Stalin sought to go further and permanently alter the country’s economy by turning an agricultural backwater into an industrial powerhouse within a mere five years. Huge industrial cities were built from scratch, turnkey factories imported from abroad, engineering plants expanded and new mines opened to meet the need for coal, iron and steel, all at breakneck speed. No eight-hour workday existed in the Soviet Union, as factory workers toiled seven days a week. The key to industrial expansion lay in the countryside, with grain taken from the villagers sold on the international market to earn foreign currency. In order to extract more grain, the countryside was collectivised. Villagers were herded into state farms, from which the kulaks were excluded. Stalin viewed collectivisation as a unique opportunity to liquidate the entire kulak class, as some 320,000 households were broken up, their members sent to concentration camps, forced to work in mines or transported to distant regions of the empire.17
The party, under Stalin’s leadership, was now sacrosanct, the party line presented as a mystical will that was beyond debate. Stalin became the personification of that sanctity, the vozhd, or great leader, a term previously reserved for Lenin. On 1 May 1929 Marx receded into the background, while Stalin ascended to equal status with Lenin. As one American journalist noted, ‘On Red Square, on the buildings opposite the Kremlin walls, huge faces of Lenin and Stalin were displayed. Their gigantic full-length portraits were mounted on scaffolding on Theatre Square, looming high above the Metropole Hotel on one side and the Grand Hotel on the other.’18
The great leader was fifty on 21 December 1929, an occasion celebrated by ‘numberless telegrams’, the party’s mouthpiece Pravda explained, as workers the world over greeted Stalin. Congratulatory slips of paper were even smuggled out of prisons in Poland, Hungary and Italy. This was not hero-worship, the propaganda machine clarified, but an expression of devotion from millions of workers everywhere to the idea of the proletarian revolution. Stalin was the party, the embodiment of all that was best in the working class: ‘flamboyant enthusiasm kept in bounds by an iron will, unshakable faith in victory based on sober revolutionary Marxian analysis, a proletarian contempt of death on the civil war fronts’, the circumspection of a leader whose mind ‘illuminated the future like a searchlight’.19
Other demonstrations of flattery abounded, as Stalin’s underlings composed paeans to their leader, enthusiastically abasing themselves. Lazar Kaganovich, the stocky, thick-moustached secretary of the party, praised him as ‘the closest, most active, most faithful assistant of Lenin’. Sergo Ordzhonikidze described his master as a true and unfaltering disciple of Lenin armed with the iron will to lead the party to the final victory of the world proletarian revolution.20
Few people, however, had ever seen Stalin except from a distance, as he stood on the rostrum in Red Square twice a year to celebrate May Day and the October Revolution. Even then he appeared almost like a sculpture, a robust figure adopting a stolid, calm pose in a military overcoat with a peaked cap. He rarely appeared in newsreels and never spoke in public. Not once had his voice been heard over the radio. His photographs, strictly controlled by his personal secretary, were all standardised. Even in posters Stalin seemed cold and distant, the embodiment of an unflinching will to push through the revolution.21
Over the course of a decade Stalin had moved from inconspicuous commissar to undisputed leader of the party. But he had repeatedly been forced to do battle with powerful forces arrayed against him. In a testament that would haunt Stalin for the rest of his life, Lenin, after handing him supreme power, had had second thoughts and called for his removal. Time and again, Trotsky, a formidable orator, gifted polemicist and respected leader of the Red Army, had confronted him. Sheer vindictiveness and cold calculation had kept Stalin moving forward, but over the years he also developed a sense of grievance, viewing himself as a victim. A victor with a grudge, he became permanently distrustful of those around him.22
The image of a stern, aloof leader towering above his potential critics suited him well, but Stalin soon began to cultivate a more human aspect. Trotsky in inner exile cut a dramatic figure, making Stalin resemble the keeper of a caged lion. As soon as he was abroad, he tried to appear more Leninist than Stalin. He began publishing a Bulletin of the Opposition, using his detailed knowledge of corridor politics to report on controversies within the party leadership. His autobiography My Life, published in Russian and English in 1930, portrayed Stalin as a mediocre, jealous and devious character whose covert machinations had led to a betrayal of the revolution. Trotsky reproduced Lenin’s Testament: ‘Stalin is rude, disloyal, and capable of abuse of the power that he derives from the party apparatus. Stalin should be removed to avoid a split.’ Stalin had coined the term Trotskyism, and now Trotsky in turn popularised the notion of Stalinism.23
