Stalin

CHAPTER 3 VICTORY

Imagine that a house is being built, and when it is finished it will be a magnificent palace. But it is still not finished, and you draw it in this condition and say, “There’s your socialism”—and there’s no roof. You will be a realist, of course—you will be telling the truth. But it is immediately apparent that this truth is in actual fact an untruth. Only the person who understands what kind of house is being built, how it is being built, and who understands that it will have a roof can utter socialist truth.

ANATOLY LUNACHARSKY, former commissar of enlightenment, 1933 ¹

MARXIST IMPERATIVES OF transcending capitalism—combined with inordinate willpower—brought apocalypse. During the first Five-Year Plan, the volume of investment quadrupled, to 44 percent of GDP by 1932 (measured in 1928 prices), but none of the massive net increase in investment came from higher agricultural surpluses.² Grain exports did not end up paying for imports of machinery.³ Soviet agriculture made no net contribution to industrialization; on the contrary, it was a net recipient of resources during the plan. True, a key driver of the industrial spurt was new labor power from villages, but the statist system used those workers grossly inefficiently. Another key driver of the spurt was brutally suppressed consumption (reinforced by that thief called inflation).⁴ Should we view peasant starvation as a source of “investment”? Even if we did, collectivization and dekulakization lowered agricultural output dramatically.⁵ Stalin’s policies did expand state procurement of grain, potatoes, and vegetables, but at breathtaking economic, to say nothing of human, cost. Collectivization involved the arrest, execution, internal deportation, or incarceration of 4 to 5 million peasants; the effective enslavement of another 100 million; and the loss of tens of millions of head of livestock. The industrialization and accompanying militarization began to revive the Soviet Union as a great power, a necessity for survival in the international system, but collectivization was not “necessary” to “modernize” a peasant economy or industrialize.⁶

Collectivization was necessary from the point of view of Marxism-Leninism, which asserted that only a noncapitalist “mode of production” could undergird a Communist regime.⁷ Once the fall 1933 harvest proved to be good, and the unbalanced investments of the first Five-Year Plan finally produced results in the second plan, even skeptics gave Stalin his due: his lunatic gamble had panned out. Socialism (anticapitalism) was victorious in the countryside as well as the city. But culture, too, for Marxists, was an integral aspect of any system of class relations, and in culture Stalin was still groping his way. Letters from cultural figures got to his desk quickly—his aides understood his interest—and, as in foreign policy, he made just about every significant decision (unlike in the economy, for want of time or interest).⁸ But the challenges proved different, not amenable to blunt class warfare. Culture did not offer the equivalent of capitalist private property or “bourgeois” parliaments to eradicate as the path to socialism. Certainly for Stalin, the party had the right to determine the disposition of all writers and artists, but not in a clumsy way.

This chapter examines the period from summer 1933 to early fall 1934, although at times it will track back in time to illuminate the trajectory of Stalin’s engagement with the artistic intelligentsia, while weaving in the workings of the Union and continuing developments in foreign affairs. Trotsky, early on, had argued that the literary sphere had its own relatively autonomous dynamic and therefore should not be administered the same way as the economy or politics (“Art must make its own way and by its own means”).⁹ He had objected to a drive for an exclusively “proletarian” culture, championed the works of “fellow travelers,” a term he coined for those who did not join the party but sympathized with the cause, and defined the party’s task in culture as ensuring that influential fellow travelers did not go over to the side of “the bourgeoisie.”¹⁰ Stalin had taken exactly the same position. A politburo decree had denied a monopoly to the early movement for proletarian culture, and supported a “society for the development of Russian culture,” to be headed by a non-party “Soviet-minded” writer of stature.¹¹ Stalin approved a proposal for a non-party writers’ periodical, Literary Newspaper.¹² The militant culture movement endured under the name Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.¹³ Factions for and against an exclusively proletarian culture, with the former tending to be Russocentric and the latter tending to see themselves as internationalist, dragged Stalin into their political-aesthetic and personal vendettas.¹⁴ But in culture, he blocked intransigent enforcement of Communist ideology, groping his way to a socialist aesthetic.

PHARAOH

Solovki, the regime’s original prison labor camp, which provided timber and fish, got displaced in the early 1930s by giant new forced labor complexes, such as one in northern Kazakhstan for ore mining and metals.¹⁵ Most ambitiously, in the harsh Chukotka territory, the Far Northern Construction Trust, or Dalstroi, was formed to extract gold.¹⁶ Prisoners traveled in cattle cars across the length of the USSR, then, from the railway terminus at Vladivostok, by ship more than 1,700 miles across the Sea of Okhotsk to Nagayevo Bay and the settlement of Magadan. The first slave labor ships had arrived there in June 1932, mostly with thieves, bandits, and murderers, almost half of whom failed to survive the journey.¹⁷ To reach the gold-digging areas, Dalstroi used tank crews to clear a path northward up the Okhotsk coast and in along the Kolyma River, then had prisoners lay roadbeds of logs over frozen earth, shortening what had been multiweek trips by reindeer. Thanks partly to a relatively rational treatment of slave laborers, more than 100 million rubles’ worth of gold would be mined each year.¹⁸ Beyond Dalstroi, though, the expected savings on cheap prison labor were often undone by low productivity and high administrative costs.¹⁹ Still, the Gulag was crucial for developing remote areas. The Union was not only an ethnoterritorial but also an economic structure.

