Stalin and His Hangmen (24 page)

Energetically repressing émigrés, intellectuals and clerics, Menzhinsky had proved his value; he would now help Stalin crush all opposition, within the party and without.

Stalin’s Struggle for Sole Control

Whosoever hath any thing fixed in his person that doth induce contempt, hath also a perpetual spur in himself to rescue and deliver himself from scorn. Therefore all deformed persons are extreme bold:… Also, it stirreth in them industry, and especially of this kind, to watch and observe the weakness of others, that they may have somewhat to repay. Again, in their superiors, it quencheth jealousy towards them, as persons that they may at pleasure despise; and it layeth their competitors and emulators asleep, as never believing they should be in possibility of advancement…

Francis Bacon,
Of Deformity

From spring 1923 Lenin was a living corpse, unable to call anyone to order. The New Economic Plan for Lenin had been a necessary but unwelcome step backwards; for the Politbiuro it represented a weakening of both the monopoly and the severity of the party’s power.

For Stalin, however, this was the time to secure that monopoly for himself ‘Personnel decides everything’ ten years later became one of Stalin’s famous slogans. From 4 April 1922, when Stalin secured his own position as general secretary of the party – a ‘cook who will make some hot dishes’, Lenin warned – he put this slogan into practice by turning the secretariat of the Central Committee into a party and state personnel office.

If Stalin had genius, it was as a personnel officer. He recruited apparently mediocre men and used them to great effect. The party’s Central Committee became Stalin’s instrument: he installed as fellow secretaries his sidekicks Viacheslav Molotov and Valerian Kuibyshev, the latter a loyal Stalinist who had shown considerable initiative in the civil war but was now a malleable alcoholic. Stalin cannily turned the secretariat from an administrative service into a political powerhouse. He funnelled or
withheld information, he compiled agendas, he kept records, and thus directed the agenda and decided the participants in party deliberations.

Once general secretary, Stalin appointed another crony, Lazar Kaganovich, to the party’s organizing and distributing section. This section decided which members were posted where, and who would attend party congresses. Stalin already had a second source of authority as a Politbiuro member where, for the time being, he spoke less and listened more to his eloquent fellow leaders. These two posts gave him a preponderance of power during Lenin’s last illness, but Stalin also had his hand on a third lever of power: he was a member of the small Orgbiuro, the body which decided how and by whom Politbiuro resolutions were carried out. Stalin dominated the Orgbiuro: apart from Molotov and Kuibyshev, who always concurred, he had only to win over Dzierżyński and Andrei Andreevich Andreev, a former waiter whom Stalin had made a secretary to the Central Committee, to have his way, with the ‘liberals’ Rykov and Tomsky easily outvoted.

Stalin also controlled the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, which reviewed all government decisions, and ran the Commissariat of National Minorities, which in the early 1920s, against Lenin’s intentions, made the Soviet Union a centralized empire rather than a federation of nation states. As commissar, Stalin oversaw with GPU help the crushing of national rebellions from his native Georgia to Bashkiria. Non-Russian communists were arrested, and some shot, for ‘nationalist’ deviations: they had misunderstood the role of the Russian Federal Republic in the Soviet Union and had taken their own autonomy seriously. They had not heeded Stalin’s and Zinoviev’s speeches explaining the difference between the Tsar’s imperialism and Soviet centralization. Zinoviev in 1919 expressed Stalin’s idea with inimitable cynicism: ‘We cannot do without Azerbaijan’s oil or Turkestan’s cotton. We take these things which we need, but not in the way that the old exploiters took them, but as elder brothers who are carrying the torch of civilization.’

Finally, Stalin dominated the Comintern. Here his cronies the Hungarian sadist Béla Kun and the robotic Finnish journalist Otto Kuusinen ensured blind adherence by most foreign communists to Stalin’s line. No wonder, then, that Lenin’s famous ‘testament’ of 1922 accused Stalin of concentrating enormous power in his hands.

