Stalin

by Ian Grey

  As a person, however, Stalin had not changed greatly. He had power and position but showed no interest in possessions and luxuries. His tastes were simple and he lived austerely. In summer, he wore a plain military tunic of linen and in winter, a similar tunic of wool and an overcoat that was some fifteen years old. He also had a short fur coat with squirrel on the inside and reindeer skin on the outside, which he started wearing soon after the Revolution and continued to wear with an old fur hat until his death. The presents, many of them valuable and even priceless works of craftsmanship, sent to him from all parts of the country, and on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, from all over the world, embarrassed him. He felt that it would be wrong to make any personal use of such gifts. And, as his daughter noted: “He could not imagine why people would want to send him all these things.” It was an insight into the paradoxical humility of this extraordinary man.

  Stalin labored to maintain direct contact with every branch of the party and of the government. It was a personal supervision that several autocrats, including Nicholas I, had tried and failed dismally to exercise. Stalin was more effective, although he had to depend on a vast, cumbrous bureaucratic machine. It was a mammoth task which meant working exceedingly long hours. Early in his career, he had formed the habit of working through the night and sleeping for brief spells during the day, and members of the Politburo and senior officials had to follow suit. For long periods, he did not leave the office adjoining his small apartment in the Kremlin. Whenever he could in summer, however, he went to his small country house at Zubalovo, not far from Moscow. This was the home in which he lived with his wife and children, relatives and friends, and there at this time, he appeared to be a relaxed family man.

  From glimpses given by Stalin’s daughter, the house at Zubalovo must then have had the warm and lively atmosphere of a landowner’s country house before the Revolution. There were nannies and tutors, a cook and servants, and crowds of relatives and friends, living with a kind of boisterous harmony under one roof. Nadya’s parents, sister, and two brothers lived there or were frequent visitors. Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, and Molotov and their wives, Kirov, Bukharin, and others were often in the house. There were family dinners, picnics in the woods, and the noise of children. But there were also discords, centered chiefly on Nadya, for while she ran the home, giving it much of the family atmosphere, she was unhappy and unable to adjust to the position that marriage had brought her.

  Nadya had been born in Baku and brought up in the Caucasus. Within her family circle, she had imbibed the revolutionary spirit. She grew to be a beautiful young woman, Asian and at times languid in appearance, and was typical of her generation in her zeal to work for the socialist millennium. No doubt as a girl she had idealized Stalin whom she remembered as a conspirator on the run, harbored by her parents, and then as the radical just returned from Siberia. Marriage with such a man probably seemed to her the highest form of service to the Revolution, but there was also a true and deep attraction between them.

  Nadya’s mother expressed opposition to the marriage. She and her husband had known Stalin for some twenty years and had always regarded him as a close friend, almost as a son. But she herself had suffered from being married to a revolutionary. Nadya was young and romantic. She had been spoiled by her sister and two brothers. Her mother probably saw no lasting happiness for her in marriage with a hardened insurgent like Stalin. There was, moreover, the age gap of twenty-two years between them.

  Nadya married Stalin in 1918. They lived at first in the Kremlin in Moscow, and she quickly came to hate the stone-walled fortress. She had been working as a secretary in Stalin’s Kommissariat for the Nationalities. After the marriage, she joined Lenin’s team of secretaries, headed by L. A. Fotyeva. Then she accompanied her husband to Tsaritsyn. Life in the grim, hunger-ridden city, torn by violence over grain deliveries and threatened by White forces, was a cruel experience.

  From the start, her married life must have been hard and lonely. Her husband was engaged at the front during the Civil War and then completely committed to the party in the continuing crises and the struggle for power. No doubt he neglected her for long periods and was frequently brusque and distracted, but he was not wholly neglectful or insensitive to her feelings. Once when she was feeling ill after a public reception, he put her to bed and comforted her. “So you love me a little after all,” she said to him. It was one incident, but probably typical of many incidents which in some marriages become overlaid by bitterness. Their son, Vasily, had been born in 1920, and their daughter, Svetlana, in 1926. But the marriage was under constant strain, mainly, it would seem, because of his absorption in his work. On one occasion, she took the two children and went to live with her father in Leningrad, but soon she returned to Moscow.

  Nadya was rarely with her children and gave them little affection. She was nevertheless a conscientious mother, who took care that they had a full program of lessons with nurses and tutors. She tended to favor Vasily, her son, possibly because his father was strict with him. She was severe toward Svetlana, who was her father’s favorite. Stalin was affectionate and playful with his daughter, writing notes, addressed to her as Khozyaika (housekeeper/boss), in which he asked for her orders for the day. The notes, which she kept, reveal a tender concern for her health and happiness.

  For some reason, Stalin had turned against Yakov, his son by his first marriage, who had been brought up by grandparents in the Caucasus. The time came when Alexander Svanidze insisted that his grandson should go to Moscow to study and take advantage of the opportunities available in the capital. But from the day of his arrival, Stalin harried his son with criticism. He disapproved of Yakov’s first marriage, his approach to his studies, and his character. When Yakov tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide in 1928 or 1929, his father remarked callously, “Ha, he couldn’t even shoot straight!” Yakov turned to his stepmother, who was only seven years older, for affection and understanding. She espoused his cause and tried to compensate for Stalin’s callousness. She, too, was probably bewildered by her husband, who could be gentle, affectionate, sensitive, and charming but also unfeeling and brutal.

