Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  What is also clear is that Russification had its limits in the other Soviet republics. The USSR remained a multinational state and Stalin stayed committed to inducing non-Russians to assimilate themselves to the Soviet order. For this he needed schools and press to use local languages and for access to be open for the promotion of local national groups. National pride had to be fostered. Thus the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, who died in 1861, was celebrated the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. Similar trends occurred in Georgia and other Soviet republics in the south Caucasus as national literary figures were acclaimed. The process of getting the peoples of central Asia to assimilate their sentiments to the territorial units demarcated by the boundaries of Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan also continued; and the Belorussians, whose national consciousness had been weakly developed before 1917, continued to possess their own schools and press.

  This immense conglomeration of peoples, held together in the framework of a revolutionary state, required new forms of rulership. Stalin is wrongly depicted as simply a tsar in Red clothing. In several ways he could not have been more different from Nicholas II. It is true that both Stalin and Emperor Nicholas, apart from a few trips to the ballet, rarely appeared in public except on occasions of great state ceremony. But Nicholas and his wife regularly went to the places favoured by peasants for Christian pilgrimage. They passionately enjoyed attending the reburial of St Serafim of Sarov deep in Russia’s countryside in summer 1903.25 Stalin went nowhere regularly unless to his dacha or on holiday. He did not deign to receive groups of peasant petitioners as the tsars had done. Lenin had understood that such activities helped him to keep in touch with what was happening in the country at large and to enhance his popularity. This practice was shunned by Stalin long before he started to worry about his personal security: he must have known that peasants — and probably most workers too — would have given him an earful of complaints about the dreadful conditions in the country.

  There was an exception to his seclusion. Sister-in-law Maria Svanidze jotted down an account in her diary of an incident on his daughter’s birthday in November 1935. Svetlana wanted to take a ride on the new Moscow Metro and Maria was set to accompany her and her brother Vasili. At the last minute Stalin said he would join them together with Molotov. Kaganovich was flummoxed. Although he had ordered ten tickets in advance, he was alarmed by the security implications of the news that Stalin was going to be involved. When they arrived at Crimea Square, the walls of the newly opened Metro station had not yet dried out but normal passengers were already using it. Bystanders spotted Stalin while arrangements were being made for him and his companions to travel in a separate carriage with its own engine, and when they got out at Okhotny Ryad, the station nearest to the Kremlin, there were ovations from fellow passengers. Resuming their places in the carriage, they travelled onward on the Ring Line until Stalin decided it was time to return home.26

  Such an excursion might have been undertaken by Nicholas II if he had still been on the throne. But usually Stalin’s behaviour contrasted with his practice. He gave speeches and wrote articles on Soviet and world politics whereas the Romanovs left it to their bishops to give sermons: tsars did not characteristically write conspectuses of their intentions. Nicholas II was a Christian believer; he felt no need as a ruler to explain his faith to those outside his family. Stalin was of a different mould. He spent much time in the 1920s and 1930s working on manuscripts. It was hard, unremitting work. He dispensed with the services of shorthand typists: he thought they fidgeted too much. He wrote laboriously in his own hand rather than suffer distraction. No emperor since Catherine the Great had such a zest for writing — and Empress Catherine had written mainly to confidential correspondents such as Voltaire and Diderot: Stalin composed his literary stuff for the world. The Romanovs were by and large considerate to their ministers. Stalin enjoyed humiliating his subordinates; he traumatised and killed many of them. He was seldom courteous and never unmenacing. (Often when he turned on the charm, he made them wonder what devilishness he was preparing.) He scared his entourage witless. Not since Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great had there been a Russian ruler who set out to have this effect.

  A further point of difference between Stalin and the tsars in their styles of rulership was of a social nature. Repeatedly, he insisted at private gatherings that his political success was attributable to the support of ‘the masses’:27

  I don’t deny that leaders have an importance; they organise and lead the masses. But without the masses they’re nothing. People such as Hannibal and Napoleon perished as soon as they lost the masses. The masses decide the success of every cause and of historical destiny.

