Effective manager

Now I don’t remember, either in the 54th, or in the 55th, maybe even in the 56th (but definitely not in the 53rd: then we were not yet up to it), we have a strong tradition in the circle of friends and like-minded people: on the day of Stalin’s death, March 5, to get together to drink for the ment of his black soul, to be happy that he was not worried about it: and we could have been worried (and we could have been worried (and we could be done (and we could be done (and As it could!) And vice versa.

This tradition is holy for years, probably forty. But by the mid-90s she faded, and soon she died completely.

I remember how I explained it to myself then. Yes, of course, it turned out in part because over the years it became increasingly difficult for us to gather (old). But the main reason for the oblivion of our beautiful tradition, I thought then, is still different. The true essence of the matter, I thought, that Stalin (finally!) Really died. That is, it ceased to be a phenomenon of today's political life, has become the property of history. So it's time to forget about him.

But it turned out that I hurried.

It’s not forty, not even fifty, and sixty years have passed since his death, and I have to write about him. So, he has not yet become a political corpse.

That is, of course. But he remained a card, still - and not without some success - played in someone's (well, in whose) political game.

Yes, of course, today even those who are trying - not to resurrect, of course, (they understand that this is impossible), but at least to galvanize this corpse, even the most ragged and shameless of them, are no longer dared to call Stalin the luminaries of science, the greatest genius of all times and a brilliant commander. Now they delicately call him an effective manager .

That is, without even denying that he was the creator of the most terrible and inhuman machine to exterminate people that mankind knew, they demand to admit that he did a lot of good, for the good and to the great glory and pride of our Fatherland.

So I decided that I will not talk about Stalin's atrocities today.

I will concentrate only on this Stalinist effective management . I will try to understand what it was still and what it was ultimately reduced to, this is his effectiveness.

*** In our attitude to Stalin, to his role in the history of our country, we have passed several stages.

At first they inspired us (and we partly believed in it) that Stalin is Lenin today .

Then we were informed that Stalin did not continue Lenin’s case, but perverted him. And in our minds, another formula was established (briefly), according to which Stalin was bad, and Lenin was good (as the heroes of Roman Fazil Iskander "Sandro from Chegem" said about him: "He who wanted good, but did not have time").

But soon, digging deeper, we (in any case, the most insightful of us) came to the conclusion that the formula "Stalin is Lenin Today" was still correct. Because it means nothing more than the fact that Lenin is Stalin yesterday . That is, that Lenin, if he didn’t have time, so only turn the small island of the camp system (Solovka) created by him into an archipelago spread throughout the territory of our country.

With the greatest certainty, Solzhenitsyn formulated this:

In the USSR, it was correctly said: “Stalin is Lenin today,” and indeed: the whole Stalin era is a direct continuation of the Leninist ... No “Stalinism” never existed in theory, in practice, nor such a phenomenon, nor such an era - this concept was invented after 1956 to the left -wing thought to save the “ideals” of communism.

(Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Journalism in three volumes. Volume 1. Article and speech. Yaroslavl, 1995. P. 342–343.)

In fact, this, of course, is not so.

The state that arose in the ruins of the collapsed Russian Empire headed less than five years (in 1922 he had practically departed). Stalin - thirty years! And the true creator of this new empire was not Lenin, but he, Stalin.

Lenin wanted to build the state he created on the basis of the idea of ​​federalism: not a unitary state, but a voluntary union of free and independent republics. And in the first years of its existence, the Soviet Union carried not only imaginary, but also real features of federalism. Each republic had its own national military formations. The supreme authority of the Union (CEC) was headed by eleven (according to the number of republics then in the Union of the Republics).

Stalin broke all this. He not only abolished national military units, but even insisted on the translation of the writing of Turkic -speaking and some other nations that are part of the Union into the Russian alphabet. A kind of pyramid (hierarchy) of peoples included in the empire was created. The top of the pyramid was, of course, the Russian people - the "older brother", as it was supposed to be called. The process of turning the federation into a unitary state was thus not only completed, but even ideologically designed.

*** 1918 became fatal for many empires.

This year, which marked the end of the First World War, Austria-Hungary broke up. The empire of the Hohenzollerns disappeared from the political map of Europe. The Ottoman Empire ceased to exist. The Russian Empire fell into pieces. Finland, Poland and the Baltic lands immediately fell away from her. Ukraine and Georgia announced their independence. In the heart of Russia, on the Volga, an attempt was made to create a Muslim Tatar-Bashkir state: "Idel-Ural."

But the Russian Empire did not die. Two or three years later, it has already recovered in almost its previous borders.

By 1922 (the year of the creation of the USSR), only two of the world empires were preserved of all world empires: British - and Russian.

It so happened with the British Empire because its smart rulers at the end of the 19th century began to call it the Commonwealth. And after the end of the First World War, they began to release their colonies (some of them at that time began to be called dominions) for more and more a longer leash. So in the second half of the last century, the British Commonwealth of Nations is no longer in words, but in reality became the Commonwealth of Free and Independent States .

As for the former Russian Empire, it managed to survive (like the British, also changing the name), because when the clutch forces that ensured its integrity (faith in the sacredness of the tsarist power), Lenin and the Bolsheviks led by him found and used other clutches, thanks to which it exists for more than decades.

