DICTATOR OF DICTATORS

Taranaki Daily News, 13 October 1928, Page 9

DICTATOR OF DICTATORS

STALIN’S CONTROL OF SIVIET, STALIN’S CONTROL OF SOVIET. Of the group of Bolshevist leaders who in the past ten years have been recasting government and civilisation in the former empire of the Tsars, Lenin captured the heart of Russian people: Trotsky lived in its imagination, and a certain sentimentality has, for some time,' been weaving itself about the name of the late Felix Djerjinsky, as the man “with the soul of a saint,” who shouldered the burden of the Red Terror because no one else offered himself for the repugnant task. Joseph Stalin, the man of the hour in the Soviet Union to-day, in spite of recent efforts to popularise him, has failed completely to stir the emotions of the Russian masses. It is conceded in Moscow that Stalin is to-day the virtual ruler of the Soviet Union, a sort of “dictator over the Bolshevist dictatorship.” He has trusted subordinates and faithful lieutenants. His ideas have their adherents, his policies their partisans. But in the whole of Moscow there are not three persons who can be called friends of Stalin. IDs name is seldom off the editorial pages of the Communist Press, but it never figures in the popular songs and ballads about the revolution and its leaders, which float from one end of Russia to the other. Stalin is a lonely figure, but his loneliness is not of other people’s making. It is rather the consequence of his own temperament, character and bringing up. In one of his eulogies of Lenin, Stalin characterised the dead leader as a “mountain eagle.” The characterisation applies much more aptly to Stalin himself. Something of ” the self-sufficiency, remoteness and isolation of the Caucasian Mountains, in whose midst he was raised, have penetrated Stalin’s character. The eagle was the bird with which he was most familiar as a child, and eagles fly singly, not in flocks. While Lenin lived there was a saying, “Lenin trusts Stalin, but Stalin trusts no one.” The saying is true to-day. Stalin keeps his own counsel. DETERMINED GENIUS. But if Russia has in Stalin no poetic material worthy of the name, it does have in the General Secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, which is the post and title Stalin has created for himself, its first Communist politician of both genius and determination. In a country which is obsessed with dreams and talkativeness, this is a rarity, and it is not unlikely that the personality of Stalin, which is such a total loss to legend and saga, may prove extremely interesting to the historian. Stalin is a political “boss.” The mantle of Lenin did not fall upon his shoulders. He acquired it by playing skilfully the game of politics within the Communist Party, by manipulating votes, men and jobs. He knows how to pack a convention, to steamroller a rival, to scatter opposition. His thought is pragmatic; his speech mathematical. Oratorical flourishes, pathos and irony are alike foreign to him. Language is there to achieve practical end; the fewer words used in the process the better. Two things have combined to bring Stalin to the fore as the dominant personality of the Soviet Government, though holding no official position in that Government. One is his complete control of the Communist Party machinery all over the Soviet Union. The other is the iron hand with which he has kept down the opposition forces within that party which, since the death of Lenin, have continually been breaking to the surface. A QUARREL. Reduced to simplest terms, the contention of the opposition in the Communist Party is that the Soviet State is not developing sufficiently in the direction of Socialism. This is the theoretic principle of the quarrel between the two factions. Personalities, however, play no small part in it. It is a war of leaders as well as of ideas, While Stalin is a “boss” and a “politician,” he is not a man without a programme. Stalin’s political and economic ideas are tending more in the direction of Russian nationalists rather than Socialist international policies. He has on several occasions recently outlined his views with regard to the Soviet’s national and internatiom.l policies. A further word about the mam and his career is essential to the proper estimate and understanding of these views. While Stalin is “aloof,” “autocratic,” he is neither an interloper nor a parvenu in the Russian revolution. Of the twelve men who on the night of October 23, 1917, foregathered in Petrograd and decided on the overthrow of the Kerensky Government by armed force, setting November 7 as the date for the coup d’etat, Stalin was one. He was one of the men who from the first shared Lenin’s views as to the proper course for the Russian revolution to take. He joined the Lenin faction of the Russian Social Democracy, the Bolshevist faction, when that came to life at the congresses of Russian Socialists in Stockholm in 1906 and in London in 1907, both of which Stalin attended.

dimensions do not, as a rule, plough up the earth to anything like that extent. It is, however, a matter of evidence, and we must wait for confirmation or correction. NATIONAL TRAINING. . These visits abroad, of brief duration each time, incidentally, are the only contact Stalin has Had with the western world. His training, too, has been strictly national. His father was a peasant shoemaker. His mother was a woman of strong religious instincts. It was her will that prevailed in the matter of educating Joseph, as he was called in his native Georgian dialect. He was sent to a theological seminary. At the ago .f 19 the seminary sent him out into the world, not a candidate for the priesthood, but as a full-fledged revolutionary. From 1898 until the outbreak of the revolution, Joseph Stalin knew no' other life than that of a proscribed and wandering agitator, organiser and pamphleteer in the interest of the revolutionary cause in Russia. While maintaining an iron discipline and dictatorship within the Communist Party proper, Stalin, believes in making the dictatorship felt as little as possible among the peasantry. That is the cornerstone of his agrarian policy. It was in accord with Stalin’s orders that local, or village, Communists were told to do less bossing and dictating to the peasants. If the peasants choose to elect to their village Soviet men who are not Communist Party members, but who understood and uphold the Soviet order, he is not disposed with it. In the same manner Stalin believes in giving concessions to the peasants even if these concessions make “little capitalists” of them. His slogan is that the country must get wealthier. He would attend to the socialisation of the peasant through the medium of co-operative agencies rather than by meddling with the little personal property which he accumulates. The middle-class peasant who is fairly well off in the eyes of Stalin is not a menace to whatever progress Socialism is attempting to make in Russia. His well-being is still of such proportions that it cannot be called capitalism, even embryonic capitalism, Stalin thinks. “SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY.” With regard to industry, Stalin is sure of one thing. The industries are in the hands of the Government. That is sufficient unto the day. The line between State capitalism and State Socialism is too indistinct to worry over. When industry becomes stronger it will be possible to inject a little more Socialist dye into its colouring. The Government, Stalin declares, is sufficient strong to control or check any “unhealthy” progress that private capital might make in Russia. The Soviet Government, he asserts, must be vigilant, but not alarmed. On the subject of foreign debts Stalin is explicit. “We cannot change,” he says, “the well-known law of our country, passed in. 1918, about the annulment of the debts of the Tsar’s Government. We continue to abide by this law. But we are not disinclined to make certain exceptions in the case of former owners whose property in Russia had been nationalised by the Soviet Government.”