part0019

Chapter Nine – Stalin’s Time of Trouble

Stalin mentally divided the Communist Party and the Soviet political world into two camps. One, a community of the faithful, consisted of Lenin-Stalin loyalists, the “real Bolsheviks” and real Soviet citizens who showed their fidelity to the regime and Communism by believing in Stalin as the great leader and by upholding his policies through thick and thin.

Arrayed against this community of the faithful was the countercommunity of unbelievers, comprising all those who were anti-Soviet, anti-Bolshevik, and anti-Stalin. Some of them, like the “esteemed reapers” of Stalin’s letter to Sholokhov, were overt enemies. Very many others were covert enemies operating behind masks of party and Soviet loyalty. Their prime method of undermining the Communist cause was to oppose Stalin by criticism and sabotage of his policies, and also by belittling his merits as the political man of genius that they knew him to be.

The Anti-Stalin Backlash

The events traced in the preceding chapters caused the community of the faithful to shrink in the early 1930s and the countercommunity to grow. Stalin’s popularity plummeted by comparison with his standing in the later 1920s. Then his critics were chiefly members of oppositional groups numbering at most a few thousand. Now, in reaction to the grim times the country was experiencing under his rule, they became far more numerous.

In his own eyes the mastermind of a second October, who deserved grateful recognition as such, Stalin appeared to many others the bungler of collectivization. They were under no inner compulsion to see him as a hero of revolutionary history. From Central Committee meetings and various circular directives that had emanated from his Central Committee offices in 1929 and early in 1930, many in high places and in the regional party leadership were aware of his personal responsibility for the policy that was publicly repudiated in the emergency of February-March 1930. Consequently, an anti-Stalin backlash developed in the early 1930s. Since little about it appeared in the Soviet press, it had a certain muted, even clandestine quality; and not all party members shared it. Still, the critical current had a potent influence on later events.

It found expression in the literary world. In 1931 the journal Red Virgin Soil published a story called “Being of Use” by Andrei Platonov, who was not then well known. It told of how in March of 1930 a certain good-hearted poor man, an electrician by trade, boarded a train in Moscow and got off somewhere in central Russia. This nameless wanderer, described as capable of erring but never of lying, moves from kolkhoz to kolkhoz being of use as an electrician and talking with peasants. Little by little the reader begins to perceive a central Russia countryside devastated by the hurricane of Stalin’s collectivization, peopled by peasants in a kind of trance. Reference is made to “hypocritical observance of the voluntary principle.” In one place the wanderer remarks that “the excesses in collectivization were not a wholesale phenomenon, some places were free of dizzying mistakes, there the party line didn’t get cut off and go into a curving deviation. But unfortunately there weren’t too many such places.” Proof that an intelligent reader could perceive the anti-Stalin message is that one—Stalin himself—wrote in red pencil on the margin: “Scum!”

In 1933 the poet Osip Mandelstam composed a sixteen-line poetic epigram about Stalin. It ran as follows:

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,

Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

But where there’s so much as half a conversation

The Kremlin’s mountaineer will get his mention.

His fingers are fat as grubs

And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer

And his boot tops gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders—fawning

half-men for him to play with.

They whinny, purr or whine

As he prates and points a finger,

One by one forging his laws, to be flung

Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

And every killing is a treat

For the broad-chested Ossete.

The oral composition traveled from Muscovite mouth to mouth until it reached the police in a version whose second stanza ran:

All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,

The murderer and peasant-slayer.

Mandelstam was arrested. When Bukharin, then editor of Izvestiia , went to Yagoda to intercede on the poet’s behalf, Yagoda recited the epigram to him by heart.

The anti-Stalin backlash showed up in the working class as well. This we know from OGPU reports found in the Smolensk archives. It was one of the tasks of the OGPU, as it had been of the tsarist police, to keep track of public opinion and report on it to the central authorities. A top secret OGPU document dated 27 March 1931, on popular attitudes in the Western province town of Roslavl in connection with the deportations, claimed that the workers “basically” approved these measures, but said that some “betray negative attitudes,” that they were talking about the “good old times” and saying, “All this would not have happened if Lenin had been alive.” Looking at Lenin’s portrait, one worker had said that “were Lenin alive, he would have allowed free trade and eased our lot. Afterwards, he would have instituted a shift toward collectivization—not by force, but by consent and persuasion.”

One Old Bolshevik who shared the view of the worker-critics was Krupskaya. Collectivization was not proceeding “in Lenin fashion,” she said in a speech of May 1930 before a party conference of Moscow’s Bauman district. Its methods had nothing in common with Lenin’s cooperative plan. In carrying it out, the leaders of the Central Committee had not consulted with the lower ranks of the party or with the people, and they had no right to blame the local organs for the Central Committee’s own mistakes. Kaganovich went down to the Bauman district to handle the situation for Stalin. He said that as a Central Committee member herself, Krupskaya had no right to criticize the Central Committee’s line. “Let not N. K. Krupskaya think,” declared Kaganovich, “that if she is the wife of Lenin she has a monopoly on Leninism.” He also passed word that Krupskaya was to be attacked, and she was from all sides. Khrushchev, then a student at the Industrial Academy in the Bauman district and a staunchly pro-Stalin rising young party functionary, recalled much later how sorry he had felt for Krupskaya, whom he too venerated, when she was being critically assailed at the conference, and how “people avoided her like the plague.”

