How to Be a Dictator

by Frank Dikotter

  Every new expression was engineered from above. After the young writer Aleksandr Avdeenko concluded a speech in 1935 with a vote of thanks to the Soviet Union he was approached by Lev Mekhlis, Stalin’s personal secretary, who suggested that he should have thanked Stalin instead. A few months later Avdeenko’s words at the World Congress of Writers in Paris were broadcast to the Soviet Union, ending every sentence with a ritualistic ‘Thank you Stalin!’ and ‘For I am joyous, thank you Stalin!’ His career thrived, and on three subsequent occasions he received the Stalin Prize.43

  Less joyous writers were consigned to the gulag, the country’s sprawling system of concentration camps. Osip Mandelstam, one of Russia’s greatest poets, was arrested for reciting a sarcastic poem critical of the leader to close friends in 1934 and died in a transit camp a few years later. Others, from poets and philosophers to playwrights, were simply shot.

  Since the cult was supposed to reflect popular adoration, poems and songs composed by the labouring masses were widely propagated. From a Soviet Daghestan woman came the adulatory lines: ‘Above the valley, the mountain peak; Above the peak the sky. But Stalin, skies have no height to equal you, only your thoughts rise higher. The stars, the moon, pale before the sun that pales in turn before your shining mind’. Seidik Kvarchia, a collectivised farmer, composed a Song of Stalin: ‘The man who fought in front of all fighters, Who succoured orphans, widows and the aged; Before whom all enemies do tremble’.44

  Despite the carefully cultivated impression of spontaneity, by 1939 a rigid canon was imposed. Official newspapers, orators and poets all sang the same hymn, praising the ‘unmatched genius’, ‘the great and beloved Stalin’, ‘the leader and inspirer of the working classes of the whole world’, ‘the great and glorious Stalin, head and brilliant theoretician of the world revolution’. People knew when to applaud at public gatherings, and when to invoke his name on public occasions. Repetition was key, not innovation, meaning that excessive flattery could be dangerous, too. Stalin, noted Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the murdered poet, had no need of zealots of any kind: he wanted people to be obedient instruments of his will, with no convictions of their own. The party machine, more often than not through the chief of Stalin’s personal chancellery, Alexander Poskrebyshev, prescribed every word and picture. But Stalin himself was also a compulsive editor, poring over editorials, editing speeches and reviewing articles. In 1937 he neatly excised the expression ‘Greatest Man of our Time’ from a TASS agency report on the May Day parade. Stalin was a gardener, constantly pruning his own cult, cutting back here and there to allow it to flourish in good season.45

  Stalinism entered the vocabulary when Stalin judged the time to be ripe. Lazar Kaganovich, the first true Stalinist, allegedly proposed ‘Let’s replace Long Live Leninism with Long Live Stalinism!’ at a dinner with Stalin in the early 1930s. Stalin modestly declined, but the term occurred with increasing frequency from the very moment the constitution was passed on 5 December 1936: ‘Our constitution is Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism’. Several weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, Sergo Ordzhonikidze used the expression to great applause in a speech entitled ‘Our Country is Invincible’, proclaiming how Stalin motivated an army of 170 million people armed with ‘Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism’.46

  Stalin’s 1924 lectures, published as Foundations of Leninism, sold swiftly after 1929, and by 1934 more than sixteen million copies of the leader’s various works were in circulation. But Leninism was not Stalinism. A founding text similar to Mein Kampf was required. This was all the more urgent since no official biography of Stalin existed. Potential hagiographers found the task daunting, as the past was continually changing. It was one thing to airbrush a dead commissar out of a photograph, quite another to keep on amending a biography. Even Henri Barbusse’s book fell from favour soon after its publication in 1935, since it mentioned leaders who had been arrested.47

  The Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party was the answer. It presented a direct line of succession from Marx and Engels to Lenin and Stalin. Every episode of the party’s history was covered, presenting the reader with a clear narrative in which the correct party line, represented by Lenin and his follower Stalin, had been opposed by a string of devious anti-party cliques that had been successfully eliminated along the path to socialism. The Short Course was commissioned in 1935 by Stalin, who demanded several revisions and edited the full text on five occasions before allowing its publication, to great fanfare, in September 1938. The book became a canonical text that deified Stalin as the living fount of wisdom, selling more than forty-two million copies in Russian alone, with translations into sixty-seven languages.48

