Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Assertions regarding Stalin’s sense of inferiority reveal at least as much about others’ sense of superiority—and not just in the case of Trotsky. Consider Boris Bazhanov, who had a university education and possessed an exalted sense of self, and who after having emigrated would belittle Stalin’s intelligence, observing that “very often he didn’t know what to do or how to do it, but he didn’t show it. I often saw him hesitate, preferring to follow events rather than direct them.” Supposedly, this behavior demonstrated that Stalin was uneducated, uncultured, unread.276 And yet, in an interview, Bazhanov condescendingly ended up putting Stalin’s circumspect inclinations in a positive light. “Stalin had the very good sense never to say anything before everyone else had his argument fully developed,” Bazhanov said. “He would sit there, watching the way the discussion was going. When everyone had spoken, he would say: Well comrades, I think the solution to the problem is such and such—and he would then repeat the conclusions towards which the majority had been drifting. And, as time passed, it came to be said of Stalin that . . . he had a fundamental wisdom of sorts which led him to propose the right answers to difficult questions.”277

  Episodes that show Stalin in an ungenerous light are many, but scarcely remarkable. Consider the following: Lenin perhaps did his intellectual nemesis Yuly Martov an unintended favor in late 1920 by denying him reentry to Soviet Russia after he had attended a conference in Germany, thereby allowing Martov to avoid a future trial that would befall the Mensheviks. As it happened, Martov had consumption and two years later Lenin requested that Stalin transfer party funds to pay for Martov’s medical care in Berlin. Stalin, no doubt remembering Martov’s accusations of banditry in 1918, which resulted in a court case for libel, refused. “What, start wasting money on an enemy of the working class?” Stalin is said to have answered Lenin. “Find yourself another [party] secretary for that!”278 Martov died on April 4, 1923; Rykov attended the funeral in Berlin on behalf of Lenin. But this can hardly be cited as evidence of Stalin’s special penchant for vengeance. Stalin was far from alone in his ill will toward Martov. Radek, who wrote the obituary for Izvestiya, dismissed Martov as “the most sincere and selfless representative of the once revolutionary petit-bourgeoisie.”279 Trotsky was no kinder, calling Martov “the Hamlet of democratic socialism.”280 Martov’s critics from the right, including the Constitutional Democrats, even his own Menshevik party, correctly accused him of having been doctrinaire and politically myopic.281 And Lenin, Martov excepted, pursued not just the political but the physical extirpation of the Menshevik Social Democrats.

  Stalin played favorites, warming to some, intriguing against many. (Budyonny, the Red cavalry commander, recalled that Stalin would privately bring up doubts about this or that person whom Budyonny had appointed.)282 But in the early 1920s, there is no hard evidence of epic depravity. Trotsky related the following anecdote, evidently from 1922, attributed to Bukharin: “I have just come from seeing Koba. Do you know how he spends his time? He takes his year-old boy from bed, fills his own mouth with smoke from his pipe, and blows it into the baby’s face. ‘It makes him stronger,’ Koba says. . . . ‘That’s barbaric,’ I said. You don’t know Koba. He is like that—a little peculiar.”283 This story rings true, but it would be read in a more sinister light only later. According to a high official of the food supply commissariat, Lenin said to him in a meeting in 1921, “When I look you in the eyes, you seem to agree with me and say ‘yes,’ but I turn away and you say ‘no.’”284 Had this anecdote been told about Stalin, it would be taken as prime evidence of clinical paranoia.

  A very few people figured Stalin out early on. “Am I satisfied with my work?” Amayak Nazaretyan wrote to his close friend Orjonikidze (June 14, 1922) back in Tiflis. “Yes and no. On the one hand, I have gone through a grand school and course of all Russian and world affairs, I am going through a school of discipline, learning exactitude in work, and from this point of view I am satisfied. On the other hand, the work is utterly paper-oriented, laborious, subjectively little-satisfying, manual labor, swallowing so much time that it’s impossible to sneeze and breathe, especially under the iron hand of Koba.” Nazaretyan added that “there is much to learn from him. Getting to know him close-up, I have developed unusual respect for him. He has a character that can only be envied. I cannot take offense. His severity is accompanied by attention to the staff.”285 Nazaretyan had caught Stalin to a T: both solicitous and demanding, and above all doggedly hardworking. That was not all. “He is sly,” Nazaretyan wrote in another letter to Orjonikidze (August 9, 1922). “Hard like a nut, you do not crack him open right away.”286 Stalin’s enemies, predictably, viewed his combined solicitude-slyness in dark terms.287

