University of Glasgow

Understanding Stalinism: The 'Orwellian Discrepancy' and the 'Rational Choice Dictator' Author(s): Vincent Barnett Reviewed work(s): Source: Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 58, No. 3 (May, 2006), pp. 457-466 Published 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
Vol. 58, No. 3, May 2006, 457-466

Routledge
Taylor&FrancisGroup

Discussion Article 'Orwellian Understanding Stalinism-The 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 andNazi totalitarianism. It analyses the 'Orwelliandiscrepancy' betweenMarxist ideals and Soviet reality, the comparative differences in numbers of people thatwere 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'

was simply ensuring the survival of his regime, dictator who, through the use of state-sponsored terror, and suggests that a better model for Stalin's government would be that of 'pseudo-rational choice irrationality'.Arguments that imply that 'TeamStalin' 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 ISAN ONGOING DEBATE IN RUSSIAN STUDIES CIRCLES regarding the nature of as a system and whether the Hitler and Soviet totalitarianism/collectivism/socialism Stalin regimes are directly comparable. As part of this debate, there is an ongoing and whether and Stalinism, dispute about the numbers of victims of Nazism 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 and Steven Rosefielde (Conquest, 1997, been Robert Conquest, Stephen Wheatcroft Conquest and Rosefielde exhibit a 1996, pp. 959-987). Rosefielde, pp. 1317-1319; political hostility and a deep moral revulsion to the Soviet terror of the 1930s that whereas might be taken to equate it in a general sense with the Nazi Holocaust, R.W. Davies) deny that the Soviet terror is directly Wheatcroft (and others like 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
circumstance of Stalinism arguing stating condition was 'farmore suggesting

VINCENT BARNETT
important than personality' conditions However, Davies in the formation might of individual

world outlooks,

that historical

explained more

about the nature from society, in hand, and

than Stalin did himself.'

recall one E.H. Carr go hand

that it was actually not possible that 'the development of society

to separate out the individual and the individual

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 'theOrwellian 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 the victims of Hitler's attempt at racial genocide. Whilst not wishing to whitewash Stalin regime, Wheatcroft wanted to make a clear moral distinction between the mass deaths associated with the Soviet policies of forced industrialisation and forced the Jewish people as a race and Hitler's policy of eliminating collectivisation, even went as far as to characterise (Wheatcroft, 1996, pp. 1319-1353). Wheatcroft 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 the victims of famine, and the victims of mass executions: he numerically USSR, 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 asmuch as the Ezhovshchina did involve a kind of execution that was supported

*See Davies explaining

Davies would want (2000, p. 445). Whether own attitude the rise of the Nazis and Hitler's

to extend is an

this

'circumstantial' question

interesting

approach to ponder.

to

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 these sorts of distinctions might 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 seem appealing on first examination. However, as the stated goals of the Stalinist variant of Marxism admirable, whereas of those of a traditional left persuasion,

Nazism,

were in the long run 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 harmony, systems. That is, if instead of preaching racial hatred, Hitler had instead preached racial 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

If I kill someone in cold blood, but then claim that Iwas acting any sense whatsoever. 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 (Wheatcroft, for in terms of Wheatcroft's category of 'mass purposive killings' 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 ismorally 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 because this was state) the amount thought necessary to eliminate at the time, or 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 hypothetical reprehensible' Hitler in Nazi-occupied Europe in 1940, and that a that make him 'lessmorally regime then killed all of them. Would than the actual Hitler who was responsible for killing five million? Jews in existence 1996, p. 1348). The implication might be that killing one million

460 Framing game with moral Wheatcroft passage the question

VINCENT in this manner killings'

BARNETT the comparative numbers

reveals that playing is not something

'mass purposive

that can be done with precise

accuracy. also attempted to make a distinction in descriptive labelling between the killings' caused by Hitler and those caused by Stalin. The following in the conclusion toWheatcroft's 1996 article:

'mass purposive

appeared

the purposive deaths caused by Hitler fitmore closely into the category of 'murder', while those caused by Stalin fitmore 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 elimination producing Stalin USSR, some appeared not to realise that Nazi ideology provided reasons for the erroneous and mistaken of Jews and communists-totally reasons, and reasons an utterly horrific and completely unjustified outcome-but underlying assumption was perhaps that we should allow in the license for his erroneous reasons for ordering mass executions at all that Hitler believed in his own (totally not acknowledge

nonetheless. Wheatcroft's

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

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 in the afterlife: thank goodness I was only hounded, thinking to themselves in and then executed; those poor Jews who were murdered tortured interrogated, 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 ifHitler had ordered amore fully encompassing sham Jews of conforming to the racist legal process that actually formally convicted that the Nazis promoted, before sending them to the concentration camps? stereotypes the moral There is still another argument against non-equivalence position. which enemy you would prefer to face: one that explains his or her ideology Consider '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 lies were certainly told to Jews themselves about their eventual fate during many these lies were a purely practical inversion in order to ease their passage to WWII, 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
accomplished in the entire history of humanity. This is especially significant when

461
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 of socialism used the Orwellian the brush of the Gulag, and hence opponents discrepancy preferable with This connects against progressive aims. to another argument Stalin sided with often put forward the Allies to suggest that Stalin was side

to Hitler:

during WWII,

and hence we should and survival

praise Stalin for his judgement the Allies for moral was reasons-the USSR

in this respect. In truth Stalin did not eventually reasons, but for purely practical

or ideological

invaded by Germany. We

should not forget that the Nazi

and Stalin was clearly willing in principle Soviet pact was negotiated by V.M. Molotov to form an alliance with Hitler, although Stalin's motives for this are contested. Remember also that the Stalinist variant of Marxism and condemned Nazism 'bourgeois democracy' to the dustbin of history, and analysed both of them as variant expressions Within of the same underlying forces prevalent within capitalist production. this framework Nazism was (after 1941) accepted as themore immediate threat to Soviet survival, but this was a purely contingent judgement; the USSR would still the UK and the USA in the medium between term. the moral significance of Nazism Consequently, and Stalinism, by trying to differentiate

have to defeat

some scholars are pushed into adopting arguments that rely on paper In truth it thin distinctions that collapse on more detailed philosophical examination. 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 then accidentally killed only 100 people, and Hitler deliberately killed five million, there would be a clear moral distinction, but once you get into the ballpark level of loses any millions of planned deaths on both sides, precise numerical comparison underlying ethical rationale. This does not mean that historical investigation into the of people killed is not a worthwhile pursuit in itself, only that such cannot be used to suggest that one dictator was investigations 'less morally reprehensible' than another, or to validate illegitimate distinctions between 'murder' and 'execution' in a tyrannical context. exact number

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

part due

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 itmight still be possible to question the by means of idea that this was a 'rational' strategy or that it was accomplished

'rationalchoices'.
passing it really essential for Stalin to engineer (in Harrison's own figures) 20 million 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 Was 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 and intellectual roots, not a sociological psychological, mania with deep-seated modelled game of 'chicken' using 'rational choice' dictator playing a mathematically 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 calculated maintain term) or over the minimum a significant period of level of murderous time. To suggest that Stalin rationally terror that he had to generate in order to

(Paul Gregory's within the Soviet 'nested dictatorship' 'rational' into its opposite. Would the meaning of the word in Germany, and hence Harrison suggest that Hitler also made a similar calculation Hitler was also acting 'rationally' by murdering Jews? Harrison brings into the discussion a quite different question which certainly did his own position is stretching the Soviet and industrialising in the 1930s, that of modernising 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 It is logically his own personal dictatorship. separate question to that of maintaining his own political position whilst accepting possible to conceive of Stalin maintaining 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 strategy, ideas that had specific origins and relevance of planning to industrialisation and Davies often neglect is that a impetuses. But a key point that both Harrison to socialist economy (as outlined initially by Marx) had absolutely nothing whatsoever concern Stalin economy. industrialisation. Socialist planning was supposed to be about improving the quality of all human life by means of overcoming exploitative social relations starting vastly more iron and steel from an advanced capitalist economy, not manufacturing by means of a tyrannical forced labour system starting from a backward semi-feudal do with peasant-dominated economy. it is false to suggest, as Harrison does, that those who view the Stalin Consequently, (Harrison, 2003, p. 2). Surrealism era as 'surreal' necessarily see it as incomprehensible a rational response to the irrationality of the First World War, and as amovement was the imagery of surrealism deliberately and sanely utilised ideas associated with the

