Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

1

The millennial moment was midnight, 31 December 2000. This is because we went from B.C. to A.D. without a year nought. Vladimir Putin described the (pseudo) millennium as ‘the 2000th anniversary of Christianity’.

2

It will be as well, here, to get a foretaste of his rigour. The fate of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a famous Red commander in the Civil War, was ordinary enough, and that of his family was too. Tukhachevsky was arrested in 1937, tortured (his interrogation protocols were stained with drops of ‘flying’ blood, suggesting that his head was in rapid motion at the time), farcically arraigned, and duly executed. Moreover (this is Robert C. Tucker’s précis in Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–41): ‘His wife and daughter returned to Moscow where she was arrested a day or two later along with Tukhachevsky’s mother, sisters, and brothers Nikolai and Aleksandr. Later his wife and both brothers were killed on Stalin’s orders, three sisters were sent to camps, his young daughter Svetlana was placed in a home for children of “enemies of the people” and arrested and sent to a camp on reaching the age of seventeen, and his mother and one sister died in exile.’

3

Conquest was strongly anti-Vietcong, but his support for the American conduct of the war was never emphatic, and has evolved in the direction of further deemphasis. (Here we may recall that, despite his donnish accent and manner, Conquest is an American. Well, American father, English mother; born in the UK; dual nationality; now a resident of California.) Kingsley was never less than 100 per cent earnest on Vietnam, right up until his death in 1995.

4

The New Statesman was founded in 1913 by, among others (and the others included Maynard Keynes), the century’s four most extravagant dupes of the USSR: H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Wells, after an audience with Stalin in 1934, said that he had ‘never met a man more candid, fair and honest’; these attributes accounted for ‘his remarkable ascendancy over the country since no one is afraid of him and everyone trusts him’. Shaw, after some banquet diplomacy, declared the Russian people uncommonly well-fed at a time when perhaps 11 million citizens (Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991) were in the process of dying of starvation. The Webbs, after extensive study, wrote a book which, ‘seen as the last word in serious Western scholarship, ran to over 1,200 pages, representing a vast amount of toil and research, all totally wasted. It was originally entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, but the question mark was triumphantly removed in the second edition – which appeared in 1937 at precisely the time the regime was in its worst phase’ (Conquest). Sidney and Beatrice Webb swallowed the great Show Trials of 1936–38, and the New Statesman was not much less sceptical: ‘We do not deny… that the confessions may have contained a substratum of truth’; ‘there had undoubtedly been much plotting in the USSR’; and so on.

5

What Nabokov characterizes as the Com-pom-poms – Sovnarkom and Narkomindel, and so on; the state liquor monopoly was called Soyuzsprit; the agency shunting the Mandelstams around in the early 1920s was unencouragingly known as Centroevac.

6

The insurrectionary armies of the Peasant War (1918–22). Lenin, with justice, thought the Greens a greater threat to the regime’s survival than the Whites.

7

Between 1 January 1917, and 1 January 1923, the price of goods increased by a factor of 100 million.

8

This made sense doctrinally, too. The Bolsheviks were internationalists; the Soviet Union was no more than the headquarters of Communism while it waited for planetary revolution. As he advanced on Warsaw in July 1920, Marshal Tukhachevsky repeated the official line: ‘Over the corpse of White Poland lies the path to world conflagration.’ (After the Red Army – largely thanks, it seems, to Stalin – was defeated, the Bolsheviks began to suspect that the fraternal revolutions weren’t going to materialize.) As for the Russians themselves, Lenin was frankly racist in his settled dislike for them. They were fools and bunglers, and ‘too soft’ to run an efficient police state. He made no secret of his preference for the Germans.

9

Though very tardily: the future US president Herbert Hoover had been agitating for a food campaign in the USSR since 1919. Lenin also continued to export grain throughout this period (and continued, of course, to commit vast sums to the fomentation of revolutions elsewhere).

10

‘There is no hint in any of the vast array of archival material to suggest that [Lenin] was troubled by his conscience about any of the long list of destructive measures he took’ (Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography). ‘Nothing in the notes, remarks and resolutions of [Stalin’s] last years suggests anything but unfailing confidence that his life’s work was eternal’ (Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire).

