Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

  Both come in slightly different versions. ‘There is a man, there is a problem. No man, no problem.’5 This is less epigrammatic, and more catechistic – more typical of Stalin’s seminarian style (one thinks of his oration at Lenin’s funeral and its liturgical back-and-forth).

  The variant on number two is: ‘Beat, beat, and, once again, beat.’ Another clear improvement, if we want a sense of Stalin’s rhythms of thought.

  5 If Stalin had been a modern American he would not have used the word ‘problem’ but the less defeatist and judgmental ‘issue’. Actually, when you consider what Stalin tended to do to his enemies’ descendants, the substitution works well enough.

  Succession

  The years of Stalin’s climb to ascendancy, 1922–29, are so undramatic – blocs, alignments, bureaucratic reshuffles, and a certain amount of doctrinal wheedling about Permanent Revolution (later to be condemned as ‘Trotskyite contraband’) and Socialism in One Country (Stalin’s view that the USSR would have to survive without Communist revolutions in, for a start, Germany, France, England and the USA): these years are so undramatic that they are best sidestepped in favour of a brief glance at Trotsky and the question why, in the end, he gave Stalin so very little trouble. He gave Stalin trouble psychologically. But not politically.

  It was by any standards a remarkably thin field that Lenin left behind him. No one can reckon on dying at the age of fifty-three; but the matter of the succession was one of the great integral carelessnesses of Leninism. The chain of command, according to State and Revolution (written in haste between the two revolutions of 1917), depended on ‘unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader’. And when that Soviet leader died – then what? Justified anxiety on this question shores up the sense of gloom and failure in Lenin’s later, post-stroke meditations.

  To begin with it looked as though the front-runner was the Petrograd – now Leningrad – Party boss, Grigori Zinoviev. This feels in itself remarkable, because nobody has ever had a good word to say for him. Conquest is untypically categorical: ‘[Zinoviev] seems to have impressed oppositionists and Stalinists, Communists and non-Communists, as a vain, incompetent, insolent, and cowardly nonentity.’ Another party star was Lev Kamenev, a more restrained and respectable personage but an incorrigible trimmer and haverer. Zinoviev and Kamenev were used to working in concert (they would also be suppressed in concert); possibly their weaknesses might have balanced out in some kind of ramshackle coalition. What else was there? Lenin, showing his vanity and, in sickness, his muted will, recommended broad-based consensus rule: rule by Politburo. But the system he had half-accidentally constructed was shaped for rule by the strongest personality. The inevitability of Stalin: Richard Pipes thinks that Stalin was inevitable. Most historians, when dealing with the Stalin ascendancy, reject ‘inevitable’ in favour of ‘logical’. … Kamenev, by the way, publicly and passionately called for Stalin’s overthrow on 21 December 1925 (Stalin’s forty-sixth birthday). At this stage he and Zinoviev had eleven years to live.6 Bukharin had thirteen.

  Nikolai Bukharin, whom Lenin called ‘the darling of the Party,’ abased himself many times. ‘I am so glad they have been shot like dogs,’ he said, referring to Zinoviev and Kamenev, in 1936. At that time he was being vigorously menaced by Stalin. But he had abased himself earlier, under no such pressure, at Lenin’s ‘demonstration’ trial of the Socialist-Revolutionists in 1922 (Pipes describes his role here as ‘sordid’. He behaved like a one-man lynch mob). Bukharin was by all accounts almost drunkenly volatile, equally likely to burst into tears or laughter. When the Mandelstams sought his help, in the early 1930s, Nadezhda was astounded by the rage he flew into – on their behalf. But Bukharin had eloquence and insight; he had a much sharper sense of reality than any of his peers. Consequently he was the only eminence uncontaminated by the critical Bolshevik vice: murderous contempt for the peasants. (‘Enrich yourselves,’ he told them, thereby attracting a doctrinal rebuke.) And Collectivization, when it came, provoked this response from him, a response seldom found in these years, in these men: moral hesitation. Bukharin said privately that during the Civil War he had seen

  things that I would not want even my enemies to see. Yet 1919 cannot even be compared to what happened between 1930 and 1932. In 1919 we were fighting for our lives. We executed people, but we also risked our lives in the process. In the later period, however, we were conducting a mass annihilation of completely defenceless men, together with their wives and children.

  Conquest adds:

  [Bukharin] was even more concerned with the effect on the Party. Many Communists had been severely shaken. Some had committed suicide; others had gone mad. In his view, the worst result of the terror and famine in the country was not so much the sufferings of the peasantry, horrible though these were. It was the ‘deep changes in the psychological outlook of those Communists who participated in this campaign, and instead of going mad, became professional bureaucrats for whom terror was henceforth a normal method of administration, and obedience to any order from above a high virtue’. He spoke of a ‘real dehumanization of the people working in the Soviet apparatus’.

  It is here, and not in the aftermath of the Kirov murder (December 1934), that we see the quickening of the Great Terror. ‘Koba, why do you need me to die?’ began the forty-third unanswered letter that Bukharin wrote to Stalin, during the long course of his house arrest, trial, sentence. Why? Zachto? Bukharin said it himself, in 1936:

  [Stalin] is unhappy at not being able to convince everyone, himself included, that he is greater than everyone; and this unhappiness of his may be his most human trait, perhaps the only human trait in him. But what is not human, but rather something devilish, is that because of this unhappiness he cannot help taking revenge on people, on all people but especially those who are in any way better or higher than he.

  Anyone better or higher: a numerous company. In earlier and happier days the two men, Stalin and Bukharin, used to tussle playfully on the lawns of their dachas. Solzhenitsyn anecdotally reports that Bukharin would often put Stalin on his back. That would have been enough.7

  Which leaves Trotsky. Lenin credited him with the highest ‘ambition’, but there was something fundamentally unserious about Trotsky’s approach to the succession. In late 1922 he had to ask directions to Lenin’s dacha in Gorky – where Stalin was a frequent and faithful visitor. Then there was the elementary ineptitude of his failure to return from holiday in order to attend Lenin’s funeral. (It is not the case that Stalin duped him over the dates.) Trotsky’s absence was widely remarked – as was Stalin’s from another funeral, in 1936. The Russian philosopher Alexander S. Tsipko pinpoints two ingredients of Bolshevik elan: disdain for the trivial and the desire to astonish the world. Trotsky epitomized both. Stalin intended to astonish the world, as we shall soon see. But he had no disdain for the trivial. The Bolsheviks had created a world in which the activities of any group of two or more people had to be monitored by the state. Stalin accepted the implications of this. The totality of Trotsky’s failure in the struggle for power is taken romantically by romantics. In fact his effort was lame, obtuse, even valetudinarian (an elderly tremolo comes off the page as we read about his various indispositions and recuperations). In the election to the Central Committee in 1921, Trotsky came in tenth – ‘far below Stalin, and even after Molotov,’ as Pipes points out. Anyway, there was no doubt who was temperamentally more suited to the job of nursing and patting and rubbing and generally tending to the gigantic paunch of the bureaucracy.

  6 Do their deaths become them? Tucker quotes a witness to the following exchange, as the two men faced their executioners. Zinoviev: ‘This is a fascist coup!’ Kamenev: ‘Stop it, Grisha. Be quiet. Let’s die with dignity.’ Zinoviev: ‘No! … Before my death I must state plainly that what has happened in our country is a fascist coup.’ (Tucker goes on to argue that ‘fascist coup’ was a reasonable analysis.) Volkogonov gives this, via one of the prison guards: ‘Althoug
h they had both written to Stalin many times begging for mercy and were apparently expecting it (he had after all promised), they sensed this was the end. Kamenev walked along the corridor in silence, nervously pressing his palms. Zinoviev became hysterical and had to be carried.’

  7 Bukharin died with defiant dignity. On balance he perhaps deserves the cadences of Arthur Koestler’s fictional conclusion in Darkness at Noon:

  A shapeless figure bent over him, he smelt the fresh leather of the revolver belt; but what insignia did the figure wear on the sleeves and shoulder-straps of its uniform – and in whose name did it raise the dark pistol barrel?

  A second smashing blow hit him on the ear. Then all became quiet. There was the sea again with its sounds. A wave slowly lifted him up. It came from afar and travelled sedately on, a shrug of eternity.

  Bukharin’s wife spent six months in a small cell ankle-deep in water and went on to serve eighteen years. Their daughter survived. His first wife and all her close family were wiped out.

  Theory

  ‘Stop it, Koba, don’t make a fool of yourself. Everyone knows that theory is not exactly your field.’

  This interruption came from the lips of the old Communist sage David Ryazonov. It was a costly taunt.

  Very soon after Lenin’s death, in April 1924, Stalin gave a course of lectures, later printed in a short book called The Foundations of Leninism. It consisted almost entirely of quotations (without them, says Volkogonov, the book would contain little more than punctuation marks). The quotations were marshalled by a research assistant named F. A. Ksenofontov. He, too, would pay for his contribution.

  In 1925 Stalin appointed Jan Sten, deputy head of the Marx-Engels Institute, as his private tutor. Sten’s job was to tighten Stalin’s grip on dialectical materialism. Twice a week, for three years, Sten came to the Kremlin apartment and coached his pupil on Hegel, Kant, Feuerbach, Fichte, Schelling, Plekhanov, Kautsky and Francis Bradley (Appearance and Reality). Stalin, ominously, found Sten’s voice ‘monotonous’, but he managed to sit through the lessons, occasionally breaking in with such queries as ‘Who uses all this rubbish in practice?’ and ‘What’s all this got to do with the class struggle?’ As Bukharin put it, Stalin was ‘eaten up by the vain desire to become a well-known theoretician. He feels that it is the only thing he lacks.’ Sten, with that monotonous voice of his, would not get off lightly.

  The tutorials ended in 1928. By December 1930 Stalin felt himself equipped to lecture the lecturers. As the unchallenged dictator whose revolution from above (his ‘Second October’) was already launched in a wave of unprecedented hysteria and havoc, he found the time to address the Institute of Red Professors in the following terms:

  We have to turn upside down and turn over the whole pile of shit that has accumulated in questions of philosophy and natural science. Everything written by the Deborin group [Academician Abram Deborin was a temporarily influential thinker] has to be smashed. Sten and Karev can be chucked out. Sten boasts a lot, but he’s just a pupil of Karev’s. Sten is a desperate sluggard. All he can do is talk.

  Sten and others were moreover accused of ‘Menshivizing idealism’ and of ‘underestimating the materialistic dialectic’. It was impossible to ascertain what Stalin was prescribing – or proscribing. The final result of his intervention was that ‘philosophy shrivelled up,’ as Volkogonov puts it: ‘no one had the courage to write anything more on the subject.’

  Ksenofontov, Stalin’s collaborator on The Foundations of Leninism, was told to abandon his work. He was later shot. Jan Sten was pronounced a ‘lickspittle of Trotsky’. He was later shot. The fate of David Ryazonov (‘Stop it, Koba’) was slightly more unusual.

  Ryazonov had a protégé, I. I. Rubin, who was among the defendants in the Menshevik trial of 1931. On his arrest Rubin was confined in what Solzhenitsyn calls the box (‘constructed in such a way that [the prisoner] can only stand up and even then is squeezed against the door’). This went on for some time, but Rubin held out. The Chekists broke him by producing a stranger whom they threatened to shoot if Rubin’s resistance continued. He witnessed two such murders before he signed. At his trial Rubin implicated Ryazonov as the possessor of documents adumbrating the full scope of the Menshevik conspiracy. ‘You won’t find them anywhere unless you’ve put them there yourself,’ said Ryazonov, when summoned to the Politburo. He was sacked, expelled from the Party, and sentenced to internal exile. He was later shot.

  It seems that the sole survivor of these theoretical exchanges was Abram Deborin, who died (in poverty) at the amazingly late date of 1963.

  The Second October and the Breaking of the Peasantry

  Collectivization (1929–33) was the opening and defining phase of Stalin’s untrammelled power: it was the first thing he did the moment his hands were free. As a crime against humanity it eclipses the Great Terror, which it also potentiated, in two senses, rendering the purge both more certain and more severe. Collectivization makes you wonder what the fifty years of the gulag would have been like if telescoped in time (to half a decade) and distended in space (to fill the entire country). Only it was worse, demographically worse. During Collectivization Stalin is reckoned to have killed about 4 million children. For the man himself, though, and for the man’s psychology, the most salient feature of Collectivization was the abysmal depth, and gigantic reach, of its failure. In his introductory administrative push, Stalin ruined the countryside for the rest of the century. It was here, too, that he lit out of all reality, and did so with full Bolshevik aggression. As the Party economist S. G. Strumilin put it: ‘Our task is not to study economics but to change it. We are bound by no laws.’ This was the first stage in Stalin’s opaque – indeed barely graspable – attempt to confront the truth, to bring it into line, to humble it, to break it.

  I was in my late twenties when I first realized – the moment came as I read a piece about Islam in the TLS – that theocracies are meant to work. Until then I thought that repression, censorship, terror and destitution were the price you had to pay for living by the Book. But no, that wasn’t the idea at all: Koranic rule was meant to bring you swimming pools and hydrogen bombs. Collectivization, similarly, was meant to work. Stalin had earlier expressed doubts about the ‘Left-deviation’ (i.e., extremely doctrinaire) attitude to the peasantry: its policies, he said, would ‘inevitably lead to … a great increase in the price of agricultural produce, a fall in real salaries and an artificially produced famine’. And his preparations for Collectivization, in the initial burst, were frivolously lax. Yet Stalin believed that Collectivization would work. Collectivization would astonish the world. This was a Stalinist rush of blood. And that is how Stalinism is perhaps best represented: as a series of rushes of blood.

  In Bolshevik terms the peasantry was (as psychologists say when referring to a huge and unmentionable family dysfunction) ‘the elephant in the living room’. The peasantry, in the Marxist universe, wasn’t really meant to be there. In the Marxist universe Russia was supposed to be more like Germany or France or England, with their well-developed urban proletariats. Yet the Russian peasants were intransigently actual: they comprised 85 per cent of the population. And, as landholders, they were technically bourgeois, technically capitalist.8 Lenin had tried to socialize the countryside. Grain requisitioning was enforced by terror – and followed by famine. His agrarian policies also gave rise, in 1920–21, to a vast national uprising that proved a greater threat to the regime than all the armies of the Whites: part of a failed but genuine revolution that utterly dwarfed those of 1905 and February 1917. His response was the abashedly capitalistic New Economic Policy; and this was an enduring doctrinal embarrassment to the Bolsheviks. Originally an enthusiast, Lenin seemed to lose his appetite for Collectivization and what it would mean. The Right bloc in the Politburo concurred. The Left bloc was more restless for bold action but was reluctantly resigned to a socialization of the countryside that might take ten or twenty years. In 1928, with Trotsky finished, no one was talkin
g with much ardour about forced Collectivization, let alone immediate forced Collectivization.9 During the earlier years of the 1920s Stalin had presented himself as a godfearing centrist. Then, with the opposition defeated, he veered wildly Left. The argument with the professionals was easily settled. As 1929 wore on, writes Conquest, Soviet economists ‘had the choice of supporting the politicians’ new plans or going to prison’.

  Stalin’s aims were clear: crash Collectivization would, through all-out grain exports, finance wildfire industrialization, resulting in breakneck militarization to secure state and empire ‘in a hostile world’. According to Robert Tucker, Stalin was beginning to picture himself as a kind of Marxist Tsar; he hoped to improve and replace Leninism (with Stalinism), and also to buttress the state ‘from above’, as had Peter the Great. What remains less clear is whether his strategy was thought through, or simply and intoxicatedly ad hoc. The Five Year Plan, after all, was not a plan but a wish list. It was certainly Stalin’s intention, or his need, to regalvanize Bolshevism, to commit it, once again, to ‘heroic’ struggle. And yet, unlike Hitler, who announced his goals in 1933 and, with a peculiarly repulsive sense of entitlement, set about achieving them, Stalin is to be seen at this time as a figure constantly fantasticated not by success but by failure.

  To get things going he needed an enemy and an emergency. The emergency was a ‘grain crisis’ after the disappointing but undisastrous harvest of 1927. The enemy was the village kulak. The kulaks (kulak means fist) were a pre-Revolutionary stratum of rich peasants: they were usurers and mortgagers and ‘exploiters of labour’; and they all but disappeared during the rural terror of War Communism. Of course, under NEP, some peasants continued to be richer than others (by about half as much again, in extreme cases). It came down to one extra cow, one extra hired hand during the harvesting, one extra window on the face of the log cabin. On 21 December 1929, Stalin celebrated his fiftieth birthday, to hyperbolic acclaim; this date also marks the birth of the ‘cult of personality’, which would take such a toll on his mental health. Eight days later he announced his policy of ‘liquidating the kulaks as a class’.