Paper and cardboard, too, were rationed, but not for Heinrich Hoffmann’s photography business, since pictures of the Führer were considered ‘strategically vital’. Every month, some four tonnes of paper were earmarked for his company.96
On 6 June 1944 the Allied powers landed in Normandy. The nightmare of encirclement now became real, as two powerful armies moved towards Germany in a giant pincer movement. Hitler, still convinced of his own genius, badgered his generals and pored obsessively over maps, but since no victory was forthcoming he became increasingly suspicious of those around him. On 20 July 1944 several military leaders made an attempt on his life by placing a bomb inside a briefcase at the Wolf’s Lair, a command post in Prussia. Hitler escaped with a few bruises. It reinforced his belief that fate had chosen him, as he pressed on with the war effort, thinking that a miracle weapon or a sudden change of fortune would rescue him and his people at the eleventh hour.
By then he had become a different person. Heinrich Hoffmann described him as ‘a shivering shadow of his former self, a charred hulk from which all life, fire and flame had long since departed’. His hair was grey, his back stooped, and he walked with a shuffle. Among his own entourage, Albert Speer noted, discipline began to slacken. Even his most devoted followers at the Berghof remained seated when he entered a room, as conversations continued, some falling asleep in their chairs, others talking loudly with no apparent inhibition.97
On 24 February 1945, with the Russians at the gates, a proclamation by the Führer was read over the radio. Hitler predicted a turnabout in the fortunes of war. He was widely mocked, even by party members: ‘another prophecy by the leader,’ one of them exclaimed ironically. Soldiers talked openly of his ‘megalomania’. With the rumble of the front in the distance, ordinary people began taking down the swastikas from public buildings, angry at the failure of the leadership to surrender. Others removed his picture from their living room. ‘I cremated him,’ said one old lady.98
During the last months of the war, Hitler withdrew into his bunker, built underneath the new chancellery. It was ‘the last station in his flight from reality,’ wrote Speer. Still he ordered the fight to continue, determined to bring death and destruction to a nation that did not deserve him.99
On 20 April 1945, Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, the first enemy shell hit Berlin. Bombardment was relentless. Two days later nothing but a white façade standing amidst smoking rubble was left of the Ministry of Propaganda. Old and trusted associates began deserting the sinking ship, Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Goering among them. Hitler shot himself on 30 April. He had heard of Mussolini’s undignified end and had ordered that his remains be incinerated to prevent any desecration. His body, together with that of Eva Braun, his long-term mistress whom he had married a day earlier, was dragged out of the bunker, doused in petrol and set alight.
A wave of suicides followed among the most committed Nazis, including the entire Goebbels family, Heinrich Himmler, Bernhard Rust and Robert Ley. Thousands of ordinary people also killed themselves. As soon as the Red Army arrived, a Protestant clergyman reported, ‘whole good, churchgoing families took their lives, drowned themselves, slit their wrists or allowed themselves to be burned up along with their homes’. But the Führer’s death prompted no spontaneous displays of public grief, no outpouring of sorrow by distraught believers. ‘Strange,’ one woman reported from Hamburg after the radio announced Hitler’s death, ‘nobody wept or even looked sad.’ A young man who had long wondered how his countrymen would react to the death of their leader was astonished by the ‘monumental, yawning indifference’ that followed the radio announcement. The Third Reich, Victor Klemperer observed, was gone overnight, almost as good as forgotten.100
All resistance collapsed the moment Hitler died. Expecting the same ferocious partisan war they had fought at home, Red Army officers were taken aback by the docility of the population. They were also surprised by the number of people who produced communist flags out of scarlet Nazi banners with the swastika cut from the centre. In Berlin this turnabout was referred to as ‘Heil Stalin!’.101
3
Stalin
‘Everywhere in Moscow one sees nothing but Lenin,’ the French journalist Henri Béraud observed in 1924, a few months after the death of the communist revolutionary and head of state. ‘Lenin posters, Lenin drawings, Lenin mosaics, Lenin scorched in pokerwork, Lenin in linoleum, Lenin inkwells, Lenin desk blotters. Entire shops devoted to selling his bust, in every size, every material and every price, from bronze, marble, stone, porcelain and alabaster to plaster. And that does not include pictures of Lenin, from formal portraits to lively snapshots and newsreels.’ Lenin, Béraud ventured, was probably the most photographed head of state – after Mussolini.1
