Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

  For Stalin these were tantalizing words.

  He spoke often and interestedly about purging from as early as 1920. ‘The purge theme in [Lenin’s] What Is To Be Done?,’ writes Tucker, ‘struck a responsive chord in the young man.’ He praised purging again in 1927: ‘What did Lenin seek then [in his Party reshuffle of 1907–08]? One thing only: to rid the Party as quickly as possible of the unstable and snivelling elements, so they wouldn’t get in the way. That, comrades, is how our party grew.’ Tucker continues, in a rather uncharacteristic passage:

  After saying this, Stalin went on: ‘Our party is a living organism. Like every organism, it undergoes a process of metabolism: the old and outworn moves out; the new and growing lives and develops.’ In brief, party people opposed to him were shit.

  The drive to purge was career-long. Purging was hard, and hardness was a Bolshevik virtue. Stalin was never really sure that he was the cleverest or the bravest or the most visionary or even the most powerful. But he knew that he was the hardest.

  In his quest for precedent, Stalin went further back (skipping Marx and Engels, who were contemptuous of terror as malum per se). When he mused about his historical destiny, Stalin’s thoughts turned to the great Russian tyrants, in particular Ivan the Terrible (the first to style himself Tsar) and Peter the Great (the first to style himself Emperor). By his various interventions in historiography and the arts, Stalin personally rehabilitated the image of Peter I, transforming him from ‘the premature industrial capitalist and syphilitic sadist’20 of the orthodox view to an altruistic modernizer and statebuilder. In Paris in 1937 Alexei Tolstoy (the supreme hack and opportunist) drunkenly admitted to direct influence on his own fiction and drama:

  [While I was working on Peter] the ‘father of the peoples’ revised the history of Russia. Peter the Great became, without my knowing it, the ‘proletarian tsar’ and the prototype of our Iosif! I rewrote it all over again in accordance with the party’s discoveries … I don’t give a damn! These gymnastics even amuse me. You really do have to be an acrobat.

  Thus the Petrine epoch (1682–1725) provided the model: bureaucratization, the deepening of enserfment, the large-scale use of slave labour, the entrenchment of the punitive organs – and, later, imperial expansion.

  Peter I was Stalin’s lodestar during the Collectivization period. Later in the 1930s, as the Terror approached, Stalin looked to Ivan IV, Ivan Vasilievich Grozny – Ivan the Dread. A recreational hands-on torturer, a frothing debauchee (seven wives, and boasts of ‘a thousand virgins’), and a paranoid psychotic (he murdered his own son, as incidentally would Peter), old Ivan seems an unlikely candidate for Communist rehabilitation. But he was a purger. And so, in the Stalin-sponsored history textbook of 1937, Soviet schoolchildren were now leadenly advised that

  [u]nder the reign of Ivan IV, Russia’s possessions were enlarged manifold. His kingdom became one of the biggest states in the world … Ivan discovered that he was being betrayed by the big patrimonial boyars. These traitors went into the service of the Poles and Lithuanians. Tsar Ivan hated the boyars, who lived in their patrimonies like little tsars and tried to limit his autocratic power. He began to banish and execute the rich and strong boyars.

  As early as 1934, at the Congress of Victors, Stalin repeatedly used the obsolete word vel’mozhi (which, like boyar, means grandee) to describe the laxer Party chieftains. And in a 1937 conversation with Sergei Eisenstein, even more ominously, Stalin echoed the Ivanian principle of destroying every traitor ‘together with his clan’ (rod: family and retinue). In his correspondence with the organs during the Terror, Stalin used the alias ‘Ivan Vasilievich’…

  Iosif the Dread already had something else in common with Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible: failure. The ‘enlightened’ brutality of Peter’s revolution from above, it is generally felt, did more to divide and deform the country than it did to elide it with Europe. Ivan’s failure, by contrast, was near-infinite. The state simply disintegrated around him. His reign was followed by the Time of Troubles, a period of chaos and civil war – and a huge secondary purge of the population, cutting the census by about a third. In his attempt to account for Ivan’s failure, Stalin said (to the filmmaker Eisenstein) that Ivan was fatally hampered by religion. After murdering a boyar clan, Stalin incredulously related, Ivan would repent for a whole year instead of just getting on with the work. (This is a good example, not only of Stalin’s ghoulish practicality, but also of his congenital deafness to the spirituality of other people; he did not recognize the souls of other people.)21 Also, Stalin said, there were ‘five’ clans that Ivan had failed to liquidate. Ivan’s failure was a failure of rigour.

