PART ONE
Joseph Stalin is one of the most notorious figures in history. He ordered the systematic killing of people on a massive scale. In his years of power and pomp, from the late 1920s until his death in 1953, he personified the Soviet communist order. The October Revolution of 1917 in Russia had given rise to a one-party, one-ideology dictatorship serving as a model for the transformation of societies across a third of the globe’s surface after the Second World War. Although Lenin had founded the USSR, it was Stalin who decisively strengthened and stabilised the structure. Without Stalin, the Soviet Union might have collapsed decades before it was dismantled in 1991.
After Lenin died in 1924, most people were surprised when Stalin emerged the victor from the ensuing conflict among the party’s leaders. By the end of the decade he had rejected the compromises the party had reluctantly accepted in order to survive in power after the Civil War in the former Russian Empire. Stalin marched the Soviet Union in the direction of industrialisation. Millions of peasants died while agriculture was collectivised. The network of labour camps was expanded and Stalin reinforced his despotism through the Great Terror of the late 1930s. Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa against the USSR in 1941 caught Stalin disastrously off guard. But the Red Army fought back and, with Stalin as supreme commander, defeated the Wehrmacht. After the Second World War the USSR asserted its dominion across the eastern half of Europe. Stalin’s reputation, for good or evil, rose to its climax. When he died in 1953, he was mourned by millions of fellow citizens who had abundant reason to detest him and his policies. He left the Soviet Union as a world power and an industrial colossus with a literate society. He bequeathed institutions of terror and indoctrination with few rivals in their scope. The history of the USSR after his death was largely a series of attempts to conserve, modify or liquidate his legacy.
Stalin left no memoirs. Before the late 1920s no one troubled to write more than a brief sketch of him. Those who did put words into print scorned him. The unsurpassed chronicler of Russia in the year 1917, Nikolai Sukhanov, dismissed him as ‘a grey, dull blank’.1 Trotski and his sympathisers such as Boris Souvarine and Isaac Deutscher ridiculed Stalin as a bureaucrat without an opinion or even personality of his own; this had also been the line taken by leaders of other revolutionary parties – Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries – who had been forced into foreign exile.2 Despite the diversity of their political orientations, all such writers agreed when characterising Lenin’s successor. Stalin’s lack of talent appeared to them as axiomatic. His defects were thought obvious. Stalin had not lived as an émigré before the fall of the Imperial monarchy in the February Revolution! He was neither a polyglot nor a decent orator! He was a mere administrator! Such features were offered as proof that he deserved second-rate status among the party’s leaders. Even friendly comrades in the decade after the October Revolution thought that his only strong suit was administration and that the important decisions of state should be left to them and not to Stalin.3
Ambitious and resentful, Stalin set about embellishing his reputation. In 1920 he stressed that Lenin, at their first meeting in 1905, had struck him as an unobtrusive figure. The aim was clear. Stalin was indicating that this was the kind of man who had founded the communist party and whom he sought to emulate: he was offering a self-portrait. But showiness was not for him. Stalin’s aide Ivan Tovstukha produced a biographical sketch in 1924, mentioning his postings in the October Revolution and Civil War;4 but this was hardly a coloratura piece of writing. Always Stalin and his associates stressed his eagerness to fit into a political collective. The self-preening political protagonists in the Soviet Union – Lev Trotski, Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin – were contrasted with the modest Party General Secretary.
Resuming his ascent to the political summit, Stalin arranged for weightier claims to be made on his behalf. Approved biographies appeared, each more hagiographical than the previous one. In 1938 a grandiose account was published, written by Party Central Committee stooges and anonymously edited by Stalin.5 The chapters represented him as the contemporary genius of world communism; and the growing tendency was to depict him as the equal of Lenin as party leader, exponent of Marxist theory and global statesman. This image was picked up in the West by commentators impressed by the industrial and educational progress made in the USSR in the 1930s. From 1941, when the USSR entered the struggle against Nazi Germany, the praise for Stalin was unstinted.Time magazine fêted him as its Man of the Year, who alone had the tenacity to lead his country to military triumph. After the Second World War, when the Cold War broke out and the Western Allies turned him from hero into villain, the number of Stalin’s admirers fell drastically away. Yet among his critics there were few who still thought him a mediocrity. Revered or detested, he was recognised as one of the twentieth century’s outstanding politicians.
