Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Stalin’s team of aides was highly capable. Amayak Nazaretyan, the ethnic Armenian, was the son of a merchant, had studied at (but not graduated from) the law faculty at St. Petersburg University and was judged to be “a very cultured, clever, well-meaning and well-balanced man,” as well as among the very few, like Voroshilov and Orjonikidze, who addressed Stalin by the familiar “thou” (ty).236 Additionally, there was Ivan Tovstukha (b. 1889), who had studied abroad and resembled a professorial type; in the Parisian emigration he gave lectures on art to a group of Bolsheviks at the Louvre. (Stalin is supposed to have told him, according to Bazhanov, “My mother kept a billy-goat who looked exactly like you, only he didn’t wear a pince-nez.”)237 After the revolution Tovstukha worked for Stalin in the nationalities commissariat, and in 1922, immediately upon becoming general secretary, Stalin brought him into the party apparatus. Known to be taciturn, Tovstukha had tuberculosis and only one lung, but he would soon replace Nazaretyan as Stalin’s top aide.238 Stalin also brought in the Odessa native Lev Mehklis (b. 1889), the scion of a minor tsarist official and himself a prerevolutionary member of the Paole Zion party. Mekhlis came over from the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate, which Stalin nominally headed; there, Mekhlis had overseen reductions in state employees and expenditures, especially of hard currency, and fought against embezzlement, bragging on a 1922 questionnaire how he had “straightened out the [state] apparatus.”239 Mekhlis moved into House of Soviets no. 1 (on Granovsky), one notch down from a Kremlin apartment. He was severe and unsocial. “Conversations between Mekhlis and his subordinates went like this: ‘Do the following. Is that clear? Dismissed.’ Half a minute,” the apparatchik Balashov recalled. Whereas Stalin addressed Tovstukha respectfully, he tended to be abrupt with Mekhlis. “Stalin could say, for example, ‘Mekhlis, matches!’ or ‘Pencils!’” Balashov observed. “Not to Tovstukha. [Stalin] was very respectful toward him, listened to him. [Tovstukha] was a reserved person, dry, spoke little, but very smart. He was a good leader.” But although “Mekhlis had a difficult personality,” Balashov concluded, “Stalin valued him for such qualities, believing that Mekhlis would implement any assignment, no matter what.”240

  Countless new people entered Stalin’s circle in these early years, some who would fall by the wayside, some who would make remarkable careers, such as Georgy Malenkov (1902–1988), the son of a railroad civil servant, an ethnic Macedonian, who studied at a classical gymnasium and then at Moscow Technical College, and Sergei Syrtsov (b. 1893), who hailed from Ukraine, joined the party at the St. Petersburg Polytechnique (which he did not finish) and served as a political commissar in the civil war responsible for forcible deportation of Cossacks. Syrtsov also participated as a 10th Party Congress delegate in the crackdown against Kronstadt in 1921, and was appointed head of personnel in the Central Committee apparatus that same year before being moved to head of agitation and propaganda in 1924.241 Stalin’s apparatchiks included Stanisław Kosior (b. 1889), whom the general secretary appointed party boss of all Siberia, Andrei Zhdanov (b. 1896), who got Nizhny Novgorod province, and Andrei Andreyev (b. 1895), whom Stalin kept in the central apparatus as a Central Committee secretary. These and other examples show that Stalin promoted not only the uneducated. This especially applied to the worldly Sokolnikov, a master of the Russian language, as well as six foreign languages, and an accomplished musician, who was a genuine intelligent, the opposite of Kaganovich (who had worked under Sokolnikov in Turkestan).242 But Sokolnikov, no less than Kaganovich, was an extremely effective organizer.243 Sokolnikov helped transform Lenin’s NEP from a slogan into a reality, and yet Lenin, typically, disparaged him.244 Stalin, however, was solicitous. True, Sokolnikov lived outside the Kremlin (he and his young third wife, a writer, had an apartment in the secondary elite complex on Granovsky), but in 1924, Stalin would elevate Sokolnikov to candidate member of the politburo.