  While Stalin was probably a difficult and neglectful husband, Nadya herself was an inadequate wife and partner. She appears to have had no understanding of the extent of the burdens her husband was bearing, or of the pressures under which he worked. She hated her role of first lady of the land and apparently made no attempt to support her husband in his position. Whenever possible, she kept her identity secret. She avoided traveling by car when it might make her conspicuous. She occupied her time with lessons in French, music, and other subjects, frantically seeking to give herself the confidence of intellectual equality with those she had to meet on official occasions. She was a sensitive, emotional young woman, married to a granite-hard master of men and leader of the nation.

  During the mid-1920s, Stalin had devoted long and careful thought to the way ahead, and the policies on which he finally decided were to draw him farther away from his wife and family. He had a sense of purpose and ruthlessness of purpose that they lacked. He had moved cautiously toward the policy of collectivization and industrialization. He did not underestimate, nor was he awed by, these operations; already he thought on a grand scale or, as he would have said, on a Russian scale. He knew, too, what savagery would be unleashed in the forcible collectivization of over 100 million peasants. It meant a return to the cruel destruction and vicious hatreds of the Civil War. But this time, it would be greater in scope. As he prepared for this conflict, his courage, nerve, and determination were staggering.

  It was fundamental to Stalin’s outlook that communism would be achieved in Russia not by education and exhortation, but by force. The party must drive the people into socialism, and only from experiencing the new way of life would they become converted. He accepted that initially, his policies would cause widespread suffering. He was declaring war on the great mass of the population, and war involved casualties
just as the victory brought rewards. He was contemptuous of Bukharin and others who shrank from the dangers and sacrifices. In each century, the Russian people had endured monstrous inhumanities both in war and as a condition of every positive advance in their history. In imposing Moscow’s rule on Novgorod, as part of the unification of Muscovy, Tsar Ivan IV had massacred some 60,000 of the city’s men, women, and children. Peter the Great, in building his first ships at Voronezh, and later in creating his city in the marshy estuary of the Neva, had expended countless lives. The people took pride now in the unity of their country and in the magnificence of St. Petersburg and gave no thought to the human cost. History provided innumerable precedents and had formulated an ethic which he, like previous Russian rulers, accepted.

  At this time, as he prepared to hurl the nation into this terrifying revolution, Stalin was acutely aware of the dangers. It was a matter not only of his personal survival but of the realization of the policies which he believed he alone had the vision and resolution to enforce. The popular adulation, already nationwide, gave him no sense of security and even less did it make him feel immune from treachery and betrayal. He was deeply suspicious of this homage, especially among those surrounding him. Throughout his life as a revolutionary, the party leaders, and Lenin himself in his last months, had sought to ignore and dismiss him. The sudden change in attitude of the survivors smacked of hypocrisy. His daughter observed that “he was astonishingly sensitive to hypocrisy and was impossible to lie to.” Behind the façade of adulation, they were conspiring against him. He did not believe he was a demiurge, as they declared, although he was convinced that he alone knew the right policies and could lead the nation.

  In the midst of the new revolution, the left opposition might try to undermine his leadership, claiming that he had usurped their policies. But he had transformed these policies, and by his timing and leadership had made it possible to apply them. Nevertheless he still had an exaggerated idea of Trotsky’s prestige and influence in the party, and in January 1929, he had him expelled from the country. Supporters of the left opposition, several thousand in number, had been arrested and banished to Siberia after the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927, and there they remained. He had no fear of Zinoviev and Kamenev. Their nerve had failed them at the time of the great October Revolution. Expelled from the party, they had made abject confessions of error and had been readmitted in June 1928. The campaign against Bukharin and the right opposition had raised their hopes of full rehabilitation, and this would ensure their good conduct. But he mistrusted them.

  Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky had been routed, but when the pressures of the new revolution were mounting and the weaker members were quailing before the storm, they might divide the party with their appeals for moderation. They would, he suspected, quote Lenin to the effect that “there is nothing more stupid than the idea of compulsion with reference to economic relations with the average peasants.” This would, perhaps, rally some support, thus weakening the party at a time of crisis.

  Stalin knew, however, that at such a time, when the party was in effect at war with the people, the call for party solidarity would keep members together and that any attempts to form an opposition faction would be damned as treason. But he was on guard and ready to act against former members of the right and left opposition.

  This applied with special force to those of the left opposition who, following the change in policy, had accepted his leadership. A number of senior members of this faction applied for readmission to the party. It was usually granted, and they received minor posts. The first of these capitulators, as they were called, was Pyatakov, whom Lenin in his “Testament” described as “a man of indubitably outstanding will and outstanding capacities.” In July 1929, a group including Karl Radek and Preobrazhensky, who were the most senior, applied for readmission. The return of these men was an acknowledgment of Stalin’s primacy as leader, which none of them would have envisaged or admitted as possible a few years earlier. But it also demonstrated the power of the party as the dominant force in their lives; it was the substitute for a lost religion and to many, for national patriotism. The party appealed to them as a community, subsuming egotistical individualism and uniting them in a higher purpose. Expulsion from this community was spiritual and moral death, and those expelled were prepared to make any recantation and suffer any humiliation in order to be allowed to creep back into the womb of the party.

