Stalin

Sometime either before or after Stalin received these two Mongols, he met with Mongolian prime minister Peljidiin Genden, but in Molotov’s office. The dictator would write Genden in a courtesy follow-up note, “I am very glad that your Republic has, finally, taken the correct path, that your internal affairs are succeeding, that you are strengthening your international might and strengthening your independence.” He advised that Mongolia needed “full unity” in the leadership, full support of the arats, and an army on the highest level, and promised continued fraternal assistance. “In that, you should have no doubts,” he concluded. “Voroshilov, Molotov, and I together thank you for the gifts you sent.” The Soviet Union was reciprocating with new automatic rifles. “They will come in handy in a battle against wolves of all types, two-legged and four-legged.”¹³⁰

WHITES AND REDS

In the field of culture—unlike foreign affairs and nationalities—Stalin had long hesitated to make his instructions public. “What kind of a critic am I, the devil take me!” he had written in response to Gorky’s urgings in 1930.¹³¹ When Konstantin Stanislavsky sought approval for staging The Suicide, by Nikolai Erdman (b. 1900), Stalin had replied, “I am a dilettante in these matters.”¹³² The dictator began to work out how he would manage the artistic intelligentsia with the Kiev-born writer Mikhail Bulgakov (b. 1891), who in the 1920s serialized a novel depicting a family of Kiev White Guardists, the Turbins, during the civil war, which muddied the red-white, good-evil picture.¹³³ Only two thirds of the work appeared before it helped prompt the journal’s closing, but it proved a sensation.¹³⁴ Bulgakov turned it into a play titled The Days of the Turbins. Directed by Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, it revived the fortunes of the Moscow Art Theater, which the pair had founded in 1898, premiering Chekhov’s The Seagull. Muscovites queued day and night for Bulgakov’s portrayal of the tragedy that befell those who had joined the counterrevolution in Ukraine.¹³⁵

Bulgakov’s daring work had no Reds at all, and his portrayal of the Whites as human beings provoked slander that he was a White Guardist enabling “former people” who had lost loved ones and possessions to mourn. Party militants likened him to the “rightists.”¹³⁶ Stalin acquiesced to the outcries to ban Bulgakov’s play Flight, another civil war story, about a family that opted to emigrate rather than live under Bolshevism.¹³⁷ But the dictator went to see Turbins, privately approved it, and publicly defended it.¹³⁸ At a meeting with irate pro-regime Ukrainian writers, Stalin pointed out that “it won’t do to write only about Communism. We have a population of 140 million, and there are only one and a half million Communists.” Bulgakov, Stalin allowed, was “alien,” “not ours,” for failing to depict exploitation properly, but he insisted that The Days of the Turbins remained “useful” to the cause, whatever the author’s intent.¹³⁹ The furious polemics would not cease, however, and Stalin finally let the play be shuttered. Censors now prohibited even publication of Bulgakov’s works, and he wrote the first of several despairing letters to the authorities asking to be deported abroad with his wife, to no avail.¹⁴⁰

Bulgakov wrote again “to the government” on March 28, 1930, pointing out that he had unearthed 301 reviews of his work over a decade, three of which had been positive, and pleading again to be allowed to emigrate with his wife or, failing that, to be appointed as an assistant director at the Moscow Art Theater; failing that, as a supernumerary there or, failing that, as a stagehand.¹⁴¹ On April 18, one of Stalin’s top aides phoned the poet at his Moscow apartment, asking his wife, who answered, to summon him. Bulgakov thought the call a prank. (This happened to be Good Friday, a significant day for Bulgakov, son of a theologian.) Stalin came on the line. “We received your letter,” he stated. “And read it with the comrades. You will get a favorable answer to it. . . . Perhaps we really should permit you to travel abroad? What, have we irritated you so much?” Bulgakov: “I have thought a great deal recently about whether a Russian writer can live outside his homeland, and it seems to me he cannot.” Stalin: “You are correct.”¹⁴² What motivated Stalin to make his first phone call to a major non-party writer remains uncertain. But four days earlier, the greatest poet in the revolution, Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was mercilessly heckled at his public recitations, fatally shot himself in the heart. (“Seriously, there is nothing to be done,” he wrote in a suicide note, as if echoing Chernyshevsky. “Goodbye.”)¹⁴³

Bulgakov got appointed as a stage director’s assistant. One writer sent him a fake summons to the Central Committee, a poor joke about his desperate petitioning. Bulgakov developed neurasthenia.¹⁴⁴ Bereft of a public, he was said to be narrating stories at his apartment over tea. One such story, according to a fellow writer, involved Bulgakov sending long letters nearly every day to Stalin, signed “Tarzan” to disguise himself. Stalin, frightened, ordered that the letter writer be identified. Bulgakov was found out, brought to the Kremlin, and confessed. Stalin noticed his shabby trousers and shoes and summoned the commissar of supply. “Your people can steal, all right,” Stalin yelled at the minion, “but when it comes to clothing a writer, they’re not up to it!” Bulgakov, in the story, took to visiting Stalin in the Kremlin regularly and noticed he was depressed. “You see, they all keep screaming: Genius, genius! And yet there’s no one I could have a glass of brandy with, even!” When Stalin phoned the Moscow Art Theater on Bulgakov’s behalf, he was told the theater director had died—that very minute. “People are so nervous these days!” Stalin was depicted as saying. “No sense of humor.”¹⁴⁵

