Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  The Shakhty trial and related actions seemed to afford Stalin’s personal dictatorship the power to overcome resistance among apparatchiks to collectivization, and to root the regime in more than itself. This task was urgent not just to disprove the critique by Trotsky—that Stalin’s was a regime of functionaries—but because Stalin genuinely believed in the working-class social base. In addition, many young people, especially those Stalin was now trying to rally, had secretly continued to sympathize with Trotsky.30 More broadly, in Soviet society disappointment had become pervasive over the failures of the revolution to deliver abundance and social justice. The vast majority of “anti-Soviet” utterances recorded in police summaries in fact had the populace demanding or wishing the regime live up to socialist goals. Nostalgia for “Father Lenin,” misguided in the brutal facts of his rule, made sense in terms of a yearning to reclaim the revolution’s promise. Shakhty promised a chance to regain the earlier elan. That all this upheaval, from the countryside to the mines and factories, was going to work out in Stalin’s favor, however, was hardly guaranteed. He put everything on the line, including his personal power.

  • • •

  SUBJECTS OF BIOGRAPHY often are portrayed as forming their personalities, including their views about authority and obedience—that is, about power—in childhood and especially the family. But do we really need to locate the wellsprings of Stalin’s politics or even his troubled soul in beatings he allegedly received as a child in Gori? The beatings likely never took place, certainly not to the extent they have usually been portrayed, but even if they had? Similarly, were the oppressive surveillance, informing, and arbitrary governance at the Tiflis seminary the critical formative experiences of Stalin’s life? That training ground for priests was a nest of tyranny and stool pigeons, but so was the entirety of Russia under the autocracy, and many of the softest Georgian Mensheviks came out of the very same seminary as Stalin did. To be sure, his intense relationship with the daring Lado Ketskhoveli, and the latter’s early death at the hands of tsarist jailers, made a lasting impression on him, helping to solidify his lifelong Marxist convictions. And Stalin’s prolonged struggle as a Bolshevik and Lenin loyalist against the overwhelming Menshevik majority of Georgia’s Social Democrats made a lasting imprint, too, sowing or eliciting some of his inner demons. In other words, Stalin’s marked personal traits, which colored his momentous political decisions, emerged as a result of politics. This suggestion to explain Stalin’s person through politics amounts to more than expediency (in the absence of plentiful, reliable sources on his early life and inner mind). Even though he had inherited the possibility of a personal dictatorship from Lenin, Stalin went through significant psychological ordeals in the struggle to be acclaimed as Lenin’s successor.

  It had taken Stalin years of angling and stress to rid himself of Trotsky, a bitter rivalry that had ensued already in 1917, intensified during the civil war into near obsession, and dominated the inner life of the party after the onset of Lenin’s fatal illness. The Trotsky struggle had exerted a deep influence on Stalin’s character. No less profound an impact came in Stalin’s struggle with Lenin’s dictation. From May-June 1923 on, Stalin was embroiled in several years of infighting during which Lenin’s purported Testament appeared suddenly, and kept reappearing, refusing to go away. With his manifold instruments of personal power, he was mercilessly hounding all those who expressed differences of opinion with him, but he was always the victim. Whether this entailed some sort of long-standing persecution complex or one of more recent vintage cannot be established given the extant sources. But we can say for certain that the internecine political warfare with the opposition—not just with Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, but also with the Testament—brought this behavior out.

  When all is said and done, the “succession struggle” was with a piece of paper—a few typed lines, no signature, no identifying initials. Stalin triumphed over its recommendation, but the Testament continued to broadcast an irrepressible echo: Stalin’s personality is dangerous; find a way to remove Stalin. He resigned, again and again. He cut a deal for a truce with them, and they published the Testament in the New York Times. He could trust no one. All the while, he was responsible for everything. It was all on his back. But did they appreciate this? Let them try to do better. They again affirmed his leadership. But it was never sufficient.

