Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 20: Stalin was Brain-Aged
Once again, the dominant, favored explanation is a vague one in which the factual gap on Stalin’s caution vis-a-vis Yezhov’s aggressiveness is sketchily and turbidly plugged by a paradigmatic deduction which asserts that Yezhov was not as intelligent as Stalin and was inherently more repressive. Yezhov is depicted like a neophyte farmer who discovers a vast underground network of gophers chewing his crop’s roots, so he sets a dynamite charge wherever he thinks he sees a depression in the ground and blows off all the charges, leaving the topsoil in dry and eroded ruins, while the gophers have dug down even deeper and escaped harm. Stalin is supposed to have been too smart, experienced, politic, or conniving - or less pathologically paranoid - to have done this. He is likened instead to the farmer who is highly skilled in fumigating the gophers’ burrows, forcing the gophers to come out and fatally expose themselves. When in full view, he traps and kills them. (This view of Stalin vs. Yezhov - without the gopher parable - is repeated in many places, such as in the 1975 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.) Once again, the dominant paradigm has great intuitive force precisely in these areas where it fills gaps.
It is much more probable, however, that Yezhov was more perceptive and intelligent than Stalin in this particular disagreement, due to Stalin’s having suffered brain-aging. This is not to be confused with an assertion that Stalin was senile at the time: that is a different matter and certainly could not have been the case because, as mentioned previously, Eton stated that Stalin proved to be a more astute diplomat than Churchill and Roosevelt, having "outwitted" them at the "Big Three" conferences, which took place as late as seven years after the Yezhovshchina ended.
The difference in age between Stalin and Yezhov was the same as the difference in age between Stalin and Khrushchev. Yezhov and Khrushchev were born in the same year: 1898. The difference is fifteen years. At the height of the Yezhovshchina, ca. 1937, Stalin was about 58 years old, Yezhov 43. A difference of fifteen years is not so great between, say, a man of 22 and a man of 37. Athletes of these two ages often compete against one another in professional sports. But the difference in age between a man of 43 and a man of 58 is much greater in terms of what biologists call "senescence" (not to be confused, once again, with senility, which is full-blown mental incompetence due to advanced age).
Senescence refers to progressive deterioration during adult years of a biological organism’s viability. These changes are gradual, but do not follow a straight-line graph or chart with a downward slope. Instead, the rate of deterioration is not the same during, for example, every succeeding eight-year period. In each succeeding eight year period, a person ages at a greater rate than he did in the preceding period of equal length, following a formula known to statistical actuaries as the Gompertz formula. This formula was named after the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz who, in 1825, first described how the mortality rate in humans follows an exponential curve as a function of age. This law or curve is often used by biologists as a measure of senescence. The curve plots the survival rates of individuals (an inverse proxy for senescence) as a function of age, and looks like a waterfall as one proceeds from left to right along the abscissa or (horizontal) x-axis. The curve is very flat or horizontal until one hits about 40 or so years of age, then falls off very sharply, curving downward to the right, showing an extreme downward turn as it nears 50 years or so. The shape of this curve is due to its exponential nature. It does not look like a flat incline, that is, it does not look like a board set up at one end on a stone, which is how it would look if humans aged by the same amount every year, which would be the case if the rate of aging or senescence was a constant. Why this is not so is not known, but what it means in real terms is that there is a much bigger difference in "age" or senescence between a man of 58 vs. one of 43, than there is when comparing a man of 37 with one of 22, even though the difference in chronological age (birth dates) between the two men in both cases is the same: 15 years.
This is an embarrassing, little discussed, emotionally charged, and deliberately ignored subject in patriarchal cultures because these cultures are also gerontological, i.e. elderly men are held up for highest esteem therein as able, wise, and most worthy to rule, while younger men of superlative ability and knowledge are regarded at best as "phenoms," at worst as threats to the existing order. The conventional wisdom in these cultures would have one believe what a second century Talmudic scholar once wrote: "Scholars grow wiser as they age, but the non-educated become foolish." Similarly, art connoisseurs the world over have seen Albrecht Duerer’s famous drawing of a 93 year old subject male who, Duerer is known to have said, was nonetheless healthy and cheerful to talk to. Nothing is said in these edifying yarns about the embarrassing subject of a "wise scholar’s" or "healthy, cheerful conversationalist’s" brain-aging, which is not apparent like wrinkles and wheezing, is subtle in effect, and is especially difficult to spot in early stages in someone’s behavior. It is not something that a personal physician tracks from year to year on his charts, as he does a patient’s blood pressure, "crackles" in his lung expansions, or lumps in women’s breasts. Its early effects are usually not regarded as pathological at all. A statesman or former revolutionary may merely seem to have "mellowed." This would be self-servingly interpreted in gerontological patriarchies as having attained "the wisdom that comes with age," rather than as brain-aging. Becoming wise is commendable in an individual’s development, but "wisdom" which comes late on the Gompertz curve should be suspect.
