RUSSIA: Stalin’s Areopagus

Russians pored last week over No. 8 of the magazine Bolshevik, absorbed like eager sponges what Josef Stalin said to German biographer Emil Ludwig (TIME, Jan. 4). Shrewd. Dr. Ludwig has been trying to save most of this conversation for a prospective biography of Stalin. Excerpts from Bolshevik No. 8:

Q.: Do you admit a parallel between yourself and Peter the Great?

Stalin: Not in the least. Historical parallels are always risky. This one is senseless.

Q.: But Peter the Great accomplished much for the development of his country, to bring western culture to Russia.

Stalin: Certainly, Peter the Great did much … to create and strengthen a national government of landlords and traders … at the cost of the serf, the peasantry, who were thrice skinned.

As for me. I am only a follower of Lenin and my aim is to be a follower worthy of him. I devote my life to the elevation of quite a different class—the working class. . . .

As for Lenin and Peter the Great the latter was a drop in the sea, while Lenin was a whole ocean.

Q.: At the table where we sit, there are 16 chairs. They say abroad on the one hand that the Soviet Union is a land ruled by committees and on the other, that everything is decided by an individual. Now which is it?

Stalin: No, it can’t be decided by an individual. . . . From the experience of three revolutions we know that of 100 decisions, not tested and corrected collectively, 90 will be one-sided. … In this Areopagus* is concentrated the wisdom of our Party. . . . Never, under any conditions, would our workers now endure the rule of one person.

Q.: It seems to me that … to a certain extent the stability of the Soviet power rests on … fear. I should like to know what your own inner reactions are when you know that in the interests of strengthening power it is necessary to instill fear. . . .

Stalin: Of course, there is a certain not very large section of the population which really fears the Soviet power and fights against it. I have in mind the remnants of the dying classes now being liquidated [wiped out] and above all a negligible part of the peasantry—the kulaks. . . . But if you take the laboring population of the Soviet Union, the workers and the toiling peasants, who represent not less than 90% of the people, they are on the side of the Soviet power and the overwhelming majority of them actively support it. And they support the Soviet power because it serves the basic interests of the workers and the peasants. In this lies the ground of the stability of the Soviet power, and not in any so-called policy of terrorizing.

Q.: I observe in the Soviet Union . . . a worship of everything American—that is to say of the land of the dollar, the most consistent capitalist country. . . . How do you explain this?

Stalin: You exaggerate. We have no special respect for everything American. But we respect American efficiency m everything—in industry, in technique, in literature, in life. . . . Among the Americans there are many sound persons physically and mentally, sound in their approach to work, to action. … In spite of the fact that America is a highly advanced capitalist land, the customs of industry, the habits of production contain something of democracy, which you cannot say of the old European capitalist lands, where the arrogant spirit of feudal aristocracy still survives.

*Areopagus: the hill on which in early Athenian times sat a council with supreme executive and judicial power.