The Allies

by Winston Groom

  In May 1922 the fifty-two-year-old Lenin suffered a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed and his speech distorted. He slowly managed to overcome these afflictions but remained mostly invalided and isolated, while Stalin, now forty-three, consolidated power in his new position as general secretary of the new regime.

  Soviet politics in those times involved a web of intrigue not seen since the bewildering days of the Borgias. One of Stalin’s protégés tried to explain why it was so easy for members of the party to change their views, or to betray each other. “For the party’s sake,” he said, “you must…force yourself to believe that white is black.” All of this nefarious behavior had begun to instill in Stalin’s peasant mind a healthy kind of paranoia. He always saw himself as a survivor, but never by accident. There were always enemies to be dealt with.1

  As he recovered, Lenin began to fear that Stalin was setting himself up to replace him, and the leader’s feelings for his trusted protégé began to change. He confided to his wife that Stalin was “not intelligent,” and that, being a Georgian, he was “Asiatic,” a pejorative. Lenin also had begun to have political disagreements with Stalin, and his first notions of removing him from power began to take shape.2

  Stalin continued maneuvering against anyone he considered competition. He became aware that Lenin distrusted him, but he persisted in his subservient manners, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It did, soon enough, in the autumn of 1922, when Lenin quietly embraced Stalin’s archenemy Leon Trotsky as the future leader of the Soviet Union. Stalin had been secretly informed of this union, however, and was thoroughly alarmed. Knowing he could not stand up to a Lenin-Trotsky combination, Stalin took measures to head it off.

  Then Lenin’s health took a turn for the worse, and his doctors demanded complete rest. Stalin seized on this diagnosis to seal Lenin off forever. Just before Christmas of 1922, he carried a resolution to the Bolshevik Central Committee assuming “personal responsibility for the isolation of Comrade Lenin.” There would be no more meetings. Friends and family were forbidden to discuss politics with the leader. Stalin took personal authority over correspondence to and from Lenin, who remained uninformed of this act of treachery.3

  The plan did not work out as Stalin had hoped. Lenin’s wife allowed her husband a congratulatory phone call to Trotsky, whom he wished to thank for a vote in the Central Committee that he had championed: government control of all international trade. When Stalin learned of it he was furious and made a serious mistake—he personally berated Mrs. Lenin, who immediately ran to her husband in tears. An angry Lenin composed a letter to Stalin breaking off all relations.

  Cooler heads prevailed, including, interestingly, that of Trotsky. When informed of the situation, Trotsky slyly—and for his own inscrutable reasons —informed one of Stalin’s allies that he was “against liquidating Stalin” but insisted that Stalin be made to write a strong letter of apology to Mrs. Lenin, which of course, recognizing his mistake, Stalin did.

  Now Lenin wrote another letter, a part of his last will and testament, which was to be read to the Soviet Congress after his death. In it, he assessed both Stalin and Trotsky vis-à-vis their fitness to lead the Soviet Union. Lenin stated that, in his opinion, Trotsky was “the ablest person” on the Central Committee but was boastful and vain. Stalin, on the other hand, “had concentrated immense power in his own hands, and I am not sure that he will always succeed in using that power with the requisite caution.”4 This was a serious indictment indeed, considering the horrors that Lenin’s own great power had visited upon the Russian people in recent years.

  Lenin dragged on, living now in a rehabilitative medical facility away from Moscow and deteriorating by the month. In March 1923 another stroke rendered him unable to read, write, or speak, which came as a great relief to Stalin. But then, miraculously, throughout the summer, Lenin began to improve; he was able to walk again and his speech came back. In October he was well enough to visit Moscow. This terrified Stalin, who feared he would damn him in a speech before the General Assembly.

  But Lenin did not make a speech anywhere. Once in Moscow, he paid a visit to several offices, then merely asked to be driven around the city, returning afterward to his quarters in the countryside. There, he went into convulsions and began to die. The end came January 21, 1924; he was fifty-three years old. As luck would have it (for Stalin, anyway), Trotsky was out of town, recovering by the Black Sea from a serious bout with influenza.

