Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

[10 October 1937]. The nausea rises to my throat when I hear how calmly people say it: He was shot, someone else was shot, shot, shot. The words … resonate through the air. People pronounce the words completely calmly, as though they were saying, ‘He went to the theatre’…

  [22 October 1937]. On the morning of the 22nd I woke up about three and couldn’t get back asleep until after five … Suddenly I heard a burst of gunfire. And then another, ten minutes later. The shooting continued in bursts … until just after five … That is what they call an election campaign. And our consciousness is so deadened that sensations just slide across its hard, glossy surface, leaving no impression. To spend all night hearing living people, undoubtedly innocent people, being shot to death and not lose your mind. And afterwards, just to fall asleep, to go on sleeping as though nothing had happened. How terrible …

  [2 November 1937] … The poor girls, what they’ve had to go through: in the morning their mother is taken away, and then they’re picked up and taken to a place that is no better than prison …

  I don’t understand anything, it all seems like a dream to me. In the morning they were still a family, and now there’s nothing, everything has shattered.

  [6 February 1938]. Yesterday morning they arrested Veta Dmitrieva. They came at 7 in the morning, locked them in their room and conducted a search … Veta said goodbye to Tanechka (age 4), she said, ‘When I come back, you’ll be all grown up.’

  [11 March 1938] … People in Moscow are in such a panic, it’s made me sick, literally … Irina’s aunt, a lawyer, said that every night two or three defense lawyers from her office are arrested. Morloki was arrested on 21 December, and on 15 January Leva, our simple-minded theatre fan and prop man, was exiled to Chita. At that rate they might as well arrest the table or sofa …

  [24 January 1939] … The city is freezing for lack of coal and firewood. Our theatre is using the building of the Tram Worker’s Park. You’d think that, even if they won’t give you any books, you’d at least be able to get some coal. There’s not any, not a speck, they don’t even give it out through official channels, and there won’t be any before summer. There’s no firewood. No electrical supplies, no stockings, no cloth, no paper. If you want to buy some manufactured product you have to spend all day in line, and stay overnight too …

  [19 February 1939] … I. I. Rybakov died – in prison. Mandelstam died in exile. People everywhere are ill or dying. I have the impression that the whole country is so completely exhausted that it can’t fight off disease, it’s a fatal condition. It’s better to die than to live in continual terror, in abject poverty, starving.

  The ‘election’ referred to on 22 October 1937 (‘Irina came home from school and said, “They told us there are mass arrests going on right now. We need to rid ourselves of undesirable elements before the election!”’), was a charade designed to celebrate the new Stalin Constitution. On 12 December Lyubov Vasilievna Shaporina went along to cast her vote:

  Quelle blague! I went into the booth, where supposedly I was going to read the ballot and choose my candidate for the Supreme Soviet – ‘choose’ means you have a choice. There was just one name, already marked. I burst out laughing uncontrollably, right there in the booth, just like a child. It took me a long time to compose myself. I leave the booth, and here comes Yury, stony-faced. I lifted my collar and ducked down into it so that only my eyes were visible; it was just hilarious.

  Outside I ran into Petrov-Vodkin and Dimitriev. V.V. was going on and on about some irrelevant topic and laughing wildly. Shame on them for putting grown people in such a ridiculous, stupid position. Who do we think we’re fooling? We were all in stitches.

  There has never been a regime quite like it, not anywhere in the history of the universe. To have its subjects simultaneously quaking with terror, with hypothermia, with hunger – and with laughter.

  29 Genrikh Yagoda (shot in 1938) was replaced as head of the Cheka by Nikolai Yezhov (shot in 1940), who was in turn replaced by Lavrenti Beria (shot in 1953). Yezhov’s period in office (1936–38), and the Great Terror itself, are sometimes called the Yezhovshchina: the time of Yezhov’s rule … The quotes in the present section are all from Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s, edited by Véronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya and Thomas Lahusen. The book is by turns boring, startling, sickening and inspiring. Some know it and some don’t – but all the voices are crippled.