11

Which the Provisional Government under Kerensky had reinstated as a punishment for front-line desertion. The Bolsheviks had earlier campaigned with the slogan, ‘Down with capital punishment, reinstated by Kerensky.’

12

Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924.

13

I searched without success for piatiletka in five end-of-monograph glossaries. Its clinching ‘internationalization’, then, didn’t last (although Hitler, and later Mao, took it up). Piatiletka means ‘five-year plan’.

14

It would not have escaped Nabokov’s notice that Chernyshevsky’s centennial (1928) was the occasion of much lugubrious ceremony in the Soviet Union. Chernyshevsky was saluted as the grandsire of the ‘Socialist Realism’ that Stalin intended to impose on the country’s remaining writers.

15

‘Lenin’ is thought to derive from the River Lena. ‘Stalin’: man of steel. ‘Kamenev’: man of stone. ‘Molotov’: the hammer. ‘Trotsky’ (né Lev Bronstein) was the name on one of his false passports; it stuck.

16

I would like to emphasize that Christopher (like James Fenton, and all other Trotskyists known to me) was, of course, strenuously anti-Stalinist. But as a socialist he needed to feel that October had not been an instantaneous – or indeed an intrinsic – disaster. Even in 1975 it was considered tasteless or mean-spirited to be too hard on the Soviet Union. No one wanted to be seen as a ‘red-baiter’ – or no one except my father.

17

Sylvain Boulouque in The Black Book of Communism: ‘Out of a population of approximately 15.5 million, more than 5 million inhabitants have left for Pakistan and Iran, where they now live in miserable conditions… [M]ost observers agree that the war took between 1.5 million and 2 million lives, 90 per cent of whom were civilians. Between 2 million and 4 million were wounded.’ These figures are due for revision, post-2001.

18

All this is taken from The Russian Revolution, 1917 in the always-fascinating ‘Uncovered Editions’ series. I have followed punctuation and house style. And I confront the reader with what follows not for its detail but for its overall effect.

19

It seems that the Romanovs had two dogs with them in Ekaterinburg. One of them, Jemmy, was killed in the basement. The other, Joy, survived, despite her breed: she was a King Charles spaniel.

20

Reading Trotsky, one is often impressed by how much dishonesty he can pack into a paragraph. As to the details of the murders: ‘I was never curious about how the sentence [sic] was carried out and, frankly, do not understand such curiosity.’ Well, the Bolshevik leadership was certainly curious about the how: hence the secrecy, the eight-year cover-up; hence the sulphuric acid.

21

Pipes’s note reads: ‘Deposition by P. V. Kukhtenko in Solokov Dossier I, dated 8 September 1918; omission in the original.’

22

‘This group had not long before executed Prince Dolgorukov, General Tatishchev, Countess Gendrikova and Yekaterina Schneider, who had been accompanying the Romanovs’ (Volkogonov, Lenin).

23

From Catherine Merridale’s Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia. In this section I am gratefully dependent on her striking chapter, ‘Common and Uncommon Graves’.

24

See also pp. 154–58.

25

This presented a logistical challenge in oft-purged Petrograd/Leningrad during the long days of arctic summer. Witnesses describe the two or three hours of darkness as something like a Monte Carlo Rally of black marias. The Cheka preferred the night, but they needed you to know that you were never safe. They could come for you at any time, in any place: on the street, in hospital, at the office or the opera.

26

Conquest notes the case of an eight-man cell at Zhitomir prison containing 160 inmates. ‘Five or six died every day,’ wrote a survivor. The bodies ‘continued to stand up because there was no room to fall down’. It was known as ‘cell torture’.

27

These ‘specially displaced’ people were usually led to some crag or snowfield with a peg sticking out of it (bearing a number) and nothing else. Jonathan Glover in his recent book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century succinctly passes on the following case: ‘In 1930, 10,000 families were sent on a journey over the ice of the Vasyugan river. Many, especially children, died on the journey. The survivors were left, with no food or tools, on bits of land in the middle of the marshes. The paths back were guarded with machine-guns. Everyone died.’

28

These words could hardly be an attempt to placate Moscow. Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind (London: Harvill Press, 1967), a much more harrowing book than Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Novy mir, 1962: under Khrushchev), had no chance whatever of being published in the Soviet Union.

29

For what prison life was like without a latrine bucket see The Gulag Archipelago, Volume One, page 540 ff.

