Stalin

THE BULWARKS OF STALIN’S POWER

The day and evening of 1 March 1953 at the near dacha. Consternation among the bodyguards.

After his guests departed in the early morning hours of 1 March, Stalin most likely went to bed. He may not have felt well.¹ He was aged and sickly. He remained in his rooms and did not, as he usually did, summon any guards or servants toward suppertime. As of early 1952, Stalin’s apartment and dacha were protected by a staff of 335 security personnel.² Another 73 attended to his non-security needs. All told, 408 people, working in shifts at various sites, were devoted to taking care of Stalin. Stalin spent a significant portion of his time in these people’s company. They walked behind him, stood guard under his windows, cooked, cleaned, and, if needed, entertained him. At the near dacha, a long corridor separated the staff quarters from the part of the house where Stalin lived. His rooms were equipped with buttons to summon staff members.

The deviation from Stalin’s routine on 1 March alarmed his security team. The guards reported to their superiors that there was no “movement” within the leader’s residence. Evening approached with no signs of life. The sense of alarm escalated, but if they were not summoned, nobody wanted to check on the boss. Finally, sometime after six o’clock, the guards were relieved to see a light turn on in Stalin’s rooms. Everyone prepared for a call. None came. Anxiety again began to mount. The guards argued over who should go check on Stalin. Nobody volunteered.

Their hesitation was understandable. Of course, they had grown accustomed to Stalin, just as the lonely leader, for whom the hired help often served as a surrogate family, had grown accustomed to them. From time to time, Stalin and the dacha staff worked together in the garden or roasted shashlik in the fireplace. Sometimes he would come into the kitchen and lie down on the Russian brick oven to ease the pain in his back. But the distance that separated Stalin and his guards was much greater than the length of the corridor that separated their quarters from his. He was strict with his staff, and they knew better than to relax the fear they felt toward him.

The guards who protected Stalin and other members of the top leadership belonged to a special department within the Soviet security system, the Main Guard Directorate. In the early days of the regime, when the egalitarian romance of the revolution still lingered, Soviet leaders often mixed with the public. In the 1920s, Stalin’s wife could still ride streetcars, and he himself walked the streets of Moscow or rode in cars with no particular precautions, though always accompanied by bodyguards. In July 1930, while vacationing in Sochi, Stalin and his wife were involved in a car crash. He was slightly injured when his head hit the windshield.³

Two months after the car crash, amid growing hysteria in the struggle against “enemies,” the Politburo adopted a resolution “to oblige Com. Stalin to immediately desist from walking through the city on foot.”⁴ Stalin did not submit to this restriction. On 16 November 1931, while walking down the street, accompanied by bodyguards, from the Central Committee building to the Kremlin, he happened to run into an armed agent of an anti-Bolshevik organization who had come from abroad. The agent was so surprised that he did not have time to pull out his gun before he was arrested. A report on the incident by the Joint State Political Directorate, the OGPU (the Soviet secret police of the time), was sent to Stalin and the other members of the Politburo. Molotov made a notation on the report: “To PB members. Com. Stalin’s walking around Moscow on foot must be stopped.”⁵ It is not known whether Stalin submitted to this demand. It is also unclear whether the encounter could have been orchestrated.

On his 1933 vacation in the south, several incidents appeared to place Stalin in danger.⁶ In August, his car was hit by a truck in Sochi. The truck’s driver was drunk, and Stalin was unharmed. Another incident took place on the Black Sea coast in September when a motorboat on which Stalin was riding came under rifle fire from the shore. The bullets landed in the water, and no one on the boat was injured. An investigation determined that rifles had been fired by border guards who had not been warned that a boat would be entering the protected zone.

The murder of Sergei Kirov on 1 December 1934 was a watershed moment in attitudes toward the safety of Soviet leaders.⁷ Using it as an excuse, Stalin undertook a series of reprisals against former members of the party opposition, who were accused of orchestrating Kirov’s murder and plotting other terrorist acts against the Soviet leadership. In 1936–1938, when terror ravaged the country, engulfing hundreds of thousands of lives, Stalin eliminated everyone suspected of disloyalty. The security apparatus was one important target of the purges, and those in charge of guarding the leaders also fell victim. In April 1937, Stalin’s chief of security was arrested and swiftly executed. Of his two successors in 1937–1938, one shot himself and the other was executed. Finally, in late 1938, the uneducated but efficient Nikolai Vlasik was appointed to the post.⁸ Stalin took a liking to him and kept him in the job for more than thirteen years.

