The Great Terror

3

ARCHITECT OF TERROR

A Prince must possess the nature of both beast and man.

Machiavelli

The events of December 1934 and January 1935, so horrible, but above all so extraordinary, lead to the question of the mind behind them. The nature of the whole Purge depends in the last analysis on the personal and political drives of Stalin.

If we have put off any consideration of his personality until after we have seen him in characteristic action, it is because we can recount what he did (and, later, describe the results of the State he brought into being) more easily than we can describe him as an individual. He was not one of those figures whose real intentions were ever openly declared, or whose real motives can readily be deduced. If Stalin’s personal drives were the motive force of the Purge, it is also true that his ability to conceal his real nature was the rock on which all resistance to the Purge foundered. His opponents could not believe that he would either wish to, or be able to, do what he did.

Stalin was now fifty-five. Until the age of thirty-seven he had been a not particularly prominent member of a small revolutionary party whose prospects of coming to power in his lifetime even Lenin had doubted as late as 1916.

When the Revolution came, Stalin appeared to be outshone by many glittering contemporaries. The time since had been spent in ceaseless political maneuver. As a result, he had defeated in turn every rival, and had now been for five years the undisputed head of State and Party; he had lately had his methods put to the severest test in the collectivization campaign and, against all prediction, had won through. This had not proved enough for him. Contrary to all that Marx had thought, we shall find in the Soviet Union of the Stalin epoch a situation in which the economic and social forces were not creating the method of rule. On the contrary, the central factor was ideas in the mind of the ruler impelling him to action very often against the natural trend of such forces. An idealist conception of history was for once correct. For Stalin created a machine capable of taking on the social forces and defeating them, and infused it with his will. Society was reconstructed according to his formulas. It failed to reconstruct him.

As the physicist Alexander Weissberg, himself a victim of the Great Purges, points out, a Marxist view of history—and, one might say, any sociological interpretation of politics—has its validity restricted “to systems which allow of the application of the statistical conception,”¹ just as with the other true sciences. When a society is so organized that the will of one man, or.a small group, is the most powerful of the political and social forces, such explanations must give way, at least to a very considerable degree, to a more psychological style.

And so we are driven to an examination of the individual Joseph Stalin. But, as Arthur Koestler remarks:

What went on in No. I’s brain? … What went on in the inflated grey whorls? One knew everything about the far-away spiral nebulae, but about them nothing. That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, much later, it would be taught by means of tables of statistics, supplemented by such anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the blackboard an algebraic formula representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: ‘Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process’. And, pointing with his ruler to a grey foggy landscape between the second and third lobes of No. 1’s brain: ‘Now here you see the subjective reflection of these factors. It was this which in the second quarter of the twentieth century led to the triumph of the totalitarian principle in the East of Europe’. Until this stage was reached, politics would remain bloody dilettantism, mere superstition and black magic…²

Stalin’s head “had a solid peasant look about it,”³ but his face was pockmarked and his teeth were uneven. His eyes were dark brown with a tinge of hazel. He had a stiff left arm and shoulder, the result of an accident when he was about ten. His torso was short and narrow, and his arms were too long.fn1 Like many ambition-driven men he was very short, only about five feet, three inches. He raised himself an inch or so by specially built shoes, and at the May Day and 7 November parades stood on a wooden slab which gave him another inch or two. Bukharin said:

It even makes him miserable that he cannot convince everyone, including himself, that he is a taller man than anybody else. That is his misfortune; it may be his most human trait and perhaps his only human trait; his reaction to his ‘misfortune’ is not human—it is almost devilish; he cannot help taking revenge for it on others, but especially those who are in some way better or more gifted than he is….⁴

Such psychological science as we have would turn also to Stalin’s childhood. W. H. Auden wrote of the origins of another dictatorship:

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence…

and not only in the history of a country, but in the early life of a dictator:

Find what occured at Linz …

But it seems doubtful if it will ever be possible really to trace what occurred at Gori, where Stalin was born and grew up, in anything like the detail implied. In any case, the necessary type of research, the free questioning of relatives and contemporaries and others in the area, has not been possible; even if it were soon to become so, it is by now presumably too late. Not that any definitive and generally accepted psychological study of the formation even of Hitler has emerged either; a fortiori, on the little and dubious evidence before us in Stalin’s case, it would seem best not to venture even the sketchiest reconstruction.

There are, anyhow, probably few historians today who would care to deduce the essentials of a personality from a few secondhand reports about a long-past childhood. With Stalin, moreover, the bare facts are in dispute. His father was, according to some accounts, a worthless drunkard; according to others, this was not so. The biographers are faced with pursuing the matter, but in the circumstances we may be excused. This is a pity, in a way, for if it were possible to describe with rigor a set of childhood conditions likely to produce a Stalin, worldwide legislation to prevent their recurrence would be a laudable enterprise.

Legends clung even about his birth. Georgians, anxious for the reputation of their country, represented him as really of Tatar or Ossetian origin.⁵ In the period of his greatness, there was a story that he was the illegitimate son of a Georgian prince.⁶ Other putative fathers include the explorer Przhevalsky and, more plausibly, a local merchant. At any rate, his accepted father was a peasant cobbler (who treated him either well or badly—for as early as this, discord descends on the accounts). His father died when he was eleven, leaving a hard-working and strong-minded mother to bring up the boy. When nearly fifteen, Stalin left the Gori elementary school for the Theological Seminary at Tbilisi, being expelled, or removed for health reasons, when he was nineteen.

This was in 1899. He had already joined the Party circles in which he was to pass the remainder of his life, and by 1901 had given up all other activity to become a professional revolutionary.

His early life in the Social Democratic organizations in the Caucasus is still a very obscure subject. The Trotskyite line, that he was unimportant and inactive, is clearly exaggerated. The hagiological stories which appeared in the 1930s and 1940s representing Stalin as a “Lenin of the Caucasus” are even more baseless. But he seems at least to have been elected a member of the Executive of the All-Caucasus Federation of the Social Democratic Party in 1903. The whole early history of the Bolsheviks in Transcaucasia has been thoroughly obfuscated by a series of historians. The main point is that Bolshevism never struck root in Georgia, and most of those who later became Bolsheviks were little more than occasionally mutinous hangers-on of the large and efficient Menshevik organization.⁷

When, after the failure of the 1905 Revolution, Lenin started to rely on bank robbery as a source of funds for the Party, Stalin was involved in organizing raids on banks in the Caucasus, though he never directly took part in them. At this time, these “expropriations” were being widely condemned in the European and the Russian Social Democratic movement, and Trotsky, among others, was pointing to the demoralization involved. Even Lenin saw this to some degree, and attempted to bring the “fighting squads” under strict control and to eliminate the semibandit elements which had got into them. But Stalin seems to have had no qualms of any sort. However, after his rise to power, nothing was ever said about this activity.

Whatever Lenin’s tactical qualms, this ruthlessness appealed to him, and in 1912 Stalin was co-opted on to the Central Committee of the Party. Thenceforward, in Siberian exile or at the center of power, he remained a high though unobtrusive figure in the Bolshevik leadership. In Lenin’s last days, his estimate of the “wonderful Georgian” changed. He said of him, “This cook’s dishes will be too peppery.” Trotsky tells us, plausibly enough, that Lenin admired Stalin for “his firmness and his direct mind,” but finally saw through “his ignorance … his very narrow political horizon, and his exceptional moral coarseness and unscrupulousness.”⁸ It was on grounds of personal unpleasantness—not of political unreliability—that he urged Stalin’s removal, not from positions of power, but from the particular post of General Secretary. Only at the very last—too late—did Lenin plan Stalin’s ruin.

At about the same time, Stalin is reported as saying to Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky, “To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed … there is nothing sweeter in the world.”⁹

This often quoted story is entirely in accord with Stalin’s practice, but it is perhaps a little unlikely that he would have spoken in quite these terms in front of possible, and not yet forewarned, rivals. His opponents, on the whole, only realized his implacability too late. But it is unnecessary today to labor the point of Stalin’s unscrupulousness or yet the extreme vindictiveness of his nature.

The Stalin method of argument, long prevalent in the Soviet Union, can be traced as early as his first articles in 1905. Its particular marks are expressions like “as is well known” (Itak izvestno), used in lieu of proof to give weight to some highly controversial assertion, and “it is not accidental” (ne sluchayno), used to assert a connection between two events when no evidence, and no likelihood, of such a connection exists. These and similar expressions became the staple of Soviet speeches in Stalin’s time, and after.

Such phrases are extraordinarily illustrative and significant. A statement like “As is well known, Trotskyites are Nazi agents” is difficult to object to in an authoritarian State, while the idea that nothing is accidental, a strictly paranoid formulation, makes it possible to construe every fault and weakness as part of a conscious plot.

This attitude accords with Stalin’s notoriously suspicious nature. Khrushchev tells us:

… Stalin was a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious; we knew this from our work with him. He could look at a man and say: “Why are your eyes so shifty today?” or “Why are you turning so much today and avoiding looking me directly in the eyes?” The sickly suspicion created in him a general distrust even toward eminent Party workers whom he had known for years. Everywhere and in everything he saw “enemies,” “double-dealers” and “spies.”¹⁰

A result of this attitude was that he almost never let down his guard. In politics, particularly in those of the sharpest style, this was to prove an excellent tactical principle.

We cannot know how far Stalin really cherished the principles he professed. Khrushchev, in his Secret Speech of February 1956, concluded a series of appalling revelations of terror by remarking of them that

Stalin was convinced that it was necessary for the defense of the interests of the working class against the plotting of the enemies and against the attack of the imperialist camp. He saw this from the position of the working class, the interests of the working people, the interests of the victory of Socialism and Communism. We cannot say that these were the deeds of a giddy despot. He considered that this should be done in the interests of the Party, of the working masses, in the name of defense of the revolution’s gains. In this lies the whole tragedy.

Most people would not perhaps regard it as the whole tragedy. But, more to our point, there is no way of telling what Stalin’s true motivation was. The fact that to all appearances he took the view attributed to him by Khrushchev does not prove that he held it sincerely. Whether he consciously thought of the state of things he created and found good as the Socialism taught in his youth, or whether he saw it as an autocracy suitable to his own aims and to Russian reality, we cannot say.

A Soviet Air Force expert who had attended a number of meetings with the top Soviet leadership in connection with plans for an intercontinental rocket mentions Stalin saying that the project would make it “easier for us to talk to the great shopkeeper Harry Truman and keep him pinned down where we want him,” but then turning to him with a curious remark: “You see, we live in an insane epoch.”¹¹

None of the Soviet leaders of the time was ever reported as expressing in private anything but a straightforward and cynically put desire to crush the West. This philosophical comment certainly goes deeper. Whether it represents Stalin’s real thinking and self-justification, or is a sign of that sensitivity to the attitude of others occasionally reported of him, cannot be guessed.

When Litvinov was discarded in 1947, he used to meet regularly with his old friend Surits, another of the rare survivors of the old Soviet diplomatic service. They frequently discussed Stalin. They both agreed that he was a great man in many ways. But he was unpredictable. And he was stubborn, refusing to consider facts which did not correspond to his wishes. He imagined, they thought, that he was serving the people. But he did not know the people and did not wish to know them, preferring the abstract idea “the People,” made up to his own liking.¹²

For what it is worth, the evidence seems to be that Stalin really believed that the abolition of incomes from capital was the sole necessary principle of social morality, excusing any other action whatever. Djilas’s summary is perhaps correct: “All in all, Stalin was a monster who, while adhering to abstract, absolute and fundamentally utopian ideas, in practice had no criterion but success—and this meant violence, and physical and spiritual extermination.”¹³

Except for the priceless, though limited, light thrown on it by Stalin’s daughter’s books, the more personal side of his character must remain to a large degree enigmatic.