Stalin did not visit the slave labor complexes, with one notable exception: the White Sea–Baltic Canal. Declared finished on June 20, 1933, after just twenty-one months, it extended for 155 miles, longer than the Panama and Suez canals, through difficult terrain.²⁰ Under Yagoda’s chaperoning, from July 18 to 25, Stalin, Voroshilov, Kirov, and Yenukidze sailed the entire canal, also touring the Kola Peninsula, the Northern Fleet, and the polar port of Murmansk. Kirov had driven to Moscow and chauffeured his guests to Leningrad.²¹ Stalin’s fellow Georgian Orjonikidze was the dictator’s oldest close friend in the regime, but Kirov—a Russian who had spent the underground years in the Caucasus—had become even closer.²² Stalin called him Mironych, an affectionate diminutive of his patronymic, and sometimes Kirych.²³ As a new general secretary, Stalin had given him a copy of his On Lenin and Leninism, inscribed TO MY FRIEND AND MY BELOVED BROTHER.²⁴ Stalin had transferred Kirov from Baku to replace Zinoviev as head of the Leningrad party organization, the most important after Moscow, a posting Kirov had resisted, yielding only after Stalin agreed it would be temporary (allowing him to return to the Caucasus). Kirov stayed on to rout the entrenched Zinoviev machine.²⁵ It was partly the chance to spend time with Kirov that drew Stalin to visit the canal.

Kirov’s personal qualities—straightforward, amiable—endeared him to more conniving Bolsheviks. “Stalin loved and respected Kirov above all others,” a longtime bodyguard would recall. “He loved him with a kind of touching, tender love. Kirov’s trips to Moscow and the south were for Stalin a genuine holiday. Sergei Mironovich would come for a week, two. In Moscow he would stay at Stalin’s apartment, and Stalin would literally not separate from him.”²⁶ “Stalin loved him,” Molotov recalled. “He was Stalin’s favorite.”²⁷ Kirov stood a mere five feet five inches (1.64 meters), shorter than the dictator.²⁸ He sent game he hunted to Stalin and, following Nadya’s death, stayed with him when in the capital (Kirov had earlier bunked with Orjonikidze). “Kirov had the ability to dissipate misunderstandings, to convert them into jokes, to break the ice,” recalled Artyom (whose deceased father had also been friendly with Kirov). “He was astonishingly bright-natured, a person like a beam of light, and at home they loved him very much, the members of [Stalin’s] family and the service personnel. They always waited upon his appearances . . . and called him Uncle Kirov.” Kirov jestingly called Stalin “the Great Leader of All Peoples of All Times,” according to Artyom, and Stalin “would retort that Kirov was the ‘Most Loved Leader of the Leningrad Proletariat.’”²⁹

The canal held strategic promise for developing mineral-rich Soviet Karelia and opening a reliable pathway from Leningrad to the north, but it ran a mere sixty feet deep and eighty feet wide, limiting its use. Stalin was said to have been disappointed, finding it “shallow and narrow.”³⁰ Nonetheless, the pharaonic visit was recorded on Soviet newsreels. Kremlinologists noted Yagoda’s prominence in the footage, even though Mężyński remained OGPU chairman. Overseeing such construction was Yagoda’s forte, and he would receive the Order of Lenin for the canal. More than 126,000 forced laborers did the work, almost entirely without machines, and probably at least 12,000 died doing so, while orchestras played in the background. Some of the surviving builders were “amnestied” with fanfare; others were transferred to construction of a Moscow–Volga Canal.³¹

GOLDEN FLEECE

Nine-year-old Svetlana had gone ahead to Sochi with her nanny. “Hello, my Dear Daddy,” she wrote on August 5, 1933. “I received your letter and I am happy that you allowed me to stay here and wait for you. . . . When you come, you will not recognize me. I got really tanned. Every night I hear the howling of the coyotes. I wait for you in Sochi. I kiss you. Your Setanka.”³² On August 18, the dictator boarded a train with his son Vasily, Artyom, and Voroshilov for Nizhny Novgorod, whence they embarked with local party boss Andrei Zhdanov on the steamship Clara Zetkin down the Volga for four days. From Stalingrad, the group traversed the steppes by automobile to Sochi, reaching the resort on August 25, after a 2,000-mile journey. “Yet again,” Voroshilov wrote to Yenukidze, “I sensed the whole limitlessness of our expanses, the whole greatness of the proletariat’s conquests.”^{33, 34} No more than an hour after having arrived in Sochi, Stalin set out in his car with Voroshilov on a drive to Green Grove, near Matsesta. At the Riviera Bridge, in Sochi’s center, they collided with a truck. It was dark, and the road unlit. Stalin’s guard detail, in the trailing car, immediately opened fire. The truck driver, who appears to have been drunk, fled in the darkness. It is unclear how severe the collision was, but Stalin was unharmed.