Like Bulgakov, Yefim Pridvorov (b. 1883), known as Demyan Bedny (bedny meaning “the poor one,” though many called him Bedny [Poor] Demyan), had been born in Ukraine and made his mark in Moscow, but while Bulgakov sought no more than a modus vivendi, Bedny tirelessly served the regime. He traveled the sites of the Five-Year Plan, declaiming verse to workers, and acquired a personal Ford and a sumptuous apartment in the Grand Kremlin Palace (his wife, children, mother-in-law, and nanny lived with him).¹⁴⁶ Bedny knew Stalin before the revolution and, like him, had published his first verse as a teenager (and was dogged by rumors of uncertain parentage). He flaunted his access to the dictator.¹⁴⁷ But two of Bedny’s poem-feuilletons irked the dictator deeply, one for mocking Russian national traditions (peasants sleeping on their warm stoves, which Stalin also did), and the dictator promulgated a resolution criticizing him. Bedny wrote to him melodramatically (“The hour of my catastrophe has come”).¹⁴⁸ Stalin exploded. “Dozens of poets and writers have been rebuked by the Central Committee when they made mistakes,” he answered. “All this you considered normal and understandable. But when the Central Committee found itself compelled to criticize your mistakes, you suddenly started to fume and shout about a ‘noose.’ . . . Is your poetry perhaps above criticism?”¹⁴⁹

Voroshilov protected his Grand Kremlin Palace neighbor Bedny, whose sloshy charm and erudition played well with the defense commissar.¹⁵⁰ But on September 1, 1932, the politburo heard a report on the poet’s debauched life, and Stalin had him evicted from the Kremlin. Bedny apologized to the dictator for his “life befouled with egotistic, greedy, evil, false, cunning, vengeful philistinism,” but begged for an equivalent-sized apartment for his private library, the largest in the regime, perhaps 30,000 volumes; Stalin promised space for it. (Yenukidze allocated Bedny an apartment in a small building at Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, 15, which the poet, in a sarcastic note to him, called “a rat’s barn.”)¹⁵¹ Bedny had worsened his predicament by indiscretion: one regular at his Kremlin apartment had recorded (and distorted) the often inebriated poet’s table talks, including a complaint that when he loaned books to Stalin, they came back stained with greasy finger marks.¹⁵² Stalin allowed Bedny to receive the Order of Lenin in connection with the poet’s fiftieth birthday, accompanied by a citation recognizing him as an “outstanding proletarian poet.”¹⁵³ Bedny had just written to Stalin, “I am afraid of nothing more than my letters. Especially my letters to you.”¹⁵⁴

HUMAN SOULS

As Bedny sank, Gorky rose. (“Previously,” the gifted children’s writer Nikolai Korneychukov, known as Korney Chukovsky, punned slyly in his diary, “literature was impoverished [o-bed-nena]; now it is embittered [o-gor-chena].”)¹⁵⁵ Stalin, with OGPU assistance, had finally coaxed Gorky, already a literary giant before the revolution, permanently back from fascist Italy. Preparing the ground, on April 23, 1932, the dictator, without warning, had disbanded the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.¹⁵⁶ The zeal of the self-styled proletarians—such as Bedny—with each striving to expose the tiniest ideological deviation in rivals, was outweighed by their lack of creative achievement. At the same time, the deep political suspicion about the non-party writers—such as Bulgakov—was balanced by their usually superior abilities. The abolition decree also established a committee to organize a founding congress for a new Union of Soviet Writers, open to non-party members. (Other arts were supposed to be organized in similar fashion.) Stalin wanted Gorky, whom the Association of Proletarian Writers had denounced as “a man without class consciousness,” to be its head.

Alexander Fadeyev, one of the chairmen of the dissolved Association of Proletarian Writers, wrote in indignation to Kaganovich (May 10).¹⁵⁷ The next day, Stalin sat in his office with Fadeyev, two other leaders of the proletarian writers’ association, two culture apparatchiks, and Kaganovich, for more than five hours. On May 29, the dictator met with some of them again for thirty minutes, just before departing for his long summer holiday.¹⁵⁸ Ivan Gronsky, one of the attendees, would later explain that Stalin had no intention of revisiting the dissolution of the proletarians, but had asked what creative method to propose. Gronsky claimed he had answered that prerevolutionary realism had been “progressive” in its “bourgeois-democratic” day, producing many great works, but now they required a literature to advance the “proletarian socialist” stage, and he suggested “proletarian socialist realism” or “Communist realism.” Stalin countered that they needed an artistic method to unite all cultural figures, and supposedly suggested “socialist realism” for its brevity, intelligibility, and inclusiveness. Whether or not it was actually the dictator who came up with this formulation, he made the decision to adopt it.¹⁵⁹

