Stalin's Genocides (6 page)

bativeness; and Lenin’s willingness to countenance labor violence and even terrorism if they forwarded the cause of the party of Social Democrats. Lenin was the founding father of Bolshevism. Young Koba, putting aside all of the hyperbolic rhetoric of the later cult of Stalin, quickly fell into step with the faction’s ideology and its revolutionary tactics. In the name of the party, Stalin engaged in a series of bank robberies and “expropriations,” the most spectacular taking place in Tiflis in 1907. Stalin’s biographers sometimes cite these robberies as a sign of his law-lessness and violence; more appropriately, they should be seen as an example of his dedication to the welfare of the party and his lack of interest in traditional morality, something he shared with a number of Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries.

It would be wrong to think of Stalin as nothing more than a violent and conspiratorial Bolshevik, though he was certainly that. He was also an ideologist, and in his role as editor of
Pravda
, Stalin took on the important task of explaining the evolving platform of Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership to their followers. Stalin was an excel-lent editor, and he only got better over time. Though his Russian was not perfect, Stalin had a good understanding of the importance of punchy, agitational prose, and he was not averse to rewriting his comrades’ contributions in that spirit. This was a talent he nurtured and exhibited until the very end of his life.12

Like many radicals of his day, Stalin spent time in tsarist exile for his revolutionary activities. His first experience of exile—1903–04 in the northern Irkutsk region—

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proved to be relatively benign. He was able to read and write, to meet with fellow revolutionaries, and to develop friendships among the exiles. The same could be said of his exile to the Vologda region from 1909 to 1912. Especially compared to the conditions of those deported in the Soviet 1930s, Stalin’s initial terms in exile seem down-right luxurious. More difficult and serious for the development of his character was his exile in Kureika (in the Turukhansk region), north of the Arctic Circle, from 1914

until shortly before the revolution. Here Stalin lived in the extremely harsh and frigid circumstances of a tiny, isolated settlement. Less hardened men would have suffered terribly from the cold, the loneliness, and the company of the small native population. Stalin seemed to thrive, or at least to master his environment, finding comfort with local families (and women), and enjoying the solitude of hunting and fishing in the Far North. He emerged from this harsh environment even more controlled and sure of his ability to survive than earlier. When he joined the revolutionary upheaval in Petrograd in the early spring 1917, Stalin was a hardened and focused Bolshevik leader, capable of working long hours and carrying out designated tasks—and those he initiated himself—with efficiency and determination.

Stalin’s role in the Great October Revolution was generally that of a follower and not a leader. Yet he was always there near Lenin, ready to take on the tasks that were assigned to him. On the one hand, he was Lenin’s facto-tum; on the other, he made himself indispensable to many of his comrades by successfully accomplishing logistical the making of a genocidaire 43

and political assignments without complaint or hesitation.

With so many self-important intellectuals involved in the revolution—Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin among them—Stalin was content to be a party leader who spoke little but got things accomplished. It would be a mistake to think about Stalin as no more than a thug and messen-ger boy, an image that Trotsky successfully but mislead-ingly imparted to posterity. Stalin made things happen and created the circumstances in which he was destined to succeed.

During the Russian Civil War, 1918–21, Stalin served for a time on the Volga as the Bolshevik chief of the Tsaritsyn front. The Red effort in Tsaritsyn had been in chaos and was threatened with collapse when Lenin sent Stalin to shore up its defenses. On setting about his tasks, Stalin wrote to Lenin: “I harry and abuse all those who deserve it, and hope for early improvements. Be sure, we will spare no one, neither ourselves nor others.” In response to Lenin’s worries about the reliability of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries in Tsaritsyn, Stalin stated: “As for the hysteri-cal maniacs, be sure that our hand shall not falter; with enemies we shall act as enemies.” Stalin worked closely with the Cheka to bring order to the Red effort and to crush potential political opponents. Klement Voroshilov, who commanded the military in Tsaritsyn, described one typical case where “Stalin’s decision was brief: ‘Shoot!’

