Martin Amis - Koba the Dread

Quoted by Tucker. Stalin was not on that horse. Volkogonov: ‘Throughout his life he visited an agricultural region only once, and that was in 1928, when he went to Siberia to see to grain deliveries. He never set foot in a village again.’

‘In all of 1930 nearly 2.5 million peasants took part in approximately 14,000 revolts, riots, and mass demonstrations against the regime’ (Nicolas Werth).

And so did Khrushchev, whose ‘secret speech’ of 1956 was entitled ‘On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences’ (and dealt only with the purge of the Party, and not of the nation). One of Stalin’s more energetic administrators (in 1937 he was sent to the Ukraine to kill 30,000 people), Khrushchev showed, nonetheless, that it was possible to recross Solzhenitsyn’s ‘threshold’ and pick up the remains of his humanity.

These were black-market outlets run by the government . Their prices were high.

John Scott did see one case during his several years at Magnitogorsk: some outgoing kulaks spiked a turbine.

Agriculture, it would eventually emerge, did not subsidize industry: industry subsidized agriculture. And Dekulakization was a net loser, too. Total dispossession of the supposed peasant plutocrats failed to cover the cost of their deportation.

From Alec Nove’s evenhanded An Economic History of the USSR: 1917–1991 . The cover of my paperback bears the striking advisory, ‘New and Final Edition.’

This word repays a visit to the dictionary: ‘(Of marriage) between man of high rank and woman of lower rank, who remains in her former station, their issue having no claim to succeed to possessions of father.’ So: a kind of pre-nup.

J. Arch Getty and R. T. Manning (eds.): Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives . Getty calls the standard interpretation ‘folkloric’. Revision begets revision. (A still more recent book swings the argument back the other way.) If Getty goes on revising at his current rate, he will eventually be telling us that only two people died in the Great Terror, and that one very rich peasant was slightly hurt during Collectivization.

A reputedly prolific rapist and murderer, Uday, we are relieved to learn, is now in a wheelchair following an assassination attempt. Like Uday, Vasily was the kind of young man who thinks it’s funny to fire live rounds at restaurant chandeliers.

This valuable formulation is, again, Robert Tucker’s. He has made the Tsar Stalin theme very much his own, and in this section I am gratefully indebted to his Stalin in Power .

‘The Pope? How many divisions does he have?’ is Stalin’s most famous expression of this indifference.

The film was The Hurricane (1937). ‘Through miles of raging ocean he defied man’s law!’ (‘The simple life on a South Pacific island is disrupted, not only by a vindictive governor but by a typhoon. Tolerable island melodrama’ – Halliwell.)

I.e., from 1928, the year of the inaugural ‘Shakhty’ case (fifty-three technicians and engineers were accused of industrial sabotage). The Show Trials were Stalin’s contribution; they remain distinct from Lenin’s ‘demonstration’ trials of the early 1920s, which were fixed but not scripted. Both types of trial used torture.

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.’

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

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.

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.

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 ?’

Genrikh Yagoda (shot in 1938) was replaced as head of the Cheka by Nikolai Yezhov (shot in 1940), who was in turn replaced by Lavrenti Beria (shot in 1953). Yezhov’s period in office (1936–38), and the Great Terror itself, are sometimes called the Yezhovshchina : the time of Yezhov’s rule… The quotes in the present section are all from Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s , edited by Véronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya and Thomas Lahusen. The book is by turns boring, startling, sickening and inspiring. Some know it and some don’t – but all the voices are crippled.

Stavsky was known as the ‘executioner of Soviet Literature’. For example, it was he who denounced Osip Mandelstam. He also had a history of alcoholism (the editors of Intimacy and Terror remark on his ‘tormented handwriting’, which was ‘deciphered only with great difficulty’). We catch him here at a vulnerable moment (midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1938/39); and it is of course painfully clear on internal evidence alone that Stavsky is stinking drunk.

I would later read that Stalin was simply echoing Lenin, who, faced with a similar disappointment, referred rather less pithily to ‘a kulak grain strike’.

Conquest makes the parenthetical point that Stalin, it would seem, harboured no decisive resentment towards his father. Iosif Vissarionovich was perhaps mildly susceptible to the verities he set out, in the interests of political security, to eradicate.

I follow Volkogonov’s phrasing. The less elaborate ‘Lenin founded this state, and we’ve fucked it up’ is given by most historians (and I have come across ‘All that Lenin created we have lost’, presumably in some transitional version of events). But Colonel General Volkogonov has a natural authority on the war years. Hereabouts his pages are anecdotally rich with three generations of top-brass table talk.

In accordance with the Pact’s reciprocal trade deals. German consignments were generally skimpy and tardy. Russian consignments were always fiercely punctual (and often topped up by direct order from Stalin). This particular goods train was of course the last.

This is more than a picture book. Brian Moynahan’s text is a fresh and vigorous distillation.