Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

  The question ‘why?’ – in any kind of narrative – is never quite satisfied by the answer ‘individual psychosis’; such an answer feels like a hole or a loose end. Hence the revisionist talk of 1936–38 as being a ‘consensus operation’ (J. Arch Getty), or as a time of ‘terror, progress, and social mobility’ (Sheila Fitzpatrick). These writers are in quest of something that isn’t there: common sense. Another way round the lone-madman theory is to view the purges as a ‘logical’ outcome of Bolshevik ideology and praxis. Having gone ahead with the dogmatic policy of Collectivization, and having reached the unexpected result of economic and moral penury, what can a good Bolshevik do but become even more radical? One can say that Stalin’s psyche was perhaps uniquely amenable to such a course.24 Apropos, here, is Santayana’s definition of the fanatic: he redoubles his efforts while forgetting his aims. He doesn’t want to think or to know. He just wants to believe.

  Nor should we neglect the obvious point – that Stalin did it because Stalin liked it. He couldn’t help himself. The Terror was, in part, an episode of sensual indulgence. It was a bacchanal whose stimulant was power; and the cycle became ever more vicious. Typically, Stalin emerged from his lost weekend much strengthened and refreshed; typically, too, the titanic hangover was reserved for his doppelganger, his alter ego, his fairground mirror – the USSR.

  I will close this section with a little kaleidoscope of unreason: ‘They don’t put old women like me on tractors,’ a peasant complained to her cellmates, thinking she had been denounced as a traktoristka (tractor-driver) rather than a trotskista (Trotskyite); when the time came to acknowledge ‘excesses’ in the unmasking of Trotskyites, Stalin officially noted that these excesses were the work of Trotskyites as yet unmasked; all the directors of the major foundries in the Ukraine were arrested, and a few months later their replacements were arrested too (it was only the third or fourth batch that managed to keep their seats); one Byelorussian commissar was arrested (and shot) for refusing to use torture, and other chiefs were killed simply for not killing enough; early in his reign Chekist Yezhov decreed that prison windows should be boarded up and prison-yard gardens asphalted over; any genuine spy was treated as an exotic and a celebrity by fellow prisoners; footballers, gymnasts, philatelists and Esperantoists were arrested for their connections abroad; a science student was arrested for having a pen pal in Manchester, even though his letters consisted almost entirely of Soviet propaganda; after a night-long interrogation, a ten-year-old boy admitted his involvement with a fascist organization from the age of seven (what happened to him? Before exacting the supreme penalty, did they wait for his twelfth birthday?); a twelve-year-old boy was raped by his interrogator, protested to the duty officer, and was duly shot … It was later – in the 1940s – that a man was sentenced to fifteen years for, among other things, ‘unfavourably contrasting the proletarian poet Mayakovsky with a certain bourgeois poet’, the bourgeois poet being Pushkin, whose centenary, as it happened, passed with some fanfare in that year of 1937.

  And so we must imagine the railway station at Kiev and the arrival of the special train from Moscow containing a large Cheka force led by Khrushchev, Molotov and Yezhov. The Chekists have a quota: the enemies of the people they will be expected to unmask must comprise a minimum of 30,000 souls.25 That will mean 30,000 confessions. Given a (low) ‘conveyor’ average of forty grillings per prisoner, that will mean over a million interrogations. The Chekists will need their special rubber aprons, their special rubber hats, their special rubber gloves.

  24 Only Stalin, perhaps, was capable of presiding over the systemic deformity he had created. His doubled mind was well suited to the methodology of ‘the two truths’, as the apparat privately called it. Malia evokes the ubiquitous unreality as follows: ‘In short, there is no such thing as socialism, and the Soviet Union built it.’