These new engines of the clutch were the idea of ​​the Third Rome by the idea of ​​the Third International and it was from it, from this idea, the ensuing new principle of state structure: instead of the unitary state, the Union of "Free Republics".

Stalin, unlike Lenin, initially imagined the state that he wanted to lead as an empire, and himself as a king.

Returning to the former, which had already destroyed the old empire forces of the clutch (unitary state and a faithful faith in a new form in the sacredness of the authorities: the cult of the leader), he put the first mine to them under the (and created) new empire, which sooner or later inevitably had to explode.

So it happened.

When the steel hoops, compressing the Stalinist empire and ensured its integrity, weakened, this mine exploded - and the empire broke up. The "Union for the Invaluable Republics of Free" overnight collapsed like a house of cards.

*** There was another mine that Stalin put under the empire he created and which, too - earlier or later - could not help but explode.

This second mine was the economic structure of the state he created.

It is customary to think that Trotsky was the true author of this economic structure. It was he who seemed to offer Lenin, who was a supporter of a liberal course focused on market relations, his own, tough version of restoring the country's economy destroyed by the war: continuing and strengthening the policy of military communism.

In fact, everything was exactly the opposite.

None other than Trotsky - a year before Lenin decided to do so, suggested cancel the surplus and replace it with a prodnalogue, that is, to move on to a new economic policy - NEPU.

*It became clear to me in practical work that the methods of military communism, imposed on us with the entire environment of the civil war, have exhausted themselves and that in order to rise in the economy it was necessary to introduce an element of personal interest, i.e. Restore the domestic market to one degree or another. I presented the Central Committee with a project for replacing food expansion with bread tax and introduction of trade ...

In early 1920, Lenin resolutely opposed this proposal. It was rejected in the Central Committee with eleven votes against four ... The farm was in a dead end for a whole year after that.*

There are only two ways to achieve that the collapsed economy earn. The first is a ruble, a market. And the second is power. Better to say - violent.

Trotsky was a pragmatist. He was to solve this problem not in party discussions, but in practice. And when Lenin abandoned the market path of leaving the economic impasse, he had no choice but to return to the power, “military”. And to ensure that he - if possible - worked as efficiently as possible. Hence all these new proposals: "screwing the nuts", "labor", "the nationalization of trade unions."

But while they were arguing there, whether the trade unions should remain the "school of communism" or are they still finally "nasty", the Kronstadt rebellion broke out and a wave of peasant uprisings swept around the country. And then Lenin had no choice but to return to the idea of ​​the market proposed by Trotsky a year ago.

Stalin - unlike Lenin and Trotsky - had no hesitation in solving this problem. For him, even such a question did not exist. As soon as he became the master (and he became him, having dealt with the “left” and “right” blasphemy, by 1929), he immediately headed for the “elimination of kulaks as a class” and “continuous collectivization”.

This time the choice was made final, and Stalin did not stop at any human victims. And ultimately, it was this particular choice that became the main reason for the future collapse of the empire he created.

Churchill in his book about the Second World War provides such a conversation with Stalin (August 15, 1942). “Tell me,” he asked the interlocutor, “the hardships of this war, as a pursuing policy of collectivization?” “Well, no,” Stalin answered this, “the collectivization policy was a terrible struggle.” “I thought so,” said Churchill, “because then you were not dealing with several thousand large landowners, but with millions of small people.” “With 10 million,” said Stalin, raising his hands. “It was something terrible. It lasted four years.”

Some historians consider this, supposedly Stalin himself a named figure - even in relation to all the victims of the Stalinist repressive system - exaggerated. In fact, it should be at least doubled. The Holodomor alone in Ukraine took, according to some estimates, six million human lives. But Ukraine is only a part of the country's huge, raped by Stalin.

Starting this article, I frivolously promised that I would not touch the themes of Stalin's atrocities in it, I will take it out, so to speak, for brackets. But it turned out that this is impossible.

Slave labor is unusual, in principle, it cannot be effective. And in order to ensure at least some economic efficiency of the collective farm system created by him, Stalin needed to do not to doom the death of not thousands, but millions of families, not a hundred or two hundred thousand, but six million Ukrainian “fists” and “somber” with their wives, elderly, old women and small children.

Only such an exorbitant scale of the Stalinist atrocities could ensure the "effectiveness" of Stalinist management.

The heirs of Stalin - for various reasons - could not afford it. And when (after the famous events in Novocherkassk) they realized that they were not able to continue to stir up the country's population with hunger, and began to buy bread in the West, from that moment the “great, powerful Soviet Union” was doomed to decay.

*** Outside of this article there are still many stories I have not been touched. The main one is Stalin and the war (in which we won, but not thanks to Stalin, as we were inspired, but despite him). This topic, although it is covered and developed more fully than others, is inexhaustible. But there are many other plots, well -known, but never become the subject of detailed and deep study. Here are just some of them: Stalin and Biology (Lysenkovshchina), Stalin and Music (Shostakovich), Stalin and Cybernetics (which he declared pseudoscience), Stalin and Linguistics, Stalin and Political Economy, Stalin and Architecture, Stalin and Literature.

I called only those spheres of our life and culture, for which Stalin’s personal intervention became destructive. And how many more there were that he ruined, leaving this field of activity to his students, associates and specifically in this case appointed party functionaries!

Each of these stories deserves not articles, but books. And although some of these books have already been written, the theme of "Stalin as an effective manager" is still waiting for its researchers.