Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  The British government, which had not been involved in the coup, mostly welcomed it.381 Already strained Soviet-Polish relations worsened.382 Tukhachevsky was dispatched to Minsk and Alexander Yegorov to Kharkov to be at the ready should Piłsudski suddenly repeat his eastward march of several years back, while the Soviet press agency TASS denied rumors of Red Army troop massing near Polish frontiers as a typical Polish provocation.383 The marshal insisted to the Soviet envoy in Warsaw that the Russians must consider him stupid if they believed he wanted a war, from which Poland could gain nothing.384 Truth be told, it did seem improbable that Poland could fulfill the role of a significant European power when sandwiched between a hostile Germany and hostile Soviet Union, itself antagonistic to Lithuania, scornful of Czechoslovakia, cool even to its ally France, and discriminatory against its large ethnic Ukrainian and Belorussian populations, while harboring territorial designs on Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belorussia. But Foreign Affairs Commissar Chicherin deemed Piłsudski “unpredictable.” Greater Romania, too, was a worry, as the Romanian national project radicalized amid the addition of many minorities as a result of the Great War. It acquired the third most powerful fascist movement after Italy and Germany, and its antiurban, anti-Semitic nationalist ideology folded in anti-Bolshevism.385 Romania refused even to grant diplomatic recognition to the USSR. To be sure, Romania was just a 17-million peasant nation and Poland just a 32-million peasant nation. But they signed a treaty of mutual aid in 1926, and the combination of the two implacably anti-Soviet states, in alliance with France—or egged on by some other more furtive imperialist machination—set Moscow on edge.

  Stalin also had to worry about an exposed eastern flank. Japan had agreed in 1925 to diplomatic recognition and to vacate northern Sakhalin, while holding on to the southern half of the island and receiving an extensive lease for oil and coal extraction in the north, while the Soviet Union confirmed Japanese supremacy in Manchuria.386 But protracted negotiations over fishery convention and timber concession highlighted the fundamental lack of comity, and in Moscow few doubted Japan would take advantage of any possible complications in the Soviet Union’s international situation. In the Soviet Far East, the population of ethnic Koreans, whose homeland had been annexed into the Japanese empire, had almost tripled to nearly 170,000 by 1926, reaching one quarter of the total population of the USSR’s strategic Vladivostok region.387 The Soviets knew the Japanese cultivated spies among this enormous East Asian population on its soil. Stalin permitted formation of a Korean national district and scores of Korean national townships, with Korean-language schools, but the regime also began discussing deportation of the concentrated Koreans away from the border, indicating the feeling of vulnerability.388 In the European part of Soviet territory, the number of ethnic Poles was estimated at between 2.5 and 4 million, and at least some of the many disaffected among them were assumed to be collaborating with Polish intelligence.389 Additionally, there were ethnic Finns on the Soviet side of the border with Finland. The USSR was hardly alone in suspecting disloyalty among its ethnic population with coethnics on the other side of an international border, but Soviet borders were incomparably vast.390

  • • •

  LENIN’S DEATH brought him back to life for the regime, and especially for Stalin. Trotsky’s political position showed itself to have been dependent on Lenin being physically around.391 But even had Trotsky been more adept politically, his biography (a former Menshevik, an intellectual), his personality (condescending, aloof), and his position (war commissar) afforded him little chance to succeed Lenin, especially against a formidable rival. Of course, in Trotsky’s mind Stalin was a deformation conjured into being by “the tired radicals, by the bureaucrats, by the NEPmen, the kulaks, the upstarts, the sneaks, by all the worms that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the manured revolution.”392 This, of course, was exactly how Stalin would characterize his nemesis. Had there been no Trotsky, Stalin would have had to invent him. Or more precisely, Stalin invented the Trotsky he needed, a task that looks simple only in hindsight. Stalin defeated Trotsky on the plane where the Georgian was perceived as most vulnerable yet proved strong—ideology. His propagation of a persuasive, accessible Leninism, which also happened to afford him the role of guarantor, was virtuoso, if unscrupulous in its plagiarism. Stalin certainly marshaled all his bureaucratic advantages and maneuvered with skill, but he also studied assiduously. “I must add a few words to try to explain Stalin’s effectiveness as a writer and orator, which gave him an edge over other orators and writers who were more skilled,” one contemporary Soviet literary critic remarked. “Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, even Trotsky were much less familiar with the texts of Lenin’s writings than Stalin. . . . Unlike them, Stalin studied Lenin’s texts and knew the printed Lenin intimately. He had no trouble selecting a quotation from Lenin if he needed it.”393