Vlasik’s career even survived an incident that took place in Moscow on 6 November 1942. An official car carrying Anastas Mikoyan, one of Stalin’s closest associates, came under rifle fire that day as it exited the Kremlin. No one was injured, and after a brief struggle the shooter was taken into custody. It turned out that he was a soldier from a Moscow air defense unit who was likely suffering from mental health problems.⁹ This incident was a terrible blow to the protection service under Vlasik’s command: an unbalanced and armed soldier had been standing in plain sight at the Kremlin gates for some time, waiting for an official car to come out, without being questioned or apprehended. Vlasik was demoted, but the leader gave him a second chance. He continued to oversee Stalin’s security.¹⁰

Vlasik seemed to enjoy Stalin’s full confidence. He followed the leader everywhere, often sat down at the same table with him to eat, and was granted the right to photograph him. Under Vlasik, the Main Guard Directorate became a powerful and influential government agency. In early 1952 it comprised 14,300 people and had an enormous budget of 672 million rubles. Vlasik’s directorate was responsible not only for protection, but also for the maintenance of the apartments and dachas of top-level Soviet leaders, keeping Central Committee members supplied with consumer goods, handling the transportation and lodging of foreign guests, and overseeing the construction of new government buildings. In 1951 approximately 80 million rubles of the directorate’s budget went toward maintaining the dachas and apartments of the fourteen highest-ranking Soviet leaders (including expenses for protection and servants). Stalin was, of course, the most expensive of the fourteen. A total of 26.3 million rubles were spent on his apartment and dacha in 1951. This sum probably did not include such expenses as automobile transport.

Serving in the Guard Directorate was both prestigious and lucrative. In 1951 the average compensation for members of Stalin’s security team (including uniforms, housing, etc.) was 5,300 rubles per month, at a time when the average monthly wage throughout the Soviet Union was 660 rubles and the average per capita income for collective farm workers was approximately 90 rubles per month.¹¹ In addition to material benefits, Vlasik’s relationship with the leader gave him significant political influence, leading to his increasing involvement—with Stalin’s encouragement—in the political intrigues that roiled around the vozhd (leader). Having a powerful patron and sense of impunity was intoxicating. Vlasik drank and enjoyed a promiscuous love life, and so did his subordinates.

Stalin generally tolerated such “weaknesses” as a pledge of obedience and devotion. Yet he was known to put his subordinates in their place, especially if they took too many liberties. During the summer of 1947 one of the waitresses at the near dacha informed Stalin that while he had been away, the dacha commandant and his deputy threw a party with drinking and prostitutes, for which they stole refreshments from the official supply. Furthermore, the deputy commandant and his female companions looked through papers on Stalin’s desk. On Stalin’s orders, the deputy commandant was arrested, interrogated at length, beaten, and shot.¹² This incident should have served as a warning to Vlasik, but it did not. Stalin continued to show a fairly relaxed attitude toward his chief bodyguard’s morals. In 1950, on Vlasik’s own admission, Stalin reprimanded him for “graft” and “relationships with women,” yet he remained in favor.¹³

Vlasik’s star waned only when the aging Stalin decided it was time for another general purge of state security. On 19 May 1952, the Politburo approved a resolution criticizing Vlasik and the entire leadership of the Ministry of State Security’s Main Guard Directorate for “criminal dissipation and the uncontrolled expenditure of resources.” Significant cutbacks to the directorate’s personnel, functions, and budget followed. Some of its members were charged with crimes. Vlasik was expelled from the party and demoted to deputy head of a labor camp in the Urals,¹⁴ and in December 1952 he was arrested. Running the Guard Directorate fell to the USSR minister for state security, Semen Ignatiev.¹⁵

The arrests, personnel cutbacks, and reorganization of the Guard Directorate undoubtedly set its members on edge. None of them, fearing for their jobs and their lives, wanted to face the consequences that could come with taking initiative. For these reasons Stalin’s bodyguards were very reluctant to check on him on 1 March 1953, even though something out of the ordinary was clearly taking place.

The branches of state security, including the branch in charge of Stalin’s personal safety, were one very important set of controls regulating the huge machine that historians call the Stalinist party-state. The framework that held this machine together was the Bolshevik party, bequeathed by Lenin, but repeatedly modified to fit the needs of Stalin’s dictatorship. Under Stalin, the party was a rigidly centralized organization whose power rested on its unquestioned right to hire, fire, and reassign personnel. Over many years, lists of positions were compiled (“the nomenklatura”). Each position came under the purview of a particular party committee, from the raikom (district committee) to the TsK (the party’s Central Committee). The career and fate of every official in the country depended on one of these party committees, and nobody, including the party functionaries themselves, could evade the system. Key government leaders were approved within the TsK apparat in Moscow.

The nomenklatura of TsK positions was constantly growing, a reflection of the center’s pursuit of ever-greater control. In September 1952, half a year before Stalin’s death, it comprised approximately 53,000 positions. Those who filled these positions were the “cream” of Soviet society, including high-level party and state officials, top military leaders, and the heads of the “creative unions” such as the Writers’ Union. One step lower were officials in charge of important regional bodies: those holding nomenklatura positions within obkoms (oblast or provincial committees), kraikoms (krai or territorial committees), and the central committees of the Communist parties of the various republics that made up the Soviet Union. This list was also constantly growing. As of 1 July 1952 it totaled 350,000 positions.¹⁶

These hundreds of thousands of functionaries were the backbone of the apparat and the pillar of the dictatorship. Of course Stalin never had direct contact with the vast majority of them. Furthermore, the party-state apparat had a life of its own and was relatively free of interference from the top leadership. In the struggle to survive, prosper, and rise through the ranks, officials sought ways to get around the strict rules aimed at centralization. They could generally act as convenience dictated so long as the paper trail they left reflected adherence to the rules. Abuses of power were common. A number of historians, exaggerating the significance of these processes, have argued that the Stalinist dictatorship was unstable, and many have attempted to explain the worst features of Stalinism—mass repression especially—as arising spontaneously from below.

The documentary evidence offers no support for the idea of a “weak dictator.” We do not know of a single decision of major consequence taken by anyone other than Stalin. We do not know of even a brief period when he did not exercise dictatorial control. The dictatorship developed extremely effective methods of manipulating and pressuring society and the apparat, and thus Stalin had a firm grip on power and the implementation of key decisions. Ongoing repression and purges of personnel kept society and the apparat in a state of mobilized tension. The archives have allowed historians to assess, in fairly precise numbers, the scale of the violence necessary to achieve such control. Official records show that approximately eight hundred thousand people were shot between 1930 and 1952.¹⁷ The number who perished as a result of the regime’s actions, however, was much higher, insofar as Stalin’s security apparat made frequent use of fatal torture techniques and the conditions prevailing in labor camps at times made them indistinguishable from death camps. Between 1930 and 1952, some 20 million people were sentenced to incarceration in labor camps, penal colonies, or prisons. During that same period no fewer than 6 million, primarily “kulaks” and members of “repressed peoples,” were subjected to “administrative exile”: forced resettlement to a remote area of the USSR. On average, over the more than twenty-year span of Stalin’s rule, 1 million people were shot, incarcerated, or deported to barely habitable areas of the Soviet Union every year.

Those who were shot or sent to the camps included a fair number of ordinary criminals. But the exceptional severity of laws and the criminalization of all spheres of socioeconomic and political life meant that ordinary citizens who committed minor infractions or were swept up in various political campaigns were often classified as criminals. Furthermore, in addition to the 26 million who were shot, imprisoned, or subjected to internal exile, tens of millions were forced to labor on difficult and dangerous projects, arrested, subjected to lengthy imprisonment without charges, or fired from their jobs and evicted from their homes for being relatives of “enemies of the people.” Overall, the Stalinist dictatorship subjected at least 60 million people to some sort of “hard” or “soft” repression and discrimination.

To this figure we must add the victims of periodic famines or starvation, which during 1932–1933 alone took the lives of between 5 and 7 million people. The Stalinist famine was largely the result of political decisions. In its campaign to break peasant opposition to collectivization, the Stalinist government used famine as a means of “punishing” the countryside. All opportunities to relieve the situation—such as purchasing grain abroad—were rejected. Starving villages had their last stores of food expropriated.

We can conclude from this horrific summation that a significant proportion of Soviet citizens suffered some form of repression or discrimination during the Stalin period.¹⁸ It would not be an exaggeration to say that an absolute majority were brutally suppressed by a privileged minority—except that many in that minority were also swept up in the terror.

To achieve its goals, including the implementation of mass repression and the extraction of grain from the starving countryside, the regime did not need its apparat to run with clocklike precision. The inability to achieve perfect centralization in such a vast country was compensated for by the widespread use of campaigns, which mostly followed a similar template. Campaigns were the cornerstone of Stalinist political practice. They all began with a set of goals and the assignment of specific tasks that originated with the center, usually Stalin himself. These steps were followed by the mobilization of the apparat to carry out the assigned tasks, using extraordinary methods and the total suspension of any sort of legality. As a result, a campaign took on the aura of a crisis, culminating at a point where retreat became necessary. This retreat took the form of a counter-campaign that eliminated some of those who had carried out the original campaign while solidifying its results and stabilizing the situation. This swinging pendulum led to the destruction of vast material resources and countless human lives. But within the context of the Stalinist system, the campaigns were an effective method of mobilizing a vast country toward a central goal.

Stalin himself did not need to exercise tight control over all party and government bodies in order to retain dictatorial power. It was sufficient to hold the main levers of power, the most important being control of the secret police. He understood, sooner than other Soviet leaders, that state security could be a valuable weapon in intraparty warfare. This was a key reason for his success. Once he attained control of the Soviet Union’s “punitive structures,” he never let it slip from his hands. He continued to use state security as an instrument of power until the day he died.

As we will see, Stalin devoted much time to the hands-on management of state security, and during certain periods—most notably during the Terror of 1937–1938—the majority of his time. He personally initiated all the main repressive campaigns, devised plans for carrying them out, and painstakingly monitored their implementation. He guided the fabrication of evidence for numerous political trials and in several instances wrote detailed scripts for how trials should play out. He had a passion for reading the cascade of arrestee interrogation protocols that came before him, and the notations he made on these documents show that he read them thoughtfully and attentively. He often wrote commentaries and issued orders for additional arrests or for the use of torture to “get to the truth.” He personally sanctioned the shooting of many people. Some he knew personally; others he had never met.

In addition to the many “ordinary” functions that the chekists performed for Stalin, they also dealt with special, “delicate” matters.¹⁹

On 5 May 1940, on Stalin’s orders, a special state security group abducted Kira Kulik-Simonich, the wife of the deputy people’s commissar for defense, Marshal Grigory Kulik, as she was leaving her house.²⁰ She was secretly transported to prison, interrogated at length, and then quietly shot. Kulik-Simonich was the descendant of a highly placed tsarist official. Many of her relatives had been shot, and some had managed to escape abroad. She had been married before and had spent time in exile with a previous husband charged with illegal activities involving hard currency. The chekists who reported all this to Stalin embellished the story with many more transgressions, including Kulik-Simonich’s affairs with foreigners. Stalin advised Kulik to divorce his wife, but when the marshal balked, Stalin ordered that Simonich be quietly done away with. When Kulik discovered his wife’s disappearance, he telephoned state security chief Lavrenty Beria, who denied that his agency was involved. Kulik did not believe him and began to dig for the truth. He was summoned to the Central Committee, where he underwent a three-hour interrogation and was ordered not to “slander” state security. Furthermore, he was told, his wife was probably a spy who had fled under threat of exposure.²¹ Kulik relented.

Cases like this one, where Stalin, for political reasons, felt it was not expedient to arrest and charge people openly, were no rarity. A year before Marshal Kulik’s wife was murdered, in July 1939, the Soviet ambassador to China was killed along with his wife. Specially selected chekists beat their heads with hammers and then staged a car crash.²² In early 1948, the Jewish civic leader and stage director Solomon Mikhoels, a popular and well-known figure in the USSR and the West, was similarly done away with.²³ Chekists crashed into Mikhoels with a truck and presented the incident as an accident. The evidence leaves no doubt that this murder was also carried out on Stalin’s direct orders.²⁴ It is one of numerous acts of individual terror committed by Stalin.²⁵ Such targeted killings were also perpetrated overseas. The most famous is the 1940 murder of Trotsky in Mexico.

The archives contain a huge number of documents confirming that Stalin routinely used the secret police to carry out arbitrary and brutal actions based solely on his own assumptions of guilt. They leave a clear impression that Stalin personally organized acts of terror that went far beyond any reasonable sense of “official necessity.” This homicidal aspect of his dictatorship obviously held special appeal for him. Immersion in a world of violence, provocation, and murder fed and intensified his pathological suspicion. Driven by fears and a certainty that he was surrounded by enemies, he felt no compunction about using violence on the grandest scale. These personal qualities were an important factor in the brutalities committed by the Soviet government from the 1920s through the 1950s.

Although Stalin relied heavily on state security, he never became beholden to it. In assigning the secret police the dirtiest work, he did not harbor illusions about the loyalty of his “sword of revolution” but instead kept his chekists in rein through periodic shake-ups and purges of their ranks. In a moment of candor, he confided to State Security Minister Ignatiev that “A chekist has only two paths—advancement or prison.”²⁶ He remained true to this principle. From the 1930s through the 1950s, chekist organizations were subjected to waves of brutal repression. The new executioners destroyed the old, only to later wind up in the torture chamber themselves.

For many decades historians have been arguing over the antecedents and causes of Stalin’s exceptional brutality. Many trace the source back to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, an event that, for Stalin, opened the door to power.