Stalin: A Biography

posthumously denounced Stalin in 1956. A more accurate translation from the Russian would be ‘cult of the individual’. Thus the 1938 biography recited the barest details of the first half of Stalin’s life before proceeding to catalogue his actions at the level of policy. There was scant attention to the family, school and native town of his boyhood. Accounts of his career in the clandestine Bolshevik committees before the Great War were discouraged; even his career in the October Revolution, the Civil War, the NEP and the Five-Year Plans was hardly covered in either the biography or the Short Course. He discouraged all historical and literary attempts to explain how he came to think what he thought or do what he did before the onset of his despotism. He strove instead to get writers, painters and film-makers to present him as the embodiment of the party rather than as a credible actor in history. Despite the preoccupation of the state media with Stalin, extremely little was allowed into the public domain telling of his ancestry, education, beliefs, demeanour or calculations.

His private existence too remained especially secluded. Before 1932 it was never mentioned in the newspapers that he was a married man. When he appeared on top of the Lenin Mausoleum, he was accompanied solely by fellow leading politicians. Pravda had made only a brief announcement of Nadya’s death.²³ The same attitude was taken with Stalin’s mother. Pravda carried short articles about his visit to her in 1935 shortly before her death, and her funeral too was reported.²⁴ Otherwise his privacy was closely guarded. A few exceptions existed. In 1939 a series of articles appeared by V. Kaminski and I. Vereshchagin about Stalin’s early life, and these included brief memoirs by some of his schoolboy friends and documents referring to his education.²⁵ Some personal documents also appeared about Stalin’s periods of arrest and imprisonment.²⁶

The continued austerity of the Stalin cult invites comment. One possibility is that he recognised that most aspects of his past and present life were unlikely to commend him to others — and so he drew the curtains across them. This is conceivable but unlikely. Stalin was a maestro of historical fabrication, and mere facts would not have inhibited him from inventing a wholly fictional biography. Another possibility is that Stalin was simply unimaginative; and since he, unlike Hitler who had Goebbels, was his cult’s main artificer, this may explain the situation. But Stalin was surrounded by associates who yearned to prove their usefulness to him. It is not credible that alternative ideas were not proposed to him. The most plausible explanation is that Stalin still believed that austerity was what best suited Russia’s cultural ambience as well as the sensibilities of the world communist movement. After the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, he had stopped being called General Secretary but instead was designated Secretary of the Party Central Committee. Until 6 May 1941, furthermore, he resolutely refused to become Sovnarkom Chairman despite the fact that this had been Lenin’s job. He could not even be tempted to create the post of Chairman for himself in the Party Politburo. Nor was Stalin head of state. That position continued to be held by Mikhail Kalinin as Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets. Letters to the ascendant communist leadership were often addressed not to Stalin but to Kalinin or to both of them.²⁷

Yet he dominated the central public life of the USSR. People lived or died according to his whim. Political, economic, social and cultural activity was conditioned by his inclinations of the day. He was the masterful guide of men and manager of affairs in the Soviet state. But Stalin had always been cunning. He had learned of the advantages of a display of modesty. Better, he concluded, to let it be thought that he was thirsty neither for power nor for prestige. Did his interest in the career of Augustus, first of the Roman emperors, influence him? Augustus would never accept the title of king despite obviously having become the founder of a dynastic monarchy.²⁸

Stalin of course wanted adulation and the cult was extravagant in his praise; the restrictions imposed by him were pragmatically motivated. He discerned that he would gain more admirers if he stopped himself — and was seen to stop himself — short of making the very extreme claims put forward by Kremlin sycophants. Control of the process was crucial to him. He remained alert to the danger of letting people praise him on their own initiative and — bizarre as it might seem — banned discussion circles (kruzhki) from looking at either the Short Course or his official biography. The reason he gave was that he did not want citizens, tired after a day’s labour, to have to turn out in the evening. In an exchange with a Leningrad party propagandist he ordered: ‘Let them have a quiet life!’²⁹ But this was disingenuous. Party members had to go to post-work meetings as a political duty. Stalin’s real aim was surely to restrict debate altogether. The texts of the two books were fairly straightforward in themselves and could quickly be studied by individuals reading alone. And once they had read and digested the texts, they could join in the ceremonies and festivals which were organised by the authorities with scrupulous care on the streets, in factories and at offices.