  Closed and gregarious, vindictive and solicitous, Stalin shatters any attempt to contain him within binaries. He was by inclination a despot who, when he wanted to be, was utterly charming. He was an ideologue who was flexibly pragmatic. He fastened obsessively on slights yet he was a precocious geostrategic thinker—unique among Bolsheviks—who was, however, prone to egregious strategic blunders. Stalin was as a ruler both astute and blinkered, diligent and self-defeating, cynical and true believing. The cold calculation and the flights of absurd delusion were products of a single mind. He was shrewd enough to see right through people, but not enough to escape a litany of nonsensical beliefs. Above all, he became in the 1920s ever more steeped in conspiracies. But Stalin’s increasing hyper-suspiciousness bordering on paranoia was fundamentally political—and it closely mirrored the Bolshevik revolution’s in-built structural paranoia, the predicament of a Communist regime in an overwhelmingly capitalist world, surrounded by, penetrated by enemies.

  • • •

  THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION—against the tyranny, corruption, and, not least, incompetence of tsarism—sparked soaring hopes for a new world of abundance, social justice, and peace. But all that was precluded by the Bolsheviks, who unwittingly yet relentlessly reproduced the pathologies and predations of the old regime state in new forms (even more than had their French Revolution forerunners, as Alexis de Tocqueville demonstrated for France). The reason was not circumstance but intentional political monopoly as well as Communist convictions, which deepened the debilitating circumstances cited to justify ever more statization and violence. To be sure, socioeconomic class was (and remains) undeniable. But the construction of political order on the basis of class, rather than common humanity and individual liberty, was (and always will be) ruinous. All non-Leninist socialists eventually discovered that if they wanted genuine democracy, they had to abandon Marx’s summons to negate and transcend capitalism and markets. In the Soviet case, for anyone not hopelessly sunk in the ideological soup, events provided ample opportunity for a rethinking—for recognition of the dire need to exit the Leninist cul-de-sac: abandon the self-defeating class war approach, accept the market as not inherently evil, encourage prospering farmers to continue, and help lift up the others. But such admissions, for almost every Bolshevik of consequence, proved too great.

  Still, even within the encumbering Leninist frame, a Soviet leader could have gone out of his way to reduce the paranoia built into the regime’s relations with the outside world and its domestic situation. A Soviet leader could have paid the price of partial accommodation, grasping that capitalism was not, in fact, dying out globally and that the capitalist powers were not, in fact, hellbent on overturning the revolutionary regime at all costs. But Stalin was not such a leader. Of course, all authoritarian regimes, in order to suppress dissent and gin up the masses, cynically require profuse “enemies.” On top of that, though, Stalin intensified the insanity inherent in Leninism from conviction and personal characteristics, ensuring that the permanent state of war with the whole world led to a state of war with the country’s majority population, and carrying the Leninist program to its full end goal of anti-capitalism.

  Stalin had not liked the NEP any more than Trotsky had, although like Lenin, and because of Lenin, Stalin appreciated the recourse to pragmatism for the greater cause. But by 1928, immediately upon Trotsky’s deportation to Kazakhstan, Stalin acted upon his long-standing leftist core convictions because, like Lenin in 1921, when the NEP had been introduced, Stalin felt the survival of the revolution was at stake, and that he had the political room to act. Stalin could never admit tha
t Trotsky and the Left opposition, in their critique of the NEP, had been, in his view, correct: it was beyond Stalin’s character to be genuinely magnanimous, and it would have undermined his rationale for Trotsky’s internal exile, provoking calls for his reinstatement. But those who believe Trotsky could have, and would have, done much the same thing as Stalin are mistaken. Trotsky was just not the leader people thought he was, or that Stalin turned out to be.

  Without Lenin, Trotsky never again demonstrated the leadership that he had in 1917 and during the civil war under Lenin’s authority. On the very uneven playing field of the personal dictatorship that Stalin inherited by dint of his appointment as general secretary and Lenin’s stroke, Trotsky was still capable of brilliant polemics, but not of building an ever-wider faction, dividing his enemies, subsuming his convictions to necessary tactical considerations. More than that, Trotsky had never been an indefatigable, nitty-gritty administrator or a strategist capable of ruthlessly opportunistic improvisation. Whatever the overlap between his and Stalin’s core beliefs, Stalin’s abilities and resolve were an order of magnitude greater.

