Stalin

To try to halt the savagery and save themselves, the top brass would have needed to be in a real conspiracy, but to them the idea of a military coup, such as in Spain, was anathema: they were Communists, and conscious of party discipline. Anyway, organizing a coup was an utterly remote proposition in the webs of surveillance and mutual denunciation.²⁹² Stalin wielded monopoly control over communications, the party cells and political administration in army units, the NKVD special departments for the army, and the public story in all newspapers and on the radio, which received ostensible confirmation of his narrative in real-life events in Spain. He also had a plethora of “vigilant” types in pursuit of reward or survival: the Kuliks and Budyonnys, the Little Blackberry Yezhov, the Gloomy Demon Mekhlis, and, in the end, Voroshilov, too.

On June 14, 1937, Voroshilov had sent a telegram to Novosibirsk reminding the locals that “only I personally sanction arrests of Trotskyites, double-dealers, and such.”²⁹³ He did not accede in every instance, especially when he was bucking Yezhov or Mekhlis rather than Stalin. Twice Yezhov sought Voroshilov’s permission to arrest one of the latter’s deputies, Andrei Khrulyov, head of military construction, but Voroshilov refused; the third time, Yezhov asked Stalin, who also refused.²⁹⁴ But Soviet military archives contain nearly thirty volumes of lists with the names of military men charged with crimes that the special department sent to the defense commissar for approval. Voroshilov affixed his signature to each name or to the whole list: “I do not object” . . . “I agree” . . . “Arrest him.” Sometimes he added vicious remarks: “Take all the scoundrels out” . . . “Round up the vermin.”²⁹⁵ Military officials dutifully conveyed to him the indignation that was supposedly emanating from the ranks over the revelations of treason (“These bastards should be chopped up alive, like pigs”). But their reports noted that “a few individuals have expressed panicked views that the fascist band that gave away many secrets to the Germans struck a blow against the fortress of the Red Army which will lead to defeat.”²⁹⁶ In fact, confusion broke out. One air brigade deputy commander destroyed all the portraits of top marshals and generals, and wanted to do the same for the portraits of the country’s political leaders, because no one could now be trusted.²⁹⁷

Incarcerated Red Army men inundated the defense commissar with desperate letters about their torture, begging—begging—for his help. “Kliment Yefremovich! You must check how the cases against the commanders of the Red Army are being handled,” a group of civil war comrades wrote to him. “You will find that materials are extracted from the arrested by means of force, threats, and turning men into limp rags.”²⁹⁸ Whether Voroshilov read these painful letters, which came in the many thousands, is unknown.²⁹⁹ In a pathetic note to himself, he wrote, “It is possible to fall into an unpleasant situation: you defend someone and he turns out to be a true enemy, a fascist.”³⁰⁰ But Voroshilov told Kuznetsov, the naval commander, that he did not believe in the guilt of the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, who had been arrested. Kuznetsov wondered, “How is it possible to sleep, when hundreds and thousands of your subordinates are arrested, and you know this is wrong?” He added, “The longer things went on, the more he [Voroshilov] lost face.”³⁰¹ In fact, evidence indicates that Voroshilov knew full well the charges were a lie.³⁰² He also comprehended the incalculable damage and dishonor wrought upon so many dedicated, patriotic military men as uniforms, chevrons, and medals were torn off and bullets fired into the backs of necks. “The authority of the army in the country is shaken,” Voroshilov wrote, again in notes to himself. “The authority of the commanding group has been shaken. . . . This means that the methods of our work, the whole system of governing the army, my work as commissar, has suffered a shattering crash.”³⁰³

Sixteen years after Voroshilov had implored Stalin, in vain, to move him to a civilian post, the former metalworker had come to cherish the Red Army, but his forced complicity in the massacre of loyal officers on the basis of fabricated charges and torture-extracted testimony psychologically pulverized him.³⁰⁴ When Alexandra Kollontai returned from her ambassadorial post to Moscow in 1937, accompanying the Swedish foreign minister, she found the normally buoyant Voroshilov “sweating from suffering; he was unaccustomedly hunched over.” She commiserated, telling him of the “terrible sorrow” that resulted from “losing faith” in the moral fiber of close friends. “You understand this?” he responded. “Terrible grief, yes, yes.”³⁰⁵

People were at a loss. “Could Voroshilov really have been indifferent to the fate of these cadres, colleagues from the civil war?” wondered Colonel Ilya Dubinsky, a Soviet tank commander demoted to deputy head of a school in Kazan. “With whom did he intend to smash the arrogant Hitler?”³⁰⁶ Trotsky, from afar, called Voroshilov “hopelessly compromised among all the thoughtful elements of the army.”³⁰⁷ Voroshilov carried a pistol and was an expert marksman. He lacked Orjonikidze’s courage, however—if suicide can be called courage. Whether the defense commissar contemplated shooting Stalin, we shall never know. Voroshilov had to know he was no substitute leader.

FIFTH COLUMN STORY LINE

Stalin had one of the most exhilarating periods in his life in May–June 1937. He had plotted and carried out a conspiracy to invent a conspiracy, ridding himself of the few plausible alternate leaders, compelled the rest of the upper officer corps to take part, and broken Voroshilov like a dog, while having his handiwork relentlessly acclaimed in newspapers and on radio. But did Stalin understand the price? Unlike Voroshilov, he appreciated Tukhachevsky’s exceptional talent. Stalin did not need Machiavelli to understand that a celebrated military man posed the gravest threat to a prince. (The Florentine had advised that such a commander should either be killed or discredited in the eyes of the army and the people.)³⁰⁸ Molotov said late in life, apropos of Tukhachevsky, “We were not sure whether he would stay firmly on our side at a difficult moment, because he was a rightist” and, unlike Trotskyites, rightists concealed their views. Molotov added, “Had he [Tukhachevsky] not been caught, he would have been very dangerous. He was the most authoritative.”³⁰⁹ True enough, but Stalin could have just had the commander quietly exiled or shot. But the despot had deliberately cut a very wide swath. And he had insisted that the men’s bodies be lacerated until they confessed to being foreign agents.

Mola’s “fifth column” bon mot emerged as the main public justification for the terror offered by representatives of the Soviet regime: a prophylactic action, with inevitable excesses, against potential enemies lying in wait for a foreign aggression. “Is it not clear that as long as capitalist encirclement exists, there will continue to exist among us wreckers, spies, saboteurs, and murderers, sent into our hinterland by the agents of foreign states?” Stalin had asked rhetorically at the February–March 1937 plenum.³¹⁰ He had underlined a similar passage in the draft notes of Molotov’s speech for the plenum, and interrupted Yezhov’s speech with the instruction, about one accused enemy, “And he will save up his strength until the moment of war, when he will really do us a lot of harm.”³¹¹ Mikoyan, a quick learner, mentioned a “fifth column” explicitly in his second speech at the same plenum. Molotov, fifty years later, would explain that Stalin “took no chances. He pitied no one. . . . It was hard to determine the limit where to stop.”³¹²

This way of thinking went beyond Stalin and his henchmen. “I am happy that all this has been uncovered and that our agencies are in a position to expose so much rottenness before the outbreak of war so that we can emerge victorious,” Bukharin, under vicious attack, had stated back at the December 1936 Central Committee plenum, in relation to terror against others, “because had we missed it at the outset and caught it only in the midst of war, that could have led to an extraordinary and terrible defeat for the entire socialist cause.”³¹³ Foreign observers of the Soviet terror also picked up the fifth column rationale.³¹⁴ Many victims, too, linked their annihilation to a pending war (as well as to the “democratic” elections announced with the new constitution).³¹⁵ But Stalin’s butchery was not triggered by the July 1936 military coup and the ensuing civil war in Spain.³¹⁶ Stalin himself almost never used Mola’s piquant “fifth column” phrase. (Bukharin in December 1936 had not actually used the term, either.)

Insiders’ treachery and the “foreign hand” had been core parts of Stalin’s worldview and governing style since his warlord days in Tsaritsyn, his first real exercise of state power, when, in August 1918, he had twenty-one “class enemies” executed for allegedly plotting to assist, from within, the Whites’ capture of the city from without, a bald attempt to galvanize the workers to fight to defend the city. He had explained this technique to the delegation from Mongolia in 1934 and again in 1935. Events in Spain in 1936 provided a dramatic story line, manipulated by him, for the ever greater scale of a domestic offensive against Zinovievites, Trotskyites, and rightists that predated Spain. Stalin acquired an additional way to justify arresting any official in heavy industry and completely unhinging weapons production: actually, he was improving Soviet security, because they wanted to turn the Soviet Union into a second Spain. He could eviscerate Soviet intelligence and diplomacy, but he was making the country more secure. Soviet borders were being penetrated, so he could shoot the border guards to make the country safer.³¹⁷ Stalin could murder anyone on the flimsiest of pretexts, or even without a pretext, and in doing so he could assert that he was fighting tooth and nail to defend socialism and the Soviet state against the kind of rightist military putsch he had been warning about for years, and that Spain concretized.

Spain was convenient but unnecessary for Stalin’s terror. The ideas of capitalist encirclement and the enemy within had been born with the Bolshevik coup itself and become the basis of all Bolshevik propaganda in the 1920s. Stalin had been contemplating the destruction of Bukharin and Tukhachevsky in the precise scenario deployed in 1937 for years. “Is it possible?” he had written to Orjonikidze about interrogation protocols implicating Tukhachevsky in a coup plot with Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. “Of course it is possible.” Stalin had answered his own question: “It seems the rightists are prepared to take the path of military dictatorship if only to escape from the Central Committee, collective and state farms, Bolshevik tempos of industrialization.” Here was the nub of 1937—but the letter had been sent September 24, 1930.³¹⁸

• • •

PERCEIVED SECURITY IMPERATIVES and a need for absolute unity once again turned the quest in Russia to build a strong state into personal rule. The Soviet regime presented multiple paradoxes: gigantic administrative structures and their frequent abolition, re-creation, and reorganization; ponderous proceduralism and pervasive violation of those procedures. Some of this was by design: overlapping jurisdictions was one way Stalin tried to keep minions in check and himself abreast of information. But much of it was unintentional—dictatorship hamstringing itself. Bureaucracies came alive, or failed to do so, on the basis of their boss’s personal dynamism and ability to build and galvanize a personal following. This was true at every level, and especially at the pinnacle.

Tyranny has a circular logic: once a dictator has achieved supreme power, he becomes keener still to hold it, driving him to weed his own ranks of even potential challengers. At the same time, plots linking domestic and foreign foes—who are supposedly caught in the nick of time—constitute one of the oldest devices in the authoritarian handbook. The content of the trumped-up plots is always specific to the culture in question, but the result is always some form of emergency rule, whereby political rivals and opponents are summarily eliminated. Under the interwar Romanian dictatorship, it was the ethnic Hungarian minority and their purported paymasters in Budapest, as well as the Gypsies; in the interwar Polish dictatorsip, it was the Ukrainians and their paymasters in Moscow and Kiev; and everywhere it was the Jews, the ultimate international conspiracy, especially for Hitler, who saw them as ready to engage in internal subversion, in league with Germany’s foreign enemies. The ratcheting up of tensions to fever pitch over subversion scenarios helps galvanize and recruit supporters, burnish regime legitimacy, and tighten central control. Scapegoats promote solidarity. A sacrificial lamb can be a kind of gift from a ruler to followers. But the breathtaking scope, as well as the participation of the targeted, set Stalin’s actions apart.

The Red Army was immense, and the self-inflicted losses—90 percent of the top ranks—represented just 0.5 percent of the whole. But a dearth of good officers to discipline, train, and lead conscripts was precisely its chief vulnerability. Conscripts, for their part, could not be sure who among their commanders would soon be unmasked as a foreign agent. Moreover, all of the Soviet Union’s foreign enemies were watching. On June 24, 1937, the organ of the Wehrmacht (Deutsche Wehr) wrote that in “shooting these well-known military brass of the Soviet Union, they self-consciously sacrificed fighting ability and leadership of the Red Army to politics. Tukhachevsky, unquestionably, was the most outstanding of all Red commanders and cannot be replaced. . . . Supposed espionage, of course, is just made up. If the Bolsheviks maintain that the ‘accused’ have confessed, that is, of course, a lie.” The Nazi party organ, Völkischer Beobachter, wrote of the USSR that “a country with such a system of murder is still included in the group of ‘civilized states.’” The Polish press gleefully pointed out that in light of the espionage charges in Moscow, the French general staff could expect that any secret military plans it might develop with the Soviets would be passed to the Germans.³¹⁹

The Soviet general staff documented the foreign reactions. The damage was severe, but Stalin, far from being deterred, was just beginning.³²⁰ By contrast, his involvement in Spain had effectively peaked as of May–June 1937. Despite the accusatory exaggerations against both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Stalin, even more than Hitler, had deliberately kept his intervention on the Iberian Peninsula within limits. Altogether, between 1,150 and 1,500 Soviet combat personnel would see duty, including 772 pilots and 351 tank operators, a paltry number compared with the 19,000 Germans, let alone the 80,000 Italians who would fight.³²¹ Another 500 or so Soviet military advisers would also serve, but only 9 Soviet political workers were sent to Spain during the entire war.³²² Soviet deaths would be recorded at 125, plus another 43 missing in action.³²³ German dead would be estimated at 300. Italy would suffer 16,650 dead, wounded, and missing in action and would expend at least 6.1 billion lira supporting Franco.³²⁴ (The economic advantages anticipated for Italian support fell largely to Germany.)³²⁵ Stalin’s expenses would be significant (in the form of loans that would not be repaid) but contained.³²⁶ Especially with the “Trotskyite” POUM crushed by spring–summer 1937, Stalin appears to have lost much of his interest.³²⁷ After summer 1937, little new Soviet equipment would be sent or upgrades made, while Soviet pilots and tank crews would be withdrawn, diplomatic ties downgraded, and the heady cultural exchanges terminated.³²⁸

Propaganda on Spain did not disappear, but in Soviet newsreels, China gained ascendancy.³²⁹ On this front as well, Stalin was annihilating his officers. NKVD bigwig Vsevolod Balytsky had been transferred from Ukraine to fabricate a Trotskyite-fascist conspiracy in the Soviet Far Eastern Army, the country’s critical line of defense against Japan; within a few weeks, on July 7, 1937, Balytsky himself was arrested as a Polish agent. He had been in Stalin’s Little Corner more than twenty times in the 1930s. En route eastward, at a Siberian train station, he had unburdened himself of complaints about the terror to a fellow Chekist, who promptly denounced him to Yezhov. The assignment of eviscerating the Soviet Far Eastern Army fell to another butcher.³³⁰ On the country’s southern border, Georgia’s Beria reported to Stalin (July 9) that he had uncovered his own “military conspiracy” in the South Caucasus military district. The next day, Joseph Goebbels recorded in his diary that Hitler judged Stalin “likely diseased in the brain. Otherwise one cannot explain his bloody rule.”³³¹