30

The circumstances are of course very different, but one can respectfully infer an interesting sex difference in these two little epiphanies. After a few expressions of gruff solidarity, Solzhenitsyn’s cellmates (one of whom, incidentally, was a stoolie) adjured him to silence: ‘Tomorrow! Night is for sleeping.’ Mrs Ginzburg and her new friends, by contrast, all talked incessantly – and without listening – to the point of clinical exhaustion: ‘“Yes, it’s lovely to be with people, but what a strain!”’

31

The secret police renamed itself seven times: Cheka (1917–22), GPU (1922–23), OGPU (1923–34), NKVD (1934–43), NKGB (1943–46), MGB (1946–53), MVD (1953–54), and KGB thereafter.

32

With Kathleen Gleeson (and their names are the same size on the cover of the paperback and hardcover). Bardach worked on his memoir while in his seventies (he is now a resident of Iowa City, and a world-renowned reconstructive surgeon), in itself sufficiently remarkable when you consider that the gulag experience almost always destroyed the faculty of memory. Nadezhda Mandelstam cohabited for three months with the amnestied journalist Kozarnovski (she was hiding him from the Cheka). For three months she systematically questioned him about the fate of her husband. She was not surprised (though she was doubly grieved) when she established that Kozarnovski’s ‘memory was like a huge, rancid pancake in which fact and fancy from his prison days had been mixed up together and baked into one inseparable mass’.

33

In Bardach’s cell the water was ankle-deep. Cf. Gulag 2 (p. 420). Solzhenitsyn tells of a whole penalty block where the water reached the prisoners’ knees: ‘In the autumn of 1941 they gave them all 58–14 – economic counterrevolution – and shot them.’ Torture preludial to death: this is a persistent theme. Sometimes the torture was, so to speak, situational; sometimes it was vigorous and concerted.

34

It Happens in Russia, published in England in 1951.

35

One still encounters the resilient superstition that it is right-wing to give high figures. Conquest and Pipes were Cold Warriors (Conquest advised Thatcher, Pipes advised Reagan); their figures are therefore ‘Cold Warrior’ figures, inflated for the purposes of propaganda. But Conquest and Pipes are world-renowned historians; they are under oath. When Conquest sent me a copy of his Kolyma, he wrote on the dedication page: ‘NB Chapter 9 is obsolete.’ And under the chapter heading itself (‘The Death Roll’) he added: ‘This is now known to be less than these reports indicate.’ Conquest’s figure for the executions in the Great Terror, on the other hand, has gone up, and is close to a ferocious 2 million for 1937–38… The mass graves now being discovered can present additional difficulties of tabulation. In Night of Stone Catherine Merridale writes: ‘The bodies, a twisted mass in death, have rotted now, and the skeletons are impossible to separate. It is inadvisable to rely on a skull-count because most of the skulls were damaged, if not shattered, by the executioners’ bullets… When you have finished, you count the femurs and divide by two. In most cases, the figure will run into thousands.’

36

The Memorial Society, an agency of Russian remembrance, prints its lists of the dead in books the size of telephone directories.

37

Except at the highest level. We read of an exhausted Dzerzhinsky’s costly rest cures in European spas.

38

This is more or less true of Iago, Claudius and Edmund (to take only the major tragedies). But we are left staring at the fact that Macbeth did not stop short – that he was, indeed, a usurping dictator who ruled by terror (and terror, perhaps, is always a confession of illegitimacy). ‘Each new morn, / New widows howl, new orphans cry…’ The fullest evocation of a terrorized society is given to the minor, linking character of Ross; but it has its points:

Macbeth incidentally contains an annihilating definition of the reality of War Communism (and Lenin’s slogan, ‘The worse the better’). It consists of seven words and is chanted by the Witches in unison (I.i.11): ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair…’

39

We cannot leave the ward without at least looking in on Vladimir Ilyich. He is a scowl that occasionally allows itself a refreshing cackle. Lenin was courteous to good Bolsheviks who agreed with him, and more than courteous to his wife, sister, and ‘mistress’ (all of them good Bolsheviks who agreed with him). Other people, though: they were not merely of no interest; they didn’t even faintly register. Lenin was a moral aphasic, a moral autist… When I read someone’s prose I reckon to get a sense of their moral life. Lenin’s writing mind is cross-eyed in its intensity of focus, painfully straitened and corseted, indefatigable in its facetiousness and iteration, and constantly strafed by microscopic pedantries.

