Stalin

by Edvard Radzinsky

  “We don’t live, we just nervously tiptoe through life

  At ten paces our words are mere silence

  And if an occasion for converse occurs

  We remember the man from the Highlands

  In the Kremlin, with chicken-necked chieftains all round

  The rabble he mocks and relies on

  ………………………………………………………

  His whiskers droop, roachlike, from under his nose.”

  The transcript cites the complete text of this—one of the most famous works in twentieth-century Russian poetry—written against the Boss. “To whom did you give copies, or read this work?” “I gave no one copies, but I read it to my wife, my brother, the writer Khazin, the writer Anna Akhmatova and her son Lev Gumilev …” “What was their reaction?” Mandelstam answered this last question in detail. We see that the torture spoken of in contemporary legend was quite unnecessary. The poet spoke voluntarily, because he was demoralized, confused, a broken man. As so often, the intellectual capitulated. During a visit from his wife the unhappy poet, on the verge of madness because of his confession, told her whose names he had mentioned and begged her to warn them.

  He was banished. In exile he became mentally ill. He used to wake his wife in the middle of the night and say he had seen Akhmatova arrested because of him, and had gone looking for Akhmatova’s body in ravines.

  Two eminent poets went into action. Anna Akhmatova succeeded in obtaining an interview with A. Enukidze, chairman of the Central Executive Committee, while Boris Pasternak sought Bukharin’s aid. Bukharin in turn appealed to the Boss. I have read his letter in the President’s Archive: “I thought I should write to you on a number of matters.… About the poet Mandelstam. He was recently arrested and banished.… I keep getting desperate telegrams from his wife telling me that he is mentally disturbed, that he has tried to jump out of the window, etc. My judgment of M. is that he is a first-class poet, but not at all a modern one, and that he is undoubtedly not quite normal. Since people keep appealing to me, and I don’t know how he has gone wrong, I decided to write to you about this too.… P.S. Boris Pasternak is utterly flabbergasted by Mandelstam’s arrest, and nobody else knows anything.”

  The Leader, who had been the butt of Mandelstam’s verses, scrawled on Bukharin’s letter. “Who authorized Mandelstam’s arrest? Disgraceful.” The proper response of an ex-poet to the arrest of another poet. Even one by whom he had been insulted. There followed one of those routine miracles: Mandelstam’s sentence was immediately reviewed. And the Boss thought of a new move. He rang Pasternak.

  Pasternak was taken aback. Petitioning Bukharin was one thing, talking to Stalin quite another.

  Stalin: Mandelstam’s case is under review, everything will be all right. Why didn’t you approach the writer’s organization or me? [Stalin was no mere Bukharin, he was the poet’s friend.] … If I were a poet and my friend got into trouble I would go to any length to help him.

  Pasternak: The writers’ organization hasn’t dealt with such matters since 1927, and if I hadn’t made a fuss now you would probably never have known about it. [He questioned the word “friend,” which was not strictly applicable to his relationship with Mandelstam.]

  Stalin: But he is a master of his craft, isn’t he?

  Pasternak: Yes, but that’s not really the point. [Pasternak was evasive, trying to understand what this terrible man was getting at.]

  Stalin: What is, then?

  Pasternak: It would be good if we could meet for a talk.

  Stalin: What about?

  Pasternak: About life and death.

  Stalin replaced the receiver loudly.

  Molotov described a postscript to the incident: “About Pasternak. Stalin rang and said he couldn’t manage to defend his friend.” Let us write in the missing words: rang and said with satisfaction.

  Yet again, the talk was of the Boss’s noble nature. Nobody dared wonder whether he, who had eyes for everything, could possibly have been unaware of the famous poet’s arrest. Mandelstam’s arrest and first conviction were, of course, ordered by him. This episode was for him a sort of test. It told him that the moment the intelligentsia started believing that the weather had changed for the better they had grown bolder. He still had not tamed them completely. But he would; that Pasternak, the boldest of them, was nonetheless afraid proved it. Did taming them completely mean teaching them not to notice the arrest of their friends? No—it meant teaching them to sing hymns of praise when friends were arrested.

