Stalin: A Biography

earlier set of ideas. He read Machiavelli’s The Prince and annotated his own copy of it. (Alas, the copy has disappeared from the archives.)²⁸ His insistence on the importance of courage could well have derived from Machiavelli’s supreme demand on the ruler: namely that he should show vertu. This is a word barely translatable into either Russian or English; but it is identified with manliness, endeavour, courage and excellence. Stalin, if this is correct, saw himself as the embodiment of Machiavellian vertu.

His was a complex mind. He had a personality prone to mistrustful fantasy and, tragically, he had the opportunity to act out his own psychological damage by persecuting millions of his people. He perceived enemies everywhere; his whole cognitive tendency was to assume that any slight problem in his personal or political life was the result of malevolent human agency. He was also drawn to suspecting the existence of plots of the widest nature. He did not limit this attitude to the USSR. Contemplating the anti-British Indian National Congress in 1938, he assured a reception of newly elected USSR Supreme Soviet delegates in 1938 that more than half were ‘agents bought up by English money’.²⁹ That the British government possessed paid informers is beyond dispute. But the idea that so large a proportion were regularly denouncing Mahatma Gandhi is without substance although it may indicate the state of mind of its advocate. In the USSR, where his word was law, Stalin was seldom content to allow for the possibility that a particular victim might have been acting alone. His preference was to link his ‘enemies’ with a conspiracy spread out across the world and connected with the intelligence services of hostile foreign powers. His associates reinforced his propensities. They had always felt politically besieged.

It was a feeling that increased after they drove out the party oppositions and undertook campaigns of immense brutality in the country. They treated all people who resisted or simply criticised them as rubbish to be annihilated. Not all of them lusted after terror, yet some did and many more were willing collaborators. Every one of these associates had reason to be fearful. The deep resentment across Soviet society was real, and they could not be confident that an alternative political leadership would not arise and overthrow them.

Stalin did not suffer from a psychosis (which is the word nowadays preferred by doctors for madness). Unlike people who are classified as mentally ill, he did not experience episodes which stopped him functioning with day- to-day competence at work. He was not a paranoid schizophrenic. Yet he had tendencies in the direction of a paranoid and sociopathic personality disorder. There was something very odd about him, as his close comrades sooner or later discerned: he was not fully in control of himself. Unease in his presence was not a new phenomenon. From boyhood onwards his friends, while recognising his positive qualities, had noted a deeply uncongenial side. He was extraordinarily resentful and vengeful. He coddled his grievances for years. He was supremely casual about the effects of the violence he commissioned. In 1918–20 and from the late 1920s he had terrorised mainly people who belonged to social groups hostile to the October Revolution; from the mid-1930s he began to victimise not only such groups but also individuals known personally to him — and many of them were veteran party comrades. His capacity to turn on friends and subordinates and subject them to torture, forced labour and execution manifested a deeply disordered personality.

There were factors in his earlier life which must have pushed him down this road. He had a Georgian sense of honour and revenge. Notions of getting even with adversaries never left him. He had a Bolshevik viewpoint on Revolution. Violence, dictatorship and terror were methods he and fellow party veterans took to be normal. The physical extermination of enemies was entirely acceptable to them. Stalin’s personal experiences accentuated the tendencies. He never got over them: the beatings in his childhood, the punitive regime of the Seminary, the disregard for him as a young activist, the deprecation of his talent in Revolution and Civil War and the assault on his reputation in the 1920s.

This is not the whole story. The environment around him in the 1930s really was a threatening one. His own policies had of course made it so. Nevertheless he had plenty of reason to feel that he and his regime were under menace. At the end of the 1920s he had introduced an order which was widely and deeply detested across the country. His speeches had left no doubt that official policies were of his making. His cult confirmed the impression. Kulaks, priests and nepmen had suffered under the First Five-Year Plan. It was not at all outlandish to presume that millions of victims, if they had survived, thirsted after the removal of Stalin and his regime. He knew that his rivals wanted rid of him and thought him unreliable, stupid and dangerous. He got used to planning on his own and to discarding associates at the least sign that they refused to go along with him. He saw enemies everywhere and intended to deal with all of them severely, however long he might have to wait. The situation was immensely dangerous. Stalin was an oddball. Culture, life-experience and, probably, basic personality made him dangerous too.

