Stalin

by Edvard Radzinsky

  The underlying idea of the plan was to squeeze a century of progress into ten years, by revolutionary means. This required industrialization, the collectivization of agriculture, and the creation of a manipulable Party, which would carry out the leader’s injunctions to the letter instead of wasting time on discussion and opposition. Only such a Party could finally tame a country stirred up by revolution and create a united society. After that it could go on to make the Great Dream come true.

  He allowed the rightist leaders to remain in the Central Committee, but slung Tomsky out of the Politburo. That body became once and for all a submissive tool in the hands of the Leader. True, the pathetic Rykov remained a member after acknowledging his errors, but he was often far from sober. In fact “vodka” was often called “rykovka” in Party circles. To teach him a lesson Stalin forced him to do penance over and over again.

  THE “BOSS” ARRIVES

  After the Congress Stalin set off for the South, as he always did in autumn. And as usual, he left Molotov in charge of “the business.” “The business” was what the Party higher-ups more and more frequently called the Party and the country. And Stalin was more and more often referred to by the people and the Party alike as “the Boss.”

  Molotov was now number 2 in the country, the Boss’s shadow. The Boss remembered that Molotov had once been the first to appreciate an unknown, pockmarked Georgian who arrived in Petrograd from nowhere, and had made way for him as editor of Pravda without a murmur.

  When Koba was appointed to the new Secretariat of the Central Committee Molotov had been senior secretary for some time. The Central Committee machine was in his hands, but this too he surrendered to Stalin without a murmur.

  The brilliant Trotsky thought Molotov a blockhead. Bukharin too complained to Kamenev of “that blockhead Molotov, who tries to teach me Marxism, and whom we call ‘Stone Arse.’ ” Chuyev asked Molotov whether it was true that Lenin had called him “Stone Arse.” Molotov answered with a laugh. “You ought to hear some of the things Lenin used to call other people. He was no blockhead.”

  Bazhanov, Stalin’s former secretary, wrote about Molotov: “He is a very conscientious, not at all brilliant but extremely capable bureaucrat.… He is polite and good-natured.” Molotov was essentially a good bureaucrat. An extremely hardworking machine, automatically carrying out the Boss’s orders. After all, the Revolution had long ceased to be the green-eyed beloved mistress, and had become an aging wife. The time for brilliant people had gone, the time for businesslike management had arrived. And besides, against the background of Stalin’s handpicked, proletarian Politburo, including such men as the cobbler Kaganovich and the metalworker Voroshilov, polite stone-bottomed Molotov with his pre-Revolution pince-nez looked like a genuine intellectual.

  The age of “Unenlightened Absolutism” had arrived.

  On vacation in the South, the Boss gave his shadow fresh instructions daily: “I think we need to solve the problem of the top people in the Soviets once and for all this autumn. First of all, Rykov must be dismissed … and their whole apparat must be disbanded. Second, you will have to take over from Rykov as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and of the Council of Labor and Defense. All this is between ourselves; we’ll talk about the details in the autumn. For the time being think it over together with a few very close friends. So long for now. Cordially yours, Stalin.”

  He was moving his pieces around the board quickly. The “business” was taking shape. In the last days of 1930 he removed Rykov from the Politburo. The Boss now made Molotov head of government.

  “The Boss” was now in effect his official title. On June 12, 1932, Kaganovich wrote to Ordzhonikidze, “As before we are receiving regular and frequent directives from the Boss.… In practice he has to carry on working while he is on holiday. But there’s no other way.”

  No, there would in the future be no other way. The Boss was in charge of everything. And the people, whose official history at the time stated that “the people overthrew all the bosses in 1917,” now affectionately called him the Boss!

  The Great Turn was a reality. The Bolshevik God lay in his Mausoleum, and a Bolshevik tsar known as “the Boss” had arrived.

  Trouncing the rightists at the Sixteenth Congress, the Boss delighted his docile and eagerly attentive audience with an undemanding witticism: “Whenever there are difficulties, minor hitches, they immediately start worrying that something dreadful may happen. If they hear a cockroach rustling, they stagger back out of harm’s way before it’s more than halfway out of its lair, they’re horror-struck and start howling that there’s a catastrophe and the Soviet regime is doomed.” The audience laughed, but he knew that they would soon be facing the famine of which the rightists had warned them.

