Stalin

by Edvard Radzinsky

  August 30, 1926. Greetings, Molotov. The way things are going we cannot avoid … removing Grigori [Zinoviev] from Comintern.… Is the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs working to find a post for Kamenev?

  And so the fate of Zinoviev and Kamenev was decided. Kamenev would be packed off with an ambassadorship. Eminent Bolsheviks who had once been Lenin’s comrades-in-arms and were now “oppositionists” were dispatched to the overfed bourgeois world; in effect, into exile. To Berlin, N. Krestinsky, former secretary of the Central Committee and member of the Politburo; to Prague, the Trotskyist Antonov-Ovseenko, who in his day had announced the overthrow of the Provisional Government; to Paris, K. Rakovsky, onetime head of the Ukrainian government, accompanied by other influential members of Lenin’s Central Committee, the Trotskyists Pyatakov and Preobrazhensky. Vienna, Argentina, Sweden, Persia … he scattered his enemies over the face of the earth. Let them rest a while and enjoy life. Just for a little while.

  Meanwhile Krupskaya made another attempt to support Lenin’s former comrades-in-arms.

  On September 16, 1926, Stalin wrote Molotov: “Discussion with Krupskaya is at present not only inappropriate, but politically damaging. Krupskaya is a schismatic.”

  Back in Moscow, he warned Krupskaya jokingly that “if you carry on splitting the Party we’ll find Lenin a different widow.” And the man who would give the Party a new history, in which all the founding members of the Bolshevik Party would be depicted as its most vicious enemies, might have done just that. Krupskaya took fright, and remained frightened to the end of her life. Stalin would send her along to sit in on meetings of the Central Control Commission, where she would confirm the wildest fabrications against her husband’s former associates.

  A DESPERATE, DOOMED BATTLE

  That autumn, while he was still in the Caucasus, he learned that his wishes had been realized: the opposition was preparing for a desperate effort. On September 23, 1926, he wrote Molotov that if Trotsky had “gone raving mad” and meant to “stake everything on one last throw,” so much the worse for him. In October oppositionists spoke out in Party cells at factories, calling for a debate. But they lost their nerve almost immediately, and acknowledged that their action had been “a breach of discipline.” It was too late—Stalin was already hounding all those “October leaders” out of the Politburo. Zinoviev also ceased to manage the Comintern.

  From that moment the opposition had nothing to lose. Battle was joined. A savage battle in which they were doomed.

  And so a year later, on the eve of the Fifteenth Party Congress, on the tenth anniversary of the October coup which he had organized, and in the state which he had founded, Trotsky was obliged to set up an underground press to print his program. He knew he would not be able to read it out at the Congress—the audience, obeying Stalin, would shout him down. The GPU, needless to say, knew what was afoot, and this was just what Stalin had been waiting for. The underground press became the excuse for the immediate expulsion of Trotsky’s supporters from the Party, and the arrest of many of them. Trotsky delivered his speech at a routine plenum of the Central Committee. His words were barely audible; he was interrupted by oaths and abuse, and the speech was accompanied throughout by cries of “Down with him!” “Get him out of here!” The same shouts drove Zinoviev from the platform. Stalin could be proud of himself. The system he had created was functioning with greater precision from one day to the next.

  The opposition then organized demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad on November 7. These were the last two open demonstrations against the Stalinist regime. The GPU, of course, knew about them in advance but allowed them to take place. In Lenin’s Party submitting Party differences to the judgment of the crowd was considered the greatest of crimes. The opposition had signed their own sentence. And Stalin, of course, a brilliant organizer of demonstrations himself, was well prepared.

