Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  A close-up of Stalin from a group photograph, Kutaisi prison (Georgia), 1903.

  Misfortune and misery: Stalin at the bier of Yekaterina “Kato” Svanidze (b. 1885), who had captured his heart, but who died in agony from disease, December 1907. They had just married the year before. Stalin left their infant son, Yakov (b. March 1907), to be raised by her relatives.

  Tsarist police mug shots of Stalin, Baku, March 30, 1910. Stalin generally spent his time in prison reading books, studying Esperanto, and denying rumors that he was a police informant, which, although unsubstantiated, would never desist.

  Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Austria-Hungary, June 28, 1914. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, in a car approaching the corner near Schiller’s Delicatessen, where the nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip was waiting, after an assassination plot had failed. The archduke had altered his itinerary, but the driver had not been informed, started to turn down the wrong street, and stalled the car.

  Princip, circa 1915, serving life in prison.

  The village of Kureika in Siberia, just below the Arctic Circle, where Stalin would spend most of the Great War. Its bleak isolation is evident even during the short season without snow drifts and icy winds.

  Siberian exiles in Monastyrskoe, administrative center of Turukhansk region (which was larger than Britain, France, and Germany combined), July 1915. Sverdlov, in glasses, is seated in the front row, next to him in a hat is Hryhory Petrovsky. Stalin is in the back row in a black hat. To Stalin’s right is Lev Kamenev and to his left is Suren Spandaryan, who died in these frozen wastes at age thirty-four. Kamenev was being subjected to a party “trial” for contradicting Lenin’s view that the Bolsheviks sought a Russian military defeat.

  Lavr Kornilov, imperial Russia’s supreme military commander, 1917. Kornilov, Kerensky wrote, “spent little time in fashionable drawing-rooms, although their doors were always open to any officer of the General Staff. . . . He was regarded as rather shy and even somewhat of a ‘savage.’” In fact, Russian patriots looked to Kornilov for salvation.

  Alexander Kerensky versus Vladimir Lenin. Lenin was photographed by Pavel Zhukov, who, like these two political adversaries, also happened to be a native of Simbirsk.

  Matylda Krzesinska, Polish-born prima ballerina of Russia’s Imperial Mariinsky Theater, and former mistress of Nicholas II, St. Petersburg, 1900. Her elegant mansion was seized in 1917 and served as the first Bolshevik headquarters until July. (The ballerina emigrated to France, married one of her two Romanov grand duke lovers, and lived to just shy of one hundred years old.) Photograph by Yakov Steinberg.

  Exterior of the art nouveau mansion, strategically situated across the river from the Winter Palace. Lenin would thunder from the small balcony.

  Seizure of Power: Second Congress of Soviets, banners proclaiming “All Power to the Soviets,” Tauride Palace, Petrograd, second night of the coup, October 26, 1917. Photographed by Pavel Otsup. “When I entered the hall,” wrote the chronicler Nikolai Sukhanov, “there was a bald, clean-shaven man I didn’t know standing on the podium and talking excitedly in a rather hoarse, stentorian voice, somewhat guttural and with a spectacular emphasis at the end of his phrases. Ha! It was Lenin.”

  Julius Tsederbaum, known as Martov, who had led the Mensheviks out of the congress hall on the first day, in protest of the Bolshevik coup. He would attack Stalin in 1918, and serve as the source of ill will between Stalin and Lenin.

  Bolshevik government (Council of People’s Commissars), Smolny, Petrograd, Lenin in the center, Stalin, hand on face, standing against the wall, early 1918, during the brief time when Left SRs, such as Prosh Proshyan, commissar for posts and telegraphs (to Lenin’s right), joined the Bolshevik-dominated government. Trotsky is absent (likely at the negotiations with Germany at Brest-Litovsk).

  Maria Spiridonova, famed terrorist, leader of the Left SRs, Petrograd, 1917. Spiridonova could have put an end to Lenin’s rule in July 1918 but did not.

  Page from Stalin’s photo album, showing himself in 1915 and Nadya Alliluyeva in 1917; they were married in 1918, and that spring Stalin took her to Tsaritsyn as his secretary. In Tsaritsyn in 1918, Stalin created a local, personal dictatorship that foreshadowed his assumption of power over the whole country.

