Internally, Stalin transformed the society and the economy of the Soviet Union by means of two gigantic processes, which also completed the consolidation of Stalin’s uncontested power in the USSR: the collectivization of agriculture; and the Stalinist reign of terror. By these two sweeping policies, Stalin aimed to eliminate every vestige of private capital. Only the state would be enriched. In turn, the state would transform the USSR into an agriculturally self-sufficient and industrially advanced world power.
The specific function of collectivization in this plan was to rid the Soviet Union of prosperous private-enterprise farmers—those same hapless kulaks whose terrible fate served as a grim warning to Archbishop Amleto Cicognani only a few years later, when Soviet Ambassador Maksim Litvinov argued for Vatican support of the USSR in World War II. Indeed, some years down the line, Stalin himself told Winston Churchill coolly that the problem of private ownership had been solved “by the use of cattle cars.” Four million small landowners were packed into those cattle cars, which transported them to Siberian detention camps and quick, merciless execution.
Stalin did not mention a word to Churchill about what chronicler Robert Conquest has called the “Harvest of Sorrow”—the planned liquidation of some fifteen million Ukrainians. Nor did he bring up his fixed triple policy of terror: systematically induced famine, the use of poison gas and the creation of a vast network of death camps in Siberia, to which those who survived were deported. Conservative estimates put the total number of Stalin’s victims at 25–35 million.
Stalin found ample and explicit mandate for his policy of planned genocide in the work of Marx and Engels. As far back as 1869, Engels had even provided what amounted to a grisly blueprint, and a self-serving justification, for dealing a literal death blow to the bourgeois class. “Until its complete extermination or loss of national status,” wrote Engels, “this racial trash always becomes the most fanatical bearer there is of counterrevolution, and remains that. That is because its entire existence is nothing more than a protest against a great historical revolution.”
Early in his career, Stalin himself had proposed genocide according to the doctrine of Marx and Engels. In his Foundations of Leninism, he declared that the reactionaries (against the proletarian revolution) must die, not as individuals, but as whole nations. There could be no doubt, he insisted, that “the whole of National Socialism” included the genocidal solution.
To effect his reign of terror on the scale he deemed essential, Stalin needed more than ideological justification. He had to make another significant change in the Party structure. To be sure, he never lost sight of the genius of Lenin’s basic structural creation. At the same time, he never hesitated to make his own modifications—if so benign a term can be used—by which he steadily transformed the Leninist monolith into the means to secure, strengthen and guard his personal power.
When the Seventeenth Party Congress met in 1934 at Stalin’s bidding, its 1,966 delegates replaced his earlier watchdog organization, OGPU, with yet another: the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). At the heart of the NKVD, the delegates obediently created an elite force. The Special Sector.
At home and around the world, the NKVD inherited all the duties and privileges of OGPU. It was an army apart from the Red Army, which it monitored and controlled. It was the right arm of the Party-State. And the Party-State, with the vigilant help of the NKVD, was simply and reductively Stalin himself.
With respect to his policies of genocide, however, it was the creation of the Special Sector of the NKVD that made the great difference. For the Special Sector was not merely another watchdog of the watchdogs, another guard to keep the guards in line. Placed at the heart of the Central Committee of the CPSU, it was in effect Stalin’s personal extermination force. It enabled Stalin to carry Lenin’s basic revolutionary principle of violence to its most stunning level. Stalin’s reign of terror could now be as extreme as it had to be.
The targets of first importance for this new extermination arm of Stalin’s monolith were within the Party-State. The moment to argue that boys will be boys was over. It was time to be rid of all the old Leninist Bolsheviks from whom Stalin might expect any residual resistance to his personal control and absolute authority.
Perhaps it was ironic that the Purges and Trials that cost the lives of tens of millions of Soviets were made possible at all by the Party’s creation of the NKVD and the Special Sector. If so, it was an irony so thoroughly soaked in blood that most of the Party members themselves did not live to appreciate it.
Along with the millions of Soviet citizens who were killed or imprisoned, 1,108 of the 1,966 delegates who had so obligingly brought these new Stalinist creations into existence were executed between 1936 and 1938 during Stalin’s Great Purges and his three Great Public Trials. Within the Central Committee itself, 98 of its 138 members and member candidates were executed.
When the bloodletting was over for the most part, not only the NKVD but the Party and the State as well were creatures that were wholly Stalin’s in membership, function and aim.
Stalin’s main preoccupation outside the Soviet Union was dictated by the geopolitical vision he inherited from Marx and Lenin. In its Stalinist form, however, that vision was shorn of any notion that the Soviet Party-State, which was totally in his control now, should relinquish its intended role of geopolitical dominance in the world.
As in the Soviet Union itself, Stalin made headway around the world by means of the Leninist structures already in place and waiting for his hand—specifically, in this case, the triple network of worldwide counterintelligence structures that had begun years before with the expansion of Feliks Dzerzhinsky’s CHEKA personnel into Soviet diplomatic and cultural missions abroad. Again, as in the Soviet Union, Stalin’s latest successor to CHEKA, the NKVD, made it possible for the Man of Steel to clamp his personal control on the international Soviet counterintelligence network and eventually to expand and perfect it almost without constraint.
At its height, the NKVD was composed of three-quarters of a million members distributed into fifty-three divisions and twenty-eight brigades. By the beginning of World War II—that is, within five years of thecreation of the NKVD—thirty-six countries spread around the globe had well-established pro-Moscow Communist parties. Over and through them all were spread the tentacles of the NKVD. And for obvious reasons, here at least, one internationalist principle insisted upon by Lenin remained the order of the Stalinist day: Every CP outside the Soviet Union was modeled on, and entirely subject to, the CPSU, as revamped by Stalin. The General Secretary had the NKVD’s guarantee on it.
Stalin owed another important debt to Lenin’s geopolitical vision and intent. For the very centerpiece of Stalin’s geopolitical strategy was that same Russo-German alliance that Lenin had always seen as the keystone of his intended domination of Europe and the world by the proletariat.
Actually, the idea that the alliance of Slav and German could dominate the whole of Europe and, indeed, could dominate the world was older than Lenin or Marx. It dated from before the time of Peter the Great. As solid geopolitical strategy, it was once entertained as an ideal on both sides of the river Elbe.
Because Lenin’s whole purpose was geopolitical from the outset, it was to be expected almost from the moment of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917 that the idea of a Russo-German alliance as the first essential step in gaining geopolitical preeminence had to become common coin in his discussions and plans with his Bolshevik Party.
The thinking was blatant in its duplicity. If it was possible to restore national virility to Germany following its depletion and humiliation during World War I, then another war at least as destructive could be engineered in order to reduce England and France—and Germany again, into the bargain—to a singular state of weakness. The infrastructure of all three nations would be destroyed. The capitalist rulers would be beggared. The proletariat would rise up—that old saw seemed never to die in the Soviet Marxist mind.
And the Great Revolution would ensue at last, with the USSR—the strongest and most intact nation—as the capstone of the new world order.
Lenin himself had started the wheels in motion for just such a plan as early as April of 1922, just over a month before his first stroke. As he had foreseen, Germany had been worn out by the four years of the World War. It had been humiliated by foreign occupation. It had been stripped of its former colonies. And it was racked by hunger and soaring inflation. It was, in short, ripe for the picking.
On April 16, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of Lenin’s USSR, Georgi G. Chicherin, met with Walter Rathenau, foreign minister of the German Republic, to sign the famed Treaty of Rapallo. By that treaty, Most-Favored-Nation treatment in Soviet-German relations was ensured, and the humiliated Germans were able to begin rearming themselves with guns, tanks, aircraft and poison gas—all of which had been forbidden by the conditions of the Versailles Treaty that had ended the war in 1918.
It was the start of a long and deadly game of cat and mouse. For while the Treaty of Rapallo was signed in secrecy, it was published by the Soviets the very next day, to put the bee of renewed hostilities in the bonnets of the French and English.
During the ten years from 1929 to 1939, Stalin carried on with Lenin’s plan for achieving domination of Europe through Germany. And Adolf Hitler’s rise to total power in Germany in 1933 provided the opening Stalin needed. His brother-in-law and intimate, Lazar M. Kaganovich, put the idea with remarkable candor in a piece he wrote for the Bolshevik newspaper Izvestia on January 20, 1934: “The conflict between Germany and France and England reinforces our situation in Europe…. We must work at deepening the divergence between the states of Europe.”
Work at it Stalin did. He tried everything in his power to make a Soviet-German military pact possible and feasible. In 1935, when Hitler brazenly defied the military restrictions still mandated for Germany by the Versailles Treaty, Stalin gave a lofty lecture to England’s foreign minister, Anthony Eden. “Sooner or later”—Stalin shook a verbal finger at the Britisher—“the German people must liberate themselves from the chains of Versailles…. I repeat, a great people such as the Germans must tear itself away from the chains of Versailles.”
By the end of that year, Stalin proposed to Hitler that they sign a bilateral nonaggression pact. It was another move in the game of cat and mouse begun by Lenin over a decade before. For earlier in the year, Stalin had already signed a treaty of “mutual assistance” with France. And in any case, even as Stalin courted Hitler, Moscow gave instructions to the Communist parties in France, England and elsewhere to raise a screaming hue and cry for the need to defend democracy everywhere against German and Italian Fascism.
Clearly, the fires of war had to be stoked on both sides of the pot. If Stalin failed to make that clear by his actions, he set the verbal record straight in the summer of 1939, when he publicly declared that “we shall be unable to undertake a geopolitical plan of action unless we successfully exploit the antagonisms between the capitalist nations in order to precipitate them into armed conflict. The principal work of our Communist parties must now be to facilitate such a conflict.”
Two months later, on August 23, 1939, Stalin’s infamous nonaggression pact with Hitler was finally signed in Moscow. This was the pact by which, in the words of the historian N. Nekrich, the USSR “opened the door for the next world war.” That was the very plan, of course. And so, at the moment of the signing, Moscow was also playing host to important military delegations from France and England.
All the ironies of the Stalinist era are bloody ones. Insofar as Hitler was an apt target for the advances of Marxist Russia, it was precisely because of his admiration for Stalin and for his proven methods of genocide. Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism, which had argued so passionately for wholesale genocide as a legitimate tool of socialism, had been published in German translation in 1924. Soon after taking power in 1933, Hitler remarked to a confidant, Hermann Rauschning, that “the whole of National Socialism [the Nazi political philosophy] is based on Marxism.”
That was not too much to say. At the very least, there can be no doubt that Hitler found the justification and the model for his ghastly “Final Solution” in the principle of genocide advocated as doctrine and policy to foment the Marxist proletarian revolution.
Truth to tell, Hitler was far from lonely, even in the West, in his admiration for the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist doctrine of genocide. It found able and even celebrated defenders in the likes of such English literary heroes as H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis and George Bernard Shaw, to name just a few.
Shaw even went so far as to call for the invention of “a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly”; and for the extermination of “useless races” on a “scientific basis.” As Nazi Adolf Eichmann testified years later in his Jerusalem trial, Hitler found exactly what Shaw had called for in the Zyklon-B gas with which he snuffed out the lives of six million Jews and other “useless races.”
Admiration for Stalin in the United States was a more tender sort of thing. Despite his incomparable ruthlessness, which was in full swing in the 1930s, Stalin’s NKVD was so unbelievably skillful in promoting his cult that America was able to allow itself to ignore his genocidal policies the way bad manners are ignored in polite company. An article in one popular American magazine of the thirties, Harper’s Weekly, presented but one example of the agreeable stereotype that came to be accepted in the United States: “Uncle Joe”—as President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself dubbed Stalin familiarly—that gentle bear of a man, firm, pipe-smoking, devoted to his family, and living modestly on a manager’s salary, like any honest American capitalist.
Truly, as Lenin had said, Stalin was the “Miraculous Georgian.”
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Stalin’s entire plan for European and global conquest reposed on the success of his 1939 nonaggression pact with Hitler. But it was Hitler who was quicker on the draw by far. The German dictator’s admiration for Stalin and his methods proved to be no stumbling block to betrayal. In a hatred born of envy, emulation and his own megalomania, Hitler turned on the Soviets. Nikita Khrushchev revealed twenty-five years later that, when Stalin learned of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, he suffered a nervous collapse and shouted, “All that Lenin created we have lost forever!”
There was precious little to choose between these two dictators who styled themselves as champions of the world socialist cause. But despite Stalin’s fit of nerves, his day was to be a longer one than Hitler’s. For once again, the Miraculous Georgian was aided by a strange combination of events over which he had no control: Hitler’s maniacal mistakes. The heroism of the Russian people. And, above all, the entry of the United States into World War II.
The trouble was that the Americans as saviors turned out to be a mixed blessing for Stalin. On the one hand, they saved his hide by resupplying England, France and the USSR itself with needed military equipment and food, and by their own enormous military effort. On the other hand, however, the Americans saved Europe’s hide into the bargain; and that threw a spanner into Stalin’s plans for a debilitated France, England and Germany.
In fact, the United States became the most important of the historical factors of World War II on which Stalin had not counted. The presence of America, with its ebullient economy and its exclusive possession of the atomic bomb, in the heartland of Europe from 1945 onward changed the whole Leninist-Marxist equation for geopolitical dominance. The age-old dream of a Slavic-German basis for such dominance was out of the question. At least, for the foreseeable future.
Still, perhaps tomorrow would be a different sort of day. And there was no harm in working to see it.
Here, at least, the United States turned out to be particularly obliging. Franklin Roosevelt allowed himself and his Western allies to be agreeably and painlessly bamboozled out of their original purpose in going to war—the liberation of Poland and all European nations.
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bsp; A cartoon-like image comes to mind of a swamp drainer so frightened by alligators snapping at his hide that he forgets why he came to the swamp in the first place. But sadly, the facts of their gross betrayal of Eastern Europe suggests something far less comic—and far less complimentary and exculpatory—for the American and British leaders who connived at yet another nonrevolutionary victory for the Leninist-Marxist proletarian revolution. A bitterly cynical cartoon appeared in one of the last editions of Budapest’s principal daily, a short time before the iron hand of Stalinism wiped out all freedom in Hungary. It showed the Eastern European nations as a maiden being swept away in the paws of a bearlike Joseph Stalin, while she cries to three uniformed men—Britain, France, and the U.S.A.: “You promised to free me from this rape … you promised!” Their answer: “Sorry, my dear, but we all belong to the same club.”
That, in sum, was the difficulty. Already a “beloved ally,” already a founding member of the United Nations Organization, already possessing treaty papers granting Stalin all power over those nations, the West lacked any moral backbone to stand up to Stalin. The best that could be done was the Kennan containment policy and the tedious, sometimes bloody, always duplicitous Cold War, splotched with Korean blood and Vietnamese blood, and unmatched in the history of nations for the number of men, women and children made the victims of man’s grossest inhumanity to man.
Nor did Stalin’s death, in March 1953, change any of the fundamentals on which the Party-State continued to function. The Leninist geopolitical structure animated by the Leninist geopolitical aim was handed on intact by the successors of Stalin. Constantly maintained at par was the international grid of local Communist parties modeled on the CPSU, the ever-active subversion through diplomatic missions and front organizations, the ideological presumption that everywhere it was possible to bring about the final overthrow of the capitalist “superstructure” and thus “liberate” the “proletariat.”
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