Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  As the Republic’s armed forces were pushed on to the retreat by Franco, the Spanish government pressed for the communists to enter the coalition. Stalin had to be phoned for consent and then Dimitrov sent the tactical instructions to communist leader José Diaz. Eventually the socialist party chief Largo Caballero emerged as head of government. By March 1937 Stalin had become distinctly edgy about being drawn into a military struggle of internal significance without being able to control the consequences, and reports about the effectiveness of the coalition and its army were not encouraging. His instinct was to pull out of Spain and disband the International Brigades in the event that Germany and Italy were also to withdraw; but for the moment he insisted on a merger of the communist and socialist parties in Spain.15 This immediately became Comintern policy. Yet the inter-party negotiations in Spain made little progress: years of mutual antagonism could not be discounted overnight. Nor did Stalin help the situation by deploying NKVD agents to seek out and liquidate Spanish Trotskyists. Distrust on the political left grew rapidly as members of the POUM, loyal to Trotski’s ideas, were rounded up. Remorselessly the Spanish Communist Party reinforced its influence in the government.

  The situation changed from month to month and the socialists refused to do the bidding of the Spanish Communist Party. By February 1938 Stalin had concluded that the communists should resign from the government. Dimitrov in Moscow and Togliatti in Spain complied with the decision despite the disarray it was bound to cause in the anti-Franco alliance.16 The political tensions on the left were not concocted out of nothing by Stalin. But he made them murderously worse than they need have been; and if anyone thought that his accusations against internal victims in the USSR were merely an instrument of despotism without genuine importance for him, they were disillusioned by events in Spain. Exactly the same political persecutions were put in train. Stalin was determined that the far-left elements on the Republican side should be liquidated before they could infect the Spanish Communist Party with their diseased purposes. Of course there were plenty of leftists in Spain who by their own profession were Trotskyists, anarchists or independent communists. Stalin had no need to ponder the options: he knew he had to cauterise the wound of far-left pluralism. Spain was going to be helped on the terms of his political homicidalism.

  The Civil War had by then turned decisively in Franco’s favour. By March 1939 it was over. The Republicans had lost the protracted struggle against reactionary forces backed by German and Italian fascism. Stalin’s policy was criticised by Trotski as excessively cautious. For Trotski, the Spanish Civil War offered one of those regular opportunities to spread revolution west of the USSR and to undermine the political far right across Europe. Stalin, though, was mindful of the risks he would run with any strong intervention. Always he dreaded thrusting the French and British governments into the arms of General Franco. Too obvious a communist hegemony over the Spanish government coalition might easily have brought this about. But he and the Comintern at least did something, and it is hardly likely that the Republicans would have held out so long if he had not sanctioned the Spanish Communist Party’s participation. His Trotskyist critics accused him of excessive pragmatism in his management of Soviet foreign policy. They ignored the limited resources available to the USSR. Economically, militarily and — above all — geographically there was no serious chance for him to do more than he achieved at the time.

  If he could not have done much more to help, however, he could certainly have done less to hinder. His behaviour towards the Spanish political left, especially in the suppression of the POUM, rightly earned him the opprobrium of George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. For Stalin acted within the cage of his assumptions. He could not imagine how a revolutionary movement could be properly mobilised unless it was purged of untrustworthy elements. At the very same time as he was getting rid of such people in the USSR he was determined to eliminate them from the ranks of the Comintern. The cause of the Revolution would rest on the inner health of the political far left. Trotskyists were infectious vermin. Stalin’s Comintern agents fought for the cause of Soviet internal politics in the mountains and plains of distant Spain.

