Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  121. Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 359.

  122. Pethybridge, One Step Backwards, 206.

  123. Citing not merely political expediency but principle, Gorky had written to Rykov (July 1, 1922) that “if the trial of the SRs ends in murder—it will be a premeditated murder, a criminal murder! I ask that you convey my opinion to Lev Trotsky and others.” He denounced the “senseless and criminal murder of the intellectual forces of our illiterate and uncultured country.” It is telling he mentioned Trotsky and not Stalin. Shpion, 1993, no. 1: 36 (RTSKHIDK, f. 7, op. 2, d. 2600, l. 11). Back in 1919, Lenin had written in response to criticism from Gorky that “the lackeys of capital consider themselves the brains of the nation. In fact they are not its brains but its shit.” Koenker, Revelations, 229–30 (RGASPI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 11164, l.1–6: Lenin letter, September 15, 1919).

  124. Vinogradov et al., Pravoeserovskii politicheskii protsess; Jansen, Show Trial; Morozov, Sudebnyi protsess sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov; Shub, “The Trial of the SRs.”

  125. The death sentences were only formally commuted in January 1924. Trotsky claimed credit for Kamenev’s proposal: Moia zhizn’, II: 211–2. On March 1, 1922, Mezynski of the GPU had ordered “all forces of informants directed at preventing the unification of SR groupings” and “the smashing of their unification strivings.” Sbornik tsirkuliarnykh pisem VChK-OGPU, III/i: 301. The GPU engaged specialists on socialist parties as consultants (referenty), who helped with public slander campaigns. Such work was led by the large Secret-Operative Department, but fully six of the ten GPU departments were involved in repression against socialists as well as anarchists.

  126. Sbornik zakonodatel’nykh i normativnykh aktov o repressiiiakh, 12.

  127. Gerson, The Secret Police, 222. At the fifth anniversary of the Soviet secret police in December 1922 at the Bolshoi Theater, Zinoviev remarked that abroad proletarians “salivated” at hearing the initials “VChK”—All-Russia Cheka—while the bourgeoisie “trembled upon hearing those three awesome letters.” The crowd laughed. Pravda, December 19, 1922: 3.

  128. At the wharf, GPU convoys were said to have doffed their caps. Chamberlain, Lenin’s Private War, 139 (citing Vera Ugrimova, 204). Ironically, many of these deportees would outlive those who deported them.

  129. Robson, Solovki; Ascher, “The Solovki Prisoners”; Beliakov, Lagernaia sistema, 385–91. There were three camps of special designation: Arkhangelsk, Kholmogorsky, and Pertominsky.

  130. Dzierzynski proposed that “a case file [delo] should be opened on every intellectual”—guilty by definition. But he subdivided the intelligentsia for surveillance purposes into “roughly, 1) novelists, 2) pundits and politicians, 3) economists (here we need subgroups: experts on finance, fuel, transport, trade, cooperatives and so on), 4) technicians (here also subgroups: engineers, agronomists, doctors, general staff personnel and so on), 5) professors and teachers and so and so on.” He continued: “Every group and subgroup should be illuminated from all sides by qualified comrades, among whom these groups should be divided by our department. The information should be verified from various sides so that our conclusions can be errorless and irreversible, which has not been the case till now owing to the hurriedness and one-sidedness of the illumination.” Platova, Zhizn’ studenchestva Rossii, 134. In one of his last acts as first deputy chairman of the GPU, Unszlicht wrote to the party secretariat (March 17, 1923) about the need “to strengthen the tendency toward schisms and disagreements in the ranks of parties that are our enemies”—meaning non-Bolshevik socialists. D. B. Pavlov, Bol’shevistskaia diktatura, 3 (citing APRF, f. 3, op. 59, d. 14, l. 38). On Unszlicht, see also Weiner, “Dzerzhinskii and the Gerd Case.”

