Stalin, Volume 1

CODA

IF STALIN HAD DIED

HE WOULD DO IT. Stalin would force the collectivization of Soviet villages and nomadic steppes inhabited by more than 100 million people between 1928 and 1933, a story taken up in volume II. At least 5 million people, many of the country’s most productive farmers or herders, would be “dekulakized,” that is, enclosed in cattle cars and dumped at far-off wastes, often in winter; some in that number would dekulakize themselves, rushing to sell or abandon their possessions to escape deportation. Those forced into the collectives would burn crops, slaughter animals, and assassinate officials.1 The regime’s urban shock troops would break peasant resistance, but the country’s inventory of horses would plummet from 35 million to 17 million, cattle from 70 million to 38 million, pigs from 26 million to 12 million, sheep and goats from 147 million to 50 million. In Kazakhstan, the losses would be still more staggering: cattle from 7.5 million to 1.6 million, sheep from 21.9 million to 1.7 million. Countrywide, nearly 40 million people would suffer severe hunger or starvation and between 5 and 7 million people would die in the horrific famine, whose existence the regime denied.2 “All the dogs have been eaten,” one eyewitness would be told in a Ukrainian village. “We have eaten everything we could lay our hands on—cats, dogs, field mice, birds—when it’s light tomorrow, you will see that the trees have been stripped of bark, for that too has been eaten. And the horse manure has been eaten. Yes, the horse manure. We fight over it. Sometimes there are whole grains in it.”3

Scholars who argue that Stalin’s collectivization was necessary in order to force a peasant country into the modern era are dead wrong.4 The Soviet Union, like imperial Russia, faced an imperative to modernize in order to survive in the brutally unsentimental international order, but market systems have been shown to be fully compatible with fast-paced industrialization, including in peasant countries. Forced wholesale collectivization only seemed necessary within the straitjacket of Communist ideology and its repudiation of capitalism. And economically, collectivization failed to deliver. Stalin assumed it would increase both the state’s share of low-cost grain purchases and the overall size of the harvest, but although procurements doubled immediately, harvests shrank. Over the longer term, collective farming would not prove superior to large-scale capitalist farming or even to smaller-scale capitalist farming when the latter was provided with machinery, fertilizer, agronomy, and effective distribution.5 In the short term, collectivization would contribute nothing on net to Soviet industrial growth.6

Nor was collectivization necessary to sustain a dictatorship. Private capital and dictatorship are fully compatible. In fascist Italy, industrialists maintained tremendous autonomous power. Mussolini, like Stalin, supported efforts to attack inflation and a balance-of-payments deficit despite the negative impact on domestic employment, for he, too, viewed a “strong” currency as a point of regime prestige. But although for Mussolini, too, economics was subordinate to his political power, he was not a leftist ideologue wedded to theories of class struggle and the like. All he needed was industrialists’ recognition of his political supremacy. He got that despite a December 21, 1927, upward revaluation of the lira that the industrialists had adamantly opposed—exports declined (and unemployment skyrocketed to at least 10 percent)—because Mussolini rejected demands by fascism’s syndicalist wing to force production and consumption under the aegis of the state. Instead, the fascist regime lowered taxes and transport costs for domestic industry, increased the allowances for depreciation and amortization, prioritized domestic producers on government contracts, encouraged the concentration of industry to reduce competition in order to keep profit levels up, increased tariffs, and took on some of the exchange risk associated with debt contracted by Italian industry abroad.7 The Italian dictatorship did not go about destroying the country’s economically successful people, who could be imprisoned quickly if they became foolish enough to hint at political opposition. None of this is meant to uphold Italian fascism in any way as a model, but merely to spotlight that nothing prevented the Communist dictatorship from embracing private capital—nothing, that is, except idées fixes.

Nor did an adverse turn in the world economy compel collectivization.8 Global deflation in commodity prices did hit the Soviet Union hard, reducing the revenues from the sale abroad of Soviet grain, oil, timber, and sugar, but Stalin, in his grand speech in Siberia on January 20, 1928, made no mention of such conditions as a factor in his decision. If the global terms of trade for primary goods producers had been favorable, would Stalin have said in Novosibirsk that day, Let’s develop large-scale privately owned kulak farms with privately hired labor? Look at these high global grain prices, we’ll never have to collectivize the peasantry! If the Soviet Union had obtained abundant long-term foreign credits in 1927–28, would Stalin have said, Let’s double down on markets at home? So what if we risk the party’s monopoly! The pernicious idea that global capitalism caused Stalin’s resort to extreme violence and erection of a brutal command system, in order to exercise control over the export commodities needed to finance industrialization, ignores the vast trove of evidence on the salience of ideology, including ideology’s role in worsening the USSR’s international position in the first place. There was a debate inside the USSR in the 1920s about how to modernize the country, but it was a remarkably narrow debate in which important options were closed off.9

For that reason, it will not do to simplify collectivization as just another instance in the Russian state’s infamous strong-arming of a predominantly peasant country because its agricultural season—in its northern climate, on a par with Canada—lasted a mere 125 days, perhaps half the length in Europe, where yields per acre were higher. The image of a Russian state through the centuries as a cruel military occupier at home is one-sided: Alexander had emancipated the serfs and Stolypin’s peasant reforms were voluntary. And Stalin was motivated by more than competition with more fortunate European rivals. Like Stolypin, Stalin wanted consolidated, contiguous farms, not the separated, small strips of the commune, but he ruled out the Stolypin route of betting on independent yeoman farmers (kulaks). Critics of Bolshevism abroad had urged old-regime professionals to work for the Soviet regime precisely in order to transform it from within, toward a Russian nationalist order and a full capitalist restoration.10 Such hopes were Stalin’s fears. Collectivization would give the Communists control over the vast countryside, a coveted goal no regime in Russia had ever had. But still more fundamentally, collectivization, like state-run and state-owned industry, constituted a form of ostensible modernization that negated capitalism. Thus did Stalin “solve” the Bolsheviks’ conundrum of how, in the words of Lenin’s last public speech, “NEP Russia could become socialist Russia.”11

• • •

THERE ARE ALWAYS ALTERNATIVES IN HISTORY. The germane question is, was there an alternative within the Leninist revolution? Nikolai Bukharin had set out the magical thinking underlying the NEP when he and Stalin drew close in political alliance. “We had thought it was possible to destroy market relations in one stroke, immediately,” Bukharin had written in The Path to Socialism and the Worker-Peasant Alliance. “It turned out that we shall reach socialism precisely through market relations.” Come again? “Market relations will be destroyed as a result of their own development.” How, exactly? Well, explained Bukharin, under capitalism, large entities end up crushing small ones in market competition, ergo, in the Soviet Union case, the large companies under state control, as well as amalgamated peasant cooperatives, would just squeeze the small private peasant farms out of existence.12 Some version of this abracadabra—that the Soviet Union could, somehow, “grow into socialism” via the NEP—had taken hold in many pockets of the party. But Bukharin was also the one who inadvertently had crystallized the impossibility of growing into anticapitalism via markets with his summons for peasants to “Enrich yourselves!”13 Of course, as any peasant could have told him—and as many did, writing to, among other newspapers, Pravda, which Bukharin edited—no sooner did a peasant household manage to achieve some success, then it was squeezed mercilessly by punitive taxation. And in 1928, with the grain procurement shortfall, hardworking peasants were subjected to criminal sanctions. When armed squads confiscated eight bulls, seven cows, four calves, three horses, thirty-six tons of wheat, a cart, a threshing machine, and a mill from B. Bondarenko of Aktyubinsk province, while sentencing him to a year in prison, he asked the presiding judge to provide an explanation for the basis of his conviction because he was not guilty of a crime. “Our goal is to dekulakize you,” the judge snapped.14 Here was the fateful formulation.

NEP, via its own middling success, was producing kulaks who, in turn, were the ones producing the harvest. Kamenev, at their July 11, 1928, encounter, had pointedly asked Bukharin about his plan for procuring grain, recording the following response: “One can persecute the kulak as much as possible, but we must make peace with the middle peasant.” But out in the countryside where such decisions were made by officials following the same class analysis, a farmer with three cows in 1925 who had six by 1928 suddenly became registered as a “class-enemy.” In Vologda, a dairy center, where Stalin had spent several years of domestic exile under the tsars, between 1927 and 1928 alone the number of kulaks leapt from 6,315 to 8,462, more than 2,000 new “bloodsuckers,” at a time when the province counted just 2,500 rural Communists.15 For marketed grain, the regime had become dependent on just 2 million peasant-household producers who sowed more than eight hectares each.16 This was a substantial population—not Bukharin’s alleged mere 3 to 4 percent of kulaks—which was susceptible to reclassification as class enemies because of their hard work. The class analysis to which all top Bolsheviks subscribed, Bukharin included, effectively ensured that the NEP had to fail if it succeeded.

Bukharin presented no genuine alternative to Stalin, even leaving aside the fact that he lacked political heft or an organizational power base. A figure with a more solid reputation and skill set was Alexei Rykov, far and away the most important proponent of the NEP. It was the authoritative Rykov who chaired politburo meetings, and had opened and closed the 15th Party Congress. A talented administrator, he possessed skills that Kamenev had only to a lesser degree and that Zinoviev and Trotsky lacked almost completely. Rykov “was gregarious and hearty and would often visit his subordinates in their homes, even if they were not Communists,” observed Simon Liberman, who knew him from 1906 and worked under him after the revolution. “He loved to take a glass with them and have expansive talks with them. His slight stutter made him a good deal more human than most of his forbidding colleagues.”17 The warmhearted kindly provincial doctor whom Liberman imagined was not the Rykov who had gone after Trotsky with a vengeance and never wavered during the infighting against the opposition. Rykov was rumored to be prone to alcohol abuse—as one nasty joke had it, “Trotsky dictates in his last will that upon his death his brain should be preserved in alcohol with the instruction that the brain goes to Stalin and the alcohol to Rykov”—but it is unclear if this was true. Rykov was a hard Bolshevik but prudent type, favoring fiscal discipline and living within one’s means. He did not dispute that in time small-scale farming would have to be replaced by large-scale and mechanized farms and that modernized farms would be “socialist” (collectivized), but he put a premium on the stability engendered by the NEP’s class conciliation. His position was less that the NEP would alchemize capitalism into socialism (Bukharin) than that forced collectivization could simply not be done, and that any attempt to do so would merely destroy what progress had been made since the civil war and famine, bringing on renewed catastrophe.

Rykov turned out to be bleakly prescient about forced collectivization’s dire, destabilizing consequences, but on the question of what to do instead he had little idea, other than staying the failing course of the NEP. Another figure, however, who worked under Rykov for many years did have some idea—Grigory Sokolnikov. Sokolnikov, who was Bukharin’s former gymnasium classmate, was also known for his softness and intellectualism. He belonged to that group of Bolsheviks—Krasin, Chicherin, Rakovski—from well-to-do families, which could be politically problematic. But he had turned out to be nearly perfect for the role of finance commissar. And when Bukharin was allied with Stalin and eviscerating the United opposition, Sokolnikov clashed with the dictator by insisting on open debate within the monopoly Communist party, including the right to open debate for Zinoviev and Kamenev, with whom Sokolnikov disagreed fundamentally on economic policy. Even in the aftermath of the brouhaha over Bukharin’s “Enrich yourselves” speech, Sokolnikov had not shrunk from extolling market relations. To be sure, unlike Yakov Yakovlev, the founder and editor of Peasant Newspaper, Sokolnikov did not go as far as to advocate that the regime allow peasants to register their de facto possession of land as private property, which could be bought, sold, or inherited. Still, Sokolnikov had insisted that the market, at least in the countryside, was compatible with socialism—not just during the present difficult conjuncture, but permanently. He also insisted that the so-called kulaks were good farmers, not enemies.

Sokolnikov agreed with Rykov’s and Bukharin’s insistence on a version of industrialization compatible with market equilibrium, but he went much further and explicitly rejected the vision, alluring to almost all Communists, of achieving comprehensive economic planning in practice. (Sokolnikov allowed for the lesser possibility of coordination.)18 Of course, almost all non-Bolshevik specialists in the finance commissariat and elsewhere were saying this, but Sokolnikov was a member of the Central Committee. He had not argued in favor of capitalism—it is hard to see how any Bolshevik could have done so and survived in a leadership position—and implementing his market socialism would not have been easy. The Soviet party-state lacked much of the institutional capacity necessary to regulate a market economy skillfully (Sokolnikov excepted). This was especially true of the mixed-state market economy of the NEP, which required a subtle understanding of the effects on the country’s macroeconomy of price controls and use of state power against private traders.19 Nonetheless, acceptance of the market and rejection of planning as a chimera were the sine qua non of any alternative path to the one Stalin had proclaimed in Novosibirsk in January 1928.

When Stalin had evicted Sokolnikov from the politburo and finance commissariat in early 1926, he had named him deputy chairman of the state planning commission—aware that Sokolnikov did not believe in planning—but this had not ended Sokolnikov’s career. He had been part of a Soviet delegation to a world economic conference in Geneva convened by the League of Nations in May 1927, when he delivered a substantive, businesslike speech on the Soviet economy and socialism that evidently impressed at least some members of the foreign audience. (Sokolnikov, who had a doctorate from the Sorbonne, spoke even better French than Bukharin.) Sokolnikov argued that the Soviet mode of industrialization was distinct because of coordination and the participation of the masses, but he called for trade and cooperation between the capitalist world and the Soviet Union, especially in the form of foreign investment.20 The applause was said to have emanated from “every seating bench of the parliament of the capitalist economy,” as a Swiss journalist sympathetic to the left observed, according to Pravda. “Even the English applauded in a sign of approval of Sokolnikov’s speech.”21 This favorable assessment in the party organ was followed, in summer 1927, by Sokolnikov’s break with the opposition.22 In December 1927, at the 15th Congress, Stalin allowed Sokolnikov to be reelected to the Central Committee, a nearly unique outcome for a former oppositionist. In spring 1928, Stalin would shift Sokolnikov over to the chairmanship of the oil trust; oil exports began to generate significant budget revenues.

That said, Sokolnikov was a mere individual, not a faction. No top military men were loyal to him; no high GPU operatives worked for him; he had no Kremlin telephone network (the vertushka) at his command, except when he was summoned on it; no power to send out directives in the name of the Central Committee on which he sat. Sokolnikov had enjoyed his greatest influence under Stalin’s patronage and now, too, his promarket, antiplanning stance would have required a politically muscular patron—such as Rykov. A Rykov-Sokolnikov political-intellectual leadership would have offered a genuine alternative to Stalin only if Rykov and others in a ruling coalition came around to capitulating on the commitment to anticapitalism in the village. Such an eventuality would have raised weighty questions: Would the regime be able to manage one system (socialism) for the city and another system (petit bourgeois capitalism) for the countryside? Would such an arrangement have even permitted socialism in the city? Would the Communist party have had to surrender its political monopoly eventually and, if so, would a Rykov-Sokolnikov leadership have acceded to or survived that? Would Rykov, who was far closer to Stalin than to Sokolnikov and fundamentally did not understand markets, even have accepted Sokolnikov as a partner?23

Of course, the existence of Stalin’s personal dictatorship meant that any real alternative to his preferred course—as opposed to a mere intellectual exercise—had to trump his power, either by outvoting him, because members of his faction defected, or by removing him. Bukharin had tried such a maneuver and failed, but when Stalin, by offering to resign, handed Rykov the opportunity, he failed to seize it. Perhaps Rykov acted out of political self-preservation, given Stalin’s power and vengeful disposition. But Rykov and others in the politburo had come to see not only a prickly, self-centered, often morose, vindictive person in Stalin, but also an indomitable Communist and leader of inner strength, utterly dedicated to Lenin’s ideas, able to carry the entire apparatus, the country, and the cause of the world revolution on his back.24 Stalin displayed a strategic mind, which had its cruelties—sizing up the weaknesses of Bukharin for sadistic as well as political purposes—but also its payoffs for managing the nationalities and regional party machines. Additionally, the group arrayed around Stalin was incomparably below him. Orjonikidze was no strategist, and in constant poor health; Voroshilov was no military man, and he knew it; Kirov had a public politician’s touch but was given to laziness and womanizing; Kaganovich was an organizer of talent but barely educated; Mikoyan worshiped Stalin, not just for careerist reasons, but because he was young; Kalinin was underestimated, but also no Stalin; Molotov could flex some political muscles, but even he operated in Stalin’s shadow. Stalin’s dark side had become no small matter to manage, but managing entirely without his leadership?

Perhaps, in the end, Rykov clung to the hope that Stalin would see the folly of his coercive turn. But Stalin would charge Bukharin and Rykov with failing to accept the logic of their own Leninism. If the Soviet Union needed to mechanize agriculture on the basis of consolidated farms (it did), and if one believed this should ultimately occur within a socialist (non-capitalist) framework (at the top almost all believed so), and if the peasants were not joining collectives voluntarily (they were not), what was the Leninist conclusion? Either seize the means of production in the countryside or be prepared to sacrifice the party’s monopoly in the long run, for, according to Marxism, class was the determinant of politics and the flourishing of a new bourgeoisie would inevitably bring political consequences. Stalin “was incorruptible and irreconcilable in class questions,” Nikita Khrushchev, a rising official in the Ukrainian party apparatus at the time of Stalin’s trip to Siberia, would recall. “It was one of his strongest qualities, and he was greatly respected for it.”25

• • •

ULTIMATELY, the principal alternative to Stalin was the willing abandonment or unwilling unhinging of the Bolshevik regime—which Stalin himself almost caused, and not just because of collectivization.

Authoritarian rulers the world over were almost never so bold as to stand up to the great powers, putting their personal regimes at risk. They pursued private gain, appointed relatives and cronies, gathered harems, delivered Populist speeches in public about defending the interests of the patria, then sold out their countries to the Europeans or gringos for the enrichment of themselves and their entourages. This was the typical story of Latin American caudillos, for example. The Soviet Union, to be sure, had a conception of itself as a world power, the center of world revolution, but it, too, was a peasant country, and still hurting from civil war and famine, yet standing up to the whole world. The Bolsheviks, with their coup, had created a condition of capitalist encirclement, then proceeded to conduct themselves in a way that reinforced their predicament, attempting coups in countries where they had won hard-fought diplomatic recognition and sought wider trade relations. But if the challenges for Russian power in the world, always great, had grown harder under a Communist regime, which had no alliances or real friends, they grew harder still as a result of Stalin’s brazen defiance.

Alongside the previous shocks of Bismarck’s unification of Germany and the Meiji restoration in Japan, whose challenges grew, on top of the long-standing competition with the global British empire, had been added a series of new shocks: the anti-Soviet states in former imperial Russian territories—the “limitrophe” of Poland, Finland, and the Baltics, as well as Greater Romania. Moreover, Germany, the United States, Britain, France, even Italy possessed the world’s advanced industrial technology, and the Soviets had been appealing to capitalists’ greed, offering to pay good money, in the form of technical assistance contracts, for advanced machines and assistance in mounting and operating them. It was not really working. But although he had tried to cut a deal with France by recognizing tsarist debts, Stalin detested the prospect of becoming dependent on foreign bankers, or conceding changes in Soviet domestic political arrangements. Provocatively, he turned to arresting German engineers in the Shakhty fabrication almost immediately after restarting negotiations for major German loans and investments, shocking Berlin and other capitals. The Soviet Union, Pravda wrote grimly in late summer 1928, would have to rely “on our own strength without help from abroad.”26 But going it alone was a delusion: the Red Army could be crushed by superior technology.

Had Stalin not only caused the mass loss of the country’s most productive farmers and half its livestock in collectivization but also failed to finagle the machinery necessary for Soviet industrialization, including tractors for agriculture, his rule would have risked the destruction of the Leninist revolution. But a fortuitous event rescued his reckless gambling. On September 4, 1929, stock prices began to fall in New York and on October 29 the market crashed. A host of structural factors and policy mistakes transformed the financial dislocation into a Great Depression. By 1933, industrial production would drop by 46 percent in the United States, 41 percent in Germany, and 23 percent in Britain. Unemployment in the United States would reach 25 percent and still higher elsewhere. International trade would drop by half. Construction would come to a virtual standstill. The world’s misfortune was Stalin’s great, unforeseen fortune.

Of course, in Marxist thinking this was no accident: Capitalism was seen as inherently prone to booms and busts, a market economy produced depressions, misallocation of capital, mass unemployment, for which planning was supposed to be the answer. But there had never before been a capitalist crisis on the scale of the Great Depression (and there has not been since). The timing of the Depression, moreover, could not have been better for Stalin: right after he launched collectivization and dekulakization. The upshot was a windfall. More than one thousand factories would be newly built or overhauled from top to bottom, and nearly every single blueprint and advanced machine came from abroad.27 The Depression afforded Stalin unprecedented leverage: suddenly, the capitalists needed the Soviet market as much as the Soviets needed their advanced technology. Without the Great Depression would the capitalists have developed such overwhelming incentives to pursue the Soviet market no matter what? Indeed, the capitalist powers not only sold their best technology to the Communist regime, they continued doing so even after the Soviets were found to be violating contracts by purchasing designs for one factory and using them for others, trickery that was amply recorded in indignant internal foreign company records; the capitalist had no other customers for massive capital goods. Scholars who write of Moscow facing an “uncooperative world economy” have it exactly backward.28 Ideology and the party monopoly were the constraints; the global economy, the enabler. In fact, the global economic crisis was a double gift. Nothing did more to legitimate Stalin’s system. But Stalin had no idea that a Great Depression was around the corner, and that it would bring the foreign capitalists on bended knee.

Because of the Great Depression, we forget just how wild was Stalin’s gamble—as great or greater than Lenin’s October coup, Brest-Litovsk, and the NEP. The Communist party, let alone the country, was not prepared for forced wholesale collectivization. Stalin could use the police to outflank the party, of course, but he also had to mount a high-profile public trial to fan the flames of “class warfare” The mass mobilization campaign launched with the Shakhty trial entailed the arrests of many qualified engineers amid a severe shortage, when they were desperately needed for the regime’s ambitious industrialization.29 The disruption caused by removing supposedly recalcitrant or sabotaging engineers was worse than whatever these alleged wreckers could have caused. Both collectivization and the class warfare campaign also required Stalin to outmaneuver his own inner circle, which looks easy only in retrospect.

The Shakhty trial and related actions seemed to afford Stalin’s personal dictatorship the power to overcome resistance among apparatchiks to collectivization, and to root the regime in more than itself. This task was urgent not just to disprove the critique by Trotsky—that Stalin’s was a regime of functionaries—but because Stalin genuinely believed in the working-class social base. In addition, many young people, especially those Stalin was now trying to rally, had secretly continued to sympathize with Trotsky.30 More broadly, in Soviet society disappointment had become pervasive over the failures of the revolution to deliver abundance and social justice. The vast majority of “anti-Soviet” utterances recorded in police summaries in fact had the populace demanding or wishing the regime live up to socialist goals. Nostalgia for “Father Lenin,” misguided in the brutal facts of his rule, made sense in terms of a yearning to reclaim the revolution’s promise. Shakhty promised a chance to regain the earlier elan. That all this upheaval, from the countryside to the mines and factories, was going to work out in Stalin’s favor, however, was hardly guaranteed. He put everything on the line, including his personal power.

• • •

SUBJECTS OF BIOGRAPHY often are portrayed as forming their personalities, including their views about authority and obedience—that is, about power—in childhood and especially the family. But do we really need to locate the wellsprings of Stalin’s politics or even his troubled soul in beatings he allegedly received as a child in Gori? The beatings likely never took place, certainly not to the extent they have usually been portrayed, but even if they had? Similarly, were the oppressive surveillance, informing, and arbitrary governance at the Tiflis seminary the critical formative experiences of Stalin’s life? That training ground for priests was a nest of tyranny and stool pigeons, but so was the entirety of Russia under the autocracy, and many of the softest Georgian Mensheviks came out of the very same seminary as Stalin did. To be sure, his intense relationship with the daring Lado Ketskhoveli, and the latter’s early death at the hands of tsarist jailers, made a lasting impression on him, helping to solidify his lifelong Marxist convictions. And Stalin’s prolonged struggle as a Bolshevik and Lenin loyalist against the overwhelming Menshevik majority of Georgia’s Social Democrats made a lasting imprint, too, sowing or eliciting some of his inner demons. In other words, Stalin’s marked personal traits, which colored his momentous political decisions, emerged as a result of politics. This suggestion to explain Stalin’s person through politics amounts to more than expediency (in the absence of plentiful, reliable sources on his early life and inner mind). Even though he had inherited the possibility of a personal dictatorship from Lenin, Stalin went through significant psychological ordeals in the struggle to be acclaimed as Lenin’s successor.

It had taken Stalin years of angling and stress to rid himself of Trotsky, a bitter rivalry that had ensued already in 1917, intensified during the civil war into near obsession, and dominated the inner life of the party after the onset of Lenin’s fatal illness. The Trotsky struggle had exerted a deep influence on Stalin’s character. No less profound an impact came in Stalin’s struggle with Lenin’s dictation. From May-June 1923 on, Stalin was embroiled in several years of infighting during which Lenin’s purported Testament appeared suddenly, and kept reappearing, refusing to go away. With his manifold instruments of personal power, he was mercilessly hounding all those who expressed differences of opinion with him, but he was always the victim. Whether this entailed some sort of long-standing persecution complex or one of more recent vintage cannot be established given the extant sources. But we can say for certain that the internecine political warfare with the opposition—not just with Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, but also with the Testament—brought this behavior out.

When all is said and done, the “succession struggle” was with a piece of paper—a few typed lines, no signature, no identifying initials. Stalin triumphed over its recommendation, but the Testament continued to broadcast an irrepressible echo: Stalin’s personality is dangerous; find a way to remove Stalin. He resigned, again and again. He cut a deal for a truce with them, and they published the Testament in the New York Times. He could trust no one. All the while, he was responsible for everything. It was all on his back. But did they appreciate this? Let them try to do better. They again affirmed his leadership. But it was never sufficient.

Closed and gregarious, vindictive and solicitous, Stalin shatters any attempt to contain him within binaries. He was by inclination a despot who, when he wanted to be, was utterly charming. He was an ideologue who was flexibly pragmatic. He fastened obsessively on slights yet he was a precocious geostrategic thinker—unique among Bolsheviks—who was, however, prone to egregious strategic blunders. Stalin was as a ruler both astute and blinkered, diligent and self-defeating, cynical and true believing. The cold calculation and the flights of absurd delusion were products of a single mind. He was shrewd enough to see right through people, but not enough to escape a litany of nonsensical beliefs. Above all, he became in the 1920s ever more steeped in conspiracies. But Stalin’s increasing hyper-suspiciousness bordering on paranoia was fundamentally political—and it closely mirrored the Bolshevik revolution’s in-built structural paranoia, the predicament of a Communist regime in an overwhelmingly capitalist world, surrounded by, penetrated by enemies.

• • •

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION—against the tyranny, corruption, and, not least, incompetence of tsarism—sparked soaring hopes for a new world of abundance, social justice, and peace. But all that was precluded by the Bolsheviks, who unwittingly yet relentlessly reproduced the pathologies and predations of the old regime state in new forms (even more than had their French Revolution forerunners, as Alexis de Tocqueville demonstrated for France). The reason was not circumstance but intentional political monopoly as well as Communist convictions, which deepened the debilitating circumstances cited to justify ever more statization and violence. To be sure, socioeconomic class was (and remains) undeniable. But the construction of political order on the basis of class, rather than common humanity and individual liberty, was (and always will be) ruinous. All non-Leninist socialists eventually discovered that if they wanted genuine democracy, they had to abandon Marx’s summons to negate and transcend capitalism and markets. In the Soviet case, for anyone not hopelessly sunk in the ideological soup, events provided ample opportunity for a rethinking—for recognition of the dire need to exit the Leninist cul-de-sac: abandon the self-defeating class war approach, accept the market as not inherently evil, encourage prospering farmers to continue, and help lift up the others. But such admissions, for almost every Bolshevik of consequence, proved too great.

Still, even within the encumbering Leninist frame, a Soviet leader could have gone out of his way to reduce the paranoia built into the regime’s relations with the outside world and its domestic situation. A Soviet leader could have paid the price of partial accommodation, grasping that capitalism was not, in fact, dying out globally and that the capitalist powers were not, in fact, hellbent on overturning the revolutionary regime at all costs. But Stalin was not such a leader. Of course, all authoritarian regimes, in order to suppress dissent and gin up the masses, cynically require profuse “enemies.” On top of that, though, Stalin intensified the insanity inherent in Leninism from conviction and personal characteristics, ensuring that the permanent state of war with the whole world led to a state of war with the country’s majority population, and carrying the Leninist program to its full end goal of anti-capitalism.

Stalin had not liked the NEP any more than Trotsky had, although like Lenin, and because of Lenin, Stalin appreciated the recourse to pragmatism for the greater cause. But by 1928, immediately upon Trotsky’s deportation to Kazakhstan, Stalin acted upon his long-standing leftist core convictions because, like Lenin in 1921, when the NEP had been introduced, Stalin felt the survival of the revolution was at stake, and that he had the political room to act. Stalin could never admit that Trotsky and the Left opposition, in their critique of the NEP, had been, in his view, correct: it was beyond Stalin’s character to be genuinely magnanimous, and it would have undermined his rationale for Trotsky’s internal exile, provoking calls for his reinstatement. But those who believe Trotsky could have, and would have, done much the same thing as Stalin are mistaken. Trotsky was just not the leader people thought he was, or that Stalin turned out to be.

Without Lenin, Trotsky never again demonstrated the leadership that he had in 1917 and during the civil war under Lenin’s authority. On the very uneven playing field of the personal dictatorship that Stalin inherited by dint of his appointment as general secretary and Lenin’s stroke, Trotsky was still capable of brilliant polemics, but not of building an ever-wider faction, dividing his enemies, subsuming his convictions to necessary tactical considerations. More than that, Trotsky had never been an indefatigable, nitty-gritty administrator or a strategist capable of ruthlessly opportunistic improvisation. Whatever the overlap between his and Stalin’s core beliefs, Stalin’s abilities and resolve were an order of magnitude greater.

