Stalin as Warlord by Alfred J. Rieber

Author:Alfred J. Rieber [Rieber, Alfred J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Wars & Conflicts, World War II, General, Biography & Autobiography, Presidents & Heads of State
ISBN: 9780300269000
Google: 6niCEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2022-08-23T20:37:32+00:00

PART III

WINNING THE PEACE

CHAPTER 6

A PYRRHIC VICTORY?

The paradoxical character of Stalin’s policies during the war stems from the nature of the abrupt shifts that they represented. All the major belligerents in the conflict were obliged in one way or another to adjust the themes of their prewar public pronouncements and modify their political tactics in rallying their people. But in Stalin’s case the shifts amounted to a rehabilitation of individuals and restoration of traditions, belief systems and institutions that had been rejected or denounced as inimical to the building of socialism. To be sure, the reversals were selective. For all the mass of documentation compiled by the ubiquitous security services, and the flood of memoirs and personal testimonies of citizens and émigrés, the question remains how successful this seismic shift was in mobilizing the mass of the population. Opinions differ.1 One conclusion seems inescapable. The invasion and occupation, accompanied by extreme brutality, brought together in a common cause for the first time in the Soviet era the mass of the population and the party leadership personified by Stalin. He and his associates were able to channel the spontaneous upsurge of patriotism, resorting less than before the war to coercive means of mobilizing the population without ever giving them up. But it was enough to arouse great expectations for the postwar era, in terms of greater freedom of expression, relaxation of punitive measures to force obedience in the factory and the farm and continuation of tolerance for the Patriarchal Orthodox Church. Among foreign communists, the abolition of the Comintern, alliance with progressive forces in capitalist countries and fewer directives from the Moscow centre fostered the illusion that the Soviet model, so alien to the societies of Europe, would not be imposed upon them even when they took power. All these effects made it more difficult, paradoxically, for Stalin to reassert his control at home and within the international communist movement in order to renew the march to socialism in one country.

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