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TOLSTOY OR STALIN? SLAVE TO FATE OR BRAVE NEW DESTINY?
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Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was not born the terrorist and serial killer he became, but a fragile, sensitive child, with a webbed left foot, called Soso (Iosof) Dzhugashvili.
His transformation from the innocent boy, who loved flowers, poetry and music, to the progressively paranoid psychopath, took place in the school of family, neighborhood, town and country.
Such was his fate that he was born in a land steeped in violence and the tradition of serfdom, a town notorious for lawlessness and a community rife with street fighting and gang bloodshed.
Thanks to Catherine the Great, Empress of the Russian Empire from 1762 to 1796, gentry owned the peasants on their estates. Well over half of the populace was serf, receiving treatment akin to nineteenth century African slaves in the Americas.
Although officially free from serfdom since 1861, Stalin's family and countrymen had its one hundred year old abuses in blood and behavior. Lacking experience in liberty and love, many simply mimicked the familiar, voluntarily perpetuating same old slavery and savagery for generations.
Mother, attractive and resourceful, lost her previous boys and expected Soso to die too.
Father talented, but not capable of controlling his drinking or fists, was slowly destroying business and marriage and acquiring the nickname Crazy Beso.
There were whispers that the child was not his, yet fathered by some powerful man, possibly a police chief, a prosperous businessman or even a priest, men supporting mother with favors and money. Who knows why.
Little Soso did not die, but in a way he did.
It was mother who delivered the death sentence, mother who wanted him to be a priest but never saw her baby as a sacred human being, mother mixing boundless adoration and highly intrusive attention with ruthless beatings, thus never truly loving him.
When Stalin came to visit her for the last time somewhere in the 1930's he asked her why she had beaten him so often and she answered: "It did not do you any harm." "You seem to have turned out all right".
She was blissfully unaware that her one hand was destroying, what the other had been building.
Such was Soso's fate that inundated by brutality and sabotage, brutality and sabotage fell in his mind and his heart, settling firmly. He never questioned it.
The environment condemning him, was now locked inside him, deeply marking him.
Forbidden to express his sorrow, incapable of acknowledging his despair even to himself, he adopted the rationalization and turned it into ideology. Beating became education. "It did not do you any harm."
Too afraid or frail to face the past and denounce the perpetrators, he never worked mother or father out of his system, never stood on his own two feet. Forced to disconnect from his true being, he became an as-if person, taking on roles, playing games, using alias after alias, yet having nothing of his own and incapable of relating to human or divine. He had made the choice to mimic his environment lock, stock and barrel. Thus he betrayed his essence, as they had betrayed him.
Never mind priesthood, he had lost his humanity.
His graduate education consisted of robberies, stays in and escapes from imperial prisons and the savagery of exile in Siberia. It taught him double-crossing, conspiracy and gangsterism alla Cosa Nostra, the secret society in Sicily, for whom murder was its very raison d'etre, still integral to life on Sicily, still colluded with. Besides mother's rationalization, father's derangement, the sadism of teachers, the ruthless vengeance of childhood hero Koba (Koba is a leading character in the novel The Patricide by Alexander Kazbegi), he copied his god Lenin so closely that they jokingly called him Lenin's left leg. Later, as the head of state, he simply acted as a "Gangster Boss". He impersonated Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who, eight years old, was ripped away from his beloved nurse, after they killed his mother, and, then in later life, went on to kill his own son and heir in a fit of rage and he copied the policy of deportation from another Tsar he hated.
He who systematically was destroyed, went on a systematic killing binge, a nearly fifty year long avalanche of terror, purging archives, intelligentsia and artists, the Party, aristocracy and masses and many of his henchmen and blood relations. "Violence is a useful tool" "It did not do you any harm."
He chose to act on the fears of the injured little boy inside the grown man, through reversing the roles, becoming the aggressor, doing what had been done to him. As Sartre said: "A child dies of shame; a hoodlum rises up in his place; the hoodlum will be haunted by the child."
Attempting to exorcise his childhood hell, he, over and over, mindlessly acted it out, starting with the first "kill" in his twenties, then going on to the next and the next... Just like John Lennon's murderer, he transferred his past to millions of others and forced them to bear it.
The universal repetition-compulsion had gotten the best of him.
What he did not know was that this universal irresistible and unconscious urge to re-enact one's inner civil war, purify one self and thus find peace, equals to addiction. One needs forever more of the drug and one needs the drug increasingly frequent. Forever looking for the next fix, it never brings the imagined salvation, only the inevitable spiral down. Stalin's life was nothing other than a merry go round of perpetual search for peace through perpetual war. Sounds familiar?
Breaking fate and rising above the merry go round depends on awareness and recovery and Stalin applied neither. Millions were sacrificed, more than in all the wars of humankind, with a crippling fallout for coming generations to this day.
The political is steeped with very personal, no matter how massively this is denied.
When Stalin created an atmosphere of constant fear in the Kremlin Palace and his empire, he simply erected his childhood home, where his eyes filled with tears and his lips turned blue when he heard his father coming, where he begged mother to hide him. When an entire people found them selves at his mercy, he simply restored little Soso powerless when faced with the tyrants in his home. When people never knew why they were deported and exterminated, he simply resurrected his own childhood bewilderment. What did he do that justified his parent's cruel behavior?
When wives betrayed husbands and comrades send comrades to their deaths, he resurrected his betrayal at the hands of his own family. When he established the collectives and forced his people into giving up independent thinking and personal identity, he demolished spirit, just like they erased his. When they died denouncing themselves, accepting the false accusations and praising their Father-God Stalin, he resurrected little Soso denying himself, time after time, in his childhood home.
Once Stalin wrote the words "villain and prostitute. Stalin" on a letter mailed to him by one of his victims, the civil war comrade Yakir, a letter of love written just before the execution. He then circulated the letter, as if he needed affirmation for the telling words, his childhood plight.
He never realized that he did not see the person Yakir.
All he saw in Yakir was father villain and mother prostitute. Every one inevitably turned into the enemy.
Just like personal rationalization became ideology, finding peace through eliminating personal enemies became raison d'etat, in turn rallying unquestioning, colluding, enabling and murderous followers and creating state as a serial killing machine. The fact that Stalin's ashes are allowed to remain in the Kremlin to this day adds profound insult to his victim's injuries and constitutes an affront and impediment to the quest for global human rights.
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin who saw himself a revolutionary, a master and a God, never was.
All he had become was father villain and mother whore. All he had created was suffering and "an entire criminal class possessing a genealogy and tradition different from the rest of society.
Each successive crisis - the Second World War, the postwar purges - the corruption of the Brezhnev era, the disintegrtion of the USSR - reinforced and augmented the ranks of this class".
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the quintessential slave, the perpetual victim, imprisoned in his victimization of all of Russia, a puppet on the strings of his past lacerations, never belonging to himself, serf to his fate. "It did not do you any harm."
When Leo (Lev) Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a small boy, his twelve year old brother Nikolai told him and his brothers that he knew of an amazing secret and when this secret was unveiled, all sickness would vanish from the earth, everyone would be happy and all men would be brothers.
After Leo proposed to know about the secret, Nikolai explained that it was carved in a green stick and the green stick was buried on the edge in a ravine in the old Zakaz forest.
"I used to believe that there was a green stick on which words were carved that would destroy all the evil in the hearts of men…"
The story impacted Leo Tolstoy, for the rest of his extraordinary life. He asked to be buried on the spot were the enchanted stick was hidden, and devoted his existence to unearthing and following up on it's secret.
He was born in a caring, sophisticated and privileged environment and blessed with advanced awareness and a powerful intuition. Yet he was also raised into a military class and a country painfully lacking in humanity. "I was taught to judge and punish. Then I was taught to make war; that is, to resist evil men with murder."
Grandfather on mothers side, Prince Sergeyevich Volkonsky, had settled on an estate called Yasnaya Polyana, some one hundred thirty miles outside of Moscow, were he lorded over his serfs with an eye on their wellbeing. Instead of meeting out daily beatings, he instated a morning reveille, often parts of a Haydn symphony, played by eight serfs, dressed up in fine local garb.
A widower, he loved nature, books, music and rare flowers, loathed hunting and spend most of his time educating his only child Marya, who's mother, Princess Katerina Dmitrievna Trubetskoy died when she was only two years old.
When Marya, heiress to the estate Yasnaya Polyana married a Count Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy, her dowry consisted of eight hundred male peasant serfs.
They settled on the estate and four sons were born, of which Leo was the youngest. When he was eighteen months old, sister Marya came into the world.
Fate then took a turn and marked the little boy's childhood with profound loss: all his primary caretakers past on.
Mother, worn out by childbearing, fell ill shortly after the birth of Marya and died when Leo was only two years old. At age nine he lost his elegant, strong and fun loving father, and a year later they buried his beloved grandmother, who had brought him the joy of story telling from Russian folklore to the tales of Scheherazade.
When he was thirteen years old his Aunt Alexandra died and the orphan children were uprooted from Yasnaya Polyana to live with Aunt Pelageya in Kazan, which meant they had to leave Aunt Toinette behind, who had stepped in for mother and grandmother, loved the children as they were her own, and of whom Leo said: "Her chief influence upon me was, from childhood, to make me feel the spiritual joy of loving and to appreciate a withdrawn and quiet life."
No wonder Tolstoy suffered from severe bouts of depression in later life, no wonder there would always be this deep yearning for love, no wonder he was obsessed by death.
Still young, he struggled with the differences between himself and his environment, and the differences between his higher and his lower self.
When the steward of the estate told him he was going to punish a serf, he was as struck as he was when his teacher locked him up in the closet for hours, merely because he stuck out his tongue: "I wondered then whether I was too stupid to understand the reason for it or whether it was they, the adults, who were stupid."
It would have been so easy to indulge in power and excess and retreat in superficial life and complacency, like so many before him, and he did, but only for a while.