  Stalin positioned himself as honoring Lenin’s “behest.” He could have made a different choice, like Trotsky, and presented himself as Lenin’s equal. Stalin had the ego for that, too. But he opted for the more strategic stance, the appearance of humility, the mere pupil, and excelled at its realization.394 Strange to say, Stalin demonstrated a far better capacity for empathy than Trotsky as well. Later, Trotsky would viciously mock the functionary and Stalin loyalist Lazar Kaganovich, failing to appreciate the uneducated Kaganovich’s immense organizational talents and perspicacity. Kaganovich—who had once admired Trotsky—showed himself to be the more incisive person, sizing up Trotsky as supremely talented in public speaking and even organization (referring to the civil war), but woefully inferior to Stalin in strategy.395 Stalin was indeed a strategist, improvising dexterously in the face of sudden opportunities, thereby seizing the advantage, including in the case of the colossal opportunity presented by upstart self-made types like Kaganovich and countless other new men like him. But Stalin emerged a victor with a grudge, roiling with self-pity, resentment, victimhood. Many scholars have attributed such feelings to an inferiority complex, an assertion that may or may not be true. But what is certain is that he exercised his personal dictatorship amid a profound structural hostility: Stalin was the disciple of a man who seemed to have called for his removal. This state of siege mirrored the position of the revolution as a whole.

  Stalin’s geopolitical vision of a Soviet Union able to avoid entanglement in what he saw as the inevitable next intraimperialist war, which would produce new revolutions, was put in doubt by the apparent rapprochement of the two capitalist blocs at Locarno, as well as by the hostile posture of newly independent Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, expanded Romania, and Japan. Stalin entered the summer of 1926 amid profound disquiet over close-neighbor enmity, to say nothing of the ambiguous trajectory of the New Economic Policy. And the cursed Testament continued to hound him.

  CHAPTER 13

  TRIUMPHANT DEBACLE

  Comrades! It is already three years that I am asking you to relieve me of the duties of the general secretary. The plenum has refused me each time. . . . I’ll allow that there was a necessity, despite the known letter of comrade Lenin, to keep me in the post of general secretary. But those conditions are gone now. They are gone because the Opposition is crushed. . . . Now it is time, in my view, to heed Lenin’s instructions. Therefore I ask the plenum to relieve me of the post of Central Committee general secretary. I assure you, comrades, the party will only gain from this.

  Stalin, Central Committee plenum, December 19, 19271

  STALIN’S APARTMENT WAS LOCATED on the second floor of the Kremlin’s Amusement Palace (Poteshny Dvor), a modest, three-story former boyar residence immediately inside the Trinity Gate. Most recently it had been the quarters of the Kremlin commandant. The apartment had six rooms, including an oval-shaped dining room, two children’s bedrooms, one main bedroom, and an office, as well as a small telephone room. Stalin got the bedroom, his wife, Nadezhda “Nadya” Alliluyeva, one of the children’s bedrooms. Five-year-old Vasily (“Vasya
”) and Artyom, the boy born the same year whose father had died in the civil war, shared the other. Stalin’s first child, Yakov, now nineteen years old, slept in the dining room. Nadya’s room had a window that looked out onto the Alexander Gardens and the Kutafya Tower, the Kremlin’s only surviving drawbridge tower.2 But overall the apartment was hardly luxurious. Still, it marked an improvement: This was the family’s second Kremlin apartment, the first having been in a noisy outbuilding of the Grand Kremlin Palace.3 After Stalin had complained to Lenin, Abram Belenky, the chief of the leadership bodyguard detail, suggested Stalin relocate to rooms in the Grand Kremlin Palace itself. Trotsky’s wife, Natalya Sedova, a museum director, had objected, insisting that the palace fell under museum jurisdiction.4 She relented, offering to yield museum offices for the proposed residence, but instead Stalin had displaced the commandant.5 In the aftermath, Belenky tried to indulge Stalin, but it backfired. “In the move to the new apartment, it turns out that someone from the central executive committee business department, perhaps comrade Belenky of the GPU, took it upon himself to order new furniture at state expense for my apartment,” Stalin complained. “This capricious operation was carried out against my decisive statement that the old furniture fully satisfied me.” He asked that the head of the Central Control Commission investigate and punish the culprit, and that the newly bought furniture be immediately removed to the warehouse or wherever it was needed.6 Regime personnel had a hard time navigating the fine line between Stalin’s sincere commitment to modest living and the sycophancy sprouting all around him.