But it seems that the human moments, few as they were, arose in connection with his wives. When the first, Ekaterina Svanidze, died, a friend who went to the cemetery with him says that he remarked, “… this creature softened my stony heart. She is dead and with her died my last warm feelings for all human beings.”¹⁴

His second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, held to the old revolutionary ideas. She is said to have become horrified with what she had learned of the sufferings of the collectivization campaign. She seems to have obtained most of her information from students at a course she had been allowed to take, and they were arrested as soon as Stalin found out.

Her suicide on 9 November 1932 took place as the result of the last series of violent quarrels with her husband, whom she accused of “butchering the people.” All early accounts agree that Stalin lost his temper with her and cursed her in front of his friends (though this is somewhat toned down in the version later given to his daughter).¹⁵ For if Nadezhda, following Ekaterina, touched him in a comparatively soft spot, it was not as soft as all that, and remarkable only in comparison with his usual conduct. She left him a letter which “wasn’t purely personal: it was partly political as well.”¹⁶ We are told that this made him think—and, of course, rightly—that he had enemies everywhere, and that it much exacerbated his suspiciousness. Stalin seems to have been deeply affected by Nadezhda’s death. He felt it for the rest of his life, blaming it on “enemies” (and on Michael Arlen, whose book The Green Hat she had been reading at the time).¹⁷

Nadezhda’s brother, the Old Bolshevik Paul Alliluyev, was Political Commissar of the Armored Forces. After a time, he was put under special surveillance. Later he told an old acquaintance that he was being kept away from Stalin and had had his Kremlin pass taken from him. It was clear to him that Yagoda and Pauker had suggested that he might be personally dangerous to Stalin in revenging his sister. He was removed from his post in 1937 and given a minor job in the Soviet Trade Delegation in Paris.¹⁸ The causes of his early death in 1937 have been variously interpreted, but his wife was later given ten years for allegedly poisoning him.¹⁹

An interesting family sidelight arises too in Stalin’s attitude toward his younger son, Vasili. With his elder son, Yakov, by his first wife, he was always on poor terms, occasionally subjecting him to minor persecutions. The feeling was mutual. With Vasili, Nadezhda Alliluyeva’s son, his attitude was quite different. The young man is described with contempt and detestation by all who came in contact with him. He was a stupid bully, a semiliterate drunkard, “a beastly pampered schoolboy let out into the world for the first time.”²⁰ In spite of a very poor record at the Kachinsky Flying School, where he received special tuition, he was passed into the Soviet Air Force without a single bad mark, and by the time he was twenty-nine was already a Lieutenant General. In his intemperate outbursts, he invariably traded on his father’s name.²¹

But Stalin finally removed Vasili from his command for drunken incompetence. And it does not seem that he ever intervened directly to advance his career. It was rather that his subordinates did not dare to do other than recommend the young man enthusiastically in spite of his lack of qualifications. All the same, there seems to be a faint echo here of Napoleonic vulgarities. H. G. Wells writes of Napoleon’s relation to the French Revolution:

And now we come to one of the most illuminating figures in modern history, the figure of an adventurer and a wrecker, whose story seems to display with an extraordinary vividness the universal subtle conflict of egoism, vanity and personality with the weaker, wider claims of the common good. Against this background of confusion and stress … this stormy and tremendous dawn, appears this dark little archaic personage hard, compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative and neatly vulgar.²²

Many people have felt something of the same about the squat, vulgar figure of Stalin against the tremendous dawn of the Russian Revolution. But, in the first place, Wells is more than a little unfair to Napoleon. His political, as well as military, talents were considerable. Doubtless the Emperor vulgarized the Revolution, but it had already vulgarized itself.

No doubt all revolutions are doomed to vulgarization. But the idealization of the first glories of the new regime often contains a large element of vulgar sentimentalism, and the change to vulgar cynicism may constitute only a comparative deflation. Both Napoleon and Stalin, however that may be, established their rule largely, though not entirely, by to some degree replacing the motivation of general ideas by that of careerism and personal loyalty.

Napoleon was, of course, a vain man. Stalin’s vanity has also been much remarked on. But it did not, at least until his last years, run to palatial ostentation. Until the Second World War, he dressed with traditional Bolshevik modesty in a plain brown military coat and dark trousers stuffed into leather boots. He lived unpretentiously in a small house in the Kremlin, formerly part of the Tsar’s servants’ quarters. Ownership and money as such played no part in his life. In the 1930s, his official salary was about 1,000 rubles a month—in purchasing power, perhaps $40. One of his secretaries accepted and dealt with this small sum, paying the superintendent of the Kremlin a modest rent for his apartment, and dealing with his Party dues, his payment for his holiday, and so on. He owned nothing but had immediate right to everything, like the Dalai Lama or the Mikado in the old days. His country villa at Borovikha and his seaside Government Summer House No. 7 at Sochi were “State property.”²³

With all this personal simplicity, Stalin’s reputation for envious emulation arose early among his colleagues. When the Order of the Red Banner began to be awarded in the Civil War, and was to be given to Trotsky, Kamenev proposed that Stalin should receive it too. Kalinin, the new Head of State, asked in surprise, “For what?” Bukharin intervened: “Can’t you understand? This is Lenin’s idea. Stalin cannot live unless he has what someone else has. He will never forgive it.”²⁴

In the final stages of the “cult of personality,” he was built up with the most astonishing adulation as a genius not only in politics, but also in strategy, the sciences, style, philosophy, and almost every field. His picture looked down from every hoarding; his bust was carried by Soviet alpinists to the top of every Soviet peak. He was elevated to be, with Marx, Engels, and Lenin, the fourth of the great political geniuses of the epoch. The histories were, of course, rewritten to make his role in the Revolution a decisive one. Khrushchev describes him inserting in a draft of his own Short Biography the following passage: “Although he performed his task as leader of the Party and the people with consummate skill and enjoyed the unreserved support of the entire Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation.”

Khrushchev goes on to say:

In the draft of his book appeared the following sentence: “Stalin is the Lenin of today.” This sentence appeared to Stalin to be too weak, so, in his own handwriting, he changed it to read: “Stalin is the worthy continuer of Lenin’s work, or, as it is said in our Party, Stalin is the Lenin of today.” You see how well it is said, not by the nation but by Stalin himself.

… I will cite one more insertion made by Stalin concerning the theme of the Stalinist military genius. “The advanced Soviet science of war received further development,” he writes, “at Comrade Stalin’s hands. Comrade Stalin elaborated the theory of the permanently operating factors that decide the issue of wars, of active defense and the laws of counter-offensive and offensive, of the cooperation of all services and arms in modern warfare, of the role of big tank masses and air forces in modern war, and of the artillery as the most formidable of the armed services. At the various stages of the war Stalin’s genius found the correct solutions that took account of all the circumstances of the situation.”

And further, writes Stalin: “Stalin’s military mastership was displayed both in defense and offense. Comrade Stalin’s genius enabled him to divine the enemy’s plans and defeat them. The battles in which Comrade Stalin directed the Soviet armies are brilliant examples of operational military skill.”²⁵

It can be argued, though, that precisely because his claim to leadership was shakily based, it had to be exaggerated and made unchallengeable. Lenin, whose dominance in the Party was genuine and accepted, had had no need of such methods. For Stalin they were, in part at least, the necessary cement of autocracy. One shrewd Soviet diplomat in the 1930s writes, “Anyone who imagines that Stalin believes this praise, or laps it up in a mood of egotistical willingness to be deceived, is sadly mistaken. Stalin is not deluded by it. He regards it as useful to his power. He also enjoys humiliating these intellectuals….”²⁶

To discuss Stalin’s character and beliefs is not to estimate his abilities. There have been two main views of these. On the first, he was an infallible genius, a “Coryphaeus of science,” an inspired leader of the human race, and so forth. On the second, he was a mediocrity. The first view, taken (during Stalin’s lifetime) by Professor Bernal, Khrushchev, and others, has been submitted to enough destructive criticism, and we need hardly deal with it. The view that he was a nonentity who reached the top by luck and low cunning still has influence. It is true that most of those who hold it would concede that he was also a monster. But they would grant him few other active qualities.

The Menshevik historian Sukhanov, soon to be his victim, described him in 1917 as making no more impression than a gray blur. Trotsky called him “the most outstanding mediocrity in our Party.”²⁷ And Khnishchev later said, in his Secret Speech of 1956, “I shall probably not be sinning against the truth when I say that ninety-nine percent of the persons present here heard and knew very little about Stalin before 1924.” He had, in fact, made little impression on the talkative politicians of the Party at that time. Thus there was some basis for the judgment of Trotsky and his successors. But on the whole it was a shallow one, as later events bore out. The qualities Stalin lacked and Trotsky possessed were not the essentials for political greatness. And Lenin alone among the Bolshevik leaders had recognized Stalin’s ability.

It is early yet to look at his career objectively, with his technique of despotism simply “considered as a fine art.” Nevertheless, we can avoid dismissing with the negative estimate of his unsuccessful rivals and their intellectual heirs the brilliant politician who was able to produce such vast and horrible effects.

Stalin had a good average grasp of Marxism, and though his adaptations of that flexible doctrine to suit his purposes were not so elaborate or so elastic as the similar interpretations of his rivals and predecessors, they were adequate to his career. His lack of the true theoretician’s mind was noted by many, and he seems to have resented it.

Bukharin told Kamenev in July 1928 that Stalin was “eaten up with the vain desire to become a well-known theoretician. He feels that it is the only thing he lacks.” The old Marxist scholar Ryazanov once interrupted Stalin when he was theorizing: “Stop it, Koba, don’t make a fool of yourself. Everybody knows that theory is not exactly your field.” Nevertheless, as Isaac Deutscher rightly comments, his great theoretical departure—“socialism in one country”—however crude and even un-Marxist a notion, was a powerful and appealing idea.²⁸

Deutscher says that “the interest of practitioners of Stalin’s type in matters of philosophy and theory was strictly limited…. The semi-intelligentsia from whom socialism recruited some of its middle cadres enjoyed Marxism as a mental labor-saving device.” But this view exaggerated Stalin’s philosophical clumsiness. Or rather, perhaps, it overrates the more philosophical Bolsheviks, such as Lenin, with whom Deutscher goes on to compare him. Lenin’s only venture into philosophy proper—Materialism and Empirio-Criticism—is his least impressive work. Stalin’s brief summary of Marxism, which appears in Chapter 4 of the “Short Course” History of the All-Union Communist Party, is, in an unpretentious way, as clear and able an account as there is. Georg Lukacs, the veteran Communist theoretician (who in the 1950s showed some revulsion from Stalinism), commented, “Since we have to do with a popular work written for the masses, no one could find fault with Stalin for reducing the quite subtle and complex arguments of the classics on this theme to a few definitions enumerated in schematic text book form.”²⁹

With the exception of Zinoviev, Stalin was the only non-“intellectual” in Lenin’s leadership. But his knowledge of more truly relevant matters was not small. Djilas tells us that “Stalin had considerable knowledge of political history only, especially Russian, and he had an uncommonly good memory. Stalin really did not need any more than this for his role.”³⁰

In 1863, Bismarck reminded the Prussian Chamber that “politics is not an exact science.” It would have been a truism to every previous generation, and he was perhaps provoked into giving the idea such definite expression by the rise of the new rationalism in historical science, of the claims to rigor of the social and political professors. Among the Russian Communists of the post-Revolutionary period, this tendency had reached its fullest development. They were political scientists; they were using the methods of the political science devised by Marx, the Darwin of society. Everything was discussed in theoretical terms.

Unfortunately, the theories were not correct, and the claim to scientific rigor was, to say the least, premature. Even if their formulations had been closer to the definitiveness claimed for them, it is still perhaps doubtful if such leaders would have prevailed in actual politics: professors of ballistics do not necessarily make good baseball players. As it was, the more intuitive Stalin, less able to analyze and plan his moves in theoretical terms, had a fuller operational grasp of reality.

As his daughter remarks, in spirit Stalin was completely Russianized. He had not learned Russian until he was eight or nine, and always spoke it with an accent. But he spoke it well, and his conversation was often rich and vivid in a coarse way. Although not well educated, he was widely read in the Russian classics—in particular, the satirists Shchedrin and Gogol. He had also read when young a number of foreign authors in Russian translation—in particular, Victor Hugo—and popular works on Darwinism and social and economic matters. Gendarmerie reports on the Tiflis Theological Seminary in the last part of the nineteenth century mention the reading by students of “seditious” literature of this sort, and Stalin’s name appears in the seminary bad-conduct book a number of times for the discovery of such works from the local “Cheap Library,” showing that he was engaged in absorbing this sort of self-education.³¹

His style of writing was unsubtle, and here again his opponents sneered at him. Djilas associates it, and its crudeness, with the backward nature of revolutionary Russia: “it contains simplicities from the writings of the church fathers, not so much the result of his religious youth, as the result of the fact that this was the way of expression under primitive conditions.” Djilas adds elsewhere that “his style was colorless and monotonous, but its oversimplified logic and dogmatism were convincing to the conformists and to common people.”³² But there is more to it than that. Clear and plain arguments are appealing not only to “common” minds. A Soviet official writes, “It was precisely his lack of brilliance, his plainness, which inclined us to believe what he said.”³³

Stalin is often described as having a curious effect of sullenness, but he could be charming enough, and had “a rough humor, self-assured but not entirely without subtlety and depth.”³⁴ In this he contrasts with the humorlessness of Lenin, and of Trotsky too. It seems doubtful that he would have had the same sort of success in a more experienced political community, but in the political circumstances in which Stalin found himself he proved a master. Tactically, he far outshone his rivals. Bukharin commented of him that he was a master of “dosing”—of giving the right dose at the right time. It is a measure of Bukharin’s own comparative ineptitude that he seems to have thought of this as an insult. In fact, it is a sound compliment to one of Stalin’s greatest strengths.

He won his position by devious maneuver. It is notable that from 1924 to 1934, there were none of the abrupt coups which mark the post-Stalin period. Stalin would attack and discredit a man, then appear to reach a compromise, leaving his opponent weakened but not destroyed. Bit by bit his opponents’ positions were undermined, and they were removed one by one from the leadership.

Lenin saw this side of Stalin’s political methods. When he was working to defeat Stalin on the Georgian issue in the last days of his active life, he told his secretary not to show Kamenev the notes he had prepared for Trotsky, or they would leak to Stalin, in which case “Stalin would make a rotten compromise in order then to deceive.”³⁵ And this indeed Stalin did in the months following Lenin’s death, exhibiting, as Gibbon says of Alaric, “an artful moderation, which contributed to the success of his designs.”

It was because Stalin never committed himself irretrievably until he felt certain of success that his opponents were so often put into a dilemma. They were never sure how far he was intending to go. And they could—and did—frequently delude themselves into thinking that he had submitted to the will of the Politburo majority, and would henceforth be possible to work with. Even when he was pressing forward hard to the terrorist solution of the question of the oppositionists, they were able to feel that this was partly due to the influence of Kaganovich and others, whom Stalin might well be induced to abandon if suitable arguments were produced. It is notable that few of the alternative solutions seriously put forward from 1930 onward envisaged the total removal of Stalin from positions of power, which alone could have saved the situation.

Thus in a manner almost unprecedented in history, he continued his “coup d’etat by inches,” culminating in a vast slaughter, while still giving an air of moderation. Through his silences and unprovocative talk, he not merely deceived many foreigners, but even in Russia itself, at the height of the Purge, was to some degree able to avoid popular blame.

A friend who had contact in the higher circles in both Stalin’s Russia and Rakosi’s Hungary remarks that Rakosi was indeed much the more educated and in a sense more intelligent man. But he laid himself open in the most unnecessary way. The most important example was that during the period of the Rajk Trial in 1949, he made a speech saying that he had spent sleepless nights until he himself had unraveled all the threads of the conspiracy. When Rajk was rehabilitated, this was a deadly weapon against Rakosi. But quite apart from that, it meant that even at the time he personally was blamed by the people and the Party for all malpractices in connection with his purge.³⁶ Stalin, who never said a word more than was necessary, would not have dreamed of making so crude a revelation. It was his triumph that the Great Purge was very largely blamed on Yezhov, the Head of the NKVD. “Not only I but very many others thought the evil came from the small man they called ‘the Stalinist Commissar.’ The people christened those years the ‘Yezhovschchina’ [Yezhov Times],” remarks Ilya Ehrenburg. Ehrenburg also tells of meeting Pasternak in the Lavnishensky Lane on a snowy night. Pasternak raised his hands to the dark sky and exclaimed, “If only someone would tell Stalin about it!”³⁷ Meyerhold, too, remarked, “They conceal it from Stalin.”³⁸

In fact, the opposite was true. The cartoonist Boris Efimov describes his brother Mikhail Koltsov telling him of a conversation with Mekhlis, who explained how the arrests were taking place. Mekhlis showed him, in confidence, “a few words in red pencil addressed to Yezhov and Mekhlis, laconically ordering the arrest of certain officials.” There were, Koltsov noted, “people still at liberty and at work, who had in fact already been condemned and … annihilated by one stroke of this red pencil. Yezhov was left with merely the technical details—working up the cases and producing the orders for arrest.”³⁹

Stalin’s achievement is in general so extraordinary that we can hardly dismiss him as simply a colorless, mediocre type with a certain talent for terror and intrigue. He was, indeed, in some ways a very reserved man. It is said that even in his younger days if beaten in an argument, he would show no emotion, but just smile sarcastically. His former secretary penetratingly remarks, “He possessed in a high degree the gift for silence, and in this respect he was unique in a country where everybody talks far too much.⁴⁰ His ambitions, and even his talents, were not clear to most of his rivals and colleagues.

Because he did not elucidate and elaborate his views and plans, it was thought that he did not have any—a typical mistake of the garrulous intellectual. “His expression,” an observer writes, “tells nothing of what he feels.”⁴¹ A Soviet writer speaks of “the expression which he had carefully devised for himself over the years as a fixture and which Comrade Stalin, as he had long been in the habit of calling himself in his thoughts and sometimes aloud, in the third person, had to assume in the presence of these people.”⁴² He would listen quietly at meetings of the Politburo, or to distinguished visitors, puffing at his Dunhill pipe and doodling aimlessly—his secretaries Poskrebyshev and Dvinsky write that his pads were sometimes covered with the phrase “Lenin-teacher-friend,” but the last foreigner to visit him, in February 1953, noted that he was doodling wolves.

All early accounts agree that one of Stalin’s characteristics was “laziness” or “indolence,” which Bukharin impressed on Trotsky as Stalin’s “most striking quality.⁴³ Trotsky remarked that Stalin “never did any serious work” but was always “busy with his intrigues.” Another way of putting this is that Stalin paid the necessary attention to the detail of political maneuver. In his words, “Never refuse to do the little things, for from the little things are built the big.”⁴⁴ One may also be reminded of a remark by a former German Commander-in-Chief, Colonel-General Baron Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, about his officers:

I divide my officers into four classes…. The man who is clever and industrious is suited to high staff appointments; use can be made of the man who is stupid and lazy; the man who is clever and lazy is fitted for the highest command, he has the nerve to deal with all situations; but the man who is stupid and industrious is a danger and must be dismissed immediately.

In the political struggle, Stalin’s great characteristic was precisely “nerve.” He had complete determination and considerable patience, together with an extraordinary ability to apply and to relax pressure at the right moment, which carried him through a series of critical situations, until his final victory.

At the center of Stalin’s superiority over his competitors was certainly his intense will, just as Napoleon ranked what he called “moral fortitude” higher in a general than genius or experience. When Milovan Djilas said to Stalin during the Yugoslav–Soviet discussions in Moscow during the war that the Serbian politician Gavrilovid was “a shrewd man,” Stalin commented, as though to himself, “Yes, there are politicians who think shrewdness is the main thing in politics….”⁴⁵ His was a will power taken to a logical extreme. There is something nonhuman about his almost total lack of normal restraints upon it.

He is said to have been a constant reader of Machiavelli, as indeed is reasonable enough. In Chapter 15 of The Prince, he would find the simple advice that rulers should in no case practice villainies which might lose them the State, but must nevertheless, if it comes to the worst, “not flinch from being blamed for vices which are necessary for safeguarding the State,” making whatever effort is feasible to “escape the evil reputation” involved. Or, again, in Chapter 18, Machiavelli recommends the appearance of mercy, faithfulness, and so forth, while noting that the Prince “and especially a new Prince, must often act in a fashion contrary to those virtues.”

When the great film director Eisenstein produced his film on Ivan the Terrible, Stalin objected to his attitude. He had been inclined to treat Ivan, in the way most people have, as a ruthless and paranoid terrorist. Stalin told Eisenstein and the actor N. K. Cherkasov that, on the contrary, Ivan had been a great and wise ruler who had protected the country from the infiltration of foreign influence and had tried to bring about the unification of Russia. “J. V. Stalin also remarked on the progressive role played by the Oprichnina [Ivan’s Secret Police]”; Stalin’s criticism of Ivan was limited to his having “failed to liquidate the five remaining great feudal families.” On that point, Stalin added humorously, “There God stood in Ivan’s way”—since Ivan, after liquidating one family, would repent for a year “when he should have been acting with increasing decisiveness.”fn2

Stalin also understood how to destroy his enemies’ political reputations. He could have learned in certain respects from another totalitarian leader whom he to some extent admired. Hitler gives a recipe for the whole tenor of the Purges:

The art of leadership, as displayed by really great popular leaders in all ages, consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary…. The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to the one category; for weak and wavering natures among a leader’s following may easily begin to be dubious about the justice of their own cause if they have to face different enemies…. Where there are various enemies … it will be necessary to block them all together as forming one solid front, so that the mass of followers in a popular movement may see only one common enemy against whom they have to fight. Such uniformity intensifies their belief in their own cause and strengthens their feeling of hostility towards the opponent.⁴⁶

But Stalin was deeper and more complex than Hitler. His view of humanity was cynical, and if he, too, turned to anti-Semitism, it was as a matter of policy rather than dogma. We can see traces of this later anti-Semitism, or rather anti-Semitic demagogy, as early as 1907, when he was remarking, in the small underground paper he then controlled at Baku, “Somebody among the Bolsheviks remarked jokingly that since the Mensheviks were the faction of the Jews and the Bolsheviks that of the native Russians, it would be a good thing to have a pogrom in the Party.”⁴⁷

The Yiddish writers shot in August 1952 were accused of the political offense of wishing to set up a secessionist state in the Crimea—a charge faintly linked with reality through the fact that a proposal had indeed arisen in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, after the war, to resettle Jews in the then-desolate peninsula. In the Doctors’ Plot of 1952–1953, a majority of those accused were Jews, but some were not. The Jewish element was publicly emphasized, but it was under the guise of a link with “Zionism,” just as in the campaign leading up to it, Jewish literary men were called “cosmopolitans” (“cosmopolitans … that long-nosed lot,” a bureaucrat comments in one of Avram Tertz’s stories). When critics in the West pointed out the undoubted anti-Semitic element in the alleged “Plot,” there were still people to come forward and say that, no, Gentiles were being accused too, and that Zionism was, after all, more or less implicitly anti-Soviet. For, as we shall see, Stalin’s policies in strictly political matters were never elaborated clearly in such a fashion that they could be refuted. There was never any complete certainty in an individual case about what his disposition would be.

This enigmatic attitude misled even experienced and clever people. Lion Feuchtwanger (Ehrenburg remarks), a passionate defender of the Jews, could never believe that Stalin persecuted Jews—just as Romain Rolland, devoted to freedom in the arts, was easily deceived by Stalin on the absence of freedom in Soviet literature.⁴⁸

The “anti-Semitism,” thus disguised, was in accord with Stalin’s general exploitation of prejudices and of the gullibility and pliability of men in general. In a broader sense, this was doubtless at the root of Stalin’s acceptance of the theories of the physiologist Pavlov (who loathed the Soviet regime). Moreover, he interpreted Pavlov in the crudest way as applying to human beings, sponsoring an attack on the view that Pavlov had dealt with the elementary nervous process of animals only and that in the case of man it was necessary to take into account the phenomenon of “resistance to the formation of conditioned reflexes.”⁴⁹

But the dull, cool, calculating effect given cumulatively through Stalin’s long career, the air of a great glacier moving slowly and by the easiest path to overwhelm some Alpine valley, is only part of the picture. At various times—and especially in his early career—the calm of his general manner was broken, and expression given to the driving emotions that possessed him.

In Lenin’s time, if offended, Stalin would sulk and stay away from meetings for days.⁵⁰ Lenin noted of him that he often acted out of anger or spite and that “spite in general plays the very worst role in politics.” He also noted Stalin’s hastiness and his tendency to solve everything by administrative impulse. At the time of Lenin’s death, he had nearly ruined himself by this “capriciousness” and needed all his skill to retrieve the situation.

Nor, later, was his terrorism wholly rational. He “practiced brutal violence, not only toward everything that opposed him but also toward that which seemed, to his capricious and despotic character, contrary to his concepts.”⁵¹ As George Kennan has remarked, to Stalin’s “darkly mistrustful mind no political issue was ever without its personal implications.”⁵² His daughter takes it as central to his character that “once he had cast someone he had known a long time out of his heart, once he had mentally relegated that someone to the ranks of his enemies, it was impossible even to talk to him about that person any more.”⁵³ There can be no doubt that Stalin pursued his grudges implacably, even after many years. But, of course, this cannot be more than a partial motive for the killings he ordered. For these involved friends as well as enemies, and men he hardly knew as much as personal rivals. Men who had injured him did not survive the Terror. And nor, of course, did men whom he himself had injured, like Bauman.

Nevertheless, when Khrushchev represents Stalin as a capricious tyrant, this is not necessarily incompatible with a basic rationale. It is true that anyone Stalin had a personal grudge against was almost automatically included on the death list, but even a long life of quarrelsome intrigue could not provide anything like the required number of victims from that source alone. To obtain the terror effect, after all those who really had stood in his way or annoyed him had been dealt with, the quota could just as efficiently be made up by caprice as by any other method.

Stalin’s Terror, in fact, begins to show a more rational pattern if it is considered as a statistical matter, a mass phenomenon, rather than in terms of individuals. The absence of strict categories of victims, such as a Trotsky might have listed, maintained the circumspect deviousness of the Purge and avoided presenting any clear-cut target to critics. The effect of terror is produced, he may have argued, when a given proportion of a group has been seized and shot. The remainder will be cowed into uncomplaining obedience. And it does not much matter, from this point of view, which of them have been selected as victims, particularly if all or almost all are innocent.

Ilya Ehrenburg, as late as 1964, still asked himself why some were shot and some spared. Why Litvinov was never in serious trouble (though kept away from active work for years), while all the diplomats associated with him were eliminated; why Pasternak, independent and unyielding, survived, while Koltsov, anxious to do everything required of him, was liquidated; why the biologist Vavilov perished, and the even more independent-minded Kapitsa remained in favor.⁵⁴

Whatever the “statistical” rationale, the way Stalin’s caprice operated is a useful sidelight on his character. A British writer of great political experience noted in the 1940s, “It seemed almost … as if Stalin simultaneously demanded and hated the sycophancy of absolute obedience.⁵⁵ This was confirmed and elaborated in a more recent Soviet account by the novelist Konstantin Simonov, who had much direct contact with the high Soviet leadership. In his Soldiers Are Made, Not Born, Stalin receives a letter from a general during the war asking for the release of a colleague, whose Civil War services he recounts:

Serpilin’s recalling of past efforts had failed to touch Stalin. It was the directness of the letter that had interested him. In his ruthless character side by side with a despotic demand for total subservience, which was the rule with him, there lay the need to come across exceptions—which was the obverse side of the same rule. At times he evinced something akin to flashes of interest in people who were capable of taking risks, of expressing opinions which ran counter to his own opinions, whether genuine or assumed. Knowing himself, he knew the degree of this risk and was all the more capable of setting store by it. Sometimes, that is! Because it was far more frequently the other way around and this was where the risk lay.

