Even as late as 1991, the military leadership held on to the habit of sponsoring official histories, and few projects were more important to the hierarchy than the writing of a new history of the war. This would be the third multivolume official history of the Great Patriotic War since Stalin’s death. But the Ministry of Defense, which was in charge of the project, knew that this time, several years into the glasnost era, a completely bogus history was out of the question. The committee-written project would have to address the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the purge of the officer corps in the late thirties. The new official history would have to answer the question why the Nazis were able to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941 with such ease.
The man in charge of the first volume, tentatively titled On the Eve of the War, was General Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov. Marshal Dmitri Yazov, the defense minister, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the leading military adviser to Gorbachev, General Valentin Varennikov, the commander of all ground forces, and the other hard-liners at the top of the army accepted Volkogonov as editor knowing they would not get a warmed-over version of the old histories of the war. His biography of Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy, published with the encouragement of the Gorbachev leadership in 1988, was the first objective study not written by a dissident. As the director of the military’s main history institute, he had had access to all the major archives of the Party, the KGB, and the military while they were still closed to almost everyone else. He was the logical man for the job. They were prepared for a history that was more critical than those published under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. But they were not prepared for what they got.
In late 1990, Volkogonov’s team turned in a draft that coolly assessed the relative evils of Stalin and Hitler and described in full detail the “repressive command system” which carried out, at Stalin’s direct order, the wholesale slaughter of thousands of officers before the war. The draft explored the roots of Stalin’s Terror and its origins in the Red Terror that followed the Revolution. They wrote critically of Stalin’s negotiations with the Nazis that allowed Moscow to annex the Baltic states and other key territories. Most appalling of all to the hard-liners, Volkogonov’s draft concluded that the Soviet Union had won the war almost “by chance”—despite Stalin, not because of him. They implied that perhaps the death of twenty-seven million Soviet people was in vain, that the victory of the Soviet Union represented the victory of one brutal regime over another.
The Ministry of Defense sent copies of the draft history around to various “reviewers”: generals, admirals, officials in the Communist Party, and the heads of the major institutes. Their reaction was angry and quick. Akhromeyev gave an interview to the reactionary Military Historical Journal that accused Volkogonov of acting as a “traitor.”
“Had Volkogonov succeeded in publishing the work, with its obviously false positions as set out in the first volume, it would have done great harm, and not only to history,” Akhromeyev said. “The lies about the war would have been used for undermining the integrity of our country and the socialist choice, and for the constant defamation of the Communist Party. This could not be allowed.” Volkogonov, he said, was an anti-Communist “turncoat” serving just one master: the equally anti-Communist Russian president, Boris Yeltsin.
The denunciations had only just begun. On March 7, at an elegant meeting hall in the Ministry of Defense, fifty-seven generals, Central Committee officials, and official academics gathered to review Volkogonov’s work. The chairman of the editorial committee, General A. F. Kochetov, opened the session by reminding everyone that “when the original conception of the ten-volume work was discussed, everyone agreed with the idea that the driving force [of the victory] was the Soviet people, the people’s army, the toilers, all led by the Party. But today, proceeding from the interests of the moment, everyone insults and blames the Party. Suddenly the people are to blame.… Many of the reviews asked the question: ‘If things were so awful before the war, why did we win?’ ”
Kochetov pointed out incredulously that in the book there was an implicit (and intolerable) comparison of socialism with fascism. He said that some of the reviewers had also complained that Volkogonov betrayed the intentions of the volume by discussing the origins of the system leading up to the war, and others simply objected to the titles of chapters such as “The Political Regime Grows Stricter” and “The Militarization of Spiritual Life.”
Kochetov then opened the session for “general discussion”: an invitation to a beheading. General Mikhail Moiseyev, chief of the general staff, attacked Volkogonov, saying that he was merely out to inspire “today’s destructive forces”—meaning Yeltsin and the pro-independence activists in the republics.
“Defend the army!” came the calls from the hall.
