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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
In fact, Service thinks that Stalin might have lost a crucial Central Committee vote in 1934, and that other leading Bolsheviks had asked Sergei Kirov, perhaps Stalin's best friend at the time, to take over as party leader. But Lazar Kaganovich, a Stalin loyalist, was responsible for counting the votes, and the Boss -- as many of his followers called him -- survived again. Kirov would be "assassinated" in a highly suspicious incident before the year was out, and most of the others who could confirm or deny the story vanished in the Terror. (It's surprising, in fact, that nothing happened to Kaganovich.)
Another event of 1934 that paved the way for the Terror was the suicide of Stalin's wife, Nadya Allilueva (after a Kremlin dinner party at which he had abused and mistreated her). Clearly this was a key event in his transformation into an increasingly isolated, increasingly cruel despot. Kaganovich said Stalin was never the same man after that night, that he "turned in on himself and hardened his attitude to people in general," as Service puts it. Nadya's nephew, Leonid Redens, wrote that her death "altered history" and "made the Terror inevitable."
This may be overstating things; the Terror was brought on by interlocking forces, and Stalin's personality was only one of them. Still, as Sebag Montefiore puts it, "Nadya's death created one of the rare moments of doubt in a life of iron self-belief and dogmatic certainty." As he told numerous people after Nadya's death, Stalin had been a bad husband. Husband and wife were both volatile and unbalanced people -- she may have been schizophrenic, and he was, after all, Stalin.
But they obviously loved each other. Their letters are full of appealing endearments, which were unusual in the dreary era of everything-for-the-people Bolshevik correspondence. "I miss you so much Tatochka," Stalin once wrote, using his pet name for her, "I'm as lonely as a horned owl." Nadya's response (to a different letter) concluded, "I am kissing you passionately just as you kissed me when we were saying goodbye!" -- which was about as close as good Communists got to epistolary heavy breathing.
Stalin: A Biography
By Robert Service
Belknap/Harvard University Press
760 pages
Nonfiction
Stalin was already guilty of crimes against humanity by 1934, and it's dangerously romantic to imagine a vastly different historical outcome with Nadya by his side. But it's clear that this loss was a devastating blow to an already disordered personality, and it's also true that Stalin the man had not yet become Stalin the Soviet icon or Stalin the murderous ogre. He still had human dimensions and human possibilities.
Whether the motivation was primarily political or personal, Stalin felt the need to consolidate his power and crush all resistance. The point of the Terror was, after all, terror -- whose principal audience is not the people imprisoned and shot but the others who are left at their desks. It didn't matter whether Stalin was annihilating his real enemies in the party (he got some of them but missed others), only that he was demonstrating what could happen to those who snickered at disloyal jokes or consorted with supposed counterrevolutionaries or had the wrong father-in-law or were just a little too Ukrainian or Polish or Armenian or Jewish.
Hence the precise numbers cooked up by his vicious secret-police chief, Nikolai Yezhov, which would seem like a parody of the Soviet quota fetish if they weren't real: In the Terror's first go-round, there were to be 268,950 individuals arrested, with just under 76,000 to be executed and the remainder sent to the Gulag. (The final numbers, of course, were much higher. No precise count is now possible, but Service thinks that roughly 1.5 million people were seized by Yezhov's agents, with half of those summarily executed, and the rest exiled to labor camps. Only about 200,000 came home again.)
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One could view the Stalinist system as a vast production line, one of whose most consistent outputs was death. For Stalin, the lives of his own people were an almost infinitely expendable resource, not unlike the Siberian timber forests or the Ukrainian wheat fields. He starved them into modernization, drove them out to fight the German war machine by the hundreds of thousands, murdered them en masse to prove his own mightiness. As Service writes, "Stalin was willing to pay any price in lives to attain his objectives."
Service insists that Stalin never lost either his Marxist faith or his sanity, but both became severely frayed as the dictator aged. Stalin never understood, Service suggests, quite how badly the Soviet state was being managed and how grim life was for ordinary people in the latter stages of his rule. He never traveled, except to and from his various dachas by limousine, and his sycophantic inner circle learned the hard way to avoid giving him any bad news. If he was as intelligent as Service thinks, he must have known, or at least suspected, that "socialism in one country" had become a cruel farce and that the adulatory Stalin cult masked an equally deep reservoir of hatred.
On at least one other occasion after 1934, Stalin apparently believed that a coup against him was imminent, or had already happened. After Hitler violated the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression treaty and launched Operation Barbarossa, the blitzkrieg June 1941 invasion that nearly brought Soviet Russia to its knees, Stalin ran state affairs for a week and then abruptly disappeared to his favorite dacha, instructing the staff to say he wasn't there. It was probably what we'd now call a depressive episode. When several Politburo members went to fetch him, they found him slumped in an armchair, looking "strange" and "guarded."
"Why have you come?" he asked. One visitor, Anastas Mikoyan, thought the Boss was expecting to be arrested. But his lieutenants lacked the nerve, or even the desire, to remove him. In the long run, Service thinks, Stalin's bulldog leadership and symbolic importance to the Russian people were crucial to winning the war. For a short time during the wartime Alliance, he was a beloved figure in the West, our "Uncle Joe" standing tall against the Nazis. (When Roosevelt, who liked Stalin, told him about the Western media's nickname, Stalin nearly walked out of the Yalta conference that was carving up the postwar world. He poked fun at himself sometimes, but never allowed others to do so.)
During the latter stage of his life, in the Cold War police state of the postwar period, Stalin must have experienced cognitive dissonance. He still believed in socialist world revolution, but what he had built looked more like a new version of the Russian Empire, more repressive and authoritarian than any since the days of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible (both of whom he admired). For ceremonial occasions he dressed up in his fruit-salad uniform as "Generalissimus Stalin," which even he thought was ridiculous. Otherwise he never went out in public.
Stalin died at his dacha outside Moscow in March 1953, after a severe stroke. His guards were too terrified to go in the room, and he lay on the floor for most of a day, partly paralyzed and soaked with his own urine. Long before he was dead, the infighting to replace him was well under way, which was no more than he deserved. Russian historians have suggested that Lavrenti Beria, the secret-police chief of the later years, had him poisoned as part of a coup attempt, and amid all the dark skulduggery of who did what in those few days, Service admits that we'll never know.
