Stalin: A Biography

running the party which had made it. But the gap between him and his followers was widening. He demanded complete obedience and often interfered in their private lives. Taking a dislike to Kaganovich’s beard, he ordered him to shave it off and threatened to do the job himself with his wife Nadya’s scissors.⁴ Probably Stalin wanted the Politburo to be identified with beardless modernity, but he had a crusty way of obtaining his purposes.

He had clambered up the ziggurat of power whose apex was the Politburo. Its members took the great decisions on political, economic, national and military policy. The Politburo’s agenda regularly included items on culture, religion and law. Stalin had no rivals among its members. These included Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Anastas Mikoyan and Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Though dominant in the Politburo, Stalin did not chair it. The tradition persisted that the chairman of Sovnarkom should perform this task.⁵ Stalin understood the instincts of the party. Like the Roman emperor Augustus who avoided awarding himself the title of king (rex) while founding a monarchy, he sacrificed personal vanity to the reality of supreme power. His main title was Party General Secretary — and sometimes he just signed himself as Secretary.⁶ His most important supporters were Molotov and Kaganovich. Both were determined and ideologically committed politicians — and Stalin had steadily imposed his will on them. They referred to him as the Boss (Khozyain). (They did this out of his hearing. Although he allowed a few old comrades to call him Koba, his growing preference was for fellow politicians to use ‘comrade Stalin’ or ‘Iosif Vissarionovich’.) Scarcely an important Politburo matter was settled in contradiction of his wishes.

He never stopped working even on holiday by the Black Sea. His personal assistants went with him and he dealt with important matters requiring his immediate adjudication by telegram. Molotov and Kaganovich kept in regular contact. Stalin himself continued to consult other communist leaders on the coast: they queued to have meetings with him. But this was a sideshow to the main drama. Moscow was Stalin’s preoccupation and he ensured that the two men he left in the capital shared his general vision of what kind of revolution was desirable. He had chosen well.

When he was in Moscow, too, Stalin devolved much responsibility to Molotov and Kaganovich. He bothered ever less frequently to convoke the Politburo. From seventy-five sessions in 1924 the number declined to fifty-three in 1928 and down again to twenty-four in 1933. Decisions were taken by polling the members by telephone, and this facilitated his ability to manipulate and control.⁷ It was usually Kaganovich who chaired the Orgburo and Secretariat. In September 1930 Stalin wrote to Molotov about the need to get rid of Rykov and for Molotov to take his place.⁸ Others in Stalin’s entourage felt unhappy — and perhaps also jealous — about the plan for Molotov’s promotion, and Voroshilov suggested that Stalin himself should take over Sovnarkom so as to bring about the ‘unification of leadership’. Molotov lacked ‘the gifts of a strategist’.⁹ Having enjoyed the praise, Stalin rejected the advice and gave the post to Molotov. He wanted to concentrate his own energies on the party and on the Comintern while knowing that Molotov would loyally carry out the tasks given to him.

The Orgburo, Secretariat and Sovnarkom dealt with matters which had to be referred to the Politburo if internal dispute arose. Stalin was kept informed about everything impinging on general policy or his personal interests. The three leaders anyway had to stick together. The Soviet economy had been exposed to the maelstrom of forced-rate industrialisation and forcible mass collectivisation. Popular disturbances were commonplace. The internal party opposition had been crushed but not liquidated, and the concern remained that Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin or even Trotski might return to exploit the situation.

Stalin’s supporters also ran the various People’s Commissariats and other state institutions. No room was allowed for half-heartedness. If supporters wished to keep their posts they had to comply to the full. In September 1929 his Chekist brother-in-law Stanislaw Redens brought the news to Stalin’s attention that OGPU chief Vladimir Menzhinski had disciplined his officials for ‘diseased phenomena’ in their work. This was an attempt to put a brake on the implementation of official policies. Stalin wanted zeal and results, not procedural regularity. He wrote to Menzhinski indicating the ‘evil’ of his ways.¹⁰ Menzhinski’s deputy Genrikh Yagoda risked similar reproof a year later when he wrote to Stalin about the ‘crude compulsion of poor and middling peasants to enter the kolkhozes’.¹¹ Stalin also kept up the pressure on the Party Central Control Commission. This was the body which adjudicated cases of disobedience to party policies; it was also meant to protect Bolsheviks against an over-mighty central party apparatus but this function had passed into desuetude. Stalin used the Central Control Commission under Ordzhonikidze to bully the oppositionist groups out of existence — and he was not slow to upbraid his ally Ordzhonikidze for lack of zeal in prosecuting troublemakers.¹²