  A vivid explanation of the meaning of the party to a dedicated communist was expressed by Pyatakov in 1928. In Paris, where he was then Soviet trade representative, he met Nikolai Volsky, a former Menshevik, who had been close to Lenin at one time. Volsky was a man of intellectual integrity and charity who was angered by the savage intolerance of the Bolsheviks. At their meeting, shortly after Pravda had reported his recantation and restoration to party membership, Pyatakov provoked Volsky by charging him with showing a lack of courage in failing to join the Bolsheviks. Angrily, Volsky replied that it was Pyatakov who lacked moral courage, for he had publicly renounced his own convictions in order to crawl back into the party. Pyatakov responded with a lengthy declaration of his faith.

  In his last months, Pyatakov said, Lenin had been ill and weary, and his writings, like NEP itself, did not truly reflect his thoughts. “The real Lenin was the man who had had the courage to make a proletarian revolution first and then to set about creating the objective conditions theoretically necessary as a preliminary to such a revolution. What was the October Revolution, what, indeed, is the Communist Party, but a miracle! No Menshevik could ever understand what it means to be a member of such a party!”

  The basic principle of Lenin’s party, he continued, was that it recognized no limitations. It acknowledged no restraints, moral, political, or physical. “Such a party is capable of achieving miracles and of doing things which no other collective of men could achieve. . . . A real Communist . . . that is, a man who was raised in the party and has absorbed its spirit deeply enough, becomes himself in a way a miracle man.”

  From this concept of the unlimited potential of the party, there flowed his acceptance of complete submission. “For such a party a true Bolshevik will readily cast out from his mind ideas in which he had believed for years. A true Bolshevik has submerged his personality in the collectivity, the party, to such an extent that he can make the necessary effort to break away from his own opinions and convictions, and can honestly agree with the party - that is the test of a true Bolshevik.

  “There could be no life for him outside the ranks of the party and he would be ready to believe that black was white and white was black, if the party required it. In order to become one with this great party he would fuse himself with it, abandon his own personality, so that there was no particle left inside him which was not at one with the party, did not belong to it.”

  Pyatakov was carried away by emotion, but he was expressing his deep faith, and there were many others who shared his vision. Another revolutionary, Victor Serge, wrote that “every communist, every participant in the revolution, feels himself to be the humblest servant of an infinite cause. He gives complete obedience to the party. . . . It is the party that does everything. Its orders are not to be discussed.” At the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924, Trotsky, too, had spoken of the party as “the unique historical instrument given to the proletariat and as the collective to which every member owed complete obedience.”

  It is questionable whether Stalin ever regarded the party with the same religious fervor as Pyatakov and others or with the acceptance of its collective will which Trotsky acclaimed as supreme, but which he could never accept as superior to his own judgment. Stalin had been a dedicated servant of the party since its formation. He had stressed obedience and discipline as essential qualities in its members but had himself always shown a certain independence of mind. Like Lenin, he was a leader and a politician, who formulated the collective will and guided it on the proper paths to fulfillment.

  Lenin had dec
lared in March 1920 that “Soviet social democracy is not at all incompatible with one-man management and dictatorship. The will of a class may sometimes be carried out by a dictator, who can sometimes do more all by himself and who is frequently more necessary.” It had been a bold statement to make to party members among whom there were frequent demands for more democracy. But he had always insisted that the party should be a militant, disciplined organization, an army under his leadership. Stalin simply developed and strengthened the party and wielded full power over it on the lines clearly laid down but never fully realized by Lenin. And whether or not he was carrying out the collective will of the party, he was convinced he was carrying out the will of history.

  Stalin became Vozhd, or leader, not only by force of personality, ability, and ruthless determination but also because he gave positive, challenging leadership. He inspired in people the faith that their hardships and sacrifices were to be endured because they would bring victory, security, and other rewards. Indeed, it was his own faith that anything was justified that would lead to the justice and prosperity of socialism.

  In his concept of “socialism in one country” he challenged the party and the people to be masters of their own fate, not dependent on foreign parties, but by heroic endeavor showing the way to the West and the world. It was a direct appeal to national pride and to the sense of messianic vocation so deeply rooted in the Russian character. The response, especially among the young members, was a wave of enthusiasm, labor, and frantic striving to achieve impossible targets. All were concentrated on the task of creating socialism in Russia and forging the way for the whole world.

  Within the party, the hesitation and disagreement had been not about the basic need for increased industrialization and the organization of large agricultural collectives, but about methods and tempo. Stalin himself had been unsure, and for a time, he had accepted the right-wing thesis that the peasants would be won over by the clear advantages of socialism. No doubt he was influenced by Lenin’s warnings that any politics that antagonized the peasants would destroy the communist regime.