Simon Montefiore - Stalin

“I took part in this myself,” wrote a young activist, Lev Kopelev, “scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain… I emptied out the old folks’ storage chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the women’s wails… I was convinced I was accomplishing the great and necessary transformation of the countryside.”

The peasants believed they could force the government to stop by destroying their own livestock: the despair that could lead a peasant to kill his own animals, the equivalent in our world of burning down our own house, gives a hint of the scale of desperation: 26.6 million head of cattle were slaughtered, 15.3 million horses. On 16 January 1930, the government decreed that kulak property could be confiscated if they destroyed livestock. If the peasants thought the Bolsheviks would be obliged to feed them, they were mistaken. 1As the crisis worsened, even Stalin’s staunchest lieutenants struggled to squeeze the grain out of the peasantry, especially in the Ukraine and North Caucasus. Stalin berated them but even though they were often twenty years younger, they replied with tantrums and threats of resignation. Stalin was constantly pouring unction on troubled waters. Andrei Andreyev, thirty-five, the boss of the North Caucasus, was close to Stalin (his wife Dora was Nadya’s best friend). Nonetheless, he said Stalin’s demands were impossible: he needed at least five years.

First Molotov tried to encourage him: “Dear Andreievich, I got your letter on grain supplies, I see it’s very hard for you. I see also that the kulaks are using new methods of struggle against us. But I hope we’ll break their backs… I send you greetings and best wishes… PS: Hurrying off to Crimea for the holidays.” 2

Then Stalin, overwrought, lost his temper with Andreyev who sulked until Stalin apologized: “Comrade Andreyev, I don’t think you do nothing in the field of grain supply. But the grain supplies from the North Caucasus are cutting us like a knife and we need measures to strengthen the process. Please remember, every new million poods is very valuable for us. Please remember, we have very little time. So to work? With Communist greetings, Stalin.”

But Andreyev was still upset so Stalin scribbled him another letter, this time calling him by a pet name and appealing to his Bolshevik honour: “Hello Andryusha, I’m late. Don’t be angry. About strategy… I take my words back. I’d like to stress again that close people must be trusted and honourable until the end. I speak about our top people. Without this our Party will utterly fail. I shake your hand, J. Stalin.” He often had to take back his own words. 3

The foundation of Stalin’s power in the Party was not fear: it was charm. Stalin possessed the dominant will among his magnates, but they also found his policies generally congenial. He was older than them all except President Kalinin, but the magnates used the informal “you” with him. Voroshilov, Molotov and Sergo called him “Koba.” They were sometimes even cheeky: Mikoyan, who called him Soso, signed one letter: “If you’re not lazy, write to me!” In 1930, all these magnates, especially the charismatic and fiery Sergo Ordzhonikidze, were allies, not protégés, all capable of independent action. There were close friendships that presented potential alliances against Stalin: Sergo and Kaganovich, the two toughest bosses, were best friends. Voroshilov, Mikoyan and Molotov frequently disagreed with Stalin. 4His dilemma was that he was the leader of a Party with no Führerprinzip but the ruler of a country accustomed to Tsarist autocracy.

Stalin was not the dreary bureaucrat that Trotsky wanted him to be. It was certainly true that he was a gifted organizer. He “never improvised” but “took every decision, weighing it carefully.” He was capable of working extraordinarily long hours—sixteen a day. But the new archives confirm that his real genius was something different—and surprising: “he could charm people.” He was what is now known as a “people person.” While incapable of true empathy on the one hand, he was a master of friendships on the other. He constantly lost his temper, but when he set his mind to charming a man, he was irresistible.

Stalin’s face was “expressive and mobile,” his feline movements “supple and graceful”: he buzzed with sensitive energy. Everyone who saw him “was anxious to see him again” because “he created a sense that there was now a bond that linked them forever.” Artyom said he made “we children feel like adults and feel important.” Visitors were impressed with his quiet modesty, the puffing on the pipe, the calmness. When the future Marshal Zhukov first met him, he could not sleep afterwards: “The appearance of JV Stalin, his quiet voice, the concreteness and depth of his judgements, the attention with which he heard the report made a great impression on me.” Sudoplatov, a Chekist, thought “it was hard to imagine such a man could deceive you, his reactions were so natural, without the slightest sense of him posing” but he also noticed “a certain harshness… which he did not… conceal.”

In the eyes of these rough Bolsheviks from the regions, his flat quiet public speaking was an asset, a great improvement on Trotsky’s oratorical wizardry. Stalin’s lack of smoothness, his anti-oratory, inspired trust. His very faults, the chip on the shoulder, the brutality and fits of irrational temper, were the Party’s faults. “He was not trusted but he was the man the Party trusted,” admitted Bukharin. “He’s like the symbol of the Party, the lower strata trust him.” 5But above all, reflected the future secret police chief, Beria, he was “supremely intelligent,” a political “genius.” However rude or charming he was, “he dominated his entourage with his intelligence.”

He did not just socialize with the magnates: he patronized junior officials too, constantly searching for tougher, more loyal, and more tireless lieutenants. He was always accessible: “I’m ready to help you and receive you,” he often replied to requests. 6Officials got through directly to Stalin. Those lower down called him, behind his back, the Khozyain which is usually translated as “Boss,” but it means much more: the “Master.” Nicholas II had called himself “ Khozyain of the Russian lands.” When Stalin heard someone use the word, he was “noticeably irritated” by its feudal mystique: “That sounds like a rich landowner in Central Asia. Fool!” 7

His magnates saw him as their patron but he saw himself as much more. “I know you’re diabolically busy,” Molotov wrote to him on his birthday. “But I shake your fifty-year-old hand… I must say in my personal work I’m obliged to you…” 8They were all obliged to him. But Stalin saw his own role embroidered with both Arthurian chivalry and Christian sanctity: “You need have no doubt, comrades, I am prepared to devote to the cause of the working class… all my strength, all my ability, and if need be, all my blood, drop by drop,” he wrote to thank the Party for acclaiming him as the Leader. “Your congratulations, I place to the credit of the great Party… which bore me and reared me in its own image and likeness.” Here was how he saw himself. 9

Nonetheless, this self-anointed Messianic hero worked hard to envelop his protégés in an irresistible embrace of folksy intimacy that convinced them there was no one he trusted more. Stalin was mercurial—far from a humourless drone: he was convivial and entertaining, if exhaustingly intense. “He was such fun,” says Artyom. According to the Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas, his “rough… self-assured humour” was “roguish” and “impish” but “not entirely without finesse and depth” though it was never far from the gallows. His dry wit was acute but hardly Wildean. Once when Kozlovsky, the court tenor, was performing at the Kremlin, the Politburo started demanding some particular song.