Those who were shot or sent to the camps included a fair number of ordinary criminals. But the exceptional severity of laws and the criminalization of all spheres of socioeconomic and political life meant that ordinary citizens who committed minor infractions or were swept up in various political campaigns were often classified as criminals. Furthermore, in addition to the 26 million who were shot, imprisoned, or subjected to internal exile, tens of millions were forced to labor on difficult and dangerous projects, arrested, subjected to lengthy imprisonment without charges, or fired from their jobs and evicted from their homes for being relatives of “enemies of the people.” Overall, the Stalinist dictatorship subjected at least 60 million people to some sort of “hard” or “soft” repression and discrimination.
To this figure we must add the victims of periodic famines or starvation, which during 1932–1933 alone took the lives of between 5 and 7 million people. The Stalinist famine was largely the result of political decisions. In its campaign to break peasant opposition to collectivization, the Stalinist government used famine as a means of “punishing” the countryside. All opportunities to relieve the situation—such as purchasing grain abroad—were rejected. Starving villages had their last stores of food expropriated.
We can conclude from this horrific summation that a significant proportion of Soviet citizens suffered some form of repression or discrimination during the Stalin period.
18
It would not be an exaggeration to say that an absolute majority were brutally suppressed by a privileged minority—except that many in that minority were also swept up in the terror.
To achieve its goals, including the implementation of mass repression and the extraction of grain from the starving countryside, the regime did not need its apparat to run with clocklike precision. The inability to achieve perfect centralization in such a vast country was compensated for by the widespread use of campaigns, which mostly followed a similar template. Campaigns were the cornerstone of Stalinist political practice. They all began with a set of goals and the assignment of specific tasks that originated with the center, usually Stalin himself. These steps were followed by the mobilization of the apparat to carry out the assigned tasks, using extraordinary methods and the total suspension of any sort of legality. As a result, a campaign took on the aura of a crisis, culminating at a point where retreat became necessary. This retreat took the form of a counter-campaign that eliminated some of those who had carried out the original campaign while solidifying its results and stabilizing the situation. This swinging pendulum led to the destruction of vast material resources and countless human lives. But within the context of the Stalinist system, the campaigns were an effective method of mobilizing a vast country toward a central goal.
Stalin himself did not need to exercise tight control over all party and government bodies in order to retain dictatorial power. It was sufficient to hold the main levers of power, the most important being control of the secret police. He understood, sooner than other Soviet leaders, that state security could be a valuable weapon in intraparty warfare. This was a key reason for his success. Once he attained control of the Soviet Union’s “punitive structures,” he never let it slip from his hands. He continued to use state security as an instrument of power until the day he died.
As we will see, Stalin devoted much time to the hands-on management of state security, and during certain periods—most notably during the Terror of 1937–1938—the majority of his time. He personally initiated all the main repressive campaigns, devised plans for carrying them out, and painstakingly monitored their implementation. He guided the fabrication of evidence for numerous political trials and in several instances wrote detailed scripts for how trials should play out. He had a passion for reading the cascade of arrestee interrogation protocols that came before him, and the notations he made on these documents show that he read them thoughtfully and attentively. He often wrote commentaries and issued orders for additional arrests or for the use of torture to “get to the truth.” He personally sanctioned the shooting of many people. Some he knew personally; others he had never met.
In addition to the many “ordinary” functions that the chekists performed for Stalin, they also dealt with special, “delicate” matters.
19
On 5 May 1940, on Stalin’s orders, a special state security group abducted Kira Kulik-Simonich, the wife of the deputy people’s commissar for defense, Marshal Grigory Kulik, as she was leaving her house.
20
She was secretly transported to prison, interrogated at length, and then quietly shot. Kulik-Simonich was the descendant of a highly placed tsarist official. Many of her relatives had been shot, and some had managed to escape abroad. She had been married before and had spent time in exile with a previous husband charged with illegal activities involving hard currency. The chekists who reported all this to Stalin embellished the story with many more transgressions, including Kulik-Simonich’s affairs with foreigners. Stalin advised Kulik to divorce his wife, but when the marshal balked, Stalin ordered that Simonich be quietly done away with. When Kulik discovered his wife’s disappearance, he telephoned state security chief Lavrenty Beria, who denied that his agency was involved. Kulik did not believe him and began to dig for the truth. He was summoned to the Central Committee, where he underwent a three-hour interrogation and was ordered not to “slander” state security. Furthermore, he was told, his wife was probably a spy who had fled under threat of exposure.
21
Kulik relented.
Cases like this one, where Stalin, for political reasons, felt it was not expedient to arrest and charge people openly, were no rarity. A year before Marshal Kulik’s wife was murdered, in July 1939, the Soviet ambassador to China was killed along with his wife. Specially selected chekists beat their heads with hammers and then staged a car crash.
22
In early 1948, the Jewish civic leader and stage director Solomon Mikhoels, a popular and well-known figure in the USSR and the West, was similarly done away with.
23
Chekists crashed into Mikhoels with a truck and presented the incident as an accident. The evidence leaves no doubt that this murder was also carried out on Stalin’s direct orders.
24
It is one of numerous acts of individual terror committed by Stalin.
25
Such targeted killings were also perpetrated overseas. The most famous is the 1940 murder of Trotsky in Mexico.
The archives contain a huge number of documents confirming that Stalin routinely used the secret police to carry out arbitrary and brutal actions based solely on his own assumptions of guilt. They leave a clear impression that Stalin personally organized acts of terror that went far beyond any reasonable sense of “official necessity.” This homicidal aspect of his dictatorship obviously held special appeal for him. Immersion in a world of violence, provocation, and murder fed and intensified his pathological suspicion. Driven by fears and a certainty that he was surrounded by enemies, he felt no compunction about using violence on the grandest scale. These personal qualities were an important factor in the brutalities committed by the Soviet government from the 1920s through the 1950s.
Although Stalin relied heavily on state security, he never became beholden to it. In assigning the secret police the dirtiest work, he did not harbor illusions about the loyalty of his “sword of revolution” but instead kept his chekists in rein through periodic shake-ups and purges of their ranks. In a moment of candor, he confided to State Security Minister Ignatiev that “A chekist has only two paths—advancement or prison.”
26
He remained true to this principle. From the 1930s through the 1950s, chekist organizations were subjected to waves of brutal repression. The new executioners destroyed the old, only to later wind up in the torture chamber themselves.
For many decades historians have been arguing over the antecedents and causes of Stalin’s exceptional brutality. Many trace the source back to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, an event that, for Stalin, opened the door to power.
2 IN LENIN’S SHADOW
Historians debate the extent to which the unrest in Petrograd in late February 1917 was spontaneous. Some claim the demonstrations were organized by professional revolutionaries, but nobody can say with certainty that this was so. The revolution erupted without warning, as a result of the social destabilization caused by almost four years of war, and the tsar and his advisers did not immediately grasp the gravity of the situation. Lenin, in Switzerland, learned of the revolution by reading about it in Western newspapers. The news was also slow in reaching Stalin in Siberian exile, as the local authorities, apparently hoping the upheavals would blow over, banned their local papers from carrying reports from Petrograd.
The tsar’s abdication sparked widespread jubilation. His brother, Grand Duke Mikhail, had been named Nicholas’s successor, but he also relinquished the throne, thus formally ending the monarchy. Shortly thereafter, in early March 1917, a town meeting was held in Achinsk, where Stalin was exiled at the time. For some reason he was not present, but his close comrade Lev Kamenev played a major role in it. A telegram praising the grand duke’s decision was sent on behalf of those gathered.
1
In 1925, when Stalin and Kamenev wound up on different sides in the struggle for power, Stalin reminded his old friend of this warm gesture toward a member of the royal family, a gesture that now looked like a serious political blunder.
