Eight
THE NATION REVIVED
Realignment
At the beginning of the 1930s Stalin had justified Russia’s huge industrial effort by recalling that she had been beaten throughout the centuries by stronger neighbours, and that she must become strong or be beaten again. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 stirred both Russian and American fears of Japanese expansion. The US recognized the USSR in 1933 and in the same year Stalin agreed to enter the League of Nations, which Lenin had denigrated as ‘an alliance of world bandits’.
When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Stalin dismissed him as the last gasp of German capitalism soon to be consumed by the communist revolution. As the Nazi threat grew, however, and Hitler declared the USSR to be the source of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, Stalin’s propaganda attacked Nazism as the enemy of the working class. The communist parties of Europe, organized in Comintern, were ordered to form a ‘Popular Front’ with all anti-Fascist parties, to moderate their revolutionary tone and start defending national interests.
Pacts and alliances were being made throughout Europe, regardless of whether their makers could fulfil them. Hitler feared a Soviet–Western rapprochement that would oppose him on two fronts. Stalin feared a Nazi–Western pact that would free Hitler to attack Russia before he had time to rebuild his purge-damaged forces. This congruence of the two dictators’ needs set the scene for the Nazi–Soviet Non-aggression Pact, signed by Molotov and his German counterpart, Ribbentrop, in August 1939. The congruence extended into other areas: as Alan Bullock has written, although Nazism and Stalinism ‘were irreconcilably hostile to each other . . . [they] had many features in common, and each presented a challenge, ideological as well as political, to the existing order in Europe’.1 Moreover, each had world plans, detested democracy, and was skilled in manipulating lies and force as the weapons of totalitarianism; and each had his own obsession – for Hitler the Jews, for Stalin the ‘class enemy’.
The Pact enabled Hitler to invade Poland and then Western Europe, while a secret protocol – whose existence was denied by the Soviet authorities until 1989 – gave Stalin a free hand to retrieve the Polish, Ukrainian and Baltic territories lost by Russia in 1918. He also attempted to annexe Finland in the winter of 1939–40, but was fought to a standstill by the tiny country. This event surprised him – and the world – and exposed the weak state of his army.
Communists and fellow travellers throughout the world recoiled from the Pact but ordinary Russians believed that their genius of a leader had saved the country by throwing Germany and the Western Powers at each others’ throats.
The Great Patriotic War
On 22 June 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin was devastated, even though he knew it was inevitable. Hitler had beaten him to the draw. He had ignored warnings from his agents, and also from Churchill, and had ordered his commanders to do nothing to provoke a German attack. Newly promoted commanders, tremulous before the Leader, lacked initiative. The German Blitzkrieg cut through Soviet defences like a knife through butter. The Red Air Force was destroyed on the ground, giving the Germans aerial freedom to attack the retreating Red Army at will.
The scale of Stalin’s miscalculation was catastrophic but it was not his nature to admit an error, let alone one of this magnitude. Instead, more than thirty senior commanders were ‘tried’ and shot as scapegoats, a small vanguard of the hundreds of commanders to be executed by the NKVD in the course of the war.
Soon after the invasion, Stalin created a new GHQ – the Stavka, harking back to the tsarist high command – and in August he became chairman of a new State Committee of Defence, People’s Commissar for Defence and, for good measure, Supreme Commander. Marshal Zhukov, a rare example of independent-mindedness, demanded that Stalin let the generals do their jobs. Stalin, however, created muddled thinking by pressing ill-prepared offensives on his commanders.
By summer 1942, he had learned much, not only about warfare, but also about the military personality, and he had in place a group of generals whose judgement he could trust. In 1943 he became ‘Marshal Stalin’, regarded as a military leader of genius by the Russians, while to the West he was benign, pipe-smoking ‘Uncle Joe’. In reality, Stalin applied the same coercive mentality to warfare as he had to other spheres. His orders invariably reminded commanders ‘not to spare their forces and not to stop, whatever the losses’. In July 1942, in a long and angry instruction, he ordered that each army should form three to five well-armed detachments of some 200 men each, to be ‘placed directly behind unreliable divisions and they must be made to shoot the panic-mongers and cowards on the spot in the event of disorderly retreat’.2 The ferocity of the Red Army’s efforts and some of its most spectacular successes, especially at Stalingrad, owed much to these murderous tactics.
