Koba the Dread

Census

There was a national census in 1937, the first since 1926, which had shown a population of 147 million. Extrapolating from the growth figures of the 1920s, Stalin said that he expected a new total of 170 million. The Census Board reported a figure of 163 million – a figure that reflected the consequences of Stalin’s policies. So Stalin had the Census Board arrested and shot. The census result went undisclosed, but the board was publicly denounced as a nest of spies and wreckers, despite the fact that it had delivered its report to Stalin and not (say) to the London Times.

In 1939 there was another census. This time the Census Board contrived the figure of 167 million, which Stalin personally topped up to 170. Perhaps the Census Board added a rider to its report, saying that if Stalin found the figure too low, then it would have to be lowered still further: Stalin would have to subtract the membership of the Census Board.

The architects of the 1937 Census Board were shot for ‘treasonably exerting themselves to diminish the population of the USSR’.

There it is – Stalinism: negative perfection.

Georgia

Accounts of the childhoods of the great historical monsters are always bathetic. Instead of saying something like ‘X was raised by crocodiles in a septic tank in Kuala Lumpur,’ they tell you about a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a house, a home. It can be admitted that the family atmosphere at the Dzhugashvilis’, in Gori, Georgia, left much to be desired. Iosif’s mother and father hit each other and they both hit Iosif. But there is nothing in the early life that prefigures Stalin’s inordinateness. It is the same with Hitler. He too was born on the periphery of the country he would rule (Upper Austria), and to peasant parents (though their situation would improve to the point where Hitler’s status resembled Lenin’s: a scion of imperial officialdom); both Adolf and Iosif served as choirboys; and both would grow to a height of five feet four. Hitler’s father (somehow very appropriately) was more and more obsessed, as he grew older, by bee-keeping. Stalin’s father was a semiliterate cobbler, and he drank.

Young Iosif Vissarionovich was the kind of kid who gives himself a nickname. The nickname was ‘Koba’. Koba was the hero of a popular novel called, suggestively, The Patricide; but Koba was not the eponym. The main thing about Koba was that he was a Robin Hood figure, a taker from the rich and giver to the poor. Stalin had another nickname, ‘Soso’ (the Georgian diminutive of Iosif), which at this point might sum him up more accurately. Apart from his memory (obligatorily described as ‘phenomenal’), he was an ordinary little boy. ‘Stalin’, of course, was another self-imposed nickname. Man of Steel. The Steel One.

He began learning Russian at the age of eight or nine (his parents were Georgian monoglots). In 1894, at the age of fifteen, he left the Gori Church School and won a kind of scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary. He was expelled, or he dropped out, five years later. Thereafter he became a full-time revolutionary.

Two details from a boyhood. A schoolfriend later said that he had never seen Iosif cry. One thinks of the famous phrase that would gain fresh currency in the 1930s: Moscow does not believe in tears. On the other hand, Koba was a poet. These lines, for example, are thought to be from his pen:

Robert Conquest once suggested that ‘a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler’. At the age of twenty, his artistic dreams frustrated, Hitler was a tramp: park benches, soup queues. Given just a little more talent, perhaps, he would have killed himself, not in the bunker, but in a cosy little studio in Klagenfurt.

We don’t know how Stalin felt about his childhood. But we know how he felt about Georgia. Why take it out on your parents, when you can take it out on a province?

In 1921, with Stalin’s full support, Lenin reannexed Georgia (which had been granted independence the year before) by invasion. Stalin went down south to attend a plenum of the new administration: his first visit for nine years. He addressed a group of railway workers and was heckled into silence with cries of ‘renegade’ and ‘traitor’. At a later meeting he harangued the local Bolshevik leaders:

Lenin was now favouring a softer line on the nationalities question, and especially on Georgia. Stalin was for maximum force.

In 1922 Stalin’s violent highhandedness, his display of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ (Lenin’s phrase) on the matter of Georgia came close to ending his career: itself amazing testimony that the strength of his feelings now outweighed his self-interest. (Power, as we shall see, had an instantly deranging effect on Stalin; during the Civil War he was chronically insubordinate and trigger-happy; it took many years before he learned to control the glandular excitements that power roiled in him.) The Georgia question would have unseated Stalin – if Lenin’s health had held. In May 1922 Lenin began to be buffeted by strokes, a month after his fifty-second birthday (he had also stopped three Russian bullets, we may recall, in 1918, and one of them was still lodged in his neck). I feel persuaded of Lenin’s intention, not from all the references to Stalin’s ‘rudeness’ (grubost: coarseness, grossness, crassness), but from this conversation between Lenin and his sister, Maria. Stalin had asked Maria to intercede for him; he played on her feelings, saying that he couldn’t sleep because Lenin was treating him ‘like a traitor’. Lenin’s talk with his sister ended:

This is said ‘decisively’ though ‘without any irritation’, suggesting that Lenin had long ceased to consider Stalin as a viable confederate. It is generally agreed that even a half-fit Lenin would have sidelined him, though Richard Pipes, in Three ‘Whys’ of the Russian Revolution, suggests that ‘Stalin was far ahead in the competition for Lenin’s post, possibly as early as 1920 but certainly by 1922.’

In 1935 Stalin went to see his mother, whom he had installed in the palace of the Tsar’s Viceroy in the Caucasus (where she kept to a single room). It is thought that this much-publicized visit was part of a pro-family campaign to combat the falling birthrate. He asked her, inter alia, about the beatings she had given him in his childhood. She answered: ‘That’s why you turned out so well.’

In 1936, when old Ekaterina died, Stalin scandalized the remains of Georgian public opinion by failing to attend her funeral.

In 1937 the Great Terror reached Transcaucasia: ‘Nowhere were victims subjected to more atrocious treatment,’ writes Robert C. Tucker, ‘than in Georgia.’ Of the 644 delegates to the Georgian party congress, in May, 425 were either shot or dispatched to the gulag (the gulag was at its deadliest in 1937–38). Mamia Orakhelashvili, a founder of the republic, had his eyes put out and his eardrums perforated while his wife was forced to watch. The party chief Nestor Lakoba had already been poisoned and buried with honours in 1936; he was now exhumed as an enemy of the people, and his wife was tortured to death in the presence of their fourteen-year-old son (who was sent to the gulag with three young friends. ‘When, later, they wrote to Beria requesting release to resume their studies,’ writes Tucker, ‘he ordered them returned to Tiflis and shot’). Budu Mdivani, the ex-premier, was arrested, tortured for three months, and shot. His wife, their four sons and their daughter were all shot.

When the interrogators started work on Mdivani he is said to have protested, ‘You are telling me that Stalin has promised to spare the lives of Old Bolsheviks! I have known Stalin for thirty years. He won’t rest until he has butchered all of us, beginning with the unweaned baby and ending with the blind great-grandmother!’ ‘All of us’ seems to refer to ‘Old Bolsheviks’; but it could mean ‘all Georgians’ (or, conceivably, all Soviet citizens). The specific nature of Stalin’s antipathy is in any case clear. It is usually attributed to his intense insecurity and his shame about his origins. Perhaps, too, he was trying to sever his last connections to anything human. In the 1930s, and beyond, Stalin killed everyone who had ever known Trotsky. But he was also killing everyone who had ever known Stalin – known him or seen him or breathed the same air.

Demian Bedny

Of all the writers with whom Stalin had dealings none was less distinguished than Demian Bedny. A hack and a McGonagall, Bedny was, ridiculously, the Soviet Union’s proletarian ‘poet laureate’. He had been active since the days of the Civil War, and his poems (or battle chants: ‘Death to the vermin! Kill them all, to the last!’) were posted on walls and scattered from aeroplanes). Trotsky praised his passion, ‘his well-grounded hatred’, and his ability to write, ‘not only in those rare instances when Apollo calls’, but ‘day in and day out, as the events demand… and the Central Committee’. There were cries of ‘Author! Author!’ from Stalin, in 1926, when Bedny published an anti-Trotsky poem, ‘Everything Comes to an End’, which included the lines:

As the show trial of the Old Bolsheviks Zinoviev and Kamenev approached its denouement, Pravda was full of mass resolutions and signed articles demanding the death penalty. Bedny’s poem for 21 August 1936, was entitled ‘No Mercy’.[1]

Demian Bedny, who was given a pension and a luxurious apartment in the Kremlin, had several run-ins with Stalin. Nadezhda Mandelstam tells the following tale of an early froideur. Apparently Bedny disliked lending books to Stalin because of the smears left in the margins by his ‘greasy fingers’. He was incautious enough to confide this to his diary; a Kremlin secretary saw the entry and passed it on. It is obvious, incidentally, that Stalin never regarded his laureate as anything but a reasonably useful idiot. Stalin knew very well that poetry was more than a factory whistle…

In 1930 Bedny published ‘Get Off the Oven-Shelf,’ a poem lamenting a decline in coal output in the Donbas (some of the miners were newly recruited peasants), and ‘Pererva’, which addressed itself to a train crash (switchman negligence on the Moscow-Kursk line). Bedny’s theme, here, was the torpor and wishfulness of the Russian temperament – what Lenin had called ‘Oblomovism’. When this critique was itself criticized by the Central Committee, Bedny wrote to Stalin, putting his case for constructive satire on the national character in the tradition of Gogol and Shchedrin. Stalin’s reply was, in Tucker’s words, ‘harshly negative’. He accused Bedny of perpetrating a ‘slander’ on the Russian proletariat.

Bedny had failed to see that Stalin was changing his stance towards Old Russia, and had now decided to exalt its folkloric traditions and historical heroes (he would rehabilitate not only Peter the Great but also Ivan the Terrible, in his own image). In Tucker’s formulation, Stalin was becoming a ‘right-radical Great Russian’. Bedny was thus most ill-advised when, in 1936, he wrote a comic opera called Bogatyrs (the great heroes), in which a sacred chapter in Russian history was raucously lampooned.

Robert Tucker:

Molotov attended the first night and walked out at the end of Act One (‘An outrage!’). Bedny was evicted from the Writers’ Union. And from his Kremlin apartment.

Our poet continued to write and publish – until 1938. At this point, his finger no nearer the pulse of events, he was moved to write an attack on Nazism, apparently unaware of the delicate manoeuvrings between Hitler and Stalin (who would soon be nominal allies). Called ‘Inferno’, Bedny’s piece reimagined Germany in terms of the classical Hell (and in contrast, no doubt, to the Paradiso of the Soviet Union). At two o’clock in the morning Bedny was summoned to the offices of Pravda. The editor, Mekhlis, showed him his manuscript, which now bore Stalin’s adjudication: ‘Tell this newly appeared “Dante” that he can stop writing.’

‘I have invented a new genre,’ said Isaac Babel, the great short-story writer, in 1934: ‘that of silence.’ Babel ceased to be published in 1937; he was arrested in 1939, and shot in 1940.

Demian ‘Bedny’: Demian the Poor (his real name was Efim Pridvorov). He was a disgrace to poetry; and his physical appearance wore that disgrace. But we are relieved that he met no worse fate than penury – silence, in his case, being neither here nor there.

The Grey Blur, the Yellow Eyes

In November 1915 Lenin wrote to his colleague Vyacheslav Karpinsky asking for

This seems especially comic when we consider the historical revisions subsequently undertaken by Stalin. Films, paintings and textbooks routinely depicted scenes of Lenin and Stalin wisely planning the Revolution together (well before 1915), the ‘great joy’ and ‘manly embraces’ of their reunions, and so on. There is something boyishly transparent about the faked transcript of 1929, supposedly of Lenin’s telegraphic communications in early 1918, when the new regime was struggling with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Stalin’s intention here is the retrospective validation, and magnification, of his own role (and, of course, the undermining of Trotsky’s):

‘Our joint reply’: a swift ascent, then, for ‘Iosif Dzh…?’ By 1915 Lenin had known Stalin for ten years. In 1912 he personally nominated him to the Central Committee. That same year Stalin twice crossed the Austrian border (illegally) to visit Lenin in Cracow. Lenin referred to him as ‘my wonderful Georgian’. And yet he couldn’t remember his name. ‘It’s very important!!!’ observed Lenin. And so it is.

When the time came to falsify, or refalsify, the historical record, Stalin had much work to do. His prerevolutionary activities (agitprop and the organization of strikes) were mildly remarkable only for the frequency of his incarcerations. Between 1903 and 1917 he was arrested seven times and sentenced to imprisonment or, more usually, to internal exile (from which he escaped five times). Between 1908 and 1917 he spent only eighteen months at liberty. Even his part in the famous ‘expropriations’ appears to have been minor. The sensational heist in Tiflis (1907), with its guns, its bombs, its scores of injuries, its innocent dead (including the mutilated horses), was the work, not of ‘Koba’, but of ‘Kamo’ (the crazed Ter-Petrosian). Stalin’s achievement, pre-1917, rests on the several articles he indubitably published in Pravda. Then came the October events in Petrograd.

The History of the All-Union Communist Party: Short Course was shepherded through the presses by Stalin in 1938 – during the first ebb of the Terror. Part primer, part ghosted autobiography, the Short Course would have eventual print runs in the tens of millions and become a cornerstone of the entire culture. Its popularity was perhaps not entirely manufactured and imposed. The Short Course, after all, was the best-known guide on how to avoid being arrested. By now, by 1938, almost everyone who remembered things differently was dead. This was one of the obscure desires of the Terror: to make a tabula rasa of the past… As the Short Course tells it, Stalin made the Revolution (and won the Civil War) more or less singlehanded – with the help and colleagueship of Lenin, and with the sinister hindrances of Trotsky. And the truth is (‘a queer but undoubted fact’, as Isaac Deutscher put it) that Stalin played no part in October at all.[2]

It seems to have been de rigueur for Stalin’s contemporaries to describe him, at this stage (he would blossom fiercely during the Civil War), as ‘a grey and colourless mediocrity’, ‘a grey blur’ (with ‘a glint of animosity’ in ‘his yellow eyes’ – Trotsky), or ‘just a small-town politician’ (Lev Kamenev). Such assessments are usually quoted as examples of lack of prescience or as tributes to Stalin’s powers of dissimulation. But it is clear that that’s exactly what Stalin was, in 1917: a grey blur, with yellow eyes (several observers mention the ‘tigerish eyes’). Still, even then Stalin had the ability to repel his peers. In March he suffered a preferment snub that Conquest finds ‘quite astonishing when we consider that it was taken to outweigh his high official standing’ (he was turned down for a minor promotion ‘in view of certain personal characteristics’). We have here a figure both anonymous and liable to give offence. As soon as the guard dropped, in other words, something feral was revealed. The grey blur gave way to the yellow eyes.

When in 1912 Lenin nominated Stalin for the Central Committee he didn’t put his name forward in the usual way but pushed him through by fiat, as if conceding that his protégé was not widely admired. Lenin indulged Stalin partly because of his background, the closest thing the Bolsheviks had to a proletarian (apart from Tomsky); and he felt that Stalin’s working-class brutality was more ideologically ‘honest’ than the brainier brutality of himself and Trotsky and to lesser degrees all the other top men. In 1922, as we have seen, Lenin experienced a fundamental rejection of Stalin, a rejection of his low cultural level, his lumpen instability. He felt power (‘immense power’) concentrating itself in Stalin and, suddenly, it seems, he saw what that power had done and was doing to him. Stalin, in fact, was not corrupted so much as symbiotically reinvented by power.

When the new cabinet was announced, in 1917, Stalin was named fifteenth and last. (To reminisce about this placement was not encouraged, in 1937–38.) Stalin was Lenin’s industrious, underbred mascot, his shaggy dog. Five years later, Lenin would sense that the dog had begun to fizz with rabies. Two years earlier, so far as Lenin was concerned, the dog didn’t even have a name.

We had better deal here with the baffling telephone conversation between Stalin and Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, on 22 December 1922, in which Stalin called her, among other things (such was Party rumour), a ‘syphilitic whore’.

The timing is important. At this stage Lenin-Stalin relations were at their lowest point, after the Georgia altercation. On the other hand, four days earlier the Central Committee had conferred on Stalin responsibility for Lenin’s medical care.[3] Thirteen days later Lenin would compose his ‘Testament’ (‘Stalin is too rude’, and so on). But Lenin wasn’t told about the telephone call until March, on the eve of his final stroke.

On 22 December 1922, Stalin learned that Krupskaya had supposedly breached Lenin’s medical regimen. In her own words (a letter to Kamenev):

What can explain Stalin’s reaction? The ‘brief note’ Lenin dictated to Krupskaya was addressed to Trotsky, praising him for his recent outmanoeuvring of Stalin (on the question of the foreign-trade monopoly). Evidence, to Stalin, of a Lenin-Trotsky bloc. But why would his aggression take the course it did? This was a clearly unforgivable intrusion, and prosecuted with such fury that Krupskaya (known to be an unmercurial woman, even as she nursed a dying husband) is said to have been reduced to hysterics (her nerves, she told Kamenev, were now ‘at breaking point’). When Lenin heard about it, as he inevitably would, he moved at once, and again inevitably, to demote and discredit Stalin. Then, on 7 March, came Lenin’s final stroke. He lived on, speechless, for another ten months; and Stalin survived.

If there is no rational explanation for Stalin’s behaviour then an irrational one will have to serve. The prominent Chekist, Dzerzhinsky, on being mildly reproached for the savagery of his Georgian purge, agreed that the suppression had indeed got completely out of hand, adding, ‘But we couldn’t help ourselves.’ We can well believe that the accession to and then the practice of power had that compulsive quality. One must feel one’s way into it by imagining Bolshevik coercive force and the adjectives associated with it – naked, raw, brutal, merciless, absolute. On 25 May 1922, Stalin had experienced a runaway powersurge, on the occasion of Lenin’s first stroke (with the massive booster of 13 December: strokes two and three). When it came to confronting Krupskaya, Stalin was all caught up in the thrills and heaves of the prospect of prepotence. He couldn’t help himself.

Krupskaya was being perfectly serious when she said that had Lenin lived on, he would eventually have joined all the other Old Bolsheviks in Stalin’s execution cellars. When he was told about the telephone call, Lenin wrote to Stalin: ‘I have no intention of forgetting what has been done against me, and it goes without saying what was done against my wife I also consider to have been directed against myself.’ Precisely. For the first and only time, and with unstoppable recklessness, Stalin had revealed a profound secret: his hatred of Lenin. To the extent that Stalin was a divided or a ‘doubled’ self, half of him hated Lenin as purely and passionately as the whole man hated Trotsky.

As instructed, Krupskaya delivered the ‘Testament’ to the Central Committee soon after Lenin’s death. Stalin then announced his resignation.

But a year had passed, and political reconfigurations were already entrained, and Stalin’s tactical offer was refused.

His ally throughout, his most loyal helper, was cerebral sclerosis. First, the disease weakened Lenin, then partly marginalized him, then silenced him, then, after a crucial delay, extinguished him – uncannily obedient, all the while, to Stalin’s needs.

The Kremlin Complexion

‘Lazar,’ said Stalin, one day in the testing year of 1937, as he struck up a conversation with his industrious underling Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich. ‘Did you know that your [brother] Mikhail is hobnobbing with the rightists? There is solid evidence against him.’

After a pause Kaganovich replied: ‘Then he must be dealt with in accordance with the law.’

Kaganovich duly telephoned his brother Mikhail (a Bolshevik since 1905 and now Commissar for aircraft construction), who shot himself the same day in a colleague’s toilet. Lazar Kaganovich died of natural causes in 1988.[4]

Such abjection was a way of surviving Stalin: you gave him something of your blood, without wavering – though Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s secretary, is said to have gone down on his knees in the hope that his wife might be spared the supreme penalty.

Nikita Khrushchev’s daughter-in-law was jailed.

Vyacheslav Molotov’s wife was sent to the gulag.

Mikhail Kalinin’s wife was beaten unconscious by a female interrogator in the presence of head Chekist Lavrenti Beria, and then sent to the gulag.

Anastas Mikoyan’s two sons were sent to the gulag.

Aleksandr Poskrebyshev’s wife was sent to the gulag. Three years later she was shot.

These men formed Stalin’s inner circle: they were the ‘Kremlin complexion’ crowd (chalky, with livid patches) who worked with him all day and drank with him all night. We must picture their faces round the dinner table, or flickering in the private projection room (musicals and Westerns in the earlier years; later, celebratory propaganda about collective farms and the like). We must picture their faces as they looked up from their desks the following day. These pale men had given Stalin something of their blood.

Rhythms of Thought

Stalin’s two most memorable utterances are ‘Death solves all problems. No man, no problem’ and (he was advising his interrogators on how best to elicit a particular confession) ‘Beat, beat and beat again.’

Both come in slightly different versions. ‘There is a man, there is a problem. No man, no problem.’[5] This is less epigrammatic, and more catechistic – more typical of Stalin’s seminarian style (one thinks of his oration at Lenin’s funeral and its liturgical back-and-forth).

The variant on number two is: ‘Beat, beat, and, once again, beat.’ Another clear improvement, if we want a sense of Stalin’s rhythms of thought.

Succession

The years of Stalin’s climb to ascendancy, 1922–29, are so undramatic – blocs, alignments, bureaucratic reshuffles, and a certain amount of doctrinal wheedling about Permanent Revolution (later to be condemned as ‘Trotskyite contraband’) and Socialism in One Country (Stalin’s view that the USSR would have to survive without Communist revolutions in, for a start, Germany, France, England and the USA): these years are so undramatic that they are best sidestepped in favour of a brief glance at Trotsky and the question why, in the end, he gave Stalin so very little trouble. He gave Stalin trouble psychologically. But not politically.

