Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1939moy.001

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                                                                                January 1, 1940

Man of the Year:Joseph Stalin




     On the year's shortest day, 60 years ago, in Gori, near
Tiflis, a son was born to a poor, hard-working Georgian cobbler
named Vissarion Djagushvili. The boy's pious mother christened
him Joseph, after the husband of Mary, mother of Jesus.

     But names were not to stick very long to this newest subject
of the Tsar; he was to answer to Soso, Koba, David, Nijeradze,
Chijikov and Ivanovich until at length he acquired the pseudonym
of Stalin, Man of Steel.

     Last week, as another Dec. 21 rolled around, the little town
of Gori was a mecca for 450 Russian writers, "intellectuals" and
students sent to gather material on Joseph Vissarionovich
Djugashvili's birth place and early surroundings. Newspapers
printed sentimental poems and stories about the "little house in
Gori" and latest photographs showed that it had been enclosed in
an ornamental stone structure and turned into a Soviet shrine. A
Tiflis motion-picture studio started filming Through Historic
Localities, a cinema intended to conduct the spectator through
every part of the country associated with Joseph Stalin's name.

     In Moscow 1,000,000 copies of President Mikhail Kalinin's
biography, A Book About the Leader, were issued, while sketches
by Defense Commissar Kliment E. Voroshilov and Commissar for
Internal Affairs Laurentius Pavlovich Beria are soon to appear.
In a twelve-page edition of Pravda, Moscow Communist Party
newsorgan, only one column was not devoted to Joseph Stalin on
his birthday morn. In an editorial called "Our Own Stalin,"
Pravda declared: "Metal workers of Detroit, shipyard workers of
Sydney, women workers of Shanghai textile factories, sailors at
Marseille, Egyptian fellahin, Indian peasants on the banks of the
Ganges -- all speak of Stalin with love. He is the hope of the
future for the workers and peasants of the world."

     In his honor the Council of People's Commissars founded 29
annual first prizes of 100,000 rubles ($20,000) each for
outstanding achievements in medicine, law, science, military
science, theatre, inventions, while 4,150 Stalin student
scholarships were announced. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet
conferred on Tovarish Stalin the Order of Lenin and gave him the
title of "Hero of Socialist Labor."

     Shop committees, laborers' clubs, soviets, Party and State
functionaries felicitate Hero Stalin, but among the
congratulations from abroad one came from an old enemy now turned
friend -- Adolf Hitler: "I beg you to accept my sincerest
congratulations on your 60th birthday," wired the Fuhrer. "I
enclose with them my best wishes for your personal welfare as
well as for a happy future for the peoples of the friendly Soviet
Union." The Nazi press meanwhile carefully eulogized Mr. Stalin
as the "revolutionary fuhrer of Russia."

     The Man. In all this wordage over Comrade Stalin's 60 years
of life only six-line communiques on the progress of the Red Army
in Finland were printed in the U.S.S.R. Obviously, the hammer-
sickle propaganda machine preferred that Soviet citizens pay as
little attention as possible to a scarcely encouraging military
campaign. Much, however, was written about Joseph Stalin's
enormous effect on world affairs in the last twelve months.

     The penultimate year of the 20th Century's fourth decade
will not go down as one noted for athletic records, medical
discoveries, great works of literature or other achievements in
the realm of the intellect, muscle or spirit. It will be
remembered, in Europe particularly, as a year in which men turned
or were forced to turn their attention almost exclusively to
politics.