But what if Stalin had died?31 He had come down with a serious case of appendicitis in 1921, requiring surgery. “It was difficult to guarantee the outcome,” Dr. V. N. Rozanov recalled. “Lenin in the morning and in the evening called me in the hospital. He not only inquired about Stalin’s health, but demanded the most thorough report.”32 Stalin had complained of pain, despite a local anesthetic, and Rozanov administered a heavy dose of chloroform, the kind of heavy dose he would administer to Frunze in 1925, who died not long after his own operation.33 Stalin, who may have also suffered ulcers (possibly attributive to typhus), following his own operation had taken a rest cure—ordered by the politburo—at Nalchik in the North Caucasus from May through August 1921.34 In December 1921, he was again incapacitated by illness.35

Later, Kremlin doctors recorded that Stalin had suffered malaria at some point in his youth. In 1909, in exile, he had a bout of typhus in the Vyatka hospital, a relapse because he had suffered it in childhood. Stalin’s elder second brother Giorgy, whom he never knew, had died of typhus. In 1915, in Siberian exile, Stalin contracted rheumatism, which periodically flared, accompanied by quinsy and flu.36 Stalin also suffered tuberculosis prior to the revolution. His first wife, Kato, died of tuberculosis or typhus. Yakov Sverdlov, with whom Stalin bunked in a single room in Siberian exile, had tuberculosis, and Stalin moved out. Sverdlov appears to have died of TB in 1919. Tuberculosis might have killed off Stalin as well.

Stalin could have been assassinated. The archives record oblique instances when potential assassins had been able to approach him or stage themselves at places he was likely to appear. At the theater one evening, for example, Dzierzynski noticed someone inside the entrance looking at the posted announcements; when Stalin exited, a different person was in the same place, doing the same thing. “If they are not ours,” he instructed in a note written that same night, “then, for sure, it is necessary to pay attention. Clarify and report.”37

Mussolini by this time had been the target of four assassination attempts, most recently when a teenager in Bologna shot at him but narrowly missed.38 On July 6, 1928, during the Soviet party plenum, a bomb was hurled at the office for passes to the OGPU in Moscow. The perpetrators linked to emigre terrorists.39 Nikolai Vlasik (b. 1896), the son of poor peasants in Belorussia, who worked in the department responsible for leadership security but was on holiday at the time, was summoned back to Moscow and included in a task force charged with reorganizing the security protection for the Cheka, the Kremlin, government dachas, and the movement of leaders between places. According to Vlasik, who would become Stalin’s lifelong chief bodyguard, in 1928 the dictator had only his Lithuanian bodyguard Jusis, who accompanied him on trips to his dachas at Zubalovo and Sochi and the walks to and from Old Square.40 Stalin was within reach of a determined assassin, to say nothing of a regime insider.

Sokolnikov, in the meetings with Kamenev in summer 1928, citing Bukharin, relayed that Tomsky, while drunk, had come up and whispered into Stalin’s ear, “Soon our workers will starting shooting you.”41 This story exists in other versions, often as an incident at Stalin’s Sochi dacha where, on someone’s birthday, a group was drinking, eating kebabs, and singing Russian folk and revolutionary songs.42 Whatever the particulars, assassinating Stalin was not beyond contemplation in the politburo.

If Stalin had died, the likelihood of forced wholesale collectivization—the only kind—would have been near zero, and the likelihood that the Soviet regime would have been transformed into something else or fallen apart would have been high. “More than almost any other great man in history,” wrote the historian E. H. Carr, “Stalin illustrates the thesis that circumstances make the man, not the man the circumstances.”43 Utterly, eternally wrong. Stalin made history, rearranging the entire socioeconomic landscape of one sixth of the earth. Right through mass rebellion, mass starvation, cannibalism, the destruction of the country’s livestock, and unprecedented political destabilization, Stalin did not flinch. Feints in the form of tactical retreats notwithstanding, he would keep going even when told to his face by officials in the inner regime that a catastrophe was unfolding—full speed ahead to socialism. This required extraordinary maneuvering, browbeating, and violence on his part. It also required deep conviction that it had to be done. Stalin was uncommonly skillful in building an awesome personal dictatorship, but also a bungler, getting fascism wrong, stumbling in foreign policy. But he had will. He went to Siberia in January 1928 and did not look back. History, for better and for worse, is made by those who never give up.