THE DEVIL AS A MIRROR
and Brodsky's Reflections on a Spawn of Hell
THE DEVIL AS A MIRROR
Moral Non-Being, the Secularization of Evil, and the Metaphysics of Doublethink:
An Experiment in Multidimensional Reading of Brodsky
A Foundational Essay-Study - Claude.ai
If God does not exist, everything is permitted.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
The banality of evil lies in the absence of thought.
— Hannah Arendt
We live after God, yet we still live by His words.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
I. INTRODUCTION: THE TEXT AS CRYPTOGRAM
Joseph Brodsky's essay "Reflections on a Spawn of Hell," written in Russian in 1973 and published in an English translation in The New York Times Magazine on the twentieth anniversary of Stalin's death, is—despite its apparent journalistic occasion—one of the most concentrated philosophical texts of the Russian emigration in the second half of the twentieth century. Its seeming publicism is deceptive: beneath the layer of memoiristic and polemical material lies a genuine ontology of evil, a theory of secularized consciousness, and—most importantly—a diagnosis of an era that remains timely to this day.
The present essay-study aims to unfold the semantic layers of Brodsky's text: the spiritual-psychological, historiosophical, religious-studies, historical, literary, philosophical, and mythological. We will attempt to show that Brodsky—while ostensibly discussing Stalin—is actually posing ultimate questions about human nature, the end of the Christian era, the fate of moral language, and what happens to a being that has lost its ontological rootedness in Good.
The central thesis of this study: Brodsky describes not a political catastrophe, but an anthropological one—and this is precisely why his text reads as prophecy, not as an obituary.
II. THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF TEARS: GRIEVING FOR THE EXECUTIONER
2.1. The Paradox of National Mourning
Brodsky begins with an observation that in itself is a philosophical enigma of the first order: the death of the era's greatest murderer was mourned by the greatest number of people with unprecedented—at least outwardly—sincerity. He immediately distinguishes two levels of this phenomenon: the quantitative (explained by the size of the population and the propaganda machine) and the qualitative, which cannot be explained by anything rational.
The personal memoir episode—schoolchildren forced to their knees, the mannish secretary of the party organization who, "wringing her hands," shouts "Cry, children, cry!"—is not merely an autobiographical detail. It is an archetypal scene with deep roots in the history of religions. Ritual weeping for a deceased leader-god has been known since ancient times: the mourning of Osiris in Egypt, the lament for Tammuz in Mesopotamia, the grief for the dying and resurrecting god-king in all agricultural cultures. Frazer in "The Golden Bough" describes this structure as universal: the death of the sacred center instills cosmic horror, for with it dies the very orderliness of the world.
But here—and this is the first paradox—the "god" was a murderer. Religious studies know such cases: chthonic deities, gods of death and destruction, to whom sacrifices were offered precisely out of fear. The cult of Kali in Hinduism, the Aztec Tezcatlipoca demanding human hearts—all were objects of genuine cult worship mixed with terror. Psychologically, this is explained by the mechanism of identification with the aggressor, described by Anna Freud: the one who can kill becomes the object not only of fear but of a special kind of love—love as capitulation before absolute power.
2.2. The Portrait as Icon, the Leader as Sacred Object
Brodsky notes: "in almost every room hung his portrait; he had become a category of consciousness, a part of everyday life." This observation opens up the religious-studies dimension of the Stalin cult, which is underestimated in a purely political analysis. The portrait of the leader functioned not merely as a political declaration of loyalty—it played the role of an icon in the precise theological sense: the presence of the sacred in profane space. The officially atheistic Soviet state recreated the entire structure of religious experience—with images, relics (the body in the Mausoleum), pilgrimage, miracles (stories of "miraculous" rescues thanks to Stalin), sacred texts (collected works), and heresies (opposition to be eradicated).
Ernst Cassirer in "The Myth of the State" shows that modern political totalitarianism is not merely a political technology but a reactivation of archaic mythological thinking in which the leader is identical to the cosmic order. When the Pharaoh dies, Ma'at, the world order, wavers. When Stalin dies, "the question arose: how to live without Stalin. No one knew the answer." This is not rhetorical exaggeration: it is an accurate transmission of a state of ontological bewilderment, which Mircea Eliade calls the "terror of history"—a state in which a person feels torn from the protective mythological cocoon.
III. THE HISTORIOSOPHY OF DOUBLETHINK: CONVERGENCE AS APOCALYPSE
3.1. What Doublethink Is According to Brodsky
The central concept of the essay—"Doublethink"—Brodsky carefully distinguishes from Orwellian "doublethink," although he uses a similar term. The Orwellian phenomenon is a consciously maintained contradiction, an instrument of political control imposed from without. Brodsky's Doublethink is something fundamentally different and incomparably more dangerous.