Stalin was remarkably hardy, all things considered. (A medical report covering family history listed incidences of “tuberculosis, syphilis, alcoholism, drug abuse, epilepsy, mental difficulties, suicide, metabolic disorders, malignant tumors, diseases of the endocrine glands.”) This was his first southern sojourn following Nadya’s death, but third consecutive one during the famine. He and his entourage had passed through settlements emptied by an absence of food and an abundance of typhus, but whether they took note remains uncertain. “Koba and I visited one (of the ten) of our horse state farms near the cities of Salsk and Proletarskaya,” Voroshilov continued in the letter to Yenukidze about Rostov province. “There we saw the most splendid horses—mothers and foals, foals and working horses. We saw magnificent merino sheep, livestock of good Kalmyk (red) lineage, geese, chickens, pigs. All this is well cared for, and the steppes are fully assimilated.” Voroshilov took up residence at Sochi’s second-best dacha, Blinovka (where his wife awaited him), but complained of dubious types being accommodated at neighboring facilities, as well as bacteria in the water, and the medical staff, especially Degtyarev (“He’s a doctor in the way that you and I are astronomers!”). Yenukidze answered (August 30, 1933) that officials all went south at the same time and things got overrun. “Koba has been feeling wonderfully the whole time, but the fourth day now he’s complaining of his teeth,” Voroshilov wrote back (September 7).³⁵ A dentist (Shapiro) had arrived to attend to Stalin’s mouth.³⁶

Stalin finally had secure high-frequency phone lines in Sochi, though he still used telegrams and field couriers, too.³⁷ In Moscow, officials were convening in his Old Square office, usually with Kaganovich presiding.³⁸ Of the 1,038 politburo decisions taken that summer, Stalin would intervene in 119, the vast majority at prompts from Kaganovich, whose correspondence was filled with plaintive requests for more guidance. “I cannot and should not have to decide any and all questions that concern the politburo,” Stalin replied (September 5, 1933). “You yourselves can consider matters and work them out.”³⁹ This instruction came immediately upon the heels of a scolding. Orjonikidze, along with land commissar Yakovlev, had objected to criminal prosecutions for managers who had shipped agricultural combines without the full complement of parts. They had the politburo formally rebuke the USSR deputy procurator general, Vyshinsky. Stalin exploded. “Sergo’s behavior can only be characterized as antiparty,” he wrote, “because its goal is to protect reactionary elements of the party against the Central Committee.” They reversed their decision.⁴⁰

On September 22, Stalin left the Puzanovka dacha to inspect a new one being built for him near Gagra, a small resort on Abkhazia’s northern Black Sea coast.⁴¹ He fell in love with this land, close by the site, according to ancient Greek legend, of the ram with a golden fleece, a symbol of authority and kingship.⁴² Entirely mountainous, with passes up to 10,000 feet above sea level and deep valleys cut by crystal-clear rivers, this seaside haven enjoyed ample moisture, and, because the mountains came almost up to the coast, Sukhum, its gracious capital, was shielded from cold northern air masses. Abkhazia had the warmest winters in the USSR. Its mountains teemed with wild boars for hunting, and its rivers and plentiful lakes with fish. Its naturally carbonated sulfur springs added to its allure. Local Bolsheviks had nationalized the neglected, malaria-infested prerevolutionary resorts, but officials in Moscow sought to claim them as well. The revived spas, as well as the citrus groves, grapevines, and tobacco fields, would forge a link to the far-off Eurasian capital. The man who would build that link was a native son, Nestor Lakoba.⁴³

“I AM KOBA, YOU ARE LAKOBA”

Short and deaf, with refined features and a cropped mustache, Lakoba carried himself with elegance. He did not pound a fist on the table or shout profanities, like his hotheaded friend Orjonikidze. Whereas Bolshevik rule in ethnic Georgian regions had, for a time, been dicey—a mass uprising had broken out in the 1920s—in Abkhazia it looked firm. Lakoba won wide popularity through the customary patronage (apartments, dachas, scarce goods), but also by attentiveness to ordinary people. He cultivated social harmony, downplaying the peasantry’s supposed social stratification, and managed to delay collectivization of the citrus groves and tobacco fields and even avoid dekulakization, otherwise unheard of. Almost uniquely among local bosses, his power base was not in the party. The Abkhaz Communist party was merely a provincial organization of the Georgian party, but the Soviet state was federal, and Lakoba served as chairman of the Abkhaz government (Council of People’s Commissars) in the 1920s, and after 1930 as chairman of the Abkhaz soviet’s central executive committee.⁴⁴ Often, he skipped meetings of the party organization.⁴⁵

Wits dubbed Abkhazia “Lakobistan.” A traveling commission had complained that such “a personalized regime is always a bad thing, always kills social life and weakens organizations, demoralizes cadres and encourages a slavish passivity among them.”⁴⁶ But Orjonikidze sent Lakoba regular telegrams about taking care of high-level Moscow visitors at the spas.⁴⁷ Trotsky (who had recuperated often in Sukhum) admired Lakoba, though he noted that, “despite the special sound amplifier he carried in his pocket, conversing with him was not easy.”⁴⁸ (The regime soon acquired a new, bulky Phonophor hearing device for him from Siemens.) Stalin called him the Deaf One, and loved that Lakoba could whip top Soviet military men at billiards and shoot like a sniper. “When Lakoba came to Moscow, you would always see him at Stalin’s place, either at the apartment or at the dacha,” Khrushchev would recall, adding, “Stalin trusted him completely.”⁴⁹ Artyom recalled that visits by Lakoba brightened up the house, noting: Stalin “loved Lakoba very much.”⁵⁰ The dictator was said to joke, “I am Koba, and you are Lakoba.”

The two men shared a great deal. Lakoba (b. 1893) did not remember his father, who had died of a bullet wound. Two stepfathers had died as well. His mother, after many tries, got him into a religious school and then the Tiflis seminary—where Stalin had studied more than a decade earlier—and whence Lakoba, too, was expelled. Lakoba had helped lead the Red Army’s civil war reconquest and Bolshevization of Abkhazia, while Stalin had egged on Orjonikidze to do the same in Georgia.⁵¹ The Abkhaz had become a minority in Georgia-controlled Abkhazia, but Lakoba and other Abkhaz Bolsheviks were determined to redress this by remaining independent.⁵² Stalin had ended up caught between the Abkhaz, who proclaimed their own republic, and the Georgians, who tried to force the territory back into Georgia.⁵³ He had approved a fudge recognizing Abkhazia as a “treaty republic.” Such decisions among competing claims had to be made across the Union, given the more than one hundred languages and the threescore recognized “nations.”⁵⁴

The USSR consisted of three levels: (1) Union republics, initially reserved for Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the South Caucasus Federation (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), then Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan; (2) autonomous republics inside Union republics for concentrated populations such as the Tatars, Bashkirs, and Yakuts in the RSFSR; the Moldavians in Ukraine; and (3) autonomous provinces, many of them in the RSFSR and the South Caucasus Federation.⁵⁵ In former tsarist Turkestan, the inhabitants, who were often multilingual, had been compelled to choose one national identity, then fought over territory. The prize cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, despite populations categorized as predominantly Tajik (Persian), had gone to Uzbekistan (Turkic), thanks to Uzbek leaders’ dynamism and Tajik leaders’ fumbling.⁵⁶ But then Stalin had acceded to Tajik demands for equal status, upgrading their autonomous republic in Uzbekistan to a self-standing Union republic.⁵⁷ Uzbeks seized the opportunity to become a national elite and aligned their future with the central regime, coercing their cereal-growing republic toward intensive cotton production. Mosques were forcibly shuttered.⁵⁸ Power was centralized in Moscow, but there were internal ethnoterritorial borders, local state institutions, vernacular official languages, and growing ranks of indigenous Communists.⁵⁹ The regime fostered not nationalism per se but Soviet nations, with Communist institutions and ways of thinking.

With the “treaty republic” status, Stalin had allowed the Abkhaz to perceive themselves as akin to a Union republic but not join the USSR as a fourth constituent of the South Caucasus Federation. His dispensation stemmed from his wariness of Georgian nationalism, his admiration for Lakoba, and Abkhazia’s uniqueness as the Soviet Union’s only subtropical region. But belated collectivization in the region’s Gudauta district had provoked a mass peasant uprising.⁶⁰ Lakoba negotiated a settlement without bloodshed, but Stalin terminated the “treaty republic” designation, specifying it as an “autonomous republic” in Georgia.⁶¹ This spurred further protests, including in Lakoba’s home village of Lykhny; the local party boss blamed Lakoba’s indulgence of “kulaks.”⁶² Lakoba managed to disperse the crowds peacefully again, promising to travel to Moscow on their behalf.⁶³ The OGPU arrested putative ringleaders, but Lakoba did manage to see Stalin and extract an accommodation: collectivization would resume, yet exclude horses.⁶⁴ Still, Stalin’s upheaval affected governing structures, too, and empowered a man who emerged as Lakoba’s cunning rival: Lavrenti Beria.⁶⁵

“A GOOD ORGANIZER”

Beria’s Mingrelian family was descended from a feudal prince, but he was born, in 1899, to modest circumstances in a hillside village in Abkhazia. He attended Sukhum’s city school, whose subjects included Russian, Orthodox theology, arithmetic, and science. His mother, Marta, like Keke Geladze, worked as a seamstress to pay for school; Beria, also like Stalin, might have been helped by a rich patron (a textile merchant who employed Marta as a domestic). Beria joined the party after the tsar’s abdication, served in the army, and graduated from high school with honors.⁶⁶ He missed the revolution, and spent part of the civil war on the wrong side: the Musavat (“Equality”) party of Azerbaijani nationalists had established an independent republic through the meddling of Ottoman and then British occupation forces, and after the British left, Beria joined Musavat counterintelligence.⁶⁷ Following the Bolshevik reconquest, he was arrested. A meeting was called and Orjonikidze and others ruled that the party had likely assigned Beria to infiltrate the “bourgeois nationalists.”⁶⁸ Beria enrolled at the newly established Polytechnic University, on the premises of his old high school, with a state stipend, to fulfill his dream of becoming an engineer, but Mircafar Bagirov (b. 1896), the twenty-four-year-old head of the Azerbaijan Cheka, recruited Beria and, after a few weeks, named him deputy secret police chief, at age twenty-one.⁶⁹

Beria’s Soviet secret police dirty work provoked numerous investigations for abuses.⁷⁰ “I feel that everyone dislikes me,” he wrote to Orjonikidze (May 1930). “In the minds of many comrades, I am the prime cause of all the unpleasantries that befell comrades over the recent period, and I figure almost like a stool pigeon.”⁷¹ Underhandedly, Beria attacked everyone else, but he felt perpetually put upon—just like Stalin.

In fact, Beria had become a legend. His early top boss, Solomon Mogilevsky, chairman of the South Caucasus OGPU, had died in a mysterious plane crash whose cause could not be established by three separate commissions of inquiry.⁷² His next boss, Ivan Pavlunovsky, pleaded at staff meetings for his deputy Beria to cease the intrigues against him.⁷³ Stalin replaced Pavlunovsky with Redens, an ethnic Pole, who knew none of the Caucasus languages or personnel. In the wee hours on March 29, 1931, after a sloshy birthday gathering for Beria at a private apartment, a drunk Redens departed—with no bodyguard detail. He made his way to the building of a young female OGPU operative who had previously rebuffed his advances; Redens tried to break down her door, and neighbors called the regular police, who arrested the disorderly drunk. His identity was established only at the station house. Word of the humiliation spread inordinately quickly. Beria immediately phoned Stalin, who transferred Redens to Belorussia (and shortly thereafter to Ukraine). Stalin was said to have delighted in Beria’s artfulness at compromising the dictator’s hapless brother-in-law.⁷⁴ Beria was promoted to chief of the South Caucasus OGPU, overseeing Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, including Abkhazia.⁷⁵ Mężyński noted, on the tenth anniversary of the Georgian branch of the OGPU, that “comrade Beria always finds his bearings precisely, even in the most complex circumstances.”⁷⁶

Lakoba, six years Beria’s senior, had everything the young secret police operative did not: heroic prerevolutionary and civil war exploits, colossal popularity among the masses, and intimate ties to Stalin.⁷⁷ But Stalin’s southern holidays were beset by epic local infighting: Georgians against Armenians, Georgians against Georgians. Stalin blamed locals’ ability to appeal to Orjonikidze, and wrote to Kaganovich that “if we don’t intervene, these people by their stupidity may ruin things.”⁷⁸ Orjonikidze was pushing for the restoration as party boss of Mamiya Orakhelashvili, a protégé (who had the university diploma Beria coveted), while Lakoba pushed for Beria (and sent him a transcript of a three-way conversation he’d had with Stalin and Orjonikidze).⁷⁹ Lakoba midwifed a three-day Beria visit to Abkhazia to see Stalin.⁸⁰ Beria soon got appointed first secretary of Georgia and concurrently second secretary of the South Caucasus Federation (under Orakhelashvili).⁸¹ He could now see Stalin during the dictator’s holidays without special intercession.⁸² In summer 1932, Beria poured poison in the dictator’s ear about Orakhelashvili.⁸³ The latter begged Stalin, and especially Orjonikidze, to be relieved of his post as Beria’s nominal superior.⁸⁴

Nothing rankled Stalin more than the suspicion that provincial officials sabotaged central directives, but in his homeland he had found someone who fulfilled orders to the letter. “Beria makes a good impression,” Stalin wrote to Kaganovich (August 12, 1932). “He’s a good organizer, a businesslike, capable functionary.” Stalin also prized Beria’s antagonism to Orjonikidze and the Georgian old guard. “In looking over South Caucasus affairs, I have become all the more convinced that in personnel selection, Sergo is an irredeemable bungler,” Stalin’s note concluded. Kaganovich wrote back (August 16): “Beria came to see me. He does indeed make a good impression as a top-level functionary.”⁸⁵ On October 9, Orakhelashvili was relieved of his post, and Beria promoted to first secretary of the South Caucasus Federation, while remaining party boss of Georgia.⁸⁶ Beria was recorded as being in Stalin’s office for the first time on November 9, just after the holiday celebrations.⁸⁷ On December 21, Beria had the Georgian party issue a formal reprimand to Lakoba.⁸⁸

NEAR-FATAL LAUNCH

The three-story dacha under construction in Gagra that Stalin visited with Lakoba on September 23, 1933, stood only twenty-five miles from Sochi. It had been carved right into the steep cliff, 700 feet above sea level, and was well concealed by tree cover, blending in with its green paint.⁸⁹ The rooms had parquet flooring, wooden ceilings in patterns, wooden furniture, and a wood-paneled cinema. Handwoven Caucasus rugs graced the floors, and nets wrapped the chandeliers to protect from possible falling glass. Each room had an emergency button. The smallish bedrooms had mattresses filled with seaweed and medicinal herbs. Salt water was piped into the bath. An auxiliary structure housed a billiard room, kitchen, and pantry. The menu consisted largely of freshly slaughtered animals, especially lambs, held live on the grounds. Lemon trees, guard booths, and a rocky hillside of fragrant eucalyptus, cypress, and cherry trees surrounded the villa; tobacco was planted as well. Guards also circled the property with truncheons, on the lookout for snakes. During the day, donkeys could be seen, and at night, jackals. Down below lay a stone beach. A small, rapid stream at the dacha gave it its name: Cold Spring. Here, Lakoba would organize a hunting party. First, however, on the day of his arrival, Stalin and entourage went for a boat ride on the Black Sea.

