Stalin: A Biography

United Opposition — The faction formed from a combination of the Left Opposition and the Leningrad Opposition in 1926.

Wehrmacht — The German army.

White Armies — The various armies which were ranged against the Red Army from 1918. Their commanders and soldiers were both anti-socialist and distrustful of liberalism and parliamentarism.

Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate — The full name of the institution usually known as Rabkrin.

Workers’ Opposition — Bolshevik faction which emerged at the end of the Civil War and called both for the internal democratisaton of the party and for the granting of authority to workers and peasants to control their sectors of the economy.

NOTES

1. Stalin as We Have Known Him

1. N. Sukhanov, Zapiski o russkoi revolyutsii.

2. See in particular B. Souvarine, Staline: apercu historique du bolchevisme; L. Trotsky, Stalin. An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence; T. Dan, Proiskhozhednie bol’shevisma: k istorii demokraticheskikh i sotsialisticheskikh idei v Rossii posle osvobozdeniya krest’yan.

3. No one apart from Lenin and Trotski was more condescending to him in the 1920s than Bukharin, who paid the ultimate price. It remains to be explained why fellow leaders omitted to recognise his potential importance in due time. The answer they themselves gave at the time was that they had overlooked his political cunning. Having dismissed Stalin as an ignorant office clerk, they did not anticipate his ruthless skills in conspiracy and manoeuvre. This will not do. The rudimentary point must be made that Stalin’s defeated rivals had an incentive to suggest they had been worsted by a master-deceiver who bore no similarity to themselves and had no talents of his own.

4. ‘Stalin (Dzhughashvili), Iosif Vissarionovich’.

5. Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (1st edn).

6. G. Gorodetsky, The Grand Delusion.

7. R. Conquest, The Great Terror. Conquest, while highlighting Stalin’s psychological oddity, affirms that he was not insane.

8. The Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher’s Stalin after World War Two incorporated the basic ideas of pre-war Trotskyist and Menshevik analyses of Stalin’s career but, unlike Trotski’s biography, insisted that the personal dictatorship of Stalin had brought about institutional and educational changes which eventually could work to the favour of genuinely communist objectives. E. H. Carr in a biographical vignette offered a similar interpretation while emphasising, to a greater extent than Deutscher, the task discharged by Stalin in Russia’s general ‘modernisation’: Socialism in One Country, 1924–1926, vol. 1, pp. 174–86. Even Trotski, though, stressed that Stalin had presided over changes in the USSR which would have effects beyond his permanent control.

9. R. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era.

10. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge.

11. D. Volkogonov, Stalin: triumf i tragediya.

12. E. Radzinsky, Stalin.

13. J. A. Getty, Origins of the Great Purges.

14. S. Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: At the Court of the Red Tsar; M. Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait.

15. A. Ulam, Stalin; R. McNeal, Stalin. Man and Leader; R. Hingley, Stalin; R. Tucker, Stalin.

16. R. McNeal, Stalin. Man and Leader; R. Tucker, Stalin, pp. 133–7.

17. R. Slusser, Stalin in October: The Man Who Missed the Revolution.

18. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge.

19. R. Conquest, The Great Terror; R. Medvedev, Let History Judge.

20. J. A. Getty, The Origins of the Great Purges.

21. O. V. Khlevniuk, 1937–i.

2. The Family Dzhughashvili

1. Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (1st edn), p. 5. In order to avoid chopping and changing in this early chapter I have transliterated Stalin’s Georgian surname as Dzhughashvili even though, strictly speaking, it should be rendered Dzhugashvili when taken from the Russian text of the official biography.

2. See the notes of the 23 December 1946 meeting taken by a participant, V. D. Mochalov: Slovo tovarishchu Stalinu, pp. 469–73. I owe to Arfon Rees the point about Bolshevik distaste for personal biographical accounts.

3. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 61, p. 1.

4. I am grateful to Stephen Jones for sharing his thoughts on this with me.

5. J. Davrichewy, Ah! Ce qu’on rigolait bien, p. 90. See also A. Ostrovskii, Kto stoyal za spinoi Stalina?, p. 90.

6. R. Medvedev, Sem’ya tirana, p. 5.

7. Ibid., p. 4.

8. J. Davrichewy, Ah! Ce qu’on rigolait bien, p. 27.

9. Ibid.

10. S. Beria, Beria, My Father, p. 21.

11. J. Davrichewy, Ah! Ce qu’on rigolait bien, pp. 27–8. Another person mentioned as Stalin’s biological father was a certain Dzhulabovi: ibid. R. Brackman has recently contended that Stalin was the bastard son of a priest called Egnatashvili: The Secret File of Joseph Stalin, p. 4; but most primary sources accurately refer to Egnatashvili as the local tavern keeper.

12. A. Mgeladze, Stalin, kakim ya ego znal, pp. 242–3.

13. J. Davrichewy, Ah! Ce qu’on rigolait bien, pp. 27–9.

14. R. and Zh. Medvedev, Neizvestnyi Stalin, p. 265.

15. I am grateful to Stephen Jones for discussing this matter with me.

16. Sochineniya, vol. 13, p. 113.

17. S. Allilueva, Tol’ko odin god, p. 313.

18. Ibid.

19. G. K. Zhukov, Vospominaniya i razmyshleniya, vol. 3, p. 215.

20. A. Ostrovskii, Kto stoyal za spinoi Stalina, p. 95.

21. Ibid.

22. Memoir of G. I. Elisabedashvili in Stalin: v vospominaniyakh i dokumentov epokhi, p. 12.

23. GF IML, fond 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 24, p. 191, cited in A. Ostrovskii, Kto stoyal za spinoi Stalina, p. 97.