  This left Stalin, general secretary of the Assembly, to make the funeral arrangements for the man all good Communists considered a god. Stalin decided to have a glass-front sarcophagus built, in which Lenin’s embalmed body in its casket could be viewed in the Kremlin’s Hall of Columns, then rest in perpetuity in a glassed-in mausoleum in Red Square—sacred, monumental, imperishable.

  In Communism, as envisioned by Karl Marx, all men were to be equal. “From each according to his ability. To each according to his needs,” is an oft-used Marxian slogan. But some men were more equal than others, it was quickly learned, and Joseph Stalin was the most equal of them all. Despite the pleas from Lenin’s widow, Stalin suppressed her husband’s last will and testament, in which he had warned that Stalin might not use his power “with requisite caution.” Coming as it did from the official god of the party, this document could have been the kiss of death for Stalin had it been read openly before the Central Committee. So Stalin simply ordered it sealed and stashed away.

  The cause of Lenin’s death, like everything else in the Soviet Union, was made a state secret, although it was put out at the time that he had died of arteriosclerosis. This gave rise to a wave of speculation, including rumors of his being poisoned by Stalin, for no sooner had Lenin paid a visit to Moscow than he went into convulsions and died. Stalin, certainly, had his reasons—and, as one of the more modern Russian historians pointed out, he was “absolutely ruthless.” Others (physicians among them) speculated that Lenin was a victim of lead poisoning from the two bullets that remained in his body, the theory being that tiny particles had leached out into his system and killed him. But the most likely cause of Lenin’s death was a massive cerebral hemorrhage. This was the conclusion of a consortium of doctors in the 1990s. He had already had several strokes, and his father had died young of a brain hemorrhage. In any case, the Communist world was convulsed in grief.5

  Stalin envisioned that all good Russians would make the pilgrimage one day, much like the hajj to Mecca made by Muslims, to gaze on Lenin’s countenance in his glassed-in tomb.*2 He ordered biochemistry professors from a Moscow university to perform the embalming operation, one that would last forever.*3 Stalin would arrange a grand, fine send-off for the Father of Communism, the man who had created their brave new world.

  Stalin himself would make the final oratory, and the best thing about it was that Leon Trotsky wouldn’t be there. Trotsky had been preparing to take his rightful place in the funeral ceremony—Moscow was a two-day train ride—when a telegram arrived:

  “The funeral takes place on Saturday. You cannot get here on time. The Politburo thinks that the state of your health makes it essential that you go to Sukhumi. —Stalin.”6

  Lenin’s funeral, in fact, wasn’t held until Sunday, but now the big show would all belong to the general secretary, Joseph V. Stalin.

  * * *

  FOR THE NEXT FOUR YEARS, Stalin and Trotsky conducted a protracted antler dance of insults private and public, published in various Communist press organs, memorandums, or in speeches made to Communist associations. Trotsky often sided with the Mensheviks. He criticized Stalin and the Bolsheviks for not democratizing the power in the government, running it instead like a dictatorship. Another difficulty posited by Trotsky—who advocated a Communist world revolution—was that if such a thing ever took place, the Russian Soviet would in likelihood be diminished by the larger entity. For all his blather about pure international Marxism, Stalin was content wit
h holding absolute concentrated power over the huge expanse of Russia. That was hard enough to control, and he didn’t want to have to report to any greater authority.

  Trotsky dominated the debate in such Communist organs as Pravda. But behind the scenes Stalin continued to concentrate his power, eliminating any prospective rivals and promoting toadies until it was he above all others who could call the tune in the Secretariat—which, in turn, controlled the Communist Party. Slowly, the vibrant Trotsky was squeezed out.

  In 1926 Stalin had Trotsky removed as chairman of the Military Council, the highest Red Army post in the Soviet government. On the heels of this action came a merciless purge of Trotskyites in the army. At the Fifteenth Party Congress, Stalin refused to let him speak, so Trotsky set up an underground press and handed out broadsheets of his remarks to his fellow Communists as they exited the meetings. Shortly afterward, Trotsky was expelled from the Central Committee.

