Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  Prudence held him back from announcing the NEP’s abandonment. In economics, moreover, there was more than a hint of Trotski’s ideas in his new measures. Better for Stalin to pretend that he was building up the legacy of Lenin. At the same time, though, he wanted to assert his status as supreme party leader. It was no longer enough to appear as his master’s voice: Stalin had to impose his own persona. A fine chance came with his fiftieth-birthday celebrations in December 1929.1 Pravda fired a barrage of eulogies about his past and present contribution to the revolutionary cause. There had been nothing like it since Lenin’s fiftieth birthday in April 1920 when Stalin had been among the leading eulogists. Stalin could gloat. He had survived the storms of censure about Lenin’s Testament and subsequent public criticism in the decade. At the banquet in Stalin’s honour he listened to the series of speeches itemising his virtues and achievements. The underestimated General Secretary had scaled the peak of the All-Union Communist Party, the Soviet state and the Communist International.

  He behaved imperiously. Earlier he had been renowned for his common touch and had seemed so ‘democratic’ in comparison with most other party leaders.2 A young Nikita Khrushchëv never forgot the impression Stalin made on him at the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925. His Ukrainian delegation asked Stalin to have his photograph taken with them. Petrov the photographer shouted instructions about the pose he wanted. Stalin quipped: ‘Comrade Petrov loves to order people around. He orders people around even though that’s now prohibited here. No more ordering people around!’3 Khrushchëv and his friends were entranced: Stalin appeared one of their own sort. It was a proletarian revolution, they thought, and a working-class fellow was running the party which had made it. But the gap between him and his followers was widening. He demanded complete obedience and often interfered in their private lives. Taking a dislike to Kaganovich’s beard, he ordered him to shave it off and threatened to do the job himself with his wife Nadya’s scissors.4 Probably Stalin wanted the Politburo to be identified with beardless modernity, but he had a crusty way of obtaining his purposes.

  He had clambered up the ziggurat of power whose apex was the Politburo. Its members took the great decisions on political, economic, national and military policy. The Politburo’s agenda regularly included items on culture, religion and law. Stalin had no rivals among its members. These included Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Anastas Mikoyan and Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Though dominant in the Politburo, Stalin did not chair it. The tradition persisted that the chairman of Sovnarkom should perform this task.5 Stalin understood the instincts of the party. Like the Roman emperor Augustus who avoided awarding himself the title of king (rex) while founding a monarchy, he sacrificed personal vanity to the reality of supreme power. His main title was Party General Secretary — and sometimes he just signed himself as Secretary.6 His most important supporters were Molotov and Kaganovich. Both were determined and ideologically committed politicians — and Stalin had steadily imposed his will on them. They referred to him as the Boss (Khozyain). (They did this out of his hearing. Although he allowed a few old comrades to call him Koba, his growing preference was for fellow politicians to use ‘comrade Stalin’ or ‘Iosif Vissarionovich’.) Scarcely an important Politburo matter was settled in contradiction of his wishes.

  He never stopped working even on holiday by the Black Sea. His personal assistants went with him and he dealt with important matters requiring his immediate adjudication by telegram. Molotov and Kaganovich kept in regular contact. Stalin himself continued to consult other communist leaders on the coast: they queued to have meetings with him. But this was a sideshow to the main drama. Moscow was Stalin’s preoccupation and he ensured that the two men he left in the capital shared his general vision of what kind of revolution was desirable. He had chosen well.

  When he was in Moscow, too, Stalin devolved much responsibility to Molotov and Kaganovich. He bothered ever less frequently to convoke the Politburo. From seventy-five sessions in 1924 the number declined to fifty-three in 1928 and down again to twenty-four in 1933. Decisions were taken by polling the members by telephone, and this facilitated his ability to manipulate and control.7 It was usually Kaganovich who chaired the Orgburo and Secretariat. In September 1930 Stalin wrote to Molotov about the need to get rid of Rykov and for Molotov to take his place.8 Others in Stalin’s entourage felt unhappy — and perhaps also jealous — about the plan for Molotov’s promotion, and Voroshilov suggested that Stalin himself should take over Sovnarkom so as to bring about the ‘unification of leadership’. Molotov lacked ‘the gifts of a strategist’.9 Having enjoyed the praise, Stalin rejected the advice and gave the post to Molotov. He wanted to concentrate his own energies on the party and on the Comintern while knowing that Molotov would loyally carry out the tasks given to him.

