Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  The timing of this concession was never explained by Stalin; he did not even allow Pravda to make a public announcement. Yet it was a concordat in all but name. This has led to speculation that foreign policy might have been the motivating factor. Stalin was about to meet Roosevelt and Churchill at the Tehran Conference. It has been suggested that a demonstrable diminution of anti-religious persecution was thought likely to enable him to squeeze a better deal out of the Western Allies.13

  This would be more plausible if he had simultaneously lessened the pressure on the other Christian denominations, especially those with organisations in the West. But Stalin openly privileged the Russian Orthodox Church. The explanation is probably connected to his calculations about rule in the USSR. The meeting with the Acting Patriarch occurred shortly after the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk. The Red Army was about to start offensives to retake the western borderlands. Hitler had permitted Christian denominations, including the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, to function under German occupation. Religious freedom, having been tasted again, would be hard to suppress quickly. While restoring limited autonomy to the Russian Orthodox Church, Stalin enabled it to resume charge of buildings which had not belonged to it since the 1920s. As the Soviet armed forces fought their way into Ukraine and Belorussia, churches were transferred into the possession of the Russian Orthodox Church. Evidently Stalin judged that Christian believers would be more easily controlled if Sergei, who was elected Patriarch at the Synod held in September 1943, was presiding over them. Stalin left nothing to chance. He appointed G. Karpov to the Governmental Council on the Russian Orthodox Church to oversee relations with it. Stalin wanted his pound of flesh.

  Another change in policy occurred in the international communist movement. Stalin reverted to his inclination in early 1941 to abolish the Comintern. Turning to Dimitrov, he instructed him to organise the necessary formalities. At meetings of the Comintern Executive Committee in May 1943 the foreign communist leaders meekly agreed to Stalin’s demands.14 He claimed to have concluded that it had been mistaken to try — as Lenin had done — to run the world communist movement from a single centre. He himself had repeated the error, and the result had been that communist parties had been accused by their enemies of being directed by the Kremlin. Stalin wanted them to be able to appeal to their respective parties without this albatross round their necks.15

  It hardly needs to be stressed that Stalin was being disingenuous. He had not the slightest intention of releasing his political grip on foreign communist parties. While allowing them the appearance of autonomy, he aimed to keep them on a short lead. Comintern Secretary-General Georgi Dimitrov would simply be transferred to the International Department of the Central Committee Secretariat of the All-Union Communist Party. His duties would be kept secret and essentially unchanged. Dimitrov had always been expected to advise and obey Stalin in relation to the world communist movement, and the same situation persisted after the Comintern’s dissolution. This gives a clue to Stalin’s reasons for the astonishing decision. There was speculation at the time and subsequently that he was trying to reassure the Western Allies about his intentions. But it can hardly have been the main motive. The period when Stalin most needed to call upon their trust had already passed. The USSR had been at its weakest before Stalingrad and Kursk, when the Wehrmacht had hopes of winning the war. Yet Stalin had done nothing for two years. He had bided his time until victory for the Red Army started to appear likely.

  The timing is unlikely to have been accidental. Stalin and his advisers were making plans for Europe after the war. Ivan Maiski and Maxim Litvinov, removed as ambassadors to London and Washington, gave their ideas. Dimitrov added his. Molotov was constantly available. All were thinking hard about what could be done to maximise the security and power of communism to the west. Clandestine communist groupings had been scratching out an existence in the early years of the Soviet–Nazi military conflict. While the USSR was on the defensive, anything that could be done by the foreign parties of the Comintern to sabotage Hitler’s New Order in Europe was welcomed. But in mid-1943 these limits on ambition had to be lifted. Stalin wanted to build up support for communist parties in eastern and east-central Europe. The parties themselves were frail — and he had not helped the situation by exterminating as many Polish comrades as possible in 1938. The Red Army was poised to recover the western borderlands of the USSR, as its territory had stood before the Nazi–Soviet diplomatic agreement of August 1939. Indeed, it was about to overrun most countries to the east of Germany and Stalin knew that their communists were regarded as agents of Moscow. It was vital for them and him to pretend that they were not Moscow’s stooges. The Comintern’s dissolution was a basic precondition.