Brodsky defines it as "the rejection of moral hierarchy, committed not in favor of another hierarchy, but in favor of Nothing." This is the loss not just of absolute, but even of relative moral criteria. Not the replacement of one set of values with another (which would be an understandable ideological transition), but the melting down of the very capacity for moral judgment, the convergence of Good and Evil into some neutral, amorphous substance.
In terms of moral philosophy, this describes a state that Aristotle would have called a complete loss of phronesis—practical wisdom, the ability to distinguish the due and undue in a specific situation. But Aristotle could not imagine a mechanism that produces this loss not through vice or ignorance, but through the systematic confusion of categories at the level of state policy, culture, and language.
3.2. Building to Kill: The Dialectic of Creation and Destruction
Brodsky's formula—"to kill in order to build, and to build in order to kill"—is, for all its aphoristic brevity, a description of a specific dialectic that became structure-forming for the 20th century. This is not merely a hyperbolic description of Soviet practice: it is a diagnosis of a particular type of rationality in which creation and destruction cease to be opposites and become mutual conditions.
Hegelian dialectics assumed that opposites are sublated in synthesis, moving to a higher level. Brodsky describes an anti-dialectic: not synthesis, but mutual decomposition. The camp builds a canal—and this is "construction"; people die in the camp—and these are "inevitable costs." The bears, described with poignant specificity ("the maddened, starving bears, accustomed to feeding on corpses from camp graves"), become an image of this very perverted dialectic: nature, having adapted to the anomaly, dies when the anomaly ceases.
In the philosophy of history, this phenomenon later received theoretical elaboration in Zygmunt Bauman's "Modernity and the Holocaust": modern industrial rationality does not oppose genocide but creates the infrastructure for it. Brodsky arrives at this conclusion intuitively, twenty years earlier and more radically: he asserts that the very scale of such confusion produces irreversible changes in the collective consciousness.
3.3. Moral Numbers: On the Astronomy of Victims
Brodsky makes an observation that might be considered rhetorical if not for its precision: "the killing of a dozen-odd million for human perception is not a reality, but a convention." This observation anticipates what psychologists would later call the "collapse of compassion" (Paul Slovic): the paradox whereby an increase in the number of victims decreases, rather than increases, emotional response.
Statistics kill empathy. One dead person is a tragedy one can experience; a million dead is an abstraction that defies emotional comprehension. Brodsky calls this the most important moral consequence of Stalinism: humanity underwent a "course of therapy" after which the scale of suffering ceased to be a measure of the reality of suffering. This is a form of moral numbness produced not by propaganda, but by the very arithmetic of catastrophe.
It is pertinent here to recall Primo Levi, who wrote about the "grey zone"—the space where executioner and victim are forced to coexist, and this coexistence produces a moral ambivalence impossible within "normal" ethical coordinates. Brodsky describes the same grey zone, but on the scale of an entire civilization: not a single camp, but a country as a concentration space in which "it was already unclear who was building and who was killing."
IV. THEOLOGY AFTER THE DEATH OF GOD: SECULARIZATION AS CATASTROPHE
4.1. A Vocabulary Without a Dictionary
Brodsky's key thesis on the nature of the modern moral crisis is formulated with aphoristic precision: "as a result of the secularization of consciousness, which took place on a global scale, man inherited from rejected Christianity a vocabulary whose usage he does not know." This is one of the most insightful observations about the nature of post-Christian culture, and it deserves detailed examination.
Christian theology created a system of absolute concepts—Good, Evil, Sin, Grace, Redemption—which had ontological grounding in the transcendent. Behind them stood Being, not merely human agreement. Secularization did not abolish these words—they continue to circulate in culture, politics, and ethics. But it deprived them of their ontological foundation: they turned into "mere words," "an object of private interpretation, if not a matter of pronunciation."
Charles Taylor in "A Secular Age" describes this process as a transition from a "porous" to a "buffered" self: pre-modern man was open to the influence of the transcendent, his "self" had no rigid boundaries between itself and the sacred. Modern man is "buffered," closed within the immanent. But Brodsky goes further than Taylor: he points not merely to psychological closure, but to a linguistic catastrophe. Moral language exists, but it is empty—like a beautiful shell without content.
