Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  The problems of the revolution brought out the paranoia in Stalin, and Stalin brought out the paranoia inherent in the revolution. The years 1926–27 saw a qualitative mutual intensification in each, which was related to events as well as to the crescendo of the opposition. Insiders arrayed around Stalin, however, appear not to have perceived him as a criminal tyrant. Certainly they had come to understand he tended to be thin-skinned and vindictive, but they also saw a driven, inexhaustible, tough-minded, and skilled workhorse leader of the party and the cause, whose moods and caprice they hoped to contain, using the politburo as their key mechanism. Whether anyone on the inside had genuine insight into the depths of his character even by December 1927, however, remains an open question.

  A JAUNT THROUGH THE CAUCASUS

  No sooner had Stalin arrived in Sochi than the clever Anastas Mikoyan, the thirty-year-old party boss of the adjacent North Caucasus territory, ambushed him on May 26. Mikoyan, whose letters were intimately addressed “Dear Soso”—the diminutive Stalin’s mother used for her son—had been the one to talk Stalin into trying the medicinal sulfur baths at Matsesta, near Sochi, which had led to these annual holidays down south.17 Now Mikoyan talked Stalin into a romp through his native South Caucasus. They departed the Black Sea coast by train that very day, in the direction of Tiflis. Stalin took along only underwear and a hunting rifle. “First I’ll mess around a bit, then I’ll attend to my health and recuperation,” Stalin remarked.18 Tovstukha telegrammed on May 28 that at a politburo meeting, Trotsky and Molotov had been at daggers drawn over a foreign concession contract that Molotov found disadvantageous; Trotsky had signed it months before, but only now had the details come to light. Well, let Molotov muck it up with Trotsky. That same day, a staff member of Stalin’s entourage wrote back to Tovstukha, “The Master is in a very good mood.”19

  “The Master” (khoziain), a patrimonial term derived from a lord of the manor, was more and more becoming a nickname for Stalin, but down south, to his longtime compatriots, he was still Koba, the avenger. He and Mikoyan visited Borjomi, land of famed mineral waters; Kutaisi; even Gori. (One can only imagine the commotion.) At some point during the trip Stalin met up with Peti “Pyotr” Kapanadze, an old friend from the Tiflis seminary whose photograph had hung on Stalin’s wall and who had actually gone on to become a priest.20 In Tiflis, Stalin took in an opera, going backstage, as he liked to do, to greet the performers and director. In the Georgian capital he and Mikoyan stayed at Orjonikidze’s apartment, where Sergo’s elder brother, Konstantin, remembered Stalin singing a bawdy Georgian song.21 Here was Stalin’s preferred company. Only their mutual close friend and honorary Caucasus compatriot Kirov, now in Leningrad, was absent.

  In Moscow, in Stalin’s absence, the politburo gathered on June 3, 1926, to discuss the strikes in Britain. Trotsky would publicly argue against continued Soviet support for Britain’s establishment trade unions in order not to strengthen the forces of collaboration with the bourgeois regime, which he argued would weaken the British Communist party and leave the British working class unprepared for the imminent crisis-opportunity for a revolutionary breakthrough.22 The politburo session, with forty-three people in attendance, lasted six hours. The day it met, in a telegram of instructions to Molotov, Stalin correctly intuited that the general strike had been a “provocation by the British Conservatives”—that is, “capital, not the revolution, was on the attack.” He added that “as a result, we do not have a new phase of stormy onslaught by the revolution but a continuing stabilization, temporary, not enduring, but stabilization nonetheless, fraught with new attempts by capital to make new attacks on the workers, who continue to be forced to defend themselves.” He condemned the radical posturing of Trotsky as well as Zinoviev, which, with no revolution in the offing, only threatened to split the British trade union movement.23 Stalin viewed Soviet support for British trade unions and striking workers as a deterrent to renewed aggression against the USSR. Still, he wanted to complete the bilateral trade negotiations of 1924 that had been left hanging. During the general strike, the British charge d’affaires in Moscow had made yet another private plea to London to restart the talks for “a settlement of one kind or another with Russia.”24 But with the Soviet announcement of money transfers to the strikers, on top of clandestine Soviet efforts to spread revolution in the colonies, British government plans to reopen the trade negotiations would be put on ice.25