  BEFORE THE OFFENSIVE, A BREATHING SPACE

  The system he had created was working. The hierarchy of “party bosses,” with the God-Boss at its summit, in a very short time had carried through industrialization and collectivization. The systems safety devices—the extrajudicial penal apparatus and the organs of agitation and propaganda—were operating effectively. The extrajudicial penal apparatus had been in complete control of the situation at that terrible moment in 1932. The ideological machine was not yet perfected, but a broad ideological front, on which the armies created by him (the cultural unions) would converge, had been opened. The population at large had also learned a great deal in the last few years: to look at starving people without noticing them, to work for a beggarly wage, to live in a house more like a hive, and to stand in line for groceries—knowing all the time that they were citizens of the world’s finest state. In the country of the almighty GPU, they felt themselves to be the freest of the free.

  But the most important part of the system, the Party pyramid, was clearly unsatisfactory. In senior posts there were many disgruntled feudal barons, corrupted by their exorbitant power at the time of the Revolution and sadly cherishing the memory of fallen idols. The incipient rebellion of 1932 had shown how precarious it all was. And the Seventeenth Congress had proved conclusively that in order to tame the country completely he would have to transform the Party.

  The necessary machinery had already been created. The successful trials of intellectuals were a splendid dress rehearsal, mounted by the very people with whom he must part company.

  Nevertheless, a breathing space was needed before the offensive began. The warm spell continued. Let the enemy enjoy themselves, let them become more brazen still. Ivan the Terrible was always pretending to be at death’s door, while his minions listened in to the treasonable talk of boyars who had begun to scent freedom.

  STALIN’S THIRD TEACHER

  In 1933 Hitler became chancellor of the German Reich.

  Ever since the beginning of the Bolshevik regime its leaders had, because of Russia’s international isolation, concentrated their minds almost entirely on internal policy. But Germany was, to the Bolsheviks, a special country.

  Once in power, with the aid of German money, they had conceived a paradoxical plan: they would abandon the “German imperialists” who had funded them and incorporate Germany in a Union of Proletarian Republics. Germany was assigned first place on the map of world revolution. Germany’s crushing defeat in World War One made that dream realistic. At the Versailles Conference, where the Germans accepted humiliating peace terms, Lloyd George had circulated a memorandum: “The greatest danger I see in the present situation is that Germany may link its destiny with Bolshevism and put its resources, its brains, and its enormous organizing abilities at the service of revolutionary fanatics who dream of conquering the world for Bolshevism by force of arms.” Since then Germany had been, in fact, threatened several times by proletarian revolution.

  Later, when the hope of revolution in Germany had faded, the two outcasts of Europe, Bolshevik Russia and defeated Germany, were gradually drawn together by economic interests. Under the Versailles Treaty the Germans had no right to train tank crews and air force personnel on German soil. Hence they set up training establishments in Russia. There, too, secret branches of German arms firms were established, and top-secret experiments leading to the creation of a German chemical weapons industry were carried out. Each side had
its own agenda: the Germans wanted to preserve their army, the Bolsheviks to create an army with the aid of the Reichswehr, in order to destroy at some later date imperialism of the German and all other varieties. In high military circles, Tukhachevsky often gave credit to the Reichswehr for teaching the Red army to handle the most modern weaponry. This collaboration went on until Hitler, who had declared himself a relentless enemy of Bolshevism, came to power. He seemed to embody the Bolsheviks’ old fear that military intervention by the imperialists was inevitable. Hitler had written that “if Germany needs lebensraum in Europe it can be found only in Russia.”

  The accession of Hitler, as some saw it, was the result of a grave miscalculation on the Boss’s part. He who had managed the Comintern as his own fief had forbidden the German Communists to ally themselves with the Social Democrats. The anti-Hitler coalition was split as a result and had lost to Hitler.