Even before Lenin died his comrades had begun glorifying him. In August 1918 a disillusioned revolutionary called Fanny Kaplan approached Lenin as he was leaving the Hammer and Sickle Factory in Moscow. She fired several shots. One bullet lodged in his neck; another went through his left shoulder. Against all odds, he survived. ‘Only those marked by destiny can escape death from such a wound,’ his physician remarked. Eulogies to the great leader followed, printed and distributed in hundreds of thousands of copies. Leon Trotsky, founder and commander of the Red Army, praised him as a ‘masterpiece created by nature’ for a ‘new era in human history’, the ‘embodiment of revolutionary thinking’. Nikolai Bukharin, editor of the party newspaper Pravda, wrote about ‘the genius leader of the world revolution’, the man with an ‘almost prophetic ability to predict’.2
Lenin recovered and put a halt to the outpouring, but when poor health finally forced him to withdraw from public appearances in 1922 the cult took on new life. The Bolsheviks, like the fascists and the Nazis, were a party held together not so much by a programme or platform but by a chosen leader. It was Lenin’s will, vision and, most of all, intuition that had guided the revolution, rather than the communist principles proposed by Marx half a century earlier. Lenin was the embodiment of the revolution. If he could no longer lead in person, then his followers had to invoke his name or claim direct inspiration from his revolutionary spirit.3
The deification of Lenin also served as a substitute for a popular mandate. Even at the height of their popularity in November 1917 the Bolsheviks won less than a quarter of the vote. They used violence to seize power, and the more power they acquired the fiercer the violence became. Fanny Kaplan’s assassination attempt was followed by a Red Terror, as the regime systematically targeted whole groups of people, from striking factory workers to peasants who deserted the Red Army. Thousands of priests and nuns, declared class enemies after the revolution, were killed, some crucified, castrated, buried alive or thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar. The entire imperial family was shot or stabbed to death, their bodies mutilated, burned and dumped in a pit. If violence alienated many ordinary people, neither the abstract language of ‘class struggle’ nor the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, foreign words that villagers in a largely illiterate countryside could barely pronounce, won them over. Appeals to the leader as a holy figure, on the other hand, were far more successful in creating at least the illusion of some sort of bond between the state and its seventy million subjects.4
Lenin did not name a successor, but in 1922 he hand-picked Stalin for the new post of General Secretary as a means of reining in Trotsky, who opposed the New Economic Policy spearheaded by Lenin. The policy effectively reversed the forced collectivisation introduced after the revolution, when factory workers had been ordered to produce by decree, their goods confiscated by the state. Christened war communism, this system had left the economy in ruins. The New Economic Policy moved back towards the market, allowing individuals to operate small enterprises. Forced grain requisitions ceased, replaced by a tax on agricultural produce. Trotsky came to view the New Economic Policy as a surrender to capitalists and rich peasants, and demanded instead an even greater role for the state in the economy.
S
talin acquired great powers as General Secretary, despite possessing obvious defects. He was no great orator, speaking with a thick Georgian accent in a voice that carried poorly. He lacked any sense of timing. He performed with an almost complete absence of gesture. And, unlike many of his colleagues, he lacked the aura of a revolutionary who had spent years abroad in exile. He could write fluently, but was not an outstanding theoretician who could expound on communist doctrine. Stalin made the best of his shortcomings, presenting himself as a modest servant devoted to promoting the greater good while others were constantly seeking the limelight.
He described himself as a praktik, a practical man of action rather than an exponent of the revolution. By all accounts he had exceptional organisational abilities, a huge capacity for work and great strength of will. His rivals often dismissed him as a mere administrator, ‘the outstanding mediocrity of our party’, as Trotsky phrased it. But Stalin was a cunning, unscrupulous operator who exploited other people’s weaknesses to turn them into willing accomplices. He was also a gifted strategic thinker with a genuine political touch. Like Hitler, he showed concern for the people around him, regardless of their position in the hierarchy, remembering their names and past conversations. He also knew how to bide his time.5
As Lenin convalesced, Stalin became his intermediary, using his new powers to draw closer to the leader. But the relationship was tempestuous, and in 1923 the two fell out. The ailing leader dictated a series of notes that became known as Lenin’s Testament, a document suggesting that Stalin had a crude temperament and should be removed from the post of General Secretary.
Alive Lenin was a threat, dead an asset. The moment Lenin passed away on 21 January 1924 Stalin became determined to pose as his most faithful pupil. He was the first among the inner circle to enter his master’s bedroom, theatrically taking the dead man’s head in both hands to bring it close to his chest, kissing him firmly on the cheeks and on the lips.6
For several weeks Lenin’s embalmed corpse was displayed in a glass catafalque on Red Square, where the winter cold kept his body intact. The party was divided over what to do next. Russia had a long tradition of mummifying its holy men. In the Monastery of Caves in Kiev, where reclusive monks used to worship before the revolution, the catacombs were lined with dozens of saints, their faces blackened, their emaciated hands resting on ragged, dusty clothes. Comparable treatment for the revolutionary leader carried religious overtones that clashed with the atheist outlook of several leaders, including Lenin’s wife. Felix Dzerzhinsky, as chair of the funeral commission, prevailed, with the backing of the General Secretary. Lenin, in death as in life, was to serve the cause of the working class, as millions would come to pay their respects before his coffin.7
Once spring arrived a few months later a team of scientists took Lenin’s body away and set about experimenting with chemicals to prevent its decomposition. In August 1924 Lenin reappeared, his whitened, marble-like body displayed in a more permanent mausoleum. It attracted long queues of worshippers, patient, poor, mystical, the same crowd, noted Henri Béraud, that could be seen ‘muttering its prayers in front of gilded icons and candles burning with a yellow flame’.8
Having captured Lenin’s corpse, Stalin set about asserting ownership over his words. He took the Lenin Institute under his wing, overseeing the publication of all significant Lenin documents. But Lenin’s collected writings did not define a doctrine. By delivering a series of lectures on Leninism, serialised in Pravda under the title ‘Foundations of Leninism’, Stalin staked his claim as guardian of his master’s legacy. Leninism, he wrote, was the Marxism of the imperial age, and Lenin the sole great heir of Marx and Engels.9
However, when party delegates convened in Moscow in May 1924 to examine Lenin’s Testament, Stalin encountered a setback. After Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, two party elders disturbed by Trotsky’s ambition, spoke out in favour of Stalin, the Central Committee decided to read the document only to select delegates as opposed to the entire assembled congress. Trotsky, reluctant to appear divisive in his coming bid for power, did not intervene. Stalin, pale as death, humbly asked for release from his duties, hoping that his show of contrition would prompt the Central Committee to refuse his request. His gamble paid off, but left him seething with resentment. He was the disciple of a man who seemed to have demanded his removal.10
After regaining his composure, Stalin began surrounding himself with reliable, loyal supporters, including Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich and Sergo Ordzhonikidze. He used his position as General Secretary to replace supporters of all his rivals with his own henchmen. He acquired personal assistants to gather information and undertake his shadier tasks. Lev Mekhlis, Stalin’s personal secretary, began overseeing every aspect of Stalin’s public image, vetting photographs that appeared in the press.11
In November 1924 Stalin cornered Trotsky. Whereas Stalin presented himself as Lenin’s pupil, Trotsky had made the tactical error of posing as Lenin’s equal by publishing his own collected writings. Not only did Trotsky appear vain, but he provided textual evidence of many differences over issues on which he had opposed Lenin. Stalin published a vicious piece entitled ‘Trotskyism or Leninism?’, denouncing his rival as the proponent of a permanent revolution that put him at loggerheads with the very principles of Leninism. Careful readers understood that the title meant Trotsky or Stalin.
Stalin also targeted Trotsky’s criticism of the New Economic Policy. Other Bolsheviks, including Zinoviev and Kamenev, the two powerful Central Committee leaders who had helped Stalin survive Lenin’s testament, disliked the turn towards the market. Stalin whittled away at them, portraying them as doctrinaire leftists whose ideas would lead the Soviet Union to perdition. Nikolai Bukharin, a tireless defender of the mixed economy, assisted him. In 1925 Stalin himself addressed peasant representatives who refused to sow crops unless they were granted land leases. With a flick of the hand Stalin promised leases for twenty years, forty years, possibly even in perpetuity. When asked if this did not seem like a return to private land ownership, he responded ‘We wrote the constitution. We can change it too.’ Reports of the meeting circulated around the world. Stalin came across as the level-headed, pragmatic boss of the party, a leader attuned to his people.12
By 1926 Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev were forced into a United Opposition against Stalin, who promptly turned on them and denounced them for bringing instability to the party by forming a faction. Since factions had been outlawed years earlier, Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo. His followers dwindled to a mere handful. In October 1927, at a full Central Committee meeting, Trotsky once more tried to bring up Lenin’s Testament. By then, however, many party delegates had come to view Stalin as the self-effacing, efficient, hard-working defender of Lenin. The marginalised Trotsky, by contrast, seemed condescending, noisy and self-absorbed. Stalin crushed him, retorting that three years earlier the party had examined the document and refused his resignation. Delegates erupted in applause. Within a month the party expelled Trotsky and dozens of his followers. In January 1928 Trotsky was sent into exile to Kazakhstan. One year later he was deported from the Soviet Union.13
Just as soon as his main rival was dispatched Stalin began implementing Trotsky’s policies. Trotsky had warned against a ‘new capitalist class’ in the countryside. After grain supplies tumbled by a third in late 1927, threatening Moscow and Leningrad with starvation, Stalin sent procurement squads into the villages, ordering them to grab what they could at gunpoint. Those who resisted were persecuted as kulaks, a derogatory term meant to designate ‘rich’ farmers but used for anyone who opposed collectivisation. This was the opening battle in a war against the countryside that would culminate a few years later in famine.
Those within the party, including Bukharin, who still adhered to Stalin’s earlier views were lambasted as rightists. Crushing fear now pervaded the party, with its members denounced and summarily arrested as ‘left oppositionists’ or ‘right deviators’. Homes were
searched and relatives taken away. People disappeared overnight. Stalin also cracked down on managers, engineers and planners, including foreigners accused of deliberate sabotage.14
In the midst of a purge of the party ranks, a huge parade was organised for May Day 1928. Ever since 1886, when the Chicago police had fired on strikers demanding an eight-hour workday, socialists around the world had celebrated 1 May. Marches by workers with unfurled banners and red flags were regular events in many cities around the world, sometimes degenerating into street fights with the police. Lenin, early in his career, had seen the potential of these celebrations, writing that they could be developed into ‘great political demonstrations’. In 1901 Stalin himself had been involved in bloody clashes around May Day in Tiflis (Tbilisi), the capital of his native Georgia.15
In 1918 Lenin made May Day an official holiday. A decade later, in 1928, Stalin had the Labour Code amended, adding 2 May to the festivities. Preparations for these showpiece events began weeks in advance, with gigantic wood and cardboard structures erected at the main intersections of Moscow, depicting workers, peasants and soldiers marching towards the future. On 1 May Stalin and his principal lieutenants appeared on the wooden ramparts of the Lenin Mausoleum, saluting a flood of humanity cheering and singing under banners and floats. Then came a giant parade of rumbling tanks, armoured cars, machine guns and searchlights, with aeroplanes buzzing overhead. It was an enormous display of organisational strength, meticulously planned from above, with every word scripted and every slogan approved by decree. Hundreds of thousands waited meekly for hours for their turn to cross the square and glimpse the leader.16
By 1929 Stalin was ready to impose his mark on the Soviet Union. Lenin had already transformed Russia into the world’s first one-party state, accomplishing what Hitler would try to achieve in the name of Gleichschaltung after 1933: the systematic elimination of all organisations outside the party. Alternative political parties, trade unions, the media, churches, guilds and associations all came under the thumb of the state. Free elections had been banned immediately after November 1917, and the rule of law was abolished, replaced by revolutionary justice and a sprawling gulag system.
How to Be a Dictator Page 9