  Leather-clad Trotsky, war commissar and newly named chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the republic, on the Volga near Kazan, September 1918. Lenin had just been shot, and Trotsky returned to the front to save the situation, after a lightning visit to Moscow.

  Gersh Brilliant, known as Grigory Sokolnikov (third from right), commander of the Turkestan front, with his subordinate Lazar Kaganovich (second from right) and indigenous members of the Bolshevik Turkestan Commission, fall 1920. Kaganovich would become a Stalin protégé in the central apparatus. Sokolnikov would become USSR finance commissar under Stalin and oversee the New Economic Policy.

  Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, the would-be restorer of the great Mongol empire who instead unwittingly delivered Outer Mongolia into Soviet hands, photographed during his interrogation by Bolshevik capturers and wearing an imperial Russian St. George’s Cross for bravery on his Mongol caftan. He was said to rip out the hearts of those he captured and place them in bowls of skulls as offerings to the Tibetan Buddhist gods.

  Red Army bayonets, celebrating victory over Baron Pyotr Wrangel, the last of the White armies, Crimea, 1920.

  Golgotha. What imperial weakness and vaulting ambition, epic miscalculation and idées fixes hath wrought—famine victims, Tsaritsyn, winter 1921–22. In 1925, the city would be renamed Stalingrad.

  Stalin and Lenin at Gorki, just outside Moscow, September 1922. Photograph by Maria Ulyanova, Lenin’s sister. Stalin had images of his visit published to show Lenin’s supposed recovery—and his own proximity to the Bolshevik leader. This pose was not among those published.

  12th Party Congress, April 1923, Stalin, among some of the more than eight hundred attendees at the Grand Kremlin Palace, without entourage. Lenin did not attend. Almost immediately afterward, Krupskaya suddenly brought forward dictation, attributed to Lenin, calling for Stalin’s removal as general secretary.

  Lenin, Gorki, 1923, one of his last photos, with doctor and nurse, taken by Maria Ulyanova.

  Lenin’s funeral, Stalin and Molotov with the casket, a frigid January 27, 1924.

  Sculptor Sergei Merkurov fashioning Lenin’s death mask, which would find its way into Stalin’s office.

  Stalin’s bestseller, On Lenin and Leninism (Moscow, 1924). Mastery of the ideology, not just the apparatus, undergirded Stalin’s power.

  Old Square, 4: Communist party headquarters (to the right of the white tower), and Old Square, 8, the agricultural commissariat (to the left of the tower), both behind the Kitai-gorod wall enclosing Moscow’s commercial quarter. From Old Square, 4, Stalin controlled the police, military, and foreign affairs as well as the party.

  Blacksmith Bridge, 15: foreign affairs commissariat.

  Znamenka, 23: the Alexander military school, which became the war commissariat and headquarters of the general staff.

  Lubyanka, 2: headquarters of the Cheka-GPU-OGPU.

  Innermost staff of Stalin’s dictatorship within the dictatorship, Old Square, 1924: Amayak Nazaretyan (seated far right), Stalin’s top aide; Ivan Tovstukha (standing, second from left), also a top aide; Grigory Kanner (standing, far left). Notwithstanding the anarchist commune resemblance, the functionaries were highly qualified.

  Stalin and the military: 14th Party Conference, Moscow, April 1925. Left to right: Mikhail Lashevich (a deputy war commissar), Mikhail Frunze (war commissar), Alexander Smirnov, Alexei Rykov, Klimenty Voroshilov (Moscow military district commander), Stalin, Mykola Skrypnik, Andrei Bubnov (head of the Red Army political department), Grigol “Sergo” Orjonikidze, Józef Unszlicht (a deputy war commissar). Frunze, who
had replaced Trotsky, would be dead before the year was out. Stalin would promote his man Voroshilov.

  Felix Dzierzynski, Soviet secret police chief, on a recuperative holiday, Sukhum, Abkhazia, Black Sea coast, 1922. Long in ill health and overworked, he would die of a heart attack in summer 1926.

  Bearing Dzierzynski’s body, July 1926. Right to left: Unszlicht out front, Yenukidze, Bukharin, Rykov, Stalin, and Voroshilov (in cap).