The engineer Alexeyev, his two sons, and several officers with them, some belonging to the [alleged oppositional]

organization, others only suspected, were seized by the Cheka and immediately shot without trial.”13

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The Civil War in Tsaritsyn proved to be a defining moment in Stalin’s growing rivalry with Trotsky, who was commander of the Red Army. Stalin was incensed by the use of former imperial army generals and specialists in the army; he was convinced that they impeded the progress of the Red forces and undermined the cause of the Bolsheviks. Trotsky, on the other hand, thought it was necessary to employ this military talent in the struggle against the Whites. Meanwhile, Trotsky was openly skeptical of the crude Georgian’s leadership abilities and was very critical of Stalin’s inexperience and bungling in military affairs.

The two denounced each other to Lenin and agitated for primacy in decisions on the Tsaritsyn front.

Despite Trotsky’s allegations, Stalin proved capable of organizing the Reds’ resistance to the Whites and of successfully carrying out the fundamental task of securing territory. Here, for the first time, Stalin experienced mass bloodletting, including summary executions and violent reprisals. To say he was responsible for the Bolsheviks’ violence on the Volga front would be an exaggeration. But it is also clear that he did not shy away from taking the most extreme measures to secure Soviet power. In this, however, he was no less violent than Lenin himself, who was known to call for the demonstrative hanging of hundreds of peasants from hilltops (“hang without fail,
so the people
see”), as a way to quell uprisings, and to shoot supposed White opponents on the spot.14 In any case, as Jörg Baberowski, among others, has argued, “In the excesses of the Civil War, Stalinism was brought to the world.”15

the making of a genocidaire 45

Stalin also participated as a front commander in the Polish–Soviet War in 1920–21. Once again, questions were raised among the Bolshevik leaders about his lack of military prowess. Eventually, he was criticized—not surprisingly, especially by Trotsky—for having refused to sign on for the Warsaw offensive in favor of his own attack on Lwów. But the fact that the Poles successfully resisted the Red Army and were able to gain a favorable peace at Riga that guaranteed them advantageous borders to the east was not due just to Stalin’s failings. The Soviet defeat in this war was not lost on Stalin—it seemed no defeat was; he had a long memory in this connection. His animus toward the Poles reappeared in vicious ways in the years to come. And, of course, his rivalry with Trotsky was further intensified; already by this point, writes Robert Service,

“he was biding his time to take his revenge.”16

Hard, cold, cruel, and impassive, Stalin experienced the victory of the revolution over its enemies and the establishment of Soviet power not as a source of joy and comfort, but as a challenge to his position within the Soviet hierarchy. His lust for personal influence, buried beneath a veneer of accommodation and compromise, meant that he would seek to inherit the position of Lenin in the party, when the Bolshevik paragon was felled by a series of strokes, the first in May 1922, and eventually died in January 1924. Of all the leading Bolsheviks, Stalin seemed to work most closely with Lenin. Their views on the New Economic Policy and the national question were also closer than often asserted in the literature.17 It was there-46

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fore not unrealistic of Stalin to expect to lead the party after Lenin’s death.

In his “Testament” (December 23–26, 1922), Lenin famously reviewed the positive and negative characteristics of a number of Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin, without indicating decisively who should succeed himself.

However Lenin’s addendum to the Testament, January 4, 1923, written under the influence of Stalin’s bullying of the leaders of the Georgian party, made it apparent that the sick and dying Bolshevik leader worried about Stalin’s personal characteristics, his “rude” behavior and harsh dealings with the comrades. That Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, soon thereafter complained to her husband that Stalin was mean to her and kept her from seeing him only increased Lenin’s suspicions of Stalin’s ambitions.

But it was too late; Lenin died on January 21, 1924. Stalin’s machinations surrounding Lenin’s death and funeral, and his ability to portray himself as Lenin’s most loyal pupil, demonstrated to those around him, especially his ostensible allies Zinoviev and Kamenev, that he sought supreme power. Lenin’s Testament, with the addendum, was read to the Central Committee only much later, in July 1926, after Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had more or less secured control of the party leadership and could write off Lenin’s remarks as the crotchety asides of an old and sick man.