It was by any standards a remarkably thin field that Lenin left behind him. No one can reckon on dying at the age of fifty-three; but the matter of the succession was one of the great integral carelessnesses of Leninism. The chain of command, according to State and Revolution (written in haste between the two revolutions of 1917), depended on ‘unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader’. And when that Soviet leader died – then what? Justified anxiety on this question shores up the sense of gloom and failure in Lenin’s later, post-stroke meditations.

To begin with it looked as though the front-runner was the Petrograd – now Leningrad – Party boss, Grigori Zinoviev. This feels in itself remarkable, because nobody has ever had a good word to say for him. Conquest is untypically categorical: ‘[Zinoviev] seems to have impressed oppositionists and Stalinists, Communists and non-Communists, as a vain, incompetent, insolent, and cowardly nonentity.’ Another party star was Lev Kamenev, a more restrained and respectable personage but an incorrigible trimmer and haverer. Zinoviev and Kamenev were used to working in concert (they would also be suppressed in concert); possibly their weaknesses might have balanced out in some kind of ramshackle coalition. What else was there? Lenin, showing his vanity and, in sickness, his muted will, recommended broad-based consensus rule: rule by Politburo. But the system he had half-accidentally constructed was shaped for rule by the strongest personality. The inevitability of Stalin: Richard Pipes thinks that Stalin was inevitable. Most historians, when dealing with the Stalin ascendancy, reject ‘inevitable’ in favour of ‘logical’…. Kamenev, by the way, publicly and passionately called for Stalin’s overthrow on 21 December 1925 (Stalin’s forty-sixth birthday). At this stage he and Zinoviev had eleven years to live.[6] Bukharin had thirteen.

Nikolai Bukharin, whom Lenin called ‘the darling of the Party,’ abased himself many times. ‘I am so glad they have been shot like dogs,’ he said, referring to Zinoviev and Kamenev, in 1936. At that time he was being vigorously menaced by Stalin. But he had abased himself earlier, under no such pressure, at Lenin’s ‘demonstration’ trial of the Socialist-Revolutionists in 1922 (Pipes describes his role here as ‘sordid’. He behaved like a one-man lynch mob). Bukharin was by all accounts almost drunkenly volatile, equally likely to burst into tears or laughter. When the Mandelstams sought his help, in the early 1930s, Nadezhda was astounded by the rage he flew into – on their behalf. But Bukharin had eloquence and insight; he had a much sharper sense of reality than any of his peers. Consequently he was the only eminence uncontaminated by the critical Bolshevik vice: murderous contempt for the peasants. (‘Enrich yourselves,’ he told them, thereby attracting a doctrinal rebuke.) And Collectivization, when it came, provoked this response from him, a response seldom found in these years, in these men: moral hesitation. Bukharin said privately that during the Civil War he had seen

Conquest adds:

It is here, and not in the aftermath of the Kirov murder (December 1934), that we see the quickening of the Great Terror. ‘Koba, why do you need me to die?’ began the forty-third unanswered letter that Bukharin wrote to Stalin, during the long course of his house arrest, trial, sentence. Why? Zachto? Bukharin said it himself, in 1936:

Anyone better or higher: a numerous company. In earlier and happier days the two men, Stalin and Bukharin, used to tussle playfully on the lawns of their dachas. Solzhenitsyn anecdotally reports that Bukharin would often put Stalin on his back. That would have been enough.[7]

Which leaves Trotsky. Lenin credited him with the highest ‘ambition’, but there was something fundamentally unserious about Trotsky’s approach to the succession. In late 1922 he had to ask directions to Lenin’s dacha in Gorky – where Stalin was a frequent and faithful visitor. Then there was the elementary ineptitude of his failure to return from holiday in order to attend Lenin’s funeral. (It is not the case that Stalin duped him over the dates.) Trotsky’s absence was widely remarked – as was Stalin’s from another funeral, in 1936. The Russian philosopher Alexander S. Tsipko pinpoints two ingredients of Bolshevik elan: disdain for the trivial and the desire to astonish the world. Trotsky epitomized both. Stalin intended to astonish the world, as we shall soon see. But he had no disdain for the trivial. The Bolsheviks had created a world in which the activities of any group of two or more people had to be monitored by the state. Stalin accepted the implications of this. The totality of Trotsky’s failure in the struggle for power is taken romantically by romantics. In fact his effort was lame, obtuse, even valetudinarian (an elderly tremolo comes off the page as we read about his various indispositions and recuperations). In the election to the Central Committee in 1921, Trotsky came in tenth – ‘far below Stalin, and even after Molotov,’ as Pipes points out. Anyway, there was no doubt who was temperamentally more suited to the job of nursing and patting and rubbing and generally tending to the gigantic paunch of the bureaucracy.

Theory

‘Stop it, Koba, don’t make a fool of yourself. Everyone knows that theory is not exactly your field.’

This interruption came from the lips of the old Communist sage David Ryazonov. It was a costly taunt.

Very soon after Lenin’s death, in April 1924, Stalin gave a course of lectures, later printed in a short book called The Foundations of Leninism. It consisted almost entirely of quotations (without them, says Volkogonov, the book would contain little more than punctuation marks). The quotations were marshalled by a research assistant named F. A. Ksenofontov. He, too, would pay for his contribution.

In 1925 Stalin appointed Jan Sten, deputy head of the Marx-Engels Institute, as his private tutor. Sten’s job was to tighten Stalin’s grip on dialectical materialism. Twice a week, for three years, Sten came to the Kremlin apartment and coached his pupil on Hegel, Kant, Feuerbach, Fichte, Schelling, Plekhanov, Kautsky and Francis Bradley (Appearance and Reality). Stalin, ominously, found Sten’s voice ‘monotonous’, but he managed to sit through the lessons, occasionally breaking in with such queries as ‘Who uses all this rubbish in practice?’ and ‘What’s all this got to do with the class struggle?’ As Bukharin put it, Stalin was ‘eaten up by the vain desire to become a well-known theoretician. He feels that it is the only thing he lacks.’ Sten, with that monotonous voice of his, would not get off lightly.

The tutorials ended in 1928. By December 1930 Stalin felt himself equipped to lecture the lecturers. As the unchallenged dictator whose revolution from above (his ‘Second October’) was already launched in a wave of unprecedented hysteria and havoc, he found the time to address the Institute of Red Professors in the following terms:

Sten and others were moreover accused of ‘Menshivizing idealism’ and of ‘underestimating the materialistic dialectic’. It was impossible to ascertain what Stalin was prescribing – or proscribing. The final result of his intervention was that ‘philosophy shrivelled up,’ as Volkogonov puts it: ‘no one had the courage to write anything more on the subject.’

Ksenofontov, Stalin’s collaborator on The Foundations of Leninism, was told to abandon his work. He was later shot. Jan Sten was pronounced a ‘lickspittle of Trotsky’. He was later shot. The fate of David Ryazonov (‘Stop it, Koba’) was slightly more unusual.

Ryazonov had a protégé, I. I. Rubin, who was among the defendants in the Menshevik trial of 1931. On his arrest Rubin was confined in what Solzhenitsyn calls the box (‘constructed in such a way that [the prisoner] can only stand up and even then is squeezed against the door’). This went on for some time, but Rubin held out. The Chekists broke him by producing a stranger whom they threatened to shoot if Rubin’s resistance continued. He witnessed two such murders before he signed. At his trial Rubin implicated Ryazonov as the possessor of documents adumbrating the full scope of the Menshevik conspiracy. ‘You won’t find them anywhere unless you’ve put them there yourself,’ said Ryazonov, when summoned to the Politburo. He was sacked, expelled from the Party, and sentenced to internal exile. He was later shot.

It seems that the sole survivor of these theoretical exchanges was Abram Deborin, who died (in poverty) at the amazingly late date of 1963.

The Second October and the Breaking of the Peasantry

Collectivization (1929–33) was the opening and defining phase of Stalin’s untrammelled power: it was the first thing he did the moment his hands were free. As a crime against humanity it eclipses the Great Terror, which it also potentiated, in two senses, rendering the purge both more certain and more severe. Collectivization makes you wonder what the fifty years of the gulag would have been like if telescoped in time (to half a decade) and distended in space (to fill the entire country). Only it was worse, demographically worse. During Collectivization Stalin is reckoned to have killed about 4 million children. For the man himself, though, and for the man’s psychology, the most salient feature of Collectivization was the abysmal depth, and gigantic reach, of its failure. In his introductory administrative push, Stalin ruined the countryside for the rest of the century. It was here, too, that he lit out of all reality, and did so with full Bolshevik aggression. As the Party economist S. G. Strumilin put it: ‘Our task is not to study economics but to change it. We are bound by no laws.’ This was the first stage in Stalin’s opaque – indeed barely graspable – attempt to confront the truth, to bring it into line, to humble it, to break it.

I was in my late twenties when I first realized – the moment came as I read a piece about Islam in the TLS – that theocracies are meant to work. Until then I thought that repression, censorship, terror and destitution were the price you had to pay for living by the Book. But no, that wasn’t the idea at all: Koranic rule was meant to bring you swimming pools and hydrogen bombs. Collectivization, similarly, was meant to work. Stalin had earlier expressed doubts about the ‘Left-deviation’ (i.e., extremely doctrinaire) attitude to the peasantry: its policies, he said, would ‘inevitably lead to… a great increase in the price of agricultural produce, a fall in real salaries and an artificially produced famine’. And his preparations for Collectivization, in the initial burst, were frivolously lax. Yet Stalin believed that Collectivization would work. Collectivization would astonish the world. This was a Stalinist rush of blood. And that is how Stalinism is perhaps best represented: as a series of rushes of blood.

In Bolshevik terms the peasantry was (as psychologists say when referring to a huge and unmentionable family dysfunction) ‘the elephant in the living room’. The peasantry, in the Marxist universe, wasn’t really meant to be there. In the Marxist universe Russia was supposed to be more like Germany or France or England, with their well-developed urban proletariats. Yet the Russian peasants were intransigently actual: they comprised 85 per cent of the population. And, as landholders, they were technically bourgeois, technically capitalist.[8] Lenin had tried to socialize the countryside. Grain requisitioning was enforced by terror – and followed by famine. His agrarian policies also gave rise, in 1920–21, to a vast national uprising that proved a greater threat to the regime than all the armies of the Whites: part of a failed but genuine revolution that utterly dwarfed those of 1905 and February 1917. His response was the abashedly capitalistic New Economic Policy; and this was an enduring doctrinal embarrassment to the Bolsheviks. Originally an enthusiast, Lenin seemed to lose his appetite for Collectivization and what it would mean. The Right bloc in the Politburo concurred. The Left bloc was more restless for bold action but was reluctantly resigned to a socialization of the countryside that might take ten or twenty years. In 1928, with Trotsky finished, no one was talking with much ardour about forced Collectivization, let alone immediate forced Collectivization.[9] During the earlier years of the 1920s Stalin had presented himself as a godfearing centrist. Then, with the opposition defeated, he veered wildly Left. The argument with the professionals was easily settled. As 1929 wore on, writes Conquest, Soviet economists ‘had the choice of supporting the politicians’ new plans or going to prison’.

Stalin’s aims were clear: crash Collectivization would, through all-out grain exports, finance wildfire industrialization, resulting in breakneck militarization to secure state and empire ‘in a hostile world’. According to Robert Tucker, Stalin was beginning to picture himself as a kind of Marxist Tsar; he hoped to improve and replace Leninism (with Stalinism), and also to buttress the state ‘from above’, as had Peter the Great. What remains less clear is whether his strategy was thought through, or simply and intoxicatedly ad hoc. The Five Year Plan, after all, was not a plan but a wish list. It was certainly Stalin’s intention, or his need, to regalvanize Bolshevism, to commit it, once again, to ‘heroic’ struggle. And yet, unlike Hitler, who announced his goals in 1933 and, with a peculiarly repulsive sense of entitlement, set about achieving them, Stalin is to be seen at this time as a figure constantly fantasticated not by success but by failure.

To get things going he needed an enemy and an emergency. The emergency was a ‘grain crisis’ after the disappointing but undisastrous harvest of 1927. The enemy was the village kulak. The kulaks (kulak means fist) were a pre-Revolutionary stratum of rich peasants: they were usurers and mortgagers and ‘exploiters of labour’; and they all but disappeared during the rural terror of War Communism. Of course, under NEP, some peasants continued to be richer than others (by about half as much again, in extreme cases). It came down to one extra cow, one extra hired hand during the harvesting, one extra window on the face of the log cabin. On 21 December 1929, Stalin celebrated his fiftieth birthday, to hyperbolic acclaim; this date also marks the birth of the ‘cult of personality’, which would take such a toll on his mental health. Eight days later he announced his policy of ‘liquidating the kulaks as a class’.

Solzhenitsyn is insistent (‘This is very important, the most important thing’) that Dekulakization was chiefly a means of terrorizing the other peasants into submission: ‘Without frightening them to death there was no way of taking back the land which the Revolution had given them, and planting them on that same land as serfs.’ (And Molotov spoke of dealing the kulaks ‘such a blow’ that ‘the middle peasant will snap to attention before us’.) The Bolshevik ‘class analysis’ of the countryside seems, even by Party standards, desperately willed, vague, ignorant and contradictory;[10] but it did have the supposed virtue of siding with the least fit – the virtue of downward selection. There were meant to be three kinds of peasant (poor, middle, kulak), and three kinds of kulak (numerically bulked out by various ‘subkulaks’ or ‘near-kulaks’ or podkulakniki, meaning ‘henchmen of kulak’). A plan approved in January 1930 stated that the first kind of kulak (the richest) was ‘to be arrested and shot or imprisoned’, writes Conquest, ‘and their families exiled; and the second exiled merely; while (at this stage) the “non-hostile” third section might be admitted to the collective farm on probation.’ The poorer peasants (who do not get a good press in the historiography: ‘drunks’, ‘layabouts’, ‘windbags’, ‘unemployables’, and so on) were encouraged, and paid, to denounce the richer peasants. Again, the extraordinary persistence of this theme: that a ruling order predicated on human perfectibility should reward, glorify, encourage and indeed necessitate all that is humanly base. In the context of the Bolsheviks’ ‘unprecedented hypocrisy’ (N. Mandelstam), we may consider, here, how the battle cry against ‘exploitation of labour’ accompanied the reenserfment, not just of the kulaks, but of the entire peasantry… The Bolsheviks found bourgeois morality, and bourgeois law, hypocritical. This belief somehow encouraged a fabulous expansion in hypocritical possibility. The Bolsheviks took hypocrisy to places it had never been before; their hypocrisy was highly innovative, highly refined, and almost wittily symmetrical. It was negative perfection.

Working in consort with tens of thousands of Party activists, the punitive organs fanned out from the cities, with rifles, and bundles of orders and instructions. Not all Soviet villages contained kulaks, but all Soviet villages had to be terrorized, so kulaks had to be found in all Soviet villages. Stalin was, of course, using a quota system (as he would in the Great Terror). He seemed to have in mind just under 10 per cent: about 12 million people. The agitators and Chekists had had three years of strident indoctrination (and active service: grain requisitioning, the exaction of levies), with all the usual machismo emphases on hardness and mercilessness; and they were themselves half-terrorized (from both sides); and Stalin’s quotas were always minimums which it was an honour to exceed. This is from Vasily Grossman’s Forever Flowing:

Stalin had for a while been putting it about that the poor and middle peasants were flocking to the collective farms ‘spontaneously’ – a discordant adverb, because spontaneity was not a quality he usually praised. Collectivization, to the peasants, meant the surrender of their goods, animals and even their physical beings to the state. The choice they faced was to collectivize or be themselves dekulakized. Stalin’s objective was Lenin’s objective of 1921: state monopoly of food.

Thus anarchy, plunder, mania and sadism were visited on the countryside. Peasant resistance took two main forms, one predictable, the other unforeseen. First, outright insurrection. The Cheka reported 402 riots and revolts in January 1930, 1,048 in February, and 6,528 in March.[11] These were often quelled by the armed forces: cavalry, armoured cars and even fighter aircraft. The peasants’ other main strategy, though, which showed a dreadful decorum, could not be answered or reversed. This is the account of an activist quoted by Tucker:

‘Everyone had a greasy mouth,’ as another activist disgustedly noted: ‘everyone blinked like an owl, as if drunk from eating.’ This was the peasantry’s last supper. And it accounted for roughly half of the national herd.

Launched over the latter part of 1929, Collectivization was already a clear catastrophe by late February 1930. There were differences, but Stalin had reached Lenin’s impasse of 1921. In the earlier case, Lenin accepted defeat, withdrawal and compromise. In other words, he accepted reality. Stalin did not. The peasantry no longer faced a frigid intellectual. It faced a passionate lowbrow whose personality was warping and crackling in the heat of power. He would not accept reality. He would break it.

Stalin’s first move was a feint towards accommodation. On 2 March 1930, all Soviet newspapers ran the famous article ‘Dizzy with Success’ (which Stalin had not shown to the Politburo). Causing consternation at every Party level, the piece jovially blamed the recent abuses and excesses on a triumphalist apparat. In April, showing a primitive, semi-subliminal self-awareness, Stalin elaborated as follows:

The new line brought temporary concessions. Collectivization was slowed and even partly reversed. But Dekulakization accelerated. The gulag could not expand fast enough to contain the deportees. In his long novel Life and Fate Grossman describes the feelings of a Soviet citizen threatened by arrest (here he coincidentally echoes Stalin: ‘How much does the Soviet Union weigh?’):

The peasantry would now experience what Grossman repeatedly calls ‘the rage of the State’. When Pasternak travelled to the countryside in the early 1930s to ‘gather material about the new life of the village’, he fell ill and wrote not a word for an entire year. ‘There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract…’ What he saw ‘would not fit within the bounds of consciousness’. No, not his consciousness. What he saw was the reification of another’s consciousness, another’s mind, another’s rage.

In the autumn of 1930 the cycle of violence became a spiral: kaleidoscopic and vertiginous. Here is part of a requisitioner’s report:

Listing five types of torture used to force peasants to reveal grain reserves, the writer Mikhail Sholokhov added, in a letter to Stalin: ‘I could give a multitude of similar examples. These are not “abuses” of the system; this is the present system for collecting grain.’ On 7 August 1932, Stalin promulgated one of the most savage laws in all history. The peasants called it the ‘five-stalk law or simply the ‘ear law’. ‘[A]ny theft or damage of socialist property’ became punishable by ten years or, as the saying went, by nine grams (of lead). A whole family could be shattered for a pilfered handful. Sentences given between August 1932 and December 1933 ran to 125,000, with 5,400 executions.

Where can Stalin’s rage go next, how can it expand and intensify? A woman widowed that fortnight by starvation is given ten years in the gulag for stealing a few potatoes. It starts to be the practice that orphaned children are shot en masse. The Cheka executes vets and meteorologists. Suddenly 20,000 Communist activists and managers are arrested (for ‘criminal complacency’ in the struggle), to terrorize the terrorizers, to pile terror upon terror, and then more terror, and then more, until Stalin, the escalationist, turns to nonconventional or nuclear terror: famine.

As grain yields fell, requisitioning quotas grew, with only one possible outcome. Stalin just went at the peasants until there was nobody there to sow the next harvest.

Women

He was twice a widower.

Of his first wife, Yekaterina (Kato) Svanidze (m. c. 1905: two years after his first arrest), Conquest writes in Stalin: Breaker of Nations:

Kato died of typhus in 1907. In his Stalin, Dmitri Volkogonov describes (but does not reproduce) photographs of her funeral showing Koba ‘short and thin, his shock of hair uncombed, standing at the graveside with a look of genuine grief on his face’. After the ceremony Stalin said to an old friend: ‘This creature softened my stony heart. She is dead and with her have died my last warm feelings for all human beings.’ Some historians take Stalin’s little speech on such good trust that they eschew quotation marks and simply paraphrase it in the third person. It was not that simple, or not that natural. If, in a work of fiction, I were to put those words into the mouth of a character, it would be on the following understanding: Here is a man who has always been puzzled by – and perhaps even ashamed of – his lack of human feeling. The death of the young wife relieves him of that puzzlement and shame (it is not his fault; the world did it). He can henceforth ally himself with feelinglessness. Kato left behind her a six-month-old son, Yakov. As Koba threw himself into the cycle of arrest, exile and escape (one year of freedom in the next decade), Yakov remained in Georgia with his maternal aunt and uncle. Certainly, Stalin never showed anything but contempt for him, and played a strange part in his terrible death.

Stalin made the acquaintance of his second wife, Nadezhda (Nadya) Alliluyeva, when she was an infant of two or three. The Alliluyevs were cultured Old Bolsheviks who regularly put Stalin up during his visits to prewar St Petersburg. It is said that he once saved Nadya and her sister Anna from some risk of drowning; and there’s no question that she idealized him over the years – the gruff agitnik, with his moustache, his tousled quiff, his multiple arrests. After the Revolution, at the age of sixteen, she became Stalin’s secretary, and then, a year later, his wife. Vasily was born in 1921, Svetlana in 1926. Nadya shot herself in the head after a party in the Kremlin to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Revolution. November 1932: in a sense, as we shall see, she was just another victim of Collectivization. While he contemplated her in the open coffin Stalin was seen to make a gesture of dismissal and heard to mutter, ‘She left me as an enemy.’