  OGPU HIERARCHS: TOP LEFT: Wiaczesław Mezynski, who replaced Dzierzynski but was himself very ill. TOP RIGHT: Jenokhom Jehuda, known as Genrikh Yagoda (new first deputy chief), Stalin’s secret agent in the secret police. BOTTOM LEFT: Artur Fraucci, known as Artuzov (head of counterintelligence), Yagoda’s nemesis. Dzierzynski called Artuzov “the absolute cleanest comrade.” BOTTOM RIGHT: Yefim Yevdokimov, North Caucasus OGPU chief, who, while visiting Stalin at the dacha in Sochi, brought the gift of fabricated industrial sabotage.

  A caricature mocking Grigory Zinoviev’s supposedly opportunistic criticisms of the party’s New Economic Policy, December 1925. By Valery Mezhlauk. Caption: “Masha, tonight is the Central Committee plenum; take out the kulak and NEPman puppets and, after I return, cover them again with mothballs, we won’t need them until autumn.”

  Stalin with newly installed Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov, who replaced Zinoviev, Smolny, April 1926. Left to right: Nikolai Antipov, new Leningrad second secretary; Stalin; Kirov; Nikolai Shvernik, outgoing Leningrad second secretary, moving to the Central Committee apparatus; Fyodor Sobinov, known as Nikolai Komarov, head of the Leningrad soviet.

  Three Caucasus Musketeers, summer 1926: Mikoyan, Stalin, Orjonikidze, in a retouched photograph published in the newspaper.

  Poteshny Dvorets (Amusement Palace), triangles on the roof dating from the seventeenth century, the only surviving Boyar residence inside the Kremlin, where Stalin and his family lived. Alexei Rykov lived here, too. The double-headed eagles on the Kremlin towers would be removed only in the 1930s.

  Zubalovo-4, in the secluded, leafy western outskirts of Moscow, the Stalin family dacha from 1919, formerly owned by the ethnic Georgian Levon Zubalashvili [Russified to Zubalov], a Baku oil magnate.

  Vasily Stalin (b. 1921, left) and Artyom Sergeyev, Yalta, 1926. Artyom was born a few months after Vasily and, after his father was killed that year in a civil war accident, was informally adopted into the Stalin household.

  Nadya and newborn Svetlana, 1927. Portrait by Moscow’s renowned private studio photographer Nikolai Svishchov-Paola. Photo album of Sergei Alliluyev, Stalin’s father-in-law.

  Yakov Jugashvili (b. 1907), Stalin’s first child from his marriage to Kato Svanidze, circa 1927.

  Karolina Til (left), who managed the Stalin household, and Aleksandra Bychkova, Svetlana’s nanny.

  Polish marshal Józef Piłsudski, victor of the Soviet-Polish War, on a state visit to Romania, Poland’s military ally, September 1922. Poland, particularly in alliance with Romania, was the foremost threat in Soviet military intelligence reports.

  Chiang Kai-shek, March 13, 1927, on the eve of the massacre of his political allies, the Chinese Communist party. After learning his assault was proceeding, Chiang confided in his private diary that his heart was “lifted” and the Communists were “worthy of being killed.” Yet Stalin felt constrained to stick with the Chinese strongman as a bulwark against British and Japanese influence in China.

  The Red Army on bicycles, parading across Red Square in front of Lenin’s cube mausoleum, May 1, 1926. Photographed by Pyotr Otsup. The Soviet military, which rode bicycles on maneuvers, too, was in no position to fight a major war.

  At the height of triumph, 15th Party Congress, December 1927. To Stalin’s left is Minei Gubelman, known as Emelyan Yaroslavsky, an all-purpose functionary. Before and after the congress, Stalin again demanded to be relieved of the post of general secretary.

  Enemies’ row: foreign military attachés at the May Day Parade, Red Square, 1928.

  Stalin, Barnaul, Siberia, January 22, 1928. Many of these Siberian officials, including regional party boss Sergei Syrtsov (on Stalin’s right), opposed a policy of forced collectivization, which Stalin had proclaimed in an epochal closed-door speech in Novosibirsk two days earlier. “Now,” Stalin said to those in this photo from Barnaul, appropos of forcing collectivization, “we will see who is a true Communist and who just talks like a Communist . . . . We possess all the power we want, but we lack the ability to exercise our power.”

  Stalin’s means of conveyance from the railhead to the Barnaul meeting: a horse named Marat and a wooden-basket sled (with a black overcoat used as a blanket). In 1928, Barnaul had no motor vehicles.

