Stalin

by Edvard Radzinsky

  For him, the wager on NEP was of course only a maneuver in the fight with Trotsky and Zinoviev. And a breathing space, as Lenin had willed it, while the Party gathered strength. The essential question was when this pause for breath should end. It must not be left too late. Stalin agreed completely with the ousted leftists that “NEP for a long time” would mean the end of the Soviet regime.

  Seventy years later the Gorbachev episode would prove yet again that a prison cannot be made self-financing. One-party rule cannot survive where someone has even minimal economic freedom.

  As he paced his study nerving himself to begin, he saw already the mirage of a unique country. One that united the Marxist economic utopia of which they had dreamt in 1917 with a mighty state. There would be a single bank, a single economic plan, a peasantry organized in collective farms, and a pyramid of lesser leaders, all-powerful at their own level. At the top of the pyramid would be the Supreme Leader, his word instantly made flesh in the lesser leaders. There would be ruthless discipline, ruthless punishments. Gigantic resources would be concentrated in the hands of the state and the Leader. He would be able to create a huge industrial economy. And hence a huge army.… And then, and then … the Great Leninist Dream of World Revolution. “The head spins!”

  The forces to execute the great turn were already in place. He announced at the Fifteenth Party Congress that “guberniya and oblast committees have taken over the business of economic management.” The pyramid of leaders—provincial Party secretaries endowed with plenary powers—which he had created, his Order of Sword Bearers, controlled the whole life of the country. He could turn things whichever way he chose. He knew how eager the Party was for the turnaround. It viewed Bukharin’s compliments to the petite bourgeoisie with contempt. The militants of the Party longed to hear again the favorite word of the Civil War—“Kill!” “Kill the kulak!” “Finish off the bourgeois!” The writer A. Vinogradov said in a letter to Gorky that “when the two children of a champion metalworker throw a schoolmate under a streetcar because he is a doctor’s son and their class enemy—it means that utterly inhuman elemental forces have been unleashed and are running riot.”

  These were the elemental forces of the Russian Revolution, and Stalin would reawaken them. He would revive the romanticism of October, the slogans of the revolutionary upsurge: “No compromise!” “Class war to the death!” To build a society like none ever seen before, in which there would be neither peasants nor shopkeepers nor petit bourgeois.

  In revolutionary battle dress he began building himself an empire. It gladdened him now to see the peasants withholding their grain. The specter of famine untied his hands. He uttered the call for which the Party was waiting. The bourgeois have forgotten the might of the Great Revolution. Very well, well remind them that the Revolution goes on!

  Decrees on the forcible confiscation of grain, like those of years gone by, were drafted once more. Squads of factory workers and Cheka agents went once more from village to village. Stalin chased his comrades-in-arms out of their offices to extort grain. Molotov recalled, “We squeezed grain out of all those who had any.… On January 1, 1928, I was in the Ukraine, pumping grain, and Stalin said, ‘I could give you a big kiss for the job you’ve done there,’ and told me he felt an urge to go off to Siberia himself.”

  Stalin left for Siberia on January 15, 1928. He visited Novosibirsk, Barnaul, and Omsk. He returned from his trip in the foulest of tempers. According to a letter from N. Krotov, “Stalin went on from Omsk to some village or other. It was said that he spent his whole time there haranguing the peasants to make them hand over their grain. While he was at it one of them up and yelled at him, ‘Dance us a lezginka, you Georgian so-and-so, and maybe we’ll give you some grain!’ He came back from Siberia with a decree already drafted: if the kulak did not surrender grain in the quantities required, punitive measures were to be used. He squeezed pretty hard. And he pumped out the grain.”

  They had dared to laugh at him. They wouldn’t do it again. This people only understood strength.

  In his copy of Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism, which I examined in the archives, Stalin left an amusing inscription on the flyleaf: “(1) weakness (2) laziness (3) stupidity are the only things that can be called vices. All else, in the absence of the above-mentioned, is virtue.”

  ALL ELSE Is VIRTUE

  Bukharin and his team were horrified: Stalin had simply reverted to war communism.

