Simon Montefiore - Stalin

The death toll of this “absurd” famine, which only occurred to raise money to build pig-iron smelters and tractors, was between four to five and as high as ten million dead, a tragedy unequalled in human history except by the Nazi and Maoist terrors. The peasants had always been the Bolshevik Enemy. Lenin himself had said: “The peasant must do a bit of starving.” Kopelev admitted “with the rest of my generation, I firmly believed the ends justified the means. I saw people dying from hunger.” “They deny responsibility for what happened later,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet, in her classic memoir, Hope Abandoned . “But how can they? It was, after all, these people of the Twenties who demolished the old values and invented the formulas… to justify the unprecedented experiment: You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Every new killing was excused on the grounds we were building a remarkable ‘new’ world.” The slaughter and famine strained the Party but its members barely winced: how did they tolerate death on such a vast scale?

“A revolution without firing squads,” Lenin is meant to have said, “is meaningless.” He spent his career praising the Terror of the French Revolution because his Bolshevism was a unique creed, “a social system based on blood-letting.” The Bolsheviks were atheists but they were hardly secular politicians in the conventional sense: they stooped to kill from the smugness of the highest moral eminence. Bolshevism may not have been a religion, but it was close enough. Stalin told Beria the Bolsheviks were “a sort of military-religious order.” When Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, died, Stalin called him “a devout knight of the proletariat.” Stalin’s “order of sword-bearers” resembled the Knights Templars, or even the theocracy of the Iranian Ayatollahs, more than any traditional secular movement. They would die and kill for their faith in the inevitable progress towards human betterment, making sacrifices of their own families, with a fervour seen only in the religious slaughters and martyrdoms of the Middle Ages—and the Middle East.

They regarded themselves as special “noble-blooded” people. When Stalin asked General Zhukov if the capital might fall in 1941, he said, “Can we hold Moscow, tell me as a Bolshevik?” just as an eighteenth-century Englishman might say, “Tell me as a gentleman!”

The “sword-bearers” had to believe with Messianic faith, in order to act with the correct ruthlessness, and to convince others they were right to do so. Stalin’s “quasi-Islamic” fanaticism was typical of the Bolshevik magnates: Mikoyan’s son called his father “a Bolshevik fanatic.” Most [41] If anything, the Old Bolsheviks had a religious education: Stalin, Yenukidze and Mikoyan were seminarists, Voroshilov a choirboy; Kalinin attended church into his teens. Even Beria’s mother spent so much time at church, she actually died there. Kaganovich’s Jewish parents were frum : when they visited him in the Kremlin, his mother was not impressed—“But you’re all atheists!” she said. came from devoutly religious backgrounds. They hated Judaeo-Christianity—but the orthodoxy of their parents was replaced by something even more rigid, a systematic amorality: “This religion—or science, as it was modestly called by its adepts—invests man with a godlike authority… In the Twenties, a good many people drew a parallel to the victory of Christianity and thought this new religion would last a thousand years,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam. “All were agreed on the superiority of the new creed that promised heaven on earth instead of other worldly rewards.”

The Party justified its “dictatorship” through purity of faith. Their Scriptures were the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, regarded as a “scientific” truth. Since ideology was so important, every leader had to be—or seem to be—an expert on Marxism-Leninism, so that these ruffians spent their weary nights studying, to improve their esoteric credentials, dreary articles on dialectical materialism. It was so important that Molotov and Polina even discussed Marxism in their love letters: “Polichka my darling… reading Marxist classics is very necessary… You must read some more of Lenin’s works coming out soon and then a number of Stalin’s… I so want to see you.”

“Party-mindedness” was “an almost mystical concept,” explained Kopelev. “The indispensable prerequisites were iron discipline and faithful observance of all the rituals of Party life.” As one veteran Communist put it, a Bolshevik was not someone who believed merely in Marxism but “someone who had absolute faith in the Party no matter what… A person with the ability to adapt his morality and conscience in such a way that he can unreservedly accept the dogma that the Party is never wrong—even though it’s wrong all the time.” Stalin did not exaggerate when he boasted: “We Bolsheviks are people of a special cut.” 2

Nadya was not of “a special cut.” The famine fed the tensions in Stalin’s marriage. When little Kira Alliluyeva visited her uncle Redens, GPU chief in Kharkov, she opened the blinds of her special train and saw, to her amazement, starving people with swollen bellies, begging to the train for food, and starving dogs running alongside. Kira told her mother, Zhenya, who fearlessly informed Stalin.

“Don’t pay any attention,” he replied. “She’s a child and makes things up.” [42] The Alliluyevs had only recently returned from Germany and they were shocked by the changes: “There were barriers and queues everywhere,” remembers Kira. “Everyone was hungry and scared. My mother was ashamed to wear the dresses she brought back. Everyone made fun of European fashions.” In the last year of Stalin’s marriage, we find fragments of both happiness and misery. In February 1932, it was Svetlana’s birthday: she starred in a play for her parents and the Politburo. The two boys, Vasya and Artyom, recited verses. 3

“Things here seem to be all right, we’re all very well. The children are growing up, Vasya is ten now and Svetlana five… She and her father are great friends…” Nadya wrote to Stalin’s mother Keke in Tiflis. It was hardly an occasion to confide great secrets but the tone is interesting. “Altogether we have terribly little free time, Joseph and I. You’ve probably heard that I’ve gone back to school in my old age. I don’t find studying difficult in itself. But it’s pretty difficult trying to fit it in with my duties at home in the course of the day. Still, I’m not complaining and so far, I’m coping with it all quite successfully…” She was finding it hard to cope.

Stalin’s own nerves were strained to the limit but he remained jealous of her: he felt old friends Yenukidze and Bukharin were undermining him with Nadya. Bukharin visited Zubalovo, strolling the gardens with her. Stalin was working but returned and crept up on them in the garden, leaping out to shout at Bukharin: “I’ll kill you!” Bukharin naïvely regarded this as an Asiatic joke.

When Bukharin married a teenage beauty, Anna Larina, another child of a Bolshevik family, Stalin tipsily telephoned him during the night: “Nikolai, I congratulate you. You outspit me this time too!” Bukharin asked how. “A good wife, a beautiful wife… younger than my Nadya!” 4

At home, Stalin alternated between absentee bully and hectored husband. Nadya had in the past snitched on dissenters at the Academy: in these last months, it is hard to tell if she was denouncing Enemies or riling Stalin who ordered their arrest. There is the story of this “peppery woman” shouting at him: “You’re a tormentor, that’s what you are! You torment your own son, your wife, the whole Russian people.” When Stalin discussed the importance of the Party above family, Yenukidze replied: “What about your children?” Stalin shouted, “They’re HERS!” pointing at Nadya, who ran out crying.