  LOOKING FOR LEVERAGE

  Many appointments Stalin had not made. Georgy Chicherin (b. 1872), for example, an aristocrat and a distant relative of Alexander Pushkin, was a Lenin appointee.245 It was Chicherin, not Stalin, who was the regime’s original night owl: he lived in an apartment adjacent to his office at Blacksmith Bridge, 15, and worked through the wee hours, being known to telephone subordinates at 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. to request information or convey directives. (To wind down, Chicherin played Mozart on the piano.) For leverage, Stalin looked to Chicherin’s principal deputy, Maxim Litvinov (b. 1876), who despite being from a wealthy banking family in Bialystok, as a Jew had been refused admission to gymnasium and then university.246 Litvinov never became reconciled to the fact that Chicherin, who had joined the Bolsheviks only in January 1918, rather than himself, an original member of the Russian Social Democrats dating to 1898, had been named foreign affairs commissar. (Both men had been in London when the summons to Chicherin came).247 Lenin told Litvinov he was an indispensable “party militant” in the commissariat, and Litvinov did carry a certain confidence based on his long-standing party service.248 But he was also perceived as suspicious and mistrustful, angling to advance himself, given to putting on airs yet suffering an inferiority complex, craving to be liked, manipulative.249 His antagonism with Chicherin became legendary. “Not a month would go by without my receiving a note marked ‘strictly confidential, for politburo members only,’ from one or the other of them,” the inner-sanctum functionary Bazhanov wrote. “In these notes Chicherin complained that Litvinov was rotten, ignorant, a gross and crude criminal who should never have been given diplomatic duties. Litvinov wrote that Chicherin was a homosexual, an idiot, a maniac, an abnormal individual.”250

  The politburo required Chicherin to bring Litvinov to its sessions on Western issues, and as a counter Chicherin elevated Lev Karakhanyan, known as Karakhan, an Armenian born in Tiflis (1889), as his deputy for the East.251 Karakhan had belonged to Trotsky’s group of internationalists, joining the Bolsheviks with him in the summer of 1917, and initially Stalin pushed to replace the Armenian, insisting that the regime needed a Muslim more amenable to Eastern peoples. Soon, however, Stalin’s correspondence with Karakhan would become obsequious. (“How’s your health and how are you feeling? You must miss [the USSR]. . . . Don’t believe Japanese diplomats for a second; the most treacherous people. . . . My bow to your wife. Greetings. I. Stalin. P.S. So far I’m alive and healthy. . . .”). Karakhan answered in kind (“I grasp your hand. With heartfelt greetings. Your L. Karakhan”). It seems that Karakhan ingratiated himself with Stalin, who, in turn, was on the lookout for his own person inside the commissariat. But Litvinov, too, competed for that role by conspicuously aping Stalin’s views.252 This dynamic could be seen all across the Soviet system—Stalin looking for personal animosities to manipulate to his benefit; officials appealing for his favor against political rivals.

  SECRET WEAPON

  Three men formed the inner core of the Cheka-GPU, and each would develop close relations with Stalin. First was Dzierzynski, who had been born in 1877 near Minsk in the borderlands of Lithuania-Belorussia, one of eight children in a family of Polish nobility landowners. He was orphaned, and zealously studied for the Catholic priesthood.253 “God is in my heart!” he is said to have told his elder brother. “And if I were ever to come to the conclusion, like you, that there is no God, I would shoot myself. I couldn’t live without God.”254 As a schoolboy, he converted to Marxism, was expelled two months before graduation from the Wilno gymnasium and, in his own words, became “a successful agitator” who “got through to the utterly untouched masses—at social evenings, in taverns, and wherever workers met.”255 But he ended up spending eleven years all told in tsarist prisons, in internal exile, and at hard labor in penal colonies, and he became consumptive.256 “His eyes certainly looked as if they were bathed in tears of eternal sorrow, but his mouth smiled an indulgent kindness,” observed the British sculptor Clare Sheridan, who in 1920 made a bust of him. (Dzierzynski told her that “one learns patience and calm in prison.”)257
Dzierżyński had a certain political vulnerability, having joined the Bolsheviks only in April 1917 and then opposed Lenin over Brest-Litovsk (1918) and trade unions (1921), but he won plaudits as the scourge of counterrevolutionaries and for living like a revolutionary ascetic, sleeping in his unheated office on an iron bed, subsisting on tea and crusts of bread.258 He reported to Lenin personally and once Lenin became incapacitated, got still closer to Stalin. Stalin was neither threatened by Dzierzynski nor fully dependent on him for secret police favors.

  Wiaczesław Mezynski, another Pole, had become Dzierzynski’s first deputy and, because his boss was simultaneously railroad commissar (and from 1924 would concurrently chair the Supreme Council of the Economy), ran the secret police. He had been born in St. Petersburg, the son of a Polish nobleman and teacher who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and graduated from the St. Petersburg law faculty. He lived in European emigration for 11 years, working as a bank clerk (in Paris) or teaching at a Bolshevik school (in Bologna), while painting and publishing sonnets. In Smolny in 1917 he was said to play Chopin waltzes on the grand piano of the former girls’ finishing school, and came across as a banker or a dandy in his three-piece suit. After his brief stint as the original commissar for finance and then some diplomatic work—Mezynski knew a dozen or so languages—Dzierzynski promoted him in the Cheka, considering him unfailing in operational instincts.259 The two lived in the Kremlin and had dachas near each other in Arkhaneglskoe (Gorki-6). Legends about Mezynski abounded: that he conducted interrogations lying on a settee draped in Chinese silks, dyed his finger- and toenails red, wore gold-framed pince-nez, and married a former governess to the Nobel family (she left him and took the children). Lenin called him “my decadent neurotic.”260 In fact, Mezynski did receive people while lying on a couch. An automobile accident in Paris had severely damaged his hearing and nerves, leaving him with degenerative osteoarthritis of the spine. In addition, he had contracted scarlatina and diphtheria in his youth and typhus at age 28, and suffered acute angina, arteriosclerosis, an enlarged heart, migraines, breathing arrhythmia, and an infected kidney. He stood 5΄9˝ but weighed 200 pounds, smoked 50 to 75 cigarettes daily, and managed no more than 5 hours of sleep because of insomnia.261 Although Mezynski had warned Trotsky during the civil war about Stalin’s incessant intriguing behind Trotsky’s back, Stalin and Mezynski, both former poets, got along. In any case, Mezynski’s profusion of ailments rendered him unthreatening, while enabling Stalin to work around him.

  The most consequential official in the secret police for Stalin was Jenokhom Jehuda, better known as Genrikh Yagoda, which he pronounced Yagóda, although Stalin cheekily called him Yágoda (berry). (Maxim Gorky would call him “Little Berry” [Yágodka]). Yagoda had been born in 1891 to a Polish-Jewish family in Yaroslavl province, one of eight children, but the next year his family settled in Nizhny Novgorod; his father was a jeweler, his mother, the daughter of a watchmaker. Yagoda’s father was a cousin of Yakov Sverdlov’s father. The young Yagoda studied at gymnasium, learning German and statistics, but in 1907 became active in revolutionary politics, mostly as an anarchist. One of his sisters was an anarchist and a pharmacist’s apprentice and he apprenticed for six months as a pharmacist in 1912; that May he was arrested in Moscow, apparently for theft and fencing stolen goods, including weapons and dynamite. Yagoda also apprenticed as an engraver to Sverdlov pere, and was rumored to have stolen all the tools, set himself up on his own, failed, come back and apologized, and then did it all over again. In the Great War he was conscripted (one of his brothers was executed for refusing to serve), and in 1915 he married a niece of Sverdlov’s, who provided his future entree into the regime: He became head of the Cheka business directorate in November 1919, though in his party autobiography he stressed his military exploits “on almost all the fronts,” with “the most varied duties, up to shooting.”262 In late 1920, Yagoda was granted the right to sign directives in Dzierzynski’s absence. In September 1923, he became second deputy GPU chairman, filling the vacuum created by Dzierzynski’s multiple responsibilities and Mezynski’s illnesses. Yagoda, no master of foreign languages, made his mark in economic management and intrigue.263 Direct reports from him to Stalin date from summer and fall 1922, a circumstance reflecting Stalin’s new position as general secretary, but also Stalin’s cultivation of police operatives.264

