Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  What is more, there was little in the writings about Stalin which gave a vivid impression of him. Usually the official eulogies are ascribed to a ‘cult of personality’ since this was the term used by Nikita Khrushchëv when he posthumously denounced Stalin in 1956. A more accurate translation from the Russian would be ‘cult of the individual’. Thus the 1938 biography recited the barest details of the first half of Stalin’s life before proceeding to catalogue his actions at the level of policy. There was scant attention to the family, school and native town of his boyhood. Accounts of his career in the clandestine Bolshevik committees before the Great War were discouraged; even his career in the October Revolution, the Civil War, the NEP and the Five-Year Plans was hardly covered in either the biography or the Short Course. He discouraged all historical and literary attempts to explain how he came to think what he thought or do what he did before the onset of his despotism. He strove instead to get writers, painters and film-makers to present him as the embodiment of the party rather than as a credible actor in history. Despite the preoccupation of the state media with Stalin, extremely little was allowed into the public domain telling of his ancestry, education, beliefs, demeanour or calculations.

  His private existence too remained especially secluded. Before 1932 it was never mentioned in the newspapers that he was a married man. When he appeared on top of the Lenin Mausoleum, he was accompanied solely by fellow leading politicians. Pravda had made only a brief announcement of Nadya’s death.23 The same attitude was taken with Stalin’s mother. Pravda carried short articles about his visit to her in 1935 shortly before her death, and her funeral too was reported.24 Otherwise his privacy was closely guarded. A few exceptions existed. In 1939 a series of articles appeared by V. Kaminski and I. Vereshchagin about Stalin’s early life, and these included brief memoirs by some of his schoolboy friends and documents referring to his education.25 Some personal documents also appeared about Stalin’s periods of arrest and imprisonment.26

  The continued austerity of the Stalin cult invites comment. One possibility is that he recognised that most aspects of his past and present life were unlikely to commend him to others — and so he drew the curtains across them. This is conceivable but unlikely. Stalin was a maestro of historical fabrication, and mere facts would not have inhibited him from inventing a wholly fictional biography. Another possibility is that Stalin was simply unimaginative; and since he, unlike Hitler who had Goebbels, was his cult’s main artificer, this may explain the situation. But Stalin was surrounded by associates who yearned to prove their usefulness to him. It is not credible that alternative ideas were not proposed to him. The most plausible explanation is that Stalin still believed that austerity was what best suited Russia’s cultural ambience as well as the sensibilities of the world communist movement. After the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, he had stopped being called General Secretary but instead was designated Secretary of the Party Central Committee. Until 6 May 1941, furthermore, he resolutely refused to become Sovnarkom Chairman despite the fact that this had been Lenin’s job. He could not even be tempted to create the post of Chairman for himself in the Party Politburo. Nor was Stalin head of state. That position continued to be held by Mikhail Kalinin as Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets. Letters to the ascendant communist leadership were often addressed not to Stalin but to Kalinin or to both of them.27

  Yet he dominated the central public life of the USSR. People lived or died according to his whim. Political, economic, social and cultural activity was conditioned by his inclinations of the day. He was the masterful guide of men and manager of affairs in the Soviet state. But Stalin had always been cunning. He had learned of the advantages of a display of modesty. Better, he concluded, to let it be thought that he was thirsty neither for power nor for prestige. Did his interest in the career of Augustus, first of the Roman emperors, influence him? Augustus would never accept the title of king despite obviously having become the founder of a dynastic monarchy.28

  Stalin of course wanted adulation and the cult was extravagant in his praise; the restrictions imposed by him were pragmatically motivated. He discerned that he would gain more admirers if he stopped himself — and was seen to stop himself — short of making the very extreme claims put forward by Kremlin sycophants. Control of the process was crucial to him. He remained alert to the danger of letting people praise him on their own initiative and — bizarre as it might seem — banned discussion circles (kruzhki) from looking at either the Short Course or his official biography. The reason he gave was that he did not want citizens, tired after a day’s labour, to have to turn out in the evening. In an exchange with a Leningrad party propagandist he ordered: ‘Let them have a quiet life!’29 But this was disingenuous. Party members had to go to post-work meetings as a political duty. Stalin’s real aim was surely to restrict debate altogether. The texts of the two books were fairly straightforward in themselves and could quickly be studied by individuals reading alone. And once they had read and digested the texts, they could join in the ceremonies and festivals which were organised by the authorities with scrupulous care on the streets, in factories and at offices.