Stalin gives Serpilin an interview, which goes fairly well:

Still, on his way out, Serpilin considered that his fate had already been finally settled during his conversation with Stalin. But in actual fact it had been settled not while they had been talking but a moment ago when Stalin had silently looked at his back as he left. That was the way he often finally decided people’s fate, looking at them not in the eyes but from behind as they left.⁵⁶

With certain categories, Stalin seems to have had different standards. His former Georgian rivals and friends were mostly shot, like their Russian counterparts. But whereas Stalin showed nothing but contempt for most of his victims, the execution of his Georgian Old Bolshevik brother-in-law Alyosha Svanidze in 1942, on charges of being a Nazi agent, brought out a different attitude:

Before the execution, Svanidze was told that Stalin had said that if he asked for forgiveness he would be pardoned. When Stalin’s words were repeated to Svanidze, he asked: “What am I supposed to ask forgiveness for? I have committeed no crime.” He was shot. After Svanidze’s death, Stalin said: “See how proud he is: he died without asking forgiveness.”⁵⁷

An even more extraordinary example is that of another Georgian, S. I. Kavtaradze. He had been Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars in Georgia from 1921 to 1922, and had fallen with the rest of the Georgian leadership during Stalin’s clash with them before and after Lenin’s death. He was expelled from the Party as a Trotskyite in 1927, and was among those not readmitted during the following years. He was arrested and sentenced in connection with the Ryutin affair, and is reported in Maryinsk and Kolyma labor camps in 1936, thoroughly disillusioned.⁵⁸ In 1940, he was still in camp. One day the commandant called him, and he was sent off to Moscow. Much to his surprise, instead of being shot, he was taken directly in his prison clothes to see Stalin, who greeted him affably, asking him where he had been all these years. He was at once rehabilitated, and sent to the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, where he shortly became Assistant People’s Commissar. After the war, he was Ambassador to Romania for a time. In his biography, as given in various Soviet reference books, a bare mention is made of the thirteen-year gap in his Party membership between December 1927 and December 1940!⁵⁹ This is a clear and conscious example of Stalin indulging a caprice.

Of his leading opponents in post-Revolutionary Georgia, while he had Mdivani shot, he made a remarkable exception to the Purge in sparing Philip Makharadze. Makharadze, though publicly censured for various errors in the particularly sensitive field of Georgian Party history,⁶⁰ remained Chairman of the Presidium of the Georgian Supreme Soviet until he died, in good odor, in 1943. His survival is very peculiar—unless, indeed, we regard the reprieve as amounting to no more than four years’ imminent expectation of arrest, and see in it a particularly subtle piece of revenge.

What may be a curious remnant of Caucasian chivalry can be seen in one of Stalin’s more general omissions from the Purge lists. He had no objection to killing or imprisoning women—in fact, “wife” is mentioned as a normal category for execution (see here). But within the inner Party itself, there is a curious survival of Old Bolshevik women. Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, is in a sense a special case, though she had been strong in the opposition to Stalin in the 1920s and had given him personal offense. But it would not by any means be beyond Stalin’s powers or beyond the usual scope of his malice to prove that Lenin’s wife had betrayed her husband.

But there are many other cases of Old Bolshevik women surviving. Elena Stasova lasted right through the Stalin epoch. L. A. Fotieva, Lenin’s secretary, who must also have known a good deal about what was one of Stalin’s most sensitive points—the quarrel with Lenin in his last days—was also spared. So was K. I. Nikolayeva, the only woman full member of the 1934 Central Committee apart from Krupskaya, who was one of the few who was carried over into the Committee elected in 1939, and she was an ex-Zinovievite at that. Another case was R. S. Zemlyachka, member of the 1904 Central Committee. A brutal terrorist, she had been Bela Kun’s chief colleague in the great slaughter in the Crimea in 1920, to which Lenin himself had objected. She survived, while Kun went to the execution cellars. Alexandra Kollontai, the star of the Workers’ Opposition, had been married to Dybenko and had lived with Shlyapnikov. On top of all this, after her acceptance of the Stalin line she remained as Ambassador (to Sweden), a profession which was anyhow almost invariably fatal. Yet she survived the Stalin epoch unscathed, en poste.

Psychologists might make something about this trait of Stalin’s. In any case, it is a comparatively human characteristic and one perhaps harking back to Caucasia as much as the blood feud does. Another “category” to be spared has no such obvious source: the former Bolshevik members of the Duma (including Grigori Petrovsky, who was under the direct threat in 1939) all survived.

But when all is said, we are still peering into the glooms of an extreme reticence. A shrewd Soviet official, who was impressed by Stalin’s patience and also by his capriciousness, comments, “That rare combination is the principal key to his character.”⁶¹ Doubtless this is a sound view, yet it only takes us into the outskirts of a full understanding.

Even as to his political aims, he never spoke his mind. That he knew in general what he was doing cannot be doubted. It is much more difficult, as we have seen, to tell how far he had made his aims explicit even in his own mind, and how far ahead he looked during a given crisis. What he had, politically speaking, was less definite than a planned control of developments. It was, rather, the feel of events, the flow. In this he was unsurpassed among his contemporaries.

We do not need to posit a conscious long-term plan to say that in a general way the drive for power was Stalin’s strongest and most obvious motivation. There have been men, like Cromwell, whose paths to supreme power were truly accidental, who neither planned nor particularly wished for the result. This is quite certainly not true of Stalin.

Bukharin said plainly, “At any given moment he will change his theories in order to get rid of someone.”⁶² But politically speaking, this shows a basic consistency. The one fundamental drive that can be found throughout is the strengthening of his own position. To this, for practical purposes, all else was subordinate. It led him to absolute power. As Machiavelli points out, though the actual seizure of power is difficult in despotic States, once seized, it is comparatively easy to hold. And Stalin seized it and held it.

Over the next four years, he carried out a revolution which completely transformed the Party and the whole of society. Far more than the Bolshevik Revolution itself, this period marks the major gulf between modem Russia and the past. It was also the deepest trauma of all those which had shaken the population in the turbulent decades since 1905. It is true that only against the peculiar background of the Soviet past, and the extraordinary traditions of the All-Union Communist Party, could so radical a turn be put through. The totalitarian machinery, already in existence, was the fulcrum without which the world could not be moved. But the revolution of the Purges still remains, however we judge it, above all Stalin’s personal achievement. If his character is to some degree impenetrable to direct investigation, we shall see it adequately displayed in his actions over the following years, and in the State he thus created and found good.