  Yagoda became Stalin’s secret weapon, but the dictator took no chances. He cultivated Yagoda’s enemies inside the secret police, such as Artur Fraucci. The latter had been born (1891) in Tver province to an ethnic Italian cheesemaker father from Switzerland and an Estonian-Latvian mother, becoming fluent in German and French and graduating from gymnasium with a gold medal, after which he completed the St. Petersburg Polytechnique. Fraucci went often to the opera to hear the basso Fyodor Chaliapin, and he himself could sing as well as play the piano and draw. He had gotten into the Cheka through connections (one of his mother’s sisters married Mikhail Kedrov), changed his name to Artur Artuzov (easier on the Russian ear), and was handed counterintelligence in July 1922.265 At Lubyanka HQ, struggles often took place among rival Cheka clans as much as against “counters” (counterrevolutionaries), and Artuzov and his professional staff disdained Yagoda and his people for their limited counterintelligence tradecraft. (Never mind that Polish intelligence, which knew Soviet personnel and Russian-Soviet police methods intimately, penetrated Soviet intelligence.)266 Besides Artuzov, Stalin had a close relationship with Józef Unszlicht, who would run military intelligence.

  Yagoda also made it easy for Stalin to manage him by his high living and compromising activities. Yagoda complained to the ascetic Dzierzynski that police officials had “no money or credit, no foodstuffs, no uniforms, the most necessary things are lacking,” leading to “demoralization, bribe-taking and other flowers blooming luxuriantly on this soil.” Karelia, Yagoda noted, lacked even stationery to write about the lack of everything.267 But Yagoda himself took up residence in the elite building at Blacksmith Bridge, which he had reconstructed at state expense, acquired an immense dacha complex, and convoked GPU meetings over crêpes and caviar washed down with vodka in private apartments. He also built up a coterie of shady characters. In one case, more than 200 bottles of confiscated brandy and rum vanished from the care of one of Yagoda’s bagmen.268 An even more notorious associate, Alexander “Sasha” Lurye, fenced “confiscated” valuables abroad in exchange for hard currency, nominally on behalf of the GPU, gave Yagoda a cut from his diamond business, and procured fine foreign wines and dildos. Yagoda acquired the foul odor of a commerçant, and his ultimate boss, Stalin, could closely track the disreputable machinations by the likes of Lurye—it was dictator’s insurance.

  “THE POINT IS ABOUT LEADERSHIP”

  Which brings us to the regime’s focal point, the dictator himself. Stalin’s character would become a central factor in world history, an outcome that would color all assessments. One scholar observed characteristically that a “politics of permanent emergency” generated by war, revolution, and civil war proved well suited to Stalin’s personal qualities. True enough, but this was applicable to the vast majority of Bolsheviks.269 Retrospective “insight” into Stalin’s character can be deeply misleading. He identified himself the way most top revolutionaries did: In 1920, in the space provided for “profession” on a party questionnaire, Stalin had inserted “writer (pundit) [publitsist].”270 Lenin, on a similar party questionnaire the year before, had written “man of letters” [literator]; Trotsky, when admitted to the Society of Former Political Prisoners, gave as his profession “writer-revolutionary.”271 (Of course, writing and editing were among the few legal activities for revolutionaries in tsarist Russia.) But while Stalin was proud of his immersion in the Marxist and Russian intelligentsia traditions, he was also a self-styled praktik: a practitioner, a doer, the closest a non-proletarian revolutionary could get to assuming the identity of a proletarian. That said, Stalin returned again and again to the touchstone of L
enin’s writings. The fundamental fact about him was that he viewed the world through Marxism.

  Probably the most pervasive characterization of Stalin, particularly among intellectuals, pegged him for an inferiority complex. “Because of his enormous envy and ambition,” Trotsky would assert, “Stalin could not help feeling at every step his intellectual and moral inferiority.”272 Trotsky would gather every morsel of hearsay that depicted Stalin’s inferiority. “I am doing everything he has asked me to do, but it is not enough for him,” Avel Yenukidze said, according to Leonid Serebryakov, who told Trotsky, “He wants me to admit that he is a genius.”273 But how well Trotsky understood Stalin remains doubtful. The two did not socialize. (“I was never in Stalin’s apartment,” Trotsky admitted, which, however, did not inhibit his assurances that he had Stalin figured out.)274 Beyond doubt, Stalin possessed a searing ambition to be a person of consequence; indeed, he worked at it relentlessly. Stalin subscribed to a substantial number of periodicals, and soon he would instruct Tovstukha to organize his enormous library according to subjects: philosophy, psychology, sociology, political economy, Russian history, history of other countries, diplomacy, military affairs, belles lettres, literary criticism, memoirs. This was not for demonstration but for work.275