Stalin, Volume 1

CHAPTER 10

DICTATOR

This was a time when we worked initially on Vozdvizhenka, and then relocated to Old Square. We would work together until midnight, 12:30 am, 1:00 am, and then we’d walk on foot to the Kremlin along Ilinka St. Me, Molotov, Kuibyshev, others. We were walking along the street, I recall, one winter, he [Stalin] wore a hat with earflaps, his ears flapping. . . . We laughed and laughed, he would say something, we would respond, tossing jokes at one another . . . totally free [volnitsa]. . . . Those watching off to the side would ask: who were this company? We had practically no bodyguards. Very few. Maybe one or two people walking, that was it. . . . It was a happy time of life. And Stalin was in a good mood.

Lazar Kaganovich, reminiscing about the period 1922–241

Everything in the Soviet Union depends in the last resort on the harvest.

British diplomatic report, December 19242

STALIN’S CREATION OF A DICTATORSHIP within the dictatorship was unforeseen. Lenin was undisputed leader (vozhd’) and no one imagined he might become incapacitated. When that suddenly happened, most everyone assumed collective leadership would prevail: even if other top Bolsheviks believed in their heart of hearts they might be Lenin’s equal, they understood no one else would perceive them as such. Also, Stalin’s considerable political gifts were underappreciated or even contemptuously scorned. Trotsky, in a brilliant phrase, would dismiss Stalin as the “outstanding mediocrity of our party,” while Kamenev, according to Trotsky, deemed Stalin “a small-town politician.”3 Finally, there was one other lesser known factor that made a Stalin ascendancy appear unlikely: several individuals had preceded him as head of the party and, after the first one died, skepticism set in that anyone could cope with the job, to say nothing of transforming it into the focal point of the entire regime.

Yakov Sverdlov, the party’s original lead administrator or “secretary” (from April 1917), had been renowned for the fact that, as one official gushed, “he knew our party better than anyone else.”4 In fact, with a staff of just six, Sverdlov had had his hands full as party committees mushroomed around the vast country, from under 600 in 1917 to 8,000 by 1919, and he simultaneously served as chairman of the Soviet central executive committee (head of state), manipulating relations with non-Bolshevik socialists.5 When Sverdlov died in 1919 at age thirty-three—having spent twelve of those years in tsarist prisons and exile—Lenin despaired of finding a replacement.6 For the central executive committee of the Soviet, Lenin even proposed returning Kamenev, the person he had shunted aside from that post in 1917. In the event, Mikhail Kalinin, an ethnic Russian, the son of a poor peasant, and a peasant in visage, got the nod, but the Soviet central executive committee had already ceased to be a locus of power.7 At the party apparatus, Yelena Stasova, a code specialist, took over as secretary, but after a few months “judged herself insufficiently competent in political questions” and in late 1919, stepped aside.8 Her replacement, the third Stalin predecessor, was Nikolai Krestinsky, a graduate of the law faculty of St. Petersburg University and the finance commissar. Krestinsky was an original member of both the politburo and the orgburo, positions he held concurrently while taking over the secretariat, a unique commanding position atop the party. He had a legendary memory, but the scope of the work seems to have overwhelmed him.9 In April 1920, Leonid Serebryakov and Yevgeny Preobrazhensky were added alongside Krestinsky, charged with improving contact with local party organizations.10 But no one in the threesome proved adept or diligent, as demonstrated by runaway complaints in the party press (something similar dogged Krestinsky at the finance commissariat).11 Files piled up unexamined, and officials lamented that nasty scrums over power (skloki) paralyzed party work nearly everywhere.12 Rather than their incompetence, however, the Krestinsky-Serebryakov-Preobrazhensky trio was done in by its support for Trotsky in the trade union row of 1920–21. Lenin cleaned house, ensuring at the 10th Party Congress that none of the three was even reelected to the Central Committee.13

As the party’s new “responsible secretary,” Lenin elevated Vyacheslav Molotov, the fourth Stalin before Stalin. “Unexpectedly for me in 1921,” Molotov would recall, “I became a Central Committee secretary.”14 Two others were appointed alongside him, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky and Vasily Mikhailov, both middling organizers. Neither lasted. The hours were long and the work tough: the secretariat was besieged with both reports of functionaries’ drunkenness, bribe taking, and political illiteracy, and requests to supply competent cadres, while appointees or prospective appointees showed up in droves looking for guidance, permissions, or favors. The party secretariat reported that in 1921 it issued passes for 254,468 visitors to its offices, or an average of nearly 700 per day, including weekends.15 But when Lenin made Stalin “general secretary” in April 1922, in place of Yaroslavsky and above Molotov, he was compensating for the redoubtable Molotov’s lack of sufficient political heft and looking for high-level leadership as well as efficiency.16 “The power [vlast’] of the Central Committee is colossal,” Lenin wrote in spring 1922, just before promoting Stalin. “We dispose of 200,000–400,000 party functionaries, and through them thousands upon thousands of nonparty people. And this gigantic Communist cause is utterly befouled by foggy bureaucratism!” Lenin demanded rising above “trifles, push them onto aides and deputy aides,” and taking on the really surpassing challenges.17 Stalin now became the only person simultaneously in the politburo, orgburo, and secretariat—and he endured.

Explanations for Stalin’s aggrandizement have rightly pointed to notable qualities of the Communist party, particularly its centralized appointments and conspiratorial secrecy, which afforded incomparable sway over information, agendas, links to the grassroots, and supervision of every state body.18 Certainly all of that could be used for institutional and personal aggrandizement, but those mechanisms had to be further built up and taken advantage of. Trotsky famously wrote that “Stalin did not create the apparatus. The apparatus created him.”19 This was exactly backward. Stalin created the apparatus, and it was a colossal feat.20 To be sure, we shall see him learning on the job, committing significant mistakes, and it would be a while before he emerged as the recognized Leader (vozhd’) not just of the party but of the country. But he demonstrated surpassing organizational abilities, a mammoth appetite for work, a strategic mind, and an unscrupulousness that recalled his master teacher, Lenin.21 Stalin proved capable of wielding the levers he inherited, and of inventing new ones. Admittedly, too often his power, including over personnel, has been viewed as that of an impersonal machine. What Trotsky and others missed or refused to acknowledge was that Stalin had a deft political touch: he recalled names and episodes of people’s biographies, impressing them with his familiarity, concern, and attentiveness, no matter where they stood in the hierarchy, even if they were just service staff. Stalin, in his midforties, found his calling at the party apparatus: he was, for all his moodiness, a people person, a ward-boss-style politician, albeit one in command of instruments beyond a ward boss’s dreams—the Communist party’s reach, discipline, and radiant-future ideology.

But what stands out most about Stalin’s ascendancy is that, structurally, he was handed the possibility of a personal dictatorship, and he began to realize that potential just by fulfilling the duties of general secretary.

Stalin had exceptional power almost instantaneously. When he took over in 1922, the Central Committee apparatus, secretariat and orgburo, already numbered some 600 people, up from just 30 two years before. No one else commanded anything like this personal staff: Lenin’s chancellery in the Council of People’s Commissars numbered 102.22 Unlike the government, the party was not merely an executive body, but a mass organization, and one deliberately intended to shadow all other institutions. Stalin’s impact on this machine was immediate. Molotov had instituted important improvements, such as a rudimentary catalogue of party personnel, but Stalin would see all this vastly expanded.23 All through spring and summer 1922, he brought in energetic people from the provinces, and obliged local party organizations to send bimonthly reports in the form of two-page personal letters. In the six months from May 1, 1922, through January 15, 1923, the apparatus recorded receiving 13,674 local meeting protocols, 1,737 summary reports, 324 reports on the political mood, and 6,337 other pieces of information, while itself sending out 141 directive circulars.24 At the 12th Party Congress (1923), the first after Stalin’s appointment, speakers marveled at how the secretariat had vastly improved.25 Stalin had a phenomenal memory, like Krestinsky, but Stalin banged heads and brought order. He liked the job. Above all, he did the job. “Ilich has in him unquestionably the most reliable Cerberus, fearlessly guarding the gates of the Central Committee,” Stalin’s first top aide, Amayak Nazaretyan, an Armenian whom he imported from the Caucasus, wrote to Sergo Orjonikidze in Tiflis (August 9, 1922). “The work of the Central Committee has significantly mutated now. What we encountered here was indescribably bad. And what were the views in the locales about the Central Committee apparatus? Now everyone has been shaken up.”26

The regime’s very physical geography spoke to the stunning strengths of Stalin’s position. The addresses in themselves appear to mean little—Vozdvizhenka, 5, and then Old Square, 4; Znamenka, 23; Bolshaya Lubyanka, 2; Blacksmith Bridge, 15; Ilinka, 9—but they reveal the crucial lines of contact among the security police and the military.27 Scholars long ago established that the provincial party machines became a cornucopia of recruits for the central apparatus and of Stalin loyalists in locales, but we shall also see how early Stalin, as head of the party, began to exercise his authority via the secret police, bringing some of them into the party apparatus and maintaining very tight contact with the police over at Lubyanka. Stalin also imposed effective control over the military. After the politiburo or Central Committee meetings took place, whatever might be decided, Stalin went back to his office and implemented the decisions—or chose not to do so. From his party office he initiated schemes outside meetings via party apparatchiks and secret police operatives. He achieved a free hand in making appointments to his own staff.28 But he also implanted his loyalists everywhere else, and found or cultivated enemies for them, too, in order to keep loyalists under watch. This went well beyond just fulfilling the duties of the general secretary position, but again, this was structurally baked into that position. Stalin would have had to show uncommon restraint, deference, and lack of ambition not to build a personal dictatorship within the dictatorship.

A geography of authority, however, also exposes limits to the power of the regime and of Stalin’s personal dictatorship, particularly the near absence of the party in the vast countryside, where four fifths of the population lived. On the eve of the October coup, the Bolsheviks had counted a mere four rural party cells and 494 peasant members, in a two-continent country.29 By 1922, after mass demobilizations of the Red Army soldiers back to their native villages, the number of party members in the countryside reached 200,000, out of 515,000 total Communists.30 But of the total rural population of nearly 120 million, party members were still less than one tenth of 1 percent. Only one of every twenty-five or so villages had a party cell. Provincial capitals were festooned with red flags and Communist slogans, but just ten minutes’ walk beyond a city’s limits, an observer would have been hard pressed to find visible evidence of the regime.31 This did not mean party rule in the cities was all well. In elections to urban soviets, the regime felt constrained to switch from secret to open balloting, with secret police monitors present, and the results were predictable, as shown in December 1922 at Moscow’s Guzhon Works (soon renamed Hammer and Sickle): Bolshevik candidates were elected by a margin of 100 votes to 2—with 1,900 abstentions.32 Beyond intimidation, the regime co-opted workers into administration, offering regular salaries, housing, special shops, and other perquisites, but also tasking them with conducting the harangues of workers riled by perceptions of Communist privilege and corruption.33 The Communist regime’s social base was itself. That meant the expanding regime was itself a society, and this society’s center was Stalin.

Unlike Nazaretyan, the aide, most everyone who managed to encounter Stalin in the 1920s caught mere glimpses. Marina Ryndzyunskaya, a sculptress at the Museum of the Revolution commissioned to craft a likeness, noted that he was a man “of medium height” and that his gait was odd. “With his left hand tucked into his pocket, he moved forward all at once,” she wrote. “When he turned, he turned not gradually, head, neck, and then body, but completely, like a soldier.”34 But what moved him? Even those who worked with Stalin usually failed to take his measure. Alexander Barmine, then a twenty-three-year-old general staff officer, first glimpsed Stalin in 1922 at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hall and claimed to have seen him “not only as he is on dress parade before delegations or admiring audiences, but in his office at work.” Stalin “looks coarser and more common, and also smaller” in person, Barmine later wrote. “His face is pockmarked and sallow. . . . His eyes are dark brown with a tinge of hazel. His expression tells nothing of what he feels. There is to me a curious heaviness and sullenness about him. The man seems neither European nor Asiatic, but a cross between the two.” At meetings, Barmine noted, Stalin sat off to the side, smoked a pipe that he stuffed with cigarette tobacco, and doodled, but he accumulated power because of his “strength of will, patience, slyness, ability to perceive human frailties and play upon them with contempt, and the supreme gift of pursuing a chosen goal inflexibly and without scruple.”35 It was a simplistic assessment—master psychologist, iron will—that came to be widely held, especially retrospectively, but it overlooked Stalin’s immersion in Marxism, a key source of his power. And it left open the question of why so many people proved susceptible to him.36 Naked careerism was one reason they sought to attach themselves to the general secretary, but many were attracted to Stalin because of his tenacious dedication to the revolutionary cause and to the state’s power.