What really does come with age are what are known as the dementias of aging and the progressive loss of the ability to remember or "merely" a reduction of the ability to reason and evaluate things afresh. These dementias and deficiencies impair the performance and improvement of myriad activities in daily life, but even the well-known Alzheimer type of dementia, unless very acute, often goes unnoticed. Former President Ronald Reagan testified before a congressional subcommittee (and the entire American public) investigating the Iran-Contra affair, yet almost no one noticed he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease at the time. Anyone who noticed it remained discreetly silent - perhaps sheepishly and incredulously amazed or confused. Reagan’s performance appeared normal to almost all auditors because he answered singly each question put to him, with little or no recall of the sequence and context of the questions and answers that led up to each new question. As he answered each question, he had little or no recollection of the previous questions he had already answered. Answering questions individually in this manner - severed from all contexts - is actually considered good and direct form in legal proceedings and inquiries of this kind. Such answers under oath are exactly the kind that judges and lawyers seek. Therefore, Reagan’s performance was not just passing, but "very good." It was apparent to auditors of these hearings that Reagan performed "better" than the much healthier, sharper, wittier Oliver North, whose intelligence and memory were more than the inquisitive Congressional investigators bargained for due to the fact that his full-functioning memory and ability to reason "on his feet" rather than merely regurgitate rehearsed syllogisms (like the Talmudist’s wise old scholars do) enabled him to see the gist of the questions. He could usually see where they were leading. This made him less malleable than Reagan, and therefore - ironically - a poorer performer in stating "what happened." Reagan’s brain was diseased and impaired. North’s was fully functioning, active, and interdictive. The "wise old scholar’s" brain may be characterized as redundantly rehearsed. It is a newfound discovery of neurology, reported at a recent annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, that oldsters compensate for brain senescence, and therefore often function as well as younger people when performing many mental tasks, by using the separate specialized "modules" of the human brain in concert, engaging them to function together "redundantly" when performing tasks for which more youthful individuals need to use only a single brain area in isolation. For example, older people can - and do - match many youngsters in memorizing lists of words due to having learned to recruit brain areas that previously in their lives had not participated in such a task. But in experiments actually performed by cognitive neurologists, oldsters fail to match younger people in such word memory "contests" if required to memorize a list of words while simultaneously walking a crooked maze. Navigating such a maze requires the simultaneous and independent use of a different and separate part of the brain than the one young people can use by itself to memorize words. While walking the maze, this specialized "word" region can then no longer be engaged in "assisting" an oldster in any word memory (or other) task. This is why many of the elderly complain about having to do "too many things at once" and appear to "slow down" overall. In such situations, their compensating "widespread neural activity" gets them "confused." (See Science News, April 17, 1999, vol. 155, No. 16, p. 247, "Neural teamwork may compensate for aging.")
As the brain ages to 60 years or so, small patches of its tissues die off due to lack of blood caused by the poor, deteriorated conditions of local arteries and capillaries that feed these tissues. These small, dead regions are known as infarcts. At this age, masses of gluey extracellular material called senile plaques begin to accumulate near brain cells. (These are suspected of being tau and beta-amyloid proteins.) Within the tapering nerve extensions of brain cells that connect them with each other in a functioning whole like wires or the tracings on a printed circuit board (but more complexly), will be found more and more dense bundles of fibrous tangles as the years progress. Ever greater numbers of plaques, tangles, and infarcts are the increasing natural and common risks for brains approaching sixty years, whereas brains of about forty are still relatively free of them. The actual effects on behavior, cognition, mood, and motivation - or even one’s beliefs - of the progressive build-up of these hostile proteins in the brain is still not a subject represented in medical science. Whatever these effects are, they certainly could not be as acute and dramatic as those of Alzheimer’s disease.
Cognitive neuroscience, an outgrowth of neurophysiology and behaviorism, is one of the youngest, least developed sciences. It is not a part of standard medical education, training, or practice. What makes its application particularly difficult is that any subjective (like mood) or behavioral (like memory) effects caused by changes in the brain with age are not likely to be recognized as being the result of brain physiology unless these changes result in an acute impairment of at least one easily recognized and separable mental ability, such as short term memory. When the effects of brain-aging are more global or generalized, such as affecting motivation, character, feelings, morals, beliefs, judgement, or creativity, explanations for them that are forthcoming in the West are not sought in physiology but rather in Cartesian or outright spiritual terms. (For an explanation of the meaning of "Cartesian" here, see neurologist Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1994.)
