Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  The global rivalry of the Allies was bound to increase after they had crushed their German and Japanese enemies. Stalin’s armies had taken the brunt of the military burden in Europe, but American power had also been decisive and was growing there. In the Far East the Red Army contributed little until the last few days. The United States, moreover, was the world’s sole nuclear power. The management of the post-war global order posed many menaces to Soviet security — and Stalin was quick to comprehend the danger.

  If his regime was unpopular abroad, it was not much more attractive to Soviet citizens. There was a paradox in this. Undoubtedly the war had done wonders to enhance his reputation in the USSR; he was widely regarded as the embodiment of patriotism and victory. Even many who detested him had come to accord him a basic respect — and when defectors from the Soviet Union were interviewed it was found that several basic values propagated by the authorities found favour. The commitment to free education, shelter and healthcare as well as to universal employment had a lasting appeal. But the haters in the USSR were certainly numerous. Armed resistance was widespread in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, western Belorussia and western Ukraine. These were recently annexed areas. Elsewhere the regime was much more durably in control and few citizens dared to organise themselves against Stalin and his subordinates. Most of those who did were young people, especially students, who had no memory of the Great Terror. Small, clandestine groupings were formed in the universities. Typically they were dedicated to the purification of Marxist–Leninist ideology and behaviour from Stalinist taint: state indoctrination had got the brightest youngsters to approve of the October Revolution. These groupings were easily penetrated and dissolved.

  More worrisome for the authorities was the hope prevailing across society that immense political and economic changes would follow the achievement of military victory. Stalin was a student of Russian history; he knew that the Russian Imperial Army’s entry into Paris in 1815 after the defeat of Napoleon had led to political unrest in Russia. Officers and troops who had experienced the greater civic freedom in France were never the same again, and in 1825 a mutiny took place which nearly overthrew the Romanovs. Stalin was determined to avoid any repetition of that Decembrist Revolt. The Red Army which stormed Berlin had witnessed terrible sights in eastern and central Europe: gas chambers, concentration camps, starvation, and urban devastation. Nazism’s impact was unmistakable. But those serving soldiers had also glimpsed a different and attractive way of life. Churches and shops were functioning. Goods were available, at least in most cities, which in the USSR were on sale only in enterprises reserved for the elites. The diet was more diverse. Peasants, if not well dressed, did not always look destitute. The pervasive regimentation of the USSR, too, was absent from the countries over which they had marched. This included Germany itself.

  Stalin did not receive explicit reports on this: the security agencies had long since learned that they had to give him the truth in ideologically acceptable terms, and Stalin did not want to hear that life was more congenial abroad. What he was told by the agencies was alarming enough. Booty brought back by soldiers included all manner of goods from carpets, pianos and paintings to gramophone records, stockings and underwear. Red Army soldiers had made a habit of collecting wristwatches and, as often as not, wearing all of them simultaneously. Even civilians who had not moved beyond the old Soviet frontiers but had been held under German military rule had had experience of a different way of life which had not been in every way uncongenial. Churches, shops and small workshops had been restored after the initial success of Operation Barbarossa. Such Soviet citizens had neither war booty nor the experience of foreign travel; but their expectation that things would change in the USSR was strong. Across the entire Soviet Union, indeed, there was a popular feeling that it had been worth fighting the war only if reforms were to ensue.12

  And so beneath the draped red flags of victory there lurked danger and uncertainty for Stalin and his regime. He understood the situation more keenly than anyone near to him in the Kremlin. It was this awareness as well as a perennial grumpiness that had made him so curt with Khrushchëv after the fall of Berlin. He saw that critical times lay ahead.

  Yet he would not have been human if warmer feelings had not occasionally suffused him. At the spectacular ceremonies he puffed out his chest. The stream of foreign dignitaries coming to Moscow at the end of the Second World War caught the sense of his mood. On such occasions he let pride take precedence over concern. Stalin, the Red Army and the USSR had won the war against a terrible enemy. As usual he compared current conditions with those which had prevailed under his admired predecessor. This was obvious from what he said to Yugoslav visitors:13

  Lenin in his time did not dream of the correlation of forces which we have attained in this war. Lenin reckoned with the fact that everyone was going to attack us, and it would be good if any distant country, for example America, might remain neutral. But it’s now turned out that one group of the bourgeoisie went to war against us and another was on our side. Lenin previously did not think that it was possible to remain in alliance with one wing of the bourgeoisie and fight with another. This is what we’ve achieved…

  Stalin was proud that he had gone one stage further than Lenin had thought possible. Whereas Lenin had hoped to preserve the Soviet state by keeping it out of inter-capitalist military conflicts and letting the great capitalist powers fight each other, Stalin had turned the USSR into a great power in its own right. Such was its strength that the USA and the United Kingdom had been obliged to seek its assistance.

  How long, however, would the alliance hold after the end of hostilities with Germany and Japan? On this, Stalin was quietly definite when he met a Polish communist delegation:14

  Rumours of war are being put about extremely intensively by our enemies.

