Stalin

by Edvard Radzinsky

  And here was Gronsky, who had spent a decade and a half in the hell of Stalin’s camps himself, proudly telling us how vigilant he had been. So the very nice Gronsky had “belonged” in those crazy days. He may have been the first witness to tell the true story of the Boss’s attitude to Gorky: “I heard Stalin on various occasions say things like ‘Who does Alexei Maximovich think he is?’ ” Then he would start reeling off a long list of Gorky’s attacks on the Bolsheviks. But he knew that Gorky was political capital. And immediately before the creation of the Writers’ Union he bestowed Gorky’s name on the city in which he was born, the main street in Moscow, and the famous Moscow Arts Theater.

  Gronsky timidly questioned this last decision:

  Gronsky: Comrade Stalin, it’s more Chekhov’s theater.

  Stalin: That’s of no importance. Gorky is a proud man, and we have to bind him to the Party with strong ropes.

  Gronsky could not know that the Master was looking far ahead. In the bloody future of which Stalin was already thinking, Gorky would have to reconcile himself to many things. The Boss was winning him over in advance, binding him with the ropes of vainglory. Giving him something to lose. The Boss knew the power of vanity, that pathetic weakness of pathetic intellectuals, knew the bait to which they all rose with remarkable uniformity to become his lackeys. The French writer Henri Barbusse had been in Moscow for the Gorky jubilee. Shortly before, he had written an article in support of Trotsky, which had brought the wrath of the French Communist Party and Comintern down upon his head. “What fools. Barbusse is political capital and they’re squandering it,” Stalin said to Gronsky. He took over this capital himself—using the same old bait for Barbusse as for others.

  During the Gorky celebrations at the Bolshoi Theater Barbusse was sitting modestly in the body of the hall. But then, in the middle of some ringing oration about Gorky, the Boss ordered Gronsky to extract him from the depths and invite him onto the platform. When the bewildered Barbusse, shepherded by Gronsky, appeared there, Stalin solemnly rose, interrupted the speaker, and began clapping. The Presidium, of course, followed the Boss’s lead and sprang to their feet. The whole uncomprehending but obedient audience rose. Stalin surrendered his own seat to the thunderstruck Barbusse, and modestly retired to the third row. Barbusse was inspired to write this of him: “Whoever you are, all that is best in your destiny is in the hands of this man with the head of a scholar, the face of a worker, and the costume of an ordinary soldier.”

  “He was a great actor,” Gronsky wrote. “He would be talking to somebody amicably, affectionately, all absolutely sincere. And as soon as he had seen that person to the door he’d say ‘what a bastard.’ ”

  The ideological reorganization continued. After the writers had been dealt with, uniformity was introduced in all cultural activity. The avant-garde in music and art was destroyed. Unions of Artists and Composers were created, and they too had secretaries, plenums, congresses. Two more mirror images of the Party. Henceforward there would be no unofficial groups in the arts. Gronsky assembled the artists in Moscow, and announced to a jeering audience: “Socialist Realism means making Rembrandt and Repin serve the working class.”

  The audience—all those innovators who had canceled bourgeois art—hissed him, but Gronsky told them, “You rage in vain, gentlemen. We want no more formalist junk.” The Boss reinstated the old school—the artists of the empire. The hated realist Repin, who had painted a gigantic canvas showing the tsarist State Council in session, was proclaimed the model. The Academy of Arts was reestablished, former exhibits were restored to the Tretyakov Gallery, and the avant-garde was relegated to the tiniest of rooms.

  Henceforward all those active in literature and the arts had to adopt a single creative method. They must follow the Party’s example. Only those who accepted the prescribed method had the right to membership in the unions. Every departure from it had to be punished, like factionalism in the Party. The method, devised by Bukharin and Gorky, was called “Socialist Realism.” Its essence was contained in the word partiinost (“Party spirit”). Only works which served the Party had the right to exist. Realism and accessibility, constituents of the method, precluded once and for all the beautiful delirium of the avant-garde.

  The Boss took away their freedom but rewarded the members of the new unions. Artists were given magnificent rent-free studios and received extra rations in the hungry years. But the Boss was especially generous to writers. Separate apartments, out-of-town houses, rations well above the average, all went to emphasize the special ideological importance of these “engineers of souls.” In exchange for their freedom, practitioners of the arts would become one of the most prestigious and highly paid groups in his kingdom.

  At their meeting with the Boss in Gorky’s house the writers, as yet unaware of the bounty to come, took advantage of a break in the discussion to beg favors. When the writer Leonov despondently hinted that his dacha did not suit him, the Boss made an unexpected and somber reply: “Kamenev’s and Zinoviev’s dachas are now vacant, you could move in there.”

  It was in fact a time when dachas became vacant in large numbers.

  13

  THE DREADFUL YEAR

  THE ONLY GENUINE CONSPIRACY

  He fought on without a pause throughout 1932 and ruthlessly demolished the Bukharin school. He had started the process a few years earlier. The genius Nikolai Ivanovich would soon have no one to show off to. In her memoirs, Anna Larina, Bukharin’s wife, recalled Bukharin discovering as he came away from a Politburo meeting in 1929 that he had lost his favorite pencil. He went back to the committee room, bent down to pick up the pencil, and saw on the floor a scrap of paper with the words in Stalin’s writing “Bukharin’s pupils must be destroyed.”

  For a start, he made Bukharin not only renounce his beliefs but betray his faithful disciples, who were then banished from Moscow. But Stalin knew that young people would not submit. Just as he had expected, the GPU shortly informed him that Bukharin’s pupils were holding meetings and carrying on “rightist” propaganda. In October 1932 some forty of Bukharin’s followers were arrested.

  That was how autumn 1932 began.

  Molotov, reminiscing in old age, said, “It was all happening at once … famine, disturbances … no, you couldn’t let your hand tremble, you couldn’t go weak at the knees. If anybody did, it was watch it—you could get knocked off!” Never mind the hunger, never mind the corpses: Stalin would drag his helpless country along the road he had always envisioned for it.

  Then, still in autumn 1932, the first genuine conspiracy against him arose within the Party.

  On a sunny August morning in 1932 a group of obvious town dwellers turned up in Golovino, a village outside Moscow. The gathering included V. Kayurov, an old Bolshevik who had once hidden Lenin in 1917; Mikhail Ivanov, another of the old guard, a member of the Party since 1906; and Kayurov’s son Vasili, a member of the Party since 1914.

  The meeting had been called by Martemyan Ryutin. As recently as 1927 he had joined in beating up Trotskyist demonstrators. But Ryutin, who came of peasant stock and had been a village schoolteacher, could not reconcile himself to the rout of the rightists and the destruction of the village. The Boss had been compelled to have him “chucked out” of the district Party committee. In 1929 he was sent off to Siberia to play a leading part in the collectivization campaign. But Ryutin carried considerable weight in the Party, and the Boss decided to preserve him. He was recalled to Moscow and in February 1930 appointed to the Presidium of the Supreme Economic Council and put in charge of the film industry. In August 1930, while the Boss was on holiday in Sochi, Ryutin was also in the Caucasus. Stalin sent for him and suggested that he should recant in public and condemn the rightists. Nothing came of this conversation. Ryutin “wriggled out of it.”

  The Boss’s response came in September 1930. It is clear from documents in the former State Archive of the October Revolution that an official of the People’s Commissariat of the Defense Industry, on
e A. Nemov, also on holiday in the Caucasus, denounced Ryutin. When Nemov was confronted, he asserted that Ryutin had called Stalin a “trickster and political intriguer who will lead the country to ruin.” Stalin thereupon wrote to Molotov on September 13 as follows: “It seems to me that in Ryutin’s case we cannot limit ourselves to expulsion [from the Party]. He will have to be exiled to some remote place. These counterrevolutionary vermin must be disarmed completely.”

  He was expelled from the Party, and even arrested, but then released. He could not, of course, have been released without the approval of the Boss. Stalin had given the order, knowing that Ryutin would never give up and could therefore be used as bait for bigger fish.

  It happened as he had expected. Once free, Ryutin immediately became active underground. He organized the League of True Marxists-Leninists to fight against the fake Marxist-Leninist Stalin. The GPU, of course, continued to keep him in its sights.