Some of 50,000 letters sent to Stalin between the autumn of 1929 and the spring of 1930 expressed the resentment that “Dizzy With Success” aroused among local party members. One that has been quoted by post-Stalin Soviet historians as typical was written by a worker in Dniepropetrovsk named Belik, who had taken part in collectivization, and appeared in Pravda on 9 June 1930. “Comrade Stalin,” he said, “I, an ordinary worker and Pravda reader, have regularly been following the newspaper articles! Is the guilty one the person who couldn’t help but hear the hue and cry over collectivization and over the question of who should direct the collective farms? All of us, the grass-roots people and the press, overlooked that basic question about the leadership of the collective farms, while Comrade Stalin, in all likelihood, was in deep sleep at that time and didn’t hear and see our mistakes. So you too have to be rebuked. But now comrade Stalin shifts all the blame on the local offices, and defends himself and the top group.”

What Comrade Belik made bold to say in a letter addressed to Stalin, others were saying informally. The party man from the Klin district of Moscow province told the Fischers apropos “Dizzy With Success”: “That was exactly what I had said from the beginning. But our local authorities wouldn’t listen because they had orders from Moscow and were afraid to disobey them. Everybody in the village now laughed at me. I wanted to go away and never return.”

Some officials even had the temerity to warn Stalin of the “excesses” while they were being committed or, afterward, to call grass roots resentment over his article to his attention. A. M. Nazaretian, a secretary of the party committee of the Transcaucasian Federation, repeatedly warned Stalin about the likely consequences of the coercive means being used, only to find himself, by Stalin’s devices, saddled with blame for those consequences and recalled to Moscow. There, without work, he and his wife and children went hungry for several months until Ordzhonikidze interceded for him. Knowing that Ordzhonikidze, along with Kirov and Kuibyshev, would defend this highly regarded Transcaucasian Old Bolshevik if the case came before the Politburo, Stalin agreed to his appointment to a minor official post in the Urals.

A document preserved in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution shows the outrage felt by some workers of Moscow and the nearby factory town of Podolsk against Stalin for his catastrophic mismanagement of the development drive. This anti-Stalin manifesto, bearing four signatures, was approved at a meeting of 273 workers held in Podolsk on 19 September 1930. It said that Stalin, dizzy with power, had lost all capacity of sound judgment. His “criminal activity” of the past two years had nullified all Lenin’s achievements and now confronted the proletarian regime with the threat of total ruin. To preserve proletarian power, Stalin must immediately be ousted and put on trial “for countless crimes that he has committed against the proletarian masses.” What fate overtook the authors of this then unpublished manifesto is not known.

Dissent also reared its head in public, although in a controlled way. In accordance with party tradition, policy theses were published in advance of the Sixteenth Congress, and on 9 June 1930 Pravda published a special “discussion sheet” filled with comments by party members. One became a cause célèbre. A party member from Saratov, named Mamaev, argued that wholesale collectivization was premature for lack of agricultural machinery, and aimed some darts directly at Stalin. The latter, Mamaev said, had quite rightly fixed attention on coercive collectivization. But most unfortunately, this came after the blundering. “So, somebody did not foresee it. Involuntarily the question arises: whose head grew dizzy?” Speaking up in defense of the maligned lower officials, Mamaev declared: “One should speak of one’s own missed shots and not give lessons to the lower party mass.” Citing an old saying in Russia, Mamaev went on: “It turns out that ‘The tsar is good, but the local chinovniki [state officials] are no good.’”

It seems that Mamaev’s short article was allowed to appear in the censored party organ to provide occasion for denunciation of the views it expressed. For there appeared in Pravda the next day a five-column editorial counterblast obviously prepared in advance, “The Kulak Agents’ Network Inside the Party.” Mamaev was branded a “kulak agent.” His defense of the lower party ranks against the leadership was “demagogy of the worst sort.” The article’s infuriated tone, its demand that Mamaev’s statement and others like it be “burned out without a trace by the hot iron of proletarian Bolshevik self-criticism,” probably achieved the intended aim of making plain to the party ranks that criticism of Stalin’s leadership was taboo.

Political Opposition

It was less easy to stifle anti-Stalin talk in higher party circles. The stage managing of the Sixteenth Congress fostered an impression of a party hierarchy united in enthusiastic support of Stalin, but it was false. The most one could say is that the congress represented a demonstrative closing of the ranks by a leadership divided about the wisdom of some current policies but reluctant to display division at a time of crisis.

Events soon showed that oppositional currents were running in the party. In late 1930 it came out that two groups had been engaging in “underground factional work” against the General Line. The leaders of this oppositional “right—‘left’ bloc” (“left” had to be used in quotes to show that no one could really be to the left of the General Line) were, on the one hand, S. I. Syrtsov, then a candidate member of the Politburo as well as a Central Committee member and the premier of the Russian Federation, and, on the other, Central Committee member V. V. Lominadze, who was first party secretary of the Transcaucasian Federation, and L. A. Shatskin, a member of the Central Party Control Commission. Although the former was pictured as a rightist and the latter two as pseudo-leftist, the fact is that all three were Stalin supporters who had soured on his policies and on him.