The struggle for power in the mid- and late 1920s has been so thoroughly documented in the literature that there is no need to review it here. The charismatic and brilliant Lev Davidovich Trotsky, whom many believed would the making of a genocidaire 47

succeed Lenin as head of the party, increasingly isolated himself from the mainstream party leaders. His self-assurance, bordering on arrogance; his lack of attention to the party apparatus, something Stalin could never be accused of; and his frequent absences from the capital tarnished his reputation as a great leader of the Red Army during the Civil War and led many to doubt his ability to lead the Soviet state. The other major contestants for power, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin, sought leading roles in the party and, like Stalin, wrote treatises on Leninism as a way to stake their claims. In the end, they all relied on Stalin to secure the party apparatus and deal with the mid-level party cadres.18

Stalin’s ability to ally on the “left” with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky and then again with Rykov, Tomsky, and Bukharin on the “right” against Zinoviev and Kamenev, all the while appearing as a supremely dis-interested advocate of party unity, guaranteed his success in this struggle. At the same time, Stalin fostered the careers of a series of stolid and capable subordinates, among them Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, and Voroshilov, who would support his attacks against Rykov, Tomsky, and Bukharin at the end of the 1920s. The methods developed by Stalin in the struggle for power served him well a few years later, as he organized the judicial murders of his political rivals, all “Old Bolsheviks,” and instigated the genocidal campaigns that characterized the 1930s.

He took his time to eliminate his rivals, and he plotted silently and well. “My greatest pleasure,” he is known to have admitted, “is to choose one’s victim, prepare one’s 48

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plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There’s nothing sweeter in the world.”19

One learns a lot about Stalin’s methods from reading the recently declassified internal debates of the Politburo and Central Committee plenums in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the crucial period for Stalin’s “seizure of power.”20

These debates are fiercely polemical, with no holds barred.

Yet Stalin remains aloof from the worst of the recrimina-tions and poses as the arbiter of party unity. His is a voice of relative restraint, while others slug it out. Molotov, in particular, serves as Stalin’s attack dog. Initially, Trotsky is the scapegoat, constantly on the defensive, yet also speak-ing too often and too aggressively himself. Once Trotsky is effectively removed from the scene in 1927, the “Right Opposition,” Rykov, Tomsky, and, a bit later, Bukharin, become the lightning rods for failed policies and party intrigues surrounding the “Second Revolution,” collectivization and the First Five-Year Plan. All the while, Stalin continues his pose as the rock-solid defender of the revolution and its accomplishments, though periodically he does ask hard questions and make sarcastic remarks about those under attack. His interventions are laconic and terse, those of a judge rather than of the prosecutor.

But he could also slug it out and attack his opponents with cynical vitriol if he felt it necessary.

Stalin’s posture in these party wrangles was, like so much else in his public life, an assumed one. He was an emotional man, who seethed with anger and resentment against his rivals beneath his calm surface, and he took great pains to keep his emotions in check.21 Yet in his pri-the making of a genocidaire 49

vate letters and in conversations with his closest confederates he revealed how deeply he was riddled with down-right hatred. In a letter to Molotov of September 1930, he uses language about Bukharin that he generally would rarely use in public, calling him a “
rotten defeatist
” and a

“
pathetic opportunist
.” In the same letter, he advises Molotov: “If Rykov and Co. try to stick their noses in again, beat them over the head. We have spared them enough. It would be a crime to spare them now.”22

While the struggle for supremacy in the party itself did not immediately lead to violence, Stalin’s methods were those of a determined conspirator and a skilled dissimu-lator. His ability to adopt many poses and personae, depending on the needs of the moment, were characteristic of his career to the very end. At the same time, his Georgian habits, tastes, and personal characteristics never completely left him. After all, he wrote exclusively in Georgian until he was twenty-eight years old.23

Who was Comrade Stalin? Very few really knew the answer to that question, even when they thought they did.