One sign of the unhealthy political situation was the noisy campaign waged under the banner of fighting foreign threats. In 1927, a series of international crises was used to pump up war hysteria: a note from Britain’s foreign secretary, Austen Chamberlain, objecting to Soviet anti-British propaganda in February; a raid on the Soviet embassy in Beijing in April; the breaking off of diplomatic relations with Great Britain in May; the June murder of the Soviet ambassador to Poland, Petr Voikov, who had helped organize the 1918 execution of Russia’s royal family; and repression against Communists in China. Calls for vigilance and military readiness spawned rumors and panic buying of manufactured goods and food supplies “in case of war.” The government’s fanning of martial passions was largely an attempt to counter criticism from the left, which was using foreign policy difficulties as fodder for attacks against the majority.
All of the Bolshevik leaders, both those still in power and those who had been expelled from office, took part in fanning militaristic passions. Stalin was no exception. News of Voikov’s murder found Stalin vacationing in the south. In an 8 June coded telegram to Moscow he offered his take on the situation: “Received about murder of Voikov by monarchist. Sense England’s hand here. They want to provoke conflict with Poland. They want to repeat Sarajevo.” By comparing Voikov’s murder with the event generally seen as the trigger for World War I, Stalin showed that he felt war was imminent.
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In the coded message he urged “maximal caution” in regard to Poland but recommended conducting ruthless reprisals and purges within the USSR:
Without delay, all prominent monarchists in our prisons or labor camps should be proclaimed hostages. We should immediately shoot five or ten monarchists and announce that with every assassination attempt, new groups of monarchists will be shot. We should give the OGPU a directive about house-to-house searches and arrests of monarchists and any sort of White Guardists throughout the entire USSR in order to completely liquidate them using all measures. Voikov’s murder gives us grounds to take revolutionary measures to completely crush monarchist and White Guard cells in all parts of the USSR. The task of fortifying our own rear demands this.
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These statements foreshadow some of the hallmarks of Stalin’s policies in the coming years. Relative prudence in foreign policy (“maximal caution”) always went hand-in-hand with exceptional ruthlessness at home. The idea of “fortifying our own rear” through repression would be a cornerstone of Stalin’s policy in the 1930s.
The Politburo members who had remained in Moscow adopted Stalin’s recommendation. A wave of repressions swept the country. On 10 June 1927,
Pravda
reported that twenty former members of the nobility—“hostages”—had been shot. The barbaric executions of innocent people severely damaged the Soviet government’s reputation. The bloodthirsty behavior of the collective leadership suggested that all the top Bolsheviks were cut from the same cloth, but this is true only up to a point. On many key issues, Politburo members were capable of independent judgment. That the members of this body did not think in lockstep offered a kernel of hope that the Bolshevik authorities could govern with a degree of rationality.
One of the last glimmers of true collective leadership could be seen in the summer of 1927. This was a time of escalating crisis, and the Politburo reached its decisions on important political matters through genuine debate. A series of short letters from Molotov to Stalin, who spent that June and July vacationing in the south, offer a window onto these debates. The main points of conflict were the nation’s policies toward China and Great Britain and the question of expelling Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Central Committee. Politburo members were still conducting themselves rather independently and forming surprising (in light of subsequent events) tactical coalitions. For example, Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, Rykov, and Rudzutak
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were critical of the policy toward China, where Moscow insisted, without success, on cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communists. (Voroshilov “has reached the point of groundless name-calling toward ‘your leadership over the past few years,’” Molotov complained in a letter to Stalin dated 4 July 1927.) Molotov and Bukharin, who enjoyed Stalin’s support, defended the correctness of the policy.
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Opinions were evenly split on the fates of Trotsky and Zinoviev. Kalinin,
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Rykov, Ordzhonikidze, and Voroshilov believed that their expulsion from the Central Committee should be delayed until the party congress that fall. In telegrams from the south, Stalin unsuccessfully objected. Only after he demanded that his vote be counted in absentia and Kalinin joined those in favor of immediate expulsion did the Politburo resolve in late June to advance the timetable.
