At some point in their careers, virtually everyone in the top Soviet leadership had to endure a ritual of humiliation and repentance followed by renewed oaths of allegiance to the
vozhd
. Stalin would cast his comrades into disfavor only to later bring them back into the fold. He was generous with rebukes and liked to orchestrate verbal floggings in the press and at various meetings. And when he lost his temper, it was a horrifying sight to behold. Minister of Foreign Trade Mikhail Menshikov told of one instance when he incurred Stalin’s wrath during a meeting by failing to properly hear his question. “He gave me a furious look,” Menshikov recalled, “and launched a fat pencil at me as hard as he could, hurling it along the length of the table in my direction. For a moment everyone froze and waited to see what would happen next.”
7
After Stalin’s death, Ignatiev complained about having been subjected to constant dressings-down: “Comrade Stalin reprimanded me using fouler language than I’d ever heard in my life and called me an idiot.”
8
When the writer Konstantin Simonov attended the Central Committee plenum in October 1952, he was struck by the furious, “almost ferocious” and “unrestrained,” tone of Stalin’s speech denouncing Molotov and Mikoyan.
9
Stalin’s temper and unpredictability, especially during his final years, were made worse by his declining health.
Top Soviet officials lived a golden-cage existence. While they exercised life-and-death power over their subordinates, they were at the constant mercy of their ultimate boss. Their security, transportation, incoming and outgoing correspondence, special telephone lines, dachas, and apartments—all were handled by state security, which was entirely under the dictator’s control. Such control meant that Stalin knew everything about how and with whom these officials spent their time. As if that were not enough, he apparently asked the secret police to install listening devices to spy on certain Politburo members.
10
Despite the oppression of the collective leadership, periodic manifestations of oligarchy inevitably threatened Stalin’s sole power. Though very much under his thumb, his fellow leaders did enjoy a certain administrative autonomy as the heads of major government institutions, and they independently made many decisions of consequence for the running of the country. Furthermore, their authority expanded as Stalin’s physical frailty diminished his involvement in day-to-day decision making. Stalin was aware of this threat. Konstantin Simonov recorded a typical comment by the
vozhd
about his comrades, as reported by an eyewitness:
Even when differences remain, they will come to some agreement on paper and present the issue to me in that form.… The managers understand that I cannot know everything; all they want from me is a stamp with my signature. Yes, I cannot know everything, so I pay attention to differences, to objections, and I try to make sense of why they come up, where the real problem lies. The managers do their best to conceal these from me; they go along with the votes but they conceal the differences, all so that they can get a stamp with my signature. What they want out of me is my stamp.
11
Stalin’s method for penetrating the defenses of this mutual protection society could best be described as scattershot. The dictator’s underlings never knew what question might suddenly interest him. They never knew whether Stalin would react to a particular decision and, if so, how or when. The constant threat of a random attack allowed him to keep the apparat and his close associates in a state of tension that helped to compensate for his lack of total control over them. The
vozhd
’s effort to maximize his power over his subordinates was helped by the number of channels through which he received information. The government and party bureaucracies, the courts, and state security all kept an eye on one another and constantly tried to prove their vigilance and effectiveness by denouncing one another to Stalin, zealously exposing others’ warts while concealing their own.
Repression, the constant threat of punishment, and Stalin’s temper and whims made the life of top Soviet officials almost as difficult as that of the powerless man or woman on the street. His “comrades” lived and worked under constant stress. One long-term Soviet diplomat left the following remembrance of the country’s minister of foreign affairs, Andrei Vyshinsky, one of Stalin’s most devoted and successful associates: “Vyshinsky was terrified of Stalin. Every Thursday he would go and report to him, and well beforehand, in anticipation of this encounter, his mood would sour. The closer it came to Thursday, the gloomier and more irritable he got.… But by Friday, when it was all behind him, he allowed himself to relax for a day or two. Experienced people knew that this was when it was best to report to him on the most complicated matters or approach him with requests of a personal nature.”
