Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  Zinoviev and Kamenev were taken into the NKVD’s custody in Moscow and accused of having organised a terrorist conspiracy with their oppositionist followers. Stalin had never ceased to worry about the capacity of the oppositions of left and right to return to power, especially if their ideas had resonance among current party officials. The suppression of successive groupings under Lominadze, Eismont and Ryutin gave no cheer. There could easily be others lurking in Moscow and the provinces. What is more, Stalin knew that Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev had not lost hope of restoration to power. He maintained surveillance over them through the eavesdropping facilities of the political police.24 He knew that they hated and despised him. Bukharin, while professing respect for Stalin to his face, was privately denouncing him. Kamenev and Zinoviev were contemptuous in the extreme. And Trotski was at liberty abroad editing the Bulletin of the Opposition and sending his emissaries into the USSR. Stalin was aware that, despite what they pretended, his party enemies felt they had a lot in common with each other. There was a distinct possibility that they would establish a clandestine coalition to undermine Stalin and his Politburo. Trotski’s capacity to maintain contact was well established. When sixty-eight of his supporters were arrested in Moscow in January 1933, the OGPU discovered a cache of Trotski’s latest articles.25

  There was also a surge of resentment throughout society at the effects of Stalin’s policies. Peasants had been battered into the collective farms and detested the new agricultural system, and hundreds of thousands of kulak families had been badly abused. Workers who failed to be promoted to managerial posts experienced a drastic deterioration in their conditions. Wages, food and shelter were seldom better than rudimentary. Higher up the social system too the bitterness was intense: engineers, intellectuals, economic experts and even managers bore a grudge about the harassment they suffered. The sense of civic disgruntlement was deep and widespread. Former members of other parties as well as defeated communist oppositionists were rancorous about the hostile sanctions applied against them. Whole national and religious groups prayed for a miracle that would remove the burden of Stalin’s policies from their shoulders. There was plenty of human material across the USSR which could, if conditions changed, be diverted into a coup against his Politburo.

  Zinoviev and Kamenev refused to ‘confess’ to conspiratorial organisation. But faced with a long prison sentence as well as permanent separation from involvement with communism, they cracked and admitted political and moral responsibility for Nikolaev’s action. The Politburo — or rather Stalin — decided that Zinoviev was the more dangerous of the two. Zinoviev was given ten years, Kamenev five. The NKVD did not stop at that. Six hundred and sixty-three past supporters of the Leningrad Opposition were rounded up and exiled to Yakutia and other parts of eastern Siberia.26 The incrimination of former internal oppositions continued. Trotski was regularly reviled in Pravda and Izvestiya. At the same time as the verdict was passed on Zinoviev and Kamenev it was announced that an exchange of party cards was to take place. The purpose was to sieve out party members who had failed to carry out the minimum of their duties or had behaved improperly or even had once belonged to internal party oppositions. No judicial consequences were anticipated for those who were to have their membership cards withdrawn. But a signal was being given that a campaign of persecution which had as yet been confined to ex-oppositionist leaders and their supporters was not to stop at the gates of the party. All had to prove themselves loyal to the Politburo or risk expulsion and demotion.

  The menacing nature of the exchange of party cards was embodied in a secret directive sent out by the Party Secretariat on 13 May 1935.27 Stalin was rampant. The Secretariat explained that adventurers, enemies of the party and outright spies had got hold of such cards. The party had been infiltrated by alien and anti-Soviet elements. On 20 May the Politburo intervened with a directive specifying that all former Trotskyists outside prison or labour camp without exception should automatically be dispatched to forced labour in the Gulag for a minimum of three years.28 Stalin’s revenge on his old adversaries and detractors had been years in coming. Now it was revealed in its primitive fury. On 20 November a further stage was reached when the imprisoned Zinoviev and Kamenev as well as the deported Trotski were charged with espionage on behalf of hostile foreign powers.