  Neither Genoa (1922), the idea of reintegration of the Soviet Union and Germany into the international order, nor Rapallo (1922), the idea of a mutual rogues’ special relationship with Germany, had delivered a viable Soviet security policy. And now British conservatives spearheaded a vocal public campaign for reprisals against the Soviet Union, even though the general strike was over and had failed. Trotsky, at the politburo meeting, complained that the general strike had never been discussed internally, which was untrue: the politburo had discussed it on May 4, 6, and 14, and formed a dedicated commission, led by the head of Soviet trade unions, Tomsky (Trotsky was not a member of the commission). Those assembled on June 3 rejected Zinoviev’s Comintern theses on the lessons of the British strikes. The already deeply acrimonious atmosphere was worsened by near constant jeering. Kamenev sardonically asked the menacing hecklers speaking while he was speaking: “Why are you all helping me?” Trotsky cut in: “‘Collective leadership’ is precisely when everyone hinders each other or everyone attacks each other.’ (Laughter).” Trotsky may have been trying to ease the tension.26 Collective leadership—ha! Stalin would get a full report.

  In the Caucasus, Stalin was on home turf in a way he had not been in a long time. On June 8, he met with a delegation of the Tiflis Main Railway Shops, where more than two decades ago he had been a youthful agitator. “I must say in all conscience, comrades, that I do not deserve a good half of the flattering things that have been said here about me,” he modestly suggested, according to the local newspaper. “I am, it appears, a hero of the October Revolution, the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the leader of the Communist International, a miraculous warrior-knight, and whatever else could be imagined. This is nonsense, comrades, and absolutely unnecessary exaggeration. It is the sort of thing that is usually said at the graveside of a departed revolutionary. But I have no intention of dying yet. . . . I really was, and still am, one of the pupils of the advanced workers of the Tiflis railway workshops.” While maintaining this faux humble posture, Stalin went on to outline how he had risen in the revolutionary underground, from his first workers’ “circle” in 1898, when he became a “pupil of the workers,” to 1917, when he became a pupil of “my great teacher—Lenin.” No fancy-pants intellectual, but a hardworking revolutionary laborer closely linked to the workers and to the Founder. “From the title of novice (Tiflis), through the title of apprentice (Baku) and the title of one of the foremen of our revolution (Leningrad)—that, comrades, is the school of my revolutionary university. . . the genuine picture of who I was and who I became, if one speaks without exaggeration, and in good conscience. (Applause turning into an ovation.)”27

  A far cry from the hissing and cursing Stalin had undergone five years earlier in Tiflis, when he had left a meeting hall with his head between his legs. This time, Orjonikidze and his men had evidently pulled out all the stops, taking no chances. But Stalin’s presentation of self at the railway shops that day was not published for a national audience, and neither were his accompanying observations on foreign affairs. Particularly salient were his comments on the coup d’etat the previous month in Poland. He retrospectively, demagogically denounced the Polish Communist party for having supported Piłsudski’s action (against a conservative government), then outlined with precision the political differences between the Piłsudski forces and their domestic rightist rivals, the National Democrats, predicting that although the former were stronger militarily, the latter would win out: Poland would turn further rightist and chauvinistic. In the meantime, Stalin cal
led Piłsudski “petit-bourgeois” but not fascistic, a view he would later change as Piłsudski himself would move in the very direction Stalin had attributed to the war minister’s domestic rivals.28 Thus, while Georgian nationalism seemed on its way to being tamed, national sentiment in independent Poland was another matter entirely.

  In Moscow the bitterness flowed and flowed. At another politburo meeting on June 14 in Stalin’s absence, when Dzierzynski, back from his trip through Ukraine, asserted that it was a “crime” to record their inner deliberations (a legal request made by the opposition), Trotsky shot back: “We should direct the GPU to stop us from talking; this will simplify everything.”29 Dzierzynski remained in high dudgeon over the death grip of bureaucracy, telling his subordinates at the Supreme Council of the Economy that June that the Soviet administrative machine was “based on universal mistrust,” and concluding, “We must junk this system.” The metastasizing apparatus, he added, was “eating the workers and peasants out of house and home, those who by their labor create real things of value.”30 To Rykov he wrote, “I do not share the policy of this Government. I do not understand it and I do not see any sense in it.”31 To Kuibyshev, he wrote that even good administrators were “drowning in interagency coordination, reports, papers, commissions. The capitalists, each one of them has his means and core responsibility. We now have the Council of Labor and defense and the politburo answering for everything. . . . This is not work, it is agony.” At the same time, Dzierzynski feared that his criticisms might “play into the hands of those who would take the country to the abyss—Trotsky, Zinoviev, Pyatakov. . . . If we do not find the correct line and pace of development our opposition will grow and the country will get its dictator, the grave digger of the revolution irrespective of the beautiful feathers on his costume. Almost all dictators nowadays are former Reds—Mussolini, Piłsudkski.”32