What this group concretely stood for has to be inferred from pertinent parts of the denunciatory articles that appeared along with the announcement of the expulsion of these leaders from their high posts. One thing is clear: these Bolsheviks began to doubt that Stalin’s policies were leading to socialism, and became convinced that the policies were producing a rampant growth of bureaucratism. The Transcaucasian bureaucracy was showing what Lominadze called a “feudal-lord attitude toward the needs and interests of workers and peasants.” In their view, the pace of industrialization should be reduced to what was soberly manageable without great wasteful spurts. Syrtsov called the vaunted successes of the piatiletka “eyewash” and described the Stalingrad tractor plant as a “Potemkin village.” The “bloc” was accused of conspiring to change the party line and leadership; according to firsthand testimony, Lominadze even envisaged Stalin’s ouster as something to be accomplished at the next party congress. This must have been a sharp blow to Stalin, since the younger fellow Georgian had been his personal protégé and emissary in Comintern affairs in the later 1920s.

By 1932 there was further drastic worsening of conditions in the country. A weary working class was now turning a deaf ear to agitation for more labor heroism. Prices had shot up. Basic goods as well as food were rationed, and not always available on ration cards. Mass manifestations of discontent were reportedly seen even in factories of privileged Moscow. With famine stalking the countryside, people going hungry in the towns, factories everywhere trying to meet the food emergency by the new panacea of rabbit-breeding on factory grounds, collectivized peasants working listlessly for lack of incentive and many (as the saying went) “leaking” out of the collectives when possible, the catastrophe of Stalinist collectivization was beyond intelligent doubt. Now even the lower and middle ranks of Soviet officialdom had largely lost the optimism still felt during the first three plan years and were stricken with what an anonymous Moscow correspondent of the Bulletin of the Opposition called “a hangover from the ‘economic October.’” Stalin was now a “fallen idol” in the eyes of all but a very small upper stratum of the bureaucracy, wrote another anonymous correspondent from Moscow to the Bulletin . He continued that the average Soviet official moved away from Stalin in a passive and expectant way, aligning himself with the party mass by refusing to show enthusiasm for Stalin. To illustrate this point, the correspondent mentioned that Stalin’s appearance at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater—always well patronized by officials—on 23 February 1932 “was greeted before my eyes with cold silence.”

The grave situation was bringing discredit on the party itself in the eyes of many ordinary people, uninformed as they were about the crucial part that Stalin had played in recent party decisions. “Bolshevism is losing popularity,” a young Hungarian Communist resident in the Soviet Union, Mate Zalka, confided to his diary. “The newspapers are pervaded with falsehood. They blame everything on forces abroad. Pravda ’s lies are terrible. Our ruble is worth a kopeck. This is no crisis, it’s worse. We’re afraid to speak the truth.” Awareness that the public was uninformed about Stalin’s personal role in bringing about the catastrophe only intensified the anguish of some highly placed officials and bitterness among middle-ranking party members against Stalin for his silence.

The year 1932 was comparable to 1921 as a time of crisis. Politically conscious people waited for Stalin to come out now, as Lenin had then, with a frank diagnosis of the situation and a prescription for a sharp policy turn designed to alleviate it. They waited in vain. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that some Soviet politicians saw Stalin’s departure from leadership as imperative for the country’s well-being.

One informal anti-Stalin group that emerged then was led by A. P. Smirnov, V. N. Tolmachev, and N. B. Eismont, men whose party membership dated from 1896, 1904, and 1907, respectively. Smirnov, the principal figure, had been a Central Committee secretary and agriculture commissar between 1928 and 1930. The Central Committee plenum of January 1933 approved an earlier Central Control Commission decision to expel Smirnov from the Central Committee and the other two from the party as punishment for having formed an “underground factional group” to change the industrialization and collectivization policies. Long after Stalin’s death, it came out that the three men were brought to account for advocating the replacement of Stalin. During the Central Committee’s consideration of the case, Stalin declared: “It’s only enemies who can say, get rid of Stalin and no harm will come of it.”

An anti-Stalin appeal came from the pen of M. I. Riutin, a well-known district party secretary in Moscow who had supported the Right against Stalin at the end of the 1920s. On 21 August 1932 he met with a dozen or so fellow party members in a Moscow apartment to discuss and edit an “Appeal to All Party Members.” Two years earlier, then a candidate member of the party Central Committee, Riutin had written a 200-page treatise that reflected the Right’s anti-Stalin position and became known in party circles as the “Riutin platform.” For that he was expelled from the party and arrested. In January 1931, however, he was released and received back his party card along with a warning not to resume oppositional activity. But he did just that by writing the Appeal in 1932. Some copies went into hand-to-hand circulation.

