Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

  Solzhenitsyn is insistent (‘This is very important, the most important thing’) that Dekulakization was chiefly a means of terrorizing the other peasants into submission: ‘Without frightening them to death there was no way of taking back the land which the Revolution had given them, and planting them on that same land as serfs.’ (And Molotov spoke of dealing the kulaks ‘such a blow’ that ‘the middle peasant will snap to attention before us’.) The Bolshevik ‘class analysis’ of the countryside seems, even by Party standards, desperately willed, vague, ignorant and contradictory;10 but it did have the supposed virtue of siding with the least fit – the virtue of downward selection. There were meant to be three kinds of peasant (poor, middle, kulak), and three kinds of kulak (numerically bulked out by various ‘subkulaks’ or ‘near-kulaks’ or podkulakniki, meaning ‘henchmen of kulak’). A plan approved in January 1930 stated that the first kind of kulak (the richest) was ‘to be arrested and shot or imprisoned’, writes Conquest, ‘and their families exiled; and the second exiled merely; while (at this stage) the “non-hostile” third section might be admitted to the collective farm on probation.’ The poorer peasants (who do not get a good press in the historiography: ‘drunks’, ‘layabouts’, ‘windbags’, ‘unemployables’, and so on) were encouraged, and paid, to denounce the richer peasants. Again, the extraordinary persistence of this theme: that a ruling order predicated on human perfectibility should reward, glorify, encourage and indeed necessitate all that is humanly base. In the context of the Bolsheviks’ ‘unprecedented hypocrisy’ (N. Mandelstam), we may consider, here, how the battle cry against ‘exploitation of labour’ accompanied the reenserfment, not just of the kulaks, but of the entire peasantry … The Bolsheviks found bourgeois morality, and bourgeois law, hypocritical. This belief somehow encouraged a fabulous expansion in hypocritical possibility. The Bolsheviks took hypocrisy to places it had never been before; their hypocrisy was highly innovative, highly refined, and almost wittily symmetrical. It was negative perfection.

  Working in consort with tens of thousands of Party activists, the punitive organs fanned out from the cities, with rifles, and bundles of orders and instructions. Not all Soviet villages contained kulaks, but all Soviet villages had to be terrorized, so kulaks had to be found in all Soviet villages. Stalin was, of course, using a quota system (as he would in the Great Terror). He seemed to have in mind just under 10 per cent: about 12 million people. The agitators and Chekists had had three years of strident indoctrination (and active service: grain requisitioning, the exaction of levies), with all the usual machismo emphases on hardness and mercilessness; and they were themselves half-terrorized (from both sides); and Stalin’s quotas were always minimums which it was an honour to exceed. This is from Vasily Grossman’s Forever Flowing:

  The fathers were already imprisoned, and then, at the beginning of 1930, they began to round up the families too … They would threaten people with guns, as if they were under a spell, calling small children ‘kulak bastards’, screaming ‘Bloodsuckers!’ And those ‘bloodsuckers’ were so terrified that they hardly had any blood of their own left in their veins. They were as white as clean paper.

  Stalin had for a while been putting it about that the poor and middle peasants were flocking to the collective farms ‘spontaneously’ – a discordant adverb, because spontaneity was not a quality he usually praised. Collectivization, to the peasants, meant the surrender of their goods, animals and even their physical beings to the state. The choice they faced was to collectivize or be themselves dekulakized. Stalin’s objective was Lenin’s objective of 1921: state monopoly of food.

  Thus anarchy, plunder, mania and sadism were visited on the countryside. Peasant resistance took two main forms, one predictable, the other unforeseen. First, outright insurrection. The Cheka reported 402 riots and revolts in January 1930, 1,048 in February, and 6,528 in March.11 These were often quelled by the armed forces: cavalry, armoured cars and even fighter aircraft. The peasants’ other main strategy, though, which showed a dreadful decorum, could not be answered or reversed. This is the account of an activist quoted by Tucker:

  I called a village meeting, and I told the people that they had to join the collective, that these were Moscow’s orders, and if they didn’t they would be exiled … They all signed the paper that same night, every one of them. Don’t ask me how I felt and how they felt. And the same night they started to do what the other villages of the USSR were doing when forced into collectives – to kill their livestock.

  ‘Everyone had a greasy mouth,’ as another activist disgustedly noted: ‘everyone blinked like an owl, as if drunk from eating.’ This was the peasantry’s last supper. And it accounted for roughly half of the national herd.

  Launched over the latter part of 1929, Collectivization was already a clear catastrophe by late February 1930. There were differences, but Stalin had reached Lenin’s impasse of 1921. In the earlier case, Lenin accepted defeat, withdrawal and compromise. In other words, he accepted reality. Stalin did not. The peasantry no longer faced a frigid intellectual. It faced a passionate lowbrow whose personality was warping and crackling in the heat of power. He would not accept reality. He would break it.

  Stalin’s first move was a feint towards accommodation. On 2 March 1930, all Soviet newspapers ran the famous article ‘Dizzy with Success’ (which Stalin had not shown to the Politburo). Causing consternation at every Party level, the piece jovially blamed the recent abuses and excesses on a triumphalist apparat. In April, showing a primitive, semi-subliminal self-awareness, Stalin elaborated as follows:

  [The unfortunate consequences] arose because of our rapid success in the collective farm movement. Success sometimes turns people’s heads. It not infrequently gives rise to extreme vanity and conceit. That may very easily happen to representatives of a party like ours, whose strength and prestige are almost immeasurable. Here, instances of Communist vainglory, which Lenin combatted so vehemently, are quite possible.

  The new line brought temporary concessions. Collectivization was slowed and even partly reversed. But Dekulakization accelerated. The gulag could not expand fast enough to contain the deportees. In his long novel Life and Fate Grossman describes the feelings of a Soviet citizen threatened by arrest (here he coincidentally echoes Stalin: ‘How much does the Soviet Union weigh?’):

  He could feel quite tangibly the difference in weight between the fragile human body and the colossus of the State. He could feel the State’s bright eyes gazing into his face; any moment now the State would crash down on him; there would be a crack, a squeal – and he would be gone.

  The peasantry would now experience what Grossman repeatedly calls ‘the rage of the State’. When Pasternak travelled to the countryside in the early 1930s to ‘gather material about the new life of the village’, he fell ill and wrote not a word for an entire year. ‘There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract …’ What he saw ‘would not fit within the bounds of consciousness’. No, not his consciousness. What he saw was the reification of another’s consciousness, another’s mind, another’s rage.

  In the autumn of 1930 the cycle of violence became a spiral: kaleidoscopic and vertiginous. Here is part of a requisitioner’s report:

  … 12 per cent of all the farmers have been tried already, and that doesn’t include the deported kulaks, peasants who were fined, etc … The prisons are full to bursting point. Balachevo prison contains more than five times as many people as it was originally designed to hold, and there are 610 people crammed into the tiny district prison in Elan. Over the last month, Balachevo prison has sent 78 prisoners back to Elan, and 48 of them were less than ten years old … [V]iolence seems to be the only way of thinking now, and we always ‘attack’ everything. We ‘start the onslaught’ on the harvest, on the loans, etc. Everything is an assault; we ‘attack’ the night from nine or ten in the evening till dawn. Everyone gets attacked: the shock troops call in everyone who has not met h
is obligations and ‘convince’ him, using all the means you can imagine. They assault everyone on their list, and so it goes on, night after night.

  Listing five types of torture used to force peasants to reveal grain reserves, the writer Mikhail Sholokhov added, in a letter to Stalin: ‘I could give a multitude of similar examples. These are not “abuses” of the system; this is the present system for collecting grain.’ On 7 August 1932, Stalin promulgated one of the most savage laws in all history. The peasants called it the ‘five-stalk law or simply the ‘ear law’. ‘[A]ny theft or damage of socialist property’ became punishable by ten years or, as the saying went, by nine grams (of lead). A whole family could be shattered for a pilfered handful. Sentences given between August 1932 and December 1933 ran to 125,000, with 5,400 executions.

  Where can Stalin’s rage go next, how can it expand and intensify? A woman widowed that fortnight by starvation is given ten years in the gulag for stealing a few potatoes. It starts to be the practice that orphaned children are shot en masse. The Cheka executes vets and meteorologists. Suddenly 20,000 Communist activists and managers are arrested (for ‘criminal complacency’ in the struggle), to terrorize the terrorizers, to pile terror upon terror, and then more terror, and then more, until Stalin, the escalationist, turns to nonconventional or nuclear terror: famine.

  As grain yields fell, requisitioning quotas grew, with only one possible outcome. Stalin just went at the peasants until there was nobody there to sow the next harvest.

  8 The peasants, now tied to their collective farms, continued to be despised as essentially ‘unsocialist’ well into the 1960s.

  9 This is more or less the consensus view. Malia dissents from it; he sees Collectivization as structural to the Lenin-Stalin continuum, and he is eloquent. ‘For a Bolshevik party the real choice in 1929 was not between Stalin’s road and Bukharin’s; it was between doing approximately what Stalin did and giving up the whole Leninist enterprise’ (The Soviet Tragedy). The question remains: how approximately do we take the word ‘approximately’?

  10 A poem of 1936 about Collectivization pictured Stalin on an ebony steed:

  Past lakes, through hills and woods and fields

  Along the road he rides

  In his grey trenchcoat with his pipe.

  Straight on his horse he guides.

  He stops and speaks

  To peasantfolk

  Throughout the countryside

  And making necessary notes,

  Goes on about his ride.

  Quoted by Tucker. Stalin was not on that horse. Volkogonov: ‘Throughout his life he visited an agricultural region only once, and that was in 1928, when he went to Siberia to see to grain deliveries. He never set foot in a village again.’

  11 ‘In all of 1930 nearly 2.5 million peasants took part in approximately 14,000 revolts, riots, and mass demonstrations against the regime’ (Nicolas Werth).

  Women

  He was twice a widower.

  Of his first wife, Yekaterina (Kato) Svanidze (m. c. 1905: two years after his first arrest), Conquest writes in Stalin: Breaker of Nations:

  We know little about their brief life together, though acquaintances say that while she prayed for his redemption from his dangerous career she was, in the Georgian tradition, obedient to his wishes; on his side, the official Social Democratic notion of the equality of the sexes played no part. Nonetheless, though occasionally brutal, he is reported to have been very fond of her.

  Kato died of typhus in 1907. In his Stalin, Dmitri Volkogonov describes (but does not reproduce) photographs of her funeral showing Koba ‘short and thin, his shock of hair uncombed, standing at the graveside with a look of genuine grief on his face’. After the ceremony Stalin said to an old friend: ‘This creature softened my stony heart. She is dead and with her have died my last warm feelings for all human beings.’ Some historians take Stalin’s little speech on such good trust that they eschew quotation marks and simply paraphrase it in the third person. It was not that simple, or not that natural. If, in a work of fiction, I were to put those words into the mouth of a character, it would be on the following understanding: Here is a man who has always been puzzled by – and perhaps even ashamed of – his lack of human feeling. The death of the young wife relieves him of that puzzlement and shame (it is not his fault; the world did it). He can henceforth ally himself with feelinglessness. Kato left behind her a six-month-old son, Yakov. As Koba threw himself into the cycle of arrest, exile and escape (one year of freedom in the next decade), Yakov remained in Georgia with his maternal aunt and uncle. Certainly, Stalin never showed anything but contempt for him, and played a strange part in his terrible death.

  Stalin made the acquaintance of his second wife, Nadezhda (Nadya) Alliluyeva, when she was an infant of two or three. The Alliluyevs were cultured Old Bolsheviks who regularly put Stalin up during his visits to prewar St Petersburg. It is said that he once saved Nadya and her sister Anna from some risk of drowning; and there’s no question that she idealized him over the years – the gruff agitnik, with his moustache, his tousled quiff, his multiple arrests. After the Revolution, at the age of sixteen, she became Stalin’s secretary, and then, a year later, his wife. Vasily was born in 1921, Svetlana in 1926. Nadya shot herself in the head after a party in the Kremlin to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Revolution. November 1932: in a sense, as we shall see, she was just another victim of Collectivization. While he contemplated her in the open coffin Stalin was seen to make a gesture of dismissal and heard to mutter, ‘She left me as an enemy.’

  During his longest exile, it is said, Stalin sired a child in Siberia. And there were rumours that in his later years he would sometimes sleep with his housekeeper, Valentina Istomina. And that is about all. Considering what he could have got up to, and considering what Beria (for instance) actually did get up to, Stalin’s sexual life was remarkably prim. One can hardly avoid a comparison with Hitler (whose only ‘great love’, Geli Raubal, shot herself in September 1931, and whose companion, Eva Braun, attempted suicide in the autumn of 1932, and again in 1935, and again in 1945, successfully, with her husband at her side). Both Stalin and Hitler felt threatened by intelligent women. Stalin: ‘a woman with ideas … a herring with ideas: skin and bones’. Hitler: ‘A highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman.’ Both responded to (frequent) complaints of neglect with a curse or a taunt; and both enjoyed inflicting humiliation. Hitler’s sexuality, or asexuality, was by far the more extreme: he was a monorchic neuter, an impotent, a terrible virgin. In him the will to power entirely subsumed the erotic energies. More generally Nazism, and also Bolshevism, exude the confusions of crypto-homosexuality, homosexuality enciphered and unacknowledged – the cult of hardness, with all the female qualities programmatically suppressed. Heterosexuality has clarity, and homosexuality has clarity; but much violence waits in the area in between. Nazism, of course, killed many thousands of homosexuals. Bolshevism, with its contradictory traditions of permissiveness and sans-culotte puritanism, alighted only rarely on a sexual enemy – ‘German bedstraw’, for example (women suspected of fraternizing with the occupation forces during the war).

  There are variations in the accounts of Nadya’s last night. During the Kremlin banquet (hosted by the cretinous Kliment Voroshilov) Stalin ‘insulted’ Nadya; there seems to have been an exchange along the lines of ‘Hey, you, have a drink!’ (Nadya was allergic to alcohol), followed by ‘Don’t you hey me!’ He also threw a doused cigarette at her (or, in a variant, a lit cigarette which went down her dress). Nadya walked out; she was followed by her friend Polina Molotov, who joined her in a calming stroll round the Kremlin courtyard. Back in the Stalin apartment, Nadya sought her bedroom (it was separate bedrooms by now), and shot herself with a German revolver. She had written a note … In a long-suppressed section of his memoirs Khrushchev reports that Nadya telephoned the dacha and was told by an oafish duty-officer that Stalin was ‘with a woman’. This feels discountable. It is the onl
y rumour of an infidelity in Stalin’s fourteen-year marriage; and it goes against our sense of the parochial diffidence of his sexuality (there are glints of disgust, too: that ‘herring’). Nor is there much cogency in another rumour, that Stalin assisted in or expedited Nadya’s suicide. There was, after all, the suicide note.

  Svetlana Stalin, then seven, would go on to reveal that the note was ‘partly personal, partly political’. It was November 1932: one wonders if Stalin was still divisible in these terms. He was already nearly all political, and after the events of this night he would finally dispense with the personal … The precipitant of Nadya’s suicide was almost certainly political, too. She had recently enrolled as a chemistry student at the Industrial Academy in Moscow. A good Communist, she would ride there in the tram. It tests the empathetic powers to imagine even a tenth of the gangrenous nausea experienced by Nadezhda Alliluyeva (a serious, cultured, strong, pretty, motherly woman of thirty-one), seated at her desk, while classmates told her about the real situation in the Ukraine (where they had spent the summer, as activists). Nadya challenged her husband, and again we must imagine the tenor of this exchange. Stalin, typically, seems to have brazened his way out (as he did with Lenin over the Krupskaya business, in a letter which arrived just after Lenin’s final incapacitation). He told Nadya that such talk was ‘Trotskyite gossip’. But she came back at him, later, having heard more from her classmates, including an account of two brothers who were arrested for trading in human flesh. This time Stalin’s response was to rebuke Nadya for political indiscipline, to arrest the students at the Industrial Academy, and to order a purge of all colleges that had contributed manpower to Collectivization. Talking about famine would soon become a capital crime in the USSR. Nadya’s execution was self-execution, but it anticipated that law.