  This meant that communist parties should find ways to identify themselves not only as internationalists but also as defenders of the national agenda. Stalin ensured that this was understood among the foreign communist leaders resident in Moscow as well as among those who had maintained contact from their own countries. Heroes, symbols, poems and songs of a nationalist resonance had to be grasped by communism; and in this way, he assumed, the local appeal of communist parties would be enhanced. This had been undertaken for Russians in the USSR; it needed to be repeated in countries which the Red Army was about to conquer. Communism was neither just an international movement nor just a Russian one; it was seeking, at Stalin’s behest, to acquire a diversity of national colours.16

  This was a concession masking militant aims. Other shifts of policy in the second half of 1943 were less covertly introduced. Among them was the reassertion of Marxism–Leninism. Russian national feeling was far from being rejected. Heroes of old Russia — the ones acceptable to the regime — were retained: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Suvorov, Lomonosov, Pushkin and Tolstoi. But the limits had to be respected. And as the war was drawing to a close, the Kremlin began to emphasise Soviet motifs. Patriotism was put forward as a greater value than internationalism, and the ‘fraternal friendship’ of the Soviet peoples was affirmed. Cosmopolitan became a dirty word. Any sign of admiration for the societies and cultures of the West was severely punished. The Soviet armed forces’ dependence on jeeps, explosives and other military equipment supplied to the USSR by the USA under the terms of Lend– Lease was the object of Stalin’s suspicion. The influx of high-quality foreign products could undermine official Soviet boasts. In 1942 the crime ‘praise of American technology’ was added to the USSR’s legal code and people could be thrown into the Gulag camps simply for expressing appreciation of a jeep.17 Stalin was aiming at the reinsulation of the Soviet mind from foreign influences at the very time when hopes were growing for the convergence of the Red Army with its Western Allies in Germany for the defeat of Nazi power.

  Ideas were tried out to increase the Red Army’s appeal in eastern and east-central Europe. Among them was Panslavism. This was the notion that the Slavs, regardless of nationality, politically and culturally had much in common. Alexander III and Nicholas II had exploited it so as to increase the Russian Empire’s influence in Bulgaria and Serbia. Stalin let groups be formed dedicated to the unification of the Slavs in the struggle against Hitler.18 He gave the non-Marxist historian Yevgeni Tarle a platform to promote the idea. For Stalin, the USSR — unlike the Russian Empire — was practising Panslavism (or Slavophilia as he referred to it) on a unique basis: ‘We, the new Slavophile Leninists — the Slavophile Bolsheviks, communists — stand not for the unification of Slavic peoples but for their union.’ For Stalin, such a union was crucial if the Slavs were to solve the age-old problem of protecting themselves against the Germans.19

  The intent was obvious: the conquest of the eastern half of Europe would be eased if the USSR could count on sympathy in those countries beyond the usual constituency of communist parties. This had been done by the last two Romanovs with much success in diplomatic relations with Bulgaria and Serbia, and Stalin counted on using it similarly. It contained damaging flaws, however, which were expose
d almost as soon as he played the Panslavist card. Not all Slavs were of the Orthodox Church or had a traditional feeling of linkage with Russians. Poles and Czechs, being Catholic, remembered centuries of antagonism. Furthermore, not all peoples in eastern and east-central Europe were Slavs. Panslavism was a downright threat to Hungarians, Romanians and Germans. (It did not commend itself to Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, but they were anyway going to be re-annexed to the USSR.) Stalin persisted with the policy until after the defeat of Nazi Germany. It was a sign of his wrong-headedness. Not all his wartime shifts in policy were successful. It also exhibited an acute perception that the campaign to win the peace had to be worked up long before the war was over. Stalin had no illusions about the difficulties ahead.