  In 1927, Stalin came into the cutting room where the brilliant Russian director Sergei Eisenstein was finishing his renowned film of the Russian Revolution, October: Ten Days That Shook the World. Stalin demanded to know if Trotsky was in the picture. When the answer was yes, Stalin “said categorically that the picture must not be shown with Trotsky in it.” And out Trotsky went.7

  Trotsky, however, continued writing and speaking out against what he considered to be Stalin’s perversions of Socialism—but he overplayed his hand. In 1928, he found himself expelled from the Communist Party. Instead of relenting and begging forgiveness, he did the opposite and was publicly banished to Kazakhstan, a remote Asiatic province near Mongolia almost two thousand miles from Moscow. Stalin’s men came to Trotsky’s apartment in the Kremlin and carried him, kicking and screaming, to the train station. The journalist Karl Radek, who was awaiting his own train to Siberian exile, remarked pithily upon Trotsky’s awkward arrival: “Moses led the Jews out of Egypt. Stalin led them out of the Politburo.”8

  Trotsky stayed in Kazakhstan only six months, but even there he coughed up a cascade of anti-Stalinist literature. At that point, the Soviet leader could have simply had him killed. But a greater plan was turning in Stalin’s paranoiac mind. He had already begun envisioning a monstrous scheme to seal the fate of vast numbers of perceived enemies when the time came, and Trotsky was shaping up to be the perfect foil.

  Stalin felt confident that Trotsky would never cease publishing his contrarian literature, nor making heretical speeches. After all, now that Lenin was gone, Trotsky was the most visible revolutionary in the world. So instead of killing him Stalin had Trotsky permanently banished from the Soviet Union and sent him abroad. In good time, Stalin could accuse Trotsky of count­errev­oluti­onary activity, then link his own enemies to Trotsky whenever it was convenient and put them on trial for treason. From now on, Leon Trotsky would be bait for one of the most bloodthirsty episodes in Russia’s Communist history.

  * * *

  AS IT TURNED OUT, moving Russia and its far-flung empire from a demand economy to a command economy proved to be a stupendous task. The majority of Russians were peasants—basically slaves until 1861, when they were freed by Czar Alexander II. Now, they were mostly subsistence farmers on small plots of state land, or land leased from noble landlords. Under communism, the idea was to place them in enormous “collectives,” or communes, in order to streamline agricultural production. Their produce, mostly grains and corn, would belong to the state, which would distribute much of it to bakers in Moscow and other cities, sell most of the rest abroad for cash, and then remit some amount back to the peasants for their own use.

  There was much resistance to this from the peasants, especially from the kulak class, which had risen above the peasant class so as to have more than one cow, or a field of goats, or a hired hand. These, Stalin found, were the real troublemakers, and he lit upon a simple but highly consequential solution: to “break [the kulaks’] resistance, to liquidate them as a class, and to replace kulak production with production from collectives and state farms.”9

  This simple-sounding order resulted in the horrific deaths of as many as 7 million Russian kulaks between late 1929 and 1932. The repulsive Cheka had been replaced by an organization known as the OGPU, which was supposed to be an improvement, and was, in its own peculiar way: it was even more thuggish and murderous. Kulaks were executed by the hundreds of thousands. Soon the definition of “kulak” began to enlarge into anyone the OGPU thought needed executing. And the OGPU painted with a very large brush.

  Countless millions more peasants were hauled off into giant concentration camps, where many were worked to death in menial labor jobs, toiling with picks and shovels to build great dams and other hydroelectric projects, as well as roads, canals,*4 railroads, government buildings, city housing, and an endless host of state-run factories turning out everything from tools and tractors to trollies and tanks.