In the first eighteen months of the war alone, some 3 million men were taken prisoner, or 65 per cent of the Soviet armed forces. A personal shock for Stalin came with the news in July 1941 that his elder son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, just out of military academy and at the front since June, was a prisoner of war (or POW). The Germans were making the most of this ‘catch’ by dropping leaflets on Soviet troops, showing Yakov in his army uniform in conversation with German officers and telling them that if their leader’s own son could surrender, they might as well give up fighting.
Stalin was enraged. In his determination to liquidate anyone who might know too much about his personal life, he had dealt with his first wife’s family, the Svanidzes, in the purges of 1937–8, either by shooting or the camps. Yakov’s ‘betrayal’ prompted the execution of a remaining Svanidze uncle and a vicious decree declaring Soviet POWs outside the law and depriving their families of state support. Denied lists of Soviet prisoners by Stalin, the Red Cross was unable to alleviate their suffering. As a result, many officers committed suicide rather than surrender, thousands of POWs, including senior officers, donned German army uniform and collaborated with the enemy, and all officers and men who managed to get back to their own side, either by escape from captivity or breaking out of encirclement, were sent to special camps for ‘checking’. Many remained in camp until the end of the Stalin era.
The NKVD was as active as ever. The least sign of dissent or criticism, at any level in army or civilian life, was punished by long camp sentences, if not death. Even entire ethnic groups, if suspected of disloyalty or collaboration with the enemy, were deported to the wastes of Siberia. For Stalin, discipline and control meant above all punishment and the threat of it. Paradoxically, ordinary Russians commonly responded to this harsh leadership positively, believing that it was necessary to overcome ‘traditional’ Russian inefficiency.
While the Allies faced the complex process of converting their economies to war production and their populations to wartime conditions, for the USSR the task was facilitated by the existence of a command economy and a society that was used to being regimented. Only the propaganda changed. Instead of Marxist slogans, the population was now exhorted to save Mother Russia.
Tsarist-style epaulettes and pre-revolutionary ranks were re-introduced, ministries replaced People’s Commissariats, government officials – including diplomats – were put back into uniform, films were made glorifying historical figures, such as Alexander Nevsky who beat the Huns, and Ivan the Terrible, the first ‘Tsar’ and conqueror of the Mongols. Most cynically, having helped to destroy the church and the clergy under Lenin, in 1943 Stalin restored the patriarchy – non-existent since the 1920s – and reopened the churches in order to boost national feeling. Marxist ideology was played down, Comintern was formally disbanded, and militant nationalism – an essential weapon in any nation’s wartime armoury – took the place of internationalism. Indeed, for the Russians the conflict was not the Second World War at all but the Great Patriotic War.
The war brought an alliance between the USSR and the Western Powers, and also introduced Stalin on to the world stage as a personality. The Caucasian brigand had long gone and now he expanded his image from Communist Party boss to world leader. In meetings with the Allies – Churchill in Moscow (1942), Churchill and Roosevelt in Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945), and Truman, Churchill and Attlee in Potsdam (1945) – he played the diplomatic game like an old hand.
Until June 1944 the Allies were compelled by force of circumstance to refuse Stalin’s demand for a second front in Europe to relieve the Red Army. In compensation, between 1 October 1941 and 30 June 1945 the Allies – mostly the US, plus the UK and Canada – delivered arms, transport, aircraft, technology and food worth some 10 billion US dollars.
Of the Western leaders, Roosevelt appeared more open towards Stalin than Churchill, who had to conceal his distaste for the Soviet despot against whose party’s regime he had personally urged the Intervention in 1918. Stalin heartily reciprocated these hidden feelings. As the war progressed, relations between Stalin and the Allies remained civil but never became warm. He lost not one iota of his distrust of the West. After unprecedented feats of arms, the Red Army drove the Germans all the way from Stalingrad to central Europe and in the spring of 1945 met US and British troops in Germany. Their natural euphoric impulse to embrace and celebrate was nipped in the bud by Stalin when the NKVD reported what was happening. Contact with Westerners risked contamination with alien values. Such defensiveness at the moment of victory did not augur well for post-war relations, either with the West or between the state and the people inside Russia.
Stalin demonstrated his xenophobia and his sense of insecurity when he agreed to meet the Allied leaders at Potsdam outside Berlin in July–August 1945 for their last meeting of the war. Stalin had been terrified when flying for the first and only time in his life from Moscow to Tehran in 1943, and now he insisted on going by train. The entire route of 1,200 miles was guarded by 17,000 NKVD troops and 1,500 operational troops posted along the track, while eight armoured trains with NKVD troops patrolled the line.
