Stalin and His Hangmen (12 page)

For the whole of the 1920s and some of the 1930s, Stalin’s Okhranka file was considered a bombshell that could destroy him or whoever tried
to use it against him while the files of other old Bolsheviks were carefully stored to damn any whom Stalin needed to discard. This however is not enough to categorize Stalin as a traitor. Like Lenin and Sverdlov, only with less hesitation, he used any means for his absolute end. If cooperation with the Okhranka proves that a Bolshevik was an impostor, then the whole of Lenin’s Politbiuro and their revolution becomes a capitalist plot, as absurd and pointless as the legendary last session of the Communist Party of the State of Utah, when it dawned on the seventeen participants that they were all FBI agents.

The striking quality that marks Stalin apart from his comrades is isolation. Before he first saw Lenin in 1905, he worshipped no living human being. There were Georgians at the seminary whom he admired: the murdered thinker and poet Lado Ketskhoveli, for instance. He also admired Seit Devdariani, who led a group of radical students. Devdariani became a philosopher and was in 1937 shot by Beria, unquestionably with Stalin’s assent, and the only copy of his manuscript
A History of Georgian Thought
perished, except for a brief fragment, with him. Stalin’s serious intellectual rivals in the Tbilisi seminary did not live long.

In Stalin’s few friendships he dictated the agenda and he was more loved than loving. Lenin, even after his brain had been shattered by strokes, however, remained a superior being in Stalin’s eyes: as ruthless and peremptory as himself, even more charismatic and, above all, with the ability to produce the right words for every theory and the right theory to justify every event, using irony, logic and abuse to convince. This worship was not fully reciprocated. Lenin saw Koba as ‘the marvellous Georgian’ but had trouble remembering the surname Jughashvili. From the start, Koba stood out from Lenin’s comrades as an atavistic executor of the party’s, especially of Lenin’s, will, baulking at nothing, yet calm and collected (when not rude and irritable), a factotum who could even write polemical treatises and expound doctrine, if not an original thinker.

Lenin gave Stalin enough praise to encourage his conceit. From newspaper articles in Georgian, summarizing what he had read in Russian, Stalin in 1913 graduated to treatises in Russian. In Lenin’s ruthless cynicism about the means used to achieve the end and in his readiness to take drastic measures, to deceive and manipulate, Stalin found a kindred soul.

Lenin held sacred the famous principle of democratic centralism: decisions reached after a vote in the party’s Central Committee were binding on all. (In fact, where necessary, a minority opinion was massaged into a majority opinion.) Stalin was an adept pupil, as he explained to Molotov:

Let’s suppose there are 80 people in the Central Committee, of whom 30 take the right position and 50 the wrong one, thus being active enemies of your policy. Why should the majority submit to the minority?… A minority has never expelled a majority. This takes place gradually. Seventy expel 10 – 15, then 60 expel another 15… And gradually, all this being done in the framework of democratic centralism, without any formal infringement of the rules. Actually, this ends with the minority of the majority remaining in the CC.
³⁵

For all his unprincipled remorselessness, his energy and patience, Stalin needed not just the right moment to take power but the right associates, those willing not just to die, but to kill for him.

TWO
Stalin, Dzierżyński and the Cheka

He will battle to the grave with dark clouds,
Beaten back a thousand times he will rise up to the end.

Feliks Dzierżyński

Prelude to Power

The Petrograd to which Stalin, Kamenev, Lenin and Trotsky flocked, in trains from Scandinavia or Siberia, in spring and summer 1917 was unrecognizable to them. Bliss was it at that dawn to be alive, or so it seemed. The removal of Tsar and court left Russia with a parliamentary government of the great, the good and the reasonable. Aristocratic liberals (constitutional democrats) shared power and platforms with socialists and dormant terrorists. Men like Alexander Kerensky, the lawyer and orator who was leader of the Duma, and effectively prime minister, would have been adequate in a peaceful Scandinavian country. They presided over the total abolition of the death penalty and complete freedom of speech and assembly. They demolished the instruments of oppression: the gendarmerie, the penal system. Crowds filled the streets and made their demands with impunity: housewives wanted bread, workers took over factories, sailors and soldiers rose up against their officers.

In fact a demographic and political disaster had occurred. Millions of peasants had died at the front while the survivors were deserting en masse to seize the land. Hundreds of thousands of officers had perished, some at the hands of their own soldiers. There were too few people left alive to feed the cities or to administer them. Russia was cut off by war from its European allies, except by tortuous rail and ship connections through Sweden and Norway or the interminable route across Siberia, the Pacific Ocean and the USA. All this was too much for a government of well-meaning men to cope with, especially when faced with the dilemma of whether to withdraw from the war and make peace with Germany, thus provoking the hostility of the British and French and mutiny by the officer class, or to continue the war to ‘final victory’ and doom the country to inevitable collapse and revolution, leaving the Bolsheviks and social revolutionaries to seize power from the ruins.

Kerensky’s government dithered, but had it made a firm decision, could not have enforced it. Trapped between the anvil of an officer corps determined to restore order and fight the Germans, and the hammer of
workers and soldiers bent on taking power from the Duma to the councils (soviets) that had flourished during the 1905 uprising, Kerensky, enlisting one set of opponents against the other, talked himself into irrelevance.

Lenin and Trotsky, let alone minor players such as Stalin, had no difficulty hiding from half-hearted attempts to arrest them. A demoralized society saw no need to extirpate them. As food became harder to find, as transport and medical services collapsed and life on the streets and at home was endangered by armed marauders, the population became resigned to accepting any force, left or right, that could seize power and take decisions. The spring of euphoria led to a summer of disillusion and an autumn of despair. When in November the Bolsheviks struck, in ten days that shook the world, paralysing Russia by seizing railway junctions and telephone exchanges, even their most principled opponents put up no coherent resistance, so great was the relief that a group of men had taken on responsibility for the future. However ominous their leaders and ideology, they would put an end to the dithering; they would fill the vacuum.

Feliks Dzierżyński: the First Forty Years

The public of Petrograd and Moscow had heard only of Lenin and Trotsky; other Bolsheviks were shadows emerging from the underground. Stalin was, as backstage manager of the revolution, the least visible of the Bolshevik Central Committee that took power. Leon Trotsky was a genius, creating the Red Army out of disaffected soldiers, workers and peasants. Vladimir Lenin bullied and cajoled fractious colleagues into a semblance of unity. Nevertheless, the revolution needed a third man against its enemies: it had to be armed against the unseen threat from those on the left and the right who wanted not a Marxist dictatorship but a pluralistic, democratic forum.

Within six weeks of the October revolution, Lenin’s men felt surrounded by such hostility that they set up a secret police. Feliks Dzierżyński, a middle-aged Pole, pallid from years in prison, created a punitive, deterrent and intelligence organization, the Cheka. Dzierżyński became the role model for all future Soviet secret police chiefs, just as
Lenin set the example for leaders of the Soviet party and state. It was the symbiosis of Dzierżyński and Stalin which would determine the fate of the USSR after Lenin fell ill and died.

Dzierżyński, who put himself forward for the post despite being as unlikely a leader as Stalin, was the ideal chief for a repressive organization. Like Stalin, he was neither Russian nor an intellectual in the sense that Lenin and Trotsky considered themselves. He had unique experience: nobody had worked as hard in eleven years of prison and exile on unmasking traitors to the revolutionary movement – chairing a committee of prisoners that interrogated suspected provocateurs, as his widow proudly recorded. Nobody was as flamboyantly self-sacrificing for the cause as Dzierżyński: his sense of propriety and duty were hypertrophied. From 1918 on, in his Lubianka office Dzierżyński interrogated prisoners and rummaged through their files and drove out to make arrests – like Stalin taking advantage of the lowest point in his victims’ biorhythms; Dzierżyński liked working late at night. The only task he, like Stalin, left to his underlings was executions. Only once did Dzierżyński shoot anybody dead – a drunken sailor who was swearing at him – and this induced a convulsive fit. In power even more ascetic than Stalin, Dzierżyński subsisted as he had in prison, on mint tea and bread, in an unheated office, his greatcoat for a blanket. He rolled cigarettes from rough Russian tobacco. Unlike Stalin, Dzierżyński was a pedantic purist. He threw away pancakes cooked by his sister because she had bought flour from a private trader; he dismissed his niece, and the man who had given her a job, from service on the railways because she had profited from the family name. Dzierżyński fled in indignation on the only occasion he went to an art gallery, never attended a concert and read only Polish romantic poetry or Marxist exegeses. Dzierżyński had his son fostered in a working-class family, where ‘it is easiest to preserve and enrich one’s soul’. Dzierżyński’s aesthetic sense was sublimated in work. His successor Menzhinsky wrote in his obituary: ‘Were it not for his artistic nature, his love of art and nature… for all his experience underground, he would never have reached the perfection of Chekist art in taking his opponents apart, which made him stand head and shoulders above all his colleagues.’

Dzierżyński gave the Cheka and its subsequent acronymic transformations a pseudo-chivalrous image of ‘sword and flame of the revolution’,
and the conviction that they should be the central, sometimes supreme, power. The principles – ‘every communist must be a chekist’ – and the extrajudicial powers of the Cheka were established by Dzierżyńskis, although he always meant it to be subject to the party’s leader: to implement and enforce, not create, ideology and policy.

Without Dzierżyński’s authority and support, Stalin might never have come to power. In 1922 Dzierżyński would swing the half-million paramilitaries he controlled away from Trotsky’s principled ‘opposition’, to Stalin’s ‘loyal support’ for Lenin’s appeasement of those in the party who wanted civil peace, a partial restoration of capitalism and the rule of law. From 1917 to 1922, as Lenin’s faithful hound, he did more than Stalin for revolutionary unity but sided with Stalin when choices between fractions had to be made.

What brought together these two men of largely incompatible temperament, class and nationality? Dzierżyński and Stalin were drawn to each other, as other Georgian and Polish intellectuals and rebels always had been. For Georgians, Poland was a congenial part of the Russian empire for university study or exile. Poles and Georgians shared a tradition of eloquence, a cult of honour, pride in a heroic medieval age of chivalry. Both nations also believed that they had been chosen by God to defend Christian values – the Poles the Catholic faith and Western culture, the Georgians the Orthodox religion and Byzantine civilization – against the barbarians of the East.

Personally, Stalin and Dzierżyński had much in common, apart from dour fathers and doting mothers. From childhood to adolescence they had been destined by their family and temperaments to be priests; the adolescent Stalin could have said what Dzierżyński told his brother Kazimierz: ‘If I ever concluded that God did not exist, I’d put a bullet through my head.’ Both at the age of nineteen underwent violent conversion to atheism and revolution. Equally unsmiling and uncommunicative in private life, they spent years of political resistance brooding in prisons and hunting in Siberia. They did not debate in Swiss cafes nor study in French libraries. Unlike the uxorious Lenin and Trotsky, their solitude was broken by only a few months of arid marital life and they both left in their native lands young sons whom they hardly knew. Both had been poets: they declaimed and catechized, they did not expatiate or analyse. Both were shy of public speaking and arcane Marxism.
Neither finished his education, and both spoke Russian as a foreign language.
¹
Stalin and Dzierżyński prided themselves on their aloofness, and on their nose for treachery. No wonder then that their meeting in Petrograd in summer 1917 after a brief encounter in Stockholm in 1906 led to an alliance.