Descartes, b. 1596, established a dominant, grandiose paradigm in the West for religion, philosophy, and science. It asserts a dualistic separation of the realm of mind from the realm of matter. For the latter realm, Descartes revived the approach of the ancient, pre-Christian materialists who said that mechanical force is the key to understanding material nature, to which Descartes added the language of mathematics. Due to this, this part of the paradigm encouraged rapid progress in the material sciences, like chemistry, optics, physics, etc. This is called the "Cartesian Revolution." The paradigm had the opposite effect in areas of thought involving beings believed to have souls, as in studies of humans and human behavior, from human biology and evolution to sociology and ethics, because these studies, the paradigm says, are not studies of matter, force, and Nature, but involve instead inspections of the wholly separate mental realm. Descartes concluded that the obvious interaction of tangible material things with intangible mental things - their mutual influence - was a miracle effected only by the omnipotence of God. Since Descartes’ time, efforts to liberate and extricate studies, disciplines, and areas of thought where "souls" are involved from religion, mysticism, and obscurantism by applying the mechanistic and mathematical ideas so successful in the material sciences has only earned thinkers the calumnies of being heretics, "atheists," etc.
In 1863, just after the discovery that there is electrical activity in the brain, I. M. Sechenov published the world science classic Reflexes of the Brain. Sechenov founded the Russian school of reflexology that eventually led to the work of the most famous (and in the West still considered by some the most sinister and threatening) Soviet scientist, the "pride of the Soviet Union," neurophysiologist I. P. Pavlov. His work on the modification of reflex activity by learning is now world famous. Pavlov’s research required vivisection, i.e. experimentation on live animals. He is credited with having founded special recovery domiciles paid for by the Soviet Union for the rehabilitation and happiness of his former experimental subject animals. This is more than present-day private American pharmaceutical companies do for their former experimental animals - it is just "too expensive" for them as a big cut into profits. These companies all but throw the animals away. But due to vivisection work like Pavlov’s, many advances have been made in the study of the neurology of animals, the results of which can be extended to all mammals, including humans. However, many researchers know that experimental mice and even larger common experimental mammals often poorly reflect human biology. Hence, the "need" in scientific research for ever larger numbers of man’s closest genetic relatives - apes.
The inability of scientists to work freely with human subjects (except to "interview" them, wherein social scientists possess rather wide latitude) inhibits developing a non-Cartesian approach to understanding how physical brain conditions pertain to uniquely human behaviors involving higher cognition - the individual and collective behaviors with which the social sciences deal. Apes lack these behaviors, or show only rudimentary forms of them. For the study of these more advanced behaviors, the Cartesian approach is still favored, i.e. "examination of the ‘mind’ by ‘introspection.’" This tradition has its Twentieth Century representatives too, such as the German school of phenomenologists, whose methods of investigating anything proceed by "examining the contents of consciousness." This method is certainly less harmful to animals (and humans) than vivisection. But because the Cartesian method is still mistakenly thought to be revealing, the study of uniquely human behaviors is still held in the grip of sociologists, historians, ethicists, and priests. There is no lack of religionists and other misguided humanitarians and ethicists ready to block or delay the advance of cognitive neuroscience, heedless of how much its advance might really benefit humanity. There is a prospect that new non-invasive brain- imaging techniques can compensate for the retarded state of this science. So far it has not, especially when compared to the advanced stages other new sciences rapidly entered, such as genetics, which is less than a century old and yet has already entered the "engineering" stage.