  Members of Stalin’s group were identifying historic oppositional activity with current state treason. Veteran heroes of the communist party were being denounced as mercenary agents of Western interests. They were like rabbits rigid with fear as the fox approaches. Flight was anyway impossible. All they could hope for was that the rest of the Politburo would somehow restrain the General Secretary.29 But the political mood was not encouraging. Stalin had quietly returned to the assumption that the surest way of strengthening both his personal position and the buoyancy of economic development was to exert heavy pressure on Gosplan and the People’s Commissariats for raised industrial tempos. Anticipating opposition, he strove to exploit efforts made by individual workers to challenge the conventional methods of production. In the Don Basin the miner Alexei Stakhanov was reported as having hewed 102 tons of coal in a single six-hour stint in August 1935. This was fourteen times the norm set by the mine’s managers. Stalin took this as demonstration that passive resistance to the Second Five-Year Plan persisted. Stakhanov was summoned to Moscow and showered with honours and gifts. The Stakhanovite movement was spread to all sectors of the economy, even to farms and to the railways.

  Stakhanovites could not break records without managers making special arrangements for them. Other workers were compelled to give auxiliary support. This disrupted the pattern of general production and output was negatively affected. Moreover, the Stakhanovites cut corners in their efforts. Broken machinery was often the result. Yet Stalin ignored the evidence. Scientific approaches to production were abandoned as the enthusiasm for getting workers to earn privileges by increased output prevailed.30

  Things could have turned out badly for the specialists in the economy — the managers, foremen, engineers and planners — if ever the suspicion of them encouraged by the Stakhanovite movement had taken the penal form applied to former oppositionists. It was a close-run thing. Stalin in 1935 did not confine his persecuting passion to the dual repression of former party oppositionists and current suspect party members. He also turned his anger upon whole social categories of citizens. The NKVD was ordered to clear Leningrad of people who by virtue of their occupation or status before 1917 were deemed intrinsically hostile to the USSR. Aristocrats, landlords, businessmen and their families in their thousands were expelled to smaller towns and villages with just the minimum of personal possessions. Over eleven thousand individuals were deported by the end of March from Leningrad,31 and the policy was reproduced in the other large cities. The Politburo under Stalin’s leadership was beginning to purge the cities of alleged anti-Soviet elements in much the same way as it had done to the rural areas by means of dekulakisation from 1929.

  Yet the current specialists, although they were harassed at work, were not strongly persecuted unless they visibly obstructed official measures. They benefited from the desire of individuals in Stalin’s entourage to hang on to them. Ordzhonikidze, People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry since 1932, protected his managers and planners not only because he thought they were being defamed but also because he recognised that he would not fulfil his institution’s quotas for the Five-Year Plan without their expertise.

  The benefits of economic consolidation were anyway beginning to be demonstrated. Steel output in 1935 was over double the amount for 1932.32 The Second Five-Year Plan, like the First, was recurrently altered as it was being implemented. Among the inevitable modifications was an increase in the budget for armaments production after Hitler became German Chancellor in January 1933 and the USSR had to assume that war with the Third Reich might soon occur.33 This obviously involved a deferment of achieving the goals set for consumer goods. But generally the Kremlin was sat
isfied with the progress being achieved. Although policy was made and announced in an atmosphere of crisis, Politburo members including Stalin gave no impression in their correspondence or discussions that they thought that there was serious active resistance to their purposes or that advances in economic development were not being made. The progress continued into 1936 and beyond. Gross industrial output in 1937, the final year of the Second Five-Year Plan, had increased by three fifths over output in 1932. Even agriculture began to recover from the traumas of collectivisation. Gross agricultural output rose by about a half in the same period.34