Some saw him as Lenin’s authentic successor who drove the automobile of Revolution along a road mapped out by Lenin. Others regarded him as Leninism’s great betrayer. Playing up Russian national interests, he was painted as little different from the emperors of old. Supposedly Stalin wanted to achieve chiefly the objectives that had eluded the greatest of the Romanovs.6 Such a desire was reflected in Stalin’s foreign policy of westward expansion. In the USSR this took the form of privileging the ethnic Russians in postings, education and status. Stalin was depicted as an exponent of traditional Russian imperialism.
Another image of Stalin had him mainly as a power-hungry killer. Once having gained supreme authority, supposedly, the latent psychotic urges were released and the carnage of the 1930s began. Some contended that this could not have happened unless the doctrines and practices of the Soviet one-party state had already been put in place; but they also insisted that the mayhem would not have occurred in 1937–8 unless an unhinged dictator had controlled the party and the political police.7 Stalin did not just incarcerate and murder. In applying physical and mental torment to his victims, he degraded them in the most humiliating fashion. He derived deep satisfaction from this. Although he himself did not beat those whom the police held in the Lubyanka prison, he encouraged the most brutal measures. He delighted in keeping even his closest associates in unrelieved fear. Definitions of insanity are controversial, but undeniably Stalin’s personality was a dangerously damaged one and this personality supplied the high-octane fuel for the journey to the Great Terror.
Or was he just a bureaucratic mediocrity protecting the interests of the administrative cadres of the one-party state? According to this interpretation, the administrators in party, police and economic commissariats aspired to expand their authority and privileges. Already in the 1920s they had abandoned their revolutionary commitment. Thus Stalin understood what they wanted and used his position in the Central Committee Secretariat to fulfil their desires. As the USSR’s supreme bureaucrat he too was bound to benefit from such an outcome. That the administrative cadres should have come to wield this power was attributed to deep tensions in Soviet state and society. The October 1917 Revolution had been made in the name of the working class and the poorest sections of the peasantry. But these groups failed to confirm themselves in power. The resultant tensions made for a situation that gave opportunities to the ‘bureaucracy’. Unscrupulous and well disciplined, the functionaries of party and state steadily formed themselves into a caste separate from the rest of society, and Stalin’s grey eminence was their leading incarnation.8
Hardly a year has passed since Stalin’s death in 1953 without the publication of yet another biography. For three decades the material was common to all: the memoirs, old and new, together with the files excavated from the archives at the command of Nikita Khrushchëv – Stalin’s successor in the Kremlin – as he shoved Stalin off the pedestal of communist esteem from the mid-1950s. Then in 1985 Mikhail Gorbachëv became Party General Secretary. Gorbachëv resumed the campaign against Stalin and all his works and a flood of documentary data was released. But it took the rise to power of Boris Yeltsin in 1991 for most scholars to gain access to the archives. It was a heady period in which to carry out research. The inconceivable had become reality: the Central Party Archive on Pushkin Street in Moscow was opened to independent scholarship and a vast number of holdings were declassified.9 This is a process with a long road yet to travel, and there has been occasional regression. But any comparison with earlier years is salutary. It is now possible to explore the political, ideological, cultural and private life of Joseph Stalin to a degree of intimacy that was previously impossible.
Writers in Russia have taken their opportunity. Their forerunner was the Soviet communist dissenter Roy Medvedev, who wrote a denunciation of Stalin in the mid-1960s.10 The book was refused publication in the USSR and was circulated there only in illicit copies. Its basic analysis was not novel: Medvedev argued that Stalin was a cynic and a bureaucrat with a maladjusted personality who suffocated the revolutionary ideals of Lenin. Under Gorbachëv there were further attempts to analyse Stalin. Dmitri Volkogonov, while showing that Stalin was a murderous dictator, called for his virtues as an industrialiser and a military leader also to be acknowledged.11 Later biographers in Russia objected to such equivocation, and Edvard Radzinski produced a popular account that focused attention on the psychotic peculiarities of his subject.12 While adding new factual details, Volkogonov and Radzinski offered nothing in their analyses not already available in the West.