40

From Colin Thubron’s In Siberia. During blizzards whole camps were known to perish. Everyone died. Even the guards. Even the dogs.

41

The word for this is agonism: the permanent struggle of the self-appointed martyr. Militant Islam is obviously and proclaimedly agonistic.

1

At the same point in the Bukharin trial two years later the ‘folk poet’ D. Dzhambul contributed a similar piece called ‘Annihilate’.

2

He merits only two passing references in John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, and the book was later banned in the USSR for that reason. ‘His name does not occur in any document relating to those historic days and nights’ (Volkogonov).

3

With hindsight we may think that Stalin was hardly the automatic choice for such a role. His real job was to cordon Lenin off from the new power vacuum, which the Politburo was immediately and unsentimentally jockeying to fill.

4

During the mid-1980s David Remnick, with appropriately heartless persistence, badgered Kaganovich for an interview. He found what he expected to find: a twitching amnesiac on a state pension. This was the charge against Mikhail: he was Hitler’s candidate for leading a fascist Russia. The Kaganoviches were Jewish.

5

If Stalin had been a modern American he would not have used the word ‘problem’ but the less defeatist and judgmental ‘issue’. Actually, when you consider what Stalin tended to do to his enemies’ descendants, the substitution works well enough.

6

Do their deaths become them? Tucker quotes a witness to the following exchange, as the two men faced their executioners. Zinoviev: ‘This is a fascist coup!’ Kamenev: ‘Stop it, Grisha. Be quiet. Let’s die with dignity.’ Zinoviev: ‘No!… Before my death I must state plainly that what has happened in our country is a fascist coup.’ (Tucker goes on to argue that ‘fascist coup’ was a reasonable analysis.) Volkogonov gives this, via one of the prison guards: ‘Although they had both written to Stalin many times begging for mercy and were apparently expecting it (he had after all promised), they sensed this was the end. Kamenev walked along the corridor in silence, nervously pressing his palms. Zinoviev became hysterical and had to be carried.’

7

Bukharin died with defiant dignity. On balance he perhaps deserves the cadences of Arthur Koestler’s fictional conclusion in Darkness at Noon:

Bukharin’s wife spent six months in a small cell ankle-deep in water and went on to serve eighteen years. Their daughter survived. His first wife and all her close family were wiped out.

8

The peasants, now tied to their collective farms, continued to be despised as essentially ‘unsocialist’ well into the 1960s.

9

This is more or less the consensus view. Malia dissents from it; he sees Collectivization as structural to the Lenin-Stalin continuum, and he is eloquent. ‘For a Bolshevik party the real choice in 1929 was not between Stalin’s road and Bukharin’s; it was between doing approximately what Stalin did and giving up the whole Leninist enterprise’ (The Soviet Tragedy). The question remains: how approximately do we take the word ‘approximately’?

10

A poem of 1936 about Collectivization pictured Stalin on an ebony steed:

Quoted by Tucker. Stalin was not on that horse. Volkogonov: ‘Throughout his life he visited an agricultural region only once, and that was in 1928, when he went to Siberia to see to grain deliveries. He never set foot in a village again.’

11

‘In all of 1930 nearly 2.5 million peasants took part in approximately 14,000 revolts, riots, and mass demonstrations against the regime’ (Nicolas Werth).

12

And so did Khrushchev, whose ‘secret speech’ of 1956 was entitled ‘On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences’ (and dealt only with the purge of the Party, and not of the nation). One of Stalin’s more energetic administrators (in 1937 he was sent to the Ukraine to kill 30,000 people), Khrushchev showed, nonetheless, that it was possible to recross Solzhenitsyn’s ‘threshold’ and pick up the remains of his humanity.

13

These were black-market outlets run by the government. Their prices were high.

14

John Scott did see one case during his several years at Magnitogorsk: some outgoing kulaks spiked a turbine.

15

Agriculture, it would eventually emerge, did not subsidize industry: industry subsidized agriculture. And Dekulakization was a net loser, too. Total dispossession of the supposed peasant plutocrats failed to cover the cost of their deportation.