     The whole post-War I period was preoccupied with politics to
a degree matched only by the 16th Century's preoccupation with
theology. So thoroughly was Europe inured to political shock that
the transition last autumn from war of nerves to war of guns was
accepted by most of its millions with an extraordinary calm. The
calm was tempered with some fear, but also with nostalgia, for
few men believe that Europe will ever again be the Europe of Aug.
31, 1939 -- just as the July of 1914 never came again. Whether
Europe's new era will end in nationalist chaos, good or bad
internationalism, or what not, the era will be new -- and the end
of the old era will have been finally precipitated by a man whose
domain lies mostly outside Europe. This Joseph Stalin did by
dramatically switching the power balance of Europe one August
night. It made Joseph Stalin man of 1939. History may not like
him but history cannot forget him. As for his contemporaries on
the 1939 scene:

     -- By early last year Adolf Hitler had already shown the
world that his bag of tricks was not bottomless. Instead of
winning another bloodless conquest in Poland, he ran his land
empire at last afoul the sea empire of Britain -- and into an
expensive, probably long and debilitating war which may well end
disastrously for him and his country. The Allies have not cracked
his Westwall -- but he has not cracked their Maginot Line. His
vaunted air fleet has not leveled Britain, as advertised, and
once again Germany finds herself dangerously blockaded by the
British Fleet.

     -- Generalissimo Francisco Franco won his civil war in
Spain, but his country was so exhausted at the war's end that
Spain's weight in international affairs remains negligible.

      -- Most vigorous character to arise anew in European
affairs was Britain's Winston Churchill, First Lord of the
Admiralty, but he was not the head of Government. Doubtful it
was, moreover, if Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain would go
down as a great war figure. History would probably regard him as
an example of magnificent stubbornness -- stubborn for peace,
then stubborn in war.

     -- Benito Mussolini was caught bluffing with his Nazi-
Fascist "Pact of Steel," and when the Allies called his bluff,
Il Duce rather awkwardly last fall backed down and declared "non-
belligerency." Grumbling at home last autumn and a major shake-up
among his top officers indicated that Mussolini's Italy had to do
a lot of sail-trimming.

     -- After seven years of Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. was
still in the dumps, offered no example to the rest of the world
as to how to get along. Best Roosevelt deeds of 1939 were his
earnest but unheeded plumpings for peace.

     Joseph Stalin's actions in 1939, by contrast, were positive,
surprising, world-shattering.

     The signing in Moscow's Kremlin on the night of August 23-24
of the Nazi-Communist "Non-Aggression" Pact was a diplomatic
demarche literally world-shattering. The actual signers were
German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet
Premier-Foreign Commissar Molotov, but Comrade Stalin was there
in person to give it his smiling benediction, and no one doubted
that it was primarily his doing. By it Germany broke through
British-French "encirclement," freed herself from the necessity
of fighting on two fronts at the same time. Without the Russian
pact, German generals would certainly have been loath to go into
military action. With it, World War II began.

     From Russia's standpoint, the pact seemed at first a
brilliant coup in the cynical game of power politics. It was
expected that smart Joseph Stalin would lie low and let the
Allies and the Germans fight it out to exhaustion, after which he
would possibly pick up the pieces. But little by little, it began
to appear that Comrade Stalin got something much more practical
out of his deal.

     -- More than half of defeated Poland was handed over to him
without a struggle.

     -- The three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
were quietly informed that hereafter they must look to Moscow
rather than to Berlin. They all signed "mutual assistance" pacts
making them virtual protectorates of the Soviet Union.

     -- Germany renounced any interest in Finland, thus giving
the Russians carte blanche to move into that country -- which
they have been trying to do for the past four weeks.

     -- It is widely supposed that Germany agreed to recognize
some Russian interests in the Balkans, most probably in Rumania's
Bessarabia and in eastern Bulgaria and the Isthmus.

     But if, in the jungle that is Europe today, the Man of 1939
gained large slices of territory out of his big deal, he also
paid a big price for it. By the one stroke of sanctioning a Nazi
war and by the later strokes of becoming a partner of Adolf
Hitler in aggression, Joseph Stalin threw out of the window
Soviet Russia's meticulously fostered reputation of a peace-
loving, treaty-abiding nation. By the ruthless attack on Finland,
he not only sacrificed the good will of thousands of people the
world over sympathetic to the ideals of Socialism, he matched
himself with Adolf Hitler as the world's most hated man.