  Stalin’s own activity was still ambiguous. In 1935–6 he oversaw the elaboration of a new USSR Constitution. He involved many leading figures in politics and culture in the work; even Bukharin at his editorial offices in Izvestiya contributed to the early variants.35 Ultimate authority, however, stayed with Stalin and the Politburo. In practice this meant Stalin. And Stalin, the relentless persecutor of ex-oppositionists and the so-called ‘former people’, sanctioned the granting of full civic rights under the Constitution to all Soviet citizens regardless of their social, religious or political backgrounds. Universal equality of treatment was proclaimed. Soviet citizens were guaranteed pay, food, education, shelter and employment. No other constitution in the world was so expansive in the benefits it proffered. At a time when all his political manoeuvres were at their most opaque Stalin presented a baffling persona to observers in 1936. The Constitution was so comprehensively benign in most of its clauses that some thought he was engaged in subterfuge. Perhaps it was designed mainly for gullible foreign eyes in the interests of the USSR’s international relations. Possibly he also intended it as propaganda at home without seriously intending to realise its contents in the foreseeable future. Stalin had a long record of disguising oppression and exploitation in the Soviet Union and claiming the country as a paradise for most of its citizens.

  Introducing the Constitution in November 1936, Stalin proclaimed: ‘Socialism, which is the first phase of communism, has basically been achieved in our country.’ Breaking with his earlier idea that resistance to communism grew fiercer as the accomplishments of the regime mounted, he welcomed the revocation of the 1918 disfranchisement of the old political, economic, social and religious elites. But he brooked no challenge to the orientation of the Politburo. The Constitution defined the USSR as ‘a socialist state of the workers and peasants’. Despite their constitutional rights, citizens would not be permitted to overturn the Soviet order. Stalin, glossing various clauses, openly stated that there would be no weakening of the communist dictatorship.

  Some citizens, however, failed to understand the practical limits to the Constitution’s realisability. Complaints and denunciations were sent to the Kremlin on the assumption that the authorities had a genuine commitment to comprehensive civic rights.36 Of course most people saw through the illusion. The according of full civil rights to ‘former people’ meant that they at best gained the rights of the oppressed remainder of Soviet citizens — and there was no official intention to reform this basic situation. The USSR was ruled arbitrarily and with massive repression. Most people expected little from the new Constitution. At a funeral meeting someone shouted: ‘One dog — Kirov — has been killed. That still leaves another dog, Stalin, alive.’37 Resentment was dire in the country-side.38 Few citizens expected much advantage to accrue to them from the Constitution. Although the communist party was not mentioned in any of its clauses, the party’s political monopoly was plainly going to be maintained so long as Stalin remained in power. The electoral system was as much a fiction as its Soviet predecessor. The NKVD laid its reports on Stalin’s desk. Whatever he had been planning by means of the Constitution, he was left in no doubt that he had not fooled most people. Everyone knew that the party and police intended to exercise as fierce a dictatorship as before.

  Other events in the second half of 1936 signalled that Stalin was far from content with political conditions. His measures, always brutal, were descending to the depths of depravity. On 29 June 1936 a secret message went from the Secretariat to local party bodies alleging the discovery of the ‘terrorist activities of the Trotyskist–Zinovievite block’. Evidently the judicial sentences in the previous year had not satisfied Stalin, and Zinoviev and Kamenev were arraigned in August in a Moscow show trial. They duly confessed to having led, in concert with Trotski abroad, an Anti-Soviet Trotskyist–Zinovievite Centre which systematically carried out assassinations in the USSR. Budënny idiotically suggested getting the Comintern to capture Trotski and ship him back for trial with the two main defendants.39 Zinoviev and Kamenev were already broken men before their miserable appearance in court. At Stalin’s behest they were subjected to continual revilement and mockery throughout the proceedings. The verdict was execution by shooting. Zinoviev and Kamenev had been told that, if they confessed to involvement in the Kirov ‘conspiracy’ in 1934, their sentences would be commuted. But Stalin had tricked them. Early next morning, before any judicial appeal could be considered, they were hauled out of their cells and shot.

  Just as ominous was the change in personnel in the NKVD. Neither Genrikh Yagoda nor his predecessor Vladimir Menzhinski had always pleased Stalin. He had had to goad them into the extreme forms of action which he advocated from the late 1920s. They were not his placemen even though they never ultimately failed to carry out his commands. Yagoda tried to ingratiate himself by telling Stalin every time a fresh cache of Trotskyist material was found.40 But it was not enough for Stalin. He wanted someone at the head of the NKVD who would be able to anticipate his wishes rather than respond to them, sometimes slowly and not very efficiently.