  He had in fact gone further, and began to speak of collectivizing the peasantry. He had supposed that the mild Bukharin would meekly submit. But to his amazement Bukharin was furious, and a series of skirmishes developed. In spring 1928 Bukharin mobilized his supporters, Rykov, then head of government, and the Trades Union leader Tomsky, and they all wrote notes to the Politburo about the threat to the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry, naturally invoking Lenin. Stalin did not intend to annihilate Bukharin just yet. He was making a 180-degree turn, and needed Bukharin to explain it from the standpoint of Marxism. He summoned a plenary meeting of the Central Committee and gave a simple account of the future in a formula heard for the first time: “The advance … toward socialism … inevitably leads to resistance on the part of the exploiting classes … [and to] the sharpening of the class struggle.”

  The population at large did not read boring political speeches, and so didn’t realize that that sentence had been passed. His lackluster words concealed a sea of blood. As a near neighbor of ours, an old Party member, once explained to my father, “When class war is waged there has to be terror. If class war is intensified—the terror must also be intensified.” My father did not believe him and merely laughed.

  The plenary meetings were a grueling experience. Bukharin refused to give in. Rykov and Tomsky supported him. In the privacy of his study Stalin tried to coax Bukharin: “You and I are the Himalayas—all the others are nonentities. Let’s reach an understanding.” But Bukharin stood his ground. The expert on Leninism had simply failed to grasp what Lenin was about. Bukharin with his European education had not understood the main lesson which the ignorant Koba had mastered in the Leninist academies: NEP and a free peasantry spelled the doom of Bolshevik power. A single day without terror was dangerous; two days without terror meant death to the Party. At Politburo meetings he began raising his voice to Bukharin, who immediately quoted his remark about “nonentities” to the other members present, hoping to make them angry. This was foolish of him—they really were nonentities. All they felt was fear; they hated Bukharin for his humiliating candor. Stalin (so Bukharin told Kamenev later) grew furious; he shouted at Bukharin, “It’s a lie, you’ve made that up.” And so it went, with hysterical outbursts and ugly scenes at every meeting.

  “Soft as wax” Bukharin kept fighting back. He even tried to enlist Kalinin and Voroshilov, promising to sweep Stalin away at some future Politburo meeting. Two other Politburo members, Rykov and Tomsky, were after all his allies. Kalinin was of two minds. A former peasant himself, he was of course against collectivization. The proletarian poet Demyan Biedny was given the job of bringing the old man to his senses. Biedny, the Party’s pet poet, resided in the Kremlin, and his enormous apartment, his mahogany furniture, his children’s governess, his chef, and his housekeeper were legendary among hungry writers. Demyan knew how to show gratitude for blessings received. At the beginning of March an article of his in Izvestia (the government newspaper) assailed certain “older men in authority” who got involved with “young artistes from the world of light opera.” Kalinin was having an affair at the time with a certain Tatyana Bakh, who had risen to stardom as his protégée. He saw at once that the drubbing would be ruthless, and shaming. For Stalin had a new weapon—the GPU dossier. Kalinin capitulated. The fun-loving playboy Voroshilov quickly took the hint from Kalinin’s experience.

  But Bukharin’s activities were becoming more and more serious. Stalin learned that he had talked to the GPU chiefs, Yagoda and Trilisser, and then he called on h
is ousted enemy Kamenev. This was in July 1928. Kamenev wrote to Zinoviev that “Bukharin was in a state of terminal shock. His lips twitched violently with agitation.” Trotsky had once been visited by his ferocious enemies Kamenev and Zinoviev, now Kamenev had been visited by their ferocious enemy Bukharin, also seeking an alliance and declaring that previous differences were immaterial. Let’s ally ourselves against Koba!

  Kamenev summarized Bukharin’s part in the discussion as follows: “Stalin is a Genghis Khan, an unscrupulous intriguer, who sacrifices everything else to the preservation of his power.… He changes his theories according to whom he needs to get rid of next.… We quarreled so violently that we started calling each other ‘liar,’ etc.… The differences between us and Stalin are many times more serious than our former differences with you.… It would be much better for us to have Zinoviev and Kamenev in the Politburo rather than Stalin.” He went on to explain Stalin’s new concept, which was the reason for their disagreements. “Stalin’s line was that capitalism grows at the expense of its colonies. We have no colonies, and no one will make us loans. We must therefore rely on tribute from our own peasantry. Stalin knows that there will be resistance. Hence his theory that as socialism grows so does resistance to it.”

  Kamenev: What are your forces?

  Bukharin: Myself, Rykov, Tomsky, and Uglanov [leader of the Moscow Bolsheviks]. The Leningraders are mostly with us, but they are frightened. Voroshilov and Kalinin let us down at the last moment. It is becoming clear that the middle of the road Chekist [his name for most ordinary members of the Central Committee] would also be for Stalin.

  Of those with power he for some reason identified Yagoda and Trilisser as his supporters. It may have been thanks to “supporter” Yagoda that news of this meeting with Kamenev reached Stalin immediately, together with a transcript of their discussion.

  Kamenev realized that Bukharin and his friends were helpless. And as naive as he himself once had been. He remarked that the tone of Bukharin’s statement showed a “total hatred for Stalin” and a “total breakdown of relations.” He asked Bukharin, “What will become of us?” “He will try to buy us with important posts … so that we can help him to suffocate us,” Bukharin replied.

  The naive Bukharin was mistaken. Kamenev had long been awaiting an approach from Stalin. Stalin had, after all, now adopted Kamenev and Zinoviev’s program. All that they had asked for he was now carrying out. Bukharin’s story only poured oil on the flames. Bukharin was doomed: alliance with him would lead nowhere. Why should he, Kamenev, spare Bukharin, who not so long ago had been calling for their blood? The best thing for him to do was to inform Stalin of this visit as soon as Bukharin left.

  Bukharin was, in any case, behind the times. Stalin needed no help from other former leaders—he could easily smother the rightists without it. Kamenev grew tired of waiting for Stalin’s call, and went himself to see Voroshilov in December. He spent two hours “groveling and praising the Central Committee’s policies to the skies.” Voroshilov said not a single word in reply.

  To close his account with the former leaders, Stalin exiled Trotsky from Russia in January 1929. As Zinoviev rightly remarked, there was “nobody left to protest to.” Stalin showed that he had not lost his sense of humor: Trotsky, who regarded himself as a true Leninist, was deported from Russia on the steamship Ilyich. Why didn’t Stalin kill him? Because he needed Trotsky alive. For future games. Trotsky would become a center of counterrevolutionary activity, and Stalin could accuse his enemies of being in contact with it. Trotsky was the bait with which he would catch his future victims. The chess player always thought several moves, very many moves ahead. Just now he had to settle accounts with Bukharin. He would set to work via Trotsky.

  In 1938, on the eve of his execution, Bukharin would write a letter to Stalin: “When I was with you once in summer 1928 you said to me, ‘Do you know why I am friends with you? It’s because you are incapable of intrigue—aren’t you?’ I said yes. And that was at the very time when I was running to Kamenev.” Poor Bukharin didn’t understand a thing. Stalin had received reports of Bukharin’s conversation with Kamenev immediately, from several sources. He asked the hapless intellectual whether or not he was “capable of intrigue” to make him squirm. And when the other man, worried out of his mind, told a lie, Stalin felt entitled to feel a mortal hatred for the liar and traitor.

  His GPU also arranged for a record of Bukharin’s conversation with Kamenev to reach Trotsky. He knew that Trotsky hated Bukharin, and would not spare him; he would publish the information immediately. As always, his calculations proved correct. Once abroad, Lev published the transcript, and presented Stalin with a bombshell: the right to speak of a compact between the rightists and their predecessors in opposition.

  At this point Stalin gained some new supporters. Radek and other Trotskyists could now surrender honorably. Stalin had, after all, “turned his fire to the right.” Stalin must be supported, and the “left flank of the Party occupied, before it is occupied by others,” as the exiles wrote to each other. In order to return, they had first to sacrifice Trotsky, their vanished leader. Radek appealed to the exiled Trotskyists, “We have brought ourselves to exile and imprisonment. I have broken with Trotsky, we are now political enemies.”