16

From Alec Nove’s evenhanded An Economic History of the USSR: 1917–1991. The cover of my paperback bears the striking advisory, ‘New and Final Edition.’

17

This word repays a visit to the dictionary: ‘(Of marriage) between man of high rank and woman of lower rank, who remains in her former station, their issue having no claim to succeed to possessions of father.’ So: a kind of pre-nup.

18

J. Arch Getty and R. T. Manning (eds.): Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives. Getty calls the standard interpretation ‘folkloric’. Revision begets revision. (A still more recent book swings the argument back the other way.) If Getty goes on revising at his current rate, he will eventually be telling us that only two people died in the Great Terror, and that one very rich peasant was slightly hurt during Collectivization.

19

A reputedly prolific rapist and murderer, Uday, we are relieved to learn, is now in a wheelchair following an assassination attempt. Like Uday, Vasily was the kind of young man who thinks it’s funny to fire live rounds at restaurant chandeliers.

20

This valuable formulation is, again, Robert Tucker’s. He has made the Tsar Stalin theme very much his own, and in this section I am gratefully indebted to his Stalin in Power.

21

‘The Pope? How many divisions does he have?’ is Stalin’s most famous expression of this indifference.

22

The film was The Hurricane (1937). ‘Through miles of raging ocean he defied man’s law!’ (‘The simple life on a South Pacific island is disrupted, not only by a vindictive governor but by a typhoon. Tolerable island melodrama’ – Halliwell.)

23

I.e., from 1928, the year of the inaugural ‘Shakhty’ case (fifty-three technicians and engineers were accused of industrial sabotage). The Show Trials were Stalin’s contribution; they remain distinct from Lenin’s ‘demonstration’ trials of the early 1920s, which were fixed but not scripted. Both types of trial used torture.

24

Only Stalin, perhaps, was capable of presiding over the systemic deformity he had created. His doubled mind was well suited to the methodology of ‘the two truths’, as the apparat privately called it. Malia evokes the ubiquitous unreality as follows: ‘In short, there is no such thing as socialism, and the Soviet Union built it.’

25

For comparison: there were 14,000 executions, nationwide, in the last half-century of Tsarist rule.

26

Stalin worked with these men and spent most evenings in their company. Dinner would usually end around 4 A.M. Day became night for all the apparatchiki, to the further detriment of their Kremlin complexions.

27

To the mortification of Sergei Nikitich Khrushchev, who was a rocket scientist and kept telling his father that Lysenkoism was without rational foundation. See the memoir Khrushchev on Khrushchev, a partial, limited, and strangely honourable book.

28

In these trials of 1922 dozens of prelates were charged with obstructing the confiscation of church valuables. Lenin was again using the 1921 famine as a political convenience: he claimed that these valuables would be used to defray humanitarian aid. They would not be so used. Solzhenitsyn gives us a moment of transcendental hypocrisy during the trial of Patriarch Tikhon. ‘[S]o it was sacrilege according to the laws of the church,’ said the Presiding Judge, ‘but what was it from the point of view of mercy?’

29

Genrikh Yagoda (shot in 1938) was replaced as head of the Cheka by Nikolai Yezhov (shot in 1940), who was in turn replaced by Lavrenti Beria (shot in 1953). Yezhov’s period in office (1936–38), and the Great Terror itself, are sometimes called the Yezhovshchina: the time of Yezhov’s rule… The quotes in the present section are all from Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s, edited by Véronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya and Thomas Lahusen. The book is by turns boring, startling, sickening and inspiring. Some know it and some don’t – but all the voices are crippled.

30

Stavsky was known as the ‘executioner of Soviet Literature’. For example, it was he who denounced Osip Mandelstam. He also had a history of alcoholism (the editors of Intimacy and Terror remark on his ‘tormented handwriting’, which was ‘deciphered only with great difficulty’). We catch him here at a vulnerable moment (midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1938/39); and it is of course painfully clear on internal evidence alone that Stavsky is stinking drunk.

31

I would later read that Stalin was simply echoing Lenin, who, faced with a similar disappointment, referred rather less pithily to ‘a kulak grain strike’.

