Ostensibly he acted as he did because evidence was brought to him that ‘enemies of the people’ — imperialist agents, subversives and counter-revolutionaries — had been exposed by the NKVD. Stalin was so suspicious that he probably persuaded himself that many of those whom he condemned to the Gulag or to execution were genuinely guilty of such crimes against the state. The nearest he came to witnessing the result of his barbarism was when he held confrontations between some broken leader willing to ‘confess’ and some other leader who was being denounced but had not yet been arrested. At the confrontation with Kulikov in December 1936, Bukharin was like a butterfly seeing the needle about to pin him to a board.
Yet although Stalin apparently derived satisfaction from such confrontations, he organised them only in the period when he still needed the sanction of his Politburo comrades for particular verdicts. After early 1937 he dropped them as being no longer necessary. Throughout the last months of 1937 the purges continued. They affected both central and local functionaries as well as ‘ordinary’ people. Awards were announced for the heroic butchers in the NKVD. Yezhov’s name became second only to Stalin’s in official esteem. On 16 December it was the turn of Abel Enukidze and fellow defendants to be tried by a Military Collegium as spies, bourgeois nationalists and terrorists. This was done in secret and in quick order. They were all shot.24
In March 1938 it was the turn of Bukharin. Along with him in the dock were three others who had belonged to the Party Central Committee in Lenin’s time: Alexei Rykov, Nikolai Krestinski and Christian Rakovski. Yagoda was also a defendant, as were several lesser figures. The third great show trial was organised by those leading figures in the NKVD who had as yet survived the Great Terror. The charges were as bizarre as before. Bukharin in particular was said to have plotted in 1918 to murder Lenin and Stalin and seize power. He parried this particular accusation while accepting political responsibility for the anti-Stalin conspiracies alleged to exist in the late 1930s. Krestinski was less cooperative. At his first appearance in court he retracted his prison testimony. Next day, looking still more haggard, he reverted to the testimony agreed with his captors. Nearly all the accused had been savagely beaten. Bukharin was spared this but was visibly a broken man. From his prison cell he had written a note to Stalin: ‘Koba, why is my death necessary for you?’ But Stalin wanted blood. Constantly consulted by Chief Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinski and Vasili Ulrikh at the end of the court’s working day, he ordered that the world’s press should be convinced of the veracity of the confessions before sentences were passed.25 Many Western journalists were indeed hoodwinked. The verdict was announced on 13 March: nearly all the defendants were to be shot.
Two days later Stalin approved a further operation to purge ‘anti-Soviet elements’. This time he wanted 57,200 people to be arrested across the USSR. Of these, he and Yezhov had agreed, fully 48,000 were to be rapidly tried by troiki and executed. Yezhov, by now practised at the management of such operations, attended to his duties with enthusiasm. Through spring, summer and autumn 1938 the carnage continued as the NKVD meat-grinder performed its grisly task on Stalin’s behalf. Having put Yezhov’s hand at the controls and ordered him to start the machine, Stalin could keep it running as long as it suited him.
Stalin never saw the Lubyanka cellars. He did not even glimpse the meat-grinder of the operations. Yezhov asked for and received vast resources for his work. He needed more than his executive officials in the NKVD to complete it. The Great Terror required stenographers, guards, executioners, cleaners, torturers, clerks, railwaymen, truck drivers and informers. Lorries marked ‘Meat’ or ‘Vegetables’ took victims out to rural districts such as Butovo near Moscow where killing fields had been prepared. Trains, often travelling through cities by night, transported Gulag prisoners to the Russian Far North, to Siberia or to Kazakhstan in wagons designed for cattle. The unfortunates were inadequately fed and watered on the journey, and the climate — bitterly cold in the winter and monstrously hot in summer — aggravated the torment. Stalin said he did not want the NKVD’s detainees to be given holiday-home treatment. The small comforts that had been available to him in Novaya Uda, Narym, Solvychegodsk or even Kureika were systematically withheld. On arrival in the labour camps they were kept constantly hungry. Yezhov’s dieticians had worked out the minimum calorie intake for them to carry out heavy work in timber felling, gold mining or building construction; but the corruption in the Gulag was so general that inmates rarely received their full rations — and Stalin made no recorded effort to discover what conditions were really like for them.
