Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Simultaneously, a few hundred yards to the east, closer to Lenin’s Mausoleum and Red Square, in his office on the second floor of the triangular eighteenth-century Yellow Palace, Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Bolshevik Party and the Vozhd —the leader—of the Soviet Union, now fifty-three, twenty-two years Nadya’s senior, and the father of her two children, was meeting his favoured secret policeman. Genrikh Yagoda, Deputy Chairman of the GPU, [1] The Soviet secret police was first called the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage, known as the Cheka. In 1922, it became the State Political Administration (GPU) then the United GPU: OGPU. In 1934, it was subsumed into the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). However, secret policemen were still known as “Chekists” and the secret police itself as “the Organs.” In 1941 and 1943, State Security was separated into its own Commissariat, the NKGB. In 1954, it became a Committee of State Security, the KGB. a ferret-faced Jewish jeweller’s son from Nizhny Novgorod with a “Hitlerish moustache” and a taste for orchids, German pornography and literary friendships, informed Stalin of new plots against him in the Party and more turbulence in the countryside.

Stalin, assisted by Molotov, forty-two, and his economics chief, Valerian Kuibyshev, forty-five, who looked like a mad poet, with wild hair, an enthusiasm for drink, women and, appropriately, writing poetry, ordered the arrest of those who opposed them. The stress of those months was stifling as Stalin feared losing the Ukraine itself which, in parts, had descended into a dystopia of starvation and disorder. When Yagoda left at 7:05 p.m., the others stayed talking about their war to “break the back” of the peasantry, whatever the cost to the millions starving in history’s greatest man-made famine. They were determined to use the grain to finance their gargantuan push to make Russia a modern industrial power. But that night, the tragedy would be closer to home: Stalin was to face a personal crisis that was the most wounding and mysterious of his career. He would replay it over and over again for the rest of his days.

At 8:05 p.m., Stalin, accompanied by the others, ambled down the steps towards the party, through the snowy alleyways and squares of that red-walled medieval fortress, dressed in his Party tunic, baggy old trousers, soft leather boots, old army greatcoat and his wolf shapka with earmuffs. His left arm was slightly shorter than the other but much less noticeable than it became in old age—and he was usually smoking a cigarette or puffing on his pipe. The head and the thick, low hair, still black but with specks of the first grey, radiated the graceful strength of the mountain men of the Caucasus; his almost Oriental, feline eyes were “honey-coloured” but flashed a lupine yellow in anger. Children found his moustache prickly and his smell of tobacco acrid, but as Molotov and his female admirers recalled, Stalin was still attractive to women with whom he flirted shyly and clumsily. 1

This small, sturdy figure, five feet, six inches tall, who walked ponderously yet briskly with a rough pigeon-toed gait (which was studiously aped by Bolshoi actors when they were playing Tsars), chatting softly to Molotov in his heavy Georgian accent, was only protected by one or two guards. The magnates strolled around Moscow with hardly any security. Even the suspicious Stalin, who was already hated in the countryside, walked home from his Old Square office with just one bodyguard. Molotov and Stalin were walking home one night in a snowstorm “with no bodyguards” through the Manege Square when they were approached by a beggar. Stalin gave him ten roubles and the disappointed tramp shouted: “You damned bourgeois!”

“Who can understand our people?” mused Stalin. Despite assassinations of Soviet officials (including an attempt on Lenin in 1918), things were remarkably relaxed until the June 1927 assassination of the Soviet Ambassador to Poland, when there was a slight tightening of security. In 1930, the Politburo passed a decree “to ban Comrade Stalin from walking around town on foot.” Yet he continued his strolling for a few more years. This was a golden age which, in just a few hours, was to end in death, if not murder. 2

Stalin was already famous for his Sphinxian inscrutability, and phlegmatic modesty, represented by the pipe he ostentatiously puffed like a peasant elder. Far from being the colourless bureaucratic mediocrity disdained by Trotsky, the real Stalin was an energetic and vainglorious melodramatist who was exceptional in every way.

Beneath the eerie calm of these unfathomable waters were deadly whirlpools of ambition, anger and unhappiness. Capable both of moving with controlled gradualism and of reckless gambles, he seemed enclosed inside a cold suit of steely armour but his antennae were intensely sensitive and his fiery Georgian temper was so uncontrollable that he had almost ruined his career by unleashing it against Lenin’s wife. He was a mercurial neurotic with the tense, seething temperament of a highly strung actor who revels in his own drama—what his ultimate successor, Nikita Khrushchev, called a litsedei , a man of many faces. Lazar Kaganovich, one of his closest comrades for over thirty years who was also on his way to the dinner, left the best description of this “unique character”: he was a “different man at different times… I knew no less than five or six Stalins.”

However, the opening of his archives, and many newly available sources, illuminate him more than ever before: it is no longer enough to describe him as an “enigma.” We now know how he talked (constantly about himself, often with revealing honesty), how he wrote notes and letters, what he ate, sang and read. Placed in the context of the fissiparous Bolshevik leadership, a unique environment, he becomes a real person. The man inside was a super-intelligent and gifted politician for whom his own historic role was paramount, a nervy intellectual who manically read history and literature, and a fidgety hypochondriac suffering from chronic tonsillitis, psoriasis, rheumatic aches from his deformed arm and the iciness of his Siberian exile. Garrulous, sociable and a fine singer, this lonely and unhappy man ruined every love relationship and friendship in his life by sacrificing happiness to political necessity and cannibalistic paranoia. Damaged by his childhood and abnormally cold in temperament, he tried to be a loving father and husband yet poisoned every emotional well, this nostalgic lover of roses and mimosas who believed the solution to every human problem was death, and who was obsessed with executions. This atheist owed everything to priests and saw the world in terms of sin and repentance, yet he was a “convinced Marxist fanatic from his youth.” His fanaticism was “semi-Islamic,” his Messianic egotism boundless. He assumed the imperial mission of the Russians yet remained very much a Georgian, bringing the vendettas of his forefathers northwards to Muscovy.

Most public men share the Caesarian habit of detaching themselves to admire their own figures on the world stage, but Stalin’s detachment was a degree greater. His adopted son Artyom Sergeev remembers Stalin shouting at his son Vasily for exploiting his father’s name. “But I’m a Stalin too,” said Vasily.

“No, you’re not,” replied Stalin. “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin IS Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no not even me!”

He was a self-creation. A man who invents his name, birthday, nationality, education and his entire past, in order to change history and play the role of leader, is likely to end up in a mental institution, unless he embraces, by will, luck and skill, the movement and the moment that can overturn the natural order of things. Stalin was such a man. The movement was the Bolshevik Party; his moment, the decay of the Russian monarchy. After Stalin’s death, it was fashionable to regard him as an aberration but this was to rewrite history as crudely as Stalin did himself. Stalin’s success was not an accident. No one alive was more suited to the conspiratorial intrigues, theoretical runes, murderous dogmatism and inhuman sternness of Lenin’s Party. It is hard to find a better synthesis between a man and a movement than the ideal marriage between Stalin and Bolshevism: he was a mirror of its virtues and faults. 3