  Tsars did not talk this way. Indeed in June 1937 Stalin went further. Being used to toasting the health of People’s Commissars, he wanted respect to be given to ‘the tens of thousands’ of small and medium leaders: ‘They’re modest people. They don’t push themselves forward and are barely discernible. But it would be blindness not to notice them.’28

  He gave sharp expression to this attitude on 7 November 1937 at the October Revolution anniversary dinner, where he delivered a speech unrecorded in the press. The praktiki, he declared, were the intermediaries who maintained the link between the Kremlin and the masses. His rivals in the Soviet leadership in the 1920s had been more popular; but they overlooked the need to nurture the careers of functionaries in the lower ranks. When Dimitrov and others tried to praise him personally, he countered with a eulogy of the praktiki.29 His belief was that the defeat of the internal party oppositions, followed by the purges of recent months, had got rid of those leaders from higher echelons in pre-revolutionary society. He had said this in June 1937 to military commanders after the arrest and execution of Tukhachevski.30 Stalin was eager to prove that he and his surviving associates were better able than the privileged former émigrés to understand the needs of the working class and the peasantry. They themselves were from the lower depths — or at least many of them were. No Romanov emperor boasted of having no genealogical excellence.

  Yet there was a moment in the Moscow Metro episode when minds turned back to the Imperial epoch. At Okhotny Ryad station Stalin’s group left the train to try out the escalator. Meanwhile the passengers on the platform thrust forward into his carriage and stayed when Stalin returned and the train moved on:31

  Everything was very touching. J[oseph] was gently smiling the whole time, his eyes were kind [dobrye], kind and gentle. I think what touched him, for all his sobriety, was the love and attentiveness shown by the people for their leader [vozhd]. There was nothing artificial or formal about it. He sort of said about the ovations given to him: the people need a tsar: i.e. a person to whom they can bow low and in whose name they can live and work.

  This remark does not seem to refer exclusively to the Russians;32 probably Stalin had all the masses of the former Russian Empire in mind when he said it. Nevertheless he had revealed something important about his understanding of rulership in the USSR. To Stalin’s eyes, the mentality of most Soviet citizens not yet been transformed by the October Revolution. They needed to be ruled, at least to some extent, in a traditional way. And this meant they needed a ‘tsar’.

  Stalin was an avid reader of books about Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. He admired their forceful methods and condoned brutality in pursuit of the interests of the state. Evidently some tsars were more congenial as models than others. Even Ivan the Terrible fell short of being the apple of his eye. For Stalin, Ivan was too unsystematic in repressing his enemies. More generally, though, he adopted certain techniques of rulership from the tsars. Most Romanov rulers maintained an aura of mystery. Too much exposure to public view might have derogated from the dignity and authority of the Imperial throne. Stalin adhered to this tradition. Possibly he did this because he knew he did not sound entirely Russian. In fact there were Romanov emperors who had had the same problem: Catherine the Great was a German princess of t
he houses of Anhalt and Holstein. In Stalin’s case the difficulty was made greater by the fact that he, a Georgian ruling Russia, had an entourage with many who were also not Russians. Stalin, furthermore, had modified his political style. No longer did he have open office hours when ordinary party militants could come and consult him. He did not have his photograph taken with provincial delegations at Party Congresses; he did not submit his ideas to discussion on public occasions.

  Just a few traces of his ‘common touch’ persisted. Despite his enormous workload, Stalin still found time to pen personal notes to individuals who wrote to him about all manner of small matters. When the peasant woman Fekla Korshunova, aged seventy, sent a letter asking permission to present him with one of her four cows, he replied:33

  Thanks, mother [matushka], for your kind letter. I don’t have need of a cow since I don’t have a farm — I’m totally a state employee [sluzhashchii], I serve the people as best I can, and employees rarely have farms. My advice to you, mother, is to hold on to your cow and keep it in memory of me.