4.2. Pygmalion in Reverse: The Idealization of Matter
Brodsky formulates the paradox of modern materialism as a paradox of Pygmalion in reverse: "the tendency towards the embodiment of the ideal, towards its materialization, went too far, namely: towards the idealization of matter." In the Greek myth, the sculptor falls in love with his own creation and prays to the gods to bring the stone to life—the stone acquires a soul. In the version Brodsky describes, the opposite happens: the soul is exchanged for stone. Spiritual categories—Good, Evil, justice, beauty—turn into "states of stone."
This is a profound critique of materialist metaphysics as such—not in its Soviet, but in its universal dimension. When "construction is Good, destruction is Evil," moral categories become dependent on the physical state of objects, rather than on relationships between subjects. This is a complete inversion of personalist ethics, in which Good is defined through the relation to the person as an end, not to the thing as a means.
The Kantian categorical imperative was an attempt to preserve the absoluteness of the moral law without a transcendent foundation—through reason. Hegel dissolved it in history. Marx lowered it into matter. Stalinism was the practical completion of this chain: the moral law became the law of productive relations, and killing people for the sake of building canals turned out to be logically irrefutable.
4.3. The Post-Christian Era: Periodizing Moral Time
Brodsky calls modernity the "post-Christian era" and admits he does not know exactly when it began. This is a fundamental honesty: the historical periodization of moral eras is fundamentally different from chronological periodization. Post-Christianity is not a date, but a state. It might have begun with the Reformation, with the Enlightenment, with the French Revolution, with Darwin, with Nietzsche—but it manifested itself in full force precisely in the 20th century, revealing its "fiends of hell."
The term "fiend of hell" in the title is not mere rhetoric. It is a precise theological classification: a being generated by hell, that is—in Christian ontology—by non-being, the absence of God, the negation of being as good. Augustine defined Evil as privatio boni—a privation of good. A fiend of hell is that which generates not just evil, but the very structure of privation, emptiness, spreading it to others.
In this sense, it is important that Brodsky unites Stalin and Hitler in a single formula: "both these fiends of Hell took the first step towards realizing a new goal: towards moral non-being." Their commonality lies not in their political programs (which are diametrically opposed), but in the metaphysical result: the destruction of humanity's very capacity for moral judgment. They "burned the moral bridges."
V. THE MYTHOLOGICAL DIMENSION: THE SHADOW, THE TRICKSTER, AND THE RETURN OF THE CHTHONIC
5.1. Stalin as the Shadow of the Collective Unconscious
Jungian analytical psychology offers an interpretation that Brodsky, apparently, intuitively grasps without naming Jungian terms. The "Shadow" in the Jungian sense is the totality of repressed, unconscious aspects of the psyche, the dark side of the personality that consciousness refuses to acknowledge as its own. When the Shadow is repressed on an individual level, it is projected outward—onto other people who begin to seem the embodiment of all that is bad. When the Shadow is repressed on a collective level—it is projected onto enemies: Jews, kulaks, bourgeois, "enemies of the people."
Stalin was not only a product of the collective Shadow but also its organizer: he found a mechanism that allowed for the systematic channeling of society's Shadow impulses through the institution of informing, purges, and mass campaigns. The "enemy of the people" is a projection screen for the collective Shadow of an entire nation. Destroying the "enemy" provided a cathartic experience: the Shadow was discharged for a moment.
But—and this is essential—the Shadow is not destroyed through projection. It returns. Brodsky accurately describes the dynamics of the return: the corpse is not in the Mausoleum, but the "dead man" continues to live—in memory, in the system, in moral consequences. De-Stalinization as a political project runs up against psychological impossibility: you cannot "de-shadowize" the collective unconscious by administrative decree.
5.2. The Trickster with a Pipe: Mythological Parallels
The image of Stalin, as sketched in Brodsky's essay, reveals a strange similarity to the archetype of the Trickster—a mythological figure combining creative and destructive functions, a boundary-breaker, a deceiver-culture-hero. In the mythologies of various peoples, the Trickster simultaneously creates fire and brings death, teaches people and deceives gods, is a source of both culture and chaos.
Stalin: knew no languages—yet left "collected works"; had no scientific education—yet created the atomic bomb; had no military talent—yet won the war; killed the best—yet the country was being built. This paradoxical structure, where obvious incompetence and criminality somehow combine with historical achievements, creates a mythological aura that rational historical analysis struggles to dispel. The Trickster myth is resilient precisely because his achievements and his crimes are inseparable: one is the condition of the other.
The "patriarchal pipe"—a detail emphasized by Brodsky—becomes in this context a mythological attribute: like a scepter, like a staff, like a weapon. The smoking pipe in cultural anthropology is often a mediator between worlds, a magical instrument. Brodsky, of course, does not consciously imply anything of the sort—but his observational power accurately captures those details that operate at the archetypal level.