  In 1934, 1935, 1936, for Stalin, failure was the elephant in the Kremlin office, study and living room, in the light and space of the various dachas, in the billiard saloon of the Crimean villa. During these interim years Stalin was digesting failure, massive and irreversible failure. He had had political success, true. (It seems to be an oddity of the Communist system that failure, if sufficiently massive, and irreversible, tends to consolidate power.) But his Second October had failed.

  Stalin couldn’t fully bring himself to know what everyone knew. The most precipitous economic decline in recorded history does not exactly go unnoticed. And there was the matter of the millions of dead, common knowledge throughout the Party, and of some concern, no doubt, even to an assembly as somnambulistic as the Congress of Victors.

  The Great Terror was an emanation from Stalin’s body. Its source lay in the effort of the mind to overcome the evidence of the gut.

  20 This valuable formulation is, again, Robert Tucker’s. He has made the Tsar Stalin theme very much his own, and in this section I am gratefully indebted to his Stalin in Power.

  21 ‘The Pope? How many divisions does he have?’ is Stalin’s most famous expression of this indifference.

  Show Trial

  Stalin told Eisenstein (whose two-part Ivan the Terrible appeared in the 1940s) that Ivan had unwisely spared ‘five’ boyar clans. He didn’t get this from the history books: no such number has ever been specified. It appears that Stalin was thinking of the popular nineteenth-century play, Tsar Fedor Iovannovich, in which a character says that Ivan was survived by ‘five boyars’.

  Nearly every night there were screenings in the private projection rooms in the Kremlin or the various dachas. Khrushchev says that Stalin was particularly keen on Westerns: ‘He used to curse them and give them proper ideological evaluation, but then immediately order new ones.’ Milovan Djilas was also invited to the Kremlin movie theatre; he noted that ‘throughout the performance Stalin made comments – reactions to what was going on, in the manner of uneducated men who mistake artistic reality for actuality.’ One is reminded, here, of the magnificent paragraph in The Truce, when Primo Levi joins the largely Russian audience at a picture show in a Ukrainian transit camp:22

  It seemed as though the people in the film were not shadows to them, but flesh-and-blood friends or enemies, near at hand. The sailor was acclaimed at every exploit, greeted by noisy cheers and sten-guns brandished perilously over their heads. The policemen and jailers were insulted with bloodthirsty cries, greeted with shouts of ‘leave him alone’, ‘go away’, ‘I’ll get you’, ‘kill them all’. After the first escape, when the exhausted and wounded fugitive was once more captured, and even worse, sneered at and derided by the sardonic asymmetrical mask of John Carradine, pandemonium broke out. The audience stood up shouting, in generous defence of the innocent man; a wave of avengers moved threateningly towards the screen … Stones, lumps of earth, splinters from the demolished doors [earlier there was a showtime stampede], even a regulation boot flew against the screen, hurled with furious precision at the odious face of the great enemy, which shone forth oversize in the foreground.

  Such a – what to call it? – lumpen, credulous primitivism, or imaginative semiliteracy, might help explain an aspect of the later Show Trials of the period 1936–38, in which renowned Old B
olsheviks, including Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev (and, in absentia, Trotsky), ‘confessed’ to a series of phantasmagoric crimes: namely, Stalin’s confidence (not at all widely shared by his circle) that world opinion would, as he said, ‘swallow it’. Some Western observers, it is true, took these unnatural melodramas at face value; others (like the American Eugene Lyons) were left ‘limp with the impact of horrors half-glimpsed’. The horrors were half-glimpsed, and Soviet citizens, it seems, half-believed the extorted confessions of the accused. This remark of Solzhenitsyn’s feels doubly significant: ‘I was keenly interested in politics from the age of ten;23 even as a callow adolescent I did not believe [Judge Andrei] Vyshinsky and was staggered by the fraudulence of the famous trials…’ Even a youth could instantly penetrate the imposture. Still, one can imagine a less exceptional child gradually losing this innocent certainty and succumbing to the moral rot, and the floating reality, of mature Stalinism.

  In later years, as we have already mentioned, Stalin’s cinematic tastes narrowed. Out went the cowboy films, the comedies and musicals. Stalin preferred to watch propaganda: pseudo-newsreels about life on the collective farms. The boards groan with fruit and vegetables, with suckling pig, with enormous geese. After their banquet the reapers return singing to the fields … What kind of pleasure did these portrayals give him? Did he ‘believe’ them – did he think they were ‘real’?

  22 The film was The Hurricane (1937). ‘Through miles of raging ocean he defied man’s law!’ (‘The simple life on a South Pacific island is disrupted, not only by a vindictive governor but by a typhoon. Tolerable island melodrama’ – Halliwell.)

  23 I.e., from 1928, the year of the inaugural ‘Shakhty’ case (fifty-three technicians and engineers were accused of industrial sabotage). The Show Trials were Stalin’s contribution; they remain distinct from Lenin’s ‘demonstration’ trials of the early 1920s, which were fixed but not scripted. Both types of trial used torture.

  Reason and the Great Terror – 2

  ‘In my opinion,’ said Khrushchev, ‘it was during the war that Stalin started to be not quite right in the head.’ Well, he should know, but Khrushchev’s view is a curious one, suggesting as it does that the Stalin of 1929–33 and 1936–38 enjoyed cloudless mental health. Not quite right? Stalin did many profoundly crazy things during the war, particularly in the period 1941–43. But common intuition turns Khrushchev’s judgment on its head. The Nazi invasion irrefutably informed Stalin that his alternate world was nonexistent, and this is why, as we’ll see, it stupefied and unmanned him. The Nazi invasion was an avalanche of reality. It made a colossal demand: Stalin had to reach down, reach back, and find and resurrect what was left of his sanity.

  As early as September 1941, three months after the invasion, when Stalin was shown the trial protocols and ‘draft sentence’ of his floundering commander-in-chief on the western front, he said, ‘I approve the sentence [execution], but tell Ulrikh to get rid of all that rubbish about “conspiratorial activity”.’ And as late as 1946 (just before the psychosis resumed), Stalin summoned the rather-too-popular Marshal Zhukov to the Kremlin and sidelined him, saying, ‘Beria has just written me a report of your suspicious contacts with the Americans and the British. He thinks you’ll become a spy for them. I don’t believe that nonsense.’ So, dismayingly but with factual candour, Stalin calls the ‘reason’ for the Great Terror exactly what it was: rubbish and nonsense … Analogously, he never asked his citizens to fight the Great Patriotic War in order to defend Marxism-Leninism, the Revolution, or the dictatorship of the proletariat. He asked them to fight it in the name of Rus’, of the Orthodox Church, of spangled tsarist generals …

  There have been several attempts – none of them, perhaps, very ardent – to adumbrate a ‘rational’ Terror. Stalin did it to preempt a fifth column in the event of war. Stalin did it to Russify (or at least de-Semitize) the Party machine. Stalin did it to forestall any opposition to his intended rapprochement with Hitler. Stalin did it to obliterate all memory of his indifferent performance in the Revolution and the Civil War. Stalin did it to prevent the dissemination of the fact that he had once been an agent of the Okhrana (the Tsar’s secret police). The absurdity of this last suggestion (offered by certain Old Bolsheviks, on no evidence) prompts me to make one of my own: Stalin did it to create a favourable reception for his History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Short Course (1938) – the ultimate how-to book on avoiding arrest.

  It is mildly and briefly tempting to argue that, during the 1930s, Stalin purged every section of society that was capable of dethroning him. The peasantry could bring him down (as it had very nearly brought Lenin down in 1921), so he purged it; the Party could bring him down, so he purged it; the Cheka could bring him down, so he purged it; the military could bring him down, so he purged it. But the Comintern couldn’t bring him down, and he purged the Comintern – along with every other Soviet institution. Here is an often-quoted joke: the Chekists rap on the door at four in the morning, to be told, ‘You’ve got the wrong apartment. The Communists live upstairs.’ Yet the number of Party members swept away in the Terror has been described as proportionately ‘tiny’ and even ‘negligible’. The purge was truly exponential in character. Arrests were carried out on the basis of a quota per area; the arrestees were then pressured to implicate others; these others were then pressured to implicate yet others …