Lenin’s testament reads like a headmaster’s report. The six most likely
candidates to succeed were all weighed and found wanting. Stalin was singled out for his reckless use of power and capriciousness (his sulks when thwarted) and, in a postscript, for his coarseness and disloyalty. But Lenin advised only that the party should ‘consider’ removing Stalin from his general secretaryship. None of Stalin’s faults were, in Bolshevik eyes, grave. Coarseness and impoliteness were virtues in a revolutionary, and Stalin, whenever anyone threw the testament in his face, retorted, ‘Yes, comrade, I actually am coarse. Ilyich suggested you find somebody else who differs from me by being more polite. All right, try and find him!’ Lenin’s critiques of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev were far more damning: they had all committed heresy by being against armed revolt at some point before October 1917. Bukharin and Piatakov were damned for their poor Marxist credentials: the first was an economist, the second an administrator.

There was no way of holding together the collective leadership that Lenin wanted to succeed him. Trotsky and Stalin, the two leading contenders in the eyes of the party’s rank and file, were both set on sole dictatorship; the satraps of Petrograd and Moscow, Zinoviev and Kamenev, saw themselves as a duumvirate but had limited and localized support. Zinoviev was also something of a joke. Few could take seriously a man who resembled Chico Marx and served his guests with a dish of steaming horse meat cooked by himself and within minutes was screaming that he would shoot them all.
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As for Piatakov and Bukharin, they preferred playing second fiddle, the former to Trotsky, the latter to Stalin, although in the early 1920s Bukharin, the only one of them who might have won a popular election in Soviet Russia, pondered his chances of ruling without Stalin. He even sounded out Stalin’s zombie head of state Mikhail Kalinin about the feasibility of dispensing with Stalin’s leadership. Kalinin kept silent about this approach but felt guilty and afraid all his life. After he died in 1946, his daughter passed on to Stalin his written confession:

Now I am on the threshold of death I have recalled something from the past which, to be honest, I had not thought significant before. Probably it was in the first year after Lenin died… After a session [of the Politbiuro] Bukharin invited me to his apartment to look at his hunting trophies. When he was showing me various birds and small animals he asked me, as if by the way, what I would think of a leadership without Stalin… I understood even then that I was being sounded out.
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Charisma won few votes in a party congress or on the Central Committee; patronage was decisive. The Bolsheviks were polarized between Trotsky and Stalin. Trotsky’s reputation had soared in times of war and danger; Stalin’s apparent moderation was attuned to the fatigue that now beset the party after a turbulent decade. In August 1924, to shut out Trotsky, Stalin hived off from the Politbiuro a group of seven ‘to agree on the most odious questions’, as Kalinin put it. Its membership was approved by a claque of twenty Central Committee members – Stalin and his supporters – who called themselves the governing collective. Stalin was thus able to decide in advance the Politbiuro’s agenda and make it accountable only to his exclusive group of seven.

Stalin’s struggle for sole control passed unremarked by the Russian public. They were relieved that 1923 had been a year of relative normality compared to the shocks and upheavals of the past six. The horrors of revolution were best evoked in
The Apocalypse of Our Time
by the philosopher Vasili Rozanov in 1919, who had died that same year of emaciation in the Troitse-Sergeev monastery:

La divina Commedia

With clanking and screeching an iron curtain is lowered over Russian History.

‘The performance is over.’

The audience got up.

‘It’s time to put on your fur coats and go home.’

They looked round.

But it turned out that there were no fur coats and no homes.

By the summer of 1923 city trams ran, the theatres were open and there were even casinos; those who had money could buy goods. Books printed in Berlin were sold in Moscow and writers could travel between the two cities. In the countryside the peasantry had enough grain for their own needs, for seedcorn and even to sell privately. But compare the first Soviet Petrograd directory of 1923 with the last Tsarist edition of 1917 and you see a metamorphosis: the addresses and buildings are the
same, but only io per cent of those in the 1917 directory are still there six years later. The city has been drained of its bourgeoisie and filled with soldiers, workers and peasants. The change in Russia is best summarized in two lines by Nikolai Gumiliov: ‘Only snakes shed their skins. We change our souls, not our bodies.’ The populace which the Politbiuro fought among themselves to control had lost all continuity with Tsarist civic society. By 1923 nobody dreamed of influencing the government; people were reduced to fear, their best hope that they would be left alone.