  The cult certainly had its successes. A seventy-one-year-old woman textile worker was invited to the October Revolution celebrations on Red Square in 1935 but because of short-sightedness did not catch a glimpse of Stalin. Bumping into Ordzhonikidze, she cried: ‘Look, I’m going to die soon — am I really not going to be able to see him?’ Ordzhonikidze told her she was not going to die and, as she walked on, a car drew up and out got Stalin. She clapped her hands: ‘Hey! Look who I’ve seen!’ Stalin smiled and said modestly: ‘What a good thing! A most ordinary human being!’ The old woman burst into tears: ‘You are our wise one, our great one… and now I’ve seen you… now I can die!’ Stalin, thinking on his feet, replied: ‘Why do you need to die? Let others go and die while you go on working!’30

  The little episode shows that many citizens, especially those who felt grateful to the authorities, had a compulsive urge to revere him. (It also indicates that Stalin, even if he liked such flattery, reacted pretty brusquely: his main concern was to coax the old woman to go on toiling years beyond the age of retirement!) Moreover, people were much more likely to engage in his worship when they were in a crowd affected by the officially created atmosphere. Not only unsophisticated citizens but also many politicians and intellectuals experienced an inner need to extol him. They counted themselves blessed even if they only briefly met him or caught a glimpse of him. The writer Kornei Chukovski was hardly a natural Stalinist. Disconcerted by the kind of literature demanded of authors by Stalin, he retreated into writing tales for children. Even so, his diary from 1936 records the following impression at a congress:31

  Suddenly there appeared Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Andreev, Zhdanov and Stalin. What on earth happened to the hall! And HE stood still, somewhat tired, pensive and magnificent. One could sense the immense habituation to power, the force and at the same time something feminine and soft…

  That Chukovski was charmed by Stalin’s ‘graceful smile’ says much for the impact of the cult.

  Yet the success was not as large as Stalin had hoped. Among the peasantry in particular there was pervasive dislike of him and many villagers regarded him — a Georgian, an atheist, an internationalist — as the very Antichrist. So desperate was rural opinion by the late 1930s that many peasants seriously hoped for war with Germany on the assumption that only military invasion would dislodge Soviet communism from power and bring about opportunities for decollectivisation.32 Such hostility was not confined to rural inhabitants. A misspelled and ungrammatical letter of protest dispatched to him and Kalinin by fifty Leningrad workers in March 1930 had stated:33

  No one has sympathy for Soviet power and you are considered hangmen of the Russian people. Why should we undertake the Five-Year Plan so abruptly when we have become poor after such richness as we had in Russia — let’s just take the example of
sugar, which used to be fed to pigs and which now can’t be found even for money, and meanwhile our children are starving and there’s absolutely nothing to give them to eat.

  The period of the First Five-Year Plan was directly associated with Stalin in the popular mind. He had claimed credit for the industrial and cultural revolution of those years. The result was that everyone knew who was to blame for the hardships.

  Exactly how widespread and deep was such hatred is a question which will never be satisfactorily answered. The NKVD supplied regular reports on popular opinion, but their language and orientation left much to be desired. Security agencies had an interest in alarming Stalin. Their power and prestige rested on their capacity to persuade him that it was only their vigilance which protected the state against its millions of internal enemies. (Not that he usually took much persuading.)