During his longest exile, it is said, Stalin sired a child in Siberia. And there were rumours that in his later years he would sometimes sleep with his housekeeper, Valentina Istomina. And that is about all. Considering what he could have got up to, and considering what Beria (for instance) actually did get up to, Stalin’s sexual life was remarkably prim. One can hardly avoid a comparison with Hitler (whose only ‘great love’, Geli Raubal, shot herself in September 1931, and whose companion, Eva Braun, attempted suicide in the autumn of 1932, and again in 1935, and again in 1945, successfully, with her husband at her side). Both Stalin and Hitler felt threatened by intelligent women. Stalin: ‘a woman with ideas… a herring with ideas: skin and bones’. Hitler: ‘A highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman.’ Both responded to (frequent) complaints of neglect with a curse or a taunt; and both enjoyed inflicting humiliation. Hitler’s sexuality, or asexuality, was by far the more extreme: he was a monorchic neuter, an impotent, a terrible virgin. In him the will to power entirely subsumed the erotic energies. More generally Nazism, and also Bolshevism, exude the confusions of crypto-homosexuality, homosexuality enciphered and unacknowledged – the cult of hardness, with all the female qualities programmatically suppressed. Heterosexuality has clarity, and homosexuality has clarity; but much violence waits in the area in between. Nazism, of course, killed many thousands of homosexuals. Bolshevism, with its contradictory traditions of permissiveness and sans-culotte puritanism, alighted only rarely on a sexual enemy – ‘German bedstraw’, for example (women suspected of fraternizing with the occupation forces during the war).

There are variations in the accounts of Nadya’s last night. During the Kremlin banquet (hosted by the cretinous Kliment Voroshilov) Stalin ‘insulted’ Nadya; there seems to have been an exchange along the lines of ‘Hey, you, have a drink!’ (Nadya was allergic to alcohol), followed by ‘Don’t you hey me!’ He also threw a doused cigarette at her (or, in a variant, a lit cigarette which went down her dress). Nadya walked out; she was followed by her friend Polina Molotov, who joined her in a calming stroll round the Kremlin courtyard. Back in the Stalin apartment, Nadya sought her bedroom (it was separate bedrooms by now), and shot herself with a German revolver. She had written a note… In a long-suppressed section of his memoirs Khrushchev reports that Nadya telephoned the dacha and was told by an oafish duty-officer that Stalin was ‘with a woman’. This feels discountable. It is the only rumour of an infidelity in Stalin’s fourteen-year marriage; and it goes against our sense of the parochial diffidence of his sexuality (there are glints of disgust, too: that ‘herring’). Nor is there much cogency in another rumour, that Stalin assisted in or expedited Nadya’s suicide. There was, after all, the suicide note.

Svetlana Stalin, then seven, would go on to reveal that the note was ‘partly personal, partly political’. It was November 1932: one wonders if Stalin was still divisible in these terms. He was already nearly all political, and after the events of this night he would finally dispense with the personal… The precipitant of Nadya’s suicide was almost certainly political, too. She had recently enrolled as a chemistry student at the Industrial Academy in Moscow. A good Communist, she would ride there in the tram. It tests the empathetic powers to imagine even a tenth of the gangrenous nausea experienced by Nadezhda Alliluyeva (a serious, cultured, strong, pretty, motherly woman of thirty-one), seated at her desk, while classmates told her about the real situation in the Ukraine (where they had spent the summer, as activists). Nadya challenged her husband, and again we must imagine the tenor of this exchange. Stalin, typically, seems to have brazened his way out (as he did with Lenin over the Krupskaya business, in a letter which arrived just after Lenin’s final incapacitation). He told Nadya that such talk was ‘Trotskyite gossip’. But she came back at him, later, having heard more from her classmates, including an account of two brothers who were arrested for trading in human flesh. This time Stalin’s response was to rebuke Nadya for political indiscipline, to arrest the students at the Industrial Academy, and to order a purge of all colleges that had contributed manpower to Collectivization. Talking about famine would soon become a capital crime in the USSR. Nadya’s execution was self-execution, but it anticipated that law.

At this time, Svetlana writes, her mother succumbed to ‘devastating disillusionment’. Nadya came to see that ‘my father was not the New Man she had thought when she was young’. But Stalin was a New Man, right enough: he had dreadfully burgeoned. Unprecedented power was his, and he had launched it on an experiment. The experiment had failed (and become, simply, a war of extermination waged against the guinea pigs). In the countryside, now, instead of growing fat on the loyally thrumming grain factories of which a German philosopher had fleetingly dreamed, the peasants were eating each other, and eating themselves.

Nadya Alliluyeva didn’t know the half of it. She was ignorant of the fact that 5 million would die in the Ukraine alone. She was ignorant of the fact that they would die of her husband’s set purpose.

If you want to know how a man felt about his wives then you look at how he treated his children. We shall do so. You would also look at how he treated his wives’ families. And Stalin’s feelings, as always, are written in crimson. This is Alan Bullock’s summary:

Afterword. When Milovan Djilas personally protested that the Red Army was raping Yugoslav women, Stalin said of his universal soldier: ‘How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors?’ The women of Yugoslavia, it seems, were treated less harshly than certain of their sisters. Solzhenitsyn, an artillery officer in East Prussia at the time of his arrest (1945), later wrote: ‘All of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction.’ To what extent, in Stalin’s view, was this also a matter of ‘having fun with a woman’?

Men and Mountains

All the Party bosses had institutions named after them. As well as the Stalin Chemical Works, there was the Voroshilov Weaving Mill, the Zinoviev Paper Mills, the Bukharin Glass Factory, and so on. Old towns were also renamed: there were suddenly places called Ordzhonikidze, Kalinin, Kirov. In his Stalin Conquest comments:

In 1938, a year that saw 4.5 million supererogatory arrests and perhaps 500,000 executions, the Cheka chief, citing ‘workers’ suggestions’, put before the Politburo the notion that Moscow should be renamed Stalinodar. Showing, now, a more traditional Bolshevik self-effacement, Stalin vetoed the change. He always said that the cult of personality, while useful politically, was distasteful to him. ‘In general,’ writes Conquest, ‘his sporadic and ineffectual criticisms of the cult may be seen as a ploy to add modesty to the rest of the panoply of his virtues.’

When Janusz Bardach, prodded by obscenities and rifle butts, staggered out of the slave ship (his destination was the isolator at Kolyma), he saw, emblazoned on the cliff face, the words

And much more.

The ‘cult of personality’, of course, became the official euphemism for the Twenty Million. We may feel that the phrase is both derisory and appropriate. According to Marx, personality played no part in history: the course of that locomotive was determined by the railtracks of political economy, and not by the quirks of the stoker. Well, the Bolsheviks submitted this theory, among many others, to graphic refutation. Stalin did have a personality, and so did Lenin.[12] Personality made a difference. In Stalin’s case, the difference was the Andes of dead bodies, one of whose peaks (call that mountain after him) disgorged its contents before the eyes of Varlam Shalamov.

1933: The Terror-Famine

We speak of famine ‘raging’, ‘stalking the land’, holding people ‘in its grip’. Describing the immobility and silence within the villages, Vasily Grossman writes: ‘Only famine was on the move. Only famine did not sleep.’ Metaphorically we invest famine with volition and intent, but famine is just an absence – an absence of food, then an absence of life. It has a smell, noted for its extreme longevity: that of purulence. And Grossman writes that, despite the stillness, ‘everything felt fierce and wild… And the earth crackled’… In considering the Terror-Famine of 1933, it is now asked of the reader forcefully to repersonify famine and call him Stalin. It is Stalin who is holding people in his grip, Stalin who is stalking the land, Stalin who is raging.

The use of famine as a weapon of the state against the populace is generally considered to be a Stalinist innovation (later taken up by Mao and other Communist leaders), but Lenin’s famine of 1921–22 had its terroristic aspects. Both famines had the same cause: punitive food-requisitioning. Whereas Stalin nurtured and consolidated the mass starvation, Lenin, by contrast, reluctantly and tardily permitted the American intervention, which saved over 10 million lives. Yet in the Ukraine, at least, Lenin’s famine overlapped with terror. As the historian H. H. Fisher put it in 1927: ‘The Government of Moscow not only failed to inform the American Relief Administration of the situation in the Ukraine, as it had done in the case of much more remote regions, but deliberately placed obstacles in the way…’ Conquest adds: ‘Indeed, between 1 August 1921 and 1 August 1922, 10.6 million hundredweight of grain was actually taken from the Ukraine for distribution elsewhere.’ All his adult life Lenin had been an admirer of famine as a ‘radicalizer’ (and secularizer) of the peasantry. And what else but terror-famine could he have had in mind when, in 1922, he warned Kamenev: ‘It is a great mistake to think that the NEP put an end to terror; we shall again have recourse to terror and to economic terror.’ So, once again, Stalin in 1933 was merely showing himself to be ‘Lenin’s most able pupil’. His only qualitative novelty, apart from the Party purge, was the show trial. And we may recall Solzhenitsyn’s comment of the ‘demonstration’ trial of the SRs in 1922: Lenin was ‘so nearly there’.

Both Lenin and Stalin considered the Ukraine the most refractory of all the republics. During the chaos of 1918–20, when the administration in Kiev changed hands thirteen times, the Bolsheviks invaded, or reinvaded, in annual campaigns. And throughout the Stalin push of 1929–33, and beyond, every imaginable Ukrainian institution was repeatedly purged. The thoroughness of Stalin’s attempt at de-Ukrainianization can be gauged from an account given in Shostakovich’s Testimony. It concerns the fate of the kobzars – peasant poets (many of them blind) who went from village to village with their verses and songs. They were not, one would have thought, an immediate threat to Soviet power, though they could be listed in separate categories of undesirables (‘outdated elements,’ for example, or simply ‘others’ – a much-used classification). But they nonetheless reminded the Ukrainian peasants that they had once had a country. The kobzars, several hundred of them, were invited to their first All-Ukrainian Congress. ‘Hurting a blind man,’ lamented Shostakovich, ‘—what could be lower?’ Some were imprisoned, but ‘almost all’ were shot, because (as Conquest notes) a blind man would not be worth feeding in the gulag.

Stalin, then, had two reasons for assaulting the Ukrainian peasants: they were peasants, and they were Ukrainian. Thus the USSR continued to export grain, and continued to store it. The food requisitioning continued until March 1933 – the epicentre of the famine. By now the collection brigades only bothered with households that weren’t obviously starving. The Ukraine had other similarities to the ‘vast Belsen’ of Conquest’s description: armed guards, and watchtowers, manned day and night, to detect and deter thefts of the crop. Despite blockading, and barricading, hundreds of thousands of peasants made their way to the cities, where they crawled around at knee height among the crowds, who themselves formed swaying, howling lines in front of the ‘commercial’ bread shops[13] (the cities, too, were ravaged, Stavropol losing 20,000, Krasnodar 40,000, Kharkov 120,000). In December 1932, to combat ‘kulak infiltration of the towns’, the regime tightened restrictions on internal travel:

Within the villages, within the families, Grossman writes, ‘Mothers looked at their children and screamed in fear. They screamed as if a snake had crept into their house. And this snake was famine, starvation, death.’ This snake was Stalin. At first the children cried all day for food; then, in addition, they cried for food all night. Some parents fled their children. Others took them to the towns and left them there. The Italian consul in Kharkov gave this report:

Some parents killed their children. And other parents ate their children. Zachto? ‘Why, what for, to what end?’ as Grossman asks. His narrator goes on:

Twenty pages earlier Grossman similarly defines the fate, not of the victim, but of the executioner:

This, perhaps, is the meaning of the Terror-Famine of 1933: the self-cannibalized were destroyed by the self-executed. And this is the surreal gangrene of Stalinism.

About 5 million died in the Ukraine, and about 2 million died in the Kuban, Don and Volga regions and in Kazakhstan. These were formerly the richest agricultural lands in the USSR.

Poison Pen

In the 1930s, Nadezhda Mandelstam tells us, the verb to write assumed a new meaning. When you said he writes or does she write? or (referring to a whole classroom of students) they write, you meant that he or she or they wrote reports to the organs. (Similarly, the Cheka’s rigged cases were called ‘novels’.) To ‘write’ meant to inform, to denounce. Solzhenitsyn calls it ‘murder by slander’.

Denunciation in Russia has a long history, going back at least as far as the sixteenth century and the testingly protracted reign of Ivan the Terrible (1533–84). ‘Spy or die’ was, more or less, the oath you swore. This practice, increasingly institutionalized under the old regime, was a tsarist barbarity that Lenin might have been expected to question. And he did waver, to the extent that he unsuccessfully proposed (in December 1918) that false denouncers should be shot. More moderate voices prevailed, and the punishment arrived at was one or two years depending on the gravity of the case. Solzhenitsyn is scandalized by this laxity. In the gulag a five-year term, compared to the far more usual tenner or quarter (twenty-five years), was colloquially known as ‘nothing’.

It was during the Collectivization period that denunciation made its great leap forward. In the villages, as we have seen, the poorer peasants were incited to denounce the richer. ‘It was so easy to do a man in,’ explains Grossman: ‘you wrote a denuniciation; you did not even have to sign it.’ By the mid-1930s, when terror turned towards the towns and cities, denunciation was being praised in the press as ‘the sacred duty of every Bolshevik, party and nonparty’. Quickly and predictably, denunciation now went through the roof. The process was quintessentially Stalinist in that a) it cultivated all that is most reptilian in human nature, and b) it selected downwards (those that were last would now be first).

And it was also, again, surreal. You might denounce someone for fear of their denouncing you; you could be denounced for not doing enough denouncing; the only disincentive to denunciation was the possibility of being denounced for not denouncing sooner; and so on. There were cases of denunciation for state bounty. From The Great Terror:

A single Communist denounced 230 people; another denounced over a hundred in four months. ‘Stalin required,’ as Conquest says, ‘not only submission, but also complicity.’ After his release from the gulag, just as he was finding himself as a writer, Solzhenitsyn came under extremely menacing pressure to become a writer in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s sense. It has been estimated that in an average office every fifth employee reported to the Cheka. As Dmitri Volkogonov writes: ‘Who could have imagined how many “spies and wreckers and terrorists” would be discovered. It was almost as if they were not living among us, but we among them!’

Tribute must now be paid to the most prodigious denouncer of all, the great Nikolaenko, scourge of Kiev. This unbelievable termagant was singled out for special praise by Stalin himself: ‘a simple person from down below’, she was nonetheless a ‘heroine’. In Kiev, pavements emptied when Nikolaenko stepped out; her presence in a room spread mortal fear. Eventually Pavel Postyshev (First Secretary in the Ukraine, candidate member of the Politburo) expelled Nikolaenko from the Party. Stalin reinstated her ‘with honour’. In a speech of 1937 he said, marvellously (for this episode is another example of the epiphanic, multifaceted negative perfection of Stalinism):

Assuming that this translation is a sensitive one (and I think it is): ‘justice’ is rich, and so is ‘obtain’ justice; ‘bothersome fly’ and ‘that twisted knot’ are rich; the rhetorical question near the end is rich; that closing ‘while’ is rich.

A vindicated Nikolaenko went back to her denunciations, and Kiev was in any case most viciously purged. Postyshev, chastened, demoted, transferred, now developed a reputation for exceptional ferocity in his function of purging his new fief, Kuibyshev. Later, as the Terror turned, he was attacked by Moscow for (of all things) exceptional ferocity: ‘by cries of “vigilance” hiding his brutality in connection with the Party’. He was arrested in February 1938, and later shot.

Meanwhile, a twice-vindicated Nikolaenko was still hard at work – on her denunciations. There is much talk of the ‘little Stalins’ all over the USSR, but Nikolaenko was a true Stalinette: accession to power dismantled her sense of reality. When the new, post-purge bosses, headed by Khrushchev, had established themselves in Kiev, Nikolaenko denounced Khrushchev’s deputy, Korotchenko. Khrushchev defended his man, a posture Stalin adjudged to be ‘incorrect’: ‘Ten per cent truth – that’s already truth, and requires decisive measures on our part, and we will pay for it if we don’t so act.’ But then Nikolaenko denounced Khrushchev, a first-echelon toady and placeman, for ‘bourgeois nationalism’, and Stalin finally conceded that she was nuts. She helped destroy about 8,000 people.

Anyone who has ever received a poison-pen letter will have been struck by a sense of the author’s desperate impotence. In the USSR, under Stalin, the poison worked: it had power. That was how it was: the writer and the poison pen.

I have not read any account of the fate of Nikolaenko. Either she was reexpelled, or her subsequent denunciations were for the most part tactfully ignored. She might of course have been shot – though Stalin showed a slight but detectable squeamishness about killing Old Bolshevik women.

As for the impressionable Postyshev, condemned by Moscow for his lack of moderation and restraint… This is The Great Terror:

Heavy Industry

Soviet industry moved forward, and staggered about the place, like a titanic infant, with every manner of thunderous accident (collisions, explosions), with peasant boys twirling off frozen scaffolding, with many deaths, sudden or premature, in the usual atmosphere of myth and coercion, of error and terror – but it did move forward. John Scott, an American volunteer at the Morlock newtown of Magnitogorsk (250,000 workers), wagered that ‘Russia’s battle of ferrous metallurgy alone involved more casualties than the battle of the Marne.’ And there were also fabulous inefficiencies: the regular unavailability, in the whole of Moscow, of a single ‘light bulb or a bar of soap’ (Tibor Szamuely), for instance, or the inability of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, constructed by the ‘fart power’ (Solzhenitsyn) of hundreds of thousands of slaves, to carry heavy shipping. Inefficiencies, when undeniable, had to be blamed on someone; and so Stalin (following Lenin) institutionalized the crime of wrecking – ‘notwithstanding’, as Solzhenitsyn says, ‘the nonexistence of this concept in the entire history of mankind’.[14] Whereas the real wrecker, the ‘super-wrecker’ (Tucker), was of course Stalin.

One of the partial and deforming ‘triumphs’ of industrialization was ideological. Until now the Bolsheviks, contra Marx, formed a ‘superstructure’ without a proper proletarian ‘base’. During the decade of the Big Break, about 30 million peasants were forced to find work in the cities. Martin Malia is characteristically panoptic:

Soviet Communism can look back on two achievements. Industrialization made up for what Malia calls Russia’s ‘deficit of modernity’ – though it deepened the systemic abnormality that led to the state’s collapse. That was one achievement. The other was the defeat of Hitler. Both owed everything to the Russian people: their tears, their sweat, their blood.

Kazakhstan

Until 1930 the economy and culture of Kazakhstan, in Soviet Central Asia, was based on nomadism and transhumance (the seasonal movement of livestock). The plan was to Dekulakize these wanderers, and then Collectivize them. Once denomadized, the Kazakhstanis would devote themselves to agriculture. But the land was not suitable for agriculture. What it was suitable for was nomadism and transhumance. The plan didn’t work out.

Over the next two years Kazakhstan lost 80 per cent of its livestock. And 40 per cent of its population: famine and disease.

The plan didn’t work out.

Congress of Victors – 1

‘The year 1937 really began on the 1st of December 1934.’ This is the famous opening sentence of Eugenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind. The year 1937 refers to the onset of the Great Terror; and 1 December 1934, refers to the murder of Sergei Kirov. The Terror did ‘begin’ in 1934 – but earlier in the year. I think we can pinpoint it.

On 26 January the Seventeenth Party Congress opened in the conference hall of the Great Kremlin Palace. The Congress styled itself the Congress of Victors. In Stalin in Power Robert Tucker redubs it the Congress of Victims, and on understandable grounds: of its 1,996 delegates, 1,108 would perish in the Terror. One can think of other names for this Congress. Congress of Vultures, one might say, after briefly consulting the reality of the countryside – or Congress of Vampires. And Congress of Vaudevillians, too: in January/February 1934 the Party began to absent itself from actuality. It entered the psychotheatre in Stalin’s head.

As the Congress of Victors opened, the USSR was just steadying itself after veering back from total ruin. Collectivization had resulted in a series of world-historical catastrophes. Something like 10 million peasant dead (this was Stalin’s own figure, in conversation with Churchill) might be acceptable to a good Bolshevik, the political objective having been achieved (unmediated control of peasant produce). But a moment of tranquil thought would have told anyone that Stalin’s Big Break had turned out to be a primitive fiasco. The USSR had lost more than half of its livestock. About a quarter of the peasantry had fled the countryside for the cities, where the housing crisis was already legendary. In 1932 Moscow itself tottered with hunger – and Moscow, as Reader Bullard noted, was ‘much better off for food than the provinces, even a short distance away’. (The long entry on ‘shortages’ in Bullard’s index itemizes, among other things, books, candles, cement, clothing, coal, door handles and locks, electricity, fertilizers, fuel, glass, household utensils, lightbulbs, matches, metal, onion-seed, paper, petrol, rubber, salt, soap, and string. When you sent a parcel, you asked the recipient to return the wrapping.) Six-fold inflation coincided with sharp cuts in wages and the extortion of regular ‘state loans’. It was a Russia of ration cards and labour books – and of increasing ‘passportization’, a most un-Leninist, not to say frankly tsarist, imposition. Such was the background, then, as the Old Bolsheviks (most of the comrades were of the October generation) gathered in Moscow for the Congress of Victors. These ageing idealists would also have been aware that the showpiece advances of industrialization had been achieved through a vast and burgeoning network of slave labour.[15]

It would not be true to say that Stalin got through the cataclysms of 1929–33 without hearing some sceptical murmurs from his colleagues. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin were by now abject and impotent figures (who would humble themselves further in the course of the Congress). But the Bolshevik fetish of unity, or of helpless and desperate cohesion, was not quite universal. Dissidence emerged most strongly in the person of M. N. Ryutin, who serves, in the present context, as something of a hero – minor, tarnished, yet unbroken. In 1930 he circulated an anti-Stalin treatise later known as the Ryutin Platform, was denounced, arrested, imprisoned, released and reinstated ‘with a warning’. In 1932 he circulated the much shorter and more trenchant ‘Appeal to Party Members’. He was again denounced, arrested, imprisoned. And here we see a crucial escalation in the level of the Stalin malevolence: its glandular sensuality, and its passionate attention to detail… The Politburo was now faced with Stalin’s demand that Ryutin be executed for treason. With Kirov leading, the Politburo refused to cross that line: it refused to kill an old comrade (or, more precisely, it refused to seal an old comrade’s fate before trial). Even Molotov was against it. Stalin could only carry Kaganovich. In the meantime he had Ryutin transferred from a political prison to a tougher one in Verhne-Uralsk. We can imagine his continuing interest in Ryutin’s welfare. And this went on for five years: Stalin, we may be sure, threw absolutely everything he had at him, and Ryutin never confessed. (He was shot in 1937, as were his two sons; his wife was killed in a camp near Karaganda.) Dissidence, in the end, was effortlessly crushed; it simply informed Stalin, with incensing clarity, that there were things he couldn’t yet do, and that his version of reality had not yet prevailed.

