The enthusiasm of Stalin’s associates for political repression stemmed from the traditions of Bolshevism. The discourse of the Soviet state had always been extremist in tone and content. Terms such as ‘anti-Soviet elements’ and ‘enemies of the people’ had been in common use from the Civil War. The notion that whole social categories deserved harsh persecution was widespread. Terrorist methods had been approved and ‘theorised’ by Lenin and Trotski.15 Show trials and the systematic fabrication of charges had been commonplace since the Socialist-Revolutionary leaders were arrested and sentenced in 1922.16 The practice of accusing those who opposed the Bolsheviks of having direct links with foreign governments and their intelligence agencies had been rife since the suppression of the Kronstadt Mutiny in 1921. The campaign of arrests during the First Five-Year Plan resuscitated such tendencies. The sense that people had to choose to be either for or against the October Revolution was universal among Bolsheviks; and all of them knew that the Soviet state was beleaguered by the forces of world capitalism. Stalin and his associates were a brutal lot. But a party lacking in gentility had produced them.
His associates were not just ingratiating themselves with Stalin when they used such language. Certainly they strove to please the Boss, and several were careerists. But many of them served and respected him also because they shared many of his ideas. This was especially true of Molotov and Kaganovich. The Great Terror, while being instigated by the single-minded leadership of Joseph Stalin, was also a reflection — however distorted a reflection — of the mind-set of Bolshevism as it had been imposed on the party by the mid-1930s. The group around Stalin had its jargon and attitudes. Its members made proposals within a particular ambience. Stalin gathered further associates who were closely in line with his basic orientation. Yezhov, who started working in the Central Committee Secretariat in 1930, was a noteworthy example. Even careerist newcomers probably came to imbibe several of the basic tenets.
Yet Stalin was the moving spirit in the coterie. He was proud of his position in the USSR; and when he looked abroad, there were few individuals he regarded with admiration. Adolf Hitler was one of the few. The occasion for Stalin to express his esteem came in June 1934 when the Führer ordered the German armed forces — the Wehrmacht — to arrest and kill the members of the SA. This was an act of political mass murder. The SA had been the paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party in its rise to power and its leader was Hitler’s associate Ernst Röhm. When Röhm started to criticise Hitler’s collusion with the German political and economic establishment, he signed the death certificate for himself and his organisation. Stalin relished the news of the Night of the Long Knives: ‘What a great fellow! How well he pulled this off!’17 It took one to know one. But he said this in a casual chat with Mikoyan: the significance of Stalin’s remark only seemed sinister to him in retrospect. Perhaps others in the gang talked in a similar fashion. What was characteristic about Stalin is that he meant every word he said about Hitler with passionate intensity, and was willing to act in the same fashion when the opportunity arose.
The psychological and intellectual scaffolding for Stalin’s proclivities was occluded from the public. He greatly admired Lenin. But among the other objects of his admiration was Ivan the Terrible. Most educated people in the USSR would have been horrified by this. Tsar Ivan was associated with arbitrary rule and terror as well as an erratic personality. But Stalin thought differently. For years he brooded over the life and rule of the sixteenth-century tsar.
At a Kremlin reception on 8 November 1937 Stalin accused the leading oppositionists of planning the territorial disintegration of the USSR in league with Germany, Britain, France and Japan. He vowed to destroy all of them. If anyone sought to detach the smallest piece of Soviet territory, he declared, ‘he is an enemy, an accursed enemy of the state and the peoples of the USSR’. Then came the climax:18
And we will annihilate every such enemy, even if he were to be an Old Bolshevik! We will annihilate his entire clan, his family! We will mercilessly annihilate everyone who by his actions and thoughts (yes, thoughts too) assails the unity of the socialist state. For the total annihilation of all enemies, both themselves and their clan!