  Yet undoubtedly many Soviet citizens, like the woman textile worker, loved the Leader. Conditions did not worsen for everyone in the 1930s. Jobs became available offering improved salary, housing and consumer goods for promotees. Stalin’s rejection of the egalitarian principle for the Soviet order created an attractive prospect for them. Usually coming from working-class or peasant backgrounds, his beneficiaries could hardly believe their luck. They replaced the elites which were being butchered on his orders. The propaganda was crude but it worked with the grain of the self-interest of the promotees. They were ambitious, bright and obedient young men and women who wanted to get on in the world. The school system reinforced the message that Stalin had moved the USSR on to the tracks of universal progress. Needless to say, even the promotees might have had their doubts. It was possible to like some aspects of him and his policies and to disapprove of others. Many people hoped against all the evidence that the terror policies would eventually be abandoned. Perhaps, they thought, Stalin would soon see the need for reform — and some thought the violence would stop when he discarded the advisers who were misleading him.34

  Stalin depended on this naïveté. He could hardly induce a purged kulak, priest or party oppositionist to love him. He could not expect a lot of undernourished, overworked factory labourers or kolkhozniki to sing his praises. But indisputably some of them did admire him. And, above all, members of the new administrative stratum wished to stick with him since he had given them their place in the sun. He had transformed the economy and built a military power. He was the Vozhd, the Leader, the Boss. Great was the name of Stalin in the minds of beneficiaries of the Stalinist state order.

  33. BRUTAL REPRIEVE

  The Great Terror came suddenly to an end on 23 November 1938. The occasion was marked unofficially by the removal of Yezhov from the NKVD and the advent to office of his deputy Lavrenti Beria. Until then there had been no serious attempt to stop the carnage. Everyone near Stalin had known that the campaign of arrests, tortures and executions had his active support: it was perilous to advocate a change of policy while he seemed fixed in purpose.

  Signs had already appeared that some in Stalin’s entourage wanted to halt the machinery of terror. Malenkov began the attempt at the Party Central Committee plenum in January 1938; he did this subtly by deploring the large number of mistakes in expulsions from the party in the previous year.1 Direct criticism of arrests and executions was avoided. Holding to the theme of internal party procedures, Malenkov rebuked local leaders for throwing innocent communists out of the party. Everyone knew that more was involved than the loss of a party membership card. Expelled Bolsheviks were invariably sent to the Gulag or shot. Malenkov later claimed that he was putting pressure on Stalin to see the light. If so, it would have been the only time he did so. Malenkov was Stalin’s creature and it is inconceivable that Stalin did not sanction Malenkov’s initiative; and in any case, apart from a decision to handle expulsions more carefully, no brake was yet applied to the machinery of terror. Nevertheless Stalin evidently had growing doubts about Yezhov. He made this manifest in a typically indirect fashion when, on 21 August 1938, Yezhov was given the People’s Commissariat of Water Transport in addition to his existing duties. This implicitly warned him that he would have the NKVD taken away from him if he failed to satisfy the Leader.

  Yezhov understood the danger he was in and his daily routine became hectic; he knew that the slightest mistake could prove fatal. Somehow, though, he had to show himself to Stalin as indispensable. Meanwhile he also had to cope with the appointment of a new NKVD Deputy Commissar, the ambitious Lavrenti Beria, from July 1938. Beria had until then been First Secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia; he was widely feared in the south Caucasus as a devious plotter against any rival — and almost certainly he had poisoned one of them, the Abkhazian communist leader Nestor Lakoba, in December 1936. If Yezhov tripped, Beria was ready to take his place; indeed Beria would be more than happy to trip Yezhov up. Daily collaboration with Beria was like being tied in a sack with a wild beast. The strain on Yezhov became intolerable. He took to drinking heavily and turned for solace to one-night stands with women he came across; and when this failed to satiate his needs, he pushed himself upon men he encountered in the office or at home. In so far as he was able to secure his future position, he started to gather compromising material on Stalin himself.