The People’s Reward
Already a remote and godlike figure, after the war Stalin became even more reclusive. He rarely appeared at meetings and his involvement in government steadily diminished as he sank further into the gloom of his last misanthropic years. With customary zeal, Soviet propaganda depicted him as ever more benign, wise and concerned, but in reality he was becoming an almost invisible force.
If the German invasion had shaken his self-confidence, the victory of May 1945 brought him worldwide praise as a great war leader. Yet he became pathologically suspicious. His already misanthropic outlook on the world was further soured in 1946 when Winston Churchill spoke for the first time of the ‘iron curtain’ that now confined the peoples of Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. The image could not have suited Stalin better: the Soviet Union was again faced by powerful enemies and it must therefore strengthen its defences. Enemies, as the Soviet people knew from bitter experience, were likely to be as active within Russia’s borders as they were outside.
Commanders and others who may once have incurred Stalin’s displeasure were arrested and shot. Party bosses and as many as 2,000 officials in Leningrad were arrested and many executed, as Stalin suppressed the leadership of the country’s second city, the ‘Hero-City’, where he detected excessive self-confidence. Political prisoners of the 1930s, sent to the front in 1941 and now returning home, many of them covered with medals, were sent back to camp. For their endurance and historic victory, the Russian people were rewarded with yet harsher controls as the reconstruction of the ruined country got under way. Once again they were exhorted to postpone the dawn of a ‘radiant future’ by sacrificing today for the sake of the communist tomorrow.
Stalin’s paranoia even embraced his closest aides, as he lashed out at his remaining stalwarts. The wife of his private secretary, who had served him faithfully for twenty-eight years, was shot and her husband soon cast aside. The wife of the head of state, Kalinin, was arrested, as was Polina Zhemchuzhina, the Jewish wife since 1921 of Molotov, the longest surviving Bolshevik, Stalin’s comrade in 1917 and thereafter his most loyal henchman. A year before her arrest in 1949, Stalin told Molotov, ‘You must divorce your wife!’3 According to Molotov, husband and wife, as good Bolsheviks, duly obeyed to serve the party cause.
Zhemchuzhina’s arrest was partly a prelude to Molotov’s own demotion, but more sinisterly was connected to a plan that had been brewing in Stalin’s mind since 1946, namely, to eradicate influential Jewish figures as a ‘dangerous alien element’.
During the war, to raise support for the Soviet war effort in the large American-Jewish community, Stalin had created the Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee. It had done its work with success but now in a world of emerging new hostilities its members were branded as Jewish nationalists. Similarly, when the State of Israel was founded in 1948 Stalin expected a pro-Soviet regime to emerge, since Zionism had socialist roots and the Israeli political élite comprised mostly Russian Jews. But Israel displayed a pro-US orientation instead, and Soviet Jews were showing wild enthusiasm for the Jewish state. Stalin smelt a rat: Jewish internationalism had raised its head. A new – old – enemy needed to be dealt with. Accused of spying for Jewish organizations backed by the US, the Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee was physically wiped out.
Xenophobia was whipped up by ‘Orwellian’ methods. Students were ordered to scan textbooks for the names of foreign scientists, while budding academics were told to find Russian names to insert in new editions. ‘Foreignness’ became synonymous with Jewishness, as the campaign focused public hatred on Soviet citizens of Jewish origin, the so-called ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, a codeword for Jews, although Jews were not the only ones to suffer. Anti-Semitism channelled Russian nationalism into anti-Western feeling and would, Stalin hoped, keep the people in line behind the regime.
The world of culture was particularly hard hit. Writers, literary and theatre critics, film-makers, in short the entire cultural intelligentsia, was again traumatized, as individuals were vilified in the press, disappeared, were tried, exiled or shot for ‘exerting alien influence’. Western books and newspapers had long been banned, now Western radio was ‘jammed’, and contacts, however casual, between Soviet citizens with Westerners could bring disaster.
Stalin was of course correct, in his sick way, to believe that Western ideas could infiltrate as effectively through personal contact as through any other medium, and he was equally correct in thinking that such ideas would corrode Soviet values. Exposure to the West in later periods brought about a profound change in the outlook of the intelligentsia and political élite, so that when Gorbachev opened the floodgates in 1987 and censorship withered, the scene was set for the total collapse of the system. It had depended for its survival on Stalin’s mono-culture of an ideology derived from Lenin, and simply could not withstand pluralistic and heterodox influences.
Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’ meanwhile reached fabulous proportions, as the state prepared for the Leader’s seventieth birthday in December 1949. Hagiographic epithets were showered on him and his name and his image saturated the media and all available wall space. No book or article could be published that did not begin and end with a quotation, however irrelevant, from one of his speeches. He took a personal hand in writing a new national anthem to his own greater glory. His henchman, Beria, told the writer of a film which was to show Stalin making his vow at Lenin’s coffin, that ‘The Vow was to be a sublime film in which Lenin is John the Baptist and Stalin the Messiah’.4
It is difficult to explain the contrast between Stalin’s apparent rationality as a war leader, his strategic success in bringing the Soviet Union into the heart of Europe as a military and political force, on the one hand, and the destructive and deranged violence he turned against his own most devoted associates, on the other. Certainly, it is in the nature of an omnipotent dictator to imagine enemies behind every bush. In this respect, Stalin was no exception. His food was tested for poison; his lifestyle involved minimal change, restricted to his dacha or his Black Sea residence; the circle of people permitted to come into contact with him was reduced to a handful, and his public appearances were limited to May Day and 7 November on Lenin’s tomb in Red Square.
His family brought him no joy, either. His daughter, Svetlana Allilyueva, married, first, a Jewish intellectual without her father’s blessing, then secondly the son of one of Stalin’s henchmen. She would defect to the West in 1967. His first son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, died ignominiously as a German POW, shot while trying to kill himself on the electrified fence. His second son, Vasili Stalin, made a brilliant but phoney career in the air force as his father’s son, but turned out a scandalous, drunken womanizer who was finally removed from office even while Stalin was still alive. He died of alcoholism in 1962, aged forty-three.
The new People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe were equally subjected to anti-Western ‘disinfection’. Their leaders – many of them Jews – were falsely linked in show trials with the alleged US-backed Zionist conspiracy, and contact with the West was harshly controlled.
Whereas parliamentary democracy on the whole replaces its administrations and élites by constitutional and natural means, dictatorships, by contrast, are arbitrary and unpredictable. In the Soviet case, replacement by purge and violence was a well-established tradition. Even as his own days were numbered, Stalin continued to control his subordinates by manipulation, moving the political pawns on his chessboard to balance and counter-balance each other – the army, police, government and party holding each other in check. As in the great bloodletting of the 1930s, so now the security organs themselves were purged, with senior officials violently removed and replaced by others who would soon be similarly despatched by a bullet in the back of the neck.
The End
The final chapter of Stalin’s life is a story of irrational hatreds, failing health, and a plan to mount a mass assault on the Soviet Jews that only his death curtailed.
The Nineteenth Party Congress of October 1952 – the first since 1939 – was preceded by the execution of thirteen of the fourteen members of the Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee. At the Congress Stalin spoke only briefly and he seemed distracted, probably because he was contemptuous of the institution that he had turned into a puppet show. At the Central Committee which followed, however, he was more his usual vindictive self, lashing out at his next intended victims.
Meanwhile, preparations for unmasking the ‘Zionist conspiracy’ moved forward. The medical profession was the chosen vehicle. In Lenin’s last days, Stalin had reported to the Politburo that Lenin had indicated a wish for potassium cyanide to end his misery as a paralysed imbecile. Stalin had lacked the nerve to oblige. With lesser ‘patients’ he was less squeamish. Now, in 1952–3, he resorted to the idea of ‘assassins in white coats’ in order to carry his plans forward.
Beginning in 1951 and continuing throughout 1952, the arrest of dozens of Jewish physicians from among the top ranks of the Soviet medical profession, on charges of ‘poisoning people with drugs, and killing them on the operating table’,5 made it plain that a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ of major proportions was being planned.
As with Lenin, one may speculate that Stalin’s own physical condition had affected his judgement. Apart from an unhealthy lifestyle – working into the small hours, eating late and sleeping until midday, little or no exercise – it is conceivable that a lifelong obsession with security and the use of extreme remedies had imposed a stress that was now taking its toll in the mental and physical forms of paranoia and dizzy spells. After his seventieth birthday his health declined more rapidly. He had a series of small strokes but, distrusting his doctors, he relied on herbal teas and steam baths, remedies from his youth.