  Shakhty trial, spring 1928, Hall of Columns in the House of Trade Unions, foreign journalists. The trial was filmed and accorded intense publicity. Stalin used Shakhty to stir a frenzy and mobilize the masses.

  Interrogation protocols, the only “evidence” produced in court.

  Class in the village, Vyatka province, 1928, on the eve of dekulakization: a “kulak” (rich peasant) with leather boots, depicted watching as a poor peasant, with feet wrapped in towels and bast sandals, does the work. In fact, most peasants who hired labor themselves also worked.

  Nikolai Bukharin Stalin caricature, February 20, 1928. Stalin had treated Bukharin, his political ally, as a younger brother, but before the year was out Stalin would turn against him in a way that displayed his political virtuosity and exceptional malice. “He is maneuvering in order to portray us as culprits of a schism,” Bukharin complained to Kamenev of Stalin on July 11, 1928.

  NOTES

  Full citations can be found in the bibliography.

  PART I: DOUBLE-HEADED EAGLE

  1.Kern, Culture of Time and Space.

  2.Rieber, “Stalin: Man of the Borderlands.”

  3.“Polozhenie o voenno-polevykh sudakh”; Rawson, “The Death Penalty in Tsarist Russia.”

  4.Brewer, Sinews of Power.

  5.Kotkin, “Modern Times.”

  6.Pflanze, Bismarck, I: 82. The famous remark “politics is the art of the possible,” which Bismarck is supposed to have uttered to Meyer von Waldeck on August 11, 1867, does not have a direct source. (It is quoted in Amelung, Bismarck-Worte, and see also Keyes, Quote Verifier.) But the concept runs throughout Bismarck’s recorded thoughts.

  7. Pflanze, Bismarck, I: 242.

  8. Pflanze, Bismarck, I: 81–5; Steinberg, Bismarck, 130–2.

  9. Steinberg, Bismarck, 198.

  10.Bismarck was preternaturally incapable of being content merely to bask in the glory, and his restlessness often got him into unnecessary trouble, as his ceaseless tactical twists and turns diminished his own room for maneuver. He created his greatest difficulties in a gratuitous struggle (Kulturkampf) against Germany’s Catholics, a burdensome, dubious undertaking. Waller, Bismarck at the Crossroads.

  11. Steinberg, Bismarck, 184, 241 (quoting Kolnische Zeitung).

  12. Prince S. N. Trubetskoy, quoted in Riabushinskii, Velikaia, I: 96.

  13. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary. For a critique, see Suny, “Beyond Psychohistory.” The chief source for the blows that an inebriated Beso rained down on his son has been Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie. Iremashvili, also from Gori, attended the Tiflis seminary with Stalin, became a Menshevik and, in October 1921, was deported to Germany along with three score others. His book provided the first memoir account of Stalin’s childhood and psychologized the future dictator. Tucker’s recourse to psychology in his first volume, partly to compensate for inaccessible source materials, was understandable. In Tucker’s second volume, Stalin is portrayed as a ruler with a paranoid personality who identifies with other paranoid rulers, particularly Ivan the Terrible, and who chooses from Russian political culture the elements of a paranoid style of rule. Tucker, Stalin in Power. Tucker did not complete the proj
ected third and final volume before his death in 2010.

  14. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 665, l. 14; Stalin Museum, 1955, 146, 1–11 (Elisabedashvili); Dawrichewy, Ah: ce qu’on, 82–4. Stalin would return—to collectivize tens of millions of heads of livestock.

  15. “In his old age he would send them and some school mates parcels of cash,” one scholar noted of Stalin. Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, 8.

  16. In September 1931, when Stalin would learn that his former history teacher at the seminary, Nikolai Makhatadze, then seventy-three, was in the Metekhi prison in Tiflis, the dictator would instruct Beria to free him. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 76, l. 113.

  17. Trotsky, Stalin, 61–2. Isaac Deutscher, a biographer of Trotsky as well as of Stalin, followed Trotsky by placing Stalin on the “semi-nomad fringe of declasses,” that is, below a genuine intelligent. Deutscher, Stalin, 24–6.

  18. Montefiore, Young Stalin. Montefiore’s book reads like a novel.

  19. Wheen, Karl Marx.