Western historians themselves largely ceased to reconsider the basic conventional wisdom developed between the 1920s and 1950s. The differences between accounts centred on particular aspects of his personality, attitudes or policies. The disputes have been highly charged. There has even been controversy about whether Stalin was responsible for the lunges towards the Great Terror. American scholar J. Arch Getty proposed that the state’s terrorist measures sprang not from Stalin’s initiative but from pressures applied by a group of Politburo members aiming always to raise the rate of industrial expansion and resenting the passive resistance of the lower echelons of the party and governmental official-dom.13 It was alleged that Stalin was merely a power broker among the Kremlin’s politicians. Supposedly he only instigated the mass killings in order to comply with the strong opinions expressed in the supreme ruling group. This was an extraordinary claim. Even the long line of writers who denied that the Gulag victims were truly to be numbered in the millions had assigned decisive responsibility to Stalin.
Nowadays virtually all writers accept that he initiated the Great Terror. The exceptions, however, do not lack support. Among them are those Russian nationalists who feel nostalgic about the Soviet victory in the Second World War and regret the collapse of the USSR. Many Georgians, too, resent any attack on their most famous compatriot even if they recognise that he committed appalling abuses against Soviet society. Yet among the rest of us there remains much controversy. There are several ways in which I hope to illuminate the murky corners of Joseph Stalin’s life. One involves looking closely at his upbringing, family life, wives, children and other relatives. This was difficult until recently: Stalin had taken care to excise references to his private life from published material. He also executed or imprisoned many who knew him well. Even his sister-in-law Anna Allilueva, who carefully submitted her draft memoir for his comments, was thrown into the Lubyanka. Stalin’s personality was mysterious in his lifetime, as he meant it to be; and many of the best-known sources on him, especially the memoirs by Trotski and Khrushchëv, offered accounts pervaded by political hostility.
Since the late 1980s it is has been possible to make a closer analysis. Stalin’s private life and entourage have been investigated by Simon Sebag Montefiore and Miklós Kun.14 His preferences in food and leisure were not drastically abnormal, at least until he achieved despotic power. Many in his entourage felt that his enemies had exaggerated his defects of personality. Such information provides an avenue towards understanding his public career. I make no apology for intensifying the examination of him at school, in the seminary, in early party groups and in the intimacy of his family. His medical condition and psychological profile also deserve attention. Such material contributes to an assessment of his motives and comportment in his public career.
Another theme of the book is the degree of Stalin’s influence before Lenin’s death. No biography fails to depreciate his already developed skills as a politician. This book benefits from the political and psychological insights of Robert Tucker, Adam Ulam, Robert McNeal and Ronald Hingley.15 Yet even these works assumed that Stalin did not count for much among Bolsheviks before 1917. Tucker contended that Stalin’s attitude to Lenin amounted to mere hero-worship through to the 1930s.16 Lenin’s unchallenged dominance is also the key theme of the study by Robert Slusser, who characterised Stalin in 1917 as ‘the man who missed the Revolution’.17 Purportedly Stalin was Lenin’s errand boy before and during 1917. The same approach has been maintained with reference to the years after the October Revolution as biographers have insisted that Stalin was a dour bureaucrat in the backrooms of Bolshevism. At most, he has been depicted as Lenin’s trouble-shooter – the man who was sent into emergency situations with a specific brief from the Kremlin. But credence is rarely given to the possibility that Stalin’s membership of the supreme bodies of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet government shows that he was already an established member of the communist ruling group. The following chapters question this long-established historical opinion.
