Uncle Josef

History, like beauty lies in the eye of the beholder but ugliness is universal. Or at least it would be easy to believe so. Sometimes, though, the muddy reality finds you and complicates your assumptions.

I teach in a suite at Moscow State University dedicated to Franklin Roosevelt. Given the national regard for FDR I actually managed not to notice how significant this was on my first day at MSU. But after one of my classes I thought about how Russia’s premier university has devoted an area to our 32nd president but you would never find so much as a bathroom bearing the name of his WWII ally Josef Stalin in an American University.

The reason for that is fairly unambiguous: in America Stalin’s reputation is synonymous with dictatorship, anchored to the agricultural collectivization programs that cost the lives of millions of Russians and shorthand for the grand scale evil that the 20th century witnessed. But in Russia, the story is, predictably more complex.

I asked a graduate student what Russian youth are taught about Stalin and her reply was “the truth.” Her version of this truth is that Stalin erred in excess and brutality, but his ideas for economic development were sound. His elimination of his rivals in the 1930s weakened the Soviet Union on the verge of World War II and was partly responsible for the huge losses the country suffered. It was a portrait composed in grays.

Another student told me that Stalin was “the most controversial figure in our history,” and asked if he was similarly viewed in the United States. I replied “No — because there’s no opposing opinion.” Nor does there appear to be much controversy in the West in general.

Here, for instance, is how a BBC documentary summarized the life of Stalin:

His forced collectivisation of agriculture cost millions of lives, while his programme of rapid industrialisation achieved huge increases in Soviet productivity and economic growth but at great cost. Moreover, the population suffered immensely during the Great Terror of the 1930s, during which Stalin purged the party of ‘enemies of the people’, resulting in the execution of thousands and the exile of millions to the gulag system of slave labour camps.

These purges severely depleted the Red Army, and despite repeated warnings, Stalin was ill prepared for Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. His political future, and that of the Soviet Union, hung in the balance, but Stalin recovered to lead his country to victory. The human cost was enormous, but was not a consideration for him.

After World War Two, the Soviet Union entered the nuclear age and ruled over an empire which included most of eastern Europe. Increasingly paranoid, Stalin died of a stroke on 5 March 1953.

Add a few notes about the early Cold War, atomic espionage and the show trials and you more or less have the American assessment of Stalin as well.

But one thing that becomes apparent if you spend any amount of time here is that World War II is present in a way that it simply is not in the United States.  This might be expected given the fact that some 400,000 American soldiers died in that war but the USSR lost nearly 25 million soldiers and civilians. The 900 day seige of Leningrad was, itself, worse than anything the US suffered during the war.

The popular view seems to hold that no matter his other flaws, Stalin is also the man responsible for defeating fascism. And that, at least in this country, still counts for something.