Riutin compressed into the Appeal’s seven or so pages a withering indictment of Stalin for breaking with Leninism, establishing a personal dictatorship, and pursuing policies that had brought the country to the brink of disaster. His reckless tempo of industrialization had disorganized the whole economy, impoverished the people, and undermined their faith in socialism. His terroristic collectivization, mainly aimed against the masses of middle and poor peasants, had reduced the countryside to desperate straits. Hardly more than 30 percent of the 1927 head of livestock survived. Millions of peasants were nomads seeking refuge in overpopulated towns. Famine was looming in 1933. Real Leninism was becoming a forbidden doctrine. The people were muzzled, live Bolshevik thought smothered, the press a monstrous factory of lies. Stalin and his retinue had usurped the party’s rights and were promoting sly, sycophantic careerists ready to change their views as commanded. The boldest and more brilliant provocateur could not have done so much to discredit Leninism and socialist construction. Lenin’s fears about Stalin had been fully borne out. He was wrecking the Communist cause and his leadership should be terminated as soon as possible.

Someone present at the August meeting turned informer. On 30 September the police raided the apartment and seized the document’s original. Riutin was expelled from the party and arrested. Two weeks later the central Party Control Commission’s presidium expelled twenty other party members as a Riutin-led “counterrevolutionary group.” They included Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had possessed copies of the Riutin Appeal without informing the authorities, the philosopher and historian V. Ter-Vaganian, P. Petrovsky (son of the Ukraine’s president), an old Georgian party comrade of Stalin’s, Sergei Kavtaradze, the writer Polina Vinogradskaya, A. Slepkov, D. Maretsky, and the philosopher Yan Sten. All of them became terror victims in a few years’ time.

One of the readers of the Appeal was Stalin. It aroused him to such fury that the expulsions and Riutin’s arrest could not appease him. He confronted the Politburo with the demand that it sanction Riutin’s execution as a terrorist. Amid silence around the Politburo table, Kirov spoke up saying: “Can’t do that. Riutin is not a lost man but an errant one. Devil only knows who had a hand in this letter. People won’t understand us.” Stalin, perhaps sensing the majority’s opposition to his demand, let the matter rest, and Riutin got off with a ten-year term—for the present.

Stalin, however, would not let go. When he found that Riutin’s confinement in the Suzdal political prison was not sufficiently severe to suit him, he had him moved to a worse regime in the Verhne-Uralsk prison. At some point thereafter Riutin was brought to Moscow in an effort to torture and pressure him into consent to play a part in a public treason trial, but he refused. In 1937, on Stalin’s personal orders, he was executed. His two sons, both aeronautical engineers, were likewise done to death. His wife was sent away and killed in a camp near Karaganda in 1947. His 20-year-old daughter and her small child were thrown out of their Moscow lodging onto the street, minus their worldly possessions.

Although Stalin’s power was not seriously threatened by the Riutin platform, his pride was. To denounce him as the Revolution’s evil genius when he saw himself as the hero-leader of its second stage was to wound him in an almost unendurably painful way. His description of the Riutin document as a call for his assassination was true in a symbolic sense. He could not help viewing the denunciation as character assassination, a deadly blow to his most sensitive and vulnerable spot—the belief in his mission of greatness in history. His response was the only one of which he was capable under those circumstances: to demand the death of his assailant as an enemy not simply of him but of the Revolution. To Stalin the punishment he demanded exactly fit the crime, and he later showed how deeply rankled he was by the ruling group’s refusal to sanction it.

Bolshevik Disbelievers

The active opposition of the Lominadzes and Riutins was not all Stalin had to contend with. There was also, especially among Old Bolsheviks, a negative attitude toward the post-NEP society taking shape in the early 1930s. Schooled as they were in what Marx and Lenin had taught about socialism, some found it hard, others impossible, to view the new society as incipiently socialist. Stalin was also versed in the teachings of Marx and Lenin, but in his mind this schooling was overlaid with the orientation on state building.

That he regarded the ongoing revolution from above as an October of socialism’s construction is clear. When the Central Committee met in January 1933 to review the results of the Five-year Plan, he not only declared that the Soviet Union had become a mighty and independent industrial power. He claimed that the “economic foundation of a socialist society” had now been built, and asserted that “we have established the principle of socialism in all spheres of the economy by expelling the capitalist elements from it.”

At the time Stalin made this claim, much of the countryside was famine-stricken. Millions were being worked to death in the forced-labor camps. Many in the new industrial sites shivered in cold, dark, barrack-like structures for lack of real housing. “Hard was the life of Soviet people then,” recalls the writer of a Soviet book of the 1960s. “I remember how ill-clothed our workers were. It wasn’t easy to get a new suit or dress on one’s ration card. Many who took part in family gatherings brought their own food. Chip-in parties, fraternally egalitarian—this had its charm. The parties ended early: 1 January was a working day, the new piatiletka was to start out in shockwork fashion.”