  35. APPROACHES TO WAR

  Domestic politics, state security and foreign policy were knotted together in the late 1930s. Stalin arrested hundreds of thousands of harmless Soviet citizens who were of an awkward national ancestry. Poles, Finns, Chinese and Koreans resident in border areas next to the states of their co-nationals were routinely deported to other distant regions of the USSR. Even the Greeks living in the Soviet republics by the Black Sea, hundreds of maritime miles from Greece, suffered this fate.1 Soviet state security policy had a national and ethnic dimension. While promoting the press and schooling for non-Russians in the Soviet multinational state, Stalin showed an intense hostility to some among them. What has become known as ethnic cleansing was not new to the USSR. The Politburo had practised such a policy against Cossacks in the north Caucasus at the end of the Civil War.2 Proposals for cleansing on the basis of nationality resurfaced at the start of the Five-Year Plan.3 But Stalin’s deportations, arrests and executions during and after the Great Terror mounted to a higher scale of national and ethnic repression.

  The application of this policy did not exclude card-carrying communists in the Soviet Union. Stalin’s zeal to make the country safe from subversion from abroad went to the point of the extermination of the Communist Party of Poland exiles in Moscow. Polish communists were especially suspect to him. Several of their leaders had sympathised with Soviet internal oppositions in the 1920s. Earlier still, many of them had sided with the Polish Marxist leader and theorist Rosa Luxemburg against Lenin before the Great War. Stalin had anyway always fretted about the menace posed by Poland to the USSR. He was easily convinced by reports from Yezhov’s NKVD that the Polish exile community had been infiltrated by the intelligence agencies of the Western capitalist powers. Stalin was in no mind in November 1937 to treat people on an individual basis: he demanded the entire party’s dissolution. Dimitrov, himself a Bulgarian exile in Moscow, docilely complied and wrote to Stalin for procedural advice. Stalin replied with the blunt demand that Dimitrov should show a sense of urgency: ‘The dissolution is about two years late.’4 Already several Polish communist leaders were in the Lubyanka. The NKVD swiftly picked up the remainder, and most of the prisoners were shot.

  Dimitrov’s obedience did not save the Comintern from Stalin’s suspicions. Scores of functionaries in its Executive Committee as well as its various departments were executed. No exemption was given to emissaries serving in Spain who were loyally slaughtering the POUM. Stalin and Yezhov tricked many of them back from Madrid and had them killed. Stalin was blunt to Dimitrov, raging that ‘all of you in the Comintern are hand in glove with the enemy’.5 In Moscow he could carry out the purge he desired. Abroad he got Dimitrov to compel the freely operating communist parties — few though they had become — in France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and the USA — to expel members who refused to support the official line or who had sympathised with Stalin’s opponents in the past. This punitive atmosphere pervaded the worldwide communist movement. Stalin wanted only such support abroad as was unmistakably loyal.

  As the Republicans went down to defeat in the Spanish Civil War, Stalin’s interest reverted to the French Communist Party and its policy toward Léon Blum’s socialist government. French communist leader Maurice Thorez, like his counterparts elsewhere in Europe, had been wary of the turn towards the popular front; but, having accepted it, he proposed to join Blum’s cabinet in 1936. Permission had to be sought in Moscow. When Moscow demurred, Thorez obeyed Moscow.6 Always the Kremlin kept tight tutelage and Stalin was in command. The chief restriction on his manoeuvres was the quality of information reaching him from the Executive Committee of the Comintern as well as from France and other countries; and leaders such as Thorez, much as they strove to please Stalin, draped their messages in the cloth of their political preferences. Stalin had co
nfidence in the system of decision-making he had established. He also functioned according to his general assumptions about global developments. While recognising the importance of international relations, he could not afford to spend most of his time on them if he was to secure the kind of internal transformation he sought — and in the late 1930s the carrying through of the bloody mass purges remained his first priority. Only an extraordinarily decisive Leader could operate as he did on the European and Asian political stage.