Yagoda had had a launch sent in, the Red Star, used on the Neva River in Leningrad. Small and unseaworthy, it had only some glass over the cabin, through which everyone was visible. At around 1:30 p.m., the group pushed off southward—Stalin, Voroshilov, and Beria, along with Vlasik and L. T. Bogdanov (bodyguards) and S. F. Chechulin (cipher specialist). “We headed for the Pitsunda Cape,” Vlasik would recall. “Entering the pier, we disembarked on the shore, relaxed, drank and snacked, walked about, spending a few hours on the shore.” Their picnic, beginning around 4:00 p.m., included Abkhaz wine. “Then we embarked again and headed back,” Vlasik continued. “At the Pitsunda Cape, there is a lighthouse and, nearby on the shore, a border post. When we exited the pier and turned in the direction of Gagra, there were rifle shots from the shore.” The boat was some 600 to 700 yards out. Vlasik claimed that he and Bogdanov covered Stalin and returned fire; Beria would claim that he covered Stalin’s body with his own. The bullets from the shore (three in total) landed in the water. The boat pulled farther from the coast. High waves rose up—a storm was in the offing—and it took the launch three harrowing hours to make it back to the Old Gagra pier.⁹⁰

Stalin, according to Chechulin, had initially joked that the Abkhaz were accustomed to greeting guests with gunshots, but after returning to Cold Spring, he sent Bogdanov back to Pitsunda to investigate. A few days later, Chechulin handed Stalin a letter from a local border guard who asked to be forgiven for shooting at the unregistered launch, which he had taken to be a foreign vessel. Sergeant N. I. Lavrov, commander of the border post, further explained that the boat had entered the restricted zone, so, as per regulations, they signaled it to stop, and when it kept going they fired warning shots in the air. Stalin did not label the incident an attempted assassination.⁹¹ Beria had Sergo Goglidze, the head of border guards for the South Caucasus, “investigate,” and he brought forward “witnesses” who testified that the shots were fired at the launch itself, blame for which, in Abkhazia, could be laid on Lakoba.⁹² But Yagoda evidently instructed Beria to portray it as a misunderstanding (in line with Stalin’s preference). The Georgian secret police sacked the Abkhaz OGPU chief and punished six Abkhaz border guards with two to three years in the Gulag; Lavrov got five.⁹³ Goglidze was soon named OGPU chief for Georgia. Legends circulated that Beria had organized hoodlums to stage the incident to discredit Lakoba, after which Beria’s henchmen had executed the perpetrators.^{94, 95}

GERMAN GAMBIT

While Stalin was in remote Gagra, a trial for the Reichstag fire was taking place in Leipzig. It had opened on September 21, 1933, and among the accused were the German Communist party leader Ernst Thälmann and Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian and undercover head of the Comintern’s Western European Bureau in Berlin. One of eight children from a workers’ family, Dimitrov had been sentenced to death for his political activities in his native country after he escaped to Yugoslavia. In Germany he operated in obscurity, but in the Leipzig courtroom he outdueled the state witnesses, Goebbels and Hermann Göring, and made the three-month trial an international antifascist sensation. (The Nazis did not have prearranged scripts for defendants who were broken to confess publicly.) “I am defending myself, an accused Communist,” Dimitrov said from the dock. “I am defending my political honor, my honor as a revolutionary. I am defending my Communist ideology, my ideals.” Germany’s high court would convict only the Dutch Communist apprehended at the scene, who would be guillotined just shy of his twenty-fifth birthday. Dimitrov would be acquitted for lack of evidence. Journalists from the world over were admitted to the proceedings, but two Soviet reporters seeking access were arrested, leading to a diplomatic row. Mikhail Koltsov, however, reported out of Paris for Pravda (September, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30), transforming Dimitrov into a household name in the USSR and fostering the legend of Communists as courageous opponents rather than facilitators of the rise of Nazism.⁹⁶

At the Reich Chancellery on September 26, at a meeting of department heads, the state secretary (the number two) at the foreign ministry insisted that Germany had little to gain from a breach with the USSR, given the countries’ economic compatibility. Hitler concurred on avoiding handing Moscow a pretext to sever relations, but he warned officials not to indulge in delusions (“The Russians were always lying”) and predicted that the Soviet government would never forgive the smashing of German Communism and that the new order in Germany had crushed every hope of world revolution.⁹⁷ Hitler was furtively accelerating a military buildup set in motion by his predecessors, in violation of Versailles restrictions, and told every Briton he could reach that German expansionism would be at Soviet expense and that Germany’s purely continental interests did not conflict with Britain’s global empire. He disavowed wanting to annex Austria (a wish that pre-1933 German governments had not disguised).⁹⁸ He would also insist to an interviewer for Le Matin that he wanted to live in peace with France.⁹⁹ Stalin followed the least hints of Franco-German as well as Anglo-German rapprochement, and of supposed British instigation of Poland and Japan and Polish-Japanese collusion.¹⁰⁰ He saw danger not in “superstructure” ideologies in any single capitalist country, such as Nazi Germany, but in the underlying “class interests” of all capitalist powers, led by Britain and France, which, axiomatically, strove to catalyze an anti-Soviet bloc.

