Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

  After the Winter War against Finland (1940–41), most observers, as we know, dismissed the Red Army as a toothless dinosaur. But at least one German officer saw it differently:

  … unprejudiced observers also noticed some very positive characteristics of the Soviet soldier: his incredibly tough conduct in defence, his imperviousness to fear and despair, and his almost unlimited capacity to suffer.

  It was these qualities, particularly the last, that turned the war – together with the great expansion of previously trapped energy, and trapped meaning, in the Russian breast. The effort was nationwide, typically huge-scale, passionate, and bootstrap: typically ‘sacrificial’. About 6 million workers were transported east, with their families – and also their factories, which were often reassembled and up and running in a matter of days. Such feats were underscored by a churning netherworld of forced-labour camps where conditions were sometimes worse than in the gulag. The zeks themselves now experienced fresh privations: the food quota was cut, and the living space halved – and not because the archipelago was getting any smaller. Of the 5.7 million POWs taken by the Germans, 4 million died in captivity (the USSR was not a signatory of the Geneva Convention; the Russian soldier suffered hardest, always and everywhere). Stalin wanted the remaining 1.7 million. And he got them. About 15–20 per cent were cleared by the Cheka. The rest faced execution or the camps.

  Stalin’s city, Stalingrad, was once Tsaritsyn: the scene of some of his more controversial activities during the Civil War. The pivotal victory there must have been savagely gratifying.44 When he kissed the Sword of Stalingrad at Teheran (November 1943), when he heard Churchill salute ‘Stalin the Mighty’: what extravagant vindication. And the second Big Three meeting, at Yalta fourteen months later, with the ageing Prime Minister and the dying President paying Stalin’s convenience the courtesy of travelling all the way to the Crimea, was another occasion for gorgeous complacency. Then the final summit in July, at Potsdam, among the shards and splinters of the Reich. Roosevelt was dead, and Churchill (halfway through the conference) lost office and was replaced by Clement Attlee.45 Hitler was dead, too, and the detailed dismantling of Hitlerism would begin at Nuremberg. Stalin could take a look around and see exactly where he stood. Presiding over an empire greater than any Tsar’s, he was now, without question, the preeminent personage on earth.

  40 When Khrushchev passed on Stalin’s remark in his Secret Speech of 1956, the assembled delegates of the Twentieth Party Congress reacted with wild laughter. It takes a beat or two before one can see why Bolsheviks should find this funny. Were they amused by the elephantiasis and demented circumspection of Stalin’s paranoia? Partly, perhaps. More likely, though, the laughter was an expression of moral aftershock, and an expression of sheer relief that such enormities were now in the past. They laughed because they could laugh. But the sound of that laughter, one imagines, remained disturbingly confused.

  41 By 1944 the trucks used for the deportations included many Studebakers, donated (not for this purpose) by the Americans as part of the Lend-Lease aid programme.

  42 Hitler planned to turn Russia into a ‘slave empire’. This does sound delusional. But then it occurs to you that a slave empire is what they had there already.

  43 Antony Beevor: Stalingrad.

  44 And Stalin’s wartime pleasures were savage. In early 1944, while clearing the southern front, General Ivan Konev ambushed 30,000 German troops retreating in open terrain. After thorough work by the Russian tanks and artillery, a Cossack cavalry unit effected the kind of slaughter (as one witness said) ‘that nothing could stop until it was over’. Subsequently there was no Churchillian talk, from the Kremlin, about the inevitable moral rot of warfare. ‘Stalin was reported to be delighted with the massacre’ (Overy), and Konev was made a marshal.

  45 Stalin was much perplexed, here, by the mysteries of democracy.

  The Saddest Story

  Within the USSR, throughout the quarter-century of his rule, Stalin was an extremely popular leader. It is something of a humiliation to commit that sentence to paper, but there is no avoiding it. Hitler was also a popular leader; but he had some economic successes, unlike Stalin, and he targeted relatively small minorities (the Jews comprised about 1 per cent of the population). Stalin’s targets were majority targets, like the peasantry (85 per cent of the population). And although Hitler’s invigilation of the citizenry was intimidating and persistent, he did not go out of his way, as Stalin did, to create a circumambience of nausea and fear. In a land where ‘people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night’ (Solzhenitsyn), Stalin was always extremely popular.