  For the USSR the Terror constituted a vast and multiform deficit. Most obviously, and most irrationally, Stalin decapitated the armed forces, whose weakness could (and almost did) bring him down. According to the Soviet press (in 1987), the military purge accounted for:

  3 of the 5 marshals

  13 of the 15 army commanders

  8 of the 9 fleet admirals and admirals Grade I

  50 of the 57 corps commanders

  154 of the 186 divisional commanders

  16 of the 16 army political commissars

  25 of the 28 corps commissars

  58 of the 64 divisional commissars

  11 of the 11 vice commissars of defence

  98 of the 108 members of the Supreme Military Soviet

  Lower down, 43,000 officers were ‘repressed’ between 1937 and 1941. One soldier likened the purge to ‘a Tartar massacre’, but even this understates the case. As Roy Medvedev put it: ‘Never has the officer corps of any army suffered such losses in any war as the Soviet Army suffered in this time of peace.’

  These ‘losses’ were not only emblazoned across the pages of Pravda: as Alan Bullock notes, the government ‘took the trouble to have the proceedings translated and published abroad’. How were they interpreted in London, Paris and Washington, and in Berlin, as war neared? Monitors of the purge would have to assume either a) that all Soviet society was writhing with incensed disaffection or b) that Stalin was a maniac. Berlin (for instance) would have known that commanders Yakir and Feldman, both of them Jews (and both of them executed), were not working for the Nazis. So interpretation b) would have been likely to predominate. After the army purge of 1937–38, it is certain, Hitler felt easier about Soviet military strength, and his assessment was confirmed by the Red Army’s prolonged humiliation at the hands of tiny Finland in the land-grabbing Winter War of 1939–40, the Slavic multitudes being horribly mauled by the blue-eyed snipers in their camouflaged ski suits. Hitler decided he could take Russia in a single campaign.

  Beria to Stalin on 21 June 1941: ‘My people and I, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, remember your wise prediction: Hitler will not attack in 1941!’ Hitler attacked the very next day; and Stalin, in Khrushchev’s words, became overnight ‘a bag of bones in a grey tunic’. This was the strategic fruit of the Great Terror.

  Why, then? Zachto? The briskest and most matter-of-fact kind of answer would go something like: to obliterate all possible opposition to the development of totalitarian rule (and, by selecting downwards, to install fresh cadres of callow obedience and brutality). Yet this doesn’t account for the range, depth and duration o
f the Terror; nor, in particular, does it explain Stalin’s need for confessions. The untrammelled use of the death penalty was something Stalin needed, physically, viscerally. He also needed confessions – and innumerable man-hours were devoted to extracting them even in cases that were never intended to be made public. It had to do with the size – the totality, the negative perfection – of the surrender Stalin demanded of his victims. In an especially fascinating chapter of The Great Terror (‘The Problem of Confession’) Conquest writes:

  The principle had become established that a confession was the best result obtainable. Those who could obtain it were to be considered successful operatives, and a poor [Chekist] had a short life expectancy. Beyond all this, one forms the impression of a determination to break the idea of the truth, to impose on everyone the acceptance of official falsehood. In fact, over and above the rational motives for the extraction of confession, one seems to sense an almost metaphysical preference for it.

  Thus the Terror enforced Stalin’s version of reality (past and present). It endeavoured to concretize his alternate world.

  Again it is perhaps helpful to see Stalin, not as a fixed or static entity, but one constantly warped and distended by office. The Terror brought Stalin more power; but it was in itself an unprecedented exertion of power, too: a double escalation. If, as the commonplace has it, power is a drug, then in some cases the drug will stop working unless the dosage is increased – exponentially in this instance. For Stalin, power was a thing of the senses and the membranes. And he invariably sought the upper limit. Collectivization ended when the peasants were all collectivized (and the kulaks all dekulakized). The Terror-Famine ended when there was no one left to sow the next harvest. Gulag went on expanding until it seemed about to burst. The Terror continued until even the temporary prisons, the schools and the churches, were all full, and the courts were sitting twenty-four hours a day. By then, 5 per cent of the population had been arrested as some sort of enemy of the people. It is often said that not a family in the country remained unaffected by the Terror. If so, then the members of those families were also subject to sentence: as members of the family of an enemy of the people. By 1939, it is fair to say, all the people were enemies of the people.