Stalin: A Biography

who was being denounced but had not yet been arrested. At the confrontation with Kulikov in December 1936, Bukharin was like a butterfly seeing the needle about to pin him to a board.

Yet although Stalin apparently derived satisfaction from such confrontations, he organised them only in the period when he still needed the sanction of his Politburo comrades for particular verdicts. After early 1937 he dropped them as being no longer necessary. Throughout the last months of 1937 the purges continued. They affected both central and local functionaries as well as ‘ordinary’ people. Awards were announced for the heroic butchers in the NKVD. Yezhov’s name became second only to Stalin’s in official esteem. On 16 December it was the turn of Abel Enukidze and fellow defendants to be tried by a Military Collegium as spies, bourgeois nationalists and terrorists. This was done in secret and in quick order. They were all shot.²⁴

In March 1938 it was the turn of Bukharin. Along with him in the dock were three others who had belonged to the Party Central Committee in Lenin’s time: Alexei Rykov, Nikolai Krestinski and Christian Rakovski. Yagoda was also a defendant, as were several lesser figures. The third great show trial was organised by those leading figures in the NKVD who had as yet survived the Great Terror. The charges were as bizarre as before. Bukharin in particular was said to have plotted in 1918 to murder Lenin and Stalin and seize power. He parried this particular accusation while accepting political responsibility for the anti-Stalin conspiracies alleged to exist in the late 1930s. Krestinski was less cooperative. At his first appearance in court he retracted his prison testimony. Next day, looking still more haggard, he reverted to the testimony agreed with his captors. Nearly all the accused had been savagely beaten. Bukharin was spared this but was visibly a broken man. From his prison cell he had written a note to Stalin: ‘Koba, why is my death necessary for you?’ But Stalin wanted blood. Constantly consulted by Chief Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinski and Vasili Ulrikh at the end of the court’s working day, he ordered that the world’s press should be convinced of the veracity of the confessions before sentences were passed.²⁵ Many Western journalists were indeed hoodwinked. The verdict was announced on 13 March: nearly all the defendants were to be shot.

Two days later Stalin approved a further operation to purge ‘anti-Soviet elements’. This time he wanted 57,200 people to be arrested across the USSR. Of these, he and Yezhov had agreed, fully 48,000 were to be rapidly tried by troiki and executed. Yezhov, by now practised at the management of such operations, attended to his duties with enthusiasm. Through spring, summer and autumn 1938 the carnage continued as the NKVD meat-grinder performed its grisly task on Stalin’s behalf. Having put Yezhov’s hand at the controls and ordered him to start the machine, Stalin could keep it running as long as it suited him.

Stalin never saw the Lubyanka cellars. He did not even glimpse the meat-grinder of the operations. Yezhov asked for and received vast resources for his work. He needed more than his executive officials in the NKVD to complete it. The Great Terror required stenographers, guards, executioners, cleaners, torturers, clerks, railwaymen, truck drivers and informers. Lorries marked ‘Meat’ or ‘Vegetables’ took victims out to rural districts such as Butovo near Moscow where killing fields had been prepared. Trains, often travelling through cities by night, transported Gulag prisoners to the Russian Far North, to Siberia or to Kazakhstan in wagons designed for cattle. The unfortunates were inadequately fed and watered on the journey, and the climate — bitterly cold in the winter and monstrously hot in summer — aggravated the torment. Stalin said he did not want the NKVD’s detainees to be given holiday-home treatment. The small comforts that had been available to him in Novaya Uda, Narym, Solvychegodsk or even Kureika were systematically withheld. On arrival in the labour camps they were kept constantly hungry. Yezhov’s dieticians had worked out the minimum calorie intake for them to carry out heavy work in timber felling, gold mining or building construction; but the corruption in the Gulag was so general that inmates rarely received their full rations — and Stalin made no recorded effort to discover what conditions were really like for them.