  Stalin could be very closed and inaccessible, yet he could also switch on the charm, and he proved to be a loyal patron to those “under his wing.”288 Mikoyan, who had met Stalin in 1919, captured well the impression Stalin made on those he favored. Mikoyan would recall how in 1922, when he was serving as party boss in Nizhny Novgorod, Stalin summoned him to his Kremlin apartment in connection with regional delegate elections for the 11th Party Congress—and how Lenin walked right in. “Stalin gained in my eyes,” Mikoyan recalled. “I saw that he was the right hand of Lenin in such important internal party matters.” In summer 1922, Stalin transferred Mikoyan to head the party’s southeast bureau (headquartered in Rostov). “After the 11th Party Congress Stalin energetically started to gather cadres, organize and rotate them in the provinces and in the center,” Mikoyan continued. “And I liked what he did, as far as I knew, and what was connected to my work.” Stalin quickly grasped the concerns Mikoyan brought and never once rejected one of the provincial’s recommendations. “All this strengthened my trust in Stalin and I started to turn to him often and during my trips to Moscow I would visit him.” Mikoyan added that “Stalin at that time worked with all his strength. . . . He was in top form, which elicited respect, and his manner and behavior elicited sympathy.”

  Mikoyan—manifestly ambitious—was clearly paying close attention, from his own careerist calculations, to a rising political force. “In spring 1923, I think in May, being in Moscow, I stopped by his apartment,” he continued. “He lived then in the first building to the right from the Kremlin’s Trinity Gate, on the second-floor of a two story building. The rooms were simple, not especially expansive, except for the dining room. His office was very small.” (Later, when Stalin upgraded his Kremlin residence and moved Mikoyan to Moscow, he gave him this apartment.) “Stalin exited his home office with his arm in a sling. I saw this for the first time and, naturally, inquired what was the matter.” Stalin: “My arm hurts, especially in spring. Rheumatism, it seems. Eventually it’ll go away.” Stalin’s arthritic problems had likely begun in childhood and worsened over time, especially during his Siberian exile; the periodic flaring was accompanied by quinsy and flu.289 (In 1904, when Stalin was twenty-six, the tsarist police noted “a distinctive trait: the movement of his left arm is circumscribed as a result of a long-ago dislocation.” This was clearly recorded from Stalin’s own words.)290 When Mikoyan asked why Stalin did not seek treatment, he answered: “And what will doctors do?” But Mikoyan consulted with physicians and managed to get Stalin to go south for treatment under the care of physicians, beginning in 1923, at the medicinal baths near Matsesta.291 The sulfur waters worked, alleviating the pain in Stalin’s joints, and he started to holiday down south every year. “Stalin liked Sochi so much,” Mikoyan concluded, “he went there even after he no longer needed to go to the Matsesta baths.”292 (In fact, the aches persisted.)

  Another privileged gathering place was Stalin’s dacha outside Moscow. This country home in Usovo on the left bank of the Medvenka River had belonged to Levon Zubalov [Zubalashvili], one of four brick dachas the now deceased Baku oil magnate had built on an expansive plot of land for himself and family members, in thick woods behind high brick walls.293 The main house (designated Zubalovo-4) had two stories; St
alin and his wife had separate rooms on the upper floor, where Stalin also had an office. Nadezhda (b. 1901), or Nadya in the diminutive, his second wife, whom he had bounced on his knee when she was a toddler and wed when she was a teenager, worked in Lenin’s secretariat. She wanted a career, not to be known as the wife of the ruler, but she suffered severe headaches and down moods.294 The lower floor was used by a constant stream of relatives and hangers-on: the extended clans of the Alliluyevs as well as the Svanidzes (the family of Stalin’s deceased first wife), with broods of sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, and spouses. The same year that Vasya was born, Stalin’s abandoned son from his first marriage, Yakov, then fourteen, was sent from Tiflis to live with him in Moscow. Stalin had abandoned him to be raised by his mother’s sister and uncle in Georgia; the move to Moscow was a difficult transition, given that he did not know Russian or, for that matter, his father. Stalin treated Yakov with hostility, calling him “my fool” in front of others, perhaps partly because he reminded his father of the lovely Georgian wife he had lost. For a time, the Stalin household had another young member, Artyom Sergeyev, who had been born nineteen days after Vasya in the same hospital, and whom Stalin took in after the boy’s father, a close civil war comrade, died in the crash of an experimental high-speed railcar fitted with an aircraft engine.

