In Hollander’s Intellectuals, the chapter begins with countless numbers of praises towards Stalin. Yet, given our current understanding of him and the Soviet Union under his rule, Stalin was a person “foreign to the very experience of love, without pity or mercy” and had an insatiable thirst for power. The praises all come from intellectuals, both western and within the Soviet Union, during Stalin’s time.
Hollander claims that the two general reasoning behind western intellectuals’ worshiping of Stalin and other dictators are:
- Western intellectuals tend to have a “profound ignorance of the personalities, policies, and intentions” of them (p.120).
- Western intellectuals had both the tendency and capacity to project qualities that they themselves value to others that they “were disposed to admire” (p.120).
While Hollander claims that these intellectuals admired cruel dictators like Stalin because of their ignorance of the dictator’s actual personality, I feel that there could be another huge reason behind this, giving the intellectuals the benefit of the doubt on their intellectual abilities. A possible explanation is that the dictators were able to control the flow of information out of the country. In an age without the internet, the only way that these western intellectuals could know about the reality under the ruling of the dictator was through other people’s reports or visiting the dictator’s nation. In both scenarios, they could be presented with false information, but they would have no way of verifying this information. Even when one visited the USSR, he or she would not ever see the whole reality. From my understanding, this really shows how powerful it is to have control over the media. Even in the modern day, with fact checks, we see so many people believing “fake news.” But, ultimately, philosophically speaking, how does one really know if what he knows is true? This again gets to an idea that came up during my conversation with Prof. Riley – under the Marxist view, the concept of truth is seen as a tool that the ruling class use to suppress and exploit the proletariats. Then, maybe psychologically, since one can never be sure of the truth, or a truth, one is inclined to believe in what one wishes to be the truth. This reasoning is present in Hollander’s chapter, and also we can see this is today’s social media – echo chambers, as some call them.
As for Duranty, I feel that he is quite hypocritical: he seemed to really “believed in the cause,” but he personally lived in Russia as a privileged individual. This is quite ironic to see that so many – the vast majority of people – are still being ripped off by the ruling class, under the name “socialism”; the goal to fully achieve socialism was to free every man so that we can all live under better conditions, yet in these actual implementations of socialism in USSR, femine and aristocracy showed that the Soviet socialism is no better than capitalism.
In reflection to the intellectuals praises of Stalin, I feel it is probably very hard to really know what really prompted these intellectuals to, whether intentionally or not, ignore the reality that they may or may not have seen. In Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, one conclusion is that people behave quite differently while in crowds. The moment one defines them as part of a popular group, they could act very differently than when they are alone. I suspect that this is also part of human nature: a revolutionary feature that might benefit the survival of humans as a species by enabling us to have this special “group” mindset. And, thus, when people are really in situations similar to that of the USSR under Stalin, they might be doing things they don’t expect themselves to do.
Furthermore, the admiration of Stalin by western intellectuals may also be influenced by their own political beliefs and ideologies. Many of these intellectuals were likely sympathetic to the Marxist ideology, and thus saw Stalin as a leader who was implementing their ideals on a national level. This may have led them to overlook or dismiss reports of human rights abuses and other atrocities committed by Stalin’s regime, and to view Stalin as a hero and leader of the Marxist cause.
Additionally, it is worth considering the role of propaganda and manipulation in shaping the perceptions of western intellectuals towards Stalin. Stalin’s regime was highly skilled at using propaganda and censorship to control the flow of information within the country and to the outside world. This allowed the regime to present a highly sanitized and idealized version of life in the Soviet Union, and to suppress any information that did not align with this narrative. As a result, western intellectuals who visited the Soviet Union or relied on reports from the regime were likely to be presented with a distorted view of reality.
In conclusion, the admiration of Stalin by western intellectuals may be driven by a combination of factors, including ignorance of his true nature, idealization of communist ideology, and the effects of propaganda and manipulation. These factors may have led these intellectuals to overlook or dismiss reports of human rights abuses and other atrocities committed by Stalin’s regime, and to view him as a hero and leader of the Marxist cause. But among these factors, the most important one might be that these intellectuals themselves are willing to believe that Communism will succeed.
One reply on “Week 6 Blog”
I completely agree with what you are saying in terms of how important it is to have control over the media because, especially back in those days when there was no internet, it is easy to manipulate how people think about certain things and people through propaganda. What confuses me is why all of the intellectuals who admired Stalin did not have the preconceived notion that he was more cruel than what they experienced based on how Stalin was presented in the media. In class we learned that the media made Stalin seem like more of a dictator then he really was by making look like this powerful figure that everyone was afraid of. The example we saw in class was the book cover that professor Riley showed us of him standing on a mountain gazing into the distance. You would think that certain people would be hesitant to approach him based on this but it did not seem like the case for the intellectuals in the Paul Hollander reading. This could be because a lot of them were French communists themselves. The point you make about visitors not seeing the full reality probably plays a significant part in the intellectuals experience as well. Stalin and his camp seemed to have done a good job masking the reality of what was going on based on the responses the intellectuals gave about his character and their experience while visiting. This also shows how little of a voice citizens had at this time because you would think that rumors would spread but there was simply no platform for this and they were probably too afraid to publicly say things about Stalin because that would jeopardize their own safety.