  25 For comparison: there were 14,000 executions, nationwide, in the last half-century of Tsarist rule.

  Interventions

  Philosophy and political economy were not the only specialisms in which Stalin (that fabulously overweening ignoramus) put himself about. Hitler confined his cultural interventions to the fields where he felt, wrongly, that he had a competence: art and architecture. But Stalin’s superbity was omnivorous. His intention, or need, was to inundate an entire society with his own quiddity. And among Stalin’s characteristics we must now include an infinite immunity to embarrassment. In September 1938, as if signalling an end to the fulminant phase of the Terror, the Short Course appeared and entrenched itself as Stalin’s official biography. By that time most of the Old Bolsheviks, who knew it to be false, were dead – but not all of them were. Over five hundred Old Bolsheviks put their signatures to a thank-you note to Stalin in the pages of Pravda in 1947 (‘with words of love and gratitude’). And there remains the impenetrable anomaly of the inner circle: Voroshilov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and so on. They knew, for example, that it was Trotsky, not Stalin, who had dominated October and the Civil War; and they knew that Trotsky was not ‘a fascist spy’. How could Stalin tolerate the existence, let alone the constant proximity, of this little reservoir of silent truth? Was it not a daily, and a nightly, reproach and reminder?26 As earlier noted, Stalin had inflicted a blood wound on most of the men in his sanctum. This was intimate humiliation; and the collusion in Stalin’s aggrandizement took the humiliation further. Still, the survival of the cronies (increasingly precarious for all of them after the war) remains a serious lacuna in Stalin’s personality mechanism. One thing it suggests is that he never ‘came to believe’ in his own novel.

  You are inclined to imagine Stalin muttering a few words to Molotov (say) about the political utility of his personal deification, but it must have been far more aggressive than that. After all, one of the purposes of the Terror, as Tucker asserts, was to impose on the Party a dramatic revision of Marx. It was a tenet of Marxism, as we have seen, that ‘personality’ remained an ‘insignificant trifle’ (in Lenin’s phrase) when set against the master forces of history. Well, Stalin himself was a bellowed rebuttal of that notion. His Marxism would have room for ‘heroes’ – great men who, as he saw it, could detect pattern in the tormenta of events and thus urge history forward. Such a one was Iosif Vissarionovich, ‘the universal genius’, as he now came to be called. He owned the physical spaces of Russia. But he wanted the mental spaces too. He wanted to fan out into every mind.

  We cannot hope, as Stalin hoped, to be all-inclusive. Here are just a few examples.

  Astronomy. Research on sunspots was felt to have taken an un-Marxist turn. In the years of the Terror more than two dozen leading astronomers disappeared.

  History. This was naturally a dangerous trade in a period when the past was undergoing revision from above. But Party history and Russian history were far from being the only sensitive areas: parenthetical observations on Joan of Arc, the Midas legend, and Christian demonology, for example, could be taken as criminal deviations from the Moscow line. Stalin’s gavel was of course a heavy instrument. In 1937 the main school of Party historians was arrested en masse and accused of ‘terrorism’. ‘[I]t is extraordinary,’ writes Conquest, ‘how many of the leading terrorist bands were headed by historians.’ Of the 183 members of the Institute of Red Professors just under half were suppressed.

  Linguistics. In the early 1930s Stalin championed the teachings of N. Marr, who held a) that language was a class phenomenon (a superstructure over the relations of production), and b) that all words derived from the sounds ‘rosh’, ‘sal’, ‘ber’ and ‘yon’. Linguisticians who held otherwise were jailed or shot. In 1950, when Stalin was seventy (and up to his armpits in the Korean crisis), he nonetheless found the time to write or at least supervise an enraged 10,000-word denunciation of the Marrists. This is Conquest, in a quietly typical strophe: ‘“These academicians”, [Stalin] was horrified to have to report, “had arrogated to themselves too much power.”’ The Marrists were now removed in their turn.

  Biology. ‘Sta
lin made his most notorious intervention into scientific life,’ Tucker succinctly notes,

  by supporting an upstart plant breeder, Trofim Lysenko, in a series of sensational projects to make agriculture flourish, which came to nothing, and a crusade to destroy the science of genetics, which succeeded.