  Stalin did not play much of a paterfamilias role. The Kremlin apartment was obviously cramped. The Zubalovo two-story Gothic dacha just outside Moscow had twelve rooms and 5,000 square feet, but Stalin’s Sunday appearances there were irregular, even in summer. His widowed mother, Keke Geladze, continued to live in Georgia and did not visit Moscow; Nadya kept in touch (“We send you greetings from Moscow. We’re living well, all are healthy. The children are growing . . .”).7 Nadya’s parents, Sergei and Olga Alliluyeva, had moved to Leningrad. Stalin’s in-laws from his first marriage to the deceased Kato Svanidze lived in Moscow and saw him on occasion, but how often remains unclear; he barely saw his wife. Stalin’s marital life was hardly bliss. He appears to have loved Nadya, yet he was inattentive, and when he did pay her mind, he often became abusive, shouting obscenities at her, or what may have been more difficult to endure, refusing to speak with her at all.8 She suffered debilitating migraines and isolation. “I decidedly have nothing to do with anyone in Moscow,” Nadya wrote in early 1926 to Maria Svanidze, the wife of Stalin’s brother-in-law from his first wife, who was in Berlin and complaining of boredom. “Sometimes it’s even strange: after all these years not to have a single close friend but, evidently, it’s a question of character. Oddly enough, I feel closer to people outside the party (with women, of course). This is obviously because they are simpler.” Nadya had little interest in indulging the role and perquisites of the wife of the leader. On the contrary, she expressed anxiety that she would not be taken seriously if she did not work outside the home, but at the same time, she wanted to be qualified for any position she obtained. When she wrote to Svanidze, she was in the last stages of pregnancy with their second child and added, “I am very sorry to have tied myself down with yet more family bonds.”9

  A daughter, Svetlana, was born on February 18, 1926; her nursery was set up in Nadya’s room. In all the voluminous documentation that Stalin left behind, there is no record of his reaction. He could be very attentive to the children, when he was home, usually at late lunches, and when he had time, asking about their affairs, presenting them with books, sending them to the theater, disciplining them in a way that would impart life lessons. Responsibility for the children and the household largely devolved onto the head servant, Karolina Til, who also retrieved the family’s meals from the Kremlin canteen. However much Stalin may have loved Nadya, the woman whom he had married as a teenager was not the cheerful, submissive hostess he now sought, given his patriarchalism and his position as leader. At least once Nadya whisked herself, Vasily, and Svetlana to her parents’ home in Leningrad.10 Kremlin gossips faulted her for “deserting” him.11 Fatefully, she returned. Yakov’s kindness enabled him to become close to his stepsiblings as well as his stepmother (a mere six years his senior), with whom he shared the cruelty of Stalin’s domestic tyranny.12 When Yakov graduated from an electromechanical high school and, instead of entering university, announced his intention to marry a sixteen-year-old schoolmate, Zoya Gunina, Stalin exploded. Alone, Yakov put a gun to his heart in the kitchen of the Stalin family’s Kremlin apartment in the Amusement Palace, missing that vital organ by inches but wounding himself. Stalin, writing to Nadya, branded Yakov “a hooligan and blackmailer, who does not have and could not have anything more to do with me.”13 Yakov’s act, in Stalin’s eyes, was not a cry of despair at his father’s relentless disapproval, but an effort to exert pressure. Yakov would marry Zoya, however, and Nadya would move the couple into her parents’ apartment. Zoya would give birth to a daughter—Stalin’s first grandchild—but the baby would die in infancy from pneumonia.14