  Quite how Yezhov could ever have made use of such documents is hard to imagine. His behaviour indicated how desperate he, the Iron Commissar, had become. Knowing he could be arrested at any time, he was sent daily into hysteria. His fate depended on whether Stalin wanted to alter policy or change personnel. If he was to survive, the NKVD chief needed Stalin to commit himself to permanent state terror with Yezhov still in charge.

  A further decline in Yezhov’s influence was detectable on 23 October 1938, when the writer Mikhail Sholokhov gained an audience with Stalin to complain about being investigated by the NKVD.2 Stalin humiliated Yezhov by requiring him to attend. On 14 November an order came from Stalin to purge the NKVD of individuals ‘not worthy of political confidence’. Next day the Politburo confirmed a directive of party and government to terminate cases currently under investigation by the troiki and the military tribunals. On 17 November the Politburo decided that enemies of the people had infiltrated the NKVD.3 Such measures spelled doom for Yezhov. He drank more heavily. He turned to more boyfriends for sexual gratification. He spoke incautiously about politics.4 He was psychologically collapsing as Stalin increasingly treated Lavrenti Beria as NKVD chief-in-waiting. The wolves were gathering. At an evening meeting with Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov on 23 November, Yezhov confessed to his incompetence in catching enemies of the people; his resignation was accepted.5 Yezhov kept his other posts in the Central Committee Secretariat and the People’s Commissariat of Water Transport for some months. But his days of pomp and authority were over.

  Beria was charged with restoring order in the NKVD and submitting it to the party’s control. Ruthless and competent, he could be trusted to clear up the mess left behind by Yezhov. Beria was no angel. Unlike Yezhov, he took an active part in beatings and kept canes for use in his office. Yet he had a steadier character than his predecessor, and Stalin and he instigated a set of reforms. Approval of torture in interrogations was not revoked but restricted, according to a January 1939 directive, to ‘exceptional’ cases.6 A dossier was assembled on Yezhov, who appeared in public for the last time on 21 January 1939. He was arrested in April and executed the following year. The entire system of troikis was dismantled. The nightmare of 1937–8 was ended; it was popularly referred to as the ‘Yezhovshchina’. This suited Stalin, who wanted the blame removed from his own shoulders. Yet although the terror-procedures were reduced, they were not abolished. The party did not control the NKVD at central and local levels on a daily basis. Torture continued to be used. The frantic atmosphere of the Great Terror had been dissipated but Stalin’s USSR remained a murderous madhouse — and most of the leading madmen were confirmed in power.

  Yezhov’s removal came after Stalin started to allow discussion in his entourage about abuses of powe
r. Two years of arrests and executions had occurred, and it was known that a high proportion of the victims did not belong to the categories of people describable as ‘anti-Soviet elements’. It is quite possible too that Yezhov misled Stalin about aspects of the process. Yezhov’s career and life depended on his ability to persuade Stalin that genuine anti-Soviet elements and enemies of the people were being arrested and eliminated. Yezhov’s activity put everyone at risk.

  Just as many people at the time and a few subsequent commentators surmised that the Great Terror had not been started on Stalin’s initiative,7 so the idea got about that the process was entirely out of his control once it had begun. Stalin may well have failed to anticipate the catastrophic excesses of the NKVD under Yezhov. What is more, local police organs undoubtedly bothered less about arresting individuals who fell into the designated social categories than in meeting the numerical quotas assigned to them. Repressions in 1937–8 were constantly accompanied by ‘wrongful’ arrests. Abuses and excesses were ubiquitous. It is also true that many truly anti-Soviet individuals survived the Great Terror and put themselves at the disposal of the German occupation regime in 1941. Hitler’s forces had little difficulty discovering kulaks, priests and other anti-Soviet elements which had been intended for elimination by Soviet terror operations. To that extent it is true that Stalin’s purposes had been frustrated. The ‘cleansing’ of the USSR of all its enemies, real or potential, had not been completely successful despite one of the most thorough repressive projects in world history.