All this was not what most Bolsheviks of the older generation meant by “socialism.” Even if Stalin had explained more clearly how socialist construction had blended in his mind with state building in the Russian pattern, few of his Old Bolshevik contemporaries could have gone along with him: their minds were not attuned to his acquired sense of Peter’s Russia as the rightful ancestor of Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia. As they saw it, socialism was not simply a matter of industrialization along with state ownership and planning; or of dislodging capitalist elements from the economy. Many of them assumed that it would mean better living conditions for the workers, not dire poverty; that its building would not necessitate mass terror against the peasants; that it would bring more equality rather than less, less bureaucracy rather than more, and more popular self-management along the lines sketched by Lenin in his picture of the “commune-state”; and that a resurrection of such relics of the tsarist past as penal servitude, barshchina , and the passport system was no part of socialist construction. Many Bolsheviks who had been Stalin’s supporters tended to believe these things just as much as those whose political sympathies had lain with Trotsky, Zinoviev, Shliapnikov, Bukharin, or others.

Knowing that most of his revolutionary contemporaries couldn’t easily reconcile the privation and inequality all around them with their values as socialists of Marxist and Leninist persuasion, Stalin sought to help them doctrinally. His spokesman Molotov (whom some in the party now began to call his “bludgeon”) explained to the elite audience gathered at the Seventeenth All-Union Party Conference in February 1932 that socialism need not entail material plenty. It was necessary, said the Soviet premier, to “give rebuff to reasoning like: ‘socialism is production for consumption’s sake’.” Such a viewpoint was “one-sided and incorrect.”

The “incorrect” idea had been axiomatic for a generation of Russian socialists. Many Bolsheviks who had never supported Trotsky would have agreed with what he wrote in March 1932: “Is it not monstrous? The country cannot get out of a famine of goods. There is a stoppage of supplies at every step. Children lack milk. But the official oracles announce: ‘The country has entered into the period of socialism!’ Would it be possible more viciously to compromise the name of socialism?” Those who spoke out in ways that presupposed such thinking came to grief. For example, a one-time revolutionary, now director of a Moscow bread factory, was called to testify at the trial of a worker who had stolen a small amount of bread and was being tried under Stalin’s law of August 1932 against theft of state property. Unable to contain himself, the director exclaimed at one point: “If we gave the workers bread, they wouldn’t steal.” Sent into exile shortly thereafter, he perished in the Terror of the later 1930s. What distinguished him from others of his generation was not his view but the fact that he voiced it.

Growing class inequality was also hard for some people of the old Marxist-Leninist persuasion to stomach. Some Bolshevik managers protested their own privileged position by boycotting the special shops, wearing workers’ clothing, and joining the food queues. When this happened in Ivanovo province after wildcat strikes broke out among textile workers in 1932, Kaganovich, who soon arrived on the scene, not only saw to the suppressing of the strikes but punished the protesting managers as well. According to one of them, who later turned up in a camp and told his story to fellow inmate Joseph Berger, Kaganovich explained that “the use of special shops by the privileged was party policy—to boycott them was therefore aggression against the government.”

Mostly, however, the disbelievers kept quiet while their disbelief continued. Vasily Yurkin, a Russian intellectual and a Bolshevik since 1914, explained to Berger in the Siberian camp at Mariinsk in 1935 that one should not confuse the events of the first revolutionary era with those taking place now. What had happened in the Civil War was unavoidable, “but what is happening now would have filled Lenin with horror.” A worker Communist named Belousov, who had been chairman of the Metal Workers’ Union in 1905 and now too was an inmate of the Mariinsk camp, told Yurkin and Berger that he had never taken part in any opposition although much of what he read in the papers “clashed with his secret, ideal image of the party.” He had passed time quietly with friends at the Society of Old Bolsheviks in Moscow. And yet: “Can you believe it—when, finally, in 1935, I was arrested, I felt a measure of relief! The fact is that for years past we Old Bolsheviks who lived in this new society, in this new state we had created with our own hands, had been living with fear and horror in our hearts—a horror more intense than anything we had felt in tsarist times.” Berger writes of Belousov’s confession: “It was the first one of its kind I had heard but I was to listen to many more from the Communists I met in other camps and prisons.”

Younger party members might put credence in Stalin’s claim of success in socialist construction; these elder ones could not. Their disbelief was something of which he was certainly aware from, among other sources, the OGPU’s reports; and it could not fail to arouse his vindictive fury. For indirectly it was a disbelief in him as the leader under whose direction the country was fulfilling Lenin’s prophesy that “Out of NEP Russia will come a socialist Russia.” Were that not happening, he would not be one of the things that “Stalin” signified to him: architect of socialism. The disbelievers did not understand that their inability to see his creation as the basically socialist society he held it to be was from his standpoint an intolerable affront, no less a blow than it would have been to defame him outright. Unknowingly, many survivors of the revolutionary generation were in grave danger of becoming outcasts from a society still being ruled in the name of their Revolution.

A Death in the Family

Another episode contributed to making 1932 a year of intense personal bitterness for Stalin rather than the time of triumph that he had certainly expected it to be. Not only did dissenting opinion spread widely in party circles; it appeared inside his family. The offender was his wife.

Nadezhda Alliluyeva-Stalina, called Nadya by intimates, was still in her late twenties when Stalin turned fifty in 1929. When they married ten years earlier, she was already an ardent party activist for whom Stalin, as an Old Bolshevik of high standing, was an embodiment of the Revolution that she idealized. Although he was a difficult man to live with, the marriage had so far survived the inevitable strains. Nadya gave him the companionship of a devoted wife and made Zubalovo, their country house outside Moscow, a sociable meeting place for many visiting friends and relatives.

