Stalin

He evinced no fondness for workers—unless they had been promoted to white-collar functionaries.¹¹¹ “We have about 8 million officials,” he continued. “Just imagine this. This is the apparatus, with whose assistance the workers govern the country. . . . How could we not cultivate this apparatus in the spirit of Marxism?” He insisted that theory was their weak point. “What is theory?” he asked, in his cathechismic style. “It is knowledge of the laws of society, knowledge that enables one to get oriented in a situation, but in this orientation process they turned out to be bad Marxists, bad because we raised them badly.” The consequences, he repeated, were dire: “If a fascist should show up, our cadres need to know how to struggle against him, and not be scared of him, and not to withdraw from and not to kowtow to him, as happened with a significant part of the Trotskyites and Bukharinites, formerly our people, who then went over to the other side.” Stalin had been compelled again and again to battle against deviations: Communists kept losing their way. These were not petty squabbles among personalities, but battles over correct theory. People who misunderstood theory made mistakes, such as opposing collectivization. He told the propagandists not to fear if some comrades did not enter the kingdom of socialism.

“And so, to whom is this book addressed?” Stalin summarized. “To cadres, and to rank-and-file workers at factories—not to rank-and-file white-collar employees in agencies, but to those cadres about whom Lenin said they are professional revolutionaries. The book is addressed to leading cadres.”¹¹² But in the discussion of Stalin’s remarks, some attendees dared to note the difficulties of assimilating the text. A. B. Shlyonsky, for example, called the Short Course “an encyclopedia of everything known about matters of Marxism-Leninism,” but he wondered where the heroes were. He suggested a need for materials to supplement the text with stories of individuals.¹¹³ Stalin, mentioning Shlyonsky by name, retorted that “we were presented with this sort of draft text [with heroes] and we revised it fundamentally. The draft text was based for the most part on exemplary individuals—those who were the most heroic, those who escaped from exile and how many times they escaped, those who suffered in the name of the cause.” But, Stalin continued, “can we really use such a thing to train and educate our cadres? We ought to base our cadres’ training on ideas, on theory . . . knowledge of the laws of historical development. If we possess such knowledge, then we’ll have real cadres, but if people do not possess this knowledge, they will not be cadres—they will be just empty spaces. . . . It is ideas that really matter, not individuals—ideas, in a theoretical context.”¹¹⁴

• • •

ON SEPTEMBER 30, 1938, around 9:30 a.m. local time (11:30 a.m. in Moscow), eight hours after the signing of the Munich Pact but well before German troops had entered Czechoslovakia, Beneš phoned the Soviet ambassador and inquired whether the Czechoslovaks should take arms and, by implication, whether the USSR would back them in a war even without the French. He asked for an answer between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. local time. Given the repeated negative signals over the previous two weeks, this action is not easy to comprehend. The Soviet ambassador drove to Prague Castle to seek further information, but Beneš was meeting with the cabinet and leaders of political parties. Around 11:45 a.m. local time, the Soviet legation cabled the Czechoslovak president’s query to Moscow.¹¹⁵ Before Moscow replied, Alexandrovsky cabled the foreign affairs commissariat again, at 1:40 p.m. Prague time, to report that Beneš had already accepted the Munich diktat (he had done so at 12:30 p.m. local time).¹¹⁶ The foreign affairs commissariat suspected that Beneš had wanted to claim that his hand had been forced because of the absence of a Soviet reply.¹¹⁷ He in fact made no such claim, though he had to have been tempted. More likely, Beneš did not want to give up. The Czechoslovak high command had told him that the army stood ready to fight, with or without allies. Had Beneš ordered the formidable Czechoslovak divisions into action against Germany, he might have forced Stalin’s hand, and that of the French government, too. The Czechoslovak president chose not to take the gamble.¹¹⁸

Stalin remained at the gathering of propagandists, where his frustrations had been building daily, and on October 1, the concluding day, he vented in a lengthy soliloquy. “Comrades, I thought that the assembled comrades would help the Central Committee and furnish some serious criticism,” he remarked. “Unfortunately, I must say that the criticism turned out to be not serious, not deep, and straight-out unsatisfactory in places.” He condemned the complaints that this or that fact was missing from the text, when the point was to capture the general tendency. “He who would study Leninism and Lenin should study Marx and Engels,” he reiterated. “Lenin arrived at new thoughts because he stood on the shoulders of Marx and Engels.” Stalin narrated the entire history of the party, in detail, from origins, like an agitator of the first rank. He could also turn playful. “It’s often asked: What’s the deal? Marx and Engels said that as soon as proletarian power is established and nationalizes the means of production, the state should wither. What the hell? It does not wither? Its death is overdue. We’ve lived twenty years, the means of production have been nationalized, and you don’t want to wither. (Laughter.)” In fact, he explained, no one had foreseen that the revolution would give birth to a new form of power. “Of course, the Petersburg proletariat, when they created soviets [of people’s deputies], did not think that they were conducting a turnabout in Marxist theory about the specific forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They just wanted to defend themselves against tsarism.” In The Communist Manifesto, which Stalin deemed “one of the best if not the best writing of Marx and Engels,” the founders had based their view of the state on the two months of the Paris Commune. “An experience of two months!” What would they have said, he asked, if they could study the twenty years of Soviet power?

Stalin had been wrestling with the problem of the state under socialism throughout the terror. Now he enumerated the state’s functions: maximizing production and military defense by mobilizing the country’s resources. Only a professional army, he pointed out, could stand up to the armies of the capitalists.¹¹⁹ He made clear that success could not be guaranteed by his leadership alone, or by the 3,000 or so officials who composed what he called the “general staff” of the party-state. “Do not think that governing a country means just writing directives,” he reiterated. “Bollocks. To govern means to do things for real, to be able to carry out the resolutions in practice, and even sometimes to improve the resolutions if they are bad.” In other words, reading the Short Course was going to facilitate handling the confounding challenges of planning and running an entire industrial economy, the complicated operations and logistics of preparing a gigantic army for battle, ensuring that every school building and schoolchild was ready for the school year or graduation. “We need to direct this book to that intelligentsia, in order to give party members and non-party members, who are not worse than party members, the opportunity to acquire knowledge and raise their horizon, their political level. . . . That’s everything. (Rousing applause. Shouts: Hurrah to the Wise Stalin.)”¹²⁰

Pravda (October 1, 1938) had directed its wrath over Czechoslovakia at Poland, predicting a new Polish partition (it was “well known that the German fascists have long been keen on some parts of Poland”). In fact, that very day, the government in Warsaw delivered an ultimatum, with a twenty-four-hour deadline, to Czechoslovakia to hand over two thirds of that country’s partially ethnic Polish territory in coal-rich Silesia known as Těšín (Cieszyn) and Fryštát (Freistadt); Prague capitulated, rendering a Polish attack unnecessary.¹²¹ “An exceptionally bold action carried out in brilliant fashion,” Göring enthused to the Polish ambassador. The Polish envoy in Germany imagined “that our step was deemed here such an expression of great strength and independent action that it is a true guarantee of our good relations with the government of the Reich.”¹²² Stalin knew that Poland’s 1938 war games had been defensive in character, but the collusion in Czechoslovakia’s dismemberment, in his thinking, put Poland on a plane with Nazi Germany.¹²³ Poland had ignored Soviet warnings, although the Polish ambassador to Moscow reassured the Soviets that “the guiding line of Polish foreign policy is the status quo: nothing with Germany against the USSR and nothing with the USSR against Germany.”¹²⁴ Still, the Soviets let it be known that the Poles were engaged in a dangerous game: there were more than 6 million Ukrainians and 2 million Belorussians in Poland.

• • •

CZECHOSLOVAKIA, AFTER AUSTRIA, became the second great collective missed opportunity of 1938. Very late on the night of October 2, 1938, after Germany and now Poland had carved up Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union—diplomatically silent for more than thirty-six hours—delivered an affirmative response to the Czechoslovak president’s request for unilateral Soviet military support. Moscow’s absurdly tardy response, the pinnacle of cynicism, even rebuked Beneš for having failed to fight Germany.¹²⁵ Japan’s military brass were crestfallen that Munich had defused a European war, which they had hoped would diminish European backing for Chiang Kai-shek and compel his capitulation.¹²⁶ As for Hitler, despite the windfall of territory, population, and industry, he had been denied a battlefield triumph, settling for his ostensible aim (the Sudetenland), as opposed to his real one (all of Czechoslovakia).¹²⁷ France’s perceptive military attaché in Berlin rightly reported to Paris that the Führer viewed Munich as a defeat, and that the Nazis wanted to ramp up propaganda to combat “the profound lassitude which the German people demonstrated when faced with the prospect of another war.”¹²⁸

Back in London, Chamberlain, appearing in front of exuberant crowds on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with the king and queen, and again outside his official residence at 10 Downing Street, hailed the Munich Pact as “peace for our time.”¹²⁹ Izvestiya (October 4, 1938) acidly wrote, “It is the first time we know of that the seizure of someone else’s territory, the shift of borders guaranteed by international treaties to foreign armies, is nothing less than a ‘triumph’ or ‘victory’ for peace.” How often did the Soviet press carry the truth? But for Stalin, too, Munich was a defeat. The German ambassador to the Soviet Union had correctly reported to Berlin the sour mood in Moscow.¹³⁰ Soviet inaction—however the Kremlin justified it—damaged the country’s international standing. Munich also starkly demonstrated Soviet international friendlessness while militarily opening a clear path eastward for Hitler. “History tells us,” Stalin himself had observed in an interview with Roy Howard back in 1936, “that when a state wishes to attack a state with which it does not share a border, it begins to create new borders until it neighbors the state it wishes to attack.”¹³¹

Hitler had aggressively shifted his borders farther eastward, in Stalin’s direction, and the Western powers had acquiesced. “The second imperialist war has already started,” reemphasized the twelfth and final chapter of the Short Course. “The characteristic aspect of the second imperialist war is that it is carried on and widened by the aggressive powers, while the other powers, the ‘democratic’ ones, against whom the war is being waged, pretend that the war does not concern them.”¹³² Shrewdly, the Polish ambassador to London, Count Edward Raczyński, likened the 1938 Munich Pact to a football match wherein Chamberlain had defended the British goal and shifted “play” to Stalin’s side of the pitch. Litvinov was said to have exclaimed, according to the NKVD, that the deal handing Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to the Nazis portended “an attack on us. . . . War is coming. The one small hope is that Germany somehow rethinks. Perhaps someone will persuade Hitler.”¹³³

Stalin’s murderous rampage, however, had put out of action his nonpareil spy network in Germany. Zelman Passov (b. 1905), the recently appointed head of the NKVD intelligence, who had completed three grades of primary schooling, wrote that “during such sharpening of the international situation, such as the [German] preparations for the seizure of Austria [and] Czechoslovakia, the foreign department [espionage] did not have one agent communication, not a single piece of information, out of Germany.”¹³⁴

• • •

STALIN WAS NOT FINISHED with the Short Course. On October 11–12, 1938, he convened a two-day expanded session of the politburo (an ersatz Central Committee plenum), tasking Zhdanov with delivering the main report. For the first time since 1935, a stenographic record was kept of a politburo session, indicating an intention to circulate the discussion to party members not present. In attendance was the new crop of regional bosses, most of whose predecessors had been put to death. “Did everyone read it, we need to ask, and what are the remarks?” Stalin inquired of the textbook. Molotov chimed in: “Are there comrades who did not read the draft?” Voices: “No, everyone read it.” Troshin, from the Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) province party committee, spoke up: “Many propagandists and district secretaries at the courses say that they understand chapter 4 [“dialectical materialism”] . . . only with the greatest difficulty.” Stalin angrily interjected: “That means they have read nothing—not Marx, not Engels.” Molotov chided the Gorky comrades for not being able to find a few agitators capable of delivering explanatory lectures. But Oleksandr Khomenko, the head of the propaganda department in the Kiev province party, also said the text was not easy, citing a colleague. Molotov: “If the comrade had earlier read and really knew the history of the party, why are insurmountable difficulties arising for him now?” Khomenko: “He knew the history of the party, comrade Molotov, in terms of those textbooks which we had, and those textbooks were manifestly unsatisfactory.” Stalin erupted again: “So it happens like this: some study the history of the party but do not consider themselves obliged to study Marx; others study dialectical materialism and do not consider themselves obliged to study the history of the party.”

The party officials whom Stalin had promoted to replace those he had murdered were telling him the truth: they could not manage the Short Course intended especially for them.

Stalin asked for the floor. He stressed how, back before 1929, small individual household farms had become predominant, how the establishment of large-scale collectivized farms had been a matter of national survival, and how only Marxism-Leninism allowed one to understand all this. “If cadres determine everything, and that means cadres who work with their intellect, cadres who administer the country, and if these cadres turn out to be politically weakly grounded, that means the state is threatened with danger,” he warned, giving as an example the Bukharinites, calling “their top layer” irredeemable foreign agents. “But besides the heads, Bukharin and others, there were masses of them, and not all of them were spies and foreign intelligence operatives.” Stalin continued: “One may assume that 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, and more were people of Bukharin. One may assume that just as many, and maybe more, were people of Trotskyism. What do you think, were all of them spies? Of course not.”

Here was a startling admission two years into a mass terror that had seen some 1.6 million arrests. “What had happened to them?” Stalin continued. “These were cadres who could not swallow the big changeover to the collective farm system, could not comprehend this big changeover, because they were not politically well grounded; they did not know the laws of development of society, the laws of economic development, the laws of political development.” He allowed that “we lost many, but we acquired new cadres who won over the people to collectivization and won over the peasant. Only this explains why we were able so easily to replace yesterday’s party elite.”¹³⁵

He returned, in conclusion, to collectivization: “The key is the chapter about why we went for collective farms. What was this? Was it the caprice of the leaders, the [ideological] itch of the leaders, who (so we are told) read through Marx, drew conclusions, and then, if you please, restructured the whole country according to those conclusions? Was collectivization just something invented—or was it necessity? Those who didn’t understand a damn thing about economics—all those rightists, who didn’t have the slightest understanding of our society either theoretically or economically, nor the slightest understanding of the laws of historical development, nor the essence of Marxism—they could say such things as suggesting that we turn away from the collective farms and take the capitalist path of development in agriculture.”¹³⁶ The Short Course reconfirmed that the terror emanated from Stalin’s mind, not as a response to crisis but as a theory of Soviet history and his rule: party opposition to collectivization, a new generation of functionaries, pedagogy.

• • •

THE SOVIET POLITICAL landscape resembled a huge forest full of charred stumps as a wildfire raged on ahead, but Stalin, who had set that fire, was still heaping oil on it long after its catastrophic consequences had become manifest. Finally, however, with the September–October 1938 rollout of the Short Course, the training manual for those who had been chosen to go forward (or just got lucky), the mass terror was, in an important sense, complete—and not a moment too soon. Stalin had been barefacedly manipulating the threat of war and foreign intervention to impose and justify this terror, but his murders had shaken the Red Army to its core.¹³⁷ And now Munich: not the threat of some abstract war at some point, but right here, right now.¹³⁸ The danger to the USSR evidently was grave enough that on October 8, 1938, not long after having demonstrably mobilized the Red Army for possible use against Poland, Stalin had Potyomkin tell the ambassador from Poland—which had just seized a piece of Czechoslovakia in the teeth of Moscow’s warnings not to do so—that “no hand extended to the Soviets would be left hanging in the air.”¹³⁹ So much for Stalin’s threat to invalidate the Soviet-Polish nonaggression pact.¹⁴⁰ Poland, too, had been excluded from the deliberations at Munich, but Berlin and Warsaw were in talks.

Supplication of Poland was not Stalin’s only conspicuous immediate post-Munich action: a mere eight days after the pact had slapped him across the face, he had also quietly formed a “commission” to investigate arrests by the NKVD. It was made up of the party functionaries Andreyev and Malenkov, as well as Beria and Vyshinsky, and nominally chaired by Yezhov.¹⁴¹ This heralded the beginning of the end of the mass terror.

Yezhov’s men understood that Stalin was moving to bring the Yezhov era at the NKVD to a close. On November 12, 1938, the same week as Marshal Blyukher’s death at Beria’s hands in Lefortovo prison, Mikhail Litvin, Yezhov’s right hand, shot himself. Two days later, the Ukraine NKVD chief, Uspensky—who was also close to Yezhov—composed a suicide note, had his wife purchase him a train ticket eastward to Voronezh, deposited some clothes on the banks of the Dnieper, and fled to Moscow, bringing wads of rubles, to hide at his mistress’s apartment. When the money ran out, she kicked him out, and Uspensky headed north to Arkhangelsk, hoping to sign up for logging work, anonymously. Stalin told Khrushchev in Kiev, over the phone, that Yezhov, taking advantage of the NKVD’s responsibility for the security of the government communication system, must have listened in on the despot’s previous call to Khrushchev about arresting Uspensky and then tipped him off.¹⁴² The day after Uspensky’s flight, Stalin, receiving his minions in the Little Corner, had a decree approved disbanding the assembly-line death sentence troikas.¹⁴³ On November 17, he summoned Vyshinsky for a “report,” after which the despot issued another decree in the politburo’s name, justifying the terror but blaming the NKVD for “a host of major deficiencies and distortions.”¹⁴⁴

Just like that, without public acknowledgment, with a few pieces of paper in the Little Corner, the mass terror was halted. Coincidence? The terror supposedly was aimed at rooting out enemies lying in wait for a war, but then, at what would appear to be maximum international war danger for the USSR, Stalin suddenly moved to end the mass arrests. Had he become less paranoid? Was it just that he had been waiting for completion of a Short Course? Or was he jolted by events portending actual danger?¹⁴⁵ We cannot definitively establish his motivations. But in the wake of Munich, the despot, in his sixty-first year, had reached a crossroads.

• • •

HENRY KISSINGER, IN his magisterial Diplomacy (1988), deemed Stalin “the supreme realist—patient, shrewd, and implacable.”¹⁴⁶ That is not the Stalin readers have encountered in this book. He often showed himself to be a shrewd operator forced to make difficult choices to defend the interests of his country, but he was never that alone. Just as often, the hard choices that confronted him had been created by his own blunders and gratuitous mayhem. Stalin cannot plausibly be portrayed as a clear-eyed realpolitiker abroad and unhinged mass murderer at home; he was the same calculating, distrustful mind in both cases. Throughout the massacres, he remained thoroughly, passionately engaged in foreign policy, devoted in his way to the cause of the Soviet state and the cause of socialism. He was an ideologue and would-be statesman who forced socialism into being through massive violence—the only way complete anticapitalism could have been achieved—and this building of socialism, in turn, made him the full sociopath he became. Now collectivization was behind him, and the mass terror against his own elites and others mostly behind him, but Hitler was in front of him. Stalin was defiant toward the Western powers and solicitous toward Germany, but fearful of an all-imperialist anti-Soviet coalition incorporating Nazi Germany, too. The resulting pas de trois—Chamberlain, Hitler, Stalin—became, in effect, a Chamberlain-versus-Stalin contest to win over Hitler. Stalin would be put to the supreme test. The stakes were the survival not just of his regime but of the country.