  A WELCOME FAMINE

  Collectivization and the destruction of kulaks—the most skillful cultivators—would inevitably lead to an unprecedented famine. Stalin and his GPU made their preparations. The endless trials of wreckers, the unremitting terror, excessive demands on workers, undernourishment, and living conditions fit only for animals had already broken the country’s will. “Can these really be the people who made a revolution?” asked a Western journalist, looking at the people meekly standing in line at a labor exchange.

  In the winter of 1931–1932 the ex-midshipman Fyodor Raskolnikov, hero of revolutionary Kronstadt and subsequently a thriving diplomat, returned to his native land for a holiday. His wife described their impressions. All the food shops were empty. There was nothing to be seen except barrels of sauerkraut. Ration cards for bread had been introduced. The population was fed in canteens at factories and mills. But the most horrible sight of all confronted her in the street: “On one occasion … near the Nikitsky Gate, I suddenly saw a peasant who seemed to appear out of the ground, accompanied by a woman with a babe in arms. Two slightly older children clung to their mothers skirts. I was shocked by the expression of utter despair on these peoples faces. The peasant doffed his cap and said in a breathless, imploring voice, ‘For the love of Christ, give us something, only be quick about it, or they’ll see and pick us up.’ ”

  “What are you afraid of? Who will pick you up?” the famous revolutionary’s wife asked in astonishment. She emptied her purse into his hand, and he disappeared, saying, “You don’t know anything about what’s going on here. Out in the country they’re all starving to death.” The Ukraine, the Volga region, the Caucasus, and Kazakhstan were in the grip of the severest of famines. Millions of starving people tried to escape to the towns, but bread was sold there only to townspeople holding ration cards. Emaciated peasants too weak to walk straight—wraithlike creatures, bearing little resemblance to human beings, with children transparent from hunger—arrived on the outskirts of towns begging for bread. The militia, or GPU agents in militia uniform, carted them away, while little boys pelted them with stones: they had been taught at school to hate the “accursed kulaks” and their children, “the kulak’s brood.” Teachers in every school told children the story of the kulak monsters who had murdered the Young Pioneer Pavlik Morozov. Morozov, a fourteen-year-old boy belonging to a village in the Sverdlov oblast, had denounced his father, a kulak, to the GPU. The son who had betrayed his father was murdered by kulaks in 1932, during the terrible famine. On the Boss’s instructions, the son who had betrayed his father in Stalin’s name, occupied an important place in all official propaganda. Stalin remembered what he had been taught in the seminary: “He who loves his father and mother more than he loves Me is unworthy of Me” (Matt. 4:37). Statues of Pavlik Morozov were erected all over the country.

  He had achieved the impossible: he had silenced all talk of hunger. Any mention of “famine in the countryside” he condemned as “counterrevolutionary agitation.” Millions were dying, but the nation hymned the praises of collectivization. Parades were organized on Red Square. There was never a line about the famine in the press or in works of literature. The village was dying in silence. At the height of the f
amine Yagoda and the GPU arranged a very successful tour for Bernard Shaw, who arrived with Lady Astor. Lady Astor was reputed to be an influential politician, and she was determined to ask Stalin about punitive measures, but in the end she just didn’t dare. Shaw wrote that “Stalin received us like old friends and let us say all that we wanted to before modestly venturing to speak himself.” He had simply seen through Shaw: this old man loved to talk. Stalin didn’t hinder him. And old Shaw wrote about an “open-hearted, just, and honorable man … who owes his outstanding elevation to those very qualities, and not to anything dark and sinister.” Shaw declared the USSR to be the country of the future. True, when he was asked why he did not remain in that country, the “Dear Liar,” as Mrs. Patrick Campbell had called him, laughingly replied that “England is Hell, it’s true, but it’s my duty to remain in Hell.” Those nice Western radicals—how they yearned to see utopia made reality.

  Shaw wrote confidently that rumors of famine were pure invention.