Later, Valentin Falin, the head of the Central Committee’s International Department, took the floor. “We must point out the insufficiencies of this volume, its thousands of mistakes,” he said. “I have not seen such fantastical stuff in thirty or forty years.… To waste government money on this is out of the question!”
Volkogonov turned pale. He had grown away from these men, but he was only now aware by how much. After more than an hour of denunciations, he finally demanded the floor.
“Respected comrades!” Volkogonov began. “My voice in this hall will no doubt be a lonely one. There is not likely to be a real scholarly discussion here. This is a tribunal on scholarship, on history, on a large group of writers. Instead of an analysis of the issue, there is just unbridled criticism.… In the atmosphere that has been created here I cannot write a new history. To write only about the victory of 1945 means to talk nonsense about 1941, about the four million prisoners, about the retreat to the Volga. It is impossible to reduce history to politics.”
Volkogonov had only begun, but now Varennikov, one of the most reactionary generals in the Ministry of Defense hierarchy, broke in, shouting, “There is a suggestion to deny him the floor!”
Volkogonov refused to back down.
“I am no less a patriot than Falin and love the Motherland no less than he,” he said. “But you cannot change the consequences of history. I agree with those who say there are many faults in this volume.… But let’s discuss and debate them. We’ll give our points of view. But, no, Comrade Falin and some others do not engage in scholarly debate, but rather make accusations about a lack of patriotism.”
“Enough!” one general shouted. “Listen to this!”
Somewhere in the hall came the shout “Stop his speech!”
Volkogonov kept going, arguing that unless the book and the Soviet people dealt with all the cruelty and misery that had preceded the war, there could be no understanding of what happened after the opening volleys of the Nazi invasion.
“How else can we look at the fact that forty-three thousand officers and other army officials were purged?” he said. “And what of the other victims? We don’t need blind patriotism. We need the truth!… Mine is a lonely voice in this hall, but I want to see what you say about it all in ten years.”
The chairman was appalled. He took personal offense.
Finally, the swarm overtook Volkogonov. The generals shouted him down, and he did not speak again. But the ritual was far from over. Two and a half hours after the session had begun, Marshal Yazov, the minister of defense, arrived. Yazov, with his lumpy face and bulbous nose, was none too bright. When it came time to appoint a new defense minister after a German teenager, Mathias Rust, managed to land his little plane on Red Square in 1987, Gorbachev went way down the ladder and found Yazov, the chief of military operations in the far east. The man had a reputation for mediocrity. But that was the point. Gorbachev wanted a man utterly without cunning. He wanted a pleasant mutt, a loyal friend.
But that was years ago, and now, with the conservatives in the midst of a full-fledged counterrevolution against radical reform, Yazov was showing his strength. He despised the direction perestroika had taken. Hundreds of thousands of young men in the Baltic sta
tes, the Caucasus, and other regions were ignoring their draft notices. Gorbachev was cutting troop levels and other liberals wanted even more reductions. Meanwhile, officers returning from Eastern Europe and Germany were living in crowded dormitories and even tents.
Yazov quickly addressed the group, and there was no doubt that his anger went far beyond any rough draft or a three-star general named Volkogonov. The battle over the book represented to him nothing less than the overall struggle for power in the Soviet Union.
“The ‘democrats’ now have made it their goal to prepare and carry out a Nuremberg II on the Communist Party,” Yazov said. “The volume has in it the outlines for an indictment for such a trial.”
“This book has at its foundation a libel of the Party,” Varennikov pitched in.
“In this hall,” Yazov continued, “I think, everyone is a Communist. And Communists cannot spit on their Party.”
It was over. Volkogonov was dismissed from the editorial committee and his draft was “returned to the board for fundamental reworking.” Another victory for the hard-line coalition. Five months later, in August, Yazov, Varennikov, Moiseyev, and other men in the room would go even farther and attempt a coup d’état.
I first met Volkogonov in 1988 when he was still in the official fold and about to publish his biography, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. (The English translation did not appear until 1991.) The publicity flaks around the foreign ministry were pitching him as their “breakthrough historian”—which caused immediate suspicion. For the liberal intelligentsia in Moscow and Leningrad, Volkogonov was not an inspiring choice. He had published dozens of books and monographs on military ideology, and none of them even hinted at independence, rigor, or critical thought. Here was a military man who had played the game; if he harbored dissident thoughts, he had not yet committed a whisper of them to paper.
But at a meeting with journalists at the Foreign Ministry, Volkogonov was impressive. He spoke without bluff or euphemism. He was familiar with all the major Western scholarship on Stalin, making detailed and admiring references to a number of books, especially Robert C. Tucker’s multivolume biography-in-progress. As a way to defend himself against official Party historians who would attack his use of foreign scholars, Volkogonov wrote in the introduction, “Without realizing it, Stalin did far more to blacken the name of ‘socialism’ than anything written by Leonard Schapiro, Isaac Deutscher, Robert Tucker or Robert Conquest.” Volkogonov clearly had full access to the spetskhran—the “special shelves” of Soviet libraries where banned books were secreted away. In his bibliography, he cites books that were, until glasnost, unavailable for ordinary Soviets: Adam Ulam’s biography of Stalin, Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, Richard Pipes’s Russia Under the Old Regime, Milovan Djilis’s Conversations with Stalin, and the memoirs of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva. In addition, Volkogonov read and made reference to the works of Stalin’s enemies, the men he defeated and executed: Bukharin, Trotsky, Rykov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Tomsky.
If Volkogonov had merely cribbed the Western biographies of Stalin and published the result under his name in the Soviet Union, his book would have had a certain notoriety. The mere notion of a Red Army general laying bare the awful facts of the Stalin era would have been an astonishing advance in the Soviet Union’s attempt to recover its historical memory. But he did much more. Volkogonov will be remembered not so much as a great thinker or writer but rather for the uniqueness of his access, the way he made scholarly use of his political position. Volkogonov alone had the chance to exploit the paperwork of the totalitarian regime, and he went everywhere: the Central Party Archives, the USSR Supreme Court Archives, the Central State Archives of the Army, the Ministry of Defense Archives, the Armed Forces General Staff Archives, and the archives of several important museums and institutes, including the Institute of Marxism-Leninism.
On those shelves, Volkogonov found no definitive answers to the remaining riddles of history. For example, he did not come up with a “smoking gun” in the 1934 murder of the Leningrad Party chief Sergei Kirov. Nearly all Western scholars assume, with good circumstantial reason, that Stalin ordered Kirov killed in order to eliminate a potential political threat and to set the stage for the Great Terror. Volkogonov assumed the same and wrote:
“The archives that I have searched do not provide any further clues for making a more definitive statement on the Kirov affair. What is clear, however, is that the murder was not carried out on the orders of Trotsky, Zinoviev, or Kamenev, which was soon put out as the official version. Knowing what we now know about Stalin, it is certain that he had a hand in it. The removal of two or three layers of indirect witnesses bears his hallmark.”
But while Triumph and Tragedy made no sensational advances, while it did not “solve” the enigma of Stalin’s motives or produce a definitive death toll for the repressions of the era, the book was in no sense a failure. By providing excerpts from hundreds of memos, telegrams, and orders that had never been seen by scholars before, Volkogonov allowed the reader a terrible intimacy with the Soviet despot; Triumph and Tragedy gave new texture, at once horrifying and bland, to our knowledge of one of the worst passages in human history.
In his portrayal of Stalin, Volkogonov was more critical than many of his liberal critics might have expected. Triumph and Tragedy showed Stalin to have been a coward, a miserable commander in chief during the war, a “mediocrity but not insignificant,” as Trotsky once put it. Volkogonov provided the conclusive documentary evidence that Stalin, using blue or red pencils, personally ordered the deaths of thousands in the same offhand tone as a man ordering a drink at a bar.
“… According to I. D. Perfilyev, an Old Bolshevik who had spent many years in a concentration camp and who told me the story, once, in Molotov’s company, while discussing a routine list with [secret police chief Nikolai] Yezhov, Stalin muttered to no one in particular: ‘Who’s going to remember all this riffraff in ten or twenty years time? No one. Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one.… The people had to know he was getting rid of all his enemies. In the end, they all got what they deserved.’
“ ‘The people understand, Iosif Vissarionovich, they understand and they support you,’ Molotov replied automatically.”
In Moscow, I got to know Volkogonov fairly well, first in his incarnation as a military historian, then as a political outcast, and, finally, when he became a radical deputy in the Russian parliament in 1990 and a top military adviser to Russian President Yeltsin. Even early on, when he had to take great care in how, and with whom, he talked about his work, Volkogonov never concealed just how deeply his days in the archives had moved him.
“I would come home from working in Stalin’s archives, and I would be deeply shaken,” Volkogonov told me. “I remember coming home after reading through the day of December 12, 1938. He signed thirty lists of death sentences that day, altogether about five thousand people, including many he knew personally, his friends. This was before their trials, of course. This was no surprise. This is not what shook me. But it turned out that, having signed these documents, he went to his personal theater very late that night and watched two movies, including Happy Guys, a popular comedy of the time. I simply could not understand how, after deciding the fate of several thousand lives, he could watch such a movie. But I was beginning to realize that morality plays no role for dictators. That’s when I understood why my father was shot, why my mother died in exile, why millions of people died.”
Volkogonov was born in the Siberian city of Chita in 1928 and later moved to the Pacific coast of Russia. His father was an agrarian specialist and his mother cared for the three children. In 1937, at the height of the purges, Anton Volkogonov was summoned to the local Party committee, where he was arrested for the crime of possessing printed matter of a “politically questionable” origin—a pamphlet by the “right deviationist” Nikolai Bukharin. Volkogonov’s father was never seen again. “He just disappeared into the meat
grinder of the purges,” Volkogonov said. “When I was older, my mother whispered to me, ‘Your father was shot. Never, never speak of it again.’ ”
This family of an “enemy of the people” was exiled to the village of Agul in the Krasnoyarsk district of western Siberia, near an ever-growing complex of forced-labor camps. When he was a child, Volkogonov saw long columns of prisoners marching from the rail stations fifty miles away to the camps. Guard dogs, barbed wire, and watchtowers were all part of his childhood landscape. With each passing month, NKVD workers cordoned off more land and built more camps. The guards dug huge trenches in the pine forest and carried the corpses to the trenches at night on old-fashioned Russian sleds. Schoolchildren would go looking for pine nuts in the forest and they would hear gunfire, Volkogonov recalled, “like the sound of canvas being ripped apart.”
Volkogonov’s mother died just after the end of the war. Like many other orphans, Dmitri Antonovich entered the military as a draftee and never left. His brother and sister were adopted by other families. As a young private and officer during the late forties and the fifties, Volkogonov got a thorough education in political orthodoxy. He learned quickly that no diversion was too small to be noticed. Toward the end of Triumph and Tragedy, Volkogonov let himself enter the portrait of the system, here as a student of military equipment and state ideology:
“… Students were tested first and foremost for their ability to summarize Stalin’s works. I remember being kept back by the teacher when I was attending the Orel Tank School. He was a lieutenant colonel, no longer a young man, and was very much liked by the class for his good nature. When we were alone he handed me my work, which was a summary of sources, and said to me in a quiet and fatherly voice: ‘It’s a good summary. I could see right away you hadn’t just copied it down and had given it some thought. But my advice is, summarize the Stalinist works more fully. Understand, more fully! And another thing. In front of the name Iosif Vissarionovich, don’t write “Com.” Write “Comrade” in full. Got it?’ That night one of my roommates told me they’d all had similar conversations with the teacher of Party history. The exams were coming up and there were rumors that in a neighboring school ‘they had paid attention’ to the sort of ‘political immaturities’ I had shown in my summaries.”
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