  It was to put the League on a regular footing that Ryutin had called the meeting in Golovino. He made a speech on “the crisis of the Party and of the proletarian dictatorship.” The gathering confirmed the program of the new league, adopted the text of an appeal, and elected a committee. Ryutin remained outside the committee for “conspiratorial reasons.” They then dispersed and began distributing their documents. For the time being the Boss made no attempt to hinder them. Most of the documents ended up in the archives of the GPU, since almost all the recipients promptly notified that body.

  Stalin knew that the documents had reached Bukharin.

  One can picture him reading them, with their hair-raising indictments of the reckless pace of industrialization and collectivization, their insistence that “no change can be expected while Stalin is at the head of the Central Committee … [Stalin the] Great Agent-Provocateur, destroyer of the Party, gravedigger of revolution in Russia … the whole country has been muzzled … lack of rights, abuse of power, arbitrary use of force … progressive pauperization of the village … conversion of the countryside into a wilderness … naked coercion and repression … literature and art reduced to the level of handmaidens and props of the Stalinist leadership,” and their conclusion that “we can either go on as we are, uncomplainingly awaiting the destruction of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or else we can remove this clique by force.”

  Zinoviev and Kamenev were also acquainted with the documents, but neither of them informed the GPU or the Central Committee. They had therefore failed in their duty as Party members to notify the Party and the GPU immediately of oppositional activity. They had fallen into Stalin’s trap.

  On September 15, 1932, the “counterrevolutionary” group was arrested by the GPU. Zinoviev and Kamenev were summoned by the Party Control Commission. They were charged with knowing about the group and failing to report it. The commission reminded Kamenev of his conversation with Bukharin and of his alliance with the Trotskyists. The October leaders were expelled from the Party and banished—Kamenev to Minusinsk, Zinoviev to Kustanai. Bukharin was not yet touched. The firm still had work for him to do. Meanwhile the evidence against him was piling up.

  Stalin could now deal with Ryutin and his followers. On October 11 a GPU tribunal sentenced them to various terms of imprisonment. Ryutin got ten years and was sent to the GPU’s maximum-security prison at Verkhne-Uralsk. So in 1932 the former village schoolteacher and former Party functionary celebrated the Revolution anniversary in a former tsarist jail.

  While awaiting trial Ryutin wrote letters to his wife which remained unknown until recently. On November 7, 1932, he wrote, “I have now been here 24 hours. My nerves have more or less quieted down. I live now only in the hope that the Party and the Central Committee will in the end forgive their prodigal son.”

  Ryutin, who had so boldly described the horrors of Stalin’s dictatorship, was now calling himself a “prodigal son” and yearning for forgiveness. In his appeal, he said, he had tried to be cautious, tactful, and polite. The Leninist taboo was still operative. Party members enjoyed immunity: only nonmembers were shot or beaten to death.

  Famine, breakdowns in the factories, and peasant rebellions had all helped to stimulate opposition, but Yagoda and his network of informers nipped mutinous stirrings in the bud. For example, the Boss received a report of criminal remarks made on November 7 in the apartment of A. Eismont, an old Bolshevik and a Party official: “If you talk to members of the Central Committee individually, the majority of them are against Stalin, but when they come to vote, they vote unanimously ‘in favor.’ Suppose we go to see Alexander Petrovich Smirnov [another old Bolshevik] tomorrow—I know the first thing he’ll say is ‘Don’t tell me there’s nobody in this whole country incapable of removing him.’ ”

  Eismont and Smirnov were arrested, but Stalin would shortly have other things on his mind. On the following night—November 8–9—during the main Bolshevik holiday, the anniversary of the October Revolution, while Ryutin was writing to his wife from the “isolator” and the trusting Eismont was enjoying a chat with a provocateur, a catastrophe occurred in Stalin’s own household.

  A SHOT IN THE NIGHT

  The festival had, as always, been a busy time for him. On November 7, with his henchmen around him, he had reviewed a military parade on Red Square. November 8 was also a holiday, and the day on which all Party members made merry. Stalin and his wife were Voroshilov’s guests. The whole of Soviet high society assembled in Voroshilov’s Kremlin apartment that evening. Those present, of course, included Stalin’s shadow, Molotov, accompanied by his wife. Stalin drank heavily that evening, trying to relax. He was very tired—it had been a terrible year. He knew that the people would not put up with another year of famine. Hungry bellies would overcome fear. His own docile henchmen would be the first to mutiny. Eismont and Ryutin were warning signals. But he let none of this show. He amused himself in his coarse fashion, lacing his conversation with foul language. His image as a rough soldier of the Party had become the reality.

  The morning after this night of revelry, his wife was found with a bullet in her heart. A pistol—a little Walther, most convenient for a lady’s handbag—lay beside her. It had been a present from her brother Pavel Alliluyev.

  NADEZHDA’S LIFE AND MYSTERIOUS DEATH

  Kira Pavlovna Alliluyeva-Politkovskaya, Stalin’s wife’s niece, had graduated from a drama school. She was about to join the famous Maly Theater and to appear in a film when her mother’s arrest in December 1948 (more later about the reasons for this), followed by her own arrest, cut short a very promising career. After her release, she appeared at various provincial theaters, worked as a television producer, and finally retired on a pension.

  I went to see her in 1992 in her tiny apartment in a typical Moscow block in an out-of-the-way spot near the River Station.

  She was still an attractive and charming woman, and in spite of the heavy blows fate had dealt her she was cheerful and remarkably sociable.

  Theatrical people readily share each other’s feelings. Perhaps that was why I found it so easy and enjoyable to talk to her.

  She began with a little family history.… “The Alliluyevs great-grandmother was a gypsy and we are all dark, wild at times, hot-tempered.… They say Nadya was a merry girl, always laughing … but that was before my time. When they realized that he was courting her they all told her that he had a very difficult temperament. But she was in love with him, she thought that he was a romantic. He had a sort of Mephistophelian look about him, with his mane of jet black hair and his burning eyes.… In Petersburg she wasn’t yet his wife—they were waiting till she was sixteen. When the government moved to Moscow, Nadya went with him to Tsaritsyn as his secretary, then became his wife.”

  Later she worked in Lenin’s Secretariat, so it was not difficult for Koba to find out things through naive little Nadya. She had to leave this job when she was “in a certain condition.” She was too embarrassed to say that she was pregnant, and pretended that her husband wanted her to leave. Lenin shrugged, and sai
d something about “these Asiatics.” He probably said it affectionately, since he was very fond of Koba in those days. In 1921, during one of the periodic purges, Nadya was expelled as “dead weight with no interest in the Party.” She tried to excuse her inactivity by the birth of her child, but to no avail. Lenin, who was aiding Koba’s rise at the time, would not allow anyone to injure his protégé. In December 1921 he wrote a letter about the services of the Alliluyev family to the Party, and Nadya was readmitted as a probationary member.

  According to one witness, “she was beautiful at times, and very ugly at others—it depended on her mood.” But another witness, Bazhanov, wrote in his book that “she was not beautiful, but she had a sweet, attractive face. At home Stalin was a tyrant, and Nadya sometimes told me with a sigh that ‘he hasn’t spoken for three days now, he won’t talk to anyone, and he doesn’t answer if anyone speaks to him; he’s an extremely difficult man.’ ” She was obviously completely dominated by him at first, as his mother had once been by his father. But, like his mother, she soon started showing her independence and her hot temper. General Orlov, a defector once high up in the GPU, described in his memoirs how Pauker, commander of Stalin’s bodyguard, once ridiculed him for calling Nadya “gentle,” and said that she was in fact very hot-tempered.

  It was a family characteristic. Alliluyeva-Politkovskaya told me a story about her father, Pavel, usually the kindest of men, breaking a billiard cue in half in a fit of uncontrollable anger. It was, she said with a charming little sigh, “his gypsy blood.”

  In their early years together, however, Stalin and Nadya were evidently happy. His vagabond days were over. For the first time in his life he had a home, the home she made for him in what had been the out-of-town mansion of the Zubalov family. The Zubalovs had owned refineries in Baku, in which he had once organized revolutionary study groups and strikes. It seemed especially fitting that he and that other Baku revolutionary, Mikoyan, should set up house in the former domain of the oil kings. The Zubalovs themselves had emigrated, leaving everything behind for the new occupants—Gobelins, marble statues, a park, a tennis court, a conservatory. That was a time when everything was going well for him, and he was rising rapidly. His old comrades lived nearby and they had so many memories to share—all those years of wandering, of imprisonment, of the sordid life underground, of terror and of blood.