  30 Stavsky was known as the ‘executioner of Soviet Literature’. For example, it was he who denounced Osip Mandelstam. He also had a history of alcoholism (the editors of Intimacy and Terror remark on his ‘tormented handwriting’, which was ‘deciphered only with great difficulty’). We catch him here at a vulnerable moment (midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1938/39); and it is of course painfully clear on internal evidence alone that Stavsky is stinking drunk.

  Ech …

  The day before Lyubov Vasilievna Shaporina basked in ‘the sun of the great Stalin Constitution’, Stalin himself addressed the voters and candidates who had gathered in the vast auditorium of the Bolshoi Theatre:

  Never before in the world have there been such genuinely free and genuinely democratic elections, never! History knows no other example [applause] … our elections are the only genuinely free and genuinely democratic elections in the whole world [loud applause] …

  Stalin’s appearance was an unexpected treat, that night at the Bolshoi. ‘The audience rose as one as he took the rostrum,’ writes Volkogonov, and the ‘storm of applause lasted for several minutes.’ Stalin began his oration in jovial style:

  Comrades, I must admit I had no intention of speaking. But our respected Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev] dragged me here, I might say, by force …

  Of course, I could have said something light about anything and everything [laughter] … I understand there are masters of that sort of thing not just in the capitalist countries, but here, too, in our Soviet country [laughter, applause] … But still, as I’m out here now, I really should say something [loud applause]. I have been put forward as a candidate for Deputy … Well, it’s not done for us Bolsheviks to decline responsibility. I accept it willingly [stormy, prolonged applause]. For myself, comrades, I want to assure you that you can count on Comrade Stalin [a stormy, prolonged ovation].

  This was some scene. Ground zero of the Great Terror – and here was the Party, joined in a panic attack of collusion in yet another enormous lie. They clapped, they laughed. Did he laugh? Do we hear it – the ‘soft, dull, sly laugh’, the ‘grim, dark laughter, which comes up from the depths’?

  While I was getting through the shelf of books I have read about him, there were four occasions when Stalin made me laugh. Laugh undisgustedly and with warmth, as if he were a comic creation going enjoyably through his hoops. These are all things Stalin said. Nothing Stalin did makes you laugh.

  One. On hearing that his grain-collection campaign of 1927 had fallen far short of its norm, Stalin identified the situation as ‘a kulak strike!’ – reaching, with charming reliability, not for one but for two categories of execration.31

  Two. There is something inimitably Stalin in the remark he was ‘in the habit of repeating’ after the war, according to Svetlana. He was in the habit of repeating: ‘Ech, together with the Germans we would have been invincible.’ It is not so much the shocking cynicism (and ideological debauchery) of the sentiment; rather, one thrills to the boundless realpolitik packed into that humble, provincial, mountain-dwelling three-letter expletive, Ech …

  Three. This concerns the terrible case of Pavel Morozov. Pavel (‘Pavlik’) was a fourteen-year-old peasant boy who, in the early 1930s, denounced his father (for kulak leanings). The father was shot. And Pavlik was soon after murdered by a band of villagers said to include his grandfather and his cousin. Stalin briefly interrupted his preparations for exalting Pavlik as a hero and martyr of socialism (statues, songs, stories, inscription in the Pioneer ‘Book of Heroism’, the Moscow Palace of Culture renamed in his honour), to remark,
privately: ‘What a little swine, denouncing his own father.’32

  Four. On 29 June 1941, a week into the Nazi invasion, Stalin attended a meeting with the military and learned the true dimensions of the discomfiture – and the true dimensions of his own miscalculation, paralysis, willed myopia, and lack of nerve. ‘Lenin left us a great inheritance and we, his heirs,’ said Stalin ‘loudly’, and searching for the appropriate modulation at this world-historical node, ‘have fucked it all up.’33

  31 I would later read that Stalin was simply echoing Lenin, who, faced with a similar disappointment, referred rather less pithily to ‘a kulak grain strike’.

  32 Conquest makes the parenthetical point that Stalin, it would seem, harboured no decisive resentment towards his father. Iosif Vissarionovich was perhaps mildly susceptible to the verities he set out, in the interests of political security, to eradicate.