     The Life. While the new Nazi-Communist partnership may have
surprised those whose Russian reading had been confined to the
idealistic utterances of such Soviet diplomats as onetime Foreign
Commissar Maxim Litvinoff, Stalin's life reveals numerous
examples of cynical opportunism and unprincipled grabbing of
power. Sent to a Greek Orthodox seminary at Tiflis at 13, young
"Soso" Djugashvili was expelled at 18 from the school because,
said his priestly teachers, of "Socialistic heresy."

     Thereafter, he led the life of a Russian professional
revolutionary. He took part in a railroad strike in Tiflis. He
was an organizer in Batum and Baku factories. He had something to
do with the series of spectacular robberies that the
"revolutionists" engineered. Once a Government-convoyed truck was
bombed in the Tiflis main square, and 341,000 rubles ($170,000)
in cash was taken from it. Maxim Litvinoff, incidentally, was
later caught in Paris with some of this money on his person.
"Soso" wandered from town to town in the Caucasus, using numerous
aliases. Five times he was arrested and exiled; four times he
escaped.

     In this early life his colleagues sometimes suspected Koba
or Ivanovich of buying leniency for himself by handing over their
names to the police. Another strange coincidence they noted was
that frequently when the comrades got into a tough spot with the
police, and had to fight their way out, Koba was rarely on hand.

     He joined Russia's radical movement in 1894 and aligned
himself with the Social Democratic Party in 1898. He was astute
enough to choose the Bolsheviks rather than the Mensheviks when
the Party split in 1903. His first contact with revolutionary
bigwigs came when he attended a Party powwow in Vienna. Leon
Trotsky noticed him in passing; Nikolai Lenin, who had first met
him in 1905 in Finland, set him to work writing an article on the
Marxist theory of governing minorities. It was in signing this
article that he first used the signature "J. Stalin." "We have
here a wonderful Georgian," Lenin wrote of Stalin at that time.
Thereafter the "wonderful Georgian" was to be the Party's
recognized expert on the 174 different peoples that made up
Soviet Russia.

     One of Lenin's favorite ideas was that if 130,000 landlords
could rule Tsarist Russia, 240,000 determined revolutionists
could rule a Soviet Russia. Lenin's efforts before the revolution
were to build up a professional revolutionary machine experienced
in organizing workers and able to dodge the police. Almost all
the big revolutionists of necessity lived abroad; Stalin and
Molotov were the only two who were able to brag in later years
that they stuck it out for the most part inside. At World War I's
start Stalin was in a prison camp just below the Arctic Circle.
He got out when a general amnesty was proclaimed at the Tsar's
abdication in 1917.

     In the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, he was a
relatively unimportant member of the Party's steering committee
whose greatest service had been as exiled Lenin's go-between with
colleagues in the 1913 Duma and as an assistant on the Petrograd
Pravda. In numerous reorganizations of the governing structure
which took place after the Bolsheviks came to power, Comrade
Stalin always had a high post, but his work was also invariably
overshadowed by the spectacular showings of Lenin, the Party's
chairman, and Trotsky, the War Commissar.

     Since J. Stalin became the supreme power in Russia, much of
the Revolution's history has been rewritten to magnify his part
in those stirring events. Trotsky's part has been completely
erased from Soviet textbooks. Meanwhile, Stalinists claim that
their hero:

     -- Fought off the White Russian forces in Siberia.

     -- Defended Petrograd against White General Nikolai Yudenich
in 1918.

     -- Saved the Donets coal-mining region from General Anton
Denikin's forces.

     -- Was responsible for early Russian successes in the Polish
War of 1920.

     -- Saved Tsaritsin (now called Stalingrad) from capture in
1918.

     At Tsaritsin there began one of the bitterest political
enmities of modern times -- the Stalin-Trotsky feud. Trotsky
claimed that Stalin, a political commissar at that time, was
insubordinate. He demanded and got from Lenin an order recalling
him. Thereafter, Comrade Stalin patiently and calculatingly
nursed his grudge against Comrade Trotsky.

