In Thomas Von Laue’s essay “Judging Stalin”, he offers a
number of very interesting considerations concerning how Americans are poorly
equipped to judge Josef Stalin as a leader due to the vastly different
socio-historical contexts between Russian culture and the West. Von Laue argues
that morality is both relative and culturally specific, and that our own sense
of morality is not applicable within a separate paradigm. In other words,
before we pass judgment on such a controversial person as Stalin, we must first
attempt to understand the cultural and political environment that surrounded
him, and then measure his actions to that standard. Von Laue comes to the
conclusion that although the costs in human life were high, the many atrocities
that Stalin committed were justified as both a result of Russia’s desperate
necessity to quickly modernize for their own self-preservation and a
manifestation of the hostile environment and chaotic conditions under which he
ruled. Ultimately, one must consider the fact that when Stalin came to power in
the early 1920s, Russia was an incredibly backwards society on the verge of
annihilation by its more industrialized European neighbors— by the time of his
death in 1953, Russia was a world superpower.
Von Laue begins
his argument by offering the assertion that the United States has one of the
most advantageous positions in modern history— we are secure from attack, we
have a stable government, and we have “unprecedented affluence and power in the
world”. For these reasons, we are not able to employ the typical American
“moral imperialism” and judge a country such as Russia under our own standards
due to its vastly different culture and history. Furthermore, a sympathetic
reading towards Russian political brutality is difficult for Westerners to
understand due to lack of shared experience.
He then
moves on to describe the political and cultural consciousness felt by Stalin
and his many contemporaries following World War I. For hundreds of years under
the tsarist autocracy, brutality had become an integral part of politics; a
thought that is extremely foreign to Westerners. By placing Stalin and his
actions within the specific context of his environment, Von Laue argues that
brutality and ruthlessness were not only justified, but also a necessary
measure to achieve the seemingly insurmountable task of modernizing Russia as
fast as possible. Following World War I, Russia was devastated both physically
and within their collective consciousness. Being a backwards nation with a
barely functioning government, Russia needed massive industrialization preserve
their existence.
Von Laue
falls into the school of historians that believe Stalin gaining rule of Russia
was inevitable since he was the only one with a talent for dealing with the
immense bureaucracy, being most familiar with the Russian people, and having
the capacity to make hard decisions when pressed. For the most part, Von Laue
establishes that most of the mechanisms (organizational and moral) that allowed
Stalin to rise to power were already in place, but he was the only one with the
capacity to take full advantage of them.
Modernizing and industrializing
Russia was a near impossible task for Stalin, and he knew that by the nature of
the Russian people, it would be difficult to successfully introduce them to a
new way of life. However, to Stalin, the cost of delaying mobilization would be
domination by a foreign power. Therefore, any sort of political morality was
thrown to the wayside, and Stalin fully continued brutality in the Russian
tradition.
Ultimately, Stalin is portrayed as
a sort of tragic figure, set between “the most nightmarish” decisions one could
ever make in politics. Although he was indeed a larger than life figure, he was
still mortal, and Von Laue believes that he deserves to be considered as such.
Despite his mistakes, Stalin did what he thought was best for his country in
the true Machiavellian tradition of his “end” justifying the means by which he
achieved it. Furthermore, Stalin is distinguished as a world leader that was
under significantly more pressure for a longer period of time than any other
ruler in modern history, and it is due to these unique set of experiences that
the West is not able to accurately judge Stalin; since the West has always been
at the top with their stomachs full, who are they to judge the actions of the
poor and hungry, especially if it is for self-preservation?
I agree with Von Laue completely.
He provides a very accurate depiction as Stalin being a product of his environment,
and he does so without deflecting responsibility. In a sense, the triumph of
Stalin in Russian history is a Pyhrric victory; he was correct in choosing to
mobilize Russia immediately, and in doing so he not only defended the country
from the Nazi advance in WWII, but an industrialized Russia played a
significant role in the Allied victory. However, the victory in WWII came at
the cost of not only war casualties, but all that died during the years of
industrialization and collectivization as well. As an audience, we should take
into account Van Laue’s observations about cultural relativism. Most people in
the United States live in a very narrowly defined cultural context, and certain
actions that seem very foreign to us are commonplace somewhere else. Russia has
had an extremely different history than the United States, and thus cultural
attitudes towards political, social, and economic morality are very different.
The fact that he terrorized his own country is abhorrent to Americans, but when
considered in the context which Von Laue provides, we can certainly see that he
had to deal with a number of difficult, uncontrollable circumstances to
accomplish his goal.
No comments:
Post a Comment