Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

  When the interrogators started work on Mdivani he is said to have protested, ‘You are telling me that Stalin has promised to spare the lives of Old Bolsheviks! I have known Stalin for thirty years. He won’t rest until he has butchered all of us, beginning with the unweaned baby and ending with the blind great-grandmother!’ ‘All of us’ seems to refer to ‘Old Bolsheviks’; but it could mean ‘all Georgians’ (or, conceivably, all Soviet citizens). The specific nature of Stalin’s antipathy is in any case clear. It is usually attributed to his intense insecurity and his shame about his origins. Perhaps, too, he was trying to sever his last connections to anything human. In the 1930s, and beyond, Stalin killed everyone who had ever known Trotsky. But he was also killing everyone who had ever known Stalin – known him or seen him or breathed the same air.

  Demian Bedny

  Of all the writers with whom Stalin had dealings none was less distinguished than Demian Bedny. A hack and a McGonagall, Bedny was, ridiculously, the Soviet Union’s proletarian ‘poet laureate’. He had been active since the days of the Civil War, and his poems (or battle chants: ‘Death to the vermin! Kill them all, to the last!’) were posted on walls and scattered from aeroplanes). Trotsky praised his passion, ‘his well-grounded hatred’, and his ability to write, ‘not only in those rare instances when Apollo calls’, but ‘day in and day out, as the events demand … and the Central Committee’. There were cries of ‘Author! Author!’ from Stalin, in 1926, when Bedny published an anti-Trotsky poem, ‘Everything Comes to an End’, which included the lines:

  Our party has served long enough

  as the target for spent politicians!

  It’s time at last

  to put an end to this outrage!

  As the show trial of the Old Bolsheviks Zinoviev and Kamenev approached its denouement, Pravda was full of mass resolutions and signed articles demanding the death penalty. Bedny’s poem for 21 August 1936, was entitled ‘No Mercy’.1

  Demian Bedny, who was given a pension and a luxurious apartment in the Kremlin, had several run-ins with Stalin. Nadezhda Mandelstam tells the following tale of an early froideur. Apparently Bedny disliked lending books to Stalin because of the smears left in the margins by his ‘greasy fingers’. He was incautious enough to confide this to his diary; a Kremlin secretary saw the entry and passed it on. It is obvious, incidentally, that Stalin never regarded his laureate as anything but a reasonably useful idiot. Stalin knew very well that poetry was more than a factory whistle …

  In 1930 Bedny published ‘Get Off the Oven-Shelf,’ a poem lamenting a decline in coal output in the Donbas (some of the miners were newly recruited peasants), and ‘Pererva’, which addressed itself to a train crash (switchman negligence on the Moscow-Kursk line). Bedny’s theme, here, was the torpor and wishfulness of the Russian temperament – what Lenin had called ‘Oblomovism’. When this critique was itself criticized by the Central Committee, Bedny wrote to Stalin, putting his case for constructive satire on the national character in the tradition of Gogol and Shchedrin. Stalin’s reply was, in Tucker’s words, ‘harshly negative’. He accused Bedny of perpetrating a ‘slander’ on the Russian proletariat.

  Bedny had failed to see that Stalin was changing his stance towards Old Russia, and had now decided to exalt its folkloric traditions and historical heroes (he would rehabilitate not only Peter the Great but also Ivan the Terrible, in his own image). In Tucker’s formulation, Stalin was becoming a ‘right-radical Great Russian’. Bedny was thus most ill-advised when, in 1936, he wrote a comic opera called Bogatyrs (the great heroes), in which a sacred chapter in Russian history was raucously lampooned.

  Robert Tucker:

  He portrayed these characters of Russian legend as drunkards and cowards … Prince Vladimir’s adoption of Christianity in the tenth century, by leading the people of Kiev into the Dnieper River for a mass baptism in the dead of winter, was ridiculed as an episode in a drunken debauch.

  Molotov attended the first night and walked out at the end of Act One (‘An outrage!’). Bedny was evicted from the Writers’ Union. And from his Kremlin apartment.