5.3. The Corpse That Won't Die: The Motif of the Unquiet Dead
The central motif of the essay is Stalin's unquietness. "We all followed the peregrinations of his corpse very attentively"—this phrase sets up an archetypal plot known to world mythology: the unquiet dead, the vampire, returning to the living. In folklore and mythology, unquietness signifies incompleteness: something remains undone, unclosed, unrequited.
The movements of the body: Mausoleum—crematorium—Kremlin wall—modest bust. This is a story of attempts to "lay to rest" the dead man ritually, legally, symbolically. Each time it turns out to be insufficient. Khrushchev read the "Secret Speech"—and the body was removed from the Mausoleum. Brezhnev rehabilitated the image—and a bust was placed. "One had the impression that no one knew what to do with the dead man. But was it with the dead man?" Brodsky asks.
In Romanian folklore, there is the concept of "strigoi"—a dead person who did not truly die because during life they were a bearer of evil that received no retribution. They return and drink the life force of the living. Politically, this is an accurate metaphor for the Stalinist legacy: the systems, institutions, psychological patterns created by Stalin continue to "drink the blood" of society, live off the living even after the physical death of their creator.
VI. LITERARY ANALYSIS: STRATEGIES OF WRITING AND THE POETICS OF TESTIMONY
6.1. The Autobiographical as Universal
Brodsky's essay is built on a precise balance between personal testimony and philosophical generalization. He begins with an autobiographical scene (the school assembly hall, kneeling, tears), but immediately begins to analyze it—not as a psychologist, but as a phenomenologist. Personal experience becomes material for extracting structures, not a self-valuable narrative.
This is the literary strategy of essayism in the Montaignian sense: the "I" of the writer is simultaneously the object and the instrument of investigation. It is significant that Brodsky specifically notes: "then—to my shame, now—to my pride." This is not merely an autobiographical detail, but a moral chronology: what once seemed shameful (the inability to share the universal grief) retrospectively turns out to be a virtue. This inversion is fundamental to his argument: the moral intuition of a child, who did not succumb to collective mourning, proves more reliable than the rationalized adult capitulation.
6.2. The Rhetoric of Deliberate Restraint
One of Brodsky's most significant rhetorical devices is rhetorical restraint where the reader expects an emotional explosion. The description of the starving bears feeding on corpses from camp graves is brief, almost protocol-like. Not a word about the victims of those camps—only the bears, now dying because there are no more corpses. This device works as a reverse catachresis: instead of intensifying the image—its deliberate weakening, which produces a far stronger effect than direct statement.
Tzvetan Todorov in "The Abuse of Memory" analyzes a particular form of testimonial writing where restraint of language is a moral position: horror defies description—therefore, it should not be described, it should be designated. Brodsky applies precisely this principle: he does not describe suffering, he establishes its coordinates.
6.3. Russian Text—English Publication: A Position Between Languages
The history of the text's creation and publication is significant: written in Russian, published in English translation in the American press. This is not merely a biographical detail of an emigrant's fate—it is a position of utterance. Brodsky speaks about the Soviet experience in a language addressed to a Western audience, and consciously translates specifically Russian realities into universal categories.
The final fragment of the essay—about the bookshop windows near the London School of Economics, where Stalin "appears mixed up with Lenin, Trotsky, Che Guevara, Mao"—is a precise statement aimed at the Western reader. This is not just a critique of Western leftists: it is a diagnosis of the moral deafness produced by theoretical detachment. The one who did not kneel in the assembly hall to Chopin's "Funeral March" can afford intellectual flirtation with the images of executioners. The one who knelt—cannot.
VII. THE HISTORICAL DIMENSION: STALINISM IN THE CONTEXT OF WORLD TYRANNY
7.1. Comparison with Nazism: Proportions of Horror
Brodsky makes a fundamentally important comparison: "the number of camps itself, exceeding the number of camps in the Third Reich in the same proportion that the USSR exceeds Germany territorially." This is not merely a statistical observation, but an attempt at a moral arithmetic that itself turns out to be problematic.
The historiographical debate on the comparability of Nazi and Soviet terror (the disputes around the Historikerstreit in Germany 1986-87, Eric Hobsbawm's concept of the "red century," the Goldhagen-Mann controversy) has never reached consensus precisely because the moral dimension defies arithmetic. Brodsky intuitively understands this: he does not construct hierarchies of horror, but points to a qualitative similarity—both regimes worked towards the production of "moral non-being."