In many cultures, age dementias are considered "bad," i.e. as having a negative moral import. On the other hand, heart attacks or strokes in these same cultures are regarded as some of the "normal" or "natural" outcomes of aging. In the Western world, few heart attack victims suffer embarrassment, except perhaps due to some untoward circumstances surrounding an occurrence. It is not considered shameful or debasing to have had one. But age dementias, especially in men who are or had been in positions of leadership or authority, are considered an embarrassment or even a disgrace. In societies in which aged men occupy the pre-eminent positions, there is a great deal of self-serving motivation to avoid talk that brain aging is as normal and common as increases of blood pressure and hardening of the arteries with age. Since it is the brain that is aging, since the primary effects are not understood yet are clearly known to have momentous consequences, and since so much religious and Cartesian mystification already prevails in many of these cultures on the subject, the suggestion of brain senescence as an explanation for a course, change, or lapse in a statesman’s judgement or behavior, or for his choice of official policies, is regarded more as an accusation rather than an explanation. In these cultures, age dementias affecting women are regarded with much less concern, as problems for personal or family attention, or even to be ignored,
It is frequently observed that U.S. Presidents "age very rapidly" once they serve in that office, and especially if they have served two terms. This is thought to be due to having been "worn down" by the indisputably intense responsibilities and stresses of that office. This misses the truth. Stress hastens senescence, including brain aging, but the real difference in appearance of "before" and "after" U.S. Presidents that the public regards as very conspicuous is that most of these presidents are elected at an age when they fall on the part of the Gompertz curve where it begins to drop off very sharply. In other words, they take office when the roller coaster car of aging has just left the mildly inclined, almost horizontal start-up ramp of the track of aging and begins to accelerate down the exponentially curved, sharply inclined part of the Gompertz slope. Many movie-goers have noticed that when male actors (whose appearance is subject to much closer scrutiny than presidents’) just pass the forty year mark, they still obtain many leading performing roles as vigorous "young men." But as they enter their late fifties, suddenly screen aficionados are surprised to see the same actors cast as doddering graybeards, wheezing geezers, bent codgers, and fumbling gaffers. Popular entertainment buffs in their early twenties might see a "young man" perform in a "young stand-up comedian program." This same fan then enters his mid-thirties and his own appearance and viability have changed very little. But he is surprised to see the same "young comedian" he formerly saw perform only a little over a decade ago now cast as a "cranky old coot." Again, this is because the performer, not the fan, was on the steep part of the Gompertz slope during the time elapsed. (Their positions could just as well have been the reverse, of course.) The Gompertz curve bends and falls just as steeply downward for brain aging as it does for the "dreaded" deterioration of cosmetic physical appearance, if not more so.
In keeping with the Talmudic commentator quoted above, young people are constantly exposed to portraits of the "geniuses," "wise men," role models, and leaders of Western civilization. One of the most universally recognized of these savants is Albert Einstein. He is invariably exhibited in photos and cartoons depicting him as an unkempt, whitened, wrinkled ancient in his sixties or seventies wearing a bowling shirt, indistinguishable - were it not for a mustache - from an elderly woman due to his advanced years. The public rarely if ever sees photos (which exist) of the well-groomed, handsome, virile, suited, youthful Einstein who published four research papers in a single year near his mid-twenties, containing four of the greatest discoveries in physical science of all time: the special theory of relativity; the equivalence of mass and energy (the well-recognized "E = m/c[squared]" formula); the photon theory of light; and the theory of the Brownian motion of molecules. Instead, the public recognizes only portraits of someone who produced almost nothing of value to science for the three decades that preceded the photographing of these widespread portrayals, who struggled in vain during that time to teach himself tensor analysis to unify the laws of physics, and later cursed himself for his erroneous use of a cosmological constant in his equations, which he called the "greatest mistake of my life." During this long period, he spent the remainder of his time, when not sailing and playing the concert violin - and vainly and erroneously disputing a new generation of quantum physicists he disagreed with - to teaching and publishing for the assistance of other scientists (and laymen) struggling to understand his theories. In 1979, a celebration was held in Jerusalem of the one-hundredth anniversary of Einstein’s birth. (Einstein had been dead for 24 years by then.) Israelis struck a special commemorative coin with equations on the reverse side that Einstein had published near the end of his life purporting to unify his general relativistic theory of gravity with Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism. This is what Einstein pursued the whole rest of his life after his productive twenties. Attending these festivities was Murray Gell-Mann, the 1969 Nobel laureate in physics and inventor of the theory of quarks as the building blocks from which all subatomic particles are formed. Gell-Mann was embarrassed to see these equations on this coin. According to him, the equations do not describe any plausible interactions. Einstein had "lost his powers," as Gell-Mann actually put it, but no one had noticed it - or wanted to mention it. Einstein had been too admired, regarded as too much of an icon of wisdom in science and philosophy, for too long. Likewise, Ronald Reagan was too esteemed and popular. Both Reagan and Einstein still "performed" very well, despite clear evidence here of types of brain aging.
What actual evidence is there that Stalin was brain aged in 1937 while Yezhov (and Khrushchev) were not? There is nothing known of there having been a post-mortem under-microscope examination of tissues from Stalin’s brain after he died in March of 1953. In cultures in which the dementias of aging are considered a type of disgrace, such as most Western cultures and many cultural regions governed by the former Soviet system, the cause of death cited on death certificates can be very misleading - and not just in the case of prominent personalities on whose behalf the U.S. Secret Service or Soviet KGB carried out security functions. In these cultures, examination of the brain of a cadaver is never routine. Even detailed post-mortems are far more likely to cite failures of cardiovascular or other organic systems than, for example, known multiple small strokes resulting in multiple dementias as the "cause of death." Citations of dementias on death certificates would not only be considered "humiliating" by many survivors, but also puzzling due to the ignorance, confusion, and mystique surrounding the human brain and its afflictions. Dissections of the brains of great scientists or statesmen who have "passed on" is still a virtual taboo having no apparent point or value, traditionalists say. But there never will be a point to performing them unless the practice is begun and the first steps toward knowledge gained, so any value it may have can become evident. This "taboo" was actually much less strong among government leaders in the Soviet Union in Stalin and even Lenin’s times than it is among Americans today. Americans are much better informed than they were a couple of decades ago regarding hardening plaques accumulating inside the arteries, and the burdens these place on the heart, kidneys, and other vital organs. However, they have never heard of the plaques and tangles inevitably accumulating in their brains with age. Such infarcts are not dreaded like heart palpitations. The knowledge, concern, and monitoring of a patient’s brain by a physician are not part of anyone’s health "check up" unless there has been a serious complaint or accident.