FROM VOZDVIZHENKA TO OLD SQUARE

Before Lenin took ill, the regime revolved around his physical location: the dacha at Gorki or the office and apartment in the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate, between which the regime had its principal meeting space, used by both the Council of People’s Commissars and the politburo.37 Central Committee offices were less grand, and located outside the Kremlin walls. Initially, the party staff set up shop inside a rooming house, where the “apparatus” squeezed into a single apartment, though soon it knocked down the wall, linking to a second. Stasova, then Krestinsky, then Molotov had offices here. It was located on Vozdvizhenka, a radial street that ran from just outside the Kremlin walls, from the Trinity Gate-Kutafya Tower westward to the Arbat. (The address was Vozdvizhenka, 4, although on the building’s other side it was listed as Mokhovaya, 7.)38 In 1920, the expanding apparatus relocated across the street, to Vozdvizhenka, 5, a more august structure built in the late eighteenth century by Matvei Kazakov, the architect of the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate, but just a fraction of the size of the latter.39 “The anterooms were crowded with callers; numerous clerks, mostly young girls in abbreviated skirts and high-heeled lacquered shoes, flitted about with arms full of documents,” wrote a Russo-American anarchist of a visit in 1920, adding that the functionaries themselves “looked pale, with sunken eyes and high cheek bones, the result of systematic undernourishment, overwork, and worry.”40 Vozdvizhenka, 5, was near the historic location of a monastery that had been burned down in the fires that had helped drive out Napoleon. Before that, it had been the site of Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina. Here, in the jammed neoclassical edifice, Stalin would have his inaugural general secretary’s office.41

That the party’s service apparatus would become almighty was something of a surprise, but not an accident.42 Lenin had chosen a ministerial form of government, but the busy people’s commissars sent proxies to the supposedly deliberative Council of People’s Commissars’ meetings, which, in any case, Lenin dominated, whoever might be present.43 More fundamentally, Lenin had insisted that the party, mainly the politburo but to an extent the Central Committee, serve as the top policy-making body. This choice was reinforced by the circumstance that neither the Council of People’s Commissars nor individual commissariats had local branches and depended on local party organizations for implementing decisions, as well as for supplying personnel perceived to be loyal.44 Technically, the party was not a state organ, so its decisions had to be formulated as decrees of the Council of People’s Commissars or laws of the Soviet central executive committee, and this redundancy bred confusion, with some suggesting that the party be abolished, others that the soviets be abolished.45 Nothing was eliminated. Departments of the central party apparatus came to parallel the structure of the Council of People’s Commissars. Not all Central Committee staff were full-fledged functionaries (or otvetstvennye rabotniki); many were stenographers, accountants, drivers—indeed, around 240 of the 600 staff members were non-party members; 340 were female.46 (Here, as elsewhere, the typing and most of the filing were done by Bolshevik wives, mistresses, or “bourgeois ladies.”)47 Nonetheless, the apparatus of the party-centric regime attracted talented people, who developed areas of special expertise, touching on nearly every possible sphere of administration: personnel, propaganda, communications, army, navy, foreign policy, security, finance.48

Pinched for space, the central party apparatus relocated in late December 1923 to the inner-city trading quarter of Kitaigorod (whose high walls and gate towers dated from medieval times), where it took over Old Square, 4, a grand former trading house of the Moscow Merchant Association dating to 1915.49 Of the wintertime move, the functionary Alexei Balashov recalled that “the staff themselves loaded and unloaded the furniture and documents on sleds, forming a long train.”50 Stalin took an office in the combined modernist-neoclassical structure built by merchant capital on the top floor, with access only through two other offices, which accommodated his main aides and a special document courier. Stalin’s suite was spacious and orderly, with a door at the back that opened to an ample conference room, where he and Molotov often conferred (behind this meeting room was Molotov’s office).51 To the left inside Stalin’s office stood a large table that could accommodate twenty people; to the right, in the far corner, stood his writing desk, along with a smaller table holding telephones, and his personal safe. He was not the night owl he would become. “Stalin arose usually around 9:00 a.m., and arrived at the Central Committee on Old Square by 11:00,” according to a long-serving bodyguard. “Stalin frequently worked until late at night, especially in those years after Lenin’s death when he had to conduct an active struggle against the Trotskyites.”52 After work, he walked home the short distance down to Red Square and through the Savior Gate (the one with the clock), often with Molotov, who also lived in the Kremlin.

Stalin had an office in the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate building, too, a result of his government post (people’s commissar for nationalities), but he seems to have used that office sparingly. But the Kremlin was also the location of the twice weekly politburo meetings. As of 1922, there were only seven full members (Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Tomsky) and three candidate or non-voting members (Bukharin, Kalinin, Molotov), although Stalin would soon add a fourth (Janis Rudzutaks). But politburo sessions were sprawling affairs, including numerous technical personnel from the apparatus, as well as various Central Committee members, Central Control Commission members, and others invited to attend parts of the meetings based upon pertinent agenda items. Central Committee plenums were even larger, and took place once or twice a month.53 But the orgburo, which handled personnel decisions, met far more frequently than any party body, and its sessions sometimes lasted whole days—they were known as orgies. And the party secretariat was essentially in continuous session. In addition, central party apparatchiks could command the assistance of the staff of entire commissariats when gathering information and preparing politburo and Central Committee agendas, reports, or recommendations for Stalin.

Stalin’s emerging dictatorship within the dictatorship, despite having no link, physical or personal, to the old regime in the old capital, nonetheless resembled tsarism in an important respect. Before 1917, the locus of power had been the imperial chancellery, nominally a service apparatus, which reported directly to the tsar and eventually merged with the tsar’s own personal chancellery.54 “The head of the chancellery,” wrote one of its long-serving heads, “was completely independent and not subordinate to the chairman of the Committee of Ministers.”55 Ministers were often less informed than chancellery functionaries, who alone developed a bird’s eye view on the state, accumulating vast power thanks to the size and complexity of the realm as well as their own aspirations and skills. All this could be said of the central Communist party apparatus vis-à-vis the Council of People’s Commissars or the Soviet central executive committee. But whereas the imperial chancellery never succeeded in fully subordinating the ministries—bureaucratic infighting had thwarted the tsars’ efforts to transform the chancellery into a personal watchdog over the entire state—in the Soviet case, every institution far and wide, except peasant communes, had a party organization that enabled the party to serve as a watchdog over the state, and the society.56 The ubiquitous party cells were empowered by a potent worldview and belief system. Stalin’s machine was not tsarist autocracy redux, in other words, but a modern one-party dictatorship.57

Old Square, 4, the heart of the Soviet regime, came to present a formidable contrast for those who knew the informal days of 1917. Alexander Ilin, known as the Genevan, recalled the original “headquarters” of the Central Committee in Petrograd “as a serene family scene,” with “everyone sitting at the dining table and drinking tea.” Now there was “a gigantic building with a labyrinth of sections and subsections. An immense number of functionaries are on every floor, hurrying about.”58 Ilin viewed this bureaucratic metamorphosis as inevitable yet sad. What he did not seem to appreciate was that inside the new “gigantic building,” there was still intimacy and camaraderie. Functionaries rode in the elevator with Stalin; some ran into him in the corridor. His office door was unlocked. “Sometimes I took a book from his library to the reading lounge,” the functionary Balashov recalled. “There, there were cupboards with a splendid library. Stalin was sent two copies of every book published by the central publishers, often signed copies. Many authors themselves sent their books. Stalin passed one copy on to us and we divided them among ourselves.” Stalin did not lock his desk. “At night he turned or locked in the safe all secret documents,” Balashov explained. “At the reception area someone stood duty, and further on were guards, so what did he have to fear?”59

NOMENKLATURA AND CONSPIRACY

Power accrued to Stalin’s apparatus in the first instance thanks to leverage over personnel. The vast majority of party members held full-time jobs, whether in factories or commissariats, their party activities being seen as voluntary, but a small number were paid to engage exclusively in party work (apparatchiks), such as running party organizations, and although such officials were supposed to be elected, during the civil war elections had taken a backseat. As fighting wound down, many officials insisted on reversion to elections, prompting Lenin, at the 11th Party Congress (March-April 1921), to counter that “if the Central Committee is deprived of the right to distribute personnel, it will be unable to direct policy.”60 Stalin, on June 6, 1922, dispatched a circular on the prerogative of Central Committee overseers to nominate the candidates (usually just one) for election to local party posts.61 Would-be regional potentates were seeking to impose their will over other locals, partly out of personal ambition, partly out of frustration at the proliferation of agencies and power centers, and the central apparatus took sides, rotating out local officials of the side it did not back. This enabled some regional officials to consolidate authority as provincial party bosses, who, in turn, centralized their power by intervening lower down, having their people “elected” as county party bosses.62 Stalin could never centralize the whole country himself, but he could effectively centralize the bosses who were centralizing their own provinces.63

Stalin’s success remained circumscribed by the country’s great distances and by mutual protection rackets (semeistvennost’), but the central apparatus compelled locals to submit ever more personnel data, forced through periodic campaigns of verifications or “purges,” and managed to register all party members in the country.64 Stalin’s functionaries incited local apparatchiks to denounce each other to the center, and sent traveling commissions to break up or at least manage local cliques.65 Here was a hoary cat-and-mouse game in sprawling Russia—far-off locales struggling to evade or otherwise cope with central commands—but now the center had the potent mechanism of the party and party discipline. What stands out is not that local party organizations often managed to reject candidates to top party posts proposed by the center, but that the central apparatus managed to impose itself to a high degree. The orgburo made at least a thousand appointments just between April 1922 and March 1923, including no fewer than forty-two new provincial party bosses.66 Stalin could hardly know every one of the cadres being moved about.67 But the desire for promotion made provincials eager to please, if they could not deceive, him. In September 1922, Stalin created a commission to promote standout local functionaries to Moscow. In confidential written evaluations that year of forty-seven secretaries of provincial party committees, one official in the Urals (Leonid) was deemed “unable to lead either soviet or party work. Falls under alien influence. . . . A functionary below provincial level.” But another, Nikolai Uglanov of Nizhny Novgorod, was said to show “initiative. He is able to unite functionaries to achieve the work. Authoritative.”68 In 1923, Stalin named Uglanov a voting member of the Central Committee, and the next year he would promote him to the capital as second secretary of the Moscow organization, and soon, first secretary.69

Appointments and transfers of senior functionaries were systematized with the development, on the initiative of Stalin’s orgburo, of a “nomenklatura” (from the Latin nomenclatura, for a list of names). Functionaries occupying a position on the nomenklatura could not be removed without approval from the central apparatus. The initial list (November 1923) contained some 4,000 positions/officials: first secretaries of republics, provinces, and counties; people’s commissars and their deputies; military district commanders; ambassadors.70 Especially notable was application of the party-controlled nomenklatura process to state-run industry. Sorting all these appointments out entailed no small amount of work, and Stalin sought to reduce the number of positions for which the central apparatus would be responsible.71 Provincial party organizations emulated the center with their own nomenklatura of appointments under their control. Tensions persisted between the practice of appointment and the principle of election and between central and local prerogatives, but the invention of the nomenklatura system, and its demand for up-to-date personnel data, was a remarkable patronage mechanism in energetic hands. Stalin put a premium on competence, which he interpreted in terms of loyalty. “We need to assemble functionaries so that people who occupy these positions are capable of implementing directives, comprehending those directives, accepting those directives as their own and bringing them to life,” he observed at the 12th Party Congress (April 1923).72 Fulfillment of Central Committee directives became Stalin’s mantra, and suspicion of non-fulfillment, his obsession.73

Stalin’s apparatus wielded additional instruments. Ivan Ksenofontov, a founding member of the Cheka, who had overseen the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal during the civil war, was placed in charge of the party’s business directorate, which managed mundane matters such as party member dues and the party budget, but also controlled offices and furnishings, apartments, food packets, medical care, cars and drivers, trips abroad.74 The business directorate had the power to grant or withhold favors, affording Stalin enormous leverage. Yet another key device was the government phone system. Worried that switchboard operators could listen in on calls, the regime developed a “vertushka,” so named because it had dials, then a novelty. At first, the self-dialed government network linked around sixty people, but soon it grew to a few hundred, and served as a mark of power (or lack thereof for those without).75 One defector claimed that Stalin oversaw installation of the vertushka system and as a result connived a way to eavesdrop on it.76 This is plausible but not corroborated by other evidence, at least for this early period.77 What we can say is that most of the vertushka phones were at Old Square and reinforced the party apparatus as a nodal point.78 The regime also established a special cipher unit, which, though nominally a division of the Cheka, in practice was autonomous, so that politburo telegrams did not pass through the secret police leadership.79 Run by Gleb Boki, an ethnic Ukrainian born in Tiflis who had studied math and physics at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute—and who had also founded a colony for wife swapping and drunken orgies—the cipher specialists coded and decoded hundreds of telegrams per day for regional party organizations, embassies abroad, and officials on holiday.80

Only Stalin, in the name of the Central Committee, could issue directives to every locale and institution, while anything sent to the politburo or Central Committee from commissariats, secret police, or the military went to the party secretariat. The Old Square mail room resembled a military operation with secret police couriers gluing, sewing, sealing, and unsealing envelopes; couriers also had to carry clean, well-oiled, loaded weapons, and to check and recheck the identity of recipients.81 But complaints of leaks and violations became constant, and officials were perpetually admonished.82 In July 1922, Yaroslavsky, who had been shifted to the party’s Siberian Bureau, lost his briefcase in which he had a codebook and notebook. The authorities offered a 100 million ruble reward—obviously, with no intention or possibility of paying; the briefcase was found, but without its contents.83 As of April 1923, it was forbidden to put in writing anything relating to state security; instead, security matters were to be discussed first in Stalin’s secretariat, before being brought to the attention of the politburo.84 On August 19, 1924, the politburo issued a resolution “on conspiracy in handling documents of the CC,” with an appendix laying out the “rules in handling the conspiratorial documents of the CC.” Many of the instructions demanded that officials “observe absolute conspiracy in the handling of documents” in terms of who saw them and how they were kept; any official who pursued a secret document had to sign it. Many had to be returned after reading.

Hypersecrecy became an unquenchable thirst that strengthened Stalin’s grip. Out of the business directorate he and his functionaries carved out a separate entity named the “secret department,” which took charge of denunciations and investigations, the party archives, and the contacts with the secret police. Modest in size at first, the secret department would expand to several hundred staff by the mid-1920s and acquire affiliates in local party branches, the military, factories, and state agencies—eventually, all major institutions. These secret departments constituted a parallel information system, a regime within the regime, that could be used to intimidate: officials did not know what was being recorded and reported in these parallel channels. The central secret department was physically cordoned off by steel doors. “The sanctum sanctorum in the grey building on the old Square is the secret department,” wrote one Soviet official after he defected. “One goes up by lift, then along a seemingly endless corridor. Meetings are held in the evenings. The building is thus in semi-darkness, empty and silent. Each step taken gives off a resounding and lonely echo. Then one is face-to-face with the inner guard posts. One’s special pass is checked. Finally one passes through the steel door separating this department from the rest of the building. And then one approaches the last door.”85

No small degree of the apparatus’s power flowed from its mystique. Ryndzyunskaya, the sculptress, wrote of the rarely glimpsed interiors of Old Square that “the first thing that amazed me in this facility was the striking cleanliness and some kind of taciturn reticence, if one can speak that way. Reticence of words, reticence of movement, nothing superfluous.” The next time she met Stalin, in her studio, she told him of being unnerved by the scary (zhutko) feeling at Central Committee HQ. “I am very, very pleased,” Stalin is said to have replied, smiling, “that’s the way it should be.”86 But of all the apparatus’s secrets, the biggest one was that runaway decree-ism, obsessive demands for written reports, and endless traveling commissions exacerbated the roiling administrative chaos across the party-state, and buried Old Square, too, in paper. Dictatorship unwittingly imposes limits on itself. Orgburo staff studied manuals by the prolific Platon Lebedev, known as Kerzhentsev, such as Principles of Organization, whose first two editions had sold out in a matter of months; the third edition (1924) was issued in a print run of 5,000. Aiming to deliver “concise practical leadership for rank and file organizers in whatever sphere they worked,” Kerzhentsev cited American and British writings, and reproduced illustrations of a British card file system for personnel—index cards for each employee—which he urged be compiled not just by alphabet but also by occupation and geography.87 But his brief for clearly specified directives, follow through, and then intelligent adjustments neglected to acknowledge the tendency of dictatorships to incur, or even promote, multiple jurisdictions and other deliberate inefficiencies as a way to ensure political control.

The conspiracy to seize power behaved like a conspiracy in power.88 The apparatus in theory was supposed to be transparent to the wider party; Lenin had insisted that a sign-in sheet hang inside the party complex with Stalin’s name on it, in alphabetical order, for his office hours.89 That said, Lenin’s own written orders were often distributed only under the proviso that they be returned to him or immediately destroyed after reading. He constantly urged, as he wrote in 1919 referring to Bolshevik subversion of Turkestan, that things had to be carried out “in an extremely conspiratorial manner (as we knew how to work under the tsar).”90 The origins and perpetuation of conspiracy, in other words, had little to do with Stalin’s personality, even if, by nature, Stalin was an archconspirator, and now the principal beneficiary.

ZNAMENKA, 23

West of the Kremlin, parallel to Vozdvizhenka, was Znamenka Street, named for an ancient church (Signs of the Holy Virgin). Znamenka, 23, the former Alexander Military School, was appropriated by the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, the war commissariat, and the Bolshevik General Staff.91 During the civil war, Znamenka was a power center, but that shifted precipitously with the victory and demobilization, as the Red Army shrank from around 5 million to 600,000 troops by the end of 1923. (Desertions drove a significant part of the reductions.) Equally important, the army was honeycombed by Communist party “political departments” in all its units, which fell under a self-standing army Political Administration—but that became a Stalin target. In 1923, the orgburo commissioned a “study” of party work in the army, ostensibly to ascertain whether such work was conducted in accord with orgburo instructions; the orgburo further mandated that representatives of the party apparatus be present at discussions of party-organizational activities in all military districts, and that the army’s political administration report regularly to the Central Committee. By fall 1923, the orgburo had instituted the equivalent of a party-controlled nomenklatura for top army positions, including members of the Revolutionary Military Councils of the center and regional military districts, as well as their aides; the main military commands; key staff of the army political administrations; military procurators and military academies.92 Every top Bolshevik official, including Trotsky, the war commissar, recognized the supremacy of the party.

If the military was politically weak in the Soviet party-state, unlike the case in most dictatorships, the military also suffered from the weak condition of society. The regime hoped to use the Red Army as a “school for socialism,” and Trotsky took a very active role in driving political training.93 Stalin, predictably, sought to seize this issue, telling the 12th Party Congress that whereas others tended to see the Red Army through the lens of military offense and defense, he saw “a collection point of workers and peasants.”94 Around 180,000 peasants would be conscripted annually during the 1920s.95 A 1924 study revealed that the call-ups were clueless about “the Bolshevik party line, the party’s struggle with Menshevism, and with other alien groups.”96 Another survey revealed that nearly nine tenths of the army’s political educators had no more than two years of primary schooling. Meanwhile, newspapers and lectures were overrun with incomprehensible foreign words, neologisms, and jargon.97 “Let’s be frank,” one army educator noted, “when we speak about banks, stock exchanges, parliaments, trusts, finance kings, and democracies, we are not being understood.”98 In some ways, the Red Army rarely rose above being a Russian language remedial course for the multinational conscript populace, not exactly a political power base. Nor was the army a bulwark for Soviet security.99 “If God does not help us . . . and we get entangled in a war,” Stalin remarked in 1924, “we’ll be thoroughly routed.”100 That said, the general secretary’s subordination of the military to the party apparatus was very far along, with the exception that Trotsky remained its nominal head. Already in late 1923, however, the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate—controlled by Stalin—had pointed out, accurately, that Trotsky did not really manage the everyday work of the war and navy commissariat.101

LUBYANKA, 2

Lubyanka, a Moscow neighborhood, owed its name to Ivan III’s conquest of medieval Novgorod (“Lubyanits” had been a name for a district in that town brought to Moscow by those forced to relocate). In spring 1918, the central Cheka, arriving from Petrograd, had commandeered Bolshaya Lubyanka, 11 (site of Dzierzynski’s first Moscow office), as well as no. 13, near the city’s main commercial quarter. As the staff expanded and a separate Moscow region Cheka was established, in fall 1919, the Cheka Special Department overseeing security in the army grabbed Bolshaya Lubyanka, 2, where the narrow street opened onto Lubyanka Square. These premises consisted of an elegant five-story rectangular building with a clock on the top front façade that had been built in 1900 by the All-Russia Insurance Company, and like the solid structure occupied by the party apparatus nearby at Old Square, reflected the ample finances and tastes of Moscow merchant capital. The insurance company had rented out Bolshaya Lubyanka, 2’s ground-floor storefronts (a bookstore, sewing machine shop, bed store, beerhall) as well as some twenty apartments of up to nine rooms each, but the residents had already been evicted, the storefronts emptied, and the building earmarked for Soviet trade unions when the Cheka swooped in. In 1920, an internal prison was outfitted here (later it would be enlarged, when two stories were added to the building). “From the outside it looks like anything but a prison,” one cellmate reported. The Cheka also appropriated additional nearby buildings and as a result, wrote one observer, it “occupies a whole neighborhood in the center of the city . . . here are located the endless administrative sections and subsections: ‘secret operations,’ ‘investigation,’ ‘statistical,’ ‘data and graphs,’ and other functions. . . . It is an entire city within the city, working . . . day and night.”102

Lubyanka, 2 was effectively subordinated not to the civilian government, but to Lenin and the politburo, which meant that this instrument, too, fell under Stalin’s purview in his capacity as head of the party apparatus.103

The Cheka’s staff was smaller than it seemed.104 As of March 1921, Lubyanka, 2, budgeted for 2,450 staff, yet managed to hire just 1,415, with genuine operatives composing only about half that total, although by January 1922, the central staff had grown to 2,735, a number it would more or less maintain. As of November 1923, the secret police also commanded 33,000 border troops, 25,000 internal order troops, and 17,000 convoy guards.105 The number of secret informants on the rolls declined from a reported 60,000 in 1920 to 13,000 by the end of that year.106 Provincial Cheka branches varied in the size of staff, with around 40 total people in most cases, only half of them operatives, to cover vast swaths of territory with often limited transportation options. The Cheka relied on its fearsome reputation. Pravda carried reports of Cheka victims being flayed alive, impaled, scalped, crucified, tied to planks that were pushed slowly into roaring furnaces or into containers of boiling water. In winter, the Cheka was said to pour water over naked prisoners, creating ice statues, while some prisoners were said to have their necks twisted to such a degree their heads came off.107 True or not, such tales contributed to the Cheka mystique. But if an unsavory reputation served as a force multiplier, it also provoked revulsion.108 In May 1919, on Dzierzynski’s initiative, the Cheka was ordered to report weekly to the-then newly established orgburo—that is, to Stalin. Dzierzynski was added to the orgburo in 1920.109 Dzierzynski also named the operative Mikhail Kedrov to head a commission that traveled the country by armored train to root out Cheka impostors and malfeasance. But sadists and riffraff who got purged for discrediting the regime turned up elsewhere in different regional branches. Kedrov, a half-trained physician and virtuoso pianist, was himself notorious for butchery, and was said to have briefly sought psychiatric care.110

The Cheka made no bones about using the tsarist inheritance of prisons, rebuilding, for example, the tsarist-era Verkhne-Uralsk “Isolator” expressly for “politicals.” Rumors circulated that the Cheka ranks overflowed with veterans of the hated okhranka, which was false—the Cheka mounted manhunts for them—but damaging to its reputation all the same.111 Whatever operatives’ origins, “people are beginning to look upon us as okhranniki,” fretted a Cheka deputy chairman, the Latvian known as Martinš Lacis.112 Nor did it help reputationally that a substantial proportion of Soviet Russia’s jailers, interrogators, and executioners were non-ethnic Russians, often Poles and Jews, a circumstance derived partly from the categories of those who had been oppressed under tsarism, and partly from methods of recruitment (Jews and Poles recruited their own).113 Proposals to curb Cheka abuses and authority were under discussion throughout 1921—after all, the civil war had been won, so why were the secret police continuing to carry out summary executions? Kamenev, the leading politburo proponent of a police overhaul, told a meeting of metalworkers that year that “there are people who justly hate the Lubyanka.”114 He proposed limiting the Cheka’s writ to political crimes, espionage, banditism, and security on railroads and at warehouses, while ceding everything else to the justice commissariat. Lenin supported Kamenev.115 So did Stalin. Dzierzynsk balked at relinquishing the Cheka’s expansive extrajudicial powers.116 But Lenin held his ground, and on February 6, 1922, the Cheka was replaced by the so-called State Political Administration (GPU), with functions that were duly circumscribed, albeit not to the full degree of Kamenev’s proposal.117

Conversion to the GPU was not enacted in February 1922 in the South Caucasus, where the threat of uprisings was deemed too great, indicating that the reform was intended as a genuine reduction in power, but this intention would be subverted, and by Lenin himself.118 On February 20, 1922, he wrote to the justice commissar demanding a “strengthening of the repression against political enemies of Soviet power and the agents of the bourgeoisie (in particular the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries),” and urged “a series of demonstration trials” in the big cities, “exemplary, noisy, educational trials,” with “an explanation of their significance to the popular masses through the courts and the press.”119 There had already been various public trials, from that of Countess Sofia Panina (1918) to cases involving the State Bank, the state department store, the textile trust, as well as some staged in the worker-saturated Donbass to rally the proletariat and send a shot across the bow of non-party economic managers.120 But this latest trial was the biggest to date. Lenin, in Gorki, despite his stroke in May 1922, examined the arrest dossiers.121 From June 8 to August 7, 1922, thirty-four putative members of the Right Socialist Revolutionary Party stood in the dock in the Hall of Columns of the House of Trade Unions. Every one had been imprisoned by the tsarist regime for revolutionary activity, but now, according to Pravda, they were “traitorous lackeys of the bourgeoisie.” The GPU used captured archives of the SR Central Committee to try to authenticate the charges. (Dziga Vertov made a propaganda film, The SR Trial.)122 Grigory “Yuri” Pyatakov, the presiding judge, handed down predetermined death sentences.123 But an uproar arose abroad, and Kamenev found a clever compromise, proposing the executions be stayed for the time being but be implemented in the event of further “criminal” actions by the SR party.124 Sitting in Lubyanka, the death-row SRs in effect became hostages.125

Lenin’s crusade against fellow socialists vitiated the police reform. In August 1922, the GPU obtained the formal power to exile or sentence people to a labor camp without trial or court conviction, and by November was granted this prerogative even for cases lacking a specific anti-Soviet act, solely on the basis of “suspicion.”126 A subversion of secret police reform would likely have happened in due course anyway: a siege mentality was baked into Bolshevism, and the GPU occupied the same building as the Cheka, with the same personnel.127 Still, Lenin personally also forced through the deportation in fall 1922 of theologians, linguists, historians, mathematicians, and other intellectuals on two chartered German ships, dubbed the Philosophers’ Steamers. GPU notes on them recorded: “knows a foreign language,” “uses irony.”128 A far larger number of what Pravda (August 31, 1922) called “ideological Wrangels and Kolchaks” were deported internally to remote labor camps, such as Solovki, officially the Northern Camps of Special Designation, at the site of a former monastery on an island in the White Sea.129

The ideologized class division of the world empowered the secret police without end. “Those elements we are dispatching or will dispatch are in themselves politically worthless,” Trotsky told a leftist foreign journalist, Louise Bryant, widow of John Reed, who published the interview in Pravda (August 30, 1922). “But they are potential weapons in the hands of our possible enemies. In the event of new military complications . . . we would be compelled to shoot them according to the regulations of war.” Here is the view later attributed to Stalin that the Soviets could not tolerate potential enemies in their midst, because their presence would encourage and facilitate foreign intervention.130

Stalin was inundated with materials from the secret police. The GPU claimed in the mid-1920s to have more than 2 million Soviet inhabitants under permanent watch.131 The okhranka had produced the “tsar’s briefing” (tsarskii listok), a compilation of observations concerning “the opposition,” as well as natural disasters, explosions, and sensational non-political crimes, which was issued weekly and added up to as many as 600 pages annually, and which Nicholas II read and marked up. But the Soviet secret police compiled extensive summaries of the political mood (svodki) far more regularly, relying upon informants from nearly every institution and settlement, down to villages.132 Around 10,000 people were also engaged in perlustrating mail for the Soviet state, compared with 50 for the tsarist state in 1914.133 Each copy of the secret police mood summaries was numbered, and sent to Lenin and Stalin, Trotsky and his deputy Sklyansky at the military, but not to Zinoviev or Kamenev, though the latter soon were included.134 Additionally, however, Stalin, in the name of the Central Committee, pursued special firsthand reports outside normal channels, recruiting his own networks of informants.