32

Conquest makes the parenthetical point that Stalin, it would seem, harboured no decisive resentment towards his father. Iosif Vissarionovich was perhaps mildly susceptible to the verities he set out, in the interests of political security, to eradicate.

33

I follow Volkogonov’s phrasing. The less elaborate ‘Lenin founded this state, and we’ve fucked it up’ is given by most historians (and I have come across ‘All that Lenin created we have lost’, presumably in some transitional version of events). But Colonel General Volkogonov has a natural authority on the war years. Hereabouts his pages are anecdotally rich with three generations of top-brass table talk.

34

In accordance with the Pact’s reciprocal trade deals. German consignments were generally skimpy and tardy. Russian consignments were always fiercely punctual (and often topped up by direct order from Stalin). This particular goods train was of course the last.

35

This is more than a picture book. Brian Moynahan’s text is a fresh and vigorous distillation.

36

Old comrades from the days of Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad; later still, Volgograd): the feral factotum Mekhlis, the ex-tailor Shchadenko, the Quasimodolike Kulik, and the tirelessly incompetent Voroshilov. In Teheran in 1943, when Churchill, in an atmosphere of historic emotion, presented Stalin (‘by order of the King’) with the Sword of Stalingrad, Voroshilov succeeded in dropping it as he solemnly bore it from the room.

37

Men of other ranks would be aware that their families would be ‘denied state assistance’: i.e., ration cards, medical treatment, and the right to vote (this last a ‘platonic’ deprivation, according to Moshe Lewin).

38

Trotsky hung on until the following day. As he lay dying in the hospital he had a strange visitor: the twenty-five-year-old Saul Bellow (who remembers the stain of blood and iodine on Trotsky’s short grey beard). The living Trotsky is evoked in Bellow’s novel The Adventures of Augie March (1953); in a book full of extraordinary passages, this is a superextraordinary passage, and powerfully romantic, embodying all the intensity of hope that our artists and thinkers directed towards 1917… When Ramón Mercader was released from prison and journeyed to Moscow in the 1960s, he formally inherited the award that had been been granted (by Stalin) to his mother. It was, of all things, the Order of Lenin.

39

For a time Stalin’s chief longevity coach was Dr Alexander Bogomolets, who claimed that he (Stalin) might live to be 150 (he would now be 122). Dr Bogomolets died of natural causes at the age of sixty-five.

40

When Khrushchev passed on Stalin’s remark in his Secret Speech of 1956, the assembled delegates of the Twentieth Party Congress reacted with wild laughter. It takes a beat or two before one can see why Bolsheviks should find this funny. Were they amused by the elephantiasis and demented circumspection of Stalin’s paranoia? Partly, perhaps. More likely, though, the laughter was an expression of moral aftershock, and an expression of sheer relief that such enormities were now in the past. They laughed because they could laugh. But the sound of that laughter, one imagines, remained disturbingly confused.

41

By 1944 the trucks used for the deportations included many Studebakers, donated (not for this purpose) by the Americans as part of the Lend-Lease aid programme.

42

Hitler planned to turn Russia into a ‘slave empire’. This does sound delusional. But then it occurs to you that a slave empire is what they had there already.

43

Antony Beevor: Stalingrad.

44

And Stalin’s wartime pleasures were savage. In early 1944, while clearing the southern front, General Ivan Konev ambushed 30,000 German troops retreating in open terrain. After thorough work by the Russian tanks and artillery, a Cossack cavalry unit effected the kind of slaughter (as one witness said) ‘that nothing could stop until it was over’. Subsequently there was no Churchillian talk, from the Kremlin, about the inevitable moral rot of warfare. ‘Stalin was reported to be delighted with the massacre’ (Overy), and Konev was made a marshal.

45

Stalin was much perplexed, here, by the mysteries of democracy.

46

With 25 million dead, and another 25 million homeless, with the loss of 70,000 villages, 1,700 towns, 32,000 factories, and a third of the national wealth, with ‘banditism’ (armed insurrection) down the length of the western border (guerrilla warfare would continue into the 1950s), and a serious though unacknowledged famine, the USSR, in 1945, was thrown back through time. The next lumbering Five Year Plan, drafted in that year, had in effect the same object as the first, industrialization, and made the usual demands for sacrifice, discipline and vigilance. This would have been congenial to Stalin – to his nostalgia for struggle.

