Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

  At this time, Svetlana writes, her mother succumbed to ‘devastating disillusionment’. Nadya came to see that ‘my father was not the New Man she had thought when she was young’. But Stalin was a New Man, right enough: he had dreadfully burgeoned. Unprecedented power was his, and he had launched it on an experiment. The experiment had failed (and become, simply, a war of extermination waged against the guinea pigs). In the countryside, now, instead of growing fat on the loyally thrumming grain factories of which a German philosopher had fleetingly dreamed, the peasants were eating each other, and eating themselves.

  Nadya Alliluyeva didn’t know the half of it. She was ignorant of the fact that 5 million would die in the Ukraine alone. She was ignorant of the fact that they would die of her husband’s set purpose.

  If you want to know how a man felt about his wives then you look at how he treated his children. We shall do so. You would also look at how he treated his wives’ families. And Stalin’s feelings, as always, are written in crimson. This is Alan Bullock’s summary:

  On the side of his first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, her brother Alexander, once one of Stalin’s closest friends, was shot as a spy; at the same time his wife was arrested and died in camp, while their son was exiled to Siberia as ‘a son of an enemy of the people’. Ekaterina’s sister, Maria, was also arrested and died in prison. On the side of his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, her sister Anna was arrested in 1948 and sentenced to ten years for espionage; Anna’s husband, Stanislav Redens, had already been arrested in 1938 as ‘an enemy of the people’ and was later shot. Ksenia, the widow of Nadezhda’s brother Pavel, and Yevgenia, the wife of Nadezhda’s uncle, were both arrested after the war and not released until after Stalin’s death.

  Afterword. When Milovan Djilas personally protested that the Red Army was raping Yugoslav women, Stalin said of his universal soldier: ‘How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors?’ The women of Yugoslavia, it seems, were treated less harshly than certain of their sisters. Solzhenitsyn, an artillery officer in East Prussia at the time of his arrest (1945), later wrote: ‘All of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction.’ To what extent, in Stalin’s view, was this also a matter of ‘having fun with a woman’?

  Men and Mountains

  All the Party bosses had institutions named after them. As well as the Stalin Chemical Works, there was the Voroshilov Weaving Mill, the Zinoviev Paper Mills, the Bukharin Glass Factory, and so on. Old towns were also renamed: there were suddenly places called Ordzhonikidze, Kalinin, Kirov. In his Stalin Conquest comments:

  Meanwhile over the years, the country had to endure not only Stalingrad and Stalino (eventually six Stalinos in all), but also Stalinabad, Stalinsk, Stalinogorsk, Stalinskoye, Stalinski, Staliniri (the capital of South Ossetia), Mount Stalin (the highest peak in the USSR – later to be joined by the highest peaks in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria), Stalin Bay, the Stalin Range, and various villages simply ‘name of Stalin’…

  In 1938, a year that saw 4.5 million supererogatory arrests and perhaps 500,000 executions, the Cheka chief, citing ‘workers’ suggestions’, put before the Politburo the notion that Moscow should be renamed Stalinodar. Showing, now, a more traditional Bolshevik self-effacement, Stalin vetoed the change. He always said that the cult of personality, while useful politically, was distasteful to him. ‘In general,’ writes Conquest, ‘his sporadic and ineffectual criticisms of the cult may be seen as a ploy to add modesty to the rest of the panoply of his virtues.’

  When Janusz Bardach, prodded by obscenities and rifle butts, staggered out of the slave ship (his destination was the isolator at Kolyma), he saw, emblazoned on the cliff face, the words

  GLORY TO STALIN, THE GREATEST GENIUS OF MANKIND.

  GLORY TO STALIN, THE GREATEST MILITARY LEADER.

  GLORY TO STALIN, THE GREATEST LEADER OF THE INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAT.

  GLORY TO STALIN, THE BEST FRIEND OF WORKERS AND PEASANTS.

  And much more.

  The ‘cult of personality’, of course, became the official euphemism for the Twenty Million. We may feel that the phrase is both derisory and appropriate. According to Marx, personality played no part in history: the course of that locomotive was determined by the railtracks of political economy, and not by the quirks of the stoker. Well, the Bolsheviks submitted this theory, among many others, to graphic refutation. Stalin did have a personality, and so did Lenin.12 Personality made a difference. In Stalin’s case, the difference was the Andes of dead bodies, one of whose peaks (call that mountain after him) disgorged its contents before the eyes of Varlam Shalamov.

  12 And so did Khrushchev, whose ‘secret speech’ of 1956 was entitled ‘On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences’ (and dealt only with the purge of the Party, and not of the nation). One of Stalin’s more energetic administrators (in 1937 he was sent to the Ukraine to kill 30,000 people), Khrushchev showed, nonetheless, that it was possible to recross Solzhenitsyn’s ‘threshold’ and pick up the remains of his humanity.

  1933: The Terror-Famine

  We speak of famine ‘raging’, ‘stalking the land’, holding people ‘in its grip’. Describing the immobility and silence within the villages, Vasily Grossman writes: ‘Only famine was on the move. Only famine did not sleep.’ Metaphorically we invest famine with volition and intent, but famine is just an absence – an absence of food, then an absence of life. It has a smell, noted for its extreme longevity: that of purulence. And Grossman writes that, despite the stillness, ‘everything felt fierce and wild … And the earth crackled’… In considering the Terror-Famine of 1933, it is now asked of the reader forcefully to repersonify famine and call him Stalin. It is Stalin who is holding people in his grip, Stalin who is stalking the land, Stalin who is raging.

  The use of famine as a weapon of the state against the populace is generally considered to be a Stalinist innovation (later taken up by Mao and other Communist leaders), but Lenin’s famine of 1921–22 had its terroristic aspects. Both famines had the same cause: punitive food-requisitioning. Whereas Stalin nurtured and consolidated the mass starvation, Lenin, by contrast, reluctantly and tardily permitted the American intervention, which saved over 10 million lives. Yet in the Ukraine, at least, Lenin’s famine overlapped with terror. As the historian H. H. Fisher put it in 1927: ‘The Government of Moscow not only failed to inform the American Relief Administration of the situation in the Ukraine, as it had done in the case of much more remote regions, but deliberately placed obstacles in the way…’ Conquest adds: ‘Indeed, between 1 August 1921 and 1 August 1922, 10.6 million hundredweight of grain was actually taken from the Ukraine for distribution elsewhere.’ All his adult life Lenin had been an admirer of famine as a ‘radicalizer’ (and secularizer) of the peasantry. And what else but terror-famine could he have had in mind when, in 1922, he warned Kamenev: ‘It is a great mistake to think that the NEP put an end to terror; we shall again have recourse to terror and to economic terror.’ So, once again, Stalin in 1933 was merely showing himself to be ‘Lenin’s most able pupil’. His only qualitative novelty, apart from the Party purge, was the show trial. And we may recall Solzhenitsyn’s comment of the ‘demonstration’ trial of the SRs in 1922: Lenin was ‘so nearly there’.

  Both Lenin and Stalin considered the Ukraine the most refractory of all the republics. During the chaos of 1918–20, when the administration in Kiev changed hands thirteen times, the Bolsheviks invaded, or reinvaded, in annual campaigns. And throughout the Stalin push of 1929–33, and beyond, every imaginable Ukrainian institution was repeatedly purged. The thoroughness of Stalin’s attempt at de-Ukrainianization can be gauged from an account given in Shostakovich’s Testimony. It concerns the fate of the kobzars – peasant poets (many of them blind) who went from village to village with their verses and songs. They were not, one would have thought, an immediate threat to Soviet power, though they could b
e listed in separate categories of undesirables (‘outdated elements,’ for example, or simply ‘others’ – a much-used classification). But they nonetheless reminded the Ukrainian peasants that they had once had a country. The kobzars, several hundred of them, were invited to their first All-Ukrainian Congress. ‘Hurting a blind man,’ lamented Shostakovich, ‘—what could be lower?’ Some were imprisoned, but ‘almost all’ were shot, because (as Conquest notes) a blind man would not be worth feeding in the gulag.

  Stalin, then, had two reasons for assaulting the Ukrainian peasants: they were peasants, and they were Ukrainian. Thus the USSR continued to export grain, and continued to store it. The food requisitioning continued until March 1933 – the epicentre of the famine. By now the collection brigades only bothered with households that weren’t obviously starving. The Ukraine had other similarities to the ‘vast Belsen’ of Conquest’s description: armed guards, and watchtowers, manned day and night, to detect and deter thefts of the crop. Despite blockading, and barricading, hundreds of thousands of peasants made their way to the cities, where they crawled around at knee height among the crowds, who themselves formed swaying, howling lines in front of the ‘commercial’ bread shops13 (the cities, too, were ravaged, Stavropol losing 20,000, Krasnodar 40,000, Kharkov 120,000). In December 1932, to combat ‘kulak infiltration of the towns’, the regime tightened restrictions on internal travel:

  The Central Committee and the government are in possession of definite proof that this massive exodus of the peasants has been organized by the enemies of the Soviet regime, by counter-revolutionaries, and by Polish agents as a propaganda coup against the process of collectivization in particular and the Soviet government in general.

  Within the villages, within the families, Grossman writes, ‘Mothers looked at their children and screamed in fear. They screamed as if a snake had crept into their house. And this snake was famine, starvation, death.’ This snake was Stalin. At first the children cried all day for food; then, in addition, they cried for food all night. Some parents fled their children. Others took them to the towns and left them there. The Italian consul in Kharkov gave this report:

  So for a week now, the town has been patrolled by dvorniki, attendants in white uniforms, who collect the children and take them to the nearest police station … Around midnight they are all transported in trucks to the freight station at Severodonetsk. That’s where all the children who are found in stations or on trains, the peasant families, the old people … are gathered together … A medical team does a sort of selection process … Anyone who is not yet swollen up and still has a chance of survival is directed to the Kholodnaya Gora buildings, where a constant population of 8,000 lies dying on straw beds in the big hangars. Most of them are children. People who are already beginning to swell up are moved out in goods trains and abandoned about forty miles out of town …

  Some parents killed their children. And other parents ate their children. Zachto? ‘Why, what for, to what end?’ as Grossman asks. His narrator goes on:

  It was then that I saw for myself that every starving person is like a cannibal. He is consuming his own flesh, leaving only his bones intact. He devours his fat to the last droplet. And then his mind goes dim, because he has consumed his own mind. In the end the starving man has devoured himself completely.

  Twenty pages earlier Grossman similarly defines the fate, not of the victim, but of the executioner:

  [O]nly one form of retribution is visited upon an executioner – the fact that he looks upon his victim as something other than a human being and thereby ceases to be a human being himself, and thereby executes himself as a human being. He is his own executioner.

  This, perhaps, is the meaning of the Terror-Famine of 1933: the self-cannibalized were destroyed by the self-executed. And this is the surreal gangrene of Stalinism.

  About 5 million died in the Ukraine, and about 2 million died in the Kuban, Don and Volga regions and in Kazakhstan. These were formerly the richest agricultural lands in the USSR.

  13 These were black-market outlets run by the government. Their prices were high.

  Poison Pen

  In the 1930s, Nadezhda Mandelstam tells us, the verb to write assumed a new meaning. When you said he writes or does she write? or (referring to a whole classroom of students) they write, you meant that he or she or they wrote reports to the organs. (Similarly, the Cheka’s rigged cases were called ‘novels’.) To ‘write’ meant to inform, to denounce. Solzhenitsyn calls it ‘murder by slander’.

  Denunciation in Russia has a long history, going back at least as far as the sixteenth century and the testingly protracted reign of Ivan the Terrible (1533–84). ‘Spy or die’ was, more or less, the oath you swore. This practice, increasingly institutionalized under the old regime, was a tsarist barbarity that Lenin might have been expected to question. And he did waver, to the extent that he unsuccessfully proposed (in December 1918) that false denouncers should be shot. More moderate voices prevailed, and the punishment arrived at was one or two years depending on the gravity of the case. Solzhenitsyn is scandalized by this laxity. In the gulag a five-year term, compared to the far more usual tenner or quarter (twenty-five years), was colloquially known as ‘nothing’.

  It was during the Collectivization period that denunciation made its great leap forward. In the villages, as we have seen, the poorer peasants were incited to denounce the richer. ‘It was so easy to do a man in,’ explains Grossman: ‘you wrote a denuniciation; you did not even have to sign it.’ By the mid-1930s, when terror turned towards the towns and cities, denunciation was being praised in the press as ‘the sacred duty of every Bolshevik, party and nonparty’. Quickly and predictably, denunciation now went through the roof. The process was quintessentially Stalinist in that a) it cultivated all that is most reptilian in human nature, and b) it selected downwards (those that were last would now be first).

  And it was also, again, surreal. You might denounce someone for fear of their denouncing you; you could be denounced for not doing enough denouncing; the only disincentive to denunciation was the possibility of being denounced for not denouncing sooner; and so on. There were cases of denunciation for state bounty. From The Great Terror:

  In one Byelorussian village depicted in a recent Soviet article, fifteen rubles a head was paid, and a group of regular denouncers used to carouse on the proceeds, even singing a song they had composed to celebrate their deeds.

  A single Communist denounced 230 people; another denounced over a hundred in four months. ‘Stalin required,’ as Conquest says, ‘not only submission, but also complicity.’ After his release from the gulag, just as he was finding himself as a writer, Solzhenitsyn came under extremely menacing pressure to become a writer in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s sense. It has been estimated that in an average office every fifth employee reported to the Cheka. As Dmitri Volkogonov writes: ‘Who could have imagined how many “spies and wreckers and terrorists” would be discovered. It was almost as if they were not living among us, but we among them!’

  Tribute must now be paid to the most prodigious denouncer of all, the great Nikolaenko, scourge of Kiev. This unbelievable termagant was singled out for special praise by Stalin himself: ‘a simple person from down below’, she was nonetheless a ‘heroine’. In Kiev, pavements emptied when Nikolaenko stepped out; her presence in a room spread mortal fear. Eventually Pavel Postyshev (First Secretary in the Ukraine, candidate member of the Politburo) expelled Nikolaenko from the Party. Stalin reinstated her ‘with honour’. In a speech of 1937 he said, marvellously (for this episode is another example of the epiphanic, multifaceted negative perfection of Stalinism):

  [In Kiev, Nikolaenko] was shunned like a bothersome fly. At last, in order to get rid of her, they expelled her from the Party. Neither the Kiev organization nor the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine helped her to obtain justice. It was only the intervention of the Central Committee of the Party which helped to disentangle that twisted knot. And what wa
s revealed by an examination of the case? It was revealed that Nikolaenko was right, while the Kiev organization was wrong.

  Assuming that this translation is a sensitive one (and I think it is): ‘justice’ is rich, and so is ‘obtain’ justice; ‘bothersome fly’ and ‘that twisted knot’ are rich; the rhetorical question near the end is rich; that closing ‘while’ is rich.

  A vindicated Nikolaenko went back to her denunciations, and Kiev was in any case most viciously purged. Postyshev, chastened, demoted, transferred, now developed a reputation for exceptional ferocity in his function of purging his new fief, Kuibyshev. Later, as the Terror turned, he was attacked by Moscow for (of all things) exceptional ferocity: ‘by cries of “vigilance” hiding his brutality in connection with the Party’. He was arrested in February 1938, and later shot.

  Meanwhile, a twice-vindicated Nikolaenko was still hard at work – on her denunciations. There is much talk of the ‘little Stalins’ all over the USSR, but Nikolaenko was a true Stalinette: accession to power dismantled her sense of reality. When the new, post-purge bosses, headed by Khrushchev, had established themselves in Kiev, Nikolaenko denounced Khrushchev’s deputy, Korotchenko. Khrushchev defended his man, a posture Stalin adjudged to be ‘incorrect’: ‘Ten per cent truth – that’s already truth, and requires decisive measures on our part, and we will pay for it if we don’t so act.’ But then Nikolaenko denounced Khrushchev, a first-echelon toady and placeman, for ‘bourgeois nationalism’, and Stalin finally conceded that she was nuts. She helped destroy about 8,000 people.