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Nevertheless, the implementation of this decision was delayed. The opposition leaders were not expelled during the Central Committee plenum in late July–August but in October. Molotov, fresh from a contentious Politburo meeting on 4 July 1927, sent Stalin an anxious letter:
The most unpleasant thing is the situation within the Seven.
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In terms of questions concerning the opposition, China, and the ARK [Anglo-Russian Unity Committee], you can already see more or less distinct divisions, and over and over we’re split down the middle with one deciding vote.… I’m increasingly wondering whether you’ll need to come to Moscow earlier than scheduled. As undesirable as that might be in health terms, judge for yourself what the situation is.… The symptoms are bad; you can’t count on stability. I haven’t talked to anyone about this, but I feel the situation isn’t good.
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How justified were Molotov’s expressions of alarm? Judging from the correspondence, Stalin took these reports in stride: “I am not afraid of the situation in the group. Why—I’ll explain when I come.”
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He had every reason for optimism. The clashes in the Politburo did not pose a serious threat to any of the Bolshevik oligarchs, including him. A stable balance of power was taking hold within the collective leadership. The summertime disputes Molotov described showed that the conflict within the Politburo was not among combating groups bent on crushing one another. As Stalin’s follower, Molotov acted in conjunction with Bukharin. Rykov, who was close to Bukharin, was acting in coordination with Stalin’s old friend Voroshilov. Kalinin, who had no strong alliances, moved from camp to camp. This sort of debate and formation of blocs was usual and helpful to the Politburo’s functioning. The future of the collective leadership depended on the extent to which Bolshevik leaders were prepared to follow the rules of the oligarchy. Stalin was the weakest link in this chain.
Once the very ambitious Trotsky and Zinoviev were removed, only one power-hungry member remained in the Politburo: Stalin. The others, for a variety of reasons, were not capable of pretending to supreme power. In the pivotal post of general secretary, Stalin used the battle against the left opposition to strengthen his position. The schism within the party permitted him to play the role of preserver of Lenin’s legacy and strengthened his control over the party apparat and state security. These advantages did not assure him victory, but they shifted the odds in his favor.
In December 1927, during the first plenary session of the Central Committee elected at the Fifteenth Party Congress, Stalin made a carefully calculated move: he submitted his resignation and refused to run for reelection to the post of general secretary. Now that the opposition had been crushed, he announced, it was a good time to fulfill Lenin’s “testament.” Earlier, he modestly explained, a “tough” man had been needed as general secretary to wage a “tough” battle against the opposition. “Now, it is no longer necessary to have tough people in such a prominent post.”
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As Stalin had surely expected, the plenum refused to accept his resignation. This move earned him important political dividends. First, once again, it diminished the relevance of Lenin’s proposal that Stalin be removed as general secretary. Second, he presented himself to top party functionaries as the driving force behind the victory over the opposition: a “tough” leader capable of “tough” measures. This toughness undoubtedly enhanced his credentials in the eyes of those who favored a “firm hand.” Third, his show of loyalty, his stated readiness to retire, must have mollified those concerned about the breakdown of collective leadership and the emergence of a “gravedigger of the revolution” (as Trotsky had labeled him). Stalin had sought and found an important formal affirmation of his status. It is hard to believe that he took this risk for the sake of intraparty democracy. What came next—his famous voyage to Siberia and attacks against rightists—attests that he was acting with careful deliberation at the December plenum. This may well have been when he reached the fateful conclusion that he was destined to rule as dictator.
A WORLD OF READING AND CONTEMPLATION
Late evening of 1 March 1953. The near dacha. The mail arrives.
Only as night approached did Stalin’s bodyguards, after many hours of anxious waiting, decide to enter his quarters. They were thankful to have a pretext: the mail had arrived. A bodyguard took the packet and set out for Stalin’s private rooms.
We do not know the contents of this last mail delivery, but normally Stalin received a huge number of papers. Lists of items sent to him from Moscow while he was vacationing in the south give us an idea of the types of documents the
vozhd
dealt with on a regular basis. During a vacation extending from September through December 1946, he received an average of just under fifty letters, reports, and other materials per day. During his final southern vacation, August through December 1951, the average dropped to thirty-five documents—not a small number.