  All of this upheaval was heartbreaking. A typical peasant house was little more than a couple of rooms to keep out the cold and a few possessions for eating, sitting, and sleeping. But a home, even one such as this, was a man’s castle, and the kulaks fiercely resisted the government’s bulldozing their hovels and moving them into the vast collective housing from which they were to toil away. A mere sixty years earlier, when they had been serfs, they’d at least often had a benevolent master landowner who looked after them—if for no reason other than to keep them productive and reasonably happy. But now, some 60 million peasants had suddenly become slaves of the state: a faceless, uncaring behemoth.

  In the meantime, as it became apparent that Moscow needed the resources and manpower of all other countries under its control, Stalin focused his attention on establishing the International Communist Party in nations throughout the world. For a while, communism became surprisingly popular in England—not so much among the working classes, as had been anticipated by Marx, but in the upper classes. Many of those who attended such elite institutions as Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge were drawn to Soviet communism. (During World War II, a number of top British agents and foreign service officers selected from the so-called public schools and universities turned out to be Soviet spies.) The Communist Party was well established in France. It thrived in Germany between the wars until Hitler crushed it. Communism became so entrenched in Spain that a civil war was fought over it. The party sprang up in South and Central America—and, of course, in the United States as well.

  The Communist Party USA was established in 1919, following the collapse of the old American Socialist Party. Immediately, it began to be identified with workers’ movements and unionization. Anarchists and radical leftists gravitated to it; at one point, it was said to contain two hundred thousand members. But over the next two decades interest seemed to sag, at least among the working classes. Adherence to the Soviet line was seen by most Americans as “foreign,” and “un-American,” although some intellectuals, academics, writers, and theatrical people still subscribed to its ideology.

  In 1929 a Lithuanian-born American founder of the Communist Party USA, Jay Lovestone (born Jacob Liebstein), traveled to Moscow, where he had the temerity to inform Joseph Stalin that because of something he termed “American exceptionalism,” organizing a large Communist movement in the United States would be impossible. Stalin reacted with a temper tantrum during which he excoriated this “heresy of American exceptionalism” and threw Lovestone out of the party.*510

  In the mid-1930s, things began to get out of hand. Word got back to Stalin of the extreme bloodshed and chaos his collectivism order had caused—so he simply denied it. Writing in Pravda of the “dizzying success” of collectivization, Stalin explained that any excesses were the fault of overzealous subordinates, adding that, “One cannot implant collectives by violence; that would be stupid and reactionary.” In the meantime, hearing of continued peasant resistance to collectivization in the face of a poor crop year, Stalin hit upon a novel solution: to simply withhold vast
amounts of the peasants’ own harvest that was languishing in the state’s grain elevators until they saw the error of their ways. This resulted in the great famine beginning in 1931, in which another approximately 10 million peasants perished while lurid reports of cannibalism leaked out.11

  Around that same time, Stalin received two famous visitors in the form of the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and a companion, Lady Astor, an American-born member of Parliament. Shaw, a lifelong socialist, decided that the diminutive Stalin looked “like a cross between the Pope and a field-marshal,” while Lady Astor, a staunch antisocialist, demanded of the Russian dictator, “How long are you going to go on killing people?” Stalin appalled the outspoken aristocrat by coolly replying that it would go on “for as long as necessary.”12

  Always curious about “the competition,” Stalin had asked Lady Astor about the political situation in England. She replied that “[Neville] Chamberlain is the coming man.” When Stalin asked, “ ‘What about Churchill? [this was after the India debacle] her eyes widened. ‘Churchill?’ she said. She gave a scornful little laugh and replied. ‘Oh, he’s finished.’ ”13

  As it was with the collectives, so it went with Stalin’s vaunted “five-year plans.” Stalin had told the world that the Soviet Union would revert from an agrarian society to an industrialized nation by the end of the 1930s. These were vague promises without many benchmarks and much room for “walking back.” But indeed, the Communists’ effort to industrialize the country was impressive. The rationale for all the deaths and suffering associated with this reverted directly to Marx’s original manifesto that urged brutal pragmatism.