7.2. Despotism as an Anthropological Constant
Brodsky writes of "the primordial need of the human race to free itself from all responsibility" as a fundamental cause of the success of totalitarian systems. This is a sharp anthropological observation, echoing Erich Fromm's analysis of authoritarianism in "Escape from Freedom" (1941): freedom as a burden, which the masses psychologically strive to shed by delegating responsibility to a charismatic leader.
But Brodsky goes further than Fromm: he does not describe this as a pathology, but as an anthropological constant realized in various historical forms. 20th-century totalitarianism differs from traditional despotism not in the structure of psychological dependence, but in its scale and technological equipment. This is an important thesis: "there are no archaic systems of thinking." The archaic thirst for domination and submission is clothed in modern forms and armed with modern means.
VIII. THE RELEVANCE OF THE PROPHECY: FROM 1973 TO THE PRESENT DAY
8.1. Stalinism is Winning: Moral Castration Continues
The final phrase of the essay—"Stalinism is winning"—was written in 1973 as a reaction to Western students' fascination with revolutionary icons. Fifty years later, it sounds even more poignant, albeit in different contexts. The mechanism Brodsky described—"the process of the moral castration of homo sapiens, begun forcibly, continues voluntarily"—has been realized not in the form he might have foreseen, but with no less precision.
The digital age has created a new type of moral numbness: the excess of information about catastrophes, wars, genocides produces precisely the effect of "astronomical numbers" that Brodsky wrote about. When each day brings new horrors, the mechanism of compassion collapse is not merely active—it is institutionalized. The news feed structurally produces moral ambivalence: "this is bad, but overall..."
8.2. De-Stalinization as an Unfinished Project
In 1973, Brodsky believed that "Stalinism as a method of governing the state has no future." This was optimism, corrected by history. It is not about the restoration of specific Stalinist methods—but about the fact that the moral structure described by Brodsky ("doublethink" in his sense) turned out to be extremely resilient and reproducible in various political contexts. The absence of moral hierarchy is not a Soviet specificity, but a state of post-Christian civilization as such.
The unfinished de-Stalinization has parallels in other historical contexts: unfinished denazification, unsettled accounts with colonialism, impunity for genocidal regimes. Every unfinished moral trial leaves a "dead man" who does not die. Brodsky intuitively understood: political decisions do not produce moral healing, because the moral illness is deeper than politics.
IX. CONCLUSION: THE MIRROR WITHOUT A REFLECTION
What, then, does Brodsky's 1973 text tell us—today, when almost all participants in the described events are gone, when the USSR itself has ceased to exist, when the very word "Stalinism" has lost concrete meaning for many people?
It tells us about the mirror. Stalin in this essay is not merely a historical figure and not merely a villain, but a mirror in which was reflected an era that rejected the ontological distinction between Good and Evil. A mirror that shows: what happens to a society that has lost the "vocabulary" of moral language—to people who inherited terms without content.
The true subject of Brodsky's essay is not Stalin. The true subject is the person capable of mourning their executioner. Not out of fear, not out of coercion—but out of sincere, genuine grief. Because the executioner, over thirty years, became a "category of consciousness," "a part of everyday life," integrated into the ontology of existence as inseparably as the "four seasons." This is the moral catastrophe: when evil becomes nature.
Brodsky, a thirteen-year-old boy who did not cry in the assembly hall, preserved something fundamentally important—not because he was smarter than others, but because he accidentally came across the German word "Führer" and allowed that word to do the work of moral identification. A tiny linguistic fact—a word in a textbook—proved stronger than the state machinery of mourning. This is the argument for preserving the language of moral distinction: as long as words still mean something, as long as "Führer" and "leader" are not mere synonyms, but a denunciation—man is still protected.
Brodsky's essay ends with the words "Stalinism is winning"—but this is not a verdict, it is a diagnosis. Diagnoses are given in order to begin treatment. And the first step towards treatment is what Brodsky himself does in this text: calling things by their names. Calling a murderer a murderer. Calling hell hell. Refusing ambivalence where the question is one of life and death.
Ultimately, this is a text about language as the last line of moral defense. As long as we call a fiend of hell a fiend of hell—it has not won.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arendt, H. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. — New York: Viking Press, 1963.
Brodsky, I. Reflections on a Fiend of Hell // Less Than One: Selected Essays. — New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986.
Bauman, Z. Modernity and the Holocaust. — Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Cassirer, E. The Myth of the State. — New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946.
Levi, P. The Drowned and the Saved. — New York: Summit Books, 1988.
Taylor, C. A Secular Age. — Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Fromm, E. Escape from Freedom. — New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941.