  The USSR was full of little Stalins, but Trofim Lysenko was a middleweight Stalin (like Naftaly Frenkel): he was a vicious charlatan who fought the truth with the weapon of violence. Of peasant stock, and semi-educated, Lysenko followed Lamarck on the inheritance of acquired characteristics, in defiance of elementary Darwinism. Twice in 1935 Lysenko had the opportunity to address an audience that included Stalin. On both occasions he attributed his most recent failures to sabotage by hostile colleagues. Stalin, who naturally responded to this theme (wrong-headed debacles blamed on enemies), greeted the first speech with a cry of ‘Bravo, Comrade Lysenko, bravo!,’ and greeted the second with the bestowal of an Order of Lenin (the first of eight). Serious biologists were now subject to arrest, and Lysenko ‘was on his way to the total pogrom of genetics that he would carry through in 1948 with Stalin’s blessing’. He remained influential well into the 1960s.27

  Religion. It may seem inapt to consider this matter under the heading of ‘interventions’: Stalin’s activities here were hardly a matter of theological nicety. From the outset the Bolshevik line had been ‘militant atheism’. Apart from the imposition of pauperism and oppression, ‘no action of Lenin’s government’, Richard Pipes believes,

  brought greater suffering to the population at large, the so-called ‘masses’, than the profanation of its religious beliefs, the closing of the houses of worship, and the mistreatment of the clergy.

  In common with any other gathering of two or more people, organized worship was ‘viewed as prima facie evidence of counter-revolutionary intent’. The brutal mauling of the church, and particularly the Russian Orthodox Church (backwards, corrupt, and fatally compromised by its links with the Tsarist gendarmerie), was perhaps politically intelligible: hence the lootings and lynchings, the priest-hunts, the rigged trials,28 the executions. But it was the regime’s extraordinary intention to stamp out private, even individual, worship too (aiming to replace ‘faith in God with faith in science and the machine’). In one of their eerily post-modernist convulsions, the Bolsheviks deployed the weapon of orchestrated mockery: blasphemous and semi-pornographic street carnivals, with cavorting Komsomols garbed as priests, popes, rabbis. The press claimed that these parades were greeted with spontaneous delight, but the people, as a witness feelingly wrote, looked on with

  dumb horror. There were no protests in the silent streets – the years of terror had done their work – but nearly everyone tried to turn off the road when it met this shocking procession. I, personally, as a witness of the Moscow carnival, may certify that there was not a drop of popular pleasure in it. The parade moved along empty streets and its attempts at creating laughter were met with dull silence …

  Yes, and what kind of laughter would that have been? During this period, church weddings were declared void (and funeral rites forbidden). Laughter and Leninism: the unholiest marriage of all.

  Quiescent in the later years of NEP, the assault on religion was resumed in 1929. While he collectivized and dekulakized, Stalin also desacralized. Priests were associated with kulaks, and classified with them, and shared their fate. One admires the scandalized tone of this Chekist’s accusation: ‘the local priest … came out openly against the closing of the church’. Normally the bells were taken first (their tolling, it was perfunctorily explained, disturbed the rest of hardworking atheists) and later melted down for industrial use; icons were smashed or burned; the profane harlequinades were revived, with, assuredly, even less success than in the cities. By the end of 1930,80 per cent of the village churches had been closed, or converted to such uses as storage points for kulaks awaiting deportation. Meanwhile, ‘proper steps’ had been taken ‘to prevent prayer meetings at home’.

  It seems safe to say that by June 1941 religion had disappeared from Stalin’s alternate world. But then reality reintruded, in the form of a rampant Wehrmacht: the greatest war machine ever assembled, and heading straight for him. He knew that his citizens would not lay down their lives for socialism. What would they lay down their lives for? Consulting this sudden reality, Stalin saw that religion was still there – that religion, funnily enough, belonged to the real.

  26 Stalin worked with these men and spent most evenings in their company. Dinner would usually end around 4 A.M. Day became night for all the apparatchiki, to the further detriment of their Kremlin complexions.

  27 To the mortification of Sergei Nikitich Khrushchev, who was a rocket scientist and kept telling his father that Lysenkoism was without rational foundation. See the memoir Khrushchev on Khrushchev, a partial, limited, and strangely honourable book.