So, just after ‘the culmination of the most precipitous peacetime decline in living standards known in recorded history’,[16] Stalin took the podium at the Congress to a standing ovation – of which, said Pravda, ‘it seemed there would be no end’.

But then something went wrong with the authorized reality, and eight days later the Terror was entrained.

Prolonged and Stormy Applause

No doubt Stalin ended the applause himself, on that occasion – with a diffident elevation of the palms, perhaps. But ending the applause for Stalin was a mortally serious business. Who could end the applause for Stalin when Stalin wasn’t there?

At a Party conference in Moscow Province, during the Terror years, a new secretary took the place of an old secretary (who had been arrested). The proceedings wound up with a tribute to Stalin. Everyone got to their feet and started applauding; and no one dared stop. In Solzhenitsyn’s version of this famous story, after five minutes ‘the older people were panting with exhaustion’. After ten minutes:

The first man to stop clapping (a local factory director) was arrested the next day and given ten years on another charge.

There existed at the time a gramophone record of one of Stalin’s longer speeches. It ran to eight sides, or rather seven, because the eighth consisted entirely of applause.

Now close this book for a moment and imagine sitting there and listening to that eighth side, at night, in the Moscow of 1937. It must have sounded like the approach of fear, like the music of psychosis, like the rage of the state.

Congress of Victors – 2

As the Congress of Victors proceeded, the Stalin confabulation seemed remarkably robust. Six months after the culmination of the worst famine in Russian history, the country’s rulers proceeded in a spirit of raucous triumphalism. The smile of Stalin’s moustache presided over the self-abasements of his most distinguished adversaries. Bukharin:

Zinoviev:

And Kamenev, incredibly, described Ryutin and his bloc as ‘rabid kulak scum’ who deserved ‘more tangible’ disciplining than mere theoretical refutation. Kirov was positively boyish:

It was not a fact. It was data from Stalin’s parallel universe. When unpleasant truths did succeed in fighting their way to the surface, the Bolshevik template supplied the expected scapegoats: those stunning losses of livestock, for example, were attributed to the characteristic barbarism of the kulaks.

The fact was that facts were losing their value. Stalin had broken the opposition. He was also far advanced towards his much stranger objective of breaking the truth. Or it may have been the other way about: actuality, under Stalin, was such that dread and disgust forbade you to accept it – or even to contemplate it. As the onetime Marxist Leszek Kolakowski persuasively writes:

The astounding servility of the Victors of 1934, who were as yet unterrorized, is usually explained as follows: if Stalin could not now be removed (they reasoned), he could at least be softened and mollified, flattered, humoured. What this amounted to was collusion in psychosis. They acted out Stalin’s psychosis, and in so doing, predictably and disastrously, they fed and fattened it.

But now reality intervened.

On the last day of the Congress the delegates were as usual given their say on the composition of the new Central Committee. While neither universal nor equal, the vote was at least direct and secret. Just over 1,200 delegates were handed a list of nominees and then crossed out the names of the men they were voting against. Volkogonov describes the result as ‘unbelievable!’ Most of the vote-counters were, of course, later shot, but one survivor claimed that Stalin had received 120-odd negative votes (to Kirov’s three). Other sources, including Khrushchev, give a figure of 300. Stalin fudged the figures and went on, in any case, to pack the Central Committee with Stalinists…

Those 300 votes would mean the death of a generation. As Tucker points out, Stalin had always suspected that he was surrounded by dissemblers and double-dealers: now he had proof. How many of the Congress eulogists had struck his name from the ballot? Tucker adds that he had further evidence of treachery. He knew of another person who had dissembled, who had feigned moderation and indifference to advancement, who had schemed and dreamed and finally prevailed. That person was himself.

Meanwhile, in the world outside the Stalin psychosis… A population that is utterly crushed, in all senses, has only one means of protest: in a kind of genetic hunger strike, it starts to cease to reproduce itself. Since 1917 the Bolsheviks had systematically undermined the family. Divorce was encouraged (to achieve it you were simply obliged to notify your spouse by postcard); incest, bigamy, adultery and abortion were decriminalized; families were scattered by labour-direction and deportation; and children who denounced their parents became national figures, hymned in verse and song. This is Moshe Lewin:

Even Stalin bestirred himself. He was photographed with his smiling children, and duly trundled down to Tiflis to pay that single visit to his mother.

Kolyma Tales

Varlam Shalamov was arrested and sent to camp in 1929. He was twenty-one, and a law student; and unlike many other millions so designated, he really was a Trotskyite. That ‘T’ in his crime-description folder (‘Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Activities’) would have dramatically worsened his first two terms. He was tried and sentenced a third time in 1943 – for having praised Ivan Bunin – and reclassified as a mere Anti-Soviet Agitator. He got out of Kolyma in 1951 and, after two years of internal exile, he got out of Magadan. Then he wrote Kolyma Tales.

Nature simplifies itself as it heads towards the poles (and we head north now because so many scores of thousands were doing so, as Stalin’s rule developed, and as the camps crazily multiplied). Nature simplifies itself, and so does human discourse:

Life was reduced. Kolyma Tales is a great groan from someone chronically reduced. Solzhenitsyn captured the agony of the gulag in the epic frame, in 1,800 unflagging, unwavering pages. Shalamov does it in the short story – for him, the only possible form. His suffering in the gulag was more extreme, more complete and more inward than that of Solzhenitsyn, who candidly observes:

Shalamov told Nadezhda Mandelstam that he could have spent a lifetime ‘quite happily’ in the camp described in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Whereas Kolyma, in the late 1930s (after Stalin’s speech demanding worse conditions), amounted to negative perfection. Osip Mandelstam was on his way to Kolyma, in 1938, when he died of hunger and dementia in the transit prison at Vtoraya Rechka.

Kolyma Tales… Two prisoners take a long trek, at night, to exhume a corpse: they will exchange its underwear for tobacco. One prisoner hangs himself in a tree fork ‘without even using a rope’. Another finds that his fingers have been permanently moulded by the tools he wields (he ‘never expected to be able to straighten out his hands again’). Another’s rubber galoshes ‘were so full of pus and blood that his feet sloshed at every step – as if through a puddle’. Men weep frequently, over a lost pair of socks, for instance, or from the cold (but not from hunger, which produces an agonized but tearless wrath). They all dream the same dream ‘of loaves of rye bread that flew past us like meteors or angels’. And they are forgetting everything. A professor of philosophy forgets his wife’s name. A doctor begins to doubt that he ever was a doctor: ‘Real were the minute, the hour, the day… He never guessed further, nor did he have the strength to guess. Nor did anyone else.’ ‘I had forgotten everything,’ says one narrator: ‘I didn’t even remember what it was like to remember.’ All emotions evaporate: all emotions except bitterness.

In Volume Two of The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn sharply disagrees with what he takes to be Shalamov’s conclusion, that ‘[i]n the camp situation human beings never remain human beings – the camps were created to this end’. Arguing for a more generous estimate of spiritual resilience, Solzhenitsyn adduces Shalamov’s own person. Shalamov, after all, never betrayed anyone, never denounced, never informed, never sought the lowest level. ‘Why is that, Varlam Tikhonovich?’ asks Solzhenitsyn (and note the coaxing patronymic). ‘Does it mean that you found a footing on some stone – and did not slide down any further?… Do you not refute your own concept with your character and verses?’ A footnote then adds, ‘Alas, he decided not to refute it’, and goes on to tell of Shalamov’s ‘renunciation’ of his own work in the Literaturnaya Gazeta of February 1972. Here, for no clear reason, Shalamov denounced his American publishers and declared himself a loyal Soviet citizen. ‘The problematics of the Kolyma Stories,’ he wrote, ‘have long since been crossed out by life.’ Solzhenitsyn adds: ‘This renunciation was printed in a black mourning frame, and thus all of us understood that Shalamov had died. (Footnote of 1972.)’ In fact, Shalamov died in 1982. And even so, even metaphorically, Solzhenitsyn got the date wrong.

Shalamov ‘died’ in 1937, if not earlier. Despite its originality, its weight of voice, and its boundless talent, Kolyma Tales is an utterly exhausted book. Exhaustion is what it describes and exhaustion is what it enacts. Shalamov can soar, he can ride his epiphanies, but his sentences plod, limp and stagger like a work gang returning from a twelve-hour shift. He repeats himself, contradicts himself, entangles himself, as if in a dreadful dream of retardation and thwarted escape. In a poem that made Solzhenitsyn ‘tremble as though I had met a long-lost brother,’ Shalamov spoke of his vow ‘[t]o sing and to weep to the very end’. And this he did, with honour. But he had encountered negative perfection, as Solzhenitsyn had not; and it broke him.

On the other hand, the book lives, and to that extent Solzhenitsyn’s point remains pertinent. In ‘The Red Cross’ Shalamov writes:

Shalamov did not forget empathy. In the four-page story ‘An Individual Assignment’ the young prisoner Dugaev is working sixteen hours a day and fulfilling only a quarter of his norm. He is surprised, one night, when his workmate Baranov rolls him a cigarette.

Dugaev has difficulty sleeping, and is losing the inclination to eat; his work deteriorates further. The story ends:

The cigarette Baranov gave him: that was Dugaev’s final smoke.

At the moment of arrest, wrote the poet, ‘you tire as in a lifetime.’ In Shalamov’s Kolyma, every moment was that kind of moment.

The Kirov Murder

On 2 December 1934, Pravda solemnly informed its readers that on 1 December at 16:30, in the city of Leningrad in the building of the Leningrad Soviet (formerly Smolny), at the hands of a murderer, a concealed enemy of the working class, died Secretary of the Central and Leningrad committees of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) and member of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, Comrade Sergei Mironovich Kirov. The gunman was under arrest.

As Pravda hit the stands, a special train containing Stalin and a numerous entourage was arriving from Moscow.

At this point Borisov, Kirov’s personal bodyguard, had only hours to live.

The gunman, a ‘misfit’ called Leonid Nikolayev, lasted till just after Christmas. Together with many other alleged conspirators, he was shot (at night, in the cellars of Liteyni Prison). About a million would follow in the Terror.

On the opening page of Stalin and the Kirov Murder Conquest writes:

Enormous and sanguinary convulsions were helped into being by Nikolayev’s bullet. Soviet society, which had steadied into a kind of breadline normality after the epic flounderings of 1929–33, was set to experience a new crescendo of the state’s rage. For all its drama and complexity, however, the Kirov murder was essentially a monstrous diversion: a red herring the size of a killer whale. It was something of an irrelevance even for Kirov. The Terror was coming anyway, and he would have been among its chief victims.

Nearly all historians are 99 per cent sure that Stalin oversaw the Kirov murder through the Moscow Cheka (and one well-placed commentator, Volkogonov, calls it ‘certain’). I am now told that post-glasnost research has rendered this view more doubtful.[18] All cui bono? considerations point to Stalin: he had at least a dozen reasons for wanting Kirov dead (or 300 reasons: those votes at the Congress of Victors). No other event would have served Stalin so well as a springboard for mass repression. And the subsequent fates of nearly every key player in the murder (no man, no problem) speaks of Stalinist assiduity. True, the crime and the cover-up were haphazardly managed; it is particularly hard to understand the Cheka’s selection of Nikolayev, a figure of almost epileptic instability. But he finished the job: Kirov was dead. Anyway, Stalin’s guilt in the matter, when set beside his greater guilt, is another near-irrelevance. Perhaps we should throw our hands in the air and attribute Nikolayev to mere Stalinian voodoo, like his magically timed, stroke-inducing affronts to Lenin in 1922–23. The point is that the momentum for terror had already gathered. Kirov’s murder gave rise to a prodigiously exaggerated version of the Rohm purge (30 June 1934); but its real equivalent was the Reichstag Fire of the previous year. Nikolayev simply saved Stalin the trouble of torching the Kremlin.

The top Leningrad Chekists were in attendance when the night train from Moscow pulled into the station. Stalin approached their chief, Medved, and, instead of patting him on the back, slapped him across the face. A student of Machiavelli, Stalin knew that the Prince must be an actor. At Kirov’s state funeral there was a more sinister piece of showmanship: Stalin kissed Kirov’s corpse.

Borisov, the personal bodyguard, was not with Kirov when Nikolayev struck (it is thought that some Moscow Chekists detained or distracted him at the door). Late in the morning of 2 December, he was sent by lorry to the Smolny, there to be interrogated by Stalin. On Voinov Street there was a minor accident. The driver and the three Cheka guards were unhurt. Borisov was dead. They had used iron bars on him in the back of the truck.

Downward selection had long been about its work, and the cadres were ready; the punitive organs were ready. As Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who would kill himself three years later, remarked to none other than Sergei Kirov in January 1934: ‘Our members who saw the situation in 1932–33 and who stood up to it are now tempered like steel. I think that with people like that, we can build a state such as history has never seen.’

Children

Svetlana was the Cordelia of the Stalin children, in that love flowed, or seeped, between the tyrant and the daughter. This, unbelievably, is from Stalin’s pen:

One assumes that the above predates Nadezhda’s suicide in 1932 (when Svetlana was six). At that point, Svetlana would write, something ‘snapped inside my father’; ‘inwardly things had changed catastrophically’. Outwardly, too: Stalin, at the time, was personally supervising one of the greatest man-made disasters in history; and Nadezhda’s death, as we have seen, was a political as well as a personal indictment. Thereafter, in any case, family life and family feeling quickly evaporated.

Stalin’s relationship with Svetlana effectively ended in 1943. The daughter’s activities, like the sons’, were monitored by the organs, and wiretaps revealed that Svetlana was having an affair with a Jewish scenarist called Alexei Kapler, whom Stalin promptly dispatched to Vorkuta (espionage: five years). ‘But I love him!’ protested Svetlana.

There followed a long estrangement, punctuated by occasional cruelties, occasional thaws. When they spent some time together in the early 1950s, Svetlana reports that ‘[w]e had nothing to say to one another.’ This is Khrushchev:

Stalin linked Svetlana to Nadezhda and to his own most spectacular failure. Still, there had been paternal love – reflexive and perfunctory, perhaps, but love. The boys had to get along without it. And while Svetlana, with her marriages, her wanderings, went on to have a pained but articulate life, Yakov and Vasily were doomed.

Vasily (1921–62), Svetlana’s full brother, has a present-day analogue in the person of Uday Hussein.[19] The children of these autocrats, unlike the autocrats, grew up in a scripted reality, and faced a different kind of assault on their mental health. Nor were Vasily Stalin’s prospects improved when, after his mother’s suicide, Stalin absented himself too, entrusting Vasily’s nurturance to Vlasik, the head of his security guards. Also Stalin is said to have regularly beaten Vasily, a little implausibly, given his otherwise religiously observed indifference to him (there is no doubt that he beat Yakov, with method and invention). The main difficulty facing the child of an autocrat, I imagine, is that reality won’t tell you what you’re worth. Later you will notice that everyone is terrified of you (except of course your father). Vasily decided to become a fighter pilot. In his Stalin, Colonel General Dmitri Volkogonov takes a scandalized look at the personal dossier of Lieutenant General Vasily Stalin. A record of dazzling promotions (‘deputy and later commander of the Air Force’) is interleaved with numerous confidential reports about Vasily’s incompetence (and brutishness). ‘Showered with honours and the blessings of well-wishers seeking their own ends,’ Volkogonov goes on, ‘Vasily had, almost unnoticed, become a fully-fledged alcoholic.’

Three weeks after Stalin’s death Vasily suffered a demotion: he was, in fact, dismissed from the service (and forbidden to wear military uniform). He was thirty-two, and died nine years later. Khrushchev found him uncontrollable. There were periods of prison and exile. He said that he was thinking of becoming the manager of a swimming pool. At the age of forty he was an invalid. There were four wives. There were seven children; three of them – to stress, in parting, an apparently sympathetic anomaly – were adopted.

Yakov (1907–43), the half-brother, Yekaterina’s boy, suffered the most dramatically and movingly. Stalin really hated him. It took me several days of subliminal work to accept this. The standard interpretation may seem ridiculous, but it is probably the right interpretation. We have seen something of Stalin’s violent insecurity about his provenance. This insecurity was now turned on Yakov. Stalin hated Yakov because Yakov was Georgian. Yakov was Georgian because his mother was Georgian; Yakov was Georgian because Stalin was Georgian; yet Stalin hated Yakov because Yakov was Georgian. The racial and regional tensions within the USSR constitute an enormous subject, but Stalin’s case was, as usual, outlandish. We have to imagine a primitive provincial who (by 1930 or so) had started to think of himself as a self-made Peter the Great: an Ivan the Terrible who had got where he was on merit. Thus Stalin was Russia personified; and Yakov was Georgian. Yakov is said also to have been of a mild and gentle disposition, to his father’s additional disgust.

Raised by his maternal grandparents, Yakov joined the Stalin household in the mid-1920s. He spoke little Russian, and did so with a thick accent (like Stalin). Nadezhda seems to have liked him and fully accepted him. But Stalin’s persecution was so systematic that towards the end of the decade Yakov attempted suicide. He succeeded only in wounding himself; and when Stalin heard about the attempt he said, ‘Ha! He couldn’t even shoot straight’ (Volkogonov has him actually confronting his son with the greeting, ‘Ha! You missed!’). Soon afterwards Yakov moved to Leningrad to live with Nadezhda’s family, the Alliluyevs.

Like Vasily, Yakov joined the armed forces, as a lieutenant (rather than a field marshal), reflecting his more peripheral status. He was the better soldier, and fought energetically until his unit was captured by the Reichswehr. This placed Stalin in a doubly embarrassing position. A law of August 1941 had declared that all captured officers were ‘malicious traitors’ whose families were ‘subject to arrest’. Thus Yakov came under the first category – and Stalin came under the second. As a kind of compromise, Stalin arrested Yakov’s wife. When the Nazis tried to negotiate an exchange, Stalin refused (‘I have no son called Yakov’). He feared all the same that the supposedly feeble Yakov might be pressured into some propagandist exhibition of disloyalty. He need not have so feared. Yakov passed through three concentration camps – Hammelburg, Lübeck, Sachsenhausen – and resisted all intimidation. It was precisely to avoid succumbing (Volkogonov believes) that Yakov made his decisive move. In a German camp, as in a Russian, the surest route to suicide was a run at the barbed wire. Yakov ran. The guard did not miss.

We have seen what Stalin did to the families of Yekaterina and Nadezhda. Yakov’s wife was Jewish, and Stalin had opposed the marriage for that reason. Nonetheless she was released after only two years in prison: a rare manifestation of slaked appetite.

Reason and the Great Terror – 1

The question of Stalin’s sanity is one we will keep having to come back to. Compromised by power (and by increasing isolation from unwelcome truths), his sense of reality was by now unquestionably very weak; but it would be wrong to think of him in a continuous state of cognitive disarray. This underestimates his vanity and his pedantry. He habitually assessed himself in the context of legitimization: world-historical legitimization. And at times his internal world was luridly cogent.

First he looked to Lenin. It hadn’t been difficult to find a Leninist warrant for Collectivization: state monopoly of food had always been considered a worthy socialist goal. Finding a Leninist warrant for the massacre of Leninists was more uphill. Pondering the implications of the Kirov murder, Stalin would have recalled August 1918. The attempted assassination of Lenin (and, on the same day, the successful assassination of Uritsky, head of the Petrograd Cheka) had launched the Red Terror, which, however, was directed outwards. Stalin wanted it directed inwards, too. Lenin had purged the Party, and approved of purges (quoting Lassalle to Marx: ‘a party grows stronger by purging itself’), but his was a paper purge, a ‘quiet’ terror, dealing only in expulsions, like the one Stalin was prosecuting in the period 1933–35. Robert C. Tucker elaborates:

For Stalin these were tantalizing words.

He spoke often and interestedly about purging from as early as 1920. ‘The purge theme in [Lenin’s] What Is To Be Done?,’ writes Tucker, ‘struck a responsive chord in the young man.’ He praised purging again in 1927: ‘What did Lenin seek then [in his Party reshuffle of 1907–08]? One thing only: to rid the Party as quickly as possible of the unstable and snivelling elements, so they wouldn’t get in the way. That, comrades, is how our party grew.’ Tucker continues, in a rather uncharacteristic passage:

The drive to purge was career-long. Purging was hard, and hardness was a Bolshevik virtue. Stalin was never really sure that he was the cleverest or the bravest or the most visionary or even the most powerful. But he knew that he was the hardest.