BLACKSMITH BRIDGE AND HOTEL LUX

Down the street from GPU headquarters at Lubyanka sat the enormous premises of the foreign affairs commissariat, at Blacksmith Bridge, 15. The name (Kuznetskii most) was derived from a long gone stone crossing over the long ago filled-in Neglinnaya River. Before the revolution, the elegant street had been known for fashion houses, bookshops, photography workshops, and restaurants, and the commissariat’s home was an opulent, semineoclassical, six-story accordion of a building built in 1905–6 with two symmetrical wings, and seized from the All-Russia Insurance Company in 1918.135 It had resplendent residences (Yagoda, a deputy chief of the GPU, happened to live here) as well as offices. Among tsarist-period ministries after the coup, foreign affairs underwent the greatest turnover as the diplomatic corps filled with a combination of returning old Bolshevik emigres and young firebrands. “Well, what are we Soviet diplomats?” Leonid Krasin liked to say. “I’m an engineer, Krestinsky, a teacher. That’s what sort of diplomats we are.” The Soviets refused to use the “bourgeois” term “ambassador” and called their envoys “plenipotenitiary representatives,” but in 1923 the foreign affairs commissariat distributed to envoys abroad “Short Instructions on following the rules of etiquette observed in bourgeois societies.”136 Pyotr Voikov, the envoy to Poland, even tried to impress upon fellow young diplomats the value of ballroom dancing. “He said, for instance that the greatest diplomatic victories had been won in conservatories,” one pupil recalled. “I will not quote the examples he cited in support of this astonishing theory; it is enough to say that the most recent example he cited referred to the Congress of Vienna” of 1815.137 As of 1924, when the commissariat numbered 484 persons in positions of responsibility, fully 33 percent were university graduates, a far greater proportion than in the central party apparatus.138 Fewer than half of commissariat personnel were ethnic Russians.139

Not far from Blacksmith Bridge was the Hotel Lux, at Tverskaya, 36, known, not without irony, as the “headquarters of world revolution” after it was given over to the Comintern. It was the place where every affiliated party could be criticized—except one.140 For the Third World Congress of the Comintern (June-July 1921), the Lux housed some 600 delegates from fifty-two countries in its small rooms.141 The premises were honeycombed with undercover GPU agents who enticed or entrapped foreigners into informing on one another. Contacts with Soviet inhabitants would become strictly regulated.142 Still, the Lux had art deco elegance to go with hot water once a week. Comintern offices proper were located elsewhere, in the two-story mansion that had belonged to the sugar baron Sergei Berg and had served as the inaugural German embassy (where Mirbach had been assassinated) on Money Lane. In 1921, when Lenin summoned Otto Kuusinen (b. 1881), the former chairman of the Finnish Social Democrats and the founder of the Finnish Communists, from Stockholm to untangle the mess of day-to-day Comintern operations as general secretary, the Finn, in turn, engaged a personal assistant, Mauno Heimo (b. 1896), who arrived in Moscow in 1924 and took over day-to-day Comintern operations. “There is no proper organization in the Comintern and you and I must create one,” Kuusinen was said to have told him. “There is no proper staff and no proper delineation of responsibilities. Fifteen hundred people are being paid for their work, but no one knows who his superior is or what authority he has or what he is actually supposed to be doing.”143 Heimo’s first order of business was to procure better premises. He lit upon Mokhovaya, 6 (also known as Vozdvizhenka, 1), a five-story building just outside the Kremlin’s Trinity Gates-Kutafya Tower.144 On the building’s inaccessible top (fifth) floor, the GPU held sway, overseeing the real work: illegal money transfers to foreign Communist parties, forged visas, and stolen foreign passports doctored for reuse.

Comintern funds invariably vanished, presumed stolen; it was also rumored to be penetrated by foreign intelligence. Other Soviet agencies tended to despise the organization (“thousands of Comintern parasites were on the Soviet payrolls,” noted one Soviet intelligence operative).145 “To understand the workings of the Comintern one must realize two things,” wrote Kuusinen’s wife: “Firstly, it was always being reorganized, and secondly, a great deal of activity was fictitious.”146 Foreign affairs commissar Chicherin pushed to separate the functions of his commissariat and the Comintern, which he would call his “internal enemy No. 1” (the “GPU hydra” only got second place). But none other than he had issued the invitation to the Comintern’s founding congress in 1919, where he was a delegate.147 Although only Comintern agents were supposed to conduct illegal work abroad, in practice, embassy personnel did so as well.148 Comintern personnel (known as “foreigners”) usually had offices under flimsy cover right inside Soviet embassies, which also housed the GPU (“close neighbor”) and military intelligence (“distant neighbor”). Moreover, the public rhetoric of top Soviet officials, including politburo members who sat on the Comintern executive committee, nearly always aligned with “the oppressed” against the governments of putative diplomatic partner countries. Still, the foreign affairs commissariat issued endless memoranda reminding the politburo that the Comintern’s high profile and the GPU’s summary executions reduced the Soviet room for maneuver internationally: foreign governments did not trust such a regime to engage in legitimate business, and if they did take the risk, invariably a scandal broke apart about underhanded Soviet-Comintern machinations.

Beyond Moscow’s two-faced foreign policy, aiming to foment revolution in the very countries they were trying to have normal relations and trade with, lay the debilitating class-based worldview. Lenin argued that the international “bourgeoisie” could never accept the permanent existence of a workers’ state, but the truth was the opposite: although Western hostility toward the Soviet regime was often intransigent and some Western individuals were committed to Soviet overthrow, Western government hostility was mostly “sporadic, diffused, disorganized,” as George Kennan explained. He added that while “many people in the Western governments came to hate the Soviet leaders for what they did,” the Communists “hated the Western governments for what they were, regardless of what they did.”149 Thus, Moscow could view a Labour government and a Tory government as in essence identical: both imperialist and, therefore, both perfidious. Entente hostility toward Soviet Russia, in other words, no more caused Bolshevik Western antagonism than Entente accommodation would have caused a friendly, hands-off Bolshevik disposition. Lenin argued that if capitalists accommodated the Soviet regime on something, it was only because they had been forced to do so, whether by their own workers’ militancy or their dependence on chasing new markets (such as Russia’s).150 Stalin accepted this line in toto, and explained that when the moment was propitious, the capitalists would intervene militarily again, aiming to restore capitalism.151 In the meantime, in negotiations for new trade deals and long-term credits, the capitalists invariably demanded repayment of repudiated tsarist-era state debt and compensation for nationalized foreign-owned property as a precondition.152 Although Lenin allowed the foreign affairs commissariat to announce Soviet readiness to enter into discussions about tsarist debts contracted before 1914, he would spurn the opportunities that would result.153

Prime Minister Lloyd George, a liberal in the classic nineteenth-century sense of laissez-faire and free trade, advanced the idea of an international conference to rehabilitate Russia and Germany in an improved peace settlement aiming at European economic reconstruction, which could profit Britain and perhaps shore up his fragile coalition government with a bold act.154 In early 1922, the Soviets accepted an invitation to attend the conference, scheduled to open April 10 in Genoa, where thirty-four countries would be represented.155 Lenin would not personally attend, allegedly out of security concerns (the Cheka reported that the Poles were planning to assassinate him in Italy); in fact, Lenin, after returning from exile in 1917, never left Russia again.156 Still, he dictated the Soviet posture. When Foreign Affairs Commissar Georgy Chicherin, preparing for Genoa, inquired, “Should the Americans strongly press for ‘representative institutions’ do you not think we could, in return for some decent compensation, make some minor changes in our constitution?” Lenin wrote “madness” on the letter, had it circulated to the politburo, and added “this and the following letter show clearly that Chicherin is sick and very much so.”157 (The Americans ended up declining to attend Genoa.) “This is ultrasecret,” Lenin wrote to Chicherin a bit later. “It suits us that Genoa be wrecked . . . but not by us, of course.”158 Whether in the end the political establishments of the great powers were ready for a full detente with Moscow remains uncertain.159 But instead of their manifest ambivalence, Lenin saw a concerted attempt at a united capitalist front against the Soviets, even though this was a conference expressly designed to help Russia with diplomatic recognition and trade.160

Lenin was not alone in sabotaging Lloyd George’s effort. French prime minister Raymond Poincare, who did not deign to attend, forced the removal from the agenda of any opportunity for the Germans to discuss their reparation grievances. Poincare viewed Lloyd George’s effort to amend Versailles (“neither victors nor vanquished”) as coming at French expense, but his hard-line strategy backfired. Back at Versailles in 1919, France had inserted a clause, Article 116, granting Russia—a post-Bolshevik Russia, it was assumed—the right to obtain German reparations for the war, and now the Soviets hinted they would do so. Walther Rathenau, the newly appointed German foreign minister, who was oriented toward rapprochement with the West, nonetheless felt constrained to order bilateral talks with Russia to remove the Article 116 sword of Damocles.161 When rumors circulated that during the Genoa opening sessions the Soviets were engaged in separate Anglo-French talks in Lloyd George’s private villa without Germany, Rathenau requested meetings with the British prime minister but was rebuffed. At 1:15 a.m. on April 16, the Soviets accepted the Germans’ suggestion of a meeting that day.162 Rathenau’s staff again tried to alert the British, but Lloyd George’s assistant did not take at least two calls. The British prime minister’s diplomatic amateurism unwittingly amplified the French prime minister’s unrealistic inflexibility as well as Lenin’s ultrasecret treachery.163 In the driving rain the German delegation drove over to the Soviet delegation at their Genoa quarters, the Hotel Imperiale, on the road between the small Ligurian seaside resort of Santa Margherita and the larger town of Rapallo, and by early evening that same day, Easter Sunday, a bilateral treaty was signed. Terms had been set out the week before in Germany (Chicherin had traveled to Genoa via Berlin), but only now did Rathenau agree to them.164

The Rapallo Treaty, for the second time, made Germany the first major power to formally recognize the Soviet state—the other had been the abrogated Brest-Litovsk Treaty—and this resumption of diplomatic ties came without the need for tsarist debt repayment or domestic concessions such as softening the Bolshevik dictatorship. The Germans accepted the validity of Soviet expropriations of German property, and the Soviets renounced all claims under Article 116. The two sides agreed to trade under what would later be called most-favored-nation status.165 Rathenau, who in addition to his government post was the general director of AEG, the German electrical conglomerate, could well understand Russia’s economic value as a supplier of raw materials to and a customer of Germany, especially with the New Economic Policy and restoration of the market. (Rathenau, the first Jew to serve as German foreign minister, would be assassinated by right-wing ultras within two months.) Rapallo reconfirmed the centrality to Bolshevik fortunes of Germany, and it seemed to preempt Lenin’s suspicions of an across-the-board coalition of the powers against the Soviet regime. The French refusal to acknowledge German grievances, the British inability to tame the French, and the Soviets’ manipulation of Article 116—a French invention—had led to France’s nightmare and Lenin’s fantasy: an apparent Soviet-German axis.166 Rapallo was accompanied by rumors of secret protocols about military obligations amounting to an alliance, which Chicherin categorically denied in a note to France.167 In fact, ties between the Red Army and the Reichswehr were already intimate and on August 11, 1922, the two countries signed a secret formal agreement on military cooperation. Obviating Versailles restrictions, the German army would obtain secret training facilities for its air and tank forces inside the Soviet Union, in exchange for Soviet access to German military industrial technology, in plants that were to be built on Soviet soil and supply each country’s armed forces.168 That, anyway, was the promise.

Lenin was running foreign affairs as a personal fief. He probably had more telephone conversations with Chicherin than anyone else, and considerable direct contact with him, too, but he treated his foreign affairs commissar like an errand boy. Even after the Rapallo Treaty, Chicherin and the Soviet delegation wanted to sign the Genoa agreement and began going slightly beyond their brief to discuss repudiated wartime debts, seeing no way to rebuild ravaged Russia other than with Western help, but Lenin condemned his negotiators for their “unspeakably shameful and dangerous vacillations.”169 In the event, no tsarist debts were repaid and no nationalized property compensated to the Entente, and as a result, no investment consortium for Russia was formed and no peace treaty with Russia signed.170 Lenin believed that the capitalist powers would be compelled to revive the Russian economy by the logic of global capitalist development, and thus he had allowed the unique moment for a possible reintegration of Russia into the European community to be lost. (The next such gathering for the Soviets would be at Helsinki in 1975.) At the same time, the Weimar Republic and the Bolshevik dictatorship were not kindred regimes and their cooperation would be fraught as Germany continued to seek rapprochement with the West.171 How the Soviets would acquire advanced technology on a large scale remained hanging. Once Lenin became incapacitated, Stalin became the central figure in foreign policy, inheriting all these challenges of the intransigent Leninist legacy. In international relations, Stalin was anything but a dictator.

OLD SQUARE, 8

When Stalin was handed the opportunity to build a personal dictatorship, not only did Lenin suffer a stroke, but Soviet Russia was prostrate, having lost millions of people to war, political terror, and emigration. The extreme dislocation was exacerbated by the orgy of Bolshevik grain requisitioning, then by a severe drought, intense heat, and hot winds that turned the black earth into a dustbowl. Sown area had already shrunk, but now 14 million of the mere 38 million acres sown failed to produce crops, causing a famine whose scale had not been seen since the eighteenth century. Peasants were reduced to eating poisonous concoctions boiled from weeds, ground bones, tree bark, or straw from their roofs, as well as dogs, cats, rats, and human flesh.172 Upward of 35 million people suffered intense hunger—the entire Volga valley (the epicenter), the southern Urals and the Tatar and Bashkir republics, the North Caucasus, large parts of southern Ukraine, Crimea. An estimated 5 to 7 million people lost their lives between 1921 and 1923 from starvation and related diseases, amounting to 50,000 deaths per week.173 In the worst famine-stricken areas, the GPU would post guards at cemeteries to prevent the starving from digging up corpses to eat. Just in the Volga valley and Crimea, the authorities registered more than 2 million orphans, miracle survivors, albeit often with hollow eyes, distended stomachs, matchstick legs.174

Lenin—having beaten back demands to repeal the NEP—now dispatched a food procurement plenipotentiary to steppe regions, which were put under martial law. When the plenipotentiary advised that fulfilling the grain quotas 100 percent would leave regions without even seed grain, he was ordered to proceed as originally instructed.175 In early 1922, Lenin sent Felix Dzierzynski on a food expedition to Siberia, whose harvest, unaffected by the severe drought elsewhere, was more or less normal.176 Dzierzynski lived in his train carriage, civil war style, writing to his wife Zofia Muszkat in despair of the enormity of the tasks and the inadequacy of his leadership as concurrent commissar of railroads (“Only now, in winter, do I clearly understand the need to prepare in summer for the winter”). His stay was prolonged—it was while Dzierzynski was in Siberia, on February 6, 1922, that the Cheka had been abolished and replaced by the GPU—and eye-opening. “The Siberian experience has demonstrated to me the fundamental shortcomings of our system of management,” he wrote his wife again in February. “Even the best thoughts and directives from Moscow do not make it here and hang in the air.”177 The GPU, meanwhile, reported out of one Siberian province (February 14) that “abuses by procurement agents reach utterly stunning proportions. . . . Everywhere arrested peasants are locked in icy granaries, flogged with whips [nagaiki] and threatened with shooting.” Peasants, fleeing to the woods, were “chased and trampled upon with horses first. Then they were stripped naked and shut in granaries with no heat. Many women were beaten unconscious, buried naked in the snow, raped.”178

Fixated on extracting food for its hungry northwest cities, the regime’s response to the rural regions in starvation had been slow and ineffective.179 Lenin refused to seek help from “imperialist” governments, but the exiled writer Maxim Gorky, with Lenin’s connivance, issued a private appeal to “all honorable persons,” and Herbert Hoover, the American secretary of commerce, replied affirmatively just two days later. Hoover (b. 1874), the son of a Quaker, had been orphaned as a child, had gone on to be part of the inaugural graduating class of Stanford University as a mining engineer, and during the Great War had founded the American Relief Administration (ARA), initially a government agency that was converted into a private body with government funding. In heeding the summons to help Soviet Russia, he laid down two conditions: that American relief personnel be allowed to operate independently, and that U.S. citizens in Soviet prisons be released. Lenin cursed Hoover and acceded. In a monumental triumph of philanthropy and organization, Hoover mustered more than $60 million worth of foreign food support, primarily in the form of corn, wheat seeds, condensed milk, and sugar, much of it donated by the United States Congress, some of it paid for by the Soviet regime with scarce hard currency and gold (melted down from confiscated church objects and other valuables). Employing 300 field agents who engaged up to 100,000 Soviet helpers at 19,000 field kitchens, the ARA at its height fed nearly 11 million people daily.180 Gorky wrote to Hoover that “your help will enter history as a unique, gigantic achievement, worthy of the greatest glory, which will long remain in the memory of millions of Russians . . . whom you have saved from death.”181

Stalin applied pressure on the foreign affairs commissariat to look after foreign grain purchases, and took part in instituting surveillance of foreign aid workers.182 He also proposed that the ARA be charged for the cost of transporting its emergency food supplies on Soviet territory.183 Thanks to the foreign donations and the purchases abroad of seed grain, as well as a return of favorable weather and peasant survival instincts, the 1922 harvest turned out to be robust. Additional alleviation was provided by the belated effects of the New Economic Policy’s incentives for peasants, so that from 1923 a recovery commenced.184 The regime, grudgingly, played a part, too. It passed the Land Code, which forbade the sale and purchase of land and restricted the legality, and to an extent the reality, of land leasing and the hiring of non-family farm labor, but it allowed peasants legally to grow any types of crops, raise any type of livestock, and build any type of structures on the land; women were recognized as equal members of the peasant household. Above all, the Land Code allowed peasant households to exercise real choice in legal land tenure: communal-repartitional, collective farm, even consolidated homesteading (i.e., Stolypinism).185 The Land Code did not use the term “commune,” substituting instead “land society,” but the regime was compelled to acknowledge that the commune had self-governing authority.186 The regime also found itself compelled to drastically reduce financial support for collective farms, which shrank to an even smaller part of the arable land (under 1 percent). The turnabout was stunning: peasants, whether communal-repartitional or homesteader, obtained far-reaching economic freedom.

The size and timely collection of the harvest remained the key determinant of the country’s well-being, and the peasant revolution that paralleled the Bolshevik seizure of power was strong enough to reshape the Soviet state. The civil war commissariat of food supply, the “requisitioning commissariat,” yielded its predominant position to the agriculture commissariat, a kind of “peasants’ commissariat” inside the proletarian dictatorship. Punctuating the shift, Alexander Smirnov (b. 1898), a party loyalist with a practical bent, was shifted from deputy food supply commissar to deputy agriculture commissar, on his way to assuming the top position in 1923. The “requisitioning commissariat” had been located at the Upper Trading Rows right on Red Square; the “peasants’ commissariat” was located, of all places, at Old Square—N. 8, just down from Communist party HQ—in the former Boyarsky Dvor Hotel and business complex built in 1901–3 in art nouveau style.187 In the famine, agricultural commissariat personnel found a raison d’être, concluding that peasant farming was perpetually on the edge of the abyss because peasants were ignorant of modern farming’s best practices. Therefore, peasants needed to be educated by agronomists and other specialists.188 The agriculture commissariat would grow into the regime’s largest, with more than 30,000 staff in central and regional offices, plus another 40,000 working on forestry. This eclipsed in size even the internal affairs commissariat, that is, the combined regular police-GPU, as well as the second biggest—the finance commissariat.189

ILINKA, 9

That a finance commissariat existed under a Communist regime was a surprise. During the civil war the regime had collected no taxes, funding itself by confiscating grain and other goods and printing paper money.190 Confusion enveloped the country’s monetary base. The populace still used nikolaevki (rubles under Nicholas II), dumskie (rubles associated with the Duma period), and kerenki (rubles under Kerensky and the Provisional Government), which the Soviet regime itself printed for a time without the crown on the double-headed eagle, as well as foreign currency, which circulated illegally and at ever steeper exchange rates.191 The Whites in territories they controlled had accepted Soviet-printed kerenki, but not Soviet rubles (sovznaki) on which the Whites stamped “money for idiots.”192 The resulting runaway inflation made vodka a major means of exchange and store of value, as barter took over the economy. Things were not as bad as Weimar Germany’s hyperinflation, where the Mark went from 60 to $1 in 1921 to 4.2 trillion to $1 two years later, but a top tsarist-era economist estimated that between 1914 and 1923 the ruble depreciated by 50 million times.193 Some Bolshevik fanatics asserted that the hyperinflation constituted a form of class war, and one called the printing presses the “machine-gun of the finance commissariat.” Ideologues also asserted that the “end of money” marked an advance in the stages of civilization, toward Communism.194 But by 1924, the Soviet currency would be stabilized and the economy remonetized, a stunning turn of events achieved by a rebuilt finance commissariat.

The finance commissariat had seized the grand premises of the Moscow offices of the expropriated St. Petersburg International Bank, at Ilinka, 9. The street’s name derived from an ancient monastery named for Ilya (Elijah) the Prophet, but Ilinka was jammed with enclosed trading rows, banks, and exchanges, and had served as prerevolutionary Moscow’s financial hub inside the walled commercial quarter known as Kitaigorod. Also situated on Ilinka were the foreign trade commissariat (N. 14) and the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate, which Stalin had merged with the party’s Central Control Commission (N. 21), where many a Communist was summoned to be disciplined. The Red Army, besides its main complex at Znamenka, had seized a second structure for the army political administration, Ilinka, 2, the former wholesale Middle Trading Rows, right near Red Square, where it would publish its newspaper Red Star. Ilinka connected Old Square and Red Square, and was the street Stalin walked down every day to and from work with his party comrades who also lived in Kremlin apartments. Without the macroeconomic achievements of Ilinka, 9, Stalin would not have enjoyed the stability that rescued the Soviet regime and enabled him to concentrate on building his personal dictatorship. The finance commissar was Grigory Sokolnikov (b. 1888), who had replaced the hapless Nikolai Krestinsky in 1922, not long after Stalin had filled Krestinsky’s former position atop the party apparatus.

Sokolnikov had a spectacular revolutionary biography.195 He grew up in bourgeois privilege in a Moscow Jewish family: his father, a physician, owned a building where the family occupied eight rooms on the upper floor and operated a lucrative pharmacy on the ground floor. Grigory, their eldest son, had German and French governesses, attended a classical gymnasium in the Arbat neighborhood (with Nikolai Bukharin and Boris Pasternak), and joined the Moscow Bolsheviks in 1905 (he may have derived his nom de revolution from the city’s Sokolniki ward). He ended up in Siberia, then in foreign exile, where he completed a doctorate in economics at the Sorbonne. Sokolnikov returned to Russia on the sealed train with Lenin and in July 1917 was elected to the small Bolshevik Central Committee, working closely with Stalin as one of the key editors of the party press and taking part in the key votes in favor of a coup, which he helped carry out.196 Afterward, Sokolnikov oversaw bank nationalization.197 He replaced Trotsky as head of the Brest-Litovsk delegation, at age twenty-nine, and signed the treaty.198 During the civil war, despite lacking formal military training, Sokolnikov served not as a political commissar but as a commander, earning an Order of the Red Banner.199 In 1920, Stalin requested that Sokolnikov be dispatched to him on the southern front against the Poles.200 Instead, Sokolnikov was given charge of reconquered Turkestan, where, as we saw, he organized a counterinsurgency and introduced the NEP tax in kind earlier than would be done in the country as a whole, legalized private markets, and carried out a monetary reform.201 In Moscow, following surgery in Germany (he had a liver condition, among other ailments), Sokolnikov relied on a team of prerevolutionary financial professionals, forced through a restoration of the State Bank, and prevented the deportation of Professor Leonid Yurovsky, who spearheaded the creation of a new currency called the chervonets, a “hard” ruble to be limited in the scale of issue and backed by gold bullion and foreign reserves.202 Sokolnikov supplemented the chervonets with gold coins issued with a portrait of the murdered Nicholas II.

Sokolnikov achieved his macroeconomic reforms in the face of widespread resistance and incomprehension in the party.203 Hard currency and gold reserves had essentially been depleted to finance emergency grain imports, but the good harvest of 1922 allowed renewed exports, which delivered a shock windfall that rebuilt gold reserves from 15 million gold rubles in January 1923 to 150 million a year later, and enabled the takeoff of the chervonets.204 Regular Soviet rubles (sovznaki) underwent three bouts of replacement at severely depreciated levels, while the chervonets grew to around 80 percent of the currency in circulation.205 Sokolnikov enforced balance of payments discipline as well, and by 1924 the Soviets would manage a trade surplus.206 Sokolnikov oversaw introduction of a regular budgetary system, with revenues from customs duties, transport, and especially direct taxation (the agricultural tax in kind, an income tax), but also new excise taxes on common items such as matches, candles, tobacco, wines, coffee, sugar, and salt. Taxing salt had been abolished as far back as 1881, making its revival by Sokolnikov extraordinary. The regime, in 1923, also reintroduced the monopoly on vodka sales (the tsars’ derided “drunken budget”), bringing in significant revenues.207 The GPU undercut Sokolnikov’s work—the politburo approved Dzierzynski’s proposal to expel all “speculators,” including currency dealers, from Moscow and other big cities—but Sokolnikov fought back.208 “The more financing your operatives receive,” Sokolnikov is said to have told Dzierzynski, “the more manufactured cases there will be.”209 The industrial lobby, too, battled Sokolnikov tooth and claw, claiming that his tight money was strangling Soviet industry.210 But Sokolnikov gave no quarter, taunting them by declaring, “Money-printing is the opium of the economy.”211 Mikhail Lurye, known as Yuri Larin, a pundit, charged in 1924 that the finance commissariat was imposing its own “dictatorship.”212 In effect, Sokolnikov helped teach Stalin macroeconomics, the relationship between the money supply, inflation, balance of payments, and exchange rates. Stalin backed him.213

“UNDER STALIN’S WING”

Stalin’s power flowed from attention to detail but also to people—and not just any people, but often to the new people. The Society of Old Bolsheviks came into being on January 28, 1922, and Stalin spoke at their inaugural meeting.214 Members had to have joined the party before 1905 and expected recognition of their hard labor stints and exile under tsarism and their seniority. But though the regime resolved to reserve the position of provincial party secretaries for party members who had joined at least before the February Revolution, in practice the guideline was violated. Old Bolsheviks were proportionally overrepresented in administration, but in a preponderance of lower-level posts, the politburo excepted.215 The Old Bolsheviks, especially those who had lived in European emigration, often looked askance at the newcomers as crude simpletons, but the latter viewed the Old Bolsheviks as suspiciously bourgeois. Each group had gone through the same civil war experience and the younger ones came out confident they did not need to know multiple foreign languages or be university educated to get things done. Stalin, although of course an Old Bolshevik himself, favored the upstarts. Many came from the workers and the peasants, but far from all.216 Fully one quarter of party members as of 1921 admitted to white-collar origins. These were not, however, predominantly figures who had served in tsarist institutions; many were products of the February Revolution, having joined various bodies of the Provisional Government. After October, they grafted themselves onto the new regime.217 “The new political elite was not predominantly proletarian in origin,” one scholar has written. “It was, however, predominantly plebeian.”218 The revolution was carried by the partially educated who often continued to study at night after long hours on the job.219 Stalin identified with them; they were younger versions of himself. Still, the people closest to him presented an eclectic mix.

The most important was Vyacheslav Skryabin (b. 1890), better known as Molotov (“the Hammer”), perhaps the regime’s first pure apparatchik (Krestinsky had concurrently been party secretary and finance commissar). The son of a shop clerk, he had managed to enroll in the St. Petersburg Polytechnique Institute, but joined the party and became an editor of Pravda after it was briefly legalized. In 1915, he adopted his party pseudonym, later explaining that “Molotov” was easier to pronounce than “Skr-ya-bin” for someone who stuttered, as he did, and that “Hammer” sounded proletarian, industrial, and could impress workers, who did not overly love party members of the intelligentsia.220 (Molotov, like Lenin, preferred a bourgeois suit and tie.) Like Stalin, Molotov had spent some time in prerevolutionary exile in Vologda, where he earned his keep by playing violin in a restaurant to entertain drunken merchants. He and Stalin may have first met in St. Petersburg, in 1912, at a dentist’s quarters that doubled as a safe house.221 Elbowed from the top position by Stalin twice (in 1917 at Pravda and in 1922 at the party secretariat), Molotov could have nursed a grudge and connived to undercut Stalin. Instead, he hitched his wagon to the Georgian, acceding to Lenin’s wishes and Stalin’s eleven-year seniority. Trotsky mocked Molotov as “mediocrity personified,” but Lenin, intending a compliment, called his protégé “the best filing clerk in Russia.”222 Boris Bazhanov, who worked in the apparatus in the early 1920s, also came away impressed. “He is a very conscientious, not brilliant but extremely industrious bureaucrat,” he wrote of Molotov. “He is calm, reserved. . . . With everyone who approaches him he is correct, a person utterly approachable, no rudeness, no arrogance, no bloodthirstiness, no striving to humiliate or crush someone.”223 Bazhanov’s words said as much about Bolshevik political culture as about Molotov.

Valerian Kuibyshev (b. 1888), an ethnic Russian and native Siberian, was from a hereditary military family. He studied at the Omsk Cadet School, then moved to the capital to enter the Military Medical Academy, but in 1906 was expelled for political activity and fled likely arrest. He managed to enter the Tomsk University Law Faculty but left after a year, went into the Bolshevik underground, and was arrested and exiled numerous times, including to Narym (from 1910) and Turukhansk (from 1915), places where Stalin had been exiled. Kuibyshev was a practiced musician like Molotov and a poet like Stalin. He took part in the 1917 Bolshevik coup in the Volga city of Samara and during the civil war served on the southern front, and then had a commanding role in the reconquest of Turkestan. Precisely when he first caught Stalin’s eye remains unclear. Stalin made him a full member of the Central Committee and a Central Committee secretary in 1922. In late 1923, Stalin named him the head of the party’s Central Control Commission, which had been established as a neutral court of appeal, but under Stalin became a bludgeon to punish party members.224 Kuibyshev viciously went after local resistance, perceived and real, to central directives and lined up officials behind Stalin in the regions and the center.225 Trotsky dubbed Kuibyshev “the foremost violator and corruptor of party statutes and morals.”226 Kuibyshev’s loyalty to Stalin was absolute.227 He also appears to have played a role in bringing to Moscow yet another indispensable functionary in Stalin’s faction—Lazar Kaganovich.

Kaganovich (b. 1893) hailed from a village in the tsarist Pale of Settlement near the small town of Chernobyl, and embodied the rough plebeian cohort. His father was an uneducated farm and factory laborer; his mother gave birth to thirteen children, six of whom survived. Lazar spoke Russian and Ukrainian, with a smattering of Yiddish, and he briefly attended a heder attached to a synagogue. But his family could not afford to educate him and he apprenticed to a local blacksmith, then moved to Kiev and joined one of his brothers at a scrapyard. At age fourteen, Kaganovich started laboring at a shoe factory—what Stalin might have become, had he had fewer options in Gori and Tiflis—joined the party in 1912 in Kiev, fought in the Great War, and, following the Bolshevik coup, in January 1918, as a twenty-four-year-old went to Petrograd as a Bolshevik delegate to the Constituent Assembly.228 During the civil war, he served in Nizhny Novgorod and Voronezh, where Trotsky’s people predominated. But during the controversy over trade unions, Kaganovich, then a trade unionist, sided with Lenin against Trotsky. Just two months after Stalin became general secretary, Kaganovich was hired in the central apparatus and put in charge of the Organization and Instruction Department, which soon absorbed the Records and Assignment Department—and would oversee the nomenklatura system. Kaganovich’s attachment to the charismatic Trotsky may have extended beyond the civil war (according to an aide in the apparatus, Kaganovich “for a rather long time tried to look like Trotsky. Later everyone wanted to copy Stalin”).229 But soon he would infuriate Trotsky with slashing ad hominem attacks. He was indisputably proletarian and, like Stalin, distrusted intellectuals and “bourgeois specialists.”230 Kaganovich was a fine speaker and natural leader, with immense energy and organizational muscle. “He is a lively fellow, no fool, young and energetic,” wrote Bazhanov.231 In 1924, Stalin made Kaganovich a Central Committee secretary.232

Stalin’s faction had tentacles around the country. He picked up a number of loyalists united by their common service, whether former or current, in Ukraine, the key republic after Russia. Other figures around him hailed from the Caucasus: the Georgian Orjonikidze (b. 1886), party boss in Georgia; the Russian Sergei Kirov (b. 1886), party boss in Azerbaijan; and the Armenian Anatas Mikoyan (b. 1895), party boss in the North Caucasus. Another figure who ended up close to the dictator was Mikhail Kalinin (b. 1875), three years Stalin’s senior, who had similarly spent time in the Caucasus during the underground years.233 Stalin got his civil war loyalist Klim Voroshilov named head of the North Caucasus military district (1921–24); he turned out to be the only loyalist from the Tsaritsyn “clan” who remained close to Stalin.234 Other figures from the civil war–era southern front—above all, those associated with the First Cavalry Army—would see their fortunes rise with Stalin, including the First Cavalry commander Semyon Budyonny as well as Alexander Yegorov. Still, in the early 1920s, Molotov, Kuibyshev, and Kaganovich constituted the innermost core of Stalin’s political clan. Observers began to say these men walked “under Stalin’s wing” (khodit’ pod Stalinym).235

Stalin’s team of aides was highly capable. Amayak Nazaretyan, the ethnic Armenian, was the son of a merchant, had studied at (but not graduated from) the law faculty at St. Petersburg University and was judged to be “a very cultured, clever, well-meaning and well-balanced man,” as well as among the very few, like Voroshilov and Orjonikidze, who addressed Stalin by the familiar “thou” (ty).236 Additionally, there was Ivan Tovstukha (b. 1889), who had studied abroad and resembled a professorial type; in the Parisian emigration he gave lectures on art to a group of Bolsheviks at the Louvre. (Stalin is supposed to have told him, according to Bazhanov, “My mother kept a billy-goat who looked exactly like you, only he didn’t wear a pince-nez.”)237 After the revolution Tovstukha worked for Stalin in the nationalities commissariat, and in 1922, immediately upon becoming general secretary, Stalin brought him into the party apparatus. Known to be taciturn, Tovstukha had tuberculosis and only one lung, but he would soon replace Nazaretyan as Stalin’s top aide.238 Stalin also brought in the Odessa native Lev Mehklis (b. 1889), the scion of a minor tsarist official and himself a prerevolutionary member of the Paole Zion party. Mekhlis came over from the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate, which Stalin nominally headed; there, Mekhlis had overseen reductions in state employees and expenditures, especially of hard currency, and fought against embezzlement, bragging on a 1922 questionnaire how he had “straightened out the [state] apparatus.”239 Mekhlis moved into House of Soviets no. 1 (on Granovsky), one notch down from a Kremlin apartment. He was severe and unsocial. “Conversations between Mekhlis and his subordinates went like this: ‘Do the following. Is that clear? Dismissed.’ Half a minute,” the apparatchik Balashov recalled. Whereas Stalin addressed Tovstukha respectfully, he tended to be abrupt with Mekhlis. “Stalin could say, for example, ‘Mekhlis, matches!’ or ‘Pencils!’” Balashov observed. “Not to Tovstukha. [Stalin] was very respectful toward him, listened to him. [Tovstukha] was a reserved person, dry, spoke little, but very smart. He was a good leader.” But although “Mekhlis had a difficult personality,” Balashov concluded, “Stalin valued him for such qualities, believing that Mekhlis would implement any assignment, no matter what.”240

Countless new people entered Stalin’s circle in these early years, some who would fall by the wayside, some who would make remarkable careers, such as Georgy Malenkov (1902–1988), the son of a railroad civil servant, an ethnic Macedonian, who studied at a classical gymnasium and then at Moscow Technical College, and Sergei Syrtsov (b. 1893), who hailed from Ukraine, joined the party at the St. Petersburg Polytechnique (which he did not finish) and served as a political commissar in the civil war responsible for forcible deportation of Cossacks. Syrtsov also participated as a 10th Party Congress delegate in the crackdown against Kronstadt in 1921, and was appointed head of personnel in the Central Committee apparatus that same year before being moved to head of agitation and propaganda in 1924.241 Stalin’s apparatchiks included Stanisław Kosior (b. 1889), whom the general secretary appointed party boss of all Siberia, Andrei Zhdanov (b. 1896), who got Nizhny Novgorod province, and Andrei Andreyev (b. 1895), whom Stalin kept in the central apparatus as a Central Committee secretary. These and other examples show that Stalin promoted not only the uneducated. This especially applied to the worldly Sokolnikov, a master of the Russian language, as well as six foreign languages, and an accomplished musician, who was a genuine intelligent, the opposite of Kaganovich (who had worked under Sokolnikov in Turkestan).242 But Sokolnikov, no less than Kaganovich, was an extremely effective organizer.243 Sokolnikov helped transform Lenin’s NEP from a slogan into a reality, and yet Lenin, typically, disparaged him.244 Stalin, however, was solicitous. True, Sokolnikov lived outside the Kremlin (he and his young third wife, a writer, had an apartment in the secondary elite complex on Granovsky), but in 1924, Stalin would elevate Sokolnikov to candidate member of the politburo.

LOOKING FOR LEVERAGE

Many appointments Stalin had not made. Georgy Chicherin (b. 1872), for example, an aristocrat and a distant relative of Alexander Pushkin, was a Lenin appointee.245 It was Chicherin, not Stalin, who was the regime’s original night owl: he lived in an apartment adjacent to his office at Blacksmith Bridge, 15, and worked through the wee hours, being known to telephone subordinates at 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. to request information or convey directives. (To wind down, Chicherin played Mozart on the piano.) For leverage, Stalin looked to Chicherin’s principal deputy, Maxim Litvinov (b. 1876), who despite being from a wealthy banking family in Bialystok, as a Jew had been refused admission to gymnasium and then university.246 Litvinov never became reconciled to the fact that Chicherin, who had joined the Bolsheviks only in January 1918, rather than himself, an original member of the Russian Social Democrats dating to 1898, had been named foreign affairs commissar. (Both men had been in London when the summons to Chicherin came).247 Lenin told Litvinov he was an indispensable “party militant” in the commissariat, and Litvinov did carry a certain confidence based on his long-standing party service.248 But he was also perceived as suspicious and mistrustful, angling to advance himself, given to putting on airs yet suffering an inferiority complex, craving to be liked, manipulative.249 His antagonism with Chicherin became legendary. “Not a month would go by without my receiving a note marked ‘strictly confidential, for politburo members only,’ from one or the other of them,” the inner-sanctum functionary Bazhanov wrote. “In these notes Chicherin complained that Litvinov was rotten, ignorant, a gross and crude criminal who should never have been given diplomatic duties. Litvinov wrote that Chicherin was a homosexual, an idiot, a maniac, an abnormal individual.”250

The politburo required Chicherin to bring Litvinov to its sessions on Western issues, and as a counter Chicherin elevated Lev Karakhanyan, known as Karakhan, an Armenian born in Tiflis (1889), as his deputy for the East.251 Karakhan had belonged to Trotsky’s group of internationalists, joining the Bolsheviks with him in the summer of 1917, and initially Stalin pushed to replace the Armenian, insisting that the regime needed a Muslim more amenable to Eastern peoples. Soon, however, Stalin’s correspondence with Karakhan would become obsequious. (“How’s your health and how are you feeling? You must miss [the USSR]. . . . Don’t believe Japanese diplomats for a second; the most treacherous people. . . . My bow to your wife. Greetings. I. Stalin. P.S. So far I’m alive and healthy. . . .”). Karakhan answered in kind (“I grasp your hand. With heartfelt greetings. Your L. Karakhan”). It seems that Karakhan ingratiated himself with Stalin, who, in turn, was on the lookout for his own person inside the commissariat. But Litvinov, too, competed for that role by conspicuously aping Stalin’s views.252 This dynamic could be seen all across the Soviet system—Stalin looking for personal animosities to manipulate to his benefit; officials appealing for his favor against political rivals.

SECRET WEAPON

Three men formed the inner core of the Cheka-GPU, and each would develop close relations with Stalin. First was Dzierzynski, who had been born in 1877 near Minsk in the borderlands of Lithuania-Belorussia, one of eight children in a family of Polish nobility landowners. He was orphaned, and zealously studied for the Catholic priesthood.253 “God is in my heart!” he is said to have told his elder brother. “And if I were ever to come to the conclusion, like you, that there is no God, I would shoot myself. I couldn’t live without God.”254 As a schoolboy, he converted to Marxism, was expelled two months before graduation from the Wilno gymnasium and, in his own words, became “a successful agitator” who “got through to the utterly untouched masses—at social evenings, in taverns, and wherever workers met.”255 But he ended up spending eleven years all told in tsarist prisons, in internal exile, and at hard labor in penal colonies, and he became consumptive.256 “His eyes certainly looked as if they were bathed in tears of eternal sorrow, but his mouth smiled an indulgent kindness,” observed the British sculptor Clare Sheridan, who in 1920 made a bust of him. (Dzierzynski told her that “one learns patience and calm in prison.”)257 Dzierżyński had a certain political vulnerability, having joined the Bolsheviks only in April 1917 and then opposed Lenin over Brest-Litovsk (1918) and trade unions (1921), but he won plaudits as the scourge of counterrevolutionaries and for living like a revolutionary ascetic, sleeping in his unheated office on an iron bed, subsisting on tea and crusts of bread.258 He reported to Lenin personally and once Lenin became incapacitated, got still closer to Stalin. Stalin was neither threatened by Dzierzynski nor fully dependent on him for secret police favors.

Wiaczesław Mezynski, another Pole, had become Dzierzynski’s first deputy and, because his boss was simultaneously railroad commissar (and from 1924 would concurrently chair the Supreme Council of the Economy), ran the secret police. He had been born in St. Petersburg, the son of a Polish nobleman and teacher who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and graduated from the St. Petersburg law faculty. He lived in European emigration for 11 years, working as a bank clerk (in Paris) or teaching at a Bolshevik school (in Bologna), while painting and publishing sonnets. In Smolny in 1917 he was said to play Chopin waltzes on the grand piano of the former girls’ finishing school, and came across as a banker or a dandy in his three-piece suit. After his brief stint as the original commissar for finance and then some diplomatic work—Mezynski knew a dozen or so languages—Dzierzynski promoted him in the Cheka, considering him unfailing in operational instincts.259 The two lived in the Kremlin and had dachas near each other in Arkhaneglskoe (Gorki-6). Legends about Mezynski abounded: that he conducted interrogations lying on a settee draped in Chinese silks, dyed his finger- and toenails red, wore gold-framed pince-nez, and married a former governess to the Nobel family (she left him and took the children). Lenin called him “my decadent neurotic.”260 In fact, Mezynski did receive people while lying on a couch. An automobile accident in Paris had severely damaged his hearing and nerves, leaving him with degenerative osteoarthritis of the spine. In addition, he had contracted scarlatina and diphtheria in his youth and typhus at age 28, and suffered acute angina, arteriosclerosis, an enlarged heart, migraines, breathing arrhythmia, and an infected kidney. He stood 5΄9˝ but weighed 200 pounds, smoked 50 to 75 cigarettes daily, and managed no more than 5 hours of sleep because of insomnia.261 Although Mezynski had warned Trotsky during the civil war about Stalin’s incessant intriguing behind Trotsky’s back, Stalin and Mezynski, both former poets, got along. In any case, Mezynski’s profusion of ailments rendered him unthreatening, while enabling Stalin to work around him.

The most consequential official in the secret police for Stalin was Jenokhom Jehuda, better known as Genrikh Yagoda, which he pronounced Yagóda, although Stalin cheekily called him Yágoda (berry). (Maxim Gorky would call him “Little Berry” [Yágodka]). Yagoda had been born in 1891 to a Polish-Jewish family in Yaroslavl province, one of eight children, but the next year his family settled in Nizhny Novgorod; his father was a jeweler, his mother, the daughter of a watchmaker. Yagoda’s father was a cousin of Yakov Sverdlov’s father. The young Yagoda studied at gymnasium, learning German and statistics, but in 1907 became active in revolutionary politics, mostly as an anarchist. One of his sisters was an anarchist and a pharmacist’s apprentice and he apprenticed for six months as a pharmacist in 1912; that May he was arrested in Moscow, apparently for theft and fencing stolen goods, including weapons and dynamite. Yagoda also apprenticed as an engraver to Sverdlov pere, and was rumored to have stolen all the tools, set himself up on his own, failed, come back and apologized, and then did it all over again. In the Great War he was conscripted (one of his brothers was executed for refusing to serve), and in 1915 he married a niece of Sverdlov’s, who provided his future entree into the regime: He became head of the Cheka business directorate in November 1919, though in his party autobiography he stressed his military exploits “on almost all the fronts,” with “the most varied duties, up to shooting.”262 In late 1920, Yagoda was granted the right to sign directives in Dzierzynski’s absence. In September 1923, he became second deputy GPU chairman, filling the vacuum created by Dzierzynski’s multiple responsibilities and Mezynski’s illnesses. Yagoda, no master of foreign languages, made his mark in economic management and intrigue.263 Direct reports from him to Stalin date from summer and fall 1922, a circumstance reflecting Stalin’s new position as general secretary, but also Stalin’s cultivation of police operatives.264

Yagoda became Stalin’s secret weapon, but the dictator took no chances. He cultivated Yagoda’s enemies inside the secret police, such as Artur Fraucci. The latter had been born (1891) in Tver province to an ethnic Italian cheesemaker father from Switzerland and an Estonian-Latvian mother, becoming fluent in German and French and graduating from gymnasium with a gold medal, after which he completed the St. Petersburg Polytechnique. Fraucci went often to the opera to hear the basso Fyodor Chaliapin, and he himself could sing as well as play the piano and draw. He had gotten into the Cheka through connections (one of his mother’s sisters married Mikhail Kedrov), changed his name to Artur Artuzov (easier on the Russian ear), and was handed counterintelligence in July 1922.265 At Lubyanka HQ, struggles often took place among rival Cheka clans as much as against “counters” (counterrevolutionaries), and Artuzov and his professional staff disdained Yagoda and his people for their limited counterintelligence tradecraft. (Never mind that Polish intelligence, which knew Soviet personnel and Russian-Soviet police methods intimately, penetrated Soviet intelligence.)266 Besides Artuzov, Stalin had a close relationship with Józef Unszlicht, who would run military intelligence.

Yagoda also made it easy for Stalin to manage him by his high living and compromising activities. Yagoda complained to the ascetic Dzierzynski that police officials had “no money or credit, no foodstuffs, no uniforms, the most necessary things are lacking,” leading to “demoralization, bribe-taking and other flowers blooming luxuriantly on this soil.” Karelia, Yagoda noted, lacked even stationery to write about the lack of everything.267 But Yagoda himself took up residence in the elite building at Blacksmith Bridge, which he had reconstructed at state expense, acquired an immense dacha complex, and convoked GPU meetings over crêpes and caviar washed down with vodka in private apartments. He also built up a coterie of shady characters. In one case, more than 200 bottles of confiscated brandy and rum vanished from the care of one of Yagoda’s bagmen.268 An even more notorious associate, Alexander “Sasha” Lurye, fenced “confiscated” valuables abroad in exchange for hard currency, nominally on behalf of the GPU, gave Yagoda a cut from his diamond business, and procured fine foreign wines and dildos. Yagoda acquired the foul odor of a commerçant, and his ultimate boss, Stalin, could closely track the disreputable machinations by the likes of Lurye—it was dictator’s insurance.

“THE POINT IS ABOUT LEADERSHIP”

Which brings us to the regime’s focal point, the dictator himself. Stalin’s character would become a central factor in world history, an outcome that would color all assessments. One scholar observed characteristically that a “politics of permanent emergency” generated by war, revolution, and civil war proved well suited to Stalin’s personal qualities. True enough, but this was applicable to the vast majority of Bolsheviks.269 Retrospective “insight” into Stalin’s character can be deeply misleading. He identified himself the way most top revolutionaries did: In 1920, in the space provided for “profession” on a party questionnaire, Stalin had inserted “writer (pundit) [publitsist].”270 Lenin, on a similar party questionnaire the year before, had written “man of letters” [literator]; Trotsky, when admitted to the Society of Former Political Prisoners, gave as his profession “writer-revolutionary.”271 (Of course, writing and editing were among the few legal activities for revolutionaries in tsarist Russia.) But while Stalin was proud of his immersion in the Marxist and Russian intelligentsia traditions, he was also a self-styled praktik: a practitioner, a doer, the closest a non-proletarian revolutionary could get to assuming the identity of a proletarian. That said, Stalin returned again and again to the touchstone of Lenin’s writings. The fundamental fact about him was that he viewed the world through Marxism.

Probably the most pervasive characterization of Stalin, particularly among intellectuals, pegged him for an inferiority complex. “Because of his enormous envy and ambition,” Trotsky would assert, “Stalin could not help feeling at every step his intellectual and moral inferiority.”272 Trotsky would gather every morsel of hearsay that depicted Stalin’s inferiority. “I am doing everything he has asked me to do, but it is not enough for him,” Avel Yenukidze said, according to Leonid Serebryakov, who told Trotsky, “He wants me to admit that he is a genius.”273 But how well Trotsky understood Stalin remains doubtful. The two did not socialize. (“I was never in Stalin’s apartment,” Trotsky admitted, which, however, did not inhibit his assurances that he had Stalin figured out.)274 Beyond doubt, Stalin possessed a searing ambition to be a person of consequence; indeed, he worked at it relentlessly. Stalin subscribed to a substantial number of periodicals, and soon he would instruct Tovstukha to organize his enormous library according to subjects: philosophy, psychology, sociology, political economy, Russian history, history of other countries, diplomacy, military affairs, belles lettres, literary criticism, memoirs. This was not for demonstration but for work.275

Assertions regarding Stalin’s sense of inferiority reveal at least as much about others’ sense of superiority—and not just in the case of Trotsky. Consider Boris Bazhanov, who had a university education and possessed an exalted sense of self, and who after having emigrated would belittle Stalin’s intelligence, observing that “very often he didn’t know what to do or how to do it, but he didn’t show it. I often saw him hesitate, preferring to follow events rather than direct them.” Supposedly, this behavior demonstrated that Stalin was uneducated, uncultured, unread.276 And yet, in an interview, Bazhanov condescendingly ended up putting Stalin’s circumspect inclinations in a positive light. “Stalin had the very good sense never to say anything before everyone else had his argument fully developed,” Bazhanov said. “He would sit there, watching the way the discussion was going. When everyone had spoken, he would say: Well comrades, I think the solution to the problem is such and such—and he would then repeat the conclusions towards which the majority had been drifting. And, as time passed, it came to be said of Stalin that . . . he had a fundamental wisdom of sorts which led him to propose the right answers to difficult questions.”277

Episodes that show Stalin in an ungenerous light are many, but scarcely remarkable. Consider the following: Lenin perhaps did his intellectual nemesis Yuly Martov an unintended favor in late 1920 by denying him reentry to Soviet Russia after he had attended a conference in Germany, thereby allowing Martov to avoid a future trial that would befall the Mensheviks. As it happened, Martov had consumption and two years later Lenin requested that Stalin transfer party funds to pay for Martov’s medical care in Berlin. Stalin, no doubt remembering Martov’s accusations of banditry in 1918, which resulted in a court case for libel, refused. “What, start wasting money on an enemy of the working class?” Stalin is said to have answered Lenin. “Find yourself another [party] secretary for that!”278 Martov died on April 4, 1923; Rykov attended the funeral in Berlin on behalf of Lenin. But this can hardly be cited as evidence of Stalin’s special penchant for vengeance. Stalin was far from alone in his ill will toward Martov. Radek, who wrote the obituary for Izvestiya, dismissed Martov as “the most sincere and selfless representative of the once revolutionary petit-bourgeoisie.”279 Trotsky was no kinder, calling Martov “the Hamlet of democratic socialism.”280 Martov’s critics from the right, including the Constitutional Democrats, even his own Menshevik party, correctly accused him of having been doctrinaire and politically myopic.281 And Lenin, Martov excepted, pursued not just the political but the physical extirpation of the Menshevik Social Democrats.

Stalin played favorites, warming to some, intriguing against many. (Budyonny, the Red cavalry commander, recalled that Stalin would privately bring up doubts about this or that person whom Budyonny had appointed.)282 But in the early 1920s, there is no hard evidence of epic depravity. Trotsky related the following anecdote, evidently from 1922, attributed to Bukharin: “I have just come from seeing Koba. Do you know how he spends his time? He takes his year-old boy from bed, fills his own mouth with smoke from his pipe, and blows it into the baby’s face. ‘It makes him stronger,’ Koba says. . . . ‘That’s barbaric,’ I said. You don’t know Koba. He is like that—a little peculiar.”283 This story rings true, but it would be read in a more sinister light only later. According to a high official of the food supply commissariat, Lenin said to him in a meeting in 1921, “When I look you in the eyes, you seem to agree with me and say ‘yes,’ but I turn away and you say ‘no.’”284 Had this anecdote been told about Stalin, it would be taken as prime evidence of clinical paranoia.