Then he questioned all of it.
"When I was young I was completely alone in my search for goodness. Every time I tried to display my innermost desire – a wish to be morally good – I met with contempt and scorn, and as soon as I gave in to base desires I was praised and encouraged.
Ambition, lust for power, self-interest, lechery, pride, anger, revenge, were all respected qualities. As I yielded to these passions I became like my elders and I felt that they were pleased with me. … I killed people in war, summoned others to duels in order to kill them, and gambled; I devoured the fruits of the peasant's labour and punished them; I fornicated and practiced deceit. … I was praised for it all and my contemporaries considered me a relatively moral man. … I began to write out of vanity, self-interest and pride. In my writings I did the same as in life. In order to achieve the fame and money for which I wrote I had to conceal what was good in myself and conceal which lent meaning to my life. And I succeeded and was praised. After the war I took up company with writers. They accepted and flattered me. … before long my attempts at improvement had been erased, nor did I know what I was teaching. Their outlook provided a theory that justified my undisciplined life.
And so I lived, abandoning myself…"
At first he had made changes through a life of action. He traveled and learned. He busied himself with running a peasant school. He traveled some more, tried to find solace in primitive life and learned some more. In the year 1861, the year of the Emancipation of the serfs, he taught the uneducated people in schools and through his writings: "… it was necessary to act in a spirit of freedom, leaving them to choose whatever path to progress they wished to take."
He worked as an Arbiter of the Peace. He married. He had thirteen children. He gave up gambling. He lived in order to give his family and himself the best possible in life.
He created epic novels with names like War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Resurrection, and many more profound writing gifts. He did his utmost to walk his talk, tried to free his serfs and did relief work during the great famine. He insisted each day, he be a better man than the day before.
He became a vegetarian, gave up hunting and tried to curb his desire for acquisition…
One day he thought: "Well fine, so you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Moliere, more famous than all the writers in the world, and so what?"
Once he was hit with this insight it became very dark for a while. Two children died.
He wanted to kill himself too, yet he managed to hang due to faith, "that particular spiritual state and force of life".
Then he decided that man's real life begins with the triumph of the inner spiritual forces over animal nature. As Rainer Maria Rilke said: "… all other is merely preparation."
His goal was very best on earth, not in the after life, not later, but in the here and now.
"The conditions of the new order of life cannot be known by us because we have to create them by our own labors. That is all that life is, to learnt the unknown, and to adapt our actions to this new knowledge."
Thus he had found the secret of breaking the chains of fate and manifesting new destiny.
Once again people could not follow him. Once again they transferred their ignorance, confusion and lack of responsibility onto Tolstoy as disdain. Once again his environment wanted him to abandon himself. He touched their comfort-zone, just like John Lennon would some hundred years later, when he grew up from the Beatles, stripped away some layers of conditioning ("buried deep where it had been planted"), abandoned some bad habits, found the secret too, and dared to imagine blissfully living for today: "if you want it."
Not long before Tolstoy died, a barrister from India with the name Mohandas K. Gandhi, read his book The Kingdom of God is Within You, while he lived in South Africa and it put a magic spell on him. "Tolstoy's book overwhelmed me. It left an abiding impression on me. Before the independent thinking, profound morality, and the truthfulness of the book, all the books given to me… seemed to pale into insignificance."
Back in India, Gandhi established the Tolstoy farm, also an experiment in new destiny.
Based in experience, adapting actions to new knowledge, he added active to Tolstoy's non-resistance, creating the way of active non-violent resistance. This way eventually transformed the lives of all who worked with him, manifested India as an independent country and inspired liberation movements all over the world, from Martin Luther King and the American civil rights movement, to Lech Walesa and the Polish Solidarity movement and the group that overthrew the Marcos tyranny in the Philippines, just like the "butterfly effect" eventually rippling out to the election of a first black President in the USA, willing to include worthy opponents in the process of change.
Gandhi considered his opponents as teachers, for to have worthy opponents is a blessing, since they will force you to be the best that you can be.
The courage of one person can generate new destiny, in families, communities, lands, futures and here and now. Transformation is a win-win for all.
Quotes from:
*Saint Genet Actor & Martyr by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1963
*Stalin by Edvard Radzinsky, 1996
*Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore, 2007
*Cosa Nostra A History of the Italian Mafia by John Dickie, 2004
*World War II Behind Closed Doors. Stalin – The Nazi's and the West by Laurence
Rees, 2008 and *Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski, 1994
*Childhood, Boyhood, Youth by Leo Tolstoy, 1857
*Tolstoy As I Knew Him by Tatyana A. Kuzminskaya, 1926
*Tolstoy by Henri Troyat, 1967
*Tolstoy by A. N. Wilson, 1988
*A Confession and Other Religious Writings by Leo Tolstoy, 1879
*The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy, 1894
*Skywriting by Word of Mouth by John Lennon, 1986
*Gandhi An Autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mohandas K. Gandhi, 1929
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