After giving birth to their two children, Vasily and Svetlana, Nadya resumed a professional life while carrying on as mistress of Zubalovo. In 1930 she entered the new Industrial Academy as a chemistry student specializing in synthetic fibers. A serious, diligent, unassuming person, she came to school by streetcar so as not to display her social position. Among those she befriended at that time was the academy’s party secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, who in retrospect attributed his successful political career and survival of later purges to the fact that Nadya had spoken well of him to Stalin.

It may have been a combination of Communist idealism and contact with the other students and everyday life at the beginning of the 1930s that turned Nadya against the policies then in force and against her husband as their chief inspirer. She came to the realization, as their daughter later put it, that “my father was not the New Man she had thought when she was young, and she suffered the most terrible, devastating disillusionment.” Based on what she was told much later by her old nurse, various relatives, and Nadya’s close friend Polina Molotova (Molotov’s wife), Svetlana conveys a picture of her mother as having become deeply depressed a few days before she died on 9 November 1932. “My nurse heard my mother say again and again that ‘everything bored her,’ that she was ‘sick of everything’ and ‘nothing made her happy’.” This testimony is in agreement with that of a one-time Soviet official, Alexander Barmine, who recalls having seen Nadya with her brother, Pavel Alliluyev, during the anniversary parade in Red Square on 7 November 1932: “She looked pale and worn, little interested in the proceedings around her. I could see that her brother was deeply concerned.”

Most likely Nadya’s dejection was evident at the dinner party held on the night of 8 November at the Voroshilovs’ to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the Revolution, and Stalin was annoyed. According to the daughter’s reconstruction of events, at one point he said to Nadya, “Hey, you, have a drink!” This is consistent with the further reported detail that he doused a cigarette in his wine glass and flipped it across the table at her. Nadya screamed, “Don’t you dare ‘hey’ me!” rose, left the banquet, and headed for home. Polina Molotova went along and walked around the Kremlin grounds with her until Nadya had calmed down enough for Polina to feel that she could safely leave her alone. Nadya retired to her private bedroom in the Stalins’ Kremlin apartment where, according to her daughter’s later account, she was found the next morning, dead from a self-inflicted bullet shot. It came from a small revolver sent her as a present from Berlin by her brother, Pavel Alliluyev, who had served as military representative with the Soviet trade mission in Germany. She left behind a letter filled with both personal and political accusations against Stalin. He was shocked into numbness by her suicide and infuriated by her accusations, which he took as an act of betrayal. When he approached her open coffin to pay his last respects during the civil leave-taking ceremony in a building on Red Square, he stood there for a moment, then pushed the coffin away from him, and abruptly walked out. He never visited her grave in Moscow’s Novo-Devichy cemetery.

A different version of Nadya’s death circulated in some Old Bolshevik circles in the 1930s. According to it, Stalin shot or strangled her to death in a fit of rage during a quarrel after he came home from the dinner party later that night. As told to the present writer by a person well-situated to know what some very high-placed persons believed, Stalin in a meeting with Politburo members on the day after Nadya’s death said that he took action against her as she menacingly advanced upon him. It could be (we may speculate) that he arrived as she was preparing to commit suicide and that a violent scene ensued in which she came at him with pistol in hand and was slain by him in an ensuing scuffle.

However that may be, Stalin’s responsibility for his wife’s untimely end is not in question. In whatever manner it physically occurred, hers was a Communist’s death of protest against him. His daughter reports that he never got over the shock and to the end of his life went on brooding about the tragedy, imputing the blame to others.

The Birth of the Great-Conspiracy Theory

Nadya’s accusatory farewell and death, coming on top of the other hammer blows to Stalin’s psychic structure, made the close of 1932 a time of inner crisis. From youth he had tended to be a loner; now he withdrew into himself more than ever and became a recluse. He stopped coming to Zubalovo and started building the country house in Kuntsevo that he occupied for the rest of his life. He moved out of the Kremlin apartment he had shared with Nadya into a smaller one not associated with her. While keeping up some ties with children and relatives, he was no longer regularly surrounded by the society of which Nadya had been a vital hub and hence no longer benefited from its free and easy flow of conversation on Soviet affairs. His more solitary life reflected a change that had come over him. As his daughter puts it, “inwardly things had changed catastrophically. Something had snapped inside my father.”

After the shocked numbness and fits of uncontrollable rage at the time of Nadya’s death, Stalin recovered his equilibrium and pursued his political life, along with a social life of sorts, as before. The price paid for the equilibrium was, however, a settled inner vision of the Soviet Communist party and the society as riddled with treason and the potentiality of treason. Even in the 1920s he had been prone to see the world around him peopled with enemies engaged in conspiratorial machinations. Now this tendency took a radical turn for the worse. He began to picture himself as the intended victim of a great counterrevolutionary conspiracy centered in certain circles of Bolshevik ill-wishers and ramified through the society. It was the only way he could mentally come to terms with the situation in which he found himself.