  This little response is a feather in the scale of his virtues; it is massively outweighed by the scale holding the records of his murderous misanthropy. But it shows that even in the terror years he was capable of kindness to strangers.

  Despite rationing the number of his public appearances, Stalin could not avoid giving speeches and having them recorded for Soviet newsreels. The party’s customs could be emasculated but not entirely abandoned. In order to confirm his legitimacy as Lenin’s successor he had to get up at Party Congresses and deliver the keynote addresses just as he was obliged to write articles and booklets explaining the latest versions of Marxist–Leninist doctrine. He never became an outstanding orator. He lacked a sense of timing; often he seemed to quicken up or slow down without a feeling for what he was saying.34 When he emphasised something, he did this with clumsy severity. Yet his primitiveness as a speaker also worked for him. Stalin wrote his own words; his message was always carefully considered. He delivered a speech with brusque directness. He was more like a general addressing his troops than a politician — or at times he was akin to a priest reading out a piece of liturgy whose details had ceased to engage his whole attention. Efforts to enliven such occasions were few. If ever there was humour, it was heavily sarcastic; and anecdotes drawn from his direct experience were notable for their rarity.

  Nor indeed did he adopt a paternalistic manner. No Romanov, not even the wilder ones such as Peter the Great, was so lacking in the social graces on public occasions. Stalin to the end of his life preserved the unrefined demeanour of the stereotypical veteran Bolshevik. No Bolshevik was more tsar-like than he; but he was still a Bolshevik.

  30. MIND OF TERROR

  Stalin frequently lied to the world when he was simultaneously lying to himself. If ever he called somebody a traitor, it was not only the minds of others he was manipulating. Needing to believe the worst of specific individuals or groups, he let his language slip from established fact to desired reality. This is detectable in the message he sent to Kaganovich in August 1934 after an abortive mutiny by the divisional artillery commander Nakhaev:1

  He is, of course (of course!), not on his own. He should be shoved against a wall and forced to tell — to divulge — the whole truth and then punished with total severity. He — he has to be — a Polish– German agent (or a Japanese one). The Chekists are becoming ridiculous when they discuss his ‘political views’ with him (and this is called interrogation!).

  Stalin was on vacation by the Black Sea at the time, hundreds of miles from Moscow. His sole knowledge of the Nakhaev incident had come through telegrams. He had been told that Nakhaev had tricked his troops into an insurrection; there was no evidence to incriminate Nakhaev in a wider plot. As for Nakhaev’s operating as a ‘Polish–German agent’, this was fanciful speculation. Stalin had confected a story for himself and others and then tried to apply a coating of feasibility.

  He seldom exposed his mental processes in public. He did not keep a diary, and the letters to his wife Nadya add little to what is known about his innermost thinking: at most he would refer briefly to his health, mood or the weather. More clues to his calculations emerge from his correspondence with Molotov, Kaganovich and other politicians. Often the contents were suspicious, conspiratorial and vengeful.2 He disbelieved that trouble happened by accident or by mistake. Plotters were at work everywhere, he assumed, and had to be discovered and punished.3 Stalin’s correspondence showed him imperious in pursuit of his purposes. When issuing instructions to Politburo members, he rarely asked for their opinions but always demanded total compliance. While believing in communism, he did not trust or respect communists.

  Trotski put down his recollections (and this became one of his main activities after being deported from the USSR in 1929). Molotov, Kaganovich and Mikoyan wrote informative memoirs.4 Stalin’s daughter and some of his in-laws also recorded their experiences.5 Sometimes Stalin blurted out something in their presence that gives us a piece of his mental jigsaw. This could be a casual statement to Molotov or to a close relative; it could equally be an improvised speech or a toast at a private banquet.6 Of course it would be foolish to forget that, when he spoke, he usually concealed something. Stalin watched people always as if they might be his enemies. Constantly he presented himself to individuals with a purpose in mind. He decided in advance what he wanted from them and adjusted his behaviour to this. He rarely raised his voice and his self-control was legendary among his associates.7 Even many of the intimate files are ambiguous evidence on the workings of Stalin’s mind. Yet he gave himself away in dribs and drabs; enough is available for subsequent generations to make plausible guesses.

  What has always been intriguing is how an undemonstrative bureaucrat of the 1920s turned into a mass killer.8 This puzzle results from analytical laziness. Even anti-communist scholars copied Trotski’s brilliant portraiture of Stalin.9 Yet Trotski gave a self-serving account. Remembering the Civil War, he stressed in particular how Stalin had conspired against party policy on the Red Army’s organisation; he failed to mention the vicious terror perpetrated by Stalin at that time. Trotski himself was an enthusiastic perpetrator of terror in the Civil War and had no incentive to castigate behaviour which he too displayed. He also disliked admitting that he should have been able to predict how Stalin might behave in the 1930s.

  Stalin’s propensity for violence, excessive even by Bolshevik norms, was observable soon after the October Revolution. In the Civil War he had put whole villages to the torch near the Southern Front in order to inspire fear among the peasantry.10 He had arrested Imperial Army officers in the Red forces on the slightest pretext and loaded them on to a barge on the River Volga: only a last-minute intervention from Moscow prevented him from drowning them.11 Even the ordinary conscripts in the Red Army had had grounds to be afraid. Stalin and his comrades on the Southern Front were reckless in their operational dispositions: the human losses in the forces under their command were unjustifiably high. Lenin, while confessing that he was no military expert, rebuked him for this at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919.12 A handful of ruthless comrades gathered around him as if he was their gang leader. His friends plotted together and stuck up for each other whenever the gang’s interests were threatened. Stalin was willing to pay any price in lives to attain his objectives. In all lives except his own. For Stalin the supreme criterion of political judgement was the need to protect and enhance his personal power.

  He was in his element when functioning in a chaotic environment. The trick he perfected in the Civil War had been the concoction of an atmosphere of suspicion and fanaticism unrestrained by moral scruple. He issued general objectives without specifying how they were to be attained. His supreme stipulation was that the objectives would be met; and if the measures involved heads being broken, he did not mind. While the world spun wildly, Stalin alone stayed tranquil and unmoved. This is how Stalin had liked it in the Civil War. His record as a political and m
ilitary leader had been known at that time but subsequently ignored.

  Yet although Stalin was ruthless and cynical, he was also optimistic in his own peculiar way. He regularly got rid of associates who queried his policies. His assumption was that people could always and easily be found to replace those who were deliberately slaughtered or who were inadvertently lost in the mayhem. ‘When the people makes its wishes clear,’ he said in a characteristically Delphic pronouncement, ‘people start to appear.’13 He was an eager promoter of the young and talented, and assumed that recruits from the working class and the peasantry could quickly master most specialised tasks. Middle-class experts in his opinion were a bane, and none were worse than the officers in the Imperial Army. Trotski stipulated that promotion should be given only on the basis of professional criteria; Lenin wavered from time to time, but he too was loath to get rid of individuals merely because of their class origins if genuine expertise was needed. Stalin was the real enthusiast in the party leadership for choosing on the premise of class. He took seriously the Leninist nostrum that communist leaders should release the potential of the lower social orders in the old society and that the tasks of socialist management were in fact simpler than the ‘bourgeois specialists’ contended.

  This outlook was not unique among Bolsheviks, even though Stalin held to it with a fanaticism such as no other Bolshevik exhibited. Not only Molotov and Kaganovich but also his other close associates shared his general attitudes. They had joined Stalin as they scrambled up the slippery pole of Soviet politics in the 1920s and 1930s. His enemies were theirs too, and they knew that their fate would be sealed if he tumbled from power. Like Stalin, they saw factional opponents as ‘swine’ and ‘scum’; and they began to compete in demanding severe sanctions. Voroshilov in a letter to Stalin in 1934 referred to Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev as ‘horrible little individuals, traitors, finished people’; and he added, ‘This poisonous and miserable scum ought to be annihilated.’14