  The English [sic] and Americans are using their agents to spread rumours to scare the peoples of those countries whose politics they don’t like. Neither we nor the Anglo-Americans can presently start a war. Everyone’s fed up with war. Moreover, there are no war aims. We aren’t getting ready to attack England and America, and they’re not risking it either. No war is possible for at least the next twenty years.

  Despite what he said in public about the warmongering tendencies of the Western Allies, he expected a lengthy period of peace from 1945. The Soviet Union and the states friendly to it in eastern Europe would not have an easy time. Devastation by war and the complications of postwar consolidation would exert the minds and energy of the communist movement for many years. But the USSR was secure in its fortress.

  For many, especially those who were unaware of Stalin’s homicidal activities, there would have been no Soviet victory in the Second World War but for his contribution — and perhaps Germany would permanently have bestridden the back of the European continent. In the USSR, too, the acclaim for him had intensified although it would be wrong to think that the exact degree of approval for him is ascertainable. Nor would it be right to assume that most citizens had uncomplicated feelings about him. Throughout the war he had held back from identifying himself with specific political and social policies. He had made that mistake during agricultural collectivisation in the late 1920s, and the self-distancing manoeuvre of ‘Dizzy with Success’ had not succeeded in saving him from the peasantry’s opprobrium. Quite who was responsible for the avoidable horrors of Soviet wartime measures was therefore not clear to everyone. Millions of citizens were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt: they wanted a relaxation of the regime and assumed that this would come about as the war came to an end.

  Stalin was more widely loved than he had any right to expect. In his more relaxed moods he liked to compare himself with the Allied leaders. His qualities, he told others, included ‘intelligence, analysis, calculation’. Churchill, Roosevelt and others were different: ‘They — the bourgeois leaders — are resentful and vengeful. One ought to keep feelings under control; if feelings are allowed to get t
he upper hand, you’ll lose.’15 This was rich coming from the lips of a Leader whose own violent sensitivities were extreme. But Stalin was in no mood for self-criticism. In a confidential meeting with Bulgarian communists he derided Churchill for failing to anticipate his defeat in the British parliamentary elections in July 1945 — and Churchill, according to Molotov, was the foreign politician whom Stalin respected the most. The conclusion was obvious: Stalin had become convinced of his own genius. He was master of a superpower beginning to fulfil its destiny. His name was as glorious as the victory being celebrated by the communist party and the Red Army. World renown had settled upon the cobbler’s son from Gori.

  PART FIVE

  The Imperator

  45. DELIVERING THE BLOW

  Stalin’s mind was a stopped clock. There was no chance in 1945 that he would satisfy popular yearnings for reform. His assumptions about policy had hardened like stalactites. He knew what he was doing. If he had relaxed the regime, he would have imperilled his personal supremacy. This consideration counted more for him than evidence that his mode of rule undermined the objective of durable economic competitiveness and political dynamism. Stalin thought strictly within the frame of his worldview and operational assumptions. The habits of despotism had anaesthetised him to human suffering. The man who digested a daily multitude of facts disregarded information he found uncongenial.

  Only his death or drastic physical incapacitation might have moved the mechanisms towards reform. He might easily have died in the first half of October 1945 when the condition of his heart gave him problems.1 The years were catching up with him. He had had patches of ill health since the Revolution, and the Second World War had levied a heavy toll. At the age of sixty-six he was long past his physical prime. His cardiac problem was kept a state secret and he took a two-month vacation;2 but this had been nothing unusual for him in the inter-war years. Not even the members of his entourage were initiated into the details of his condition — they were simply left to surmise that he was suffering from an illness of passing significance. Apart from his physician Vladimir Vinogradov, no one had an inkling of the medical prognosis. Politburo members knew they had to desist from any display of inquisitiveness. It would have been dangerous for Stalin to think they were aware of his growing frailty. He would instantly have suspected that a coup against him was in the offing. He needed only a scintilla of doubt about individuals to flash in his mind before consigning them to the security police.

  Despite his bodily decline, he could go on ruling the USSR through the existing institutions, personnel and procedures. Stalin’s personal supremacy rested upon the maintenance of the one-party dictatorship. Ideocracy and terror remained indispensable instruments of his despotism — and he never wavered in his determination to sustain it. He did not retreat from his intentions towards the wider world and aimed at a further strengthening of the USSR’s position as a great power. He reinforced Soviet hegemony over countries on the western borders: the zone of Europe conquered by the Red Army was to be held tightly within his grasp; and opportunities were to be sought to extend the USSR’s influence in Asia. Having won the war against the Third Reich, Stalin did not intend to lose the peace to the Western Allies. At a meeting with his intimates, he ordered them ‘to deliver a strong blow’ against any suggestion of the desirability of ‘democracy’ in the USSR.3 In Stalin’s opinion, democratic aspirations in Soviet society were the unfortunate consequence of co-operation with the USA and the United Kingdom from 1941. Western politicians after 1917 had feared the spread of the revolutionary bacillus from Russia; Stalin from 1945 dreaded his USSR becoming afflicted with counter-revolutionary infections: parliaments and markets to his mind were the diseased products of the capitalist order which had to be stopped from leaching their poison into his country.

  He cultivated peaceful relations with his Western allies and sought economic benefit through increased trade and loans. He allowed a widening of the scope of public debate after the war. He contemplated measures to expand the provision of industrial consumer goods. Yet already he made such any such orientation subsidiary to the achievement of other priorities. Stalin let nothing get in the way of the enhancement of the country’s military might and security — and he set about dedicating vast resources to the acquisition of his own A-bomb and to the subjugation of eastern and east-central Europe to the Kremlin. The question was not whether Stalin would rule moderately or fiercely, but how fiercely he would decide to rule. The connection between internal and external policies was intimate. Ferocity in the USSR had ramifications abroad. Equally important was the likelihood that any expected deterioration in relations with the Western Allies would induce him to reinforce repressive measures at home.

  Stalin had deported several Caucasian nationalities to the wilds of Kazakhstan in 1943–4. He had arrested the various elites of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania when he reannexed those states in 1944; the victims were either shot, thrown into the Gulag or dumped in Siberian settlements. Dekulakisation and declericalisation were bloodily imposed and 142,000 citizens of these new Soviet republics were deported in 1945–9.4 Stalin set the intelligence agencies to work at catching anyone disloyal to himself and the state. He put Soviet POWs through ‘filtration’ camps after their liberation from German captivity. An astonishing 2,775,700 former soldiers in the Red Army were subjected to interrogation upon repatriation, and about half of them landed up in a labour camp.5 Everywhere the police and party were looking out for insubordination. Marxist–Leninist propaganda had regained prominence toward the end of the war, and this emphasis continued after 1945. Citizens of the USSR were to be left with no illusions: the pre-war order was going to be reintroduced with a vengeance.

  The Soviet armed forces and security agencies had their hands full inside the USSR’s own borders. Even the task of feeding the army was difficult.6 Resistance was intense in those regions which had lain outside the USSR before the Second World War. Partisan warfare in defence of nationhood, religion and social custom was intense in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, western Belorussia and western Ukraine. Stalin was not alone in the Kremlin leadership in thinking that massive retaliation was required. The word went forth that the new borders of the USSR were permanent and non-negotiable and that its citizens would have to accept the fact or suffer the punitive consequences. Stalin was turning the country into a military camp. By assuming the title Generalissimus — like one of his heroes, Suvorov — on 28 June 1945 he signalled the regimentation he was going to imprint on Soviet public life. Uniforms, conscription and armaments were lauded. Pravda editorials were full of injunctions to obey party and government. The need for state defence was regularly conveyed by the media. There was no sense that peacetime would last long. The official media insisted that further sacrifices would be required of society.

  Across the half of Europe it controlled, meanwhile, the USSR reinforced the victory achieved over Nazi Germany. The Red Army and the NKVD confined the ‘liberated’ peoples to a framework of policies favourable to the local communist parties. Stalin had been preparing for this outcome for a couple of years. Former diplomats Maxim Litvinov and Ivan Maiski, whom he had sacked when he deemed them altogether too soft on the Western Allies, continued to be charged with preparing confidential papers on the future of both Europe and the Grand Alliance.7 Germany’s defeat made it urgent to lay down practical guidelines for the USSR’s hegemony over eastern Europe. Stalin adopted a differentiated strategy. In Germany he aimed to maximise his influence in Prussia, which lay in the Soviet occupation zone, without causing diplomatic conflict with his allies. In the other countries he had greater flexibility but still had to tread carefully. Communists were few outside Yugoslavia and had only a small following. At first Stalin moved cautiously. While inserting communists into coalition ministries, he eschewed the establishment of undiluted communist dictatorships.

  Stalin’s foreign policy beyond the countries under the Soviet Union’s direct control was complex. It never stopped evolvi
ng. He hesitated to annoy the other members of the Grand Alliance; he did not want to jeopardise his gains in eastern and east-central Europe while lacking the military capacity to match the Americans. He was also eager to get the most out of the wartime relationship with the USA. The wreckage of the war left little scope for the USSR to export grain, oil and timber to pay for imports of machinery and technology, as Stalin had done in the 1930s. An American state loan would help enormously, and for a couple of years this remained one of his prime objectives.

  Simultaneously he and Molotov intended to maximise Soviet influence around the world. The blood of the Soviet wartime dead in their opinion had earned Moscow the right to assert itself just as Washington and London did. The eastern half of Europe was not the limit of their pretensions. After Mussolini’s Italian Empire collapsed, Stalin instructed Molotov to press for newly liberated Libya to be declared a Soviet protectorate. Nor was he quick to withdraw the Red Army from northern Iran, where Azeris were the majority of the population. There was talk in the Kremlin of annexing the territory to Soviet Azerbaijan — the Azerbaijani communist leadership were especially keen on this.8 Whether Stalin seriously expected the Western Allies to give way is unknown. Perhaps he was just chancing his arm. He was anyway realistic enough to see that the USSR would not dent the ‘Anglo-American hegemony’ in most parts of the globe until his scientists had developed bombs of the type dropped by the US Air Force on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like Hitler, Stalin had failed to understand the destructive potential of nuclear weapons. He intended to rectify the situation by putting Politburo member Beria in charge of the Soviet research programme. The task was to enable the USSR to catch up with the Americans without delay.