In the exercise of power Stalin had stumbled. There were notable successes in industrialization, but the total picture was grim. Taking socialism by storm in the coercive Russian state-building tradition proved in practice too costly and disruptive a mode of national development. Collectivizing by terror had backfired with consequences that included the worst famine in Russia’s history along with the loss of about half her livestock. The human cost was beyond calculation. The backlash was testimony to widespread belief in the party that Stalin was to blame for these misfortunes. To this his reaction was vindictive rage.

It was impossible for him to recognize that he had bungled things and that there was justice in the criticism of his leadership. That would be the path of breakdown, of parting company with himself—the idealized Stalin-self. Since he could not relinquish or seriously scale down his self-concept, he had to keep his mind’s eye firmly fixed on achievements and treat the costs as unavoidable or caused by others. More, he had to see the changes wrought during the piatiletka as equivalent in their consequences to the October Revolution, and himself as the architect of a socialist society. Lenin, the leader of the first October, was adored afterward by the party he had steered to that triumph. Now he too deserved to be adored. There were many, especially among ordinary people, who did pay homage to him—he could see signs of that in the Soviet press, in the growing attention to his revolutionary biography, his past and present exploits. But many others saw everything in a negative light. Instead of recognizing an historic victory, they were belittling the constructive achievements. Instead of saluting his leadership of genius, they were criticizing him and conspiring to overthrow him.

Such, it appears, was the direction of Stalin’s thinking at this point. Not being able to see anything in his actions that merited criticism, he had to perceive the critics and disbelievers as deliberate maligners engaged in an attempt to sabotage the revolution of socialist construction by besmirching his leadership and doing everything possible to make the enterprise fail. He had to see in every Riutin an assassination-scheming counterrevolutionary, a wrecker, an enemy of the people, all the more dangerous in that he wore a mask of loyalty. Because—as Stalin certainly knew from secret-police reports—criticism of him was rife, he could only conclude that large numbers of persons were plotting his own and the regime’s destruction. He naturally thought of individuals he firmly knew to be his enemies as plausible ringleaders of the conspiracy.

Indirect, ex post facto evidence that he so reasoned exists in a letter of the party Central Committee, marked top secret and dated 29 July 1936. It was sent as a circular letter to all republic, regional, town, and district party committees, and it concerned “the terrorist activity of the Trotskyist-Zinovievist counterrevolutionary bloc.” The bloc was said to have concentrated on “perpetrating terror against very prominent party leaders, in the first instance Comrade Stalin.” Of special significance is the date given for the formation of the purported great anti-Soviet conspiracy: the end of 1932. Since the letter came from Stalin’s headquarters and was indubitably a product of his inspiration, the timing of the alleged conspiracy’s inception suggests that the belief in its existence arose in his mind at the time when he was under stress of the events just described.

We have, moreover, some revealing public remarks of Stalin’s that go to corroborate the above reconstruction of his thought process. The occasion was a graduating ceremony of the Red Army Academy, held in the Kremlin palace on 4 May 1935. Stalin was the speaker. He began by harking back to the theme of the no-more-beatings speech of 1931. The task had been to move a country ruined by four years of the World War and three of the Civil War, with a semiliterate population and no more than oases of industry in a sea of tiny peasant farmsteads, onto the rails of modern industry and mechanized agriculture. It was a question of EITHER doing this in the shortest possible time and thus strengthening socialism, OR of failing to do it and letting the country lose its independence and become a play object for imperialist powers. The country had experienced then a most cruel famine in the sphere of technology. Only by making sacrifices and introducing the most stringent economy in everything, including nourishment and manufactured goods, could the technology famine be eliminated. Of course, quick and wholesale successes were not to be expected in such a big undertaking; it had been necessary to overcome early setbacks and go forward without wavering toward the great aim.

But not all comrades possessed the requisite nerves, patience, and composure. “Let bygones be bygones,” the saying went. “But a man has a memory, and involuntarily you think back on the past when you take stock of the results of our work.” Well, Stalin went on, some comrades took fright at the difficulties and called on the party to retreat. “What good do your industrialization and collectivization, your machines, iron and steel, tractors, combines, and automobiles do us,” they said. “Better to produce more manufactured goods, better to buy more raw material for consumer goods and give the population more of all those trifles (melochi) that enhance people’s lives.” Of course, said Stalin, the three billion rubles of foreign exchange obtained through cruellest economizing and spent on industry could have been used to raise consumer goods production—at the expense of undermining the foundations of socialism, being disarmed in the face of external enemies, becoming captive of the internal and external bourgeoisie. That too would have been a kind of plan, but a plan of socialism’s retreat rather than the plan of offensive that was chosen and that led to the victory of socialism.

But the comrades who were shoved aside in the process did not confine themselves to criticism and passive resistance, Stalin continued. They threatened to raise a revolt in the party against the Central Committee. More than that, they threatened “certain ones among us” with bullets. “Apparently, they reckoned on intimidating us and forcing us to swerve from the Leninist path. These people obviously forgot that we Bolsheviks are people of a special cut. . . . They forgot that we were forged by great Lenin, our vozhd’ , our teacher, our father, who did not know or recognize fear in struggle. . . . Naturally, we gave no thought to swerving from the Leninist path. We stuck to this path and redoubled the speed of our advance, sweeping aside any and all obstacles. True, along the way we had to do damage to some of these comrades. But that couldn’t be helped. I must confess that I too took part in this business.”