  No one knows how many people famine carried off. Estimates vary between five and eight million.

  Stalin fought famine with his usual weapon—Terror. In August 1932 he personally drafted the famous law declaring that “persons misappropriating public property must be regarded as enemies of the people” and introduced savage penalties for any such offense. The people at large dubbed this the “five ears law,” since it threatened any hungry person who stole a few ears of corn with execution by shooting or, at best, ten years’ imprisonment. N. Krylenko, still People’s Commissar for Justice, waxed indignant at a Central Committee meeting in January 1933: “We are sometimes up against flat refusal to apply this law rigidly. One People’s Judge told me flatly that he could never bring himself to throw someone in jail for stealing four ears. What we’re up against here is a deep prejudice, imbibed with their mothers’ milk … a mistaken belief that people should be tried in accordance not with the Party’s political guidelines but with considerations of ‘higher justice.’ ”

  Judges were told to base their decisions solely on the Party’s guidelines. Very soon Krylenko would be given a practical demonstration of this principle on his own hide.

  By January 1933, fifty-five thousand people had been convicted under the new law, and two thousand of them shot. People were dying of hunger, but dared not touch the kolkhoz grain. In spite of the famine, grain exports to Western Europe continued without interruption. He needed funds for the new factories under construction. In 1930 he sold 48 million poods (864,000 tons) of grain, in 1931, 51 million, in 1932, 18 million, and in the hungriest year of all, 1933, he still managed to sell 10 million poods. With the aid of fear, bloodshed, and hunger he led, or rather dragged, a broken-backed country along the road to industrialization.

  He had foreseen the famine, and he needed it. The village, drained of its strength and near death from hunger, meekly succumbed to death by collectivization. The old revolutionary formula “the worse, the better” had proved its efficacy. But he still had work to do if he was to tame the country. Famine came to his aid once more. According to GPU estimates, more than one and a half million peasants had fled to the towns to escape from hunger and “de-kulakization.” As if to defend the towns from the hungry, he bound the peasants to the land. Internal passports were introduced. But people living in rural areas were not allowed to hold their own passports, and anyone found in a town without one was arrested by the militia. The passport system deprived the peasants of freedom of movement, and gave the GPU and the militia an additional means of exercising tight control over all citizens. Another of history’s ironies. Passports had existed in tsarist Russia, and their abolition was one of the main demands of the Revolution. Gone were October’s dreams of the dismantling of the state: the monster state was now a reality.

  While he was creating it, he paid unwearying attention to ideology.

  FRIEND OF THE ARTS

  Here too the GPU became his main helper. Cudgeling confessions out of intellectuals was not Yagoda’s only skill. He also did excellent work with intellectuals not yet in jail. His closest friends included some of the most eminent writers, and he invented an extraordinary way of showing his trust in them. Investigating officers would summon them to the GPU to listen in while suspects were interrogated. From an adjoining room the writers could hear the interrogator browbeating some unfortunate intellectual until, completely demoralized, he agreed to slander a friend. Among those who went along to the GPU and “listened in” were the brilliant Isaac Babel and Peter Pavlenko. Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote that “in 1934 Pavlenko’s account of how he accepted an invitation from a GPU investigator out of curiosity and was present in hiding at a nocturnal interrogation, reached [the poet Anna] Akhmatova and myself. According to Pavlenko Osip Emilevich [Mandelstam] looked pitiful and confused during the interrogation. His trousers kept falling down, and he had to keep hitching them up. He gave irrelevant answers, talked all sorts of nonsense, and squirmed like a carp in a frying pan.” The really horrifying thing was that Pavlenko did not realize how monstrous his story was. Time had already hardened most peoples hearts. Yagoda was taming the writers, training them to collaborate with the GPU. Confiding the interrogators’ secrets to them enabled him to ask for confidences in return—for their help and participation in the actual work of the secret police.

  The wife of N. Yezhov, Stalin’s most terrible torturer (and Yagoda’s eventual successor), asked Nadezhda Mandelstam a naive question: “The writer Pilnyak visits us. Whom do you visit?” “Visiting” in this context meant enjoying the patronage of the mighty GPU.

  Yagoda it was who had successfully carried out the Boss’s order to bring Maxim Gorky back to the USSR. Beginning in 1928 Gorky, in Sorrento, was inundated with telegrams and letters from his homeland, in which workers’ groups, prompted by the GPU, told him how they missed their bard.

  In the same year, the Boss had organized celebrations in honor of Gorky’s sixtieth birthday, the likes of which had never been seen. He knew how to do the honors. Portraits of the writer and articles about him filled all the newspapers. Through Yagoda’s emissaries, the Boss offered Gorky the post of spiritual leader, second man in the state. The old, old story—“You and I are Himalayas.”

  Living abroad Gorky missed the matchless fame he had once enjoyed. He agreed to visit the USSR. Collectivization interested him. He had always hated the “half-savage, stupid, awkward people in Russian villages” (the peasantry). His hopes were raised by the fact that they would now be converted into a rural branch of the proletariat he so loved, as workers in state and collective farms.

  When Gorky returned, Yagoda was his inseparable companion. “Yagodka” (“Little Berry”) was Gorky’s affectionate name for the secret police chief. “Little Berry” took him on a tour around the GPU’s camps. Gorky was shown former thieves and prostitutes who had become shock workers (those who set new productivity standards). And all the time there was a constant, unbroken stream of flattery. The Boss knew peopie’s weaknesses. In the camps Gorky was touched by the successes of reeducation. Moved to tears, he sang the praises of the GPU. He would return to the USSR to stay just as the trials of intellectuals were beginning, in the year of the Shakhtintsy affair. In an article for Pravda, the humanitarian Gorky supplied a formula which would become the motto of the Stalin era: “If the enemy refuses to surrender he must be destroyed.”

  The Boss was not mistaken in him. He had brought Gorky back to play a special part in the taming of the intelligentsia.

  TAMING THE INTELLIGENTSIA

  All this time, from 1929 on, a campaign against “ideological distortions” proceeded in parallel with the trials of wreckers. The intelligentsia was being taught caution in its use of the printed word. The slightest departure from the official view risked an accusation of perverting Marxism-Leninism, or worse.

  Biologists, philosophers, educationists, and economists were all assailed. All branches of learning reported the discovery of “distortions.” The “pseudo-academics,”
as they were now called, obediently did penance at public meetings.

  Stalin was gradually eliminating shame. Fear is stronger than shame.

  The cruel years that had gone before now looked like a reign of freedom. Quite recently, in 1926, the Moscow Arts Theater had been allowed to put on Mikhail Bulgakov’s Days of the Turbins. It was a fantastic success. Spectators watched in amazement a play which portrayed White officers (the enemy) not as the usual monsters but as likable, decent people. The production infuriated writers who were members of the Party. But the play proved to have one seemingly inexplicable devotee and defender. The Boss went to see it time and time again. Was this really odd? Not at all. The play dramatized the wreckage of the old empire. And Stalin, as he settled accounts with the leaders of October, could already see the empire of the future.

  Still, he did not believe in playing favorites. In 1929, while he was taming the intelligentsia, the Arts Theater accepted a new play from Bulgakov. Flight was about the end of the White army and its exodus from Russia. The heroes were the same, the ideas were the same as those of Days of the Turbins. But times had changed. The Boss had the play discussed in the Politburo. The body which governed the whole state was called on to examine a play which had not yet been shown. In his empire that sort of thing would be the norm. He knew that nothing was more important than ideology. He had taken to heart Lenin’s dictum “the slightest relaxation in ideology will lead to loss of power by the Party.” The Politburo accepted the recommendation of the commission it had set up that “staging of this play be deemed inexpedient.” The verdict of P. Kerzhentsev, director of the Central Committee’s Department of Agitation and Propaganda, is appended to the minutes: “The author’s bias is quite clear: he is making excuses for people who are our enemies.” As if at a word of command, the newspapers, each and every one, set about destroying Bulgakov. Agitprop did its job, and The Days of the Turbins was taken off. The experienced Kerzhentsev obviously intended to seek out the rightists in the arts.