Eliade, M. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. — New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959.
Jung, C.G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. — Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
Arendt, H. The Origins of Totalitarianism. — New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951.
Frazer, J.G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. — London: Macmillan, 1922.
Slovic, P. "If I look at the mass I will never act": Psychic numbing and genocide // Judgment and Decision Making. — 2007. Vol. 2, No. 2.
Todorov, T. Les abus de la mémoire. — Paris: Arléa, 1995.
Joseph Brodsky: Reflections on a Spawn of Hell – The Immortal Tyrant
I doubt that in the whole history of the world there has ever been a murderer whose death was wept over by so many people, and so sincerely, as was Josef Stalin’s 20 years ago. While it may be easy to explain the number of weepers by the size of the population and the power of the communications media (in which case, Mao, if he dies, will hold first place), it is extremely difficult to explain the quality of these tears.
Twenty years ago I was 13. I was in school; they herded us all into the assembly hall, ordered us to get down on our knees, and the Secretary of the Party Organization—a masculine female with cluster of medals on her chest—wrung her hands and screamed to us from the stage, “Weep children, weep! Stalin has died!” And she herself was first to begin wailing in lamentation. There was no way around it—We sniffled our noses, and then, little by little, even began to howl for real. The hall wept, the presidium wept, parents wept, neighbors wept; from the radio came Chopin’s “Marche Funebre” and something from Beethoven. In general, it seems, nothing but funeral music was broadcast on the radio for five days. As for me (then to my shame, now to my pride), I did not weep, although I knelt and sniffled like everyone else. Most likely it was because not long before this I discovered in a German grammar borrowed from a friend that the German for “leader” was fuhrer. A section was even called that: “Unser Fuhrer Stalin”. I would not weep for a Fuhrer.
It is also possible that my family’s preparations to move had an influence. For it had become known that as a result of the Doctors’ Plot (and there was no need for the result to be in doubt), all Jews would be resettled in the Far East, in order to pay with hard labor for the guilt of their fellow people—the wrecker‐doctors—for the good of the Socialist fatherland. We had sold our piano, which I could not play anyhow. It would have been stupid to drag it across a whole country—even if they would allow it; They discharged my father from the army, where he had served all during the war, and they would not hire him for any job anywhere; only my mother was working, but her job hung by a hair too. We lived on her salary and prepared for deportation; from hand to hand passed a letter signed by Ehrenburg, Botvinnik and other notable Soviet Jews, told of the guilt of the Jews before Soviet power, and it was supposed to appear in “Pravda” any day.
But in “Pravda” appeared the communiqué about the death of Stalin and how his death meant grief and woe for all people. And people began to weep. And they wept, I think, not because they wanted to please “Pravda”, but because an entire epoch was tied to Stalin (or, more precisely, because Stalin had tied himself to an entire epoch). Five‐Year Plans, the Constitution, victory in the war, postwar construction, the idea of order — no matter how nightmarish it had been. Russia had lived under Stalin for almost 30 years, his portrait hung in virtually every room, he became a category of consciousness, a part of everyday life, we were used to his mustache, to the profile (considered “aquiline”), to the postwar officer’s jacket he wore (meaning it was neither peacetime nor wartime), and to the patriarchal pipe. We were used to them as people get used to the portrait of a relative or to an old lamp. In our antireligious state the Byzantine idea that all power comes from God was transformed into the idea of the interconnection of power and nature, into a feeling of his power being as inevitable as the four seasons of the year. People grew up, got married, got divorced, had children, got old and all the time the portrait of Stalin hung over their heads. There was some reason to weep.
The question arose of how to live without Stalin. No one knew the answer. It was pointless to expect it from anyone in the Kremlin. For in the Kremlin—it’s that kind of place — they always talk about absoluteness of power, and therefore, for men in the Kremlin Stalin is, if not flesh, at least more than a ghost. We all followed with interest the vicissitudes of his corpse. First the corpse was put in the Mausoleum. After the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 it was removed, subjected to cremation, and the urn filled with his ashes installed in the Kremlin wall, where it is now located. Then—a comparatively short time ago—they raised a rather modest (judging by the standards of our time) bust alongside the urn. If one seeks the symbolic meaning of all these transformations—and there has to be one; otherwise why did they alt occur?—one might say that at first the intention to preserve the status quo dominated in the Kremlin; next a desire to condemn the status quo (only partly, it is true) became dominant; next it was decided to retract—also, partially—the condemnation; All this created the impression that no one knew what to do with the dead man. Or was he a dead man?