Stalin named Gorky honorary chairman of the organizing committee for the proposed new writers’ union.¹⁶⁰ On September 17, 1932, the regime awarded Gorky the Order of Lenin, renamed Moscow’s central Tverskaya Street, the Volga city of Nizhny Novgorod (Gorky’s birthplace), and the Moscow Art Theater for him. It also launched a weeklong celebration of forty years of his artistic production, culminating on September 25 in the Bolshoi. Gronsky would later claim he had objected to such excessive adulation, to which Stalin supposedly replied, “He is an ambitious man. It is necessary to bind him to the party.”¹⁶¹

Not long thereafter, Stalin attended two meetings with writers—not at Central Committee headquarters on Old Square, but at the luxurious mansion granted to Gorky in central Moscow (Malaya Nikitskaya, 6), an art moderne masterpiece expropriated from the prerevolutionary industrialist and art patron Stepan Ryabushinsky. At the first session (October 20, 1932), Stalin and entourage met with writers who belonged to the party, and he explained the party decision to disband the Association of Proletarian Writers. He praised the superior power of live theater, citing Alexander Afinogenov’s Fear, which was seen by millions and dramatizes waverers among intellectuals, but has a party organizer saying, “We are fearless in the class struggle—and merciless with the class enemy,” while an angel child asks, “Papa, which is the greater menace—a left deviation or a right deviation? I think the greatest menace is double-dealers.”¹⁶² But Stalin was trying to urge the gathered party loyalists toward tutelage. “The sea of non-party writers is multiplying, but no one leads them, no one helps them; they are orphans,” he stated. “At one time, I was also non-party and did not understand many things. But senior comrades did not push me away; they taught me how to master the dialectic.”¹⁶³

Six days later, non-party writers were included in a second gathering with the dictator and his entourage. Invitations had gone out only over the phone, with the proviso not to divulge the information, perhaps in order to enhance the sense of being chosen. (Neither Bedny nor Bulgakov was invited.) Few of the fifty assembled literary figures had ever met Stalin, let alone spent an intimate evening with him. Emotions ran high. At the first break, they surrounded Stalin, and one asked about state dachas. “From under his bushy eyebrows, his eyes quickly and carefully survey the rows of those present,” the literary critic Koreli Zelinsky wrote in a private account the next day. “When Stalin laughs—and he does so often and quickly—he squints and bends over the table, his eyebrows and mustache run apart, and his visage becomes sly. . . . What the portraits do not at all convey is that Stalin is very mobile. . . . He is very sensitive to the objections and in general strangely attentive to everything said around him. It seems he does not listen or forget. But, no, it turns out he caught everything at all wavelengths in the radio station of his mind. The answer is ready at once, in the forehead, straightforward, yes or no. Then you understand that he is always ready for combat. And, at the same time, watch out if he wants to please. There is a vast gamut of hypnotic tools at his disposal.”¹⁶⁴

Stalin wanted to conjure into being a coterie of writers of stature whose utterances would carry weight and yet who could be more or less controlled. “I forgot to talk about what you are ‘producing,’” he remarked, after allowing many writers to speak. “There are various forms of production: artillery, locomotives, automobiles, trucks. You also produce ‘commodities,’ ‘works,’ ‘products.’ . . . You are engineers of human souls. . . . As some here rightly said, the writer cannot sit still; he must get to know the life of the country. Rightly said. People are transforming life. That is why I propose a toast: ‘To Engineers of Human Souls.’”¹⁶⁵ Voroshilov interjected, “Not really.” Everyone applauded. Stalin turned his whole body to the defense commissar: “Your tanks would be worth little if the souls inside them were rotten. No, the production of souls is more important than the production of tanks.”

During a second break, the tables were laid with food and drink (this was still during the famine time), and Fadeyev importuned Stalin to repeat what he had told the Communist writers at the earlier gathering: intimate details of Lenin’s last days. Stalin stood, raised his glass, and said, “To a great man, to a great man,” then repeated it again, as if a little drunk. “Lenin knew he was dying,” Stalin said, and “asked me once when we were alone together to bring him a cyanide capsule. ‘You are the most severe person in the party,’ Lenin said. ‘You are able to do it.’ At first I promised him, but then I could not do it. How could I give Ilich poison? I felt bad. And then, you never know how the illness will progress. So I didn’t give it to him.” There were further toasts, and the atmosphere became ever more visionary (an entire writers’ city; no more paper shortages). “I still remember how Gorky bid farewell to Stalin, kissing like a man on the mustaches,” Zelinsky wrote. “Gorky, tall, stooped to Stalin, who stood straight like a soldier. Gorky’s eyes shone and, ashamedly, unnoticeably, he wiped away a small tear.”¹⁶⁶

Fadeyev followed the meeting with a diatribe in Literary Newspaper against his former comrades in the Association of Proletarian Writers and preserved his position of influence with the regime. Gorky faced opportunities and dilemmas he had not encountered back in Sorrento.¹⁶⁷ One of the first major services he performed, on August 17, 1933, was to lead a “brigade” of 120 writers who followed Stalin’s tour to the White Sea–Baltic Canal with their own OGPU-supervised visit and glorified slave labor, in the name of a supposedly higher humanism. “I saw grandiose structures—dams, sluices, and a new waterway,” the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko wrote in one of the many thank-you notes to Yagoda (August 22). “But I was taken more by the people, who worked there and who organized the work. I saw thieves and bandits (now shock workers), who gave speeches in a human tongue, summoning their comrades at work to follow their example. Previously I had not seen the OGPU in the role of educator, and what I saw was for me extraordinarily joyful.”¹⁶⁸

WHO WOULD WRITE THE BIOGRAPHY?

Distribution of Stalin’s writings inside the USSR reached an estimated 16.5 million copies as of early 1934.¹⁶⁹ His Questions of Leninism alone had been issued, in 17 languages, in more than 8 million copies by then. But the problem of Stalin’s biography remained acute: the only Russian-language text, written by his aide Tovstukha, dated back to the 1920s and was the length of a newspaper essay.¹⁷⁰ Although Mikhail Koltsov had written a lively Life of Stalin for serialization in the Village Newspaper, it remained unpublished, evidently because Stalin had rejected it.¹⁷¹

Foreign publications, meanwhile, were making the leader of the world proletariat into a bandit/bank robber, and recounting his alleged betrayals of comrades as an undercover agent for the tsarist secret police.¹⁷² A psychoanalytic memoir by a Gori and Tiflis classmate (who had emigrated) alleged that Stalin’s father, Beso, had beaten him, so that, “from childhood on, the realization of his thoughts of revenge became the aim to which everything was subordinated.”¹⁷³ A Comintern official in Germany wrote alarmingly to Moscow about the sullying of Stalin’s image by enemies, singling out in particular Essad Bey.¹⁷⁴ A Baku-born Jew (1905) whose birth name was Lev Nussimbaum, Bey had gone to a Russian gymnasium in Berlin, taken classes in Turkish and Arabic at Friedrich Wilhelm University, begun wearing a turban, reinvented himself as a Muslim prince, and become a bestselling author who frequented the Café Megalomania. His colorful Stalin, published in Berlin in 1931, portrayed an outlaw in vivid orientalist strokes and embellished or invented evidence so that the dubious became possible, the possible probable, and the probable certain. “The difference between poetry and truth,” he wrote, “is not yet recognized in the mountains.”¹⁷⁵

Bey’s competition proved to be another orientalist-fabulist: Beria. No sooner had the regional party organization fallen under his control than it established a Stalin Institute to collect materials pertinent to “Stalin’s biography and his role as theoretician and organizer” of the party in the South Caucasus.¹⁷⁶ But Stalin’s aide Tovstukha, deputy director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow, started trying to transfer all original Stalin-related materials from Georgia.¹⁷⁷ Regime officials, meanwhile, had sounded out Gorky to write the biography, but he demurred.¹⁷⁸ Instead, the apparatus accepted a proposal by the French writer Henri Barbusse to write a book about Stalin, with oversight by Tovstukha (to ensure the desired depiction of the struggle against Trotsky).¹⁷⁹ Anyone taking on Stalin’s life had to confront his constant discouragement. When the latest History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) referred to him in standard parlance as “the wise leader of all the toilers,” Stalin wrote, “An apotheosis of individuals? What happened to Marxism?”¹⁸⁰ He rejected the Society of Old Bolsheviks’ plan to mount an exhibit about his life as “strengthening a ‘cult of the personality,’ which is harmful and incompatible with the spirit of our party.”¹⁸¹

“CONGRESS OF VICTORS”

The year 1934 dawned. Soviet industry was booming. The capitalist world remained mired in the Great Depression. The United States had recognized the Soviet Union. The famine was mostly over. It was time to gloat. In “The Architect of Socialist Society” (Pravda, January 1, 1934), sycophant supreme Karl Radek depicted a future historian giving lectures in the revolution’s fiftieth year at the School of Interplanetary Communications. The lecturer, looking back from 1967, would emphasize the surprise among the world bourgeoisie that a new leader had succeeded Lenin and built socialism, at a necessarily furious pace, against the fierce resistance of capitalist elements and their facilitators. Stalin was called “the great pupil of great teachers who himself had now become the teacher, . . . the exemplar of the Leninist Party, bone of its bone, blood of its blood.” His success was attributed to his “creative Marxism,” his proximity to cadres, his resolve, and his fealty to Lenin. “He knew that he had fulfilled the oath taken ten years earlier over Lenin’s casket,” the essay observed. “And all the working people of the world and the world revolutionary proletariat knew it, too.”¹⁸²

Ten years to the day after Stalin had been sworn that oath, January 26, the 17th Party Congress opened in the Grand Kremlin Palace, bringing together 1,225 voting and 739 nonvoting delegates, representing 2.8 million members and candidates. Party statutes had specified an annual congress, but three and a half years had elapsed, the longest interval yet.¹⁸³ Pravda headlined it as the “Congress of Victors.” Magnanimously, the dictator had allowed high-profile opposition figures back into the party after they had again publicly admitted their errors. From the rostrum they issued self-flagellating calls for “unity,” with Kamenev defending Stalin’s personal dictatorship (in contrast to his bold denunciation of it back at the 14th Party Congress).¹⁸⁴ Bukharin, whom Stalin would appoint editor of Izvestiya, told the congress regarding the right deviation: “Our grouping was unavoidably becoming the focus for all the forces fighting against the socialist offensive, and primarily for the strata most threatened by the socialist offensive—the kulaks and their urban intellectual ideologists,” which had heightened the danger of “an untimely foreign intervention.” He praised the plan and quipped, “Hitler wants to drive us into Siberia, and the Japanese imperialists want to drive us from Siberia, so the entire 160 million population of our country would have to be located on one of the blast furnaces of Magnitogorsk.”¹⁸⁵

Stalin delivered a five-hour keynote on opening night. “He spoke unhurriedly, as if conversing,” one witness wrote in his diary. “He was witty. The more he spoke, the closer he became to the audience. Ovations. Explosions of laughter. Full-blooded. But a practical, working speech.”¹⁸⁶ The dictator issued a call to accountability, speaking of “difficulties of our organizational work, difficulties of our organizational leadership. They are concentrated in us ourselves, in our leading functionaries, in our organizations. . . . The responsibility for our failures and shortcomings rests, in nine out of ten cases, not on ‘objective conditions’ but on ourselves and only on ourselves.” He denounced chancellery methods of management (“resolutions and decrees”) and called for criticism from below, worker competitions, getting bosses into the factories and farms, getting skilled workers out of offices and into production, and refusing to tolerate people who failed to implement directives. “We must not hesitate to remove them from their leading posts, regardless of their services in the past.”¹⁸⁷

After the applause died down, Stalin offered an example of empty-words leadership:

STALIN: How goes the sowing?

FUNCTIONARY: The sowing, comrade Stalin? We have mobilized. (Laughter.)

STALIN: And?

FUNCTIONARY: We posed the question squarely. (Laughter.)

STALIN: And then?

FUNCTIONARY: We have a breakthrough, comrade Stalin, soon there’ll be a breakthrough.

(Laughter.)

STALIN: And in fact?

FUNCTIONARY: There is movement. (Laughter.)

STALIN: But in fact, how goes the sowing?

FUNCTIONARY: So far, the sowing is not happening, comrade Stalin. (General guffaws.)¹⁸⁸

Stalin pointedly added that provincial officials, “like feudal princes, think the laws were written not for them but for fools.”

Against capitalism’s “raging waves of economic shocks and military-political catastrophes,” Stalin contrasted how “the USSR stands apart, like an anchor, continuing its socialist construction and struggle for keeping the peace.” He accused the capitalists, without irony, of “deepening their exploitation via strengthening the intensity of their labor, and at the expense of farmers, by further reduction in the prices of products of their labor.” Fascism, and especially National Socialism, he averred, “contained not an atom of socialism,” and “should be seen as a sign of the bourgeoisie’s weakness, of its lack of power to rule by the old parliamentary methods, forcing it to turn internally to terrorist methods of rule” and externally to a “policy of war.” Without naming the likely aggressor, he foresaw a “new imperialist war” that “will certainly unleash revolution and place the very existence of capitalism in question in a number of countries, as happened during the first imperialist war.”¹⁸⁹

Stalin observed that fascism in Italy had not prohibited good bilateral relations with the USSR, and dismissed as “imaginary” German complaints that the Soviet Union’s many nonaggression pacts signified a “reorientation” toward Western Europe. “We never had any orientation toward Germany, nor have we [now] any orientation toward Poland and France,” he insisted. “We were oriented in the past and are oriented in the present only on the USSR. (Stormy applause.)” He also warned Japan: “Those who desire good peace and relations would always meet a positive response, but those who try to attack our country will receive a crushing rebuff to teach them in future not to poke their pig snouts into our Soviet garden. (Thunderous applause.)”¹⁹⁰

RUDELY INTERRUPTED

As Stalin basked in the Grand Kremlin Palace spectacle, Hitler intruded, announcing a ten-year nonaggression “declaration” with Poland. The text contained no recognition of existing borders, but, sensationally, each side vowed not to “resort to force in the settlement of such disputes” as might arise between them.¹⁹¹ Hitler’s foreign policy adviser, Alfred Rosenberg, had vowed to annihilate Poland. Poland’s participation was no less head spinning: it had a military alliance with France as well as a defensive alliance with Romania (both dating to 1921). But Poland had only a poorly equipped army to defend long borders facing two dynamic dictatorships, both of whose predecessors had made the country disappear from the map. Adding to that sense of vulnerability, the Versailles Treaty had made the predominantly ethnic German city of Danzig an autonomous “free city” under the League of Nations, leaving Poland without a Baltic port, and placed a so-called Corridor of Polish territory between German East Prussia and the rest of Germany, a recipe for instability.¹⁹²

Even though the declaration did not legally invalidate the Franco-Polish alliance, Hitler had effectively broken the encirclement ring. Poland’s political class, meanwhile, dreamed of playing an independent role in European affairs. “It was,” one interwar observer noted, “a tragedy for Poland to have been reborn too weak to be a power, and strong enough to aspire to more than the status of a small state.”¹⁹³ French officials privately called Poland a bigamist.¹⁹⁴ But of course, Paris was in talks with Berlin as well. Piłsudski received the French ambassador after the signing (January 29, 1934), explaining that “he had hesitated, had dragged things on, but the Franco-German negotiations had made him decide to expedite them, because if the [French] proposals were accepted by Germany, France would openly abandon the [Versailles] peace treaty.”¹⁹⁵ The nonaggression declaration with Germany promised Poland reduced economic tensions as well (an end to trade and tariff wars). Moreover, even though France based its security on relations with Britain, not its eastern alliances, French foreign ministers now finally began to visit Warsaw.¹⁹⁶

Stalin was caught out worse than the French. Seeking to keep Poland out of any anti-Soviet alliance, he had allowed the Galicia-born Radek to meet secretly with Polish officials. Radek insisted that Poland’s private gestures toward Moscow constituted “an about-face and not a maneuver.”¹⁹⁷ Artur Artuzov, the intelligence official, tried to puncture this wishful thinking, arguing that the Poles were flirting with the USSR solely to raise Germany’s interest in a bilateral deal, but Stalin accused Artuzov of “misinforming the politburo.”¹⁹⁸ Voroshilov, too, had gotten into the act, requesting a meeting with the sympathetic German ambassador, Rudolf Nadolny, and dwelling “a particularly long time on Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in which connection he finally said that two words of the chancellor’s in public would be enough [to dispel] the impression that the anti-Soviet tendency of the book still had validity today.”¹⁹⁹

Hitler’s intelligence reports had warned of a pending Polish-Soviet alliance—Radek’s back-channel flattery and calculated leaks had done the work for Piłsudski.²⁰⁰ Stalin, ready to betray Germany to Poland and Poland to Germany, had been one-upped by both.²⁰¹

Piłsudski had made plain to a German interlocutor that “Poland would never under any circumstances respond to any German attempts to turn Polish efforts toward Russian Ukraine.”²⁰² But in Moscow, suspicions were rife that the anodyne German-Polish declaration contained secret military and territorial clauses.²⁰³ Colonel Józef Beck—who had helped Piłsudski carry out his 1926 military coup—made the first visit to the Soviet Union by a Polish foreign minister since their state’s reestablishment. He had little love for Poland’s ally France (having once been ejected from that country as persona non grata) and prided himself on being able to handle Germany, but he wanted to avoid appearing to tilt between Poland’s two big neighbors. He was hosted at a luncheon by Voroshilov, and engaged thrice by Litvinov (February 13, 14, and 15, 1934), who noted that his Polish counterpart “does not see danger on the part of Germany or general danger of war in Europe at this time.” The Polish-born Litvinov gloated that when he reminded Beck that Poland had signed nonaggression pacts with the USSR for three years, and with Germany for ten, “Beck became manifestly embarrassed (the one time during our entire conversation).” But the minister vowed this could be fixed, and indeed their bilateral pact would soon be extended to ten years (and their legations upgraded to embassies). Beck returned from Moscow with pleurisy.²⁰⁴

KIROV AND OTHERS ACCLAIM THE LEADER

The party congress had continued through February 10. Stalin belatedly acknowledged the livestock losses (his report carried a table), which he attributed to kulak sabotage, yet he urged that “1934 must and can be a breakthrough year to growth of the whole livestock economy.” The dearth of meat was widely felt.²⁰⁵ Orjonikidze proposed that industrial production plans be cut, rather than increased, and the congress approved a resolution for the rest of the second plan, stipulating 18.5 percent growth in consumer goods, versus 14.5 for producer goods. Many speakers underscored the imperative to ramp up retail trade and living standards.²⁰⁶ But Kaganovich affirmed that Stalin’s “revolution from above was the greatest revolution human history has known, a revolution that smashed the old economic structure and created a new collective farm system.”²⁰⁷ Even Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, the erstwhile ardent Trotsky supporter, marveled from the rostrum, “Collectivization—that is the heart of the matter! Did I predict collectivization? I did not.”²⁰⁸

Kirov, afforded the honor of closing out discussion of Stalin’s report, celebrated all that had been achieved, assuring delegates that “the chief difficulties are behind us,” while reminding them to keep shoulders to the wheel. His oratory elicited repeated clapping, especially when he proposed that every word of Stalin’s political report be approved as marching orders. “Comrades, ten years ago, we buried the man who founded our party, who founded our proletarian state,” Kirov concluded. “We, comrades, can say with pride before Lenin’s memory: we fulfilled that vow; we in future, too, shall fulfill that vow, because that vow was made by the grand strategist of the liberation of the toilers of our country and the whole world, comrade Stalin. (Stormy, prolonged applause, a warm ovation by the entire hall, all stand.)”²⁰⁹

Stalin declined to give the heretofore customary reply to the discussion, citing “no disagreements at all.”²¹⁰ He dictated the composition of the new Central Committee: seventy-one members and sixty-eight candidates. The number of candidates he permitted to stand equaled the number of slots, although, by party tradition, delegates could cross out anyone they opposed. In the voting on February 9, 1934, only 1,059 of 1,225 ballots ended up in the record. (At the previous congress, 134 voting delegates had not returned ballots.)²¹¹ Only Kalinin and Ivan Kodatsky (Leningrad province soviet chairman) were elected unanimously in the official accounting. Three votes went against Stalin, though apparatchiks might have tossed out a few negatives. Kirov received four against. (Back at the 16th Congress, Stalin, like Kirov, had officially received nine votes against.)²¹²

Rumors circulated in Moscow and then abroad about some provincial party bosses having sought to have the aw-shucks Kirov replace Stalin.²¹³ Lev Shaumyan (b. 1904), a newspaper editor (and the unofficially adopted son of Mikoyan), would later assert that “the thought ripened in the minds of certain congress delegates, primarily those who remembered Lenin’s Testament well, that it was time to transfer Stalin from the post of general secretary to other work.”²¹⁴ But the idea that Kirov was widely viewed as worthy of replacing Stalin, or that he led a “moderate faction” opposed to Stalin, is contradicted by the evidence.²¹⁵ Kirov seemed a provincial by comparison with his predecessor in the second capital, Zinoviev, who had worked closely with Lenin and headed the Comintern. At the same time, Kirov had turned out a lot like Zinoviev: a talker, a bon vivant. Still, there was a difference. “At meetings, he never once said anything about any question,” Mikoyan told Khrushchev of Kirov. “He sat silent, and that was it.”²¹⁶ Selecting the general secretary, moreover, fell not to the congress but to the one-day plenum of the newly elected Central Committee afterward. Another gloss on the whispering was provided by the Leningrad delegate Mikhail Rosliakov. “Generally,” he would recall, “the talk was that the party had matured, grown stronger, that there were even people capable of replacing Stalin if the necessity arose.”²¹⁷

A congress report by the apparatchik Yezhov revealed that 10 percent of the party membership had joined during the civil war or before 1917, but that this profile applied to 80 percent of the congress delegates. In other words, 1,646 of the 1,966 delegates had become Communists when Lenin was the leader.²¹⁸ But Lenin-era Communists showed loyalty to Stalin. One was Veniamin Furer (b. 1904), a talented organizer in a mining town of Ukraine who had been given the floor at the congress during the February 7 session. “At the 16th Party Congress, comrade Stalin spoke of those reserves that lurk in the depths of our Soviet system,” Furer said in his remarks at the 17th. “If one breaks the bureaucratic knot, if one advances organizational work, these reserves would surface. . . . These reserves are the creative energy, the creative initiative of the mass.” He hit all the Stalin notes: “Thousands of new people have grown in the Donbass and constitute the proletarians of the Stalinist epoch. . . . They present to us, to our organizational work, to our leadership, more demands, demands that are more complex. . . . Our new worker judges us, in localities, on concrete questions: apartment repair, club organization, development of shops and canteens. . . . This party congress, opening a new plane of battle for socialism, should task the entire party and each Communist with the fighting task of studying and fully mastering the Stalinist style of work. (Applause.)”²¹⁹

MERE SECRETARY

A military-industrial parade on Red Square punctuated the victors’ congress. On February 10, 1934, Stalin and his inner circle met, apparently before the Central Committee plenum that evening, and he proposed that Kirov relocate to Moscow as a Central Committee secretary. “What are you talking about?!” Molotov later recalled of Kirov’s response. “I’ll be no good here. In Leningrad I can do as well as you, but what can I do here?” Some evidence suggests that Orjonikidze supported Kirov’s refusal, Stalin stalked out, and Kirov went to mollify him.²²⁰ A compromise ensued: Kirov would become a Central Committee secretary but remain party boss in Leningrad.²²¹

This provoked the hasty transfer of Andrei Zhdanov from Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) to Moscow as Central Committee secretary.²²² Born in Mariupol (1896), Zhdanov was the grandson of a priest and the son of a school inspector (who had died when the boy was just three) and a classical pianist (who had health issues after giving birth to him).²²³ He affected the trappings of an intellectual, had an easy demeanor in Stalin’s presence, and was a Russian nationalist. Khrushchev recalled him as a charming fellow who would carry out any assignment.²²⁴ Zhdanov was not even a politburo candidate member, but, in the absence of the dictator or Kaganovich, he would sign politburo meeting protocols.²²⁵