The cult certainly had its successes. A seventy-one-year-old woman textile worker was invited to the October Revolution celebrations on Red Square in 1935 but because of short-sightedness did not catch a glimpse of Stalin. Bumping into Ordzhonikidze, she cried: ‘Look, I’m going to die soon — am I really not going to be able to see him?’ Ordzhonikidze told her she was not going to die and, as she walked on, a car drew up and out got Stalin. She clapped her hands: ‘Hey! Look who I’ve seen!’ Stalin smiled and said modestly: ‘What a good thing! A most ordinary human being!’ The old woman burst into tears: ‘You are our wise one, our great one… and now I’ve seen you… now I can die!’ Stalin, thinking on his feet, replied: ‘Why do you need to die? Let others go and die while you go on working!’³⁰

The little episode shows that many citizens, especially those who felt grateful to the authorities, had a compulsive urge to revere him. (It also indicates that Stalin, even if he liked such flattery, reacted pretty brusquely: his main concern was to coax the old woman to go on toiling years beyond the age of retirement!) Moreover, people were much more likely to engage in his worship when they were in a crowd affected by the officially created atmosphere. Not only unsophisticated citizens but also many politicians and intellectuals experienced an inner need to extol him. They counted themselves blessed even if they only briefly met him or caught a glimpse of him. The writer Kornei Chukovski was hardly a natural Stalinist. Disconcerted by the kind of literature demanded of authors by Stalin, he retreated into writing tales for children. Even so, his diary from 1936 records the following impression at a congress:³¹

Suddenly there appeared Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Andreev, Zhdanov and Stalin. What on earth happened to the hall! And HE stood still, somewhat tired, pensive and magnificent. One could sense the immense habituation to power, the force and at the same time something feminine and soft…

That Chukovski was charmed by Stalin’s ‘graceful smile’ says much for the impact of the cult.

Yet the success was not as large as Stalin had hoped. Among the peasantry in particular there was pervasive dislike of him and many villagers regarded him — a Georgian, an atheist, an internationalist — as the very Antichrist. So desperate was rural opinion by the late 1930s that many peasants seriously hoped for war with Germany on the assumption that only military invasion would dislodge Soviet communism from power and bring about opportunities for decollectivisation.³² Such hostility was not confined to rural inhabitants. A misspelled and ungrammatical letter of protest dispatched to him and Kalinin by fifty Leningrad workers in March 1930 had stated:³³

No one has sympathy for Soviet power and you are considered hangmen of the Russian people. Why should we undertake the Five-Year Plan so abruptly when we have become poor after such richness as we had in Russia — let’s just take the example of sugar, which used to be fed to pigs and which now can’t be found even for money, and meanwhile our children are starving and there’s absolutely nothing to give them to eat.

The period of the First Five-Year Plan was directly associated with Stalin in the popular mind. He had claimed credit for the industrial and cultural revolution of those years. The result was that everyone knew who was to blame for the hardships.

Exactly how widespread and deep was such hatred is a question which will never be satisfactorily answered. The NKVD supplied regular reports on popular opinion, but their language and orientation left much to be desired. Security agencies had an interest in alarming Stalin. Their power and prestige rested on their capacity to persuade him that it was only their vigilance which protected the state against its millions of internal enemies. (Not that he usually took much persuading.)

Yet undoubtedly many Soviet citizens, like the woman textile worker, loved the Leader. Conditions did not worsen for everyone in the 1930s. Jobs became available offering improved salary, housing and consumer goods for