  Of course, Stalin’s popularity was wholly – Hitler’s merely largely – a matter of manipulation. For the citizen the process began in nursery school, and was reinforced by every means and from every direction and at all times. As in Germany, this was the birth of mass-media propaganda; people were unaware, then, that propaganda was propaganda – and propaganda worked. To love Stalin, suggests Volkogonov (who loved Stalin), was a form of ‘social defence’: it conditioned you to avoid trouble. Sakharov loved Stalin, and, like Volkogonov, was distraught at his death. ‘It was years,’ he later wrote, ‘before I understood the degree to which deceit, exploitation and outright fraud were inherent in the whole Stalinist system. That shows the hypnotic power of mass ideology.’ Moreover, Stalin made a ridiculous amount of headway in putting it about that the Cheka worked independently of the Kremlin. There’s the famous anecdote – the two men meeting in the streets of Moscow, during the height of the Terror: ‘If only someone would tell Stalin!’ and so on. And this was not a joke, and these were no ordinary Ivans. The two men were Ilya Ehrenburg and Boris Pasternak.

  The love for Stalin: it is very nearly the saddest story of all. You can see Dmitri Volkogonov slowly shaking his head as he writes, ‘No other man in the world has ever accomplished so fantastic a success as he: to exterminate millions of his own countrymen and receive in exchange the whole country’s blind adulation.’ What has Stalin gone and done here? What is the nature of this particular crime – what is its content? It feels like some form of rape: a travesty of love, prosecuted by force. He took you early, too, in your school uniform. So, another enormous and contaminating lie, implanted in the childish heart.

  Love signalled the totality of his victory. 1984 ends as follows:

  He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache … But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

  Into the Sere

  No one is ever going to tell us about the physiology of autocratic rule, about the addiction to power and how this affects the system. But it seems fair to assume, in Stalin’s case, that he bore the marks of an addiction so lavishly slaked. Presiding over what can confidently be called the least relaxing regime in human history cannot itself have been relaxing. (The hourly fear of assassination, one imagines, would also have been far from salutary.) Then there was the Second World War to be dealt with: for Stalin this meant four years of twenty-hour days. So how were things going, under this particular Kremlin complexion? He was now sixty-five.

  The war released great energies and talents in the Soviet people. But it also released half-forgotten or unexperienced emotions, faculties, mental states (responsibility, endeavour, initiative, pride); and these had won the war. Pasternak describes the general agonized yearning that the state would now begin to back off from its citizens – after thirty years of (in order) world war, revolution, civil war, famine, forced collectivization, more famine, terror and, again, world war. Stalin was quick to assure his people that the ‘total claim’ he made on them was not going to be reduced. I’m sure he sensed their awakened spirit; and I’m sure he didn’t like it. Round about now we further note the development in Stalin of a fierce strain of natio
nal inferiority, which expressed itself as aggressive xenophobia combined with Great Russian hauteur. He felt inferior not just to the West but to the satellite countries of Central Europe, and killed army veterans who had seen what it was like in Bulgaria or Yogoslavia. His bitter isolationism, political and personal, was linking up with rearoused suspicions about the people, the people themselves, who seemed to him to be newly stirring.

  In the period 1945–53 Stalinism entered its rancid, crapulent phase. The old addict was starting to pay for his ‘excesses’. Since 1929 the Soviet Union had been a reflection of Stalin’s mind. And now that mind was breaking up: infarctions, minor strokes, dizzy spells, faints. In common with another exhausted autarch, Macbeth, Stalin’s way of life was fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf. Withered, parched, and above all lurid, in the botanical sense (‘dingy yellowish brown’), and in every other: ghastly, wan, glaring, gaudy, sensational, and horrifying. And gutter-level: the level of the street corner and the upended milk crate. There would be more executions, deportations, conspiracies to establish ‘conspiracies’; additional millions would be absorbed by the clogged gulag. But the theme of the period is fading vigour – twitching, flailing. Atavisms, primitive stupidities, were ready to recrudesce. If the postwar years lack the phantasmagoric coherence of the 1930s, they still achieve an unexpectedly sordid symmetry. Even in his last excitations Stalin managed to fight his way to consummate historical disgrace.