In his quest for precedent, Stalin went further back (skipping Marx and Engels, who were contemptuous of terror as malum per se). When he mused about his historical destiny, Stalin’s thoughts turned to the great Russian tyrants, in particular Ivan the Terrible (the first to style himself Tsar) and Peter the Great (the first to style himself Emperor). By his various interventions in historiography and the arts, Stalin personally rehabilitated the image of Peter I, transforming him from ‘the premature industrial capitalist and syphilitic sadist’[20] of the orthodox view to an altruistic modernizer and statebuilder. In Paris in 1937 Alexei Tolstoy (the supreme hack and opportunist) drunkenly admitted to direct influence on his own fiction and drama:

Thus the Petrine epoch (1682–1725) provided the model: bureaucratization, the deepening of enserfment, the large-scale use of slave labour, the entrenchment of the punitive organs – and, later, imperial expansion.

Peter I was Stalin’s lodestar during the Collectivization period. Later in the 1930s, as the Terror approached, Stalin looked to Ivan IV, Ivan Vasilievich Grozny – Ivan the Dread. A recreational hands-on torturer, a frothing debauchee (seven wives, and boasts of ‘a thousand virgins’), and a paranoid psychotic (he murdered his own son, as incidentally would Peter), old Ivan seems an unlikely candidate for Communist rehabilitation. But he was a purger. And so, in the Stalin-sponsored history textbook of 1937, Soviet schoolchildren were now leadenly advised that

As early as 1934, at the Congress of Victors, Stalin repeatedly used the obsolete word vel’mozhi (which, like boyar, means grandee) to describe the laxer Party chieftains. And in a 1937 conversation with Sergei Eisenstein, even more ominously, Stalin echoed the Ivanian principle of destroying every traitor ‘together with his clan’ (rod: family and retinue). In his correspondence with the organs during the Terror, Stalin used the alias ‘Ivan Vasilievich’…

Iosif the Dread already had something else in common with Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible: failure. The ‘enlightened’ brutality of Peter’s revolution from above, it is generally felt, did more to divide and deform the country than it did to elide it with Europe. Ivan’s failure, by contrast, was near-infinite. The state simply disintegrated around him. His reign was followed by the Time of Troubles, a period of chaos and civil war – and a huge secondary purge of the population, cutting the census by about a third. In his attempt to account for Ivan’s failure, Stalin said (to the filmmaker Eisenstein) that Ivan was fatally hampered by religion. After murdering a boyar clan, Stalin incredulously related, Ivan would repent for a whole year instead of just getting on with the work. (This is a good example, not only of Stalin’s ghoulish practicality, but also of his congenital deafness to the spirituality of other people; he did not recognize the souls of other people.)[21] Also, Stalin said, there were ‘five’ clans that Ivan had failed to liquidate. Ivan’s failure was a failure of rigour.

In 1934, 1935, 1936, for Stalin, failure was the elephant in the Kremlin office, study and living room, in the light and space of the various dachas, in the billiard saloon of the Crimean villa. During these interim years Stalin was digesting failure, massive and irreversible failure. He had had political success, true. (It seems to be an oddity of the Communist system that failure, if sufficiently massive, and irreversible, tends to consolidate power.) But his Second October had failed.

Stalin couldn’t fully bring himself to know what everyone knew. The most precipitous economic decline in recorded history does not exactly go unnoticed. And there was the matter of the millions of dead, common knowledge throughout the Party, and of some concern, no doubt, even to an assembly as somnambulistic as the Congress of Victors.

The Great Terror was an emanation from Stalin’s body. Its source lay in the effort of the mind to overcome the evidence of the gut.

Show Trial

Stalin told Eisenstein (whose two-part Ivan the Terrible appeared in the 1940s) that Ivan had unwisely spared ‘five’ boyar clans. He didn’t get this from the history books: no such number has ever been specified. It appears that Stalin was thinking of the popular nineteenth-century play, Tsar Fedor Iovannovich, in which a character says that Ivan was survived by ‘five boyars’.

Nearly every night there were screenings in the private projection rooms in the Kremlin or the various dachas. Khrushchev says that Stalin was particularly keen on Westerns: ‘He used to curse them and give them proper ideological evaluation, but then immediately order new ones.’ Milovan Djilas was also invited to the Kremlin movie theatre; he noted that ‘throughout the performance Stalin made comments – reactions to what was going on, in the manner of uneducated men who mistake artistic reality for actuality.’ One is reminded, here, of the magnificent paragraph in The Truce, when Primo Levi joins the largely Russian audience at a picture show in a Ukrainian transit camp:[22]

Such a – what to call it? – lumpen, credulous primitivism, or imaginative semiliteracy, might help explain an aspect of the later Show Trials of the period 1936–38, in which renowned Old Bolsheviks, including Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev (and, in absentia, Trotsky), ‘confessed’ to a series of phantasmagoric crimes: namely, Stalin’s confidence (not at all widely shared by his circle) that world opinion would, as he said, ‘swallow it’. Some Western observers, it is true, took these unnatural melodramas at face value; others (like the American Eugene Lyons) were left ‘limp with the impact of horrors half-glimpsed’. The horrors were half-glimpsed, and Soviet citizens, it seems, half-believed the extorted confessions of the accused. This remark of Solzhenitsyn’s feels doubly significant: ‘I was keenly interested in politics from the age of ten;[23] even as a callow adolescent I did not believe [Judge Andrei] Vyshinsky and was staggered by the fraudulence of the famous trials…’ Even a youth could instantly penetrate the imposture. Still, one can imagine a less exceptional child gradually losing this innocent certainty and succumbing to the moral rot, and the floating reality, of mature Stalinism.

In later years, as we have already mentioned, Stalin’s cinematic tastes narrowed. Out went the cowboy films, the comedies and musicals. Stalin preferred to watch propaganda: pseudo-newsreels about life on the collective farms. The boards groan with fruit and vegetables, with suckling pig, with enormous geese. After their banquet the reapers return singing to the fields… What kind of pleasure did these portrayals give him? Did he ‘believe’ them – did he think they were ‘real’?

Reason and the Great Terror – 2

‘In my opinion,’ said Khrushchev, ‘it was during the war that Stalin started to be not quite right in the head.’ Well, he should know, but Khrushchev’s view is a curious one, suggesting as it does that the Stalin of 1929–33 and 1936–38 enjoyed cloudless mental health. Not quite right? Stalin did many profoundly crazy things during the war, particularly in the period 1941–43. But common intuition turns Khrushchev’s judgment on its head. The Nazi invasion irrefutably informed Stalin that his alternate world was nonexistent, and this is why, as we’ll see, it stupefied and unmanned him. The Nazi invasion was an avalanche of reality. It made a colossal demand: Stalin had to reach down, reach back, and find and resurrect what was left of his sanity.

As early as September 1941, three months after the invasion, when Stalin was shown the trial protocols and ‘draft sentence’ of his floundering commander-in-chief on the western front, he said, ‘I approve the sentence [execution], but tell Ulrikh to get rid of all that rubbish about “conspiratorial activity”.’ And as late as 1946 (just before the psychosis resumed), Stalin summoned the rather-too-popular Marshal Zhukov to the Kremlin and sidelined him, saying, ‘Beria has just written me a report of your suspicious contacts with the Americans and the British. He thinks you’ll become a spy for them. I don’t believe that nonsense.’ So, dismayingly but with factual candour, Stalin calls the ‘reason’ for the Great Terror exactly what it was: rubbish and nonsense… Analogously, he never asked his citizens to fight the Great Patriotic War in order to defend Marxism-Leninism, the Revolution, or the dictatorship of the proletariat. He asked them to fight it in the name of Rus’, of the Orthodox Church, of spangled tsarist generals…

There have been several attempts – none of them, perhaps, very ardent – to adumbrate a ‘rational’ Terror. Stalin did it to preempt a fifth column in the event of war. Stalin did it to Russify (or at least de-Semitize) the Party machine. Stalin did it to forestall any opposition to his intended rapprochement with Hitler. Stalin did it to obliterate all memory of his indifferent performance in the Revolution and the Civil War. Stalin did it to prevent the dissemination of the fact that he had once been an agent of the Okhrana (the Tsar’s secret police). The absurdity of this last suggestion (offered by certain Old Bolsheviks, on no evidence) prompts me to make one of my own: Stalin did it to create a favourable reception for his History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Short Course (1938) – the ultimate how-to book on avoiding arrest.

It is mildly and briefly tempting to argue that, during the 1930s, Stalin purged every section of society that was capable of dethroning him. The peasantry could bring him down (as it had very nearly brought Lenin down in 1921), so he purged it; the Party could bring him down, so he purged it; the Cheka could bring him down, so he purged it; the military could bring him down, so he purged it. But the Comintern couldn’t bring him down, and he purged the Comintern – along with every other Soviet institution. Here is an often-quoted joke: the Chekists rap on the door at four in the morning, to be told, ‘You’ve got the wrong apartment. The Communists live upstairs.’ Yet the number of Party members swept away in the Terror has been described as proportionately ‘tiny’ and even ‘negligible’. The purge was truly exponential in character. Arrests were carried out on the basis of a quota per area; the arrestees were then pressured to implicate others; these others were then pressured to implicate yet others…

For the USSR the Terror constituted a vast and multiform deficit. Most obviously, and most irrationally, Stalin decapitated the armed forces, whose weakness could (and almost did) bring him down. According to the Soviet press (in 1987), the military purge accounted for:

3 of the 5 marshals

13 of the 15 army commanders

8 of the 9 fleet admirals and admirals Grade I

50 of the 57 corps commanders

154 of the 186 divisional commanders

16 of the 16 army political commissars

25 of the 28 corps commissars

58 of the 64 divisional commissars

11 of the 11 vice commissars of defence

98 of the 108 members of the Supreme Military Soviet

Lower down, 43,000 officers were ‘repressed’ between 1937 and 1941. One soldier likened the purge to ‘a Tartar massacre’, but even this understates the case. As Roy Medvedev put it: ‘Never has the officer corps of any army suffered such losses in any war as the Soviet Army suffered in this time of peace.’

These ‘losses’ were not only emblazoned across the pages of Pravda: as Alan Bullock notes, the government ‘took the trouble to have the proceedings translated and published abroad’. How were they interpreted in London, Paris and Washington, and in Berlin, as war neared? Monitors of the purge would have to assume either a) that all Soviet society was writhing with incensed disaffection or b) that Stalin was a maniac. Berlin (for instance) would have known that commanders Yakir and Feldman, both of them Jews (and both of them executed), were not working for the Nazis. So interpretation b) would have been likely to predominate. After the army purge of 1937–38, it is certain, Hitler felt easier about Soviet military strength, and his assessment was confirmed by the Red Army’s prolonged humiliation at the hands of tiny Finland in the land-grabbing Winter War of 1939–40, the Slavic multitudes being horribly mauled by the blue-eyed snipers in their camouflaged ski suits. Hitler decided he could take Russia in a single campaign.

Beria to Stalin on 21 June 1941: ‘My people and I, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, remember your wise prediction: Hitler will not attack in 1941!’ Hitler attacked the very next day; and Stalin, in Khrushchev’s words, became overnight ‘a bag of bones in a grey tunic’. This was the strategic fruit of the Great Terror.

Why, then? Zachto? The briskest and most matter-of-fact kind of answer would go something like: to obliterate all possible opposition to the development of totalitarian rule (and, by selecting downwards, to install fresh cadres of callow obedience and brutality). Yet this doesn’t account for the range, depth and duration of the Terror; nor, in particular, does it explain Stalin’s need for confessions. The untrammelled use of the death penalty was something Stalin needed, physically, viscerally. He also needed confessions – and innumerable man-hours were devoted to extracting them even in cases that were never intended to be made public. It had to do with the size – the totality, the negative perfection – of the surrender Stalin demanded of his victims. In an especially fascinating chapter of The Great Terror (‘The Problem of Confession’) Conquest writes:

Thus the Terror enforced Stalin’s version of reality (past and present). It endeavoured to concretize his alternate world.

Again it is perhaps helpful to see Stalin, not as a fixed or static entity, but one constantly warped and distended by office. The Terror brought Stalin more power; but it was in itself an unprecedented exertion of power, too: a double escalation. If, as the commonplace has it, power is a drug, then in some cases the drug will stop working unless the dosage is increased – exponentially in this instance. For Stalin, power was a thing of the senses and the membranes. And he invariably sought the upper limit. Collectivization ended when the peasants were all collectivized (and the kulaks all dekulakized). The Terror-Famine ended when there was no one left to sow the next harvest. Gulag went on expanding until it seemed about to burst. The Terror continued until even the temporary prisons, the schools and the churches, were all full, and the courts were sitting twenty-four hours a day. By then, 5 per cent of the population had been arrested as some sort of enemy of the people. It is often said that not a family in the country remained unaffected by the Terror. If so, then the members of those families were also subject to sentence: as members of the family of an enemy of the people. By 1939, it is fair to say, all the people were enemies of the people.

The question ‘why?’ – in any kind of narrative – is never quite satisfied by the answer ‘individual psychosis’; such an answer feels like a hole or a loose end. Hence the revisionist talk of 1936–38 as being a ‘consensus operation’ (J. Arch Getty), or as a time of ‘terror, progress, and social mobility’ (Sheila Fitzpatrick). These writers are in quest of something that isn’t there: common sense. Another way round the lone-madman theory is to view the purges as a ‘logical’ outcome of Bolshevik ideology and praxis. Having gone ahead with the dogmatic policy of Collectivization, and having reached the unexpected result of economic and moral penury, what can a good Bolshevik do but become even more radical? One can say that Stalin’s psyche was perhaps uniquely amenable to such a course.[24] Apropos, here, is Santayana’s definition of the fanatic: he redoubles his efforts while forgetting his aims. He doesn’t want to think or to know. He just wants to believe.

Nor should we neglect the obvious point – that Stalin did it because Stalin liked it. He couldn’t help himself. The Terror was, in part, an episode of sensual indulgence. It was a bacchanal whose stimulant was power; and the cycle became ever more vicious. Typically, Stalin emerged from his lost weekend much strengthened and refreshed; typically, too, the titanic hangover was reserved for his doppelganger, his alter ego, his fairground mirror – the USSR.

I will close this section with a little kaleidoscope of unreason: ‘They don’t put old women like me on tractors,’ a peasant complained to her cellmates, thinking she had been denounced as a traktoristka (tractor-driver) rather than a trotskista (Trotskyite); when the time came to acknowledge ‘excesses’ in the unmasking of Trotskyites, Stalin officially noted that these excesses were the work of Trotskyites as yet unmasked; all the directors of the major foundries in the Ukraine were arrested, and a few months later their replacements were arrested too (it was only the third or fourth batch that managed to keep their seats); one Byelorussian commissar was arrested (and shot) for refusing to use torture, and other chiefs were killed simply for not killing enough; early in his reign Chekist Yezhov decreed that prison windows should be boarded up and prison-yard gardens asphalted over; any genuine spy was treated as an exotic and a celebrity by fellow prisoners; footballers, gymnasts, philatelists and Esperantoists were arrested for their connections abroad; a science student was arrested for having a pen pal in Manchester, even though his letters consisted almost entirely of Soviet propaganda; after a night-long interrogation, a ten-year-old boy admitted his involvement with a fascist organization from the age of seven (what happened to him? Before exacting the supreme penalty, did they wait for his twelfth birthday?); a twelve-year-old boy was raped by his interrogator, protested to the duty officer, and was duly shot… It was later – in the 1940s – that a man was sentenced to fifteen years for, among other things, ‘unfavourably contrasting the proletarian poet Mayakovsky with a certain bourgeois poet’, the bourgeois poet being Pushkin, whose centenary, as it happened, passed with some fanfare in that year of 1937.

And so we must imagine the railway station at Kiev and the arrival of the special train from Moscow containing a large Cheka force led by Khrushchev, Molotov and Yezhov. The Chekists have a quota: the enemies of the people they will be expected to unmask must comprise a minimum of 30,000 souls.[25] That will mean 30,000 confessions. Given a (low) ‘conveyor’ average of forty grillings per prisoner, that will mean over a million interrogations. The Chekists will need their special rubber aprons, their special rubber hats, their special rubber gloves.

Interventions

Philosophy and political economy were not the only specialisms in which Stalin (that fabulously overweening ignoramus) put himself about. Hitler confined his cultural interventions to the fields where he felt, wrongly, that he had a competence: art and architecture. But Stalin’s superbity was omnivorous. His intention, or need, was to inundate an entire society with his own quiddity. And among Stalin’s characteristics we must now include an infinite immunity to embarrassment. In September 1938, as if signalling an end to the fulminant phase of the Terror, the Short Course appeared and entrenched itself as Stalin’s official biography. By that time most of the Old Bolsheviks, who knew it to be false, were dead – but not all of them were. Over five hundred Old Bolsheviks put their signatures to a thank-you note to Stalin in the pages of Pravda in 1947 (‘with words of love and gratitude’). And there remains the impenetrable anomaly of the inner circle: Voroshilov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and so on. They knew, for example, that it was Trotsky, not Stalin, who had dominated October and the Civil War; and they knew that Trotsky was not ‘a fascist spy’. How could Stalin tolerate the existence, let alone the constant proximity, of this little reservoir of silent truth? Was it not a daily, and a nightly, reproach and reminder?[26] As earlier noted, Stalin had inflicted a blood wound on most of the men in his sanctum. This was intimate humiliation; and the collusion in Stalin’s aggrandizement took the humiliation further. Still, the survival of the cronies (increasingly precarious for all of them after the war) remains a serious lacuna in Stalin’s personality mechanism. One thing it suggests is that he never ‘came to believe’ in his own novel.

You are inclined to imagine Stalin muttering a few words to Molotov (say) about the political utility of his personal deification, but it must have been far more aggressive than that. After all, one of the purposes of the Terror, as Tucker asserts, was to impose on the Party a dramatic revision of Marx. It was a tenet of Marxism, as we have seen, that ‘personality’ remained an ‘insignificant trifle’ (in Lenin’s phrase) when set against the master forces of history. Well, Stalin himself was a bellowed rebuttal of that notion. His Marxism would have room for ‘heroes’ – great men who, as he saw it, could detect pattern in the tormenta of events and thus urge history forward. Such a one was Iosif Vissarionovich, ‘the universal genius’, as he now came to be called. He owned the physical spaces of Russia. But he wanted the mental spaces too. He wanted to fan out into every mind.

We cannot hope, as Stalin hoped, to be all-inclusive. Here are just a few examples.

Astronomy. Research on sunspots was felt to have taken an un-Marxist turn. In the years of the Terror more than two dozen leading astronomers disappeared.

History. This was naturally a dangerous trade in a period when the past was undergoing revision from above. But Party history and Russian history were far from being the only sensitive areas: parenthetical observations on Joan of Arc, the Midas legend, and Christian demonology, for example, could be taken as criminal deviations from the Moscow line. Stalin’s gavel was of course a heavy instrument. In 1937 the main school of Party historians was arrested en masse and accused of ‘terrorism’. ‘[I]t is extraordinary,’ writes Conquest, ‘how many of the leading terrorist bands were headed by historians.’ Of the 183 members of the Institute of Red Professors just under half were suppressed.

Linguistics. In the early 1930s Stalin championed the teachings of N. Marr, who held a) that language was a class phenomenon (a superstructure over the relations of production), and b) that all words derived from the sounds ‘rosh’, ‘sal’, ‘ber’ and ‘yon’. Linguisticians who held otherwise were jailed or shot. In 1950, when Stalin was seventy (and up to his armpits in the Korean crisis), he nonetheless found the time to write or at least supervise an enraged 10,000-word denunciation of the Marrists. This is Conquest, in a quietly typical strophe: ‘“These academicians”, [Stalin] was horrified to have to report, “had arrogated to themselves too much power.”’ The Marrists were now removed in their turn.

Biology. ‘Stalin made his most notorious intervention into scientific life,’ Tucker succinctly notes,

The USSR was full of little Stalins, but Trofim Lysenko was a middleweight Stalin (like Naftaly Frenkel): he was a vicious charlatan who fought the truth with the weapon of violence. Of peasant stock, and semi-educated, Lysenko followed Lamarck on the inheritance of acquired characteristics, in defiance of elementary Darwinism. Twice in 1935 Lysenko had the opportunity to address an audience that included Stalin. On both occasions he attributed his most recent failures to sabotage by hostile colleagues. Stalin, who naturally responded to this theme (wrong-headed debacles blamed on enemies), greeted the first speech with a cry of ‘Bravo, Comrade Lysenko, bravo!,’ and greeted the second with the bestowal of an Order of Lenin (the first of eight). Serious biologists were now subject to arrest, and Lysenko ‘was on his way to the total pogrom of genetics that he would carry through in 1948 with Stalin’s blessing’. He remained influential well into the 1960s.[27]

Religion. It may seem inapt to consider this matter under the heading of ‘interventions’: Stalin’s activities here were hardly a matter of theological nicety. From the outset the Bolshevik line had been ‘militant atheism’. Apart from the imposition of pauperism and oppression, ‘no action of Lenin’s government’, Richard Pipes believes,

In common with any other gathering of two or more people, organized worship was ‘viewed as prima facie evidence of counter-revolutionary intent’. The brutal mauling of the church, and particularly the Russian Orthodox Church (backwards, corrupt, and fatally compromised by its links with the Tsarist gendarmerie), was perhaps politically intelligible: hence the lootings and lynchings, the priest-hunts, the rigged trials,[28] the executions. But it was the regime’s extraordinary intention to stamp out private, even individual, worship too (aiming to replace ‘faith in God with faith in science and the machine’). In one of their eerily post-modernist convulsions, the Bolsheviks deployed the weapon of orchestrated mockery: blasphemous and semi-pornographic street carnivals, with cavorting Komsomols garbed as priests, popes, rabbis. The press claimed that these parades were greeted with spontaneous delight, but the people, as a witness feelingly wrote, looked on with

Yes, and what kind of laughter would that have been? During this period, church weddings were declared void (and funeral rites forbidden). Laughter and Leninism: the unholiest marriage of all.