  This was obvious in his intervention in the affairs of the Chinese Communist Party. Stalin continued to demand that Mao Tse-tung maintain the alliance with Chiang Kai-shek. Although Mao thought that Stalin overrated the Chinese nationalist movement — the Kuomintang — led by Chiang Kai-shek, he sorely needed financial and political assistance from Moscow. ‘United front’ tactics were demanded by Stalin, and Mao had to accede. Since being suppressed by the Kuomintang in 1927, the Chinese Communist Party had regrouped. The Long March had been undertaken in 1934 to the north of China, where Mao consolidated the party’s support in the villages. The Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party remained intensely hostile to each other. Mutual suspicion spilled over into sporadic violence. Civil war was prevented only by the external threat posed by militarist Japan. The Japanese, who had occupied Manchuria in 1931 and set up the Manchukuo puppet state, plainly contemplated further territorial expansion. To Stalin, who as usual thought in broad geopolitical categories and desired to enhance the immediate security of the USSR, it seemed best for Mao and Chiang to put aside their rivalry; this was the advice supplied by the Comintern to the Chinese communists throughout the mid-1930s.

  Mao continued to wriggle away from the Comintern line. No foreign communist party leader before the Second World War displayed such contumacy (as Stalin regarded it). Mao’s men hated the policy of alliance with Chiang and wanted to free themselves from it as soon as they could. Yet when Chiang was captured by an independent Chinese warlord, they found themselves compelled to send Zhou Enlai to secure his release. They had to do this or else face losing crucial military supplies from the USSR. Communist discipline had prevailed.7

  The situation changed in July 1937 when the Japanese invaded China proper. Beijing and Shanghai fell quickly to their forces. The Chinese Red Army resumed a more co-operative attitude towards the Kuomintang in the national interest. Yet China’s joint forces were no match for Japan. Down the country swept the conquering army, carrying out massacres of civilians in the cities. Stalin pledged weapons and finance to the Chinese communists. He also reorganised his own borderlands. It was in these years that Stalin ordered ethnic purges of Koreans and Chinese living in the Soviet Far East. The regional leadership of the NKVD was replaced and the Red Army was put on alert for any menace from Japan’s Kwantung Army in Manchukuo. The two sides, Soviet and Japanese, kept each other guessing about their geopolitical pretensions. Frequent border skirmishes aggravated the situation and on 25 November 1936 the Japanese signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany and Italy. Concern in the Kremlin was acute. Stalin saw no point in diplomatic concessions, and when the Kwantung Army clashed with Soviet forces in May 1939 at Nomonhan, he met fire with fire. War broke out. The Red Army in the Far East was reinforced by tanks and aircraft. Commander Georgi Zhukov was dispatched to lead the campaign.8

  The maps in east, south and west were being redrawn by militarism. The League of Nations had proved ineffective as Japan overran first Manchuria and then China. International protests failed to save Ethiopia from Italian conquest; and Germany, after intervening actively in the Spanish Civil War, annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia. Yet until Nomonhan the Red Army had seen more action against Soviet peasant rebels than against the foreign enemies of the USSR. The great test of Stalin’s industrial and military preparations was at last taking place.

  Despite the lacerations of the Great Terror, the Red Army acquitted itself well. Just as the Russians had expected an easy victory over an inferior enemy in 1904, the Japanese expected a Soviet military collapse. Intelligent and adaptive, Zhukov had learned much from the German training programmes observed on the soil of the USSR until 1933. Like Tukhachevski, he identified tank formations as essential to contemporary land warfare. His arrival in the Far East energised the Soviet offensive strategy. He had witnessed Stalin’s destruction of the Supreme Command and knew that nothing short of comprehensive victory over the Japanese would keep the NKVD off his back.9 His sole advantage was that Stalin, as had been the case since the Civil War, did not stint in the granting of men and equipment to his commanders. Zhukov plotted to outmatch the enemy in resources before taking them on. By August 1939 he had amassed such a force and could start his planned offensive. Stalin watched warily through the prism of reports reaching him from army commanders and the military intelligence agency. While Zhukov needed Stalin’s trust, Stalin needed Zhukov’s success in the campaign.

