Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  BLACKSMITH BRIDGE AND HOTEL LUX

  Down the street from GPU headquarters at Lubyanka sat the enormous premises of the foreign affairs commissariat, at Blacksmith Bridge, 15. The name (Kuznetskii most) was derived from a long gone stone crossing over the long ago filled-in Neglinnaya River. Before the revolution, the elegant street had been known for fashion houses, bookshops, photography workshops, and restaurants, and the commissariat’s home was an opulent, semineoclassical, six-story accordion of a building built in 1905–6 with two symmetrical wings, and seized from the All-Russia Insurance Company in 1918.135 It had resplendent residences (Yagoda, a deputy chief of the GPU, happened to live here) as well as offices. Among tsarist-period ministries after the coup, foreign affairs underwent the greatest turnover as the diplomatic corps filled with a combination of returning old Bolshevik emigres and young firebrands. “Well, what are we Soviet diplomats?” Leonid Krasin liked to say. “I’m an engineer, Krestinsky, a teacher. That’s what sort of diplomats we are.” The Soviets refused to use the “bourgeois” term “ambassador” and called their envoys “plenipotenitiary representatives,” but in 1923 the foreign affairs commissariat distributed to envoys abroad “Short Instructions on following the rules of etiquette observed in bourgeois societies.”136 Pyotr Voikov, the envoy to Poland, even tried to impress upon fellow young diplomats the value of ballroom dancing. “He said, for instance that the greatest diplomatic victories had been won in conservatories,” one pupil recalled. “I will not quote the examples he cited in support of this astonishing theory; it is enough to say that the most recent example he cited referred to the Congress of Vienna” of 1815.137 As of 1924, when the commissariat numbered 484 persons in positions of responsibility, fully 33 percent were university graduates, a far greater proportion than in the central party apparatus.138 Fewer than half of commissariat personnel were ethnic Russians.139

  Not far from Blacksmith Bridge was the Hotel Lux, at Tverskaya, 36, known, not without irony, as the “headquarters of world revolution” after it was given over to the Comintern. It was the place where every affiliated party could be criticized—except one.140 For the Third World Congress of the Comintern (June-July 1921), the Lux housed some 600 delegates from fifty-two countries in its small rooms.141 The premises were honeycombed with undercover GPU agents who enticed or entrapped foreigners into informing on one another. Contacts with Soviet inhabitants would become strictly regulated.142 Still, the Lux had art deco elegance to go with hot water once a week. Comintern offices proper were located elsewhere, in the two-story mansion that had belonged to the sugar baron Sergei Berg and had served as the inaugural German embassy (where Mirbach had been assassinated) on Money Lane. In 1921, when Lenin summoned Otto Kuusinen (b. 1881), the former chairman of the Finnish Social Democrats and the founder of the Finnish Communists, from Stockholm to untangle the mess of day-to-day Comintern operations as general secretary, the Finn, in turn, engaged a personal assistant, Mauno Heimo (b. 1896), who arrived in Moscow in 1924 and took over day-to-day Comintern operations. “There is no proper organization in the Comintern and you and I must create one,” Kuusinen was said to have told him. “There is no proper staff and no proper delineation of responsibilities. Fifteen hundred people are being paid for their work, but no one knows who his superior is or what authority he has or what he is actually supposed to be doing.”143 Heimo’s first order of business was to procure better premises. He lit upon Mokhovaya, 6 (also known as Vozdvizhenka, 1), a five-story building just outside the Kremlin’s Trinity Gates-Kutafya Tower.144 On the building’s inaccessible top (fifth) floor, the GPU held sway, overseeing the real work: illegal money transfers to foreign Communist parties, forged visas, and stolen foreign passports doctored for reuse.