  On the morning of November 7 a small crowd, most of them students, moved toward Red Square, carrying banners with opposition slogans: “Let us direct our fire to the right—at the kulak and the NEP man,” “Long live the leaders of the World Revolution, Trotsky and Zinoviev.” The GPU did its work, and a handpicked “public” soon attached itself to the column. The procession reached Okhotny Ryad, not far from the Kremlin. Here the criminal appeal to the non-Party masses was to be made, from the balcony of the former Paris hotel. Stalin let them get on with it. Smilga and Preobrazhensky, both members of Lenin’s Central Committee, draped a streamer with the slogan “Back to Lenin” over the balcony. Those marching in support of the opposition shouted “Hurrah!” The “toilers” immediately “acted in protest,” blowing whistles supplied in advance, throwing tomatoes they just happened to be carrying. A group headed by the secretary of the district Party Committee, Ryutin, arrived by car and tried to break in through the locked door. At the same time a Red army soldier climbed the sheer wall to the balcony and tore down the slogan, to the laughter of the mob. Ryutin and his companions found a way into the building and began assaulting the oppositionists. Ultimately they would all perish: the beaten—Smilga and Preobrazhensky—and the beater—Ryutin—alike.

  Meanwhile loud shouts of “Bash the oppositionists” were heard from the crowd, and, more loudly still, “Down with the Yid oppositionists.” Those demonstrating in favor of the opposition were first beaten up and then arrested.

  While all this was going on preparations were being made for a solemn meeting in the Bolshoi Theater to mark the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. After the ceremonies the famous director Eisenstein was supposed to show his film October. He was not ready in time. G. Alexandrov, who was then Eisenstein’s assistant director, remembered: “At four Stalin came into the cutting room. He greeted us and said, ‘Is Trotsky in your picture?’ Eisenstein said, ‘Yes.’ After viewing it Stalin said categorically that the picture must not be shown with Trotsky in it.” So the great director Eisenstein set to work excising from the film October the man who had been the father of October.

  On November 14 Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Party. A little later one hundred cinemas were simultaneously screening the revolutionary blockbuster October—minus Trotsky. Krupskaya warmly approved of it, and wrote in Pravda: “You feel that a new art has emerged and is already taking shape in our country. That art has a colossal future.” She was right. A new art had emerged. And Stalin would harness Eisenstein, and all the other geniuses of the medium, to its service.

  At the Fifteenth Congress in December, to the usual accompaniment from the hall of approval for himself and indignation with the opposition, he said: “We make one condition: the opposition must renounce its views openly and honestly before the whole world. It must stigmatize the errors which it has committed … it must deliver up its cells to us, and make it possible for the Party to disband them completely. Either that, or let them quit the Party. If they won’t go quietly—we’ll chuck them out.” This triggered shouts of “Right!” and prolonged applause.

  He knew, of course, that all these former leaders were not yet ready to scourge themselves “before all the world” and “openly and honestly” hand over their supporters (the “cells”) to the GPU. But in this way he obtained the right to “chuck them out.” The Congress confirmed the expulsion of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and seventy or so other oppositionists from the Party, including such notables as Pyatakov, Radek, and Smilga. Kamenev was expelled from the Central Committee. In that anniversary year he calmly drove almost all of the God Lenin’s henchmen out of the Party. Nor did he leave it at that. In speeches made by his allies, the oppositionists’ former comrades, there were interesting hints of further action. A. Rykov, for instance, proclaimed that “in the situation which the opposition was endeavoring to create … we cannot, in my opinion, guarantee that in the very near future we shall not have to enlarge our prison population somewhat.”

  Shouting and clapping, his audience was preparing its own future.

  Speeches like that of Rykov enabled Stal
in to go further and to do something which the former Kremlin boyars could never have expected. All those ex-members of the Central Committee—Radek, Smilga, Beloborodov, Muralov, Preobrazhensky, I. Smirnov—were banished, as in tsarist times. And as the above-mentioned Bolsheviks themselves had banished their former fellow revolutionaries, the SRs.

  The living symbol of world revolution, Lev Trotsky, was also banished. After the November demonstration he was evicted from his apartment in the Kremlin. While he looked for another, he stayed with his friend A. Beloborodov, the imperial family’s murderer. Trotsky’s banishment was carried out in the best tradition. First, Bukharin informed Trotsky by telephone of the decision to banish him. Trotsky, naturally, thought of organizing a demonstration for the day of his banishment. But Stalin had plans of his own. He instructed Bukharin to tell Lev that his departure had been postponed for two days. Then, the very next day, an “escort” arrived to take Lev to the station. Trotsky locked himself in his room, but, as Molotov described it, “Trotsky was carried out of his department. Two men carried him. One was my chief bodyguard Pogudil. He was a mighty boozer.”

