Stalin: A Biography

23. ENDING THE NEP

Suddenly at the end of the 1920s Stalin trampled on the New Economic Policy like an angry bull. The economic compromise inaugurated by Lenin’s Politburo seven years earlier was rejected. Massive violence was used to introduce a system of collective farms. Forced-rate industrialisation began. Persecution of kulaks, nepmen and ‘bourgeois specialists’ was intensified. Politics too underwent change. The internal party regime was further tightened and show trials were resumed against surviving leaders of the moribund rival parties. An offensive began against every kind of nationalist tendency.¹ The boundaries of cultural expression were drastically reduced and organised religion became the object of violent assault. The controversial settlement that had held since 1921 fell apart.

Stalin initiated the changes after the shortfall in grain supplies became critical at the end of 1927. On 6 January 1928 the Secretariat sent out a secret directive threatening to sack local party leaders who failed to apply ‘tough punishments’ for grain hoarders.² Stalin let his feelings show in a letter to Sergei Syrtsov and the Siberian party leadership:³

Siberian communists were put on notice that an immediate increase in grain procurements was demanded. Unlike Ukraine and the north Caucasus, Siberia — which had supplied a third of Soviet wheat exports — had experienced a warm summer. Stalin was determined to extract the grain from its kulak owners. He and a select group of party functionaries set off by train from Moscow on 15 January 1928. Politicians like Mikoyan, Kirov, Zhdanov, Shvernik, Postyshev and Kosior made similar trips, accompanied by thousands of party officials, to the agricultural regions of the USSR.⁴

State grain procurements had tumbled to only 70 per cent of the total obtained a year before. The difficulties had arisen from the Politburo’s mishandling of the economy. Since 1926 several measures had been introduced to squeeze additional revenue from the private sectors. A class tax was levied on the kulaks: fiscal revenue from them rose by over 50 per cent in 1926–7. ‘Evil-intentioned’ hoarding of industrial and agricultural products was in 1926 made a criminal offence under Article 107 of the Criminal Code. Surcharges were imposed on the traffic of private goods on the railways. The government expropriated many private flour-mills. These measures followed the reorientation of immediate economic objectives proposed by Stalin and Bukharin at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December. Party policy was being geared to an accelerated pace of industrialisation through a steady expansion of state capital accumulation. This emphasis was reaffirmed in July 1926. Gosplan — the State Planning Committee, which was responsible for drawing up a plan for the country’s economic development — was told to prepare for a situation where enterprises would become subject to greater instruction and supervision. Moves were made towards bringing the entire economy under central governmental authority.⁵

Politburo members became impatient about the NEP; and as they turned policy in the direction of radical change they committed themselves to the socialist and industrialising aims of the makers of the October Revolution. In opting for rapid and fundamental change they were intensifying the transformation of the USSR in the direction of ‘modernity’. The vestiges of the old order were to be eradicated. Irked by Trotski, they wished to demonstrate their credentials. They also knew that the slow pace of economic transformation made fertile soil for the United Opposition’s propaganda among party leaders in the provinces⁶ — and despite the ceaseless political centralisation since mid-1918 there was reason for the ascendant leaders to fear a sudden flaring up of resistance to their supremacy. But they believed in what they were doing. Stalin lived for Bolshevism; but he combined ideological adherence with feelings towards his rivals — jealousy, rancour and vengefulness — that were far from pure.

The predictable consequence of the economic measures from 1926 was the disruption of the market economy. Even before hacking at the roots of the NEP, Stalin — together with Bukharin until the expropriations of January 1928 — had been giving them a serious bruising. They had disturbed the garden still earlier by lowering prices for products from state-owned factories as a means of resolving the ‘scissors crisis’ in 1923. The effect was cumulative. A shortage of goods was reported as traders bought up what was available. Three years later Stalin and Bukharin also brought down prices they were willing to pay for grain. The result was a decline in the marketing of the cereal harvest. The two leading individuals in the Politburo had competed with each other in incompetence. Only one of them, Bukharin, saw the error of his ways by indicating to the Central Committee that retail prices needed to be raised to avoid calamity. Stalin faced him down. He had had enough: the NEP in its early years had restored the economy but could not secure industrial advance at a pace rapid enough for Politburo members. The Central Committee plenum in February 1927 backed the measures taken in the previous year.

Stalin and Bukharin had tipped the economy downhill, and Stalin refused to recognise their stupendous blunder. What was he thinking of in 1927? Stalin never explained his strategy in detail. Some have suggested that he merely wanted power and had to pick a fight with Bukharin on terrain where he could count on him taking a stand out of line with opinion in wider party circles. This is a possibility. But the more plausible explanation is that Stalin, having agreed with Bukharin on a more militant approach to industrialisation, refused to back down. He had a blunted faculty of judgement. The NEP had always left a bad taste in the mouth of Stalin and many leading Bolsheviks at the centre and in the provinces. The recurrent emergencies had kept them edgy. There had been the terrible famine in 1922 and the ‘scissors crisis’ in commerce in 1923. The party had tried to squeeze more out of the workers in factories and mines by rationalising the process of production. But this was never enough to satisfy the critics on the political left. In their diverse ways the oppositionists — the Democratic Centralists, the Workers’ Opposition, the Left Opposition, the Leningrad Opposition and the United Opposition — made the Politburo edgy by castigating it for ideological cowardice and betrayal.

The NEP had achieved more than its critics allowed. The volume of industrial and agricultural output by 1926–7 by most estimates had wholly or nearly reattained the level of the last year before the Great War; and the Soviet state was raising its rate of investment in capital projects. The NEP appeared capable of generating a moderate pace of economic development in the years ahead. There was also much political and social stability. Party, OGPU and Red Army held unchallengeable power. A Georgian uprising occurred in 1924; there were also disturbances in central Asia. But otherwise there was tranquillity. The clamp-down on public dissent was effective.

The question remained whether the pace of economic development was sufficient for the USSR to protect itself against potential external enemies. By the late 1920s the main dangers were thought to be Britain (which broke diplomatic relations in May 1927), France (which continued to demand the repayment of Russia’s old state loans) and Japan (which greedily eyed Soviet possessions in the Far East). It was doubtful that the Red Army was well enough equipped to deal with any of them in a war. Although industrial development was proceeding, the technological gap between the Soviet Union and the West’s most advanced economies was growing. The Bolsheviks had come to power as firm believers in the vital necessity of science and engineering as vehicles of socialist progress. A decade after the October Revolution nothing had happened in the USSR which suggested that the gap could soon be closed. The USA and Germany were racing ahead. Stalin and his associates were concerned about the Soviet regime’s persistent failure.

The party’s mood did not rest only on calculations of economic development. Nepmen made fortunes while manufacturing little. A wealthy stratum of peasants, whom the Bolsheviks referred to as the kulaks, again emerged in the countryside. Priests, imams and rabbis spread the word of God. Marxist–Leninist atheism was unpopular. Sections of the intelligentsia, especially among the non-Russian peoples, were cultivating nationalist ideas. Concessions on the national question had been promoted since the October Revolution and reinforced under the NEP. In Ukraine there was a systematic campaign of ‘Ukrain-ianisation’ of schools, press and public personnel. Similar drives were undertaken in other Soviet republics. Yet nationalism was on the rise everywhere in the USSR and was outmatching the spread of socialist consciousness. The basic policy of Lenin and Stalin was backfiring spectacularly. Moscow responded in 1926 by endorsing measures to deport a number of religious and tribal leaders in Azerbaijan.⁷ The handling of the national question grew harsher at the same time as severity increased in economic policy. Stalin’s associate Kaganovich, who headed the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1925–6, mooted measures to deport Poles from the western borderlands to the USSR’s internal regions. His purpose was to prevent Ukraine being infiltrated by Piłsudski’s intelligence agencies.⁸

The same party which had made the October Revolution in the name of the working class and the poorest peasants looked out on a society where capitalism, religion and nationalism were growing in strength. Even the ranks of the party caused concern. Membership in 1927, after an intensive recruitment campaign, rose to 1,200,000. Although this was a substantial total, it disguised official worries that the quality of recruits in terms of ideological fervour and educational accomplishment left much to be desired.⁹

It was against this background that the destabilising economic measures had been introduced from the mid-1920s. Stalin had long had a penchant for economic autarky. Unless state policy produced indigenous industrial growth, he assumed, it was inappropriate. He had written to Molotov in June 1925:¹⁰

Whereas Bukharin advocated industrialisation at a slowish pace and tried to discourage demands for acceleration, Stalin displayed increasing frustration. The partnership of Stalin and Bukharin was disintegrating without either of them yet anticipating that a decisive rupture was about to occur. They still got on well in the Politburo. They also saw each other socially. But Stalin’s ideas were hardening. In December 1926 he denied that the USSR would take fifty or more years to match the volume of the economics of foreign capitalist powers. Indeed he declared that ‘giant steps’ forward could and should be taken.¹¹

Stalin’s contribution to discussions of economic policy until January 1928 had been of a measured nature and — apart from his licensed attacks on the internal party oppositions — his outward behaviour had been calm since Lenin’s death. His rivals had some excuse for misreading the situation; but it was not a mistake they were going to be able to repeat without pain. Stalin was acting craftily. He breathed not a word to Bukharin about the war on the countryside he was about to start. Closeted for two days on the Trans-Siberian Railway with his aide Alexander Poskrëbyshev and others, though, he was in a pugnacious frame of mind. (Poskrëbyshev was the latest of Stalin’s personal assistants and was to remain in post until 1953.) Anybody who got in Stalin’s way on his trip was going to receive ferocious treatment. On arrival in Novosibirsk, he ordered arrests of ‘anti-Soviet’ kulaks. Grain procurement quotas were to be fulfilled. The campaign started to ‘expand the establishment’ of collective farms.¹² Squads were assembled in west Siberia and the Urals to collect the quotas set for grain collection. They travelled out to the farms armed to the teeth and grabbed whatever produce they discovered. As in 1918–20, Bolsheviks entered villages, summoned peasant gatherings and demanded immediate compliance at gunpoint.

Stalin returned to Moscow on 6 February 1928 with wagons of grain seized from ‘hoarders’. Pravda celebrated the achievement.¹³ It seemed that Stalin’s line had triumphed without resistance in the central party leadership. He and the other leaders insisted that the ‘middle peasants’ as well as the kulaks needed to be coerced into releasing their harvests.¹⁴ Bukharin was outraged. The change in policy had been undertaken in the provinces without prior sanction by the Politburo or the Central Committee. There was no precedent in the party’s history. Stalin had arrived in Moscow like a thief with his loot; instead of acknowledging his crime, he expected to have his virtue commended. The Politburo was in uproar. Its members stopped speaking to each other outside official meetings. When challenged about his policies, Stalin grew angry and imperious. Bukharin complained to him about his demeanour on 16 April. Stalin wrote back: ‘You won’t force me to stay quiet or hide my opinion by your shrieks about “my wanting to teach everybody”. Is an end ever going to be put to the attacks on me?’¹⁵ These words combined self-righteousness and over-sensitivity in a pugnacious mixture.

Stalin understood how to exploit the situation. He wanted faster agricultural collectivisation and state-planned industrialisation. Most party officials had never felt comfortable with the NEP. They itched to go over to a more ‘revolutionary’ line. In the Komsomol — the party’s youth organisation — there were also many militants who yearned for the Politburo to abandon compromise. This trend was also found in the OGPU: many police officials were eager to enforce a regime with greater control over an unruly society. The Red Army had leading commanders eager for economic transformation and an end to the constriction of their budgetary opportunities.¹⁶ Although agriculture had been the focal point of Stalin’s initiative in January 1928, he associated himself with a much larger agenda. Like his supporters in the party and other public bodies, he wanted to accelerate and deepen the country’s transformation. Industry, schooling, urban construction and socialist indoctrination were to be prioritised. The state was to become more penetrative and traditional attachments to religion and nationhood were to disappear. The USSR was to turn itself into a military power which could defend itself.

Moving beyond agricultural policy, Stalin organised a trial of engineers and ‘industrial specialists’, including several foreigners, from Shakhty in the Don Basin. They were charged with deliberate sabotage. Officially the OGPU under Genrikh Yagoda was conducting an independent enquiry. In reality it was Stalin who was accuser and judge. Investigative procedures were ignored. The Party General Secretary ordered the arrested individuals to be beaten into confessing to imaginary crimes. He was resetting the machinery of Soviet politics. He was cracking the resistance of industrial specialists — managers, engineers and planners — to demands for quicker industrial growth. Through the Shakhty plaintiffs he established a case of widespread sabotage. The shadow of suspicion fell over specialists throughout the USSR.

Stalin had let others do his dirty business. He avoided calling for the execution of the accused in the Shakhty Affair. He manoeuvred so as to get his results while protecting a pure reputation.¹⁷ Meanwhile Gosplan was preparing directives for the USSR’s entire economy. Sovnarkom had given instructions to this effect in June 1927 and the work was coming to completion in summer 1928. The first variant of the Five-Year Plan was scheduled for inauguration in October. The output targets were astonishingly high: capital goods were projected to increase by 161 per cent and consumer goods by 83 per cent.¹⁸ All sectors of the economy were to be subjected to state control. Although priority was given to the development of heavy industry, the Politburo anticipated that the popular standard of living in the towns would simultaneously improve. There was also an expectation that a hundred thousand tractors would be manufactured for use in agriculture and put at the disposal of the collective farms which were about to be created. Revenues for this over-optimistic scheme were to come from the main beneficiaries of the NEP. Stalin wanted to exact a tribute from the better-off peasantry. Bukharin described this as ‘idiotic illiteracy’.

Bukharin in April secured a decision at the Central Committee plenum condemning ‘excesses’ in recent practices in procurement. When the Central Committee met again on 4 July, its official resolution gave a commitment to the NEP and even promised a rise in grain prices.¹⁹ The problem for Bukharin, though, was the failure of his measures to restore economic stability. Peasants refused to release grain stocks. The violence had exacerbated relations between the villages and the administrative authorities. In any case the shortage of industrial products for purchase gave no incentive for the peasantry to return to the market.²⁰ The Politburo had hoped to alleviate problems by importing wheat; but this was too little and too late to terminate the food-supplies deficit. Nor did it do anything about the difficulties with the peasants. Meanwhile the towns remained short of grain and vegetables. The Politburo could not ignore the monthly reports: the USSR faced a winter of urban malnutrition.

What Bukharin had not bargained for was the reaction of several powerful leaders. He had expected Voroshilov and Kalinin to criticise what had happened in the Urals and Siberia.²¹ Even Ordzhonikidze was sometimes disloyal to Stalin behind the scenes.²² Bukharin remained hopeful that he could win over individuals such as OGPU leader Yagoda as well as the rest of the party. The reversion to War Communism had to be exposed for what it was.²³ Yet Stalin won all of them to his side. (It was said that Kalinin’s weakness for ballerinas allowed Stalin to put pressure on him.) By summer 1928 Bukharin was becoming frantic. He even started to worry that Stalin would bring Kamenev and Zinoviev back into public politics as useful allies. Bukharin made overtures to Kamenev to prevent this. ‘The disagreements between us and Stalin,’ he told him, ‘are many times more serious than all the ones we had with you. The Rightists… wanted Kamenev and Zinoviev restored to the Politburo.’²⁴ Bukharin’s overtures were a sign of panic. He could not assemble sufficient support at the highest party levels. His sole prominent allies against the General Secretary were Rykov, Tomski and Uglanov.

Yet Bukharin believed that the ‘Urals-Siberian method’ would be disowned and that the market mechanisms of Lenin’s NEP restored. Initially his optimism seemed justified. The ‘excesses’ reported in the expropriation campaign were officially castigated and denials were issued that the ‘extraordinary measures’ implied an abandonment of the NEP. Although Stalin successfully insisted that a stronger commitment to early collectivisation also be inserted into public statements, the feeling was widespread that he had damaged himself politically.

Bukharin did not give up. Having written inscrutable prose for most of his adult life, he came down to earth and published ‘Notes of an Economist’. Bukharin castigated ideas of ‘super-industrialisation’. According to him, these were Trotskyist and anti-Leninist. He claimed that only a balanced, steady relationship between the interests of industry and agriculture would secure healthy economic development.²⁵ There was nothing in the ‘Notes’ that jarred against anything Stalin had said up to 1928; and since Stalin still avoided disowning the NEP, Bukharin did not need special permission to publish what he wanted in the hope of neutralising a politician whom he had come to regard as the USSR’s Genghis Khan.²⁶ But he also misjudged Stalin by assuming that all that interested him was to keep power.²⁷ What had started as a crisis over food supplies had acquired other dimensions. Stalin’s group in the Politburo and Central Committee were not going to be satisfied by changes to agricultural measures. They wanted fast industrial progress and military security. They wished to crush nationalism and religiosity. They aimed to eradicate hostility to the Soviet regime, and the remnants of the old propertied classes were to be got rid of. Cities, schools and cinemas had to be established. Socialism was to be spread as an idea and a practical reality.

Stalin and Bukharin clashed every time they met. In his condition of heightened expectancy, Stalin applied his programme to international relations. He now denied that ‘capitalist stabilisation’ prevailed, and he declared that the world economy was facing yet another fundamental emergency. He resolved that this should be reflected in the world communist movement. Before the Comintern’s Sixth Congress in July 1928, Stalin declared that anti-communist socialists in Europe — members of labour and social-democratic parties — were the deadliest enemies of socialism. He called them ‘social-fascists’. Bukharin was horrified: he understood the dangers posed by the European far right. Appreciating the qualitative difference between conservatism and fascism, he wanted Hitler’s Nazis to be the main object of the German Communist Party’s political attack. But Stalin amassed the support required in the Politburo for a change of policy in the Comintern. The internal breach with the NEP obtained an external aspect. Until then it had been the official line that world capitalism had stabilised itself after the Great War. Now Stalin insisted that a ‘third period’ had commenced as capitalism entered its terminal crisis and that revolutionary opportunities were about to present themselves in Europe.

This had been under discussion in the Politburo for a year or two but no serious alteration of the Comintern’s practical instructions to Europe’s communist parties had followed. Wanting to do down Bukharin, Stalin had a personal interest in changing policy. But there was probably more to it. Stalin had had doubts about ‘European socialist revolution’ in 1917–18. Yet his scepticism was absolute and sometimes his Bolshevik instincts took him over. Aiming at the transformation of the USSR, he might have been reverting to radical type. From mid-1928, however, Stain’s group ordered communists throughout the continent to adopt the stance taken by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Extreme radicalism became dominant again and the Comintern, at the Politburo’s instigation, purged the doubters and vacillators — as well as the Trotskyists — from the ranks of its parties. World communism was being readied for the imminent revolutionary upheaval.

Stalin, while insisting that revolutions were about to break out in Europe, continued to stipulate that the Russian Communist Party should concentrate on building ‘socialism in one country’. His enemies took this as proof that Stalin was a hypocrite or a bungler. Trotski reminded everyone of Stalin’s cack-handed instructions to the Chinese Communist Party in 1927; Bukharin was baffled by the turn in policy. There was no fundamental paradox in Stalin’s change of policy. His controversial commitment to socialism in one country did not imply a basic disregard for the necessity of international revolution. Stalin had never ceased to accept that the USSR would face problems of security until such time as one or more of the globe’s great powers underwent a revolution of the Soviet kind. This did not mean, however, that he was willing to risk direct intervention in Europe; he still feared provoking a crusade against the USSR. But he no longer sought to restrain the communist parties in Germany, France and Italy which had made no secret of their frustration with the Comintern’s insistence that they should collaborate with social-democratic and labour parties in their countries.

He seldom did anything for one sole reason. When allied to Bukharin before 1928, Stalin left a lot of the handling of the Comintern to him. Bukharin had many supporters in leading positions in the foreign parties. By altering policy and expelling dissenters, Stalin could bring his own people to the top. Prone to moodiness, Bukharin contemplated resigning as a means of putting pressure on Stalin.²⁸ Stalin had frequently offered his own resignation from posts since the October Revolution; but he would not have treated Bukharin with the indulgence which he himself had received. His only idea of victory involved crushing and humiliating the enemy.

Much ground had already been prepared for him. In moving forward to comprehensive state ownership and regulation, the ascendant party leadership was moving backwards towards the Soviet economic system of the period of the Civil War. The Supreme Council of the People’s Economy had been established to supervise all economic activity after the October Revolution.²⁹ The banking and industrial sectors had been seized by the state in the Civil War and much had subsequently been retained. Gosplan had been created in February 1921. After starting the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin and his associates suggested that they were initiating a calculated strategy from this transformation. The word ‘plan’ implied that this was the case. No such strategy in any definitive form existed and there were many zigzags on the route to transformation. Policies were modified and sometimes abandoned. Once announced, targets for economic growth were frequently altered. Yet Stalin was not without a compass when he threw the NEP overboard. Although he lacked a calculated strategy, he always possessed a set of operational assumptions, and these assumptions were shared by many in the central and local party leaderships.

Sooner or later, as even Nikolai Bukharin thought, the market had to be eliminated from the economy and the social elements hostile to socialism — the kulaks, the nepmen, clergy, ‘bourgeois specialists’, nationalists and supporters of all other political and cultural trends — had somehow to disappear. The need for a wholly state-owned economy and state-directed society was the shared objective of leading Bolsheviks. They did not flinch at the use of force. Hardened by their experiences before and after the October 1917 Revolution, they were more than willing to ensure compliance by crude methods. The frustrations of the NEP were immense. The military threat from abroad did not fade and the technological gap between the USSR and the West was growing. Loyal supporters of the ascendant party leadership, moreover, were embarrassed by oppositionists who declared that they had betrayed the objective of the Revolution led by Lenin. Such a mentality offered a framework of assumptions inside which it was possible for Stalin to make his piecemeal proposals from 1928 and to count upon substantial support in the wider party.

Stalin started with basic assumptions about the world. These came from his peculiar and distorted reaction to his Georgian background, to his experience of the revolutionary underground and to the Bolshevik variant of Marxism. Whatever the matter to be decided, he was never perplexed to the point of vacillation. His axioms did not prescribe policy in detail. By thinking and commanding according to his fundamental ideas, he could be instantly decisive. Any given situation might sometimes require much study — and Stalin worked assiduously even after the Second World War at keeping himself well informed. But most situations could be decided without a great deal of work; indeed Stalin could afford to leave them to his subordinates and demand reports on what had been decided. He surrounded himself with persons such as Molotov and Kaganovich who shared his assumptions, and he promoted others who could be trained to internalise them (or to go along with them out of ambition or fear). It is this inner world of assumptions which gives the clue about Stalin’s otherwise mysterious capacity to manoeuvre in the changing situations of the 1930s.

During the First Five-Year Plan the USSR underwent drastic change. Ahead lay campaigns to spread collective farms and eliminate kulaks, clerics and private traders. The political system would become harsher. Violence would be pervasive. The Russian Communist Party, OGPU and People’s Commissariats would consolidate their power. Remnants of former parties would be eradicated. ‘Bourgeois nationalists’ would be arrested. The Gulag, which was the network of labour camps subject to the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), would be expanded and would become an indispensable sector of the Soviet economy. Dozens of new towns and cities would be founded. Thousands of new enterprises would be created. A great influx of people from the villages would take place as factories and mines sought to fill their labour forces. Literacy schemes would be given huge state funding. Promotion of workers and peasants to administrative office would be widespread. Enthusiasm for the demise of political, social and cultural compromise would be cultivated. Marxism–Leninism would be intensively propagated. The change would be the work of Stalin and his associates in the Kremlin. Theirs would be the credit and theirs the blame.

24. TERROR-ECONOMICS

Stalin in 1929 was determined to alter the USSR’s economic structures and practices. Gosplan was put under a political clamp and told to produce ever more ambitious versions of the First Five-Year Plan. The Politburo resolved that targets should be hit inside four rather than five years, and the officials of Gosplan were commanded to carry out the gigantic task of amending schemes involving the country’s industry, agriculture, transport and commerce. Warnings by experts against hyper-optimism were ignored. Whole new cities such as Magnitogorsk were constructed. Digging began of the White Sea–Baltic Canal. Engineering plants in Moscow and Leningrad were expanded; new mines were sunk in Ukraine, the Urals and the Kuznets Basin. Peasants in their millions were attracted into the expanding labour force. Skilled workers became managers. Factories were put on to a seven-day working week. American and German technology was bought with revenues which accrued from the rise in grain exports. Foreign firms were contracted to establish new plants and help train Soviet personnel. Educational facilities were expanded. Youth was promoted. A vast economic transformation was put in hand.

Industrial wages were meant to rise by about a half, but the skyrocketing of food prices discounted any such gain, especially after the introduction of bread rationing in early 1929. Housing construction lagged far behind the needs of the expanded urban population. Having aimed to build a hundred thousand tractors, security considerations turned the Politburo and Gosplan towards raising the proportion of the budget devoted to armaments. The needs of consumers were also downgraded as the requirements for coal, iron, steel and machinery were increased.¹

Having forcibly extracted grain from the hands of the peasantry since January 1928, the Politburo ignored Bukharin’s call for a reversion to the New Economic Policy and began to designate his ideas as a Right Deviation from Marxist–Leninist principles. In 1929 it resolved upon the mass collectivisation of agriculture. There had been many sorts of collective farms in the 1920s. Stalin selected two types to be introduced. The ‘higher’ type was the sovkhoz, whose land was owned by the state and whose workers were simply the rural equivalent of the hired factory labour force. The other type was the kolkhoz. This stood for ‘collective farm’ in Russian; the difference from the sovkhoz was that kolkhozes formally rented the land from the state and agreed to deliver a fixed quota of the harvest to the state. Whereas sovkhoz workers were paid a regular wage, workers on a kolkhoz were paid according to the number of days they contributed to the farm. The real difference was minimal for peasants. The Politburo’s policy as publicly announced was that entrance to either type of collective farm should be on a voluntary basis. Local party committees were ordered to conduct propaganda to encourage the phenomenon. Once Bukharin had been ejected from the Politburo in November 1929, Stalin stiffened the campaign.²

The Politburo repeatedly raised the tempo of implementation. The process quickened even in summer as the authorities strove to procure the required grain from the villages at prices resented by the peasants. An article by Stalin on 7 November, the anniversary of the October Revolution, contended that many rural households saw the advantage of collective farms without the need for the state to compel them; and it drew a contrast with the proposals of the United Opposition.³ A Politburo commission was established to work out implementation. The purpose was to prioritise the setting up of collective farms in the lower Volga region (which was famously fertile). Russia’s Far North was to be the last region to undergo total collectivisation in 1933. It was a short schedule but it became shorter. Central and local cadres who argued for a delay were firmly overruled. Instructions were kept confidential and vague; and party and governmental functionaries, concerned that they might be judged lacking in obedience, set about imposing total collectivisation with immediate effect.⁴

In July 1929 it stayed official policy that terror should be avoided and that kulaks as well as the majority of the peasantry ought to be enlisted in the collective farms. Stalin, however, wanted none of this. In December 1929 he announced that kulaks should be banned from becoming collective farm workers. His words were blunt:⁵

On 30 January 1930 the Politburo chillingly approved the liquidation of kulaks as a class. A Central Committee directive was sent out in February. Three kulak categories were designated. The first consisted of individuals to be sent to concentration camps, the second to distant parts of the USSR and the third to other parts of their province. The Politburo called for religious bodies to be simultaneously targeted.⁶ The OGPU was managed in the same way as the economy. Quotas were assigned to regions for dekulakisation, and destinations in the north Urals and Kazakhstan were prescribed. The Politburo handed down the schedule for operations.⁷

Stalin, like other Bolsheviks, detested the kulaks. He seems to have sensed that the peasantry would not join the sovkhozes and kolkhozes unless they were afraid of the consequences of resistance. Repression of a sizeable minority would bring this about — and anyway he probably genuinely believed that the kulaks would seriously disrupt the operation of collective farms. Over 320,000 households were subjected to dekulakisation by July 1930. The violence was immense. The superior force of the authorities, aided by the suddenness of the campaign, prevailed. A whole way of rural life was being swept into oblivion.⁸

Already in 1927 the Politburo had sanctioned the use of forced labour to expand the mining of gold. This initiative was translated in the following year to timber hewing.⁹ Stalin gave rulings on the use of concentration camps not just for the social rehabilitation of prisoners but also for what they could contribute to the gross domestic product in regions where free labour could not easily be found. He had never been reluctant to contemplate such camps as a central component of communist party rule; and he did not flinch from ordering arrests and ordering OGPU chief Vladimir Menzhinski to create the permanent organisational framework. Among the victims were categories of persons whom he feared and resented. Members of outlawed political parties were high on the list. Stalin also had ‘bourgeois nationalists’, priests and private traders in his sights as well as recalcitrant economic experts. His method was a continuation of the techniques developed at Shakhty. Leading individuals and groups in ‘anti-Soviet’ categories were put on show trial. The objective was to intimidate all their followers and sympathisers into giving up thoughts of opposition in case they too might be arrested.