  The Orgburo, Secretariat and Sovnarkom dealt with matters which had to be referred to the Politburo if internal dispute arose. Stalin was kept informed about everything impinging on general policy or his personal interests. The three leaders anyway had to stick together. The Soviet economy had been exposed to the maelstrom of forced-rate industrialisation and forcible mass collectivisation. Popular disturbances were commonplace. The internal party opposition had been crushed but not liquidated, and the concern remained that Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin or even Trotski might return to exploit the situation.

  Stalin’s supporters also ran the various People’s Commissariats and other state institutions. No room was allowed for half-heartedness. If supporters wished to keep their posts they had to comply to the full. In September 1929 his Chekist brother-in-law Stanisław Redens brought the news to Stalin’s attention that OGPU chief Vladimir Menzhinski had disciplined his officials for ‘diseased phenomena’ in their work. This was an attempt to put a brake on the implementation of official policies. Stalin wanted zeal and results, not procedural regularity. He wrote to Menzhinski indicating the ‘evil’ of his ways.10 Menzhinski’s deputy Genrikh Yagoda risked similar reproof a year later when he wrote to Stalin about the ‘crude compulsion of poor and middling peasants to enter the kolkhozes’.11 Stalin also kept up the pressure on the Party Central Control Commission. This was the body which adjudicated cases of disobedience to party policies; it was also meant to protect Bolsheviks against an over-mighty central party apparatus but this function had passed into desuetude. Stalin used the Central Control Commission under Ordzhonikidze to bully the oppositionist groups out of existence — and he was not slow to upbraid his ally Ordzhonikidze for lack of zeal in prosecuting troublemakers.12

  Joint meetings of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission were also used as a means of getting Stalin’s favoured policies validated. He pulled this trick whenever he thought he might meet with criticism in the Central Committee. The result was satisfactory for him. The OGPU, Central Control Commission and Central Committee were bodies which supervised all Soviet public life, and they were held under the authority of Stalin and his leading group.

  Having defeated the Left Opposition and Right Deviation, Stalin allowed individual oppositionists back into public life on strict terms. If they petitioned for rehabilitation he demanded that they should recant like an accused heretic before the Spanish Inquisition. Abject public self-criticism was demanded and, often enough, obtained. Many Trotskyists in particular were attracted by the high priority accorded to fast industrial growth; never having been principled democrats, they forgot their demands for the restoration of democracy to party and soviets and joined the Stalin group. Pyatakov and Preobrazhenski were among them. Not that Stalin was going to trust them regardless of what they said in public. In September 1930 he wrote to Molotov:13

  Careful surveillance needs to be maintained for a while over Pyatakov, that genuinely rightist Trotskyist (a second Sokolnikov) who now represents the most harmful element in the composition of the block of Rykov-Pyatakov plus the Kondratevite-Defeatist mood of bureaucrats from the Soviet apparatus.

  Stalin remained uneasy abou
t factional regrouping. His operational code was: once an oppositionist, always an oppositionist. If given reason to re-expel adversaries from public life, he was unlikely to take a kindly approach.

  This tendency to see conspiratorial linkages among those who were not on his side was detectable in a note he sent to Ordzhonikidze in 1930. The OGPU had conducted interrogations of a large number of former Imperial Army officers and discovered that several had put their political hopes in Mikhail Tukhachevski. Although not a scintilla of proof was found that Tukhachevski planned a coup d’état, Stalin’s suspicion deepened:14

  At any rate, Tukhachevski has turned out to be captive to anti-Soviet elements and has been especially worked over by anti-Soviet elements from the ranks of the Rightists. That’s what comes out of the materials [of the interrogations]. Is this possible? Of course it’s possible once it has failed to be excluded. Obviously the Rightists are ready to go to the lengths of a military dictatorship if only this would free them from the C[entral] C[ommittee], from kolkhozes and sovkhozes, from Bolshevik rates of development of industry.

  Stalin was in no doubt: Tukhachevski, Kondratev and Bukharin were leading figures in this disloyal ‘camp’ of the Rightists.15 Only after the OGPU had done its work did he allow himself to believe that Tukhachevski was ‘100% clean’.16

  He drove his ideas like iron bolts into the minds of his associates. Molotov, Ordzhonikidze, Kaganovich, Voroshilov and a few others were his confidants, and his implicit objective was to form a fanatical Kremlin gang devoted to himself as boss. Anyone who got in his way was expelled. In October 1930 he took offence at the People’s Commissar for Finances. He wrote to the Politburo ordering: ‘Hang Bryukhanov by the balls for all his present and future sins. If his balls hold out, consider him acquitted in court; if they don’t hold out, drown him in the river.’17 Stalin drew a picture of Bryukhanov suspended in the air and attached to a pulley by a rope which was tugging his penis and testicles back through his legs. Sometimes, though, he aimed his ridicule at himself. Writing to Voroshilov in March 1929, he mocked his own grandiose image: ‘World Leader [Vozhd]? Go fuck his mother!’18

  Yet although Stalin could chaff himself in this fashion, he let no gang members do the same to him: his dignity mattered a great deal to him. So too did his authority. It was he who decided who could join and who should leave the gang. He also told the gang who its enemies were. He cajoled the members to regard their critics as the worst renegades. Indeed by 1932 he told Kaganovich to get Pravda to ‘curse crudely and sharply’ not only Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries but also Right Deviationists and Trotskyists as being advocates of the restoration of capitalism.19 The intention was evident. Stalin and the Kremlin gang were to regard themselves as the sole repository of political wisdom and socialist commitment. The people of the USSR should be led to believe that only the ascendant party leadership would truly try to supply society with material and social welfare and that anti-Stalinists would drag the country down and back to the bad old days of greedy factory owners, bankers and landlords. Vilification of opponents should therefore be taken to the point of the fantasy that Bukharin and Trotski were in league with the capitalist West.

  Stalin turned all criticism of himself into a drama. Slight divergence from his wishes was treated as personal betrayal and political treason. He transmitted this attitude to his followers and got them to gang up on those whom he wished to topple. On vacation in September 1929, he sent a furious note to Politburo members Molotov, Voroshilov and Ordzhonikidze:20

  Have you read Rykov’s speech? In my opinion it represents the speech of a non-party Soviet bureaucrat disguised by the tone of someone ‘loyal’ and ‘sympathetic’ to the Soviets. Not a word about the party! Not a word about the Right Deviation! Not a word about the party’s achievements which Rykov dirtily accredits to himself but which in fact were made through struggle with the Rightists, including Rykov himself… I have discovered that Rykov is continuing to act as [Politburo] chairman for you on Mondays and Thursdays. Is this true? If it’s true, why are you permitting such a comedy? Who needs it and for what purpose?

  Molotov instantly obeyed: ‘It’s obvious to me… that St[alin] is right. My only disagreement is that we’re “sheltering” Rykov. We must, however, correct the matter as proposed by St[alin].’21

  It was easy for Stalin, the Soviet political counterpart of Al Capone, to find new gang members.22 As his previous supporters were found wanting in zeal or efficiency, he promoted others. Some were among the most unappealing figures in Soviet public life. Andrei Vyshinski, a former Menshevik, became Chief Prosecutor in 1935. His basic proposition that confession (which could be obtained by torture) was the queen of the modalities of judicial proof was music to Stalin’s ears. Lavrenti Beria, First Party Secretary of the Transcaucasian Federation until his promotion in 1938 to the leadership of the NKVD (which incorporated the OGPU from 1934), had a penchant for beating his prisoners personally. Nikolai Yezhov, promiscuous bisexual and alcoholic, was even quicker to jump to the worst conclusions about individuals than Stalin was. Stalin was to make him NKVD chief in 1936. Others such as Nikita Khrushchëv, who headed the Moscow City Party Committee from 1935, had a decent side; but this did not stop him from doing his share of killing in the Great Terror.