These impromptu-appearing remarks of 1935 betray a great deal: that Stalin was obsessively troubled by memories of earlier criticism and viewed the critics, or some of them, as plotters of his assassination; that he managed to reconcile the record of the recent past with the indispensable image of himself as the glorious leader of Soviet Russia’s march to modernity and socialism; that he cast himself as a hero not only in refusing to relax the pressure but also in suppressing party opponents; that he made himself out to have been a famine-fighter by transferring the famine to the realm of technology while transforming actual mass starvation into cruel “economizing” on nourishment; and that he minimized past privation by treating the missing essentials, like clothing, as life-enhancing “trifles.” Finally, his description of the Bolsheviks as “people of a special cut”—the phrase used in his “oath” speech of 1924—shows that he still held to his idealized community concept, the image of the party as a league of warriors united in fidelity to a heroic leader.

That was what Stalin believed that the Bolsheviks ought to be, but not what he thought they all were. As he saw it in the aftermath of the bitter autumn of 1932, the party as then constituted, with a total of 3,200,000 members and candidates, was at best a conglomeration of real Bolsheviks and enemies masquerading under the name. Such was his contention when he addressed the Central Committee plenum called in early January 1933 to assess the results of the piatiletka. He coupled the proud claim that the economic foundation of socialism had been built with the dark vision of a party and society swarming with masked enemies, and the demand for a purge.

Here was Stalin’s vision: various former people—merchants, industrialists, kulaks and their accomplices, bourgeois intellectuals, and others—were ensconced in Soviet plants, farms, and government offices; some had even wormed their way into the party. Unable to fight openly, they were carrying on stealthy wrecking activities, such as arson, sabotage, thievery, even the inoculating of cattle with the plague and of horses with meningitis. They would go to any length to mobilize backward elements for anti-Soviet purposes. Remnants of the SRs, Mensheviks, bourgeois nationalists, Trotskyists, and Rightists could reactivate themselves in these circumstances. Hence the internal struggle must grow more intense with progress in completing the construction of socialism. The quality that Bolsheviks most needed now was revolutionary vigilance.

Two important conclusions followed from Stalin’s diagnosis of the situation. First, the Soviet state, including its punitive organs, must be strengthened. It must not be allowed to begin withering away as Marxist theory foretold. “A strong and mighty dictatorship of the proletariat—that’s what we need now to smash to pieces the last remnants of the dying classes and break up their thieving machinations.” Some comrades had understood the Marxist thesis about the elimination of classes and resulting disappearance of the state as grounds for torpor and complacency, for the counterrevolutionary theory of the diminishing of class war and weakening of state power. Such people were degenerates or double-dealers who must be kicked out of the party.

The second conclusion was the necessity of a large-scale party purge. This had already been decided by the Politburo, very likely at the time of the Riutin affair under pressure from the enraged Stalin. A special resolution of the January plenum approved the Politburo’s decision to conduct a party purge during 1933 and to “organize the work of purging the party in such a way as to ensure iron proletarian discipline in the party and cleanse the party ranks of all unreliable, unstable, and hanger-on elements.”

A Central Committee directive of 28 April 1933 made clear the intended scope of the operation. A Central Purge Commission, headed by Jan Rudzutak and numbering among its members Kaganovich, Kirov, Yaroslavsky, and Stalin’s rising protégé from the Central Committee apparatus, Yezhov, was to direct a network of republic, regional, and district purge commissions in weeding out all who might be adjudged to fall into one of six broad categories, the first three of which were defined as follows: “(1) class alien and hostile elements who made their way into the party by deceit and remain there in order to demoralize the party ranks; (2) double-dealers who live by deceiving the party, who conceal from it their true aspirations and, covered by a false oath of ‘fidelity’ to the party, in fact strive to undermine the party’s policy; (3) open and hidden violators of the iron discipline of the party and state, who fail to carry out the decisions of the party and state, who cast doubt on or discredit the party’s decisions and plans by chatter about their ‘lack of realism’ and ‘impracticability’.” Party critics of Stalin and his policies were to be prime targets.

The projected purge was placed in the hands of a specially created purge commission rather than the regular party body for this purpose, the Central Control Commission. Under Kuibyshev from its formation in 1923 until 1926 and under Ordzhonikidze thereafter to 1930, the Central Control Commission had served the Stalin faction well as a disciplinarian arm of the fight against the oppositions. But under Rudzutak after 1930, the agency came under criticisms indicating that Stalin now saw it as an impediment to his full freedom to act against opponents in the party. One criticism was excessive leniency in reinstating party members who appealed to the commission against lower-level expulsion actions.

Although the special new commission was placed under Rudzutak, its creation indicated that Stalin did not trust the established party body to carry out satisfactorily the major purge operation that he envisaged. He wanted an organ that would mercilessly root out the “masked enemies” from Soviet society. He was starting down the road that led to the Terror of the later 1930s.