Stalin

TREPIDATION IN THE INNER CIRCLE

The initial arrival of the four at the near dacha, early morning hours of 2 March 1953.

The bodyguard entered Stalin’s apartments with the packet of mail and started looking for him. After walking through several rooms, he finally found the vozhd in the small dining room. The sight must have been extremely disturbing. Stalin was lying helpless on the floor, which was wet beneath him.¹ This last point is important not for reasons of schadenfreude or as an evocative detail but because it affected subsequent events. It appeared to the bodyguard that Stalin was unable to speak, but he did make a small hand gesture, beckoning him to approach. The bodyguard summoned his colleagues, who helped him lift Stalin onto the couch. They then rushed to telephone their immediate superior, State Security Minister Semen Ignatiev. According to the bodyguards’ later accounts, Ignatiev refused to make any decisions and told them to call members of the top leadership: Beria and Malenkov.

Ignatiev’s reaction was perfectly understandable. He was behaving just as the bodyguards had done several hours earlier, when they were afraid to enter Stalin’s rooms uninvited. Ignatiev did not want to take responsibility for a decision to summon doctors to the vozhd. This was a ticklish matter for a man who, just two years earlier, had been plucked from the relatively cozy position of Central Committee department head and assigned to hunt for enemies of the people as minister of state security. He must have rued the day Stalin picked him for this job, which carried a high price for failure. From then on he lived in fear. Upon hearing that Stalin had suffered some sort of stroke, his only desire was to hand decision-making responsibility to somebody else.

Having failed to get any guidance from their boss, the bodyguards managed to find Malenkov, who then informed the other members of the ruling Five: Beria, Khrushchev, and Bulganin. This made sense. Without a clear understanding of Stalin’s condition, Malenkov did not want to go to the dacha by himself or be the only one to sanction the summoning of doctors. Any decisions should be made collectively. The four men agreed to meet at the dacha to assess the situation and give each other cover for whatever actions were taken.

Both Khrushchev’s memoirs and the bodyguards’ accounts describe the top leadership’s extreme caution after arriving at the dacha in the middle of the night. They were afraid of doing anything that might provoke Stalin’s wrath if he recovered. According to Khrushchev, at first they did not even enter Stalin’s apartments, choosing instead to interrogate the bodyguards. What they heard made them even more nervous. That Stalin was incapacitated and had apparently urinated on himself put the leaders in a difficult position. They knew he would not want anyone to see him in such a state. What if this was just a passing episode? Stalin would not look fondly on anyone who had witnessed his humiliating helplessness. As Khrushchev describes it, once they learned from the bodyguards that Stalin “now seemed to be sleeping, we thought that since he was in such poor shape, it would be awkward for us to appear at his side and make our presence officially known. So we went back to our homes.”²

Khrushchev’s memoirs apparently do not tell the whole story. According to the bodyguards, before leaving, the four designated Malenkov and Beria to enter Stalin’s rooms and personally assess his condition. Such an assessment required two men for obvious reasons. If all four went, they would make unnecessary noise and risk rousing the vozhd. And none of them wanted to go in by himself. Khrushchev and Bulganin thus waited in the bodyguards’ quarters while Beria and Malenkov snuck stealthily in to look at Stalin, terrified of waking him. The bodyguards recalled one slapstick detail: Malenkov’s new shoes made a squeaking noise, so he took them off and carried them under his arm. As the two men approached, they could hear Stalin lightly snoring. After emerging, Beria berated the bodyguards for raising a fuss over nothing. Stalin was just sleeping. The bodyguards defended their actions, explaining that matters had been much worse a few hours earlier.³ Dismissing the bodyguards’ concerns, the four men returned to Moscow.

Some historians and commentators have detected conspiratorial overtones in this episode and blame Stalin’s death on the decision not to call for medical help. This interpretation is doubtful. First, according to the doctors who performed the autopsy, Stalin’s stroke was the result of atherosclerosis that had been developing for years.⁴ Quick intervention would not have saved him. On the other hand, his fellow leaders could not have known this. They did not understand the implications of providing or withholding medical care, and their failure to summon doctors could have contained some malicious intent. Many Soviet leaders, in their hearts, surely did not wish their abusive leader long life. Nevertheless, less sinister explanations must also be considered. Stalin’s associates were simply afraid of intervening. They were not used to taking the initiative, and they knew Stalin’s suspicious and capricious nature all too well. During those days in early March, everyone involved—the bodyguards, Ignatiev, and the other members of the Five—behaved exactly as Stalin had trained them to behave. They tiptoed nervously forward, always looking over their shoulders and trying to shift as much responsibility as possible onto each other.

For many years, even Stalin’s closest associates and friends, people with whom he had shared long years of struggle, had lived under the constant threat of destruction. A dictator can only be sure of his power if those around him are at his mercy. After destroying the former opposition leaders, in 1937–1938 Stalin proceeded to have a significant portion of the Politburo shot. The close relatives of some of his surviving associates were also arrested or killed. The brother of Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich committed suicide, and Kalinin’s wife wound up in a camp.⁵ This suppression of potential oligarchs continued after the war. The Leningrad Affair did away with Nikolai Voznesensky and Aleksei Kuznetsov, two members of the younger generation who had risen to prominence under Stalin.⁶ Molotov’s wife was arrested around the same time. In the final months of his life, Stalin lashed out at Molotov and Mikoyan, essentially removing them from power. His death would provide the only guarantee against new purges.

At some point in their careers, virtually everyone in the top Soviet leadership had to endure a ritual of humiliation and repentance followed by renewed oaths of allegiance to the vozhd. Stalin would cast his comrades into disfavor only to later bring them back into the fold. He was generous with rebukes and liked to orchestrate verbal floggings in the press and at various meetings. And when he lost his temper, it was a horrifying sight to behold. Minister of Foreign Trade Mikhail Menshikov told of one instance when he incurred Stalin’s wrath during a meeting by failing to properly hear his question. “He gave me a furious look,” Menshikov recalled, “and launched a fat pencil at me as hard as he could, hurling it along the length of the table in my direction. For a moment everyone froze and waited to see what would happen next.”⁷ After Stalin’s death, Ignatiev complained about having been subjected to constant dressings-down: “Comrade Stalin reprimanded me using fouler language than I’d ever heard in my life and called me an idiot.”⁸ When the writer Konstantin Simonov attended the Central Committee plenum in October 1952, he was struck by the furious, “almost ferocious” and “unrestrained,” tone of Stalin’s speech denouncing Molotov and Mikoyan.⁹ Stalin’s temper and unpredictability, especially during his final years, were made worse by his declining health.

Top Soviet officials lived a golden-cage existence. While they exercised life-and-death power over their subordinates, they were at the constant mercy of their ultimate boss. Their security, transportation, incoming and outgoing correspondence, special telephone lines, dachas, and apartments—all were handled by state security, which was entirely under the dictator’s control. Such control meant that Stalin knew everything about how and with whom these officials spent their time. As if that were not enough, he apparently asked the secret police to install listening devices to spy on certain Politburo members.¹⁰

Despite the oppression of the collective leadership, periodic manifestations of oligarchy inevitably threatened Stalin’s sole power. Though very much under his thumb, his fellow leaders did enjoy a certain administrative autonomy as the heads of major government institutions, and they independently made many decisions of consequence for the running of the country. Furthermore, their authority expanded as Stalin’s physical frailty diminished his involvement in day-to-day decision making. Stalin was aware of this threat. Konstantin Simonov recorded a typical comment by the vozhd about his comrades, as reported by an eyewitness:

Even when differences remain, they will come to some agreement on paper and present the issue to me in that form.… The managers understand that I cannot know everything; all they want from me is a stamp with my signature. Yes, I cannot know everything, so I pay attention to differences, to objections, and I try to make sense of why they come up, where the real problem lies. The managers do their best to conceal these from me; they go along with the votes but they conceal the differences, all so that they can get a stamp with my signature. What they want out of me is my stamp.¹¹

Stalin’s method for penetrating the defenses of this mutual protection society could best be described as scattershot. The dictator’s underlings never knew what question might suddenly interest him. They never knew whether Stalin would react to a particular decision and, if so, how or when. The constant threat of a random attack allowed him to keep the apparat and his close associates in a state of tension that helped to compensate for his lack of total control over them. The vozhd’s effort to maximize his power over his subordinates was helped by the number of channels through which he received information. The government and party bureaucracies, the courts, and state security all kept an eye on one another and constantly tried to prove their vigilance and effectiveness by denouncing one another to Stalin, zealously exposing others’ warts while concealing their own.

Repression, the constant threat of punishment, and Stalin’s temper and whims made the life of top Soviet officials almost as difficult as that of the powerless man or woman on the street. His “comrades” lived and worked under constant stress. One long-term Soviet diplomat left the following remembrance of the country’s minister of foreign affairs, Andrei Vyshinsky, one of Stalin’s most devoted and successful associates: “Vyshinsky was terrified of Stalin. Every Thursday he would go and report to him, and well beforehand, in anticipation of this encounter, his mood would sour. The closer it came to Thursday, the gloomier and more irritable he got.… But by Friday, when it was all behind him, he allowed himself to relax for a day or two. Experienced people knew that this was when it was best to report to him on the most complicated matters or approach him with requests of a personal nature.”¹²

Stalin was a merciless boss. He expected total dedication from his subordinates and favored a military management style: orders had to be carried out unquestioningly and at any cost—no excuses. In addition to the constant danger of arrest and the excessive workload, the lives of Stalin’s close associates were made difficult by his nocturnality. To accommodate the vozhd, the apparat worked both at night, when Stalin was awake, and during the day, when the rest of the country was up. The stresses of working for Stalin apparently made some stronger. A number of his closest associates lived many years. Molotov and Kaganovich, for example, nearly reached the century mark. But not everyone had the iron constitution and adaptability needed to survive the demands Stalin placed on his subordinates. A Central Committee document written in 1947 admitted that “An analysis of the health of the party and government’s leading cadres has shown that many individuals, even among the relatively young, suffer from diseases of the heart and the circulatory and nervous systems sufficiently serious to impact their ability to work. One cause of these diseases is stressful work not only during the day, but also during the night, and often even on holidays.”¹³ As long as Stalin was alive, nothing could be done about this problem, but soon after his death a resolution was adopted requiring regular government offices to remain closed at night, and the bureaucracy began to run in a more normal way.

Stalin kept himself at the center of the huge machine used to manipulate officials. He initiated and guided repression, orchestrated all major reassignments, and was constantly reshuffling people so that nobody grew too comfortable in a particular job. Like any dictator, he strove to instill a sense of fear, adoration, and instinctive devotion in his underlings. Vyacheslav Molotov, a diehard follower of the dictator, described Lazar Kaganovich as a “two hundred percent Stalinist.”¹⁴ These were the sorts of people Stalin tried to cultivate.

A key element of the process by which the Soviet government—including its very top leadership—was “Stalinized” was the mass purges of the 1930s. In a matter of months, the purges destroyed the party’s old guard and replaced it with fresh faces, unburdened by excessive knowledge of the past or ideas about how the country might be run differently. “New stock” replaced officials who had earned their places in the Soviet government during the revolution. By 1940, after the Terror had receded, 57 percent of party secretaries in the regions of Russia and on the central committees of the Soviet Union’s ethnic republics were under the age of thirty-five.¹⁵ Many ministers, generals, directors of major enterprises, and leaders of cultural unions were between thirty and forty.

Stalin gave these upstarts tremendous power, allowing them to preside over their own little dictatorships. The fates, even the lives, of millions were in their hands. The distribution of significant resources and the functioning of gigantic enterprises depended on them. They formed their own caste, which lived by its own laws and enjoyed its own privileged world. The members of this caste did not know hunger or material want. They were not affected by the catastrophic shortage of housing or the backwardness of the health care system. They lived in spacious apartments and dachas, protected by guards. Their cars sped past overcrowded public buses and trolleys. Whoever did their shopping did not have to line up for hours outside empty stores. Their salaries and tax-free supplemental pay (known as “envelopes”) exceeded by orders of magnitude the meager pay of ordinary citizens. The fees paid to Soviet writers privileged to belong to the nomenklatura reached the hundreds of thousands of rubles, in some cases generating annual incomes of up to a million rubles, many thousands of times what a Soviet peasant survived on.¹⁶ Dazzled by the sense of belonging to an all-powerful government corporation and by their own importance, they were utterly free of compassion, self-reflection, or understanding of the “other.”

Stalin was the gatekeeper for the world of the nomenklatura. Entry could be gained only with his favor and support. For those fortunate enough to survive, the horrible fates of their predecessors and the continuing repression only intensified their gratitude toward the dictator. Stalin was twice the age of many members of this new generation of officials. Many of them knew little of the party’s revolutionary period or of former leaders who were now labeled enemies. For them, Stalin was the ultimate authority, the leader of the revolution, the victorious generalissimo, and a theoretician on a par with the founders of Marxism.

Stalin strove variously to feed this image. He cultivated an inferiority complex in his close associates: “You are blind like little kittens. Without me the imperialists would strangle you.”¹⁷ Gradually he acquired the exclusive right to advance any initiative of significance, leaving the operational details to his comrades. His speeches, conversations, and letters were like lectures that he laced with contrived profundities. He liked to assign meaning to events and show off his vast knowledge and deep understanding of problems. The self-confident tone of his pontificating often belied the flimsiness and artificiality of his reasoning. But who would dare challenge him? For most functionaries, who tended to lack sophistication, Stalin’s utterances had an almost sacred quality. However, it was not just his monopoly on theoretical pronouncements that made the vozhd the voice of authority. He was well read and had a good memory, as well as a knack for pithy aphorisms. He would spend time preparing for his meetings, and it enabled him to show an impressive knowledge of detail. Such knowledge left a deep impression on many who witnessed these performances.

The primary reason that every utterance by Stalin carried such weight was that these were the words of an enormously powerful dictator who inspired both horror and adoration. To promote this image, he adopted the manner of a judge and master of destinies. During conferences he did not fraternize with other attendees but strolled around, pipe in hand. Before the spellbound gazes of onlookers, he reasoned out loud as if mulling weighty decisions. Stalin never publicly spoke of himself as a great man. It was enough that official propaganda shouted his greatness to the point of absurdity. Aware that brilliance stands out nicely against a façade of modesty, Stalin presented himself as a mere disciple of Lenin and servant of the party and the people. Every opportunity was taken to highlight this “humility.” He feigned impatience or even embarrassment when greeted with the inevitable standing ovation. He peppered his speeches with self-deprecation and folksy humor. He helped certain visitors to his dacha with their coats. After arriving at a reception arranged by Mao Zedong during the Chinese leader’s January 1950 visit to Moscow, Stalin greeted the cloakroom attendant but turned down his services. “Thank you, but this is something even I seem to be able to manage.” After removing his coat, he hung it on a hanger himself.¹⁸ This affected modesty did not prevent Stalin from asserting his own worth when warranted. In 1947 he personally edited his official biography, inserting the following: “Masterfully performing the job of vozhd of the party and people and enjoying the full support of the Soviet people, Stalin nevertheless did not allow even a shadow of self-importance, conceit, or self-admiration into anything he did.” Thirteen million copies of this biography were printed.¹⁹

Stalin must have believed that if he was going to hold on to power, he had to be considered infallible. On occasion he recognized that mistakes were made, but they could never be his. Misguided decisions and actions were attributed to “the government,” officials, or—most often—the plotting of enemies. The idea that he might bear personal responsibility for the country’s afflictions was rejected out of hand. He was, however, willing to take credit for its achievements. Boundless power inevitably gave him, as it does any dictator, a belief that he was endowed with remarkable prescience. But unlike the mystically inclined Hitler, who believed he was following a higher calling, Stalin’s belief in his infallibility probably had more to do with his untrusting nature and anxieties. He was sure that the only person he could count on was himself. Around him swarmed enemies and traitors. At times, this political paranoia was the cause of unfathomable tragedy. Such was the case in 1937–1938.