A year earlier, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, the leader’s Georgian colleague Avel Enukidze had introduced a few human touches, bringing together some elements of the Stalin myth. Stalin was the son of a cobbler, a precocious and gifted student, but also a young rebel, thrown out of a theological seminary. He lacked all vanity. He was a man of the people with a knack for explaining complicated matters very simply to workers, who affectionately nicknamed him ‘Soso’. He never wavered in his defence of Bolshevism and gave himself entirely to revolutionary work. ‘Stalin will remain the same to the end of his life,’ Enukidze proclaimed.24
Stalin was not merely the leader of the party. He was also de facto head of the Communist International, or Comintern, making him the figure pointing the way forward towards the worldwide proletarian revolution. Yet at home and abroad he still remained, unlike Trotsky, a mysterious, distant figure. In November 1930 Stalin invited the United Press correspondent Eugene Lyons to meet him personally in his office. Lyons, a fellow-traveller who had worked in the New York office of TASS, the official Soviet news agency, had been carefully selected from dozens of reporters in Moscow. Stalin met him at the door. He smiled, but there was a shyness that instantly disarmed the correspondent. His shaggy moustache, Lyons reported, gave his swarthy face a friendly and almost benign look. Everything spoke of simplicity, from his relaxed manner, the austerity of his attire and the spartan nature of his office to the quiet, orderly corridors of the headquarters of the Central Committee. Stalin listened. He was thoughtful. ‘Are you a dictator,’ Lyons finally asked. ‘No, I am not,’ Stalin replied gently, explaining that in the party all decisions were collective and no one person could dictate. ‘I like that man,’ exulted Lyons on the way out. ‘Stalin Laughs!’, a sycophantic piece of work edited by Stalin himself, appeared on the front page of major newspapers around the world, ‘ripping the cloak of secrecy’ surrounding the recluse of the Kremlin.25
Stalin had inserted an intimate domestic note into the interview, talking about his wife and three children. A week later Hubert Knickerbocker interviewed Stalin’s mother, a simple woman wearing a common dress of grey wool. ‘Soso was always a good boy!’ she exulted, happy to talk about her favourite subject.26
More prestigious intellectual figures followed, popularising and diffusing the image of a kindly, simple, modest man who was no dictator despite wielding huge power. A year later the socialist author George Bernard Shaw received a military guard of honour in Moscow and a banquet to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday. He toured the country, visiting model schools, prisons and farms, with villagers and workers carefully drilled to praise the party and their leader. After a two-hour private audience, masterfully staged by Stalin, the Irish playwright found the dictator a ‘charmingly good-humoured fellow’ and proclaimed: ‘There was no malice in him, but also no credulity.’ Shaw never tired of promoting the despot, and died in 1950 in his bed with a portrait of his idol on the mantelpiece.27
Emil Ludwig, a popular biographer of Napoleon and Bismarck, likewise met Stalin in December 1931, and was struck by the simplicity of a man who had so much power but ‘took no pride in its possession’. But the individual whose biogra
phy did most to propagate the image of a simple man who grudgingly accepted the adoration of millions was probably Henri Barbusse, a French writer who moved to Moscow in 1918 and joined the Bolshevik Party. When they first met in 1927 Stalin completely captivated Barbusse, whose laudatory articles were translated in Pravda. Following another encounter in 1932 the Culture and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee carefully vetted Barbusse, who also organised the Paris-based World Committee Against War and Fascism. In October 1933 Barbusse collected 385,000 francs Stalin had sent to Paris, the rough equivalent of US$330,000 in today’s money. In the words of André Gide, another French literary figure whom Stalin had approached, substantial financial advantages awaited those who wrote ‘in the right direction’.28