  131. Izmozik, Glaza, 115 (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, l. 156).

  132. S. A. Krasil’nikov, “Politbiuro, GPU, ii intelligentsia v 1922–1923 gg.,” in Intelligentsiia, obshchestvo, vlast’, 53. The party, too, established an “information department,” which from 1924 (as part of the battle against Trotsky) would undergo strengthening, but it gathered information not only on party cells, but also workers, peasants, industry, agriculture, nationalities, and regions. KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh [1984], III: 159. In fact, almost all organizations, from the Red Army to the Communist Youth League, engaged in surveillance and mood summaries.

  133. Svodki had been kept by the Provisional Government, for army and navy, and resumed by the Petrograd Bolsheviks to track the mood of soldiers and of workers. Indeed, within days of the coup, Petrograd Bolsheviks sent a questionnaire to regional party groups on the masses’ feelings toward “the seizure of power.” Izmozik, Glaza, 50. During the Great War, Britain and Germany had engaged in mail perlustration, as well as censorship and propaganda. By 1918, the British employed the same per capita proportion of censors as would the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Holquist, “‘Information is the Alpha and Omega,’” 422, 440. The British also sought not just to record but also to shape the mood in the trenches. Englander, “Military Intelligence.” The French and German armies were no different. Becker, The Great War, 217–9.

  134. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 84, d. 176, 196; Sakharov, Politicheskoe zaveshchanie, 131, 142–3.

  135. The building was also numbered 5/21. The square in front of the commissariat would be renamed for Wacław Worowski, a polyglot literary critic and Soviet diplomat who was assassinated in May 1923 in Switzerland by an anti-Soviet emigre evacuated from Crimea with the White forces of Baron Wrangel. A Swiss court acquitted the assassin, judging the murder a legitimate act of retribution against the Soviet regime for its atrocities. Chistiakov, Ubit’ za Rossiiu! The famous central Kiev artery Kreshchatik also bore Worowski’s name from 1923 until 1937.

  136. Liadov, Istoriia Rossiiskogo protokola, appendix document 2.

  137. Besedovskii, Revelations of a Soviet Diplomat, 78-9.

  138. Magerovsky, “The People’s Commissariat,” I: 246–53. A Soviet source gave a total of 1,066 personnel as of January 1924: Desiat’ let sovetskoi diplomatii

  139. Uldricks, Diplomacy and Ideology, 97–115.

  140. Non-Russian Comintern representatives, known in the jargon as the “best representatives of the working class,” were referred to in private as “the best friends of the Russian party.” Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered, 39 (citing Kuusinen to Herbert Droz, February 5, 1923: archives de Jules Humbert Droz, I: 143).

  141. Von Mayenburg, Hotel Lux [1978]. Baronness Ruth von Mayenburg worked for Soviet military intelligence. See also Vaksberg, Hôtel Lux; Von Mayenburg, Hotel Lux [1991]. In 1933, the original four stories would be expanded to six, bringing the hotel to 300 rooms, filled with officials and refugees from countries that outlawed Communism. (Originally Tverskaya, 36, became Gorky, 10.)

  142. Soviets had to leave an identification card and fill out two questionnaires to enter the Lux; at midnight, all were supposed to be out. Kennel, “The New Innocents Abroad,” 15.

  143. Kuusinen, Rings of Destiny, 44. Besides Kuusinen, the top Comintern staff included Osip Tarshis, known as Pyatnitsky (b. 1882), a Lithuanian Jew and former carpenter; and, eventually, Dmitry Manuilsky (b. 1883), the son of an Orthodox priest from a Ukrainian village and the first secretary of the Communist party in Ukraine and a Stalin loyalist.

  144. See Heimo and Tivel, 10 let Kominterna. (The old Berg mansion went to the Italian embassy in February 1924, when diplomatic relations were restored.) The Comintern library and archives were kept in the basement, where the meetings were also held, in the so-called club room. “It was no joke sitting on narrow benches for hours on end, especially after an eight-hour workday when everyone was tired,” Kuusinen’s wife Aino noted. “Foreigners who did not understand Russian suffered particularly and had difficulty hiding their yawns. But no one dared to protest, or even to mention the fact that members of the Executive Committee were never to be seen at them.” Kuusinen, Rings of Destiny, 55. The
library was overseen by Allan Wallenius, a Finn who had taken a librarian’s course at the New York Public Library; the archivist was Boris Reinstein.

  145. Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service, 47.

  146. Kuusinen, Rings of Destiny, 39, 41, 59–60. Besides Pyatnitsky, Meyer Trilliser worked in the International Relations Department before moving to foreign intelligence.

  147. “Posledniaia sluzhebnaia zapiska Chicherina,” Istochnik, 1995, no. 6: 108–10; Kennan, Russia and the West, 177.

  148. Adibekov and Shirinia, Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Komintern, 76 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3 d. 164, l. 2). The violation of the ban on illegal activity by embassy personnel was demonstrated when, two years later, the politburo forbid Soviet diplomats from spreading revolutionary literature—unless expressly permitted (by Chicherin) to do so. RGASPI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 24 539; f. 17, op. 3, d. 158, l. 2 and d. 173, l. 2; Drachkovitch and Lazitch, Lenin and the Comintern, 534. The Comintern did take over funding foreign Communist parties from the foreign affairs commissariat, and began to develop its own separate set of international couriers, to the delight of Zinoviev. Adibekov and Shirinia, Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Komintern, 25–6; Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, III: 67.

  149. “In Moscow’s view,” Kennan continued, “non-Communist statesmen were regarded as incapable of doing good intentionally.” Kennan, Russia and the West, 181–5.

  150. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, III: 67–8; Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered.

  151. Stalin in Pravda, December 18, 1921, in Sochineniia, V: 118–20.

  152. The Soviets, in negotiations, understood that their purchases would benefit the economies and important constituencies in those capitalist countries to whom they could appeal. Kennan, Russia and the West, 189–95.

  153. Pravda, October 29, 1921.

  154. Orde, British Policy; Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe. On Soviet participation: Genuezskaia konferentsiia: Materialy i dokumenty (Moscow: NKID, 1922); Ioffe, Genuezskaia Konferentsiia; Liubimov and Erlikh, Genuezskaia konferentsiia.

  155. Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, I: 270–2, 287–8. When Russia unilaterally announced that it could represent all six Soviet Socialist Republics at the Genoa Conference, Ukrainian leaders erupted in full fury (the new Union treaty would be signed only later that year).

  156. APRF, f. 3, op. 22, d. 306, l. 8–9, Hoover Institution Archives, Volkogonov papers, container 23: Cheka note to Molotov, January 23, 1922. None of the top Bolsheviks went. The Cheka report also mentioned as a target Georgy Chicherin, who would lead the Soviet delegation, which included Maxim Litvinov, Adolf Joffe, Cristian Rakovski, Leonid Krasin, Wacław Worowski, Janis Rudzutaks (then thirty-two years old), and Alexander Beksadyan (foreign affairs commissar of Armenia).

  157. Lenin, “V. M. Molotovu dlia chlenov politbiuro TsK RKP (b),” PSS, LIV: 136–7.

  158. Lenin added, characteristically, “Of course this must not be mentioned even in secret documents.” Pipes, Unknown Lenin, 144–5. Chicherin was also under Lenin’s strict instructions to remain silent about the inevitability of another imperialist war, the overthrow of capitalism, and so on. Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, III/i: 120.

  159. White, Origins of Detente; Fink, The Genoa Conference.

  160. In Britain, Lord Curzon and Winston Churchill were the anti-Bolshevik intransigents, opposed to Lloyd George’s initiative, but Lenin judged Lloyd George to be the tip of the British imperialist spear. DBFP, VIII: 280–306. See also O’Connor, Engineer of Revolution; and Khromov, Leonid Krasin, 64–82.

