by Martin Amis
In Volume Two of The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn sharply disagrees with what he takes to be Shalamov’s conclusion, that ‘[i]n the camp situation human beings never remain human beings – the camps were created to this end’. Arguing for a more generous estimate of spiritual resilience, Solzhenitsyn adduces Shalamov’s own person. Shalamov, after all, never betrayed anyone, never denounced, never informed, never sought the lowest level. ‘Why is that, Varlam Tikhonovich?’ asks Solzhenitsyn (and note the coaxing patronymic). ‘Does it mean that you found a footing on some stone – and did not slide down any further?… Do you not refute your own concept with your character and verses?’ A footnote then adds, ‘Alas, he decided not to refute it’, and goes on to tell of Shalamov’s ‘renunciation’ of his own work in the Literaturnaya Gazeta of February 1972. Here, for no clear reason, Shalamov denounced his American publishers and declared himself a loyal Soviet citizen. ‘The problematics of the Kolyma Stories,’ he wrote, ‘have long since been crossed out by life.’ Solzhenitsyn adds: ‘This renunciation was printed in a black mourning frame, and thus all of us understood that Shalamov had died. (Footnote of 1972.)’ In fact, Shalamov died in 1982. And even so, even metaphorically, Solzhenitsyn got the date wrong.
Shalamov ‘died’ in 1937, if not earlier. Despite its originality, its weight of voice, and its boundless talent, Kolyma Tales is an utterly exhausted book. Exhaustion is what it describes and exhaustion is what it enacts. Shalamov can soar, he can ride his epiphanies, but his sentences plod, limp and stagger like a work gang returning from a twelve-hour shift. He repeats himself, contradicts himself, entangles himself, as if in a dreadful dream of retardation and thwarted escape. In a poem that made Solzhenitsyn ‘tremble as though I had met a long-lost brother,’ Shalamov spoke of his vow ‘[t]o sing and to weep to the very end’. And this he did, with honour. But he had encountered negative perfection, as Solzhenitsyn had not; and it broke him.
On the other hand, the book lives, and to that extent Solzhenitsyn’s point remains pertinent. In ‘The Red Cross’ Shalamov writes:
In camp a human being learns sloth, deception and vicious-ness. In ‘mourning his fate’, he blames the entire world … He has forgotten empathy for another’s sorrow; he simply does not understand it and does not desire to understand it.
Shalamov did not forget empathy. In the four-page story ‘An Individual Assignment’ the young prisoner Dugaev is working sixteen hours a day and fulfilling only a quarter of his norm. He is surprised, one night, when his workmate Baranov rolls him a cigarette.
Greedily Dugaev inhaled the sweet smoke of home-grown tobacco, and his head began to spin.
‘I’m getting weaker,’ he said.
Baranov said nothing.
Dugaev has difficulty sleeping, and is losing the inclination to eat; his work deteriorates further. The story ends:
The next day he was again working in the work gang with Baranov, and the following night soldiers took him behind the horse barns along a path that led into the woods. They came to a tall fence topped with barbed wire. The fence nearly blocked off a small ravine, and in the night the prisoners could hear tractors backfiring in the distance. When he realized what was about to happen, Dugaev regretted that he had worked for nothing. There had been no reason for him to exhaust himself on this, his last day.
The cigarette Baranov gave him: that was Dugaev’s final smoke.
At the moment of arrest, wrote the poet, ‘you tire as in a lifetime.’ In Shalamov’s Kolyma, every moment was that kind of moment.
The Kirov Murder
On 2 December 1934, Pravda solemnly informed its readers that on 1 December at 16:30, in the city of Leningrad in the building of the Leningrad Soviet (formerly Smolny), at the hands of a murderer, a concealed enemy of the working class, died Secretary of the Central and Leningrad committees of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) and member of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, Comrade Sergei Mironovich Kirov. The gunman was under arrest.
As Pravda hit the stands, a special train containing Stalin and a numerous entourage was arriving from Moscow.
At this point Borisov, Kirov’s personal bodyguard, had only hours to live.
