Stalin

Functionaries inside the police harbored similar delusions. Israel Shreider, who went by Mikhail, a top official in the militia (the regular police), which was subordinated to the NKVD, observed that “at that time, I saw Stalin as a god and blindly believed that he did not know what was going on in the organs of the NKVD.” Arrested himself, he was taken to Moscow’s Butyrka prison, whose cells were crammed with big shots. They were beaten senseless during “interrogations.” None wanted to speak to the others, suspecting that their cell mates were stool pigeons, and each demanded paper so they could write petitions to Stalin to profess their innocence. “Everyone wrote to Stalin,” Shreider explained. “Naturally, in perpetually thinking of Stalin, we frequently saw him in our dreams, spoke with him, proved to him our innocence, complained about the torturer-interrogators.” The next day, Shreider added, they noticed that those who had dreamed of Stalin were summoned to “interrogation” and beaten. “When someone began to report that he had seen Stalin in his dream,” he noted, “the whole cell expressed sympathy.” They noticed that their interrogators would place their petitions to Stalin on the desk during interrogations. “Does Stalin know?” they asked themselves again. “The petitions and complaints are not reaching him!”²⁷⁹

A corollary to the Stalin-did-not-know delusion was the legend of infiltration of the NKVD by enemies aiming to destroy good people. “Everyone more and more talks about the sickness or wrecking by the NKVD leaders,” professor Vladimir Vernadsky (b. 1863), a renowned geochemist and member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, wrote in his diary (January 25, 1938). “More and more heard about Yezhov’s wrecking. Again unnecessary, infuriating severity all around. Again discussion of deliberate wrecking” (February 20).²⁸⁰ A political commissar in the army in Vyazma, near Smolensk, told a military associate, “It looks like party cadres are being destroyed deliberately.”²⁸¹

These and other conjectures—which would echo in the subsequent scholarly literature—offer insight into Soviet mentalities of the time, but no explanation for the terror.²⁸² In Mongolia, there was no old Bolshevism or faux transition to democracy. Mironov had gone back to Ulan Bator, where he would personally help force the arrest of at least 10,000 Mongols in the sparsely populated country, including 300 ministerial officials and 180 military leaders, by the time he returned to Moscow for good in April 1938.²⁸³ A onetime lowly ensign of the tsarist army and then a Soviet border guard, Mironov was promoted to deputy foreign affairs commissar responsible for the strategic Far East, moved into the House on the Embankment, obtaining a high-floor six-room apartment with a view to the Kremlin’s onion domes, and fantasized about becoming foreign affairs commissar. His days were numbered.²⁸⁴

Altogether, at least 20,000 Mongols would be executed over the course of 1937–38. Much of its officialdom—Choibalsan excepted—was obliterated.²⁸⁵ (In Spain, the Soviet terror was infinitesimal in comparison.) More than half of Mongolia’s state budget was now being spent on the military, but the Soviets were forcing annihilation of the small number of Mongolian officers. And even after the massive destruction and replacement, Soviet personnel did not trust the Mongolian army—then again, the executions and lies aroused strong anti-Russian feelings.²⁸⁶ The rampage seemed utterly senseless, insanity.

THE LOGIC OF A WARPED MIND

Back at the February–March 1937 plenum, Stalin had referred to “about 12,000 party members who sympathized with Trotsky to some extent or other [in 1927]. Here you see the total forces of the Trotskyite gentlemen.”²⁸⁷ Accurate or not, he presented this number in a way that was dismissive, not alarmist. Similarly, in his November 1936 opening of the 8th Congress of Soviets, apropos of allowing former kulaks to vote in the elections to the new Supreme Soviet, he had said, “Some say this is dangerous, because elements hostile to Soviet power could sneak into the highest offices, some of the former White Guardists, kulaks, priests, and so on. But really, what is there to fear? . . . For one thing, not all former kulaks, White Guardists, and priests are hostile to Soviet power.”²⁸⁸ Half a year later, he approved orders for mass executions of former kulaks because of the mortal danger they posed. “We have become convinced,” Malenkov had revealingly explained on a trip to annihilate the leadership of the autonomous republic of Tatarstan, inside the Russian republic, “that where the tasks of the party and government are not being fulfilled, we must seek enemies.”²⁸⁹

It sounded like complete cynicism: “seek” (or fabricate) enemies. But in Stalin’s world, which his minions came to share, every allegation derived from a kernel of truth, no matter how minuscule. Tukhachevsky did have meetings with the German military brass (which were fully authorized). Republic and provincial party bosses did fail to implement central directives (which bordered on the impossible). Poland, Germany, and Japan did try to recruit spies on Soviet territory among non-Russian nationalities (standard international practice). Dekulakized peasants did have grievances against Soviet power (they had been dispossessed and deported to frozen wastes). Hostile powers did funnel disinformation into Soviet military intelligence (Stalin was proactively doing the same). Pro-Japanese sentiment did emerge in Mongolia (thanks to inhuman Soviet overlordship). “Bukharin met with Kamenev, they talked, they discussed the policies of the Central Committee and other things,” Kaganovich, late in life, parroting Stalin, reasoned of their ill-advised July 1928 meeting. “Trotsky, who was a good organizer, could have headed a rebellion. . . . Who after all could believe that old, experienced conspirators, using all the experience of Bolshevik conspiratorial methods and Bolshevik organization, that these people would not establish ties among themselves and would not create an organization?”²⁹⁰

Above all, opposition to collectivization had taken place. Stalin seems to have been haunted not by the millions of peasants and nomads who had starved but by the Communist officials who had dared to criticize his rule because of it.²⁹¹ He repeatedly voiced his venom against them, charging that they had lacked the stomach to see through what was necessary. Opposition to collectivization became the leitmotif of the interrogation protocols he demanded and underlined, and of his private and public utterances. Stalin, interrupting Yezhov, had blurted out at the December 1936 plenum about the rightists, “They denied that they had any platform. They had a platform. What did it call for? For the restoration of private enterprise in industry, for the opening of our gates to foreign capital, especially to English capital. . . . For the restoration of private enterprise in agriculture, for the curtailment of the collective farms, for the restoration of the kulaks, for moving the Comintern out of the USSR.”²⁹² It remained only to add a sense of the means for an internal putsch—the Red Army command (around Tukhachevsky), the NKVD leadership (around Yagoda), the Kremlin commandant and bodyguard directorate—to complete the narrative arc from criticism of collectivization to espionage, sabotage, coup.

Stalin presumed that the socialist system’s survival depended on him and that his former comrades desperately wanted to get rid of him. If, additionally, one assumed—as he did—that a foreign military attack was inevitable, and that in the event of war his former comrades could become eager collaborators with the fascists and other foreign enemies—not just out of spite, revenge, or ambition but because only his removal could undo collectivization—then all these people, and anyone who sympathized with or thought like them, had to be eliminated before war broke out. Did critics not understand that all opposition was objectively serving foreign enemies? Who could deny that the Soviet Union faced enemies? Who could deny that the capitalists had intervened against the USSR in the civil war and would do so again? Who could deny that imperialism was aggressive and would stop at nothing? In Spain, “fascists” had risen up in a putsch, and they were being assisted by the foreign fascist powers, and not opposed by the “democratic” ones. What more did anyone need to know? If counterrevolution supported by aggressive foreign intervention could take place in Spain, was it not still more likely to be attempted against the Soviet Union, a strategic country with a fully socialist system? His critics either failed elementary logic or had “lost their minds.”²⁹³

“SPIES”

Pravda had underscored, accurately, that both Japan and Germany were “anti-status-quo powers” and could attain their aims solely through a new world war, a flanking threat Stalin did not invent.²⁹⁴ Soviet intelligence reported that Japan and Germany shared intelligence information about Soviet military capabilities with each other as well as with Poland, which was true. Finland was sharing intelligence with the Japanese about Soviet military capabilities, too. Japan had sent military observer missions to countries encircling the USSR—Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Latvia—and Stalin regularly received reports, culled from decoded Japanese military attaché communications, of a possible Japanese attack on the USSR. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), had met the Japanese military attaché to Berlin (Hiroshi Ōshima) in 1936, and the next year he met an intelligence official of the Finnish general staff (Antero Svensson). The Abwehr also extended financial assistance to Estonian intelligence.²⁹⁵ Of course, all the powers in the interwar period were targeted by foreign espionage. The international situation in the 1930s posed a threat to every great power, but only one embarked on a wholesale domestic slaughter. Nazi Germany was crawling with spies, especially spies working on behalf of the Soviet Union, but again, Hitler did not put to death his own officials and intelligence officers.²⁹⁶ Stalin had even his policy critics charged as “spies.”

Stalin did not invent the hoary trope of the “foreign hand” (externally assisted conspiracy to undermine the state). Allegations of a foreign hand at court had contributed mightily to the erosion of Nicholas II’s legitimacy during the Great War; Kerensky, nearly successfully, had leveled the foreign hand charge against Lenin and the Bolsheviks. It was a device straight out of the authoritarian handbook, playing to patriotic stirrings and insecurities—in Russia’s case, of a complex geography—and it was powerfully reinforced by the Bolshevik division of the world into two hostile camps, socialism and capitalism. For years, Stalin had been driving Soviet propagandists and the NKVD to find the foreign hand behind everything: in the 1928 Shakhty trial (French and German agents), in Ukrainian resistance to collectivization (Polish agents, relying on the British and the French), in the 1932 rebellion in the satellite Mongolia (Japanese agents), in the Kirov murder (German agents, even as he had discouraged investigation of the actual leads to the Latvian and German consulates). But 1937–38 was different.

Nothing had prepared the Soviet populace for the explosion of spy mania that now engulfed the country.²⁹⁷ Although Stalin’s November 1934 instructions to the Mongols had stated that critics needed to be charged as spies, and his politburo resolution of September 29, 1936, had insisted that the Zinoviev-Trotskyite conspirators be seen as “intelligence agents, spies, subversives, and wreckers of the fascist bourgeoisie,” in the second half of 1936—during the outbreak of the Spanish civil war and Stalin’s decision to intervene there militarily—there had been no full-throated public campaign of mass charges of spying. Then, under Stalin’s tutelage, Pravda carried a sensational article (May 4, 1937) across three pages, “On Certain Cunning Techniques of Recruitment by Foreign Intelligence,” which Stalin had edited and which was widely reprinted and assigned for discussion at meetings throughout the country. It asserted that inside the USSR, Nazi Germany possessed “a reserve that could be called upon for espionage work.”²⁹⁸ Stalin had inserted a page of material into the draft about an alleged incident concerning a Soviet employee in Japan who had met a female “aristocrat” in a restaurant. Once, during their rendezvous, a Japanese in military uniform arrived to announce he was the woman’s husband. Another Japanese man appeared and proposed that he could quiet the scandal by having the Soviet man sign a document promising to inform the Japanese about internal Soviet affairs. The truce maker, Stalin explained, was a Japanese intelligence operative. The Soviet man had unwittingly been recruited to spy for Japan. It could happen.²⁹⁹

But the number of accused spies was just too large for such a person-by-person recruitment. In 1935–36, the NKVD had arrested 9,965 foreign “spies.” (By comparison, in France, 300 foreign passport holders and 48 French nationals were noted as suspected enemy agents in 1936.) Then, in 1937–38, the NKVD arrested 265,039 spies.³⁰⁰ This included nearly 19,000 just for Latvia and 7,800 just for Romania. Who exactly could be running more than a quarter million spies among the Soviet populace? Who gave them their directives? To whom did they report? Stalin did not publicly address this issue of spy handlers, and it is easy to see why.

The small number of ordinary citizen foreign passport holders who remained resident in the USSR were registered and monitored.³⁰¹ As for accredited representatives of foreign governments, they numbered 1,129 at embassies in Moscow and some 400 at twenty-four consulates.³⁰² This foreign diplomatic community—as Stalin knew better than anyone—was under the most intense surveillance. The sixty-two employees of the German embassy in Moscow (as of 1938) were kept under unrelenting watch and nearly total isolation from the Soviet public.³⁰³ Even leaving aside the fact that every Soviet inhabitant knew the inevitable consequences of any contact with foreigners, let alone with foreign diplomatic personnel, the idea that these few German employees could have recruited and handled 39,000 accused German spies among the Soviet populace in 1937–38 beggars belief. True, Germany also had a few foreign consulates, but Stalin, in a tit for tat, had forced one German mission after another to close: Leningrad, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Novosibirsk.³⁰⁴ By spring 1938, not just Germany, but Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Britain, and Afghanistan had all lost their consulates in the Soviet Union.

Not surprisingly, internal German foreign ministry records indicate that of the approximately 1,100 German nationals who would be arrested for intelligence operations in the USSR from 1936 to 1941, just two had any such involvement, and one vanished without trace.³⁰⁵ The head of the security agency for the Wehrmacht admitted internally in 1938 that he lacked a firm idea of how Soviet military intelligence worked.³⁰⁶

The number of accused Polish spies was even greater than the number of German ones. In fact, Polish sabotage activities on Soviet territory had not suddenly increased; they had been going on, closely watched and interdicted, for a long time. Until 1937, Poland maintained consulates in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, Kiev, Minsk, and Tiflis, but Poland managed to hold on to just two (Kiev, Minsk), in exchange for which the Soviet Union kept one in Poland (Lwów) and one in the Free City of Danzig (Gdańsk).³⁰⁷ Stalin’s counterintelligence measures apparently induced the Polish embassy and consulates on Soviet territory to desist from recruiting agents among Soviet ethnic Poles (who mostly did not live in Moscow, Kiev, or Minsk in any case).³⁰⁸ But the arrest of Polish “spies” among Soviet inhabitants continued, exceeding 101,000 by the end of 1938, a spectacularly improbable workload for one embassy and two consulates.

Despite the mass arrests, Stalin had no idea whether he was catching any real foreign spies or, if he was, what harm they might have caused—and what is more, he made virtually no effort to find out. Japanese army intelligence did send small numbers of White Russian émigrés and Koreans across the barely marked frontiers to recruit or bribe the disaffected among the Soviet population.³⁰⁹ But the NKVD arrested nearly 53,000 Soviet inhabitants as agents of Japan in 1937–38. All “testimony” about their espionage and sabotage was either suggested or outright written by their interrogators, in the pursuit of arrest quotas. “Spies” and “terrorists” captured at or near border crossings were lumped together with contrabandists (ordinary people engaged in petty trade).³¹⁰ Dubiously, the country for which an arrested Soviet inhabitant was allegedly engaged in acts of espionage and sabotage was often altered at the very last minute. If a person had an ethnic Polish wife or relative, he or she would usually be charged as a Polish spy, unless all of a sudden the accused was needed for a “case” involving German spies (or Japanese, or Romanian, and so on).³¹¹ To be sure, an excuse for such sloppiness was at the ready: better to chop off some innocent heads than to let even one spy go free. War was coming. But then, as we shall see, in 1939 and 1940—after a new world war had commenced—the NKVD would arrest a measly 7,620 spies, a quarter million fewer than in 1937–38.³¹²

The NKVD’s egregious violation of elementary rules of counterintelligence craft in the treatment of alleged spies in 1937–38 mattered only if Stalin was primarily pursuing foreign agents in the conventional sense, meaning people who committed specific acts. But he had called every foreigner in the Soviet Union ipso facto a spy, beginning with humanitarian relief workers during the first Soviet famine of 1921–23.³¹³ For him, “spying” seems to have encompassed an extraordinarily wide variety of activities, including clipping newspapers.³¹⁴ At closed party meetings and sessions in the Little Corner, he mostly insisted that those arrested were actual spies engaged in specific acts.³¹⁵ He would tell minions that penetration by foreign spies was increasing, such information would then duly appear in intelligence reports sent to him, and he would cite the reports. At meetings, he scribbled notes about saboteurs, spies, and the like.³¹⁶ Did Stalin, at some level, convince himself that the USSR was crawling with spies and would-be spies ready to act when the opportunity presented itself? Perhaps he did, but his charges of espionage were based not on facts but on a political equation. Kaganovich absorbed Stalin’s way of thinking, remarking at the February–March 1937 plenum that “if they stand for defeat [of the Soviet Union], it’s clear they are spies.”³¹⁷

SYNOPSIS

World history had never before seen such carnage by a regime against itself, as well as its own people—not in the French Revolution, not under Italian fascism or Nazism. Although it was clear to no one at the time, the future bloodbath was latent in Stalin’s policy battles with what he called the right deviation in 1928 and especially 1929, when he took evident pleasure in humiliating Bukharin. It was also manifest in Stalin’s toying with the arrest of Tukhachevsky in 1930, and propelled by the opposition in the party during collectivization and the famine in 1932. It was facilitated by Stalin’s promotion of Yezhov inside the party apparatus, to oversee the NKVD and the reopening of the Kirov assassination case in 1935, followed by arrest waves of Trotskyites in late 1935 and early 1936.³¹⁸ Unsatisfied with the convictions of Zinoviev and Kamenev for creating a “moral atmosphere” conducive to Kirov’s murder, Stalin had insisted that they be directly implicated in the actual deed, and that Trotsky, in foreign exile, be directly implicated, too. From here it was a short step to the incited public hysteria of the first Moscow showcase trial, staged in August 1936, of Zinovievites and Trotskyites, which fixated on a meeting in 1932 when the two tiny, pathetic groupings had attempted to coordinate, and resulted in the executions of Zinoviev and Kamenev.

Stalin drove the process with his desire to break psychologically the loyalists in his inner circle, above all Orjonikidze but also Kaganovich and Voroshilov, and he further intensified it with his desire to counter Trotsky’s condemnatory writings about his betrayal of the revolution and interdict the possibility of a Trotskyite beachhead in Spain under a dissident (non-Stalinist) Marxist party, the POUM, some of whose members had once been associated with Trotsky or continued to admire him. A second trial of “Trotskyites,” in January 1937, was followed by Orjonikidze’s suicide and an unprecedented eleven-day February–March 1937 Central Committee plenum, which included fatal smearing of Bukharin and Yagoda and Stalin’s threat to replace sitting elites wholesale; an early June 1937 special session of the Main Military Council and a mid-June in-camera trial resulting in executions of Tukhachevsky and the military brass; a late June 1937 party plenum outlining a phantasmagorical “Center of Centers”; the launching, in July–August 1937, of “mass operations” with ever-expanding quotas; the annihilation of republic and provincial party machines, of the Comintern, foreign affairs commissariat, foreign intelligence, and military intelligence; the disruption of the industrial economy, including military industry; the August 1937 coup-rampage in Mongolia; some forty provincial showcase trials, mostly in fall 1937, ordered up by central directive; a January 1938 plenum’s concessions to party wailings about NKVD savagery, accompanied by extensions of the mass operations. The third Moscow trial, in March 1938, seemed to mark a public culmination of sorts, but the carnage was far from over.

Mass terror by the regime against its own elites and masses, like collectivization, was both an inherent possibility within the Bolshevik revolutionary project and a choice Stalin alone made—and saw through. Collectivization (a violent conscription of the peasantry to serve the state) and its attendant horrors were necessary to consolidate the Bolshevik project of a political monopoly hell-bent on a noncapitalist modernity (collectivization would not be repudiated after Stalin’s death). The mass terror constituted a gratuitous infliction of phenomenal violence, although for Stalin, in many ways, the party’s recoil at the costs of collectivization precipitated his terror. The best indication that the terror inhered in Bolshevism was the relative ease with which Stalin could foist the bloodbath upon the political police, army, party-state, cultural elites, and indeed the entire country. The best indication of his singular role in doing so was the fact that it blindsided even his intimates. Molotov, no softie, did not see the mass arrests and executions coming (he was still vouching for some former repentant Trotskyites in fall 1936).³¹⁹ “Gradually,” Molotov would explain later in life, “things came to light in a sharp struggle in various areas.”³²⁰ Stalin would have Molotov’s top aides arrested in 1937–38. Orjonikidze, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov—Stalinists all—not only failed to foresee but resisted the wholesale expansion into their spheres of the wrecking-espionage mania, publicly stating that wreckers and spies were few.

There could have been no such terror without the Communist party and its ideology, but there would have been no such terror without Stalin, and his profoundly dark personality, immense strength of will, and political skill.³²¹ At least 383 execution lists signed by him have survived, containing the names of more than 43,000 “enemies of the people,” mostly the highest-level officials and officers. The terror was centrally implemented by Nikolai Yezhov and Mikhail Frinovsky of the NKVD.³²² Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Zhdanov, Andreyev, and Malenkov cosigned the mass sentencing lists prepared for the “politburo,” and traveled as emissaries to multiple locales to pour oil on the flames. Pravda, under the frenzied editorship of Lev Mekhlis—whose deeply tortured soul even Stalin remarked upon—served as an indispensable fulcrum of public direction of the terror. Of those who implemented the terror regionally, among the most rabid proved to be such NKVD operatives as Sergei Mironov (Western Siberia and Mongolia) and Leonid Zakovsky (Leningrad and Moscow). But Stalin relentlessly drove them.³²³ Had he wanted only to break the will of his own inner circle, he could have accomplished that without mass graves. Had he, despite his dictatorial grip, felt a need to subjugate even more the secret police and the military brass, he could have done that with a surgical strike. Had he wanted to force supposedly noncompliant elites to become more obedient, he did not need to have so many sitting officials killed—and then, often, their replacements as well.

Stalin showed no sign that he was in the least tormented by the slaughter—he received an outpouring of furious or grief-stricken letters from wives, mothers, daughters, sons, brothers of the arrested, begging for his intercession to stop the madness, and he ignored them—but he did show awareness of the security consequences of what he was doing.³²⁴ In August 1937, at a large gathering of political workers in the Red Army, he had asked the rapporteur “how Red Army soldiers were reacting to the fact that there were commanders who were trusted, and suddenly criticized, and arrested?” The rapporteur was put on the spot—was the question a provocation? In response, he gently admitted the obvious: doubts were being expressed about the guilt of accused Red Army commanders. Stalin shot back: “Are there facts here of a loss of authority of the party, the authority of the military leadership?” Was it a rhetorical question, even a kind of confession? The despot continued: “Like this: One tries to parse this out, today one turns in so and so, and then they arrest him. God parse it out, whom to believe?” The rapporteur responded: “Comrade Stalin here put the question about whether the authority of the party, the authority of the army, has been undermined. I must say, no.” Stalin interjected: “A little undermined.”³²⁵ He knew.

NONCAUSES

Very few people had come to know Stalin well, and those who did, he confounded. “Speaking about myself, I can say that I knew two Stalins,” Mikoyan would write. “The first, whom I valued a great deal and respected as an old comrade, for the first ten years, and then a completely different person in the later period. . . . I was able to grasp the full measure of Stalin’s dictatorial tendencies and actions only when it was already too late to struggle against him. Orjonikidze and Kirov, with whom I was very close and whose attitudes I understood, ended up in the same position of being deceived by the ‘first’ guise of Stalin.” However self-exculpatory, Mikoyan’s assessment rings true. Kaganovich, late in life, said much the same. “The postwar was a different Stalin,” he remarked. “The prewar, different. Between ’32 and the ’40s, different. Until ’32, completely different. He changed. I saw no fewer than five-six different Stalins.” Khrushchev, too, differentiated an earlier from a later ruler. “In the early 1930s, Stalin was very simple and accessible,” he recalled, but then Stalin changed, for reasons that Khrushchev, who continued to worship him, never figured out.³²⁶

Stalin’s darkening mental disposition has often been attributed to the 1932 protest-suicide of his second wife, Nadya. Some have also pointed to the December 1934 assassination and loss of his rare close friend Sergei Kirov in Leningrad (for which Stalin was blamed). That these events had an outsized emotional impact on him is plausible. One of his bodyguards recalled late in life that Stalin would sit for long periods at Nadya’s grave, in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery. Svetlana, who was six at the time of her mother’s death and kept away from the funeral, asserted that her father never visited the grave, but she, too, insisted that her father never got over Nadya’s death.³²⁷ That said, direct evidence regarding the evolution of Stalin’s psychology remains extremely thin. Moreover, much of the core terror scenario in Stalin’s mind predated 1932, while the mass murders did not follow closely after the 1932 or 1934 events. So, although the assertion that he snapped in 1932 (or 1934) might well be true, it does not solve the riddle of why he launched and saw through such a mass killing several years later.

By far the simplest of all explanations would be to attribute the terror to paranoia, a kind of hallucinatory aria.³²⁸ Stalin suspected the worst of people, and he received an endless stream of reports confirming his suspicions.³²⁹ Never mind that he was the arch-plotter: They were out to get him. Never mind that he was an inveterate liar: They were lying to him, sabotaging his directives, covering up their mistakes. He suspected that the effusive affirmations of his leadership were two-faced, and that officials were privately thinking critical thoughts. Yezhov, like Yagoda before him, dutifully assembled overheard remarks (real or invented), and the despot read them.³³⁰ The prisons, too, were eavesdropped on, and the transcripts delivered to Stalin.³³¹ Stalin was compulsively eager for denunciations (and therefore susceptible to people’s efforts to annihilate rivals), and once he had read a denunciation about someone, he found it difficult to put it out of mind: suspicions had been raised. When informed that someone had bad-mouthed him behind his back, Stalin would undergo a “psychological metamorphosis,” according to Svetlana. “At this point—and this was where his cruel, implacable nature showed itself—the past ceased to exist for him. Years of friendship and fighting side by side in a common cause might as well never have been. . . . ‘So you’ve betrayed me,’ some inner demon would whisper. ‘I don’t even know you anymore.’”³³²

Distrust is the disease of the tyrant. Stalin’s “maniacal suspiciousness” was extreme even by those standards, something he himself would occasionally acknowledge.³³³ And yet, even beyond the fact that none of the psychological diagnoses of him have been based upon direct medical evidence, the emphasis on his paranoia can be overdone. He showed tremendous self-control, rarely raised his voice, rarely displayed anger (and if so, usually with his eyes).³³⁴ At the parades on Red Square, he did not wear a bulletproof vest under his overcoat.³³⁵ He did not employ a double. His chief bodyguard would recall not only that “Stalin did not like it when he was accompanied by security,” but that he would walk the streets of Sochi and greet the crowds, shaking hands. (We have already noted similar behavior in his one joyride on the metro.) Stalin’s obsession over poison and assassination ran deep. But if he was paranoiac, he was also lucidly strategic. The evidence for an extremely high degree of calculation behind the terror is overwhelming.³³⁶

A THEORY AND PRACTICE OF RULE

The terror was not about some imagined Georgian national proclivity to violence, Stalin’s supposed criminal energy, an outgrowth of beatings by his father, a result of the authoritarian snitch culture of the Tiflis seminary, feelings of inadequacy and shame before genuine Bolsheviks, the suicide of his wife, the death of Kirov, or Stalin’s paranoiac streak. It was an outgrowth of his rule.

Stalin’s great conundrum was the state. He studied the art of rule via books rather than contemporary examples, and was conversant with German philosophy (Fichte, Hegel), Russia’s revolutionary tradition (nihilism, the People’s Will, Plekhanov), and the French Revolution (Jacobinism, Robespierre, Thermidor).³³⁷ Machiavelli was known to him via the socialist revolutionary tradition in a way that the Florentine was not for the Nazis. Stalin underlined a variety of passages in his 1869 Russian translation of The Prince (“It is unnatural that the armed should submit to the unarmed”; “Princes may, without dread, be severe in wartime”).³³⁸ He also underlined a passage noting that “Chinggis Khan killed many people, saying, ‘The deaths of the vanquished are necessary for the conquerors’ peace of mind.’”³³⁹ But Stalin never extolled the Mongolian khan, except privately to Mongols, and he had discovered his saying in Vasily Klyuchevsky’s Course of Russian History (1916). Stalin systematically studied works on autocratic rule, such as Vatslav Vorovsky’s On the Nature of Absolutism, in volume 1 of his Works (1933) and Mikhail Olminsky’s The State, Bureaucracy, and Absolutism in the History of Russia, third edition (1925).³⁴⁰ He had become passionately devoted to the study of ancient Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, marking up Robert Vipper’s Essays on the History of the Roman Empire (originally Berlin, 1923), especially passages on Augustus.³⁴¹ Stalin had taken to studying up on how to be a despot.

Even as his reading had widened, it remained anchored in Marx and Lenin.³⁴² But of the many gaping holes in Marx’s oeuvre, by far the greatest was the relative inattention to the state, and not just in the transition period from capitalism to socialism (and on to communism), but in general—a gap Lenin did not fill.³⁴³ To the extent that Stalin allowed himself rare criticisms of Lenin, it was on the question of the state.³⁴⁴ In his copy of a 1935 reissue of Lenin’s State and Revolution, for example, Stalin had marked the passage about the survival (rather than withering) of the state in the initial stage of a classless society—so on that, Lenin was correct—but when Lenin quoted Engels about the class-oppressive nature of all states, including socialist ones, Stalin wrote in the margin, “No!”³⁴⁵ In his copy of a 1937 reissue of Marx’s The Civil War in France, next to the passage about how all states had a “class character,” Stalin would write, “Not only.”³⁴⁶ But what else, exactly? And what to say about the issue of his personal dictatorship, which was not anticipated in Marxist theory, to put it mildly? In the ideologized Communist context, these questions demanded an answer. Marxism-Leninism did not explain the operation of “bureaucracy,” except as an inherent degeneration that should not have existed in the first place.

Not coincidentally, the Soviet state and its functionaries happened to be the grand theme of Trotsky’s anti-Stalin Marxist writings. Stalin was made to wonder: should he proactively prevent the consolidation of a bureaucratic “class” by deliberately upending it? If so, how would that help the Soviet state manage the economy or the country’s defense? Should he ensure that the revolutionary regime not “degenerate,” as revolutionaries turned into bureaucrats, and instead remove them so that new, younger leaders could come to the fore to regenerate the revolution?³⁴⁷ In the event, Stalin decided to force a radical reinvention of the Soviet elite, in the mold of the young striver he had once been, executing or incarcerating those he deemed to be of a bygone epoch while promoting and nurturing hundreds of thousands of new people.³⁴⁸

Stalin’s carnage made him more preoccupied than ever with identifying and promoting people, to fill the vacant positions in the mammoth and still growing apparatus.³⁴⁹ He blended incited pandemonium and mass murder with an ambitious, people-centric exercise in statecraft. Statecraft may seem a bizarrely incongruous framework for understanding the mass murder of one’s own people. To be clear, the challenges of running and conceptualizing the state under socialism did not cause the terror. His obsessions with criticism of collectivization, Trotsky, and the independence of his own inner circle were the key drivers. Still, the challenges of the state’s operation and personnel were the context in which Stalin acted. He apparently hoped that younger, more energetic, and—ultimately—better-educated functionaries would better spur economic development, because of dynamism and superior political consciousness. Those who had been through the trials of revolution, collectivization, and industrialization were exhausted, morally and politically, susceptible to temptation, whether through blandishments proffered by foreign agents or the indulgence of the high life. Their replacements, no less significantly, would all be beholden to Stalin utterly.³⁵⁰

This went far beyond patronage. Instinctively didactic, Stalin was at heart a pedagogue. A critical core of his inner being consisted of an ethos and practice of self-improvement, a result of his initial leap at the Gori school, studies at the seminary, discovery of Marxism, path into punditry, and triumph over the intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals atop the party. Stalin “worked very hard to improve himself,” Molotov, the longest close observer, would later recall.³⁵¹ In turn, the advancement of new people to high positions, and their personal growth while in those positions, became defining elements in his self-conception as the leader who opened opportunity to them. Young cadres, he argued, could lead by mastering Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and the ins and outs of technology. He latched on to younger people, those who represented the future, products of the soil and the shop floor, as well as of the evening technical and party courses, bootstrapping just as he had and in need of mentoring. The terror enabled him to play the role of teacher to a populous new generation of functionaries, a fundamental trait of his persona and of his conception of rule. He directed showcase trials, the content of confessions extracted even in the absence of trials, and newspaper reportage to tell stories and teach lessons.

All the while, Stalin purposefully ratcheted up fear to strengthen political control and mobilize the entire country to a state of high tension, a technique of rule undergirded by his connect-the-dots theory of party opposition to forced collectivization leading inexorably to a putsch on behalf of foreign powers—it was at once ludicrous and logical, and he repeated it over and over again, in public and in private. “In the face of the danger of military attack,” he was quoted as saying in a 1938 book on “defense dramaturgy,” by the theater critic Zinaida Chalaya, “our entire people must be kept in the condition of mobilization readiness, so that no ‘accident’ or tricks by our external enemies could catch us off guard.”³⁵² Stalin worked tirelessly to put the country in the grip of fear, supposedly for its own benefit.

• • •

NO ONE HAD TALKED more about the coming war than Stalin, as he drove the country’s military buildup, but then he attacked all the institutions critical for a war effort, and not just the armed forces. In the foreign affairs commissariat, at least one third of all staff would be either executed or imprisoned, including nearly two thirds of the upper echelons.³⁵³ Soviet trade representatives abroad were also destroyed en masse, absurdly accused of embezzling and funneling hundreds of thousands of rubles to Trotsky and Sedov, even as NKVD foreign intelligence’s agent in Paris lent Trotsky’s son in Paris sums of 10 to 15 francs that he had trouble paying back.³⁵⁴ In NKVD foreign intelligence, there would be nearly 100 arrests in 1937–38, including at least a dozen station chiefs abroad; in Berlin, Stalin cleaned house, arresting nearly every NKVD operative there. Military intelligence fared still worse, losing 182 operational staff to arrests in 1937–38. “You are aware that, in essence, there is no intelligence gathering,” the head of the political administration in Soviet military intelligence reported to Mekhlis in 1938. “We have no military attaché in America, Japan, England, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Finland, Iran, Turkey, that is, in almost every major country.”^{355, 356} For 127 consecutive days in 1938, Stalin did not receive any information whatsoever from NKVD foreign intelligence.

Stalin’s terror, not born of any fundamental crisis, caused multiple crises. Many officials who remained at large yearned for an end to the mass arrests, because they feared not just for themselves but for the country.³⁵⁷ People at home and abroad who had not questioned Stalin’s rule before now did so.³⁵⁸ Would he come to see the scope of his damage? Would the “Center of Centers” operating out of the Little Corner just keep framing and murdering people indefinitely?