  Proof that his Panslavism had ulterior motives lies in the development of Soviet internal policy. The motif of the Motherland dominated official statements, and steadily the coarseness of anti-internationalism increased. Alexander Fadeev, Chairman of the USSR Union of Writers, roundly condemned ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’. 20 Stalin did not comment publicly on this initiative; but the fact that Fadeev’s provocative article became the unchallengeable party line is proof that this chauvinistic version of patriotism had Stalin’s approval and indeed had been instigated by him. Among those groups most clearly threatened by the accusation of cosmopolitanism, of course, were Soviet Jews. Stalin was already playing with one of the grubbiest instruments of rule: anti-semitism.

  This deserves consideration by those who want to make sense of Stalin and Soviet politics. Public life in the wartime USSR was not homogeneous. Nor was there a sudden break in 1945. Of course Stalin made concessions in the war; but several of them — especially as regards the Orthodox Church and the Comintern — really belonged to an agenda of increased rather than decreased state pressure. Stalin conceded when he had to, but snatched back his limited compromises as soon as he had the chance. His behaviour was mysterious to those who surrounded him. To them it appeared that he was more open than in the past to military advice and to the country’s religious and cultural traditions. They hoped that some kind of conversion had taken place and that this behaviour would continue after the war had been won. They fooled themselves. There were plenty of signs in 1943 and even earlier that Stalin had given ground only tactically. Those who knew him intimately, especially fellow members of the State Committee for Defence, noticed nothing to indicate that the Boss wanted reform; they understood that the recent relaxations might not necessarily be permanent. They were right.

  Yet the rest of Soviet society — or at least those of its members who wanted to think the best of him — were kept in the dark. War left them no time to ponder. They were fighting, working and looking for food. The relief of pressures was welcomed by them, but they expected much more. Indeed thousands of Russian POWs, once removed from the grip of Stalin’s regime, decided that Stalin too was an enemy and volunteered to help the Germans defeat him under the leadership of Lieutenant-General Andrei Vlasov. But the vast majority of those captured by the Wehrmacht refused to cross sides.21 Like other citizens of the USSR, they hoped against hope that deep reforms would take place at the end of the war. Rigours which had been bearable in the battles against Nazism would be regarded as unnecessary and intolerable once Germany had been defeated.

  People were deluding themselves. Stalin had made only those concessions vital for the prosecution of a successful military effort. The basic Soviet order remained intact. Since the start of Operation Barbarossa Stalin had ordered the NKVD to mete out merciless punishment to military ‘cowards’ and labour ‘shirkers’. Any sign of deviation from total obedience invoked instant retaliation. The state planning agencies diverted available resources to the armed forces at the expense of civilians, who were left with barely enough for subsistence. The vertical chains of command were tightened. Central and local political leaderships were required to carry through every decree from the Kremlin to the letter. The one-party dictatorship was being put to the ultimate test and was reorganised so as to use the powers at its disposal to the maximum effect. The party in particular acquired importance as an organisation co-ordinating relations between the Red Army and the governmental institutions in each locality; it was also the party which devised the propaganda to stiffen the morale of soldiers and civilians. Yet the USSR remained a terrifying police state and the basic structures of coercion stayed in place. No informed citizens should have expected anything different from Stalin. He had ruled by fear for too long for there to be doubt about how he would behave on the resumption of peace.

  41. SUPREME COMMANDER

  The man with the gammy left arm rejected for conscription in the First World War and criticised for military bungling in both the Civil War and the Soviet-Polish War commanded a state at war with Nazi Germany. Stalin in Moscow confronted Hitler in Berlin. In the minds of both men this was a personal duel as well as a clash between ideologies and state-systems. Neither of them lacked self-belief in directing his war effort.

  The Soviet war leader took time to judge how to handle public opinion. Molotov made the initial announcement about the war on behalf of the political leadership on 22 June 1941. Another hero of the day was the radio announcer Isaak Levitan, whose rich bass voice epitomised the popular will to resist the German invasion at any cost. When at last Stalin made his broadcast to Soviet citizens on 3 July, eleven days after the start of military hostilities, he adjusted his language to the wartime emergency. These were his opening words:1

  Comrades! Citizens!

  Brothers and sisters!

  Fighters in our army and navy!

  It is to you I appeal, my friends!

  Many have noted that Stalin was reverting to traditional Russian discourse by addressing himself to ‘brothers and sisters’. This is true. But what is usually missed is that he started his speech by appealing to comrades and citizens (and at least one listener noted a caesura between ‘Citizens! Comrades!’ and ‘Brothers and sisters’).2 Nor did he seek to identify himself exclusively with Russians. When listing the peoples threatened by Germany, he mentioned not only the Russians but also ‘the Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Uzbeks, Tatars, Moldavians, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and the other free peoples of the Soviet Union’.3

  Listeners were grateful for signs that resolute defence was being prepared. The writer Yekaterina Malkina heard the speech and was inspired by it; and her house servant was so moved that she broke down in tears. Malkina wrote to a friend:4

  I forgot to tell you further about Stalin’s speech that, as I listened to it, it seemed that he was very upset. He talked with such large pauses and frequently drank a lot of water; you could hear him pouring it out and swallowing it. All this served to strengthen the emotional impact of his words. That very day I went and signed up with the volunteer army.

  Few persons who heard him that day forgot the experience.

  Groping his way towards an appropriate mode of communication, he sometimes succeeded brilliantly:

  How could it happen that our glorious Red Army gave up to the fascist forces a number of our towns and districts? Surely the German fascist forces are truly invincible forces, as the boastful fascist propagandists constantly trumpet?

  Of course not! History shows that invincible armies don’t exist and have never existed. Napoleon’s army was considered invincible but it was crushed in turn by Russian, English, German forces. Wilhelm’s German army during the first imperialist war was also considered an invincible army, but it suffered defeat several times at the hands of Russian and Anglo-French forces and, finally, was defeated by Anglo-French forces. The same has to be said about the present German fascist army of Hitler. This army has not yet met serious resistance on the continent of Europe. Only on our territory has it met serious resistance.

  These words were delivered in an unyielding tone which confirmed that the fight would be taken to the Germans. The challenge was flung back at Hitler and the Wehrmacht.r />
  Stalin’s rhetoric was woefully unrealistic about the kind of enemy facing the Red Army. He warned people that enslavement to ‘German princes and barons’ awaited them in the event of the USSR’s failure to beat the Wehrmacht.5 He ignored the specific nature of Nazism’s New Order. Not princes and barons but Gauleiters and the SS were the Third Reich’s enforcers. Racial violence, mobile gas-wagons and concentration camps were installed in the East and yet not once did Stalin refer to them. The First World War remained imprinted on his mind. He was also transfixed by the memory of the Civil War. In his speech on Red Square on 7 November 1941 — the anniversary of the October Revolution — he rambled on about foreign ‘interventionists’ as if they and the Nazis were threats to the Soviet state of equal importance.6 Equally adrift from the facts was his claim that Germany was racked by ‘hunger and impoverishment’.7 Stalin was dredging up outdated clichés of Bolshevik party pronouncements. As Soviet soldiers and civilians came into direct contact with the Wehrmacht and SS, they learned for themselves that Nazism had methods and purposes of unique repulsiveness. Stalin’s reputation as a propagandist was greater than his performance.

  There were limits indeed to Stalin’s adaptability. Winston Churchill’s regular parliamentary speeches and Franklin Roosevelt’s weekly radio broadcasts stood in contrast with Soviet practice. Stalin delivered only nine public wartime addresses of any length. He did not write for the newspapers. Although he could have got others to compose pieces for him, he refused to publish in his own name what he himself had not written. Information in general about him was scanty. He passed up opportunity after opportunity to inspire people outside the format of his preferred modalities.