  Stalin did not overlook the Comintern. Bukharin had supervised its Executive Committee on the Politburo’s behalf since Zinoviev’s demise. With the falling out between Stalin and Bukharin in 1928, this body became an area of contention, and Bukharin was ejected from the Executive Committee in April 1929. For some time Stalin relied upon Dmitri Manuilski and Osip Pyatnitski to run the show for him in the Comintern. They held the main European communist parties to account. A tight hierarchy controlled what went on in German, Italian and French communism. The system of command was reinforced by the presence in Moscow of leading and trusted leaders on secondment from their native countries. Among them were Ernst Meyer, Palmiro Togliatti and Maurice Thorez. But the Comintern did not limit itself to long-distance control. Agents were sent on lengthy missions. Thus the Hungarian Eugen Fried was dispatched to Paris and kept in regular contact with the Politburo of the French Communist Party; and communists in France attempted little without prior sanction being obtained from him.23 The Comintern had been strictly controlled since its foundation in 1919; but the degree of interference rose in the 1930s as Stalin sought to ensure that nothing done by communists abroad would damage the interests of what he was attempting in the USSR.

  It did not come easily to Stalin to offer a reasoned critique. In fact it did not come to him at all. He was a political streetfighter: no holds were barred. He believed this was what the situation required. Although he confected a risible image of his enemies, his worries about the position of himself and his associates were not entirely unrealistic. They had jerked the rudder of policies away from the NEP and set a course for rapid and violent economic transformation. The gang had to take responsibility for the consequences. They could expect no mercy unless they could guarantee an increase in economic and military capacity. It made sense to blackguard the critics in case things went wrong. Citing Lenin’s words at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921, Stalin told Kaganovich that factional dissent from the ascendant leadership’s line would result in the emergence of ‘White Guard’ tendencies and ‘the defence of capitalism’.24 Lenin had said no such thing. But this did not matter to Stalin: he wanted to sharpen the siege mentality already experienced by his fellow Politburo members and the repetition of outlandish accusations suited this desire.

  While rehabilitating several repentant members of the United Opposition, Stalin showed no indulgence to the unapologetic Trotski. In January 1929 the Politburo discussed what to do with the man who was capable of causing them most trouble. From exile in Alma-Ata, Trotski was producing ripples in Moscow. His remaining supporters tended his memory in hope that his restoration to power would not long be postponed. Even members of Stalin’s entourage urged him to bring Trotski ba
ck since the basic official economic orientation was what Trotski had long recommended (and Aaron Solts said to Ordzhonikidze that Trotski would bring greater intelligence to the policies).25 Trotski offered no word of compromise to Stalin, who for his part feared that until he got rid of his old enemy there would always be a danger that Trotski would exploit whatever difficulties arose in the First Five-Year Plan.

  Yet Stalin did not yet call for his physical liquidation. No veteran Bolshevik had been executed for political dissent. The alternative to Alma-Ata was deportation from the USSR. Already in summer 1927 Stalin had considered sending him to Japan.26 The Politburo came to its decision on 10 January 1929 and Trotski was expelled for ‘anti-Soviet work’.27 Turkey was the destination chosen. Trotski and his family set sail across the Black Sea on the steamship Ilich. The Politburo calculated that he would be shunned by the parties of the Comintern (as he was) and ignored by the world’s capitalist powers (as he was). But Trotski was not finished. He started to publish a regular Bulletin of the Opposition from abroad. Expelled from party and country, he had nothing to lose. What was disconcerting to Stalin was that Trotski’s contact with the USSR remained unbroken. The Bulletin reported on controversies in the central party leadership. Trotski knew the Moscow political gossip; he also dredged his memory for instances of Stalin’s stupidity and nastiness and described them in his autobiography28 — and he knew that Stalin hated being ridiculed or criticised. Distribution of the Bulletin was clandestine, but this had also been the case with the Bolshevik faction before 1917. Deportation was not the cure for the ills of Trotskyism.

  Stalin did not repeat the gaffe of letting an oppositionist leader out of his clutches. In summer 1929 he learned that Vissarion Lominadze and a few other second-rank Bolsheviks were criticising the style and policies of his leadership. In the following year there was further trouble. Lominadze had been talking also to the Chairman of the RSFSR Sovnarkom, Sergei Syrtsov. Stalin drew the worst possible conclusion, writing to Molotov:29