A NEED FOR PERESTROIKA OF THE SOUL

Pyotr Patrushev

 Pyotr Patrushev Is A Sydney-Based Writer And Translator And A Commentator On Soviet Affairs.

The whole of history is about sacrifice. No-one remembers victims. People only remember victors.

- Stalin in Rybakov's latest novel, 1935 And Other Years.

TRUE, no-one knows for sure the number of Stalin's victims. If we count the unnecessary losses during the war, the number could be as high as twice the present population of Australia. Internal genocide on this scale is unparalleled in modern history. We have to go back to the Aztec empire's mass sacrificial rites to find anything even remotely approaching the Russian scale.

We know what happened to the Aztec empire. As for the Soviet Union, it is only now that the full extent of the carnage and its implications for the national conscience are being assessed. The "Waking Giant" is waking from a giant psychological nightmare that lasted almost three quarters of a century.

It may be that the results of Mr Gorbachev's perestroika and indeed the future of the Soviet Union as a world power will be largely determined not so much by the economic, political or legal reforms, essential as these are, but by the the extent and thoroughness of the psychological restructuring that will be needed to incorporate the horrifying abuses of the past into the consciousness of the nation.

One cannot accomplish much in economics or politics if one is dealing with a nation of drunks whose spiritual backbone has been broken. One cannot live by glasnost alone. And certainly, one cannot create computer software or even potatoes out of ideological discussions.

The Soviets realise this. Reports are emerging about exhumations of mass graves in various republics. The skulls, both children's and adults, their meagre belongings, the sizes of the holes in their craniums blown out by bullets, are being neatly catalogued. It is being noted that victims were often lined in a row along the side of the mass graves and shot with one bullet, where possible, to save ammunition.

These are the first rumblings of the massive grief and anger, suppressed by the people for decades. There are calls for a legal reform which would waive the statute of limitations in relation to those of Stalin's henchmen who are still alive.

It is not an easy task to understand and explain the extent of Stalin's carnage. Calling Stalin a paranoid schizophrenic, as has been done recently, also resolves very little. If so, then a substantial part of the Soviet population was, for almost 30 years, in the grip of some strange mental derangement.

Recently, a number of books and articles have appeared which probe the problem deeply. There is the talk of the "father syndrome", from which Russia suffered under Stalin, and to which some are still nostalgically attached. There are the first voices, such as that of the writer Yuri Dombrovsky, which look at the emergence of three distinct breeds among the Soviet population: the Informer, the Executioner and the Victim; the "unholy trinity" which fed hundreds of Stalin's camps with human fodder. If we pull this recent and some older information about the nature of Stalin's period together, the following picture emerges.

A number of historians agree that most revolutions pass through the following stages: 1. Social frictions in the society and the erosion of existing authority; 2. Seizure of power by one of the revolutionary groups; 3. Brief period of flirtation with the previously held utopian ideals which are quickly eroded by practical demands; 4. Split between the radical and moderate factions of the new leadership; 5. Seizure of power by the radicals and the ensuing terror; 6. A virtual recreation of the old order, but with a new ruler and a greater and more efficient mechanism of repression.

The peculiarity of the Russian revolution of 1917, compared for example to the French and the English revolutions, all of which roughly correspond to the above formula, lies in the particular vehemence with which the old order was destroyed and the new created, and the personal psychological tendencies of the two supreme leaders that the Soviet Union inherited after the revolution -namely, Lenin and Stalin.

Both had little emotional contact with their fathers. Lenin's father was an aloof, strict and emotionally sterile schoolmaster. Stalin's father was a drunk and a weakling who nonetheless intimidated and punished Stalin. Of course, neither Lenin nor Stalin ever acknowledged the source of his rebelliousness. Yet, Lenin was almost possessed by regicidal fantasies, while Stalin could never submit himself to any authority at all, not even that of God (he was a failed seminarian).

Some psychological authorities speak of fanatical leaders of the ilk of Stalin or Hitler as the "garbage collectors of the collective unconscious". The removal and the subsequent murder of Tsar Nicholas and his family by Lenin and his associates represented a profound shift for the Russian psyche which always regarded the Tsar as God's representative on Earth.

During the following 50 years, Russia had to pay dearly for this departure. For it still could not shake off its spiritual and psychological dependence on a strong paternal authority. Vladimir Lenin was a childless, humourless, asexual and obsessional individual who was good at chess and party politics. Soon after the revolution, he became increasingly exasperated by the creeping of the old order into the new and was finally removed by a bullet fired by a woman.