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For obvious reasons, Stalin was regularly sent orders and draft orders by the highest governmental bodies—not all, but the most important ones. Reports from the foreign and military ministries and state security and intelligence bodies regularly crossed his desk. He saw summaries of the foreign press prepared by TASS, the Soviet news agency. Some of these summaries, with his notations, have been preserved in the archives. He was also brought summaries of reports by foreign correspondents in Moscow. In keeping with a habit he had developed before the war, he regularly received daily reports on the production of planes and aircraft engines. Top aviation industry officials often wrote him on specific issues. The
vozhd
had always taken a special interest in aviation, but he also received reports on the production of other military hardware. After the Korean War started in 1950, he received daily summaries of military actions and reactions to the war by the foreign press. He was also regularly informed about national stockpiles. On top of all this, the volume of correspondence between Stalin and China’s leaders was growing. Finally, his mail included many letters from his top associates on various topics, requests from government agencies, and personnel proposals. Just reading all these letters and reports must have taken an enormous amount of time, and many of them required him to make decisions and compose some sort of response.
In addition to these official papers, Stalin found time to keep up with Soviet magazines, books, and newspapers, particularly
Pravda,
which he studied attentively. The inventory of materials sent to him during his southern vacation in 1926 lists a large number of Soviet and émigré newspapers and journals, including Menshevik and White Guard publications.
2
In later years, periodicals disappeared from the list—probably not because Stalin ceased reading them but because they were delivered to him so routinely that listing them was a waste of time.
According to some memoiristic sources, Stalin claimed to read an average of four to five hundred pages a day.
3
It is difficult to imagine how he could keep up such a fantastic pace. Some days he may really have read that much or, more likely, scanned texts, focusing on the most interesting passages. In addition to the time he had to spend at his desk dealing with official papers, his workday was filled with hours-long conferences and meetings in his office. The dinners he hosted could extend for hours, as did his regular movie screenings. And he spent quite a bit of time writing. From what we know of his schedule, it appears that Stalin had little time to sit at his desk contemplating the steady stream of papers with which he was daily confronted.
He liked books. Reading played a major role in shaping his ideas. In the revolutionary milieu to which Stalin had been drawn as a youth, the value placed on intellectual pursuits and theorizing was tremendous, but these explorations were ideologically one-sided. This one-sidedness left a permanent mark on Stalin. He read “socially significant” books and studied Marx and Lenin. A literary scholar who made a thorough analysis of Stalin’s writings and speeches noted the narrow scope of his erudition in literary fiction. He was well versed in literature from the Soviet period but had a poor knowledge of Russian or foreign classics.
4
Observations regarding the political and ideological blinders that limited Stalin’s reading are supported by the lists of books and journals in his library, or rather those in which he made notations.
5
In total his archive holds 397 items. Of course his reading was not limited to these books, but his marginal comments and underscorings suggest that they are the ones that most captured his attention.
The lion’s share of this collection is comprised of books and journals containing works by Lenin—seventy-two items in all. Stalin was an attentive student of Lenin, and some of his own works represent a recasting or popularization of Lenin’s thinking. Not surprisingly, he constantly cited Lenin in his public speeches. But he also relied on Lenin’s work as a sort of bible or instruction manual when dealing with affairs of state within his close circle of associates. “Whenever I was at Stalin’s, either at a large or small meeting or talk,” one of Stalin’s commissars related, “I’d notice the following habit. If somebody made a proposal that may have been practical but a bit out of the ordinary, he’d walk up to the shelf with Lenin’s books, think a moment, and pull out a little volume. Sometimes he’d say, ‘Let’s have a look at what Vladimir Ilyich has to say on the matter.’ Sometimes he’d read something aloud; sometimes he’d just paraphrase.”
6
Marx and Engels are much less evident in Stalin’s articles. The archival collection of his library includes only thirteen of their works. Although Marxism was official doctrine and portraits of the bearded wise men were ubiquitous features of the Soviet landscape, Stalin occasionally allowed himself certain liberties in regard to these classics. In 1934, in memoranda to Politburo members and the ideological overseers of various party organizations, he criticized a number of Engels’s works: “Only idiots can harbor any doubts that Engels was and remains our teacher. But this by no means implies we must paper over Engels’s mistakes, that we must conceal them and—especially—pass them off as incontestable truths.”
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