  33 I follow Volkogonov’s phrasing. The less elaborate ‘Lenin founded this state, and we’ve fucked it up’ is given by most historians (and I have come across ‘All that Lenin created we have lost’, presumably in some transitional version of events). But Colonel General Volkogonov has a natural authority on the war years. Hereabouts his pages are anecdotally rich with three generations of top-brass table talk.

  In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark

  We should consider him, for the time being, not as a political or ideological entity but as a physical system, a will, a constitution, a quivering organism.

  Stalin’s summary of the situation on 29 June seemed fairly accurate – and would have seemed entirely so if he had recast the sentence in the first-person singular. Soviet unpreparedness for the Nazi invasion is of course legendary. And Stalin’s refusal to believe in its imminence was no mere perversity or dereliction: it was the result of herculean self-hypnosis. He staked his being on it; and he lost. When the news came through (‘they are bombing our cities’), Stalin’s psyche simply fell away. It prostrated him; he became a bag of bones in a grey tunic; he was nothing but a power vacuum.

  Despite the global astonishment it caused, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was a construable move on Stalin’s part, even an obvious one, given the dilatory hauteur of the Allies’ approaches to Moscow. It was the later, supplementary agreement, the Borders and Friendship Treaty, that Volkogonov regards as ‘Stalin’s greatest mistake’. In the USSR Nazism had always been

  properly defined as a terroristic, militaristic, dictatorial regime and the most dangerous phalanx of world imperialism. To Soviet minds, it was the embodiment of the class enemy in concentrated form … It is now difficult to establish precisely who suggested introducing the word ‘friendship’ into the title of the treaty. If it was the Soviet side, it testifies to political mindlessness.

  The way Stalin saw it, the imperialist powers would embroil themselves in a marathon bloodbath in Europe, after which a strengthened Red Army would do some empire-building of its own among the ruins. This dream was rather seriously undermined when Hitler took France in six weeks – leaving Stalin pacing the floor and giving vent to many a ‘choice’ obscenity (the adjective is Khrushchev’s). By June 1941 Hitler’s war record went as follows: Poland in twenty-seven days, Denmark in twenty-four hours, Norway in twenty-three days, Holland in five, Belgium in eighteen, France in thirty-nine, Yugoslavia in twelve, and Greece in twenty-one. Hitler had never been diffident about his plans for the USSR. In Mein Kampf (1925) he had proposed to cut a path eastward with fire and sword, and to enslave the Slavic undermen. After he came to power Mein Kampf was aggressively reissued ‘with no deletions’. Even Stalin fully accepted that it was only a question of when. In the broadest sense Soviet preparations for war were gargantuan, but they were off-centre, and fatally medium-term.

  Stalin received not fewer than eighty-four written warnings of the coming attack, from sources as various as Richard Sorge (his masterspy then stationed in the German Embassy in Tokyo) and Winston Churchill (who had decryptions from Bletchley Park). Any reasonably observant passenger on the Moscow-Berlin railway line would have prophesied war; for weeks, men and munitions had been thundering east, to form the largest concentration of poised violence ever. In the early months of 1941 there were 324 violations of Soviet airspace by German reconnaissance planes (which, if forced to land, were repaired and when necessary refuelled by Soviet engineers). The German ambassador in Moscow dismantled all precedent by giving the exact day; a German deserter earned summary execution (as a provocateur) by giving the exact hour. Russian commanders who put their troops on alert were sharply menaced from above (even by such comparative realists as Zhukov). On 14 June an official statement dismissed rumours of war as ‘clumsy fabrications’. At this time all German vessels left all Russian ports. On 21 June Lavrenti Beria demanded the recall of the Soviet minister in Berlin for ‘bombarding’ him with disinformation, promising, moreover, ‘to grind him to dust’ in the gulag.