There is no actual physical evidence of Stalin being brain-aged in 1937. This should not be surprising. As pointed out previously, few people - professional or lay - look for or even notice what lies outside dominant paradigms. Given the primitive state of neuroscience at the time of Stalin’s death, a detailed post-mortem brain autopsy, if one had actually been performed, could only have projected backward in time and hazarded a guess as to the age of onset of any discovered pathologies. Hypothetical brain-aging for Stalin could thus only be inferred from a detailed examination of his behavior and observed changes or lapses in it - not easily or reliably done by anyone not actually present with Stalin at the time. What is more, there are no agreed upon parameters for such an infant science as to what changes or anomalies of speech, habit, character, or conduct will validate an inference that one or more types of brain-aging have occurred. The most easily observable dementias of brain aging involve problems affecting motor abilities or the performance of ordinary daily activities. Likewise, impairments of the ability to remember can be conspicuous, even subjectively obvious to the afflicted and annoyed individual himself. To assess changes like these, much anecdotal material by Stalin’s immediate associates - like Molotov and others - would need to be carefully evaluated. Less noticeable and sometimes almost completely hidden is the loss of the power to think anew, to reason afresh - loss of novel cognition, of the "powers" Gell-Mann was talking about, whether originally extraordinary or mundane.
As Stalin aged, he very likely suffered progressive failure of a masterful ability credited to him in his prime by allies, enemies, and the totalitarian paradigmists alike: a consummate ability to subtly outmaneuver his opponents diplomatically (as in the cases of Churchill and Roosevelt), politically (as with Trotsky), and militarily (as against Hitler). The questions are: (1) was Stalin working with a decline of this acumen at the time of Hitler’s invasion of Poland (September 1, 1939) when he was a few months shy of 60 years old; and (2) was this the result of brain senescence? Almost any reasonable person, if he did not know that the subject was Stalin, and without knowing any pertinent medical facts, would answer the first question, "Oh, most likely yes - if you are pushing sixty." If fervently held convictions about Stalin, Communism, and the totalitarian paradigm, as well as the gerontological biases of patriarchal cultures in general, were not at stake, anyone answering the first question in the negative would ordinarily be expected to carry the burden of proof of producing some good medical facts or circumstantial reasons that led him to think Stalin was an exception to the rule. This is a gaping bunghole in the dominant paradigm that its advocates do not even attempt to plug, since it is blatantly extra-paradigmatic.
Stalin had ignored incoming intelligence reports that predicted an immanent Nazi military attack on the Soviet Union. His newfound trust in Hitler’s promises of non-aggression in August of 1939 were out of character for someone who had been acutely aware of the intentions of Germany’s Fuehrer. Hitler had openly declared that Bolshevism was rivaled only by "Jews" as the greatest evil in need of fervent, speedy, and permanent eradication from the world. Many excuses can be made as to why Stalin ignored his intelligence reports: they might have been British or American provocations designed to incite the USSR to attack the Nazis first. On the other hand, Stalin may have wanted to prolong the peace, stalling actual war. Or the procrastination may have been one of Stalin’s subtle traps to lead the Germany armies deep into Asia where they would be most vulnerable to counterattack. However, the Nazis blockaded Leningrad and were almost in Moscow by the time a stunned and dazed Stalin realized that war had become a reality. It was left to Molotov to make the announcement to the Soviet public. The totalitarian paradigm portrays Stalin as a great paranoid, but these are not the actions and reactions of someone a clinical psychologist or forensic specialist would profile as a paranoid, but more like the behaviors expected of a cautious, deeply disappointed, or otherwise somewhat mentally afflicted person who could still evaluate and act logically.