Stalin was a vengeful and ruthless manipulator and a psychopath whose immense insecurities about his height, intelligence and appearance were more than compensated for by an unquenchable thirst for power. His party nickname, Koba, came from a novel, The Patricide, by a little-known Georgian writer Kazbegi. He also used to identify psychologically with the pretender to the Russian throne, Grishka Otrepyev. His heroes were highwaymen and people like Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, both of whom, by omission or commission, killed their sons.

Similarly, Stalin deserted his firstborn son Yakov when he was captured by the Germans. His second son became a hopeless alcoholic. He largely ignored his daughter Svetlana and destroyed the lives of his two wives. Such were the men that were supposed to lead the USSR to its goal of being a workers'paradise on earth. It could be said that if Lenin seduced Mother Russia with his utopian promises of peace, bread and land for everyone, Stalin had methodically proceeded to rape her.

As Stalin's greatest gift lay in projecting his own impulses on to others, he first had to rid Russia of exactly the people who responded to Lenin's, and his own, siren call: the idealists, the rebels, and the young who were good at dismantling authority but not very good at consolidating a dictatorship.

The irony of it is that the closer the new pretender came to the throne and to the title of Father of the Nation, the more insecure he became. Deep down, he knew he was only a false pretender and that the only way he could maintain his power was through eliminating all possible rivals who might possess better claim to the title - which meant virtually everyone.

The purges and the denunciations that ensued could only be compared to Dante's Inferno in their grotesque and senseless brutality and violence. Stalin, who in theory did not like the laws of genetics, embarked on a systematic process of "unnatural selection", allowing the survival only of those who represented no threat to him - the cowards, the sycophants, the sadists, and the careerists whom he could set one against the other. The "top dog" determined which breeds were going to survive and thrive under him.

And thrive they did. While ordinary people chafed under incredible poverty and hard toil, the new elite built themselves dachas on the Black Sea coast and elsewhere and created a network of privileges which would put the Tsar and his boyars to shame.

Yet such was the power of even a pseudo-father figure, and such is the need in most people to maintain an illusion of normalcy in their lives, that many people still believed in the benign nature of their leader, blaming his henchmen for the abuses (of course, Stalin cunningly cultivated this notion). Even the West was largely deceived by the genial Uncle Joe. To justify a reality which was becoming increasingly absurd, a whole topsy-turvy school of psychiatry was conveniently created which proceeded to brand, and to put away into mental institutions, anyone who dared to question the status quo.

For Stalin, death, and only death, was the ultimate arbiter. He could not sleep well until he was sure that all those who could oppose him - and there were more and more of them as his mind slipped finally into a truly clinical paranoia - were physically eliminated.

In the meantime, Stalin's heirs entrenched themselves at every level of government, industry and the party, so that even Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in his secret speech in 1956 did little to uproot them.

Seventy-one years after the October Revolution there are five times as many alcoholics in the USSR as there are soldiers, its production of tractors is 6.5 times greater than that of the US, while its production of paper is five times less. Profound disillusionment with the system, shortage of information and excesses of planning have one common cause: an ignorant and mediocre class of pseudo-managers whose only concerns were and are political orthodoxy and survival. Poisoned rivers, polluted seas and eroded soil were only a natural extension of the economy whose primary task was to keep in power a bunch of incompetent and corrupt yes-men.

For Mr Gorbachev or anyone else, rooting out the yes-men and their descendants is not going to be easy. In Rybakov's best-selling novel about the early years of Stalin's reign, there is a telling passage. When an old row of food shops in the centre of Moscow was being demolished to make way for a new housing development, huge and well-fed rats emerged from underground recesses and ran for cover, invading even a nearby luxury hotel. The hotel had to be closed down for a while to allow the rats to be exterminated.

Well, the new Russia cannot afford to close its hotel down, even briefly, and it can also no longer afford simply to destroy rats, even rats that have fattened themselves on human blood. To cope with this dilemma and to regenerate the energy and the vitality of the exhausted and largely cynical Russian masses, Mr Gorbachev and his supporters will have to respond to the deeply felt need for psychological and spiritual renewal without which all their other reforms may remain but a pipe dream.

Editor: Pyotr Patrushev’s books and articles can be found on his website, www.russiantranslate.org

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