While Stalin and the Politbiuro wrangled, the state seemed to retreat and OGPU became more discreet. In 1923, according to official figures, only 414 persons were shot, the lowest number since Tsarist times and until 1947 when Stalin suspended the death penalty.
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In fact Menzhinsky had retracted one tentacle of OGPU and extended others. The Cheka had shifted its tactics from brutality to more subtle but no less lethal surveillance. Menzhinsky’s foreign department concentrated on settling scores with emigres and was a polyglot elite of imaginatively murderous experts under a chief who enjoyed his
metier.
In domestic affairs, OGPU took a leaf or two from the book of Dmitri Tolstoi, minister of the interior under Tsar Alexander II, who had designated three classes of men with close contact with the population – schoolteachers, gendarmes and priests – police informers. OGPU had 40,000 literate employees intercepting mail and telephone calls and thousands of others – 20,000 in Moscow alone – informing on citizens’ conversations and discussions so that regular summaries of the mood of the public could be compiled. Even with this enormous covert civilian army, OGPU fought for new territory.

Dzierżyński asked Iagoda to write a report on ‘completely open, obvious profiteering, enrichment and brazenness’ to persuade the Central Committee to employ OGPU to expel profiteers and their families from major cities, confiscate their property and colonize with these people the wildernesses of northern Russia and Siberia. The Politbiuro took half-hearted action against smugglers and bar owners; the commissar of finances had to protect the urban retail trade from Dzierżyński’s narrow-minded obsessions.

A real blow to OGPU came from Bukharin in autumn 1924:

Dear Feliks… I consider that we must as soon as possible move to a more ‘liberal’ form of Soviet rule: fewer repressions, more legality, more discussion, more self-rule (under the party’s guidance
naturaliter
[Bukharin liked to use Latin]), etc…. That is why I sometimes speak out against proposals to widen the rights of the GPU, etc. Understand, dear Feliks (you know how much I love you) that you have no reasons whatsoever to suspect me of any bad feelings to you personally or the GPU as an institution…
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Dzierżyński passed the letter to Menzhinsky with his own commentary:

We have to take account of such moods in the Central Committee’s ruling circles, and pause for thought. It would be a very great political mistake if in principle the party on the question of the GPU were to surrender to the philistines and give them a holiday – as a party line, as a policy, as a declaration. That would mean giving in to capitalist enterprise, philistinism, tending to the denial of Bolshevism, this would be the triumph of Trotskyism and a surrender of positions. To counteract these moods we must re-examine our practice, our methods and get rid of whatever might feed such moods. This means that we (the GPU) have perhaps to be a bit quieter, more modest, resort to searches and arrests more cautiously, with better evidence… We have to re-examine our policy on letting people go abroad – and visas…
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The hangmen had to try a new tack. OGPU was under attack from Commissar for Foreign Affairs Chicherin as its methods undermined his diplomatic efforts abroad. Commissar for Justice Nikolai Krylenko, reverting to the legality he had been trained in, also put pressure on OGPU: he demanded that crimes, even against the state, be dealt with by the prosecutor’s office, the
prokuratura,
under his commissariat. To Zinoviev, Dzierżyński complained: ‘A very difficult stage has come for OGPU. Its workers are mortally tired, some to the point of hysterics. But in the higher echelons of the party a well-known section is beginning to doubt the necessity of OGPU (Bukharin, Sokolnikov, Kalinin).’
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Dzierżyński complained bitterly that Krylenko was usurping the role of OGPU: suppose, he said, the Commissariat for Justice took over political cases, ‘that would, at a time when the political circumstances are changing, threaten the very existence of the Soviet Union.’
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