  But what if Stalin had died?31 He had come down with a serious case of appendicitis in 1921, requiring surgery. “It was difficult to guarantee the outcome,” Dr. V. N. Rozanov recalled. “Lenin in the morning and in the evening called me in the hospital. He not only inquired about Stalin’s health, but demanded the most thorough report.”32 Stalin had complained of pain, despite a local anesthetic, and Rozanov administered a heavy dose of chloroform, the kind of heavy dose he would administer to Frunze in 1925, who died not long after his own operation.33 Stalin, who may have also suffered ulcers (possibly attributive to typhus), following his own operation had taken a rest cure—ordered by the politburo—at Nalchik in the North Caucasus from May through August 1921.34 In December 1921, he was again incapacitated by illness.35

  Later, Kremlin doctors recorded that Stalin had suffered malaria at some point in his youth. In 1909, in exile, he had a bout of typhus in the Vyatka hospital, a relapse because he had suffered it in childhood. Stalin’s elder second brother Giorgy, whom he never knew, had died of typhus. In 1915, in Siberian exile, Stalin contracted rheumatism, which periodically flared, accompanied by quinsy and flu.36 Stalin also suffered tuberculosis prior to the revolution. His first wife, Kato, died of tuberculosis or typhus. Yakov Sverdlov, with whom Stalin bunked in a single room in Siberian exile, had tuberculosis, and Stalin moved out. Sverdlov appears to have died of TB in 1919. Tuberculosis might have killed off Stalin as well.

  Stalin could have been assassinated. The archives record oblique instances when potential assassins had been able to approach him or stage themselves at places he was likely to appear. At the theater one evening, for example, Dzierzynski noticed someone inside the entrance looking at the posted announcements; when Stalin exited, a different person was in the same place, doing the same thing. “If they are not ours,” he instructed in a note written that same night, “then, for sure, it is necessary to pay attention. Clarify and report.”37

  Mussolini by this time had been the target of four assassination attempts, most recently when a teenager in Bologna shot at him but narrowly missed.38 On July 6, 1928, during the Soviet party plenum, a bomb was hurled at the office for passes to the OGPU in Moscow. The perpetrators linked to emigre terrorists.39 Nikolai Vlasik (b. 1896), the son of poor peasants in Belorussia, who worked in the department responsible for leadership security but was on holiday at the time, was summoned back to Moscow and included in a task force charged with reorganizing the security protection for the Cheka, the Kremlin, government dachas, and the movement of leaders between places. According to Vlasik, who would become Stalin’s lifelong chief bodyguard, in 1928 the dictator had only his Lithuanian bodyguard Jusis, who accompanied him on trips to his dachas at Zubalovo and Sochi and the walks to and from Old Square.40 Stalin was within reach of a determined assassin, to say nothing of a regime insider.

  Sokolnikov, in the meetings with Kamenev in summer 1928, citing Bukharin, relayed that Tomsky, while drunk, had come up and whispered into Stalin’s ear, “Soon our workers will starting shooting you.”41 This story exists in other versions, often as an incident at Stalin’s Sochi dacha where, on someone’s birthday, a group was drinking, eating kebabs, and singing Russian folk and revolutionary songs.42 Whatever the particulars, assassinating Stalin was not beyond contemplation in the politburo.

  If Stalin had died, the likelihood of forced wholesale collectivization—the only kind—would have been near zero, and the likelihood that the Soviet regime would have been transformed into something else or fallen apart would have been high. “More than almost any other great man in history,” wrote the historian E. H. Carr, “Stalin illustrates the thesis that circumstances make the man, not the man the circumstances.”43 Utterly, eternally wrong. Stalin made history, rearranging the entire socioeconomic landscape of one sixth of the earth. Right through mass rebellion, mass starvation, cannibalism, the destruction of the country’s livestock, and unprecedented political destabilization, Stalin did not flinch. Feints in the form of tactical retreats notwithstanding, he would keep going even when told to his face by officials in the inner regime that a catastrophe was unfolding—full speed ahead to socialism. This required extraordinary maneuvering, browbeating, and violence on his part. It also required deep conviction that it had to be done. Stalin was uncommonly skillful in building an awesome personal dictatorship, but also a bungler, getting fascism wrong, stumbling in foreign policy. But he had will. He went to Siberia in January 1928 and did not look back. History, for better and for worse, is made by those who never give up.