  On 21 December 1939 Stalin turned sixty. Six months earlier in Berlin leaders had queued up at the chancellery to offer their best wishes to Hitler. In Moscow the congratulations were a public exercise in self-abasement, as party leaders published lengthy paeans in a twelve-page edition of Pravda. ‘The Greatest Man of our Time,’ gushed Lavrentiy Beria, the new head of the NKVD. ‘Stalin, the Great Driver of the Locomotive of History,’ declared Lazar Kaganovich. ‘Stalin is Today’s Lenin,’ proclaimed Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan. Stalin, the entire Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet wrote, was ‘The most beloved and dearest man of our country and of the working people of all the world’. Upon the ‘Great Continuer of Lenin’s Task – Comrade Stalin’, they bestowed the order of Hero of Socialist Labour.49

  Stalin required abasement from his entourage, boundless enthusiasm from the masses, whose gifts arrived from every corner of the Soviet Union. It was their long-awaited chance to repay Stalin, the ultimate carer and provider, with a token of their undying gratitude. There were drawings from children, photographs from factories, paintings and busts by amateurs, telegrams from admirers, a tidal wave of offerings that required a month of acknowledgements in the pages of Pravda. Selected items were displayed in the Museum of the Revolution as a testament to the people’s devotion.50

  Among the many foreign well-wishers was Adolf Hitler. ‘Please accept my most sincere congratulations on your sixtieth birthday. I take this occasion to tender my best wishes. I wish you personally good health and a happy future for the peoples of the friendly Soviet Union.’51

  For the best part of a decade Stalin and Hitler had observed each other with a mixture of growing wariness and grudging admiration. ‘Hitler, what a great fellow!’ Stalin exclaimed after the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler, for his part, found the Great Terror deeply impressive. But Stalin had read Mein Kampf carefully, including those passages where its author promised to erase Russia from the map. ‘Never forget,’ Hitler had written, ‘that the rulers of present-day Russia are bloodstained common criminals. We are dealing with the scum of humanity.’52

  After the Munich Agreement in September 1938 Stalin called a halt to the Great Terror. Its main executioner, Nikolai Yezhov, was purged in November and replaced by Beria. By this time Stalin was surrounded by sycophants. Every potential opponent within the leadership had fallen victim to the purges. Since insufficient zeal in supporting the party line could be construed as disloyalty, the secret service had even turned against those who remained silent. Stalin had no friends, only underlings; no allies, only flatterers. As a result, he alone took all major decisions.

  On 23 August 1939 Stalin stunned the world by signing a non-aggression pact with Hitler, in what seemed a brilliant if highly risky move in an unprincipled power game. By freeing Germany from the need to wage war on two fronts, the Soviet Union could sit back and watch the capitalist countries fight each other to exhaustion. Within weeks it became clear that there were secret clauses to the pact, as the Soviet Union invaded half of Poland.

  Hitler also gave Stalin a free hand in Finland, and in November 1939 the Soviet Union attacked its tiny neighbour. What should have been an easy victory turned into a bloody stalemate, with more than 120,000 Soviet casualties. The Great Terror had clearly crippled the Red Army, since some 30,000 officers had fallen vict
im to Stalin’s purges. Three of the army’s five marshals had been executed. A peace treaty was signed in March 1940, but the experience left the Kremlin in shock. Finland exposed the military weakness of the Soviet Union.53

  The country’s carefully fostered reputation as a peace-loving nation was also shattered. The League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union. Abroad, some who identified with the ideals of socialism now viewed Joseph Stalin as the equivalent of Adolf Hitler.