Physically he was, of course; But psychologically? At this point it is quite easy to launch into discussions about how the thing is not Stalin but the system he created or that created him; how although Russia needed her Nuremberg Trial, it is even better that there was none, because forgiveness is higher than the idea of “an eye for an eye” (especially if it is unconscious); how sooner or later technical progress will put everything in its proper place, for even a totalitarian system, if it wants to last, must grow into a technocracy; how a general convergence awaits us. All right. But in the case at hand, it is not archaic or progressive systems and their fates that interest me. The “secrets of the court of Madrid” and the psychology of “the strong of this world” do not interest me either. I am interested in the moral effect of Stalinism, and more precisely in that pogrom it caused in the minds of my fellow countrymen and in the consciousness of this century. For from my point of view Stalinism is above all a system of thinking, and only afterward a technology of power, of methods of ruling. For—I fear—archaic systems of thinking do not exist.
For almost 30 years a country with a population of almost 200 million was ruled by a man whom some considered a criminal, others a paranoiac, others an Eastern despot who in essence might still be re‐educated—but all of these categories of people sat down at the same table to eat with him, conducted talks with him and shook his hand. The man did not know a single foreign language—including Russian, which he wrote with monstrous grammatical errors. But in bookstores virtually all over the world one can find collections of his works written for him by people who were exterminated because they performed this task, or who remained alive for the same reason. This man had the foggiest notions about history (apart from Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” which was his bedside book), geography, physics, chemistry; but his scientists, sitting under lock and key, nevertheless managed to create atomic and hydrogen bombs that in quality were by no means inferior to their sisters born in a place called the free world. This man, who had no experience running corporations, nevertheless created a secret police agency unique in its magnitude, one that terrified equally the schoolboy—who noticed a bedbug crawling across the portrait of the leader hanging above his bed and broke into a cold sweat at the thought that his schoolteacher might see this—and the former Comintern member writing his memoirs somewhere in the back areas of South America. He ruled the country for almost 30 years and all that time he kept murdering. He murdered his helpers (which was not so unjust, for they were murderers themselves), and he murdered those who murdered his helpers. He murdered both the victims and their executioners. Then he began to murder whole categories of people—or, to use his term, classes. Then he devoted himself to genocide. The number of people who perished in his camps cannot be calculated exactly, nor can the number of the camps themselves, but surely the total surpassed the number of camps in the Third Reich by a figure proportionate to the difference in size between the U.S.S.R. and Germany. At the end of the fifties I myself worked in the Far East, and I shot crazed wild bears that had gotten used to feeding on the corpses from labor‐camp graves and were now dying off because they could not return to normal food. And all the time that he was murdering, he was building. Labor camps, hospitals, hydroelectric stations, giant metallurgical complexes, canals, cities, etc., including monuments to himself. And gradually everything got confused in that vast country. One could not comprehend who was murdering and who was building. One could not comprehend whom to love and whom to fear, who was doing evil and who good. One was left to the conclusion that it was all the same. Living was possible, but living became senseless. It was then, from our moral soil, abundantly fertilized by the idea of the ambivalence of everything and everyone, that Doublethink into being.
By Doublethink I do not mean simply “I‐ say‐one-thing‐I‐do‐another” and vice versa. Nor do I mean what Orwell described in “1984.” I mean the rejection of a moral hierarchy, rejection not for the sake of another hierarchy but for the sake of Nothing. I mean that state of mind characterized by the formula “it’s‐bad‐but‐in‐general-it’s‐good” (and, more rarely, vice versa). I mean the loss of not only an absolute but even a relative moral criterion. I mean not the mutual destruction of the two basic human categories—good and evil—as a result of the struggle between them, but their mutual decomposition as a result of coexistence. Putting it more precisely, I mean their convergence. However, it would be going too far to say that this process took place quite consciously. When one is talking about human beings, in general it is better, if possible, to avoid any generalizations, and if I permit myself to use them, it is because at the time in question human destinies were maximally generalized. For the majority the advent of a double mentality occurred not on an abstract level, not on the level of conceptualization, but on the instinctive level, on the level of needle-fine sensations, the kind of guessing that goes on in dreams. For the majority, of course, everything was clear; the poet who fulfilled the social order to glorify the leader thought through his task and picked out the words—therefore he was making a choice. The official whose hide depended on his attitude to things was also making a choice. And so forth. Of course, in order to make the correct choice and create this converged Evil (or Good) an impulse of the will was needed; and to this end official propaganda came to a person’s aid with its positive vocabulary and philosophy of the rightness of the majority; but if he did not believe in it—then simple terror came. What happened on the level of thought was reinforced on the level of instinct, and vice versa.
