The Times Great Lives

Munich and After

Treaty with the Nazis

Soviet foreign policy in the thirties, as much as Soviet domestic policy, was clearly Stalin’s creation. He had long been by inclination a Soviet nationalist rather than an internationalist; and now that he was firmly established in the seat of power he was unlikely to shrink from any of the implications of ‘Socialism in one country’. Faced by the German menace, he executed without embarrassment the ideological change of front necessary to bring the Soviet Union into the League of Nations and to conclude treaties of alliance with France and Czechoslovakia. In the end it was not lack of Soviet good will that defeated this project, but the weakness of France and what appeared to Soviet eyes as a dual policy on the part of Great Britain. So long as Great Britain could be suspected of hesitating between a deal with Germany and a common front against her, Stalin on his side would equally keep both doors open. Munich, though a severe shock to prospects of cooperation, was partly offset by British rearmament, and the riddle of British policy was unsolved throughout the winter. On March 10, 1939, at the eighteenth party congress Stalin gave what was doubtless intended as a note of warning that Soviet policy was ‘not to allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by war-mongers’. But his speech was overtaken by the march of events.

It was Hitler’s seizure of Prague in the middle of March which fired the train. Great Britain now prepared feverishly for war and sought for allies in the east. Two alternatives were still open to her. She could have an alliance with the Soviet Union at the price of accepting Soviet policy in Eastern Europe – in Poland, in Rumania, in the Baltic States; or she could have alliances with the anti-Soviet Governments of these countries at the price of driving the Soviet Union into the hostile camp. British diplomacy was too simple-minded, and too ignorant of eastern Europe, to understand the hard choice before it. It plunged impetuously into the pacts of guarantee with Poland and Rumania; and within a few days, on May 3, 1939, the resignation of Litvinov and his replacement by Molotov signalled a vital change in Soviet foreign policy. The British mission which had been sent to Moscow found itself unable to make any progress. Negotiations continued; but unless Great Britain was prepared to abandon the Polish alliance, or put severe pressure on her new ally, their eventual break-down was certain. When Hitler decided to wait no longer, Stalin for his part did not hesitate. Ribbentrop came to Moscow and the German-Soviet treaty was signed. It is fair to infer that Stalin regarded it as a pis aller. He would have preferred alliance with the western Powers, but could not have it on any terms which he would have found tolerable.

Uneasy Neutrality

Twenty-two months of most uneasy neutrality followed. The German advance in Poland was answered by a corresponding Soviet move to reoccupy the White Russian territories ceded to Poland by the treaty of Riga in 1921. Thus, by the autumn of 1939, Soviet and German power already confronted each other in Poland, on the Danube, and on the Baltic. The war against Finland in the winter of 1939-40 was designed to strengthen the defences of Leningrad by pushing forward the frontier in a westerly direction. It eventually achieved this object, but at the cost of much discredit to Soviet prestige and the formal expulsion of the Soviet Union from the League of Nations.

After the fall of France, Soviet fears of German victory and German predominance grew apace; and military and industrial preparations were pressed forward. Stalin now probably foresaw the inevitability of conflict, but was determined not to provoke or hasten it. In November, 1940, he sent Molotov on a visit to Berlin without being able to mitigate the palpable clash of interests. On the other hand, Japanese neutrality was assured when Matsuoka was effusively received in Moscow in April, 1941. In the following month Stalin, hitherto only Secretary-General of the party and without official rank, became President of the Council of People’s Commissars – the Soviet Prime Minister. The appointment sounded a note of alarm at home and of warning abroad.

Russia at War

Heavy Burden of Responsibility

The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and the almost immediate threat to the capital placed on Stalin’s shoulders an enormous weight of anxiety and responsibility. From the outset, the supreme direction of the war effort and defence organization became vested in the State Defence Committee consisting of five members – Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Beria, and Malenkov, with Stalin as chairman, though it was not till March, 1943, that he assumed the rank of marshal, and later of generalissimo. During the war his customary public speeches on May 1 and on the eve of November 7 took the form of large-scale reviews of military operations and war policy. He was also active in a diplomatic role. Before the war Stalin had been almost entirely inaccessible to foreigners. Now, apart from regular conversations with the allied Ambassadors, he received a constant flow of distinguished visitors. Lord Beaverbrook and Mr Harriman were in Moscow in August, 1941, to organize supplies from the west; Mr Churchill came in August, 1942, and again, with Mr Eden, in October, 1944. In December, 1943, Stalin met President Roosevelt and Mr Churchill at Teheran, and in February, 1945, at Yalta. The last meeting of the Big Three, with Mr Truman succeeding Roosevelt and Mr Attlee replacing Mr Churchill in the middle of the proceedings, took place at Potsdam in July, 1945.

Among his diplomatic activities Stalin was particularly concerned with the perennial problem of Soviet-Polish relations. By dint of much patience he eventually secured the recognition of the new Polish Government by his allies, and the acceptance by them as the frontier, between the Soviet Union and Poland, of the so-called ‘Curzon line’ originally drawn by the Allied and Associated Powers at the Paris peace conference of 1919. He worked untiringly to secure for his country that place of undisputed equality with the other Great Powers to which its achievements and sacrifices in the war entitled it.

Domestic Policy

Comintern and Church

Two striking decisions of domestic policy during the war – the disbandment of Comintern and the renewed recognition of the Orthodox Church – were undoubtedly taken by Stalin out of deference for allied opinion; but they were in line with this long-standing inclination, accentuated by the war, to give precedence to national over ideological considerations. The reforms of 1944 which accorded separate armies and separate rights of diplomatic representation abroad to the major constituent republics of the Soviet Union were perhaps partly designed to secure to the Ukraine and White Russia independent membership and voting power in the United Nations. When the war ended Stalin was in his sixty-sixth year. A holiday of two-and-a-half months in the autumn of 1945 at Sochi on the Black Sea produced the usual crop of rumours, but was no more than a merited and necessary respite from the burden of public affairs. In December he was back in Moscow for the visit of Mr Bevin and Mr Byrnes. Thenceforward there were few personal contacts between Stalin and representatives of the western Powers. In February, 1946, he took part in the elections to the Supreme Soviet, making the principal campaign speech, in which he forecast an early end of bread rationing – a hope which was defeated by the bad harvest. He also declared that it was the intention of the Soviet Communist Party to organize a new effort in the economic field, the aim of which would be to treble pre-war production figures. Although advanced in years, Stalin still continued to hold the reins of power and in March, 1946, he was again confirmed as Secretary of the central committee of the party. In the same year the State Publishing House began publication of a collected edition of his works.

Growing Mistrust

The unparalleled popularity in the non-Communist world with which the Russian people in general, and Marshal Stalin in particular, had emerged from the war thus early gave place to mistrust. It had been hoped that the pre-war doctrine which was associated with Stalin’s name, of ‘socialism in one country’, would provide the basis for peaceful coexistence in the post-war period. Stalin’s own comments on international affairs sometimes tended to confirm, and sometimes to deny, this prospect. Thus in answer to questions put to him by the Moscow correspondent of the Sunday Times in September, 1946, Stalin declared that, in spite of ideological differences, he believed in the possibility of lasting cooperation between the Soviet Union and the western democracies, and that Communism in one country was perfectly possible. This provoked worldwide interest and was regarded as a welcome statement, contributing much to the easing of growing international tension. A month later, however, in reply to questions sent to him by the United Press of America, he asserted that in his opinion ‘the incendiaries of a new war’, naming several prominent British and American statesmen, constituted the most serious threat to world peace, and thus destroyed the earlier good impression.

Russia’s post-war policy towards her neighbours did nothing to confirm Stalin’s peaceful protestations. The independent Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, had already been incorporated in Russia in 1940. Finland and Bulgaria were compelled to surrender territory to Russia as the price of defeat, and Poland suffered even greater amputations as the reward of victory. In the Far East Russia claimed North Sakhalin and the Kurilles Islands as her price for taking part in the war against Japan. In all the countries which had been overrun by the Red Army it was only a question of time before a Communist regime had been set up and its opponents liquidated. By the middle of 1948 the borders of Communism stretched from the Elbe to the Adriatic. A year later Communism had triumphed in China. Stalin controlled the destinies of an empire far larger than any Tsar had ever dreamed of.