Working sessions of the politburo were giving way to “commissions” (an invention of Kaganovich), while the use of telephone polls for approving politburo decisions had grown to between 1,000 and 3,000 times a year. Even so, Stalin was often just dictating “politburo” decrees to Poskryobyshev or his other top aide Boris Dvinsky. (Ever the functionaries, they would note, “No telephone polling of politburo members taken.”)²²⁶

Further reflecting the changes wrought by collectivization-dekulakization, Stalin elevated several secret police officials to full membership in the Central Committee without prior candidate status: Yagoda (43 years old), Yevdokimov (43), Balytsky (42), and Beria (35). Yezhov (39) and Khrushchev (39) also became full members without having been candidates. Zhdanov (38) was promoted from candidate to full member; Poskryobyshev and Mekhlis became candidate members, even though they had not even been congress delegates.²²⁷ The post-congress Central Committee returned all members of the politburo from the previous congress, in 1930, except for Rykov.²²⁸ Stalin’s name came first on the list of members of the politburo, the orgburo, and the secretariat (after the 16th Congress, his name had appeared alphabetically). His portrait in the gallery of politburo members was rendered far larger, and his khakis lightened to make him stand out. Tellingly, however, Stalin decided that he should be formally listed as merely a “secretary,” in what looks like yet another indication of the long shadow of Lenin’s Testament about removing him as “general secretary.”²²⁹

PRIVATE LIFE

Inside the triangular Kremlin, the Imperial Senate formed its own triangular fortress, and Stalin’s wing was a fortress within the fortress. Even the regime personnel given regular Kremlin passes for state business needed a special pass for Stalin’s wing. Located one floor below where Lenin’s had been and on the building’s opposite side, it came to be known to regime insiders as “the Little Corner.”²³⁰ Stalin had marked his permanent shift to the Kremlin by having the interiors redone. The walls in the offices were lined with shoulder-height wood paneling, under the theory that wood vapors enhanced air quality, and the elevators were paneled with mahogany. The tiled stove in Stalin’s office yielded to central heating. Behind his working desk hung a portrait of Lenin. In a corner, on a small table, stood a display case with Lenin’s death mask. Another small table held several telephones (“Stalin,” he would answer). Next to the desk was a stand with a vase holding fresh fruit. In the rear was a door that led to a room for relaxation, rarely used, with oversized hanging maps and a giant globe. In the main office, between two of the three large windows that let in afternoon sun, sat a black leather couch where, in his better moods, Stalin and guests sipped tea with lemon. In the country’s darkest moments he could exude optimism, but when, to others, matters seemed brightest, he could become gloomy, withdrawn.

Ten miles away, in Volynskoe village, near the town of Kuntsevo on the right bank of the Moscow River, the OGPU completed construction on a new dacha for him in 1934—within just a year, using fiberboard panels (not long-lasting, but easy to put up).²³¹ In contrast to the neo-Gothic style of Zubalovo, Meran Merzhanyants, known as Miron Merzhanov, an ethnic Armenian and the head architect for the central executive committee, adopted a simpler neoclassicism for the one-story, seven-room villa with sundeck and veranda.²³² The Near Dacha, as it became known, sat on thirty acres in a deep wood and was encircled by a solid wall made of plywood, four to five meters high, which was painted green, like the residence, to blend in. The site proved easy to secure but at first noisy (to one side lay the village of Davydkovo, which filled with drunken men at night, and to another, the Kiev Station freight depot).²³³ For a time, Stalin continued to sleep at his new Kremlin apartment and use the Zubalovo dacha, but Nadya’s absence weighed on him at places they had shared. Soon he decided on the Near Dacha as his permanent residence.²³⁴

Hitler lived at the eighteenth-century Palais Schulenburg, at 77 Wilhelmstrasse, the chancellor’s residence since 1871, which during the Weimar Republic had acquired a modernist addition, where Hitler had his formal office. The Führer had the palace part remodeled, recovering the original grandeur but with an elegant simplicity. He would also have his Munich apartment (16 Prinzregentenplatz) refurbished in rectilinear forms, opening up larger light-filled, strikingly modern and spare spaces. These interiors were photographed for the German public. Additionally, Hitler vastly expanded the chalet-style farmhouse in the alpine border town of Berchtesgaden, in the Obersalzberg, where he had stayed on holiday. It had been rechristened the Berghof (“mountain farm”) and now had more than thirty rooms.²³⁵ An ample dining room, study, and great hall were built with Swiss stone and pinewood paneling, and the Teutonic furniture, too, was deliberately oversized. Picture windows and an open-air terrace afforded panoramic views of the snowcapped Bavarian Alps and Austria in the distance. Over time, the entire mountain area would be closed in a wide security perimeter with a high fence, but the loss of physical accessibility was compensated for by images of Hitler’s domestic life published in periodicals. Commercially available photo albums also depicted him hiking in the pure mountain air with his dog or entertaining blond children at his mountain retreat. Postcards for sale showed him feeding deer on the terrace—a private, softer Führer.²³⁶