by Ian Grey
In January 1938, Stalin sent Khrushchev to reorganize the party and the government there and to revive the economy which had been shattered by collectivization. It was a demonstration of his confidence in Khrushchev’s loyalty and in his competence as an energetic and ruthless administrator. Two good harvests, relieving immediate anxieties about grain deliveries, appeared to justify Khrushchev’s claims that he had solved the Ukrainian problem. In 1938, he was promoted to be a candidate member of the Politburo, and the following year, he became a full member.
The purge continued unabated. People were arrested in thousands, and most were sentenced to forced labor. GULAG, the main administration of corrective labor camps, which was a department of the NKVD, was responsible for a vast web of camps, concentrated mainly in the far north and in Siberia. The foundations of GULAG had been laid in July 1918 by Lenin, who had ordered the setting up of the system, and within five years, 355 camps had been established, containing more than 68,000 persons. The most reliable estimate of the total numbers of people “living in detention under the NKVD” during the Ezhovshchina places the figures between 7 and 14 million. All were required to work at cutting timber, mining, building roads, and other heavy labor. Conditions were appalling. Food was severely rationed, and those who failed to reach their labor norms received less than the starvation minimum. Deaths from hard labor, malnutrition, and the harsh conditions, especially in winter, were appallingly high. But already the forced labor camps had become accepted officially as the system whereby political and criminal prisoners could be isolated and made to serve the state in developing the remoter regions of the Soviet Union.
Early in 1938, however, Stalin became disturbed by the mounting fury of the Ezhovshchina. His purpose of liquidating the old Bolsheviks and the veterans of the Revolution and the Civil War, and other sources of opposition, had been achieved. But under Ezhov, the purge had spread like a malignant plague. Everywhere people were spying and informing against each other and everywhere arrests were on the increase. Terror was raging out of control. Stalin saw the need to call a halt He showed the same sense of timing and the same authority, which he had displayed nearly eight years earlier with his article, “Dizziness from Success.”
In January 1938, the Central Committee passed a resolution which heralded what was to be called the “Great Change.” The title of the resolution was “Concerning the Mistakes of Party Organizations in Excluding Communists from the Party, Concerning Formal-Bureaucratic Attitudes Towards the Appeals of Excluded Members of the VKP (b), and Concerning Measures to Eliminate These Deficiencies.” The new orders were passed quickly to the party secretaries at every level and to the command points of the NKVD, and emanating from the Kremlin in Moscow. They were promptly obeyed. The new enemy was identified now as the Communist-careerist. He had taken advantage of the purge to denounce his superiors and to gain promotion. He was guilty of spreading suspicion and of undermining the party. A purge of careerists was launched. At the same time, mass repression diminished and the rehabilitation of victimized party members began.
The real halt to the great purge came, however, in July 1938, when Lavrenty Beria was appointed Ezhov’s deputy. He took charge of the NKVD at once, although Ezhov was not removed until December 1938, when he was made kommissar for Inland Water Transport. Soon afterward, he was shot.
Many NKVD officers were tried and executed for extracting confessions from innocent people, while others were relegated to labor camps. Loyal party members, emerging from the long nightmare, were relieved by the purging of the NKVD. It confirmed their belief that fascists had insinuated themselves into the security forces and the government and that they were responsible for the cruel persecutions and injustices of the Ezhovshchina. This explanation was encouraged officially, and it absolved Stalin and the Politburo of responsibility.
Directly controlling every branch of Soviet policy and deeply involved in the buildup of the armed forces and conduct of foreign policy, Stalin could not maintain detailed control over the purge. He was aware that the NKVD had arrested many who were not guilty and that of the 7 to 14 million people serving sentences of forced labor in the GULAG camps many were innocent of any taint of disloyalty. They were inevitable sacrifices, inseparable from any campaign on this scale. But he resented this waste of human material. The aircraft designer Yakovlev recorded a conversation with him in 1940, in which Stalin exclaimed: “Ezhov was a rat; in 1938, he killed many innocent people. We shot him for that!”
Throughout these terrible years, Stalin showed an extraordinary self-control and did not lose sight of his purpose. He knew what he was doing. He was convinced the majority of the people liquidated were guilty in principle. And he acted with a cold, merciless inhumanity. According to Medvedev, during the years 1937–39, Stalin and Molotov signed some 400 lists, containing the names of 44,000 people, authorizing their execution. Stalin could not have known or studied the cases of so many people, and he had to accept the advice of men whom he disliked and distrusted like Ezhov. He would have acted, however, on the principle that such sacrifices were completely justified by the purpose being pursued. Indeed, he went further by insisting that in purging traitors, the NKVD should not leave possible secondary sources of treason. The families and everyone close to Tukhachevsky and others were all arrested and banished to Siberia. Such paranoia and fanaticism were controlled by a ruthlessly practical intellect. Sentiment and conscience played no part. All was subjugated to his purpose of building a powerful, invulnerable socialist Russia.