This was hardly Marxist in style or content. Was it perhaps a residue of Stalin’s extreme attitude to his upbringing in Georgia where, at least in the mountains, the traditions of the blood feud persisted? This cannot be the exclusive explanation. Although Georgian traditions may have encouraged him to seek revenge for any damage, they did not involve the assumption that the destruction of entire extended families was desirable.19 A more plausible influence was Stalin’s reading of early Russian history — he had long been an enthusiastic reader of R. Vipper’s biography of Ivan the Terrible.20 Dedicating himself to exterminating not only individual leaders but also their relatives, Stalin was reproducing the attitudes of Ivan the Terrible.
He continued to ponder the springs of human endeavour. He put one trait of character above all others: ‘Lenin was right to say that a person lacking the courage to act at the crucial moment cannot be a true Bolshevik leader.’21 He wrote this in a letter to Kaganovich in 1932. Two years later a similar sentiment surfaced in one of his brief messages to his mother: ‘The children send their respects to you. Since Nadya’s death, of course, my personal life is heavy. But so be it: a courageous person must always stay courageous.’22 Probably Stalin was expressing himself sincerely. (Perhaps he was also trying to convince himself that he was valorous.) All acquaintances were impressed by his will power. Even the wilful Kaganovich was bendable to his purposes. But this was not enough for Stalin, who wanted to appear not merely strong-minded but also courageous. Such a virtue was to remain a dominant theme in his thinking; he was to emphasise the need for it in the very last speech he improvised to the Central Committee in October 1952, just months before his death.23
His style of thinking can be glimpsed in the jottings he made in the 1939 edition of Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism. Stalin studied this dour work on epistemology despite all the practical matters of state he had to decide. He scattered a commentary in the margins. Stalin savoured Lenin’s polemical attacks, scribbling down phrases such as ‘Ha! Ha!’ and even ‘Oi Mama! Well, what a nightmare!’24 His mental fixation with Lenin was evident from the way he repeatedly copied out Lenin’s name in Latin script.25 Yet the most intriguing thing is what he wrote on the flyleaf at the end of the book:26
NB! If a person is:
1) strong (spiritually),
2) active,
3) intelligent (or capable),
then he is a good person regardless of any other ‘vices’.
1) weakness,
2) laziness,
3) stupidity
are the only thing [sic] that can be called vices.
Of all the reactions to Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism this is surely the oddest. It is hard to believe that it was the reading of the book that provoked Stalin’s comments; probably he simply used the flyleaf as a convenient space for ideas that came to mind.
Stalin, communing with himself, used the religious language of the spirit and of sin and vice. Human endeavour apparently could be encapsulated only in such terms: evidently Marxism would not fulfil this task by itself. Stalin was reverting to the discourse of the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary; his early schooling had left an indelible imprint.
The content of the commentary, though, is deeply unChristian; it is reminiscent more of Niccolò Machiavelli and Friedrich Nietzsche than of the Bible. For Stalin the criterion of goodness was not morality but effectiveness. Individuals were to be judged for their inner strength, assiduity, practicality and cleverness. Any blemishes on the escutcheon of a career were forgivable if accompanied by substantial achievements in the service of the cause. Furthermore, the fact that the characteristics despised by Stalin were weakness, idleness and stupidity is revealing. Stalin the mass killer slept easily at night. Not for him the uneasiness of wearing the crown of state: he adored po
wer. But he was also self-demanding. He wanted action and wished it to be based on sound judgement, and he could not abide sloth and lack of intelligent commitment. He was offering himself the plaudits of history. Judging his own long and bloody career in revolutionary politics, he found nothing to reproach. But like a sixteenth-century Calvinist he felt the need to keep asking himself whether he really met his own exacting standards. Gruff and blunt as he was among his associates, he had episodes of introspection. But he did not torment himself. The very process of laying out the criteria of judgement apparently allayed such doubts as he had about himself. He grew into his own myth.
