History, Objectivity, and Stalin’s Toes

In times past, Mormon intellectualdom has been much exercised over the issue of objectivity and the writing of history. By and large, I think that these debates have focused on the wrong issues. Stalin’s toes help to illustrate one of the reasons why.

The middle two toes on one of Stalin’s feet were fused together. We know this because this fact appears in a dossier on the young communist radical Stalin (then called Koba), which was kept by the czarist secret police. Virtually every writer and biographer of Stalin in the west feels called upon to at some point or another mention this fact about Stalin’s toes. It has become an obligatory reference. My own theory is that the ubiquity of Stalin’s toes in his biographies can be traced to Shakespeare.

Stalin by all accounts — including post-Stalin Soviet accounts — was one of the great monsters of human history. He had his friends and long time associates shot. He ruthlessly suppressed any opposition to his power. He systematically starved millions of his own citizens and sent unnumbered others to die a slow death of malnutrition, overwork, and exposure in the Siberian gulags. The only person who comes close in terms of sheer body count is Mao. Hitler is not really in the same league, as the thousand year Reich was destroyed in twelve years. Stalin had decades to carry out his crimes. The toes are a wonderful device to paint the picture of Stalin’s monstrosity. The deformity of Stalin’s toes becomes an unstated metaphor for the deformity of his soul. They are an allusion to Richard III, another murderous tyrant whose deformed body acted as a metaphor for his misshapen spirit. Now if you asked Robert Conquest, or any of Stalin’s other biographers, if they thought that bodily deformity was an accurate indicator of moral depravity, they would certainly deny it. Stalin’s toes are not being offered as a causal explanation of his acts or even as evidence of his character. Still, the image of the misshapen monster is too powerful not to use.

Are the allusions to Stalin’s toes objective? Well they are certainly accurate by historical standards. It is well-documented that Stalin did indeed have fused toes on one foot. Yet this answer is obviously lame, and it points out the problem of asking the question. In one sense, the allusions to Stalin’s toes are the opposite of objectivity. They are being used as a literary device to show Stalin as a monster. They are not being shown as part of a mirror of nature, but rather they form a rhetorical flourish in an implicit (or just as frequently explicit) denunciation of Stalin. In another sense, however, the toes are entirely fair game. Allusion to them satisfies all of the cannons of historical documentation, and suggesting that Stalin was a misshapen monster does not seem to be entirely beyond the bounds of reasonable interpretation.

Stalin’s toes point to the central fact that historians are ultimate story tellers. This doesn’t mean that they make it all up, as suggested by a cynical Napoleon, or that all is subjectivity and there is no truth, as suggested by those of the 1970s and 1980s who OD-ed on post-modernism. It is not a neo-Kantian or Kuhnian point about the necessity of assumptions. Rather it is a point about writing.

History is narrative. It consists of authors putting together words to tell a story. The difference between a historian and a novelist lies in the differing disciplines that their media impost upon them. Historians cannot make up facts. They must rely on some sort of evidence for their claims (although what counts as good and bad evidence is always up for grabs). Yet like a novelist, historians must fill out their stories, provide them with a plot, and characterize the people that occupy the stories. In their way, historians are writing the truth. History can be false. The biographies of Stalin written during his lifetime were certainly false on many levels. Yet the truth or falsity of history does not ultimately lie, I think, in the objectivity of the historian. Rather than asking a question about the genesis of an author’s ideas or interests, we should look at the work that she produces. We should ask certain questions about the work. Does the story abide by the rules of history? Does it make up facts or make false claims about documents? But beyond these questions we ask questions about the story that it tells. Is it true? Does its interpretation illuminate or obscure? These are questions that cannot really be answered in terms of objectivity. But they do have answers. The use of Stalin’s toes seems true to me, in a way that a similar use of FDR’s misshapen legs would be false.

10 comments for “History, Objectivity, and Stalin’s Toes

  1. Are you sure about the writers’ motives in mentioning Stalin’s toes? I haven’t read any of these biographies, but I can think of at least 2 other possible reasons for mentioning the toes beyond wanting a rhetorical flourish to demonize him:

    1) It is something that people just find interesting because it’s unusual.
    2) Perhaps Stalin himself was somehow concerned about or motivated by his deformed toes.

    I think that’s why it seems funny to leave polygamy out of mormon history. It is both (1) interesting and (2) an important source of motivation and concern for the historical characters.

  2. Ed: I think that it is a mistake to leave polygamy out of Mormon history as well. However, I have yet to read anything by anyone suggesting that Stalin had deeply hidden toe-motives. It may be that minor physical deformaties are inherently interesting, but I can’t help but see shades of Richard III in the ritual invocation of the fused toe factoid.

  3. For what it’s worth, biographers also note other physical deformities of Stalin: a withered arm, pockmarked face, a hunched and short stature.

  4. I read at least one biography of Stalin and I don’t recall any mention of his toes. Maybe I just missed that portion.

    What impresses me about Stalin is that not only did he kill so many people but he left a legacy. There were some leaders who admired him and sought to emulate him. In at least one book I read, a Kurdish visitor saw that Saddam’s office had a shelf that was lined with many Stalin biographies. There are also witnesses to Saddam who have recollected that before he took over the presidency of Iraq, he was already telling people that he was going to establish a Stalinist state in Iraq.

    There is a purge Saddam conducted at the beginning of his rule, in which he killed people who were very close to him. Basically he stood at a podium in an auditorium and called out the names of people who were to be shot at which point they would be taken out of the room and killed. But he did this in such a way that everyone around him was baptized in blood — because the survivors of the purge were required to participate themselves in the killing. This famous first purge of his was a sort of vile improvement on Stalin’s cruel technique. It ensured that no innocent hero could stand out of the crowd and mount a coup against Saddam. I believe that Saddam’s methods of incriminating everyone around him in his actions, conducted over a period of three decades, has a lot to do with the lasting stubborness of the insurgency today.

  5. The same literary device appears in biographies of Joseph Smith. They mention how tall and handsome he was. Even his physical “deformities” such as a lisp, balding, and limp act as symbols of his righteousness since they are all the effects of beatings, assassination attempts, and surviving a brutal operation. This literary device is called prosopography and appears all over the place, not just Shakespeare.

  6. Taylor: Thanks for the the new word (prosopography, prosoprography, prosopograpy; ok, I think I have it now). I think that you are exactly right about the way in which Joseph’s physical characteristics are used. It is worth pointing out, that hagiagraphy is not the only medium to use prosopography. As I recall, Brodie dwelt on Joseph’s good looks as a way of talking about his hypnotic and charismatic appeal.

    Joseph’s limp, good looks, broken teeth, etc. are all well documented historical facts as well. Since you actually are a historian, I wonder what you make of the use of prosopography (I just love this word!) in writing history. As a methodological matter do you think that history properly conducted places constraints not only on the sorts of factual claims that can be made, but also on the sorts of literary devices that can be employed?

  7. It’s just a little ironic that you use Richard III as the pattern of moral depravity manifesting itself in physical deformity. There is precious little evidence of Richard’s deformity (it appears first in a piece statement by Sir Thomas More made 30 years after Richard’s death), and there’s a continuing historical debate about what nefarious deeds Richard was actually responsible for. Many claim that he was not in fact responsible for the murder of the little princes, and that, in fact, one of them outlived Richard.

    It is true, on the other hand, that Richard was the last of the Plantagenets, defeated at Bosworth Field by the first of the Tudors, Henry VII. So, prove Richard a villain, and support your current dynasty! But we should not be hasty in blaming Thomas More, or Shakespeare, for not portraying Richard favorably, since the Tudor kings (and queen) of the 16th century may well have considered such a portrayal as treason.

  8. More examples:

    Wilhelm II’s withered arm.
    Adolf Hitler’s testicular problems (don’t remember exactly–maybe an undescended testicle)
    Napoleon’s shortness and impotence

    One could go on and on

  9. Nate, I don’t know how much I have to say about prosopography as a valid historical methodology. It is, as you say, an interesting symbolic or metaphorical device. What is most interesting about it to me is that it illustrates that facts are not neutral. Facts are facts, but facts have no meaning unless we prescribe meaning to them. They always have to be interpreted. There is no getting around it.
    Hayden White’s Metahistory documents the narrative nature of historiography. He talks about how historians construct a plot and then talk about history within the literary genres of comedy, tragedy, romance, satire, etc. Everyone uses “facts”, but you have to tell a story with the facts.
    In that sense, I think that literary devices are inevitable in historiography, but also necessary, since just a list of facts would be utterly dull. That said, I agree that they need to be used responsibly, but don’t ask me what that means because I am a nihilist right now…

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