Such was the chaos of the Great Terror that despite Stalin’s insistence that each victim should be formally processed by the troiki, the number of arrests and executions has not been ascertained with exactitude. Mayhem precluded such precision. But all the records, different as they are about details, point in the same general direction. Altogether it would seem that a rough total of one and a half million people were seized by the NKVD in 1937–8. Only around two hundred thousand were eventually released. To be caught in the maw of the NKVD usually meant to face a terrible sentence. The troiki worked hard at their appalling task. The impression got around — or was allowed to get around — that Stalin used nearly all of the arrestees as forced labourers in the Gulag. In fact the NKVD was under instructions to deliver about half of its victims not to the new camps in Siberia or north Russia but to the execution pits outside most cities. Roughly three quarters of a million persons perished under a hail of bullets in that brief period of two years. The Great Terror had its ghastly logic.
32. THE CULT OF IMPERSONALITY
The Lenin cult glistened like a film of oil over the dark ocean of Soviet reality in the late 1930s. Stalin had always presided over its rites. It had been he who arranged for the corpse of the Soviet leader to be displayed in the Mausoleum. He organised the publication of Lenin’s memoirs and helped to set up an Institute of Lenin. He vowed undying allegiance to Lenin’s ideas and practices. During the New Economic Policy he claimed to be a mere pupil of the great man.
The ‘biography’ by Lenin’s aide Ivan Tovstukha in 1927 was really just a catalogue of his arrests, places of exile, main publications and official posts. Although it mentioned Stalin’s support for Lenin against Kamenev and Zinoviev in October 1917, there was no reference to subsequent factional campaigns, and he was listed as being merely ‘one of the secretaries of the Party Central Committee from 1922’: his full title of General Secretary was omitted.1 With Stalin’s rise to political supremacy at the end of the 1920s all this started to change. After sending Bukharin and the Right Deviation down to defeat, he demanded appreciation as more than a party administrator. On 21 December 1929 Stalin’s (supposed) fiftieth birthday was celebrated with the fanfares of a ceremony of state.2 Even if he had been bashful (and in fact he was wary of making himself look ridiculous by permitting excessive praise),3 political self-interest dictated the need for media acclaim in a period when oppositionist leaders were making scathing criticisms. Stalin aspired to his own personal cult.
He continued to express admiration for his predecessor. Although he allowed others to use the term ‘Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism’, he himself avoided it. Stalin even refused to sanction a complete edition of his collected works (whereas Trotski had already published twenty-one volumes of his writings before falling from grace). Addressing a large Moscow conference on propaganda in 1938, he condemned attempts to put him on the same level as Lenin as a party theorist. His Foundations of Leninism, Stalin insisted, was only a work of exegesis. The originality of thought lay with Lenin, which was why it made sense to talk of Marxism–Leninism and not just Marxism. But the teacher ought not to be confused with the pupil.4
Nevertheless he often allowed his light to outshine the aureole surrounding his predecessor. Comparisons of the two men began to be made at Lenin’s expense. The party historian Yemelyan Yaroslavski opined that Stalin was the more decisive of the two leaders and that the reason l
ay in the excessive number of years spent by Lenin in emigration.5 But usually the downgrading of Lenin was done in a visual fashion rather than in texts. On New Year’s Day in 1931 Pravda carried a line drawing of Stalin on its front page — and Lenin appeared in it only as a name printed on a banner.6 A similar picture was used to emphasise Stalin’s greatness in the annals of Soviet communism on New Year’s Day in 1937.7 Line drawings continued to be preferred to cartoons. Pravda had always avoided carrying humorous representations of the party’s leaders. (Foreign anti-communist politicians, though, were thought fair game.) This tradition endured through the 1930s. No levity was permitted to infringe Stalin’s dignity; and whenever his image appeared in Soviet newspapers, it was in contexts that corroborated his supreme status. Commissioned pictures had to convey the impression of an inspiring genius with the determination and wisdom to change the face of state and society in the USSR, and both editors and censors were careful to comply.