  In fact Stalin needed Hitler to expedite his next move. If Hitler had not existed Stalin would have had to invent him. The threat of Hitler, the threat of intervention, conferred on him enormous powers, justified the most extreme measures. It also compelled European radicals to support him in spite of everything. He, after all, was the focal point of opposition to fascism, the object of hatred for fascism. Hitler put an end to the international isolation of the USSR. The Entente nations had to seek alliance with the USSR. The Soviet rapprochement with America confirmed this trend. Furthermore, the large number of votes cast against Hitler in the elections to the Reichstag held the promise of future upheavals. The mirage of world revolution reappeared. Old Bolsheviks wrote in a letter to Pravda that “Hitler will hold on for a few months, followed by total collapse and revolution.” The ironies of history! These two leaders hated each other, yet there were uncanny coincidental resemblances. Like Stalin, Hitler was a third son, and his older siblings too had died. Hitler too was born in poverty, he too was, according to legend, illegitimate, and his father had even earned his living for a time as a shoemaker. Hitler’s only love, like Stalin’s, had committed suicide, though everyone would think that he had killed her. Their regimes exchanged expressions of hatred, and yet mirrored each other. For that reason, each had useful lessons for the other. After Lenin and Trotsky, Hitler was Stalin’s third teacher.

  In 1934, as he pondered his next move, he must have taken Hitler’s example into account. The way in which Hitler had settled the fate of certain Party comrades, after they had brought him to power, was instructive. They had been a bunch of unruly malcontents, very much like Lenin’s Party. Hitler, who had also created a mighty state subservient to its leader, found a drastic solution to the problem. He denounced his comrades of yesterday as traitors, and personally took charge of their extermination. Stalin was able to observe that event in June 1934, while he was still digesting the results of the Seventeenth Congress, held in January and February.

  Meanwhile, he encouraged the growing “anti-German hysteria”—as the Germans called it—in the newspapers. What the Russians called “anti-Bolshevik hysteria” was just as actively encouraged by the other side, to the advantage of both leaders.

  “RED RUSSIA IS BECOMING PINK”

  While he planned his murderous change of policy at home, he let the warm spell continue.

  An article in Komsomolskaya Pravda declared, “Not so long ago any music critic who saw a saxophone, or Utesov, in his dreams would wake up in a cold sweat.… But now … there’s jazz wherever you go—Utesov, Rensky, Berezovsky, English jazz, Czechoslovak jazz, women’s jazz, even Lilliputian jazz.” The Days of the Turbins returned to the stage of the Arts Theater, and Stalin went to see his favorite show again.

  “Red Russia Is Becoming Pink,” proclaimed a headline in the Baltimore Sun.

  In 1934, when the warm spell was at its warmest, H. G. Wells arrived in the USSR. With Hitler ruling Germany, Wells, who hated Fascism, wanted very much to like Stalin. For Stalin too the visit had a special importance. Wells had met Lenin in 1920 and enthused over the “Visionary of the Kremlin” in a book. That had been a year of famine, but endless banquets were given in honor of Wells. They were learning already how to bewitch eminent Western friends, though the artist Annenkov quoted a quite unexpected speech heard by Wells at one such banquet: “We’ve been eating rissoles and cakes, and they have more of an attraction for us than meeting you, believe me. You see us here decently dressed, but not one of the worthy people here present would be prepared to unbutton his waistcoat, because he’d have nothing underneath except a scrap of dirty old rag which, if I remember rightly, once went by the name of ‘shirt.’ ”

  Now, in 1934, Wells would not be hearing anything of that sort. The Boss had taught the intelligentsia to behave themselves.

  Wells was delighted with all he saw. Or, to be more precise, with all that was shown him. “Something very significant is happening in the USSR,” he wrote. “The contrast with 1920 is striking. The capitalists must learn from the USSR.… The financial oligarchy has outlived itself.… Roosevelt is already intent on a thorough reorganization of society, and the creation of a planned economy.”