  Stalin himself was being courted by Britain and France as their governments sought ways to restrain Hitler by means of an agreement with the USSR. Yet there was little urgency in the overtures. The British Foreign Office sent out a middle-ranking official by steamship to Leningrad instead of flying him out, and the official was not allowed to take any diplomatic initiative. Stalin, hedging his bets in European diplomacy, took the drastic step of letting Berlin know that he would not be averse to an approach from the Germans.

  He had already expended a load of precious resources on extending the internal state terror to foreign parts. The extermination of Trotskyists and anarchists in Spain was just part of his repressive zeal. Assassinations were carried out against anti-communist Russian émigrés in Europe. Individual communist critics of Stalin were also targeted. The greatest quarry of all was Trotski. Huge priority was accorded by the Soviet intelligence organs to funding and organising attempts on his life. Shunted from one country to another, he had finally found refuge in Coyoacán on the outskirts of Mexico City. No longer a fundamental threat to Stalin in the Kremlin, Trotski had infuriated him by publishing the Bulletin of the Opposition and organising the Fourth International. The first attack on him in Coyoacán was led by the mural artist David Alfaro Siqueiros. It failed, and Trotski reinforced his security precautions. But Stalin was obsessed with his wish to kill him. The second attack was more subtly arranged. NKVD agent Ramón Mercader managed to infiltrate the Trotski household by posing as a follower of his. On 20 August 1940 he had the opportunity he had awaited in the villa and plunged a mountaineering ice-pick into Trotski’s head.

  The hunting down of Stalin’s mortal enemy had involved a large diversion of resources from other tasks of espionage.10 Nevertheless the Soviet spy network was not ineffective in the 1930s. Communism was seen by many European anti-fascists as the sole bulwark against Hitler and Mussolini. A small but significant number of them volunteered their services to the USSR. Stalin and the NKVD could also count on regular reports from communist parties in Europe and North America.

  This provided the Soviet leadership with the information to formulate its foreign policy on the basis of sound knowledge about the likely response from abroad. In Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom the NKVD had high-level spies with extraordinary access to state secrets. The problem was not the provision of information but its processing and distribution. Stalin insisted on restricting the reports from diplomatic and espionage agencies to a tiny handful of associates. An inner group of the Politburo was established to monitor, discuss and decide. But such was his suspicion towards fellow politicians in the Kremlin that he often let no one else inspect the available reports. As crises in international relations multiplied and deepened before 1939, this meant that the actions of the USSR depended crucially, to a much greater extent even than in Germany, on the lonely calculations of the Leader. Simultaneously he was also examining reports on the entire gamut of internal policies on politics, security, economy, society, religion, nationhood and culture. His time for scrutinising the material flowing from abroad was finite. The
reportage was always contradictory in content; it was also of diverse degrees of reliability. Stalin’s mistrust of his associates meant that he wasted the advantages supplied by his intelligence network.11

  He was culpable too for reducing the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs to a shadow of its former self. The Great Terror had removed hundreds of qualified personnel. Jews in particular were repressed. The result was that after 1937–8 every functionary in Moscow and the embassies avoided saying anything that might conceivably cause trouble. Strong, direct advice to Stalin was eschewed.

  Nerves of steel were required for Stalin and his Politburo associates as they followed events in Europe and Asia in 1939. His personal interventions in diplomatic affairs were becoming ever more frequent, and on 5 May 1939 he formalised the situation by changing the leadership of Sovnarkom. Stalin installed himself as Chairman for the first time. This was a step he had until then resisted; since 1930 he had been content to let Molotov run the government. The darkening picture of international relations induced a change of mind. Molotov, though, was not discarded but assigned to the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs. Maxim Litvinov was eventually, in 1941, appointed ambassador to the USA. His known preference for a system of collective security against the fascist threat in Europe had appeared to limit Soviet diplomatic options in mid-1939. The door was opened for a more flexible foreign policy towards Nazi Germany if the opportunity arose. (The fact that Litvinov was Jewish was a further impediment to conciliation with Hitler.) Molotov was Stalin’s senior henchman as well as a Russian. Yet another signal was being given that Stalin believed highly important developments to be in the offing.