The gunman, a ‘misfit’ called Leonid Nikolayev, lasted till just after Christmas. Together with many other alleged conspirators, he was shot (at night, in the cellars of Liteyni Prison). About a million would follow in the Terror.
On the opening page of Stalin and the Kirov Murder Conquest writes:
Single events – even accidental ones – have often turned the path of history. The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, just over twenty years previously, brought on a perhaps otherwise avoidable Great War. At any rate, that is the only individual crime (or dual crime, since the Archduke’s morganatic17 wife was also killed) with which the Kirov murder can be compared.
Enormous and sanguinary convulsions were helped into being by Nikolayev’s bullet. Soviet society, which had steadied into a kind of breadline normality after the epic flounderings of 1929–33, was set to experience a new crescendo of the state’s rage. For all its drama and complexity, however, the Kirov murder was essentially a monstrous diversion: a red herring the size of a killer whale. It was something of an irrelevance even for Kirov. The Terror was coming anyway, and he would have been among its chief victims.
Nearly all historians are 99 per cent sure that Stalin oversaw the Kirov murder through the Moscow Cheka (and one well-placed commentator, Volkogonov, calls it ‘certain’). I am now told that post-glasnost research has rendered this view more doubtful.18 All cui bono? considerations point to Stalin: he had at least a dozen reasons for wanting Kirov dead (or 300 reasons: those votes at the Congress of Victors). No other event would have served Stalin so well as a springboard for mass repression. And the subsequent fates of nearly every key player in the murder (no man, no problem) speaks of Stalinist assiduity. True, the crime and the cover-up were haphazardly managed; it is particularly hard to understand the Cheka’s selection of Nikolayev, a figure of almost epileptic instability. But he finished the job: Kirov was dead. Anyway, Stalin’s guilt in the matter, when set beside his greater guilt, is another near-irrelevance. Perhaps we should throw our hands in the air and attribute Nikolayev to mere Stalinian voodoo, like his magically timed, stroke-inducing affronts to Lenin in 1922–23. The point is that the momentum for terror had already gathered. Kirov’s murder gave rise to a prodigiously exaggerated version of the Rohm purge (30 June 1934); but its real equivalent was the Reichstag Fire of the previous year. Nikolayev simply saved Stalin the trouble of torching the Kremlin.
The top Leningrad Chekists were in attendance when the night train from Moscow pulled into the station. Stalin approached their chief, Medved, and, instead of patting him on the back, slapped him across the face. A student of Machiavelli, Stalin knew that the Prince must be an actor. At Kirov’s state funeral there was a more sinister piece of showmanship: Stalin kissed Kirov’s corpse.
Borisov, the personal bodyguard, was not with Kirov when Nikolayev struck (it is thought that some Moscow Chekists detained or distracted him at the door). Late in the morning of 2 December, he was sent by lorry to the Smolny, there to be interrogated by Stalin. On Voinov Street there was a minor accident. The driver and the three Cheka guards were unhurt. Borisov was dead. They had used iron bars on him in the back of the truck.
Downward selection had long been about its work, and the cadres were ready; the punitive organs were ready. As Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who would kill himself three years later, remarked to none other than Sergei Kirov in January 1934: ‘Our members who saw the situation in 1932–33 and who stood up to it are now tempered like steel. I think that with people like that, we can build a state such as history has never seen.’
17 This word repays a visit to the dictionary: ‘(Of marriage) between man of high rank and woman of lower rank, who remains in her former station, their issue having no claim to succeed to possessions of father.�
�� So: a kind of pre-nup.
18 J. Arch Getty and R. T. Manning (eds.): Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives. Getty calls the standard interpretation ‘folkloric’. Revision begets revision. (A still more recent book swings the argument back the other way.) If Getty goes on revising at his current rate, he will eventually be telling us that only two people died in the Great Terror, and that one very rich peasant was slightly hurt during Collectivization.
Children
Svetlana was the Cordelia of the Stalin children, in that love flowed, or seeped, between the tyrant and the daughter. This, unbelievably, is from Stalin’s pen:
My little housekeeper, Setanka, greetings!