  AILMENTS APLENTY

  The three Caucasus musketeers wound down their jaunt: Orjonikidze accompanied Stalin and Mikoyan on the return train all the way to Poti, the Black Sea port, and from there, Stalin and Mikoyan took a boat up to Sochi, arriving on June 15, 1926. One gets the feeling that if Stalin could have just stayed the whole year at Sochi, running the regime from there, he might have been content. He read regime documents for pleasure not just work, played skittles (gorodki), and gardened. “He liked to go on picnics,” recalled the daughter of Stalin’s chief bodyguard, the Lithuanian Ivan Jusis. “Usually we headed up the mountains and looked for an interesting spot, and there arranged to stop. We always took along a white tablecloth. We were sure to have kebabs and different open-faced sandwiches: with caviar, with fish—sturgeon, salmon. There were also cheese and herbs, especially cilantro. My father knew how to make sausage out of bear meat, Lithuanian style, which Stalin loved.”33 Jusis appears to have been particularly close to Stalin. In Moscow, he had moved from Varsonefyev Lane (near the Lubyanka), where elite Chekists lived, into the Grand Kremlin Palace, taking one of the apartments formerly occupied by ladies-in-waiting. Dzierzynski lived at the end of the same corridor; the celebrated proletarian poet Demyan Bedny lived one floor up, in a sumptuous dwelling, as did Voroshilov. In Sochi, Jusis was no mere bodyguard but a companion.

  Stalin had come down with food poisoning from a rotten fish, and the doctors forced him onto a diet. They also managed to conduct a serious medical examination of him, perhaps the most detailed record of his health up to then. Ivan Valedinsky, newly appointed scientific director of the Matsesta sanitorium near Sochi, and three other physicians examined Stalin in a small room at dacha no. 4, where he was staying. “Comrade Stalin entered from the balcony wing, sat across from us doctors and carried himself very simply,” Valedinsky recalled. “We doctors felt at ease.” Stalin was found to have chronic, albeit non-active tuberculosis. His intestines gave him trouble, as if he had been poisoned. (Actually, in his youth he had contracted typhus, which leaves ulcers on the walls of the stomach.) He suffered bouts of diarrhea. He had chest pain caused by insufficient blood to the heart, which he self-treated using lemons. He complained of pain on the fingers of his left hand. His joints were inflamed and red. The doctors noted the beginnings of muscular atrophy in his left preshoulder. “Myalgia and arthritis of the left upper extremity,” they wrote. (Myalgia or muscle pains, if not caused by a trauma, often results from viral infections.) The doctors also observed eruptions of chronic quinsy (peritonsillar abscess), which produced sore throats and swelling. Stalin’s breathing was heavy, but the cause, pathologies in his right lung (pleural effusion or excess fluid), would not be discovered until many years later. This might have been the cause of the softness of his voice: even after microphones were introduced, he could sometimes barely be heard.