Having long lost all human feeling, except perhaps for his housekeeper, Stalin’s personal life was an empty shell. If he had earlier been affected by a sense of isolation, by the end of his life it had become a genuine persecution mania.
Whether or not his fears were driving his policy, Stalin ordered the trials of the ‘foreign-backed terrorist group of murdering doctors’. The long night of 1937 was to be replayed, this time with the clear intention of arousing the anti-Semitic instincts of the Russian people, barely suppressed during the more idealistic days of communist internationalism, and provoking widespread attacks on the Jewish population.
The doctors were accused of plotting to murder the Soviet leadership as a means of advancing the Zionist cause. The names of all those arrested were not published in full since they included Russians, and that would have undermined the Zionist conspiracy theory: the public could not be expected to understand why such distinguished and honoured men had sold themselves to international Jewish organizations.
Well trained to go through the proper motions in support of even the least believable campaigns, Soviet citizens – from top military down to factory workers and peasants – began reporting evidence of ‘medical sabotage and terrorism’ by Jews at all levels. Public hostility to the Jews reached epic proportions, even though in the 1930s, countering Trotsky’s charge that the purge trials were anti-Semitic in intent, Stalin had condemned anti-Semitism as ‘the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism’,6 and punishable by death. To maintain the fiction that international Zionism, not the Jews, was the target, Stalin ordered honours and prizes to be issued to prominent Soviet Jews.
Stalin planned to hold a public trial of the main accused and to have them hanged in public in Red Square, where the orchestrated ‘righteous indignation’ of the mobs would spread throughout the country as pogroms. To ‘save’ the Jewish population, he planned mass deportations under the harshest conditions to eastern Siberia, where the ‘Jewish problem’ – said officially not to exist in the Soviet Union – would be finally solved.
Recent Russian research of the circumstances surrounding these events suggests that Stalin in fact had a super plan: the ‘final solution’ of the Jewish problem was only the prelude to a cataclysmic confrontation with the West – the final clash between communism and imperialism. As Western alarm at Soviet anti-Semitism mounted, and Stalin’s entourage expressed growing concern about Russia’s credibility on the world stage, Stalin apparently poured scorn on their heads and seemed to be inviting war.
Surrounded by secrecy his entire life, even the circumstances of Stalin’s death are blurred. Certainly his general health was bad by 1953, if not much earlier, yet in late February 1953 he attended a performance of Swan Lake at the Bolshoi, sitting alone and unseen at the back of his darkened box. On the night of 28 February he watched a film at the Kremlin and then drove to his dacha, where he was joined by Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin. They left at 4 a.m. on 1 March and Stalin went to bed.
Normally, his security staff expected him to call for tea by about 10 a.m., but on this occasion there was no sign of life in Stalin’s room until about 6 p.m., when a light went on. Still no call came for his staff to enter, and they were under his own strict orders not to do so. Finally, at 10 p.m., using the excuse that the mail had arrived, one of the guards entered Stalin’s room and found him lying helplessly on the floor in a pool of urine, mumbling incoherently. He had collapsed at 6.30 p.m., as his broken watch showed.
Not until 9 a.m. on 2 March, some fourteen hours since he was found with the obvious signs of having suffered a major stroke, was a large team of doctors – all of Russian nationality – allowed to attend the Leader. Given the criminal culture pervading the Stalinist leadership, it is natural to ask whether Beria had either engineered Stalin’s death or by withholding assistance allowed the Leader to die.
Stalin’s daughter and son were called. Vasily staggered about, drunk and yelling that his father was being murdered. Svetlana later described her father’s death as ‘difficult and terrible. . . . The death agony was horrible. He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of the fear of death. . . . ’7 The doctors struggled for days to overcome the inevitable until, at 9.50 p.m. on 5 March, they announced that the patient was dead.
His mummified body was placed next to Lenin’s in the Mausoleum, sharing the catafalque until 1961, when an old Bolshevik called Fanny Lazurkina told the Twenty-first Party Congress that Lenin had come to her in a dream the previous night and said he was fed up with having Stalin’s body lying next to him. Stalin was removed that night.
Within a month the Jewish doctors were released and their evidence declared invalid, having been extracted by illegal means. Stalin’s successors now feared Beria as the man who had most incriminating information on them, and they moved quickly to neutralize him. He was arrested in July 1953 and after prolonged interrogation, tried and summarily executed in December.