     In 1922 Trotsky was offered the post of Secretary General of
the Central Committee of the Communist Party, but turned it down.
All except Stalin thought it was a mere routine job. Stalin
eagerly grabbed it. Stalin saw in it the chance to become
something resembling a Soviet Boss Tweed. The Communist Party was
growing by leaps & bounds. Comrade Stalin appointed the new
secretaries of the expanding organization. Comrade Stalin could
not directly punish a recalcitrant secretary, but one who showed
too much independence could easily be shifted, without
explanation, from a nice post in, say, the Crimea, to a cold
outpost in Archangel. By the time of Lenin's death in 1924
Stalinist bureaucracy was already in the saddle.

     Probably the most debated point in post-war Soviet history
was the "last testament" supposedly left by Lenin. Most salient
point in the alleged document was a proposal to get rid of Stalin
"because he is too crude." Stalinists have long denied its
genuineness; best Trotskyist argument is that Stalin once quoted
it and that Stalin once admitted: "Yes, I am rough, rough on
those who roughly and faithlessly try to destroy the Communist
Party."

     At any rate, Lenin's proposal could scarcely be carried out
against Stalin's strong organization. During this and the
subsequent crucial period the chief members of the Political
Bureau of the Central Committee, the Party's ruling body, were
Stalin, Trotsky, Grigori Zinoviev, Leo Kamenev, Alexei Rykov,
Nikolai Bukharin, Mikhail Tomsky -- seven little bottles hanging
on the wall. In 1928 Trotsky was exiled from the U.S.S.R., in
1936 Zinoviev and Kamenev were tried for treason, found guilty,
shot. Tomsky attended the trial, committed suicide. In 1938 Rykov
and Bukharin went before the firing squad.

     In twelve years of Stalin absolutism the world has had many
conflicting reports of how Socialism in Russia got along. There
were accounts of big dams built, large factories going up,
widespread industrialization, big collective-farming projects.
Five-Year plans were announced. Free schools and hospitals were
erected everywhere. Illiteracy was on the way to being wiped out.
There was no persecution of minorities as such. A universal
eight-hour and then a seven-hour day prevailed. There were free
hospitalization, free workers' summer colonies, etc.

     To be sure, the collectivization program in the Ukraine
resulted in a famine which cost not less than 3,000,000 lives in
1932. It was a Stalin-made famine. The number of wrecks and
industrial accidents became prodigious. Soviet officials laid it
to sabotage. More likely they were due more to too rapid
industrialization. Millions in penal colonies were forced into
slave labor.

     Moreover, Russian officialdom began to experience a terror
which continues to this day. For the murder of Stalin's "Dear
Friend," Sergei M. Kirov, head of the Leningrad Soviet, who had
once called Comrade Stalin the "greatest leader of all times and
all nations," 117 persons were known to have been put to death.
That started the fiercest empire-wide purge of modern times.
Thousands were executed with only a ghost of a trial. Secret
police reigned as ruthlessly over Russia as in Tsarist times.
First it was the Cheka, next the OGPU, later the N.K.V.D. -- but
essentially they were all the same. Comrade Stalin recognized
their function when, one day, he viewed that part of the walls of
the Kremlin from which Tsar Ivan IV watched his enemies executed,
was reported as saying: "Ivan the Terrible was right. You cannot
rule Russia without a secret police."

     After his death Lenin was sanctified by Stalin. Joseph
Stalin has gone a long way toward deifying himself while alive.
No flattery is too transparent, no compliment too broad for him.
He became the fountain of all Socialist wisdom, the
uncontradictable interpreter of the Marxist gospel. His dry
doctrinal history of the Communist Party is a best-seller in
Russia, just as Hitler's turgid but more interesting Mein Kampf
outsells all secular volumes in Germany. He goes in for Nazi-like
plebiscites. Hitler won his 1938 election by 99.08% of the
voters; Stalin polls 115% in his own Moscow bailiwick. Stalin's
photograph became the icon of the new State, whose religion is
Communism.

     But Joseph Stalin is not given to oratorical pyrotechnics.
Only two or three times a year does he appear on the parapet of
Lenin's tomb in Red Square, wearing his flat military cap, his
military tunic, his high Russian boots. He attends Party meetings
but rarely public gatherings. He has made only one radio speech
and is not likely to make many more. His thick Georgian accent
sounds strange to Russia.

     Three Rooms. His life is mostly spent inside the foreboding
walls of that collection of churches, palaces and barracks in
Moscow called the Kremlin. His office is large and plain,
decorated only by the pictures of Marx and Engels and a death
mask in white plaster of Lenin. His private apartment, once the
dwelling of the Kremlin's military commander, is only three rooms
big.

     Joseph Stalin has been married twice: first, in 1903, to a
Georgian girl named Ekaterina Svanidze, who died in 1907, and
then to Nadya Sergeievna Alleluieva, who died in 1932. By his
first wife he had a son, Yasha Djugashvili, now in his thirties,
and obscure engineer in Moscow. Father and son do not hit it off.
By Mrs. Stalin No. 2 he had a son and daughter: Vasya, now 19,
and Svetlana, 14. Good-looking Daughter Svetlana is the apple of
her father's eye. The two children go to school, but live in the
Kremlin. Joseph's cackling, gossipy mother, old Ekaterina
Georguvna Djugashvili, whom Soviet and foreign journalists used
to dote on interviewing, died in Tiflis in 1937. She had for
several years lived in an apartment in the former palace of the
Tsar's Georgian viceroy.

     Novelist Maxim Gorky was a good friend of Stalin, but
perhaps his dearest friends were Commissar for Heavy Industry
Grigori Konstantinovich Ordjonkidze and Soviet Executive,
Committee Secretary Avel Yenukidze. Ordjonkidze died "of a heart
attack," Yenukidze before a firing squad. Defense Commissar
Voroshilov has enjoyed the master's friendship and lived longer
than anybody. Best pal of late years is said to be Leningrad
Party Boss Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov, regarded as Stalin's
heir. Last week rumors flew thick & fast that Comrade Zhdanov was
on the skids. His birthday testimonial to Stalin failed to see
the light of print.

     Few foreigners have met Stalin, none has come to know him
well. He has been interviewed by U.S. Newsmen Walter Duranty,
Eugene Lyons, Roy Wilson Howard. Author Emil Ludwig and Professor
Jerome Davis each once had long, serious sessions with him.
Playwright George Bernard Shaw and his friend, Lady Astor, went
on a lark to Moscow and saw him, too. "When are you going to stop
killing people?" asked the impertinent Lady Astor. "When it is no
longer necessary," answered Comrade Stalin.

     Despite the disastrous purges, despite the low opinion that
J. Stalin & Co. held of human life, Soviet Russia had definitely
gained some measure of respect for its apparent righteousness in
foreign affairs. It had supported against reactionary attacks
popular Governments in Hungary, Austria, China, Spain. But last
year, in three short months, the Man of 1939 found it expedient
to toss that reputation out of his Kremlin window.

     For long Russians have been obsessed with the nightmare of a
combination of capitalist nations that would turn against her.
Perhaps it was this haunting fear, rather than any innate
sympathy for the Nazis, that led Tovarish Stalin to take measures
to insure the Soviet Union against easy attack. He was not astute
enough to see that such measures as he has taken in Finland were
more likely than ever to unite the world against him.

     Once in a plea for greater industrial, and hence military
power, Joseph Stalin said: "Old Russia was continually beaten
because of backwardness. It was beaten by the Mongol khans. It
was beaten by Turkish beys. It was beaten by Swedish feudal
landlords. . . . It was beaten because of military backwardness,
cultural backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural
backwardness. . . . That is why we cannot be backward any more."
Last week, as the news of a Russian rout in upper Finland was
broadcast, it began to look as if, temporarily at least, Soviet
Russian efficiency was not essentially better than that of Old
Russia. It began to appear as though Finnish democrats could be
added, temporarily at least, to the Man of 1939's list of those
who had laid the Russian bear by the heels. And that the Man of
1939 was making a very poor start on 1940.