Stalin’s grand error of trusting Hitler and thereby actually encouraging him to invade is accounted for by adherents of a Marxist-Leninist paradigm as evidence of Stalin’s love of peace. The most plausible Marxist-Leninist explanations of this type avoid psychological analyses of Stalin’s character - a favorite subject of the totalitarian paradigmists -, confining themselves instead to Stalin’s ideological repugnance of war. This is said to have been Stalin’s continuation of the thinking of Lenin, who regarded war as Marx did: as Western nations’ chief means of enforcing their imperialist business interests, and as a desperate "fix" that a flawed economic system (capitalist) needs every two decades or so to uphold prosperity, avoid depression, and avert crashing financial collapse. Old Bolsheviks had been exiled to Siberia by the Tsar as often for pacifism and opposition to Russia’s entrance into European wars as they had been for revolutionary activity. Stalin believed that war is the antagonist of building socialist systems, but is the life’s blood of capitalism. It is natural for the dominant paradigmists to steer clear or outright dismiss this explanation, especially since its empirical basis is very strong. They dwell instead on Stalin’s personality, finding fault, blame, and "causation" all at once. Western economists pretend that capitalist systems can sustain prosperity and even enjoy "unlimited growth potential" during continued peacetime - though no-one has ever seen this (note the words "during continued peacetime") any more than anyone has yet seen an industrial nation embodying Marx’s ideal of a truly classless society in which the wholeness of each human life is being realized.
The error Stalin made was not so much one of gullibility prompted by a character flaw or runaway idealism, since he actually did at first consider an anti-Hitler alliance with the Western nations. He still acted logically. He seems instead to have made an error of judgement in a very complex situation, an error easy to criticize or excuse with "20/20 hindsight." But it is clear that without the assistance of General Zhukov, who was 17 years Stalin’s junior and only two years older than Yezhov, Hitler might have prevailed. Once again, as with Yezhov, but this time in war, Stalin availed himself of the aid of a remarkable, gifted, qualified man in his early forties who was not yet accelerating rapidly into senescence down the Gompertz curve like he was. Unlike Yezhov, Zhukov was allowed to accomplish his professional goal. Even the opposition needed him. Stalin gave Zhukov the green light, rather than repeatedly flashing in his eyes a cautionary amber light, as he had done with Yezhov, or a parade of alternating stop and go signals. It is well known that Zhukov found himself under a great burden of debating Stalin to convince him that Stalin’s (and many other of his military advisors’) war tactics had become dated, and would not defeat Hitler’s army.
A patient, intelligent, foreign-assisted underground that had been around since Russia’s Civil War eluded Yezhov - and eventually triumphed in the 1990’s. Even with his humble manuscript, he could never fully convince Stalin to pull out all stops on liquidating it. Why he wrote it is no puzzle: to convince Stalin. The "angst" Yezhov suffered in his last days as NKVD head - before his own arrest - was not so much the fear paradigmatic historians believe he had of "coming up face down in front of his superiors" when he presented them with lists of purported members of the oppositionist underground ready to spout confessions and testimony that he may have tortured them into rehearsing. If there ever was an "explanation" that smacks of "subjective bourgeois projection" by comfortable armchair analysts, who rarely see little more than their own fears and egos in others - a favorite counter-criticism of Marxists - this is it. It does not occur to them that Yezhov’s travail and final demise could have been induced by his inability to really convince Stalin to hunt down the "Civil War scum" who had already initiated and promoted a new generation of oppositionists from his own age cohort. Once infused with this new blood, with Yezhov sufficiently constrained (to a degree that, for example, J. Edgar Hoover had never been) by a hesitant and "seasoned" Stalin, the opposition’s "star" finally began to rise. Beria was also about twenty years younger than Stalin, and in the same age cohort once again as Yezhov and Zhukov - which is also the age cohort of Khrushchev and the others who inherited and fronted for the cause of the Old Civil War Opposition. The battle for Communism and the Soviet Union’s future was taking place amongst this generation. Beria may have been convinced that Yezhov was right because, during his brief tenure succeeding him as NKVD head, he continued the purges, but primarily within the Soviet Union’s security apparatuses, until he was eliminated in turn by the same oppositionist gang with Khrushchev at its front.
Yezhov suffered a much commented on decline in mental and physical health, as well as a severe deterioration in work and personal habits, near the end of his service in the NKVD. Some of Stalinism’s apologists state that he suffered deliberate, chronic, low-level metal poisoning, perhaps by mercury. Such poisoning does not kill right away, but results in many of the ailments Yezhov actually complained about, symptoms noticed by those with whom he had personal contact. These symptoms - coinciding with Yezhov’s professional frustrations - include teeth falling out, a mangy appearance, fatigue and flu-like symptoms, body aches, loss of appetite, sleep disturbances, paranoia, and possibly delirium. (Consult sci.med. See Bibliography.) All of these symptoms can be induced by old-fashioned substances - not implausible in a world capital famous for Byzantine intrigue. Some critics say if Yezhov was so afflicted, it was self-induced, but it is difficult to see why he would subject himself to protracted, non-fatal doses. It cannot be overlooked that Yezhov’s health problems began around 1937 when he was appointed General Commissar for State Security Forces of the NKVD. This made him head of the NKVD and General Commissar of the GUGB, which existed within the NKVD. As pointed out above, the network of conspirators against whom his hunt was directed had a patient, snail-like foothold in the GUGB.