Stalin provided all the documentation for his biographer, with every detail supervised by his underlings within the propaganda machine. In Stalin: A New World Seen through One Man, published in March 1935, Barbusse portrayed Stalin as a new messiah, a superhuman whose name millions chanted at every parade on Red Square. Yet even as those around him adored him, he remained modest, crediting his master Lenin for every victory. His salary was a meagre five hundred roubles, his home had only three windows. His eldest son slept on a couch in the dining room, the younger one in an alcove. He had one secretary, in contrast to former British prime minister Lloyd George who had employed thirty-two. Even in his personal life this ‘frank and brilliant man’ remained ‘a simple man’.29
From Henri Barbusse to George Bernard Shaw foreign celebrities helped Stalin get around a paradox at the very heart of his cult: the Soviet Union was supposedly a dictatorship of the proletariat, not the dictatorship of one individual. In communist polemics, only fascist dictators like Mussolini and Hitler proclaimed that their word was above the law, their people obedient subjects who must bend to their will. Therefore, even as his cult pervaded all aspects of everyday life, the very idea that Stalin was a dictator became taboo. Ostensibly the people glorified him, against his own wishes, and it was they who demanded to see him, as he reluctantly displayed himself to millions during the Red Square parades.30
Every aspect of his image stood in contrast to those of his nemeses. Hitler and Mussolini would rant and rave in front of their followers, while at party gatherings the self-effacing secretary would sit in watchful silence in the back row of a crowded platform. They spoke at people, he listened to them. They were dominated by emotion, he stood for reason, carefully weighing his every word. His words were few, and therefore treasured and studied by all. As Emil Ludwig put it, even his quietness conveyed power, as there was something slightly menacing in ‘the dangerous weight of the silent’.31
Stalin may, as Henri Barbusse claimed, have had only one secretary, but after his fiftieth birthday in 1929 he used the party machine to shore up his cult, as posters, portraits, books and busts began to proliferate. In the summer of 1930 the Sixteenth Congress of the Communist Party became a demonstration of fealty to Stalin, who spoke for seven hours. Praise, now obligatory, circulated inside the congress, in the newspapers and on the radio.32
In the countryside, where a merciless campaign of collectivisation was being enforced, statues of Lenin and Stalin could be seen at the peak of the 1932 famine. An estimated six million people died of hunger in Ukraine, the Urals, the Volga, Kazakhstan and parts of Siberia, as huge stocks of grain as well as milk, eggs and meat were sold on the international market to finance the Five-Year Plan. Even as they were reduced to eating grass and tree bark, villagers were forced to acclaim their leader.33
In 1930 the Sixteenth Congress had been greeted by ‘stormy, prolonged applause extending into a lengthy ovation’. Four years later, at the Seventeenth Congress, this was no longer deemed adequate, and the stenograms recorded a ‘tremendous ovation’ as well as shouts of ‘Long Live our Stalin!’ The gathering was hailed as a Congress of Victors, as the delegates celebrated the successes of agricultural collectivisation and rapid industrialisation. But behind the scenes members grumbled about Stalin’s methods. Some feared his ambition even as they publicly acclaimed him. Rumour had it that he had received so many negative votes that some paper ballots had to be destroyed.34
Stalin did nothing. He knew the virtue of patience, displaying a nerveless, calculated restraint in the face of adversity. But when in late 1934 an assassin shot Sergey Kirov, the boss of Leningrad, Stalin took drastic measures. This marked the start of the Great Terror, as party members who had at some point or another defied Stalin were arrested. In August 1936 Zinoviev and Kamenev, the first to undergo a show trial, were found guilty and executed. Others followed, including Bukharin and twenty other defendants allegedly part of a ‘Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites’. More than 1.5 million ordinary people were ensnared by the secret police, interrogated, tortured and in many cases summarily executed. At the campaign’s height in 1937 and 1938 the execution rate was roughly a thousand per day, with people accused of being class enemies, saboteurs, oppositionists or speculators, some denounced by their own neighbours or relatives.35