  Volkogonov reports that in January 1948 the Minister of the Interior, Kruglov, was called in by Stalin:

  [He] ordered him to devise ‘concrete measures’ for constructing new, additional concentration camps and prisons for special purposes … ‘Submit draft decrees in February,’ he told Kruglov. ‘We need special conditions for holding Trotskyites, Mensheviks, SRs, anarchists and Whites.’ ‘It will be done, Comrade Stalin, it will be done,’ Kruglov assured him.

  New camps, new prisons – for old, old crimes (the anarchists had been wiped out by Lenin in 1918). Stalin erratically revealed certain human qualities in his last years (a photograph of Nadezhda Alliluyeva would reappear on his desk), among them an elderly and irascible fear of change.46 This fear now allied itself to a rancorous bid for autarky. There were old crimes, but there were also new crimes. PZ, for instance (Abasement Before the West), or VAD (Praising American Democracy), or the presumably more minor VAT (Praising American Technique). Then, from what at first seems to be an unexpected direction, there was suddenly another new crime: the crime of being Jewish.

  Nothing quite explains this collapse into the gutter by Stalin, though his history of anti-Semitism turns out to be long and colourful. Khrushchev said he was dyed in the wool; and there are examples of Stalin’s anti-Semitic crudities dating back to the teens of the century. ‘Anti-Semitism is counterrevolution,’ Lenin had tersely decided. And yet the Party was tainted with it as early as the 1920s. There seems to have been a policy of low-pressure ghettoization, in which the poorer Jews of the old Pale of Settlement in the East European Plain were encouraged to migrate to the Crimea. With Stalin’s ascendancy came a change of destination: the new Jewish Autonomous Region would be established in Birobidzhan, a ‘desolate’ area near the Chinese border.

  This is Richard Overy:

  … Soviet propaganda made great play with the idea that the regime was protecting the culture and identity of the Jewish people. But [Birobidzhan’s] remoteness from the traditional centres of Jewish culture … made it an unattractive prospect. Birobidzhan was a failed experiment in Soviet apartheid.

  During the 1930s anti-Semitism became a part of Cheka policy, and in the years of the Terror such phrases as ‘contact with Zionist circles’ began to appear in its fabrications. The tenor of Stalin’s prejudice is revealed in an anecdote describing a party attended by officials of the punitive organs in 1936, shortly after the executions of Zinoviev and Kamenev (both of them Jews). Conquest’s version goes as follows:

  After a good deal of drinking all round, K. V. Pauker, who had been present at Zinoviev’s execution in his capacity as head of the NKVD [Cheka] Operative Department, gave a comical rendering of that event. Himself acting the part of Zinoviev, he was dragged in by two other officers. He hung from their arms moaning, ‘Please, for God’s sake, call Iosif Vissarionovich.’ Stalin laughed heartily, and when Pauker repeated the performance, adding as his own invention, ‘Hear, Israel, our God is the only God!’ Stalin was overcome with merriment and had to sign to Pauker to stop.

  Of the eighteen defendants at the Bukharin/Yagoda trial of 1938, thirteen were Jews, including Trotsky and his son Sedov, tried in absentia. Among other things, this was a signal to Berlin. ‘Molotov is not Bronstein,’ as Ribbentrop duly observed.

  One wonders whether Stalin’s hatred of Trotsky, one of the most passionate in history (with three floors of the Lubyanka devoted to his destruction), was to some extent ‘racial’. It is, anyway, all of a piece. Anti-Semitism is an announcement of inferiority and a protest against a level playing field – a protest against talent.47 And this is true, too, of the most hysterical, demonizing, millenarian versions of the cult, according to which a tiny minority, the Jews, planned to achieve world domination. Now how would they manage that, without inordinate gifts? It is said that anti-Semitism differs from other prejudices because it is also a ‘philosophy’. It is also a religion – the religion of the inadequate. When tracing the fateful synergy between Russia and Germany (soon to climax), we may recall that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the ‘warrant for genocide’ as it is called in Norman Cohn’s book of that name, was a fiction composed by the Tsarist secret police.48

  The pact years of 1939–41 saw collaborative anti-Semitism between the two regimes. German Jews who had hoped to find safety in the USSR were first corralled, then delivered to the Gestapo. Meanwhile, Jewish refugees from the German-occupied countries were imprisoned or exiled to Central Asia or Siberia. In his half of partitioned Poland, Stalin combined general decapitation with a sustained attack on Jewish culture, banning religious holidays (including the Sabbath), bar mitzvahs and circumcisions, and dismantling the shtetls. After June 1941, Soviet policy went briefly into reverse, a switch apparently confirmed by Stalin’s endorsement, ten months later, of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. But the momentum of atavism was building. Conquest notes that Jewish activists interrogated by the Cheka in 1939 ‘were treated very badly’, but ‘the curses and imprecations never had any racial tone. When they were reinterrogated in 1942–43, anti-Semitic abuse had become the norm.’ The shift in emphasis, like everything else, was top-down.

  There were about 3 million Jews in the Soviet Union after the war, 1.25 million having died in the Holocaust. That Jewry faced the possibility of a second Holocaust, in successive decades, is strongly suggested by Stalin’s sclerotic manoeuvrings in this period, and particularly his decision of 1951: anti-Semitism went from covert to overt, from Pravda’s mutterings about ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ to a fully orchestrated propaganda campaign. Stalin was now ready to mobilize the atavism. Until 1951 his racially motivated arrests, executions, murders, purges and bannings had been largely clandestine. In the spring of that year he started developing the Slansky case in satellite Czechoslovakia (fourteen high-level Stalinists, eleven of them Jewish, were tried and executed, the charge being emended from ‘bourgeois nationalism’ to ‘Zionism’). Further publicity was generated by a gang of Jewish ‘wreckers’ in Ukrainian industry in 1952. Then came ‘the Doctors’ Plot’, and the propaganda juggernaut started preparing the public for a nationwide pogrom. Solzhenitsyn believes that the pogrom was to be launched at the beginning of March by the hanging of the ‘doctor-murderers’ in Red Square. But then, too, at the beginning of March something else happened: Stalin died.

  Historians usually say that there would have been ‘another terror’ of uncertain scale; but what kind of terror? It wouldn’t have been like the Great Terror, where public participation was confined to the delivery of denunciations. The Jewish te
rror would have modelled itself on the older Bolshevik idea or tactic of inciting one class to destroy another. It would have resembled the Red Terror of 1918 with the Jews very approximately in the role of the bourgeoisie. The Red Terror of 1918, Orlando Figes insists, was participatory, top-down but also bottom-up. It is tempting to see more mangled regression here, in Stalin, as he sets about provoking the baser energies of the masses, and more nostalgia for the days of struggle, the days, as Lenin called them, of ‘chaos and enthusiasm’.

  There are rational explanations for Stalin’s surrender to the gutter voodoo. Conquest summarizes them (and they form a rebarbative brew):

  [His] attitude from 1942–43 seems to have been based in part on what he took to be Hitler’s successful use of anti-Semitic demagogy. It was certainly also due to his increasing Russian nationalism, to which he felt most, or many, Jews were not truly assimilable. And the idea of a special Jewish predilection for capitalism is of course to be found in Marx.

  The proximate cause of the final delirium was evidently the emergence of the state of Israel in 1948 and the arrival, later that year, of the new ambassador, Golda Meir, who attracted a crowd of 50,000 Jews outside the Moscow synagogue. This was a shocking display of ‘spontaneity’; it also confronted Stalin with an active minority who owed an allegiance other than to ‘the Soviet power’. He is supposed to have said: ‘I can’t swallow them, I can’t spit them out.’ In the end, it seems, he decided to do both. The Jews who survived the gauntlet were meant to end up in Birobidzhan on the Chinese border and in other parts of Siberia where, according to Solzhenitsyn, ‘barracks had already been prepared for them’.