There is another kind of excruciating experience that Yezhov is known for a fact to have endured, one which could not have been self-inflicted. During Yezhov’s conduct of the purges, Stalin not only flashed a "cautionary amber warning light" in his eyes, as stated above. Stalin alternately told Yezhov "stop," and then "go," "stop," and then "go," "stop" and... . Behaviorists have found such a "strobe" treatment tantamount to torture in the severe physiological toll it takes on both humans and lower mammals, such as experimental mice. The chronological reconstruction of what is known to have transpired between Stalin and Yezhov clearly shows Stalin did this. Such behavior by Stalin is consistent with what is discreetly and euphemistically referred to as the "confusion" that is reported of people suffering various age dementias.
Though it is not certain, it is far more probable, realistic, and scientific to operate on the assumption that Stalin failed to see as clearly as Yezhov the threat posed by a patient, abiding counter-revolutionary underground that subsequent history shows eventually did prevail, and that this was due to Stalin’s advanced brain age (compared to Yezhov), than to frame the discussion in terms of the usual plethora of psychological and moral traits imputed to Stalin and Yezhov with less than a probable basis, but only on the basis of a particular historian’s or writer’s own selections and impressions of testimony. The entire field of discussion has been smothered by impressions and projections about two people the writers never met. Many such discussions, as pointed out above, purvey pure caricature, hastily and sketchily drawn up according to the logic of the totalitarian paradigm and the sucking needs of gaping, looming holes in accounts that are only scantily factual. Other discussions and "analyses" are just projections of a particular historian’s or writer’s own worst fears and fascinations. Accounts of what was going on between Stalin and Yezhov that assert, for example, that Stalin was more "cautious" than Yezhov, or that Stalin was more appeasing of the "liberals" on the Politburo than Yezhov (who wanted to arrest many of them as agents of the opposition), when not just plain historically doubtful (as the "appeasement" theory), are mere behavioral descriptions (e.g., Stalin was "more cautious") that purport to be saying something more as to the actual causes of what Stalin was doing. This is a fraudulent "explanation" in which the adjective "cautious" ambiguously denotes both a description of a behavior and a "cause." If the latter, one is expected to understand this to be due to a more mature intelligence on Stalin’s part (compared to Yezhov), or else due to a kind of character mellowing with age. These are "Cartesian" explanations once again. They do not address material causes. Even if these descriptions of Stalin’s cognitive abilities and character ca. 1937 were completely correct, they would still have most likely been a result of what laymen call - in an effort to highlight the "disgrace" involved in age dementias - "softening of the brain," which is actually the plaque-hardening described above. The important point is that an historian would be on much firmer ground as to what was really going on ca. 1937 - 1938 if he wrung all documentable evidence for changes in Stalin’s behavior that point to age dementias, instead of discoursing on Cartesian changes that are the stock-in-trade of the kind of moral, psychological, and character-development "explanations" which have been the slanderous and dramatic favorite of anti-Stalinists. Historians need to stop pretending that moral, spiritual, and psychological characterizations (e.g. Stalin was "ruthless, atheistic, and paranoid" or, at another time, "cautious") are causes, when they are really only verbal descriptions of patterns of behavior that do have material and physiological causes. The crux of the matter is that historians lack scientific training. Even if not tied up in political apologies for the West, they are immersed in Cartesian spiritual, philosophical, and psychological wrangling. They need to come back to the real world of matter and flesh.
It is a certainty that historians will resist these suggestions as interdisciplinary intrusions into their jealously guarded narrow domain, or ridicule them as the absurdity that "history is controlled by the Gompertz curve." Far be it from them to use these proposals to frame a new and better paradigm in which age dementias are key factors. As pointed out above, this will be avoided because it necessitates deep criticism of patriarchal and gerontological cultures. If the dominant paradigm had called for it, however, such a program of criticism would have already been drawn up in the minutest detail. Historians and social scientists have repeatedly shown their reluctance for the hard sciences to "invade" their fields, such as the hue and cry put out by military historians when the late Isaac Asimov and others suggested that the sinking of the Spanish Armada had more to do with the possession by the English of technologically superior lighter-weight cannon in their gunwales than to superior battle tactics, more inspiring officers, greater valor, or favorable weather conditions. Historians suffered another such trespass on the sanctity of their domains when it was suggested that ergot poisoning of wheat harvests was a principal cause of the witch-hunting mania in Europe rather than, for example, doctrinal intolerance of witches demanded of the pious by Scripture. The latter is, once again, a Cartesian explanation because it seeks for the cause of the hysteria involved (persecutory behavior) by finding a "rational" means toward a desired end - salvation - according to a Scriptural injunction believed to call for the execution of witches. (That the injunction itself, or belief in it, is irrational is irrelevant to characterizing the explanation as Cartesian because the issue is whether or not the behavior is a realistic and workable means toward a given and accepted end, not whether or not the ends or belief in them are rational.)