  Even Stalin’s absolute power did not delight him absolutely. He exulted in it, yet it roused his self-pity. He thrilled to being the center of attention, the decision maker, the successor to Lenin, the leader, but it ate at him that everyone knew Lenin’s Testament called for his removal. The giddy pleasure and the torment, the long-held ambition and the current burden, the paradoxes of his power, weighed on him. After the rigmarole of staging the huge 14th Party Congress, and much else besides, he was exhausted. “I’m thinking about going on a short holiday in two weeks, I’m really tired,” he had written on February 1, 1926, to Orjonikidze in Tiflis. But Stalin’s boundless power continued to besiege him: meetings with the State Bank chairman, state statistical administration personnel, the central consumer cooperative chairman, the railways, Ukrainian officials, Bashkir officials, Belorussian officials, Dagestanis, Kazakhstanis, Buryat Mongols, the health commissar, managers of state trusts, this local party boss, that local party boss, worker delegations, trade union functionaries, newspaper editors, university rectors, foreign affairs staff, ambassadors, foreign Communists, secret police, military brass, youth organizers, final negotiations for the disappointing treaty with Germany, women’s organizers, the May Day parade and receptions, the first ever general strike in Britain. Finally, however, he escaped. “I’ll be near Sochi in a few days,” he wrote again to Orjonikidze on May 16. “How are you planning to spend your holiday? Koba.”15 Stalin arrived on May 23. Almost immediately he sent a ciphered telegram to Molotov, who was minding the store in Moscow (Monday, May 24): “I got here Sunday evening. The weather is lousy. . . . Belenky told me that 1) Trotsky was back in Moscow [from Berlin] as early as Wednesday morning; 2) Preobrazhensky went to visit him in Berlin (for a rendezvous?). Interesting.”16 Yes, even on holiday.

  Some four years after Stalin had been named general secretary his personal rule was secure even when he was far from Moscow. That said, the survival of his power still depended upon maintaining a majority in the politburo. Through January 1926, changes in the composition of the full (voting) members of that body had been rare: Yelena Stasova had served only briefly, following Sverdlov’s death, July-September 1919; Lenin had removed Nikolai Krestinsky in 1921, promoting Zinoviev in his place; Bukharin had taken the deceased Lenin’s place in 1924. As of 1926, Zinoviev and Trotsky were still full members. But in January 1926, while demoting Kamenev to candidate (non-voting) member, Stalin had managed to promote Voroshilov, Molotov, and Kalinin to full members. Stalin’s voting majority in the nine-person body comprised those three, as well as the trio of Rykov, Bukharin, Tomsky. The worn-down Dzierzynski was another of the five candidate members, as were the Stalin protégés Nikolai Uglanov, Moscow party boss, Janis Rudzutaks, a Central Committee secretary on Old Square, and Petrovsky, a Ukrainian state official after whom Ye
katerinoslav, the country’s tenth biggest city, was renamed Dnepropetrovsk in 1926. In other words, many of Stalin’s loyalists had non-voting status. True, beginning in the summer of 1926, he would manage to change the politburo composition still more, to his advantage. But it would take him through the end of 1927, when the 15th Party Congress would finally be held, to drive the Zinoviev-Trotsky opposition out of the party entirely and into internal exile. And all the while, the nasty political brawling would go on and on and on, party forum after party forum, dragging in all those around Stalin and impinging on his psyche.

  Stalin’s complete political triumph over the opposition in December 1927, moreover, would follow debacle after debacle in his policies. Almost all the problems could be traced to the source of the regime’s strength: Communist ideology. Bolshevik socialism (anticapitalism) attracted and gave meaning to the shock-troop activists, supplied the vocabulary and worldview of millions in the party and beyond, and achieved a monopoly over the public sphere, but this same politically empowering ideology afforded no traction over the international situation or the faltering quasi-market domestic economy. On the contrary, the ideology made those formidable challenges still less tractable. The seizure of power had resulted in a narrow set of options for managing Russia’s power in the world, rendering it orthogonal to the great powers abroad and to the majority population peasants at home. Reinforcing this sense of siege was a personal dynamic whereby Stalin’s political victory only whetted his thirst for vindication. Benevolence was beyond him. Toward vanquished rivals he showed only false magnanimity. Dedicated revolutionaries, longtime comrades in arms, became presumed traitors for questioning his personal rule or regime policies. This demonization inhered in Bolshevism, of course, and it closely paralleled Lenin’s behavior, but Stalin carried it further, applying it to Communists. After Stalin crushed his party rivals, they became alleged terrorists plotting to kill him and collude with foreign powers.