12
Stalin was a merciless boss. He expected total dedication from his subordinates and favored a military management style: orders had to be carried out unquestioningly and at any cost—no excuses. In addition to the constant danger of arrest and the excessive workload, the lives of Stalin’s close associates were made difficult by his nocturnality. To accommodate the
vozhd,
the apparat worked both at night, when Stalin was awake, and during the day, when the rest of the country was up. The stresses of working for Stalin apparently made some stronger. A number of his closest associates lived many years. Molotov and Kaganovich, for example, nearly reached the century mark. But not everyone had the iron constitution and adaptability needed to survive the demands Stalin placed on his subordinates. A Central Committee document written in 1947 admitted that “An analysis of the health of the party and government’s leading cadres has shown that many individuals, even among the relatively young, suffer from diseases of the heart and the circulatory and nervous systems sufficiently serious to impact their ability to work. One cause of these diseases is stressful work not only during the day, but also during the night, and often even on holidays.”
13
As long as Stalin was alive, nothing could be done about this problem, but soon after his death a resolution was adopted requiring regular government offices to remain closed at night, and the bureaucracy began to run in a more normal way.
Stalin kept himself at the center of the huge machine used to manipulate officials. He initiated and guided repression, orchestrated all major reassignments, and was constantly reshuffling people so that nobody grew too comfortable in a particular job. Like any dictator, he strove to instill a sense of fear, adoration, and instinctive devotion in his underlings. Vyacheslav Molotov, a diehard follower of the dictator, described Lazar Kaganovich as a “two hundred percent Stalinist.”
14
These were the sorts of people Stalin tried to cultivate.
A key element of the process by which the Soviet government—including its very top leadership—was “Stalinized” was the mass purges of the 1930s. In a matter of months, the purges destroyed the party’s old guard and replaced it with fresh faces, unburdened by excessive knowledge of the past or ideas about how the country might be run differently. “New stock” replaced officials who had earned their places in the Soviet government during the revolution. By 1940, after the Terror had receded, 57 percent of party secretaries in the regions of Russia and on the central committees of the Soviet Union’s ethnic republics were under the age of thirty-five.
15
Many ministers, generals, directors of major enterprises, and leaders of cultural unions were between thirty and forty.
Stalin gave these upstarts tremendous power, allowing them to preside over their own little dictatorships. The fates, even the lives, of millions were in their hands. The distribution of significant resources and the functioning of gigantic enterprises depended on them. They formed their own caste, which lived by its own laws and enjoyed its own privileged world. The members of this caste did not know hunger or material want. They were not affected by the catastrophic shortage of housing or the backwardness of the health care system. They lived in spacious apartments and dachas, protected by guards. Their cars sped past overcrowded public buses and trolleys. Whoever did their shopping did not have to line up for hours outside empty stores. Their salaries and tax-free supplemental pay (known as “envelopes”) exceeded by orders of magnitude the meager pay of ordinary citizens. The fees paid to Soviet writers privileged to belong to the nomenklatura reached the hundreds of thousands of rubles, in some cases generating annual incomes of up to a million rubles, many thousands of times what a Soviet peasant survived on.
16
Dazzled by the sense of belonging to an all-powerful government corporation and by their own importance, they were utterly free of compassion, self-reflection, or understanding of the “other.”
Stalin was the gatekeeper for the world of the nomenklatura. Entry could be gained only with his favor and support. For those fortunate enough to survive, the horrible fates of their predecessors and the continuing repression only intensified their gratitude toward the dictator. Stalin was twice the age of many members of this new generation of officials. Many of them knew little of the party’s revolutionary period or of former leaders who were now labeled enemies. For them, Stalin was the ultimate authority, the leader of the revolution, the victorious generalissimo, and a theoretician on a par with the founders of Marxism.
Stalin strove variously to feed this image. He cultivated an inferiority complex in his close associates: “You are blind like little kittens. Without me the imperialists would strangle you.”
