{Stalin and the Mystery of Power}[7th April 1991]

[Redbook9:42][19910407:1231c]{Stalin and the Mystery of Power}[7th April 1991]

19910407.1231 (Sun[day])

[continued]

‘In the account of [Lenin’s]* successor,** the “magical Stalinist night” invoked repeatedly in Sinyarsky/Tertz’s*** earlier writing is once again dominant. A faithful Leninist, Stalin**** could not help stamping the idea of absolute dictatorship with his own antithetical personality. This amounted to anointing himself a god, # clothing his power with mystery, and making of the State a quasi-religious thing. He was a “born artist” and master hypnotist (the illustrative literary text in this instance is Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita”). Did he believe the propaganda about his own exceptional gifts, or the justifications offered publicly for the waves of arrests and executions he oversaw? Sinyarsly suggests that “like any true artist, Stalin both believed and didn’t believe his imagination”.#* Nostalgia for his era is a nostalgia for order#** and the compulsory certitudes that sustained it – and even more Sinyarsky suggests, for a time when power was not merely a mechanism but a mystery.”#***

#****

*[Square brackets per ms]

**(Lenin died 1924)

***(the author’s alter ego)

****(Stalin General Secretary [of the Communist Party] from 1922)

#

				1920
				C
			(/↓/)	|	\ ↓\
		r~		|		S~	1928
				|			\↓\
	g~			|			M~	1936
				|			(/)
				|		U~

#*{Hmm....}

[True of some creative people at least]

#**1922ff – 1953

64C1920

64M~1936

64A~1952

↓

(p43)

[Next ts entry]

#***ie religion as hierarchy

– M~

#**** – ibid [T[imes] L[iterary] S[upplement] 4589, 19910315:5, ‘Homo Sovieticus: Utopia & reality in Russian experience’, D. Fanger, Professor of Slavic and Comparative History at Harvard University]

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