If Stalin did indeed suffer an age dementia curtailing one or more of his remarkable abilities during the Yezhovshchina, putting him at a disadvantage due to senescence - unlike Yezhov - against the machinations of the Old White Opposition, would not the symptoms have been observed at the time or disclosed by now? The surprising answer is no. Even if he had been the victim of a well-developed case of a prevalent and (now) well-known age dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease, which affects commonly used abilities observed daily by others, like memory of names and places, it would have gone unnoticed, being mistaken for other things. This is in part due to the embarrassment surrounding the subject - the compelling cultural and moral taboos previously noted-, in part to Judeo-Christian-nourished ignorance, silence, and repugnance concerning the "frailties of the flesh," and in part to the dominance of the Cartesian paradigm. After Ronald Reagan completed his second term of office as U.S. President, when his Alzheimer’s disease was full-blown, he attempted to introduce Margaret Thatcher on her birthday at the new Ronald Reagan Museum and Library in Simi Valley, California. He held three-by-five prompting cards in front of him (not unusual for any president). As he began to introduce her, the audience applauded one of the most popular U.S. Presidents and "Cold Warriors" of all time, who had once referred to the Soviet Union as "the evil empire." He had been the only president since Teddy Roosevelt who seemed to enjoy the office. He was, it was said, Teflon-coated. His support of the Strategic Defense Initiative and the greatest "peacetime" arms build-up in the recorded history of the world - by which he seriously jeopardized the U.S. economy - had once-and-for-all proved the superior wealth and economic might of the U. S., finally breaking the Soviet Union’s financial backbone, helping to lead, only a few years later, to its collapse. After a few introductory remarks at the museum festivity, he stopped, seemingly unable to move a card. He then went back and redid the introduction. As he did so, the audience applauded a second time, as if nothing had happened. Only those present who were his intimates knew there was some kind of problem, such as his son Michael who, at the time, knew only that "he’s getting a little slow" (sic) because of his advanced age (Reagan, The Man and His Presidency by Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald Strober, p. 581). During his presidency, when his disease was in its much milder, incipient stage, a report by a presidential commission, released in Feb. 1987, depicted Reagan as "confused and uninformed," working with a "relaxed" "personal management style" which had prevented him, the report said, from controlling subordinates during the Iran-contra affair. These are Cartesian explanations once again, attributing Reagan’s professional performance to a style of management which is "explained" by his "mental state." C. Everett Koop, the then Surgeon General of the U. S., the nation’s top doctor, a "born-again" Christian who taught the people of the U.S. the "evils" of tobacco, said only that Reagan had a "very winsome, hesitant way of speaking" in a lowered voice. When addressing the question as to whether this "style," which had earned Reagan the epithet "The Great Communicator," had been connected to incipient Alzheimer’s disease, Koop said, "Somebody could buy that. But I don’t believe it for one moment." (ibid., p. 585 - 586).
A final and little known note of interest on the subject of paradigms is that Trotsky used the Communist Academy as a forum to lead a group of Marxist theorists who contended that excessive study and use of Pavlov’s materialist theories would deter efforts to formulate what Trotsky thought would be a fruitful synthesis of Marxism with Freudianism. Once again, Trotsky’s ideas, in this case anti-scientific and anti-materialist, struck a deep chord in the West. Such a synthesis was actually taught by Herbert Marcuse to Angela Davis and other student radicals in the 1960’s at the University of California at San Diego. Pavlov’s ideas were discounted by both Trotsky and Marcuse as not having political importance. Despite their residual appeal in the West, scientific progress is gradually consigning Trotsky and Marcuse to the trash bins of obsolete thinkers because, while Freud’s hypotheses contain very powerful theoretical ideas applicable to the sexually repressed - a common type in the West -, the poor empirical basis possessed by Freud has come under such virulent attack by many science writers lately as to leave Freud branded a "pseudo-scientist." (See A. K. Dewdney’s Yes, We Have No Neutrons.)
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