And the biographers, while rightly stressing that Stalin came to wield enormous power from the 1930s, have usually omitted to note that he was not omnipotent. He had to operate the machinery of the system of power he inherited. He could modify it, but he was unable to transform it without shattering the basis of ‘Soviet power’. In the Great Terror of 1937–8 he strove to eliminate tendencies in politics that restricted the impact of central commands: clientelism, localism and administrative passive resistance. He also tried to liquidate the obstructive trends pervading Soviet society which counteracted the Kremlin’s policies. Not only administrators but also workers and collective-farm labourers found ways to defend themselves against Moscow and its requirements. Stalin’s introduction of fresh policies from the late 1920s was accompanied by adjustments to the communist order. But these adjustments induced a syndrome of interests which obstructed further basic change. It is conventional to depict Stalin as an unimpeded despot. Without doubt he could introduce internal and external policies without contradiction in the Politburo. But I shall show that his personal rule depended upon his willingness to conserve the administrative system he had inherited. He also had to assimilate himself in many ways to the mental outlook of the people of the Soviet Union if he wanted to go on ruling them without provoking revolt.
Stalin, custodian-in-chief of the Soviet order, was also its detainee. In order to rule despotically through the communist dictatorship, he had to restrict his impulse to eliminate practices which inhibited the imposition of a perfect system of vertical command. Powerful though he was, his powers were not limitless. This consideration is not a fine scholarly point but helps towards an understanding of the vicissitudes of his career. To the end of his life he sought to keep the Soviet order in a condition of controlled agitation. Aiming to conserve personal despotism and party dictatorship, he strove to disrupt trends towards a stabilisation which might conflict with his larger purposes. But constraints of power existed even for Stalin.
The purposes of Stalin at any rate sprang not only from his psychological drives and practical calculations but also from his world view. Marxism was a guiding philosophy throughout his adult life. But it was not the only ingredient in his thinking. His Georgian origin, his cultural interests and his ecclesiastical training left their mark. Russian national traditions also had a growing importance, especially from the 1930s. He was not an original scholar. Far from it: his few innovations in ideology were crude, dubious developments of Marxism. Sometimes the innovations arose from political self-interest more than intellectual sincerity. But about the genuineness of Stalin’s fascination with ideas there can be no doubt. He read voraciously and actively. His insertion of nationalist themes into official Soviet ideology ought to be seen for what it was. Stalin deployed the nationalism he found congenial. This was not the nationalism of Church, peasant and village. It was not even the nationalism of the tsars; for although he extolled Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, he excoriated most other past rulers. Stalin’s was a Russian nationalism of the state, of technology and intolerance, of atheism, of cities, of military power. It was so idiosyncratic a compilation as to be virtually his own invention – and it overlapped substantially with Soviet Marxism as it had been developed since the death of Lenin.
Yet he continued to be pragmatic, and his ability to decide large international questions with the leaders of the world’s great powers led some historians to conclude that Stalin was a statesman in the tradition of the tsars. There was something in this. Stalin was eager to be taken seriously by American and European leaders and to secure concessions to Soviet interests at the conference table. He also strained to understand the complexities of the problems of the USSR itself in administration, economy and society. He was a ruler of great assiduity and intervened in the minutiae of policy whenever he could.
The question, however, has remained about his sanity. Stalin’s obsession with personal control was so extreme and brutal that many have pondered whether he was psychotic. Roy Medvedev, the Soviet historian–dissenter, denied that Stalin was insane.18 Robert Tucker too maintained a cautious stance and argued that Stalin, while not being clinically mad, had a personality damaged by his experiences as a child. Robert Conquest agreed but stressed the unhealthy appetite Stalin had for vengeance and murder. All this brings up the matter of the nature of the ‘enemies’ whom Stalin sought to eliminate. Were they phantoms of his imagination without existence in objective reality? Medvedev, Tucker and Conquest agree that his was a deeply maladjusted personality. Quite how peculiarly he behaved in his intimate circle has become ever clearer since the doors of the archives have opened. The atmosphere in his family in the 1920s was highly charged and the fact that his wife Nadezhda was mentally unstable made things worse. In politics he was exceptionally suspicious, vengeful and sadistic. Stalin had a gross personality disorder.