Quiescent in the later years of NEP, the assault on religion was resumed in 1929. While he collectivized and dekulakized, Stalin also desacralized. Priests were associated with kulaks, and classified with them, and shared their fate. One admires the scandalized tone of this Chekist’s accusation: ‘the local priest… came out openly against the closing of the church’. Normally the bells were taken first (their tolling, it was perfunctorily explained, disturbed the rest of hardworking atheists) and later melted down for industrial use; icons were smashed or burned; the profane harlequinades were revived, with, assuredly, even less success than in the cities. By the end of 1930, 80 per cent of the village churches had been closed, or converted to such uses as storage points for kulaks awaiting deportation. Meanwhile, ‘proper steps’ had been taken ‘to prevent prayer meetings at home’.

It seems safe to say that by June 1941 religion had disappeared from Stalin’s alternate world. But then reality reintruded, in the form of a rampant Wehrmacht: the greatest war machine ever assembled, and heading straight for him. He knew that his citizens would not lay down their lives for socialism. What would they lay down their lives for? Consulting this sudden reality, Stalin saw that religion was still there – that religion, funnily enough, belonged to the real.

Voices from the Yezhovshchina[29]

This is the voice of Stepan Podlubny (b. 1914), a factory-school apprentice:

The source of Stepan’s distress is revealed in an earlier entry: he has been an informer since 1932. (Solzhenitsyn writes: ‘I hesitate to sully the shining bronze countenance of the Sentinel of the Revolution, yet I must: they also arrested persons who refused to become informers.’) The Podlubnys had been dispossessed as kulaks in 1929. Stepan’s mother concealed her origins and was sentenced to eight years for this crime. The extracts end as follows:

Many years later Stepan Podlubny donated his diary to the Central Popular Archives as ‘an act of repentance’.

This is the voice of Leonid Potyomkin (b. 1914), an engineer who would later be Vice Minister of Geology (1965–75):

Leonid had been to see Happy Fellows (which was incidentally the toast of Stalin’s screening-room) back in January, when he doggedly noted that its ‘cheerfulness and musicality make for a pleasant spectacle, arousing cheerfulness in the spectator’.

This is the voice of Vladimir Stavsky (b. 1900), General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers and Chief Editor of Novy mir:[30]

This is the voice of Lyubov Vasilievna Shaporina (b. 1879), the founder of the Leningrad Puppet Theatre and the wife of the composer Yury Shaporin:

The ‘election’ referred to on 22 October 1937 (‘Irina came home from school and said, “They told us there are mass arrests going on right now. We need to rid ourselves of undesirable elements before the election!”’), was a charade designed to celebrate the new Stalin Constitution. On 12 December Lyubov Vasilievna Shaporina went along to cast her vote:

There has never been a regime quite like it, not anywhere in the history of the universe. To have its subjects simultaneously quaking with terror, with hypothermia, with hunger – and with laughter.

Ech…

The day before Lyubov Vasilievna Shaporina basked in ‘the sun of the great Stalin Constitution’, Stalin himself addressed the voters and candidates who had gathered in the vast auditorium of the Bolshoi Theatre:

Stalin’s appearance was an unexpected treat, that night at the Bolshoi. ‘The audience rose as one as he took the rostrum,’ writes Volkogonov, and the ‘storm of applause lasted for several minutes.’ Stalin began his oration in jovial style:

This was some scene. Ground zero of the Great Terror – and here was the Party, joined in a panic attack of collusion in yet another enormous lie. They clapped, they laughed. Did he laugh? Do we hear it – the ‘soft, dull, sly laugh’, the ‘grim, dark laughter, which comes up from the depths’?

While I was getting through the shelf of books I have read about him, there were four occasions when Stalin made me laugh. Laugh undisgustedly and with warmth, as if he were a comic creation going enjoyably through his hoops. These are all things Stalin said. Nothing Stalin did makes you laugh.

One. On hearing that his grain-collection campaign of 1927 had fallen far short of its norm, Stalin identified the situation as ‘a kulak strike!’ – reaching, with charming reliability, not for one but for two categories of execration.[31]

Two. There is something inimitably Stalin in the remark he was ‘in the habit of repeating’ after the war, according to Svetlana. He was in the habit of repeating: ‘Ech, together with the Germans we would have been invincible.’ It is not so much the shocking cynicism (and ideological debauchery) of the sentiment; rather, one thrills to the boundless realpolitik packed into that humble, provincial, mountain-dwelling three-letter expletive, Ech…

Three. This concerns the terrible case of Pavel Morozov. Pavel (‘Pavlik’) was a fourteen-year-old peasant boy who, in the early 1930s, denounced his father (for kulak leanings). The father was shot. And Pavlik was soon after murdered by a band of villagers said to include his grandfather and his cousin. Stalin briefly interrupted his preparations for exalting Pavlik as a hero and martyr of socialism (statues, songs, stories, inscription in the Pioneer ‘Book of Heroism’, the Moscow Palace of Culture renamed in his honour), to remark, privately: ‘What a little swine, denouncing his own father.’[32]

Four. On 29 June 1941, a week into the Nazi invasion, Stalin attended a meeting with the military and learned the true dimensions of the discomfiture – and the true dimensions of his own miscalculation, paralysis, willed myopia, and lack of nerve. ‘Lenin left us a great inheritance and we, his heirs,’ said Stalin ‘loudly’, and searching for the appropriate modulation at this world-historical node, ‘have fucked it all up.’[33]

In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark

We should consider him, for the time being, not as a political or ideological entity but as a physical system, a will, a constitution, a quivering organism.

Stalin’s summary of the situation on 29 June seemed fairly accurate – and would have seemed entirely so if he had recast the sentence in the first-person singular. Soviet unpreparedness for the Nazi invasion is of course legendary. And Stalin’s refusal to believe in its imminence was no mere perversity or dereliction: it was the result of herculean self-hypnosis. He staked his being on it; and he lost. When the news came through (‘they are bombing our cities’), Stalin’s psyche simply fell away. It prostrated him; he became a bag of bones in a grey tunic; he was nothing but a power vacuum.

Despite the global astonishment it caused, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was a construable move on Stalin’s part, even an obvious one, given the dilatory hauteur of the Allies’ approaches to Moscow. It was the later, supplementary agreement, the Borders and Friendship Treaty, that Volkogonov regards as ‘Stalin’s greatest mistake’. In the USSR Nazism had always been

The way Stalin saw it, the imperialist powers would embroil themselves in a marathon bloodbath in Europe, after which a strengthened Red Army would do some empire-building of its own among the ruins. This dream was rather seriously undermined when Hitler took France in six weeks – leaving Stalin pacing the floor and giving vent to many a ‘choice’ obscenity (the adjective is Khrushchev’s). By June 1941 Hitler’s war record went as follows: Poland in twenty-seven days, Denmark in twenty-four hours, Norway in twenty-three days, Holland in five, Belgium in eighteen, France in thirty-nine, Yugoslavia in twelve, and Greece in twenty-one. Hitler had never been diffident about his plans for the USSR. In Mein Kampf (1925) he had proposed to cut a path eastward with fire and sword, and to enslave the Slavic undermen. After he came to power Mein Kampf was aggressively reissued ‘with no deletions’. Even Stalin fully accepted that it was only a question of when. In the broadest sense Soviet preparations for war were gargantuan, but they were off-centre, and fatally medium-term.

Stalin received not fewer than eighty-four written warnings of the coming attack, from sources as various as Richard Sorge (his masterspy then stationed in the German Embassy in Tokyo) and Winston Churchill (who had decryptions from Bletchley Park). Any reasonably observant passenger on the Moscow-Berlin railway line would have prophesied war; for weeks, men and munitions had been thundering east, to form the largest concentration of poised violence ever. In the early months of 1941 there were 324 violations of Soviet airspace by German reconnaissance planes (which, if forced to land, were repaired and when necessary refuelled by Soviet engineers). The German ambassador in Moscow dismantled all precedent by giving the exact day; a German deserter earned summary execution (as a provocateur) by giving the exact hour. Russian commanders who put their troops on alert were sharply menaced from above (even by such comparative realists as Zhukov). On 14 June an official statement dismissed rumours of war as ‘clumsy fabrications’. At this time all German vessels left all Russian ports. On 21 June Lavrenti Beria demanded the recall of the Soviet minister in Berlin for ‘bombarding’ him with disinformation, promising, moreover, ‘to grind him to dust’ in the gulag.

Just after midnight on 22 June the goods train laden with Soviet-donated matériel, bound for Berlin, crossed the border.[34] Soviet frontier guards could hear the engines of the tanks as they manoeuvred into position… At three o’clock in the morning, just outside Moscow, Stalin sought his couch in the Kuntsevo dacha. The evening meal had perhaps been lighter and briefer than usual: many of the top commissars were already heading south for their summer holidays. ‘Stalin had hardly laid his head on the pillow,’ writes Volkogonov, when Zhukov called the dacha and told the duty officer: ‘Wake him up immediately. The Germans are bombing our cities.’ When Stalin came to the phone Zhukov told of the air attacks on Kiev, Minsk, Sevastopol, Vilna… ‘Did you understand what I said, Comrade Stalin?’ He could hear the sound of Stalin’s breathing. Again he asked: ‘Comrade Stalin, do you understand?’ Only when the German embassy confirmed that the two nations were now at war (‘What have we done to deserve this?’ cried Molotov) did Stalin give the order to begin fighting back.

Before we consider the psychological peculiarities of the case, it is necessary to register the gravity of Stalin’s misreading, and the price of his tenacity in error. In the first weeks of the war the Soviet Union lost 30 per cent of its ammunition and 50 per cent of its reserves of food and fuel. In the first three months the air force lost 96.4 per cent of its planes (this staggering figure is Volkogonov’s). By the end of 1941 Leningrad was besieged and German troops were approaching the southern suburbs of Moscow. By the end of 1942, 3.9 million Russian soldiers had been taken prisoner – 65 per cent of the Red Army. Only a few days after the launch of Operation Barbarossa (original, and more brutal, codename: Operation Fritz), informed opinion in London and Washington – and Moscow – held that the war was already lost.

How is it to be explained, Stalin’s posture as hostilities approached? It would be pat, but also accurate, to say that from 1933 to 1941 the only human being on earth that Stalin trusted was Adolf Hitler. (One assumes, too, that the latter gave his personal assurance that any trouble on the border would be the work of mutinous generals; this would strike a chord with the susceptible Stalin, who was still purging his army.) Different historians give different emphases. For example, Stalin believed that Russian mobilization would repeat the blunder of 1914, leading to a German ultimatum, and war (Conquest); Stalin was enervated, mentally wiped out, by the speed of the German success in France (Tucker); Stalin’s rapprochement with militant fascism induced a generalized confusion in his political reflexes (Volkogonov). In his lopsided but very busy book, Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II, Len Deighton makes the point that Stalin was the victim of his own paranoia – or reverse-paranoia. He felt that the imperialists were trying to lure him into a quagmire: this, after all, was what he had wanted to do to the imperialists. All writers agree that Stalin underestimated Hitler’s fanaticism. Germany, Stalin thought, would never risk a war on two fronts. But there was no second front, until 1944.

In Russia’s War (and how much of it was Russia’s war) Richard Overy says that in 1941 Stalin was engaged in ‘a personal battle with reality’. This is surely right, and we can take the point further. For years that battle had seemed to be going very well, what with the innumerable little victories of 1937–38. Stalin, remember, was a figure unstoppably giganticized by power. He had become a Saturn. And he very much wanted Hitler to refrain from attacking him in 1941. And what he very much wanted had a habit, by now, of coming to pass. Stalin felt that reality was obedient to his will; like King Lear, he thought the thunder would peace at his bidding. Hitler was fantastic, inordinate, unbelievable. But he was dourly real.

After the Great War, Churchill said that he had beaten all the lions and tigers – and did not now intend to be beaten by ‘the baboons’. He meant the Bolsheviks. It is of course always a moral error to compare your adversaries to beasts, and such ‘animalization’ is a considerable twentieth-century theme (Lenin was already talking about the ‘insects’ and ‘vermin’ arrayed against him, in 1917). Still, Stalin’s behaviour in early 1941 bears marked similarities to a certain manoeuvre in baboon praxis. If a weak baboon is threatened by a strong baboon he will sometimes symbolically offer up his rear end, as if for passive intercourse. The weak baboon is actually showing some psychological nous. Stalin tried it, and merely got what he seemed to be asking for. Maybe, too, he was half baboon, half ostrich, under the impression that if he couldn’t see reality, then reality couldn’t see him.

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya

One of the most extraordinary photographs in The Russian Century: A History of the Last Hundred Years[35] is that of the corpse of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was a young partisan captured by the Germans in the battle for Moscow. When the Russians counter-attacked they found her body on a village gibbet. In January 1942 her story was told in Pravda. There followed a poem, a play, and a cult. In the play Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya sees Stalin in a vision just before her death, and he solaces her with the information that Moscow has been saved (neglecting, inter alia, to explain why her father and grandfather were both shot in the Terror). In any event, one glance at the corpse of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and you would understand the nature of the enemy you faced. The Nazi policy of what might be called innovatory barbarism earned them the furious enmity of a wavering population which, even as things stood, produced nearly a million turncoats. Stalin knew that the Russian people wouldn’t fight for him. But they would fight for Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. She would make them ‘bellow like bulls when they attack’.

There are two photographs of this young woman in The Russian Century. One shows her being marched off to captivity with a placard round her neck, no doubt disclosing her crime (arson); it is an exceptionally beautiful face, both dark and pale, and of softly Jewish cast. The faces of her captors are businesslike, matter-of-fact, even quietly regretful… In the second photograph she wears the noose of a taut rope, though the body has been cut down. Her black hair is fanned out on the snow. Her ‘perfect’ right breast is visible – but you can’t quite say that, because a breast owes part of its perfection to the other breast, and the other breast has here been hacked off. Her head is bent at an impossible angle. And her face is unforgettably that of a martyr. The eyes are closed, the mouth is full but tightly clenched. Her face expresses preternatural self-sufficiency, and an entirely effortless superiority to her murderers and mutilators. It is the face of another world, another cosmos. She was eighteen.

As the Russians retreated in the first few weeks of the war they left behind them, in Poland, the Baltic states, and the Ukraine, Cheka-manned prisons full of the ‘usual suspicious elements’ – meaning, very broadly, anyone with an education. The prisoners were almost invariably killed, even the ordinary criminals and those merely awaiting trial. One can see the logic of dynamiting a cellful of suspects (women suspects: this happened in the Ukraine). But the more typical preference was to administer a slow death. There are many accounts of prison floors strewn with genitals, breasts, tongues, eyes and ears. Arma virumque cano, and Hitler-Stalin tells us this, among other things: given total power over another, the human being will find that his thoughts turn to torture.

Accounting, as a Catholic, for his belief in evil as a living force, the novelist Anthony Burgess once said, ‘There is no A. J. P. Taylor-ish explanation for what happened in Eastern Europe during the war.’ Nor is there. Of the many characteristics shared by the two ideologies, however, one in particular proved wholly corrosive: the notion that mercilessness is a virtue. In the millenarian confrontation of the antichrists, the twin sons of perdition, cruelty became competitive, both between and within the opposed forces. Hereabouts a line is crossed, and one thinks of the fuddled brute in the court report who has stabbed his victim ninety-three times (or some such outlandish figure). The first thrust will be justified by the one that comes after. Every further thrust will be justified by the one that came before.

Hitler spelled it out. In March 1941, nearly three months before the campaign began, he told his senior officers that the war against Russia would be different from the war against France. The war against Russia would be one of annihilation: Vernichtungskrieg. And under the cover of that, under its fog and night, its foul breath, would come the Vernichtungslagers, the to-nothing camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Maidanek, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor.

The Taste Inside Stalin’s Mouth

On the day that Barbarossa broke, Stalin was so uncertain of his stomach that only a single glass of tea passed his lips. That glass of tea did not wash away the ‘taste of wormwood’ which (as he told his secretary, Poskrebyshev) had lodged itself in his mouth on 22 June 1941. When he questioned his great war-winning general, Zhukov, about the chances of holding Moscow, Stalin said, ‘I ask you this with pain in my heart…’ A pain in the heart, a flutter in the gut, and a new taste in the mouth. Wormwood: a sour perennial herb of the genus Artemisia. Wormwood: bitterness or grief, or a cause of these.

When his generals told him the truth about the western front, Stalin collapsed as a regnant presence. Some accounts have him holed up for a week or more at Kuntsevo in a state of semi-hibernation. In Volkogonov’s version we are offered an abruptly reclusive figure who would, nonetheless, occasionally lurch into the Defence Council with a volley of obscene abuse and then lurch out again. On 1 July a delegation arrived at the dacha. ‘Why have you come?’ asked Stalin with the ‘strangest’ look on his face. He clearly expected dethronement or arrest; and he would have gone quietly. To his obvious surprise, Molotov and Kaganovich and the rest of them patiently suggested that the country should resist the Germans and that Stalin should lead this effort. His reply is usually given as ‘Fine’ – though Conquest’s ‘All right’ sounds more appropriately robotic (it consorts with the taste of wormwood in his mouth). The battle for Moscow hadn’t begun. The battle with reality would last until Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–43.

At first he tried to prosecute the war through terror: the familiar psycho-chaos of fear and fantasy. He used the methods, and the personnel, of the Civil War.[36] Trotsky’s innovation, the ‘blocking unit’ (which ensured certain death with shame to those evading possible death with honour), was widely revived. Captured officers would be aware that their families now faced arrest.[37] Stalin kept ordering his blinded, shattered, trapped or fleeing forces to undertake obliterating counterattacks; failure invited summary trial and execution. At a time when the camps were being combed for competent military men, Stalin took the trouble to shoot 300 officers who were already in prison. As Kiev was falling he disdained all counsel and refused on principle to let the army retreat: 650,000 soldiers were taken prisoner, therefore becoming, by Order 270 (August 1941), ‘traitors to the motherland’. In other countries returning POWs were greeted by brass bands and bunting; in the USSR, soldiers who had fought their way out of encirclement were greeted with the super or the gulag. In 1941 and 1942 ‘no fewer than 157,593 men – a full sixteen divisions’ (Volkogonov) were executed for cowardice.

All his life Stalin was a consistently terrible little man. He never had anything resembling a finest hour – but the battle for Moscow shows him at his meagre apogee. In a crisis so severe that the government apparatus was being carted off to the Urals (the ‘Highway of Enthusiasts’, which led eastward, was thick with fleeing bureaucrats watched by jeering crowds) and there were plans to mine every significant piece of real estate in the capital (including the Metro), Stalin chose not to retreat. His train was waiting, but he stayed. In addition he astonished the Politburo with the proposal that the October Parade should take place as usual, which it did, in a snowstorm; the Germans were kilometres from the suburbs; and stretchers were ready to remove the dead and injured from Red Square if the Luftwaffe attacked. Stalin stood, as they say. He knew about failure; the author of Collectivization certainly knew something about failure. But this? All historians regard Stalin’s failure of 1941 as perhaps the most abject in world history. But he stood, he stood there, and he took it, like the sleet in his face.

Bolshevik Bravery

It is suggestive that Stalin, adding to his copious demerits, should question the courage of the Russian soldier, who would soon be astonishing the world with his (and her) heroic madness. Perhaps we should take a look at the physical bravery of the main politicals.

Trotsky was brave, but I have never read anyone who claimed that Lenin, when danger neared, was other than a double-quick decamper (and Zinoviev was known as ‘panic personified’). Trotsky was physically brave. A sense of invulnerability was an ingredient of his charisma. It was still with him on 20 August 1940, in Mexico. When the assassin Ramón Mercader drove the icepick into Trotsky’s head there came a cry – a cry that is variously described but seemed to convey outrage, infinite and incredulous outrage. And Trotsky resisted, and fought with his assailant.[38] When Mercader struck, Trotsky had been at his desk, working on a biography of the man who had him murdered.

Stalin. In a playful demonstration of strength Tukhachevsky once swept him off his little feet and held him head-high; Stalin’s face, it is said, was a picture of rage and terror. It was terror only during the flight to Teheran in 1943. When the plane bobbed through the air pockets, Stalin’s knuckles whitened on the armrests as he grimaced with undisguisable fear. The plane had an escort of twenty-seven fighters. Stalin had never flown before. And he never flew again.

For the third and final Big Three summit, in 1945, Stalin travelled to Potsdam, by rail, under the protection of fifteen hundred regular soldiers and 17,000 Cheka troops. The nightly removal to Kuntsevo was always a major military operation. If Stalin took his daughter for a stroll in the grounds of the Kremlin, there would be a tank looking over his shoulder or idling just ahead.

In Teheran, Churchill toasted him as ‘Stalin the Mighty’. And that was the trouble. As a fighting man, or as a political bully of fighting men, in the Civil War, Stalin showed plenty of ‘contempt for life’, without perhaps ever attaining the truly radical refinement of that ethos: contempt for death. His performance was strikingly mercurial; but I have never seen any suggestion that he was shy of danger.