A succession of such trials occurred in 1929–30. These involved much political inventiveness with Stalin supplying the main momentum. Historians Sergei Platonov and Yevgeni Tarle were arrested and included in the so-called Academy of Sciences Affair which led to the condemnation of the non-existent All-People’s Union for the Struggle for Russia’s Regeneration in July 1929.¹⁰ The fictitious Industrial Party, including the engineer Leonid Ramzin, was brought to court in November 1930. The Labouring Peasant Party, also non-existent, was arraigned in December 1930; the main defendants were the economists Alexander Chayanov and Nikolai Kondratev.¹¹ The so-called Union Bureau of the Mensheviks was tried in February and March 1931 with Nikolai Sukhanov as the leading defendant.¹² Outside the RSFSR there were trials of nationalists. Many of them had until recently been figures of the political establishment. But wherever Stalin and his associates caught a whiff of nationalism they resorted to judicial procedures. Ukraine, Belorussia and the Caucasus, north and south, were subjected to similar proceedings. Torture, outlandish charges and learned-by-rote confessions became the norm. Hundreds of defendants were either shot or sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment.¹³

Stalin’s strategy was to bring about a massive increase in political control as his general revolutionary assault was reinforced. His zeal to subjugate all strata of ‘specialists’ was heightened. Industrial managers, lawyers, teachers and military officers fell foul of him. The Red Army narrowly escaped a trial of its commanders but the interrogations alone, which involved Stalin in person, were enough to scare the living daylights out of the officer corps. Individual generals, though, were persecuted. Like the Red Army, the Russian Orthodox Church — as well as the other Christian denominations and indeed Islam, Judaism and Buddhism — escaped a show trial. But this did not mean that repression was withheld. Attacks on religious leaders became so frequent and systematic that the League of the Militant Godless expected belief in deities to be eradicable within a few years. Persecution was extreme, and only a twelfth of the Russian Orthodox Church’s priests were left functioning in their parishes by 1941.¹⁴

Meanwhile promotions of newly trained workers and peasants took place as the administrative stratum was widened. Volunteer collectivisers were found among young workers. Armed and indoctrinated, these so-called ‘25,000-ers’ set out for the villages to deal with the ‘class enemy’.¹⁵ Recruitment to the party expanded. By 1931 it had 1,369,406 full members.¹⁶ Literacy and numeracy spread. There was a reprise of revolutionary spirit as the regime gave out the message that socialism was being created in the USSR while abroad capitalism was entering its final crisis. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 made this a plausible message at the time. Unconditional enthusiasts for the Politburo’s policies existed everywhere. Even many who detested the violence and vilification were willing to believe that a new and better world was being created. In the party there was relief that action at last was being taken. Bukharin’s group had so little organised support that it did not merit the name of the Right Opposition. The end of the NEP was welcomed. Local party secretaries became mini-Stalins making all the fundamental decisions across the range of public policy — and the fact that nearly all the economy was somehow or other taken into the hands of the state meant that their powers had never been greater.¹⁷

While promoting industrialisation and collectivisation, Stalin did not overlook the fact that he ruled a former empire. In a speech to a conference of industrial functionaries on 4 February 1931 he declared: ‘In the past we didn’t have and couldn’t have a fatherland. But now that we have overthrown capitalism and power is in our hands, the people — and we — have a fatherland and we will protect its independence.’¹⁸ Patriotism was making its way back on to the list of official priorities. While society was being split asunder by policy initiatives from the late 1920s, Stalin recognised that some cement was needed to keep the people of the USSR together.

The range of changed policies was large, and in every case Stalin’s intervening hand was felt. Even on the ‘philosophical front’ he was active. On 9 December he visited the Institute of Red Professors. Several of the academics, including Abram Deborin, were known as supporters of Bukharin. Stalin demanded greater militancy from his own followers in the party cell at the institute: ‘Everything written here by you is correct; the problem is that not everything has yet been said. In the critical part it’s possible to say much more. You’ve given the correct evaluation here but it’s too soft and unsatisfactory.’ Then he added: ‘Do you have the forces? Will you be able to cope? If you have the forces, you need to do some beating.’¹⁹ Stalin was determined to crack the nut of intellectual resistance to his policies. He spoke of Deborin’s group:²⁰

Stalin treated the philosophers in the party cell as troops to be deployed in a campaign against the enemy.

The motif was manifest: ‘What sort of Marxism is this which separates philosophy from politics, theory from practice?’²¹ Stalin was somewhat incoherent. Elsewhere in his commentary he accused Bukharin and Deborin of cloaking their politics in philosophical argumentation. But he was not worried by his contradictions. He wanted cultural life cleared of every trace of opposition to his policies. Narrowness, rigidity and ritualism were to be introduced. Lenin was to be raised as the unchallengeable totemic figure in the campaign. His Materialism and Empiriocriticism, that crude work on epistemology which Stalin had dismissed when it appeared in 1909, would be elevated to the status of a philosophical classic and all philosophers would have to take its postulates as axiomatic.²²

Yet even Stalin could not totally ignore the huge disruptions to agriculture caused by his policies. Forewarned of the fate awaiting them, peasant communities in Ukraine, the north Caucasus, south Russia and central Asia took up arms. The urban squads of collectivisers were met with violent opposition. The Red Army, despite early official concerns about the loyalty of its conscripts, successfully suppressed such risings; and nowhere did the rebels manage to organise themselves across a broad territory as they had at the end of the Civil War. But the imposition of collective farms led to deep resentment. Antagonism to the authorities was ineradicable and the millions of peasants who were forced to give up their property and customs withdrew co-operation. Productivity fell away. A system proposed as the permanent solution to the problems of the rural economic sector might have yielded more grain for the towns but this was happening at the point of a rifle, and the perils of continuing mass collectivisation at the current rate became obvious.²³

Several in Stalin’s entourage witnessed on the trips around the country the appalling consequences of this policy. (They did this without calling for a reversal of the general line: they were not Bukharinists.) Stalin was unbudgeable from the general line of agrarian policy. The most he would concede was that local implementation had been excessive and that officials in the provinces had misunderstood central policy. On 2 March 1930 Pravda printed an article by him, ‘Dizzy with Success’, which castigated over-zealous collectivisers:²⁴

He deceitfully insisted that it had always been his intention that collectivisation should be conducted on the voluntary principle. By then the proportion of the USSR’s agricultural households herded into collective farms had risen to about 55 per cent.²⁵ Stalin maintained that local party officials were guilty of ‘excesses’ and ‘distortions’. Unlike the United Opposition, he declared the central party leadership had not intended to impose collectivisation by force and by decrees.

‘Dizzy with Success’ involved gargantuan hypocrisy. Although he was primarily culpable for the recent acceleration, Stalin did not admit blame. For a whole year he had goaded party officials to bully peasants into collective farms. He had issued fearsome directives on dekulakisation. He had sacked and disgraced politicians who criticised the pace of collectivisation; even his cronies in the Politburo had attracted his ire. But he had a highly developed instinct for political self-preservation. Embitterment against him was intense in society. The time had come to place the blame on those who had faithfully implemented his wishes. He got away with this. Confused lower-level officials allowed many millions of households to revert to traditional land tenure. Quickly the percentage of collective farms in the USSR’s agriculture started falling: by early June it was only twenty-three.²⁶ Yet Stalin, while willing to retreat tactically, was fixed on his strategy: Soviet farming was to be forced into the collectivist mould in short order. After the summer the campaign for total collectivisation was resumed and in 1932 about 62 per cent of the households engaged in agriculture belonged to collective farms. The percentage was to rise to ninety in 1936.²⁷ This was achieved by means of massively increased force applied with greater precision than before. The result was turmoil in the countryside. The combination of violent seizure of grain stocks and violent reorganisation of farm tenure and employment resulted in famine across vast areas.

The economic premise of policy was not publicly revealed, but Stalin made it plain in an instruction to Molotov: ‘Force up the export of grain to the maximum. This is the core of everything. If we export grain, credits will be forthcoming.’²⁸ A few days later, in August 1930, he repeated the message in case its content had not been fully accepted. Mikoyan had reported complacently about the level of wheat procurement across the USSR. This to Stalin was insufferable. The point was to go on raising that level and to ‘force up’ the grain export trade ‘wildly’.²⁹ Nothing less than a hysterical campaign to collect and sell wheat abroad would satisfy him.

Again and again he reverted to tactical, temporary retreats such as had happened with ‘Dizzy with Success’. On holiday by the Black Sea in August 1931 he saw enough for himself to know that collectivisation had reduced ‘a series of districts in west Georgia to starvation’. But characteristically he blamed the resident party and OGPU officials: ‘They don’t understand that the Ukrainian methods of grain procurement, necessary and sensible in grain districts, are imprudent and harmful in non-grain districts which, moreover, have no industrial proletariat.’ He even deplored the arrest of hundreds of people — not a reaction normally found in Stalin’s career.³⁰ Stalin recommended that grain be shipped forthwith into west Georgia. Contrary to what is often thought, the Politburo under his leadership frequently made such decisions on emergency relief. But always the main strategic objective was kept in mind and eventually reapplied. Industrialisation and collectivisation were two sides of the same coin. The state needed to seize grain for export in order to finance the expansion of mining and manufacturing output. Stalin left no one in the Kremlin in doubt about this.

He barked out the case for driving the economic transformation at a frenetic pace in a speech to a conference of industrial officials and managers on 4 February 1931:³¹

The language had an emotional intensity he had not used since Lenin’s funeral. The sonorous phrases hit home like a hammer. The patriotic appeal was unmistakable. The simple metaphor of ‘beating’, repeated again and again, conveyed the urgency of the struggle ahead.

Stalin warned his audience: ‘Such is the law of the exploiters: beat the backward and the weak. The wolf’s law of capitalism. You are backward, you are weak — so you are in the wrong and therefore you can be beaten and enslaved.’³² The solution, he insisted, was irresistible:³³

He had no doubt about what could be achieved. At a May Day reception in 1933 he was to declare:³⁴

The Leader’s voice in his 1931 speech to the industrial officials and managers had confirmed that there would be no vacillation. The course of rapid industrialisation and collectivisation had been set and there would be no deviation from it. Leader, party and state were wholly determined to reach the plotted destination. Firmness and courage were required. But Stalin was confident. In a sentence that was quickly picked up by official propagandists he declared: ‘There are no fortresses that could not be stormed by Bolsheviks.’ Looking across the audience, he moved to the finale of his speech:³⁵

Stalin was a bureaucrat, conspirator and killer and his politics were of a monstrous species. Yet he was also inspiring. Nobody listening to him on that occasion could fail to be impressed by his performance.

He was summoning his subordinates, in the republic and the provinces as well as in Moscow, to effect a gigantic political and economic transmutation. He knew that he could not know everything that went on. He was adept at getting thousands of officials to show the required zeal by setting out a general policy or handing down fixed delivery quotas. Many subordinates were appalled by the ‘excesses’. But many others — out of conviction, fear or ambition — co-operated eagerly. Once the project had been formulated in 1928–9, officialdom in all Soviet institutions competed with each other to obtain a share of the increased resources. They also aspired to the power and privileges dangled as a bait in front of them. The direction of policy had been made abundantly clear and they wanted to take advantage of the journey about to be embarked upon.³⁶

His summons was successful. The First Five-Year Plan, scheduled to last to the end of 1933, was completed a year ahead of schedule. National income had nearly doubled since the tax-year 1927–8. Gross industrial output had risen by a remarkable 137 per cent. Within industry, the output of capital goods registered a still more impressive increase of 285 per cent. The total employed labour force had soared from 11.3 million under the New Economic Policy to 22.8 million. The figures have to be treated with caution. Stalin and his associates were never averse to claiming more for their achievements than they should have done; and indeed they themselves derived information from lower echelons of party and government which systematically misled them. Disruption was everywhere in the economy.³⁷ Ukraine, south Russia and Kazakhstan were starving. The Gulag heaved with prisoners. Nevertheless the economic transformation was no fiction. The USSR under Stalin’s rule had been pointed decisively in the direction of becoming an industrial, urban society. This had been his great objective. His gamble was paying off for him, albeit not for his millions of victims. Magnitogorsk and the White Sea–Baltic Canal were constructed at the expense of the lives of Gulag convicts, Ukrainian peasants and even undernourished, overworked factory labourers.

25. ASCENT TO SUPREMACY

Stalin had once paraded before the party as the paladin of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. As Party General Secretary he had ordered searches of the archives and exposed every disagreement between his enemies — Trotski, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin — and Lenin. Stalin himself had fallen out badly with Lenin in 1922–3. Yet when Trotski’s American supporter Max Eastman published documents on that dispute in 1925, Stalin got the Politburo to command Trotski to reject them as forgeries. Implicitly he was making the claim that he alone loyally tended the flame of Lenin’s memory.

Prudence held him back from announcing the NEP’s abandonment. In economics, moreover, there was more than a hint of Trotski’s ideas in his new measures. Better for Stalin to pretend that he was building up the legacy of Lenin. At the same time, though, he wanted to assert his status as supreme party leader. It was no longer enough to appear as his master’s voice: Stalin had to impose his own persona. A fine chance came with his fiftieth-birthday celebrations in December 1929.¹ Pravda fired a barrage of eulogies about his past and present contribution to the revolutionary cause. There had been nothing like it since Lenin’s fiftieth birthday in April 1920 when Stalin had been among the leading eulogists. Stalin could gloat. He had survived the storms of censure about Lenin’s Testament and subsequent public criticism in the decade. At the banquet in Stalin’s honour he listened to the series of speeches itemising his virtues and achievements. The underestimated General Secretary had scaled the peak of the All-Union Communist Party, the Soviet state and the Communist International.

He behaved imperiously. Earlier he had been renowned for his common touch and had seemed so ‘democratic’ in comparison with most other party leaders.² A young Nikita Khrushchëv never forgot the impression Stalin made on him at the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925. His Ukrainian delegation asked Stalin to have his photograph taken with them. Petrov the photographer shouted instructions about the pose he wanted. Stalin quipped: ‘Comrade Petrov loves to order people around. He orders people around even though that’s now prohibited here. No more ordering people around!’³ Khrushchëv and his friends were entranced: Stalin appeared one of their own sort. It was a proletarian revolution, they thought, and a working-class fellow was running the party which had made it. But the gap between him and his followers was widening. He demanded complete obedience and often interfered in their private lives. Taking a dislike to Kaganovich’s beard, he ordered him to shave it off and threatened to do the job himself with his wife Nadya’s scissors.⁴ Probably Stalin wanted the Politburo to be identified with beardless modernity, but he had a crusty way of obtaining his purposes.

He had clambered up the ziggurat of power whose apex was the Politburo. Its members took the great decisions on political, economic, national and military policy. The Politburo’s agenda regularly included items on culture, religion and law. Stalin had no rivals among its members. These included Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Anastas Mikoyan and Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Though dominant in the Politburo, Stalin did not chair it. The tradition persisted that the chairman of Sovnarkom should perform this task.⁵ Stalin understood the instincts of the party. Like the Roman emperor Augustus who avoided awarding himself the title of king (rex) while founding a monarchy, he sacrificed personal vanity to the reality of supreme power. His main title was Party General Secretary — and sometimes he just signed himself as Secretary.⁶ His most important supporters were Molotov and Kaganovich. Both were determined and ideologically committed politicians — and Stalin had steadily imposed his will on them. They referred to him as the Boss (Khozyain). (They did this out of his hearing. Although he allowed a few old comrades to call him Koba, his growing preference was for fellow politicians to use ‘comrade Stalin’ or ‘Iosif Vissarionovich’.) Scarcely an important Politburo matter was settled in contradiction of his wishes.

He never stopped working even on holiday by the Black Sea. His personal assistants went with him and he dealt with important matters requiring his immediate adjudication by telegram. Molotov and Kaganovich kept in regular contact. Stalin himself continued to consult other communist leaders on the coast: they queued to have meetings with him. But this was a sideshow to the main drama. Moscow was Stalin’s preoccupation and he ensured that the two men he left in the capital shared his general vision of what kind of revolution was desirable. He had chosen well.

When he was in Moscow, too, Stalin devolved much responsibility to Molotov and Kaganovich. He bothered ever less frequently to convoke the Politburo. From seventy-five sessions in 1924 the number declined to fifty-three in 1928 and down again to twenty-four in 1933. Decisions were taken by polling the members by telephone, and this facilitated his ability to manipulate and control.⁷ It was usually Kaganovich who chaired the Orgburo and Secretariat. In September 1930 Stalin wrote to Molotov about the need to get rid of Rykov and for Molotov to take his place.⁸ Others in Stalin’s entourage felt unhappy — and perhaps also jealous — about the plan for Molotov’s promotion, and Voroshilov suggested that Stalin himself should take over Sovnarkom so as to bring about the ‘unification of leadership’. Molotov lacked ‘the gifts of a strategist’.⁹ Having enjoyed the praise, Stalin rejected the advice and gave the post to Molotov. He wanted to concentrate his own energies on the party and on the Comintern while knowing that Molotov would loyally carry out the tasks given to him.

The Orgburo, Secretariat and Sovnarkom dealt with matters which had to be referred to the Politburo if internal dispute arose. Stalin was kept informed about everything impinging on general policy or his personal interests. The three leaders anyway had to stick together. The Soviet economy had been exposed to the maelstrom of forced-rate industrialisation and forcible mass collectivisation. Popular disturbances were commonplace. The internal party opposition had been crushed but not liquidated, and the concern remained that Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin or even Trotski might return to exploit the situation.

Stalin’s supporters also ran the various People’s Commissariats and other state institutions. No room was allowed for half-heartedness. If supporters wished to keep their posts they had to comply to the full. In September 1929 his Chekist brother-in-law Stanisław Redens brought the news to Stalin’s attention that OGPU chief Vladimir Menzhinski had disciplined his officials for ‘diseased phenomena’ in their work. This was an attempt to put a brake on the implementation of official policies. Stalin wanted zeal and results, not procedural regularity. He wrote to Menzhinski indicating the ‘evil’ of his ways.¹⁰ Menzhinski’s deputy Genrikh Yagoda risked similar reproof a year later when he wrote to Stalin about the ‘crude compulsion of poor and middling peasants to enter the kolkhozes’.¹¹ Stalin also kept up the pressure on the Party Central Control Commission. This was the body which adjudicated cases of disobedience to party policies; it was also meant to protect Bolsheviks against an over-mighty central party apparatus but this function had passed into desuetude. Stalin used the Central Control Commission under Ordzhonikidze to bully the oppositionist groups out of existence — and he was not slow to upbraid his ally Ordzhonikidze for lack of zeal in prosecuting troublemakers.¹²

Joint meetings of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission were also used as a means of getting Stalin’s favoured policies validated. He pulled this trick whenever he thought he might meet with criticism in the Central Committee. The result was satisfactory for him. The OGPU, Central Control Commission and Central Committee were bodies which supervised all Soviet public life, and they were held under the authority of Stalin and his leading group.

Having defeated the Left Opposition and Right Deviation, Stalin allowed individual oppositionists back into public life on strict terms. If they petitioned for rehabilitation he demanded that they should recant like an accused heretic before the Spanish Inquisition. Abject public self-criticism was demanded and, often enough, obtained. Many Trotskyists in particular were attracted by the high priority accorded to fast industrial growth; never having been principled democrats, they forgot their demands for the restoration of democracy to party and soviets and joined the Stalin group. Pyatakov and Preobrazhenski were among them. Not that Stalin was going to trust them regardless of what they said in public. In September 1930 he wrote to Molotov:¹³

Stalin remained uneasy about factional regrouping. His operational code was: once an oppositionist, always an oppositionist. If given reason to re-expel adversaries from public life, he was unlikely to take a kindly approach.

This tendency to see conspiratorial linkages among those who were not on his side was detectable in a note he sent to Ordzhonikidze in 1930. The OGPU had conducted interrogations of a large number of former Imperial Army officers and discovered that several had put their political hopes in Mikhail Tukhachevski. Although not a scintilla of proof was found that Tukhachevski planned a coup d’état, Stalin’s suspicion deepened:¹⁴

Stalin was in no doubt: Tukhachevski, Kondratev and Bukharin were leading figures in this disloyal ‘camp’ of the Rightists.¹⁵ Only after the OGPU had done its work did he allow himself to believe that Tukhachevski was ‘100% clean’.¹⁶

He drove his ideas like iron bolts into the minds of his associates. Molotov, Ordzhonikidze, Kaganovich, Voroshilov and a few others were his confidants, and his implicit objective was to form a fanatical Kremlin gang devoted to himself as boss. Anyone who got in his way was expelled. In October 1930 he took offence at the People’s Commissar for Finances. He wrote to the Politburo ordering: ‘Hang Bryukhanov by the balls for all his present and future sins. If his balls hold out, consider him acquitted in court; if they don’t hold out, drown him in the river.’¹⁷ Stalin drew a picture of Bryukhanov suspended in the air and attached to a pulley by a rope which was tugging his penis and testicles back through his legs. Sometimes, though, he aimed his ridicule at himself. Writing to Voroshilov in March 1929, he mocked his own grandiose image: ‘World Leader [Vozhd]? Go fuck his mother!’¹⁸

Yet although Stalin could chaff himself in this fashion, he let no gang members do the same to him: his dignity mattered a great deal to him. So too did his authority. It was he who decided who could join and who should leave the gang. He also told the gang who its enemies were. He cajoled the members to regard their critics as the worst renegades. Indeed by 1932 he told Kaganovich to get Pravda to ‘curse crudely and sharply’ not only Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries but also Right Deviationists and Trotskyists as being advocates of the restoration of capitalism.¹⁹ The intention was evident. Stalin and the Kremlin gang were to regard themselves as the sole repository of political wisdom and socialist commitment. The people of the USSR should be led to believe that only the ascendant party leadership would truly try to supply society with material and social welfare and that anti-Stalinists would drag the country down and back to the bad old days of greedy factory owners, bankers and landlords. Vilification of opponents should therefore be taken to the point of the fantasy that Bukharin and Trotski were in league with the capitalist West.

Stalin turned all criticism of himself into a drama. Slight divergence from his wishes was treated as personal betrayal and political treason. He transmitted this attitude to his followers and got them to gang up on those whom he wished to topple. On vacation in September 1929, he sent a furious note to Politburo members Molotov, Voroshilov and Ordzhonikidze:²⁰

Molotov instantly obeyed: ‘It’s obvious to me… that St[alin] is right. My only disagreement is that we’re “sheltering” Rykov. We must, however, correct the matter as proposed by St[alin].’²¹

It was easy for Stalin, the Soviet political counterpart of Al Capone, to find new gang members.²² As his previous supporters were found wanting in zeal or efficiency, he promoted others. Some were among the most unappealing figures in Soviet public life. Andrei Vyshinski, a former Menshevik, became Chief Prosecutor in 1935. His basic proposition that confession (which could be obtained by torture) was the queen of the modalities of judicial proof was music to Stalin’s ears. Lavrenti Beria, First Party Secretary of the Transcaucasian Federation until his promotion in 1938 to the leadership of the NKVD (which incorporated the OGPU from 1934), had a penchant for beating his prisoners personally. Nikolai Yezhov, promiscuous bisexual and alcoholic, was even quicker to jump to the worst conclusions about individuals than Stalin was. Stalin was to make him NKVD chief in 1936. Others such as Nikita Khrushchëv, who headed the Moscow City Party Committee from 1935, had a decent side; but this did not stop him from doing his share of killing in the Great Terror.

Stalin did not overlook the Comintern. Bukharin had supervised its Executive Committee on the Politburo’s behalf since Zinoviev’s demise. With the falling out between Stalin and Bukharin in 1928, this body became an area of contention, and Bukharin was ejected from the Executive Committee in April 1929. For some time Stalin relied upon Dmitri Manuilski and Osip Pyatnitski to run the show for him in the Comintern. They held the main European communist parties to account. A tight hierarchy controlled what went on in German, Italian and French communism. The system of command was reinforced by the presence in Moscow of leading and trusted leaders on secondment from their native countries. Among them were Ernst Meyer, Palmiro Togliatti and Maurice Thorez. But the Comintern did not limit itself to long-distance control. Agents were sent on lengthy missions. Thus the Hungarian Eugen Fried was dispatched to Paris and kept in regular contact with the Politburo of the French Communist Party; and communists in France attempted little without prior sanction being obtained from him.²³ The Comintern had been strictly controlled since its foundation in 1919; but the degree of interference rose in the 1930s as Stalin sought to ensure that nothing done by communists abroad would damage the interests of what he was attempting in the USSR.

It did not come easily to Stalin to offer a reasoned critique. In fact it did not come to him at all. He was a political streetfighter: no holds were barred. He believed this was what the situation required. Although he confected a risible image of his enemies, his worries about the position of himself and his associates were not entirely unrealistic. They had jerked the rudder of policies away from the NEP and set a course for rapid and violent economic transformation. The gang had to take responsibility for the consequences. They could expect no mercy unless they could guarantee an increase in economic and military capacity. It made sense to blackguard the critics in case things went wrong. Citing Lenin’s words at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921, Stalin told Kaganovich that factional dissent from the ascendant leadership’s line would result in the emergence of ‘White Guard’ tendencies and ‘the defence of capitalism’.²⁴ Lenin had said no such thing. But this did not matter to Stalin: he wanted to sharpen the siege mentality already experienced by his fellow Politburo members and the repetition of outlandish accusations suited this desire.

While rehabilitating several repentant members of the United Opposition, Stalin showed no indulgence to the unapologetic Trotski. In January 1929 the Politburo discussed what to do with the man who was capable of causing them most trouble. From exile in Alma-Ata, Trotski was producing ripples in Moscow. His remaining supporters tended his memory in hope that his restoration to power would not long be postponed. Even members of Stalin’s entourage urged him to bring Trotski back since the basic official economic orientation was what Trotski had long recommended (and Aaron Solts said to Ordzhonikidze that Trotski would bring greater intelligence to the policies).²⁵ Trotski offered no word of compromise to Stalin, who for his part feared that until he got rid of his old enemy there would always be a danger that Trotski would exploit whatever difficulties arose in the First Five-Year Plan.

Yet Stalin did not yet call for his physical liquidation. No veteran Bolshevik had been executed for political dissent. The alternative to Alma-Ata was deportation from the USSR. Already in summer 1927 Stalin had considered sending him to Japan.²⁶ The Politburo came to its decision on 10 January 1929 and Trotski was expelled for ‘anti-Soviet work’.²⁷ Turkey was the destination chosen. Trotski and his family set sail across the Black Sea on the steamship Ilich. The Politburo calculated that he would be shunned by the parties of the Comintern (as he was) and ignored by the world’s capitalist powers (as he was). But Trotski was not finished. He started to publish a regular Bulletin of the Opposition from abroad. Expelled from party and country, he had nothing to lose. What was disconcerting to Stalin was that Trotski’s contact with the USSR remained unbroken. The Bulletin reported on controversies in the central party leadership. Trotski knew the Moscow political gossip; he also dredged his memory for instances of Stalin’s stupidity and nastiness and described them in his autobiography²⁸ — and he knew that Stalin hated being ridiculed or criticised. Distribution of the Bulletin was clandestine, but this had also been the case with the Bolshevik faction before 1917. Deportation was not the cure for the ills of Trotskyism.

Stalin did not repeat the gaffe of letting an oppositionist leader out of his clutches. In summer 1929 he learned that Vissarion Lominadze and a few other second-rank Bolsheviks were criticising the style and policies of his leadership. In the following year there was further trouble. Lominadze had been talking also to the Chairman of the RSFSR Sovnarkom, Sergei Syrtsov. Stalin drew the worst possible conclusion, writing to Molotov:²⁹

Stalin’s suspicions were too fantastic even for Molotov, and Lominadze and Syrtsov were simply dismissed from the Central Committee.

The atmosphere of a political witch-hunt was thickening. Nikolai Bauman was sacked from the Central Committee Secretariat for being mildly conciliatory to the former members of the United Opposition. Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich were edgy. Their policies involved a huge gamble. In seeking to consolidate the regime and to deepen the Revolution they were attacking a wide front of enemies in politics, the economy and society. This required the vigorous deployment of party, armed forces and the OGPU. The leaders of these institutions had to be trustworthy. Each institution had to be strengthened in personnel and material resources to carry out its tasks. But, as the state’s power was increased, the danger arose that such leaders had a growing capacity to undermine the Politburo. Lukewarm followers were of no use to Stalin. Unequivocal support alone would do.

The firmness shown by Stalin in 1930–1 failed to discourage confidential criticism in the upper echelons of the party. Although the Syrtsov-Lominadze group had been broken up, other little groupings sprouted up. One consisted of Nikolai Eismont, Vladimir Tolmachev and A. P. Smirnov. Denounced by informers in November 1932 and interrogated by the OGPU, they confessed to verbal disloyalty. But this was not enough for Stalin. The joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission in January 1933 condemned the leaders for having formed an ‘anti-party grouping’ and took the opportunity to reprimand Rykov and Tomski for maintaining contact with ‘anti-party elements’.³⁰ Yet no sooner had one grouping been dealt with than another was discovered. Martemyan Ryutin, a Moscow district party functionary, hated Stalin’s personal dictatorship. He and several like-minded friends gathered in their homes for evening discussions and Ryutin produced a pamphlet demanding Stalin’s removal from office. Ryutin was arrested. Stalin, interpreting the pamphlet as a call for an assassination attempt, urged Ryutin’s execution. In the end he was sentenced to ten years in the Gulag.³¹

Stalin never forgot a slight or missed a chance to hit back. He would wait as long as necessary to take his chance. Every tall tree he chopped down satiated an ego which had been injured by years of underappreciation and mockery. His memory was extraordinary, and he had his future victims marked down in a very long list. He extended his distrust to his allies and subordinates. Stalin demanded total loyalty. His daughter Svetlana, writing a reverential memoir in 1967, recalled:³²

This was his way. Once an enemy always an enemy! And even if he was compelled for internal party reasons to show mercy, he always intended to slake his thirst for vengeance in due course.

Bukharin belatedly appreciated this. Until 1928 he had been content to have his rough, aggressive comrade at his side. When he fell out with Stalin, he knew it would be hard to get back into his favour. Still he went on trying to arrange his readmission to public life. He wrote pleading letters to Stalin. He continued to visit and stay in Stalin’s dacha at Zubalovo, talking at length with Nadya Allilueva and playing with their children. Foolishly, however, he went on blabbing about his genuine opinions to other oppositionist leaders. He sometimes did this on the telephone. Little did he suspect that the OGPU provided Stalin with transcripts of its phone-taps. Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev were providing material which would make Stalin’s ultimate retaliation truly terrible. He knew their flattery and obeisance were insincere.

His close associates were equally determined to consolidate the authority of their gang. But almost always in the course of the First Five-Year Plan it was Stalin who took the initiative in persecuting or suppressing the group’s enemies. No one was more suspicious and aggressive. Yet his maladjusted personality was not the only factor at work. Although he exaggerated the scale of immediate menace to the leading group, he and his associates had cause for anxiety. Trotski was active abroad. Bukharin became editor of the government’s newspaper Izvestiya (‘News’) in 1934; Zinoviev and Kamenev returned to prominence around the same time. An alternative leadership in waiting had re-formed itself. The Bolshevik party’s experience in 1917 showed how quickly a small political group could turn a country upside down. Stalin had to watch out. The fact that lesser fry among his own supporters — Lominadze, Syrtsov, Eismont, Tolmachev and Smirnov — had proved disloyal made him still edgier.

Furthermore, expressions of disgust about ‘peasant questions’ were commonplace in the Red Army. Since the armed forces were imposing official agrarian policy, this had to be a cause for concern. Soldiers widely hated the collective farms. Rumours were rife. In 1930 a story flew around the Moscow Military District that Voroshilov had killed Stalin.³³ The implication was obvious: a yearning existed for a change in policy. Having identified himself as the protagonist of radical change, Stalin had made himself the target of unpopularity.

At every level of authority in the USSR there was discontent. The regional party officials felt a growing concern about Stalin’s unpredictable and violent inclinations; they did not warm to the possibility that he might go on putting pressure on them for increased rates of economic growth — and the First Five-Year Plan had made such officials more powerful than under the NEP. The party had been the vanguard institution of the Five-Year Plan. As the state took private economic sectors into its ownership and as the whole economy expanded, so each regional party official acquired enormous authority. With this authority, though, there came massive responsibility. Many officials, harassed by the Kremlin’s imposition of production quotas and acquainted with the enormous disorder and discontent across their regions, yearned for a period of retrenchment rather than continued rapid transformation. The leadership of several People’s Commissariats in Moscow and the provinces felt similar unease about Stalin and the Politburo. The Soviet state, while gaining much from the policies of the First Five-Year Plan, was far from being reconciled to unthinking acceptance of whatever policies were handed down from on high.

Below the stratosphere of party and governmental officialdom there were millions of malcontents. Oppositionists in their thousands were waiting for Stalin’s fall. Outside the ranks of Bolshevism there were still more irreconcilables. Most Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Kadets had ceased political activity; but they were willing to start operating again if the opportunity arose. The same was true of Borotbists, Dashnaks, Musavatists and the many other national parties which had been suppressed in the Civil War. Then there were the priests, mullahs and rabbis who had suffered persecution by the Bolsheviks, and, although up to three million people had emigrated after the October Revolution, there remained plenty of former aristocrats, bankers, industrialists, landowners and shopkeepers who continued to long for the Soviet state’s collapse.

Years of state violence and popular hardship had deepened the reservoir of anger with the regime. Kulaks and their supporters had been killed and deported. Industrial managers and other experts had been persecuted. ‘Bourgeois nationalists’, including Russian ones, had been imprisoned. Remaining religious leaders had been persecuted. Show trials had been organised in Moscow and the provinces. The labour-camp system held a million convicts. Whole zones in north Russia, Siberia and Kazakhstan were inhabited by involuntary colonists who lived and worked in conditions scarcely better than prison. Hostility to the regime was not confined to those who had suffered arrest or deportation. Peasants on the collective farms, especially in the famine areas, hated the agricultural system imposed on the villages. Workers were annoyed by the failure of the authorities to fulfil their promise to raise the popular standard of living. Even the newly promoted administrators in politics and the economy contained many who disliked the harsh practices of the regime. The display of obedience did not tell the whole truth. A multitude of individuals suffered from the punitive, arbitrary workings of the Soviet order and might be counted on to support almost any movement against Stalin and his policies.

This was not the way the official propagandists presented the situation, and fellow travellers around the world replicated their triumphal complacency; indeed the idea that Stalin had no external reason for feeling insecure has become the standard view upon the condition of Soviet politics by the early 1930s. Dictatorships, however, are not immune to political instability, and the Bolshevik leaders sensed that the important strata in society would oust them if the opportunity ever offered itself. Stalin had won several victories. He had instigated forced-rate industrialisation and collectivisation to the accompaniment of massive repression. He had imposed the aims of ‘socialism in one country’. He had harried the former internal party oppositions. He had become the dictator of the USSR in all but name. He and his associates were not without support. Promotees enjoyed their new privileges. Members of the Komsomol and young party activists were enthused by the project of revolutionary transformation. Cultural activists admired the anti-illiteracy campaign. Military personnel relished the strengthening of the armed forces. There was an appreciation that while the Western economies were being disrupted by the effects of the Wall Street Crash, the USSR was making a great industrial advance.

Stalin and his associates would not have lasted in office without such support. It was not yet clear whether the support outweighed the hostility in state and society. For the moment no one could challenge Stalin. He had reached the coveted summit of power. But the summit was an exposed spot, and it remained to be seen whether he would pay for having attained this position of eminence.

26. THE DEATH OF NADYA

Stalin became ever more isolated from daily life in the USSR as concern for his personal security grew. He no longer kept open office in the Secretariat. He visited no collective farm. While on vacation in Abkhazia allegedly he once went to inspect a market; but the Sukhum authorities, eager to impress him, got the stallholders to lower their prices for the duration of his visit: thus he was prevented from discovering the high cost of living.¹ In any case, he never inspected the factories and mines being constructed; and when he went to inspect the White Sea Canal, his trip was announced in the press only days after it had taken place.² The OGPU had picked up a potential assassin, Yakov Ogarëv, outside the Kremlin in November 1931. Ogarëv, however, had been so surprised by Stalin’s unexpected appearance on Red Square that he failed to pull out his revolver.³ Security concerns alone did not explain Stalin’s withdrawal from view. The fact was that he had set up a political structure which no longer required him to get out and about. Whether in the Kremlin office or at his dachas, he could give his orders and prod his subordinates into carrying them out.

Political cloistering did nothing to lessen the strains in his family. His son Yakov tried to kill himself in 1929; it was a botched attempt which earned Stalin’s contempt rather than sympathy. Marital relations with Nadya were tense. He was extremely gruff to her and never admitted to fault. Quite possibly Stalin continued to have the odd fling with young communists; and, even if he was faithful to Nadya, she did not always believe him and was driven mad with jealousy. Yet it had never been his way to compromise in personal relationships, least of all with women. Joseph’s attitudes were not the only reason why she got angry. Another factor was her mental condition. Although its precise nature remains unclear, probably it would nowadays be categorised as some kind of schizophrenia. Days of quietude alternated with explosive aggression. Stalin could never be sure what awaited him in the Kremlin flat or at the Zubalovo dacha — and his insensitivity to her plight was driving her to despair. Nadya had always been strong-willed. Stalin had been the love of her life, and, unlike others in her family, she did not have extramarital dalliances. Feeling rejected and underappreciated, she could take it no more in 1926 and decamped to Leningrad, intending to divorce Joseph.⁴

Yet she yielded to his pleadings and gave the marriage another try. She wanted no more children; according to her daughter, she had already had two abortions.⁵ Stalin had not obstructed her from registering as a student at the Industrial Academy. Letters between husband and wife were tender. His routine was established: every summer he would go to the south of the RSFSR. Usually the destination was Sochi on the northeast coast of the Black Sea. Nadya filled her letters with news of the children, the household, the weather and her progress as a student.

The Stalins decided to consult over her mental condition with foreign medical experts. Since the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 it had been normal for members of the Soviet elite to go to German clinics and spas. Stalin was one of the few who spurned this privilege; distrusting doctors and disliking foreign countries, he never considered travelling abroad for his healthcare. Georgi Chicherin, his Foreign Affairs Commissar, rebuked him: ‘How good it would be if you, Stalin, were to change your appearance and travel for a certain time abroad with a genuine interpreter rather than a tendentious one. Then you’d see reality!’⁶ But Stalin approved of Nadya’s trip. No less than his wife, he urgently wanted her to get cured. Even for her, however, permission had to come from on high. The Party Orgburo and Secretariat took from April to July 1930 to process her request, supported by her physicians in Moscow, to spend a month in Germany. The final sanction was signed by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and I. N. Smirnov.⁷ Stalin arranged for Nadya to send him personal letters through the diplomatic post.⁸ She met her brother Pavel and his wife Yevgenia on her trip; and after seeing the doctors she returned in time for the start of the Industrial Academy term in September.⁹

The medical papers are missing;¹⁰ but according to Nadya’s niece Kira Allilueva the diagnosis was a fusion of the cranial seams.¹¹ Joseph wrote affectionate letters to her. Throughout these months — before, during and after her journey — he used the sentimental code they had developed over the years, dropping particular letters from phrases like ‘deep kisses many times’.¹²

Her health, though, did not improve. In 1932 she turned to Soviet physicians for advice on what appear to have been abdominal complaints. It has been mooted that they resulted from an earlier abortion.¹³ What seems to have happened is that a planned surgical operation was postponed on medical grounds. This was what she confided to her Kremlin maid Alexandra Korchagina.¹⁴ Nadya fretted as much as ever; and although she made no further attempt to break free from her husband, the marriage remained an unsettled one. He could hardly be bothered with her. In a period where he and his propagandists were touting the importance of films, Joseph did not bestir himself by taking her to the cinema. When he was not drinking with his uncouth comrades, he went on flirting with women. The children brought no solace to Nadya. Severe and demanding, she gave them little of the cuddling normal in other families. Only when they were apart did Joseph and Nadya get back on affectionate terms. This was little comfort for a woman who was expected to give the maximum of psychological support to her husband without ever being able to count on his reciprocation.

Nadya did not limit her assistance to family matters but also supported him politically. Stories spread that, like her confidant Bukharin, she detested the agricultural collectivisation campaign. In fact she was a wife who jealously guarded her husband’s political position. On 2 May 1931 she wrote to Sergo Ordzhonikidze about Industrial Academy affairs. Her claim was that Stalin’s injunction for the right sort of ‘technical specialists’ to be trained was being ignored. Yet she insisted that her fellow students were not to know and the letter was to be destroyed.¹⁵ She was snitching on people in the Industrial Academy in support of the line of the country’s ruling clique.

Yet the dual problems of her medical condition and her relationship with Joseph had her on the brink of eruption. The only surprise is that no one properly understood this. Close friends like Tamara Khazanova (by now married to Andrei Andreev) and Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina knew of her troubles but failed to understand the depths of her misery. Nadya felt terribly lonely. She found certain kinds of social situation very disturbing. She tended to get distressed when Joseph got together with his cronies and their wives. The ruling group’s tradition was to gather for supper at the Voroshilovs’ Kremlin flat for a celebration of the October Revolution anniversary on 7 November. (Sovnarkom had adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918, moving the date by thirteen days and thereby changing the month in which the Revolution had taken place.) Always there was excessive drinking and a lot of crude banter. In 1932 Nadya made a special effort to dress up to look her best. It made no difference to Joseph’s behaviour. Late in the evening he flirted with the wife of Alexander Yegorov, who had served with him in the Soviet–Polish War. Natalya Yegorova was wearing a glamorous frock and behaving coquettishly. Apparently he did his crude trick of rolling a bit of bread into a ball and flicking it at her. Nadya was seized with jealousy, and stormed out of the gathering. Witnesses dismissively put this down to her ‘Gipsy blood’.¹⁶

There are other versions of what happened before she left. One story has it that Stalin yelled across at Nadya using the familiar ‘you’ form in Russian and that she took exception to this. Another is that he threw a lighted cigarette at her. But the likeliest version is that he was indeed making eyes at Natalya Yegorova and that Nadya could take it no longer. What happened next is more definitely recorded. Polina Zhemchuzhina ran after her into the cold night air. Nadya was extraordinarily tense and Polina walked her around the Kremlin grounds in an attempt to calm her down. Then Nadya went by herself to the family flat while Polina went back to the party.¹⁷

Nadya’s thoughts plunged into existential darkness. Some years previously her brother had made her the present of a gun; despite looking like a toy pistol (as Stalin later recalled), it was a lethal weapon.¹⁸ Seating herself on the bed, she pointed it at her heart and shot herself. Her corpse was found by the morning maid. The panicking household staff made a call to Abel Enukidze. As Central Committee member and administrator of the Kremlin site, he would have the authority to decide on appropriate action. As it happened, Enukidze was also Nadya’s godfather.¹⁹ Without hesitation he ordered that Stalin should be roused. The Stalins had taken to sleeping in separate rooms and Joseph was seemingly unaware of the consequences of his misbehaviour the night before. Doctors were summoned to ascertain the cause of death. This was not going to be a lengthy task: Nadya had shot herself through the heart. When Professors Rozanov and Kushner carried out the postmortem after midday, the body was laid out on the bed. Near by was the small revolver. Death must have been instantaneous and, they concluded, had occurred eight to ten hours previously. Nadya had taken her own life. Rozanov and Kushner started to write their brief report at one o’clock.

The politicians were deciding what to reveal to the public.²⁰ It was thought inappropriate to tell the truth for fear of diminishing Stalin’s prestige. Instead Pravda was asked to state that Nadya had died of the effects of appendicitis. Wives of the most prominent leaders signed a letter of condolence to Stalin. This too was published in the newspaper. A funeral commission was selected, headed by Abel Enukidze. There was to be a cortège behind a horse-drawn carriage carrying her coffin. The mourners would gather on Red Square at three o’clock in the afternoon on 12 November and would walk across the city to the Novodevichi Monastery Cemetery. Such occasions were cause for official concern, and the OGPU was put in charge of the organisation and security of the proceedings. Orchestras were to be supplied by the OGPU and the Red Army. A short ceremony was to take place at the graveside. There would be two speakers: Kaganovich as Moscow City Committee Party Secretary and Kalashnikov, a representative from the Industrial Academy where she had been studying.²¹ Stalin left the details to others. His public appearance on the day of the funeral was going to be an ordeal, and he did not volunteer to give a eulogy before the coffin was interred.

Despite what many subsequently suggested, he attended the ceremony. The cortège of mourners made its way on foot through the city. It was a day without snow. Crowds lined the streets. At the cemetery the open coffin was taken from the carriage and lowered into the hard earth. Kaganovich’s oration briefly mentioned the deceased and ended with a request that communist party members should carry out the duties falling to them as a consequence of Stalin’s personal loss. Kalashnikov gave a eulogy to Nadya as a fine and dedicated student.²² The funeral was over within minutes. Stalin and his comrades returned by limousine to the Kremlin. A simple tombstone was erected over Nadya’s grave, where it remains to this day.

When the Industrial Academy approached Stalin for permission to examine her working materials, he immediately consented and asked Anna Allilueva, Nadya’s sister, to expedite this. Not for Stalin the usual possessiveness of the widower. He told Anna to inspect the safe with the assistance of Tamara Khazanova.²³ Nadya’s daughter Svetlana was to claim that a suicide note was left behind; but Svetlana learned only many years later that her mother had died by her own hand, and her memoirs are anyway not always reliable. It anyway can hardly be assumed that such a note would necessarily explain everything. What is clear is that the official clampdown on information in 1932 served only to feed the growth of rumours. In diplomatic circles it was bruited that she had committed suicide.²⁴ Gossip was intense within the walls of the Kremlin. This was dangerous activity. Alexandra Korchagina, the maid of Joseph and Nadya, was denounced by other Kremlin domestic staff for saying that Stalin had killed her; she was sentenced to three years’ corrective labour on the White Sea–Baltic Canal. Korchagina claimed that it was her own denouncers who had made such a statement about Stalin.²⁵ The denouncers themselves were arrested in the 1935 clear-out of Kremlin auxiliary staff.²⁶

Indisputably Stalin was deeply shaken. ‘I was a bad husband,’ he admitted to Molotov: ‘I never had time to take her to the cinema.’²⁷ This was hardly a full recognition of the scale of assistance he would have needed to give Nadya. But it signalled a degree of remorse. Significantly it also implied that circumstances, rather than his own demeanour, determined his contribution to the tragedy. He was also thinking as much about himself as about his deceased wife. His self-centredness grew. Within a few weeks he was blaming her directly and worrying about the fate of their children. The attempt on his own life by young Yakov Dzhughashvili came back to mind, and at a dinner with his friends he blurted out: ‘How could Nadya, who so much condemned Yasha for such a step, go off and shoot herself? She did a very bad thing: she made a cripple out of me.’ Alexander Svanidze, his brother-in-law by his first marriage, tried to mollify him by asking how she could leave her two children motherless. Stalin was angry: ‘Why the children? They forgot her within a few days: it’s me she made a cripple for life!’ But then he proposed: ‘Let’s drink to Nadya!’²⁸

Steadily he came to take a less charitable view of Nadya’s suicide:²⁹

He focused his thoughts on the harm done to the children and, above all, to himself. Sinking into introspection, he confided in no one. He told the children that their mother had died of natural causes. Tough and icy though he was in outward behaviour, Stalin’s inner mood was touchy.

For some weeks there were worries that he too might do away with himself. He was pale and inattentive to his daily needs. His characteristic earthy sense of humour disappeared. It was weeks before he started to pull himself around. Seeking companionship, he turned to his Politburo associates. Kirov was a particular chum. Whenever Kirov was on a trip from Leningrad, he went to see the Ordzhonikidzes; but frequently Stalin called him over to his place and Kirov slept there overnight.³⁰ Mikoyan was also frequently invited. This caused embarrassment for Mikoyan, whose wife Ashken was not easily persuaded that he really was staying where he said. Soon Mikoyan had to start declining Stalin’s requests, and Stalin turned to Alexander Svanidze.³¹ He sorely needed the reassurance and company of familiar individuals. The Soviet Union’s ruler was a lonely widower. According to Lazar Kaganovich, he was never the same man again. He turned in on himself and hardened his attitude to people in general.³² He drank and ate more, sometimes sitting at the table for three or four hours after putting in a full day in his office.³³

Yet he did not yet take things out on the family and friends of his late wife. (That came later.) The Alliluevs tried to stay in touch with him without presuming too much upon his time and convenience. Nadya’s father Sergei wrote to him to ask whether he might still go and stay at the Zubalovo dacha. He was in poor health and hoped to convalesce in the countryside.³⁴ The request, written two months after Nadya’s death, tugged Stalin out of his self-absorption. Indeed it exasperated him: ‘Sergei! You’re a strange person! What sort of “permission” do you need when you have the full right to come and reside in “Zubalovo” without any “permission”!’³⁵ He welcomed other members of the Alliluev family, and Yevgenia — Nadya’s sister-in-law — made efforts to see that he had a social life. The Svanidzes too popped by to see him whenever they could. Blood ran thicker than water both for Stalin and them.

Yet Zubalovo offered reminders of his married years. Another dacha outside Moscow seemed a sensible idea, and Stalin discovered an architect with ideas he found congenial. Miron Merzhanov designed country houses with thick, gloomy walls as if they were intended to stand as impregnable fortresses. Without Nadya to dissuade him, Stalin commissioned a residence serving better as a work place than as a family home. A rural spot was found near Kuntsevo, west of Moscow. It was only seven miles from the Kremlin and could be reached within minutes by official limousine. Stalin got the dacha he wanted. There was a large hall for meetings as well as several bedrooms and rooms for afternoon tea, billiards and film-shows. The construction was complete by 1934; Stalin quickly set himself up there and ceased to sleep in the Kremlin flat. The dacha became known as Blizhnyaya (‘Nearby Dacha’). Another was built further out and called Dalnyaya (‘Distant Dacha’), but Blizhnyaya was his favourite. Merzhanov had to be patient with his patron. No sooner had Blizhnyaya gone up than Stalin demanded alterations, even to the extent of requiring a second storey to be added.³⁶ He was forever thinking of ways to make the little rural castle into his dream.

His was a restless and unhappy spirit. Although he lived by choice apart from his family, he was not comfortable with being on his own; and Moscow, where he had spent most years of his second marriage, was never going to allow him to forget the past. He looked forward keenly to his vacations in the south. Although he and Nadya had holidayed there together, her student obligations had latterly kept her in Moscow. State dachas already existed along the coast between Sochi and Sukhum, and Merzhanov was kept busy with commissions to design new ones.

Nearly all Stalin’s vacations after 1932 took place in Abkhazia. Although he lived alone in the various local dachas, he spent his time convivially. The wine flowed and his tables groaned with food. His boon companion was Nestor Lakoba. In the factional disputes of the 1920s Lakoba had kept the Communist Party of Georgia clear of oppositionist influence. He had fought in the Civil War and was a crack shot with a hunting rifle; it amused Stalin that Lakoba put the Red Army commanders to shame when they went out hunting in the mountains.³⁷ Lakoba, moreover, had been an orphan and — like Stalin — had had a difficult childhood; and he too had studied at the Tiflis Spiritual Academy.³⁸ He was a bluff Caucasian who saw to it that Stalin was given the leisure to enjoy the delights of the Caucasus: the scenery, the wildlife, the wines and the cuisine. Even when Stalin stayed in Sochi, over the Abkhazian border in the RSFSR, Lakoba would come to visit. In 1936 when Lakoba got into political trouble with higher party authority in the Transcaucasian Federation and was stripped of the right to leave Sukhum without permission, Stalin was furious. Whatever might be the local political intrigues, he wanted the company of Nestor Lakoba.³⁹

The first holiday after Nadya’s death was memorable in more ways than one. On 23 September 1933 Stalin and his bodyguards took a boat trip off Sukhum. Suddenly they were subjected to rifle fire from the coast. His chief bodyguard Nikolai Vlasik threw himself on top of Stalin to protect him and requested permission to return fire. Meanwhile the boatman steered away from the area. The immediate assumption was that this had been an attempt at assassination; but the truth turned out to be more mundane. The Abkhazian NKVD had been suspicious of a boat which did not come from the locality and assumed that foreigners were up to no good. The coastguards owned up and pleaded for mercy, and Stalin recommended that they should suffer only disciplinary measures. (In the Great Terror the case was dug up and they were either shot or sent to forced-labour camps.)⁴⁰

Stalin’s power and eminence attracted attention from politicians in the south Caucasus. His presence was a heaven-sent opportunity to impress him. Among those who yearned to be taken up by Stalin was Lavrenti Beria. In 1933 he was First Secretary of the Party Transcaucasian Committee and one bright summer’s morning found an excuse to visit Stalin before breakfast at a Black Sea dacha. Beria was too late. Stalin was already down in the bushes below the buildings and, when Beria caught his first glimpse of him, he saw to his chagrin that Stalin was accompanied by Lakoba. Not that this inhibited Beria from toadying. After breakfast Stalin remarked: ‘That wild bush needs clearing out, it gets in the way of the garden.’ But efforts to remove the roots failed until Beria, snatching an axe off a Muscovite visitor, applied himself. Beria made sure Stalin heard him saying: ‘I can chop under the roots of any bush which the owner of this garden, Joseph Vissarionovich, might point to.’⁴¹ He was almost volunteering himself as a purger for Stalin. Few of these convivial encounters were without political content. Stalin, even on holiday, could not insulate himself from the ambitions of intriguers.

Yet most of his visitors were party and government functionaries of the region. No one, not even Molotov or Kaganovich, was a chum as Kirov had been; and Lakoba was more like a seasonal landlord than a genuine intimate. Having put up barricades against psychological intrusion, Stalin restricted himself to playful recreation. He took nieces and nephews on his knee. He sang Orthodox liturgical chants by the piano. He went hunting, challenged visitors to games of billiards and welcomed the presence of female relatives. But he had got harder as a personality. Ice had entered his soul. Molotov and Kaganovich, who immensely admired him, could not work out what made him tick. They later said that he changed a lot after Nadya’s death. But the same works emphasise what made him exceptional: will power, clarity of vision, endurance and courage. Always Molotov and Kaganovich were observing him from the outside. They were in awe of Stalin. While they too were wilful and determined, they appreciated someone who had these qualities to a unique level of intensity. When he acted oddly, they gave him the benefit of the doubt. They thought he had earned the right to any psychological peculiarity by the services he had rendered to the USSR.

Most of them until the late 1930s felt no reason to query the mental condition of their Leader. Doubtless Stalin had previously driven them to distraction with orders to intensify political and economic campaigns. Yet the policies had been those of the ascendant party leadership and the negative side of Stalin’s personality was largely overlooked. Earlier acquaintances had been more perceptive. Fellow pupils in Gori and Tbilisi as well as many party comrades before 1917 had remarked on his hypertrophied sense of importance and his excessive tendency to take offence. And when Lenin used him as Political Commissar in the Civil War or as Party General Secretary, he knew that Stalin would need careful handling if his volatility and crudity were not to damage the interests of the Revolution. Then in the early 1930s Stalin started to demand capital punishment for his adversaries in the communist party. If Nadya’s suicide changed him, it was only to push him down a road he had been travelling his whole life long.

27. MODERNITY’S SORCERER

Stalin and his associates aimed to turn the USSR into an industrial and military megalith. They were militants. They wrestled to change society from top to bottom. They fought for ‘cultural revolution’. Their campaign, as they saw it, required the entire syndrome of attitudes and behaviour in the country to be transformed in the spirit of the Enlightenment in general and Marxism in particular. War was waged upon customary ideas. Religion was to be eradicated and nationalist affiliations dissolved. The intelligentsia in the arts and sciences was to be battered into submission or else discarded. The objective was for communism to become the generally accepted ideology and for Stalin’s variant of Marxism–Leninism to be installed as its core. He had not suddenly discovered this inclination. In the 1920s he had urged that young communists be trained to take up positions of authority and spread the party’s ideas.¹ The entire generation of Bolshevik veterans shared his standpoint. They believed that the achievement of socialism required a fundamental rupture with the old society and the elites who had formed opinions in it.

Stalin, like every communist, insisted that culture was not confined to the poems of Pushkin but covered literacy, numeracy, hygiene, shelter, food, conscientiousness and efficiency. There was an almost religious ecstasy in the political sermons he and his fellow leaders delivered on the ‘cultural front’. Writers were designated as ‘engineers of human souls’. His Marxist faith was fused with a warlike spirit. No one underestimated the difficulties of the campaign as Stalin urged the cultural combatants to rise to the task in hand. At the Seventeenth Party Congress in January–February 1934 he declared that fierce battles still lay ahead:²

Fervour and pugnacity were demanded: Stalin had begun a war he was determined to win.

Most observers have assumed that his ultimate aim was merely to ‘catch up’ with the West. This is to underestimate his purposes. He had a much more comprehensive project, and the atmosphere of his rule, which engendered much popular enthusiasm, is incomprehensible without that project. When Stalin spoke about the need for the introduction of ‘modernity’ (sovremennost’) to the USSR, what he had in mind was something more than blind imitation of the advanced capitalist countries. Soviet-style modernity in his estimation would be of an altogether superior kind.

He and the rest of the Politburo were Marxist believers. The utopian strain in their thought was to the fore in the early 1930s; they thought that Soviet modernity would raise humanity to a higher plane of existence not just by eliminating the bad old traditions in Russia but also by doing things unparalleled in the West. Unemployment had already been eradicated and soon the gap in material conditions between town and countryside would be closed.³ Universal provision of food, shelter, education and healthcare would be guaranteed. Bolsheviks had always claimed that capitalism was an inherently wasteful economic system in comparison with socialism. Marx and Lenin had written that industrialists and bankers inevitably developed an interest in doing down competitors and in blocking technological advance at the expense of popular aspirations and requirements. Resources were not going to be unproductively expended in Stalin’s USSR. A virtue was claimed for the standardisation of products and services. The higher good was the principle of common availability. Stalin was hostile, at least in public, to the maintenance of manufacturing sub-sectors dedicated to luxury goods. Individualisation of choice was consciously downplayed. The priority was for the ‘new Soviet person’ to accept the obligations of membership of ‘the collective’.

Stalin advocated ideas of this kind in speeches and articles. He embodied them in his public appearance and comportment. His soldierly tunic, his avoidance of the word ‘I’, his issuance of orders in the name of the respective party organs rather than in his own, even his lack of oratorical tricks: all these features helped to convey the message that Soviet modernity would ultimately triumph and bring unprecedented benefit to toiling humanity.

The ascendant party leadership had cleared a lot of the ground for cultural transformation. The First Five-Year Plan was accompanied by vicious campaigns against religion, and the Red Army and the 25,000-ers arrested clerics and kulaks with equal eagerness. Religion was to be stamped out. Many churches, mosques and synagogues were shut down. Out of 73,963 religious buildings open before 1917, only 30,543 were allowed to function by April 1936.⁴ Nationalism of every stripe was also trampled underfoot. The elites of the various national and ethnic groups were objects of intense suspicion, including even many people who had aligned themselves with the communists in previous years. Show trials of leading ‘bourgeois nationalists’ were held from 1929. The League of the Militant Godless was given sumptuous funding. When Mykola Skrypnik, a Bolshevik Ukrainian leader who had strongly promoted the interests of his nation, committed suicide, no official regret was expressed. The times had changed, and the USSR was being pointed towards transformations which according to veteran Bolsheviks were overdue. Private printing presses were closed down. Travel between the USSR and foreign countries became impossible unless political and police organs gave their sanction. The ascendant leaders tried to insulate the country from all ideological influences but their own. Basic cultural assumptions of Bolshevism were at last going to be realised.

Such assumptions had been more pluralistic before the October Revolution than later. Bolshevism’s regimentative side won out over its other tendencies after 1917, and the extremism of Stalin and his cronies prevailed over attitudes once sponsored by the rest of the Politburo. The violence and crudity of the new campaign in the ‘cultural revolution’ was remarkable.

Nor was high culture overlooked as an arena of struggle. Stalin’s interventions had previously been of a confidential nature, and in the 1920s it had been Trotski and Bukharin who were known for their contacts with the creative intelligentsia. Trotski had written Art and Revolution. Stalin was now seeking to impose himself. In 1930 he gave a ruling on the political history of Bolshevism before 1914.⁵ Increasingly his subordinates interfered in the arts and sciences through the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Secretariat. Long gone was the period when Anatoli Lunacharski (who died in 1933) or Nadezhda Krupskaya could fix the main lines of policies through the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment. Stalin was determined to get the kind of culture, high and low, appropriate to the state and society he was constructing. He increased his contacts with intellectuals. He watched plays and the ballet more than previously. He kept on reading novels, history books and conspectuses of contemporary science. He got his associates to do the same. Cultural transformation had to be directed just as firmly as the basic changes in economics and politics.

He welcomed a few intellectuals as his occasional companions. This too was a change from previous years when only his political cronies, apart from the poet Demyan Bedny, got near him. Maxim Gorki, whom he had tempted back from a self-imposed exile in 1931, frequented Stalin’s dacha. Other visitors included the novelists Mikhail Sholokhov and Alexei Tolstoi.

However highly he valued Gorki as a writer, however, reasons of state were never far from his mind. Gorki was famous in the West and could be turned into an embellishment of the USSR. He was fêted on his return as a great proletarian intellectual. Stalin wanted something for all this. In 1929 he persuaded Gorki to visit the Solovki prison camp; he even cajoled him into becoming co-author of a book on the building of the White Sea Canal.⁶ Gorki was duped into believing that humanitarian efforts were being made to rehabilitate the convict labourers. He also presided over the First Congress of Writers in 1934 and lent a hand in the formation of the Union of Writers. Gorki’s approval helped Stalin to bring the arts in the USSR under tight political control. The price Stalin had to pay was to have to listen to the writer’s complaints about the maltreatment of various intellectuals by the authorities. But fortunately for Stalin, Gorki died in summer 1936. The rumour grew that the NKVD poisoned him for importuning the General Secretary a little too often. However that may have been, his death freed Stalin to transform Gorki into an iconic figure in the official arts of the USSR.

Sholokhov and Tolstoi too had dealings with Stalin. Quiet Flows the Don by Sholokhov was one of the few good pieces of Soviet inter-war prose which did not assail the premises of communism. Set in the Cossack villages of south Russia and crammed with regional idioms, the novel was a saga of the Civil War. Its first edition contained episodes thought to be indulgent to the Whites. Sholokhov, after modifying the text as required, entered the classical canon of the regime. He also produced a sequel, The Virgin Soil Upturned, about the collectivisation campaign. This was aesthetically less impressive; it also strengthened the suspicion that he had purloined most of the chapters of Quiet Flows the Don from a deceased Cossack writer.⁷ Even so, Sholokhov was not a servile hack. He was horrified by what he witnessed in the countryside as the Cossacks were brutally herded into collective farms. Repeatedly he wrote to Stalin pointing this out. As famine grew in south Russia, the correspondence became heated on both sides.⁸ Sholokhov’s letters testify to his courage; Stalin’s engagement with him signals a recognition that loyalist intellectuals performed a useful function for him by raising difficult questions without ever threatening his political position. No politician got away with such impertinence.

Another writer who had Stalin’s ear was Alexei Tolstoi, the patriotic novelist and nephew of the nineteenth-century author. Tolstoi had come to think that the Bolsheviks had discharged the historic task of reuniting Russia, seeing off its external enemies and undertaking its overdue industrialisation. The novelist fed ideas to Stalin about the continuities between Imperial and communist patterns of rule. According to Tolstoi, it was the Party General Secretary’s duty to stand firm in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. Ivan and Peter had used brutal methods in pursuit of the country’s interests. Tolstoi was knocking at an open door: Stalin, an eager student of Russian history, already saw the connections with the reigns of Ivan and Peter.⁹

He knew what he liked in the arts as well as in historical scholarship. At the theatre he had admired Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Days of the Turbins since its première in 1926. This was a play about the shifting allegiances in Ukraine during the Civil War. Stalin’s devotion showed a willingness to understand the fighting in terms much less simplistic than in official history textbooks: Bulgakov depicted not only the Reds but also the Whites in sympathetic tones. At the ballet Stalin preferred Chaikovski’s Swan Lake to newer pieces of music and choreography. The significance of this is a matter of speculation. Perhaps he simply wanted to identify himself as an enthusiast for classical dance and anyway found nothing very attractive in Soviet choreography. It was the same with music. Although he began to attend symphonies and operas, few contemporary composers engaged his admiration. Poetry by living writers too was of small interest to him. The poet Vladimir Mayakovski, who committed suicide in 1930, was turned — like Gorki — into an artistic totem of the regime. Stalin paid only lip-service to his memory. (Lenin had claimed it was scandalous at a time of paper shortage to allocate resources for his poems.) The General Secretary had an enduring love for the Georgian poetical classics to the exclusion of Soviet contemporary verse.

Down the years he was mocked as someone without feeling for the arts. His enemies consoled themselves in defeat by drawing attention to his intellectual limitations. They went too far with their ridicule. Stalin also had himself to blame, for he had deliberately drawn the curtains over his educational level, poetical achievement and range of intellectual interests,¹⁰ and his verbal exchanges with most writers and painters usually turned on political questions.

In fact the flame of Stalin’s genuine aesthetic appreciation had not gone out. He displayed it especially when questions arose about the arts in his native Georgia. When Shalva Nutsubidze compiled and translated an anthology of Georgian poetry into Russian in the mid-1930s, Stalin could not resist taking a look at the typed draft. Back flowed his lifelong enthusiasm for poetry, and he pencilled proposed amendments in the margins.¹¹ Nutsubidze and Stalin made for an odd pair. Nutsubidze was a scholar who had refused to join the party; his very project to produce a Georgian literary anthology might have served as a pretext for arresting him. But the two men got on well and Nutsubidze appreciated Stalin’s suggestions as real improvements.¹² Stalin did not allow his assistance to be publicised. Nor did he give permanent approval to attempts to resuscitate his fame as a minor Georgian poet. Some of the early verses crept into print and this cannot have happened without his sanction. But second thoughts prevailed. The poems were not widely reprinted in his time in power and did not appear in his multi-volume Works published after the Second World War. Reasons of state prevailed over vanity. Stalin had probably concluded that the romantic poetry of his youth would disfigure his image as the Man of Steel. Presumably he also wanted to set the literary tone for the times. Culture was to be judged by the yardstick of current political requirements.

Literature, painting and architecture were arts more easily analysed in this reductive fashion than music. Stalin wanted two things at once. He desired culture for the ‘masses’; he also aimed to disseminate high culture. He wished the USSR’s attainments to outmatch any achieved abroad. Insisting on Russia’s centuries-old greatness, he assimilated Russian writers and composers of the nineteenth century — Pushkin, Tolstoi, Glinka and Chaikovski — to the socialist project after 1917. He had a private enthusiasm for Dostoevski, whom he judged a brilliant psychologist;¹³ but Dostoevski’s overt reactionary politics and mystical religious faith proved too much even for Stalin to approve republication of his works. The librettos of Glinka’s operas were rewritten and many of Pushkin’s and Tolstoi’s writings were banned. Even so, much of the pre-revolutionary artistic heritage with its conservative, liberal and apolitical elements was made available to the public. Stalin’s cultural programme was an unstable mixture. He could kill artists at will and yet his policies were incapable of producing great art unless he either deliberately or unconsciously overlooked, at least to some extent, what his artists were really doing.

Culture in general attracted his occasional — and unpredictable — interventions. Stalin’s aide Lev Mekhlis rang up Pravda cartoonist Boris Yefimov in 1937 and told him to come immediately to the Kremlin. Suspecting the worst, Yefimov feigned influenza. But ‘he’ — Stalin — was insisting; Yefimov could postpone the visit at most by a day. In fact Stalin simply wished to say that he thought Yefimov should cease drawing Japanese figures with protruding teeth. ‘Definitely,’ replied the cartoonist. ‘There won’t be any more teeth.’¹⁴ Stalin’s interventions were equally direct in film production. Boris Shumyatski, the People’s Commissar in charge of Soviet cinema until his arrest in 1938, understood that the General Secretary was the sole reviewer who had to be taken seriously.¹⁵ Stalin had screening facilities set up in his dachas outside Moscow and by the Black Sea. Films such as Lenin in October were among his favourites; but he liked audiences to be entertained as well as indoctrinated. He did not object to an escapist melodrama like Circus; and as propaganda came to stress patriotism, Stalin applauded the films Ivan the Terrible and Alexander Nevski directed by Sergei Eizenshtein. It was a favour which Eizenshtein both relished and feared: he knew that Stalin would pounce with fury upon any scenes he deemed to conflict with current official politics.

Such artistic works of distinction as were created in the 1930s — with very few exceptions — came into being despite him. The works of Anna Akhmatova, who composed her wonderful elegiac cycle of poems Requiem in 1935–40, were banned from the press. (Only in the Second World War, when her verses were useful for raising public morale, did Stalin somewhat relent.)¹⁶ That masterpiece of Russian prose, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, remained in his desk drawer at his death and was not published in full in the Soviet Union until 1975. Stalin even terrorised the genius of mid-century Russian classical music Dmitri Shostakovich, who was denounced for writing pieces which nobody could whistle. Shostakovich was constrained to ‘confess’ his errors; indeed his Fifth Symphony in 1937 became known as ‘A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism’. Music, however, was less harshly treated than the other arts. Terrified though he had been, Shostakovich went on writing and having his symphonies performed. Just a few fine literary pieces were printed. Among them were Sholokhov’s two novels and some of Andrei Platonov’s short stories. But generally Stalin’s rule spread a blight over the already damaged artistic environment of the USSR.

The Great Terror of 1937–8 was to scare most intellectuals into cooperating overtly with the state or else just keeping their heads down. Just a very few of them challenged authority. Osip Mandelshtam in 1934 read out an anti-Stalin poem to a private soirée:¹⁷

The last line reproduced the (unproved) rumour that Stalin was of Ossetian ancestry.

The listeners that evening included an informer, and the poet was arrested. Even Stalin, though, was unsure what to do with him. His instinct was to execute him; but instead he telephoned another great poet, Boris Pasternak, and asked whether Mandelshtam’s was a truly wonderful talent. Pasternak was in acute embarrassment: if he said yes, he too might be arrested; but to say no would be to condemn his friend and rival to the Gulag. Pasternak gave an equivocal answer, prompting Stalin to comment sarcastically: ‘If I had a poet friend who was in trouble, I’d throw myself at a wall to save him!’¹⁸ Mandelshtam was sent to the Gulag in 1938. The list of fine artists who were shot or incarcerated is depressingly long. More great intellectuals perished in the 1930s than survived. Isaak Babel, writer of wonderful short stories about the Red cavalry in the Soviet–Polish War of 1920, was a victim. So was the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerkhold. Even Mikhail Bulgakov, whose plays had pleased Stalin in the 1920s, was ushered into the pits of depression. He perished a broken man in freedom in 1940. Anna Akhmatova suffered despite never being arrested: her son Lev was taken by the police in her place. Unlike Bulgakov, she endured her situation with lasting fortitude.

The repression came also to scholarship and the natural sciences. Among the victims of the show trials in 1929–31 were historians such as Sergei Platonov who were accused of Russian nationalist activity. Yevgeni Tarle, who later became one of Stalin’s favourite historians, was locked up. Literary criticism was another dangerous scholarly area. Although Stalin enlisted nineteenth-century poetry and prose in his programme for cultural revolution, he was not going to permit the publication of unorthodox interpretations. Scientific teaching and research were also persecuted whenever he saw them as a threat to the regime. The list of outstanding figures who were repressed is a long one. It included the biologist Nikolai Vavilov, the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev and the physicist Lev Landau.

This treatment of the country’s scientists clashed with the official campaign to put the USSR in the vanguard of scientific progress. Yet the Soviet Union was a political despotism and Stalin had prejudices which he imposed even on areas of human enquiry where he had no expertise whatever. He also had a bias in favour of scientists who came from the working class or peasantry and, regardless of their limited education, challenged conventional ideas. He was further attracted to any scientific idea which appeared congenial to the crude version of Marxist epistemology and ontology which he espoused (and which he wrote up in the chapter on dialectical materialism in the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): A Short Course.¹⁹) The most notorious case was Timofei Lysenko, a self-styled geneticist who claimed to be able to breed new strains of plant by changing their climatic environment. Trained geneticists such as Vavilov protested that Lysenko ignored decades of proof that plants did not pass on their environmentally acquired characteristics from one generation to another. Lysenkoism was a bastard form of the Lamarckian propositions of natural selection. Vavilov failed to interest Stalin; Lysenko captivated his enthusiasm. The result was a catastrophe for Soviet genetics and the consignment of Vavilov to a forced-labour camp.

Many of the scientists, scholars and artists who thrived under Stalin were third-raters. Chairman of the USSR Writers’ Union was the talentless Alexander Fadeev, not Bulgakov or Pasternak; and it was the mediocre Tikhon Khrennikov rather than the musical genius Dmitri Shostakovich who led the USSR Union of Composers. Political reliability was what counted with the Agitprop Department of the Party Secretariat. The organisations gave the permits for individuals to function in the Soviet Union; they could make or break the careers of their members. They disposed of funds, food packs, sanatoria and holiday dachas. Their leaders — the Fadeevs and the Khrennikovs — went to social gatherings hosted by Stalin. Each Soviet republic had its own unions. The Kremlin conferred awards and medals. Not only scholars but also aviators, footballers, opera singers and even circus clowns hoped to win them. The annual Stalin Prizes brought prestige and a handsome cheque in the bank account. Stalin was the architect of this system of control and reward. He carried through the cultural revolution of his choice, and was proud of the achievements under his rule.²⁰

By 1939 about 87 per cent of Soviet citizens between the ages of nine and forty-nine were literate and numerate. Schools, newspapers, libraries and radio stations proliferated. Factory apprenticeships had hugely expanded in number. The universities teemed with students. An agrarian society had been pointed in the direction of ‘modernisation’. The cultural revolution was not restricted to the dissemination of technical skills; it was also aimed at spreading science, urbanism, industry and Soviet-style modernity. Attitudes and manners were to be transformed.²¹ Schools, newspapers and radio trumpeted this official priority. Soviet spokesmen — politicians, scholars, teachers and journalists — asserted that the USSR was a beacon of enlightenment and progress. Capitalist states were depicted as forests of ignorance, reaction and superstition. Physics, the ballet, military technology, novels, organised sport and mathematics in the USSR were touted as evidence of the progress already made.

The USSR had in many ways dragged its society out of the ruts of traditionalism. But the process was not unidirectional. Marxism–Leninism, despite its pretensions to ‘scientific analysis’, rested on assumptions inherited from earlier centuries. This was particularly true of Stalin’s way of thinking. He had never eradicated the superstitious worldview he had encountered as a small boy; and his attitudes were transferred to cultural life as a whole once he had supreme power. Official Soviet thought, consolidated in the Civil War, postulated the existence of alien, maleficent forces acting against the common weal. Conspiracies were supposedly being formed everywhere. The appearance of sincerity had always to be queried. Foreign agencies were alleged to be ubiquitous in the USSR. Such thinking did not begin with Stalin. Lenin during the Kronstadt Revolt and on other occasions had ascribed outbreaks of dissent and resistance to the activity of capitalist powers abroad. Under Stalin, though, this mode of perception became an ever more cardinal feature. The testing of political and economic assertions against empirical evidence fell into desuetude; open discussion on the scientific model ceased. Pronouncements from the Kremlin served as the regime’s kabbalah. Anyone refusing to accept the existence of fiends using diabolical methods to overturn the regime was liable to be treated as an infidel or heretic deserving summary punishment.

A corpus of magical writ was purveyed. Its texts were not the works of Marx, Engels or even Lenin. Soviet culture from the late 1930s was dominated by The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): A Short Course and the official biography of Stalin. Excerpts from both were accorded quasi-Biblical authority. Marxism–Leninism in general, and Stalin’s version of it in particular, was reproducing a mentality characteristic of peasant traditionalism. Customs in the countryside were associated with belief in spirits, demons and sorcerers. Witchcraft was a normal phenomenon and spells were regularly employed to ward off evil (or to inflict it on enemies). This syndrome suffused Stalinism and its culture. Without using the term, Stalin suggested that black magic had to be confronted if the forces of good — Marxism–Leninism, the communist party and the October Revolution — were to survive and flourish. Not every novelist, scholar or scientist went along with such idiocy. Quite the contrary: the best cultural achievements under Stalin were devoid of it. But in key sectors, especially the schools and the print and broadcast media, he could impose the pattern very effectively. Despite its achievements in twentieth-century culture, the USSR was being dragged back to older modalities of thought. Stalin, far from being the clean-limbed titan of modernity, was a village sorcerer who held his subjects in his dark thrall.

28. FEARS IN VICTORY

Even as the First Five-Year Plan had neared completion in 1932, the strains in the economy and in society were becoming intolerable. The famine deepened in Ukraine, south Russia, the north Caucasus and Kazakhstan. Rural rebellions had not been completely suppressed. Attacks on collectivisation squads, OGPU officials and local soviets continued. Having been bludgeoned into joining kolkhozes, hundreds of thousands of peasant families left the countryside rather than endure further hardship.¹ Trouble started to spread to the towns. Strikes and demonstrations against the regime were organised in the textile city of Ivanovo.²

Like Lenin in 1921, Stalin saw the need for a temporary economic retreat. The difference was that, whereas Lenin had introduced the New Economic Policy mainly for fear of a universal revolt by the peasantry, it was the workers who brought Stalin to his senses. If industrialisation were to be disrupted, the foundations of his power would be undermined. There was recognition that the problems in the towns and villages were linked. From May 1932 the peasants were permitted to trade their agricultural surplus at so-called kolkhoz markets. Between August 1932 and February 1933 the state’s planned collection quotas for grain were reduced from 18.1 to 14.9 million tons.³ The industrial component of the retreat took shape in a slackening of the tempo of capital investment during the Second Five-Year Plan. The rampant dash for expanded output in factories and mines was to be slowed.⁴ The living conditions of citizens were at last given prominence. Industrial consumer products were planned to increase by 134 per cent and agricultural output by 177 per cent in 1933–7. Housing space was to expand by two fifths.⁵ Apparently he was beginning to see sense. The objective was to avoid a second headlong dash for growth in capital projects and to consolidate the gains already won.

There was more discussion in the Politburo about industry than about agriculture. Stalin knew his mind about the countryside even though he felt the need to make concessions. Industrial policy put him in a quandary, and he listened to the debate in the Politburo as Molotov and Kaganovich argued for a slowing down against the wishes of Ordzhonikidze in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Stalin’s instincts tugged him towards Ordzhonikidze but he moved increasingly against him. At the January 1933 Central Committee plenum Stalin announced a lowering of the industrial growth target to 13–14 per cent.⁶

The pressure on society was only moderately relieved. The reduced agricultural collections did little to stave off starvation since the 1932 harvest, badly affected by the weather, was a poor one. Stalin’s concessions to the peasants had their limits; and the insistence on keeping up grain exports was maintained. The penal sanctions for disobedience were made more severe than ever. On 7 August, at his personal instigation, peasants who stole even a handful of grain became liable to the death sentence or a minimum of ten years’ imprisonment.⁷ At a time when peasants in several regions were so desperate that some turned to cannibalism, this was a decree of extraordinary ferocity even for Stalin. The yeast in the bread of reform was repression. He also instructed the OGPU to see that kulaks and ‘speculators’ did not take advantage of the concessions being made.⁸ Police, army and party were used to ensure that the basic economic and political changes introduced since 1928 would stay intact. Stalin was completely in charge of economic policy. The slightest sign of disagreement from communist leaders in Moscow or the provinces earned his instant rebuke. The result was that not once after the second half of 1932 did a fellow Politburo member dare to challenge any of his decisions.⁹

At times Stalin seemed baffled by the abuses and chaos he had caused through his policies. Writing to Kaganovich and Molotov in June 1932, he mentioned that party committees in Ukraine and the Urals were crudely dividing the centrally assigned quotas for grain procurement among the lower territorial units of each province. He asked why such committees did not take local peculiarities into account.¹⁰ But in order to fulfil the quotas imposed from Moscow there was little that provincial administrators could do but use rough and ready methods. They were only doing at the local level what Stalin was doing in the Kremlin. Being cut off from rural and administrative realities, he assumed that the problem was local incompetence or mischief.

Yet reports on the poor harvest and spreading famine caused even Stalin, comfortably on vacation by the Black Sea, to lighten Ukrainian grain collections in mid-August; and once his sanction had been secured, the Politburo halved its quotas to alleviate the hardship.¹¹ (Not that he stopped feeling let down by the republican party leaders in Kiev: he kept his promise to the Politburo that eventually they would be removed.)¹² Stalin also allowed a lowering of procurement quotas in the Volga, the Urals and Kazakhstan after the 1933 harvest.¹³ But his indulgences were temporary and partial. When Kaganovich in September 1934 requested yet another lowering of the Ukrainian grain quotas, Stalin retorted:¹⁴

Politburo member Kaganovich was being reminded that the general orientation of policies was to be sustained.

The palliative measures of 1932–3 had little immediate effect. Even the lowered collection quotas left the peasantry with less wheat and potatoes than they needed for subsistence. They ate berries, fungi, rats and mice; and, when these had been consumed, peasants chewed grass and bark. Probably six million people died in a famine which was the direct consequence of state policy.¹⁵ Further measures were announced. The Kolkhoz Model Statute, introduced in 1935, allowed each household between a quarter and a half of a hectare for its private plot.¹⁶ This additional incentive to the economy’s non-state sector was a signal of the terrible conditions for Soviet consumers. Without private agricultural production, albeit in a very restricted framework, conditions would have been still worse. Peasants eked out their existence in the most severe circumstances even after the famine ended in 1933. But life was only a little better for most workers in the towns. Urban wages remained lower in real terms than before the First Five-Year Plan. Industrialisation and collectivisation had thrown society into the maelstrom of hunger, migration and the Gulag. But Stalin and his Politburo had pulled back from the most extreme of their policies for economic transformation, and many officials and most citizens were hoping that the frenzied chaos of 1928–32 had been terminated.

The Seventeenth Party Congress of January and February 1934 was hailed in advance as the Congress of Victors. On the surface there was unanimity among the delegates. No direct criticism of the ascendant party leadership was made. Stalin’s Central Committee report was met with rapturous acclaim; its contents ranged confidently across both foreign and internal policy. He took pride in the ‘victories’ achieved since 1928. Rapid industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation had been imposed. Bolshevik oppositions on the left and the right had been crushed. Priority had been given to socialism in one country. The Central Committee was distinguished more by its listing of long-term objectives than by its specification of immediate policy.

Delegates confined themselves in public to making pleas on behalf of particular localities or economic sectors. Some asked for adjustments of existing measures; but there was no overt discussion of the Ukrainian famine or general industrial policy.¹⁷ Behind the scenes, however, there were grumbles about Stalin’s methods and ambitions. Republican and provincial party officials had had a rough time in recent years as they strove to implement the demands of the Politburo and Gosplan. They had no objection to the additional powers and privileges all this had brought. But the perspective of a regime of permanent pressure was undesirable for them. Quite apart from their personal interests, they believed that a period of consolidation was required. In the absence of open opportunities some of them — at least according to a few sources — approached Politburo member Sergei Kirov and asked him to consider taking over the General Secretaryship from Stalin. Other memoirs suggest that, when the vote for the Central Committee took place, Stalin did badly and that Kaganovich, who was in charge of the counting, had to fiddle the results to secure Stalin’s re-election. If this was true, then the call of the arrested Ryutin was being answered, and Stalin stood in danger of political oblivion.¹⁸

Stalin gave grounds for worry that the flames of his severity had not been extinguished. While agreeing on the need for economic consolidation, he did not fail to argue the need for vigilance and repression whenever enemies of the people were discovered. He declared that internal party oppositionists had ‘descended into the camp of livid counter-revolutionaries and wreckers in the service of foreign capital’.¹⁹ Former oppositionists had only recently been readmitted to the party. It seemed from Stalin’s Central Committee report than he was not entirely convinced that the settlement should be permanent — and he menacingly linked internal party opposition to traitorous activity at the level of the state. It is no wonder that many delegates thought it dangerous to leave him in post as General Secretary.

Events behind the scenes at the Congress remain mysterious. Those intimately involved in them — Kirov and Kaganovich — never divulged the details. Most of the lesser participants were to disappear in the Great Terror and no formal record was made of what had happened at the Congress. Kirov was to acquire a posthumous reputation as a political moderate in the Politburo. There is little to sustain this beyond a few gestures in the direction of increasing bread supplies in Leningrad where he was City Party Secretary.²⁰ All Politburo members tended to protect their sectors of work against the ravaging effects of general policy, and Kirov was no exception. And if indeed Kirov was approached at the Congress, he is likely to have told Stalin of the kind of support he was receiving from delegates. Kirov did not comport himself as a Leader in the making and gave no sign of this ultimate ambition. It cannot be demonstrated beyond doubt that the Congress vote for the new Central Committee humiliated Stalin. All that may confidently be said is that many officials were disenchanted with him and that they may have registered this on their ballot papers. Stalin for his part had cause to worry regardless of the stories about Kirov and the Central Committee vote. Having won victory on all fronts in the First Five-Year Plan, he had learned that a multitude of fellow victors refused to give him carte blanche to proceed however he wished.

For a while he did little in reaction, and the more moderate face of official policy was maintained. It was made more difficult for the police arbitrarily to arrest specialists working in the economy. The OGPU, moreover, was incorporated in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Some contemporary observers hoped that this would lead to a taming of the repressive zeal of the Chekists. Thousands of individuals arrested in the late 1920s started to return from the labour camps and resume a free life. The economy was steered steadily towards the achievement of the goals of the Second Five-Year Plan in an atmosphere untainted by the previous hysteria.

But then something happened which disrupted the political calm. On 1 December 1934 Kirov was shot by an assassin. Leonid Nikolaev, probably annoyed by Kirov’s dalliance with his wife, walked into the Smolny Institute and killed him stone dead. The Leningrad NKVD had already been reported for sloppiness in September 1934,²¹ and its subsequent incompetence belonged to a pattern. Stalin was shocked white and rigid — or at least this was how he appeared to others at the time. Nikolaev was listed as a former Zinovievite. He was quickly interrogated, including a session in Stalin’s presence, and then shot. Mysterious accidents swiftly occurred to his police handlers — and although the NKVD leadership in Leningrad was disciplined for its oversights, the punishment was far from severe for most of them.²² Stalin issued a decree sanctioning the formation of troiki which could mete out summary ‘justice’ without recourse to the courts. The basis was laid for an extension of state terror. Former oppositionists were arrested and interrogated. Zinoviev privately speculated that Stalin would use the murder as a pretext to undertake his own campaign of repression on the model of Hitler’s activity in Germany.²³ Stalin attended Kirov’s funeral looking grim and determined. Even his close associates wondered how he was going to deal with the situation; but everyone assumed that severe measures would be applied.

Instantly the rumour spread that Stalin had connived in Kirov’s liquidation. He was known for a preference for repressive action, and stories abounded that Kirov had been touted as his replacement as General Secretary. Supposedly Stalin was behind the killing. In fact all the evidence is circumstantial and no proof has ever been found. What is undeniable is that Stalin had no compunction about drastic measures. He had not yet killed a close associate but the assassination of Kirov could have been the first such occasion; and even if he did not order the killing, it was he who most benefited from it. Kirov’s death permitted him to treat the former oppositionists as he had implied he wanted to in his Central Committee report to the Seventeenth Party Congress.

Zinoviev and Kamenev were taken into the NKVD’s custody in Moscow and accused of having organised a terrorist conspiracy with their oppositionist followers. Stalin had never ceased to worry about the capacity of the oppositions of left and right to return to power, especially if their ideas had resonance among current party officials. The suppression of successive groupings under Lominadze, Eismont and Ryutin gave no cheer. There could easily be others lurking in Moscow and the provinces. What is more, Stalin knew that Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev had not lost hope of restoration to power. He maintained surveillance over them through the eavesdropping facilities of the political police.²⁴ He knew that they hated and despised him. Bukharin, while professing respect for Stalin to his face, was privately denouncing him. Kamenev and Zinoviev were contemptuous in the extreme. And Trotski was at liberty abroad editing the Bulletin of the Opposition and sending his emissaries into the USSR. Stalin was aware that, despite what they pretended, his party enemies felt they had a lot in common with each other. There was a distinct possibility that they would establish a clandestine coalition to undermine Stalin and his Politburo. Trotski’s capacity to maintain contact was well established. When sixty-eight of his supporters were arrested in Moscow in January 1933, the OGPU discovered a cache of Trotski’s latest articles.²⁵

There was also a surge of resentment throughout society at the effects of Stalin’s policies. Peasants had been battered into the collective farms and detested the new agricultural system, and hundreds of thousands of kulak families had been badly abused. Workers who failed to be promoted to managerial posts experienced a drastic deterioration in their conditions. Wages, food and shelter were seldom better than rudimentary. Higher up the social system too the bitterness was intense: engineers, intellectuals, economic experts and even managers bore a grudge about the harassment they suffered. The sense of civic disgruntlement was deep and widespread. Former members of other parties as well as defeated communist oppositionists were rancorous about the hostile sanctions applied against them. Whole national and religious groups prayed for a miracle that would remove the burden of Stalin’s policies from their shoulders. There was plenty of human material across the USSR which could, if conditions changed, be diverted into a coup against his Politburo.

Zinoviev and Kamenev refused to ‘confess’ to conspiratorial organisation. But faced with a long prison sentence as well as permanent separation from involvement with communism, they cracked and admitted political and moral responsibility for Nikolaev’s action. The Politburo — or rather Stalin — decided that Zinoviev was the more dangerous of the two. Zinoviev was given ten years, Kamenev five. The NKVD did not stop at that. Six hundred and sixty-three past supporters of the Leningrad Opposition were rounded up and exiled to Yakutia and other parts of eastern Siberia.²⁶ The incrimination of former internal oppositions continued. Trotski was regularly reviled in Pravda and Izvestiya. At the same time as the verdict was passed on Zinoviev and Kamenev it was announced that an exchange of party cards was to take place. The purpose was to sieve out party members who had failed to carry out the minimum of their duties or had behaved improperly or even had once belonged to internal party oppositions. No judicial consequences were anticipated for those who were to have their membership cards withdrawn. But a signal was being given that a campaign of persecution which had as yet been confined to ex-oppositionist leaders and their supporters was not to stop at the gates of the party. All had to prove themselves loyal to the Politburo or risk expulsion and demotion.

The menacing nature of the exchange of party cards was embodied in a secret directive sent out by the Party Secretariat on 13 May 1935.²⁷ Stalin was rampant. The Secretariat explained that adventurers, enemies of the party and outright spies had got hold of such cards. The party had been infiltrated by alien and anti-Soviet elements. On 20 May the Politburo intervened with a directive specifying that all former Trotskyists outside prison or labour camp without exception should automatically be dispatched to forced labour in the Gulag for a minimum of three years.²⁸ Stalin’s revenge on his old adversaries and detractors had been years in coming. Now it was revealed in its primitive fury. On 20 November a further stage was reached when the imprisoned Zinoviev and Kamenev as well as the deported Trotski were charged with espionage on behalf of hostile foreign powers.

Members of Stalin’s group were identifying historic oppositional activity with current state treason. Veteran heroes of the communist party were being denounced as mercenary agents of Western interests. They were like rabbits rigid with fear as the fox approaches. Flight was anyway impossible. All they could hope for was that the rest of the Politburo would somehow restrain the General Secretary.²⁹ But the political mood was not encouraging. Stalin had quietly returned to the assumption that the surest way of strengthening both his personal position and the buoyancy of economic development was to exert heavy pressure on Gosplan and the People’s Commissariats for raised industrial tempos. Anticipating opposition, he strove to exploit efforts made by individual workers to challenge the conventional methods of production. In the Don Basin the miner Alexei Stakhanov was reported as having hewed 102 tons of coal in a single six-hour stint in August 1935. This was fourteen times the norm set by the mine’s managers. Stalin took this as demonstration that passive resistance to the Second Five-Year Plan persisted. Stakhanov was summoned to Moscow and showered with honours and gifts. The Stakhanovite movement was spread to all sectors of the economy, even to farms and to the railways.

Stakhanovites could not break records without managers making special arrangements for them. Other workers were compelled to give auxiliary support. This disrupted the pattern of general production and output was negatively affected. Moreover, the Stakhanovites cut corners in their efforts. Broken machinery was often the result. Yet Stalin ignored the evidence. Scientific approaches to production were abandoned as the enthusiasm for getting workers to earn privileges by increased output prevailed.³⁰

Things could have turned out badly for the specialists in the economy — the managers, foremen, engineers and planners — if ever the suspicion of them encouraged by the Stakhanovite movement had taken the penal form applied to former oppositionists. It was a close-run thing. Stalin in 1935 did not confine his persecuting passion to the dual repression of former party oppositionists and current suspect party members. He also turned his anger upon whole social categories of citizens. The NKVD was ordered to clear Leningrad of people who by virtue of their occupation or status before 1917 were deemed intrinsically hostile to the USSR. Aristocrats, landlords, businessmen and their families in their thousands were expelled to smaller towns and villages with just the minimum of personal possessions. Over eleven thousand individuals were deported by the end of March from Leningrad,³¹ and the policy was reproduced in the other large cities. The Politburo under Stalin’s leadership was beginning to purge the cities of alleged anti-Soviet elements in much the same way as it had done to the rural areas by means of dekulakisation from 1929.

Yet the current specialists, although they were harassed at work, were not strongly persecuted unless they visibly obstructed official measures. They benefited from the desire of individuals in Stalin’s entourage to hang on to them. Ordzhonikidze, People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry since 1932, protected his managers and planners not only because he thought they were being defamed but also because he recognised that he would not fulfil his institution’s quotas for the Five-Year Plan without their expertise.

The benefits of economic consolidation were anyway beginning to be demonstrated. Steel output in 1935 was over double the amount for 1932.³² The Second Five-Year Plan, like the First, was recurrently altered as it was being implemented. Among the inevitable modifications was an increase in the budget for armaments production after Hitler became German Chancellor in January 1933 and the USSR had to assume that war with the Third Reich might soon occur.³³ This obviously involved a deferment of achieving the goals set for consumer goods. But generally the Kremlin was satisfied with the progress being achieved. Although policy was made and announced in an atmosphere of crisis, Politburo members including Stalin gave no impression in their correspondence or discussions that they thought that there was serious active resistance to their purposes or that advances in economic development were not being made. The progress continued into 1936 and beyond. Gross industrial output in 1937, the final year of the Second Five-Year Plan, had increased by three fifths over output in 1932. Even agriculture began to recover from the traumas of collectivisation. Gross agricultural output rose by about a half in the same period.³⁴

Stalin’s own activity was still ambiguous. In 1935–6 he oversaw the elaboration of a new USSR Constitution. He involved many leading figures in politics and culture in the work; even Bukharin at his editorial offices in Izvestiya contributed to the early variants.³⁵ Ultimate authority, however, stayed with Stalin and the Politburo. In practice this meant Stalin. And Stalin, the relentless persecutor of ex-oppositionists and the so-called ‘former people’, sanctioned the granting of full civic rights under the Constitution to all Soviet citizens regardless of their social, religious or political backgrounds. Universal equality of treatment was proclaimed. Soviet citizens were guaranteed pay, food, education, shelter and employment. No other constitution in the world was so expansive in the benefits it proffered. At a time when all his political manoeuvres were at their most opaque Stalin presented a baffling persona to observers in 1936. The Constitution was so comprehensively benign in most of its clauses that some thought he was engaged in subterfuge. Perhaps it was designed mainly for gullible foreign eyes in the interests of the USSR’s international relations. Possibly he also intended it as propaganda at home without seriously intending to realise its contents in the foreseeable future. Stalin had a long record of disguising oppression and exploitation in the Soviet Union and claiming the country as a paradise for most of its citizens.

Introducing the Constitution in November 1936, Stalin proclaimed: ‘Socialism, which is the first phase of communism, has basically been achieved in our country.’ Breaking with his earlier idea that resistance to communism grew fiercer as the accomplishments of the regime mounted, he welcomed the revocation of the 1918 disfranchisement of the old political, economic, social and religious elites. But he brooked no challenge to the orientation of the Politburo. The Constitution defined the USSR as ‘a socialist state of the workers and peasants’. Despite their constitutional rights, citizens would not be permitted to overturn the Soviet order. Stalin, glossing various clauses, openly stated that there would be no weakening of the communist dictatorship.

Some citizens, however, failed to understand the practical limits to the Constitution’s realisability. Complaints and denunciations were sent to the Kremlin on the assumption that the authorities had a genuine commitment to comprehensive civic rights.³⁶ Of course most people saw through the illusion. The according of full civil rights to ‘former people’ meant that they at best gained the rights of the oppressed remainder of Soviet citizens — and there was no official intention to reform this basic situation. The USSR was ruled arbitrarily and with massive repression. Most people expected little from the new Constitution. At a funeral meeting someone shouted: ‘One dog — Kirov — has been killed. That still leaves another dog, Stalin, alive.’³⁷ Resentment was dire in the country-side.³⁸ Few citizens expected much advantage to accrue to them from the Constitution. Although the communist party was not mentioned in any of its clauses, the party’s political monopoly was plainly going to be maintained so long as Stalin remained in power. The electoral system was as much a fiction as its Soviet predecessor. The NKVD laid its reports on Stalin’s desk. Whatever he had been planning by means of the Constitution, he was left in no doubt that he had not fooled most people. Everyone knew that the party and police intended to exercise as fierce a dictatorship as before.

Other events in the second half of 1936 signalled that Stalin was far from content with political conditions. His measures, always brutal, were descending to the depths of depravity. On 29 June 1936 a secret message went from the Secretariat to local party bodies alleging the discovery of the ‘terrorist activities of the Trotyskist–Zinovievite block’. Evidently the judicial sentences in the previous year had not satisfied Stalin, and Zinoviev and Kamenev were arraigned in August in a Moscow show trial. They duly confessed to having led, in concert with Trotski abroad, an Anti-Soviet Trotskyist–Zinovievite Centre which systematically carried out assassinations in the USSR. Budënny idiotically suggested getting the Comintern to capture Trotski and ship him back for trial with the two main defendants.³⁹ Zinoviev and Kamenev were already broken men before their miserable appearance in court. At Stalin’s behest they were subjected to continual revilement and mockery throughout the proceedings. The verdict was execution by shooting. Zinoviev and Kamenev had been told that, if they confessed to involvement in the Kirov ‘conspiracy’ in 1934, their sentences would be commuted. But Stalin had tricked them. Early next morning, before any judicial appeal could be considered, they were hauled out of their cells and shot.

Just as ominous was the change in personnel in the NKVD. Neither Genrikh Yagoda nor his predecessor Vladimir Menzhinski had always pleased Stalin. He had had to goad them into the extreme forms of action which he advocated from the late 1920s. They were not his placemen even though they never ultimately failed to carry out his commands. Yagoda tried to ingratiate himself by telling Stalin every time a fresh cache of Trotskyist material was found.⁴⁰ But it was not enough for Stalin. He wanted someone at the head of the NKVD who would be able to anticipate his wishes rather than respond to them, sometimes slowly and not very efficiently.

On 26 September 1936 he thought he had found that man in Nikolai Yezhov. Yagoda was sacked by Politburo decision and Yezhov took his place. Yezhov was a party official who had risen steadily through the ranks since 1917. He joined the Assignments and Records Department of the Party Secretariat in 1927, becoming its head in 1930. At the time of his appointment as People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs he was both Secretary of the Party Central Committee and Chairman of the Party Control Commission. Stalin had seen him at work and appreciated his fanatical commitment to rooting out and annihilating the adversaries of the ascendant party leadership. In 1935 Yezhov, with Stalin’s encouragement and editorial assistance, had produced a ‘theoretical work’, never published, on the internal party oppositions. Entitled ‘From Factionalism to Open Counter-Revolution’, it intensified the menace to everyone — especially the leaders — who had ever failed to accept Stalin’s line of policy. To have been an oppositionist in the past had become the same as to be guilty of treason in the present.⁴¹ On being appointed People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, Yezhov was asked to devote nine-tenths of his time to the NKVD.⁴²

Since December 1934 Stalin had had the legislative and organisational basis for an expanded state terror in the form of the troiki. He had practised terror widely but fitfully in 1935–6. He had also shown a degree of self-restraint as had his associates, and his rule was increasingly characterised by economic advance and social quiescence. But resentment was deep in society even though active resistance had been quelled. Although oppositionists and ‘former people’ were being hunted down, many had escaped capture. Links remained between Trotski and his followers; Bukharin was not the sole leading ex-oppositionist leader who hoped for a change of personnel and politics at the apex of Soviet politics. As yet Stalin’s victims, at least in the course of the Second Five-Year Plan, fell into restricted categories. But there was no guarantee that this would always remain the case.

Stalin’s earlier career, especially in the Civil War and during the First Five-Year Plan, pointed to the dangers of the situation. He was always tempted to settle accounts violently with ‘enemies’, and he was angry when his entourage failed to identify them to him. He never lacked eagerness to take the initiative. He was at his most dangerous when he sensed peril for himself and the Soviet order. Sooner or later, Stalin, the most determined driver of the vehicle of terror, would again grasp the steering wheel and turn the key. The years from the end of 1932 through to late 1936 witnessed occasional ignition and abrupt forward movement. The machinery responded fitfully to Stalin’s guidance. When he turned the key the result was unpredictable. Sometimes the battery was flat and needed topping up. On other occasions the plugs were too damp and all he could achieve was a brief, sputtering sound. But in fact the vehicle was roadworthy; and when the circumstances were more favourable in 1937, the driver would be able to start and keep it running at full speed until he decided to bring it to a halt a year later.

29. RULING THE NATIONS

The communist party administered a multinational state. Russians constituted 53 per cent of the population and Stalin tried to associate himself with the Russian nation.¹ This tendency of his had grown over the 1920s and early 1930s. Stalin and Lenin had fallen out when Lenin demanded gentler treatment for the Georgian communist leadership than Stalin approved.

Young Vasili Stalin once said to his sister Svetlana: ‘But you know, our father used to be a Georgian.’² The boy had been brought up in Russia speaking Russian and thought of his father as a Russian. Vasili was making a childish error: Stalin had not magically become a Russian. It is true that Stalin once referred to himself as a ‘Russified Georgian Asiatic’ and denied that he was a ‘European’.³ This was a rare attempt at national self-description after the October Revolution, but it has to be treated with circumspection. Georgia, according to the geographers, belongs to Asia since it lies to the south of the peaks of the Caucasus. Consequently the combination of ‘Georgian’ and ‘Asiatic’ is perplexing. Presumably it stemmed to some degree from a Georgian sense of cultural superiority over the peoples of the East. Stalin in any case used the phrase not in public but at a private dinner party in Voroshilov’s apartment. He blurted it out in a light-hearted apology to the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov for interrupting his speech to the guests. By calling himself an Asiatic, a pejorative term among Europeans, Stalin was using humour to lighten the atmosphere. As always his comments must be interpreted in the light of the circumstances of their expression.

Yet there was a core of intrinsic plausibility in Stalin’s quip. Born a Georgian, he retained habits and attitudes of his homeland and continued to cherish Georgian classical poetry. But he was also impressed by the rulers of the great Asian empires. He read avidly about Genghis Khan. His experience with Russia too had imprinted itself on his consciousness. He admired Russian nineteenth-century literature. He was proud of Russia’s past and present power. He resented the loss of those territories such as Sakhalin which had belonged to the Russian Empire. He liked to be among Russians as well as among Georgians. The likelihood is that his subjective identity was neither exclusively Russian nor exclusively Georgian but a fluid, elusive mixture of both. This is not an unusual condition. Many people who travel from country to country semi-assimilate themselves to new cultures without abandoning the culture of their upbringing. Stalin, moreover, was a socialist internationalist. As a Marxist he considered ideas of nationhood to be a temporary and contradictory phenomenon: they both enhanced and vitiated their societies. It is doubtful that Stalin felt a need to fix a national identity for himself in his own mind. Rather his priorities were focused upon ruling and transforming the USSR and securing his personal despotism.

These priorities nudged him towards a change of policy on the national question regardless of the complexities of his own identity. Despite arresting individuals for Russian nationalism in the course of the First Five-Year Plan, he simultaneously ordered the media to avoid offending the national feelings of ordinary Russians and issued a confidential rebuke to the poet Demyan Bedny for poking fun at Russian popular proclivities.⁴ Stalin and Kaganovich, when ordering the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in central Moscow in 1932, specified that this should be done without public announcement and at night: they did not want it getting about that a Georgian and a Jew had given the command.⁵ When Stalin’s official biography appeared in 1938, there was no reference to his Georgian background after the second sentence in the book.⁶

He had reason to be worried about Russian popular resentment at being ruled by alien politicians. Although the NKVD — and previously the OGPU — seems to have reported little on this, Stalin had a lifelong sensitivity to such matters. A clandestine poster had an image of two bands of warriors facing each other across the river. One was a Jewish band led by Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev, while the other was Georgian and commanded by Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Enukidze. Below the image was the inscription: ‘And the Slavs fell into dispute about who was to rule in Old Russia.’⁷ Stalin indeed had several non-Russians in his entourage and not all of them were Georgians. Prominent among them in the early 1930s were Kaganovich (a Jew) and Mikoyan (an Armenian). Consequently Stalin remained wary of popular opinion. The battering of Russia’s peasantry, its Orthodox Church and its village ways of life induced vast hostility to the regime. What is more, the emphasis of official propaganda was on the importance of Stalin in the shaping of policies. This left no doubt about his personal responsibility. Peasants hated him, and no amount of propaganda could mollify their feelings.⁸

By then the regime had abandoned many of its original objections to Russian traditions. The doyen of Soviet historical scholarship in the 1920s had been Mikhail Pokrovski, who had depicted the centuries before 1917 as an epoch of Russia’s oppression of other peoples in the empire. No emperor or general had been accorded any positive qualities. The entire social system was treated as a blockage to social progress. From the mid-1930s all this changed. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great were lauded as initiators of administrative order, economic advance and external influence. The commanders Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov were hailed as rescuers of Russia and Europe from French tyranny. Whereas the Caucasian rebels had once been treated as heroes, historians began to stress that Russian Imperial rule conveyed much benefit to the borderlands. Russian scientific and cultural achievements were also highlighted. The chemist Mendeleev and the physiologist Ivan Pavlov (who died only in 1936) were said to be superior to their foreign counterparts. Russian nineteenth-century literary classics were produced in enormous print-runs, and the centenary of Alexander Pushkin’s death was celebrated with pomp in 1939. It was no longer acceptable to mock or denigrate Russia and the Russians in Stalin’s USSR.

With Zhdanov and Kirov Stalin oversaw production of appropriate historical texts.⁹ The new orthodoxy was that the USSR was enhancing the best customs of Russian Imperial patriotism and enlightenment without reproducing the negative features of tsarism. Pride in country was to be fostered. Much of this was cynical propaganda to win favour with Russians. But it probably played on chords by then congenial to Stalin. After the October Revolution twentieth-anniversary parade in 1937 he spoke at a private dinner in Voroshilov’s Kremlin flat attended by a couple of dozen leading politicians and military commanders:¹⁰

Stalin was an able actor and may not have believed a word of this. But the likelihood is that the statement with its peculiar mixture of Marxist– Leninist and Russian Imperial sentiments reflected his genuine opinion.

He was also responding to the currents swirling in the political air. Individuals of Russian nationality tended to take the place of the defeated adversaries of the Stalin faction. Jews lost out. In the light of his continued association with Jewish friends (if indeed anyone could be called his friend), it would be difficult to call him an anti-semite; yet the fact remained that his principal enemies Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev — prominent members of Lenin’s Politburo — were Jewish by origin. Throughout the hierarchies of state administration the Russians were being promoted. Even in non-Russian Soviet republics they were securing posts. By contrast non-Russians seldom rose to high office outside areas where their nation did not constitute the majority of the local population. From the mid-1930s the Gulag system of camps contained ‘bourgeois nationalists’ of all national and ethnic groups except the Russians. The Russian language was honoured. It became compulsory in all schools and offices even though the Soviet republics were simultaneously allowed to go on teaching the local language too. The alphabets of other languages were altered. Latin and Arabic scripts gave way in most languages to ones based on the Cyrillic model.¹¹

Many suggested that Stalin, frustrated with merely distorting Marxism–Leninism, had effected its abandonment. The émigré Russian fascist leader Konstantin Rodzaevski, becoming convinced that Stalinism and fascism were identical, returned from Harbin to the USSR after the Second World War. (This was not Rodzaevski’s wisest move: he was shot on arrival in Moscow.)¹² So was Stalin objectively a Russian nationalist even if he did not subjectively advocate such a posture? Undoubtedly from the mid-1930s he engineered the elevation of the Russians over the other nations of the Soviet Union. Russians were preferred for appointment to high public office. The Russian language was given pride of place in the school curriculum. Russian writers, commanders and even certain emperors were eulogised by the media. The conquest of those other nations by the forces of the Russian Empire was treated as a boon for their general development.

The extolling of Russia and the Russians was accompanied by brutal maltreatment of several other peoples of the USSR. Ukrainians and Kazakhs believed that Stalin was inflicting genocide on them. Both suffered extremes of hardship through the violent collectivisation of agriculture imposed from Moscow. Kazakhs, a nomadic people, were forced to settle in kolkhozes. Ukrainians had always been an agricultural people. Abruptly their villages had been invaded by the OGPU and the 25,000-ers and, after the deportation of kulaks, the remainder of the inhabitants were forced into the collective farming system. The Kazakhs and Ukrainians suffered worse than Russians in most areas of Russia. The reason was similar: the Kazakhs had a culture which had not yet accepted agriculture, much less collective farming; the Ukrainians included many households with a notable commitment to the benefits of private farms. Kazakhs and Ukrainians were bound to be hit deliberately hard by the collectivisation campaign started at the end of the 1920s.

Initially there was an economic and cultural motivation to the Politburo’s treatment of both peoples rather than a national one. But once the campaign got under way, Stalin and his associates were alert to any possibility that ‘bourgeois nationalists’ might put themselves at the head of the rural resistance. Kazakh tribal and religious leaders were constantly persecuted. Repression was also applied in Ukraine not only against kulaks but also against priests, writers and scholars.

Ukraine, however, continued to present Stalin with causes for political concern even though he was willing in 1932–3 to lower the grain-collection quotas across the republic. As collectivisation and deku-lakisation proceeded and material conditions worsened, peasants in their hundreds of thousands sought to flee to regions of the USSR where the food supply was more secure. Among the refugees were Ukrainians who, according to the OGPU, carried the bacillus of nationalism. The Politburo’s reaction, instigated by Stalin, was to instruct the Ukrainian communist authorities to close the Republic’s frontiers to human traffic from 22 January 1933. The same policy of closure was applied to the Kuban area of the north Caucasus where many Ukrainians had settled in earlier years: Stalin wanted to stop them from spreading nationalist ideas outside their villages.¹³ In the previous month, on 14 December 1932, the Politburo had decreed that the traditional party policy of recruiting mainly Ukrainian cadres to party and government in Ukraine and in Ukrainian-inhabited areas elsewhere had been applied much too mechanically. The alleged result was the penetration of the state by ‘bourgeois-nationalist elements’. The Politburo commanded that a much more rigorous political sieving of promotees should be undertaken.¹⁴

Coming after the arrests and trials of Ukrainian cultural figures from the late 1920s,¹⁵ these measures were brutal and discriminatory; and although Stalin did not seek the extermination of all Ukrainians and Kazakhs, he certainly aimed to extirpate all opposition real and potential from among them. The ultimate objective, though, was to turn Ukraine and Kazakhstan into economically efficient Soviet republics. He therefore allowed both peoples to retain their culture, albeit in a much more restricted form than in the decade after the October Revolution. If the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic could be made an integral part of the USSR, it would constitute an economic model which would win admirers for communism in eastern Europe.¹⁶ Fertile Kazakhstan could also become a republic envied abroad, especially by Moslems. Collectivisation, dekulakisation, declericalisation and neglect of famine were appalling ways to raise Ukraine and Kazakhstan as models of the communist order, but they made a modicum of sense within the world-view of Stalin’s Marxism–Leninism.

Not all interpretations of Stalin as a nationalist have him as a Russophile. Some think his indulgences to the Russians were a blind to his drive to enhance the prestige and conditions of the Georgian nation. Supposedly, far from being a Russian nationalist, he had maintained the patriotic enthusiasms of his youth. He had never approved Abkhazia’s separation from Georgia in the constitutional arrangements of 1921–2, despite delighting in taking his vacations on the Abkhazian coast.¹⁷ In 1931 he compelled his friend Nestor Lakoba to accept the incorporation of Abkhazia in the Georgian Soviet Republic. Most Georgians regarded Abkhazia as a province of historical Georgia and many of them felt grateful to Stalin for his action. Once incorporated, Abkhazia was exposed to a Georgianising cultural offensive, especially after the murder of Lakoba in December 1936.¹⁸ The Abkhaz alphabet was compulsorily changed to a system based on the Georgian script. Abkhaz-language schooling was restricted. Georgian officials were transferred to the Abkhazian party, government and police. Demographic restructuring took place as Mingrelians, living in western Georgia, were allotted housing and jobs in Abkhazia from 1937.¹⁹

Stalin himself kept up his interest in the cultural pursuits of his youth. He fostered the publication of the old Georgian literary classics. He continued to read the great thirteen-century epic Knight in the Panther’s Skin by Shota Rustaveli. He permitted the reprinting of Alexander Qazbegi’s Patricide, the tale of mountain banditry which had inspired him as a boy. It was this cultural interest that had led Stalin to spend time reading and amending Shalva Nutsubidze’s anthology of Georgian poetry.²⁰

Yet these phenomena do not signify that Stalin was a Georgian nationalist. Such an interpretation would fit ill with his policies at the end of the Civil War, with the conquest of Georgia in 1921, with the persecution of the Georgian communist leadership in 1922 and above all with the attacks on Georgia’s peasants, priests, cultural figures and politicians from the late 1920s through to the late 1930s. The fact that many Georgians subsequently forgot about this does not alter this record. Stalin’s attitude can probably be best explained by reference to his long-known approach to the national question in general. Since Marxism and the National Question in 1913, his axiom had been that peoples without a vigorous press and literature should not be described as nations.²¹ His premise was that such peoples should be brought to a higher cultural level by being associated with adjacent sophisticated nations. This role could be fulfilled in Abkhazia by increasing the Georgian influence; and whereas he wanted to see the Ukrainians and Belorussians pulled higher by the introduction of Russian culture, his personal experience told him that Georgians, being non-Slavs, could not sensibly be handled this way: Georgian national consciousness was too strongly developed for this to be possible.

Stalin elevated the status of Russians in the USSR and favoured some nations more than others; and he did this for a mixture of ideological and pragmatic reasons. The USSR was a state undergoing an economic and social transformation. Stalin had preconceptions about how to deal with the resultant problems. But he also had to react to circumstances that neither he nor anyone in his entourage had anticipated. Through the 1930s he found provisional solutions to the problems old and new.

Yet Stalin was no more likely to amputate Marxism–Leninism than to cut off his own fingers. What he was doing was more like shaving his beard; for the essential ideology was left largely intact. Stalin was idiosyncratic in the aspects of Russian national identity he chose for approval. He declined to include aspects which had figured prominently in the ideology of most professed nationalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These had praised the religious faith of the Russian people, their rural customs and the simplicity and beauty of their villages. Russia’s peasantry — its unsophisticatedness, endurance and lack of regard for the rest of the world — had been at the core of historical nationalism. None of this appeared in a positive light in Stalin’s thinking. He dredged the Russian past for precedents for the communist preoccupation with state power, strong rulers, terror, industrialisation, towns and cities, secularism and organisational gigantism. There had been trends in this direction in some intellectual circles before 1917, but not in exactly the same form. The version of Russian nationalism which he allowed emerged largely from his own head.²²

There of course existed another ideology which hymned dictatorship, militarism, cities, gigantism and distrust of the West and derided peasant, village and Christianity. That ideology was Marxism–Leninism. What Stalin had done was to strip back the various versions of Russian national identity to a single, very peculiar one — and it was one which maximised the overlap with Marxist–Leninist notions as they had evolved since 1917. Russians were encouraged to enjoy a sense of nationhood but were severely dissuaded from exploring it. The authorities felt they knew what national identity was good for the Russian people, and punished attempts to offer alternatives.

Russians, furthermore, were expected to be as much Soviet as Russian. Just as the Romanov tsars had fostered popular allegiance to the Russian Empire more than to any national idea, so Stalin induced a mingling of multinational pride in the USSR more than unequivocal nationalism.²³ He gave an impromptu speech at the dinner in Voroshilov’s flat on 7 November, and among other things he declared:²⁴

He did not explain why Russians were more loyal than other nations to the October Revolution and the Soviet Union. But two factors stood out. One was that the Soviet Union was founded on a Russian territorial core. Another was that the Russian people were given advantages denied to others. Nevertheless Stalin did not want them turning into nationalists. He still feared the Russians. Consequently while other peoples had their own communist parties, he withheld this from the RSFSR. Their national feelings were to be channelled into a fusion of Soviet and Russian identities. By this means he would be able to enlist their support without letting the uncontrollable genie of nationalism into the open.

What is also clear is that Russification had its limits in the other Soviet republics. The USSR remained a multinational state and Stalin stayed committed to inducing non-Russians to assimilate themselves to the Soviet order. For this he needed schools and press to use local languages and for access to be open for the promotion of local national groups. National pride had to be fostered. Thus the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, who died in 1861, was celebrated the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. Similar trends occurred in Georgia and other Soviet republics in the south Caucasus as national literary figures were acclaimed. The process of getting the peoples of central Asia to assimilate their sentiments to the territorial units demarcated by the boundaries of Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan also continued; and the Belorussians, whose national consciousness had been weakly developed before 1917, continued to possess their own schools and press.

This immense conglomeration of peoples, held together in the framework of a revolutionary state, required new forms of rulership. Stalin is wrongly depicted as simply a tsar in Red clothing. In several ways he could not have been more different from Nicholas II. It is true that both Stalin and Emperor Nicholas, apart from a few trips to the ballet, rarely appeared in public except on occasions of great state ceremony. But Nicholas and his wife regularly went to the places favoured by peasants for Christian pilgrimage. They passionately enjoyed attending the reburial of St Serafim of Sarov deep in Russia’s countryside in summer 1903.²⁵ Stalin went nowhere regularly unless to his dacha or on holiday. He did not deign to receive groups of peasant petitioners as the tsars had done. Lenin had understood that such activities helped him to keep in touch with what was happening in the country at large and to enhance his popularity. This practice was shunned by Stalin long before he started to worry about his personal security: he must have known that peasants — and probably most workers too — would have given him an earful of complaints about the dreadful conditions in the country.

There was an exception to his seclusion. Sister-in-law Maria Svanidze jotted down an account in her diary of an incident on his daughter’s birthday in November 1935. Svetlana wanted to take a ride on the new Moscow Metro and Maria was set to accompany her and her brother Vasili. At the last minute Stalin said he would join them together with Molotov. Kaganovich was flummoxed. Although he had ordered ten tickets in advance, he was alarmed by the security implications of the news that Stalin was going to be involved. When they arrived at Crimea Square, the walls of the newly opened Metro station had not yet dried out but normal passengers were already using it. Bystanders spotted Stalin while arrangements were being made for him and his companions to travel in a separate carriage with its own engine, and when they got out at Okhotny Ryad, the station nearest to the Kremlin, there were ovations from fellow passengers. Resuming their places in the carriage, they travelled onward on the Ring Line until Stalin decided it was time to return home.²⁶

Such an excursion might have been undertaken by Nicholas II if he had still been on the throne. But usually Stalin’s behaviour contrasted with his practice. He gave speeches and wrote articles on Soviet and world politics whereas the Romanovs left it to their bishops to give sermons: tsars did not characteristically write conspectuses of their intentions. Nicholas II was a Christian believer; he felt no need as a ruler to explain his faith to those outside his family. Stalin was of a different mould. He spent much time in the 1920s and 1930s working on manuscripts. It was hard, unremitting work. He dispensed with the services of shorthand typists: he thought they fidgeted too much. He wrote laboriously in his own hand rather than suffer distraction. No emperor since Catherine the Great had such a zest for writing — and Empress Catherine had written mainly to confidential correspondents such as Voltaire and Diderot: Stalin composed his literary stuff for the world. The Romanovs were by and large considerate to their ministers. Stalin enjoyed humiliating his subordinates; he traumatised and killed many of them. He was seldom courteous and never unmenacing. (Often when he turned on the charm, he made them wonder what devilishness he was preparing.) He scared his entourage witless. Not since Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great had there been a Russian ruler who set out to have this effect.

A further point of difference between Stalin and the tsars in their styles of rulership was of a social nature. Repeatedly, he insisted at private gatherings that his political success was attributable to the support of ‘the masses’:²⁷

Tsars did not talk this way. Indeed in June 1937 Stalin went further. Being used to toasting the health of People’s Commissars, he wanted respect to be given to ‘the tens of thousands’ of small and medium leaders: ‘They’re modest people. They don’t push themselves forward and are barely discernible. But it would be blindness not to notice them.’²⁸

He gave sharp expression to this attitude on 7 November 1937 at the October Revolution anniversary dinner, where he delivered a speech unrecorded in the press. The praktiki, he declared, were the intermediaries who maintained the link between the Kremlin and the masses. His rivals in the Soviet leadership in the 1920s had been more popular; but they overlooked the need to nurture the careers of functionaries in the lower ranks. When Dimitrov and others tried to praise him personally, he countered with a eulogy of the praktiki.²⁹ His belief was that the defeat of the internal party oppositions, followed by the purges of recent months, had got rid of those leaders from higher echelons in pre-revolutionary society. He had said this in June 1937 to military commanders after the arrest and execution of Tukhachevski.³⁰ Stalin was eager to prove that he and his surviving associates were better able than the privileged former émigrés to understand the needs of the working class and the peasantry. They themselves were from the lower depths — or at least many of them were. No Romanov emperor boasted of having no genealogical excellence.

Yet there was a moment in the Moscow Metro episode when minds turned back to the Imperial epoch. At Okhotny Ryad station Stalin’s group left the train to try out the escalator. Meanwhile the passengers on the platform thrust forward into his carriage and stayed when Stalin returned and the train moved on:³¹

This remark does not seem to refer exclusively to the Russians;³² probably Stalin had all the masses of the former Russian Empire in mind when he said it. Nevertheless he had revealed something important about his understanding of rulership in the USSR. To Stalin’s eyes, the mentality of most Soviet citizens not yet been transformed by the October Revolution. They needed to be ruled, at least to some extent, in a traditional way. And this meant they needed a ‘tsar’.

Stalin was an avid reader of books about Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. He admired their forceful methods and condoned brutality in pursuit of the interests of the state. Evidently some tsars were more congenial as models than others. Even Ivan the Terrible fell short of being the apple of his eye. For Stalin, Ivan was too unsystematic in repressing his enemies. More generally, though, he adopted certain techniques of rulership from the tsars. Most Romanov rulers maintained an aura of mystery. Too much exposure to public view might have derogated from the dignity and authority of the Imperial throne. Stalin adhered to this tradition. Possibly he did this because he knew he did not sound entirely Russian. In fact there were Romanov emperors who had had the same problem: Catherine the Great was a German princess of the houses of Anhalt and Holstein. In Stalin’s case the difficulty was made greater by the fact that he, a Georgian ruling Russia, had an entourage with many who were also not Russians. Stalin, furthermore, had modified his political style. No longer did he have open office hours when ordinary party militants could come and consult him. He did not have his photograph taken with provincial delegations at Party Congresses; he did not submit his ideas to discussion on public occasions.

Just a few traces of his ‘common touch’ persisted. Despite his enormous workload, Stalin still found time to pen personal notes to individuals who wrote to him about all manner of small matters. When the peasant woman Fekla Korshunova, aged seventy, sent a letter asking permission to present him with one of her four cows, he replied:³³

This little response is a feather in the scale of his virtues; it is massively outweighed by the scale holding the records of his murderous misanthropy. But it shows that even in the terror years he was capable of kindness to strangers.

Despite rationing the number of his public appearances, Stalin could not avoid giving speeches and having them recorded for Soviet newsreels. The party’s customs could be emasculated but not entirely abandoned. In order to confirm his legitimacy as Lenin’s successor he had to get up at Party Congresses and deliver the keynote addresses just as he was obliged to write articles and booklets explaining the latest versions of Marxist–Leninist doctrine. He never became an outstanding orator. He lacked a sense of timing; often he seemed to quicken up or slow down without a feeling for what he was saying.³⁴ When he emphasised something, he did this with clumsy severity. Yet his primitiveness as a speaker also worked for him. Stalin wrote his own words; his message was always carefully considered. He delivered a speech with brusque directness. He was more like a general addressing his troops than a politician — or at times he was akin to a priest reading out a piece of liturgy whose details had ceased to engage his whole attention. Efforts to enliven such occasions were few. If ever there was humour, it was heavily sarcastic; and anecdotes drawn from his direct experience were notable for their rarity.

Nor indeed did he adopt a paternalistic manner. No Romanov, not even the wilder ones such as Peter the Great, was so lacking in the social graces on public occasions. Stalin to the end of his life preserved the unrefined demeanour of the stereotypical veteran Bolshevik. No Bolshevik was more tsar-like than he; but he was still a Bolshevik.

30. MIND OF TERROR

Stalin frequently lied to the world when he was simultaneously lying to himself. If ever he called somebody a traitor, it was not only the minds of others he was manipulating. Needing to believe the worst of specific individuals or groups, he let his language slip from established fact to desired reality. This is detectable in the message he sent to Kaganovich in August 1934 after an abortive mutiny by the divisional artillery commander Nakhaev:¹

Stalin was on vacation by the Black Sea at the time, hundreds of miles from Moscow. His sole knowledge of the Nakhaev incident had come through telegrams. He had been told that Nakhaev had tricked his troops into an insurrection; there was no evidence to incriminate Nakhaev in a wider plot. As for Nakhaev’s operating as a ‘Polish–German agent’, this was fanciful speculation. Stalin had confected a story for himself and others and then tried to apply a coating of feasibility.

He seldom exposed his mental processes in public. He did not keep a diary, and the letters to his wife Nadya add little to what is known about his innermost thinking: at most he would refer briefly to his health, mood or the weather. More clues to his calculations emerge from his correspondence with Molotov, Kaganovich and other politicians. Often the contents were suspicious, conspiratorial and vengeful.² He disbelieved that trouble happened by accident or by mistake. Plotters were at work everywhere, he assumed, and had to be discovered and punished.³ Stalin’s correspondence showed him imperious in pursuit of his purposes. When issuing instructions to Politburo members, he rarely asked for their opinions but always demanded total compliance. While believing in communism, he did not trust or respect communists.

Trotski put down his recollections (and this became one of his main activities after being deported from the USSR in 1929). Molotov, Kaganovich and Mikoyan wrote informative memoirs.⁴ Stalin’s daughter and some of his in-laws also recorded their experiences.⁵ Sometimes Stalin blurted out something in their presence that gives us a piece of his mental jigsaw. This could be a casual statement to Molotov or to a close relative; it could equally be an improvised speech or a toast at a private banquet.⁶ Of course it would be foolish to forget that, when he spoke, he usually concealed something. Stalin watched people always as if they might be his enemies. Constantly he presented himself to individuals with a purpose in mind. He decided in advance what he wanted from them and adjusted his behaviour to this. He rarely raised his voice and his self-control was legendary among his associates.⁷ Even many of the intimate files are ambiguous evidence on the workings of Stalin’s mind. Yet he gave himself away in dribs and drabs; enough is available for subsequent generations to make plausible guesses.

What has always been intriguing is how an undemonstrative bureaucrat of the 1920s turned into a mass killer.⁸ This puzzle results from analytical laziness. Even anti-communist scholars copied Trotski’s brilliant portraiture of Stalin.⁹ Yet Trotski gave a self-serving account. Remembering the Civil War, he stressed in particular how Stalin had conspired against party policy on the Red Army’s organisation; he failed to mention the vicious terror perpetrated by Stalin at that time. Trotski himself was an enthusiastic perpetrator of terror in the Civil War and had no incentive to castigate behaviour which he too displayed. He also disliked admitting that he should have been able to predict how Stalin might behave in the 1930s.

Stalin’s propensity for violence, excessive even by Bolshevik norms, was observable soon after the October Revolution. In the Civil War he had put whole villages to the torch near the Southern Front in order to inspire fear among the peasantry.¹⁰ He had arrested Imperial Army officers in the Red forces on the slightest pretext and loaded them on to a barge on the River Volga: only a last-minute intervention from Moscow prevented him from drowning them.¹¹ Even the ordinary conscripts in the Red Army had had grounds to be afraid. Stalin and his comrades on the Southern Front were reckless in their operational dispositions: the human losses in the forces under their command were unjustifiably high. Lenin, while confessing that he was no military expert, rebuked him for this at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919.¹² A handful of ruthless comrades gathered around him as if he was their gang leader. His friends plotted together and stuck up for each other whenever the gang’s interests were threatened. Stalin was willing to pay any price in lives to attain his objectives. In all lives except his own. For Stalin the supreme criterion of political judgement was the need to protect and enhance his personal power.

He was in his element when functioning in a chaotic environment. The trick he perfected in the Civil War had been the concoction of an atmosphere of suspicion and fanaticism unrestrained by moral scruple. He issued general objectives without specifying how they were to be attained. His supreme stipulation was that the objectives would be met; and if the measures involved heads being broken, he did not mind. While the world spun wildly, Stalin alone stayed tranquil and unmoved. This is how Stalin had liked it in the Civil War. His record as a political and military leader had been known at that time but subsequently ignored.

Yet although Stalin was ruthless and cynical, he was also optimistic in his own peculiar way. He regularly got rid of associates who queried his policies. His assumption was that people could always and easily be found to replace those who were deliberately slaughtered or who were inadvertently lost in the mayhem. ‘When the people makes its wishes clear,’ he said in a characteristically Delphic pronouncement, ‘people start to appear.’¹³ He was an eager promoter of the young and talented, and assumed that recruits from the working class and the peasantry could quickly master most specialised tasks. Middle-class experts in his opinion were a bane, and none were worse than the officers in the Imperial Army. Trotski stipulated that promotion should be given only on the basis of professional criteria; Lenin wavered from time to time, but he too was loath to get rid of individuals merely because of their class origins if genuine expertise was needed. Stalin was the real enthusiast in the party leadership for choosing on the premise of class. He took seriously the Leninist nostrum that communist leaders should release the potential of the lower social orders in the old society and that the tasks of socialist management were in fact simpler than the ‘bourgeois specialists’ contended.

This outlook was not unique among Bolsheviks, even though Stalin held to it with a fanaticism such as no other Bolshevik exhibited. Not only Molotov and Kaganovich but also his other close associates shared his general attitudes. They had joined Stalin as they scrambled up the slippery pole of Soviet politics in the 1920s and 1930s. His enemies were theirs too, and they knew that their fate would be sealed if he tumbled from power. Like Stalin, they saw factional opponents as ‘swine’ and ‘scum’; and they began to compete in demanding severe sanctions. Voroshilov in a letter to Stalin in 1934 referred to Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev as ‘horrible little individuals, traitors, finished people’; and he added, ‘This poisonous and miserable scum ought to be annihilated.’¹⁴

The enthusiasm of Stalin’s associates for political repression stemmed from the traditions of Bolshevism. The discourse of the Soviet state had always been extremist in tone and content. Terms such as ‘anti-Soviet elements’ and ‘enemies of the people’ had been in common use from the Civil War. The notion that whole social categories deserved harsh persecution was widespread. Terrorist methods had been approved and ‘theorised’ by Lenin and Trotski.¹⁵ Show trials and the systematic fabrication of charges had been commonplace since the Socialist-Revolutionary leaders were arrested and sentenced in 1922.¹⁶ The practice of accusing those who opposed the Bolsheviks of having direct links with foreign governments and their intelligence agencies had been rife since the suppression of the Kronstadt Mutiny in 1921. The campaign of arrests during the First Five-Year Plan resuscitated such tendencies. The sense that people had to choose to be either for or against the October Revolution was universal among Bolsheviks; and all of them knew that the Soviet state was beleaguered by the forces of world capitalism. Stalin and his associates were a brutal lot. But a party lacking in gentility had produced them.

His associates were not just ingratiating themselves with Stalin when they used such language. Certainly they strove to please the Boss, and several were careerists. But many of them served and respected him also because they shared many of his ideas. This was especially true of Molotov and Kaganovich. The Great Terror, while being instigated by the single-minded leadership of Joseph Stalin, was also a reflection — however distorted a reflection — of the mind-set of Bolshevism as it had been imposed on the party by the mid-1930s. The group around Stalin had its jargon and attitudes. Its members made proposals within a particular ambience. Stalin gathered further associates who were closely in line with his basic orientation. Yezhov, who started working in the Central Committee Secretariat in 1930, was a noteworthy example. Even careerist newcomers probably came to imbibe several of the basic tenets.

Yet Stalin was the moving spirit in the coterie. He was proud of his position in the USSR; and when he looked abroad, there were few individuals he regarded with admiration. Adolf Hitler was one of the few. The occasion for Stalin to express his esteem came in June 1934 when the Führer ordered the German armed forces — the Wehrmacht — to arrest and kill the members of the SA. This was an act of political mass murder. The SA had been the paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party in its rise to power and its leader was Hitler’s associate Ernst Röhm. When Röhm started to criticise Hitler’s collusion with the German political and economic establishment, he signed the death certificate for himself and his organisation. Stalin relished the news of the Night of the Long Knives: ‘What a great fellow! How well he pulled this off!’¹⁷ It took one to know one. But he said this in a casual chat with Mikoyan: the significance of Stalin’s remark only seemed sinister to him in retrospect. Perhaps others in the gang talked in a similar fashion. What was characteristic about Stalin is that he meant every word he said about Hitler with passionate intensity, and was willing to act in the same fashion when the opportunity arose.

The psychological and intellectual scaffolding for Stalin’s proclivities was occluded from the public. He greatly admired Lenin. But among the other objects of his admiration was Ivan the Terrible. Most educated people in the USSR would have been horrified by this. Tsar Ivan was associated with arbitrary rule and terror as well as an erratic personality. But Stalin thought differently. For years he brooded over the life and rule of the sixteenth-century tsar.

At a Kremlin reception on 8 November 1937 Stalin accused the leading oppositionists of planning the territorial disintegration of the USSR in league with Germany, Britain, France and Japan. He vowed to destroy all of them. If anyone sought to detach the smallest piece of Soviet territory, he declared, ‘he is an enemy, an accursed enemy of the state and the peoples of the USSR’. Then came the climax:¹⁸

This was hardly Marxist in style or content. Was it perhaps a residue of Stalin’s extreme attitude to his upbringing in Georgia where, at least in the mountains, the traditions of the blood feud persisted? This cannot be the exclusive explanation. Although Georgian traditions may have encouraged him to seek revenge for any damage, they did not involve the assumption that the destruction of entire extended families was desirable.¹⁹ A more plausible influence was Stalin’s reading of early Russian history — he had long been an enthusiastic reader of R. Vipper’s biography of Ivan the Terrible.²⁰ Dedicating himself to exterminating not only individual leaders but also their relatives, Stalin was reproducing the attitudes of Ivan the Terrible.

He continued to ponder the springs of human endeavour. He put one trait of character above all others: ‘Lenin was right to say that a person lacking the courage to act at the crucial moment cannot be a true Bolshevik leader.’²¹ He wrote this in a letter to Kaganovich in 1932. Two years later a similar sentiment surfaced in one of his brief messages to his mother: ‘The children send their respects to you. Since Nadya’s death, of course, my personal life is heavy. But so be it: a courageous person must always stay courageous.’²² Probably Stalin was expressing himself sincerely. (Perhaps he was also trying to convince himself that he was valorous.) All acquaintances were impressed by his will power. Even the wilful Kaganovich was bendable to his purposes. But this was not enough for Stalin, who wanted to appear not merely strong-minded but also courageous. Such a virtue was to remain a dominant theme in his thinking; he was to emphasise the need for it in the very last speech he improvised to the Central Committee in October 1952, just months before his death.²³

His style of thinking can be glimpsed in the jottings he made in the 1939 edition of Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism. Stalin studied this dour work on epistemology despite all the practical matters of state he had to decide. He scattered a commentary in the margins. Stalin savoured Lenin’s polemical attacks, scribbling down phrases such as ‘Ha! Ha!’ and even ‘Oi Mama! Well, what a nightmare!’²⁴ His mental fixation with Lenin was evident from the way he repeatedly copied out Lenin’s name in Latin script.²⁵ Yet the most intriguing thing is what he wrote on the flyleaf at the end of the book:²⁶

Of all the reactions to Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism this is surely the oddest. It is hard to believe that it was the reading of the book that provoked Stalin’s comments; probably he simply used the flyleaf as a convenient space for ideas that came to mind.

Stalin, communing with himself, used the religious language of the spirit and of sin and vice. Human endeavour apparently could be encapsulated only in such terms: evidently Marxism would not fulfil this task by itself. Stalin was reverting to the discourse of the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary; his early schooling had left an indelible imprint.

The content of the commentary, though, is deeply unChristian; it is reminiscent more of Niccolò Machiavelli and Friedrich Nietzsche than of the Bible. For Stalin the criterion of goodness was not morality but effectiveness. Individuals were to be judged for their inner strength, assiduity, practicality and cleverness. Any blemishes on the escutcheon of a career were forgivable if accompanied by substantial achievements in the service of the cause. Furthermore, the fact that the characteristics despised by Stalin were weakness, idleness and stupidity is revealing. Stalin the mass killer slept easily at night. Not for him the uneasiness of wearing the crown of state: he adored power. But he was also self-demanding. He wanted action and wished it to be based on sound judgement, and he could not abide sloth and lack of intelligent commitment. He was offering himself the plaudits of history. Judging his own long and bloody career in revolutionary politics, he found nothing to reproach. But like a sixteenth-century Calvinist he felt the need to keep asking himself whether he really met his own exacting standards. Gruff and blunt as he was among his associates, he had episodes of introspection. But he did not torment himself. The very process of laying out the criteria of judgement apparently allayed such doubts as he had about himself. He grew into his own myth.

The fact that he jotted down his remarks in a copy of a work by Lenin may not have been an accident: Stalin measured himself by Lenin’s standard.²⁷ The influence was not merely ideological. Stalin had seen Lenin at close quarters and abidingly respected and even revered his memory. But the language used in the jottings was not especially Leninist. Possibly Stalin’s style of amoralism came not from Marxism– Leninism but from a much earlier set of ideas. He read Machiavelli’s The Prince and annotated his own copy of it. (Alas, the copy has disappeared from the archives.)²⁸ His insistence on the importance of courage could well have derived from Machiavelli’s supreme demand on the ruler: namely that he should show vertù. This is a word barely translatable into either Russian or English; but it is identified with manliness, endeavour, courage and excellence. Stalin, if this is correct, saw himself as the embodiment of Machiavellian vertù.

His was a complex mind. He had a personality prone to mistrustful fantasy and, tragically, he had the opportunity to act out his own psychological damage by persecuting millions of his people. He perceived enemies everywhere; his whole cognitive tendency was to assume that any slight problem in his personal or political life was the result of malevolent human agency. He was also drawn to suspecting the existence of plots of the widest nature. He did not limit this attitude to the USSR. Contemplating the anti-British Indian National Congress in 1938, he assured a reception of newly elected USSR Supreme Soviet delegates in 1938 that more than half were ‘agents bought up by English money’.²⁹ That the British government possessed paid informers is beyond dispute. But the idea that so large a proportion were regularly denouncing Mahatma Gandhi is without substance although it may indicate the state of mind of its advocate. In the USSR, where his word was law, Stalin was seldom content to allow for the possibility that a particular victim might have been acting alone. His preference was to link his ‘enemies’ with a conspiracy spread out across the world and connected with the intelligence services of hostile foreign powers. His associates reinforced his propensities. They had always felt politically besieged.

It was a feeling that increased after they drove out the party oppositions and undertook campaigns of immense brutality in the country. They treated all people who resisted or simply criticised them as rubbish to be annihilated. Not all of them lusted after terror, yet some did and many more were willing collaborators. Every one of these associates had reason to be fearful. The deep resentment across Soviet society was real, and they could not be confident that an alternative political leadership would not arise and overthrow them.

Stalin did not suffer from a psychosis (which is the word nowadays preferred by doctors for madness). Unlike people who are classified as mentally ill, he did not experience episodes which stopped him functioning with day-to-day competence at work. He was not a paranoid schizophrenic. Yet he had tendencies in the direction of a paranoid and sociopathic personality disorder. There was something very odd about him, as his close comrades sooner or later discerned: he was not fully in control of himself. Unease in his presence was not a new phenomenon. From boyhood onwards his friends, while recognising his positive qualities, had noted a deeply uncongenial side. He was extraordinarily resentful and vengeful. He coddled his grievances for years. He was supremely casual about the effects of the violence he commissioned. In 1918–20 and from the late 1920s he had terrorised mainly people who belonged to social groups hostile to the October Revolution; from the mid-1930s he began to victimise not only such groups but also individuals known personally to him — and many of them were veteran party comrades. His capacity to turn on friends and subordinates and subject them to torture, forced labour and execution manifested a deeply disordered personality.

There were factors in his earlier life which must have pushed him down this road. He had a Georgian sense of honour and revenge. Notions of getting even with adversaries never left him. He had a Bolshevik viewpoint on Revolution. Violence, dictatorship and terror were methods he and fellow party veterans took to be normal. The physical extermination of enemies was entirely acceptable to them. Stalin’s personal experiences accentuated the tendencies. He never got over them: the beatings in his childhood, the punitive regime of the Seminary, the disregard for him as a young activist, the deprecation of his talent in Revolution and Civil War and the assault on his reputation in the 1920s.

This is not the whole story. The environment around him in the 1930s really was a threatening one. His own policies had of course made it so. Nevertheless he had plenty of reason to feel that he and his regime were under menace. At the end of the 1920s he had introduced an order which was widely and deeply detested across the country. His speeches had left no doubt that official policies were of his making. His cult confirmed the impression. Kulaks, priests and nepmen had suffered under the First Five-Year Plan. It was not at all outlandish to presume that millions of victims, if they had survived, thirsted after the removal of Stalin and his regime. He knew that his rivals wanted rid of him and thought him unreliable, stupid and dangerous. He got used to planning on his own and to discarding associates at the least sign that they refused to go along with him. He saw enemies everywhere and intended to deal with all of them severely, however long he might have to wait. The situation was immensely dangerous. Stalin was an oddball. Culture, life-experience and, probably, basic personality made him dangerous too.

For all his sociability, moreover, Stalin was a lonely man — and such friends as he made were either found wanting in loyalty or died. He no longer had domestic stability or permanent emotional support. His first wife had died young. His life as a clandestine party organiser had been disrupted and unsatisfactory, and he had found it next to impossible to make friends in exile. (Not that he had tried very hard.) His second wife had killed herself; and, among his best friends in power, Kirov had been assassinated and Ordzhonikidze had eventually opposed his strategic ideas. Solitary again, Stalin had no peace of mind. He was a human explosion waiting to happen.

There was a vicious circle in the interaction between what was happening in the country and what he thought about it. His policies had produced a ghastly situation. Millions had died in the course of collectivisation in Ukraine, south Russia, the north Caucasus and Kazakhstan. Repression had been massive in town and countryside. The popular standard of living had plummeted. Resistance had taken the form of rural revolts and industrial strikes, and the ascendant party leadership could not depend entirely even upon the armed forces. Yet rather than change his policies Stalin introduced greater violence to the tasks of governance. Violence in turn bred stronger resentment and this induced Stalin, already a profoundly suspicious and vengeful ruler, to intensify and broaden the application of state coercion. The situation brought out the worst in him. In fact he had plenty of badness in him to be brought out long before he held despotic power. To explain is not to excuse: Stalin was as wicked a man as has ever lived. His was a mind that found terror on a grand scale deeply congenial. When he had an opportunity to implement his ideas, he acted with a barbaric determination with few parallels in world history.

31. THE GREAT TERRORIST

If Stalin’s mind had a predisposition towards mass terror, it remains to be explained why he abruptly intensified and expanded repressive measures in the last months of 1936. For two years he had been gearing up the machinery of state violence. He had crushed active critical groupings. He had arrested thousands of former members of the United Opposition and killed Zinoviev and Kamenev. He had deported tens of thousands of ‘former people’ from the large cities. He had filled the Gulag system of camps to bursting point with real and potential enemies of the regime. His personal supremacy was unchallenged. He suborned his entourage into accepting his main demands in policy; and when he sensed a lack of total compliance, he replaced personnel with ease. The procedural mechanisms had been simplified since Kirov’s assassination. Stalin still formally consulted the Politburo but its members were merely asked to ratify measures which the NKVD proceeded to apply through its troiki. Party rule had ceased to function in its customary fashion.

A further step in the direction of what became known as the Great Terror was taken at the December 1936 Central Committee plenum.¹ Stalin let his dogs off the leash and set them on Bukharin and the veteran Rightists. Yezhov led the pack, declaring that Bukharin had known all about the terrorist plans and actions of the (non-existent) Trotskyist–Zinovievite block. The scheme was obvious. Yezhov had been sanctioned to widen the net of former oppositionist victims and to brand all of them as being in league with each other and working for foreign powers. Bukharin for months had been living in fear of something like this happening. When it occurred, it took him by surprise. He was still editor of Izvestiya. He had written pieces which, if read between the lines, could be interpreted as warnings about the effects of Stalin’s policies; but he had kept out of contact with the survivors of the Left Opposition. He had had nothing to do with Zinoviev and Kamenev for years. Yet Stalin and Yezhov were hunting him down. Bukharin demanded to confront those of Yezhov’s prisoners who were incriminating him. This was arranged in the presence of Stalin and the Politburo. Dragged out of the Lubyanka, Yevgeni Kulikov claimed that Bukharin had headed a Union Centre.² Georgi Pyatakov went further, claiming that Bukharin had liaised regularly with known Trotskyists like himself.³

Bukharin was not yet arrested, but from December 1936 through to July 1937 the net of repression was cast ever wider and reached its full list of victim-categories. The NKVD arrested followers of oppositions of both Left and Right. It seized existing holders of office in party, government, army and all other public institutions. It moved against large groups in society which had connections with the pre-revolutionary elites. It apprehended members of former anti-Bolshevik parties, clergy and ex-kulaks. It picked up and deported several national and ethnic groups in the USSR’s borderlands. Having identified the categories for repression, the NKVD’s terror machinery was kept working at full pace until November 1938.

One thing is sure: it was Stalin who instigated the carnage of 1937–8, although there was a current of popular opinion in the USSR that it was not essentially his fault. Supposedly his associates and advisers had persuaded him that only the most extremes measures would save the state from destruction; and in later decades this notion continued to commend itself to a handful of writers.⁴ But this was self-delusion. Stalin started and maintained the movement towards the Great Terror. He did not need to be pushed by others. He and nobody else was the engineer of imprisonment, torture, penal labour and shooting. He resorted to terror on the basis of Bolshevik doctrines and Soviet practical precedents. He also turned to it out of an inner psychological compulsion.⁵ Yet although he did not need much temptation to maim and kill, he had a strategy in mind. When he acted, his brutality was as mechanical as a badger trap. Stalin knew what he was hunting in the Great Terror, and why. There was a basic logic to his murderous activity. It was a logic which made sense within the framework of personal attitudes which interacted with Bolshevism in theory and practice. But he was the despot. What he thought and ordered had become the dominant factor in what was done at the highest level of the Soviet state.

Chief among his considerations was security, and he made no distinction between his personal security and the security of his policies, the leadership and the state. Molotov and Kaganovich in their dotage were to claim that Stalin had justifiable fears about the possibility of a ‘fifth column’ coming to the support of invading forces in the event of war.⁶ Stalin gave some hints of this. He was shocked by the ease with which it had been possible for General Franco to pick up followers in the Spanish Civil War which broke out in July 1936.⁷ He intended to prevent this from ever happening in the USSR. Such thinking goes some way to explaining why he, a believer in the efficacy of state terror, turned to intensive violence in 1937–8. Yet he would probably have felt impelled towards terror even without the pressures of the international situation. He felt the impulse to terror before the late 1930s. Inside the party there was much discontent with him and his policies, and indeed massive anger existed across the country. Although his power was enormous, he could never allow himself the luxury of complacency. The possibility of the bitter discontent bursting into a successful movement against him could not be discounted. Stalin’s revolutionary break with the NEP had caused tremors which were far from dying down. Beneath the surface of calm and obedience there boiled a deep resentment in state and society which had already given him cause for anxiety.

So if his reaction to the Civil War in Spain was the match, the entire political and social situation in the USSR over the past few years was the tinderbox. Stalin had come close to saying this in the message he and Zhdanov sent from the Black Sea to Kaganovich and Molotov on 25 September 1936:⁸

In lighting the match, Stalin did not necessarily have a predetermined plan any more than he had had one for economic transformation at the beginning of 1928. Although the victim-categories overlapped each other, there was no inevitability in his deciding to move against all of them in this small space of time. But the tinderbox had been sitting around in an exposed position. It was there to be ignited and Stalin, attending to all the categories one after another, applied the flame.

Trotski’s former ally Georgi Pyatakov had been arrested before Yezhov’s promotion. Pyatakov had been working efficiently as Ordzho-nikidze’s deputy in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Ordzhonikidze, in discussions after the December 1936 Central Committee plenum, refused to believe the charges of terrorism and espionage laid against him. This was a battle Stalin had to win if he was to proceed with his campaign of repression. Pyatakov was placed under psychological pressure to confess to treasonous links with counter-revolutionary groups. He cracked. Brought out to an interview with Ordzhonikidze in Stalin’s presence, he confirmed his testimony to the NKVD. In late January 1937 a second great show trial was held. Pyatakov, Sokolnikov, Radek and Serebryakov were accused of heading an Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre. The discrepancies in evidence were large but the court did not flinch from sentencing Pyatakov and Serebryakov to death while handing out long periods of confinement to Radek and Sokolnikov. Meanwhile Ordzhonikidze’s brother had been shot on Stalin’s instructions. Ordzhonikidze himself fell apart: he went off to his flat on 18 February 1937 after a searing altercation with Stalin and shot himself. There was no longer anyone in the Politburo willing to stand up to Stalin and halt the machinery of repression.⁹

Ordzhonikidze’s suicide happened in the course of a Central Committee plenum that lasted into March 1937. Stalin, without hiding behind Yezhov, asserted that the Trotskyist–Zinovievite bloc had installed an agency for espionage, sabotage and terrorism working for the German intelligence services.¹⁰ Yezhov repeated that Trotskyists, Zinovievites and Rightists were operating in a single organisation, and Stalin with the plenum’s consent instructed him to carry out a thorough investigation.¹¹ Stalin also threatened those who held posts in the party. He aimed to break up the clientelist system which inhibited the operation of a vertical administrative hierarchy:¹²

The alarm bell was being rung for a party and police purge. Bukharin was arrested on 27 February, Yagoda on 29 March. Mass expulsions meanwhile took place from the party through to the summer. Marshal Tukhachevski was arrested on 27 May along with most members of the Supreme Command. The armed forces had been added to party and police as suspect institutions. Tukhachevski was shot on 11 June; he had signed a confession with a bloodstained hand after a horrific beating.

The tall poppies of the USSR were being cut down. Yet another Central Committee plenum was convoked on 23 June. Yezhov reported on his investigations. Shamelessly fabricating the evidence, he reported that a Centre of Centres had been uncovered uniting Rightists, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Red Army, the NKVD, Zinovievites, Trotskyists and provincial party leaders. This was an alleged conspiracy on the grandest scale. Not only anti-Bolsheviks and former Bolshevik oppositionists but also current party leaders were said to have plotted to overthrow Stalin and his comrades; and Yezhov implied that only his own vigilance had prevented a coup from occurring.¹³

Stalin managed the process cunningly. He contrived again to hide behind Yezhov’s initiatives and pretend that he himself had nothing to do with the planning of repression. But as the moves were made against Central Committee members, it was unfeasible for him to say nothing; and in any case he was easily thrown into a bad temper by open criticism of the arrests. At the June 1937 plenum of the Central Committee G. N. Kaminski, People’s Commissar of Health, objected: ‘This way we’re killing off the entire party.’ Stalin barked back: ‘And you don’t happen to be friends with these enemies!’ Kaminski had taken his stand on principle and stuck to it: ‘They’re absolutely not my friends.’ Stalin came back at him: ‘Well, in that case it means you’re a berry from the same field as them.’¹⁴ Another brave individual was Osip Pyatnitski, a leading Soviet functionary in the Comintern, who vehemently opposed the proposal to execute Bukharin and accused the NKVD of fabricating its cases. Stalin suspended the proceedings and assembled the Politburo to discuss the outburst. Voroshilov and Molotov went to Pyatnitski to persuade him to retract. Pyatnitski refused. When the Central Committee reconvened, Yezhov denounced Pyatnitski as a former Okhrana agent, and Pyatnitski’s days were numbered. Stalin drew the plenum to a close on 29 June. He had crushed all opposition and called on the Central Committee to expel thirty-five full and candidate members from its ranks. The shocked Central Committee voted in favour.¹⁵

Equipped with the Central Committee’s troubled approval, the Politburo on 2 July decided on a decree to carry out a definitive purge of ‘anti-Soviet elements’. Not only the alleged leadership of the (entirely fictitious) Centre of Centres was to be eliminated but even whole social categories were to be savaged.¹⁶ It would affect former kulaks, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, priests, Bolshevik oppositionists, members of non-Russian parties, White Army soldiers and released common criminals. Order No. 00447 was drawn up by Stalin and Yezhov and sanctioned by the Politburo on 31 July. The campaign was set to start on 5 August, and Stalin signalled his intention to oversee it by not taking his regular vacation by the Black Sea. Yezhov, consulting him frequently, had established a USSR-wide quota for people to be condemned. With elaborate precision he determined that 268,950 individuals should be arrested. The procedures would involve judicial farce; the victims were to be hauled before revolutionary troiki of party and police and, without right of defence or appeal, found guilty. It was also indicated exactly how many should be dispatched to forced labour: 193,000 individuals. The rest, 75,950, were to be executed.

The fact that he ordered the killing of nearly three out of every ten people arrested under Order No. 00447 invalidates the suggestion that Stalin’s mass purges in mid-1937 were motivated mainly by the quest for slave labour.¹⁷ Undoubtedly the NKVD’s enterprises needed such labour to fulfil their targets for building, mining and manufacturing. But the Great Terror, while having an economic purpose, was systematically wasteful of human resources. The mass killings demonstrate that security interests were at the forefront of Stalin’s mind.

On 25 July 1937 he and Yezhov had also put forward Order No. 00439, which spread a net of terror across a further category of people. German citizens and Soviet citizens of German nationality were to be arrested. The order did not designate a quota: the NKVD was charged simply with getting on with the operation on its own initiative. In fact 55,000 people received punitive sentences and these included 42,000 executions.¹⁸ Stalin had decided that some types of foreigner were just as dangerous to him as kulaks and other ‘anti-Soviet elements’. He did not stop with the Germans resident in the USSR. After them came the Poles, the former émigrés in the Chinese city of Harbin, the Latvians and several other peoples. ‘National operations’ of this nature continued through the rest of 1937 and all 1938.

The conclusion is inescapable. Stalin had decided to deal with the objects of his security worries in a sustained burst of NKVD mass arrests and murders. Additions were recurrently made to the quotas set for the operation against ‘anti-Soviet elements’ and to the list of nationalities marked down as hostile. Leaders in the provinces were not discouraged from applying for permission to raise the number of victims to be seized. Stalin wrote telegrams fostering the murderous enthusiasm. No document survives of his having gone the other way and trying to stem the flood of arrests, torture and killing. When the Krasnoyarsk Party Regional Committee wrote to him about a fire in a grain store, he simply replied: ‘Try the guilty persons in accelerated fashion. Sentence them to death.’¹⁹ There was no injunction to local leaders to exercise care in repressing the ‘correct’ people. His emphasis was always upon getting his subordinates to carry out the Great Terror with zeal. Thick, bloody slices were cut from the personnel of party, government and all other institutions. The word went forth that the only way to save your life, if it was at all possible, was to comply eagerly with orders for repression.

Even Kaganovich had to plead his case before him when Stalin objected to his past association with ‘enemy of the people’ Marshal Iona Yakir. Kaganovich plucked up courage to point out that it had been Stalin who had recommended Yakir to him a decade before.²⁰ Nikita Khrushchëv, Moscow Party Committee Secretary, was similarly threatened when Stalin accused him of being a Pole. At a time when Polish communist émigrés in Moscow were being routinely shot, Khrushchëv was understandably keen to prove that he was a genuine Russian.²¹

Stalin’s involvement remained direct and deep as his envoys went to the main centres to preside over the sackings and arrests of local leaders. One of these envoys was Politburo member Andreev, a repentant member of the Workers’ Opposition whose past made it imperative to carry out orders implicitly. He went to cities such as Chelyabinsk, Krasnodar, Samara, Saratov, Sverdlovsk and Voronezh as well as Soviet republics such as Belorussia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.²² Andreev quickly decided whom to arrest and whom to replace them with. But he consulted Stalin before going ahead with his plans. From Stalinabad in Tajikistan he reported that ‘enemies have been working here in a basic fashion and have felt fairly free in doing this’. Stalin telegraphed back on 3 October 1937:²³

Andreev, Malenkov, Zhdanov and others toured the various regions carrying out their master’s policy.

Although it was physically impossible to ratify each and every operation carried out in particular localities, Stalin still managed to examine 383 ‘albums’ of proposed victims brought to him by Yezhov in the Great Terror. These albums alone contained the names of about 44,000 people. The higher the status of the victim, the more likely it was that Yezhov would seek Stalin’s signature before proceeding. Stalin, a busy man, was expected to go through the lists and tick off recommended sentences whenever he spotted a name he knew and had a preference for what should be done. He did this with his usual assiduity; there is no sign that he objected to doing things in the ‘album fashion’. All the time, too, he bound the rest of the Politburo to the process. Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov and others were asked for their approval, and they frequently added their rhetorical flourishes to their names. ‘Give the dog a dog’s death!’ was one of Molotov’s touches. Stalin was still avoiding incurring exclusive responsibility. Obviously he retained a residual worry that he would not get away with the outrages he was organising. Having bludgeoned his comrades into condoning the measures, he wanted their continuing formal complicity.

The fact that Stalin targeted millions of persons who had broken no law had operational consequences. So too did his determination to purge every single public institution. In this situation it was crucial to obtain assent and co-operation from officials in party, government and police who might otherwise have disrupted the process — and as things turned out, many of them were doomed to pay for their compliance with their own lives. It was presumably for this reason that Stalin needed the trials, however spurious and brief they were, to take place. Not only that: he felt constrained to obtain proofs of crime. Somehow he had to demonstrate to the survivors of the Great Terror, including the individuals he promoted from obscurity, that the dreadful state violence had been justified. A comparison with Nazi Germany is apposite. When the German security agencies rounded up Jews, Roma, homosexuals and the mentally disabled there was no secret about the regime’s antagonism towards them. Hitler kept quiet about the scale of the arrests and the fate of those who had been arrested; but this coyness was aimed at avoiding unnecessary opposition among citizens of the Reich: he had no need as he saw things to pretend that the victims were spies or saboteurs. They had been arrested exactly because they were Jews, Roma, homosexuals or mentally disabled.

Such an approach would not do for Stalin. Kulaks, priests, Mensheviks, Germans, Harbinites and Trotskyists lacked the popular antagonism towards them that Hitler had whipped up against his victims. They had to be shown to be a malignant presence in respectable, loyal Soviet society. Stalin was running a terror-state. Yet the requirement existed even for him to keep the confidence of the office-holders whose lives he spared. It did not greatly matter that his case against the victims was inherently implausible. What counted was that stenographers could record that, as far as the state was concerned, due legal process had taken place. Perhaps there was a personal edge to this. Stalin had characteristically seen the world in black-and-white terms. Intermediate colours did not exist for him, and he implicitly believed that those persons whom he felt he could not trust were indeed working actively and conspiratorially against him and his policies. For psychological reasons, then, he too required that his victims could be shown to have done wrong; and since the NKVD lacked material evidence, the sole option was for the alleged spies and saboteurs to be brought to admit their guilt. Interests of state came together with the aberrant purposes of an unbalanced Leader.

Ostensibly he acted as he did because evidence was brought to him that ‘enemies of the people’ — imperialist agents, subversives and counter-revolutionaries — had been exposed by the NKVD. Stalin was so suspicious that he probably persuaded himself that many of those whom he condemned to the Gulag or to execution were genuinely guilty of such crimes against the state. The nearest he came to witnessing the result of his barbarism was when he held confrontations between some broken leader willing to ‘confess’ and some other leader who was being denounced but had not yet been arrested. At the confrontation with Kulikov in December 1936, Bukharin was like a butterfly seeing the needle about to pin him to a board.

Yet although Stalin apparently derived satisfaction from such confrontations, he organised them only in the period when he still needed the sanction of his Politburo comrades for particular verdicts. After early 1937 he dropped them as being no longer necessary. Throughout the last months of 1937 the purges continued. They affected both central and local functionaries as well as ‘ordinary’ people. Awards were announced for the heroic butchers in the NKVD. Yezhov’s name became second only to Stalin’s in official esteem. On 16 December it was the turn of Abel Enukidze and fellow defendants to be tried by a Military Collegium as spies, bourgeois nationalists and terrorists. This was done in secret and in quick order. They were all shot.²⁴

In March 1938 it was the turn of Bukharin. Along with him in the dock were three others who had belonged to the Party Central Committee in Lenin’s time: Alexei Rykov, Nikolai Krestinski and Christian Rakovski. Yagoda was also a defendant, as were several lesser figures. The third great show trial was organised by those leading figures in the NKVD who had as yet survived the Great Terror. The charges were as bizarre as before. Bukharin in particular was said to have plotted in 1918 to murder Lenin and Stalin and seize power. He parried this particular accusation while accepting political responsibility for the anti-Stalin conspiracies alleged to exist in the late 1930s. Krestinski was less cooperative. At his first appearance in court he retracted his prison testimony. Next day, looking still more haggard, he reverted to the testimony agreed with his captors. Nearly all the accused had been savagely beaten. Bukharin was spared this but was visibly a broken man. From his prison cell he had written a note to Stalin: ‘Koba, why is my death necessary for you?’ But Stalin wanted blood. Constantly consulted by Chief Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinski and Vasili Ulrikh at the end of the court’s working day, he ordered that the world’s press should be convinced of the veracity of the confessions before sentences were passed.²⁵ Many Western journalists were indeed hoodwinked. The verdict was announced on 13 March: nearly all the defendants were to be shot.

Two days later Stalin approved a further operation to purge ‘anti-Soviet elements’. This time he wanted 57,200 people to be arrested across the USSR. Of these, he and Yezhov had agreed, fully 48,000 were to be rapidly tried by troiki and executed. Yezhov, by now practised at the management of such operations, attended to his duties with enthusiasm. Through spring, summer and autumn 1938 the carnage continued as the NKVD meat-grinder performed its grisly task on Stalin’s behalf. Having put Yezhov’s hand at the controls and ordered him to start the machine, Stalin could keep it running as long as it suited him.

Stalin never saw the Lubyanka cellars. He did not even glimpse the meat-grinder of the operations. Yezhov asked for and received vast resources for his work. He needed more than his executive officials in the NKVD to complete it. The Great Terror required stenographers, guards, executioners, cleaners, torturers, clerks, railwaymen, truck drivers and informers. Lorries marked ‘Meat’ or ‘Vegetables’ took victims out to rural districts such as Butovo near Moscow where killing fields had been prepared. Trains, often travelling through cities by night, transported Gulag prisoners to the Russian Far North, to Siberia or to Kazakhstan in wagons designed for cattle. The unfortunates were inadequately fed and watered on the journey, and the climate — bitterly cold in the winter and monstrously hot in summer — aggravated the torment. Stalin said he did not want the NKVD’s detainees to be given holiday-home treatment. The small comforts that had been available to him in Novaya Uda, Narym, Solvychegodsk or even Kureika were systematically withheld. On arrival in the labour camps they were kept constantly hungry. Yezhov’s dieticians had worked out the minimum calorie intake for them to carry out heavy work in timber felling, gold mining or building construction; but the corruption in the Gulag was so general that inmates rarely received their full rations — and Stalin made no recorded effort to discover what conditions were really like for them.

Such was the chaos of the Great Terror that despite Stalin’s insistence that each victim should be formally processed by the troiki, the number of arrests and executions has not been ascertained with exactitude. Mayhem precluded such precision. But all the records, different as they are about details, point in the same general direction. Altogether it would seem that a rough total of one and a half million people were seized by the NKVD in 1937–8. Only around two hundred thousand were eventually released. To be caught in the maw of the NKVD usually meant to face a terrible sentence. The troiki worked hard at their appalling task. The impression got around — or was allowed to get around — that Stalin used nearly all of the arrestees as forced labourers in the Gulag. In fact the NKVD was under instructions to deliver about half of its victims not to the new camps in Siberia or north Russia but to the execution pits outside most cities. Roughly three quarters of a million persons perished under a hail of bullets in that brief period of two years. The Great Terror had its ghastly logic.

32. THE CULT OF IMPERSONALITY

The Lenin cult glistened like a film of oil over the dark ocean of Soviet reality in the late 1930s. Stalin had always presided over its rites. It had been he who arranged for the corpse of the Soviet leader to be displayed in the Mausoleum. He organised the publication of Lenin’s memoirs and helped to set up an Institute of Lenin. He vowed undying allegiance to Lenin’s ideas and practices. During the New Economic Policy he claimed to be a mere pupil of the great man.

The ‘biography’ by Lenin’s aide Ivan Tovstukha in 1927 was really just a catalogue of his arrests, places of exile, main publications and official posts. Although it mentioned Stalin’s support for Lenin against Kamenev and Zinoviev in October 1917, there was no reference to subsequent factional campaigns, and he was listed as being merely ‘one of the secretaries of the Party Central Committee from 1922’: his full title of General Secretary was omitted.¹ With Stalin’s rise to political supremacy at the end of the 1920s all this started to change. After sending Bukharin and the Right Deviation down to defeat, he demanded appreciation as more than a party administrator. On 21 December 1929 Stalin’s (supposed) fiftieth birthday was celebrated with the fanfares of a ceremony of state.² Even if he had been bashful (and in fact he was wary of making himself look ridiculous by permitting excessive praise),³ political self-interest dictated the need for media acclaim in a period when oppositionist leaders were making scathing criticisms. Stalin aspired to his own personal cult.

He continued to express admiration for his predecessor. Although he allowed others to use the term ‘Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism’, he himself avoided it. Stalin even refused to sanction a complete edition of his collected works (whereas Trotski had already published twenty-one volumes of his writings before falling from grace). Addressing a large Moscow conference on propaganda in 1938, he condemned attempts to put him on the same level as Lenin as a party theorist. His Foundations of Leninism, Stalin insisted, was only a work of exegesis. The originality of thought lay with Lenin, which was why it made sense to talk of Marxism–Leninism and not just Marxism. But the teacher ought not to be confused with the pupil.⁴

Nevertheless he often allowed his light to outshine the aureole surrounding his predecessor. Comparisons of the two men began to be made at Lenin’s expense. The party historian Yemelyan Yaroslavski opined that Stalin was the more decisive of the two leaders and that the reason lay in the excessive number of years spent by Lenin in emigration.⁵ But usually the downgrading of Lenin was done in a visual fashion rather than in texts. On New Year’s Day in 1931 Pravda carried a line drawing of Stalin on its front page — and Lenin appeared in it only as a name printed on a banner.⁶ A similar picture was used to emphasise Stalin’s greatness in the annals of Soviet communism on New Year’s Day in 1937.⁷ Line drawings continued to be preferred to cartoons. Pravda had always avoided carrying humorous representations of the party’s leaders. (Foreign anti-communist politicians, though, were thought fair game.) This tradition endured through the 1930s. No levity was permitted to infringe Stalin’s dignity; and whenever his image appeared in Soviet newspapers, it was in contexts that corroborated his supreme status. Commissioned pictures had to convey the impression of an inspiring genius with the determination and wisdom to change the face of state and society in the USSR, and both editors and censors were careful to comply.

Photographs were frequently carried. Among the most famous was one taken as he scooped little Gelya Markizova into his arms when she presented a bouquet to him.⁸ Her bright smiling face adorned many books in following years. Little did readers know that her parents perished in the Great Terror soon after her big day. But Stalin got what he wanted. He was able to have himself represented as the warmest friend to all children in the country.

He strove to identify himself with young people in general. Pravda reproduced many photos of him greeting heroes of labour, science or exploration. Astutely he did not always monopolise the publicity. The typical front page of newspapers gave pride of space to young heroes of the moment: Stakhanovite miners or metalworkers, record-breaking milkmaids, geographical explorers or long-distance aviators. Citizens were invited to believe that the state led by Stalin had a dynamic orientation towards science, education, meritocracy and patriotism. Aviators had a special attraction for Stalin. When a celebratory book appeared on his meetings with individuals of outstanding achievement, Soviet flyers were given greater space than any other category of person. He loved to meet them: ‘You know how I’ll fight like a tiger so that no one may give offence to our flyers!’;⁹ and they were understandably pleased by his attentiveness and by the medals they received from him.¹⁰ By sharing the plaudits with Soviet citizens beyond the inner circle of powerful political leaders he enhanced his image as a modest man of the people. For Stalin, aviators and explorers had the advantage of operating far away from the public gaze. By contrast industrial managers and party bosses were widely unpopular and indeed Stalin routinely castigated them whenever (his own) policies caused resentment. Culpable subordinates served as a lightning conductor that deflected political damage on to others.

Stalin also aimed to associate himself with leaders of official organisations and enterprises at lower levels of the Soviet state. While arresting a multitude of the older post-holders in the 1930s, he issued appeals to those younger ones who took their place. Having long represented himself as a praktik, he declared at a Kremlin reception for metallurgical and coal-mining functionaries on 30 October 1937:¹¹

He chose his words subtly so as to avoiding reducing himself to the level of his audience. He left no doubt that he was one of the ‘big leaders’, and the cult of the Vozhd confirmed that he was the biggest of them. This mixture of self-assertion and modesty won friends and influenced the Kremlin elite, the party and the people.

Stalin liked to be seen to be restricting the cultic extravaganza. Worship had to be effusive but not totally ridiculous in its extent. He frequently reprimanded his underlings if, unable to guess his opinion, they overstepped the mark of flattery. He was made angry by an attempt to publish his articles from the years before the Great War. Stalin wrote to Kaganovich, Yezhov and Molotov in August 1936 — while he was on holiday by the Black Sea — seeking their help in preventing publication.¹² (Obviously he could have given a direct order and it would have been instantly obeyed; but Stalin also wanted to impress on the Politburo that he remained a member of a political team.) He continued to comment scathingly on what was written about him. Stalin exclaimed to one of his physicians, M. G. Shneidorovich, about the inaccuracies in Soviet newspapers: ‘Look, you’re an intelligent man, doctor, and you must understand: there’s not a word of truth in them!’ The physician was beginning to feel he had the Leader’s confidence until Stalin added that doctors were just as unreliable as journalists — and doctors had the means and opportunity to poison him!¹³

Beria could nevertheless publish a history of Bolshevik party organisations in the Transcaucasus. This had gained Stalin’s sanction. Beria’s book controverted the received opinion that only the Marxists of St Petersburg or the emigration had had a decisive impact on the fate of the party. Although the contents were mostly a historical fiction, the theme of the historical importance of the borderlands was overdue its attention. (Beria, though, was not the authentic author: he commissioned and appropriated the text and then shot the writers.) Beria’s great Caucasian rival, Nestor Lakoba, produced an account of Stalin’s experiences along the Black Sea littoral after the turn of the century.¹⁴ Some memoirs also appeared about Stalin in Siberian exile.¹⁵ Yet there was little detail about the episodes in his rise to prominence in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party before the Great War and the circumstances of his co-optation to the Central Committee in 1912. Much remained hidden, and Stalin kept it that way. Mystery served his purpose: people would naturally be inclined to assume that he had been more important than was true. He enlarged the space for this to occur by removing his enemies from the history of Bolshevism. Steadily those other Bolsheviks who had been close to Lenin before the October Revolution were eliminated from the textbooks — and in most cases they were physically liquidated.

The grandiose acclaim kept on growing. At the Sixteenth Party Congress in June 1930 Stalin was greeted by ‘stormy, prolonged applause extending into a lengthy ovation’. The Congress rose to its feet shouting ‘Hurrah!’ The same occurred at the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934, when there was a tremendous ovation and shouts of ‘Long live our Stalin!’ By the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, after the Great Terror, even this was thought inadequate. Congress organisers had arranged chants of ‘Hurrah for our Leader, Teacher and Friend, Comrade Stalin!’

Stalin biographies had been appearing thick and fast. The French writer Henri Barbusse’s 1935 life of the General Secretary was translated into Russian and placed on sale in the USSR.¹⁶ It was Barbusse who put into circulation the phrase: ‘Stalin is the Lenin of today.’ But not even Barbusse entirely pleased Stalin. It was this displeasure that led him in 1938 to get the Central Committee to commission Stalin: A Biography, which narrated his life from birth in the little town of Gori to the present day. His towering importance in Bolshevik theory and practice was affirmed. The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): A Short Course appeared in the same year and covered the periods of communist party history through to the late 1930s. For years there had been competing versions of the history of Soviet communism. Several had enjoyed the approval of the Central Committee, and their authors — Nikolai Popov, Yemelyan Yaroslavski and Andrei Bubnov — had earned large royalties. Yet a single official statement was required when unflinching orthodoxy was a matter of life and death. A team of writers was assembled under V. G. Knorin, Y. M. Yaroslavski and P. N. Pospelov to provide such a work.

Stalin too worked on it behind the scenes; he not only wrote a chapter in the Short Course but also edited the book’s entire text five times.¹⁷ A line of legitimate succession was traced from Marx and Engels through Lenin to Stalin. Tendentiousness and mendacity were the book’s hallmarks. For every point where disputes had arisen among Marxist revolutionaries it was suggested that only one authentic expression of Marxism was available and that Lenin and his follower Stalin had consistently adopted it. Soviet communism’s history was treated in Manichean terms. There were the forces of rectitude led by Leninism and the forces of deceit and betrayal under the anti-Bolshevik parties — the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Anarchists and nationalists of all types — as well as, subsequently, the Bolshevik factions hostile to Stalin. The Short Course deplored ‘the Trotskyists, the Bukharinites, nationalist deviators and other anti-Leninist groups’. Not once had Lenin made a mistake in doctrine or strategy. By good fortune a man equally infallible, Stalin himself, succeeded him.

The two leading characters of the Short Course were treated differently. It is usually assumed that the book enabled Stalin to supplant Lenin in the mythology of Soviet communism.¹⁸ This is untrue. Despite creating his own cult, he still found it useful to acknowledge the superiority of Lenin.¹⁹ This was obvious in the handling of the party’s early history. Whereas the official biography gave attention to Stalin’s career as a young revolutionary, his name hardly appeared in the opening chapters of the Short Course.²⁰ In the entire book there were forty-nine citations of Lenin’s works but only eleven of those by Stalin. Evidently Stalin still sensed a continuing need to cloak himself with the mantle of Lenin’s memory.²¹ The treatment of the October Revolution is remarkable in this respect. Its pages on the seizure of power avoided any reference to Stalin.²² (Later generations of historians have missed this; indeed one wonders whether they have bothered to read the Short Course.) The point is that Stalin in the late 1930s, despite dominating the Soviet political scene, saw the desirability of placing a few limits to the worship of his own greatness. Even the Leader had to be cautious.

What is more, there was little in the writings about Stalin which gave a vivid impression of him. Usually the official eulogies are ascribed to a ‘cult of personality’ since this was the term used by Nikita Khrushchëv when he posthumously denounced Stalin in 1956. A more accurate translation from the Russian would be ‘cult of the individual’. Thus the 1938 biography recited the barest details of the first half of Stalin’s life before proceeding to catalogue his actions at the level of policy. There was scant attention to the family, school and native town of his boyhood. Accounts of his career in the clandestine Bolshevik committees before the Great War were discouraged; even his career in the October Revolution, the Civil War, the NEP and the Five-Year Plans was hardly covered in either the biography or the Short Course. He discouraged all historical and literary attempts to explain how he came to think what he thought or do what he did before the onset of his despotism. He strove instead to get writers, painters and film-makers to present him as the embodiment of the party rather than as a credible actor in history. Despite the preoccupation of the state media with Stalin, extremely little was allowed into the public domain telling of his ancestry, education, beliefs, demeanour or calculations.

His private existence too remained especially secluded. Before 1932 it was never mentioned in the newspapers that he was a married man. When he appeared on top of the Lenin Mausoleum, he was accompanied solely by fellow leading politicians. Pravda had made only a brief announcement of Nadya’s death.²³ The same attitude was taken with Stalin’s mother. Pravda carried short articles about his visit to her in 1935 shortly before her death, and her funeral too was reported.²⁴ Otherwise his privacy was closely guarded. A few exceptions existed. In 1939 a series of articles appeared by V. Kaminski and I. Vereshchagin about Stalin’s early life, and these included brief memoirs by some of his schoolboy friends and documents referring to his education.²⁵ Some personal documents also appeared about Stalin’s periods of arrest and imprisonment.²⁶

The continued austerity of the Stalin cult invites comment. One possibility is that he recognised that most aspects of his past and present life were unlikely to commend him to others — and so he drew the curtains across them. This is conceivable but unlikely. Stalin was a maestro of historical fabrication, and mere facts would not have inhibited him from inventing a wholly fictional biography. Another possibility is that Stalin was simply unimaginative; and since he, unlike Hitler who had Goebbels, was his cult’s main artificer, this may explain the situation. But Stalin was surrounded by associates who yearned to prove their usefulness to him. It is not credible that alternative ideas were not proposed to him. The most plausible explanation is that Stalin still believed that austerity was what best suited Russia’s cultural ambience as well as the sensibilities of the world communist movement. After the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, he had stopped being called General Secretary but instead was designated Secretary of the Party Central Committee. Until 6 May 1941, furthermore, he resolutely refused to become Sovnarkom Chairman despite the fact that this had been Lenin’s job. He could not even be tempted to create the post of Chairman for himself in the Party Politburo. Nor was Stalin head of state. That position continued to be held by Mikhail Kalinin as Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets. Letters to the ascendant communist leadership were often addressed not to Stalin but to Kalinin or to both of them.²⁷

Yet he dominated the central public life of the USSR. People lived or died according to his whim. Political, economic, social and cultural activity was conditioned by his inclinations of the day. He was the masterful guide of men and manager of affairs in the Soviet state. But Stalin had always been cunning. He had learned of the advantages of a display of modesty. Better, he concluded, to let it be thought that he was thirsty neither for power nor for prestige. Did his interest in the career of Augustus, first of the Roman emperors, influence him? Augustus would never accept the title of king despite obviously having become the founder of a dynastic monarchy.²⁸

Stalin of course wanted adulation and the cult was extravagant in his praise; the restrictions imposed by him were pragmatically motivated. He discerned that he would gain more admirers if he stopped himself — and was seen to stop himself — short of making the very extreme claims put forward by Kremlin sycophants. Control of the process was crucial to him. He remained alert to the danger of letting people praise him on their own initiative and — bizarre as it might seem — banned discussion circles (kruzhki) from looking at either the Short Course or his official biography. The reason he gave was that he did not want citizens, tired after a day’s labour, to have to turn out in the evening. In an exchange with a Leningrad party propagandist he ordered: ‘Let them have a quiet life!’²⁹ But this was disingenuous. Party members had to go to post-work meetings as a political duty. Stalin’s real aim was surely to restrict debate altogether. The texts of the two books were fairly straightforward in themselves and could quickly be studied by individuals reading alone. And once they had read and digested the texts, they could join in the ceremonies and festivals which were organised by the authorities with scrupulous care on the streets, in factories and at offices.

The cult certainly had its successes. A seventy-one-year-old woman textile worker was invited to the October Revolution celebrations on Red Square in 1935 but because of short-sightedness did not catch a glimpse of Stalin. Bumping into Ordzhonikidze, she cried: ‘Look, I’m going to die soon — am I really not going to be able to see him?’ Ordzhonikidze told her she was not going to die and, as she walked on, a car drew up and out got Stalin. She clapped her hands: ‘Hey! Look who I’ve seen!’ Stalin smiled and said modestly: ‘What a good thing! A most ordinary human being!’ The old woman burst into tears: ‘You are our wise one, our great one… and now I’ve seen you… now I can die!’ Stalin, thinking on his feet, replied: ‘Why do you need to die? Let others go and die while you go on working!’³⁰

The little episode shows that many citizens, especially those who felt grateful to the authorities, had a compulsive urge to revere him. (It also indicates that Stalin, even if he liked such flattery, reacted pretty brusquely: his main concern was to coax the old woman to go on toiling years beyond the age of retirement!) Moreover, people were much more likely to engage in his worship when they were in a crowd affected by the officially created atmosphere. Not only unsophisticated citizens but also many politicians and intellectuals experienced an inner need to extol him. They counted themselves blessed even if they only briefly met him or caught a glimpse of him. The writer Kornei Chukovski was hardly a natural Stalinist. Disconcerted by the kind of literature demanded of authors by Stalin, he retreated into writing tales for children. Even so, his diary from 1936 records the following impression at a congress:³¹

That Chukovski was charmed by Stalin’s ‘graceful smile’ says much for the impact of the cult.

Yet the success was not as large as Stalin had hoped. Among the peasantry in particular there was pervasive dislike of him and many villagers regarded him — a Georgian, an atheist, an internationalist — as the very Antichrist. So desperate was rural opinion by the late 1930s that many peasants seriously hoped for war with Germany on the assumption that only military invasion would dislodge Soviet communism from power and bring about opportunities for decollectivisation.³² Such hostility was not confined to rural inhabitants. A misspelled and ungrammatical letter of protest dispatched to him and Kalinin by fifty Leningrad workers in March 1930 had stated:³³

The period of the First Five-Year Plan was directly associated with Stalin in the popular mind. He had claimed credit for the industrial and cultural revolution of those years. The result was that everyone knew who was to blame for the hardships.

Exactly how widespread and deep was such hatred is a question which will never be satisfactorily answered. The NKVD supplied regular reports on popular opinion, but their language and orientation left much to be desired. Security agencies had an interest in alarming Stalin. Their power and prestige rested on their capacity to persuade him that it was only their vigilance which protected the state against its millions of internal enemies. (Not that he usually took much persuading.)

Yet undoubtedly many Soviet citizens, like the woman textile worker, loved the Leader. Conditions did not worsen for everyone in the 1930s. Jobs became available offering improved salary, housing and consumer goods for promotees. Stalin’s rejection of the egalitarian principle for the Soviet order created an attractive prospect for them. Usually coming from working-class or peasant backgrounds, his beneficiaries could hardly believe their luck. They replaced the elites which were being butchered on his orders. The propaganda was crude but it worked with the grain of the self-interest of the promotees. They were ambitious, bright and obedient young men and women who wanted to get on in the world. The school system reinforced the message that Stalin had moved the USSR on to the tracks of universal progress. Needless to say, even the promotees might have had their doubts. It was possible to like some aspects of him and his policies and to disapprove of others. Many people hoped against all the evidence that the terror policies would eventually be abandoned. Perhaps, they thought, Stalin would soon see the need for reform — and some thought the violence would stop when he discarded the advisers who were misleading him.³⁴

Stalin depended on this naïveté. He could hardly induce a purged kulak, priest or party oppositionist to love him. He could not expect a lot of undernourished, overworked factory labourers or kolkhozniki to sing his praises. But indisputably some of them did admire him. And, above all, members of the new administrative stratum wished to stick with him since he had given them their place in the sun. He had transformed the economy and built a military power. He was the Vozhd, the Leader, the Boss. Great was the name of Stalin in the minds of beneficiaries of the Stalinist state order.

33. BRUTAL REPRIEVE

The Great Terror came suddenly to an end on 23 November 1938. The occasion was marked unofficially by the removal of Yezhov from the NKVD and the advent to office of his deputy Lavrenti Beria. Until then there had been no serious attempt to stop the carnage. Everyone near Stalin had known that the campaign of arrests, tortures and executions had his active support: it was perilous to advocate a change of policy while he seemed fixed in purpose.

Signs had already appeared that some in Stalin’s entourage wanted to halt the machinery of terror. Malenkov began the attempt at the Party Central Committee plenum in January 1938; he did this subtly by deploring the large number of mistakes in expulsions from the party in the previous year.¹ Direct criticism of arrests and executions was avoided. Holding to the theme of internal party procedures, Malenkov rebuked local leaders for throwing innocent communists out of the party. Everyone knew that more was involved than the loss of a party membership card. Expelled Bolsheviks were invariably sent to the Gulag or shot. Malenkov later claimed that he was putting pressure on Stalin to see the light. If so, it would have been the only time he did so. Malenkov was Stalin’s creature and it is inconceivable that Stalin did not sanction Malenkov’s initiative; and in any case, apart from a decision to handle expulsions more carefully, no brake was yet applied to the machinery of terror. Nevertheless Stalin evidently had growing doubts about Yezhov. He made this manifest in a typically indirect fashion when, on 21 August 1938, Yezhov was given the People’s Commissariat of Water Transport in addition to his existing duties. This implicitly warned him that he would have the NKVD taken away from him if he failed to satisfy the Leader.

Yezhov understood the danger he was in and his daily routine became hectic; he knew that the slightest mistake could prove fatal. Somehow, though, he had to show himself to Stalin as indispensable. Meanwhile he also had to cope with the appointment of a new NKVD Deputy Commissar, the ambitious Lavrenti Beria, from July 1938. Beria had until then been First Secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia; he was widely feared in the south Caucasus as a devious plotter against any rival — and almost certainly he had poisoned one of them, the Abkhazian communist leader Nestor Lakoba, in December 1936. If Yezhov tripped, Beria was ready to take his place; indeed Beria would be more than happy to trip Yezhov up. Daily collaboration with Beria was like being tied in a sack with a wild beast. The strain on Yezhov became intolerable. He took to drinking heavily and turned for solace to one-night stands with women he came across; and when this failed to satiate his needs, he pushed himself upon men he encountered in the office or at home. In so far as he was able to secure his future position, he started to gather compromising material on Stalin himself.

Quite how Yezhov could ever have made use of such documents is hard to imagine. His behaviour indicated how desperate he, the Iron Commissar, had become. Knowing he could be arrested at any time, he was sent daily into hysteria. His fate depended on whether Stalin wanted to alter policy or change personnel. If he was to survive, the NKVD chief needed Stalin to commit himself to permanent state terror with Yezhov still in charge.

A further decline in Yezhov’s influence was detectable on 23 October 1938, when the writer Mikhail Sholokhov gained an audience with Stalin to complain about being investigated by the NKVD.² Stalin humiliated Yezhov by requiring him to attend. On 14 November an order came from Stalin to purge the NKVD of individuals ‘not worthy of political confidence’. Next day the Politburo confirmed a directive of party and government to terminate cases currently under investigation by the troiki and the military tribunals. On 17 November the Politburo decided that enemies of the people had infiltrated the NKVD.³ Such measures spelled doom for Yezhov. He drank more heavily. He turned to more boyfriends for sexual gratification. He spoke incautiously about politics.⁴ He was psychologically collapsing as Stalin increasingly treated Lavrenti Beria as NKVD chief-in-waiting. The wolves were gathering. At an evening meeting with Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov on 23 November, Yezhov confessed to his incompetence in catching enemies of the people; his resignation was accepted.⁵ Yezhov kept his other posts in the Central Committee Secretariat and the People’s Commissariat of Water Transport for some months. But his days of pomp and authority were over.

Beria was charged with restoring order in the NKVD and submitting it to the party’s control. Ruthless and competent, he could be trusted to clear up the mess left behind by Yezhov. Beria was no angel. Unlike Yezhov, he took an active part in beatings and kept canes for use in his office. Yet he had a steadier character than his predecessor, and Stalin and he instigated a set of reforms. Approval of torture in interrogations was not revoked but restricted, according to a January 1939 directive, to ‘exceptional’ cases.⁶ A dossier was assembled on Yezhov, who appeared in public for the last time on 21 January 1939. He was arrested in April and executed the following year. The entire system of troikis was dismantled. The nightmare of 1937–8 was ended; it was popularly referred to as the ‘Yezhovshchina’. This suited Stalin, who wanted the blame removed from his own shoulders. Yet although the terror-procedures were reduced, they were not abolished. The party did not control the NKVD at central and local levels on a daily basis. Torture continued to be used. The frantic atmosphere of the Great Terror had been dissipated but Stalin’s USSR remained a murderous madhouse — and most of the leading madmen were confirmed in power.

Yezhov’s removal came after Stalin started to allow discussion in his entourage about abuses of power. Two years of arrests and executions had occurred, and it was known that a high proportion of the victims did not belong to the categories of people describable as ‘anti-Soviet elements’. It is quite possible too that Yezhov misled Stalin about aspects of the process. Yezhov’s career and life depended on his ability to persuade Stalin that genuine anti-Soviet elements and enemies of the people were being arrested and eliminated. Yezhov’s activity put everyone at risk.

Just as many people at the time and a few subsequent commentators surmised that the Great Terror had not been started on Stalin’s initiative,⁷ so the idea got about that the process was entirely out of his control once it had begun. Stalin may well have failed to anticipate the catastrophic excesses of the NKVD under Yezhov. What is more, local police organs undoubtedly bothered less about arresting individuals who fell into the designated social categories than in meeting the numerical quotas assigned to them. Repressions in 1937–8 were constantly accompanied by ‘wrongful’ arrests. Abuses and excesses were ubiquitous. It is also true that many truly anti-Soviet individuals survived the Great Terror and put themselves at the disposal of the German occupation regime in 1941. Hitler’s forces had little difficulty discovering kulaks, priests and other anti-Soviet elements which had been intended for elimination by Soviet terror operations. To that extent it is true that Stalin’s purposes had been frustrated. The ‘cleansing’ of the USSR of all its enemies, real or potential, had not been completely successful despite one of the most thorough repressive projects in world history.

Yet his failure to achieve all his objectives in their entirety is scarcely proof that he did not succeed to a very large degree. The fact that a multitude of people were wrongly arrested was neither here nor there. Essentially Stalin was applying to the judicial system what he had already developed for the economic system. The management of most sectors of public affairs in the USSR was chaotic. Policy was imposed and quantitative targets were set with dire punitive sanctions in the event of failure to hit the targets. This had been how the industrial growth rates were administered in the First Five-Year Plan. Agricultural collectivisation had been directed in the same way. The point was that the entire administrative system operated on the premise that lower-level officials had to be given precise numerical indicators. Stalin and the Politburo knew that the information reaching them from the localities was frequently unreliable. Misinformation was a basic defect of the Soviet order. Just as waste occurred in industrial production, so unnecessary human losses could be accepted in the Great Terror. So long as Stalin achieved the ultimate aim of eradicating most of that mass of disgruntled individuals who might remain a menace he had no compunction about the mayhem he caused.

Unmistakably he had become the country’s despot. He had eliminated foes in every institution. Not even the party had restrained him. Among the main results of the Great Terror had been drastic reduction in the party’s power and status. Stalin had turned himself into the unchallengeable individual locus of state authority. His was a most personal autocracy. He had come closer to total despotism than almost any monarch in history. He held sway over the Soviet state; no state institution could push him into decisions which he found uncongenial. Grand policy was firmly in his grasp and, by unpredictable interventions in smaller affairs of state, he caused all holders of office to try and anticipate his wishes. The state, moreover, kept its people in a condition of traumatic subservience. Civil society barely existed. Only the Russian Orthodox Church kept the slightest vestige of autonomy from the state — and it was scarcely much of an autonomy when tens of thousands of priests had been murdered. Every other institution and association was subject to the requirements of the central political authorities. Stalin had stabilised his despotism and its structures by means of the Great Terror, and the pervasiveness of control by the one-party state was deep and irresistible.

Yet this was not a totalitarian dictatorship as conventionally defined because Stalin lacked the capacity, even at the height of his power, to secure automatic universal compliance with his wishes. He could purge personnel without difficulty. But when it came to ridding the Soviet order of many informal practices he disliked, he was much less successful. In such cases he was like someone trying to strike a match on a block of soap.

Constraints continued to exist upon his rule. In 1937 he had told the Party Central Committee that he intended to eradicate the network of political patronage in the USSR. Yet cliental groups survived. The politics of the USSR continued to involve patronage — and in many parts of the country this meant links based on families and clans. There were also local ‘nests’ of functionaries leading the party, soviets and other public institutions. Technical and social obstacles to a neat vertical system of state power remained. Functionaries promoted in the late 1930s, however much they admired Stalin, saw it was vital to be cautious in messages to Moscow. Misinformation from below remained a basic local requirement for self-protection. The press, judiciary and market had countervailed only weakly against provincial political establishments under the NEP; they had massively less weight — if indeed they had any weight at all — after 1928. The situation changed little after 1938. Stalin’s clique could not know everything with the desired accuracy. Promoted functionaries were keen to enjoy their privileges. Stalin needed to treat them well materially; he could not permanently rely on terror alone.

He had a clear understanding of this. He had deliberately promoted the young and working-class cadres to high postings. Whereas in France and Britain the old clung to power, Stalin had brought on a fresh generation to replace the ageing veterans of the October Revolution — and he was pleased with his achievement.⁸ He had promoted young adults to all rungs on the ladder of party and government. This had long been one of his objectives, and he had attained it by the most brutal methods. At the end of the Great Terror he sought to keep the promotees on his side. The system of graduated perks and privileges was maintained. The higher the rung, the greater the reward. Stalin bribed them into murderous complicity. The administrative beneficiaries of the purges had a fixed higher income and guaranteed access to goods and services denied to the rest of society. Even if they did not literally step into dead men’s shoes, they certainly took possession of their apartments, dachas, paintings, carpets and pianos. They hired their tutors, chauffeurs and nannies. The promoted officials belonged to a privileged elite.

Stalin wished to sedate the minds of officials still fearful that he might resume the terror. At the celebratory Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, his general report picked up the theme:⁹

His appeal to the recent promotees was fervent. Unnamed discussants, he declared, thought it better for the state to ‘orientate itself to the old cadres’ with all their experience. But Stalin insisted that the wiser course was the one he had chosen.¹⁰ Not for the last time he gave the impression that the promotees had no firmer friend than himself.

Having created a new administrative elite, he wanted their allegiance. It was for them more than for any other group in society that he had ordered the publication of the Short Course. Indeed the whole ‘technical– scientific intelligentsia’ was in his sights. Recognising that they had limited time to do any reading at the end of the working day, he had supplied them with an easily assimilated text which explained and justified the existence of the Soviet order.¹¹ This was also the group in society which, after the Great Terror, he and Zhdanov sought to recruit to the party. No longer were workers to be given privileged access to membership. Recruitment should take place on merit and usefulness for the socialist cause.¹²

A technocratic imperative was being proclaimed, and Stalin was putting himself forward as the Leader of the newly reformed USSR. With typical false modesty — and even self-pity — he pretended that the burden of individual leadership had somehow been thrust upon him. At times he complained about this. While other Soviet leaders tended the business of their assigned institutions, he gave consideration to the entire range of affairs. At a supper party in 1940 he was quite mawkish:¹³

When Kalinin protested that they were always short of time, Stalin exclaimed: ‘No, that’s not the point! People wet behind the ears don’t want to study and re-study. They listen to me and then leave everything as it was before. But I’ll show the lot of you if I lose my patience. And you know how I can do that!’ This was a charade: Stalin would have locked up any Politburo members poking their noses into what he regarded as exclusively his business.

While wanting his policies to be followed, however, Stalin demanded that his subordinates should give frank, instant opinions. Every so often he got each of them on his own and enquired about options. For Stalin, Politburo members were useless unless they could come up with ideas for fresh measures. His period of rule was characterised by constant emergency. This made for an arena of discussion which would have driven most men crazy. Stalin was incessantly looking for signs of weakness or treachery. If they seemed shifty, he told them so; and he had a knack of catching them off guard. Always Stalin was querying whether a subordinate was ‘sincere’. He could not abide what official propaganda referred to as ‘double-dealing’. His ideal communist party associate was ruthless, dynamic, straightforward and utterly loyal. He liked, too, individuals who came ‘from the people’. Not all his subordinates, even after the Great Terror had spent itself, were working class or peasant in origin. Indeed Molotov, Zhdanov and Malenkov were distinctly middle class by parentage. But the general tone in Stalin’s entourage was never genteel, and all his subordinates had to join in displays of the crude masculinity which the Boss liked.

Like all bullies, Stalin acted out his fantasies. If ever any of these Soviet leaders was insincere in his behaviour to his intimates, it was the Boss himself. His was the least straightforward personality of all of them. He would have hated to be asked the piercing questions with which he skewered others. In identifying personal treachery as the most heinous offence, he was externalising a worry about his subordinates reflecting a cardinal feature of his own character. At last his gross personality disorder was functioning without restraint. He could indulge his paranoiac, vengeful proclivities to the utmost and nothing except a successful internal coup, military conquest or his premature death could save others from his murderous whims.

Across the 1930s Stalin had dominated the Politburo and the rest of the Soviet political leadership; but the Great Terror had elevated him to an unprecedented height above the other leaders. In all but name he was despot. His associates continued to respect him, even to admire him. But they also existed in mortal dread. Few dared to contradict him even in private conversation. Only Molotov had sufficient confidence to disagree with him about policies — and even he had to exercise caution in his phrasing and demeanour. The others were even more circumspect. It was a fiendishly difficult task because Stalin often deliberately disguised what he really thought. Politburo members were compelled to reveal their opinions without foreknowledge of his intentions. Always they were kept edgy by the master of intimidation and mystification. He had killed Kaganovich’s brother Moisei and demoted Molotov’s wife from office. He went on to arrest her as well as the wives of Kalinin and Andreev. Physical danger did not disappear from the Politburo. By devouring other members of their families, the Kremlin shark signalled that his appetite for victims had not been satisfied. They could take nothing for granted.

Most of those associates who survived the Great Terror succeeded in living out the natural term of their lives. Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Voroshilov and Zhdanov had been with Stalin since the 1920s and were kept by his side at least until he started to move against some of them after the 1940s. The promoted newcomers — Malenkov, Khrushchëv, Vyshinski and Beria — stayed with him to the end of his life. The ruling group began to settle down. From the end of 1938 no Politburo member was arrested until Voznesenski was put away in 1949. No Red Army general was taken into custody, moreover, before the defeats of June 1941. But the memory of what had happened earlier did not vanish. All the rulers were acutely aware that they stayed in post solely at the whim of their supreme master.

He acted on his own. Among the arcana of Soviet administrative correspondence is a report of the NKVD in 1940 which Beria relayed to Stalin. The main conclusion was that the Gulag more than paid for itself as a sector of the Soviet economy: ‘The entire system of camps and labour colonies is fully paying its way and no subsidy for the prisoners (1,700,000 persons), their guards or the camp apparatus is needed.’¹⁴ Beria was on the make and may already have known that the opposite was true. But the regime was being consolidated; Stalin would not consider any basic alteration of what he had built. He was powerful and confident. He was overworked. He had strengthened the state as the prime lever of political and economic change. He had never believed in the spontaneous positive potential of the people. He wanted workers and peasants to support the regime, to work to their physical limit and to denounce ‘enemies’. He was jovial about the usefulness of the camps and executions. At the Eighteenth Party Congress he exulted that whereas 98.6 per cent of voters had supported the regime after Tukhachevski’s trial in mid-1937, the proportion increased to 99.4 per cent after Bukharin had been sentenced in March 1938.¹⁵

This was the comment of a man who felt he had largely succeeded. He had achieved enough of his objectives to know that his personal despotism and his design for the Soviet order were secure at least for the foreseeable future. He and the Politburo were to make minor modifications in future years as they sought to bind the walls together in the face of unanticipated storms. The basic design stayed intact; and those observers who have interpreted the modifications in terms of fundamentally separate periods are scarcely convincing. If it makes sense to talk of ‘late Stalinism’ or ‘high Stalinism’, the date of demarcation should be set at the end of the Great Terror in 1938. Stalin went on tinkering with his architect’s drawings. Relations among party, people’s commissariats and armed forces underwent alteration before, during and after the war. He fiddled with the scope allowed for Russian national identity and for cultural and religious expression; he also adjusted his cult to the social atmosphere of the time. Economic policies were repeatedly modified. Foreign policy was frequently amended. Stalin did not refer to his architecture as Stalinist but was not averse to others using the term. This order prevailed until the day he died — and in many respects it was to outlive him.