For all his sociability, moreover, Stalin was a lonely man — and such friends as he made were either found wanting in loyalty or died. He no longer had domestic stability or permanent emotional support. His first wife had died young. His life as a clandestine party organiser had been disrupted and unsatisfactory, and he had found it next to impossible to make friends in exile. (Not that he had tried very hard.) His second wife had killed herself; and, among his best friends in power, Kirov had been assassinated and Ordzhonikidze had eventually opposed his strategic ideas. Solitary again, Stalin had no peace of mind. He was a human explosion waiting to happen.

There was a vicious circle in the interaction between what was happening in the country and what he thought about it. His policies had produced a ghastly situation. Millions had died in the course of collectivisation in Ukraine, south Russia, the north Caucasus and Kazakhstan. Repression had been massive in town and countryside. The popular standard of living had plummeted. Resistance had taken the form of rural revolts and industrial strikes, and the ascendant party leadership could not depend entirely even upon the armed forces. Yet rather than change his policies Stalin introduced greater violence to the tasks of governance. Violence in turn bred stronger resentment and this induced Stalin, already a profoundly suspicious and vengeful ruler, to intensify and broaden the application of state coercion. The situation brought out the worst in him. In fact he had plenty of badness in him to be brought out long before he held despotic power. To explain is not to excuse: Stalin was as wicked a man as has ever lived. His was a mind that found terror on a grand scale deeply congenial. When he had an opportunity to implement his ideas, he acted with a barbaric determination with few parallels in world history.

31. THE GREAT TERRORIST

If Stalin’s mind had a predisposition towards mass terror, it remains to be explained why he abruptly intensified and expanded repressive measures in the last months of 1936. For two years he had been gearing up the machinery of state violence. He had crushed active critical groupings. He had arrested thousands of former members of the United Opposition and killed Zinoviev and Kamenev. He had deported tens of thousands of ‘former people’ from the large cities. He had filled the Gulag system of camps to bursting point with real and potential enemies of the regime. His personal supremacy was unchallenged. He suborned his entourage into accepting his main demands in policy; and when he sensed a lack of total compliance, he replaced personnel with ease. The procedural mechanisms had been simplified since Kirov’s assassination. Stalin still formally consulted the Politburo but its members were merely asked to ratify measures which the NKVD proceeded to apply through its troiki. Party rule had ceased to function in its customary fashion.

A further step in the direction of what became known as the Great Terror was taken at the December 1936 Central Committee plenum.¹ Stalin let his dogs off the leash and set them on Bukharin and the veteran Rightists. Yezhov led the pack, declaring that Bukharin had known all about the terrorist plans and actions of the (non-existent) Trotskyist–Zinovievite block. The scheme was obvious. Yezhov had been sanctioned to widen the net of former oppositionist victims and to brand all of them as being in league with each other and working for foreign powers. Bukharin for months had been living in fear of something like this happening. When it occurred, it took him by surprise. He was still editor of Izvestiya. He had written pieces which, if read between the lines, could be interpreted as warnings about the effects of Stalin’s policies; but he had kept out of contact with the survivors of the Left Opposition. He had had nothing to do with Zinoviev and Kamenev for years. Yet Stalin and Yezhov were hunting him down. Bukharin demanded to confront those of Yezhov’s prisoners who were incriminating him. This was arranged in the presence of Stalin and the Politburo. Dragged out of the Lubyanka, Yevgeni Kulikov claimed that Bukharin had headed a Union Centre.² Georgi Pyatakov went further, claiming that Bukharin had liaised regularly with known Trotskyists like himself.³

Bukharin was not yet arrested, but from December 1936 through to July 1937 the net of repression was cast