47

On the other hand, one should not forget that support for Hitler was broad-based, and that Nazism had many distinguished admirers (among them Martin Heidegger and two Nobel Laureates in physics).

48

‘It was in the twelfth century,’ Cohn writes, ‘that [the Jews] were first accused of murdering Christian children, of torturing the consecrated wafer, and of poisoning the wells. It is true that popes and bishops frequently and emphatically condemned these fabrications; but the lower clergy continued to propagate them, and in the end they came to be generally believed.’ As in his other classic work, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Cohn identifies the semieducated clerisy as the natural constituency for militant utopians as well as anti-Semites – a constituency that Stalin (or Stalin’s mother) once hoped he would join. It was also Chernyshevsky’s.

49

As part of an effort to improve the birth rate, German women, on each parturition, were awarded a crucifix tastelessly called the Mutterkreuz. Aryan households, at this time, were forbidden to employ any Jewess under the age of forty-five. No Mutterkreuz for her.

50

Right up until 1989 the Auschwitz Museum itself was a monument to Holocaust denial. The part played by the Jews was deemphasized in favour of the Struggle Against Fascism. Similarly: ‘The report produced in Kiev on Babi Yar talked of the death of “peaceful Soviet citizens”, not of Jews’ (Overy).

51

It was only after his suicide that Mayakovsky’s work ‘began to be introduced forcibly, like potatoes under Catherine the Great,’ noted Pasternak: ‘This was his second death.’ Pasternak survived, without compromise. His lover, Olga Ivinskaya, was interrogated and sent to the gulag. The child she was carrying was stillborn in jail.

52

The Bolsheviks persisted with this outfit long after taking power. The squeak-and-glisten look, it seems, was admired by all the putschists of the first half of the twentieth century.

53

This is Lenin’s thumbnail sketch of the Red Terror. Again, for perspective (and this applies to the years 1917–24): ‘it is possible that more people were murdered by the Cheka than died in the battles of the civil war’ (Figes).

54

This letter of Lenin’s has an equivalent in the Stalin archive: the one to Mikhail Sholokhov (who, according to Solzhenitsyn, didn’t write And Quiet Flows the Don) about the peasantry. In rather more languid tones, Stalin assures his ‘esteemed’ comrade that the ‘worthy reapers’, whom he had only minimally inconvenienced, were not as worthy as they seemed: they were using terrorism to starve the towns.

55

Other things were named after Gorky – a weaving factory, for instance, and an airplane (the world’s largest), which crashed. Solzhenitsyn, who is maximally hard on Maxim, eagerly reports that camps were named after him too – posthumously, no doubt. One of Stalin’s rare jokes.

56

The boy told him, inter alia, about the ‘mosquito treatment’: these insects, like airborne piranha, could turn a man into a skeleton within hours. Prisoners were also strapped to logs and then bounced down the stone steps of the fortress.

57

Not deep enough. Solzhenitsyn visited the site many years later. He was there all day, and saw two barges.

58

Other doctors were implicated, and in such numbers (Conquest tells us) that they were collectively known as ‘Gorkyists’ in the prisons and camps.

59

This and subsequent quotes are from an account by Sir Jerome Horsey of the Muscovy Company in London.

60

‘All saving his king, which by no means he could make stand in his place with all the rest upon the plain board’ (Horsey’s note, which sounds too good to be true).

61

Stalin, it seems, drank moderately by Russian standards. But he postponed giving up smoking (cigarettes and pipe) until the fruitlessly late date of 1952.

62

N. V. Krylenko (who was prosecutor at the SR trial, and sometime Commissar of Justice) held that laws were hypocritical. ‘It is one of the most widespread sophistries of bourgeois science to maintain that the court… is an institution whose task it is to realize some sort of special “justice” that stands above classes… “Let justice prevail in courts” – one can hardly conceive more bitter mockery of reality than this.’ In July 1938 Stalin was given a list of 138 names; the words ‘Shoot all 138’ accompany his signature. Krylenko’s name was on that list. His trial lasted twenty minutes (the paperwork minimum), and the protocol ran to nineteen lines. Was that unhypocritical enough for him?

