treachery as the most heinous offence, he was externalising a worry about his subordinates reflecting a cardinal feature of his own character. At last his gross personality disorder was functioning without restraint. He could indulge his paranoiac, vengeful proclivities to the utmost and nothing except a successful internal coup, military conquest or his premature death could save others from his murderous whims.
Across the 1930s Stalin had dominated the Politburo and the rest of the Soviet political leadership; but the Great Terror had elevated him to an unprecedented height above the other leaders. In all but name he was despot. His associates continued to respect him, even to admire him. But they also existed in mortal dread. Few dared to contradict him even in private conversation. Only Molotov had sufficient confidence to disagree with him about policies — and even he had to exercise caution in his phrasing and demeanour. The others were even more circumspect. It was a fiendishly difficult task because Stalin often deliberately disguised what he really thought. Politburo members were compelled to reveal their opinions without foreknowledge of his intentions. Always they were kept edgy by the master of intimidation and mystification. He had killed Kaganovich’s brother Moisei and demoted Molotov’s wife from office. He went on to arrest her as well as the wives of Kalinin and Andreev. Physical danger did not disappear from the Politburo. By devouring other members of their families, the Kremlin shark signalled that his appetite for victims had not been satisfied. They could take nothing for granted.
Most of those associates who survived the Great Terror succeeded in living out the natural term of their lives. Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Voroshilov and Zhdanov had been with Stalin since the 1920s and were kept by his side at least until he started to move against some of them after the 1940s. The promoted newcomers — Malenkov, Khrushchev, Vyshinski and Beria — stayed with him to the end of his life. The ruling group began to settle down. From the end of 1938 no Politburo member was arrested until Voznesenski was put away in 1949. No Red Army general was taken into custody, moreover, before the defeats of June 1941. But the memory of what had happened earlier did not vanish. All the rulers were acutely aware that they stayed in post solely at the whim of their supreme master.
He acted on his own. Among the arcana of Soviet administrative correspondence is a report of the NKVD in 1940 which Beria relayed to Stalin. The main conclusion was that the Gulag more than paid for itself as a sector of the Soviet economy: ‘The entire system of camps and labour colonies is fully paying its way and no subsidy for the prisoners (1,700,000 persons), their guards or the camp apparatus is needed.’14 Beria was on the make and may already have known that the opposite was true. But the regime was being consolidated; Stalin would not consider any basic alteration of what he had built. He was powerful and confident. He was overworked. He had strengthened the state as the prime lever of political and economic change. He had never believed in the spontaneous positive potential of the people. He wanted workers and peasants to support the regime, to work to their physical limit and to denounce ‘enemies’. He was jovial about the usefulness of the camps and executions. At the Eighteenth Party Congress he exulted that whereas 98.6 per cent of voters had supported the regime after Tukhachevski’s trial in mid-1937, the proportion increased to 99.4 per cent after Bukharin had been sentenced in March 1938.15
This was the comment of a man who felt he had largely succeeded. He had achieved enough of his objectives to know that his personal despotism and his design for the Soviet order were secure at least for the foreseeable future. He and the Politburo were to make minor modifications in future years as they sought to bind the walls together in the face of unanticipated storms. The basic design stayed intact; and those observers who have interpreted the modifications in terms of fundamentally separate periods are scarcely convincing. If it makes sense to talk of ‘late Stalinism’ or ‘high Stalinism’, the date of demarcation should be set at the end of the Great Terror in 1938. Stalin went on tinkering with his architect’s drawings. Relations among party, people’s commissariats and armed forces underwent alteration before, during and after the war. He fiddled with the scope allowed for Russian national identity and for cultural and religious expression; he also adjusted his cult to the social atmosphere of the time. Economic policies were repeatedly modified. Foreign policy was frequently amended. Stalin did not refer to his architecture as Stalinist but was not averse to others using the term. This order prevailed until the day he died — and in many respects it was to outlive him.
PART FOUR
Warlord
34. THE WORLD IN SIGHT
Stalin the Leader was multifaceted. He was a mass killer with psychological obsessions. He thought and wrote as a Marxist. He behaved like the more ruthless Russian rulers of earlier centuries. He was a party boss, administrator, editor and correspondent. He was a paterfamilias and genial host at his dacha as well as a voracious reader and intellectual autodidact. Depending on circumstances, he displayed all these aspects at once or hid some while exhibiting others. He had the capacity to divide and subdivide himself. Stalin’s multitude of forms left his associates impressed, baffled and fearful — and indeed this was one of the secrets of his success in maintaining dominance over them.
His record as an international statesman has always been controversial. The jury of history has offered a majority verdict that his preoccupation with Soviet economic development and political consolidation deflected his attention from foreign affairs. Some have accused Stalin of knowing and caring nothing about events abroad. The building of ‘socialism in a single country’ was among his main slogans, and the General Secretary’s advocacy of this priority fostered the misperception, both at the time and later, that he was not bothered by what happened in the rest of the world. The general assumption has been that he and his Politburo comrades had ditched the project of worldwide socialist revolution. His opponents Trotski and Bukharin said this, and their view has attracted the nodding heads of most subsequent commentators. About Stalin’s concentration on the situation inside the USSR there is no doubt. But this did not mean he overlooked foreign policy. Nor did he allow it to be formulated without his active intervention: he continued to give it the high priority it had had for him in the 1920s.
Stalin had always thought hard about international relations and Soviet external security. During the Civil War he had had responsibility for policy in the Caucasus and the Baltic region. In 1920 he discussed with Lenin the future of a Europe under socialist administration. Stalin offered his thoughts on military and political aspects of the Red Army’s campaign in Poland; he also came to the fore with proposals for expanding Soviet influence along the entire frontier from Turkey to Afghanistan. Under the New Economic Policy, far from being preoccupied with factional and bureaucratic matters, he took an active leading part in the Politburo’s decisions on Britain, Germany and China.
Detailed elaboration of policy was still left to institutions with the necessary expertise: the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs and the Comintern. When Georgi Chicherin retired through ill health in 1930, Maxim Litvinov took his place despite having no recent affiliation with Stalin;1 and when the post of Secretary-General of the Executive Committee of the Comintern was created after the Seventh World Congress in 1935, Stalin turned not to an adjutant such as Molotov or Kaganovich but to the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov, whom he barely knew but who had worldwide fame after being put on trial in Nazi Germany. Stalin in public mentioned foreign policy in his political reports on behalf of the Central Committee but wrote no substantial piece on the subject. Yet when items of importance cropped up, an internal group of the Politburo consulted among themselves.2 Stalin watched, regulated and directed. He sent instructions. No important decision was taken before he had given his approval. Yet he did not usually roll up his sleeves and get involved in the minutiae of implementation as he did in internal affairs.
This detachment from the day-to-day running of the People’s Commissariat and the Comintern as well as the confidentiality of discussions at the highest level (which was maintained for decades after Stalin’s death) 3 sustained the mystery about the Politburo’s intentions. Abroad, speculation was rife. The USSR’s military might was growing at a steady rate. Each May Day parade indicated that the Soviet state was recovering its position as a European and Asian power of importance.
Yet what did Stalin want to do in the world? If he is judged by his own speeches and articles, he looked upon