  Zubalovo was located a good eight miles beyond Moscow and lacked a direct road; in winter one needed chains on a vehicle’s wheels or an auto sled (a car body with tank treads). Stalin traveled out infrequently, mostly on Sundays. Still, the dacha had a player piano, left over from the old Zubalov days—miraculously, it still functioned—which Stalin enjoyed, being exceedingly fond of music. Also, he tended a vegetable garden on the grounds, as well as geese, chickens, guinea fowl, and a small apiary. From the nearby state farm he occasionally borrowed a horse-drawn sled—like scenes from Chekhov, one of Stalin’s favorite authors. “In the evenings,” Artyom recalled, “Stalin really loved to ride the sleds.”295 Here was a Stalin few saw. Trotsky’s dacha—known as Headquarters—was grander, located just north of Moscow in the settlement of Arkhangelskoe at the nationalized Yusupov Palace, an estate formerly owned by the Golitsyns and before that the Sheremetevs, where the art still hung on the walls: Tiepolo, Boucher, Fragonard; it was not known as a social gathering spot. By contrast, the Orjonikidzes and, later, Sergei Kirov, perhaps Stalin’s closest friend, would visit Stalin at Zubalovo. The Mikoyans and their four boys would occupy an even larger Zubalovo dacha (Zubalovo-2), where the Voroshilovs also obtained a dacha.296 Stalin would sometimes arrive at Zubalovo in a dark mood, however, and set to quarreling with Nadya. Their marriage was strained over different conceptions of the wife’s role.

  Lidiya Fotiyeva, under whom Nadya worked, recalled Stalin’s wife as being “very beautiful” and having “Georgian eyes” (her grandfather was Georgian), but Fotiyeva also noted that “Stalin was very rude with her,” although he did not raise his voice (“Stalin always spoke softly”). While Nadya was working in Lenin’s secretariat, Stalin sometimes had her take his own dictation, too, but mostly he wanted her to play hostess to his guests at their apartment. When she was pregnant with Vasya (1920–21), Stalin became determined that she quit her work outside the home. Fotiyeva claimed that when she reported Stalin’s pressure on Nadya to quit to Lenin, he asked to be kept informed; when Stalin backed down, Lenin nonetheless remarked, “Asiatic.” On December 10, 1921, eight months after Vasya’s birth, Nadya—the wife of a politburo member and a personal secretary to Lenin—was expelled during a party purge for political “passivity.”297 She wrote an appeal to Lenin. Who would have had the temerity or the power to purge her? Only one person, who was evidently trying to force his wife back into the home. Lenin dictated a note over the telephone to the head of the party’s Central Control Commission urging Nadya’s reinstatement.298 Nadya was restored to candidate status, but regained full membership only in 1924.299 She would take up secretarial work at Revolution and Culture, part of Pravda’s publishing empire, not wanting to be known or treated as the general secretary’s wife. Nadya could be extremely difficult, prone to migraines and depression. At the same time, Stalin was a self-centered, patriarchal husband and poor father.

  This, then, was the person at the center of the regime in the early 1920s: personable yet secretive, charming yet dissembling, solicitous yet severe, sociable yet malevolent toward the wife who sought his love. But within the “family” of apparatchiks, Stalin was the supreme patron. “Notwithstanding all his intelligent wildness of disposition, if I may use such an expression,” Nazaretyan concluded of Stalin’s peculiarities, “he is a soft person, has a heart, and is capable of valuing the worth of people.”300 Ultimately, what stood out most about Stalin was his command inside the apparatus. “Working alongside Stalin was not easy, especially for the leaders of the secretariat and the closest aides,” recalled Alexei Balashov, a functionary. “Very great tension was felt around him. . . . You had to work round the clock, without exaggeration, going home only to sleep.” They all became exhausted, and dreamed of getting leave to study. One time, according to Balashov, they held a meeting of what they called the “true Leninists”—otherwise known as the 20—and “Stalin said, ‘Comrade Dzierzynski, [Grigory] Kanner here petitioned to be released to study. What do you think about that?’ All the aides became intently quiet. ‘That’s terrific,’ Dzierzynski answered, ‘I have a free cell. Let him sit there and study.’ We all went cold.”301 (Kanner, described as “a small man” who had “curly black hair” resembling “sheep’s fleece,” had joined Stalin’s apparatus early in May 1922, and developed a reputation for getting tasked with the nastiest assignments.)302 Balashov added that “there was no fear. There was respect for [Stalin’s] tenacity, industriousness, and exactitude. I considered that there was a lot to learn from him on how to become a good leader-organizer.”303

