Stalin

———PART II——— TERROR AS STATECRAFT

Will future generations understand it all? Will they understand what is happening? It is terrifying living through it.

ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI, Soviet envoy to Sweden, notes written at a European spa on hotel stationery, March 25, 1938¹

IN HIS HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, Joseph Campbell would indirectly explain the archetype in world mythologies that Soviet regime propagandists much earlier had applied to Stalin: humble origins (a man of the people), a call to greatness on the people’s behalf, a demonstration of separation (slaying of dragons, i.e., of the party opposition), a crushing setback and near defeat (peasant and party resistance to collectivization), a mythic rebound of resilience and fortitude, culminating in triumph (Congress of Victors; a socialist great power).² With Soviet hagiographers competing to portray Stalin as just such a humble man of the people and their instrument of destiny, Beria, in particular, intuited the dividends from depicting him as the Lenin of the Caucasus. This portrait, for all its blatant falsehoods, captured Stalin’s obsession with menace, something Campbell’s archetype could not do, but also Stalin’s archetypal commitment to a transcendent mission for the supposed greater good. Realizing the dream of socialism had seemed improbable for decades. But after the abdication of the tsar, in 1917, the decision by Russia’s Provisional Government to continue the war—like imperial Germany’s decision to launch the U-boat campaign that provoked U.S. entry and tipped the war’s balance—had changed the course of humanity. Socialism was no longer just libraries full of pamphlets, songs, marches, meetings, and schisms, but a country.

In power, socialism swelled the state and destroyed not just the “bourgeoisie” but the small-business owner, the family farmer, the artisan.³ All of this shocked non-Leninist socialists who hoped to end exploitation and alienation and break through to social democracy while still insisting on their class approach. These Marxists repudiated the Soviet Union as not socialism but a deformation, because of Russia, or Lenin, or Stalin. After all, Marx had never advocated mass murder, but freedom. Nowhere did he say there should be collective farms formed by secret police coercion, mass deportations to frozen wastes, terrible famine.⁴ Of course, Marx had insisted that wage labor was “wage slavery,” private capital “exploitation” and “alienation,” the market “chaos,” and therefore that, to achieve lasting abundance and freedom, capitalism had to be “transcended.” The tragedy began unfolding with the very invention of “capitalism.”⁵ Once markets and private property were named and blamed as the source of evil, statization would be the consequence. A few socialists began, painfully, to recognize that there could be no freedom without markets and private property, but they were denounced as apostates. Compounding the tragedy of the left, traditional conservatives committed the gross error of inviting the fascists and Nazis to power in no small part because of the leftist threat and the hard-nosed view that differences between anticapitalist democratic socialists and Leninists were delusion. To top it all off, Social Democrats and Communists fought a bitter civil war over workers’ allegiance.

When Hegel famously referred to history as a “slaughter bench,” he had no idea what he was talking about, and yet he was right. Partly that was because of the influence of Hegel’s hazardous ideas on the Marxists: the sophistry known as the dialectic, the idolatry of the state, the supposed historical “progress” through the “necessary” actions of great men.⁶

It was no accident, as Hegelian-inspired Marxists might say (and as Trotsky had predicted already in 1904), that a single leader had emerged atop a single-party system that, on the basis of class analysis, denied legitimacy to political opposition.⁷ It was also no accident that this single leader was Stalin, at once a militant Communist and an unprincipled intriguer, an ideologue and an opportunist—the Leninist fusion—who, like his mentor, possessed extreme willpower, which was the prerequisite for attaining what only unspeakable bloodshed could: the elimination of capitalism.⁸ Stalin could not boast the effortless success of those to the manor born. He had to be, and was, a relentless striver. He also happened to carry a gargantuan chip on his shoulder, for although he had benefited immeasurably from Lenin’s patronage, he then suffered the unending humiliation of Lenin’s supposed call for his removal, which was thrown at him by his rivals and whispered across the entire party. Stalin emerged as a leader of acute political intelligence and bottomless personal resentment. The collectivization that he forced through to the end, famine notwithstanding, provoked criticism in the party—Syrtsov on the fiction of the politburo; Ryutin on his amoral dictatorship—magnifying Stalin’s righteousness and resentment. To an extent, power reveals who a person is. But the effects on Stalin of accruing and exercising power unconstrained by law or constitutional limits—the power of life and death over hundreds of millions—were immense. Alongside the nature of Bolshevism, the setting of his regime—Russia, with its fraught history and geopolitics, its sense of historic mission and grievance, which were given new impetus and form by socialism’s fixation on capitalist encirclement—also indelibly shaped who he became.

Without Stalin there would have been no socialism, and without socialism, no Stalin.⁹ That said, his demonic disposition, which the experience of this kind of rule in this place heightened, never overwhelmed his ability to function at the highest level. Physically, he continued to suffer from frequent bouts of flu and fever, stomach ailments, dental problems, and severe pain in his joints, but he proved hearty enough to be a hands-on ruler of one sixth of the earth’s surface. His capacity for work was prodigious, his zeal for detail unquenchable.¹⁰ He received 100 or even 200 documents a day, some of substantial length, and he read many of them, often to the end, scribbling comments or instructions on them.¹¹ He initiated or approved untold personnel appointments, goaded minions in relentless campaigns, attended myriad congresses and ceremonies bearing the burden of instruction, assiduously followed the public and private statements of cultural figures, edited novels and plays, and prescreened films. He pored over a voluminous flow of intelligence reports and lengthy interrogation protocols of accused spies, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, traitors. He wrote and rewrote the texts of decrees, newspaper editorials, and his own speeches, confident in his abilities. Very occasionally he made grammatical mistakes in Russian, his second language, but he wrote accessibly, using rhetorical questions, catchphrases, enumeration.¹² The fools were the ones who took him for a fool.

Pravda taught Soviet inhabitants indebtedness to the state and to Stalin personally, depicting everything they had—food, clothing, education, joy—as gifts (“Thank you, comrade Stalin!”).¹³ In newsreels he came across as the epitome of wise leadership, photogenic in his signature tunic. “In his speeches Stalin was categorical, but simple,” recalled the loyalist writer Konstantin Simonov (b. 1915). “With people—this we sometimes saw in the newsreels—he conducted himself simply. He dressed simply, identically. There was nothing showy about him, no external pretensions to greatness or a sense of being chosen. This corresponded to our impressions of how a person standing at the head of the party should be. Altogether this was Stalin: all these feelings, all these positive traits, real and drawn by us, of the leader of the party and state.”¹⁴ Stalin’s leader cult was manufactured—acquiring the character of an arms race, as proponents strove to outdo one another—but not artificial.¹⁵ If Hitler, despite the forelock that fell into his face, the near ridiculous mustache, and the constant chewing of his fingernails, could hold his country in thrall, the reason lay at least as much in the German people as in the Führer’s gifts. Stalin, too, possessed a weird magnetism, derived from his ability to personify socialist modernity and Soviet might, to inspire and validate people’s aspirations. The cult’s power was that it was not just about Stalin; it was about them.¹⁶

• • •

LOOKED AT SOBERLY, Stalin’s anticapitalist experiment resembled a vast camp of deliberately deprived workers, indentured farmers, and slave laborers toiling for the benefit of an unacknowledged elite.¹⁷ But the Soviet Union was a fairy tale. Unrelenting optimism spread alongside famine, arrests, deportations, executions, camps, censorship, sealed borders.¹⁸ Newsreels that showed Stalin also featured belching smokestacks—Soviet inhabitants came to know factories by name and sight—tanks and bombers, giant icebreakers, fecund farms, the friendship of peoples, and vigorous, marching, smiling masses, a tableau of modernity, progress, socialism. Many Soviet inhabitants—especially, but not only, the young—craved a transcendent purpose, and in the swirl of ambition, fanaticism, and opportunism they willingly endured hardships, finding personal fulfillment, even liberation, in submission to the state-led struggle in the name of social justice, abundance, and peace. The relentless demands for public professions of loyalty risked eliciting playacting and sullen obedience. But the cause offered the possibility of belonging. Many embraced violence and cruelty as unavoidable in bringing about a new world, and they keenly soaked up the propaganda. To manage contradictions and conscience, they had the transcendent truth of Marxism-Leninism, and the personal example of “comrade Stalin.” People of this era who were looking for a brighter future, a chance to be part of something larger than themselves, found it.¹⁹ “The tiniest little fish,” one woman would enthuse in her diary, “can stir the depths of the ocean.”²⁰

In the USSR, an entire generation was coming of age in what seemed like the most heroic epoch in history, acquiring skills, education, apartments—building and living socialism. New or wholly reconstructed factories abounded, their production celebrated daily. The famine had been left behind, and rationing was abolished. In the economy, the years 1934–36 turned out to be relatively good, as the country consolidated its investments.²¹ Waste was colossal, of course, but most of the rest of the world was still mired in the effects of the Great Depression. The regime had also eased up on the state of emergency, the extrajudicial and judicial executions. And yet, the land of Soviets remained deeply insecure. When the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov fed a dog, it salivated, and the scientist rang a bell. After many repetitions, Pavlov stopped the feeding but continued the ringing—and the animal salivated anyway. Pavlov had conditioned the dog to respond to the bell as if the sound were the smell and taste of food. The Soviet populace, too, had been conditioned: the “bell” sounded by the regime was “capitalist encirclement,” and the people’s reflexive response was fear of foreign invasion and war.²²

Nonetheless, the Soviet population was unprepared for what struck the country during its hour of triumph beginning in 1936. Even by Stalinist standards, the carnage would be breathtaking.²³ The peak year for Soviet executions—20,201 of them—had been 1930, during dekulakization. In the three years from 1934 to 1936, a time that included mass reprisals for the Kirov murder, the NKVD reported arresting 529,434 people, including 290,479 for counterrevolutionary crimes, and executing 4,402 of them. But for the two years 1937 and 1938, the NKVD would report 1,575,259 arrests, 87 percent of them for political offenses, and 681,692 executions. (The country’s working-age population was around 100 million.) Because an untold number of people sentenced to incarceration were actually executed, and many others died during interrogation or transit and fell outside of execution tabulations, the total who perished directly at the hands of the Soviet secret police in 1937–38 was likely closer to 830,000.²⁴

No such numbers were publicly divulged, and as a result almost no one could fathom the full scale of what was transpiring. Nor could people comprehend the reasons. In many industrial sectors, output plans were not being met, and queues for bread would appear as a result of a poor harvest in 1936, but a sense of the world-beating success of industrialization and stabilization of the collective farm system remained pervasive. (Even privately, the regime evinced no special anxiety about the economic situation.)²⁵ Substantial popular discontent persisted, as under all authoritarian regimes, but it was not increasing, and it certainly did not threaten the regime.²⁶ Soviet society had astonishingly little overt political opposition of any kind. No possibility existed of establishing any genuine organization independent of the regime, let alone of overthrowing it—that would be possible only via military defeat and occupation. The threat of such a war, and on two fronts—west (Germany) and east (Japan)—did continue to loom large in 1937–38, but it already had for several years without provoking any remotely comparable domestic bloodshed. Indeed, the years 1937 and 1938 would bring the long-feared bloodbath—but it did not come on account of war. No foreign power attacked.²⁷ There was no immediate threat—social, economic, political—to the country or to the regime’s legitimacy or stability, no crisis. But then, suddenly, there was total crisis.

• • •

SCHOLARS HAVE APPROACHED the enigma of the Great Terror in a variety of ways. Robert Conquest, who gave the episode its proper name (1968, 1990), remains the point of departure, having definitively shown Stalin’s central role decades before archives were declassified. Conquest, though, did not really attempt an explanation (he wrote more or less under the assumption that a Communist regime, and Stalin personally, would inevitably get around to inflicting mass terror in pursuit of ever-greater power).²⁸ Alexander Gerschenkron, in a review of Conquest’s The Great Terror, quoted his argument that “the nature of the whole purge depends in the last analysis on the personal and political drives of Stalin,” then observed that all dictators exhibit a drive to increase their power, and that any modern dictatorship “which is supported neither by an ancient tradition (or close alliance with an ancient power, such as the Church) nor by the active consent of the governed must at all times justify its continuation in power.” Stalin’s dictatorship, too, would be expected to foster “a permanent condition of stress by creating enemies at home and abroad and/or by imposing upon the population gigantic tasks that would be unlikely to be carried out in the absence of the dictatorship,” as well as “a charismatic image of the dictator,” “a utopian goal, carefully kept in a remote future,” and “proscription of any deviating values, supported by threats and acts of repression.”²⁹

Stalin instigated an epic version of the time-honored authoritarian device of trumped-up conspiracies linking internal with external “enemies,” but the Soviet case differed in more than just scale.³⁰ Roy Medvedev, author of the other monumental work on the terror (1971, 1989), endeavored to separate Stalin from the sacred Lenin and depicted him as a traditional tyrant, but he similarly asserted that Stalin was motivated by “lust for power, boundless ambition,” as if all tyrants murdered their own elites not just on such a scale but also with forced confessions to fantastical crimes they had not committed.³¹ Trotsky imagined Stalin’s motivations as jealousy and pettiness, while the biographer Robert C. Tucker saw a pursuit of fame and glory. Moshe Lewin surmised that a paranoid “Stalin actually became the system and his personality acquired therefore a ‘systemic’ dimension,” an apt description, though not an analysis.³² Hiroaki Kuromiya incisively dissected Stalin’s cold-blooded logic regarding opponents and enemies, while Erik van Ree revealed Stalin as a Marxist-Leninist true believer, and Arfon Rees showed him to be a combination revolutionary and Machiavellian.³³ These insights were not offered as explanations for the murderous episode of 1937–38. “There is in Stalin’s Terror an element of sheer preposterousness which defies explanation,” Adam Ulam conceded, after trying.³⁴

A few analysts have stressed not intentions but the chronic dysfunctionality of the political system, as if all authoritarian regimes—which are all dysfunctional to a great degree—do what Stalin’s did.³⁵ In Nazi Germany, Hitler went after the Jews (less than 1 percent of the population), Communists, and Social Democrats, but in the USSR Stalin savaged his own loyal elites across the board. To be sure, the greater number of victims were ordinary Soviet people, but what regime liquidates colossal numbers of loyal officials? Could Hitler—had he been so inclined—have compelled the imprisonment or execution of huge swaths of Nazi factory and farm bosses, as well as almost all Nazi provincial Gauleiters and their staffs, several times over? Could he have executed the personnel of Nazi central ministries, thousands of his Wehrmacht officers—including almost his entire high command—as well as the Reich’s diplomatic corps and its espionage agents, its celebrated cultural figures, and the leadership of Nazi parties throughout the world (had such parties existed)? Could Hitler also have decimated the Gestapo even while it was carrying out a mass bloodletting? And could the German people have been told, and would the German people have found plausible, that almost everyone who had come to power with the Nazi revolution turned out to be a foreign agent and saboteur?³⁶ Even among ideological dictatorships, Communism stands out.

Special features inherent in the Soviet system made a mass and participatory terror between 1936 and 1938 possible. The existence of an extensive police apparatus equipped to arrest and sentence in assembly-line fashion was necessary but not sufficient. Still more important was the existence of the shadowy Communist party, which had cells in all of the country’s institutions, making heresy hunting possible, and an ideology, a class-war practice, and a conspiratorial modus operandi that proved readily conducive to mass murder in the name of reasserting the party’s special mission and purity. All of this was buttressed by the adversarial nature of Soviet noncapitalist industrialization and collectivization, which was linked to an increase in the ranks of enemies; the regime’s censorship (strict control over information and assiduous promotion of certain ways of thinking); widespread resentment of the new elite, which under socialism was not supposed to exist; and widespread belief in a grand crusade, building socialism, in whose name the terror was conducted.³⁷ The masses became complicit as a result of party cell, factory, and farm meetings, and especially their written denunciations, informing, and extracted confessions. That said, the slaughter was neither self-generating nor self-sustaining. Soviet state power was enacted by millions of people—not just those within the formal administrative machinery—but guided by a single individual.

Did Stalin have reason to fear for his power? He had built socialism, a feat even his loyalists had thought unlikely. His personal authority was so secure that, as we shall see, in August 1936 he could once again abandon the capital for more than two months, going on holiday to Sochi. There was no repetition of the blistering Ryutin condemnation in a text circulated hand to hand. No one in his inner circle pretended to be on the same level. Nonetheless, it was clear to him that his “unbounded power” remained oddly contingent. He was the supreme leader by virtue of his position as head of the party, reinforced by his acclamation as the “Lenin of our day.”³⁸ But voting politburo members held the right to nominate someone else as the top secretary of the party, a recommendation that would be forwarded for formal ratification to the first plenum of the Central Committee newly chosen by a party congress. Stalin was thus a dictator on conditional contract. His faction had stood by him through thick and thin. But would the voting nine—Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, Kalinin, Andreyev, Kosior, Mikoyan, and Chubar—continue to do so? Even if Stalin remained certain of their obeisance, he was eager, like all dictators, to convert his dictatorship into despotism.³⁹ For the men in his own loyal faction, in which Stalin had long taken evident pride, this meant breaking their will. Herein lay a key motivation for the fantastic terror of 1936–38.

And yet, considerations of personal power alone do not explain Stalin or the terror. Certainly he pursued power with a vengeance—on behalf of the cause, which in his mind was the same thing as his personal rule—but he had taken gambles with his power, also on behalf of the cause, and was sometimes defiant when it would have been more power enhancing to be prudent. At times he could not be sure what would enhance his power. For him, the terror constituted a form of rule, a matter of statecraft.

Stalin was a liar, a chameleon, who talked out of both sides of his mouth and often said what interlocutors wanted to hear. But more than any other secretive dictator, except perhaps Hitler, he repeatedly explained himself. Everything Stalin did during the years 1936–38 he had been talking about for years. Some things he said only privately, such as his instructions to a Mongolia delegation to stage trials of lamas not merely as counterrevolutionaries but as spies for Mongolia’s foreign enemy Japan, because the lamas could become traitors in the rear in the event of war. Publicly, however, Stalin had stated that he was building socialism against all manner of implacable class enemies; that the class struggle sharpened as the country got closer to the full victory of socialism; that enemies with party cards were the most dangerous because they could secretly burrow into the heart of the system; that those who opposed collectivization wanted to restore capitalism; that all foreigners were spies; that the Zinovievites, Trotskyites, and the right deviation were interlinked and tied to the military; that the rightists wanted to remove him in a putsch, establish a puppet government, hand over Soviet territories, and make a rump USSR into a colony of Germany or Japan (or was it Poland or Romania?); that enemies had become desperate and resorted to all-out terror; that the big bosses were not as valuable as the lower levels; that legions of new people (a “Soviet intelligentsia”) needed to be promoted and nurtured in Marxism-Leninism; that a new imperialist war was inevitable; that the Soviet Union had to avoid becoming the target of an anti-Soviet bloc; that the country needed to become a great power with a military to match the imperialists; that a new imperialist war could enable socialism to expand the same way the previous imperialist war had enabled the Russian Revolution; that the British stood behind the entire imperialist order; that Hitler was an intelligent leader; and that Trotsky and his supposed followers were the most diabolical threat to socialism and the Soviet state.⁴⁰ These various enunciations fit into a grisly logical whole, and Stalin had the untrammeled power to act on them.