Joint meetings of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission were also used as a means of getting Stalin’s favoured policies validated. He pulled this trick whenever he thought he might meet with criticism in the Central Committee. The result was satisfactory for him. The OGPU, Central Control Commission and Central Committee were bodies which supervised all Soviet public life, and they were held under the authority of Stalin and his leading group.

Having defeated the Left Opposition and Right Deviation, Stalin allowed individual oppositionists back into public life on strict terms. If they petitioned for rehabilitation he demanded that they should recant like an accused heretic before the Spanish Inquisition. Abject public self-criticism was demanded and, often enough, obtained. Many Trotskyists in particular were attracted by the high priority accorded to fast industrial growth; never having been principled democrats, they forgot their demands for the restoration of democracy to party and soviets and joined the Stalin group. Pyatakov and Preobrazhenski were among them. Not that Stalin was going to trust them regardless of what they said in public. In September 1930 he wrote to Molotov:¹³

Careful surveillance needs to be maintained for a while over Pyatakov, that genuinely rightist Trotskyist (a second Sokolnikov) who now represents the most harmful element in the composition of the block of Rykov- Pyatakov plus the Kondratevite-Defeatist mood of bureaucrats from the Soviet apparatus.

Stalin remained uneasy about factional regrouping. His operational code was: once an oppositionist, always an oppositionist. If given reason to re-expel adversaries from public life, he was unlikely to take a kindly approach.

This tendency to see conspiratorial linkages among those who were not on his side was detectable in a note he sent to Ordzhonikidze in 1930. The OGPU had conducted interrogations of a large number of former Imperial Army officers and discovered that several had put their political hopes in Mikhail Tukhachevski. Although not a scintilla of proof was found that Tukhachevski planned a coup d’etat, Stalin’s suspicion deepened:¹⁴

At any rate, Tukhachevski has turned out to be captive to anti-Soviet elements and has been especially worked over by anti-Soviet elements from the ranks of the Rightists. That’s what comes out of the materials [of the interrogations]. Is this possible? Of course it’s possible once it has failed to be excluded. Obviously the Rightists are ready to go to the lengths of a military dictatorship if only this would free them from the C[entral] C[ommittee], from kolkhozes and sovkhozes, from Bolshevik rates of development of industry.

Stalin was in no doubt: Tukhachevski, Kondratev and Bukharin were leading figures in this disloyal ‘camp’ of the Rightists.¹⁵ Only after the OGPU had done its work did he allow himself to believe that Tukhachevski was ‘100% clean’.¹⁶

He drove his ideas like iron bolts into the minds of his associates. Molotov, Ordzhonikidze, Kaganovich, Voroshilov and a few others were his confidants, and his implicit objective was to form a fanatical Kremlin gang devoted to himself as boss. Anyone who got in his way was expelled. In October 1930 he took offence at the People’s Commissar for Finances. He wrote to the Politburo ordering: ‘Hang Bryukhanov by the balls for all his present and future sins. If his balls hold out, consider him acquitted in court; if they don’t hold out, drown him in the river.’¹⁷ Stalin drew a picture of Bryukhanov suspended in the air and attached to a pulley by a rope which was tugging his penis and testicles back through his legs. Sometimes, though, he aimed his ridicule at himself. Writing to Voroshilov in March 1929, he mocked his own grandiose image: ‘World Leader [Vozhd]? Go fuck his mother!’¹⁸

Yet although Stalin could chaff himself in this fashion, he let no gang members do the same to him: his dignity mattered a great deal to him. So too did his authority. It was he who decided who could join and who should leave the gang. He also told the gang who its enemies were. He cajoled the members to regard their critics as the