  Balashov made an additional point, though: the general secretary lived inside the apparatus bubble. “I did not like that Stalin was an apparat functionary, an apparatchik,” Balashov noted. “The management of the party and country flowed from us in chancellery fashion, without advice from the masses. Of course, he [Stalin] met with many different people, took part in meetings of village correspondents, for example, specialists. But that all happened in the office. It was as if people were smoking tobacco [makhorka] and nothing was visible in the smoke cloud.”304 But if Stalin had limited contact with the masses, he had an extraordinary degree of contact with young regime functionaries. Whereas Trotsky openly mocked functionaries for perverting the revolution, Bukharin later supposedly told the Menshevik Fyodor Dan that Stalin “is like the symbol of the party, the lower strata trust him.”305 Balashov, who was a Kaganovich protégé but who through an uncle saw Trotsky in private settings, noted that in all the years he (Balashov) worked in the central apparatus (1922–26), Trotsky showed up only once.306 Stalin identified with these people, he listened to their concerns and, although perhaps not capable of genuine empathy, worked to enable mid- and lower-level functionaries to raise their abilities, to master Marxism and administration. Stalin developed a romantic view of the Soviet system that he would hold his entire life. “What must the dict[atorship] of the party signify?” he wrote in a copy of a 1923 work by Lenin. “A state power resting on force? No, that’s rubbish! Unlimited rights by the party? Not that either! The point is not about rights, the point is about trust in the party, and trust does not at all presuppose unlimited rights of the party as its necessary condition. The point is about leadership.”307 Thrust into power, Stalin found himself on a lifelong quest not only for personal glory but also for deciphering the secrets to ruling over men and things in order to further Russian power in the world.

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  VOZDVIZHENKA AND THEN OLD SQUARE became the hub in the vast wheel of Stalin’s kingdom. Like its imperial Russian predecessor, the Soviet state emerged as a labyrinth of patron-client relationships that cut across formal institutions. But St
alin’s patron-client relations were strongly institutional: the Communist party machine, for all its inefficiencies and frictions, was something that the tsarist regime just did not have. Because of the party, the vast collection of personal followings that composed the party-state converged on a single person, the party’s leader.308 In a remarkably short time, Stalin had people everywhere that mattered, and the extent to which functionaries serving the cause understood themselves also to be serving him personally was extraordinary. People were surprised by this breathtaking power because they underestimated Stalin. But if such a degree of political control had been established that quickly even by a person immediately recognized as one of the great political figures of all time, it still would have surprised contemporaries. To be sure, the capacity of the dictatorship as of 1922–24 was limited, but it was greater than that of tsarism, for unlike the autocracy, the Soviet regime actively promoted mass mobilization on its behalf. And yet, the Soviet state, too, had failed so far to discover the secret to fully integrating the mobilized masses into an authoritarian polity.

  The regime’s political and even physical arrangements reflected the dual revolutions of 1917–18, Bolshevik and peasant, which faced each other warily. Additionally, the two governmental pillars of the New Economic Policy—at Old Square, 8 (agriculture) and Ilinka, 9 (finance)—flanked the central party apparatus. All three bodies were ensconced smack in the heart of Moscow’s prerevolutionary commercial and financial quarter (Kitaigorod), and all three were architectural embodiments of merchant capital and aspirations. How cognizant Stalin was of being housed in Moscow’s prerevolutionary capitalist epicenter, while running the Communist party and presiding over a Communist indulgence of capitalism (NEP), remains unclear. What is clear is that he was marinated in Communist ideology. Lots of regimes have a secret police and hunt for enemies. What differentiated this regime was its special single-party structure and a transcendent idea, the vision of a new world of abundance, social justice, and peace. Many were committed to building that world within the framework of the one-party system, but others became disappointed that that world had not yet materialized. Talk circulated of the New Economic Policy as a Thermidor, the French revolutionary name for the month of July, when, in 1794, a counterrevolution had occurred and the Jacobins were overthrown. To be sure, the Bolsheviks themselves had introduced the NEP and remained in power.309 Still, some observers foresaw an inevitable forced denationalization of industry, with corresponding changes in the political system. The NEP, in such thinking, was merely the first concession.310