The fact that he jotted down his remarks in a copy of a work by Lenin may not have been an accident: Stalin measured himself by Lenin’s standard.27 The influence was not merely ideological. Stalin had seen Lenin at close quarters and abidingly respected and even revered his memory. But the language used in the jottings was not especially Leninist. Possibly Stalin’s style of amoralism came not from Marxism– Leninism but from a much earlier set of ideas. He read Machiavelli’s The Prince and annotated his own copy of it. (Alas, the copy has disappeared from the archives.)28 His insistence on the importance of courage could well have derived from Machiavelli’s supreme demand on the ruler: namely that he should show vertù. This is a word barely translatable into either Russian or English; but it is identified with manliness, endeavour, courage and excellence. Stalin, if this is correct, saw himself as the embodiment of Machiavellian vertù.
His was a complex mind. He had a personality prone to mistrustful fantasy and, tragically, he had the opportunity to act out his own psychological damage by persecuting millions of his people. He perceived enemies everywhere; his whole cognitive tendency was to assume that any slight problem in his personal or political life was the result of malevolent human agency. He was also drawn to suspecting the existence of plots of the widest nature. He did not limit this attitude to the USSR. Contemplating the anti-British Indian National Congress in 1938, he assured a reception of newly elected USSR Supreme Soviet delegates in 1938 that more than half were ‘agents bought up by English money’.29 That the British government possessed paid informers is beyond dispute. But the idea that so large a proportion were regularly denouncing Mahatma Gandhi is without substance although it may indicate the state of mind of its advocate. In the USSR, where his word was law, Stalin was seldom content to allow for the possibility that a particular victim might have been acting alone. His preference was to link his ‘enemies’ with a conspiracy spread out across the world and connected with the intelligence services of hostile foreign powers. His associates reinforced his propensities. They had always felt politically besieged.
It was a feeling that increased after they drove out the party oppositions and undertook campaigns of immense brutality in the country. They treated all people who resisted or simply criticised them as rubbish to be annihilated. Not all of them lusted after terror, yet some did and many more were willing collaborators. Every one of these associates had reason to be fearful. The deep resentment across Soviet society was real, and they could not be confident that an alternative political leadership would not arise and overthrow them.
Stalin did not suffer from a psychosis (which is the word nowadays preferred by doctors for madness). Unlike people who are classified as mentally ill, he did not experience episodes which stopped him functioning with day-to-day competence at work. He was not a paranoid schizophrenic. Yet he had tendencies in the direction of a paranoid and sociopathic personality disorder. There was something very odd about him, as his close comrades sooner or later discerned: he was not fully in control of himself. Unease in his presence was not a new phenomenon. From boyhood onwards his friends, while recognising his positive qualities, had noted a deeply uncongenial side. He was extraordinarily resentful and vengeful. He coddled his grievances for years. He was supremely casual about the effects of the violence he commissioned. In 1918–20 and from the late 1920s he had terrorised mainly people who belonged to social groups hostile to the October Revolution; from the mid-1930s he began to victimise not only such groups but also individuals known personally to him — and many of them were veteran party comrades. His capacity to turn on friends and subordinates and subject them to torture, forced labour and execution manifested a deeply disordered personality.
There were factors in his earlier life which must have pushed him down this road. He had a Georgian sense of honour and revenge. Notions of getting even with adversaries never left him. He had a Bolshevik viewpoint on Revolution. Violence, dictatorship and terror were methods he and fellow party veterans took to be normal. The physical extermination of enemies was entirely acceptable to them. Stalin’s personal experiences accentuated the tendencies. He never got over them: the beatings in his childhood, the punitive regime of the Seminary, the disregard for him as a young activist, the deprecation of his talent in Revolution and Civil War and the assault on his reputation in the 1920s.
This is not the whole story. The environment around him in the 1930s really was a threatening one. His own policies had of course made it so. Nevertheless he had plenty of reason to feel that he and his regime were under menace. At the end of the 1920s he had introduced an order which was widely and deeply detested across the country. His speeches had left no doubt that official policies were of his making. His cult confirmed the impression. Kulaks, priests and nepmen had suffered under the First Five-Year Plan. It was not at all outlandish to presume that millions of victims, if they had survived, thirsted after the removal of Stalin and his regime. He knew that his rivals wanted rid of him and thought him unreliable, stupid and dangerous. He got used to planning on his own and to discarding associates at the least sign that they refused to go along with him. He saw enemies everywhere and intended to deal with all of them severely, however long he might have to wait. The situation was immensely dangerous. Stalin was an oddball. Culture, life-experience and, probably, basic personality made him dangerous too.