2
It is unlikely, however, that Stalin felt this way in 1917. The telegram reflected the prevailing intoxication with hope and freedom. In this mood, Stalin, Kamenev, and other freed revolutionaries streamed toward Petrograd.
It took some time before Stalin and his fellow Bolsheviks found their bearings when they first were able to emerge from the underground and play a legitimate role in the new system. In the capital, they discovered divided political power. Russia’s parliament, the State Duma, had formed a provisional government, composed primarily of members of liberal parties that favored the creation of a Western-style parliamentary republic. Yet at the same time, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, a revolutionary body whose authority came from the support of rebelling workers and, most important, soldiers of the Petrograd garrison, exercised a significant share of actual power. The soviet was run by members of socialist parties: Menshevik Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). These two parties were the most influential forces within the revolutionary camp, and they had so far outmaneuvered the other parties, including the Bolsheviks. The SRs and Mensheviks were the ones setting the revolution’s short- and long-term objectives. They considered the events of February a bourgeois revolution that would introduce a prolonged period of bourgeois-democratic development. They therefore believed that at the initial stage, a liberal bourgeois party should hold power and that it was for the Constituent Assembly to determine the shape of the new Russia. The attainment of socialism was a distant goal. Other, more developed capitalist countries—not Russia—would lead the way toward world socialism.
At the same time, the Russian socialists had no intention of renouncing the power that had fallen into their laps. They were not obtuse dogmatists, incapable of deviating from doctrine, but realists and pragmatists, albeit lacking in political sophistication and decisiveness. They were well aware of the dangers confronting the country. Foremost among them was civil war and the spread of a bloody rebellion that could wreak havoc and take Russia to the brink of catastrophe and collapse, not for the first time in its history. The most eloquent symbols of this danger were the millions of war-weary and embittered armed men returning from the front. In 1917, the only responsible position a politician could take was that civil war must be avoided at all costs. Maintaining civil peace was the only way to prevent massive casualties and pave the way toward a better future. The socialists leading the soviet saw it as their duty to suppress revolutionary excesses and work with the liberals and the Provisional Government. Cooperating from a position of strength, they made reasonable use of their power and placed the highest priority on maintaining peace. The official formulation of this policy of compromise was: support for the Provisional Government so long as it advanced the cause of revolution.
Many Bolsheviks, usually described as “moderate” or “rightist,” endorsed essentially the same approach.
3
Kamenev was one of this faction’s leaders. He and Stalin shared a bond of long-standing friendship and party collaboration. In December 1912 Stalin wrote him, “Greetings friend! I rub your nose in an Eskimo kiss. Dammit. I miss the hell out of you. I miss you—I swear on my dog! There’s nobody, nobody to have a heart-to-heart talk with, devil take you.”
4
There is nothing surprising in the fact that early on, Stalin and Kamenev held similar political positions. While Lenin and many other prominent Bolsheviks remained in Switzerland, Kamenev and Stalin played an important role in leading the party in Russia. After arriving in Petrograd, they essentially took control of the Bolshevik newspaper
Pravda
and used it to promote a moderate agenda, based on the belief that the ascent of the liberal bourgeoisie to power was in accordance with the dictates of history and that socialism was a long-term prospect. The newspaper proclaimed conditional support for the Provisional Government. As members of the Petrograd soviet leadership, Kamenev and Stalin interacted closely with other socialists. The Bolsheviks were beginning negotiations to explore joining forces with the Menshevik left wing.
From the start, Kamenev and Stalin were forced to defend their stances. Lenin, dissatisfied with the political line being promoted by
Pravda,
demanded different slogans. Writing from emigration, he argued for a radical course, declaring war on the Provisional Government and advocating socialist revolution. Kamenev and Stalin worked together to parry these attacks. They heavily edited an article sent by Lenin before publishing it in
Pravda.
5
Most likely, they truly did not understand Lenin’s intentions and assumed his radicalism was simply a function of being out of touch with what was actually happening in the country.