63

This crescendo of indignation could have continued. Kamenev’s wife was arrested in 1935 and shot in 1941; his older son was arrested in 1937 and shot in 1939 (his younger son survived a Cheka orphanage and the gulag). Zinoviev’s three brothers were shot, as was one of his sisters; three other sisters, together with three nephews (one of whom was shot), a niece, a brother-in-law and a cousin were sent to camp; his son Stefan was shot.

64

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume Two, pp. 119–20.

1

Partido Obrero de Unificatión Marxista, the heretical sect of Catalonia, savaged by the Cheka during the Spanish Civil War for its Trotskyist bent.

2

‘I’m very sorry, but I can be of no help.’ ‘I don’t know anything.’

3

The Nabokov quote is naturally another matter, but American readers should be told that the word being quibbled with here means, in English, something like ‘moronic bastard’, and has no sexual connotation.

4

Liddie Neece, the fourth Mrs Robert Conquest. ‘Liddie and I are getting married,’ he told my father. ‘Bob, you can’t do that. Not again’ ‘Well, I thought – one for the road.’ That was twenty-two years ago.

5

6

These feelings are described in Autopsy for an Empire. Volkogonov died shortly after completing it, in 1995.

7

Dates of publication in Russia. They appeared in reverse order in the West.

8

The Kronstadt sailors, and other groups, actually called themselves revolutionaries and fought under the red flag.

9

‘Above all, it was Trotsky,’ writes Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War, ‘who in December 1918 ordered the formation of “blocking units” equipped with machine guns, whose role was simply to shoot front-line soldiers who attempted to retreat.’

10

When Austria’s Haider praises one of Hitler’s employment policies, Europe spits him out, convulsively, as if he were a bad oyster. Russia’s Putin praises Stalin, echoes Stalin (‘to liquidate the oligarchs as a class’), and proposes to mint coins bearing Stalin’s profile. He is welcomed at Downing Street, and has tea with the Queen… More substantively, between 1945 and 1966, writes Solzhenitsyn, ‘eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals had been convicted in West Germany… And during the same period, in our country (according to the reports of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court), about ten men have been convicted.’ In the 1980s, Molotov and Kaganovich, two elderly Eichmanns, were living on state pensions in Moscow.

11

Solzhenitsyn recalls a quaveringly passionate speech by a Greek writer, in Moscow, on behalf of the imprisoned Communists. Maybe he ‘did not understand the shamelessness of his appeal, and maybe, too, in Greece they do not have the proverb: “Why grieve for others when there is sobbing at home?”’

12

The Gulag Archipelago: ‘Sukhanovka was the most terrible prison [the Cheka] had. Its very name was used to intimidate prisoners; interrogators would hiss it threateningly. And you’d not be able to question those who had been there: either they were insane and talking only disconnected nonsense, or they were dead.’

13

In his introduction to the abridged single-volume Gulag (first published in 1999, and recommended only as a kind of crib), Edward E. Ericson gives the following American sales figures: 2,244,000 for Volume One, 500,000 for Volume Two, and 100,000 for Volume Three. These figures are representative worldwide, and point to the limits of our stamina and appetite. In fact, The Gulag Archipelago simply goes on getting better, and, of course, achieves an impregnable unity.

14

The Politburo moved against Beria with extreme wariness. The man chosen to arrest him was no lesser figure than the war-winner, Marshal Zhukov.

15

To risk bathos, we should incidentally consider, as an illustration of the Chekist personality, the matter of Khrushchev’s car. When the cabal figureheaded by a trembling Brezhnev (who once fainted before Kaganovich’s wrath) finally ousted him, Khrushchev lived on in disgraced and much-monitored retirement (the bathroom, too, was bugged, and Khrushchev stoutly denounced the Politburo for spending good rubles just ‘to eavesdrop on my farts’). They gave Khrushchev a car. Much thought had gone into Khrushchev’s car. It was a low-to-middling kind of car, and went wrong all the time (which was meant to be humiliating). But the point was that the car had private plates, and not government plates. This was intended to suggest that Khruschev was corrupt. You want to say, ‘Make your point’ Either a reeking rattletrap with government plates, or, with private plates, a burnished limousine.

16

The poem’s ‘tone may give it the appearance of a commentary after the event [reads my father’s note]; in fact Binyon wrote it within the first few weeks of war’. Like Kipling at the same stage, he seemed to grasp the dimensions of what was about to unfold.