  Our poet continued to write and publish – until 1938. At this point, his finger no nearer the pulse of events, he was moved to write an attack on Nazism, apparently unaware of the delicate manoeuvrings between Hitler and Stalin (who would soon be nominal allies). Called ‘Inferno’, Bedny’s piece reimagined Germany in terms of the classical Hell (and in contrast, no doubt, to the Paradiso of the Soviet Union). At two o’clock in the morning Bedny was summoned to the offices of Pravda. The editor, Mekhlis, showed him his manuscript, which now bore Stalin’s adjudication: ‘Tell this newly appeared “Dante” that he can stop writing.’

  ‘I have invented a new genre,’ said Isaac Babel, the great short-story writer, in 1934: ‘that of silence.’ Babel ceased to be published in 1937; he was arrested in 1939, and shot in 1940.

  Demian ‘Bedny’: Demian the Poor (his real name was Efim Pridvorov). He was a disgrace to poetry; and his physical appearance wore that disgrace. But we are relieved that he met no worse fate than penury – silence, in his case, being neither here nor there.

  1 At the same point in the Bukharin trial two years later the ‘folk poet’ D. Dzhambul contributed a similar piece called ‘Annihilate’.

  The Grey Blur, the Yellow Eyes

  In November 1915 Lenin wrote to his colleague Vyacheslav Karpinsky asking for

  a big favour: find out (from Stepko [N. D. Kiknadze] or Mikha [M. G. Tskhakaya]) the name of ‘Koba’ (is it Iosif Dzh …? we’ve forgotten). It’s very important!!!

  This seems especially comic when we consider the historical revisions subsequently undertaken by Stalin. Films, paintings and textbooks routinely depicted scenes of Lenin and Stalin wisely planning the Revolution together (well before 1915), the ‘great joy’ and ‘manly embraces’ of their reunions, and so on. There is something boyishly transparent about the faked transcript of 1929, supposedly of Lenin’s telegraphic communications in early 1918, when the new regime was struggling with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Stalin’s intention here is the retrospective validation, and magnification, of his own role (and, of course, the undermining of Trotsky’s):

  1. Lenin here. I’ve just received your special letter. Stalin isn’t here and I haven’t been able to show it to him yet … As soon as Stalin gets back I’ll show him your letter … 2. I want to consult Stalin before replying to your question … 3. Stalin has just arrived and we are going to discuss the matter and give you our joint reply … Tell Trotsky we request a break in the talks and his return to [Petrograd]. Lenin.

  ‘Our joint reply’: a swift ascent, then, for ‘Iosif Dzh …?’ By 1915 Lenin had known Stalin for ten years. In 1912 he personally nominated him to the Central Committee. That same year Stalin twice crossed the Austrian border (illegally) to visit Lenin in Cracow. Lenin referred to him as ‘my wonderful Georgian’. And yet he couldn’t remember his name. ‘It’s very important!!!’ observed Lenin. And so it is.

  When the time came to falsify, or refalsify, the historical record, Stalin had much work to do. His prerevolutionary activities (agitprop and the organization of strikes) were mildly remarkable only for the frequency of his incarcerations. Between 1903 and 1917 he was arrested seven times and sentenced to imprisonment or, more usually, to internal exile (from which he escaped five times). Between 1908 and 1917 he spent only eighteen months at liberty. Even his part in the famous ‘expropriations’ appears to have been minor. The sensational heist in Tiflis (1907), with its guns, its bombs, its scores of injuries, its innocent dead (including the mutilated horses), was the work, not of ‘Koba’, but of ‘Kamo’ (the crazed Ter-Petrosian). Stalin’s achievement, pre-1917, rests on the several articles he indubitably published in Pravda. Then came the October events in Petrograd.

