GREAT BRITAIN: Who’s Stalin?

To their evident regret, Messrs. A. & C. Black Ltd. of 4 Soho Square, London at last found it necessary to include for the first time in the 1934 British Who’s Who, published last week, the name of the Dictator of the largest nation in the World. They could not bring themselves to state who or what he is, dismissed him in three lines. Full text:

STALIN, Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili; b. Gori, Tiflis Province 1879; m. Nadejda Sergeyevna Alleluya (d. 1932), two c.

This ignored not only Comrade Stalin’s key post as General Secretary of the Communist Party which rules Russia but even his first wife by whom he had an elder son, Yasha, who has grown up to be something of a scapegrace.

To answer the question “Who’s Stalin?,” Soviet citizens, who have no Who’s Who, turn to the Small Soviet Encyclopaedia. In this they find no reference whatsoever to Stalin’s wives or children because mention of such personal trivialities is considered “bourgeois” by Bolsheviks. Instead they read 3,000 rather turgid words opening with the sentence:

STALIN (Djugashvili) Joseph Vissarionovich (born in 1879), an Old Bolshevik,* a professional revolutionist, V. I. Lenin’s nearest and most loyal pupil and comrade in arms, a prominent theorist.

The rest of the Soviet sketch of Stalin is chiefly devoted to intensive efforts to depict him, rather than Trotsky, as the No. 2 Bolshevik during Lenin’s lifetime. Twenty-three times the twinhood of Lenin & Stalin in doctrine & action is reasserted, despite the well-known “Testament of Lenin” in which the Communist Party was expressly warned by Comrade Lenin not to accept as his successor Comrade Stalin “who is too rough” but to choose “another man who in all respects differs from Stalin, namely one more patient, more logical.”

Though Trotsky, whom Stalin ousted and exiled (TIME, Aug. 22. 1927), was the creator of the Red Army and its commander in the civil war with the Whites, the Soviet Encyclopaedia misleadingly asserts: “In the period of civil war Stalin was one of the leaders of the Red Army. With his name is connected a series of brilliant victories of the Soviet Republic in the battle with counterrevolution and foreign intervention.”

In Stalin’s youth, the Red sketch remarks, he edited a Bolshevist paper named Dro (“Time”). His crimes of robbery and assassination are omitted though his arrests, exiles and escapes are listed—with significant omission of the fact that Stalin did not escape from his last exile to Siberia but was pardoned by Kerensky.

Striking, in view of Comrade Litvinoff’s promise to President Roosevelt that members of the Soviet Government would abstain from fomenting Communism in the U. S., is the Soviet Encyclopaedia’s flat statement that in 1929 Stalin flayed both the German and U. S. Communist Parties for their “rightist opportunism”—i.e. their failure to foment Communism with sufficient “leftist violence.”

“Stalin is an irreconcilable fighter” says the Soviet Encyclopaedia “for solidarity and Bolshevist policy against all opportunism and reconciliation.”

Best current account of doings in Dictator Stalin’s office is translated this month by The Living Age from the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Excerpts: “Stalin’s office . . . occupies an entire ‘Stalin’s half’ of the [sixth and top] floor [of the Party Secretariat Building] and one door only connects it with other rooms. This door opens on the room of Stalin’s private secretary. . . . There are no unexpected guests. At a prearranged time and without any waiting the visitor is ushered in. . . .

“Stalin . . . likes to attack each problem by having the relevant material from the rooms of the Secretariat and from the different People’s commissars left in his own office, where he arrives at his final decisions without assistance. He does not write down his conclusions in his own hand but dictates to the secretary who is on duty. The secretary has to enter the room without a word, write down in complete silence what Stalin says, and leave the room without saying anything. When some matter of unusual importance is under consideration Stalin walks about the room as he dictates, puffing at his pipe—an old habit that has remained with him from the time when he used to be in prison. . . .

“Since hostilities broke out in Manchuria between China and Japan, Stalin has concentrated his attention on foreign policy. Since 1930 no diplomatic step has been taken without directions from Stalin. The Dictator has been profoundly disturbed by the repeated humiliations to which Japan has subjected Russian prestige in the Far East. He certainly counts on a Japanese attack. His whole strategy is therefore directed toward creating the most favorable attitude possible toward Russia in Europe in order to be able to meet the danger of Japanese provocation with as little risk as possible.”

*Title of honor held by comrades who were members of the Party before the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905.