Published in 1953, The Captive Mind came soon after poet Miłosz (A future Nobel Prize Winner) fled from his native Poland. Milosz wrote it as early as 1952, showing eye-popping penetration into the misery implicit in all that the whole of Russia and Eastern Europe suffered.
It should be compulsory reading for anyone who thinks they might understand the politics of communism without reading it. This book is a towering indictment of the world behind the Iron Curtain and a must for anyone interested in extremism, totalitarianism, or anyone foolish enough to think communism is a pretty neat idea.
Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, known to history simply as 'Stalin', was an obscure and mostly despised member of the Bolshevik movement, a similarly obscure and despised sub-faction of the German-directed international Social Democratic Party going back to the late 19th century. The leader (more or less) of the Bolshevik faction had long been Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, a second son of a minor bureaucrat in the Tsarist regime whose elder brother had been executed as a radical who had conspired in a plot to assassinate a prior Tsar. His name to history became 'Lenin.'
Lenin hated Stalin, and all he stood for. By my reading of Bolshevik history, so did everyone else in Lenin's faction, for many years. Stalin was regarded as no true believer in Marxist political or economic theory, a self-serving autocrat whose only real motivation was power for power's own sake, an opportunist whose chief contribution to the party prior to 1917 had been to rob banks around the old Russian empire to raise money for the party. What made Comrade Stalin unique among his revolutionist peers was his academic training, not in politics or government but rather as a failed seminarian, once pursuing a position in the priesthood of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Long story shortened, when Lenin died of a stroke a few years after the revolutions of 1917 after having seen the new communist regime successfully through a massive and catastrophic civil war which had amounted to another world war following WWI, he left behind a seemingly insoluble vacuum of power in the party.
Socialists, for anyone who ever met a few, are people who despise and distrust each other far more than they do their avowed enemies of the aristocracy or capitalism. While various players in the party maneuvered and manipulated to try and rise to the top, Stalin was hatching various schemes based purely on his own malevolent gossip among them, to get them all fighting against each other, while increasingly volunteering for various posts and positions no one else wanted to take up, until within a few years he was in charge of everything, and everyone else realized they had to serve him whether they liked it or not.
Stalin knew that what he needed to sustain his own newfound and increasingly absolute powers by the late 1920s, was not for the party faithful to come to believe in him as its leader, but rather for the 'masses' to regard communism itself as the new religion, in some of the most deeply devout religious civilizations in all Christendom going back centuries, with him not just as its high priest but as its actual God.
It worked. By the time Germany invaded Russia in the summer of 1941, Stalin's position as national godhead was well in place. It had been his own personal fault that his own country had been invaded by the Nazi regime, because he had first signed a treaty with it in 1939 just weeks before Germany's over-running of Poland (with Soviet military aid and a Red Army occupation force capturing eastern Poland by prior agreement days later) and the subsequent outbreak of a second world war, and then allowed his own obsession with the threat to the Soviet far east by Japan to distract him so thoroughly that he simply ignored continuing intelligence reports coming to him from around the world about an obvious German intention to invade Russia. There had actually been high-ranking military, diplomatic and intelligence officials in the Soviet regime who were imprisoned and even executed for daring to suggest that Stalin's new friend Hitler was about to invade their country.
You don't dare run afoul of God. Stalin knew that. And so he became God, and the world suffered incalculably for generations after his death in 1954, for the narcissistic megalomania of one man's obsession with power for its own sake.
Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, known to history simply as 'Stalin', was an obscure and mostly despised member of the Bolshevik movement, a similarly obscure and despised sub-faction of the German-directed international Social Democratic Party going back to the late 19th century. The leader (more or less) of the Bolshevik faction had long been Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, a second son of a minor bureaucrat in the Tsarist regime whose elder brother had been executed as a radical who had conspired in a plot to assassinate a prior Tsar. His name to history became 'Lenin.'
Lenin hated Stalin, and all he stood for. By my reading of Bolshevik history, so did everyone else in Lenin's faction, for many years. Stalin was regarded as no true believer in Marxist political or economic theory, a self-serving autocrat whose only real motivation was power for power's own sake, an opportunist whose chief contribution to the party prior to 1917 had been to rob banks around the old Russian empire to raise money for the party. What made Comrade Stalin unique among his revolutionist peers was his academic training, not in politics or government but rather as a failed seminarian, once pursuing a position in the priesthood of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Long story shortened, when Lenin died of a stroke a few years after the revolutions of 1917 after having seen the new communist regime successfully through a massive and catastrophic civil war which had amounted to another world war following WWI, he left behind a seemingly insoluble vacuum of power in the party.
Socialists, for anyone who ever met a few, are people who despise and distrust each other far more than they do their avowed enemies of the aristocracy or capitalism. While various players in the party maneuvered and manipulated to try and rise to the top, Stalin was hatching various schemes based purely on his own malevolent gossip among them, to get them all fighting against each other, while increasingly volunteering for various posts and positions no one else wanted to take up, until within a few years he was in charge of everything, and everyone else realized they had to serve him whether they liked it or not.
Stalin knew that what he needed to sustain his own newfound and increasingly absolute powers by the late 1920s, was not for the party faithful to come to believe in him as its leader, but rather for the 'masses' to regard communism itself as the new religion, in some of the most deeply devout religious civilizations in all Christendom going back centuries, with him not just as its high priest but as its actual God.
It worked. By the time Germany invaded Russia in the summer of 1941, Stalin's position as national godhead was well in place. It had been his own personal fault that his own country had been invaded by the Nazi regime, because he had first signed a treaty with it in 1939 just weeks before Germany's over-running of Poland (with Soviet military aid and a Red Army occupation force capturing eastern Poland by prior agreement days later) and the subsequent outbreak of a second world war, and then allowed his own obsession with the threat to the Soviet far east by Japan to distract him so thoroughly that he simply ignored continuing intelligence reports coming to him from around the world about an obvious German intention to invade Russia. There had actually been high-ranking military, diplomatic and intelligence officials in the Soviet regime who were imprisoned and even executed for daring to suggest that Stalin's new friend Hitler was about to invade their country.
You don't dare run afoul of God. Stalin knew that. And so he became God, and the world suffered incalculably for generations after his death in 1954, for the narcissistic megalomania of one man's obsession with power for its own sake.