For all his sociability, moreover, Stalin was a lonely man — and such friends as he made were either found wanting in loyalty or died. He no longer had domestic stability or permanent emotional support. His first wife had died young. His life as a clandestine party organiser had been disrupted and unsatisfactory, and he had found it next to impossible to make friends in exile. (Not that he had tried very hard.) His second wife had killed herself; and, among his best friends in power, Kirov had been assassinated and Ordzhonikidze had eventually opposed his strategic ideas. Solitary again, Stalin had no peace of mind. He was a human explosion waiting to happen.
There was a vicious circle in the interaction between what was happening in the country and what he thought about it. His policies had produced a ghastly situation. Millions had died in the course of collectivisation in Ukraine, south Russia, the north Caucasus and Kazakhstan. Repression had been massive in town and countryside. The popular standard of living had plummeted. Resistance had taken the form of rural revolts and industrial strikes, and the ascendant party leadership could not depend entirely even upon the armed forces. Yet rather than change his policies Stalin introduced greater violence to the tasks of governance. Violence in turn bred stronger resentment and this induced Stalin, already a profoundly suspicious and vengeful ruler, to intensify and broaden the application of state coercion. The situation brought out the worst in him. In fact he had plenty of badness in him to be brought out long before he held despotic power. To explain is not to excuse: Stalin was as wicked a man as has ever lived. His was a mind that found terror on a grand scale deeply congenial. When he had an opportunity to implement his ideas, he acted with a barbaric determination with few parallels in world history.
31. THE GREAT TERRORIST
If Stalin’s mind had a predisposition towards mass terror, it remains to be explained why he abruptly intensified and expanded repressive measures in the last months of 1936. For two years he had been gearing up the machinery of state violence. He had crushed active critica
l groupings. He had arrested thousands of former members of the United Opposition and killed Zinoviev and Kamenev. He had deported tens of thousands of ‘former people’ from the large cities. He had filled the Gulag system of camps to bursting point with real and potential enemies of the regime. His personal supremacy was unchallenged. He suborned his entourage into accepting his main demands in policy; and when he sensed a lack of total compliance, he replaced personnel with ease. The procedural mechanisms had been simplified since Kirov’s assassination. Stalin still formally consulted the Politburo but its members were merely asked to ratify measures which the NKVD proceeded to apply through its troiki. Party rule had ceased to function in its customary fashion.
A further step in the direction of what became known as the Great Terror was taken at the December 1936 Central Committee plenum.1 Stalin let his dogs off the leash and set them on Bukharin and the veteran Rightists. Yezhov led the pack, declaring that Bukharin had known all about the terrorist plans and actions of the (non-existent) Trotskyist–Zinovievite block. The scheme was obvious. Yezhov had been sanctioned to widen the net of former oppositionist victims and to brand all of them as being in league with each other and working for foreign powers. Bukharin for months had been living in fear of something like this happening. When it occurred, it took him by surprise. He was still editor of Izvestiya. He had written pieces which, if read between the lines, could be interpreted as warnings about the effects of Stalin’s policies; but he had kept out of contact with the survivors of the Left Opposition. He had had nothing to do with Zinoviev and Kamenev for years. Yet Stalin and Yezhov were hunting him down. Bukharin demanded to confront those of Yezhov’s prisoners who were incriminating him. This was arranged in the presence of Stalin and the Politburo. Dragged out of the Lubyanka, Yevgeni Kulikov claimed that Bukharin had headed a Union Centre.2 Georgi Pyatakov went further, claiming that Bukharin had liaised regularly with known Trotskyists like himself.3
Stalin: A Biography Page 44