Photographs were frequently carried. Among the most famous was one taken as he scooped little Gelya Markizova into his arms when she presented a bouquet to him.8 Her bright smiling face adorned many books in following years. Little did readers know that her parents perished in the Great Terror soon after her big day. But Stalin got what he wanted. He was able to have himself represented as the warmest friend to all children in the country.
He strove to identify himself with young people in general. Pravda reproduced many photos of him greeting heroes of labour, science or exploration. Astutely he did not always monopolise the publicity. The typical front page of newspapers gave pride of space to young heroes of the moment: Stakhanovite miners or metalworkers, record-breaking milkmaids, geographical explorers or long-distance aviators. Citizens were invited to believe that the state led by Stalin had a dynamic orientation towards science, education, meritocracy and patriotism. Aviators had a special attraction for Stalin. When a celebratory book appeared on his meetings with individuals of outstanding achievement, Soviet flyers were given greater space than any other category of person. He loved to meet them: ‘You know how I’ll fight like a tiger so that no one may give offence to our flyers!’;9 and they were understandably pleased by his attentiveness and by the medals they received from him.10 By sharing the plaudits with Soviet citizens beyond the inner circle of powerful political leaders he enhanced his image as a modest man of the people. For Stalin, aviators and explorers had the advantage of operating far away from the public gaze. By contrast industrial managers and party bosses were widely unpopular and indeed Stalin routinely castigated them whenever (his own) policies caused resentment. Culpable subordinates served as a lightning conductor that deflected political damage on to others.
Stalin also aimed to associate himself with leaders of official organisations and enterprises at lower levels of the Soviet state. While arresting a multitude of the older post-holders in the 1930s, he issued appeals to those younger ones who took their place. Having long represented himself as a praktik, he declared at a Kremlin reception for metallurgical and coal-mining functionaries on 30 October 1937:11
I’m going to propose a somewhat peculiar and unconventional toast. Our custom is to toast the health of the [Kremlin’s] leaders, chiefs, heads and people’s commissars. This of course isn’t a bad thing. But apart from the big leaders there also exist middle-size and small leaders. We have tens of thousands of them, these leaders — both small and middling. They are modest people. They don’t push themselves forward and they’re practically invisible. But it would be blind of us not to notice them. For the fate of production across our entire people’s economy depends on these people.
He chose his words subtly so as to avoiding reducing himself to the level of his audience. He left no doubt that he was one of the ‘big leaders’, and the cult of the Vozhd confirmed that he was the biggest of them. This mixture of self-assertion and modesty won friends and influenced the Kremlin elite, the party and the people.
Stalin liked to be seen to be restricting the cultic extravaganza. Worship had to be effusive but not totally ridiculous in its extent. He frequently reprimanded his underlings if, unable to guess his opinion, they overstepped the mark of flattery. He was made angry by an attempt to publish his articles from the years before the Great War. Stalin wrote to Kaganovich, Yezhov and Molotov in August 1936 — while he was on holiday by the Black Sea — seeking their help in preventing publication.12 (Obviously he could have given a direct order and it would have been instantly obeyed; but Stalin also wanted to impress on the Politburo that he remained a member of a political team.) He continued to comment scathingly on what was written about him. Stalin exclaimed to one of his physicians, M. G. Shneidorovich, about the inaccuracies in Soviet newspapers: ‘Look, you’re an intelligent man, doctor, and you must understand: there’s not a word of truth in them!’ The physician was beginning to feel he had the Leader’s confidence until Stalin added that doctors were just as unreliable as journalists — and doctors had the means and opportunity to poison him!13
Beria could nevertheless publish a history of Bolshevik party organisations in the Transcaucasus. This had gained Stalin’s sanction. Beria’s book controverted the received opinion that only the Marxists of St Petersburg or the emigration had had a decisive impact on the fate of the party. Although the contents were mostly a historical fiction, the theme of the historical importance of the borderlands was overdue its attention. (Beria, though, was not the authentic author: he commissioned and appropriated the text and then shot the writers.) Beria’s great Caucasian rival, Nestor Lakoba, produced an account of Stalin’s experiences along the Black Sea littoral after the turn of the century.14 Some memoirs also appeared about Stalin in Siberian exile.15 Yet there was little detail about the episodes in his rise to prominence in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party before the Great War and the circumstances of his co-optation to the Central Committee in 1912. Much remained hidden, and Stalin kept it that way. Mystery served his purpose: people would naturally be inclined to assume that he had been more important than was true. He enlarged the space for this to occur by removing his enemies from the history of Bolshevism. Steadily those other Bolsheviks who had been close to Lenin before the October Revolution were eliminated from the textbooks — and in most cases they were physically liquidated.