I have received all your letters. Thank you for the letters! I haven’t replied because I’m very busy. How are you passing the time, how’s your English, are you well? I’m well and cheerful, as always. It’s lonely without you, but what can I do except wait. I kiss my little housekeeper.
One assumes that the above predates Nadezhda’s suicide in 1932 (when Svetlana was six). At that point, Svetlana would write, something ‘snapped inside my father’; ‘inwardly things had changed catastrophically’. Outwardly, too: Stalin, at the time, was personally supervising one of the greatest man-made disasters in history; and Nadezhda’s death, as we have seen, was a political as well as a personal indictment. Thereafter, in any case, family life and family feeling quickly evaporated.
Stalin’s relationship with Svetlana effectively ended in 1943. The daughter’s activities, like the sons’, were monitored by the organs, and wiretaps revealed that Svetlana was having an affair with a Jewish scenarist called Alexei Kapler, whom Stalin promptly dispatched to Vorkuta (espionage: five years). ‘But I love him!’ protested Svetlana.
‘Love!’ screamed my father, with a hatred of the very word I can scarcely convey. And for the first time in his life he slapped me across the face, twice. ‘Just look, nurse, how low she’s sunk!’ He could no longer restrain himself. ‘Such a war going on, and she’s busy the whole time fucking!’
There followed a long estrangement, punctuated by occasional cruelties, occasional thaws. When they spent some time together in the early 1950s, Svetlana reports that ‘[w]e had nothing to say to one another.’ This is Khrushchev:
He loved her, but he used to express these feelings of love in a beastly way. His was the tenderness of a cat for a mouse. He broke the heart first of a child, then of a young girl, then of a woman and mother.
Stalin linked Svetlana to Nadezhda and to his own most spectacular failure. Still, there had been paternal love – reflexive and perfunctory, perhaps, but love. The boys had to get along without it. And while Svetlana, with her marriages, her wanderings, went on to have a pained but articulate life, Yakov and Vasily were doomed.
Vasily (1921–62), Svetlana’s full brother, has a present-day analogue in the person of Uday Hussein.19 The children of these autocrats, unlike the autocrats, grew up in a scripted reality, and faced a different kind of assault on their mental health. Nor were Vasily Stalin’s prospects improved when, after his mother’s suicide, Stalin absented himself too, entrusting Vasily’s nurturance to Vlasik, the head of his security guards. Also Stalin is said to have regularly beaten Vasily, a little implausibly, given his otherwise religiously observed indifference to him (there is no doubt that he beat Yakov, with method and invention). The main difficulty facing the child of an autocrat, I imagine, is that reality won’t tell you what you’re worth. Later you will notice that everyone is terrified of you (except of course your father). Vasily decided to become a fighter pilot. In his Stalin, Colonel General Dmitri Volkogonov takes a scandalized look at the personal dossier of Lieutenant General Vasily Stalin. A record of dazzling promotions (‘deputy and later commander of the Air Force’) is interleaved with numerous confidential reports about Vasily’s incompetence (and brutishness). ‘Showered with honours and the blessings of well-wishers seeking their own ends,’ Volkogonov goes on, ‘Vasily had, almost unnoticed, become a fully-fledged alcoholic.’
Three weeks after Stalin’s death Vasily suffered a demotion: he was, in fact, dismissed from the service (and forbidden to wear military uniform). He was thirty-two, and died nine years later. Khrushchev found him uncontrollable. There were periods of prison and exile. He said that he was thinking of becoming the manager of a swimming pool. At the age of forty he was an invalid. There were four wives. There were seven children; three of them – to stress, in parting, an apparently sympathetic anomaly – were adopted.
Yakov (1907–43), the half-brother, Yekaterina’s boy, suffered the most dramatically and movingly. Stalin really hated him. It took me several days of subliminal work to accept this. The standard interpretation may seem ridiculous, but it is probably the right interpretation. We have seen something of Stalin’s violent insecurity about his provenance. This insecurity was now turned on Yakov. Stalin hated Yakov because Yakov was Georgian. Yakov was Georgian because his mother was Georgian; Yakov was Georgian because Stalin was Georgian; yet Stalin hated Yakov because Yakov was Georgian. The racial and regional tensions within the USSR constitute an enormous subject, but Stalin’s case was, as usual, outlandish. We have to imagine a primitive provincial who (by 1930 or so) had started to think of himself as a self-made Peter the Great: an Ivan the Terrible who had got where he was on merit. Thus Stalin was Russia personified; and Yakov was Georgian. Yakov is said also to have been of a mild and gentle disposition, to his father’s additional disgust.
Raised by his maternal grandparents, Yakov joined the Stalin household in the mid-1920s. He spoke little Russian, and did so with a thick accent (like Stalin). Nadezhda seems to have liked him and fully accepted him. But Stalin’s persecution was so systematic that towards the end of the decade Yakov attempted suicide. He succeeded only in wounding himself; and when Stalin heard about the attempt he said, ‘Ha! He couldn’t even shoot straight’ (Volkogonov has him actually confronting his son with the greeting, ‘Ha! You missed!’). Soon afterwards Yakov moved to Leningrad to live with Nadezhda’s family, the Alliluyevs.
Like Vasily, Yakov joined the armed forces, as a lieutenant (rather than a field marshal), reflecting his more peripheral status. He was the better soldier, and fought energetically until his unit was captured by the Reichswehr. This placed Stalin in a doubly embarrassing position. A law of August 1941 had declared that all captured officers were ‘malicious traitors’ whose families were ‘subject to arrest’. Thus Yakov came under the first category – and Stalin came under the second. As a kind of compromise, Stalin arrested Yakov’s wife. When the Nazis tried to negotiate an exchange, Stalin refused (‘I have no son called Yakov’). He feared all the same that the supposedly feeble Yakov might be pressured into some propagandist exhibition of disloyalty. He need not have so feared. Yakov passed through three concentration camps – Hammelburg, Lübeck, Sachsenhausen – and resisted all intimidation. It was precisely to avoid succumbing (Volkogonov believes) that Yakov made his decisive move. In a German camp, as in a Russian, the surest route to suicide was a run at the barbed wire. Yakov ran. The guard did not miss.
We have seen what Stalin did to the families of Yekaterina and Nadezhda. Yakov’s wife was Jewish, and Stalin had opposed the marriage for that reason. Nonetheless she was released after only two years in prison: a rare manifestation of slaked appetite.
19 A reputedly prolific rapist and murderer, Uday, we are relieved to learn, is now in a wheelchair following an assassination attempt. Like Uday, Vasily was the kind of young man who thinks it’s funny to fire live rounds at restaurant chandeliers.
Reason and the Great Terror – 1
The question of Stalin’s sanity is one we will keep having to come back to. Compromised by power (and by increasing isolation from unwelcome truths), his sense of reality was by now unquestionably very weak; but it would be wrong to think of him in a continuous state of cognitive disarray. This underestimates his vanity and his pedantry. He habitually assessed himself in the context of legitimi
zation: world-historical legitimization. And at times his internal world was luridly cogent.
First he looked to Lenin. It hadn’t been difficult to find a Leninist warrant for Collectivization: state monopoly of food had always been considered a worthy socialist goal. Finding a Leninist warrant for the massacre of Leninists was more uphill. Pondering the implications of the Kirov murder, Stalin would have recalled August 1918. The attempted assassination of Lenin (and, on the same day, the successful assassination of Uritsky, head of the Petrograd Cheka) had launched the Red Terror, which, however, was directed outwards. Stalin wanted it directed inwards, too. Lenin had purged the Party, and approved of purges (quoting Lassalle to Marx: ‘a party grows stronger by purging itself’), but his was a paper purge, a ‘quiet’ terror, dealing only in expulsions, like the one Stalin was prosecuting in the period 1933–35. Robert C. Tucker elaborates:
After 1917, when membership in what was now a ruling party grew attractive to careerists and the like, Lenin looked to the purge as a means of weeding out such people … and on one occasion he even called for a ‘purge of terrorist character’ – specifically, summary trial and shooting – for ‘former officials, landlords, bourgeois and other scum who have attached themselves to the Communists …’