On September 28, amid Soviet negotiations to sell the Chinese Eastern Railway to Manchukuo, the Japanese had Manchukuo authorities arrest six Soviet employees. The Japanese were evidently trying to force a sale at a rock-bottom price. The Soviets had requested 250 million rubles; the Japanese offered the equivalent of one tenth that sum: 50 million paper yen. Stalin terminated the negotiations. He also ordered up a propaganda offensive against Japanese “militarism”—not something he did vis-à-vis Nazi Germany.¹⁰¹

Yenukidze, a Germanophile and Stalin confidant, concocted a scheme with German ambassador Herbert von Dirksen to find a modus vivendi by sending someone with stature to Hitler, even without formal invitation. They decided that the Jewish Nikolai Krestinsky, a former Soviet ambassador to Germany who was fluent in the language and was taking a rest cure at Kissingen, was to stop over in Berlin on the way home. Litvinov advised against such a move, but Molotov and Kaganovich favored it. Stalin agreed. Hitler reluctantly acceded to his foreign ministry’s urgings to receive the “Judeo-Bolshevik” envoy.¹⁰² Right then (October 14, 1933), however, the Führer declared on the radio that Germany would pull out of the League of Nations.¹⁰³ France erupted with loose talk of launching a preventive war.¹⁰⁴ Molotov and Kaganovich wrote to Stalin (October 16), reversing their support for Krestinsky’s Berlin stopover. “It is incomprehensible why Krestinsky’s trip should be called off,” the dictator fired back that same day. “What do we care about the League, and why should we conduct a demonstration in honor of an insult to the League and against its insult of Germany?”¹⁰⁵ But the foreign affairs commissariat had already backed out of the gambit.¹⁰⁶

AMERICAN GAMBIT

Stalin had traveled again, a few miles south of the Pitsunda Cape, arriving on October 9, 1933, at Mysra (Myussera in Russian), site of a secluded seaside Romano-Greek estate recently owned by an Armenian oil magnate.¹⁰⁷ Nearby, Lakoba had instigated construction of yet another luxury dacha for Stalin. (Only the urinals were of domestic make.)¹⁰⁸ The next day, in New York, Henry Morgenthau Jr., acting treasury secretary, had brought a Philadelphia millionaire and Franklin Roosevelt confidant, William Bullitt, to a meeting with an unofficial Soviet representative. Roosevelt was eager to find common cause in containing Japanese expansionism, concerned about Hitler, and being lobbied by U.S. business for continued access to the Soviet market, after orders from that country had shrunk. Bullitt delivered a draft letter from the president, addressed to Kalinin (formal head of state), containing an invitation to Washington for a chosen representative. Stalin, who had hurried back to Gagra, instructed Molotov to accept and recommended sending Litvinov. The latter begged off in a cipher, but Stalin and Kalinin wrote to Molotov and Kaganovich (October 17) insisting on Litvinov and urging them to “act more boldly and without delay, since now the situation is favorable.”¹⁰⁹

On November 2, 1933, Stalin finally left Sochi for Moscow.¹¹⁰ Yagoda soon reported to Voroshilov that, in connection with a “counterrevolutionary terrorist monarchist plot” to assassinate Stalin, twenty-six arrests had been made, almost all former gentry and a lot of them women. One was said to have “connections” through children to people living in the Kremlin.¹¹¹ (During 1933, there would be at least ten serious attempts on Hitler’s life.)¹¹²

In mid-November Litvinov managed what he himself had doubted: U.S. recognition, after sixteen years of no relations. He had conceded nothing on repudiated tsarist and Provisional Government debts, other than a willingness to discuss them, and made an empty pledge that the Soviets would not interfere in U.S. domestic affairs by supporting American Communists.¹¹³ Molotov took to publicly praising Litvinov.¹¹⁴ Stalin awarded him a state dacha and a bodyguard detail, a mark of Litvinov’s rising value—and the need to keep him under 24/7 surveillance. Anxieties in Tokyo about U.S.-Soviet collusion in the Far East intensified.¹¹⁵ Japan, without allies and in violation of international covenants, pursued hegemony in its region, which entailed formidable simultaneous military burdens: defeat of the Red Army in a possible war; subjugation of mainland China; and attainment of home-island security against the U.S. Navy.¹¹⁶ But for now, the depth of any U.S.-Soviet cooperation remained uncertain.¹¹⁷

