Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

CHAPTER 3 VICTORY

Imagine that a house is being built, and when it is finished it will be a magnificent palace. But it is still not finished, and you draw it in this condition and say, “There’s your socialism”—and there’s no roof. You will be a realist, of course—you will be telling the truth. But it is immediately apparent that this truth is in actual fact an untruth. Only the person who understands what kind of house is being built, how it is being built, and who understands that it will have a roof can utter socialist truth.

ANATOLY LUNACHARSKY, former commissar of enlightenment, 1933 ¹

MARXIST IMPERATIVES OF transcending capitalism—combined with inordinate willpower—brought apocalypse. During the first Five-Year Plan, the volume of investment quadrupled, to 44 percent of GDP by 1932 (measured in 1928 prices), but none of the massive net increase in investment came from higher agricultural surpluses.² Grain exports did not end up paying for imports of machinery.³ Soviet agriculture made no net contribution to industrialization; on the contrary, it was a net recipient of resources during the plan. True, a key driver of the industrial spurt was new labor power from villages, but the statist system used those workers grossly inefficiently. Another key driver of the spurt was brutally suppressed consumption (reinforced by that thief called inflation).⁴ Should we view peasant starvation as a source of “investment”? Even if we did, collectivization and dekulakization lowered agricultural output dramatically.⁵ Stalin’s policies did expand state procurement of grain, potatoes, and vegetables, but at breathtaking economic, to say nothing of human, cost. Collectivization involved the arrest, execution, internal deportation, or incarceration of 4 to 5 million peasants; the effective enslavement of another 100 million; and the loss of tens of millions of head of livestock. The industrialization and accompanying militarization began to revive the Soviet Union as a great power, a necessity for survival in the international system, but collectivization was not “necessary” to “modernize” a peasant economy or industrialize.⁶

Collectivization was necessary from the point of view of Marxism-Leninism, which asserted that only a noncapitalist “mode of production” could undergird a Communist regime.⁷ Once the fall 1933 harvest proved to be good, and the unbalanced investments of the first Five-Year Plan finally produced results in the second plan, even skeptics gave Stalin his due: his lunatic gamble had panned out. Socialism (anticapitalism) was victorious in the countryside as well as the city. But culture, too, for Marxists, was an integral aspect of any system of class relations, and in culture Stalin was still groping his way. Letters from cultural figures got to his desk quickly—his aides understood his interest—and, as in foreign policy, he made just about every significant decision (unlike in the economy, for want of time or interest).⁸ But the challenges proved different, not amenable to blunt class warfare. Culture did not offer the equivalent of capitalist private property or “bourgeois” parliaments to eradicate as the path to socialism. Certainly for Stalin, the party had the right to determine the disposition of all writers and artists, but not in a clumsy way.

This chapter examines the period from summer 1933 to early fall 1934, although at times it will track back in time to illuminate the trajectory of Stalin’s engagement with the artistic intelligentsia, while weaving in the workings of the Union and continuing developments in foreign affairs. Trotsky, early on, had argued that the literary sphere had its own relatively autonomous dynamic and therefore should not be administered the same way as the economy or politics (“Art must make its own way and by its own means”).⁹ He had objected to a drive for an exclusively “proletarian” culture, championed the works of “fellow travelers,” a term he coined for those who did not join the party but sympathized with the cause, and defined the party’s task in culture as ensuring that influential fellow travelers did not go over to the side of “the bourgeoisie.”¹⁰ Stalin had taken exactly the same position. A politburo decree had denied a monopoly to the early movement for proletarian culture, and supported a “society for the development of Russian culture,” to be headed by a non-party “Soviet-minded” writer of stature.¹¹ Stalin approved a proposal for a non-party writers’ periodical, Literary Newspaper.¹² The militant culture movement endured under the name Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.¹³ Factions for and against an exclusively proletarian culture, with the former tending to be Russocentric and the latter tending to see themselves as internationalist, dragged Stalin into their political-aesthetic and personal vendettas.¹⁴ But in culture, he blocked intransigent enforcement of Communist ideology, groping his way to a socialist aesthetic.

PHARAOH

Solovki, the regime’s original prison labor camp, which provided timber and fish, got displaced in the early 1930s by giant new forced labor complexes, such as one in northern Kazakhstan for ore mining and metals.¹⁵ Most ambitiously, in the harsh Chukotka territory, the Far Northern Construction Trust, or Dalstroi, was formed to extract gold.¹⁶ Prisoners traveled in cattle cars across the length of the USSR, then, from the railway terminus at Vladivostok, by ship more than 1,700 miles across the Sea of Okhotsk to Nagayevo Bay and the settlement of Magadan. The first slave labor ships had arrived there in June 1932, mostly with thieves, bandits, and murderers, almost half of whom failed to survive the journey.¹⁷ To reach the gold-digging areas, Dalstroi used tank crews to clear a path northward up the Okhotsk coast and in along the Kolyma River, then had prisoners lay roadbeds of logs over frozen earth, shortening what had been multiweek trips by reindeer. Thanks partly to a relatively rational treatment of slave laborers, more than 100 million rubles’ worth of gold would be mined each year.¹⁸ Beyond Dalstroi, though, the expected savings on cheap prison labor were often undone by low productivity and high administrative costs.¹⁹ Still, the Gulag was crucial for developing remote areas. The Union was not only an ethnoterritorial but also an economic structure.

Stalin did not visit the slave labor complexes, with one notable exception: the White Sea–Baltic Canal. Declared finished on June 20, 1933, after just twenty-one months, it extended for 155 miles, longer than the Panama and Suez canals, through difficult terrain.²⁰ Under Yagoda’s chaperoning, from July 18 to 25, Stalin, Voroshilov, Kirov, and Yenukidze sailed the entire canal, also touring the Kola Peninsula, the Northern Fleet, and the polar port of Murmansk. Kirov had driven to Moscow and chauffeured his guests to Leningrad.²¹ Stalin’s fellow Georgian Orjonikidze was the dictator’s oldest close friend in the regime, but Kirov—a Russian who had spent the underground years in the Caucasus—had become even closer.²² Stalin called him Mironych, an affectionate diminutive of his patronymic, and sometimes Kirych.²³ As a new general secretary, Stalin had given him a copy of his On Lenin and Leninism, inscribed TO MY FRIEND AND MY BELOVED BROTHER.²⁴ Stalin had transferred Kirov from Baku to replace Zinoviev as head of the Leningrad party organization, the most important after Moscow, a posting Kirov had resisted, yielding only after Stalin agreed it would be temporary (allowing him to return to the Caucasus). Kirov stayed on to rout the entrenched Zinoviev machine.²⁵ It was partly the chance to spend time with Kirov that drew Stalin to visit the canal.

Kirov’s personal qualities—straightforward, amiable—endeared him to more conniving Bolsheviks. “Stalin loved and respected Kirov above all others,” a longtime bodyguard would recall. “He loved him with a kind of touching, tender love. Kirov’s trips to Moscow and the south were for Stalin a genuine holiday. Sergei Mironovich would come for a week, two. In Moscow he would stay at Stalin’s apartment, and Stalin would literally not separate from him.”²⁶ “Stalin loved him,” Molotov recalled. “He was Stalin’s favorite.”²⁷ Kirov stood a mere five feet five inches (1.64 meters), shorter than the dictator.²⁸ He sent game he hunted to Stalin and, following Nadya’s death, stayed with him when in the capital (Kirov had earlier bunked with Orjonikidze). “Kirov had the ability to dissipate misunderstandings, to convert them into jokes, to break the ice,” recalled Artyom (whose deceased father had also been friendly with Kirov). “He was astonishingly bright-natured, a person like a beam of light, and at home they loved him very much, the members of [Stalin’s] family and the service personnel. They always waited upon his appearances . . . and called him Uncle Kirov.” Kirov jestingly called Stalin “the Great Leader of All Peoples of All Times,” according to Artyom, and Stalin “would retort that Kirov was the ‘Most Loved Leader of the Leningrad Proletariat.’”²⁹

The canal held strategic promise for developing mineral-rich Soviet Karelia and opening a reliable pathway from Leningrad to the north, but it ran a mere sixty feet deep and eighty feet wide, limiting its use. Stalin was said to have been disappointed, finding it “shallow and narrow.”³⁰ Nonetheless, the pharaonic visit was recorded on Soviet newsreels. Kremlinologists noted Yagoda’s prominence in the footage, even though Mężyński remained OGPU chairman. Overseeing such construction was Yagoda’s forte, and he would receive the Order of Lenin for the canal. More than 126,000 forced laborers did the work, almost entirely without machines, and probably at least 12,000 died doing so, while orchestras played in the background. Some of the surviving builders were “amnestied” with fanfare; others were transferred to construction of a Moscow–Volga Canal.³¹

GOLDEN FLEECE

Nine-year-old Svetlana had gone ahead to Sochi with her nanny. “Hello, my Dear Daddy,” she wrote on August 5, 1933. “I received your letter and I am happy that you allowed me to stay here and wait for you. . . . When you come, you will not recognize me. I got really tanned. Every night I hear the howling of the coyotes. I wait for you in Sochi. I kiss you. Your Setanka.”³² On August 18, the dictator boarded a train with his son Vasily, Artyom, and Voroshilov for Nizhny Novgorod, whence they embarked with local party boss Andrei Zhdanov on the steamship Clara Zetkin down the Volga for four days. From Stalingrad, the group traversed the steppes by automobile to Sochi, reaching the resort on August 25, after a 2,000-mile journey. “Yet again,” Voroshilov wrote to Yenukidze, “I sensed the whole limitlessness of our expanses, the whole greatness of the proletariat’s conquests.”^{33, 34} No more than an hour after having arrived in Sochi, Stalin set out in his car with Voroshilov on a drive to Green Grove, near Matsesta. At the Riviera Bridge, in Sochi’s center, they collided with a truck. It was dark, and the road unlit. Stalin’s guard detail, in the trailing car, immediately opened fire. The truck driver, who appears to have been drunk, fled in the darkness. It is unclear how severe the collision was, but Stalin was unharmed.

Stalin was remarkably hardy, all things considered. (A medical report covering family history listed incidences of “tuberculosis, syphilis, alcoholism, drug abuse, epilepsy, mental difficulties, suicide, metabolic disorders, malignant tumors, diseases of the endocrine glands.”) This was his first southern sojourn following Nadya’s death, but third consecutive one during the famine. He and his entourage had passed through settlements emptied by an absence of food and an abundance of typhus, but whether they took note remains uncertain. “Koba and I visited one (of the ten) of our horse state farms near the cities of Salsk and Proletarskaya,” Voroshilov continued in the letter to Yenukidze about Rostov province. “There we saw the most splendid horses—mothers and foals, foals and working horses. We saw magnificent merino sheep, livestock of good Kalmyk (red) lineage, geese, chickens, pigs. All this is well cared for, and the steppes are fully assimilated.” Voroshilov took up residence at Sochi’s second-best dacha, Blinovka (where his wife awaited him), but complained of dubious types being accommodated at neighboring facilities, as well as bacteria in the water, and the medical staff, especially Degtyarev (“He’s a doctor in the way that you and I are astronomers!”). Yenukidze answered (August 30, 1933) that officials all went south at the same time and things got overrun. “Koba has been feeling wonderfully the whole time, but the fourth day now he’s complaining of his teeth,” Voroshilov wrote back (September 7).³⁵ A dentist (Shapiro) had arrived to attend to Stalin’s mouth.³⁶

Stalin finally had secure high-frequency phone lines in Sochi, though he still used telegrams and field couriers, too.³⁷ In Moscow, officials were convening in his Old Square office, usually with Kaganovich presiding.³⁸ Of the 1,038 politburo decisions taken that summer, Stalin would intervene in 119, the vast majority at prompts from Kaganovich, whose correspondence was filled with plaintive requests for more guidance. “I cannot and should not have to decide any and all questions that concern the politburo,” Stalin replied (September 5, 1933). “You yourselves can consider matters and work them out.”³⁹ This instruction came immediately upon the heels of a scolding. Orjonikidze, along with land commissar Yakovlev, had objected to criminal prosecutions for managers who had shipped agricultural combines without the full complement of parts. They had the politburo formally rebuke the USSR deputy procurator general, Vyshinsky. Stalin exploded. “Sergo’s behavior can only be characterized as antiparty,” he wrote, “because its goal is to protect reactionary elements of the party against the Central Committee.” They reversed their decision.⁴⁰

On September 22, Stalin left the Puzanovka dacha to inspect a new one being built for him near Gagra, a small resort on Abkhazia’s northern Black Sea coast.⁴¹ He fell in love with this land, close by the site, according to ancient Greek legend, of the ram with a golden fleece, a symbol of authority and kingship.⁴² Entirely mountainous, with passes up to 10,000 feet above sea level and deep valleys cut by crystal-clear rivers, this seaside haven enjoyed ample moisture, and, because the mountains came almost up to the coast, Sukhum, its gracious capital, was shielded from cold northern air masses. Abkhazia had the warmest winters in the USSR. Its mountains teemed with wild boars for hunting, and its rivers and plentiful lakes with fish. Its naturally carbonated sulfur springs added to its allure. Local Bolsheviks had nationalized the neglected, malaria-infested prerevolutionary resorts, but officials in Moscow sought to claim them as well. The revived spas, as well as the citrus groves, grapevines, and tobacco fields, would forge a link to the far-off Eurasian capital. The man who would build that link was a native son, Nestor Lakoba.⁴³

“I AM KOBA, YOU ARE LAKOBA”

Short and deaf, with refined features and a cropped mustache, Lakoba carried himself with elegance. He did not pound a fist on the table or shout profanities, like his hotheaded friend Orjonikidze. Whereas Bolshevik rule in ethnic Georgian regions had, for a time, been dicey—a mass uprising had broken out in the 1920s—in Abkhazia it looked firm. Lakoba won wide popularity through the customary patronage (apartments, dachas, scarce goods), but also by attentiveness to ordinary people. He cultivated social harmony, downplaying the peasantry’s supposed social stratification, and managed to delay collectivization of the citrus groves and tobacco fields and even avoid dekulakization, otherwise unheard of. Almost uniquely among local bosses, his power base was not in the party. The Abkhaz Communist party was merely a provincial organization of the Georgian party, but the Soviet state was federal, and Lakoba served as chairman of the Abkhaz government (Council of People’s Commissars) in the 1920s, and after 1930 as chairman of the Abkhaz soviet’s central executive committee.⁴⁴ Often, he skipped meetings of the party organization.⁴⁵

Wits dubbed Abkhazia “Lakobistan.” A traveling commission had complained that such “a personalized regime is always a bad thing, always kills social life and weakens organizations, demoralizes cadres and encourages a slavish passivity among them.”⁴⁶ But Orjonikidze sent Lakoba regular telegrams about taking care of high-level Moscow visitors at the spas.⁴⁷ Trotsky (who had recuperated often in Sukhum) admired Lakoba, though he noted that, “despite the special sound amplifier he carried in his pocket, conversing with him was not easy.”⁴⁸ (The regime soon acquired a new, bulky Phonophor hearing device for him from Siemens.) Stalin called him the Deaf One, and loved that Lakoba could whip top Soviet military men at billiards and shoot like a sniper. “When Lakoba came to Moscow, you would always see him at Stalin’s place, either at the apartment or at the dacha,” Khrushchev would recall, adding, “Stalin trusted him completely.”⁴⁹ Artyom recalled that visits by Lakoba brightened up the house, noting: Stalin “loved Lakoba very much.”⁵⁰ The dictator was said to joke, “I am Koba, and you are Lakoba.”

The two men shared a great deal. Lakoba (b. 1893) did not remember his father, who had died of a bullet wound. Two stepfathers had died as well. His mother, after many tries, got him into a religious school and then the Tiflis seminary—where Stalin had studied more than a decade earlier—and whence Lakoba, too, was expelled. Lakoba had helped lead the Red Army’s civil war reconquest and Bolshevization of Abkhazia, while Stalin had egged on Orjonikidze to do the same in Georgia.⁵¹ The Abkhaz had become a minority in Georgia-controlled Abkhazia, but Lakoba and other Abkhaz Bolsheviks were determined to redress this by remaining independent.⁵² Stalin had ended up caught between the Abkhaz, who proclaimed their own republic, and the Georgians, who tried to force the territory back into Georgia.⁵³ He had approved a fudge recognizing Abkhazia as a “treaty republic.” Such decisions among competing claims had to be made across the Union, given the more than one hundred languages and the threescore recognized “nations.”⁵⁴

The USSR consisted of three levels: (1) Union republics, initially reserved for Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the South Caucasus Federation (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), then Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan; (2) autonomous republics inside Union republics for concentrated populations such as the Tatars, Bashkirs, and Yakuts in the RSFSR; the Moldavians in Ukraine; and (3) autonomous provinces, many of them in the RSFSR and the South Caucasus Federation.⁵⁵ In former tsarist Turkestan, the inhabitants, who were often multilingual, had been compelled to choose one national identity, then fought over territory. The prize cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, despite populations categorized as predominantly Tajik (Persian), had gone to Uzbekistan (Turkic), thanks to Uzbek leaders’ dynamism and Tajik leaders’ fumbling.⁵⁶ But then Stalin had acceded to Tajik demands for equal status, upgrading their autonomous republic in Uzbekistan to a self-standing Union republic.⁵⁷ Uzbeks seized the opportunity to become a national elite and aligned their future with the central regime, coercing their cereal-growing republic toward intensive cotton production. Mosques were forcibly shuttered.⁵⁸ Power was centralized in Moscow, but there were internal ethnoterritorial borders, local state institutions, vernacular official languages, and growing ranks of indigenous Communists.⁵⁹ The regime fostered not nationalism per se but Soviet nations, with Communist institutions and ways of thinking.

With the “treaty republic” status, Stalin had allowed the Abkhaz to perceive themselves as akin to a Union republic but not join the USSR as a fourth constituent of the South Caucasus Federation. His dispensation stemmed from his wariness of Georgian nationalism, his admiration for Lakoba, and Abkhazia’s uniqueness as the Soviet Union’s only subtropical region. But belated collectivization in the region’s Gudauta district had provoked a mass peasant uprising.⁶⁰ Lakoba negotiated a settlement without bloodshed, but Stalin terminated the “treaty republic” designation, specifying it as an “autonomous republic” in Georgia.⁶¹ This spurred further protests, including in Lakoba’s home village of Lykhny; the local party boss blamed Lakoba’s indulgence of “kulaks.”⁶² Lakoba managed to disperse the crowds peacefully again, promising to travel to Moscow on their behalf.⁶³ The OGPU arrested putative ringleaders, but Lakoba did manage to see Stalin and extract an accommodation: collectivization would resume, yet exclude horses.⁶⁴ Still, Stalin’s upheaval affected governing structures, too, and empowered a man who emerged as Lakoba’s cunning rival: Lavrenti Beria.⁶⁵

“A GOOD ORGANIZER”

Beria’s Mingrelian family was descended from a feudal prince, but he was born, in 1899, to modest circumstances in a hillside village in Abkhazia. He attended Sukhum’s city school, whose subjects included Russian, Orthodox theology, arithmetic, and science. His mother, Marta, like Keke Geladze, worked as a seamstress to pay for school; Beria, also like Stalin, might have been helped by a rich patron (a textile merchant who employed Marta as a domestic). Beria joined the party after the tsar’s abdication, served in the army, and graduated from high school with honors.⁶⁶ He missed the revolution, and spent part of the civil war on the wrong side: the Musavat (“Equality”) party of Azerbaijani nationalists had established an independent republic through the meddling of Ottoman and then British occupation forces, and after the British left, Beria joined Musavat counterintelligence.⁶⁷ Following the Bolshevik reconquest, he was arrested. A meeting was called and Orjonikidze and others ruled that the party had likely assigned Beria to infiltrate the “bourgeois nationalists.”⁶⁸ Beria enrolled at the newly established Polytechnic University, on the premises of his old high school, with a state stipend, to fulfill his dream of becoming an engineer, but Mircafar Bagirov (b. 1896), the twenty-four-year-old head of the Azerbaijan Cheka, recruited Beria and, after a few weeks, named him deputy secret police chief, at age twenty-one.⁶⁹

Beria’s Soviet secret police dirty work provoked numerous investigations for abuses.⁷⁰ “I feel that everyone dislikes me,” he wrote to Orjonikidze (May 1930). “In the minds of many comrades, I am the prime cause of all the unpleasantries that befell comrades over the recent period, and I figure almost like a stool pigeon.”⁷¹ Underhandedly, Beria attacked everyone else, but he felt perpetually put upon—just like Stalin.

In fact, Beria had become a legend. His early top boss, Solomon Mogilevsky, chairman of the South Caucasus OGPU, had died in a mysterious plane crash whose cause could not be established by three separate commissions of inquiry.⁷² His next boss, Ivan Pavlunovsky, pleaded at staff meetings for his deputy Beria to cease the intrigues against him.⁷³ Stalin replaced Pavlunovsky with Redens, an ethnic Pole, who knew none of the Caucasus languages or personnel. In the wee hours on March 29, 1931, after a sloshy birthday gathering for Beria at a private apartment, a drunk Redens departed—with no bodyguard detail. He made his way to the building of a young female OGPU operative who had previously rebuffed his advances; Redens tried to break down her door, and neighbors called the regular police, who arrested the disorderly drunk. His identity was established only at the station house. Word of the humiliation spread inordinately quickly. Beria immediately phoned Stalin, who transferred Redens to Belorussia (and shortly thereafter to Ukraine). Stalin was said to have delighted in Beria’s artfulness at compromising the dictator’s hapless brother-in-law.⁷⁴ Beria was promoted to chief of the South Caucasus OGPU, overseeing Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, including Abkhazia.⁷⁵ Mężyński noted, on the tenth anniversary of the Georgian branch of the OGPU, that “comrade Beria always finds his bearings precisely, even in the most complex circumstances.”⁷⁶

Lakoba, six years Beria’s senior, had everything the young secret police operative did not: heroic prerevolutionary and civil war exploits, colossal popularity among the masses, and intimate ties to Stalin.⁷⁷ But Stalin’s southern holidays were beset by epic local infighting: Georgians against Armenians, Georgians against Georgians. Stalin blamed locals’ ability to appeal to Orjonikidze, and wrote to Kaganovich that “if we don’t intervene, these people by their stupidity may ruin things.”⁷⁸ Orjonikidze was pushing for the restoration as party boss of Mamiya Orakhelashvili, a protégé (who had the university diploma Beria coveted), while Lakoba pushed for Beria (and sent him a transcript of a three-way conversation he’d had with Stalin and Orjonikidze).⁷⁹ Lakoba midwifed a three-day Beria visit to Abkhazia to see Stalin.⁸⁰ Beria soon got appointed first secretary of Georgia and concurrently second secretary of the South Caucasus Federation (under Orakhelashvili).⁸¹ He could now see Stalin during the dictator’s holidays without special intercession.⁸² In summer 1932, Beria poured poison in the dictator’s ear about Orakhelashvili.⁸³ The latter begged Stalin, and especially Orjonikidze, to be relieved of his post as Beria’s nominal superior.⁸⁴

Nothing rankled Stalin more than the suspicion that provincial officials sabotaged central directives, but in his homeland he had found someone who fulfilled orders to the letter. “Beria makes a good impression,” Stalin wrote to Kaganovich (August 12, 1932). “He’s a good organizer, a businesslike, capable functionary.” Stalin also prized Beria’s antagonism to Orjonikidze and the Georgian old guard. “In looking over South Caucasus affairs, I have become all the more convinced that in personnel selection, Sergo is an irredeemable bungler,” Stalin’s note concluded. Kaganovich wrote back (August 16): “Beria came to see me. He does indeed make a good impression as a top-level functionary.”⁸⁵ On October 9, Orakhelashvili was relieved of his post, and Beria promoted to first secretary of the South Caucasus Federation, while remaining party boss of Georgia.⁸⁶ Beria was recorded as being in Stalin’s office for the first time on November 9, just after the holiday celebrations.⁸⁷ On December 21, Beria had the Georgian party issue a formal reprimand to Lakoba.⁸⁸

NEAR-FATAL LAUNCH

The three-story dacha under construction in Gagra that Stalin visited with Lakoba on September 23, 1933, stood only twenty-five miles from Sochi. It had been carved right into the steep cliff, 700 feet above sea level, and was well concealed by tree cover, blending in with its green paint.⁸⁹ The rooms had parquet flooring, wooden ceilings in patterns, wooden furniture, and a wood-paneled cinema. Handwoven Caucasus rugs graced the floors, and nets wrapped the chandeliers to protect from possible falling glass. Each room had an emergency button. The smallish bedrooms had mattresses filled with seaweed and medicinal herbs. Salt water was piped into the bath. An auxiliary structure housed a billiard room, kitchen, and pantry. The menu consisted largely of freshly slaughtered animals, especially lambs, held live on the grounds. Lemon trees, guard booths, and a rocky hillside of fragrant eucalyptus, cypress, and cherry trees surrounded the villa; tobacco was planted as well. Guards also circled the property with truncheons, on the lookout for snakes. During the day, donkeys could be seen, and at night, jackals. Down below lay a stone beach. A small, rapid stream at the dacha gave it its name: Cold Spring. Here, Lakoba would organize a hunting party. First, however, on the day of his arrival, Stalin and entourage went for a boat ride on the Black Sea.

Yagoda had had a launch sent in, the Red Star, used on the Neva River in Leningrad. Small and unseaworthy, it had only some glass over the cabin, through which everyone was visible. At around 1:30 p.m., the group pushed off southward—Stalin, Voroshilov, and Beria, along with Vlasik and L. T. Bogdanov (bodyguards) and S. F. Chechulin (cipher specialist). “We headed for the Pitsunda Cape,” Vlasik would recall. “Entering the pier, we disembarked on the shore, relaxed, drank and snacked, walked about, spending a few hours on the shore.” Their picnic, beginning around 4:00 p.m., included Abkhaz wine. “Then we embarked again and headed back,” Vlasik continued. “At the Pitsunda Cape, there is a lighthouse and, nearby on the shore, a border post. When we exited the pier and turned in the direction of Gagra, there were rifle shots from the shore.” The boat was some 600 to 700 yards out. Vlasik claimed that he and Bogdanov covered Stalin and returned fire; Beria would claim that he covered Stalin’s body with his own. The bullets from the shore (three in total) landed in the water. The boat pulled farther from the coast. High waves rose up—a storm was in the offing—and it took the launch three harrowing hours to make it back to the Old Gagra pier.⁹⁰

Stalin, according to Chechulin, had initially joked that the Abkhaz were accustomed to greeting guests with gunshots, but after returning to Cold Spring, he sent Bogdanov back to Pitsunda to investigate. A few days later, Chechulin handed Stalin a letter from a local border guard who asked to be forgiven for shooting at the unregistered launch, which he had taken to be a foreign vessel. Sergeant N. I. Lavrov, commander of the border post, further explained that the boat had entered the restricted zone, so, as per regulations, they signaled it to stop, and when it kept going they fired warning shots in the air. Stalin did not label the incident an attempted assassination.⁹¹ Beria had Sergo Goglidze, the head of border guards for the South Caucasus, “investigate,” and he brought forward “witnesses” who testified that the shots were fired at the launch itself, blame for which, in Abkhazia, could be laid on Lakoba.⁹² But Yagoda evidently instructed Beria to portray it as a misunderstanding (in line with Stalin’s preference). The Georgian secret police sacked the Abkhaz OGPU chief and punished six Abkhaz border guards with two to three years in the Gulag; Lavrov got five.⁹³ Goglidze was soon named OGPU chief for Georgia. Legends circulated that Beria had organized hoodlums to stage the incident to discredit Lakoba, after which Beria’s henchmen had executed the perpetrators.^{94, 95}

GERMAN GAMBIT

While Stalin was in remote Gagra, a trial for the Reichstag fire was taking place in Leipzig. It had opened on September 21, 1933, and among the accused were the German Communist party leader Ernst Thälmann and Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian and undercover head of the Comintern’s Western European Bureau in Berlin. One of eight children from a workers’ family, Dimitrov had been sentenced to death for his political activities in his native country after he escaped to Yugoslavia. In Germany he operated in obscurity, but in the Leipzig courtroom he outdueled the state witnesses, Goebbels and Hermann Göring, and made the three-month trial an international antifascist sensation. (The Nazis did not have prearranged scripts for defendants who were broken to confess publicly.) “I am defending myself, an accused Communist,” Dimitrov said from the dock. “I am defending my political honor, my honor as a revolutionary. I am defending my Communist ideology, my ideals.” Germany’s high court would convict only the Dutch Communist apprehended at the scene, who would be guillotined just shy of his twenty-fifth birthday. Dimitrov would be acquitted for lack of evidence. Journalists from the world over were admitted to the proceedings, but two Soviet reporters seeking access were arrested, leading to a diplomatic row. Mikhail Koltsov, however, reported out of Paris for Pravda (September, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30), transforming Dimitrov into a household name in the USSR and fostering the legend of Communists as courageous opponents rather than facilitators of the rise of Nazism.⁹⁶

At the Reich Chancellery on September 26, at a meeting of department heads, the state secretary (the number two) at the foreign ministry insisted that Germany had little to gain from a breach with the USSR, given the countries’ economic compatibility. Hitler concurred on avoiding handing Moscow a pretext to sever relations, but he warned officials not to indulge in delusions (“The Russians were always lying”) and predicted that the Soviet government would never forgive the smashing of German Communism and that the new order in Germany had crushed every hope of world revolution.⁹⁷ Hitler was furtively accelerating a military buildup set in motion by his predecessors, in violation of Versailles restrictions, and told every Briton he could reach that German expansionism would be at Soviet expense and that Germany’s purely continental interests did not conflict with Britain’s global empire. He disavowed wanting to annex Austria (a wish that pre-1933 German governments had not disguised).⁹⁸ He would also insist to an interviewer for Le Matin that he wanted to live in peace with France.⁹⁹ Stalin followed the least hints of Franco-German as well as Anglo-German rapprochement, and of supposed British instigation of Poland and Japan and Polish-Japanese collusion.¹⁰⁰ He saw danger not in “superstructure” ideologies in any single capitalist country, such as Nazi Germany, but in the underlying “class interests” of all capitalist powers, led by Britain and France, which, axiomatically, strove to catalyze an anti-Soviet bloc.

On September 28, amid Soviet negotiations to sell the Chinese Eastern Railway to Manchukuo, the Japanese had Manchukuo authorities arrest six Soviet employees. The Japanese were evidently trying to force a sale at a rock-bottom price. The Soviets had requested 250 million rubles; the Japanese offered the equivalent of one tenth that sum: 50 million paper yen. Stalin terminated the negotiations. He also ordered up a propaganda offensive against Japanese “militarism”—not something he did vis-à-vis Nazi Germany.¹⁰¹

Yenukidze, a Germanophile and Stalin confidant, concocted a scheme with German ambassador Herbert von Dirksen to find a modus vivendi by sending someone with stature to Hitler, even without formal invitation. They decided that the Jewish Nikolai Krestinsky, a former Soviet ambassador to Germany who was fluent in the language and was taking a rest cure at Kissingen, was to stop over in Berlin on the way home. Litvinov advised against such a move, but Molotov and Kaganovich favored it. Stalin agreed. Hitler reluctantly acceded to his foreign ministry’s urgings to receive the “Judeo-Bolshevik” envoy.¹⁰² Right then (October 14, 1933), however, the Führer declared on the radio that Germany would pull out of the League of Nations.¹⁰³ France erupted with loose talk of launching a preventive war.¹⁰⁴ Molotov and Kaganovich wrote to Stalin (October 16), reversing their support for Krestinsky’s Berlin stopover. “It is incomprehensible why Krestinsky’s trip should be called off,” the dictator fired back that same day. “What do we care about the League, and why should we conduct a demonstration in honor of an insult to the League and against its insult of Germany?”¹⁰⁵ But the foreign affairs commissariat had already backed out of the gambit.¹⁰⁶

AMERICAN GAMBIT

Stalin had traveled again, a few miles south of the Pitsunda Cape, arriving on October 9, 1933, at Mysra (Myussera in Russian), site of a secluded seaside Romano-Greek estate recently owned by an Armenian oil magnate.¹⁰⁷ Nearby, Lakoba had instigated construction of yet another luxury dacha for Stalin. (Only the urinals were of domestic make.)¹⁰⁸ The next day, in New York, Henry Morgenthau Jr., acting treasury secretary, had brought a Philadelphia millionaire and Franklin Roosevelt confidant, William Bullitt, to a meeting with an unofficial Soviet representative. Roosevelt was eager to find common cause in containing Japanese expansionism, concerned about Hitler, and being lobbied by U.S. business for continued access to the Soviet market, after orders from that country had shrunk. Bullitt delivered a draft letter from the president, addressed to Kalinin (formal head of state), containing an invitation to Washington for a chosen representative. Stalin, who had hurried back to Gagra, instructed Molotov to accept and recommended sending Litvinov. The latter begged off in a cipher, but Stalin and Kalinin wrote to Molotov and Kaganovich (October 17) insisting on Litvinov and urging them to “act more boldly and without delay, since now the situation is favorable.”¹⁰⁹

On November 2, 1933, Stalin finally left Sochi for Moscow.¹¹⁰ Yagoda soon reported to Voroshilov that, in connection with a “counterrevolutionary terrorist monarchist plot” to assassinate Stalin, twenty-six arrests had been made, almost all former gentry and a lot of them women. One was said to have “connections” through children to people living in the Kremlin.¹¹¹ (During 1933, there would be at least ten serious attempts on Hitler’s life.)¹¹²

In mid-November Litvinov managed what he himself had doubted: U.S. recognition, after sixteen years of no relations. He had conceded nothing on repudiated tsarist and Provisional Government debts, other than a willingness to discuss them, and made an empty pledge that the Soviets would not interfere in U.S. domestic affairs by supporting American Communists.¹¹³ Molotov took to publicly praising Litvinov.¹¹⁴ Stalin awarded him a state dacha and a bodyguard detail, a mark of Litvinov’s rising value—and the need to keep him under 24/7 surveillance. Anxieties in Tokyo about U.S.-Soviet collusion in the Far East intensified.¹¹⁵ Japan, without allies and in violation of international covenants, pursued hegemony in its region, which entailed formidable simultaneous military burdens: defeat of the Red Army in a possible war; subjugation of mainland China; and attainment of home-island security against the U.S. Navy.¹¹⁶ But for now, the depth of any U.S.-Soviet cooperation remained uncertain.¹¹⁷

The Americans promptly dispatched their own Marx to the USSR, Harpo, on a pantomime goodwill tour. His act brought the house down. (After he convinced a Soviet family that he had not pilfered their silver, they shook hands, and 300 table knives cascaded to the floor from his sleeves.)¹¹⁸ Bullitt had arrived as ambassador on December 11, 1933, and Litvinov immediately dropped the bombshell that the USSR, in anticipation of war with Japan, wished to join the League of Nations.¹¹⁹ On December 20, at a banquet in Bullitt’s honor at Voroshilov’s apartment, Bullitt was taken by the charm of the “cherub” host; the pair danced a medley of Caucasus moves and American foxtrot.¹²⁰ Stalin attended and asked Bullitt for 250,000 tons of steel rails to complete strategic double-tracking of the Trans-Siberian. “If you want to see me at any time, day or night, you have only to let me know and I will see you at once,” the dictator volunteered. “President Roosevelt is today, in spite of being a leader of a capitalist country, one of the most popular men in the Soviet Union.” Then Stalin planted a wet kiss on Bullitt’s cheek.¹²¹

At this very moment, the Comintern executive committee approved theses for the American Communist party’s upcoming convention in Cleveland (to be held in the spring). “The ‘New Deal’ of Roosevelt is the aggressive effort of the bankers and trusts to find a way out of the crisis at the expense of the millions of toilers,” the theses stated. “Under cover of the most shameless demagogy, Roosevelt and the capitalists carry through drastic attacks upon the living standards of the masses, increased terrorism against the Negro masses. . . . The ‘New Deal’ is a program of fascistization and the most intense preparations for imperialist war.”¹²²

Granting an interview to the reliably pro-Soviet Walter Duranty (December 25, 1933), Stalin spoke publicly about his diplomatic coup with the United States. Sitting between portraits of Marx and Lenin, with a drawing of a projected 1,312-foot Palace of the Soviets that was supposed to eclipse the Empire State Building, the dictator lauded Roosevelt as “by all appearances . . . a courageous statesman.” He assured American business that the Soviets paid their debts (“Confidence, as everyone knows, is the basis of credit”). He put Japan on notice as well. Then, when Duranty, on cue, inquired of the Soviet stance vis-à-vis the League of Nations, Stalin responded, “We do not always and in all conditions take a negative attitude toward the League,” adding that “the League may well become a break upon or an obstacle to war.”¹²³

The United States was not a member of the League. Any Soviet bid would have to be shepherded by France, and three days later the Soviet envoy in Paris communicated Moscow’s terms for joining the League as well as a regional alliance.¹²⁴ Franco-Soviet talks would proceed glacially. Distrust ran deep.¹²⁵ Édouard Herriot, who had signed the Franco-Soviet nonaggression pact and now wanted to counter Hitler, had demonstrated the price of rapprochement when, in summer-fall 1933, he had visited the USSR during the famine, disembarking at Odessa. Just before he reached Kiev, streets were washed, corpses removed, shops with windows stocked with goods (the populace was not allowed in), and a “festive crowd” assembled from OGPU and Communist Youth League personnel. In Kharkov, he was shown a “model” children’s facility, the tractor factory, and a museum devoted to the Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko. He asked to see the countryside and was taken to a collective farm where he again encountered activists and operatives, this time disguised as farmers. Everywhere, he ate his fill. Soviet Ukraine was “like a garden in full bloom,” Herriot observed in Pravda. “When one believes that the Ukraine is devastated by famine, allow me to shrug my shoulders.”¹²⁶

LAMAS AND WOLVES

Duranty had been followed into Stalin’s office by the co-chairs of the politburo’s Mongolia commission, Voroshilov and Sokolnikov, and two Mongolian officials, a deputy prime minister for finance and a leftist party scourge of the lamas. Mongolia served as a Soviet showcase and experimental laboratory for the colonial world and, even more important, a territory that supplied defense in depth for the southern Siberian border, meat and raw materials for the Soviet economy (paralleling Kazakhstan), and a link with China, should war with Japan break out.¹²⁷ Since imposing the “New Course” retreat stabilization, Stalin had worried that Mongolia’s NEP equivalent had allowed a revival of traders (NEPmen) and better-off nomads (kulaks), and persistent sway of the lama “class.” Voroshilov told the Mongols that, against a population of just 700,000, there were still 120,000 lamas with undue influence (“Beyond that, the lamas engage in homosexualism, corrupting the youth who return to them”). Stalin asked how the lamas supported themselves. The Mongols answered that lamas drew substantial income from the lamaseries and served as spiritual leaders, physicians, traders, and advisers to the arats (common people). “It’s a state within a state,” Stalin interjected. “Chinggis Khan would not have permitted that. He would have cut them all down.”

Soviet proconsuls were instigating a terror against fabricated Japanese spies, which destroyed the head of the Mongolian People’s Party and brought perhaps 2,000 arrests.¹²⁸ Stalin asked about the budget, and the Mongols replied that their GDP totaled just 82 million tugriks, while the state budget was 33 million; the Soviets extended a loan of 10 million, but the army alone cost 13 million. “A large part of your budget is being swallowed up by white-collar employees,” Stalin admonished. “Can it be impossible to get away with fewer?”¹²⁹

Sometime either before or after Stalin received these two Mongols, he met with Mongolian prime minister Peljidiin Genden, but in Molotov’s office. The dictator would write Genden in a courtesy follow-up note, “I am very glad that your Republic has, finally, taken the correct path, that your internal affairs are succeeding, that you are strengthening your international might and strengthening your independence.” He advised that Mongolia needed “full unity” in the leadership, full support of the arats, and an army on the highest level, and promised continued fraternal assistance. “In that, you should have no doubts,” he concluded. “Voroshilov, Molotov, and I together thank you for the gifts you sent.” The Soviet Union was reciprocating with new automatic rifles. “They will come in handy in a battle against wolves of all types, two-legged and four-legged.”¹³⁰

WHITES AND REDS

In the field of culture—unlike foreign affairs and nationalities—Stalin had long hesitated to make his instructions public. “What kind of a critic am I, the devil take me!” he had written in response to Gorky’s urgings in 1930.¹³¹ When Konstantin Stanislavsky sought approval for staging The Suicide, by Nikolai Erdman (b. 1900), Stalin had replied, “I am a dilettante in these matters.”¹³² The dictator began to work out how he would manage the artistic intelligentsia with the Kiev-born writer Mikhail Bulgakov (b. 1891), who in the 1920s serialized a novel depicting a family of Kiev White Guardists, the Turbins, during the civil war, which muddied the red-white, good-evil picture.¹³³ Only two thirds of the work appeared before it helped prompt the journal’s closing, but it proved a sensation.¹³⁴ Bulgakov turned it into a play titled The Days of the Turbins. Directed by Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, it revived the fortunes of the Moscow Art Theater, which the pair had founded in 1898, premiering Chekhov’s The Seagull. Muscovites queued day and night for Bulgakov’s portrayal of the tragedy that befell those who had joined the counterrevolution in Ukraine.¹³⁵

Bulgakov’s daring work had no Reds at all, and his portrayal of the Whites as human beings provoked slander that he was a White Guardist enabling “former people” who had lost loved ones and possessions to mourn. Party militants likened him to the “rightists.”¹³⁶ Stalin acquiesced to the outcries to ban Bulgakov’s play Flight, another civil war story, about a family that opted to emigrate rather than live under Bolshevism.¹³⁷ But the dictator went to see Turbins, privately approved it, and publicly defended it.¹³⁸ At a meeting with irate pro-regime Ukrainian writers, Stalin pointed out that “it won’t do to write only about Communism. We have a population of 140 million, and there are only one and a half million Communists.” Bulgakov, Stalin allowed, was “alien,” “not ours,” for failing to depict exploitation properly, but he insisted that The Days of the Turbins remained “useful” to the cause, whatever the author’s intent.¹³⁹ The furious polemics would not cease, however, and Stalin finally let the play be shuttered. Censors now prohibited even publication of Bulgakov’s works, and he wrote the first of several despairing letters to the authorities asking to be deported abroad with his wife, to no avail.¹⁴⁰

Bulgakov wrote again “to the government” on March 28, 1930, pointing out that he had unearthed 301 reviews of his work over a decade, three of which had been positive, and pleading again to be allowed to emigrate with his wife or, failing that, to be appointed as an assistant director at the Moscow Art Theater; failing that, as a supernumerary there or, failing that, as a stagehand.¹⁴¹ On April 18, one of Stalin’s top aides phoned the poet at his Moscow apartment, asking his wife, who answered, to summon him. Bulgakov thought the call a prank. (This happened to be Good Friday, a significant day for Bulgakov, son of a theologian.) Stalin came on the line. “We received your letter,” he stated. “And read it with the comrades. You will get a favorable answer to it. . . . Perhaps we really should permit you to travel abroad? What, have we irritated you so much?” Bulgakov: “I have thought a great deal recently about whether a Russian writer can live outside his homeland, and it seems to me he cannot.” Stalin: “You are correct.”¹⁴² What motivated Stalin to make his first phone call to a major non-party writer remains uncertain. But four days earlier, the greatest poet in the revolution, Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was mercilessly heckled at his public recitations, fatally shot himself in the heart. (“Seriously, there is nothing to be done,” he wrote in a suicide note, as if echoing Chernyshevsky. “Goodbye.”)¹⁴³

Bulgakov got appointed as a stage director’s assistant. One writer sent him a fake summons to the Central Committee, a poor joke about his desperate petitioning. Bulgakov developed neurasthenia.¹⁴⁴ Bereft of a public, he was said to be narrating stories at his apartment over tea. One such story, according to a fellow writer, involved Bulgakov sending long letters nearly every day to Stalin, signed “Tarzan” to disguise himself. Stalin, frightened, ordered that the letter writer be identified. Bulgakov was found out, brought to the Kremlin, and confessed. Stalin noticed his shabby trousers and shoes and summoned the commissar of supply. “Your people can steal, all right,” Stalin yelled at the minion, “but when it comes to clothing a writer, they’re not up to it!” Bulgakov, in the story, took to visiting Stalin in the Kremlin regularly and noticed he was depressed. “You see, they all keep screaming: Genius, genius! And yet there’s no one I could have a glass of brandy with, even!” When Stalin phoned the Moscow Art Theater on Bulgakov’s behalf, he was told the theater director had died—that very minute. “People are so nervous these days!” Stalin was depicted as saying. “No sense of humor.”¹⁴⁵

Like Bulgakov, Yefim Pridvorov (b. 1883), known as Demyan Bedny (bedny meaning “the poor one,” though many called him Bedny [Poor] Demyan), had been born in Ukraine and made his mark in Moscow, but while Bulgakov sought no more than a modus vivendi, Bedny tirelessly served the regime. He traveled the sites of the Five-Year Plan, declaiming verse to workers, and acquired a personal Ford and a sumptuous apartment in the Grand Kremlin Palace (his wife, children, mother-in-law, and nanny lived with him).¹⁴⁶ Bedny knew Stalin before the revolution and, like him, had published his first verse as a teenager (and was dogged by rumors of uncertain parentage). He flaunted his access to the dictator.¹⁴⁷ But two of Bedny’s poem-feuilletons irked the dictator deeply, one for mocking Russian national traditions (peasants sleeping on their warm stoves, which Stalin also did), and the dictator promulgated a resolution criticizing him. Bedny wrote to him melodramatically (“The hour of my catastrophe has come”).¹⁴⁸ Stalin exploded. “Dozens of poets and writers have been rebuked by the Central Committee when they made mistakes,” he answered. “All this you considered normal and understandable. But when the Central Committee found itself compelled to criticize your mistakes, you suddenly started to fume and shout about a ‘noose.’ . . . Is your poetry perhaps above criticism?”¹⁴⁹

Voroshilov protected his Grand Kremlin Palace neighbor Bedny, whose sloshy charm and erudition played well with the defense commissar.¹⁵⁰ But on September 1, 1932, the politburo heard a report on the poet’s debauched life, and Stalin had him evicted from the Kremlin. Bedny apologized to the dictator for his “life befouled with egotistic, greedy, evil, false, cunning, vengeful philistinism,” but begged for an equivalent-sized apartment for his private library, the largest in the regime, perhaps 30,000 volumes; Stalin promised space for it. (Yenukidze allocated Bedny an apartment in a small building at Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, 15, which the poet, in a sarcastic note to him, called “a rat’s barn.”)¹⁵¹ Bedny had worsened his predicament by indiscretion: one regular at his Kremlin apartment had recorded (and distorted) the often inebriated poet’s table talks, including a complaint that when he loaned books to Stalin, they came back stained with greasy finger marks.¹⁵² Stalin allowed Bedny to receive the Order of Lenin in connection with the poet’s fiftieth birthday, accompanied by a citation recognizing him as an “outstanding proletarian poet.”¹⁵³ Bedny had just written to Stalin, “I am afraid of nothing more than my letters. Especially my letters to you.”¹⁵⁴

HUMAN SOULS

As Bedny sank, Gorky rose. (“Previously,” the gifted children’s writer Nikolai Korneychukov, known as Korney Chukovsky, punned slyly in his diary, “literature was impoverished [o-bed-nena]; now it is embittered [o-gor-chena].”)¹⁵⁵ Stalin, with OGPU assistance, had finally coaxed Gorky, already a literary giant before the revolution, permanently back from fascist Italy. Preparing the ground, on April 23, 1932, the dictator, without warning, had disbanded the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.¹⁵⁶ The zeal of the self-styled proletarians—such as Bedny—with each striving to expose the tiniest ideological deviation in rivals, was outweighed by their lack of creative achievement. At the same time, the deep political suspicion about the non-party writers—such as Bulgakov—was balanced by their usually superior abilities. The abolition decree also established a committee to organize a founding congress for a new Union of Soviet Writers, open to non-party members. (Other arts were supposed to be organized in similar fashion.) Stalin wanted Gorky, whom the Association of Proletarian Writers had denounced as “a man without class consciousness,” to be its head.

Alexander Fadeyev, one of the chairmen of the dissolved Association of Proletarian Writers, wrote in indignation to Kaganovich (May 10).¹⁵⁷ The next day, Stalin sat in his office with Fadeyev, two other leaders of the proletarian writers’ association, two culture apparatchiks, and Kaganovich, for more than five hours. On May 29, the dictator met with some of them again for thirty minutes, just before departing for his long summer holiday.¹⁵⁸ Ivan Gronsky, one of the attendees, would later explain that Stalin had no intention of revisiting the dissolution of the proletarians, but had asked what creative method to propose. Gronsky claimed he had answered that prerevolutionary realism had been “progressive” in its “bourgeois-democratic” day, producing many great works, but now they required a literature to advance the “proletarian socialist” stage, and he suggested “proletarian socialist realism” or “Communist realism.” Stalin countered that they needed an artistic method to unite all cultural figures, and supposedly suggested “socialist realism” for its brevity, intelligibility, and inclusiveness. Whether or not it was actually the dictator who came up with this formulation, he made the decision to adopt it.¹⁵⁹

Stalin named Gorky honorary chairman of the organizing committee for the proposed new writers’ union.¹⁶⁰ On September 17, 1932, the regime awarded Gorky the Order of Lenin, renamed Moscow’s central Tverskaya Street, the Volga city of Nizhny Novgorod (Gorky’s birthplace), and the Moscow Art Theater for him. It also launched a weeklong celebration of forty years of his artistic production, culminating on September 25 in the Bolshoi. Gronsky would later claim he had objected to such excessive adulation, to which Stalin supposedly replied, “He is an ambitious man. It is necessary to bind him to the party.”¹⁶¹

Not long thereafter, Stalin attended two meetings with writers—not at Central Committee headquarters on Old Square, but at the luxurious mansion granted to Gorky in central Moscow (Malaya Nikitskaya, 6), an art moderne masterpiece expropriated from the prerevolutionary industrialist and art patron Stepan Ryabushinsky. At the first session (October 20, 1932), Stalin and entourage met with writers who belonged to the party, and he explained the party decision to disband the Association of Proletarian Writers. He praised the superior power of live theater, citing Alexander Afinogenov’s Fear, which was seen by millions and dramatizes waverers among intellectuals, but has a party organizer saying, “We are fearless in the class struggle—and merciless with the class enemy,” while an angel child asks, “Papa, which is the greater menace—a left deviation or a right deviation? I think the greatest menace is double-dealers.”¹⁶² But Stalin was trying to urge the gathered party loyalists toward tutelage. “The sea of non-party writers is multiplying, but no one leads them, no one helps them; they are orphans,” he stated. “At one time, I was also non-party and did not understand many things. But senior comrades did not push me away; they taught me how to master the dialectic.”¹⁶³

Six days later, non-party writers were included in a second gathering with the dictator and his entourage. Invitations had gone out only over the phone, with the proviso not to divulge the information, perhaps in order to enhance the sense of being chosen. (Neither Bedny nor Bulgakov was invited.) Few of the fifty assembled literary figures had ever met Stalin, let alone spent an intimate evening with him. Emotions ran high. At the first break, they surrounded Stalin, and one asked about state dachas. “From under his bushy eyebrows, his eyes quickly and carefully survey the rows of those present,” the literary critic Koreli Zelinsky wrote in a private account the next day. “When Stalin laughs—and he does so often and quickly—he squints and bends over the table, his eyebrows and mustache run apart, and his visage becomes sly. . . . What the portraits do not at all convey is that Stalin is very mobile. . . . He is very sensitive to the objections and in general strangely attentive to everything said around him. It seems he does not listen or forget. But, no, it turns out he caught everything at all wavelengths in the radio station of his mind. The answer is ready at once, in the forehead, straightforward, yes or no. Then you understand that he is always ready for combat. And, at the same time, watch out if he wants to please. There is a vast gamut of hypnotic tools at his disposal.”¹⁶⁴

Stalin wanted to conjure into being a coterie of writers of stature whose utterances would carry weight and yet who could be more or less controlled. “I forgot to talk about what you are ‘producing,’” he remarked, after allowing many writers to speak. “There are various forms of production: artillery, locomotives, automobiles, trucks. You also produce ‘commodities,’ ‘works,’ ‘products.’ . . . You are engineers of human souls. . . . As some here rightly said, the writer cannot sit still; he must get to know the life of the country. Rightly said. People are transforming life. That is why I propose a toast: ‘To Engineers of Human Souls.’”¹⁶⁵ Voroshilov interjected, “Not really.” Everyone applauded. Stalin turned his whole body to the defense commissar: “Your tanks would be worth little if the souls inside them were rotten. No, the production of souls is more important than the production of tanks.”

During a second break, the tables were laid with food and drink (this was still during the famine time), and Fadeyev importuned Stalin to repeat what he had told the Communist writers at the earlier gathering: intimate details of Lenin’s last days. Stalin stood, raised his glass, and said, “To a great man, to a great man,” then repeated it again, as if a little drunk. “Lenin knew he was dying,” Stalin said, and “asked me once when we were alone together to bring him a cyanide capsule. ‘You are the most severe person in the party,’ Lenin said. ‘You are able to do it.’ At first I promised him, but then I could not do it. How could I give Ilich poison? I felt bad. And then, you never know how the illness will progress. So I didn’t give it to him.” There were further toasts, and the atmosphere became ever more visionary (an entire writers’ city; no more paper shortages). “I still remember how Gorky bid farewell to Stalin, kissing like a man on the mustaches,” Zelinsky wrote. “Gorky, tall, stooped to Stalin, who stood straight like a soldier. Gorky’s eyes shone and, ashamedly, unnoticeably, he wiped away a small tear.”¹⁶⁶

Fadeyev followed the meeting with a diatribe in Literary Newspaper against his former comrades in the Association of Proletarian Writers and preserved his position of influence with the regime. Gorky faced opportunities and dilemmas he had not encountered back in Sorrento.¹⁶⁷ One of the first major services he performed, on August 17, 1933, was to lead a “brigade” of 120 writers who followed Stalin’s tour to the White Sea–Baltic Canal with their own OGPU-supervised visit and glorified slave labor, in the name of a supposedly higher humanism. “I saw grandiose structures—dams, sluices, and a new waterway,” the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko wrote in one of the many thank-you notes to Yagoda (August 22). “But I was taken more by the people, who worked there and who organized the work. I saw thieves and bandits (now shock workers), who gave speeches in a human tongue, summoning their comrades at work to follow their example. Previously I had not seen the OGPU in the role of educator, and what I saw was for me extraordinarily joyful.”¹⁶⁸

WHO WOULD WRITE THE BIOGRAPHY?

Distribution of Stalin’s writings inside the USSR reached an estimated 16.5 million copies as of early 1934.¹⁶⁹ His Questions of Leninism alone had been issued, in 17 languages, in more than 8 million copies by then. But the problem of Stalin’s biography remained acute: the only Russian-language text, written by his aide Tovstukha, dated back to the 1920s and was the length of a newspaper essay.¹⁷⁰ Although Mikhail Koltsov had written a lively Life of Stalin for serialization in the Village Newspaper, it remained unpublished, evidently because Stalin had rejected it.¹⁷¹

Foreign publications, meanwhile, were making the leader of the world proletariat into a bandit/bank robber, and recounting his alleged betrayals of comrades as an undercover agent for the tsarist secret police.¹⁷² A psychoanalytic memoir by a Gori and Tiflis classmate (who had emigrated) alleged that Stalin’s father, Beso, had beaten him, so that, “from childhood on, the realization of his thoughts of revenge became the aim to which everything was subordinated.”¹⁷³ A Comintern official in Germany wrote alarmingly to Moscow about the sullying of Stalin’s image by enemies, singling out in particular Essad Bey.¹⁷⁴ A Baku-born Jew (1905) whose birth name was Lev Nussimbaum, Bey had gone to a Russian gymnasium in Berlin, taken classes in Turkish and Arabic at Friedrich Wilhelm University, begun wearing a turban, reinvented himself as a Muslim prince, and become a bestselling author who frequented the Café Megalomania. His colorful Stalin, published in Berlin in 1931, portrayed an outlaw in vivid orientalist strokes and embellished or invented evidence so that the dubious became possible, the possible probable, and the probable certain. “The difference between poetry and truth,” he wrote, “is not yet recognized in the mountains.”¹⁷⁵

Bey’s competition proved to be another orientalist-fabulist: Beria. No sooner had the regional party organization fallen under his control than it established a Stalin Institute to collect materials pertinent to “Stalin’s biography and his role as theoretician and organizer” of the party in the South Caucasus.¹⁷⁶ But Stalin’s aide Tovstukha, deputy director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow, started trying to transfer all original Stalin-related materials from Georgia.¹⁷⁷ Regime officials, meanwhile, had sounded out Gorky to write the biography, but he demurred.¹⁷⁸ Instead, the apparatus accepted a proposal by the French writer Henri Barbusse to write a book about Stalin, with oversight by Tovstukha (to ensure the desired depiction of the struggle against Trotsky).¹⁷⁹ Anyone taking on Stalin’s life had to confront his constant discouragement. When the latest History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) referred to him in standard parlance as “the wise leader of all the toilers,” Stalin wrote, “An apotheosis of individuals? What happened to Marxism?”¹⁸⁰ He rejected the Society of Old Bolsheviks’ plan to mount an exhibit about his life as “strengthening a ‘cult of the personality,’ which is harmful and incompatible with the spirit of our party.”¹⁸¹

“CONGRESS OF VICTORS”

The year 1934 dawned. Soviet industry was booming. The capitalist world remained mired in the Great Depression. The United States had recognized the Soviet Union. The famine was mostly over. It was time to gloat. In “The Architect of Socialist Society” (Pravda, January 1, 1934), sycophant supreme Karl Radek depicted a future historian giving lectures in the revolution’s fiftieth year at the School of Interplanetary Communications. The lecturer, looking back from 1967, would emphasize the surprise among the world bourgeoisie that a new leader had succeeded Lenin and built socialism, at a necessarily furious pace, against the fierce resistance of capitalist elements and their facilitators. Stalin was called “the great pupil of great teachers who himself had now become the teacher, . . . the exemplar of the Leninist Party, bone of its bone, blood of its blood.” His success was attributed to his “creative Marxism,” his proximity to cadres, his resolve, and his fealty to Lenin. “He knew that he had fulfilled the oath taken ten years earlier over Lenin’s casket,” the essay observed. “And all the working people of the world and the world revolutionary proletariat knew it, too.”¹⁸²

Ten years to the day after Stalin had been sworn that oath, January 26, the 17th Party Congress opened in the Grand Kremlin Palace, bringing together 1,225 voting and 739 nonvoting delegates, representing 2.8 million members and candidates. Party statutes had specified an annual congress, but three and a half years had elapsed, the longest interval yet.¹⁸³ Pravda headlined it as the “Congress of Victors.” Magnanimously, the dictator had allowed high-profile opposition figures back into the party after they had again publicly admitted their errors. From the rostrum they issued self-flagellating calls for “unity,” with Kamenev defending Stalin’s personal dictatorship (in contrast to his bold denunciation of it back at the 14th Party Congress).¹⁸⁴ Bukharin, whom Stalin would appoint editor of Izvestiya, told the congress regarding the right deviation: “Our grouping was unavoidably becoming the focus for all the forces fighting against the socialist offensive, and primarily for the strata most threatened by the socialist offensive—the kulaks and their urban intellectual ideologists,” which had heightened the danger of “an untimely foreign intervention.” He praised the plan and quipped, “Hitler wants to drive us into Siberia, and the Japanese imperialists want to drive us from Siberia, so the entire 160 million population of our country would have to be located on one of the blast furnaces of Magnitogorsk.”¹⁸⁵

Stalin delivered a five-hour keynote on opening night. “He spoke unhurriedly, as if conversing,” one witness wrote in his diary. “He was witty. The more he spoke, the closer he became to the audience. Ovations. Explosions of laughter. Full-blooded. But a practical, working speech.”¹⁸⁶ The dictator issued a call to accountability, speaking of “difficulties of our organizational work, difficulties of our organizational leadership. They are concentrated in us ourselves, in our leading functionaries, in our organizations. . . . The responsibility for our failures and shortcomings rests, in nine out of ten cases, not on ‘objective conditions’ but on ourselves and only on ourselves.” He denounced chancellery methods of management (“resolutions and decrees”) and called for criticism from below, worker competitions, getting bosses into the factories and farms, getting skilled workers out of offices and into production, and refusing to tolerate people who failed to implement directives. “We must not hesitate to remove them from their leading posts, regardless of their services in the past.”¹⁸⁷

After the applause died down, Stalin offered an example of empty-words leadership:

STALIN: How goes the sowing?

FUNCTIONARY: The sowing, comrade Stalin? We have mobilized. (Laughter.)

STALIN: And?

FUNCTIONARY: We posed the question squarely. (Laughter.)

STALIN: And then?

FUNCTIONARY: We have a breakthrough, comrade Stalin, soon there’ll be a breakthrough.

(Laughter.)

STALIN: And in fact?

FUNCTIONARY: There is movement. (Laughter.)

STALIN: But in fact, how goes the sowing?

FUNCTIONARY: So far, the sowing is not happening, comrade Stalin. (General guffaws.)¹⁸⁸

Stalin pointedly added that provincial officials, “like feudal princes, think the laws were written not for them but for fools.”

Against capitalism’s “raging waves of economic shocks and military-political catastrophes,” Stalin contrasted how “the USSR stands apart, like an anchor, continuing its socialist construction and struggle for keeping the peace.” He accused the capitalists, without irony, of “deepening their exploitation via strengthening the intensity of their labor, and at the expense of farmers, by further reduction in the prices of products of their labor.” Fascism, and especially National Socialism, he averred, “contained not an atom of socialism,” and “should be seen as a sign of the bourgeoisie’s weakness, of its lack of power to rule by the old parliamentary methods, forcing it to turn internally to terrorist methods of rule” and externally to a “policy of war.” Without naming the likely aggressor, he foresaw a “new imperialist war” that “will certainly unleash revolution and place the very existence of capitalism in question in a number of countries, as happened during the first imperialist war.”¹⁸⁹

Stalin observed that fascism in Italy had not prohibited good bilateral relations with the USSR, and dismissed as “imaginary” German complaints that the Soviet Union’s many nonaggression pacts signified a “reorientation” toward Western Europe. “We never had any orientation toward Germany, nor have we [now] any orientation toward Poland and France,” he insisted. “We were oriented in the past and are oriented in the present only on the USSR. (Stormy applause.)” He also warned Japan: “Those who desire good peace and relations would always meet a positive response, but those who try to attack our country will receive a crushing rebuff to teach them in future not to poke their pig snouts into our Soviet garden. (Thunderous applause.)”¹⁹⁰

RUDELY INTERRUPTED

As Stalin basked in the Grand Kremlin Palace spectacle, Hitler intruded, announcing a ten-year nonaggression “declaration” with Poland. The text contained no recognition of existing borders, but, sensationally, each side vowed not to “resort to force in the settlement of such disputes” as might arise between them.¹⁹¹ Hitler’s foreign policy adviser, Alfred Rosenberg, had vowed to annihilate Poland. Poland’s participation was no less head spinning: it had a military alliance with France as well as a defensive alliance with Romania (both dating to 1921). But Poland had only a poorly equipped army to defend long borders facing two dynamic dictatorships, both of whose predecessors had made the country disappear from the map. Adding to that sense of vulnerability, the Versailles Treaty had made the predominantly ethnic German city of Danzig an autonomous “free city” under the League of Nations, leaving Poland without a Baltic port, and placed a so-called Corridor of Polish territory between German East Prussia and the rest of Germany, a recipe for instability.¹⁹²

Even though the declaration did not legally invalidate the Franco-Polish alliance, Hitler had effectively broken the encirclement ring. Poland’s political class, meanwhile, dreamed of playing an independent role in European affairs. “It was,” one interwar observer noted, “a tragedy for Poland to have been reborn too weak to be a power, and strong enough to aspire to more than the status of a small state.”¹⁹³ French officials privately called Poland a bigamist.¹⁹⁴ But of course, Paris was in talks with Berlin as well. Piłsudski received the French ambassador after the signing (January 29, 1934), explaining that “he had hesitated, had dragged things on, but the Franco-German negotiations had made him decide to expedite them, because if the [French] proposals were accepted by Germany, France would openly abandon the [Versailles] peace treaty.”¹⁹⁵ The nonaggression declaration with Germany promised Poland reduced economic tensions as well (an end to trade and tariff wars). Moreover, even though France based its security on relations with Britain, not its eastern alliances, French foreign ministers now finally began to visit Warsaw.¹⁹⁶

Stalin was caught out worse than the French. Seeking to keep Poland out of any anti-Soviet alliance, he had allowed the Galicia-born Radek to meet secretly with Polish officials. Radek insisted that Poland’s private gestures toward Moscow constituted “an about-face and not a maneuver.”¹⁹⁷ Artur Artuzov, the intelligence official, tried to puncture this wishful thinking, arguing that the Poles were flirting with the USSR solely to raise Germany’s interest in a bilateral deal, but Stalin accused Artuzov of “misinforming the politburo.”¹⁹⁸ Voroshilov, too, had gotten into the act, requesting a meeting with the sympathetic German ambassador, Rudolf Nadolny, and dwelling “a particularly long time on Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in which connection he finally said that two words of the chancellor’s in public would be enough [to dispel] the impression that the anti-Soviet tendency of the book still had validity today.”¹⁹⁹

Hitler’s intelligence reports had warned of a pending Polish-Soviet alliance—Radek’s back-channel flattery and calculated leaks had done the work for Piłsudski.²⁰⁰ Stalin, ready to betray Germany to Poland and Poland to Germany, had been one-upped by both.²⁰¹

Piłsudski had made plain to a German interlocutor that “Poland would never under any circumstances respond to any German attempts to turn Polish efforts toward Russian Ukraine.”²⁰² But in Moscow, suspicions were rife that the anodyne German-Polish declaration contained secret military and territorial clauses.²⁰³ Colonel Józef Beck—who had helped Piłsudski carry out his 1926 military coup—made the first visit to the Soviet Union by a Polish foreign minister since their state’s reestablishment. He had little love for Poland’s ally France (having once been ejected from that country as persona non grata) and prided himself on being able to handle Germany, but he wanted to avoid appearing to tilt between Poland’s two big neighbors. He was hosted at a luncheon by Voroshilov, and engaged thrice by Litvinov (February 13, 14, and 15, 1934), who noted that his Polish counterpart “does not see danger on the part of Germany or general danger of war in Europe at this time.” The Polish-born Litvinov gloated that when he reminded Beck that Poland had signed nonaggression pacts with the USSR for three years, and with Germany for ten, “Beck became manifestly embarrassed (the one time during our entire conversation).” But the minister vowed this could be fixed, and indeed their bilateral pact would soon be extended to ten years (and their legations upgraded to embassies). Beck returned from Moscow with pleurisy.²⁰⁴

KIROV AND OTHERS ACCLAIM THE LEADER

The party congress had continued through February 10. Stalin belatedly acknowledged the livestock losses (his report carried a table), which he attributed to kulak sabotage, yet he urged that “1934 must and can be a breakthrough year to growth of the whole livestock economy.” The dearth of meat was widely felt.²⁰⁵ Orjonikidze proposed that industrial production plans be cut, rather than increased, and the congress approved a resolution for the rest of the second plan, stipulating 18.5 percent growth in consumer goods, versus 14.5 for producer goods. Many speakers underscored the imperative to ramp up retail trade and living standards.²⁰⁶ But Kaganovich affirmed that Stalin’s “revolution from above was the greatest revolution human history has known, a revolution that smashed the old economic structure and created a new collective farm system.”²⁰⁷ Even Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, the erstwhile ardent Trotsky supporter, marveled from the rostrum, “Collectivization—that is the heart of the matter! Did I predict collectivization? I did not.”²⁰⁸

Kirov, afforded the honor of closing out discussion of Stalin’s report, celebrated all that had been achieved, assuring delegates that “the chief difficulties are behind us,” while reminding them to keep shoulders to the wheel. His oratory elicited repeated clapping, especially when he proposed that every word of Stalin’s political report be approved as marching orders. “Comrades, ten years ago, we buried the man who founded our party, who founded our proletarian state,” Kirov concluded. “We, comrades, can say with pride before Lenin’s memory: we fulfilled that vow; we in future, too, shall fulfill that vow, because that vow was made by the grand strategist of the liberation of the toilers of our country and the whole world, comrade Stalin. (Stormy, prolonged applause, a warm ovation by the entire hall, all stand.)”²⁰⁹

Stalin declined to give the heretofore customary reply to the discussion, citing “no disagreements at all.”²¹⁰ He dictated the composition of the new Central Committee: seventy-one members and sixty-eight candidates. The number of candidates he permitted to stand equaled the number of slots, although, by party tradition, delegates could cross out anyone they opposed. In the voting on February 9, 1934, only 1,059 of 1,225 ballots ended up in the record. (At the previous congress, 134 voting delegates had not returned ballots.)²¹¹ Only Kalinin and Ivan Kodatsky (Leningrad province soviet chairman) were elected unanimously in the official accounting. Three votes went against Stalin, though apparatchiks might have tossed out a few negatives. Kirov received four against. (Back at the 16th Congress, Stalin, like Kirov, had officially received nine votes against.)²¹²

Rumors circulated in Moscow and then abroad about some provincial party bosses having sought to have the aw-shucks Kirov replace Stalin.²¹³ Lev Shaumyan (b. 1904), a newspaper editor (and the unofficially adopted son of Mikoyan), would later assert that “the thought ripened in the minds of certain congress delegates, primarily those who remembered Lenin’s Testament well, that it was time to transfer Stalin from the post of general secretary to other work.”²¹⁴ But the idea that Kirov was widely viewed as worthy of replacing Stalin, or that he led a “moderate faction” opposed to Stalin, is contradicted by the evidence.²¹⁵ Kirov seemed a provincial by comparison with his predecessor in the second capital, Zinoviev, who had worked closely with Lenin and headed the Comintern. At the same time, Kirov had turned out a lot like Zinoviev: a talker, a bon vivant. Still, there was a difference. “At meetings, he never once said anything about any question,” Mikoyan told Khrushchev of Kirov. “He sat silent, and that was it.”²¹⁶ Selecting the general secretary, moreover, fell not to the congress but to the one-day plenum of the newly elected Central Committee afterward. Another gloss on the whispering was provided by the Leningrad delegate Mikhail Rosliakov. “Generally,” he would recall, “the talk was that the party had matured, grown stronger, that there were even people capable of replacing Stalin if the necessity arose.”²¹⁷

A congress report by the apparatchik Yezhov revealed that 10 percent of the party membership had joined during the civil war or before 1917, but that this profile applied to 80 percent of the congress delegates. In other words, 1,646 of the 1,966 delegates had become Communists when Lenin was the leader.²¹⁸ But Lenin-era Communists showed loyalty to Stalin. One was Veniamin Furer (b. 1904), a talented organizer in a mining town of Ukraine who had been given the floor at the congress during the February 7 session. “At the 16th Party Congress, comrade Stalin spoke of those reserves that lurk in the depths of our Soviet system,” Furer said in his remarks at the 17th. “If one breaks the bureaucratic knot, if one advances organizational work, these reserves would surface. . . . These reserves are the creative energy, the creative initiative of the mass.” He hit all the Stalin notes: “Thousands of new people have grown in the Donbass and constitute the proletarians of the Stalinist epoch. . . . They present to us, to our organizational work, to our leadership, more demands, demands that are more complex. . . . Our new worker judges us, in localities, on concrete questions: apartment repair, club organization, development of shops and canteens. . . . This party congress, opening a new plane of battle for socialism, should task the entire party and each Communist with the fighting task of studying and fully mastering the Stalinist style of work. (Applause.)”²¹⁹

MERE SECRETARY

A military-industrial parade on Red Square punctuated the victors’ congress. On February 10, 1934, Stalin and his inner circle met, apparently before the Central Committee plenum that evening, and he proposed that Kirov relocate to Moscow as a Central Committee secretary. “What are you talking about?!” Molotov later recalled of Kirov’s response. “I’ll be no good here. In Leningrad I can do as well as you, but what can I do here?” Some evidence suggests that Orjonikidze supported Kirov’s refusal, Stalin stalked out, and Kirov went to mollify him.²²⁰ A compromise ensued: Kirov would become a Central Committee secretary but remain party boss in Leningrad.²²¹

This provoked the hasty transfer of Andrei Zhdanov from Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) to Moscow as Central Committee secretary.²²² Born in Mariupol (1896), Zhdanov was the grandson of a priest and the son of a school inspector (who had died when the boy was just three) and a classical pianist (who had health issues after giving birth to him).²²³ He affected the trappings of an intellectual, had an easy demeanor in Stalin’s presence, and was a Russian nationalist. Khrushchev recalled him as a charming fellow who would carry out any assignment.²²⁴ Zhdanov was not even a politburo candidate member, but, in the absence of the dictator or Kaganovich, he would sign politburo meeting protocols.²²⁵

Working sessions of the politburo were giving way to “commissions” (an invention of Kaganovich), while the use of telephone polls for approving politburo decisions had grown to between 1,000 and 3,000 times a year. Even so, Stalin was often just dictating “politburo” decrees to Poskryobyshev or his other top aide Boris Dvinsky. (Ever the functionaries, they would note, “No telephone polling of politburo members taken.”)²²⁶

Further reflecting the changes wrought by collectivization-dekulakization, Stalin elevated several secret police officials to full membership in the Central Committee without prior candidate status: Yagoda (43 years old), Yevdokimov (43), Balytsky (42), and Beria (35). Yezhov (39) and Khrushchev (39) also became full members without having been candidates. Zhdanov (38) was promoted from candidate to full member; Poskryobyshev and Mekhlis became candidate members, even though they had not even been congress delegates.²²⁷ The post-congress Central Committee returned all members of the politburo from the previous congress, in 1930, except for Rykov.²²⁸ Stalin’s name came first on the list of members of the politburo, the orgburo, and the secretariat (after the 16th Congress, his name had appeared alphabetically). His portrait in the gallery of politburo members was rendered far larger, and his khakis lightened to make him stand out. Tellingly, however, Stalin decided that he should be formally listed as merely a “secretary,” in what looks like yet another indication of the long shadow of Lenin’s Testament about removing him as “general secretary.”²²⁹

PRIVATE LIFE

Inside the triangular Kremlin, the Imperial Senate formed its own triangular fortress, and Stalin’s wing was a fortress within the fortress. Even the regime personnel given regular Kremlin passes for state business needed a special pass for Stalin’s wing. Located one floor below where Lenin’s had been and on the building’s opposite side, it came to be known to regime insiders as “the Little Corner.”²³⁰ Stalin had marked his permanent shift to the Kremlin by having the interiors redone. The walls in the offices were lined with shoulder-height wood paneling, under the theory that wood vapors enhanced air quality, and the elevators were paneled with mahogany. The tiled stove in Stalin’s office yielded to central heating. Behind his working desk hung a portrait of Lenin. In a corner, on a small table, stood a display case with Lenin’s death mask. Another small table held several telephones (“Stalin,” he would answer). Next to the desk was a stand with a vase holding fresh fruit. In the rear was a door that led to a room for relaxation, rarely used, with oversized hanging maps and a giant globe. In the main office, between two of the three large windows that let in afternoon sun, sat a black leather couch where, in his better moods, Stalin and guests sipped tea with lemon. In the country’s darkest moments he could exude optimism, but when, to others, matters seemed brightest, he could become gloomy, withdrawn.

Ten miles away, in Volynskoe village, near the town of Kuntsevo on the right bank of the Moscow River, the OGPU completed construction on a new dacha for him in 1934—within just a year, using fiberboard panels (not long-lasting, but easy to put up).²³¹ In contrast to the neo-Gothic style of Zubalovo, Meran Merzhanyants, known as Miron Merzhanov, an ethnic Armenian and the head architect for the central executive committee, adopted a simpler neoclassicism for the one-story, seven-room villa with sundeck and veranda.²³² The Near Dacha, as it became known, sat on thirty acres in a deep wood and was encircled by a solid wall made of plywood, four to five meters high, which was painted green, like the residence, to blend in. The site proved easy to secure but at first noisy (to one side lay the village of Davydkovo, which filled with drunken men at night, and to another, the Kiev Station freight depot).²³³ For a time, Stalin continued to sleep at his new Kremlin apartment and use the Zubalovo dacha, but Nadya’s absence weighed on him at places they had shared. Soon he decided on the Near Dacha as his permanent residence.²³⁴

Hitler lived at the eighteenth-century Palais Schulenburg, at 77 Wilhelmstrasse, the chancellor’s residence since 1871, which during the Weimar Republic had acquired a modernist addition, where Hitler had his formal office. The Führer had the palace part remodeled, recovering the original grandeur but with an elegant simplicity. He would also have his Munich apartment (16 Prinzregentenplatz) refurbished in rectilinear forms, opening up larger light-filled, strikingly modern and spare spaces. These interiors were photographed for the German public. Additionally, Hitler vastly expanded the chalet-style farmhouse in the alpine border town of Berchtesgaden, in the Obersalzberg, where he had stayed on holiday. It had been rechristened the Berghof (“mountain farm”) and now had more than thirty rooms.²³⁵ An ample dining room, study, and great hall were built with Swiss stone and pinewood paneling, and the Teutonic furniture, too, was deliberately oversized. Picture windows and an open-air terrace afforded panoramic views of the snowcapped Bavarian Alps and Austria in the distance. Over time, the entire mountain area would be closed in a wide security perimeter with a high fence, but the loss of physical accessibility was compensated for by images of Hitler’s domestic life published in periodicals. Commercially available photo albums also depicted him hiking in the pure mountain air with his dog or entertaining blond children at his mountain retreat. Postcards for sale showed him feeding deer on the terrace—a private, softer Führer.²³⁶

No public mention was made of the existence, let alone location, of Stalin’s private Moscow residence, even as the entire regime became organized around it. A team of chauffeurs remained on twenty-four-hour call at the special Kremlin garage, which was jammed with foreign makes. Stalin had acquired a 1929 Rolls-Royce but was usually driven in a Packard, a premier luxury brand he had come to love since the Tsaritsyn days (when he rode in a Packard Twin Six “touring car”).²³⁷ In 1933, the regime had purchased the new Packard Twelve in the United States (Stalin would travel with the top down, from Sochi to Abkhazia and back, just for the ride). He preferred the jump seat, facing forward, which he pulled down himself. One guard sat on the backseat, and another next to the driver. Stalin’s Packard drove right up to his entrance of the Imperial Senate; exiting the Kremlin, at the Borovitskaya Gates, he traveled west along Znamenka, then the Arbat, Smolensk Square, Borodino Bridge, Great Dorogomilov Street, and onto the old Mozhaisk Highway to a hidden sharp left turnoff at Volynskoe. Service personnel nicknamed the route “the Georgian Military Highway,” in reference to the actual road in the Caucasus.

Inside the dacha, Stalin and his guests, by custom, wore slippers (he tucked his trousers into his socks). An intercom connected all the rooms. The hot water heater was imported. A separate building, some 200 yards from the principal residence, housed a kitchen, which had a traditional Russian-style stove, which beckoned when his rheumatism acted up. The auxiliary structure contained a Russian-style bathhouse and billiard room, too. Master artisans from around the country fabricated much of the furniture, doors, and wall paneling at Moscow’s Lux Factory. A wooden bed that workmen had used became Stalin’s. Contrary to legend, he slept in the bedroom (some 200 square feet). The floors were also made of wood. The dining room, off to the right of the entrance, had a long table, an upright piano, and a gramophone. Stalin collected records, favoring the danceable light romances of Pyotr Leshchenko and especially the émigré Alexander Vertinsky.²³⁸ During and after meals, he convened regime meetings. According to Mikoyan, the dictator ate slowly but had a healthy appetite. “Stalin loved a variety of fish dishes,” he wrote. “Danube herring he loved very much. . . . He loved poultry: guinea fowl, duck, flattened young chicken. He loved thin rack of lamb cooked on a spit. . . . Thin bones, a little meat, dry-broiled.”²³⁹ Lakoba would bring racks of lamb from Abkhazia.

The Near Dacha was built with children’s bedrooms, but Vasily (age thirteen) and Svetlana (eight) continued to live in the Kremlin apartment below their father’s office and to spend weekends and summers at Zubalovo.²⁴⁰ (Yakov Jughashvili, age twenty-six, lived at Granovsky, 3.) Full-time care of the children fell to Til as well as Pauker, who had been born in Habsburg Lemberg (Lwów, Lviv, Lvov), of Jewish extraction, the son of a barber, from whom he had learned the trade.²⁴¹ Vasily, red haired like his mother, with a pimply face, initially was sent to School No. 20; Svetlana began at No. 25, a model school known for “very tough, strict discipline,” as Pauker reported to Stalin. (Vasily was transferred there.)²⁴² Their father’s portrait hung in the school, which offered radio and electrotechnology, airplane and automobile modeling, ballroom dancing, theater, a rifle team, parachute jumping, volleyball, hockey, excursions to the State Tretyakov Gallery, summer camps in Crimea. Perhaps 85 percent of the teaching staff did not belong to the party. Vasily’s closest friend was nicknamed “Collective Farm Boy” (his mother, from a village, scrubbed the school’s floors). But his friends could not visit him at home. Stalin would sometimes read aloud to Vasily and Artyom. “Once he almost laughed to the point of tears,” Artyom recalled of a reading of the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, “and then he said, ‘And here comrade Zoshchenko remembered about the GPU and changed the ending!’”²⁴³

Stalin’s own son was a rambunctious type, signing his letters “Red Vaska.” Perhaps he misbehaved, at least in part, to get his father’s attention. “With a reluctant heart,” the bodyguard Vlasik would recall, “we had to report his behavior to his father, ruining his mood.”²⁴⁴ Vasily observed how his father doted on his younger sister, with constant reminders that Svetlana was a good example.²⁴⁵ Svetlana studied hard under the guidance of her nanny, Bychkova.²⁴⁶ “Stalin, someone who absolutely lacked sentimentalism, expressed such untypical gentleness toward his daughter,” recalled Candide Charkviani, a Georgian official. “‘My Little Hostess,’ Stalin would say, and seat Svetlana on his lap and give her kisses. ‘Since she lost her mother, I have kept telling her that she is the mistress of the house,’ Stalin told us.”²⁴⁷ Stalin instructed her to issue orders, and she would address written commands to “Secretary No. 1,” and he would answer, “I submit.” She also recalled, however, that he was absent. “Once in a while,” she wrote, “he enjoyed the sounds of children playing.” Stalin would overnight at the Near Dacha. “Sometimes before he left, he’d come to my room in his overcoat to kiss me good night as I lay sleeping,” Svetlana added. “He liked kissing me while I was little, and I’ll never forget how tender he was to me.”²⁴⁸ She was heard to utter, “Let the whole world hate me, as long as Papa loves me. If Papa tells me to go to the moon, I’ll go.”^{249, 250}

Into the public vacuum about Stalin’s personal life stepped Kyrill Kakabadze, a Soviet trade representative in Berlin for Georgia’s manganese mines, who had defected and published a defamatory essay in the British Sunday Express (April 8, 1934) that purported to describe Stalin’s “orgies” at a “personal estate” in Zubalovo of 300,000 acres. “Stalin lives like a tsar,” he wrote, supposedly costing the state ₤300,000 a year and 1,000 lives a day. “Stalin took for himself huge apartments that had once been inhabited by Ivan the Terrible.” Soviet representatives in London begged for compromising material on Kakabadze for release to the British press (the OGPU went to work, discovering that he was from a merchant family), then the German press republished the Kakabadze articles.²⁵¹ Stalin took it out on Beria, his minion for all things Georgian, writing (April 14) that, “besides the Georgian carousers and scamps arrested in Moscow hotels, there is another large group in Leningrad. The dissoluteness of so-called representatives of Georgian economic organizations has placed shame on the South Caucasus organizations. We oblige you to take immediate measures to liquidate the unseemliness, if you do not want the South Caucasus to end up in the court of the Central Committee.”²⁵²

COMMON ENEMIES

Stalin had fixed a covetous eye on Chinese Turkestan, or Xinjiang (“New Territory”). From January through April 1934, he fought a small war there. Renewal of a mass Muslim rebellion had spurred Comintern operatives to contemplate pushing for a socialist revolution, but Soviet military intelligence had pointed out that, even though the rebels commanded the loyalty of almost the entire Muslim population (90 percent), a successful Muslim independence struggle in Chinese Turkestan could inspire the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz in Soviet Turkestan or even the Mongols. Stalin had decided to send about 7,000 OGPU and Red Army soldiers, as well as airplanes, artillery, mustard gas, and Soviet Uzbek Communists, to defend the Chinese warlord. Remarkably, he allowed Soviet forces to combine with former White Army soldiers abroad, who were promised amnesty and Soviet citizenship. A possible Muslim rebel victory turned into a defeat. Unlike the Japanese in Manchuria, Stalin did not set up an independent state, but he solidified his informal hold on Xinjiang, setting up military bases, sending advisers, and gaining coal, oil, tungsten, and tin concessions. Some 85 percent of Xinjiang’s trade was with the USSR.²⁵³ British and Japanese observers and Chinese newspapers railed against Soviet “imperialism.”²⁵⁴ Chiang Kai-shek became dependent on Soviet goodwill to communicate with Xinjiang’s capital, Ürümqi.²⁵⁵

Ambassador Bullitt, who had returned to the United States after his brief December whirlwind in Moscow, came back. “The honeymoon atmosphere had evaporated completely before I arrived,” he wrote to Roosevelt (April 13, 1934).²⁵⁶ That very day, the U.S. Congress passed the Johnson Act, which prohibited foreign nations in default from marketing bonds in the United States, effectively preempting Roosevelt’s government from underwriting loans to the Soviet Union as negotiations proceeded for belated repayment of tsarist and Provisional Government debt.²⁵⁷

For Stalin, in any case, the threat of an immediate Japanese attack had receded.²⁵⁸ Hitler’s Germany was the greater puzzle.²⁵⁹ On April 19, Stalin’s spies delivered a copy of a secret document sent by the British ambassador in Berlin, Eric Phipps, to London, quoting Hitler to the effect that “it’s better to be respected and unloved than weak and loved.” Phipps asserted that “in relation to Russia, however, Hitler is ready to leave personal feelings aside and conduct a policy of realism.”²⁶⁰ A follow-up intercepted assessment from Phipps stated, in Russian translation, “The [Nazi] regime is solid, and the storm troopers are so disciplined that [Hitler] can be endangered only as a result of a serious uprising or a slow process of internal decay.” Stalin underlined this passage.²⁶¹ Balytsky, OGPU chief in Soviet Ukraine, sent Stalin a report on the German consulates in Kharkov, Kiev, and Odessa, which were now run by Nazi party members who were said to be recruiting Nazi youth and storm troopers on Soviet territory among the half million ethnic Germans in Soviet Ukraine. Balytsky initiated arrests of Soviet “fascists.”²⁶²

On May 5, 1934, Polish foreign minister Beck, as promised, signed an early renewal of the nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union.²⁶³ But Stalin took talk of Poland trying to maintain neutrality vis-à-vis both its giant neighbors as disinformation, and behind Poland—indeed, behind every Soviet foe—he saw Britain. Stalin could not or would not grasp that “imperialist” Britain had the same enemies as the USSR: Nazi Germany in Europe and militaristic Japan in Asia.²⁶⁴ British-Soviet relations were poor.²⁶⁵ The British embassy official Sir William Strang had reported from Moscow that Pravda was calling the Nazi ideologue Rosenberg “a lackey of British imperialism.”²⁶⁶ Officials in London were also incredulous at Soviet assertions that the British were “the real force behind German and Japanese fascism,” as the Comintern’s Dmytro Manuilsky had put it at the 17th Party Congress. The son of an Orthodox priest from Ukraine, he had charged, in typical contradictions-of-capitalism fashion, that Britain was instigating these two powers against the Soviet Union to avoid a new intra-imperialist war over colonies.²⁶⁷ Even the tsarist-era military men Alexander Svechin and Boris Shaposhnikov wrote that Poland, Romania, and other limitrophe states were ultimately subordinated to the will of London and Paris.²⁶⁸

Internally, Tukhachevsky urged that, since Poland or Romania was sure to attack at some point, the Red Army ought to take advantage of the poor state of these implacable enemies’ railways to deliver a knockout blow before they could fully mobilize. The appeal of such preemptive war had been enhanced by a perceived shift toward military attacks without formal war declarations.²⁶⁹ But for all the talk about the inevitability of war, Stalin was not looking to fight one.²⁷⁰

Neither was Britain. Although Japan eyed British-controlled parts of Southeast and South Asia, it was preoccupied with China, but Germany under Hitler looked less contained—and British credibility was on the line.²⁷¹ British society, however, was overwhelmingly desirous of avoiding another catastrophic war and mostly sympathetic to Germany’s grievances against the Versailles Treaty. Added to this was the political-ideological challenge of the Comintern and, behind it, the Soviet Union, whose industrialization—contrary to British expectations—had seemed to succeed. For London, no less than for Stalin, some sort of accommodation with Nazi Germany seemed the path to security.

POET TO POET

The poet Osip Mandelstam, outraged over the famine, had composed sixteen lines that blamed Stalin. The verses, which he read to a handful of intimates, did not mention the dictator by name, but mocked a “Kremlin highlander” with oily fingers, a criminal underworld past, and part Ossetian descent. In April 1934, Mandelstam saw fellow poet Boris Pasternak on the street—the two had known each other since 1922—and he recited the rhymed invective to him. Hearsay has Pasternak deeming the lines an act of suicide, responding, “I didn’t hear this; you didn’t recite it to me.”²⁷² On the night of May 16–17, Mandelstam was arrested at his apartment, where the police confiscated manuscripts, letters, and his address book. The poet was allowed to take a few personal items and books. He was said to have selected Dante’s Inferno.²⁷³

The admission process to the new union of writers had commenced, and on May 15, Fadeyev, Bedny, Pasternak, and others were inducted.²⁷⁴ A devastated Pasternak now learned of Mandelstam’s arrest from Anna Gorenko (b. 1889), known as Akhmatova, who had arrived from Leningrad that evening. He went to see Mandelstam’s wife, Nadezhda, and they evidently tried to call Bedny, who had once promised to defend Mandelstam if necessary, but had ceased to have contact with Stalin and deemed intervention useless.²⁷⁵ Nadezhda managed to get into the Kremlin to see Yenukidze, but also with no results. It seems Pasternak went to Izvestiya and implored Bukharin to intercede. (Pasternak was doing literary translations for the newspaper as a source of income.)²⁷⁶ According to the woman who later would become Pasternak’s lover, he “raced frantically all over town, telling everybody that he was not to blame and denying responsibility for Mandelstam’s disappearance.” In fact, Pasternak did not know but Mandelstam, under interrogation, had not named all the people to whom he had recited the poem—only those already known to the interrogator—and omitted Pasternak.²⁷⁷ At the other extreme, the short-story writer Pyotr Pavlenko boasted to acquaintances that he’d been allowed to listen secretly to Mandelstam’s interrogation at Lubyanka, evidently from behind a door in an adjacent room.²⁷⁸

In a surprise, Mandelstam was sentenced not to death or even a Gulag camp, but exile in Cherdyn (northern Urals), and allowed to take his wife. In early June 1934, he attempted suicide, jumping out a window. Bukharin wrote to Stalin about the poet’s frail psychology, noting that “Boris Pasternak is utterly at a loss over Mandelstam’s arrest and no one knows anything.”²⁷⁹ Then, on June 13, Pasternak was summoned to the phone at his communal apartment on Volkhonka Street. The caller said Stalin would be getting on the line, but Pasternak, like Bulgakov some years earlier, thought it a prank and hung up. The phone rang again, the same voice stating the call was from Stalin’s office and, to eliminate disbelief, dictated a special number to call. Pasternak dialed it and soon heard, “Stalin speaking.”

Stalin told Pasternak that Mandelstam’s case had been reexamined and the result would be favorable. (The sentence was commuted to mere banishment from the largest cities; he and his wife moved to Voronezh.) Stalin asked if Mandelstam was Pasternak’s friend—a tricky question. If Pasternak said yes, he could be implicated; if he said no, he was betraying Mandelstam. “Poets rarely make friends,” he answered. “They envy each other.” Stalin told him that if something terrible had befallen one of his friends, he would go to the wall to aid him. Then Stalin asked if Mandelstam was genuinely a “master.” Again, tricky: this could have referred to the verses about the “Kremlin highlander.” What Pasternak answered remains a matter of dispute. He seems to have suggested that they meet face-to-face. Stalin hung up. Pasternak dialed the number again, asking Poskryobyshev to reconnect him, but Stalin’s aide said the dictator was busy. Pasternak asked whether he could tell others of the call; Poskryobyshev said he would leave it to him.²⁸⁰ That very day, Pasternak told Ilya Ehrenburg (who was living in Paris with a Soviet passport but had just arrived in Moscow with André Malraux). Ehrenburg spread the sensational news to select other writers.²⁸¹ For Pasternak, the call had happened extremely quickly, but it would reverberate in his head for a lifetime.

A NEW AUTHORITY

Georgi Dimitrov, the acquitted but still imprisoned Bulgarian Comintern operative, had finally been deported from Germany. He arrived in Moscow by plane (February 27, 1934), and Stalin afforded him a hero’s welcome and Soviet citizenship.²⁸² “It is difficult to imagine,” Dimitrov recorded in his diary, “a more grandiose reception or more sympathy and love.”²⁸³ He had become the best-known Communist internationally after Stalin.²⁸⁴ Dimitrov was given an apartment at the Comintern’s Hotel Lux, which also housed a young Yugoslav named Josip Broz Tito and a Vietnamese named Nguyen Ai Cuoc, later known as Ho Chi Minh.²⁸⁵ (Dimitrov would soon obtain one of the 550 grand apartments in the new Government House, an elite complex colloquially known as the House on the Embankment, designed by Boris Yofan and built by Yagoda, on the site of wine warehouses along the Moscow River, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin walls.)²⁸⁶ Stalin took to phoning him. Convalescing outside Moscow at a dacha in Arkhangelskoe, on the former estates of Princes Golitsyn and Yusupov, Dimitrov requested an audience. On April 6, Stalin had him named to the Comintern executive committee, and the next day he received him in the Little Corner, one on one.²⁸⁷

Some Communists, including Germans who had managed to escape into exile from Nazi terror, were lobbying for a shift toward cooperation with other parties on the left.²⁸⁸ But Stalin stressed the need to win over European workers from parliamentarism, whose absence had allowed Russian workers to be revolutionary in 1917. “In all countries, the bourgeoisie will proceed to fascism,” he told Dimitrov, which he presented as an opportunity for Communists to win workers’ allegiance, provided the latter were made to understand that the era of parliamentarism was ending, meaning Social Democrats could be outmaneuvered. Still, he concluded that “we cannot immediately and easily win millions of workers in Europe.” In the meantime, he encouraged Dimitrov to seize leadership inside the Comintern: “Kuusinen is good, but an academic; Manuilsky—agitator; [Wilhelm] Knorin—propagandist! [Osip] Pyatnitsky—narrow . . . Who says that this ‘foursome’ must remain [in charge]?” Molotov chimed in: “You have looked the enemy in the face. And after prison, you now take the work into your hands.”²⁸⁹

At the 1934 May Day parade, Stalin motioned Dimitrov to come up to the dictator’s side on the Mausoleum, a Kremlinological sign for all. Dimitrov seized the moment, asking to be received again privately when convenient; Stalin agreed to an audience the next day. “Select yourself where and how to appear and what to write,” he instructed him in the Little Corner. “Don’t let yourself be talked into anything.”²⁹⁰ Dimitrov drew inspiration from recent events in France, where workers, in response to antiparliamentary riots by far right, monarchist, and fascist leagues, had ignored party divisions on the left and united in a general strike to prevent France from following Germany’s path.²⁹¹ “The wall between Communist workers and Social Democrats should be demolished,” Dimitrov told the visiting Maurice Thorez, the French Communist party leader, on May 11. But this was a call not to cooperate with Social Democrat party leaders but to redouble efforts to reclaim their rank and file.²⁹² Additional urgency arrived on May 19, when a fascist-inflected coup succeeded in Dimitrov’s native Bulgaria. And yet, not only Stalin but also Pyatnitsky (real surname Tarshis), Béla Kun, Wilhelm Knorin, Solomon Lozovsky (Dridzo), and Jenő Varga detested Social Democrats and opposed a broad leftist front to combat fascism.

BUNGLING

Stalin summoned Artuzov, who had predicted Poland’s behavior, to a series of discussions in the Little Corner. (Litvinov exited when the intelligence officials entered.)²⁹³ Soviet military intelligence in Europe had suffered a string of catastrophic exposures several years running, as a result of violating elementary tradecraft: recruiting agents among local Communist party members (who were under police surveillance).²⁹⁴ A list compiled by Yagoda for Stalin and Voroshilov of every agent exposure with names, dates, and causes, covered ten pages and highlighted “infestation by traitors,” “recruitment of foreign cadres among dubious elements,” and “non-observance of the rules of conspiracy,” all of which had resulted in the USSR being fed “a mass of disinformation.”²⁹⁵ On May 26, 1934, Stalin appointed Artuzov deputy chief of military intelligence, concurrent with his post as head of OGPU foreign intelligence, an unprecedented combination.²⁹⁶

Within a month, Artuzov had written a detailed analysis—one copy to Stalin, one to Voroshilov, and none to Jan Berzin, the nominal military intelligence chief—detailing that the Soviets now had essentially no military intelligence operations in Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, France, or Italy. His solution was to prohibit, once again, recruitment of foreign Communists as spies and to improve the pay and housing of operatives abroad. Fatefully, Stalin also accepted Artuzov’s recommendation to liquidate military intelligence’s department for analysis, the one central clearinghouse for assessing the mass of all incoming information. Artuzov pointed out that there was no such all-knowing and therefore risky department of analysis in the OGPU foreign directorate (which was one of its weaknesses).²⁹⁷ Military intelligence was subordinated directly to the defense commissar, who emerged with enhanced powers.²⁹⁸

In terms of counterintelligence, the secret police claimed that a Soviet spy in Chinese Harbin was a double agent who had helped Japan roll up part of the Soviet espionage network in the Far East.²⁹⁹ Stalin demanded to know from Yagoda which Soviet operative had recruited the spy.³⁰⁰ A far more important case remains confounding. The OGPU had put the head of Red Army external relations, Colonel Vasily Smagin, under observation on the basis of intercepted deciphered telegrams from the Japanese military attaché Torashirō Kawabe. “We have precisely established that Smagin in January 1934, using the possibilities in his position, took from a rank-and-file operative in the Fourth Department [military intelligence] fifty-seven file cards of secret agent material about Japan and twenty-nine about China to his home for three days,” Yagoda wrote. “This had nothing in common with his official duties.” Stalin underlined this passage, and another about Smagin’s closeness to Kawabe. Smagin, however, was only sacked and left unemployed—and eventually given a teaching position.³⁰¹

LONG KNIVES

Hitler’s renunciation of the League of Nations had begun to lift the postwar taboo in France on the idea of any “alliance.”³⁰² Since Hitler’s takeover, Litvinov had been urging a regional pact against him, borrowing the phrase “collective security” from the League and arguing that “peace is indivisible” (i.e., either every country had peace or none had it). Lenin had sized up Litvinov as “the most crocodile-like of our diplomats,” who tore into and held on to people.³⁰³ Stalin, however, was not keen on a regional pact that, without Germany, would come across as anti-German while not even guaranteeing Soviet border security on the Baltic Sea. He also wanted to avoid giving a pretext for a Polish-German bloc on his immediate border.³⁰⁴ Still, he viewed talks with Paris as a useful instrument for his talks with Berlin, exactly as the French did.³⁰⁵

The USSR won diplomatic recognition on June 9, 1934, from Czechoslovakia and Romania, members of the Little Entente, and by the 27th the draft of a comprehensive Eastern Pact—France, the Soviet Union, the Little Entente, the Baltic states, Germany, Poland, Finland—was being circulated alongside a separate Franco-Soviet agreement.³⁰⁶ On June 29, Stalin received an OGPU intelligence report (“from a serious Polish source”) asserting that, by having invited Goebbels to Warsaw, Piłsudski was showing Paris he had options to discourage the latter’s bruited alliance with Moscow.³⁰⁷

The counterpart to a Soviet security deal centered on France was a Comintern shift toward a united front with Social Democrats against fascism. Dimitrov wrote cryptically in his diary (June 29), “Stalin: I never answered you. I had no time. On this question, there is still nothing in my head. Something must be prepared!” (Dimitrov also wrote to himself, “So lonely and personally unhappy! It’s almost more difficult for me now than last year in prison.” But then Dimitrov, despite being married to the cause, addressed his personal loneliness, resuming correspondence with Rosa Fleischmann, a Jewish Communist from Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland whom he had met in Vienna years earlier, and who would soon become his second wife and companion, something Stalin did not have.)³⁰⁸

The Central Committee was holding a plenum, the first such full meeting since the party congress, devoted to meat supply and livestock.³⁰⁹ Early on the morning of June 30, 1934, Hitler arrested Captain Ernst Röhm, chief of staff of the street-fighting SA (Sturmabteilung), in a Bavarian resort town; as many as 2,000 more arrests ensued. Surly and overweight, with a prominent scar on his left cheek, and openly homosexual, Röhm was one of the few who used the familiar du (“thou”) with Hitler. He led some 3 million SA members, poorly armed and disorganized, but more than were in the Nazi party, and nearly thirty times the size of the Reichswehr (limited by the Versailles Treaty).³¹⁰ His Brownshirt militia sought a permanent place in the Nazi order as a reward for helping bring Hitler to power and targeting Nazi enemies (leftists, Jews), but he had toned down his rhetoric of a continuing revolution and accepted Hitler’s request to go on medical leave and send the Brownshirts on leave as well (most were due to return in August). But Reichswehr generals—who reported to Hindenburg, not the chancellor Hitler—were adamant that the paramilitary SA be neutered. The Nazi Schutzstaffel, or SS (Heinrich Himmler), Sicherheitsdienst, or SD (Reinhard Heydrich), and Gestapo (also Heydrich) had no love for their SA rivals, either. Rumors of a pending crackdown against the SA had spurred the latter to yet another drunken rampage in Munich on the evening of June 29.³¹¹ At the same time, Hitler had been told that President Hindenburg was ready to declare martial law and receive the former conservative prime minister Franz von Papen on June 30. In the end, after much stalling, the Führer felt compelled to move against both the SA and the traditional conservatives.

The army brass put its resources in SS hands, and left the latter to fabricate the damning evidence of a supposed SA “putsch” with the aid of an unnamed foreign country.³¹² Still, it was awkward: the SA had been just as crucial (and just as dispensable) to the Nazi revolution as the Kronstadt sailors had been to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. In a two-hour, radio-broadcast speech to the Reichstag (twelve of whose members would be among those to be executed), Hitler highlighted storm trooper moral laxity and Röhm’s homosexuality and declared that he had acted patriotically to preempt a planned SA “Night of the Long Knives.”³¹³ Stalin was said to have badgered his newly arrived envoy in Berlin for details of the “bloodbath.”³¹⁴ Izvestiya dedicated four columns on its front page to Hitler’s Reichstag speech about the Night of the Long Knives.³¹⁵ “What a guy [molodets],” Stalin exclaimed to his inner circle, according to Mikoyan’s later recollections. “Well done. Knows how to act!”³¹⁶ A Comintern instant analysis, clueless about the dynamics of the Nazi regime, wrote that the “monopolist big bourgeoisie” had crushed the “petit-bourgeois strata.”³¹⁷ Pravda (July 2, 1934) editorialized that “German fascism once again revealed itself as the agent of finance capital.” British intelligence did little better, misperceiving a triumph of the Reichswehr over the party and a “return of the Rapallo line” of closeness to the Soviet Union.³¹⁸ In fact, the episode solidified a Nazi accord with the army and large-scale industry on Hitler’s terms, while clearing the way for him to merge the chancellorship with the presidency upon Hindenburg’s passing. The SS would be even more radical, ideologically, than the SA.

If the hearsay about Stalin’s enthusiastic reaction is correct, he was also wrong. This was the first (and would be the sole) violent regime purge of Hitler’s rule. The Führer had agreed to dispatch Röhm only under pressure from Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich, yet he still hoped Röhm could be persuaded to do the deed himself. (The Brownshirt fighter did not touch the pistol left for him in his prison cell and had to be executed.)³¹⁹ For all the sensation, a mere eighty-five known people were summarily executed without legal proceedings, and just fifty of them even belonged to the SA. Some individual scores were settled.³²⁰ What Stalin and British intelligence most failed to grasp was the consolidation of the Nazi regime’s anti-Bolshevism.³²¹

Stalin, however, was not ready to surrender on winning over Nazi Germany. On July 1, 1934, following the conclusion of the Central Committee plenum, Dimitrov sent him a draft of his political report for a proposed 7th Comintern Congress (scheduled for the fall). Dimitrov could defy Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels, but he remained inordinately deferential toward the Soviet dictator. Stalin, in turn, asked that Dimitrov “consider” his suggestions, and his marginal comments indicate that he was far from letting go of his thesis on Social Democracy as the left wing of fascism. Dimitrov’s text asked “whether it is correct to refer to Social Democracy indiscriminately as social fascism,” and “Are Social Democrats always and everywhere the main social bulwark of the bourgeoisie?” Stalin wrote in the margins, “As to the leadership—yes, but not ‘indiscriminate.’” Beyond this tiny concession, where Dimitrov gently tried to rehabilitate some Social Democrats as a basis for cooperation in the struggle against fascism, Stalin pointedly inserted, “Against whom is this thesis?”³²² On July 5, the politburo was informed that Germany, still suffering the effects of the Depression, had raised the prospect of a 200-million-mark credit for the purchase of German machinery.³²³ Dimitrov, suffering from latent malaria, chronic gastritis, and other illnesses, departed for two months to Georgia on medical leave.

STRENGTHENING SOCIALIST LEGALITY

On July 10, 1934, after six months of internal back-and-forth, the regime announced the replacement of the OGPU by the NKVD (the people’s commissariat of internal affairs).³²⁴ Mężyński had appealed to Stalin yet again in early 1934 to be allowed to resign. (“No activities. Only lying down 24 hours a day,” he had written in his notebook in Kislovodsk. “This is death. You lie all day in the hammock, and death sits across from you.”)³²⁵ Stalin proposed that Kaganovich confer with him and possibly accept his request. Then, on May 10, Mężyński’s heart had stopped. Four days later, his ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall, with an artillery salute.³²⁶ Rumors had Stalin set to appoint Mikoyan, which frightened Yagoda’s gang and brightened other Chekists who appreciated Mikoyan’s sly humor and lectures at their club.³²⁷ But Stalin named Yagoda commissar and Yankel Sorenson, known as Yakov Agranov, his first deputy.³²⁸ The regime had just expanded Article 58 of the RSFSR criminal code (regarding counterrevolutionary activities) with new subarticles (2–13) to cover attempts to seize power, espionage, anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation, and Trotskyism.³²⁹ As Stalin had proposed, military desertion was now punished as treason, with sentences of execution or, in extenuating circumstances, ten years in confinement.³³⁰ Nonetheless, the formation of the NKVD was conceived as a genuine legal reform.³³¹ The politburo would soon decree a parallel expansion in the number of judges and procuracy personnel, with pay raises.³³² Kaganovich explained that “the reorganization of the OGPU means that, as we are in more normal times, we can punish through the court and not resort to extrajudicial repression, as we have until now.”³³³

This new mandate had to be explained to police operatives.³³⁴ “In capitalist countries, instead of the ‘celebrated’ bourgeois order, there is chaos, a sea of blood, extrajudicial executions, gas, machine guns and armored cars on the streets,” Yagoda told them in a speech at the NKVD’s founding. “If now, in the village, we do not have expansive kulak formations that we had previously, if in the city the counterrevolution does not have the character it had before, the question arises: What guises, what forms are possible for the activities of counterrevolutionary agents?” He answered that former parties (SRs, Mensheviks, bourgeois nationalists) could reanimate and link up with Communist oppositionist elements (Trotskyites, rightists) for espionage and sabotage, requiring the NKVD to abjure mass arrests in favor of “subtle, painstaking, and probing investigations.”³³⁵ Investigations had to be conducted with greater observance of procedural rules.³³⁶ Ultimately, the reform was aimed at better coherence of the state, under the slogan “strengthening revolutionary legality.”³³⁷ But none of this meant imposing limits on Stalin’s power, whose extralegal operation caused many of the very problems of arbitrariness about which he complained.³³⁸

ARTISTS AND THE STATE

Technically, the Union of Soviet Writers was a civic organization, but it was blatantly an arm of the state.³³⁹ It was spending almost no time on aesthetics.³⁴⁰ Its main activity, in the run-up to the anticipated founding congress, consisted of endless meetings of its governing board and manifold committees, and entertainment. The union’s headquarters occupied a nineteenth-century mansion on Vorovsky (formerly Cooks’) Street, in what had been Moscow’s most aristocratic neighborhood, part of the ancient Dolgorukov estate. (This figured in Tolstoy’s War and Peace as the Rostov estate.) Known as the “Central House of the Writers,” the HQ had a library with newspapers and journals, a restaurant, a competitive billiards team, sport groups for tennis, chess, and horseback riding, and study sections for thematic subjects and foreign languages. It also took over a fledgling dacha colony, at Peredelkino, which, like the Moscow HQ, would afford a certain degree of self-organized intellectual life (circles, house visits), although this was shadowed by willing and blackmailed informants.³⁴¹

Two years after the politburo decree announcing it, the writers’ union’s founding congress had still not met, having been postponed several times. Gorky had been set to deliver the keynote, but on May 11, 1934, his son Maxim Peshkov passed away, at age thirty-eight. He had taken part in a drinking binge with some secret police operatives at a May Day picnic, been left to sleep it off outside on a bench, and been diagnosed with influenza. He was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery on May 12 (the day before Mężyński’s body was placed on view at the House of Trade Unions). Gorky was shattered. “He no longer belonged to himself, and seemed that he was not a person but an institution,” obliged to carry on, noted one close friend.³⁴² Gossips speculated that the regime had killed Gorky’s son to intimidate him.³⁴³ But as the congress’s new opening date approached, Gorky would write a forceful letter to Stalin, asking to be relieved of his role as chairman, and would submit a heated article for Pravda lashing out at party hacks trying to control literature (which Kaganovich authorized Mekhlis to hold back). “Literary affairs are sharpening,” Kaganovich would write to Stalin, who, preoccupied with other matters on which Kaganovich sought guidance (Japan, grain procurements), would answer, three days later, “It must be explained to all Communist writers that the Master in literature, as in all other areas, is only the Central Committee, and that they are obliged to subordinate themselves unconditionally to the latter.”³⁴⁴

A Literary Fund was established on July 28, 1934, with the aim of subsidizing cultural figures in need, including up-and-coming writers, formalizing an ad hoc practice whereby they were granted shoes or winter coats. The money came from 10 percent deductions in the honoraria paid by publishing houses, as well as 0.5 to 2 percent of the fees for live performances. Additionally, the state budget contributed 25 percent of the Literary Fund’s resources. Soon, about 100,000 requests for aid accumulated (many writers submitted multiple petitions).³⁴⁵ Behind closed doors, writers disagreed vehemently on whether such subsidies enhanced productivity or blocked it by removing hunger.³⁴⁶ The Literary Fund obtained permission to build more dachas at Peredelkino as well. Of the three dozen writers’ families initially granted residency, few were Communist party members. Most writers failed to pay the nominal rent.³⁴⁷

WRITING HISTORY

On July 23, 1934, Stalin received the British writer H. G. Wells—who had interviewed Lenin—and they argued the world.³⁴⁸ (Radek would send Stalin a translation of passages about the dictator in Wells’s autobiography, published the same year, noting, “We didn’t manage to seduce the girl.”)³⁴⁹ Stalin’s last meeting in Moscow was July 29. Vlasik arranged for their special train to stop at Sochi’s remote freight yard for security reasons, but Stalin—for all his security anxieties—detested having to hide and insisted on detraining at the regular passenger station. His black Rolls-Royce awaited him, but he enjoyed walking a bit on foot, startling onlookers.³⁵⁰ That summer, he planned to work on a new history textbook. A few years back, in a letter to the journal Proletarian Revolution, he had exploded in fury at one historian’s criticisms of Lenin for supposedly having insufficiently criticized the danger of centrism in German Social Democracy before the Great War. Stalin, right on the facts, had tendentiously exaggerated the author’s argument, and called the article “anti-party and semi-Trotskyite.” Stalin also rejected the author’s claim that more documents remained to be uncovered. “Who besides hopeless bureaucrats would rely only on paper documents?” he wrote. “Who besides archival rats do not understand that the party and its leaders need to be assessed above all by their actions, and not only by their declarations?”³⁵¹

Not long thereafter, the politburo had formed a commission to write a new history of the party. But even the textbook drafted by the lapdog Yaroslavsky had been rejected, for lacking vivid individual heroes.³⁵² Stalin had his minions force the issue.³⁵³ Functionaries assembled a large group of historians. “We went into the hall like geese,” Sergei Piontkovsky recorded in his diary. “In all, there were about 100 people in the room. . . . Stalin stood up frequently, puffed on his pipe, and wandered between the tables.” He interrupted the main speaker and finally just took the floor. “Stalin spoke very quietly. He held the secondary school textbooks in his hand and spoke with a slight accent, striking the textbooks with his hand, proclaiming, ‘These textbooks are good for nothing. What the heck is the “feudal epoch,” “the epoch of industrial capitalism,” “the epoch of formations”—it’s all epochs and no facts, no events, no people, no concrete information, no names, no titles, no content.’” Piontkovsky’s diary continued: “Stalin said what we need are textbooks with facts, events, names. History should be history.”³⁵⁴

Of course, behind closed doors, Stalin was using just such a schematic vocabulary: feudal epoch, capitalist mode of production, bourgeois democracy.³⁵⁵

In Sochi, the dictator summoned Kirov, who arrived in early August and stayed at the Zenzinovka dacha (where Rykov used to stay). Writing history was not exactly Kirov’s forte. But Stalin also summoned Zhdanov, the dictator’s youngest favorite. Speaking to Alexandra Kollontai, Soviet envoy to Sweden, before departing Moscow, Stalin had playfully posed as a “right deviationist,” contrasting himself with Zhdanov, a “left deviationist,” a statement less about Stalin’s politics than Zhdanov’s extremism.³⁵⁶ Vasily and Artyom were also in Sochi all July and August, and Stalin gave them the draft history to test it. Zhdanov’s fifteen-year-old son, Yuri, invited to join the group for lunch, recalls that Stalin, to general laughter, observed that historians divided history into three successive schemata: matriarchate, patriarchate, and secretariat.³⁵⁷

After work, Stalin and Kirov grilled kebabs, sang old songs (“There’s a Cliff on the Volga”), and worked the garden with shovels, while Kirov chased the ducks and guinea fowl. Stalin did not like to swim (he was from the mountains), but Kirov did, and Stalin would wait for him at the shore. Stalin even permitted Kirov to go with him to the Russian steam bath, where they pounded each other with birch leaves.³⁵⁸ The dictator permitted no mistresses or prostitutes. Kirov got bored. “I am devilishly sick of this place,” he wrote to his wife back in Leningrad, complaining that they could not even play skittles. “We had intense heat, then six days and nights of intense rain. . . . Now, again, tedious heat has struck.”³⁵⁹ Stalin could not be torn from his beloved Sochi, but Kirov was back in Leningrad already by August 30, 1934, having departed in a train with Andrei Andreyev’s family. “He had a strong suntan,” recalled Natalya Andreyeva, the functionary’s daughter. “His teeth were white; he smiled often.”³⁶⁰

Grain procurements were severely lagging, despite the comparatively good harvest, and Kaganovich and Molotov wrote to Stalin about easing the burden on transport by purchasing 100,000 tons of Argentine and Australian wheat for the Soviet Far East. “Wheat imports now, when abroad they are shouting about the lack of wheat in the USSR, can only be a political minus,” he objected.³⁶¹ Instead he proposed they apply “maximum pressure.” Molotov was deployed to Siberia, Kaganovich to Ukraine, Mikoyan to Kursk and Voronezh, Chubar to the Middle Volga, and Zhdanov to Stalingrad province. Voroshilov, on fall maneuvers, was instructed to look into harvest gathering in Belorussia and the western province.³⁶² Kirov was sent to Kazakhstan to ensure harvest collection under his former protégé, local party boss Levon Mirzoyan. Stalin was now taking a restrained approach to the Kazakhs. Kirov got the head procurator for East Kazakhstan fired for abuses and asked Yagoda to remove police operatives for mistreating collective farmers.³⁶³ But when Kaganovich wrote to Stalin requesting a reduced procurement quota for Ukraine, Stalin warned him and the inner circle of a slippery slope.³⁶⁴

EXTRAVAGANZA

Finally, the founding congress of the Union of Soviet Writers had opened on August 17, 1934, with 597 delegates (377 with voting rights) and 40 foreign guests.³⁶⁵ The union had admitted around 1,500 members and 1,000 candidate members, of whom 1,535 lived in the Russian republic, including slightly more than 500 in Moscow, 206 in Ukraine, around 100 in Belorussia, 90 in Armenia, 79 in Azerbaijan, and 26 in Turkmenistan. About one third of the total membership and one half of the congress attendees belonged to the party.³⁶⁶ “Literally all writers submitted applications to join the writers’ union,” the newly appointed deputy head of the Central Committee culture department stated at a pre-congress gathering of the union’s party members. “Not a single writer did not submit an application, except Anna Akhmatova.”³⁶⁷ An exaggeration, but not by much. “On the threshold of its opening, the question unexpectedly arose of how to decorate the Columned Hall of the House of Trade Unions,” recalled one playwright of the venue. “Several of the projects were completely fantastic and unacceptable. At the last meeting, which took place in [culture and propaganda chief Alexei] Stetsky’s office, . . . I suggested we hang portraits of the classic writers. Stetsky stood, shook my hand, and said the question was decided.”³⁶⁸

A grandiose affair, broadcast over the radio and shown on newsreels, the congress lasted sixteen days. Crowds massed outside the hall to catch glimpses of the famous writers. Inside, an ovation greeted Gorky’s appearance to launch the proceedings. His report, “On Soviet Literature,” offered a potted history of literature from the dawn of writing that did not take up a single Soviet writer and, vaguely, called for a “folklore of the toiling people.”³⁶⁹ Samuil Marshak gave a report on children’s literature (August 19), Radek on the literature of dying capitalism (August 24), Aleksei Tolstoy on dramaturgy (August 27).³⁷⁰ “Everyone is consumed by the congress; the West through government glasses,” the literary critic Mikhail Kuzmin laconically wrote of the long speeches.³⁷¹ Zhdanov informed Sochi (August 28) that “everyone praises the congress right up to the incorrigible skeptics and ironists, who are not few in the writers’ milieu.”³⁷² By contrast, Chekists reported from informants that Mikhail Prishvin and Pantaleymon Romanov had ridiculed the “outstanding boredom and bureaucratism,” while the romanticist P. Rozhkov called the congress “a sleepy kingdom.” Isaac Babel labeled it “a literary wake.”³⁷³

One revelation emerged from the report (August 20) on literature in the Georgian republic, delivered by the university rector Malakia Toroshelidze, who at Stalin’s insistence began with the Middle Ages. It attracted the most attention of all the reports on national literatures in the USSR, and sparked discussion about ignored achievements, given the obsession with Europe.³⁷⁴ The Frenchman Malraux, the most prestigious foreigner in attendance, in prepared remarks read by an interpreter, noted that “if writers are really engineers of human souls, do not forget that an engineer’s highest calling is to invent. Art is not submission; art is conquest. (Applause.)” He added, “You should know that only really new works can sustain the cultural prestige of the Soviet Union abroad, the way Mayakovsky sustained it, the way Pasternak does. (Applause.)”³⁷⁵ This was the nub of the dilemma Stalin faced.

When novelist Fyodor Gladkov invited Ivan Kirilenko (b. 1902), an infamous hard-liner, and other Ukrainian writers to “tea,” they declined, fearing it would be seen as “a grouping.”³⁷⁶ An NKVD analysis of the delegates turned up several former SRs, anarchists, nationalists, and members of anti-Soviet “organizations.” Someone distributed an unauthorized leaflet to the foreign delegates; nine copies were found, written in pencil, and the NKVD tried handwriting analysis to identify the anonymous author. “You organize various committees to aid the victims of fascism, you gather the antiwar congresses, you establish libraries of books burned by Hitler, all that is wonderful,” the leaflet stated. “But why do we not see your activity in connection with aiding the victims of our Soviet fascism, carried out by Stalin. . . . Why do you not establish libraries to rescue Russian literature. . . . Personally we worry that in a year or two Iosif Jughashvili (Stalin), who did not finish seminary, will not be satisfied with the title of world philosopher and demand, on the example of Nebuchadnezzar, that he be considered, at least, a ‘sacred cow.’”

Stalin, from Sochi, intervened with his whip hand so that the politburo decreed coverage by more than just Evening Moscow and Literary Newspaper.³⁷⁷ “It is necessary for Pravda or Izvestiya to print the speeches of the representatives of Ukraine, Belorussia, the Tatar autonomous republic, Georgia, and other republics,” he had written to Kaganovich and Zhdanov (August 21, 1934). “They need to be printed fully or at a minimum two thirds of each speech. The speeches of the nationals are no less important than others. Without their publication, the congress of writers would be colorless and uninteresting. If this requires that we supplement the number of newspaper pages, then it should be done, without regard for paper.”³⁷⁸ The dictator also expressed outrage at the party organizations of Buryat-Mongolia, Yakutia, the Volga Germans, and Bashkiria for not taking the gathering seriously. “The writers’ congress is a very important matter, for it unites and strengthens the intelligentsia of the peoples of the USSR under the flag of the Soviets, under the flag of socialism. This is very important for us, very important for socialism. The above-named republics turned out to be in the tail of events, they turned out cut off from the living cause and disgraced themselves. We cannot overlook such a failure.”³⁷⁹

The congress would cost 1.2 million rubles, significantly over budget, with breakfasts, lunches, and dinners amounting to about 40 rubles per day per attendee. The average cost of a canteen lunch for a worker was 84 kopecks, for a white-collar employee 1.75 rubles; lunch in a commercial restaurant cost 5.84 rubles.³⁸⁰ (In 1934, worker salaries averaged 125 rubles per month, schoolteacher salaries around 100.)

Delegates could avail themselves of a tour of Moscow’s Museum of Western Painting, an excursion to the planetarium, a trip to the cinema for The Way of the Enthusiasts or Dziga Vertov’s Three Songs About Lenin. A Moscow theater was staging The Miraculous Alloy, Vladimir Kirshon’s comedy of optimistic youth. Pasternak and his company tried Moscow’s recently opened Georgian restaurant, Aragvi, where a meal cost a small fortune. The vast majority of delegates took part in Aviation Day festivities (August 18). Gorky hosted soirées at his dacha for foreign guests and intimates.³⁸¹ Delegates were also afforded a special showing of the documentary Chelyuskin, about 104 people on an Arctic research mission whose icebreaker of that name had sunk, stranding them on an ice floe for months, until their rescue (on the twenty-eighth landing) by daring Soviet aviators, who were then given a ticker tape parade in Moscow.³⁸² Stalin had gone to greet the returning Chelyuskin expedition scientists and sailors at Moscow’s Belorussia train station. Soviet radio had focused world attention on the expedition’s plight, but the dictator evidently had declined an American offer of assistance.³⁸³

FAIRY TALE

Zhdanov, in his speech at the congress, had called for literary depictions of “reality in its revolutionary development,” geared toward “the ideological remolding and education of the toilers in the spirit of socialism.” He demanded “a combination of the most austere, sober, practical work, with supreme heroism and the most grandiose prospects.”³⁸⁴ Some speakers urged multiple ways to achieve this. “We should tell our artists, ‘Everything is permitted,’” urged the thirty-four-year-old screenwriter Natan Zarkhi. “Everything that serves the defense of the motherland, its strengthening, the victory of Communism, Bolshevik ideas, everything that leads to the development of Soviet culture and the flourishing of the creative individuality of the people, growing not in spite of the collective but because of it.”³⁸⁵

Socialist realism’s precise forms, in other words, remained to be adjudicated even just in literature.³⁸⁶ Any definition for music was deferred without end. Musicians effectively lost the ability to experiment at the composition level but could pursue refinement of instrumental and vocal techniques. Many “class enemies” (sons of former tsarist generals, nephews of tsarist interior ministers, daughters of former nobles, former ladies-in-waiting) were allowed to remain at positions in music and conduct training, a tolerance perhaps reflecting Stalin’s intense interest in quality traditional music.³⁸⁷ Painting had its own specificities. Standard realism had already triumphed by the 1920s, but many painters had little experience in narrative forms and had trouble finding a place in the new order.³⁸⁸ Stalin, who in the underground days had collected postcards of famous paintings, in power chose not to live surrounded by oil paintings on the walls. (On the contrary, he had allowed the sale abroad of “bourgeois” artworks accumulated in tsarist Russia, altogether some four thousand paintings, including forty-four of the highest order—Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, Titian, van Eyck—until meager receipts and international scandal prompted an end to the fire sales.)^{389, 390}

Pasternak had harbored illusions about the likely philosophical level of the congress. “I am murderously downtrodden,” he was said to have repeated in intimate company. “You understand: murderously.”³⁹¹ Many writers who disagreed vehemently about aesthetics agreed on the need for top-down imposition of a single approach for everyone. They were also zealous about getting state recognition, as opposed to public favor, and not a few lobbied for or welcomed repressive measures against rivals. Socialist realism served as an administration system as much as an aesthetic: party directives, censorship, prizes, apartments, dachas, travel—or their denial—as well as myriad personnel employed as cultural apparatchiks, editors, and censors, what Bulgakov called “people with ideological eyes.”³⁹²

On August 29, 1934, with the congress set to draw to a close in three days and “elections” imminent for the position of writers’ union secretary (or party controller), Zhdanov and Kaganovich wrote to Sochi proposing candidates.³⁹³ Stalin narrowed their list to two, and they selected the bespectacled Alexander Shcherbakov (b. 1901), whose education at the Communist Academy and the Institute of Red Professors had been interrupted (on official documents he wrote: “according to my education, a teacher of the history of the party”).³⁹⁴ Summoned out of the blue by Kaganovich, Shcherbakov arrived to find Zhdanov with him. “Here’s the thing,” they told him. “We want to assign you work that is extremely important and difficult; you probably will be stunned when I tell you what kind of work it is.” He was contemplating northeastern Kazakhstan. “I was genuinely stunned,” Shcherbakov recorded in his diary. They dispatched him directly from Old Square to the writers’ milieu. “I spent a half hour at the congress. I left. Nauseating.”³⁹⁵

Aleksei Tolstoy, author of science fiction, historical novels, and children’s books, would call Shcherbakov “a rabbit who swallowed a boa constrictor.”³⁹⁶ Tolstoy (b. 1883), a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, embodied many of the paradoxes Stalin faced with writers. He had emigrated to Paris with the Whites but returned in 1923 to a hero’s welcome, supporting the revolution. He took up residence in a villa with servants in Tsarskoye Selo, where Nicholas and Alexandra had lived, earning the nickname “the workers-and-peasants’ count.” (Stalin first met him in 1932 at Gorky’s.) After the success of the first two installments of Tolstoy’s novel Peter the First (1934), which celebrated the founding of the Russian empire and compared Peter to Stalin, he was told to relocate to Moscow, where he got a state apartment and a dacha in elite Barvikha. (“He collected mahogany and birch pieces made during Paul I’s reign” to furnish his residences, one Soviet musician wrote.)³⁹⁷ The count wore a fur-lined coat with beaver collar, caroused in Moscow’s restaurants with a rat pack, married his young secretary (his fourth wife), and enjoyed permission to travel to Europe at state expense. “The great trait of the personality of Aleksei Tolstoy,” the contemporary literary historian Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky observed, “was the astonishing combination of enormous natural gifts with a complete lack of brains.”³⁹⁸ But he toed the line.

Writing to Zhdanov from Sochi, Stalin, based on newspaper accounts, deemed Gorky’s congress speech “a bit pale from the point of view of Soviet literature,” and complained that Bukharin’s speech had introduced “an element of hysteria,” but concluded that “in general the congress went well.”³⁹⁹ The congress concluded on September 1, 1934, by “electing” thirty-seven preapproved members of the union’s governing body chaired by Gorky, which that same day “elected” Shcherbakov as head of its secretariat.⁴⁰⁰ The NKVD secretly reported that the writers were busying themselves with personal matters: purchase of cars, construction of dachas, departures on writing trips or holidays, some doing so even before the final day of the congress. “What is striking, above all,” the operative noted, “is that after the congress the writers talk very little about it. It is as if everyone conspired to keep silent.”⁴⁰¹ In fact, the writers expended considerable energy parsing the power of this or that person on the governing board, who was up, who down, what it would mean for their careers and the course of literature. Many viewed Gorky as a guarantee of literary values, and a balance of power among egos and tendencies.

• • •

TSARIST CENSORS HAD SUPPRESSED parts of the work of the bravura satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and in the early 1930s, Leningrad writers had issued Unpublished Shchedrin, a compilation Stalin acquired and assiduously marked up in red and blue pencil, indicating multiple readings of its vivid passages about bureaucrats, scoundrels, debauches. “Write your denunciations, wretches,” Stalin underlined. “Grief goes to that city whose boss showers it with decrees without thinking, but still greater grief occurs when the boss is unable to apply any decrees at all.”⁴⁰² In a gesture calculated to win intelligentsia favor, he allocated state funds to the son of Saltykov-Shchedrin, and the OGPU compiled a report on conversations among Leningrad writers about it. The critic V. Medvedev was quoted to the effect that Stalin was “a most decisive and severe politician,” but also “a great liberal and patron in the best sense of that word. Every day we hear about a conversation between Stalin and some writers, or about some assistance rendered at his initiative to one of the mass of writers. In Stalin, literature and writers have a great friend.”⁴⁰³ That was precisely how the dictator wanted to be seen.

Stalin’s success in getting the creative intelligentsia in line had been uncanny. Every major cultural figure in the USSR in the 1930s had his or her own love affair with him. They exaggerated their own significance, and the attention he paid to them. The best ones, however, were correct: he did oversee them personally. Stalin tended not to imprison or execute those he considered the highest talents (Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Pasternak, even Andrei Platonov), and would accept a lightening of the sentences of those on whom punishment seemed unavoidable, such as with Mandelstam’s exile. Many cultural figures were lied to and coerced to conjure up a socialist paradise of joy and plenty.⁴⁰⁴ But blandishments and the prospect of a mass audience proved effective in recruitment as well. The prestigious names, like Tolstoy, who were neither Communist nor anti-Communist but cynics, were precisely whom Stalin had in mind when he insisted that art could best be categorized as loyal (or disloyal), that is, as Soviet (or anti-Soviet). The problem, however, was artistic quality. Blast furnaces and even collective farms turned out to be a lot easier than novels, poems, or plays, let alone symphonies or canvases.⁴⁰⁵ That said, much of the mass Soviet public—who wanted to believe in a brighter future—embraced socialist realism.⁴⁰⁶ As the opening line had it in a hit song, “Everything Higher: Aviation March,” by Pavel German and Ilya “Yuli” Khait, which would prove popular only in the 1930s: “We were born to turn fairy tale into reality.”

Yenukidze sent Stalin a long, upbeat account of Moscow affairs (September 5, 1934), beginning with the writers’ congress, which he predicted would have “gigantic consequences for the writers of all our republics and not less for the foreign proletarian and in general advanced writers.” He congratulated Stalin on his wisdom for having the speeches published and his advice to Toroshelidze concerning the report on Georgian literature, which Yenukidze, a fellow Georgian writing to Stalin in Russian, singled out for special praise. He touched on the removal of the ancient Kitaigorod walls in front of Old Square, where Stalin had kept his party office, and on reconstruction work inside the Kremlin, where Stalin had his now predominant office. Yenukidze was having the Kremlin walls repainted, the roofs fixed, and interior lawns replaced. He lauded construction of the metro, the liveliness of Moscow streets, the opening of the theater season, and the good weather, lamenting only the pending departure of his close friend Voroshilov for a holiday in Sochi. “The children arrived fine,” Yenukidze concluded in reference to Vasily and Svetlana. “I saw them three times. They are going to school. I’m ending, otherwise you will curse me for these prolix trivialities. Be healthy.”⁴⁰⁷