  Valedinsky would write that during an objective examination of Stalin’s internal organs, no elements of any pathological changes were found. Still, the examination appears to have led to a diagnosis of Erb-Charcot syndrome—fatigue, cramps, and a progressive wasting.34 Whatever the correct diagnosis, Stalin’s left arm with the suppurated elbow had continued to deteriorate and was barely usable. He also felt a permanent crunch in his knees, as well as in his neck when he turned. His aching muscles showed some signs of dystrophy, perhaps also symptoms of Erb-Charcot, although this might have been a genetic ailment.35 The doctors recommended a dozen Matsesta sulfur baths. “Upon departing from the examination Stalin asked me, ‘How about a bit of brandy?’” Valedinsky answered that “on Saturdays it’s possible to get somewhat stirred up and on Sundays to really relax, but on Mondays to go to work with a clear head.” He added, using a sly Communist code for a convivial occasion, that “this answer pleased comrade Stalin and the next time he organized a ‘voluntary Saturday’ [subbotnik] that was very memorable for me.”36 Stalin clearly took a shine to Valedinsky, the son of a priest who himself had completed seminary, and then, with his father’s permission, had gone on to Tomsk for medical training, after which he’d earned a Ph.D., served in the Great War, and got himself named to the Kremlin sanatorium. Stalin could be spectacularly charming when he wanted to be, particularly with service personnel. And the relief that Sochi-Matsesta brought may well have influenced Stalin’s moods for the better.

  Despite the lingering effects of the rotten fish, there was delightful news: the besieged opposition had served up yet another unwitting gift for the dictator they despised. Grigory Belenky, a Left oppositionist who had managed to hold his position as party boss of Moscow’s Krasnaya Presnya ward, organized a meeting at a dacha in the woods around twenty miles outside Moscow. Perhaps seventy people attended. They aimed to organize supporters at the big factories, higher educational institutions, and state agencies.37 “Even if there were only one chance in a hundred for regenerating the Revolution and its workers’ democracy, that chance had to be taken at all costs,” one participated asserted.38 Belenky estimated the support of sixty-two party cells in his ward. “If we can take Krasnaya Presnya, we can take everything,” he supposedly said.39 This was all delusion. Who was going to stick their necks out for them, with OGPU goons sitting conspicuously in party cell meeting halls and voting by means of an open show of hands? To the meeting in the woods, Belenky had invited Mikhail Lashevich, first deputy war commissar, who, when asked whether the oppositionists were organizing in the army, supposedly replied, “Here, the situation is excellent.”40 At least one participant informed on the group, and already on June 8–9 interrogations began.41 A clandestine opposition meeting in the woods, involving the first deputy commissar of war: manna from heaven.

  With Tovstukha telegramming Sochi, on June 24, that given Stalin’s continued absence he would put off the Central Committee plenum in Moscow until July 12, Stalin moved to take full advantage of the opposition’s latest “conspiracy,” writing back on June 25 “to Molotov, Rykov, Bukharin, and other friends” that the “Zinoviev Group” must have been involved in this “Lashevich Affair.” Zinoviev had not been present in the woods that day, but, after all, e
verything was linked. Stalin added some tendentious remarks about how the bounds of “loyal” opposition had, for the first time, been breached, and demanded not only that Lashevich be sacked from the war commissariat but that Zinoviev be removed from the politburo and, by extension, from the Comintern. “I assure you,” Stalin concluded with evident glee, “in the party and the country no one will feel sorry for Zinoviev, because they know him well.”42

  Pure joy. One functionary accompanying Stalin reported to his superiors in Moscow that the poet Demyan Bedny “comes by often. He regales us with bawdy jokes.” Still, it was past time to coax the dictator back to the capital. Molotov, on July 1, 1926, wrote insistently, “We consider necessary your arrival on July 7.” Molotov’s correspondence reveals appreciation for Stalin’s strong leadership, and affection. Stalin departed for Moscow no earlier than July 6.43 No sooner did he arrive back in the capital than Dzierzynski wrote asserting that Britain had been behind Piłsudski’s coup in Poland. “A whole host of data show with indubitable clarity (for me) that Poland is preparing a military attack against us with the aim of breaking off Belorussia and Ukraine from the USSR,” Dzierzynski asserted. “All the work of Piłsudski is concentrated on this. . . . In short order Romania is set to receive a huge mass of weapons from Italy, including submarines.” At the same time, he noted “an enlivening of activity of all White Guards in the limitrophe”—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. Almost immediately after Piłsudski’s coup, the Soviet Union had proposed nonaggression pacts to Estonia and Latvia, but neither responded affirmatively.44 Dzierzynski maintained that only domestic political considerations held Piłsudski back and that to mount his invasion, all he needed was to galvanize public opinion. Dzierzynski wanted the Central Committee to check the Red Army’s combat readiness, supply, mobilization and evacuation capability.45 Welcome back to Moscow, comrade Stalin! (The relentless greeting at every encounter which rang in his ear.)