The cult flourished as the terror unfolded. In 1934, Stalin was not the only one glorified by his underlings. By the end of the 1920s virtually every leader, down to directors of local enterprises, had their workers carry their portraits in triumph on public holidays. Some leaders became little Stalins, copying their master in their own fiefdoms, immortalising themselves in portraits and statues, surrounded by sycophants who sang their praises. One such was Ivan Rumiantsev, himself a flatterer who acclaimed Stalin as a ‘genius’ in 1934. He viewed himself as the Stalin of the Western Region, compelling 134 collective farms to be named after him. In the spring of 1937 Rumiantsev was denounced as a spy and shot.36
Sometimes Politburo members had entire cities renamed in their honour. Stalingrad existed, but so did Molotov and Ordzhonikidze. When a leader fell from favour, names were summarily revised, as happened to the ill-fated cities of Trotsk and Zinovevsk. But by 1938 only one other name was allowed equal standing with Stalin’s, that of Mikhail Kalinin, nominal President of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, or head of state from 1919 to 1946. His role was purely symbolic, but he served admirably, dutifully signing each and every one of Stalin’s decrees. When his wife was arrested for calling Stalin a ‘tyrant and a sadist’, Kalinin did not lift a finger.37
In June 1934, three months after the Congress of Victors, Stalin began overseeing every aspect of the state propaganda machine. His image became still more ubiquitous, with one American visitor observing large portraits ‘on the hoardings surrounding the new metro excavations in Moscow, on the façades of public buildings in Kazan, in the Red Corners of shops, on the walls of guardrooms and prisons, in shops, in the Kremlin, the cathedrals, the cinemas, everywhere’.38
In the intervals between signing death warrants and directing show trials Stalin met with writers, painters, sculptors and playwrights. The individual, in every aspect of art, vanished, as Stalin imposed a style known as ‘socialist realism’. Art had to glorify the revolution. Fairy tales were prohibited as unproletarian: children were to be enthralled with books about tractors and coal mines. In what one historian has called a ‘hall of mirrors’, the same motives were endlessly repeated as committees vetted texts and images. Since Stalin was the embodiment of the revolution, he was the most prominent of them all: ‘it was not a rare incident for workers to compose a letter to Stalin during a meeting in the Stalin House of Culture of the Stalin Factory on Stalin Square in the city of Stalinsk.’39
Stalinsk was but one of five cities named after the great leader. There were also Stalingrad, Stalinabad, Stalino and Stalinagorsk. Great parks, factories, railways and canals were all named after him. The Stalin Canal, dug all the way from the White Sea to Leningrad on the Baltic Sea by convict labour during the first Five-Year Plan, was opened in 1933. The best steels were christened stalinite. ‘His name is shouted at you through every printed column, every billboard, every radio,’ noted Eugene Lyons: ‘His image is ubiq
uitous, picked out in flowers on public lawns, in electric lights, on postage stamps; it is for sale in plaster-of-Paris and bronze busts in nearly every shop, in crude colours on teacups, in lithographs and picture postcards.’40
The number of propaganda posters fell from 240 in 1934 to 70 in 1937, but their print runs increased as the focus shifted towards the leader himself. When ordinary people made a fleeting appearance, it was always in relation to him: gazing up at him, carrying his portrait in parades, studying his texts, saluting him, singing songs about him and following him into a utopian future.41
Stalin, now all-pervasive, acquired a benign smile. The Congress of Victors had, after all, announced in 1934 that socialism had been achieved, and Stalin himself proclaimed one year later that ‘life has become more joyous’. There was a smiling Stalin surrounded by adoring crowds, and a smiling Stalin with joyous children presenting flowers. One image, circulated in its millions, showed him at a Kremlin reception in 1936 taking flowers from a small girl in a sailor suit named Gelia Markizova (her father was later shot as an enemy of the people). Stalin was Grandfather Frost, the Russian Santa Claus, beaming benevolently as children celebrated New Year’s Day. Everything, it seemed, was a gift from Stalin. Buses, tractors, schools, housing, collective farms, all were bestowed by Him, the ultimate dispenser of goods. Even adults, it seemed, were children, Stalin their father, or, rather, the ‘little father’, or batiushka, a term of endearment used for tsars who expressed concern over the welfare of their subjects. The constitution, passed at the height of the show trials in December 1936, was Stalin’s Constitution.42
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