  Japan’s rise and the first signs of catastrophe: Russian Pacific fleet flagship Petropavlovsk after striking two mines off Port Arthur, Russo-Japanese War, March 31, 1904. To make up for the loss, Russia dispatched its Baltic fleet around the world, but its ships, too, were promptly sunk in battle.

  Sergei Witte, New Hampshire hotel, August 1905. Witte’s support for construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway had been partially responsible for provoking the war with Japan, but after Russia’s defeat, he negotiated an advantageous peace at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Nicholas II appointed him Russia’s first ever prime minister, but could not stand him.

  Ceremonial opening of the State Duma (the lower house), Tsar Nicholas II presiding, Winter Palace throne room, April 27, 1906. The tsar instantly regretted conceding the creation of Russia’s first-ever legislature and schemed to emasculate or abolish it.

  Pyotr Durnovó. Interior minister whose political crackdown rescued the autocracy in 1905–6. A fellow official recalled him as “small, all muscle and nerves.” This caricature by Zinovy Grzhebin formed part of a series (“Olympus”) of biting portraits of high officials.

  Pyotr Stolypin (second from the right, in white), who succeeded Witte as prime minister and, concurrently, Durnovó as interior minister, in Kiev, August 1911, as Nicholas II greets peasants of Kiev province. Stolypin would shortly fall to an assassin in the Kiev Opera House.

  A metaphor for the hollowing autocracy: Stolypin’s state dacha, August 12, 1906. During this earlier assassination attempt, twenty-eight people died, including the prime minister’s fifteen-year-old daughter. Photographed by Karl Bulla.

  Queen Victoria (lower center) and her royal relatives: German Kaiser Wilhelm II (lower left, looking up), the future Russian tsar Nicholas II (bowler hat), at the Coburg Palace, Germany, April 21, 1894, two days after the wedding of Victoria’s grandchildren Princess Victoria Melita (“Ducky”) of Saxe-Coburg/Edinburgh and Ernst Ludwig of Hesse, Germany. Alix of Hesse, another grandchild and the sister of the groom, had just acceded to Nicholas’s proposal for marriage and soon became Alexandra of Russia.

  Alexei, heir to the throne, age six, with his naval attendant, Andrei Derevenko, on a specially outfitted bicycle, in the homeland of the tsarevich’s mother, August 1910. To prevent fatigue or even a bruise—fro
m which the hemophiliac boy could bleed to death—Alexei was often hand carried as well. He inherited the life-threatening condition from his mother and she from Queen Victoria.

  Besarion “Beso” Jugashvili. The only known image of what is thought to be Beso, Stalin’s father.

  Ketevan “Keke” Geladze, Stalin’s mother.

  Stalin’s birth house, Gori, Georgia.

  Yakobi “Koba” Egnatashvili, Gori tavern owner, falsely rumored to have been Stalin’s father. He paid for Stalin’s education.

  Gori church school, students and teachers, 1892; young Ioseb Jugashvili, age thirteen, is in the last row, dead center.

  This is the first known photograph of Stalin

  Tiflis Orthodox seminary students and teachers, 1896; Jugashvili (last row, second from the left) is clean shaven.

  Neoclassical seminary building, dubbed the Stone Sack, where for a time Stalin lived as well as studied under a regimen of surveillance and snitching.

  Lado Ketskhoveli (1877–1903), Stalin’s first mentor in Marxism and revolution. Lado was killed by prison tsarist officials, a fate that befell many leftists and could have befallen Stalin.

  Meteorological Observatory in Tiflis, where Stalin worked from December 1899 through March 1901 (photographed by TASS in 1939). His stint as a meteorologist was, essentially, the only legal paid employment he held until being named a people’s commissar in 1917, at age thirty-nine.