  Comintern funds invariably vanished, presumed stolen; it was also rumored to be penetrated by foreign intelligence. Other Soviet agencies tended to despise the organization (“thousands of Comintern parasites were on the Soviet payrolls,” noted one Soviet intelligence operative).145 “To understand the workings of the Comintern one must realize two things,” wrote Kuusinen’s wife: “Firstly, it was always being reorganized, and secondly, a great deal of activity was fictitious.”146 Foreign affairs commissar Chicherin pushed to separate the functions of his commissariat and the Comintern, which he would call his “internal enemy No. 1” (the “GPU hydra” only got second place). But none other than he had issued the invitation to the Comintern’s founding congress in 1919, where he was a delegate.147 Although only Comintern agents were supposed to conduct illegal work abroad, in practice, embassy personnel did so as well.148 Comintern personnel (known as “foreigners”) usually had offices under flimsy cover right inside Soviet embassies, which also housed the GPU (“close neighbor”) and military intelligence (“distant neighbor”). Moreover, the public rhetoric of top Soviet officials, including politburo members who sat on the Comintern executive committee, nearly always aligned with “the oppressed” against the governments of putative diplomatic partner countries. Still, the foreign affairs commissariat issued endless memoranda reminding the politburo that the Comintern’s high profile and the GPU’s summary executions reduced the Soviet room for maneuver internationally: foreign governments did not trust such a regime to engage in legitimate business, and if they did take the risk, invariably a scandal broke apart about underhanded Soviet-Comintern machinations.

  Beyond Moscow’s two-faced foreign policy, aiming to foment revolution in the very countries they were trying to have normal relations and trade with, lay the debilitating class-based worldview. Lenin argued that the international “bourgeoisie” could never accept the permanent existence of a workers’ state, but the truth was the opposite: although Western hostility toward the Soviet regime was often intransigent and some Western individuals were committed to Soviet overthrow, Western government hostility was mostly “sporadic, diffused, disorganized,” as George Kennan explained. He added that while “many people in the Western governments came to hate the Soviet leaders for what they did,” the Communists “hated the Western governments for what they were, regardless of what they did.”149 Thus, Moscow could view a Labour government and a Tory government as in essence identical: both imperialist and, therefore, both perfidious. Entente hostility toward Soviet Russia, in other words, no more caused Bolshevik Western antagonism than Entente accommodation would have caused a friendly, hands-off Bolshevik disposition. Lenin argued that if capitalists accommodated the Soviet regime on something, it was only because they had been forced to do so, whether by their own workers’ militancy or their dependence on chasing new markets (such as Russia’s).150 Stalin accepted this line in toto, and explained that when the moment was propitious, the capitalists would intervene militarily again, aiming to restore capitalism.151 In the meantime, in negotiations for new trade deals and long-term credits, the capitalists invariably demanded repayment of repudiated tsarist-era state debt and compensation for nationalized foreign-owned property as a precondition.152 Although Lenin allowed the foreign affairs commissariat to announce Soviet readiness to enter into discussions about tsarist debts contracted before 1914, he would spurn the opportunities that would result.153

  Prime Minister Lloyd George, a liberal in the classic nineteenth-century sense of laissez-faire and free trade, advanced the idea of an international conference to rehabilitate Russia and Germany in an improved peace settlement aiming at European economic reconstruction, which could profit Britain and perhaps shore up his fragile coalition government with a bold act.154 In early 1922, the Soviets accepted an invitation to attend the conference, scheduled to open April 10 in Genoa, where thirty-four countries would be represented.155 Lenin would not personally attend, allegedly out of security concerns (the Cheka reported that the Poles were planning to assassinate him in Italy); in fact, Lenin, after returning from exile in 1917, never left Russia again.156 Still, he dictated the Soviet posture. When Foreign Affairs Commissar Georgy Chicherin, preparing for Genoa, inquired, �
�Should the Americans strongly press for ‘representative institutions’ do you not think we could, in return for some decent compensation, make some minor changes in our constitution?” Lenin wrote “madness” on the letter, had it circulated to the politburo, and added “this and the following letter show clearly that Chicherin is sick and very much so.”157 (The Americans ended up declining to attend Genoa.) “This is ultrasecret,” Lenin wrote to Chicherin a bit later. “It suits us that Genoa be wrecked . . . but not by us, of course.”158 Whether in the end the political establishments of the great powers were ready for a full detente with Moscow remains uncertain.159 But instead of their manifest ambivalence, Lenin saw a concerted attempt at a united capitalist front against the Soviets, even though this was a conference expressly designed to help Russia with diplomatic recognition and trade.160

  Lenin was not alone in sabotaging Lloyd George’s effort. French prime minister Raymond Poincare, who did not deign to attend, forced the removal from the agenda of any opportunity for the Germans to discuss their reparation grievances. Poincare viewed Lloyd George’s effort to amend Versailles (“neither victors nor vanquished”) as coming at French expense, but his hard-line strategy backfired. Back at Versailles in 1919, France had inserted a clause, Article 116, granting Russia—a post-Bolshevik Russia, it was assumed—the right to obtain German reparations for the war, and now the Soviets hinted they would do so. Walther Rathenau, the newly appointed German foreign minister, who was oriented toward rapprochement with the West, nonetheless felt constrained to order bilateral talks with Russia to remove the Article 116 sword of Damocles.161 When rumors circulated that during the Genoa opening sessions the Soviets were engaged in separate Anglo-French talks in Lloyd George’s private villa without Germany, Rathenau requested meetings with the British prime minister but was rebuffed. At 1:15 a.m. on April 16, the Soviets accepted the Germans’ suggestion of a meeting that day.162 Rathenau’s staff again tried to alert the British, but Lloyd George’s assistant did not take at least two calls. The British prime minister’s diplomatic amateurism unwittingly amplified the French prime minister’s unrealistic inflexibility as well as Lenin’s ultrasecret treachery.163 In the driving rain the German delegation drove over to the Soviet delegation at their Genoa quarters, the Hotel Imperiale, on the road between the small Ligurian seaside resort of Santa Margherita and the larger town of Rapallo, and by early evening that same day, Easter Sunday, a bilateral treaty was signed. Terms had been set out the week before in Germany (Chicherin had traveled to Genoa via Berlin), but only now did Rathenau agree to them.164

  The Rapallo Treaty, for the second time, made Germany the first major power to formally recognize the Soviet state—the other had been the abrogated Brest-Litovsk Treaty—and this resumption of diplomatic ties came without the need for tsarist debt repayment or domestic concessions such as softening the Bolshevik dictatorship. The Germans accepted the validity of Soviet expropriations of German property, and the Soviets renounced all claims under Article 116. The two sides agreed to trade under what would later be called most-favored-nation status.165 Rathenau, who in addition to his government post was the general director of AEG, the German electrical conglomerate, could well understand Russia’s economic value as a supplier of raw materials to and a customer of Germany, especially with the New Economic Policy and restoration of the market. (Rathenau, the first Jew to serve as German foreign minister, would be assassinated by right-wing ultras within two months.) Rapallo reconfirmed the centrality to Bolshevik fortunes of Germany, and it seemed to preempt Lenin’s suspicions of an across-the-board coalition of the powers against the Soviet regime. The French refusal to acknowledge German grievances, the British inability to tame the French, and the Soviets’ manipulation of Article 116—a French invention—had led to France’s nightmare and Lenin’s fantasy: an apparent Soviet-German axis.166 Rapallo was accompanied by rumors of secret protocols about military obligations amounting to an alliance, which Chicherin categorically denied in a note to France.167 In fact, ties between the Red Army and the Reichswehr were already intimate and on August 11, 1922, the two countries signed a secret formal agreement on military cooperation. Obviating Versailles restrictions, the German army would obtain secret training facilities for its air and tank forces inside the Soviet Union, in exchange for Soviet access to German military industrial technology, in plants that were to be built on Soviet soil and supply each country’s armed forces.168 That, anyway, was the promise.

  Lenin was running foreign affairs as a personal fief. He probably had more telephone conversations with Chicherin than anyone else, and considerable direct contact with him, too, but he treated his foreign affairs commissar like an errand boy. Even after the Rapallo Treaty, Chicherin and the Soviet delegation wanted to sign the Genoa agreement and began going slightly beyond their brief to discuss repudiated wartime debts, seeing no way to rebuild ravaged Russia other than with Western help, but Lenin condemned his negotiators for their “unspeakably shameful and dangerous vacillations.”169 In the event, no tsarist debts were repaid and no nationalized property compensated to the Entente, and as a result, no investment consortium for Russia was formed and no peace treaty with Russia signed.170 Lenin believed that the capitalist powers would be compelled to revive the Russian economy by the logic of global capitalist development, and thus he had allowed the unique moment for a possible reintegration of Russia into the European community to be lost. (The next such gathering for the Soviets would be at Helsinki in 1975.) At the same time, the Weimar Republic and the Bolshevik dictatorship were not kindred regimes and their cooperation would be fraught as Germany continued to seek rapprochement with the West.171 How the Soviets would acquire advanced technology on a large scale remained hanging. Once Lenin became incapacitated, Stalin became the central figure in foreign policy, inheriting all these challenges of the intransigent Leninist legacy. In international relations, Stalin was anything but a dictator.

  OLD SQUARE, 8

  When Stalin was handed the opportunity to build a personal dictatorship, not only did Lenin suffer a stroke, but Soviet Russia was prostrate, having lost millions of people to war, political terror, and emigration. The extreme dislocation was exacerbated by the orgy of Bolshevik grain requisitioning, then by a severe drought, intense heat, and hot winds that turned the black earth into a dustbowl. Sown area had already shrunk, but now 14 million of the mere 38 million acres sown failed to produce crops, causing a famine whose scale had not been seen since the eighteenth century. Peasants were reduced to eating poisonous concoctions boiled from weeds, ground bones, tree bark, or straw from their roofs, as well as dogs, cats, rats, and human flesh.172 Upward of 35 million people suffered intense hunger—the entire Volga valley (the epicenter), the southern Urals and the Tatar and Bashkir republics, the North Caucasus, large parts of southern Ukraine, Crimea. An estimated 5 to 7 million people lost their lives between 1921 and 1923 from starvation and related diseases, amounting to 50,000 deaths per week.173 In the worst famine-stricken areas, the GPU would post guards at cemeteries to prevent the starving from digging up corpses to eat. Just in the Volga valley and Crimea, the authorities registered more than 2 million orphans, miracle survivors, albeit often with hollow eyes, distended stomachs, matchstick legs.174

  Lenin—having beaten back demands to repeal the NEP—now dispatched a food procurement plenipotentiary to steppe regions, which were put under martial law. When the plenipotentiary advised that fulfilling the grain quotas 100 percent would leave regions without even seed grain, he was ordered to proceed as originally instructed.175 In early 1922, Lenin sent Felix Dzierzynski on a food expedition to Siberia, whose harvest, unaffected by the severe drought elsewhere, was more or less normal.176 Dzierzynski lived in his train carriage, civil war style, writing to his wife Zofia Muszkat in despair of the enormity of the tasks and the inadequacy of his leadership as concurrent commissar of railroads (“Only now, in winter, do I clearly understand the need to prepare in summer for t
he winter”). His stay was prolonged—it was while Dzierzynski was in Siberia, on February 6, 1922, that the Cheka had been abolished and replaced by the GPU—and eye-opening. “The Siberian experience has demonstrated to me the fundamental shortcomings of our system of management,” he wrote his wife again in February. “Even the best thoughts and directives from Moscow do not make it here and hang in the air.”177 The GPU, meanwhile, reported out of one Siberian province (February 14) that “abuses by procurement agents reach utterly stunning proportions. . . . Everywhere arrested peasants are locked in icy granaries, flogged with whips [nagaiki] and threatened with shooting.” Peasants, fleeing to the woods, were “chased and trampled upon with horses first. Then they were stripped naked and shut in granaries with no heat. Many women were beaten unconscious, buried naked in the snow, raped.”178

  Fixated on extracting food for its hungry northwest cities, the regime’s response to the rural regions in starvation had been slow and ineffective.179 Lenin refused to seek help from “imperialist” governments, but the exiled writer Maxim Gorky, with Lenin’s connivance, issued a private appeal to “all honorable persons,” and Herbert Hoover, the American secretary of commerce, replied affirmatively just two days later. Hoover (b. 1874), the son of a Quaker, had been orphaned as a child, had gone on to be part of the inaugural graduating class of Stanford University as a mining engineer, and during the Great War had founded the American Relief Administration (ARA), initially a government agency that was converted into a private body with government funding. In heeding the summons to help Soviet Russia, he laid down two conditions: that American relief personnel be allowed to operate independently, and that U.S. citizens in Soviet prisons be released. Lenin cursed Hoover and acceded. In a monumental triumph of philanthropy and organization, Hoover mustered more than $60 million worth of foreign food support, primarily in the form of corn, wheat seeds, condensed milk, and sugar, much of it donated by the United States Congress, some of it paid for by the Soviet regime with scarce hard currency and gold (melted down from confiscated church objects and other valuables). Employing 300 field agents who engaged up to 100,000 Soviet helpers at 19,000 field kitchens, the ARA at its height fed nearly 11 million people daily.180 Gorky wrote to Hoover that “your help will enter history as a unique, gigantic achievement, worthy of the greatest glory, which will long remain in the memory of millions of Russians . . . whom you have saved from death.”181