Such was the chaos of the Great Terror that despite Stalin’s insistence that each victim should be formally processed by the troiki, the number of arrests and executions has not been ascertained with exactitude. Mayhem precluded such precision. But all the records, different as they are about details, point in the same general direction. Altogether it would seem that a rough total of one and a half million people were seized by the NKVD in 1937–8. Only around two hundred thousand were eventually released. To be caught in the maw of the NKVD usually meant to face a terrible sentence. The troiki worked hard at their appalling task. The impression got around — or was allowed to get around — that Stalin used nearly all of the arrestees as forced labourers in the Gulag. In fact the NKVD was under instructions to deliver about half of its victims not to the new camps in Siberia or north Russia but to the execution pits outside most cities. Roughly three quarters of a million persons perished under a hail of bullets in that brief period of two years. The Great Terror had its ghastly logic.

32. THE CULT OF IMPERSONALITY

The Lenin cult glistened like a film of oil over the dark ocean of Soviet reality in the late 1930s. Stalin had always presided over its rites. It had been he who arranged for the corpse of the Soviet leader to be displayed in the Mausoleum. He organised the publication of Lenin’s memoirs and helped to set up an Institute of Lenin. He vowed undying allegiance to Lenin’s ideas and practices. During the New Economic Policy he claimed to be a mere pupil of the great man.

The ‘biography’ by Lenin’s aide Ivan Tovstukha in 1927 was really just a catalogue of his arrests, places of exile, main publications and official posts. Although it mentioned Stalin’s support for Lenin against Kamenev and Zinoviev in October 1917, there was no reference to subsequent factional campaigns, and he was listed as being merely ‘one of the secretaries of the Party Central Committee from 1922’: his full title of General Secretary was omitted.¹ With Stalin’s rise to political supremacy at the end of the 1920s all this started to change. After sending Bukharin and the Right Deviation down to defeat, he demanded appreciation as more than a party administrator. On 21 December 1929 Stalin’s (supposed) fiftieth birthday was celebrated with the fanfares of a ceremony of state.² Even if he had been bashful (and in fact he was wary of making himself look ridiculous by permitting excessive praise),³ political self-interest dictated the need for media acclaim in a period when oppositionist leaders were making scathing criticisms. Stalin aspired to his own personal cult.

He continued to express admiration for his predecessor. Although he allowed others to use the term ‘Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism’, he himself avoided it. Stalin even refused to sanction a complete edition of his collected works (whereas Trotski had already published twenty-one volumes of his writings before falling from grace). Addressing a large Moscow conference on propaganda in 1938, he condemned attempts to put him on the same level as Lenin as a party theorist. His Foundations of Leninism, Stalin insisted, was only a work of exegesis. The originality of thought lay with Lenin, which was why it made sense to talk of Marxism–Leninism and not just Marxism. But the teacher ought not to be confused with the pupil.⁴

Nevertheless he often allowed his light to outshine the aureole surrounding his predecessor. Comparisons of the two men began to be made at Lenin’s expense. The party historian Yemelyan Yaroslavski opined that Stalin was the more decisive of the two leaders and that the reason lay in the excessive number of years spent by Lenin in emigration.⁵ But usually the downgrading of Lenin was done in a visual fashion rather than in texts. On New Year’s Day in 1931 Pravda carried a line drawing of Stalin on its front page — and Lenin appeared in it only as a name printed on a banner.⁶ A similar picture was used to emphasise Stalin’s greatness in the annals of Soviet communism on New Year’s Day in 1937.⁷ Line drawings continued to be preferred to cartoons. Pravda had always avoided carrying humorous representations of the party’s leaders. (Foreign anti-communist politicians, though, were thought fair game.) This tradition endured through the 1930s. No levity was permitted to infringe Stalin’s dignity; and whenever his image appeared in Soviet newspapers, it was in contexts that corroborated his supreme status. Commissioned pictures had to convey the impression of an inspiring genius with the determination and wisdom to change the face of state and society in the USSR, and both editors and censors were careful to comply.

Photographs were frequently carried. Among the most famous was one taken as he scooped little Gelya Markizova into his arms when she presented a bouquet to him.⁸ Her bright smiling face adorned many books in following years. Little did readers know that her parents perished in the Great Terror soon after her big day. But Stalin got what he wanted. He was able to have himself represented as the warmest friend to all