17
Gradually he acquired the exclusive right to advance any initiative of significance, leaving the operational details to his comrades. His speeches, conversations, and letters were like lectures that he laced with contrived profundities. He liked to assign meaning to events and show off his vast knowledge and deep understanding of problems. The self-confident tone of his pontificating often belied the flimsiness and artificiality of his reasoning. But who would dare challenge him? For most functionaries, who tended to lack sophistication, Stalin’s utterances had an almost sacred quality. However, it was not just his monopoly on theoretical pronouncements that made the
vozhd
the voice of authority. He was well read and had a good memory, as well as a knack for pithy aphorisms. He would spend time preparing for his meetings, and it enabled him to show an impressive knowledge of detail. Such knowledge left a deep impression on many who witnessed these performances.
The primary reason that every utterance by Stalin carried such weight was that these were the words of an enormously powerful dictator who inspired both horror and adoration. To promote this image, he adopted the manner of a judge and master of destinies. During conferences he did not fraternize with other attendees but strolled around, pipe in hand. Before the spellbound gazes of onlookers, he reasoned out loud as if mulling weighty decisions. Stalin never publicly spoke of himself as a great man. It was enough that official propaganda shouted his greatness to the point of absurdity. Aware that brilliance stands out nicely against a façade of modesty, Stalin presented himself as a mere disciple of Lenin and servant of the party and the people. Every opportunity was taken to highlight this “humility.” He feigned impatience or even embarrassment when greeted with the inevitable standing ovation. He peppered his speeches with self-deprecation and folksy humor. He helped certain visitors to his dacha with their coats. After arriving at a reception arranged by Mao Zedong during the Chinese leader’s January 1950 visit to Moscow, Stalin greeted the cloakroom attendant but turned down his services. “Thank you, but this is something even I seem to be able to manage.” After removing his coat, he hung it on a hanger himself.
18
This affected modesty did not prevent Stalin from asserting his own worth when warranted. In 1947 he personally edited his official biography, inserting the following: “Masterfully performing the job of
vozhd
of the party and people and enjoying the full support of the Soviet people, Stalin nevertheless did not allow even a shadow of self-importance, conceit, or self-admiration into anything he did.” Thirteen million copies of this biography were printed.
19
Stalin must have believed that if he was going to hold on to power, he had to be considered infallible. On occasion he recognized that mistakes were made, but they could never be his. Misguided decisions and actions were attributed to “the government,” officials, or—most often—the plotting of enemies. The idea that he might bear personal responsibility for the country’s afflictions was rejected out of hand. He was, however, willing to take credit for its achievements. Boundless power inevitably gave him, as it does any dictator, a belief that he was endowed with remarkable prescience. But unlike the mystically inclined Hitler, who believed he was following a higher calling, Stalin’s belief in his infallibility probably had more to do with his untrusting nature and anxieties. He was sure that the only person he could count on was himself. Around him swarmed enemies and traitors. At times, this political paranoia was the cause of unfathomable tragedy. Such was the case in 1937–1938.
4 TERROR AND IMPENDING WAR
Throughout 1937, the wave of repressions against members of the nomenklatura and former oppositionists continued to grow. In August, this wave turned into a tsunami when the ranks of the repressed were expanded from a few tens of thousands of officials to hundreds of thousands of ordinary Soviet citizens. It was at this point that the repression of 1937–1938 earned the name given it by Robert Conquest: “the Great Terror.”
1
After the archives were opened, we learned that the Great Terror was actually a series of operations approved by the Politburo and aimed at different groups. The most far-ranging of these operations—the one against “anti-Soviet elements”—was carried out in fulfillment of NKVD Order No. 00447, approved by the Politburo on 30 July 1937 and planned for August through December. Each region and republic was assigned specific numerical targets for executions and imprisonments in camps. The quotas for the destruction of human lives were very much like those for the production of grain or metal. During the first stage, approximately two hundred thousand people were to be sent to the camps and more than seventy thousand were to be shot. Yet Order No. 00447 allowed for flexibility: local officials had the right to ask Moscow to increase the permitted number of arrests and executions. It was clear to everyone involved that this right was actually a duty. After expeditiously reaching initial targets, local authorities sent Moscow new “increased obligations,” which were almost always approved. With Moscow’s encouragement, the initial plan for destroying “enemies” was fulfilled several times over.