on irrational events is not movement. Commentary burgeoning psychoanalytic who describe the Stalin era as 'surreal' actually necessarily irrational itself. What those mean is that the Orwellian discrepancy was bizarre, in that socialist ideas had led

UNDERSTANDING STALINISM

463

basic

into the Gulag. And one of the reasons for this 'economic surrealism' was that Marx's ideas about the necessary preconditions for creating a socialist economy were totally ignored.2 Unsurprisingly, the collapse of the USSR was eventually the

being

result.
for those of the Harrison - Davies school, the final line in the sand for Stalin's 'rationality' relates to the development defending of the Soviet economy. Davies (with Melanie Ilic and Oleg Khlevnyuk) has recently written: Thus, 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' and/or industrialisation. without have been achieved

of collectivisation not

This means that the latter two goals could 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 alone the mass murder

itself had negative consequences for the Soviet economy, let (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 Imean 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 is revealing of 'Stalin's economic logic', but in all correspondence material honesty I could not find any genuine 'economic logic' in their presentation of the archive that they have discovered. Of course there iswhat passed for 'economic logic' amongst 'Team Stalin', but this was actually neither 'economic' nor 'logical' itwas more

2Some

aspects

of how

this

distortion

was

able

to occur

are discussed

in Barnett

(2005a

and

2005b).

464

VINCENT

BARNETT reacting to events using

akin to the analysis of committee-bound reasoning common

bureaucrats haphazardly

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 that the basic purpose of revolutionary irrationality. Remember socialists achieving political power in 1917 was to construct a system of rational planning based upon real human needs. Most within commentators system was not in place in the USSR agree that such a fully rational and complete in the early 1930s, and hence Stalin was operating irrationality, or lagged institutional overhang from the would

a system of (partial) 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 generated planned destruction economy, had its own internal political to conform to a previously existed. After and bureaucratic established model logic. It was not by the attempt

as no such model

of a rationally 1929 Stalin himself engineered the have provided killings' such that were

of the cadre of brilliant Russian as an integral part of

a rational model,

economists who might the 'mass purposive

discussed previously.3
Harrison's it is better to view Stalin's Reformulating description, choice 1930s as characterised by 'pseudo-rational irrationality', rational actions that only appear rational from the point of view about his own position, about the position paranoid paranoid actions in the or apparently of a dictator of the USSR

internationally, and having a very tenuous grasp of economic theory, the intellectual and the consequences of tyrannical rule for the Soviet state and genesis of Marxism institutions. But this is not real 'rationality', nor did it involve governmental genuinely rational choices. Charles Bettelheim has usefully highlighted what he calls 'the cult of the chief, which was close to the Nazi's as being Fuehrerprinzip, 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 is not something that Stalin ever tried to accomplish egalitarianism '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 because previously the Stalinist shown by Davies and his co-workers using new archive materials, system is now seen to be much more complex than had been

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
cases of attempted

465

leader's pronouncements

reforms, or even no internal examples of people rallying against the 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 - 102). Totalitarian corporatism is that eating a red herring (Wheatcroft, 2004, pp. 101 system Harrison Nor Soviet that has does been invaluably documented in detail by Davies, Wheatcroft, the and their colleagues. the fact that, as outlined by other examples of recent scholarship, and group alliances and also zigzags of 'excesses'

terror involved constituencies

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 deeply about Stalin irrational, tyrannical that 'the only logic in the terror was the logic inherent system of rule' (Rees, 2000, p. 450). in a

Conclusion
it should be accepted that Stalin was not rational, but neither was he mad: he economic theory, just ignorant and corrupt. He was ignorant of conventional 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 Hence was that studying the detail of Stalin's rule is not a completely to use this detail as legitimate activity for historians, only that the temptation 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 aman twisted by hate who believed very strongly in totally false and irrational been. This does not mean ideas. That intellectual iswhy, as a historian, it is so important to focus on the history of ideas and rather than only on empirical or 'events' history. By developments,

4In a recent Stalinism,

review

writing from adaptations (Thatcher, 2004,

article, about Eric

Ian Thatcher van Ree's

some p. 908).

of the most

some recent scholarship on Stalin and usefully surveyed that 'Most of Stalin's key ideas... were merely (2002) book time' familiar aspects of the leading Marxist thinkers of Stalin's

466

VINCENT BARNETT

too much on the latter, the erroneous focusing 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. negative. And history, both positive In truth the importance of individual belief is central to all human and (as in the two parallel cases under review here) horrifically is crucial, then it could have been different.

if human belief

Middlesex, UK

References and the Dynamics Barnett, (1998) Kondratiev of Economic (London, Macmillan). Development Russian Economy, 1890-1940: and Alternatives Ideas, Debates Barnett, V. (2004) The Revolutionary (London, Routledge). Barnett, V. (2005a) A History of Russian Economic Thought (London, Routledge). 'The Soviet Economy?an to Fail?', History that was Bound Barnett, V. (2005b) Review, Experiment December, pp. 19-22. in Political Research 19. Formation', (2001) 'Stalinist Ideological Economy, isHistory? p. 32. (1985) What Penguin), (Harmondsworth, R. (1997) 'Victims of Stalinism: A Comment', 49, 7, pp. 1317-1319. Studies, Conquest, Europe-Asia R.W. The Vices of Integrity: E.H. Carr, 1892 Davies, (2000) 'Review Essay of Jonathan Haslam, 59, 3. 1982\ The Russian Review, Carr, Bettelheim, E.H. O. (2004) 'The Politburo and Economic in R.W., Ilic, M. & Khlevnyuk, Decision-Making', Rees, E.A. of Stalin's Dictatorship (ed.) (2004) The Nature (London, Palgrave). Statistics: Some Comments', Ellman, M. 54, 7. Studies, (2002) 'Soviet Repression Europe-Asia to the conference M. (2003) 'Stalin and Our Times', article presented of the Irish Association Harrison, for Russian and East European in Studies, University Cork, 9-11 May 2003, published College, Roberts and Ours Irish Association for Russian and Geoffrey (ed), Stalin: His Times (Dublin: East European Studies, 2005), pp. 67-84. H. & Szyrmer, J. (1992) Faulty Foundations: Soviet Economic 1928-41 Policies, Hunter, (Princeton, Davies, NJ, Princeton Rees, E.A. Rosefielde, 987. Thatcher, van Ree, Press). University The Russian Review, 59, 3. (2000) 'The Great Terror: Suicide or Murder?', S. (1996) 'Stalinism in Post-Communist Studies, 48, 6, pp. 959 Perspective', Europe-Asia C. V.

I.D. (2004) 'Stalin and Stalinism: A Review Article', Studies, 56, 6. Europe-Asia E. (2002) The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin (London, Routledge). of Comparison', Problems Benn, D. (1999) 'Nazism and Stalinism: Studies, Wedgwood Europe-Asia 51, 1. S. (1996) 'The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, Wheatcroft, Studies, 48, 8, pp. 1319-1353. 1930-45', Europe-Asia S.G. 'Towards Explaining the Changing Levels of Stalinist in the Wheatcroft, (2002) Repression in Wheatcroft, S.G. Views Traditional 1930s', (ed.) (2002) Challenging of Russian History (London, Palgrave). 'From Team Stalin to Degenerate S.G. (2004) in Rees, E.A. Wheatcroft, Tyranny', (ed.) (2004) The Nature of Stalin's Dictatorship Palgrave). (London,