  On 26 September 1936 he thought he had found that man in Nikolai Yezhov. Yagoda was sacked by Politburo decision and Yezhov took his place. Yezhov was a party official who had risen steadily through the ranks since 1917. He joined the Assignments and Records Department of the Party Secretariat in 1927, becoming its head in 1930. At the time of his appointment as People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs he was both Secretary of the Party Central Committee and Chairman of the Party Control Commission. Stalin had seen him at work and appreciated his fanatical commitment to rooting out and annihilating the adversaries of the ascendant party leadership. In 1935 Yezhov, with Stalin’s encouragement and editorial assistance, had produced a ‘theoretical work’, never published, on the internal party oppositions. Entitled ‘From Factionalism to Open Counter-Revolution’, it intensified the menace to everyone — especially the leaders — who had ever failed to accept Stalin’s line of policy. To have been an oppositionist in the past had become the same as to be guilty of treason in the present.41 On being appointed People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, Yezhov was asked to devote nine-tenths of his time to the NKVD.42

  Since December 1934 Stalin had had the legislative and organisational basis for an expanded state terror in the form of the troiki. He had practised terror widely but fitfully in 1935–6. He had also shown a degree of self-restraint as had his associates, and his rule was increasingly characterised by economic advance and social quiescence. But resentment was deep in society even though active resistance had been quelled. Although oppositionists and ‘former people’ were being hunted down, many had escaped capture. Links remained between Trotski and his followers; Bukharin was not the sole leading ex-oppositionist leader who hoped for a change of personnel and politics at the apex of Soviet politics. As yet Stalin’s victims, at least in the course of the Second Five-Year Plan, fell into restricted categories. But there was no guarantee that this would always remain the case.

  Stalin’s earlier career, especially in the Civil War and during the First Five-Year Plan, pointed to the dangers of the situation. He was always tempted to settle accounts violently with ‘enemies’, and he was angry when his entourage failed to identify them to him. He never lacked eagerness to take the initiative. He was at his most dangerous when he sensed peril for himself and the Soviet order. Sooner or later, Stalin,
the most determined driver of the vehicle of terror, would again grasp the steering wheel and turn the key. The years from the end of 1932 through to late 1936 witnessed occasional ignition and abrupt forward movement. The machinery responded fitfully to Stalin’s guidance. When he turned the key the result was unpredictable. Sometimes the battery was flat and needed topping up. On other occasions the plugs were too damp and all he could achieve was a brief, sputtering sound. But in fact the vehicle was roadworthy; and when the circumstances were more favourable in 1937, the driver would be able to start and keep it running at full speed until he decided to bring it to a halt a year later.

  29. RULING THE NATIONS

  The communist party administered a multinational state. Russians constituted 53 per cent of the population and Stalin tried to associate himself with the Russian nation.1 This tendency of his had grown over the 1920s and early 1930s. Stalin and Lenin had fallen out when Lenin demanded gentler treatment for the Georgian communist leadership than Stalin approved.

  Young Vasili Stalin once said to his sister Svetlana: ‘But you know, our father used to be a Georgian.’2 The boy had been brought up in Russia speaking Russian and thought of his father as a Russian. Vasili was making a childish error: Stalin had not magically become a Russian. It is true that Stalin once referred to himself as a ‘Russified Georgian Asiatic’ and denied that he was a ‘European’.3 This was a rare attempt at national self-description after the October Revolution, but it has to be treated with circumspection. Georgia, according to the geographers, belongs to Asia since it lies to the south of the peaks of the Caucasus. Consequently the combination of ‘Georgian’ and ‘Asiatic’ is perplexing. Presumably it stemmed to some degree from a Georgian sense of cultural superiority over the peoples of the East. Stalin in any case used the phrase not in public but at a private dinner party in Voroshilov’s apartment. He blurted it out in a light-hearted apology to the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov for interrupting his speech to the guests. By calling himself an Asiatic, a pejorative term among Europeans, Stalin was using humour to lighten the atmosphere. As always his comments must be interpreted in the light of the circumstances of their expression.