A very few people figured Stalin out early on. “Am I satisfied with my work?” Amayak Nazaretyan wrote to his close friend Orjonikidze (June 14, 1922) back in Tiflis. “Yes and no. On the one hand, I have gone through a grand school and course of all Russian and world affairs, I am going through a school of discipline, learning exactitude in work, and from this point of view I am satisfied. On the other hand, the work is utterly paper-oriented, laborious, subjectively little-satisfying, manual labor, swallowing so much time that it’s impossible to sneeze and breathe, especially under the iron hand of Koba.” Nazaretyan added that “there is much to learn from him. Getting to know him close-up, I have developed unusual respect for him. He has a character that can only be envied. I cannot take offense. His severity is accompanied by attention to the staff.”285 Nazaretyan had caught Stalin to a T: both solicitous and demanding, and above all doggedly hardworking. That was not all. “He is sly,” Nazaretyan wrote in another letter to Orjonikidze (August 9, 1922). “Hard like a nut, you do not crack him open right away.”286 Stalin’s enemies, predictably, viewed his combined solicitude-slyness in dark terms.287

Stalin could be very closed and inaccessible, yet he could also switch on the charm, and he proved to be a loyal patron to those “under his wing.”288 Mikoyan, who had met Stalin in 1919, captured well the impression Stalin made on those he favored. Mikoyan would recall how in 1922, when he was serving as party boss in Nizhny Novgorod, Stalin summoned him to his Kremlin apartment in connection with regional delegate elections for the 11th Party Congress—and how Lenin walked right in. “Stalin gained in my eyes,” Mikoyan recalled. “I saw that he was the right hand of Lenin in such important internal party matters.” In summer 1922, Stalin transferred Mikoyan to head the party’s southeast bureau (headquartered in Rostov). “After the 11th Party Congress Stalin energetically started to gather cadres, organize and rotate them in the provinces and in the center,” Mikoyan continued. “And I liked what he did, as far as I knew, and what was connected to my work.” Stalin quickly grasped the concerns Mikoyan brought and never once rejected one of the provincial’s recommendations. “All this strengthened my trust in Stalin and I started to turn to him often and during my trips to Moscow I would visit him.” Mikoyan added that “Stalin at that time worked with all his strength. . . . He was in top form, which elicited respect, and his manner and behavior elicited sympathy.”

Mikoyan—manifestly ambitious—was clearly paying close attention, from his own careerist calculations, to a rising political force. “In spring 1923, I think in May, being in Moscow, I stopped by his apartment,” he continued. “He lived then in the first building to the right from the Kremlin’s Trinity Gate, on the second-floor of a two story building. The rooms were simple, not especially expansive, except for the dining room. His office was very small.” (Later, when Stalin upgraded his Kremlin residence and moved Mikoyan to Moscow, he gave him this apartment.) “Stalin exited his home office with his arm in a sling. I saw this for the first time and, naturally, inquired what was the matter.” Stalin: “My arm hurts, especially in spring. Rheumatism, it seems. Eventually it’ll go away.” Stalin’s arthritic problems had likely begun in childhood and worsened over time, especially during his Siberian exile; the periodic flaring was accompanied by quinsy and flu.289 (In 1904, when Stalin was twenty-six, the tsarist police noted “a distinctive trait: the movement of his left arm is circumscribed as a result of a long-ago dislocation.” This was clearly recorded from Stalin’s own words.)290 When Mikoyan asked why Stalin did not seek treatment, he answered: “And what will doctors do?” But Mikoyan consulted with physicians and managed to get Stalin to go south for treatment under the care of physicians, beginning in 1923, at the medicinal baths near Matsesta.291 The sulfur waters worked, alleviating the pain in Stalin’s joints, and he started to holiday down south every year. “Stalin liked Sochi so much,” Mikoyan concluded, “he went there even after he no longer needed to go to the Matsesta baths.”292 (In fact, the aches persisted.)

Another privileged gathering place was Stalin’s dacha outside Moscow. This country home in Usovo on the left bank of the Medvenka River had belonged to Levon Zubalov [Zubalashvili], one of four brick dachas the now deceased Baku oil magnate had built on an expansive plot of land for himself and family members, in thick woods behind high brick walls.293 The main house (designated Zubalovo-4) had two stories; Stalin and his wife had separate rooms on the upper floor, where Stalin also had an office. Nadezhda (b. 1901), or Nadya in the diminutive, his second wife, whom he had bounced on his knee when she was a toddler and wed when she was a teenager, worked in Lenin’s secretariat. She wanted a career, not to be known as the wife of the ruler, but she suffered severe headaches and down moods.294 The lower floor was used by a constant stream of relatives and hangers-on: the extended clans of the Alliluyevs as well as the Svanidzes (the family of Stalin’s deceased first wife), with broods of sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, and spouses. The same year that Vasya was born, Stalin’s abandoned son from his first marriage, Yakov, then fourteen, was sent from Tiflis to live with him in Moscow. Stalin had abandoned him to be raised by his mother’s sister and uncle in Georgia; the move to Moscow was a difficult transition, given that he did not know Russian or, for that matter, his father. Stalin treated Yakov with hostility, calling him “my fool” in front of others, perhaps partly because he reminded his father of the lovely Georgian wife he had lost. For a time, the Stalin household had another young member, Artyom Sergeyev, who had been born nineteen days after Vasya in the same hospital, and whom Stalin took in after the boy’s father, a close civil war comrade, died in the crash of an experimental high-speed railcar fitted with an aircraft engine.

Zubalovo was located a good eight miles beyond Moscow and lacked a direct road; in winter one needed chains on a vehicle’s wheels or an auto sled (a car body with tank treads). Stalin traveled out infrequently, mostly on Sundays. Still, the dacha had a player piano, left over from the old Zubalov days—miraculously, it still functioned—which Stalin enjoyed, being exceedingly fond of music. Also, he tended a vegetable garden on the grounds, as well as geese, chickens, guinea fowl, and a small apiary. From the nearby state farm he occasionally borrowed a horse-drawn sled—like scenes from Chekhov, one of Stalin’s favorite authors. “In the evenings,” Artyom recalled, “Stalin really loved to ride the sleds.”295 Here was a Stalin few saw. Trotsky’s dacha—known as Headquarters—was grander, located just north of Moscow in the settlement of Arkhangelskoe at the nationalized Yusupov Palace, an estate formerly owned by the Golitsyns and before that the Sheremetevs, where the art still hung on the walls: Tiepolo, Boucher, Fragonard; it was not known as a social gathering spot. By contrast, the Orjonikidzes and, later, Sergei Kirov, perhaps Stalin’s closest friend, would visit Stalin at Zubalovo. The Mikoyans and their four boys would occupy an even larger Zubalovo dacha (Zubalovo-2), where the Voroshilovs also obtained a dacha.296 Stalin would sometimes arrive at Zubalovo in a dark mood, however, and set to quarreling with Nadya. Their marriage was strained over different conceptions of the wife’s role.

Lidiya Fotiyeva, under whom Nadya worked, recalled Stalin’s wife as being “very beautiful” and having “Georgian eyes” (her grandfather was Georgian), but Fotiyeva also noted that “Stalin was very rude with her,” although he did not raise his voice (“Stalin always spoke softly”). While Nadya was working in Lenin’s secretariat, Stalin sometimes had her take his own dictation, too, but mostly he wanted her to play hostess to his guests at their apartment. When she was pregnant with Vasya (1920–21), Stalin became determined that she quit her work outside the home. Fotiyeva claimed that when she reported Stalin’s pressure on Nadya to quit to Lenin, he asked to be kept informed; when Stalin backed down, Lenin nonetheless remarked, “Asiatic.” On December 10, 1921, eight months after Vasya’s birth, Nadya—the wife of a politburo member and a personal secretary to Lenin—was expelled during a party purge for political “passivity.”297 She wrote an appeal to Lenin. Who would have had the temerity or the power to purge her? Only one person, who was evidently trying to force his wife back into the home. Lenin dictated a note over the telephone to the head of the party’s Central Control Commission urging Nadya’s reinstatement.298 Nadya was restored to candidate status, but regained full membership only in 1924.299 She would take up secretarial work at Revolution and Culture, part of Pravda’s publishing empire, not wanting to be known or treated as the general secretary’s wife. Nadya could be extremely difficult, prone to migraines and depression. At the same time, Stalin was a self-centered, patriarchal husband and poor father.

This, then, was the person at the center of the regime in the early 1920s: personable yet secretive, charming yet dissembling, solicitous yet severe, sociable yet malevolent toward the wife who sought his love. But within the “family” of apparatchiks, Stalin was the supreme patron. “Notwithstanding all his intelligent wildness of disposition, if I may use such an expression,” Nazaretyan concluded of Stalin’s peculiarities, “he is a soft person, has a heart, and is capable of valuing the worth of people.”300 Ultimately, what stood out most about Stalin was his command inside the apparatus. “Working alongside Stalin was not easy, especially for the leaders of the secretariat and the closest aides,” recalled Alexei Balashov, a functionary. “Very great tension was felt around him. . . . You had to work round the clock, without exaggeration, going home only to sleep.” They all became exhausted, and dreamed of getting leave to study. One time, according to Balashov, they held a meeting of what they called the “true Leninists”—otherwise known as the 20—and “Stalin said, ‘Comrade Dzierzynski, [Grigory] Kanner here petitioned to be released to study. What do you think about that?’ All the aides became intently quiet. ‘That’s terrific,’ Dzierzynski answered, ‘I have a free cell. Let him sit there and study.’ We all went cold.”301 (Kanner, described as “a small man” who had “curly black hair” resembling “sheep’s fleece,” had joined Stalin’s apparatus early in May 1922, and developed a reputation for getting tasked with the nastiest assignments.)302 Balashov added that “there was no fear. There was respect for [Stalin’s] tenacity, industriousness, and exactitude. I considered that there was a lot to learn from him on how to become a good leader-organizer.”303

Balashov made an additional point, though: the general secretary lived inside the apparatus bubble. “I did not like that Stalin was an apparat functionary, an apparatchik,” Balashov noted. “The management of the party and country flowed from us in chancellery fashion, without advice from the masses. Of course, he [Stalin] met with many different people, took part in meetings of village correspondents, for example, specialists. But that all happened in the office. It was as if people were smoking tobacco [makhorka] and nothing was visible in the smoke cloud.”304 But if Stalin had limited contact with the masses, he had an extraordinary degree of contact with young regime functionaries. Whereas Trotsky openly mocked functionaries for perverting the revolution, Bukharin later supposedly told the Menshevik Fyodor Dan that Stalin “is like the symbol of the party, the lower strata trust him.”305 Balashov, who was a Kaganovich protégé but who through an uncle saw Trotsky in private settings, noted that in all the years he (Balashov) worked in the central apparatus (1922–26), Trotsky showed up only once.306 Stalin identified with these people, he listened to their concerns and, although perhaps not capable of genuine empathy, worked to enable mid- and lower-level functionaries to raise their abilities, to master Marxism and administration. Stalin developed a romantic view of the Soviet system that he would hold his entire life. “What must the dict[atorship] of the party signify?” he wrote in a copy of a 1923 work by Lenin. “A state power resting on force? No, that’s rubbish! Unlimited rights by the party? Not that either! The point is not about rights, the point is about trust in the party, and trust does not at all presuppose unlimited rights of the party as its necessary condition. The point is about leadership.”307 Thrust into power, Stalin found himself on a lifelong quest not only for personal glory but also for deciphering the secrets to ruling over men and things in order to further Russian power in the world.

• • •

VOZDVIZHENKA AND THEN OLD SQUARE became the hub in the vast wheel of Stalin’s kingdom. Like its imperial Russian predecessor, the Soviet state emerged as a labyrinth of patron-client relationships that cut across formal institutions. But Stalin’s patron-client relations were strongly institutional: the Communist party machine, for all its inefficiencies and frictions, was something that the tsarist regime just did not have. Because of the party, the vast collection of personal followings that composed the party-state converged on a single person, the party’s leader.308 In a remarkably short time, Stalin had people everywhere that mattered, and the extent to which functionaries serving the cause understood themselves also to be serving him personally was extraordinary. People were surprised by this breathtaking power because they underestimated Stalin. But if such a degree of political control had been established that quickly even by a person immediately recognized as one of the great political figures of all time, it still would have surprised contemporaries. To be sure, the capacity of the dictatorship as of 1922–24 was limited, but it was greater than that of tsarism, for unlike the autocracy, the Soviet regime actively promoted mass mobilization on its behalf. And yet, the Soviet state, too, had failed so far to discover the secret to fully integrating the mobilized masses into an authoritarian polity.

The regime’s political and even physical arrangements reflected the dual revolutions of 1917–18, Bolshevik and peasant, which faced each other warily. Additionally, the two governmental pillars of the New Economic Policy—at Old Square, 8 (agriculture) and Ilinka, 9 (finance)—flanked the central party apparatus. All three bodies were ensconced smack in the heart of Moscow’s prerevolutionary commercial and financial quarter (Kitaigorod), and all three were architectural embodiments of merchant capital and aspirations. How cognizant Stalin was of being housed in Moscow’s prerevolutionary capitalist epicenter, while running the Communist party and presiding over a Communist indulgence of capitalism (NEP), remains unclear. What is clear is that he was marinated in Communist ideology. Lots of regimes have a secret police and hunt for enemies. What differentiated this regime was its special single-party structure and a transcendent idea, the vision of a new world of abundance, social justice, and peace. Many were committed to building that world within the framework of the one-party system, but others became disappointed that that world had not yet materialized. Talk circulated of the New Economic Policy as a Thermidor, the French revolutionary name for the month of July, when, in 1794, a counterrevolution had occurred and the Jacobins were overthrown. To be sure, the Bolsheviks themselves had introduced the NEP and remained in power.309 Still, some observers foresaw an inevitable forced denationalization of industry, with corresponding changes in the political system. The NEP, in such thinking, was merely the first concession.310

Lenin had confessed in November 1922 that “we still do not know where and how we must restructure ourselves, reorganize ourselves, so that after the retreat we may begin a stubborn move forward.”311 It would fall to Stalin to provide an answer. Before that, though, he had to deal with Trotsky. Every dictatorship needs a ubiquitous “enemy,” who threatens it from within. For that role, Trotsky was tailor-made, a gift to Stalin, once he figured that out. It was not Trotsky, let alone Zinoviev or Kamenev, but Stalin’s principal patron, Lenin—or at least, dictation attributed to Lenin—who would prove to be the gravest threat to the absolute power inherent in the general-secretary position, and to Stalin’s psychic balance.