Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Hypersecrecy became an unquenchable thirst that strengthened Stalin’s grip. Out of the business directorate he and his functionaries carved out a separate entity named the “secret department,” which took charge of denunciations and investigations, the party archives, and the contacts with the secret police. Modest in size at first, the secret department would expand to several hundred staff by the mid-1920s and acquire affiliates in local party branches, the military, factories, and state agencies—eventually, all major institutions. These secret departments constituted a parallel information system, a regime within the regime, that could be used to intimidate: officials did not know what was being recorded and reported in these parallel channels. The central secret department was physically cordoned off by steel doors. “The sanctum sanctorum in the grey building on the old Square is the secret department,” wrote one Soviet official after he defected. “One goes up by lift, then along a seemingly endless corridor. Meetings are held in the evenings. The building is thus in semi-darkness, empty and silent. Each step taken gives off a resounding and lonely echo. Then one is face-to-face with the inner guard posts. One’s special pass is checked. Finally one passes through the steel door separating this department from the rest of the building. And then one approaches the last door.”85

  No small degree of the apparatus’s power flowed from its mystique. Ryndzyunskaya, the sculptress, wrote of the rarely glimpsed interiors of Old Square that “the first thing that amazed me in this facility was the striking cleanliness and some kind of taciturn reticence, if one can speak that way. Reticence of words, reticence of movement, nothing superfluous.” The next time she met Stalin, in her studio, she told him of being unnerved by the scary (zhutko) feeling at Central Committee HQ. “I am very, very pleased,” Stalin is said to have replied, smiling, “that’s the way it should be.”86 But of all the apparatus’s secrets, the biggest one was that runaway decree-ism, obsessive demands for written reports, and endless traveling commissions exacerbated the roiling administrative chaos across the party-state, and buried Old Square, too, in paper. Dictatorship unwittingly imposes limits on itself. Orgburo staff studied manuals by the prolific Platon Lebedev, known as Kerzhentsev, such as Principles of Organization, whose first two editions had sold out in a matter of months; the third edition (1924) was issued in a print run of 5,000. Aiming to deliver “concise practical leadership for rank and file organizers in whatever sphere they worked,” Kerzhentsev cited American and British writings, and reproduced illustrations of a British card file system for personnel—index cards for each employee—which he urged be compiled not just by alphabet but also by occupation and geography.87 But his brief for clearly specified directives, follow through, and then intelligent adjustments neglected to acknowledge the tendency of dictatorships to incur, or even promote, multiple jurisdictions and other deliberate inefficiencies as a way to ensure political control.

  The conspiracy to seize power behaved like a conspiracy in power.88 The apparatus in theory was supposed to be transparent to the wider party; Lenin had insisted that a sign-in sheet hang inside the party complex with Stalin’s name on it, in alphabetical order, for his office hours.89 That said, Lenin’s own written orders were often distributed only under the proviso that they be returned to him or immediately destroyed after reading. He constantly urged, as he wrote in 1919 referring to Bolshevik subversion of Turkestan, that things had to be carried out “in an extremely conspiratorial manner (as we knew how to work under the tsar).”90 The origins and perpetuation of conspiracy, in other words, had little to do with Stalin’s personality, even if, by nature, Stalin was an archconspirator, and now the principal beneficiary.

  ZNAMENKA, 23

  West of the Kremlin, parallel to Vozdvizhenka, was Znamenka Street, named for an ancient church (Signs of the Holy Virgin). Znamenka, 23, the former Alexander Military School, was appropriated by the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, the war commissariat, and the Bolshevik General Staff.91 During the civil war, Znamenka was a power center, but that shifted precipitously with the victory and demobilization, as the Red Army shrank from around 5 million to 600,000 troops by the end of 1923. (Desertions drove a significant part of the reductions.) Equally important, the army was honeycombed by Communist party “political departments” in all its units, which fell under a self-standing army Political Administration—but that became a Stalin target. In 1923, the orgburo commissioned a “study” of party work in the army, ostensibly to ascertain whether such work was conducted in accord with orgburo instructions; the orgburo further mandated that representatives of the party apparatus be present at discussions of party-organizational activities in all military districts, and that the army’s political administration report regularly to the Central Committee. By fall 1923, the orgburo had instituted the equivalent of a party-controlled nomenklatura for top army positions, including members of the Revolutionary Military Councils of the center and regional military districts, as well as their aides; the main military commands; key staff of the army political administrations; military procurators and military academies.92 Every top Bolshevik official, including Trotsky, the war commissar, recognized the supremacy of the party.

  If the military was politically weak in the Soviet party-state, unlike the case in most dictatorships, the military also suffered from the weak condition of society. The regime hoped to use the Red Army as a “school for socialism,” and Trotsky took a very active role in driving political training.93 Stalin, predictably, sought to seize this issue, telling the 12th Party Congress that whereas others tended to see the Red Army through the lens of military offense and defense, he saw “a collection point of workers and peasants.”94 Around 180,000 peasants would be conscripted annually during the 1920s.95 A 1924 study revealed that the call-ups were clueless about “the Bolshevik party line, the party’s struggle with Menshevism, and with other alien groups.”96 Another survey revealed that nearly nine tenths of the army’s political educators had no more than two years of primary schooling. Meanwhile, newspapers and lectures were overrun with incomprehensible foreign words, neologisms, and jargon.97 “Let’s be frank,” one army educator noted, “when we speak about banks, stock exchanges, parliaments, trusts, finance kings, and democracies, we are not being understood.”98 In some ways, the Red Army rarely rose above being a Russian language remedial course for the multinational conscript populace, not exactly a political power base. Nor was the army a bulwark for Soviet security.99 “If God does not help us . . . and we get entangled in a war,” Stalin remarked in 1924, “we’ll be thoroughly routed.”100 That said, the general secretary’s subordination of the military to the party apparatus was very far along, with the exception that Trotsky remained its nominal head. Already in late 1923, however, the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate—controlled by Stalin—had pointed out, accurately, that Trotsky did not really manage the everyday work of the war and navy commissariat.101

  LUBYANKA, 2

  Lubyanka, a Moscow neighborhood, owed its name to Ivan III’s conquest of medieval Novgorod (“Lubyanits” had been a name for a district in that town brought to Moscow by those forced to relocate). In spring 1918, the central Cheka, arriving from Petrograd, had commandeered Bolshaya Lubyanka, 11 (site of Dzierzynski’s first Moscow office), as well as no. 13, near the city’s main commercial quarter. As the staff expanded and a separate Moscow region Cheka was established, in fall 1919, the Cheka Special Department overseeing security in the army grabbed Bolshaya Lubyanka, 2, where the narrow street opened onto Lubyanka Square. These premises consisted of an elegant five-story rectangular building with a clock on the top front façade that had been built in 1900 by the All-Russia Insurance Company, and like the solid structure occupied by the party apparatus nearby at Old Square, reflected the ample finances and tastes of Moscow merchant capital. The insurance company had rented out Bolshaya Lubyanka, 2’s ground-floor storefronts (a bookstore, sewing machine shop, bed store, beerhall) as well as some twenty ap
artments of up to nine rooms each, but the residents had already been evicted, the storefronts emptied, and the building earmarked for Soviet trade unions when the Cheka swooped in. In 1920, an internal prison was outfitted here (later it would be enlarged, when two stories were added to the building). “From the outside it looks like anything but a prison,” one cellmate reported. The Cheka also appropriated additional nearby buildings and as a result, wrote one observer, it “occupies a whole neighborhood in the center of the city . . . here are located the endless administrative sections and subsections: ‘secret operations,’ ‘investigation,’ ‘statistical,’ ‘data and graphs,’ and other functions. . . . It is an entire city within the city, working . . . day and night.”102

  Lubyanka, 2 was effectively subordinated not to the civilian government, but to Lenin and the politburo, which meant that this instrument, too, fell under Stalin’s purview in his capacity as head of the party apparatus.103

  The Cheka’s staff was smaller than it seemed.104 As of March 1921, Lubyanka, 2, budgeted for 2,450 staff, yet managed to hire just 1,415, with genuine operatives composing only about half that total, although by January 1922, the central staff had grown to 2,735, a number it would more or less maintain. As of November 1923, the secret police also commanded 33,000 border troops, 25,000 internal order troops, and 17,000 convoy guards.105 The number of secret informants on the rolls declined from a reported 60,000 in 1920 to 13,000 by the end of that year.106 Provincial Cheka branches varied in the size of staff, with around 40 total people in most cases, only half of them operatives, to cover vast swaths of territory with often limited transportation options. The Cheka relied on its fearsome reputation. Pravda carried reports of Cheka victims being flayed alive, impaled, scalped, crucified, tied to planks that were pushed slowly into roaring furnaces or into containers of boiling water. In winter, the Cheka was said to pour water over naked prisoners, creating ice statues, while some prisoners were said to have their necks twisted to such a degree their heads came off.107 True or not, such tales contributed to the Cheka mystique. But if an unsavory reputation served as a force multiplier, it also provoked revulsion.108 In May 1919, on Dzierzynski’s initiative, the Cheka was ordered to report weekly to the-then newly established orgburo—that is, to Stalin. Dzierzynski was added to the orgburo in 1920.109 Dzierzynski also named the operative Mikhail Kedrov to head a commission that traveled the country by armored train to root out Cheka impostors and malfeasance. But sadists and riffraff who got purged for discrediting the regime turned up elsewhere in different regional branches. Kedrov, a half-trained physician and virtuoso pianist, was himself notorious for butchery, and was said to have briefly sought psychiatric care.110

  The Cheka made no bones about using the tsarist inheritance of prisons, rebuilding, for example, the tsarist-era Verkhne-Uralsk “Isolator” expressly for “politicals.” Rumors circulated that the Cheka ranks overflowed with veterans of the hated okhranka, which was false—the Cheka mounted manhunts for them—but damaging to its reputation all the same.111 Whatever operatives’ origins, “people are beginning to look upon us as okhranniki,” fretted a Cheka deputy chairman, the Latvian known as Martinš Lacis.112 Nor did it help reputationally that a substantial proportion of Soviet Russia’s jailers, interrogators, and executioners were non-ethnic Russians, often Poles and Jews, a circumstance derived partly from the categories of those who had been oppressed under tsarism, and partly from methods of recruitment (Jews and Poles recruited their own).113 Proposals to curb Cheka abuses and authority were under discussion throughout 1921—after all, the civil war had been won, so why were the secret police continuing to carry out summary executions? Kamenev, the leading politburo proponent of a police overhaul, told a meeting of metalworkers that year that “there are people who justly hate the Lubyanka.”114 He proposed limiting the Cheka’s writ to political crimes, espionage, banditism, and security on railroads and at warehouses, while ceding everything else to the justice commissariat. Lenin supported Kamenev.115 So did Stalin. Dzierzynsk balked at relinquishing the Cheka’s expansive extrajudicial powers.116 But Lenin held his ground, and on February 6, 1922, the Cheka was replaced by the so-called State Political Administration (GPU), with functions that were duly circumscribed, albeit not to the full degree of Kamenev’s proposal.117

  Conversion to the GPU was not enacted in February 1922 in the South Caucasus, where the threat of uprisings was deemed too great, indicating that the reform was intended as a genuine reduction in power, but this intention would be subverted, and by Lenin himself.118 On February 20, 1922, he wrote to the justice commissar demanding a “strengthening of the repression against political enemies of Soviet power and the agents of the bourgeoisie (in particular the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries),” and urged “a series of demonstration trials” in the big cities, “exemplary, noisy, educational trials,” with “an explanation of their significance to the popular masses through the courts and the press.”119 There had already been various public trials, from that of Countess Sofia Panina (1918) to cases involving the State Bank, the state department store, the textile trust, as well as some staged in the worker-saturated Donbass to rally the proletariat and send a shot across the bow of non-party economic managers.120 But this latest trial was the biggest to date. Lenin, in Gorki, despite his stroke in May 1922, examined the arrest dossiers.121 From June 8 to August 7, 1922, thirty-four putative members of the Right Socialist Revolutionary Party stood in the dock in the Hall of Columns of the House of Trade Unions. Every one had been imprisoned by the tsarist regime for revolutionary activity, but now, according to Pravda, they were “traitorous lackeys of the bourgeoisie.” The GPU used captured archives of the SR Central Committee to try to authenticate the charges. (Dziga Vertov made a propaganda film, The SR Trial.)122 Grigory “Yuri” Pyatakov, the presiding judge, handed down predetermined death sentences.123 But an uproar arose abroad, and Kamenev found a clever compromise, proposing the executions be stayed for the time being but be implemented in the event of further “criminal” actions by the SR party.124 Sitting in Lubyanka, the death-row SRs in effect became hostages.125

  Lenin’s crusade against fellow socialists vitiated the police reform. In August 1922, the GPU obtained the formal power to exile or sentence people to a labor camp without trial or court conviction, and by November was granted this prerogative even for cases lacking a specific anti-Soviet act, solely on the basis of “suspicion.”126 A subversion of secret police reform would likely have happened in due course anyway: a siege mentality was baked into Bolshevism, and the GPU occupied the same building as the Cheka, with the same personnel.127 Still, Lenin personally also forced through the deportation in fall 1922 of theologians, linguists, historians, mathematicians, and other intellectuals on two chartered German ships, dubbed the Philosophers’ Steamers. GPU notes on them recorded: “knows a foreign language,” “uses irony.”128 A far larger number of what Pravda (August 31, 1922) called “ideological Wrangels and Kolchaks” were deported internally to remote labor camps, such as Solovki, officially the Northern Camps of Special Designation, at the site of a former monastery on an island in the White Sea.129

  The ideologized class division of the world empowered the secret police without end. “Those elements we are dispatching or will dispatch are in themselves politically worthless,” Trotsky told a leftist foreign journalist, Louise Bryant, widow of John Reed, who published the interview in Pravda (August 30, 1922). “But they are potential weapons in the hands of our possible enemies. In the event of new military complications . . . we would be compelled to shoot them according to the regulations of war.” Here is the view later attributed to Stalin that the Soviets could not tolerate potential enemies in their midst, because their presence would encourage and facilitate foreign intervention.130

  Stalin was inundated with materials from the secret police. The GPU claimed in the mid-1920s to have more than 2 million Soviet inhabitants under permanent watch.131 The okhranka had
produced the “tsar’s briefing” (tsarskii listok), a compilation of observations concerning “the opposition,” as well as natural disasters, explosions, and sensational non-political crimes, which was issued weekly and added up to as many as 600 pages annually, and which Nicholas II read and marked up. But the Soviet secret police compiled extensive summaries of the political mood (svodki) far more regularly, relying upon informants from nearly every institution and settlement, down to villages.132 Around 10,000 people were also engaged in perlustrating mail for the Soviet state, compared with 50 for the tsarist state in 1914.133 Each copy of the secret police mood summaries was numbered, and sent to Lenin and Stalin, Trotsky and his deputy Sklyansky at the military, but not to Zinoviev or Kamenev, though the latter soon were included.134 Additionally, however, Stalin, in the name of the Central Committee, pursued special firsthand reports outside normal channels, recruiting his own networks of informants.