The grandiose acclaim kept on growing. At the Sixteenth Party Congress in June 1930 Stalin was greeted by ‘stormy, prolonged applause extending into a lengthy ovation’. The Congress rose to its feet shouting ‘Hurrah!’ The same occurred at the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934, when there was a tremendous ovation and shouts of ‘Long live our Stalin!’ By the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, after the Great Terror, even this was thought inadequate. Congress organisers had arranged chants of ‘Hurrah for our Leader, Teacher and Friend, Comrade Stalin!’
Stalin biographies had been appearing thick and fast. The French writer Henri Barbusse’s 1935 life of the General Secretary was translated into Russian and placed on sale in the USSR.16 It was Barbusse who put into circulation the phrase: ‘Stalin is the Lenin of today.’ But not even Barbusse entirely pleased Stalin. It was this displeasure that led him in 1938 to get the Central Committee to commission Stalin: A Biography, which narrated his life from birth in the little town of Gori to the present day. His towering importance in Bolshevik theory and practice was affirmed. The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): A Short Course appeared in the same year and covered the periods of communist party history through to the late 1930s. For years there had been competing versions of the history of Soviet communism. Several had enjoyed the approval of the Central Committee, and their authors — Nikolai Popov, Yemelyan Yaroslavski and Andrei Bubnov — had earned large royalties. Yet a single official statement was required when unflinching orthodoxy was a matter of life and death. A team of writers was assembled under V. G. Knorin, Y. M. Yaroslavski and P. N. Pospelov to provide such a work.
Stalin too worked on it behind the s
cenes; he not only wrote a chapter in the Short Course but also edited the book’s entire text five times.17 A line of legitimate succession was traced from Marx and Engels through Lenin to Stalin. Tendentiousness and mendacity were the book’s hallmarks. For every point where disputes had arisen among Marxist revolutionaries it was suggested that only one authentic expression of Marxism was available and that Lenin and his follower Stalin had consistently adopted it. Soviet communism’s history was treated in Manichean terms. There were the forces of rectitude led by Leninism and the forces of deceit and betrayal under the anti-Bolshevik parties — the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Anarchists and nationalists of all types — as well as, subsequently, the Bolshevik factions hostile to Stalin. The Short Course deplored ‘the Trotskyists, the Bukharinites, nationalist deviators and other anti-Leninist groups’. Not once had Lenin made a mistake in doctrine or strategy. By good fortune a man equally infallible, Stalin himself, succeeded him.
The two leading characters of the Short Course were treated differently. It is usually assumed that the book enabled Stalin to supplant Lenin in the mythology of Soviet communism.18 This is untrue. Despite creating his own cult, he still found it useful to acknowledge the superiority of Lenin.19 This was obvious in the handling of the party’s early history. Whereas the official biography gave attention to Stalin’s career as a young revolutionary, his name hardly appeared in the opening chapters of the Short Course.20 In the entire book there were forty-nine citations of Lenin’s works but only eleven of those by Stalin. Evidently Stalin still sensed a continuing need to cloak himself with the mantle of Lenin’s memory.21 The treatment of the October Revolution is remarkable in this respect. Its pages on the seizure of power avoided any reference to Stalin.22 (Later generations of historians have missed this; indeed one wonders whether they have bothered to read the Short Course.) The point is that Stalin in the late 1930s, despite dominating the Soviet political scene, saw the desirability of placing a few limits to the worship of his own greatness. Even the Leader had to be cautious.
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