  The History of the All-Union Communist Party: Short Course was shepherded through the presses by Stalin in 1938 – during the first ebb of the Terror. Part primer, part ghosted autobiog
raphy, the Short Course would have eventual print runs in the tens of millions and become a cornerstone of the entire culture. Its popularity was perhaps not entirely manufactured and imposed. The Short Course, after all, was the best-known guide on how to avoid being arrested. By now, by 1938, almost everyone who remembered things differently was dead. This was one of the obscure desires of the Terror: to make a tabula rasa of the past … As the Short Course tells it, Stalin made the Revolution (and won the Civil War) more or less singlehanded – with the help and colleagueship of Lenin, and with the sinister hindrances of Trotsky. And the truth is (‘a queer but undoubted fact’, as Isaac Deutscher put it) that Stalin played no part in October at all.2

  It seems to have been de rigueur for Stalin’s contemporaries to describe him, at this stage (he would blossom fiercely during the Civil War), as ‘a grey and colourless mediocrity’, ‘a grey blur’ (with ‘a glint of animosity’ in ‘his yellow eyes’ – Trotsky), or ‘just a small-town politician’ (Lev Kamenev). Such assessments are usually quoted as examples of lack of prescience or as tributes to Stalin’s powers of dissimulation. But it is clear that that’s exactly what Stalin was, in 1917: a grey blur, with yellow eyes (several observers mention the ‘tigerish eyes’). Still, even then Stalin had the ability to repel his peers. In March he suffered a preferment snub that Conquest finds ‘quite astonishing when we consider that it was taken to outweigh his high official standing’ (he was turned down for a minor promotion ‘in view of certain personal characteristics’). We have here a figure both anonymous and liable to give offence. As soon as the guard dropped, in other words, something feral was revealed. The grey blur gave way to the yellow eyes.

  When in 1912 Lenin nominated Stalin for the Central Committee he didn’t put his name forward in the usual way but pushed him through by fiat, as if conceding that his protégé was not widely admired. Lenin indulged Stalin partly because of his background, the closest thing the Bolsheviks had to a proletarian (apart from Tomsky); and he felt that Stalin’s working-class brutality was more ideologically ‘honest’ than the brainier brutality of himself and Trotsky and to lesser degrees all the other top men. In 1922, as we have seen, Lenin experienced a fundamental rejection of Stalin, a rejection of his low cultural level, his lumpen instability. He felt power (‘immense power’) concentrating itself in Stalin and, suddenly, it seems, he saw what that power had done and was doing to him. Stalin, in fact, was not corrupted so much as symbiotically reinvented by power.

  When the new cabinet was announced, in 1917, Stalin was named fifteenth and last. (To reminisce about this placement was not encouraged, in 1937–38.) Stalin was Lenin’s industrious, underbred mascot, his shaggy dog. Five years later, Lenin would sense that the dog had begun to fizz with rabies. Two years earlier, so far as Lenin was concerned, the dog didn’t even have a name.

  We had better deal here with the baffling telephone conversation between Stalin and Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, on 22 December 1922, in which Stalin called her, among other things (such was Party rumour), a ‘syphilitic whore’.

  The timing is important. At this stage Lenin-Stalin relations were at their lowest point, after the Georgia altercation. On the other hand, four days earlier the Central Committee had conferred on Stalin responsibility for Lenin’s medical care.3 Thirteen days later Lenin would compose his ‘Testament’ (‘Stalin is too rude’, and so on). But Lenin wasn’t told about the telephone call until March, on the eve of his final stroke.

  On 22 December 1922, Stalin learned that Krupskaya had supposedly breached Lenin’s medical regimen. In her own words (a letter to Kamenev):

  Stalin subjected me to a storm of the coarsest abuse yesterday about a brief note Lenin dictated to me with the permission of the doctors. I didn’t join the party yesterday. In the whole of the last thirty years I have never heard a coarse word from a comrade.

  What can explain Stalin’s reaction? The ‘brief note’ Lenin dictated to Krupskaya was addressed to Trotsky, praising him for his recent outmanoeuvring of Stalin (on the question of the foreign-trade monopoly). Evidence, to Stalin, of a Lenin-Trotsky bloc. But why would his aggression take the course it did? This was a clearly unforgivable intrusion, and prosecuted with such fury that Krupskaya (known to be an unmercurial woman, even as she nursed a dying husband) is said to have been reduced to hysterics (her nerves, she told Kamenev, were now ‘at breaking point’). When Lenin heard about it, as he inevitably would, he moved at once, and again inevitably, to demote and discredit Stalin. Then, on 7 March, came Lenin’s final stroke. He lived on, speechless, for another ten months; and Stalin survived.

  If there is no rational explanation for Stalin’s behaviour then an irrational one will have to serve. The prominent Chekist, Dzerzhinsky, on being mildly reproached for the savagery of his Georgian purge, agreed that the suppression had indeed got completely out of hand, adding, ‘But we couldn’t help ourselves.’ We can well believe that the accession to and then the practice of power had that compulsive quality. One must feel one’s way into it by imagining Bolshevik coercive force and the adjectives associated with it – naked, raw, brutal, merciless, absolute. On 25 May 1922, Stalin had experienced a runaway powersurge, on the occasion of Lenin’s first stroke (with the massive booster of 13 December: strokes two and three). When it came to confronting Krupskaya, Stalin was all caught up in the thrills and heaves of the prospect of prepotence. He couldn’t help himself.

  Krupskaya was being perfectly serious when she said that had Lenin lived on, he would eventually have joined all the other Old Bolsheviks in Stalin’s execution cellars. When he was told about the telephone call, Lenin wrote to Stalin: ‘I have no intention of forgetting what has been done against me, and it goes without saying what was done against my wife I also consider to have been directed against myself.’ Precisely. For the first and only time, and with unstoppable recklessness, Stalin had revealed a profound secret: his hatred of Lenin. To the extent that Stalin was a divided or a ‘doubled’ self, half of him hated Lenin as purely and passionately as the whole man hated Trotsky.

  As instructed, Krupskaya delivered the ‘Testament’ to the Central Committee soon after Lenin’s death. Stalin then announced his resignation.

  But a year had passed, and political reconfigurations were already entrained, and Stalin’s tactical offer was refused.

  His ally throughout, his most loyal helper, was cerebral sclerosis. First, the disease weakened Lenin, then partly marginalized him, then silenced him, then, after a crucial delay, extinguished him – uncannily obedient, all the while, to Stalin’s needs.

  2 He merits only two passing references in John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, and the book was later banned in the USSR for that reason. ‘His name does not occur in any document relating to those historic days and nights’ (Volkogonov).

  3 With hindsight we may think that Stalin was hardly the automatic choice for such a role. His real job was to cordon Lenin off from the new power vacuum, which the Politburo was immediately and unsentimentally jockeying to fill.

  The Kremlin Complexion

  ‘Lazar,’ said Stalin, one day in the testing year of 1937, as he struck up a conversation with his industrious underling Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich. ‘Did you know that your [brother] Mikhail is hobnobbing with the rightists? There is solid evidence against him.’

  After a pause Kaganovich replied: ‘Then he must be dealt with in accordance with the law.’

  Kaganovich duly telephoned his brother Mikhail (a Bolshevik since 1905 and now Commissar for aircraft construction), who shot himself the same day in a colleague’s toilet. Lazar Kaganovich died of natural causes in 1988.4

  Such abjection was a way of surviving Stalin: you gave him something of your blood, without wavering – though Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s secretary, is said to have gone down on his knees in the hope that his wife might be spared the supreme penalty.

  Nikita Khrushchev’s daughter-in-law was jailed.

  Vyacheslav Molotov’s wife
was sent to the gulag.

  Mikhail Kalinin’s wife was beaten unconscious by a female interrogator in the presence of head Chekist Lavrenti Beria, and then sent to the gulag.

  Anastas Mikoyan’s two sons were sent to the gulag.

  Aleksandr Poskrebyshev’s wife was sent to the gulag. Three years later she was shot.

  These men formed Stalin’s inner circle: they were the ‘Kremlin complexion’ crowd (chalky, with livid patches) who worked with him all day and drank with him all night. We must picture their faces round the dinner table, or flickering in the private projection room (musicals and Westerns in the earlier years; later, celebratory propaganda about collective farms and the like). We must picture their faces as they looked up from their desks the following day. These pale men had given Stalin something of their blood.

  4 During the mid-1980s David Remnick, with appropriately heartless persistence, badgered Kaganovich for an interview. He found what he expected to find: a twitching amnesiac on a state pension. This was the charge against Mikhail: he was Hitler’s candidate for leading a fascist Russia. The Kaganoviches were Jewish.

  Rhythms of Thought

  Stalin’s two most memorable utterances are ‘Death solves all problems. No man, no problem’ and (he was advising his interrogators on how best to elicit a particular confession) ‘Beat, beat and beat again.’