Why George Bernard Shaw Whitewashed Josef Stalin

History, as we all know, tends to favor the victors of wars. This in part explains why two of the greatest architects of 20th Century genocide, Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, have been treated very differently in the more than 50 years since they held power. Hitler is so universally reviled that he canceled his own first name. Stalin on the other hand is presented as a more complicated and nuanced figure. It’s not just that Stalin’s Soviet Union defeated Hitler and Germany (with Allied help), Uncle Joe also had powerful and smart friends in the West, high among them was the celebrated Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.

In fairness to Shaw, at least in his younger days, the Soviet Union, and before it, Russia in general held a heady appeal to Western artists. Even prior to the Bolsheviks, the pump had already been primed, in theater by the plays of Chekov and the directing style of Stanislavski, and in literature more generally, Tolstoy, who at the start of the 20th Century was wildly praised and mimicked. So it was natural for Shaw, himself a socialist with progressive ideas, to see the USSR not as a red menace, but as a hope for humanity.

Shaw’s work, notably in “Pygmalion” and “Man and Superman,” deals with political and cultural issues, especially surrounding class and gender. Of humble birth himself, Shaw distrusts the hierarchical system of England and Ireland, unlike his contemporary, Oscar Wilde, born nearby him in Dublin, Shaw was not the manor born. We can see why this storyteller of working-class stock took a shine to the notion of a workers’ paradise. 

In “The Revolutionist’s Handbook,” Shaw writes “Now we have yet to see the man, who, having any practical experience of Proletarian Democracy, has any belief in its capacity for solving great political problems or even for doing ordinary parochial work intelligently and economically.” So, he was not a huge fan of democracy. Shaw preferred the idea of being ruled by perfect systems. And he thought the Soviet Union was well on its way to achieving just that.

Had Shaw been ignorant of the atrocities committed by Stalin, we might easily forgive him for falling into the soft lies and propaganda of the Soviet state. But by the 1940s the scale and scope of Stalin’s crimes were becoming known, yet Shaw stayed a stalwart ally. So much so, in fact, that anti-authoritarian (and socialist) author George Orwell, acting as an informant to the British government, would name Shaw as “reliably pro Russia on all major issues.” Orwell named names. 

So how was it that Shaw, and not just him, but so many of the brightest artists and writers of his time, were willing to look past murder and even genocide? We ask this not in the spirit of canceling George Bernard Shaw, but of truly understanding what led him to this dark compromise.

There is a tendency in our time to imagine that the first 2 decades of the 21st Century saw the fastest and most profound technological expansion in history. Yet, the opening 20 years of the 20th Century might have us beat in terms of the structural changes to physical and cultural spaces. The wide adoption of the light bulb, automobiles, planes, the phonograph, and moving pictures transformed the plastic of reality. The bright, shiny London of young Bertie Wooster in the 1920s was nothing like the dark and murky, gas-lit city of Sherlock Holmes just a few decades before. Shaw experienced both. 

It is easy to see why he and his contemporaries imagined that material needs could soon be furnished without the punishing demands put upon a capitalist labor force. In Stalin, Shaw saw a true man of the age. He didn’t fiddle around with legislatures, courts, or markets, he announced five-year plans and got them done. Shaw would go to his death in 1950 truly believing that, in the long run, the unfortunate deaths of millions would be for the common good. Above the bed where he died was a framed picture of Josef Stalin. 

Before we are too harsh in our historical judgment of Shaw, we ought to take a square look at his descendants in the entertainment industry today. Hollywood has become famously beholden to a China that is credibly accused of genocide and has committed an ocean of human rights abuses. This fealty to China might be more motivated by money than Shaw’s love of Soviet Communism, but it is also about control. This is true with regard to the progressive or “woke” messaging so pervasive in Hollywood’s products, but also a general insistence on obedience to the state, so long as it is controlled by Democrats.

In some ways, our country’s relationship to China is very similar to Shaw’s with the Soviet Union. We accept inconvenient tragedy because in the