It was the coup d’état in Prague in February, 1948, which finally forced western Europe and North America into action for their common defence. The North-Atlantic Treaty was signed in April, 1949. But even before then the west had successfully met another outward thrust by Russia. It was in June, 1948, that the air-lift began which nullified the effects of the blockade of Berlin. Stalin remained, as always, in the background during this period of dynamic Russian expansion. It was only rarely that he received a foreign diplomat, though leaders of the satellite States naturally had readier access to him. From time to time the suggestion was made for a new conference between Stalin, the American President and the British Prime Minister, but none of them came to anything. It was in 1946 that President Truman disclosed that he had invited Stalin to Washington for a social visit, but that Stalin had found it necessary to decline for reasons of health. In the last interview which he gave to a foreign correspondent (to the representative of the New York Times in December last year) he indicated that he held a favourable view of proposals for talks between himself and the head of the new American Administration, President Eisenhower, and that he was interested in any new diplomatic move to end hostilities in Korea. President Eisenhower declared his willingness last month to hold a meeting with Stalin in certain circumstances, and Mr Churchill subsequently told the House of Commons that he did not rule out the possibility of three-cornered discussions.

Stalin’s New Role: Economic Theorist

It was in the last year of his life that Stalin appeared in a role which would have surprised former colleagues, such as Lenin and Trotsky, but which therefore may well have given him most pride – as an economic theorist in the tradition of (and not less important than) Marx, Engels and Lenin. Shortly before the nineteenth congress of the Russian Communist Party, which was held in Moscow in October, 1952 – the first congress since 1939 – Stalin published his Economic Problems of Socialism in the ussr, which has since become the definitive text-book for Communists in all countries. In this work he warned his readers that, for all Russia’s successes in building a new society, it was wrong to think that the natural economic laws did not apply as much in Russia as elsewhere. He also forecast a deepening crisis of capitalism, that west European countries would dissociate themselves from the United States, and that war between these capitalist countries was inevitable. He also outlined a programme of basic preliminary conditions necessary for the transition to Communism in the Soviet Union. At the Congress there was a reorganization of party organs – the Politburo and the Orgburo being brought together in a single body, the Praesidium of the Central Committee, of which Stalin became chairman.

On the occasion of his seventieth birthday in December, 1949, there were widespread celebrations throughout the Soviet Union and busts of Stalin were erected on 38 of the highest peaks in the Soviet Union. It marked, too, the inauguration of international Stalin peace prizes, to be awarded each year on his birthday. On March 3, 1953, it was announced by Moscow radio that Stalin was gravely ill as the result of a haemorrhage, that he had lost consciousness and speech, and that he would take no part in leading activity for a prolonged period.

Only a few details are known of Stalin’s personal life. In 1903 he married Yekaterina Svanidze, a profoundly religious woman and the sister of a Georgian comrade, who left him a son, Yasha, when she died in 1907 of pneumonia. His second wife, whom he married in 1918 – Nadezhda Alliluyeva – was 20 years younger than himself and was the daughter of a Bolshevik worker, with whom Stalin had contacts in both the Caucasus and St Petersburg. She was formerly one of Lenin’s secretaries and later studied at a technical college in Moscow. This marriage, too, ended with the death of his wife, in November, 1932. She left him two children – a daughter, Svetlana, and a son, Vassili, now a high ranking officer in the Soviet Air Force. Late in life he married Rosa Kaganovich, the sister of Lazar Kaganovich, a member of the Politburo.

Alan Turing

7 June 1954

Dr Alan Mathison Turing, obe, frs, whose death at the age of 41 has already been reported, was born on June 23, 1912, the son of Julius Mathison Turing. He was educated at Sherborne School and at King’s College, Cambridge, of which he was elected a Fellow in 1935. He was appointed obe in 1941 for wartime services in the Foreign Office and was elected frs in 1951. Until 1939 he was a pure mathematician and logician, but after the war most of his work was connected with the design and use of automatic computing machines, first at the National Physical Laboratory and then since 1948 at Manchester University, where he was a Reader at the time of his death.

The discovery which will give Turing a permanent place in mathematical logic was made not long after he had graduated. This was his proof that (contrary to the then prevailing view of Hilbert and his school at Göttingen) there are classes of mathematical problem which cannot be solved by any fixed and definite process. The crucial step in his proof was to clarify the notion of a ‘definite process’, which he interpreted as ‘something that could be done by an automatic machine’. Although other proofs of insolubility were published at about the same time by other authors, the ‘Turing machine’ has remained the most vivid, and in many ways the most convincing, interpretation of these essentially equivalent theories. The description that he then gave of a ‘universal’ computing machine was entirely theoretical in purpose, but Turing’s strong interest in all kinds of practical experiment made him even then interested in the possibility of actually constructing a machine on these lines.

It was natural at the end of the war for him to accept an invitation to work at the National Physical Laboratory on the development of the ace, the first large computer to be begun in this country. He threw himself into the work with enthusiasm, thoroughly enjoying the rapid alternation of abstract questions of design with problems of practical engineering. Later at Manchester he devoted himself more particularly to problems arising out of the use of the machine. It was at this time that he became involved in discussions on the contrasts and similarities between machines and brains. Turing’s view, expressed with great force and wit, was that it was for those who saw an unbridgeable gap between the two to say just where the difference lay.

The war interrupted Turing’s mathematical career for the six critical years between the age of 27 and 33. A mathematical theory of the chemical basis of organic growth which he had lately started to develop has been tragically interrupted, and must remain a fragment. Important though his contributions to logic have been, few who have known him personally can doubt that, with his deep insight into the principles of mathematics and of natural science, and his brilliant originality, he would, but for these accidents, have made much greater discoveries.

Henri Matisse

A master of modern French painting

3 November 1954

M. Henri Matisse, one of the most outstanding representatives of the modern French school of painting, died on Wednesday at his home at Nice. He was 84, and had been in poor health for several years.

Partly, if not chiefly, because they were both subject to the same indiscriminate abuse from artistic ‘diehards’ in England, M. Henri Matisse and Señor Pablo Picasso were closely connected in the public mind. In reality they had not very much in common, though they were associated in their first departure from academic art. To some extent they were complementary, and Matisse was weak where Picasso is strong, and the other way about. Of the two Matisse was the less intellectual, and he had not the range and depth or the inventiveness and versatility of the Spaniard but it is questionable if he had not more of the special sensibility of the painter as distinct from other kinds of creative artist. His colour was enchanting and his handling of paint was masterly.

Henri Matisse, who is said to have had some Jewish blood, was a Norman, the son of a grain merchant in a small way, and was born at Le Cateau Nord, on December 31, 1869. His father wanted him to become a lawyer and put him into the office of a legal friend to pick up what knowledge he could before entering a law school. But after about a year the boy got appendicitis, and during his long convalescence at home he took up painting at the suggestion of a neighbour who had seen him sketching. The result was that when he was 20 Matisse went to Paris, where he entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts and studied under Bouguereau. When he was 24 he married Mlle Amelie Noellie Parayre, and before long he had a young family of a daughter and two sons. Times were hard, but besides being an excellent housewife Mme Matisse opened a small millinery shop to help out the family income.

Then Gustave Moreau, the ‘mystical’ painter, who may be said to have started the cult of ‘Salome’, saw Matisse working in the Louvre, making copies of pictures there, and invited him to study in his own studio at the Ecole des Beaux Arts which was destined to become a nursery of young rebels, the fellow pupils of Matisse including Rouault and Dufy. In 1897 Matisse met the veteran Camille Pissarro and for a time worked as successfully as an Impressionist as he had as a copyist of old masters in the Louvre. On the advice of Pissarro in 1898 Matisse visited London to study Turner. Matisse was not greatly impressed by Turner, which was not surprising, because the acute interest in Paris had shifted from Impressionism, but he heard about Whistler and his Japanese prints. On his return to Paris he began to study oriental art systematically, and after a visit to Corsica, where he stayed a year, he went to Munich to see an exhibition of Moslem art, which confirmed his impression of the decorative values of the East.

‘Les Fauves’

Up to now, though he was experimenting, Matisse had not kicked over the traces. He was exhibiting regularly at the official Salon, and in 1904 the dealer Vollard, from whom he had bought Cézanne’s ‘Bathers’ to hang in his studio, gave him a one-man show of nearly 50 pictures. The explosion came at the Autumn Salon of 1905. For this exhibition Matisse organized a collection of works by the more advanced painters, including himself, Derain, Braque, Rouault, and Vlaminck, and these were hung in a room by themselves. An indignant critic, Louis Vauxcelles, writing in Gil Blas, called the room a ‘cage aux Fauves’ or ‘cage of wild beasts’, and the name stuck. Beyond distortion or deformation of natural appearance in the interests of design and vehemence in statement, the Fauves had no common doctrine. Fauvism, in fact, might be described as a violent wrenching away of the picture from literal representation.

A picture that came in for special abuse was Matisse’s ‘Woman with a Hat’. This, for which Mme Matisse was the model, was bought by the American writer Miss Gertrude Stein, who was doing useful propaganda for the rebels. In 1906 she introduced Matisse to Picasso, who was then painting her portrait. Matisse was now celebrated. The Galerie Druet gave him a big one-man show, and in 1908 he was introduced to the American public by Alfred Steiglitz.

Fauvism in Paris was followed by Cubism, which was originated by Picasso and Braque. Matisse is credited with the invention of the name, but he does not appear to have more than flirted with Cubism, though it was he who introduced Negro sculpture to Picasso. The truth seems to be that Matisse was too much of a painter in the special sense of the word to be greatly interested in geometrical abstraction. After 1908, when, refusing to take any fees, he taught for a short time at a school in Paris opened by his friends and supporters, Matisse did not greatly change his style. He spent two years in Morocco, stayed various times at Saint Tropez, Cassis and Collioure, and travelled in America, Tahiti, Italy, and Russia. In 1917 he took a villa at Nice, where he remained more or less for the rest of his life.

Visit to America

On his first visit to America Matisse was violently attacked and accused of obscenity in his work, so that he begged an interviewer, ‘Oh please do tell the American people that I am a normal man; that I am a devoted husband and father; that I have three fine children; that I go to the theatre, ride horse-back, have a comfortable home, a fine garden that I love, flowers, &c., just like any man’, and this self-description tallies with the impressions of an English observer who described Matisse as a quiet, sensible, bourgeois gentleman, without pose or affectation. America, too, revised its opinion, for in 1927 Matisse received a first prize at the Carnegie International, and a year or two later the Carnegie Institute invited him to be a judge in its competition.

Besides being a painter Matisse was an etcher, lithographer, and wood-engraver, and he produced a good many works of sculpture. He illustrated the poems of Mallarmé and an edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published by the Limited Edition Club, New York, in 1935. His work is known all over the world, the largest collections being in the Moscow Museum of Western Art and the Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania. Matisse, who is represented at the Tate Gallery by ‘Le Forêt’ and ‘Nude’, both bequeathed by Mr C. Frank Stoop in 1933, was included in both the Post-Impressionist exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1911, and in 1937 there was a very extensive exhibition of his work at the Rosenberg and Helft Gallery in London.

Though he was already well known in artistic circles in London, it was not until 1945 that Matisse really got ‘into the news’. In the December of that year an exhibition of works by Picasso and Matisse, arranged by La Direction Générale des Relations Culturelles and the British Council, was opened by the French Ambassador at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Criticism began mildly enough with a letter to The Times, signed by Professor Thomas Bodkin and Dr D. S. MacColl, to the effect that the war-diminished space in our galleries and museums should be devoted to the exhibition of their own historical treasures rather than to the works of two contemporary foreign painters of highly disputable merit. There followed in The Times a spate of correspondence for and against, many of the blows aimed at Picasso falling upon Matisse. Red herrings were strewn, but the discussion as a whole ranged round the perennial question of the distortion of natural appearance under emotion and in the interests of pictorial design.