The few firsthand reports of meetings with Stalin about this time arouse astonishment. It is as though one is presented not with facets of a single personality, but with several different people embodied in the one amazing man. Toward the end of 1936, Joseph E. Davies, a wealthy industrialist and convinced capitalist, was appointed U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. While there, he traveled widely and conscientiously sought to study the regime and its industrial program. He was honest and observant and won the respect of the Soviet hierarchy. Like other ambassadors, he had never met Stalin, but he did see him in June 1938 when he made his formal calls on Kalinin, the president, and Molotov, the prime minister, before his departure. He was in Molotov’s office when the door at the far end of the room opened, and to his surprise, he saw Stalin approaching.
In a letter to his daughter, Davies wrote: “He greeted me cordially with a smile and with great simplicity, but also with a real dignity.” They had a long and frank conversation, and Stalin made it clear he sought American aid and friendship. Davies was impressed by his “strong mind which is composed and wise. His brown eye is exceedingly kind and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him. It is difficult to associate his personality and this impression of kindness and gentle simplicity with what has occurred here in connexion with these purges and shootings of the Red Generals and so forth.”
With his officials, senior and junior, Stalin was brief, exacting, and peremptory. He demanded obedience and dedication, and he respected efficiency and expertise. But he could show warmth and concern, as the memoirs of Zhukov, Yakovlev, and others indicate. Zhukov even wrote of him as “an imposing figure. Free of affectation and mannerism, he won the heart of everyone he talked with.” Moments of friendliness, like his simplicity and charm of manner, are usually dismissed as theatrical displays turned on for a purpose. But he was a man, at times human and considerate and at other times inhuman and implacable. His moments of affection and benevolence were rare occasions of genuine emotion, felt by a man, isolated by his power, by his relentless sense of mission, and by his mistrust of others.
At the end of this dark and terrible period of the purges, Stalin stood in an unassailable position. He was the father and leader of the people. They had not identified him with his repression. In the sixteenth century, the Russians had blamed the boyars for the excesses of Ivan the Terrible’s reign, and in later centuries, they had blamed the tsar’s officials, rarely the tsar himself.
In the same way, Stalin had not been blamed. He rarely appeared in public or addressed meetings in the years 1936–38. He cultivated an aloofness which encouraged the general belief that he did not know and was not responsible for the crimes of the NKVD.
Instead, Ezhov had been brought into the limelight. He and his senior officers were decorated with the Order of Lenin, and the presentations were widely publicized. A resolution passed by workers of the Stalin Automobile Factory, and typical of resolutions passed in factories, offices, and schools throughout the country, expressed gratitude to the “workers of the NKVD led by their fighting kommissar, N. I. Ezhov, so indefatigable and ruthless in unmasking the people’s enemies.” The resolution closed with “Long live the famed and vigilant Soviet counter-espionage with its iron kommissar, Ezhov.” Ilya Ehrenburg, the leading journalist of the time, wrote after Stalin’s death: “We thought (probably because we wanted to think so) that Stalin did not know about the senseless ravaging of Communists, of the Soviet intelligentsia.” He also described meeting Boris Pasternak on a snowy night in Lavrushensky Pereulok at the height of the Ezhovshchina. Pasternak raised his hands to the darkened sky and exclaimed, “If only someone would tell Stalin about it!”
Stalin had nevertheless achieved his purpose. He had liquidated the old generation of revolutionaries and intelligentsia, retaining only those whom he considered absolutely loyal and necessary. He was now advancing the new Soviet elite, who were young, tough, and devoted to him. An English economist who spent a year from mid-1936 studying in the Economic Research Institute of Gosplan in Moscow and lived in the students’ hostel of the All-Union Planning Academy, wrote that the academy was a kind of party school for training members of unimpeachable loyalty for senior posts: “Notwithstanding all their variety of personal character, these people were very alike, so far as I knew them, in their rather simple-minded and ruthless practicality. Marxist theory and Soviet policy as expounded by Stalin suited them exactly. I could not and cannot imagine a leader better suited to them. In the opinion of one of them, there were about 50,000 party members of their general status and these were the ‘masters of the country.’ The purge which throughout this period was mounting to its climax worried them not at all in any way apparent to me either for their own safety or for pity.”
With this new generation of selected and trained Stalinist members, Stalin transformed the managerial class in party and state. They were inexperienced and were faced with the malaise, aggravated by the years of terror, which took the form of unwillingness and fear of taking initiative and responsibility. In the armed forces, the untried young officers, and the damage done to morale, were to bring the country close to disaster. But Stalin could claim that Soviet Russia had become stronger as a result of his grandiose campaigns of industrialization, collectivization, education, and social transformation, and that the nation was better prepared to meet the grave challenge already looming.
The 1930s were years of mounting pressures on Stalin. Overall policy as well as major, and often minor, decisions on industrialization, social reforms, the buildup of the armed forces, and foreign relations were referred to the Politburo. Usually, they were discussed, but it was Stalin himself who made the decisions. Foreign policy was one of his special concerns. The Soviet Union was menaced in the east and west, and the conduct of foreign relations became more complex and demanding, as he sought to deflect or at least delay the inevitable war. He carried enormous responsibilities, and only a man of exceptional physical stamina, sharp and disciplined intelligence, and iron self-control could have met such demands.
In the early years of the Soviet regime, Stalin had taken only slight interest in foreign policy. Lenin, working with Georgy Chicherin, the kommissar for Foreign Affairs, and Maxim Litvinov, his deputy, and with Bukharin, Kamenev, and Trotsky, had made it his responsibility. He had assumed a doctrinaire approach. Marxist dogma denied absolutely the possibility of permanent peace between “the camp of socialism” and “the camp of capitalism.” The function of Soviet policy was to promote revolution in the enemy camp through the Comintern, the organ of world revolution, and by any other means.
Lenin had found, however, that as a matter of political and economic survival, he had to pursue normal relations with other countries. Soviet policy sought to build a system of alliances which would end Russia’s isolation from the world community of nations. Progress was slow at first. The capitalist powers were wary of approaches from a government which preached revolution and pursued subversion in their countries. The efforts of Chicherin and Litvinov were rewarded in 1921, however, by peace treaties with Afghanistan, Persia, and Turkey; and then dramatically on April 16, 1922, a treaty of mutual friendship with Germany was signed in Rapallo. Early in 1924, recognition by Britain and most of the countries of Western Europe further reduced Russia’s isolation.
By 1925, Soviet foreign policy had been reformulated. National interest, entailing considerable continuity with the tsarist past, became the main concern. The new policy was described as a “breathing space” and defined as “a long period of so-called peaceful coexistence between the U.S.S.R. and the capitalist countries.”
It was an article of faith for Stalin as a Marxist that socialism would inevitably displace capitalism. For a time, he had accepted that the promotion of world revolution through the Comintern was the first objective. Soon after the Revolution, he had become skeptical about the prospects of world revolution and contemptuous of the Comintern. International communism was an ideal which Trotsky, Lenin, Bukharin, and others thought realizable in the near future. Stalin was not sanguine, and he was concerned with the urgent practical problems of Soviet Russia. It was the home of the Revolution, and if it collapsed or was destroyed by capitalist enemies, world revolution would recede and become no more than a dream.
Stalin’s approach was basically different from the approach of the other old Bolshevik leaders. They were internationalists and cosmopolitans. Moreover, Trotsky, the foremost internationalist, was one of the many Jewish Marxists, who had no special feeling for Russia. By contrast, Stalin was intensely Russian in outlook. He had adopted Russia as his homeland. His daughter wrote: “My father loved Russia deeply all his life. I know of no other Georgian who had so completely sloughed off his qualities as a Georgian and loved everything Russian the way he did. Even in Siberia my father felt a real love of Russia.” With the fervor of a convert, he became a Russian nationalist and as chauvinistic as any of the Romanov emperors. Russia was, he believed, the nation chosen to forge communism and lead the world. He himself remained dedicated to Marxism with world revolution and socialism as the ultimate goals, but they lay in the future. Russia was his immediate, all-consuming concern.
During the late 1920s, the Treaty of Rapallo was a cornerstone of Soviet policy. Stalin’s nagging fear was that Germany might be reconciled with the West and drawn into alliances against Soviet Russia. His anxiety became acute in October 1925, when Germany participated in the Locarno Pact and again in the following year when Germany was admitted to the League of Nations. Communists looked on the League as a sinister capitalist organization. But Gustav Stresemann, the German foreign minister, was seeking good relations with East and West. He calmed Soviet anxieties, first by a new trade agreement, and then by the Treaty of Berlin, forging closer ties with Moscow. By 1932, Russia was taking 30.5 percent of German machinery exports. Hundreds of German technicians and engineers were working and instructing in Russia, and German officers were training Russian troops.
The launching of the First Five-year Plan brought further changes in emphasis in Soviet policy. Reporting in July 1930 to the Sixteenth Party Congress, Stalin declared that “our policy is a policy of peace and of strengthening trade relations with all countries.” Trade had been regarded merely as an instrument of foreign policy in attacking the markets and influence of the capitalist powers. Now trade was recognized as essential in obtaining the machinery, technical assistance, and capital for industrialization. But the pur
suit of peace was the first priority.
Fundamental to Stalin’s policies, internal and external, was the conviction that war was imminent and might devastate Soviet Russia before it was able to gather strength. It was with this thought that he had demanded immediate collectivization and headlong industrialization. There was no time to lose. The Treaty of Versailles was no more than a truce between two wars. He followed events closely in the West, seeking early signs of the coming conflict.
His hope was that the war would be confined to the capitalist camp and that Russia would be able to stand aside, as the United States had done during World War I, intervening decisively toward the end. But the danger was that Russia might be directly involved. Addressing the Central Committee in January 1925, he had said: “The preconditions of war are ripening. War may become inevitable, of course, not tomorrow or the next day, but in a few years. . . . The problem of our army, of its strength and its readiness, will arise in connexion with complications in the countries surrounding us. . . . This does not mean that in any such situation we are bound in duty to intervene actively against anybody. . . . But if war begins, we shall hardly be able to sit with folded arms. We shall have to come out, but we ought to be the last to come out. And we should come out in order to throw the decisive weight on the scales, the weight that should tilt the scales.” As the years passed, it became clear that Soviet Russia could not remain a spectator.