I think that I understand how all this happened. When God stands behind Good and the Devil behind Evil, there at least exists a purely terminological difference between the two concepts. But in the modern world approximately the same thing stands behind both Good and Evil: matter. Matter, as we know, does not have its own moral categories. In other words, both Good and Evil are in the same state as a stone. The tendency to the embodiment of the ideal, to its materialization, has gone too far—namely, to the idealization of material. This is the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, but from my point of view there is something ominous in animated stone.
Perhaps it can be expressed even more precisely. As a result of the secularization of consciousness that has taken place on a global scale, man’s heritage from the Christianity he has renounced is a vocabulary that he does not know how to use, and therefore he is forced to improvise. Absolute concepts have degenerated simply into words that have become objects of personal interpretation, if not mere questions of pronunciation. In other words, arbitrary categories at best. With the transformation of absolute concepts into arbitrary categories, little by little the idea has taken root in our consciousness. This idea is very dear to human nature, for it excuses everyone and everything from any responsibility whatsoever. In this lies the reason for the success of totalitarian systems: They answer the basic need of the human race to be free of any responsibility. And the fact that in this age of incredible catastrophes we have not been able to find an adequate reaction—for it, too, would have to be incredible — to these catastrophes suggests that we have drawn near to the realization of this utopia.
I think that we live in the post‐Christian age. I don’t know when it began. The Soviet writer Leonid Leonov proposed (as a present for one of Stalin’s birthdays) beginning new system of measuring time: from the day of Dzhugashvili’s (Stalin’s) birth. I don’t know why this proposal was not accepted. Perhaps because Hitler was younger. But he captured the spirit of the time correctly. For precisely these two spawn of hell took the first steps toward the embodiment of the new goal: moral nonexistence. It was not they, of course, who began murdering in order to build and building in order to murder; but precisely they ran this business on such a gigantic scale that they completely overshadowed their predecessors and cut off their followers’—and humanity’s in general—paths of retreat. In a sense they burned all moral bridges. The extermination of 10 million or more is not a reality for human perception, but something relative and arbitrary, just as the goal of this extermination is relative and arbitrary. The maximal reaction possible and desirable (because of the instinct for self‐preservation) to such situation is: shock, a blank mind. Stalin and Hitler conducted the first sessions of this kind of therapy, but just as thieves steal not for yesterday, the tracks of their crimes lead into the future.
I do not want to draw an apocalyptic picture; but if in the future the murders are going to go on and the building be continued, the convergence of moral criteria plus the astronomical quantity of victims will transform us and our descendants, the main thing, into moral corpses from the Christian point of view, and the happiest of mortals from their own. As the philosopher said, they will find themselves on the far side of Good and Evil. But—why make it so complex? Simply on the far side of Good.
In this sense I do not believe in de‐Stalinization. I do believe in it as in a change of methods of ruling—independent of the indubitable circumstance that relapses will occur and one can anticipate not only the restoration of 100‐foot‐high monuments, but even something flashier. To the honor of the current Kremlin administration one can say that it is not too carried away by the idea of Frankensteinian electrification of the corpse. Stalin appears in quasi‐historical films and in the homes of Georgians—who suffered no less, if not more, than any national minority in the U.S.S.R., but who in this way (for lack of a better way) cultivate their nationalism. The retired secret police agent or the former officer, the taxi driver or bureaucrat on pension will tell you, of course, that under Stalin “there was more order.” But they all miss not so much the “iron Ordnung” as their own past youth or maturity. In principle neither the basic mass of the people nor the party utters the leader’s name in vain. There are too many essential problems to spend one’s time in retrospection. The name can still be used as a banner by some right‐wing group inside the party returning to its trough; but I think that even in the event of a successful beginning, this banner will be returned to obscurity rather quickly. Stalinism as a method of governing a state, in my opinion, has no future.
Therefore, it is all the stranger to see these aquiline features in a bookstore window near The London School of Economics, in the Latin Quarter in Paris or in a shop on some American campus, where they decorate the shelves beside Lenin, Trotsky, Che Guevara, Mao, etc.—all the small‐time and big‐time murderers who, apart from the difference of their ideals, have one common characteristic: They all committed murder. No matter what their numerator is, their denominator is common; and the sum of these fractions would produce a number that would confuse even a computer. I don’t know what all the young people are looking for in these books, but if they really can find something there for themselves, it means only one thing: that the process of moral castration of Homo sapiens, begun by force, is continuing voluntarily, and that Stalinism, as a system of thinking, is conquering.
MARCH 4, 1973
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