Simon Montefiore - Stalin

The recent Secret File of Stalin by Roman Brackman claims the entire Terror was Stalin’s attempt to wipe out anyone with knowledge of his duplicity. Yet there were many reasons for the Terror, though Stalin’s character was a major cause. Stalin liquidated many of those who had known him in the early days, yet he mysteriously preserved others. He also killed over a million victims who had no knowledge of his early life. However, Brackman also gives an excellent account of the intrigues and betrayals of underground life.

Stalin later seemed to confirm the story of the sinking barge in a fascinating letter to Voroshilov: “The summer after the assassination attempt on Lenin we… made a list of officers whom we gathered in the Manege… to shoot en masse… So the Tsaritsyn barge was the result not of the struggle against military specialists but momentum from the centre…” Five future Second World War marshals fought at Tsaritsyn: in ascending competence—Kulik, Voroshilov, Budyonny, Timoshenko and Zhukov (though the latter fought there in 1919 after Stalin’s departure).

Stalin was never the titular Head of State of the Soviet Union, nor was Lenin. Kalinin’s title was the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee, technically the highest legislative body, but he was colloquially the “President.” After the 1936 Constitution, his title was Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Only with the Brezhnev Constitution did the Secretary-General of the Party add the Presidency to his titles. The Bolsheviks coined a new jargon of acronyms in their effort to create a new sort of government. People’s Commissars ( Narodny Komissar) were known as Narkoms . The government or Council (Soviet) of People’s Commissars was known as Sovnarkom .

Stalin’s row with Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, outraged Lenin’s bourgeois sentiments. But Stalin thought it was entirely consistent with Party culture: “Why should I stand on my hind legs for her? To sleep with Lenin does not mean you understand Marxism-Leninism. Just because she used the same toilet as Lenin…” This led to some classic Stalin jokes, in which he warned Krupskaya that if she did not obey, the Central Committee would appoint someone else as Lenin’s wife. That is a very Bolshevik concept. His disrespect for Krupskaya was probably not helped by her complaints about Lenin’s flirtations with his assistants, including Yelena Stasova, the one whom Stalin threatened to promote to “wife.”

Of course Kaganovich kept the moustache which remained fashionable. Even facial hair was then based on the leader cult: if a client wanted a goatee with beard and moustache, he would ask his barber for a “Kalinin” after the Politburo member. When Stalin ordered another leader, Bulganin, to chop off his beard, he compromised by keeping a “Kalinin” goatee.

Stalin followed the same principle with his clothes: he refused to replace his meagre wardrobe of two or three much-darned tunics, old trousers and his favourite greatcoat and cap from the Civil War. He was not alone in this sartorial asceticism but he was aware that, like Frederick the Great whom he had studied, his deliberately modest old clothes only accentuated his natural authority. As for his boots, the cobbler’s son always took care to cultivate his martial air: he commissioned a special pair in Tsaritsyn in 1918 and later had them made in soft leather. When he got corns, he cut holes in the leather.

Yet their self-conscious brutality coexisted with a rigid code of Party manners: Bolsheviks were meant to behave to one another like bourgeois gentlemen. Divorces were “frowned upon more severely than in the Catholic Church.” When Kaganovich wrote on the death sentence of an innocent general that he was a “slut”, he just put “s…”. Molotov edited Lenin’s use of the word “shitty” replacing it with “…” and talked prissily about using a “name not used in Party circles.”

His revealing thoughts on the kulaks on his scraps of paper include: “kulaks—deserters” then, even more suggestively: “villages and slaves.” One peasant revealed how kulaks were selected: “Just between the three of us, the poor peasants of the village get together in a meeting and decide: “So and so had six horses…” They notify the GPU and there you are: So-and-so gets five years.” Only novelists and poets are really capable of catching the brutish alienation of the villages: Andrei Platonov’s novel The Foundation Pit is the finest of these.

At the Bolshoi, Kozlovsky suddenly lost his voice during Rigoletto . The singer peered helplessly up towards Stalin’s Box A, pointing at his throat. Quick as a flash, Stalin silently pointed at the left side of his tunic near the pocket where medals are pinned and painted a medal. Kozlovsky’s voice returned. He got the medal.

Kirov, his Leningrad boss, lived in a huge apartment containing a dazzling array of the latest equipment. First there was a huge new American fridge—a General Electric—of which only ten were imported into the USSR. American gramophones were specially prized: there was a “radiola” on which Kirov could listen to the Mariinsky Ballet in his apartment; there was a “petiphone,” a wind-up gramophone without a speaker, and one with a speaker, plus a lamp radio. When the first television reached Moscow just before the war, the Mikoyans received the alien object that reflected the picture in a glass that stuck out at forty-five degrees. As for Budyonny, Stalin wrote: “I gave you the sword but it’s not a very beautiful one so I decided to send you a better one inscribed—it’s on its way!”

For example, Kamenev’s wife was Trotsky’s sister; Yagoda was married into the Sverdlov family; Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s secretary, was married to the sister of Trotsky’s daughter-in-law. Two top Stalinists, Shcherbakov and Zhdanov, were brothers-in-law. Later the children of the Politburo would intermarry.

In Sholokhov’s novel Virgin Soil Upturned , the Cossacks call off their revolt when they read it. But they also withdraw from the collective farm.

“You know Marapultsa,” Voroshilov wrote to Stalin in October 1930. “He was condemned for five years… I think you agree with me that he was condemned rightly.” On another occasion, Voroshilov appealed to Stalin for a “semi-lunatic” he had known since 1911 who was in jail. “What do I want you to do? Almost nothing… but for you to consider for one minute the destruction of Minin and decide what to do with him…”

They frequently disagreed with him, certainly on small matters such as a discussion about the Kremlin military school: “Seems that after the objections of Comrade Kalinin and others (I know other Politburo members object too), we can forgive them because it’s not an important question,” Stalin wrote to Voroshilov. Having defeated Bukharin in 1929, Stalin wanted to appoint him Education Commissar but as Voroshilov told Sergo in a letter, “Because we were a united majority, we pushed it through (against Koba).”

Doing nothing and lacking “vigilance” was an equally sacred sin in Stalin’s eyes: he called it “thoughtlessness.”

Nechist means an unclean devil in peasant folklore.