  Stalin had badly miscalculated. In order to prepare a defensive line against Germany, he invaded the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and made them into Soviet protectorates. This plan, too, was short-sighted, based on his belief that Hitler would become bogged down in France. But German troops reached Paris within less than five weeks. It now seemed as if Hitler would be able to secure one of Germany’s flanks far sooner than expected and turn his tanks against the Soviet Union. By May 1941 a mounting tide of evidence from Stalin’s own intelligence services pointed to a massive German military build-up along the frontier. Stalin, relying on experience and intuition, dismissed it as mere provocation. In the words of historian Robert Service, in his supreme confidence Stalin had unwittingly prepared ‘the conditions for the greatest military disaster of the twentieth century’.54

  Stalin was in bed in his dacha some two hundred kilometres outside Moscow when more than three million German soldiers poured across the border. Chief of General Staff Georgy Zhukov, who had warned him repeatedly of an impending invasion, phoned his master, who hurried back to the Kremlin. He still believed it was a conspiracy, until hours later the German ambassador clarified the situation: Germany was at war with the Soviet Union. Stalin was distraught, but recovered quickly, establishing a Supreme Command packed with his political commissars. Then he abandoned the Kremlin, returning to his dacha, where he skulked for several days.

  German tanks rolled across the vast plains of western Russia, with separate formations smashing their way to Leningrad in the north and Kiev in the south. Along the way many Soviets welcomed the troops as liberators, especially in Ukraine where millions had starved during the famine. But Hitler viewed all as racial degenerates, to be reduced to serfdom.

  On 3 July 1941 Stalin spoke over the radio, preparing the Soviet people for war by appealing to patriotism rather than communism. Crowds gathered to listen to the broadcast in city squares, ‘holding their breath in such profound silence that one could hear every inflection of Stalin’s voice’, according to one foreign observer. For several minutes after he had finished the silence continued. Overnight, at home and abroad, he became the defender of freedom. Alexander Werth, a journalist based in Moscow, remembered that ‘the Soviet people now felt that they had a leader to look to’.55

  Stalin, back in control, ordered that every town be defended to the last, very much against the advice of his generals. Instead of ordering a strategic withdrawal from Kiev, he allowed the Ukrainian capital to be encircled, with half a million troops trapped inside. But the arrival of winter a month later, combined with fierce resistance from Russian troops, halted the German advance on Moscow. In December 1941 the United States entered the war, tilting the balance back in favour of the Soviet Union. By then over two million Red Army soldiers had been killed, and 3.5 million taken prisoner.

  Stalin did not quite vanish from view after his radio address, but appeared only fleetingly during the war’s first years. He did not write for the newspapers, and he rarely spoke in public, passing up every opportunity to inspire and motivate his people. Pravda published occasional photographs, showing him as army commander with a military cap and a single red star, his uniform decorated with imposing epaulettes. But he seemed more a disembodied symbol of the war effort than a Supreme Commander leading his people in the Great Patriotic War. No information was divulged on his activities or his family life. His seclusion had the advantage, one foreign journalist noted, that there was no clash between image and reality since the public knew so little about their leader.56

  Only after the Battle of Stalingrad turned the tide of war in February 1943, ending the threat to the oil fields of the Caucasus, did Stalin return to centre stage. He promoted many of his officers, awarding himself the title of Marshal of the Soviet Union. Newspapers were peppered with new expressions, from ‘Stalinist strategy’ and ‘the Stalinist military school of thought’ to the ‘military genius of Stalin’. His proclamations following each victory were solemnly read over the radio and marked by a salute of guns, with 1944 celebrated as the year of the ‘ten Stalinist blows’.57

  Stalin also presented himself as a key player on the world stage, a great and dignified statesman with a grey moustache and silver hair. He was shown in the company of foreign dignitaries in a wood-panelled room in the Kremlin, standing back as his underlings signed treaties. He appeared next to British prime minister Winston Churchill and US president Franklin D. Roosevelt in summit meetings in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam, planning the post-war world. His smile returned, as he sat majestically in his marshal’s greatcoat, one of the world’s great statesmen.58

  The world’s great figures who shuffled through Stalin’s office said good words about him. ‘I like him the more I see him,’ pronounced Churchill, unaware of just how much Stalin despised and belittled him. The Americans agreed. A credulous Roosevelt perceived something beyond a revolutionary in Stalin’s nature, namely a ‘Christian gentleman’. Truman, who succeeded to the presidency after Roosevelt passed away, confided to his diary: ‘I can deal with Stalin. He is honest – but smart as hell.’ His secretary of state James Byrnes held that ‘The truth is he is a very likeable person.’ Stalin enthralled foreign journalists, who routinely referred to him as Uncle Joe.59

  Even some of Stalin’s own people liked him. Terror and propaganda had advanced hand in hand throughout the 1930s, with millions starved, imprisoned or executed. Only the most foolhardy foreign admirer could believe that his own victims genuinely adored the perpetrator of so much human misery. When Nadezhda Mandelstam was forced to seek work in a textile factory in Strunino, a small town just outside Moscow, she discovered that during the Great Terror local people were so embittered that they routinely referred to Stalin as ‘the pockmarked fellow’. But almost everyone was traumatised by a war waged with unparalleled savagery, as the invaders went far beyond the battlefield to torture, murder and enslave, determined to crush people they considered racially inferior.60

  Entire cities were starved into submission, with a million lives claimed just in the twenty-eight-month siege of Leningrad. More than seven million civilians were killed in occupied areas, not counting a further four million who died of hunger or disease. Some twenty-five million people were made homeless, with 70,000 villages erased from the map. Perhaps understandably, some people looked up to Stalin, needing someone to believe in. The propaganda machine conflated Stalin and the motherland as one and the same. He was the leader of a just war, the Supreme Commander of a Red Army that would not only liberate the motherland but also exact revenge.61

  Yet even as war worked wonders in enhancing his reputation, large swathes of the population apparently remained indifferent. Propaganda relentlessly projected an image of a potent and sage leader rallying the masses against the common enemy, but when a British journalist spent a week travelling by train from Murmansk to Moscow, speaking to dozens of soldiers, railway workers and civilians from all walks of life, Stalin’s name was not mentioned once.62

  Distrust of the one-party state ran deep in the countryside, where young men were drafted into the army. Many new recruits were religious villagers who wrote letters back home ending with the words ‘Long Live Jesus Christ’. In 1939 some of them defaced busts of Lenin and Stalin, driving political instructors to sheer despair. It was the propagandists in the army who cared most about Stalin. These attitudes changed after the imposition of ruthless discipline in 1941. In July 1942 Stalin issued Order Number 227, ‘Not a Step Backward!’, treating disobedience or retreat as treason. Spec
ial units were placed behind the front line to shoot laggards, leaving the troops in no doubt as to whom they should fear most, Stalin or Hitler. More generally, the regime showed little regard for the lives of its soldiers. Those injured or mutilated while fighting received heartless treatment, with many rounded up and deported to the gulag.63

  The Red Army was destroyed and renewed at least twice, but Stalin could afford to lose more tanks and more people than Hitler. On their way to Berlin, the German capital, the troops engaged in widespread looting, pillaging and rape, more often than not with the approval of their commanders, including Stalin.64

  Stalin ran the war as he ran everything else, singlehandedly. In the words of Isaac Deutscher, one of his earliest biographers, ‘He was in effect his own commander-in-chief, his own minister of defence, his own quartermaster, his own minister of supply, his own foreign minister, and even his own chef de protocol.’ As the red flag went up over Berlin, he was the great victor. Yet Stalin, more paranoid than ever, distrusted the army. The real hero was Chief of General Staff and Deputy Chief Supreme Commander Georgy Zhukov, who had led the westward march towards Hitler’s bunker. In Moscow the population called him ‘our St George’, from the patron saint of the capital. Zhukov led the victory parade in Red Square on 24 June 1945, although he understood his master well enough to refer to him as ‘the captain of genius’ in his tribute. The party line relentlessly glorified ‘Our great genius and leader of troops, comrade Stalin, to whom we owe our historic victory’. That same month, Stalin gave himself the ultimate accolade, bestowing upon himself the title of Generalissimo.65

  A year later, after his colleagues had been tortured into providing incriminating evidence, Zhukov was consigned to inner exile in the provinces. His name was no longer mentioned. Victory Day celebrations were suspended after 1946, memoirs by soldiers, officers and generals forbidden. In the official memory of the war, everyone receded into the background, allowing Stalin alone to shine. In 1947 a Short Biography of Stalin, designed for ordinary readers, was published to great fanfare. Strikingly similar to Henri Barbusse’s hagiography published in 1935, it sold as many as eighteen million copies by 1953. The chapter on the Great Patriotic War mentioned none of his generals, least of all Zhukov, portraying Stalin as the architect of victory.66