The Americans promptly dispatched their own Marx to the USSR, Harpo, on a pantomime goodwill tour. His act brought the house down. (After he convinced a Soviet family that he had not pilfered their silver, they shook hands, and 300 table knives cascaded to the floor from his sleeves.)¹¹⁸ Bullitt had arrived as ambassador on December 11, 1933, and Litvinov immediately dropped the bombshell that the USSR, in anticipation of war with Japan, wished to join the League of Nations.¹¹⁹ On December 20, at a banquet in Bullitt’s honor at Voroshilov’s apartment, Bullitt was taken by the charm of the “cherub” host; the pair danced a medley of Caucasus moves and American foxtrot.¹²⁰ Stalin attended and asked Bullitt for 250,000 tons of steel rails to complete strategic double-tracking of the Trans-Siberian. “If you want to see me at any time, day or night, you have only to let me know and I will see you at once,” the dictator volunteered. “President Roosevelt is today, in spite of being a leader of a capitalist country, one of the most popular men in the Soviet Union.” Then Stalin planted a wet kiss on Bullitt’s cheek.¹²¹

At this very moment, the Comintern executive committee approved theses for the American Communist party’s upcoming convention in Cleveland (to be held in the spring). “The ‘New Deal’ of Roosevelt is the aggressive effort of the bankers and trusts to find a way out of the crisis at the expense of the millions of toilers,” the theses stated. “Under cover of the most shameless demagogy, Roosevelt and the capitalists carry through drastic attacks upon the living standards of the masses, increased terrorism against the Negro masses. . . . The ‘New Deal’ is a program of fascistization and the most intense preparations for imperialist war.”¹²²

Granting an interview to the reliably pro-Soviet Walter Duranty (December 25, 1933), Stalin spoke publicly about his diplomatic coup with the United States. Sitting between portraits of Marx and Lenin, with a drawing of a projected 1,312-foot Palace of the Soviets that was supposed to eclipse the Empire State Building, the dictator lauded Roosevelt as “by all appearances . . . a courageous statesman.” He assured American business that the Soviets paid their debts (“Confidence, as everyone knows, is the basis of credit”). He put Japan on notice as well. Then, when Duranty, on cue, inquired of the Soviet stance vis-à-vis the League of Nations, Stalin responded, “We do not always and in all conditions take a negative attitude toward the League,” adding that “the League may well become a break upon or an obstacle to war.”¹²³

The United States was not a member of the League. Any Soviet bid would have to be shepherded by France, and three days later the Soviet envoy in Paris communicated Moscow’s terms for joining the League as well as a regional alliance.¹²⁴ Franco-Soviet talks would proceed glacially. Distrust ran deep.¹²⁵ Édouard Herriot, who had signed the Franco-Soviet nonaggression pact and now wanted to counter Hitler, had demonstrated the price of rapprochement when, in summer-fall 1933, he had visited the USSR during the famine, disembarking at Odessa. Just before he reached Kiev, streets were washed, corpses removed, shops with windows stocked with goods (the populace was not allowed in), and a “festive crowd” assembled from OGPU and Communist Youth League personnel. In Kharkov, he was shown a “model” children’s facility, the tractor factory, and a museum devoted to the Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko. He asked to see the countryside and was taken to a collective farm where he again encountered activists and operatives, this time disguised as farmers. Everywhere, he ate his fill. Soviet Ukraine was “like a garden in full bloom,” Herriot observed in Pravda. “When one believes that the Ukraine is devastated by famine, allow me to shrug my shoulders.”¹²⁶

LAMAS AND WOLVES

Duranty had been followed into Stalin’s office by the co-chairs of the politburo’s Mongolia commission, Voroshilov and Sokolnikov, and two Mongolian officials, a deputy prime minister for finance and a leftist party scourge of the lamas. Mongolia served as a Soviet showcase and experimental laboratory for the colonial world and, even more important, a territory that supplied defense in depth for the southern Siberian border, meat and raw materials for the Soviet economy (paralleling Kazakhstan), and a link with China, should war with Japan break out.¹²⁷ Since imposing the “New Course” retreat stabilization, Stalin had worried that Mongolia’s NEP equivalent had allowed a revival of traders (NEPmen) and better-off nomads (kulaks), and persistent sway of the lama “class.” Voroshilov told the Mongols that, against a population of just 700,000, there were still 120,000 lamas with undue influence (“Beyond that, the lamas engage in homosexualism, corrupting the youth who return to them”). Stalin asked how the lamas supported themselves. The Mongols answered that lamas drew substantial income from the lamaseries and served as spiritual leaders, physicians, traders, and advisers to the arats (common people). “It’s a state within a state,” Stalin interjected. “Chinggis Khan would not have permitted that. He would have cut them all down.”

Soviet proconsuls were instigating a terror against fabricated Japanese spies, which destroyed the head of the Mongolian People’s Party and brought perhaps 2,000 arrests.¹²⁸ Stalin asked about the budget, and the Mongols replied that their GDP totaled just 82 million tugriks, while the state budget was 33 million; the Soviets extended a loan of 10 million, but the army alone cost 13 million. “A large part of your budget is being swallowed up by white-collar employees,” Stalin admonished. “Can it be impossible to get away with fewer?”¹²⁹