  Just after midnight on 22 June the goods train laden with Soviet-donated matériel, bound for Berlin, crossed the border.34 Soviet frontier guards could hear the engines of the tanks as they manoeuvred into position … At three o’clock in the morning, just outside Moscow, Stalin sought his couch in the Kuntsevo dacha. The evening meal had perhaps been lighter and briefer than usual: many of the top commissars were already heading south for their summer holidays. ‘Stalin had hardly laid his head on the pillow,’ writes Volkogonov, when Zhukov called the dacha and told the duty officer: ‘Wake him up immediately. The Germans are bombing our cities.’ When Stalin came to the phone Zhukov told of the air attacks on Kiev, Minsk, Sevastopol, Vilna … ‘Did you understand what I said, Comrade Stalin?’ He could hear the sound of Stalin’s breathing. Again he asked: ‘Comrade Stalin, do you understand?’ Only when the German embassy confirmed that the two nations were now at war (‘What have we done to deserve this?’ cried Molotov) did Stalin give the order to begin fighting back.

  Before we consider the psychological peculiarities of the case, it is necessary to register the gravity of Stalin’s misreading, and the price of his tenacity in error. In the first weeks of the war the Soviet Union lost 30 per cent of its ammunition and 50 per cent of its reserves of food and fuel. In the first three months the air force lost 96.4 per cent of its planes (this staggering figure is Volkogonov’s). By the end of 1941 Leningrad was besieged and German troops were approaching the southern suburbs of Moscow. By the end of 1942, 3.9 million Russian soldiers had been taken prisoner – 65 per cent of the Red Army. Only a few days after the launch of Operation Barbarossa (original, and more brutal, codename: Operation Fritz), informed opinion in London and Washington – and Moscow – held that the war was already lost.

  How is it to be explained, Stalin’s posture as hostilities approached? It would be pat, but also accurate, to say that from 1933 to 1941 the only human being on earth that Stalin trusted was Adolf Hitler. (One assumes, too, that the latter gave his personal assurance that any trouble on the border would be the work of mutinous generals; this would strike a chord with the susceptible Stalin, who was still purging his army.) Different historians give different emphases. For example, Stalin believed that Russian mobilization would repeat the blunder of 1914, leading to a German ultimatum, and war (Conquest); Stalin was enervated, mentally wiped out, by the speed of the German success in France (Tucker); Stalin’s rapprochement with militant fascism induced a generalized confusion in his political reflexes (Volkogonov). In his lopsided but very busy book, Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II, Len Deighton makes the point that Stalin was the victim of his own paranoia – or reverse-paranoia. He felt that the imperialists were trying to lure him into a quagmire: this, after all, was what he had wanted to do to the imperialists. All writers agree that Stalin underestimated Hitler’s fanaticism. Germany, Stalin thought, would never risk a war on two fronts. But there was no second front, until 1944.

  In Russia’s War (and how much of it was Russia’s war) Richard Overy says that in 1941 Stalin
was engaged in ‘a personal battle with reality’. This is surely right, and we can take the point further. For years that battle had seemed to be going very well, what with the innumerable little victories of 1937–38. Stalin, remember, was a figure unstoppably giganticized by power. He had become a Saturn. And he very much wanted Hitler to refrain from attacking him in 1941. And what he very much wanted had a habit, by now, of coming to pass. Stalin felt that reality was obedient to his will; like King Lear, he thought the thunder would peace at his bidding. Hitler was fantastic, inordinate, unbelievable. But he was dourly real.

  After the Great War, Churchill said that he had beaten all the lions and tigers – and did not now intend to be beaten by ‘the baboons’. He meant the Bolsheviks. It is of course always a moral error to compare your adversaries to beasts, and such ‘animalization’ is a considerable twentieth-century theme (Lenin was already talking about the ‘insects’ and ‘vermin’ arrayed against him, in 1917). Still, Stalin’s behaviour in early 1941 bears marked similarities to a certain manoeuvre in baboon praxis. If a weak baboon is threatened by a strong baboon he will sometimes symbolically offer up his rear end, as if for passive intercourse. The weak baboon is actually showing some psychological nous. Stalin tried it, and merely got what he seemed to be asking for. Maybe, too, he was half baboon, half ostrich, under the impression that if he couldn’t see reality, then reality couldn’t see him.

  34 In accordance with the Pact’s reciprocal trade deals. German consignments were generally skimpy and tardy. Russian consignments were always fiercely punctual (and often topped up by direct order from Stalin). This particular goods train was of course the last.

  Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya

  One of the most extraordinary photographs in The Russian Century: A History of the Last Hundred Years35 is that of the corpse of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.