  161. On Genoa, see Ernest Hemingway, “Russian Girls at Genoa,” Toronto Daily Star, April 13, 1922, reprinted in Hemingway By-Line: 75 Articles and Dispacthes of Four Decades (London: Penguin, 1968), 46–7. See also Eastman, Love and Revolution, 285–90; Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, I: 298–301 (Chicherin speech). Soviet-German bilateral negotiations had actually commenced over repatriation of Russian POWs. Williams, “Russian War Prisoners”; Shapiro, Soviet Treaty Series, I: 40–1. Gustav Hilger, who had been educated in Russian as well as German schools and returned to Soviet Russia in 1919, aged twenty-four, as a machine-construction engineer, oversaw the repatriations: Hilger and Meyer, Incompatible Allies, 25. Far from everyone was repatriated; emigres numbered about 500,000 in Europe by 1921.

  162. Peter Kruger, “A Rainy Day, April 16, 1922: The Rapallo Treaty and the Cloudy Perspective for German Foreign Policy,” in Fink, Genoa, Rapallo, and European Reconstruction, 49–64.

  163. Kennan, Russia and the West, 198–21; Fink, Genoa Conference. See also White, Origins of Detente.

  164. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki, V: 226 (Litvinov).

  165. Izvestiia, May 10, 1922; Sbornik deistvuiushchikh dogovorv soglashenii, III: 36–8. Lenin had also made sure to negotiate a separate treaty with Italy as well, to sow discord among the great powers, but after that treaty was signed (May 1922), he failed to ratify it.

  166. Lenin had told Moscow party activists on December 6, 1920, that “although she is herself imperialist, Germany is obliged to seek for an ally against world imperialism, because she has been crushed. That is the situation we must turn to our advantage.” “Doklad o kontsessiiakh,” PSS, 55–78 (at 68).

  167. Sandomirskii, Materialy Genuezskoi konferentsii, 327–8; Eudin and Fisher, Soviet Russia and the West, 202 (Chicherin to Barthou, April 29, 1922).

  168. Gorlov, Sovershenno sekretno, Moskva-Berlin, 1920–1933; Muller, Das Tor zur Weltmacht; Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee [1993]; Erickson, Soviet High Command [1962], 247–82. On August 19, 1922, Krestinsky, the newly named Soviet envoy to Berlin, wrote to Trotsky, with a copy to Stalin, requesting they send a military figure to Berlin, like Frunze or Tukhachevsky. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 755, l. 1. Bukharin gave a general speech at the Comintern Congress in November 1922, explaining that a worker state could sign military alliances with bourgeois great powers, just as it could accept loans. IV Vsemirnyi kongress, 195–6; Eudin and Fisher, Soviet Union and the West, 209–10.

  169. White, Origins of Detente, 181.

  170. Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered, 90–98 (quote at 98).

  171. Germany spent a small fortune beginning in April 1922 to blame Poincare and France for the Great War (a supposed revenge for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in 1870), a propaganda blitz in which the Soviets eagerly participated, seeking to further discredit Nicholas II by portraying the war as a Franco-tsarist Russian aggression. Keiger, Raymond Poincare, 288–91; Mombauer, Origins of the First World War, 200.

  172. Fisher, Famine, 300; Golod 1921–1922; Lubny-Gertsyk, Dvizhenie naseleniia na territorii SSSR; and Adamets, Guerre civile et famine en Russie. Pravda (June 30, 1921) warned of the catastrophe early. The food supply commissariat foresaw a catastrophic procurement of less than 4.3 million tons (5.4 million had been procured in 1920); the actual amount from the tax would be around 2.7 million. Piat’ let vlasti Sovetov, 373; Genkina, Perekhod, 302. In 1928, an outside expert estimated that between 1916 and 1924, 8 to 10 million people had died from epidemics. Grant, Medical Review of Soviet Russia, 15.

  173. Fisher, Famine, 96. See also Pethybridge, One Step Backwards, 91–119. Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian relief coordinator, vacillated in his estimates of population subjected to intense hunger, either 20 to 30 million (September 1921) or 50 million (1922). League of Nations, Records of the . . . Assembly, II: 545, III: 59. See also Graziosi, “State and Peasants,” 65–117 (at 100).

  174. Wehner and Petrov, “Golod 1921–1922 gg.,” 223 (citing GARF, f. 1065, op. 1, d. 86, l. 12). Some people profited from the crisis: while passengers clamoring for seats on trains were turned away, a guard on a rail express train route in 1922 used an entire compartment, as well as the toilet, to stock salt, the currency of trade, and had his wife conduct transactions at station stops—“so many pou
nds of salt for a goose, so many for a suckling pig”—which could be resold at astronomical markups in blighted areas the train traveled through. Mackenzie, Russia Before Dawn, 229.

  175. Logachev, “‘V khlebnom raoine Zapadnoi Sibiri’: ot prodraverstka k golodu,” 36–43.

  176. Beisembaev, Lenin i Kazakhstan, 325–6.

  177. Dzerzhinskii, Feliks Dzerzhinskii: dnevnik zakliuchennogo, 229–30; Tishkov, Dzerzhinskii [1976], 335–8; Bartashevich, “Moskva zhdet . . . khleba,” 34–7; Plekhanov and Plekhanov, F. E. Dzerzhinskii, 368–9.

  178. Berelowich and Danilov; Sovetskaia derevnia glazami, I: 572–4 (TsA FSB, 1, op. 6, d. 461, l. 69–76).

  179. Edmondson, “The Politics of Hunger.” “Instead of the peasantry relieving the cities,” one historian aptly summarized, “millions of peasants themselves became objects of relief.” Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society, 89.

  180. Patenaude, Big Show in Bololand; Itogi posledgol s 15/X-1922 g. 1/VIII-1923 g. (Moscow: Tsentral’naia komissiia pomoshchi golodayushchim, 1923), 65. The ARA delivered 784,000 tons of food aid. Total food imports would exceed 2 million tons, including the foreign purchases. Fisher, Famine, 298n, 554.

  181. As cited in H. Johnson, Strana i mir, 1992, no. 2: 21. The ARA benefitted from the Bolsheviks’ ruthlessness in clampdowns on railroad workers and others. The regime used Red Army soldiers to guard the trainloads of relief grain being shipped to stricken areas (the soldiers were allotted rations, but if the delivery trains ended up taking longer than expected, many soldiers would arrive at their destination nearly dead themselves). Fisher, Famine, 181, 191.

  182. PSS, XLV: 122, 127, L: 187, 388–9; Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, VIII: 366, XI: 509; McNeal, Stalin, 48; Hoover Institution Archives, Volkogonov papers, container 23.

  183. The Bolsheviks assumed the ARA would prioritize feeding “class enemies” of the regime. In fact, Hoover ordered relief workers not even to discuss politics, let alone organize politically, believing that the ARA’s example of efficiency would inspire the Russian people to overthrow Bolshevism. Some observers wondered if such a process had perhaps begun. On May 28, 1923, Boris Bakhmeteff, the Provisional Government’s ambassador to the United States, wrote to a confidant (Yekaterina Kuskova) about a conversation with Hoover. “Not long ago he very persuasively related to me that in his opinion the formation of surpluses among the peasants will lead to a confrontation with the existing system of Bolshevik rule,” wrote Bakhmeteff. “Agents [of the ARA] have correctly apprised Hoover of the pressure on prices of these surpluses and of the natural growth among peasants of the idea that they should bring this grain to market to sell at the highest possible price. As a result of the expansion of this phenomenon, that is, the growth of grain surpluses, landholders will naturally want to sell these surpluses at the maximal highest prices, and a maximal price signifies the conditions of free world trade. I think that Hoover is right and that the antagonism of this natural and insurmountable instinct to receive for one’s grain the highest price will become one of the strongest and unconquerable enemies of the Bolshevik system.” Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov Papers, ca. 1879–1970, Columbia Unviersity, box 1. See also Budnitskii, “Boris Bakhmeteff’s Intellectual Legacy”; and Engerman, Modernization, 116.