  “They’re carrying Trotsky out!” his son was shouting, and ringing the doorbells of all the other apartments. None of those living in the building opened up. Stalin had them trained by now. They carried Trotsky downstairs to a waiting car without interference. On the station platform his son still kept shouting, appealing to the railroad employees: “Look! Look how they’re carrying Trotsky!” But the station was empty, and the railroad staff were unmoved. Trotsky had had his day.

  All those benighted semiliterate workers, introduced into the Party by the “Lenin draft,” sighed happily. No longer could it be said of their Party that “the Jews rule.” They were grateful to Stalin. Radek made a sour joke: “Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, Stalin led them out of the Politburo.”

  Zinoviev and Kamenev again took fright, and immediately recanted, publicly condemning their views as anti-Leninist. Zinoviev was reinstated in 1929.

  THE BEST PUPIL

  During the days of mourning for Lenin, Stalin, among others, made a speech. The former seminarist had not forgotten his homiletics. He spoke of the commandments bequeathed by the God Lenin, and vowed to carry them out. As indeed he did, in the shortest possible time. Lenin had intended to tame the rebellious old guard: Stalin made this an imperative. Lenin had adopted a menacing resolution on Party unity: Stalin made it an iron law. Indeed, he had every right to say: “I declare that the present regime in the Party is the exact expression of the regime which was established in the Party under Lenin at the time of the Tenth and Eleventh Congresses.”

  What now lay ahead was the abandonment of NEP and the final pacification of the country. Russia was about to meet its new tsar.

  His mind turned to the future of a state that now belonged to him. Among his first steps were his attempts to lure back the great émigrés. Approaches were made to Gorky. The eminent “Bard of the Proletariat” and “Stormy Petrel of the Revolution” had not accepted the October coup. He had branded his friend of yesterday, Lenin, as “an adventurer, prepared to betray the interests of the proletariat in the most shameful fashion.” Throughout 1918 his newspaper New Life had condemned Bolshevik terrorism. Koba had said of him that “the Russian Revolution has overthrown quite a few authorities, and we fear that the lost laurels of these great ones give Gorky sleepless nights, we fear that Gorky feels a fatal urge to join the has-beens—well, it’s up to him. The Revolution neither pities nor buries its dead.”

  But Gorky had been equally uncompromising, and written a play about the sordid aspects of the new regime. Zinoviev, as boss of Petrograd, repeated the treatment meted out to the writer by “accursed tsarism”: the play was banned, and Gorky’s apartment was searched. Zinoviev added a new wrinkle: he threatened to arrest people close to Gorky. But Gorky would not be put off. In New Life he wrote, “This is just what we expect from a regime which fears the light of publicity, is antidemocratic, tramples on basic civic rights … and sends punitive expeditionary forces against peasants.” Zinoviev closed the newspaper down, and Lenin had to advise the father of proletarian literature to remove himself from the first proletarian state. Gorky left Russia in 1922, ostensibly to seek medical treatment. But now that his archenemy Zinoviev had been driven out of Leningrad, Stalin’s orders were that Gorky should be persuaded to return. The homecoming of the “Stormy Petrel of the Revolution” would sanctify the advent of a new Leader. Stalin made the new chief of the secret police, Genrikh Yagoda, responsible for bringing Gorky back.

  Negotiations were going on simultaneously with another celebrity, one who had never belonged to the Party, the composer Sergei Prokofiev. The enticement of Prokofiev was also a GPU operation. In January 1927, after many changes of mind, Prokofiev decided to visit “Bolshevizia” with his wife.

  As soon as Prokofiev arrived in the country from Paris “a certain Zucker” was attached to him as his “constant companion.” This “employee of the Supreme Executive Committee” (as he described himself to Prokofiev) was, of course, a GPU agent.

  Prokofiev was taken to the best hotel, the Metropole. In his diary, the “naive person with gray eyes” (as his friends called him) wrote: “An enormous room with a delightful view of the Bolshoi Theater, but no bath, the water for washing yourself was in jugs.… The crowd in the streets was good-natured—could these be the wild beasts who had so horrified the whole world? Hotel servants take tips, as they do everywhere, and are polite.… Zucker spent the whole journey enthusiastically explaining the beneficial activities of his Party. It proved to be very interesting, and on a planetary scale.”

  The processing continued. Prokofiev was taken to a “special restaurant,” where the meal was “exceptionally tasty” and the service just as good. There were “grouse, marvelous whipped cream,” and “in general a host of forgotten Russian things.” When he entered the Conservatoire the orchestra welcomed him with a triumphal march. Back at the hotel he was handed a “letter of an erotic, and indeed demonic character … with telephone number enclosed” (the omniscient organization overlooked nothing). In the end, an old friend told him that “ ‘life here is impossible: you’re watched and spied on the whole time, it’s sheer torture … every sixth person is a spy.’ ”

  Zucker finally decided to show his complete confidence in Prokofiev by taking him along “as a guest” to the Kremlin. The company chosen for this occasion was as “intellectual” as could be arranged: a friend of Kamenev’s, Trotsky’s sister, Kamenev’s wife (Kamenev himself had by then been dispatched to Rome as ambassador).

  The Kamenevs still had quarters in the Kremlin. “Soldiers with rifles and bayonets gleaming in the sunshine guard the Kremlin,” Prokofiev noted. Zucker kept up a gushing commentary: the man who just passed us is a minister of something or other, this is where Lenin did this or that, look, the revolutionary poet Demyan Biedny lives here, “ ‘but living here can be very inconvenient,’ Zucker told me, ‘if you just want to invite somebody as a guest … there’s a lot of bother with passes.…’ We were taken to an enormous, comfortable room with magnificent armchairs and bookcases. We were shown in with a certain ceremony, there was an aura of deference, Olga Davidovna [Trotsky’s sister] seemed lively and pleasant.… Later Litvinov (Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs) and his wife put in an appearance. They both announced that they loved music. Zucker tactfully hinted that it would be nice if I played something.… The new revolutionary forces took their ease to the strains of my compositions.”

  The visit dragged on till after midnight, when they walked through the darkness to the car. “Litvinov’s wife carried her muddy shoes along the endless Kremlin corridors.… ‘How I love this quiet Kremlin,’ she exclaimed. It was amusing, if you knew how turbulently active that very same Kremlin was in the world.”

  Both Zucker and Kamenev’s wife would be shot.

  But Prokofiev liked what he saw. He paid several subsequent visits to the USSR and eventu
ally resettled there. Yagoda had succeeded.

  12

  THE COUNTRY AT BREAKING POINT

  RETURN TO REVOLUTION

  In those days many people still had the pre-Revolution habit of keeping diaries, most of which would vanish with their authors in the time of Terror. A few prudent people, my father among them, would burn their diaries for fear of arrest. So what little has trickled through time’s cruel sieve is doubly precious.

  This is from the diary of I. Schutz, a teacher of history: “In the provinces people spoke openly of famine. The peasants have instinctively devised a specific tactic which has spread everywhere. Their tactic is to keep their grain out of sight and they are such artists at concealment that look as he may no one will ever find it.… Hence the startling news that in Odessa scouts are posted to look out for bread, and in the Caucasus, the country’s granary, restaurants offer ‘dinner with bread’ as if that was something miraculous.”

  He had set out to implement Bukharin’s policy of “alliance with the peasantry,” and the result was a shortage of bread. Once they felt themselves free the peasants simply refused to sell grain to the state at low prices. There was no food for the towns, and none for the army, which, although Europe was at peace, was steadily expanding.

  Stalin would shut himself up in his study, and pace the floor, sucking his pipe. The power was in his hands. His rivals for the leadership had been laid low. Bukharin—“Bukhkashka,” as the Party derisively called him—was, of course, not a rival. For Stalin what he should do next was no longer a question. Later, when he was thinking over his disagreements with Stalin, Bukharin would recall an “economic” discussion they had back in 1925. In the course of the discussion Stalin had said that if they gambled on NEP for long it would beget capitalism.