  The Boss received Wells, and succeeded in enchanting him—while making no concessions. He dismissed the possibility of a planned economy in capitalist conditions. He even defended revolutionary violence: “Capitalism is rotten through and through, but the old order will not collapse by itself. It is naive to hope for concessions from the power holders.” Wells did not give up completely. As president of the Pen Club, he expressed a wish to discuss with his old friend Gorky the possibility of Soviet writers joining that organization. He told Stalin that the Pen Club insisted on “the right of all to express their opinions, including the opposition, freely. I don’t know, however, whether such broad freedom can be permitted here.” The Boss answered laughingly, “We Bolsheviks call it self-criticism. It is widely practised in the USSR.”

  A mere two years later Wells would realize what freedom of expression meant in the USSR. The tragedy of 1937 would leave him stunned, and he would write a novel called The Wrath of God about a man who betrays a revolution.

  But for the time being Wells had served a purpose. He had confirmed that “Stalin is Lenin today.”

  BROTHER KIROV

  On June 2, 1934, the State Prosecutor’s Office of the USSR adopted an “order concerning the prevention of infringements of legality with special reference to technical experts and managers.” The terrible trials seemed to be a thing of the past.

  After the Seventeenth Congress it was rumored in the Party that Kirov was to be transferred to Moscow, where, as the Boss’s closest friend, a member of the Politburo, and a secretary of the Central Committee, he would shortly occupy the second place in the Party hierarchy.

  This raised the hopes of the Party and the intelligentsia, since Kirov was becoming more and more conspicuously the protagonist of the warm spell. He said in a speech in Leningrad that “the old enemy groupings have melted down in the course of the struggle for the Five-Year Plan, and we need no longer reckon with them.” (Kirov was referring to the program of intensive industrialization launched in 1929, and known as the Five-Year Plan.)

  The Boss loved Kirov and knew that he was loyal. But he had become dangerous. After all the blood spilled, all the slave laborers left dead during the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal (his pet project), after his ruthless war on the kulaks, nobody could accuse Kirov of spinelessness. But he had taken the warm spell at face value. It came as no surprise that a maudlin Kalinin, in Leningrad and in Kirov’s presence, had interrupted a poet who was singing the praises of the Cheka and said, “We shouldn’t be extolling the Cheka, but looking forward to a time when the Cheka need no longer raise its punitive hand.” Kirov had applauded him. Kirov was being used more and more frequently by the Boss’s enemies. Stalin knew that Bukharin had grown fond of visiting Leningrad. In a letter written shortly before his death (now in the President’s Archive), Bukharin said, “When I was in disgrace and fell sick in Leningrad,
Kirov came to see me, spent the whole day with me, wrapped me up warmly, put his own railroad carriage at my disposal, and sent me off to Moscow with such tender care.” The Boss knew about this “tender care” shown to an enemy of his.

  Gorky, too, was putting more pressure on him, pleading for someone or other all the time, and invoking Kirov’s name as he did so. Kirov’s latest charitable proposal was that Uglanov, one of the rightist leaders, should be allowed to resume an active career. The Boss, however, remembered very well what the penitent Uglanov had written in March 1933. The catalog of treacherous acts was endless: “We acknowledged our mistakes at the November plenum of the Central Committee in 1929.… A few months went by … in the course of collectivization and the liquidation of the kulaks a number of difficulties arose … and again … we were in a mood to fight against the Party.… At the Sixteenth Congress we acknowledged our mistakes and assured the Party that we would work conscientiously, but in autumn 1933 some of my supporters resumed the struggle. Discussing the situation in the country with them, I came to the conclusion that a leadership headed by Stalin was incapable of overcoming the immense difficulties … and that it was necessary to bring Rykov, Bukharin, Tomsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev back into the leadership of the Party and the country.” And this was the man for whom Kirov sought forgiveness! Where would it end? Start forgiving such people and you would have another Seventeenth Congress—Congress of Traitors—on your hands.

  Stalin’s resolve had ripened. Further delay was pointless. It was time to attack. His enemies were writing Kirov’s name on their banner. He would have to sacrifice his loyal brother. They gave him no choice.

  Using the sort of logic he favored, he could say that objectively they were Kirov’s killers. Just as they had been Nadya’s killers. The killers of the two people dearest to him. They had earned his hatred and his vengeance.