The trouble was power, and the inflationary effects of power. That was the trouble on the plane to Teheran: all this weight, all this value, all this me, subject to the uncontrollable physics of weather and aviation.

Retributively, fear of death became his internal great terror. When Lenin died the embalmers of his corpse were nominated as the Immortalization Commission. Stalin wanted immortalization while he was still alive, and one of his later ‘interventions’ took the form of an increasingly lively interest in gerontology; like Mao, he exhausted various quackeries with the usual results.[39]

Hatred of death, in Stalin’s case, duly arrived at its negative apotheosis. Towards the end he started killing doctors.

It loves blood / The Russian earth

So wrote Anna Akhmatova, who, after the war, would be earning her living by cleaning floors. And it did love blood, the Russian earth.

The battle for Moscow was Germany’s first defeat in the Second World War; it roughly coincided with Pearl Harbor (7 December) and with Hitler’s declaration of war against the USA (11 December) – surely, for Hitler, the moment of irreversible hubris. These events produced an enormous and complementary expansion in the psyche of his adversary: 1942 saw a series of superambitious disasters for the Red Army. Dmitri Volkogonov describes Stalin’s military thinking as ‘primitive’ (or indifferent to losses); he learned ‘by blood-spattered trial and error’ – but he did learn. He desisted, on the whole, from killing his generals, and started attending to them; Zhukov would soon be talking to Stalin ‘brusquely’, as if to an inferior. In October 1942 Stalin recalled the political commissars (Volkogonov’s ‘military illiterates’) from their ‘dual commands’ at the front. He created new decorations and restored Tsarist ranking systems; the shoulder-boards which in the Civil War had been nailed into the bare flesh of White officers now appeared on the uniforms of the Reds.

Stalin’s mental journey, by 1943, proceeded in the opposite direction to that of Hitler. One moved towards reality; the other moved away from it. They crossed paths at Stalingrad. And as the war turned on the hinge of that battle (and on the new psychological opposition), Stalin might have concerned himself with a ‘counterfactual’: if, instead of decapitating his army, he had intelligently prepared it for war, Russia might have defeated Germany in a matter of weeks. Such a course of action, while no doubt entailing grave consequences of its own, would have saved about 40 million lives, including the vast majority of the victims of the Holocaust.

I have been saying that the invasion pressed Stalin into a semblance of mental health. Certainly, in August 1945, remission ended, and the patient’s sanity once again fell apart. And even during the war he found time for a domestic atrocity that typically (i.e., insanely) combined the gratuitous and the literalistic. As early as the summer of 1941, Stalin evicted the Volga Germans from the lands they had occupied for two centuries and deported them to Central Asia and Siberia. In 1943–44 other minor nationalities followed: the Kalmyks, the Chechens, the Ingushi, the Karachai, the Balkars, and the Crimean Tartars; then the Crimea and the Caucasus were partly cleansed of Greeks, Bulgars, Armenians, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Khemshins. In Stalin’s view these were all suspect populations likely to turn to the Nazis; he told Khrushchev that he wanted to do the same to the Ukrainians but – despite his efforts in the 1930s – there were still too many of them (c. 40 million).[40] The achieved deportations involved about 1.2 million people, most of them women, children and the elderly; the men were all in the army (where the Chechens and the Ingushi alone produced thirty-six Heroes of the Soviet Union). In its reports on these operations the Cheka keeps praising its own ‘efficiency’; and the deportations were not conducted with quite the raucous brutality of Dekulakization. All the families were dispossessed (Solzhenitsyn says that they were usually given an hour to pack); they were dispatched by rail, river and road;[41] their fatality rate, over the next three or four years, was about 20–25 per cent. For the deportees now joined the kulaks in that enormous category, the ‘specially displaced’: they were internal refugees, itinerant slave labour, asked to adapt to new lands, new languages, new climates…

These actions naturally constituted a significant military deficit for the USSR. The extraordinarily thorough and labour-intensive excision of the Volga Germans came at a time when the western front had disintegrated: Beria’s initial circular went out on the day that the Germans reached the Neva (and the siege of Leningrad began to solidify). True, Stalin was still in the process of reining himself in; yet in 1943–44 – the golden age of his mental equilibrium – he still felt the need for the broadest possible canvas of power and pain. Traitor nations, traitor ethnicities: such suspicions would resurface after the war, forming the greatest and blackest irony of the entire period.

Meanwhile, across the border, Hitler’s psychological trouble was revealing itself as clinical – as organic. In early 1941 he was already sufficiently ‘confident’ to undertake the invasion of Russia a) without a war economy, and b) without antifreeze. That is to say, he gambled on victory in a single campaign: a physical impossibility. We have seen how Chancellory-watchers all over the world were deceived by Hitler’s spell of success; he himself would have been the more deceived, to put it mildly. Recent work by Ian Kershaw and others has suggested that the ‘authoritarian chaos’ of Hitler’s polity was fundamentally irrational and self-destructive, and his plans for the east delusional.[42] After Stalingrad, in any event, Hitler would scream at the bringers of bad news with foam visible in the corners of his mouth. ‘If ever a building can be considered the symbol of a situation,’ wrote Albert Speer, ‘this was it’: the walls of his bunker in East Prussia were sixteen feet thick; they ‘locked him up inside his delusions’. After the briefcase-bomb attempt on his life (July 1944), Hitler came to believe that Stalin’s purge of the Red Army had been an act of Benthamite justice and precision. He started doing what Stalin had stopped doing: he reimposed Party discipline, installing political officers at all military HQs. Having earlier lost his voice, Hitler, after the bomb attack, lost his hearing. His isolation was complete.

It loves blood, the Russian earth. The great battles represented inconceivable concentrations of hatred. Stalingrad, where the front was reduced to a street, a house, a room, a ceiling, a wall, a window; where swarms of rats ‘flowed like a warm river over the living and the dead’; where, indeed, the Germans were confronted by Rattenwaffe, ratwar,[43] in which the Slavic under-men (Hitler’s ‘swamp animals’) took the fight to them in the runnels and the sewers (‘deep war’, in Ilya Ehrenburg’s phrase), and prevailed. Or the meshuggah megabattle of Kursk (July 1943), where, during a violent thunderstorm, fascism and Communism clashed with ‘indescribable fury and horror’, as Alan Bullock writes: huge densities of ‘armour crashed into each other to form a roaring, whirling tangle of over a thousand tanks locked together in combat for over eighteen hours’ – in an area of barely three square miles. Or the Siege of Leningrad, begun during the battle for Moscow and not lifted for 900 days, with a million dying in the first winter, the ‘road of life’ over frozen Lake Ladoga (the first trucks disappeared under the ice; many horses died en route and were delivered as meat), the relief vehicles making the return journey with refugees, the director of the Hermitage weeping on the railway platform as the first treasures rolled east, and Shostakovich, to the sound of guns, writing the symphony that expressed the murderous violence pressing in on the beleaguered city…

After the Winter War against Finland (1940–41), most observers, as we know, dismissed the Red Army as a toothless dinosaur. But at least one German officer saw it differently:

It was these qualities, particularly the last, that turned the war – together with the great expansion of previously trapped energy, and trapped meaning, in the Russian breast. The effort was nationwide, typically huge-scale, passionate, and bootstrap: typically ‘sacrificial’. About 6 million workers were transported east, with their families – and also their factories, which were often reassembled and up and running in a matter of days. Such feats were underscored by a churning netherworld of forced-labour camps where conditions were sometimes worse than in the gulag. The zeks themselves now experienced fresh privations: the food quota was cut, and the living space halved – and not because the archipelago was getting any smaller. Of the 5.7 million POWs taken by the Germans, 4 million died in captivity (the USSR was not a signatory of the Geneva Convention; the Russian soldier suffered hardest, always and everywhere). Stalin wanted the remaining 1.7 million. And he got them. About 15–20 per cent were cleared by the Cheka. The rest faced execution or the camps.

Stalin’s city, Stalingrad, was once Tsaritsyn: the scene of some of his more controversial activities during the Civil War. The pivotal victory there must have been savagely gratifying.[44] When he kissed the Sword of Stalingrad at Teheran (November 1943), when he heard Churchill salute ‘Stalin the Mighty’: what extravagant vindication. And the second Big Three meeting, at Yalta fourteen months later, with the ageing Prime Minister and the dying President paying Stalin’s convenience the courtesy of travelling all the way to the Crimea, was another occasion for gorgeous complacency. Then the final summit in July, at Potsdam, among the shards and splinters of the Reich. Roosevelt was dead, and Churchill (halfway through the conference) lost office and was replaced by Clement Attlee.[45] Hitler was dead, too, and the detailed dismantling of Hitlerism would begin at Nuremberg. Stalin could take a look around and see exactly where he stood. Presiding over an empire greater than any Tsar’s, he was now, without question, the preeminent personage on earth.

The Saddest Story

Within the USSR, throughout the quarter-century of his rule, Stalin was an extremely popular leader. It is something of a humiliation to commit that sentence to paper, but there is no avoiding it. Hitler was also a popular leader; but he had some economic successes, unlike Stalin, and he targeted relatively small minorities (the Jews comprised about 1 per cent of the population). Stalin’s targets were majority targets, like the peasantry (85 per cent of the population). And although Hitler’s invigilation of the citizenry was intimidating and persistent, he did not go out of his way, as Stalin did, to create a circumambience of nausea and fear. In a land where ‘people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night’ (Solzhenitsyn), Stalin was always extremely popular.

Of course, Stalin’s popularity was wholly – Hitler’s merely largely – a matter of manipulation. For the citizen the process began in nursery school, and was reinforced by every means and from every direction and at all times. As in Germany, this was the birth of mass-media propaganda; people were unaware, then, that propaganda was propaganda – and propaganda worked. To love Stalin, suggests Volkogonov (who loved Stalin), was a form of ‘social defence’: it conditioned you to avoid trouble. Sakharov loved Stalin, and, like Volkogonov, was distraught at his death. ‘It was years,’ he later wrote, ‘before I understood the degree to which deceit, exploitation and outright fraud were inherent in the whole Stalinist system. That shows the hypnotic power of mass ideology.’ Moreover, Stalin made a ridiculous amount of headway in putting it about that the Cheka worked independently of the Kremlin. There’s the famous anecdote – the two men meeting in the streets of Moscow, during the height of the Terror: ‘If only someone would tell Stalin!’ and so on. And this was not a joke, and these were no ordinary Ivans. The two men were Ilya Ehrenburg and Boris Pasternak.

The love for Stalin: it is very nearly the saddest story of all. You can see Dmitri Volkogonov slowly shaking his head as he writes, ‘No other man in the world has ever accomplished so fantastic a success as he: to exterminate millions of his own countrymen and receive in exchange the whole country’s blind adulation.’ What has Stalin gone and done here? What is the nature of this particular crime – what is its content? It feels like some form of rape: a travesty of love, prosecuted by force. He took you early, too, in your school uniform. So, another enormous and contaminating lie, implanted in the childish heart.

Love signalled the totality of his victory. 1984 ends as follows:

Into the Sere

No one is ever going to tell us about the physiology of autocratic rule, about the addiction to power and how this affects the system. But it seems fair to assume, in Stalin’s case, that he bore the marks of an addiction so lavishly slaked. Presiding over what can confidently be called the least relaxing regime in human history cannot itself have been relaxing. (The hourly fear of assassination, one imagines, would also have been far from salutary.) Then there was the Second World War to be dealt with: for Stalin this meant four years of twenty-hour days. So how were things going, under this particular Kremlin complexion? He was now sixty-five.

The war released great energies and talents in the Soviet people. But it also released half-forgotten or unexperienced emotions, faculties, mental states (responsibility, endeavour, initiative, pride); and these had won the war. Pasternak describes the general agonized yearning that the state would now begin to back off from its citizens – after thirty years of (in order) world war, revolution, civil war, famine, forced collectivization, more famine, terror and, again, world war. Stalin was quick to assure his people that the ‘total claim’ he made on them was not going to be reduced. I’m sure he sensed their awakened spirit; and I’m sure he didn’t like it. Round about now we further note the development in Stalin of a fierce strain of national inferiority, which expressed itself as aggressive xenophobia combined with Great Russian hauteur. He felt inferior not just to the West but to the satellite countries of Central Europe, and killed army veterans who had seen what it was like in Bulgaria or Yogoslavia. His bitter isolationism, political and personal, was linking up with rearoused suspicions about the people, the people themselves, who seemed to him to be newly stirring.

In the period 1945–53 Stalinism entered its rancid, crapulent phase. The old addict was starting to pay for his ‘excesses’. Since 1929 the Soviet Union had been a reflection of Stalin’s mind. And now that mind was breaking up: infarctions, minor strokes, dizzy spells, faints. In common with another exhausted autarch, Macbeth, Stalin’s way of life was fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf. Withered, parched, and above all lurid, in the botanical sense (‘dingy yellowish brown’), and in every other: ghastly, wan, glaring, gaudy, sensational, and horrifying. And gutter-level: the level of the street corner and the upended milk crate. There would be more executions, deportations, conspiracies to establish ‘conspiracies’; additional millions would be absorbed by the clogged gulag. But the theme of the period is fading vigour – twitching, flailing. Atavisms, primitive stupidities, were ready to recrudesce. If the postwar years lack the phantasmagoric coherence of the 1930s, they still achieve an unexpectedly sordid symmetry. Even in his last excitations Stalin managed to fight his way to consummate historical disgrace.

Volkogonov reports that in January 1948 the Minister of the Interior, Kruglov, was called in by Stalin:

New camps, new prisons – for old, old crimes (the anarchists had been wiped out by Lenin in 1918). Stalin erratically revealed certain human qualities in his last years (a photograph of Nadezhda Alliluyeva would reappear on his desk), among them an elderly and irascible fear of change.[46] This fear now allied itself to a rancorous bid for autarky. There were old crimes, but there were also new crimes. PZ, for instance (Abasement Before the West), or VAD (Praising American Democracy), or the presumably more minor VAT (Praising American Technique). Then, from what at first seems to be an unexpected direction, there was suddenly another new crime: the crime of being Jewish.

Nothing quite explains this collapse into the gutter by Stalin, though his history of anti-Semitism turns out to be long and colourful. Khrushchev said he was dyed in the wool; and there are examples of Stalin’s anti-Semitic crudities dating back to the teens of the century. ‘Anti-Semitism is counterrevolution,’ Lenin had tersely decided. And yet the Party was tainted with it as early as the 1920s. There seems to have been a policy of low-pressure ghettoization, in which the poorer Jews of the old Pale of Settlement in the East European Plain were encouraged to migrate to the Crimea. With Stalin’s ascendancy came a change of destination: the new Jewish Autonomous Region would be established in Birobidzhan, a ‘desolate’ area near the Chinese border.

This is Richard Overy:

During the 1930s anti-Semitism became a part of Cheka policy, and in the years of the Terror such phrases as ‘contact with Zionist circles’ began to appear in its fabrications. The tenor of Stalin’s prejudice is revealed in an anecdote describing a party attended by officials of the punitive organs in 1936, shortly after the executions of Zinoviev and Kamenev (both of them Jews). Conquest’s version goes as follows:

Of the eighteen defendants at the Bukharin/Yagoda trial of 1938, thirteen were Jews, including Trotsky and his son Sedov, tried in absentia. Among other things, this was a signal to Berlin. ‘Molotov is not Bronstein,’ as Ribbentrop duly observed.

One wonders whether Stalin’s hatred of Trotsky, one of the most passionate in history (with three floors of the Lubyanka devoted to his destruction), was to some extent ‘racial’. It is, anyway, all of a piece. Anti-Semitism is an announcement of inferiority and a protest against a level playing field – a protest against talent.[47] And this is true, too, of the most hysterical, demonizing, millenarian versions of the cult, according to which a tiny minority, the Jews, planned to achieve world domination. Now how would they manage that, without inordinate gifts? It is said that anti-Semitism differs from other prejudices because it is also a ‘philosophy’. It is also a religion – the religion of the inadequate. When tracing the fateful synergy between Russia and Germany (soon to climax), we may recall that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the ‘warrant for genocide’ as it is called in Norman Cohn’s book of that name, was a fiction composed by the Tsarist secret police.[48]

The pact years of 1939–41 saw collaborative anti-Semitism between the two regimes. German Jews who had hoped to find safety in the USSR were first corralled, then delivered to the Gestapo. Meanwhile, Jewish refugees from the German-occupied countries were imprisoned or exiled to Central Asia or Siberia. In his half of partitioned Poland, Stalin combined general decapitation with a sustained attack on Jewish culture, banning religious holidays (including the Sabbath), bar mitzvahs and circumcisions, and dismantling the shtetls. After June 1941, Soviet policy went briefly into reverse, a switch apparently confirmed by Stalin’s endorsement, ten months later, of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. But the momentum of atavism was building. Conquest notes that Jewish activists interrogated by the Cheka in 1939 ‘were treated very badly’, but ‘the curses and imprecations never had any racial tone. When they were reinterrogated in 1942–43, anti-Semitic abuse had become the norm.’ The shift in emphasis, like everything else, was top-down.

There were about 3 million Jews in the Soviet Union after the war, 1.25 million having died in the Holocaust. That Jewry faced the possibility of a second Holocaust, in successive decades, is strongly suggested by Stalin’s sclerotic manoeuvrings in this period, and particularly his decision of 1951: anti-Semitism went from covert to overt, from Pravda’s mutterings about ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ to a fully orchestrated propaganda campaign. Stalin was now ready to mobilize the atavism. Until 1951 his racially motivated arrests, executions, murders, purges and bannings had been largely clandestine. In the spring of that year he started developing the Slansky case in satellite Czechoslovakia (fourteen high-level Stalinists, eleven of them Jewish, were tried and executed, the charge being emended from ‘bourgeois nationalism’ to ‘Zionism’). Further publicity was generated by a gang of Jewish ‘wreckers’ in Ukrainian industry in 1952. Then came ‘the Doctors’ Plot’, and the propaganda juggernaut started preparing the public for a nationwide pogrom. Solzhenitsyn believes that the pogrom was to be launched at the beginning of March by the hanging of the ‘doctor-murderers’ in Red Square. But then, too, at the beginning of March something else happened: Stalin died.

Historians usually say that there would have been ‘another terror’ of uncertain scale; but what kind of terror? It wouldn’t have been like the Great Terror, where public participation was confined to the delivery of denunciations. The Jewish terror would have modelled itself on the older Bolshevik idea or tactic of inciting one class to destroy another. It would have resembled the Red Terror of 1918 with the Jews very approximately in the role of the bourgeoisie. The Red Terror of 1918, Orlando Figes insists, was participatory, top-down but also bottom-up. It is tempting to see more mangled regression here, in Stalin, as he sets about provoking the baser energies of the masses, and more nostalgia for the days of struggle, the days, as Lenin called them, of ‘chaos and enthusiasm’.

There are rational explanations for Stalin’s surrender to the gutter voodoo. Conquest summarizes them (and they form a rebarbative brew):

The proximate cause of the final delirium was evidently the emergence of the state of Israel in 1948 and the arrival, later that year, of the new ambassador, Golda Meir, who attracted a crowd of 50,000 Jews outside the Moscow synagogue. This was a shocking display of ‘spontaneity’; it also confronted Stalin with an active minority who owed an allegiance other than to ‘the Soviet power’. He is supposed to have said: ‘I can’t swallow them, I can’t spit them out.’ In the end, it seems, he decided to do both. The Jews who survived the gauntlet were meant to end up in Birobidzhan on the Chinese border and in other parts of Siberia where, according to Solzhenitsyn, ‘barracks had already been prepared for them’.

It is perhaps controversial to suggest that Iosif Stalin in his last years was capable of further spiritual decline. But one is struck by the loss, the utter evaporation, of his historical self-consciousness, suggesting some sort of erasure in a reasonably important part of Stalin’s brain. ‘Anti-Semitism is counterrevolution.’ Anti-Semitism was the creed of the Whites, of the Tsarists – and of the Black Hundreds, the reactionary gangs with their knives and knuckledusters (sometimes equipped with guns – and vodka – by the gendarmerie), against whom the young Stalin might have stood in line on the streets of Russia’s cities. Anti-Semitism was for the rabble and the Right. In turning to it, the world’s premier statesman, as he then was, also squandered the vast moral capital that the USSR had accumulated during the war: Hitler’s conqueror, incredibly, became Hitler’s protégé. The various restrictions imposed on Soviet Jewry lacked the lewd pettines of some of the Nuremberg Laws of the 1930s;[49] but Stalin’s signature is everywhere apparent. As his social fascism broadened to include ethnic fascism, Stalin added to his other innovations by becoming the first Holocaust-denier. It was dangerous to talk about ‘Jewish martyrdom’ (this was ‘national egotism’), and the regime concertedly heckled the notion that the fate of the Jews was a significant aspect of the Second World War.[50] Chaotically Stalinesque, too, was the arrest of several Jews on the (probably trumped-up) charge of accusing the state of anti-Semitism.

One last deformed irony emerges from the strange dance, the pas de deux performed by the little moustache and the big moustache. In his final convulsion, ‘the Doctors’ Plot’, the defendants (nearly all of them Jewish) were accused (falsely) of the quintessential, the defining, the exceptionalizing Nazi crime: medical murder.