  “YOU MUST BELIEVE THAT WHITE IS BLACK”

  Why was it so easy for them to change their views and betray each other? Pyatakov, once a leading Trotskyist and subsequently a staunch Stalinist, startled Valentinov with this explanation: “For the Party’s sake you can and must at 24 hours’ notice change all your convictions and force yourself to believe that white is black.” For the Party’s sake! When the former seminarist Stalin called the Party the Order of Sword Bearers he had just that in mind: the sacred nature of the Party. Trotsky expressed the same thought in his dictum “the Party is always right.” Like the church, their Party remained pure even if those who served it erred. For, like the church, the Party was founded on scripture, in its case the sacred Marxist texts, which would never allow the Party as a whole to err, or sinful individual members to change its sacred nature.

  Hence the principle “everything for the Party,” which allowed them to betray themselves and humble themselves before Stalin—the head of the Sacred Party.

  Professions of repentance came pouring in, and Stalin graciously allowed the repentant “leftists” to return from exile. Pyatakov, Smilga, Rakovsky, Beloborodov, and other notables condemned Trotsky and carne back into the Party. Their prestige and their energy were very helpful to Stalin in what historians would call the Year of the Great Turn.

  Back in 1925, when Stalin, in alliance with the rightists, was attacking Kamenev and Zinoviev in Leningrad, the poet Sergei Yesenin had committed suicide in the Hotel Angleterre. In Russia poets are prophets. One of Yesenin’s regular drunken hallucinations was a horrifying Black Man. The great peasant poet even then sensed Stalin’s approach. Now the hour had come. The Black Man had readied himself to destroy the age-old Russian village as Yesenin had known it.

  From April 1929 the turnaround was official. The Year of the Great Turn had begun. The greatest experiment of the twentieth century, which promised endless bloodshed. But what did blood matter, when ahead of them lay the great future? Stalin meant to attain it by revolutionary means, in the shortest possible time. Very soon the resistance of the village would be destroyed, as would a considerable section of the middle peasantry. The rest would be united in kolkhozy, collective farms. The unpaid labor of tillers of the soil gathered together thus would produce colossal funds for investment. He would build a huge industrial economy. This too in the shortest time imaginable. He would make the workers forget about wages. And holidays. Revolutionary enthusiasm—that was the thing! The country could look forward to unprecedented privations, industrial accidents resulting from unheard-of tempos which neither worn-out machinery nor half-starved workers could endure. He knew that people were unhappy when they did not understand the source of their agony, so, fee
ling charitable toward his fellow citizens, he decided in advance to provide the country with culprits for its future miseries. The blame must lie with “enemies”—this was the eternal Russian explanation for all the nation’s woes. He remembered how during the First World War the tsar’s government had quickly found a plausible explanation for the defeats incurred by their incompetent generals: spies were responsible! And the people were happy to believe it. He thought up a new variant: the modern equivalent of those spies would be the engineers. Wreckers! Experts trained in the days of the tsars who, naturally, hated the dictatorship of the proletariat and tried to sabotage it. He could count on the ignorant loathing of the semiliterate masses for the educated, the intelligentsia. And on what had as a result become the mob’s favorite word: “Kill!”

  As he approached the turning point, he had to plunge the country into an atmosphere of constant fear. Only fear could excuse possible excesses in advance and reduce the people to the level of subservience necessary for the Great Change. And to unmask the “wreckers,” he called upon the GPU; now the secret police began to gain a powerful hold on the public mind.

  THE GLADIATORIAL GAMES

  That was the origin of a unique spectacle: the show trials, first of their kind, in the late twenties.

  As the decade neared its end, life was drab and hunger prevailed. Everywhere swarmed hoards of physically unclean people. Migrants from the countryside had taken possession of the towns: people who wiped their noses with their hands and were used to living, eating, and sleeping in a single room, often parents and children together. The huge apartments of the upper class had become communal dwellings, housing a dozen or so families. In the mornings members of different households, indecently half-clad, stood chatting in the queue for the lavatory or washbasin. And the regular subject of conversation was the trials of those wreckers whom the valiant GPU was constantly unmasking. The detective stories told in court, and the awesome sentences handed down, brought a little variety into the dreary lives of ordinary people. The trials were a peculiar variant of the Roman gladiatorial games.