But was his behaviour merely the reflection of a Georgian upbringing? Ideas of personal dignity and revenge were widespread in his native land, especially in the rural areas. Practically every biographer has assumed that this had an influence on his subsequent career. But Georgia’s culture was neither uniform nor unchanging. Stalin imbibed ideas in Gori and Tbilisi which were rejected by others, and an exclusive ascription of his personal and political comportment to his national origins is inappropriate. The dysfunctionality of the Dzhughashvili family was remarked upon by his friends. His own odd character was worsened by his later experience of being underappreciated by his comrades in the revolutionary movement; and the tenets and practices of communism confirmed his harsher tendencies. (All leading Bolsheviks condoned the Red Terror in 1918: this was yet another reason why they tended to ignore Stalin’s extremism until the late 1920s.) He was also influenced by the books he read about previous Russian rulers, especially Ivan the Terrible; and he annotated Machiavelli’s The Prince. There were many interacting factors which contributed to Stalin’s extraordinary ferocity.
Yet although he exaggerated the strength and intent of the opposition to him, such opposition was not insignificant in its potential. There was method in Stalin’s alleged madness. Conquest and Medvedev have pointed to the existence of groupings of internal party critics.19 Getty has indicated that Stalin was unhappy with passive resistance to his policies among the party’s officials in the provinces.20 Khlevnyuk has indicated his persistent concern about past and current members of the communist central leadership.21
This book is intended to show that Stalin’s worries went wider and deeper than his concern about internal party critics. He really did have a multitude of enemies. None of them had much chance against him. His defeated opponents gossiped against him, and some subordinates in the party formed little groups to conspire against him. There were plenty of delegates to Party Congresses who felt that his power had become overmagnified after the First Five-Year Plan of 1928–32. More broadly, outside the party, multitudes of people had reason to bear him a grudge: Bolsheviks expelled from the party; priests, mullahs and rabbis; Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries; nationalists among the non-Russians – and indeed among the Russians; peasants; even workers and soldiers. His unpopularity was as great as his power at its peak, and the fact that he fostered a cult of the individual for himself meant that no one in the country could fail to identify him as being personally responsible for the policies that had brought suffering to the country. This was a situation that was unlikely to improve in the near future. At the very moment of his political victory Stalin had much cause to be worried.
The following chapters offer a comprehensive portrait of Stalin in his time. They investigate not only what he did but also why he did it and how he was allowed to do it. He is examined simultaneously as leader, administrator, theorist, writer, comrade, husband and father. His social background, schooling, nationality and ways of work and leisure are analysed. Stalin as a psychological type also needs to be considered – and his habits of daily life as well as the large scale of his political manoeuvres and statesmanship enter the account.
The charge has been laid that such an approach runs the risk of ‘humanising’ the communist leaders. I plead guilty. Stalin carried out campaigns of carnage which have been described with words outside the lexicon of our species: monstrous, fiendish, reptilian; but the lesson to be learned from studying several of the twentieth century’s most murderous politicians is that it is wrong to depict them as beings wholly incomparable to ourselves. Not only is it wrong: it is also dangerous. If the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot are represented as having been ‘animals’, ‘monsters’ or ‘killing machines’, we shall never be able to discern their successors. Stalin in many ways behaved as a ‘normal human being’. In fact he was very far from being ‘normal’. He had a vast desire to dominate, punish and butcher. Often he also comported himself with oafish menace in private. But he could also be charming; he could attract passion and admiration both from close comrades and from an immense public audience. On occasion he could be modest. He was hard-working. He was capable of kindliness to relatives. He thought a lot about the good of the communist cause. Before he started killing them, most communists in the USSR and in the Comintern judged him to be functioning within the acceptable bounds of political conduct.
Of course, they overlooked the other side of Stalin. It was a side that had been plentifully evident after the October Revolution. He had killed innumerable innocents in the Civil War. He had gone on to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths in the First and Second Five-Year Plans. He was a state murderer long before instigating the Great Terror. The neglect of his propensities appears inexplicable unless account is taken of the complex man and politician behind the ‘grey blur’ he presented to a multitude of observers. Stalin was a killer. He was also an intellectual, an administrator, a statesman and a party leader; he was a writer, editor and statesman. Privately he was, in his own way, a dedicated as well as bad-tempered husband and father. But he was unhealthy in mind and body. He had many talents, and used his intelligence to act out the roles he thought suited to his interests at any given time. He baffled, appalled, enraged, attracted and entranced his contemporaries. Most men and women of his lifetime, however, underestimated Stalin. It is the task of the historian to examine his complexities and suggest how better to understand his life and times.