The Bedbug

When he adopted the ‘reconciliation line’ at the Congress of Victors in 1934, Maxim Gorky was profoundly mistaken in thinking that ‘biographical therapy’ was the way to Stalin’s soul. Planetary preeminence didn’t soften him in 1945. A few more mendacious hosannahs wouldn’t have softened him in 1934. Stalin wasn’t that kind of animal.

Writers were pushed, sometimes physically, sometimes spiritually, into all kinds of unfamiliar shapes by the Bolsheviks. Isaac Babel, shot in 1940, Osip Mandelstam, losing his mind en route to Kolyma in 1938 (‘Am I real and will death really come?’): these men could tell themselves that they were martyrs to their art; and they were, and so were hundreds of others. Some more or less genuine writers tried to work ‘towards’ the Bolsheviks. Their success depended inversely on the size of their talent. Talentless writers could flatter the regime. Talented writers could not flatter the regime, or not for long. One thinks of Mayakovsky. His tough-guy verses about bayonets and pig-iron statistics have a smile somewhere behind them; and his play The Bedbug (a satire on bureaucratism) was considered subversive enough to be quietly quashed. But he compromised his talent, minor though it was. And it seems that you just can’t do that. He killed himself in 1930.[51] The strangest and perhaps the sourest destiny of all, however, was that of Maxim Gorky.

‘I despise and hate them more and more,’ he wrote of the Bolsheviks, in June 1917. Gorky was not a ‘hereditary proletarian’, but he was certainly a hereditary plebeian: early poverty was followed by orphanhood; he took his first job at the age of nine. By the mid-1890S he was world-famous, and still in his twenties. His revolutionary credentials were also excellent. He was an enemy of the old regime, and had done time in prison. A friend of Lenin’s since 1902, Gorky donned the black leather tunic and the knee-high boots for the failed revolution of 1905.[52] During the war his large apartment in Petersburg became a Bolshevik HQ. Gorky’s disillusionment was gradual but steady. Two weeks after October he wrote the following:

In A People’s Tragedy Orlando Figes uses Gorky as a moral anchor. In the typhoon of unreason, his is the voice of suffering sanity.

He was also a superenergetic philanthropist, saving many lives and easing many hardships during the Red Terror and the Civil War. Lenin, for a little while longer, was still listening to him, even though Gorky’s newspaper, Novaia zhin’ (new world), had been suppressed in 1918. It is extraordinary how many of Lenin’s most-quoted utterances are to be found in his correspondence with Gorky: the one about the ‘unutterable vileness’ of all religion; the one about intellectuals being society’s ‘shit’; the one about the ‘marvellous Georgian’. In power, Lenin grew sterner with his friend. Gorky’s letters are now forceful pleas for particular leniencies and general moderation. Lenin fights his corner in his usual style, with the kind of debating tricks that would embarrass even the Oxford Union, and crowingly delivered:

Quite easily done.[54] Lenin’s letters started to include threats. ‘I cannot help saying: change your circumstances radically, your environment, your abode, your occupation, – otherwise life may disgust you for good’ (July 1919). Italics added. To bring about the inevitable rift it would take the death of two poets and a famine.

When Moscow eventually started to admit that a quarter of the peasantry was dying of starvation, Gorky was chosen to lead the call for aid. When the famine was over, Lenin arrested all but two of the relief committee and told Gorky to go abroad ‘for his health’. Then there were the deaths of the poets, Alexander Blok and Nikolai Gumilev. After a brief enthusiasm for October, and two famous poems in celebration of it, Blok wrote nothing after 1918, and died of hunger and despair in August 1921. Days later, Gumilev (the former husband of Anna Akhmatova) was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka – for monarchist sympathies, which he indeed professed. Gorky went at once to Moscow and obtained from Lenin an order for Gumilev’s release. When he got back to Petrograd he found that Gumilev had already been shot, without trial. On being told of this, Gorky coughed up blood. His health was in any case poor. He emigrated in October.

In 1932 Gorky was induced to return to the USSR, from Italy, by Comrade Stalin. This was a propaganda coup for the regime, which made much of the deliverance of the great writer from ‘fascist Italy’. He was awarded the Order of Lenin; a little palace in Moscow was made available for him, and a dacha (into which, on hearing of Gorky’s difficulties with the stairs, Stalin sensitively installed an elevator); Tverskaia Street became Gorky Street, and his native Nizhnyi Novgorod became Gorky: this was large-scale lionization.[55] It must have been clear to Stalin that Gorky would eventually give him trouble. There would be a man, there would be a problem. Stalin, I am sure, was excited by the idea of breaking this big cat: breaking the talent, breaking the integrity, breaking the man.

As early as June 1929, during the second of his five reintroductory summer trips to Russia, Gorky comprehensively defiled himself. To counter the recent publication, in England, of a book about Solovki (An Island Hell: A Soviet Prison in the Far North), Gorky was sent on a visit to the cradle of the gulag. The camp was hurriedly Potemkinized. As Solzhenitsyn tells it, however, Gorky secured an uninvigilated ninety-minute conversation with a fourteen-year-old boy in the Children’s Colony. He left the barracks ‘streaming tears’.[56] In the Visitors’ Book he praised ‘the tireless sentinels of the Revolution, [who] are able, at the same time, to be remarkably bold creators of culture’; these views were published worldwide. ‘Hardly had [Gorky’s] steamer pulled away from the pier than they shot the boy’ (Solzhenitsyn).

The second spectacular self-abasement occurred in 1933–34, when Gorky edited The White Sea-Baltic Canal (his co-editors included the Deputy Chief of the gulag). In the summer of 1933 a delegation of 120 writers visited the canal, which had just been completed, and thirty-six of them contributed to the volume, which lauded the project as ‘a uniquely successful effort at the mass transformation of former enemies of the proletariat’. Built by slave labour (mostly kulaks), the canal was meant to connect the two fleets by a mighty waterway. In the end it cost perhaps 150,000 lives, and it was useless.[57] Gorky had long been a close friend of the hard-line but candid and realistic Kirov, the Leningrad boss, in whose fief the canal was built. The book itself was evidence enough: manifestly and monotonously fraudulent, sickly and craven. Gorky’s incidental pronouncements, around now, are unrecognizable. He speaks the dialect of the regime in a tone of icy triumphalism.

It was the murder of Kirov (December 1934) that penetrated Gorky’s spiritual coma. Stalin expected this. A matter of hours after the killing, Cheka troops ringed Gorky’s Crimean villa – to protect him, or to contain him lest he speak out? The parallel tracks now entered the chicane. Urged by Stalin to join the condemnation of individual terror (after the Kirov killing), Gorky replied that he condemned state terror too: this amounted to an accusation of murder. When Gorky returned to Moscow the organs moved in closer. He told friends that he was under ‘house arrest’. His quarantine was bizarrely symbolized by the fact that the copies of Pravda he saw were specially rigged up for him (‘reports of arrests,’ as Tucker notes, ‘were replaced by news about the crab catch and the like’). Isolation increased in May 1935 when his adopted son, Maxim Peshkov, who acted as his go-between, died mysteriously after a minor illness. Gorky’s own pulmonary trouble grew worse. Stalin, accompanied by Molotov and Voroshilov, paid a visit to his bedside. He died on 18 June 1936, and was buried with full honours. Two months later his old friend Kamenev came to the dock (and to eventual execution) in a trial that Gorky had been expected to denounce.

No personage in history, we may think, has a weaker claim to the benefit of the doubt, but Stalin is less thoroughly implicated in the death of Gorky (and Gorky’s son) than in the death of Kirov. Moving from the ‘quiet terror’ of Party expulsions to the percussion of the Great Terror itself, Stalin was now at his most anarchically improvisational, a mad gymnast of multiple deceit, filling a hole here, plugging a gap there, in the vibrating edifice of his reality. In the later trial of Bukharin and others (1938) it was claimed that Gorky was killed by his doctors, who were themselves the creatures of head Chekist Yagoda. Yagoda was of course executed; and so were Drs Levin and Kazakov.[58] The Gorky ‘murder’, a bumbling, piecemeal business (the doctors induced him to stand near bonfires and to visit people who had colds), sounds embarrassingly feeble, and drenches the event in an undeserved improbability. The entire case feels extemporized: Yagoda’s plot was presented as a terroristic move against the leadership, and so Gorky (his shade would not have been happy to learn) was liquidated as one of the stauncher Stalinists. Anyway, there seems to be a rule, and it may be metaphysical: when Stalin wished for a death, then that wish came true.

Gorky, then, was trying to regain his integrity. But why did he lose it in the first place? Solzhenitsyn is unsparing:

We understand Solzhenitsyn’s anger (that last sentence contains two definitive insults), but we cannot quite accede to it. Vanity, venality – perhaps; but Gorky was stumbling, groping, suffering. He returned to Russia because on some level he felt, perhaps conceitedly, that he could moderate the system – moderate Stalin – from within. He pawned his soul, and then tried to redeem it.

Anomalously, Gorky was allowed a last trip to the Crimea – for his health. One night, escaping the supervision of his doctors, he climbed out of a window and crept into the garden. Tucker writes (he is paraphrasing his source): ‘Gorky looked up at the sky. Then he walked to a tree, clasped its branches in his arms, and stood there weeping.’ He had much to weep about. In general, writers never find out how strong their talent is: that investigation begins with their obituaries. In the USSR, writers found out how good they were when they were still alive. If the talent was strong, only luck or silence could save them. If the talent was weak, they could compromise and survive. Thus, for the writers, the Bolsheviks wielded promethean power: they summoned posterity and inserted it into the here and now.

A certain document was found among Gorky’s papers. On reading it Yagoda swore and said, ‘No matter how much you feed a wolf, he keeps looking back towards the woods.’ (This is a unique occurrence: Yagoda, here, is more generous than Solzhenitsyn.) In the document Gorky had imagined Stalin as a flea – a flea that had grown to vast and uncontrollable proportions, ‘insatiable for humanity’s blood’ (in Conquest’s gloss) ‘yet essentially parasitical’. And perhaps we should make that giant flea a giant bedbug, for Stalin craved, and brought about, the politicization of sleep. He murdered sleep.

With a solemnity that can be easily imagined, Stalin himself led Gorky’s funeral march. The passionate friendship the two men shared now established itself in Soviet myth. A fortnight later the three journals Gorky edited were closed down and their staffs arrested, along with others of his entourage.

Demian Bedny: Demian the Poor. Maxim Gorky: Maxim the Bitter. Iosif Grozny: Iosif the Terrible.

End

This is how Ivan went, in 1584: ‘[he] began grievously to swell in his cods, with which he had most horribly offended above fifty years together, boasting of a thousand virgins he had deflowered’.[59] The soothsayers were called in, and Ivan sought relief in the fondling of jewelry. He died while attempting to begin a game of chess:

‘Was strangled’ here means ‘asphyxiated’, because Ivan died of natural causes. As, scandalously, did Stalin. He took rather longer to go. And, such was his incredible talent for death, he showed that he could kill people violently even from his coffin.

One of the hundred and more Jewish artists executed between 1948 and 1953 was the legendary actor Solomon Mikhoels. He was not arrested; he was lured, murdered, and left in the street, where a Cheka truck drove over him. The regime was content at first to decide that the death was accidental, but later it was put about that he had indeed been murdered – by the CIA, to stop him from exposing an American spy ring. Mikhoels had performed, privately, in the Kremlin. He had done Shakespeare for Stalin. He had done Lear for Stalin. I contend that this was a great historical moment. Lear was of course a totalitarian from birth – there are differences – but Lear remains the central visionary meditation on the totalitarian mind. Did Stalin’s nose twitch when he heard Mikhoels, his future victim, flaying him from the stage?

And nor of course was Koba. Khrushchev reports him as being unwontedly cheerful on the evening of 28 February (and unwontedly drunk);[61] other accounts describe a night of sombre denunciations from the head of the table, and Stalin’s silent and disgusted departure (at the usual hour: 4 A.M.). the standing dinner invitation to Kuntsevo had always been a mixed blessing. In more youthful days the Kremlin cronies had amused themselves with bun fights, songs, jokes, japes. A typical prank was the placement of a ripe tomato on the chair of the drunken Poskrebyshev (was this, one wonders, before or after his wife was shot – or both?). Stalin enjoyed the spectacle of humiliation – getting Khrushchev to dance Cossack-style, for example. But these men were already humiliated, long before 1953. By then Poskrebyshev was gone (fired, merely) and the others, particularly Beria and Malenkov, were regarded with intense suspicion. ‘I’m finished,’ Stalin had recently been heard to say to himself: ‘I trust no one, not even myself.’ Svetlana says of this period that a visit to her father would physically wipe her out for several days; and Svetlana was in no fear of her life.

On 1 March Stalin stirred at midday, as usual. In the pantry the light came on: MAKE TEA. The servants waited in vain for the plodding instruction, BRING TEA IN. Not until 11 P.M. did the duty officers summon the nerve to investigate. Koba was lying in soiled pyjamas on the dining-room floor near a bottle of mineral water and a copy of Pravda. His beseeching eyes were full of terror. When he tried to speak he could only produce ‘a buzzing sound’ – the giant flea, the bedbug, reduced to an insect hum. No doubt he had had time to ponder an uncomfortable fact: all the Kremlin doctors were being tortured in jail, and his personal physician of many years, Vinogradov, was, moreover (at the insistence of Stalin himself), ‘in irons’.

Beria, apparently fresh from some debauch, made a flying visit on the night of 1 March. But it wasn’t until the next morning that a team of (non-Jewish) doctors was assembled and set to work, spurred on by Beria’s obscenities and threats, while members of the Politburo paced about in the adjoining room. One finds oneself tending to linger over the medical documents (is it the novelty of a natural death?), with their portrait of total powerlessness. Extracts:

Because the patient, in other words, had had a massive stroke. The doctors applied leeches – four behind either ear, contentedly and innocently sucking the bedbug’s blood. Magnesium sulphate was administered by enema and hypodermic. Stalin’s right side was paralysed; his left side twitched at random. Over the next five days, as the doctors trembled over their work, Vasily Dzhugashvili would sometimes stagger in and shout, ‘They’ve killed my father, the bastards!’ At 9:50 P.M. on 5 March Stalin began sweating heavily. His blue face turned bluer. Svetlana watched and waited. This is her valediction:

What was he doing? He was groping for his power.

Stalin was dead – but he wasn’t yet done. He had always loved grinding people together, pestling them together, leaving them without air and space, without recourse; he had always loved hemming and cooping them, penning them, pinning them: the Lubyanka reception ‘kennel’, with three prisoners for every yard of floor space; Ivanovo, with 323 men in a cell intended for twenty, or Strakhovich, with twenty-eight men in a cell intended for solitary confinement; or thirty-six in a single train compartment, or a black maria packed so tight that the urkas can’t even pickpocket, or the zeks trussed in pairs and stacked like logs in the back of the truck – en route to execution… On the day of Stalin’s funeral vast multitudes, ecstatic with false grief and false love, flowed through Moscow in dangerous densities. When, in a tightening crowd, your movements are no longer your own and you have to fight to breathe, a simple and sorrowful realization asserts itself through your panic: that if death comes, it will be brought here by life, too much life, a superabundance of life. And what were they all doing there anyway – mourning him? On that day well over a hundred people died of asphyxiation in the streets of Moscow. So Stalin, embalmed in his coffin, went on doing what he was really good at: crushing Russians.

Negative Perfection

While preparing for the demonstration trial of the SRs, Lenin wrote to the People’s Commissar of Justice (May 1922):

‘Terror is a powerful means of policy,’ said Trotsky, ‘and one would have to be a hypocrite not to understand this.’

Both men, we see, are anxious to avoid being hypocritical.[62] No, let us not have any hypocrisy. Terror, if you must. But let us not have any hypocrisy. Lenin’s letter to Kursky elaborates on an earlier suggestion: ‘Comrade Kursky! In my opinion we ought to extend the use of execution by shooting (allowing the substitution of exile abroad) to all activities of the Mensheviks, SR’s, etc.’ Looking at the thing from the PR point of view, Lenin goes on: ‘We ought to find a formulation that would connect these activities with the international bourgeoisie.’ His italics; and his hypocrisy. State terror is state hysteria; any attempt, however coldly undertaken, ‘to legalize it in a principled way, and without hypocrisy’ will turn out to be hypocritical. And how do we construe Trotsky’s pronouncement? One would ‘have to be a hypocrite,’ he argues, ‘not to understand’ that ‘terror is a powerful means of policy.’ ‘Not to understand’, here, is a euphemism for ‘not to act on’: his political opponents, after all, don’t mind his understanding it. Trotsky ought to have used the word ‘sentimentalist’ in place of ‘hypocrite’. Everyone knows that terror is unsentimental. We still need persuading that terror is unhypocritical. More generally, we take it on board that Lenin and Trotsky were alert to the danger of hypocrisy.

In fact, of course, hypocrisy boomed under the Bolsheviks, like hyperinflation. I do not intend it as a witticism when I say that hypocrisy became the life and soul of the Party – indeed, this understates the case. Hypocrisy didn’t know what had hit it in October 1917. Until then, hypocrisy had had its moments, in politics, in religion, in commerce; it had played its part in innumerable social interactions; and it had starred in many Victorian novels, and so on; but it had never been asked to saturate one sixth of the planet. Looking back, hypocrisy might have smiled at its earlier reticence, for it soon grew accustomed to the commanding heights.

This vice flourishes when words and deeds abandon all contiguity. Before examining the word ‘revolution’ (square one), let us consider square two: ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. Barely more than a footnote in Marx, the phrase was fetishized by the Bolsheviks as ‘vanguardism’: the elite revolutionaries establish a dictatorship in the name of the proletariat; the proletariat, over time, outgrows mere ‘trade-union consciousness’, and catches up with the vanguard; the vanguard, the state, then famously ‘withers away’, and full Communism is ‘realized’. The Bolsheviks, as we are aware, got stuck in the first phase of the process and never moved beyond it (though in a sense they did manage to wither away, a ‘short’ century later, leaving nothing behind them). Lenin was being hypocritical, therefore, when he outlawed the trade unions on the grounds that the proletariat already enjoyed dictatorial power.

Russia never experienced the dictatorship of the proletariat.

What Russia experienced was the dictatorship of the proletarian.

Russia experienced Stalin, and negative perfection.

(1) During the famine of 1933 Moscow continued its Russification policy in the Ukraine, purging all institutions (including the Chamber of Weights and Measures and the Geodesic Board). One official who had come under attack, Skrypnyk, responded spiritedly: he counterattacked, and then shot himself. The official obituary described his suicide as ‘an act of faintheartedness particularly unworthy of a member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party’.

(2) From The Great Terror: ‘The absolutely certain way for a defendant to get himself shot was to refuse to plead guilty. He would then not go before an open court at all, but either perish under the rigours of the preliminary investigation, or be shot, like Rudzutak, after a twenty-minute closed trial. The logic of Stalin’s courts was different from what is customary elsewhere. The only chance of avoiding death was to admit to everything, and to put the worst possible construction on all one’s activities. It is true that even this seldom saved a man’s life.’

(3) During Collectivization, when the peasants were slaughtering their cattle, the chief of grain procurement in the Ukraine, who could expect to feast his way through the coming struggle (i.e., terror-famine), is quoted as saying: ‘for the first time in their sordid history the Russian peasants have eaten their fill of meat.’

(4) This is Robert Tucker on the execution of Kamenev and Zinoviev, whose lives Stalin had originally promised to spare: ‘He not only humiliated, exploited, and destroyed them, but he caused them to die knowing they had publicly abased and besmirched themselves and very many others, taken on the guilt for his murder of Kirov, his supreme duplicity, and his terrorist conspiracy against the party-state. They had confessed to representing a variety of fascism when he was introducing just that in Russia by, among other things, this very pseudo-trial; and they wound up grovelling at their murderer’s feet and glorifying him – all for nothing but to serve his purposes.’[63] In his forty-third unanswered letter to Stalin, Bukharin wrote: ‘I feel towards you, towards the Party, towards the cause nothing but great and boundless love. I embrace you in my thoughts…’ Few murderers have asked this of their victims – to go to their deaths with endearments on their lips. But this was the size of the defeat, the size of the deficit, that Stalin insisted on.

(5) Occasionally requests for clemency were passed around the table by the leadership. One such, from an innocent military commander on the eve of his execution, was footnoted: ‘A pack of lies. Shoot him – I. Stalin’; ‘Agreed. Blackguard! A dog’s death for a dog – Beria’; ‘Maniac – Voroshilov’; ‘Swine! – Kaganovich.’

(6) In 1948 Stalin made the following addition to his official biography, the Short Course: ‘At the various stages of the War Stalin’s genius found the correct solution that took account of all the circumstances… His military mastership was displayed both in defence and offence. His genius enabled him to divine the enemy’s plans and defeat them.’ Stalin then made this addition to that addition: ‘Although he performed his task of leader of the Party with consummate skill and enjoyed the unreserved support of the entire Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation.’

(7) Increasingly, as the Terror-Famine gripped, peasants stole grain to stay alive. A new law politicized this crime, declaring that all such pilferers were to be treated as enemies of the people, and would receive the tenner or the super. ‘By the beginning of 1933,’ writes Volkogonov, ‘more than 50,000 people, many of them starving, had been sentenced.’ Using the word ‘famine’ carried the same penalty. The ‘worthy reapers’, in Stalin’s facetious formulation, didn’t know that they were starving as a matter of government policy. But they did know that they were starving. And it was a capital crime to remark on it. In essence, people were being killed, quickly, for the capital crime of saying that they were being killed slowly.

You see why Solzhenitsyn needs his expletives, his italics, his exclamation marks, his thrashing sarcasm. On the chain gang they had you sing: