s thesis or reasoning, it was the paranoid tyrant himself who wrote Marxism and Problems of Linguistics. No one “ghostwrote” it. Nobody would have dared to, and Stalin would not have delegated the exercise of the Communist movement’s magisterium to anyone else (who could undertake such a task only by taking his life in his hands).[8]

During the height of the cult of Stalin’s personality, his millions of worshippers exclaimed that he embodied wisdom, strategic genius, and foresight, not just in politics, but in all areas of life, including military strategy, science, economics and, at least by 1950, even the philosophy of language. He was credited with every success, real or perceived, of the Soviet Union.

And then he died.

I never robbed banks or committed murder, but I was no less dead in my sins than Joseph Stalin, who in his youth had hardened his heart against God (and perhaps God hardened it as well: Exodus 7:13-8:19). The dead can do nothing for themselves. Apart from His grace, I would have remained abominable in His sight, dead in Adam, consumed by intellectual pride. In a poor display of gratitude I wrote a book calling for the pursuit of wisdom, not after Marx, let alone Stalin, but after Christ.

Notes

[1] Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, a chapter in History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, the official textbook of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, September 1938.

[2] Uncommon Knowledge: Part 1: Stephen Kotkin on Stalin’s Rise to Power, July 29, 2015; Uncommon Knowledge: Part 2: Stephen Kotkin discusses Stalin’s consolidation of power, July 29, 2015. On YouTube are many of this master teacher’s interviews and lectures, all of them stimulating. Two volumes of his comprehensive Stalin biography have been published:

Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (Penguin, 2014), which covers Stalin’s early life, rise to power in the Bolshevik Party, and role in the Russian Revolution, and concludes in 1928, just before the consolidation of his dictatorship by the end of 1929.

Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (Penguin, 2017), focuses on his leadership in the 1930s, including the collectivization of agriculture, the Holodomor and Great Terror, and the lead-up to World War II, as well as the preparations for conflict with Nazi Germany.

Kotkin expects the third and final volume, Stalin: Totalitarian Superpower, 1941-1990, to be published in 2025. It will cover Stalin’s influence during and after World War II and his impact on the Soviet Union and the world​.

[3] At Lenin’s directive. Simon Sebag Montefiore narrates this with cinematic verve in Young Stalin, Knopf, 2007, 11-16. I cannot recommend this book too highly for the light it throws on Soso, the troubled lad who became the Man of Steel.

[4] Nothing philosophical fell from the pen of Adolf Hitler. His Mein Kampf contains views that could be loosely interpreted as philosophical, touching as they do on race, nationalism, Lebensraum for Germans, and the Führerprinzip, but it’s a work of propaganda, not a treatise. It lacks the depth, dialectical reasoning, and systematic approach found in Stalin’s efforts to synthesize Marxist theory and Soviet  practice in, say, Dialectical and Historical Materialism.

[5] Beso, Soso’s alcoholic father, who regularly beat the snot out of him for any reason or none, not so much.

[6] Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1950. Its content first appeared as articles in Pravda, June 20, July 4, and August 2, 1950. Leonard Schatzki was its English-language translator.

[7] “One does not . . . argue for one’s worldview. Rather, one’s worldview—a network of nonnegotiable beliefs about one’s relationship to others, to the cosmos, and to God—is the foundation upon on which one argues or asks questions. One’s basic worldview is implicated in the effort to argue or justify. It gets expressed in socially and historically conditioned ideologies, philosophies, and theologies. They are many, but the worldview-forming capacity, like the language-forming capacity, is anthropologically one. One may vindicate rationally one’s theorized worldview by showing its superiority to another, but the worldview will even supply the criteria of evaluation. I’m developing the idea of a pre-theoretical (yet theorizable) worldview which, without our effort, forms as we mature from infancy through childhood and adolescence to adulthood. It forms in tandem with our capacity for language (without which theorization can’t happen).” Anthony Flood, Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, Independently published, 2022, 42-43.

[8] “[T]hroughout the whole of the Stalinist period [1930-1953] Stalin himself was the only person in the Soviet Union who ever dared to say anything new.” Gustav A. Wetter, S.J., Dialectical Materialism. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958, 209. Quoted in Antón Donoso, “Stalin’s Contribution to Soviet Philosophy,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 5:2, May 1965, 267. (I’m grateful to Dave Lull for making this paper available to me.) Another valuable article by this author is  “Stalinism in Marxist Philosophy,” Studies in Soviet Thought, 19:2, March 1979, 113-141. To my knowledge the most comprehensive and penetrating scholarly exposition and criticism of Soviet philosophy have come from Roman Catholic philosophers, particularly Donoso (1932-2018), Wetter (1911-1991), and Józef Maria Bocheński (1902-1995). My visitors might also be interested to know that Soviet-influenced Marxist philosophy has had among its defenders in the United States tenured philosophy professors, most (if not all) of them card-carrying members of the Communist Party during Cold War. Notable among them were John Somerville (1905-1994), Howard L. Parsons (1918-2000), Dale Riepe (b. 1918), and David H. DeGrood (b. 1937).