  28 In these trials of 1922 dozens of prelates were charged with obstructing the confiscation of church valuables. Lenin was again using the 1921 famine as a political convenience: he claimed that these valuables would be used to defray humanitarian aid. They would not be so used. Solzhenitsyn gives us a moment of transcendental hypocrisy during the trial of Patriarch Tikhon. ‘[S]o it was sacrilege according to the laws of the church,’ said the Presiding Judge, ‘but what was it from the point of view of mercy?’

  Voices from the Yezhovshchina29

  (i.)

  This is the voice of Stepan Podlubny (b. 1914), a factory-school apprentice:

  6 December 1937. No one will ever know how I made it through the year of 1937 … I’ll cross it out like an unnecessary page, I’ll cross it out and banish it from my mind though the black spot the massive ugly black spot like a thick blood stain on my clothes, will be with me most likely for the rest of my life.

  It will remain because my life during these 341 days of 1937 has been as ugly and disgusting as the clotted blood that oozes out in a thick red mass from under the corpse of a man dead from the plague.

  The source of Stepan’s distress is revealed in an earlier entry: he has been an informer since 1932. (Solzhenitsyn writes: ‘I hesitate to sully the shining bronze countenance of the Sentinel of the Revolution, yet I must: they also arrested persons who refused to become informers.’) The Podlubnys had been dispossessed as kulaks in 1929. Stepan’s mother concealed her origins and was sentenced to eight years for this crime. The extracts end as follows:

  They consider her a danger to society. You’d think they’d caught a bandit, but even bandits get lighter sentences than that. Well, so what, you can’t break down a stone wall with just your head. Can this be the end of justice on earth. No there will be justice. Many people have perished in the name of justice, and as long as society exists, people will be struggling for justice. Justice will come. The truth will come.

  Many years later Stepan Podlubny donated his diary to the Central Popular Archives as ‘an act of repentance’.

  (ii.)

  This is the voice of Leonid Potyomkin (b. 1914), an engineer who would later be Vice Minister of Geology (1965–75):

  Welcome to the year 1935 in the country of Socialism! … After class I go to a lecture: ‘The Low-life Scum of the Zinoviev Group and the City Administrative Committee Decision about the Party Meeting at the Mining Institute’. The speaker is a charming young woman, a student in our institute’s graduating class. She is a good speaker and her Party spirit is enchanting to watch and to listen to …

  [10 July 1935]. The perfect speech of the commissar of the regiment serves as an example of cogency in its presentation of clear thoughts penetrating the entire depths of the essence of phenomena. In terms of its enthusiasm, the clarity of its sound structure and the delightful culture of its language. With a deep awareness of the meaning of the words I uplift my voice with astounding force and join the chorus as we march to my favourite song, the march from the film Happy Fellows.

  Leonid had been to see Happy Fellows (which was incidentally the toas
t of Stalin’s screening-room) back in January, when he doggedly noted that its ‘cheerfulness and musicality make for a pleasant spectacle, arousing cheerfulness in the spectator’.

  (iii.)

  This is the voice of Vladimir Stavsky (b. 1900), General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers and Chief Editor of Novy mir:30

  What happiness!

  To celebrate the New Year with the people nearest and dearest to my heart! My dear, darling Lyulya! We’ve been through so much suffering, so much sorrow! But now the path to happiness is before us! The path of heroism and triumph! … You are so dear to me! A fellow human being in the best sense of the word. The snow is pouring down from the spruces and pines, I know. The night is darkest blue, and there’s not a star in the sky. But in our hearts, yours and mine, we have stars, and sky, and happiness! …

  My darling! The whole richness of life appears before my eyes, all of life beats in my heart, my beloved!

  And I want to live, together with the epoch, together with Stalin, together with you, my beloved, my darling!

  And we will triumph!

  And we will be happy!

  I love you! My darling!

  (iv.)

  This is the voice of Lyubov Vasilievna Shaporina (b. 1879), the founder of the Leningrad Puppet Theatre and the wife of the composer Yury Shaporin: