Stalin and His Hangmen (45 page)

From 1934 to 1937 Stalin had a secret go-between with Hitler: a Georgian, David Kandelaki, whom Stalin knew through his first in-laws, the Svanidzes. Kandelaki had been educated in Germany. Officially, he headed the Soviet trade mission to Germany and Scandinavia, but he answered to neither the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs nor the NKVD. His remit went beyond trade.
²⁵

Two Nazis looked eastwards. Hermann Goering’s cousin Herbert wanted to work with the Soviet Union against France and Britain. Dr Hjalmar Schacht, the finance minister, despite planning to invade the Soviet Ukraine and share it with Poland, offered Stalin five hundred million marks credit in exchange for oil for Germany’s military. ‘Tell Kandelaki,’ Stalin told Kaganovich in September 1935, when Germany and the Soviet Union were disowning each other publicly, ‘to insist on getting from the Germans everything we need for military purposes and for dyes.’

Whether or not Stalin thought peaceful coexistence possible with Hitler, he eagerly stirred up rivalry between France and Germany for the Soviet Union’s support. ‘The old entente has gone,’ Stalin wrote to Kaganovich and Molotov on 2 September 1935. ‘Instead two ententes are forming: that of Italy and France on one hand, and of England and Germany on the other hand. The worse the fight between them, the better for us… It is not at all to our advantage for one of them to smash the other. Our advantage lies in their fight being as prolonged as possible, without a quick victory for one over the other.’

Social democracy or Trotskyism stuck in Stalin’s throat far more than fascism. In September 1933 Mussolini and Stalin added neutrality and friendship to their non-aggression pact; in 1936, Mussolini’s press acclaimed the shooting of Zinoviev and Kamenev as proof of Stalin’s conversion to views compatible with Italian fascism.

By 1937, Stalin had become so confident of Hitler’s strength and France and Britain’s weakness that he had Kandelaki draft a pact with Hitler. The author was rewarded with the Order of Lenin, but was shot a year before the pact was signed.

Women and Children

The fate of Zinoviev and Kamenev and the mystery around Kirov’s murder were enough to convince anyone in the Central Committee of the party, let alone the Politbiuro, of the lethal consequences of dissidence. However, one group, barely represented in the top echelons, could still risk speaking out: women. Under the Tsars women had been prominent in opposing tyranny – with guns and bombs as well as words – and the state, with some remnant of chivalry, had hesitated to come down on them with the same force that it applied to male revolutionaries. In the USSR the voice of female protest was far weaker, but it could still be heard until the mid-1930s.

Stalin removed women from power as assiduously as he dismissed Jews. Women Trotskyists shared exile with male Trotskyists, and the wives of Stalin’s real or imaginary political opponents were subjected to measures only a degree or two milder than were their husbands, unless they had renounced and divorced them. Nevertheless, 95 per cent of those sentenced to the camps or to death for counter-revolutionary activity were men.

Three dowagers exerted vestigial influence. The most important was Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin’s widow. In the mid-1930s she remained a deputy commissar for education and sat on party commissions. Stalin had loathed her ever since December 1922, when he had abused her for taking dictation from Lenin against doctors’ orders. She had begged Kamenev and Zinoviev to ‘protect me from coarse interference in my private life, from unworthy cursing and threats…’ Since then Krupskaia had been overridden by Stalin on every question including the mummification of Lenin and the cult of his name. ‘If you want to respect Lenin’s name, then build crèches, kindergartens, houses, schools and so on,’ she had said.

Krupskaia had first gravitated to Zinoviev and Kamenev, the most Leninist in education and outlook of the leadership. When Zinoviev and Kamenev were ousted, Krupskaia, like Lenin’s sister Maria, moved right, to Bukharin. When collectivization began in 1929 Krupskaia took Bukharin’s side, claiming that Lenin had intended cooperatives, not
collective farms, to supersede the peasant smallholder. Krupskaia, the daughter of an army lieutenant and a governess, was a narrow-minded bigot compared to whom, on questions of culture and education, Stalin was a liberal, but she could not tolerate the repression of Lenin’s colleagues. She protested at Stalin’s falsification of party history; he lambasted her for idolizing Trotsky. Stalin saw to it that foreign visitors were kept away from her and even threatened to declare the compliant old Bolshevik Elena Stasova Lenin’s real widow if Krupskaia did not cave in. ‘In what way actually is Comrade Krupskaia different from any other responsible comrade?’ Stalin asked, calling Krupskaia’s speech at the fourteenth party congress ‘pure rubbish’.
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Krupskaia’s protests became fainter as Stalin’s recriminations became harsher. On 19 March 1935, for the first and last time, she was summoned to Stalin’s office where she remained for two hours. Agranov, Iagoda’s deputy, and Nikolai Ezhov, shadowing the NKVD for Stalin, arrived two hours earlier. To judge from the gaggle of NKVD and commissars present that afternoon, the subject was the forthcoming prison sentences to punish Zinoviev and Kamenev for ‘moral’ responsibility for Kirov’s murder. Krupskaia was mute when Kamenev and Zinoviev were tried for the third time and shot. After that she connived at Stalin’s murders and was too compromised to speak out. In 1937, on a commission with Politbiuro members to decide Bukharin’s fate, Krupskaia even voted for the harshest proposal: expulsion, arrest and shooting.
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Krupskaia received hundred of letters from victims – often children – of Stalin’s repression who hoped that she could make Stalin set injustices right, but her only protests were against Russian chauvinism: she deplored the damage to minority languages from having Russian compulsorily taught in all schools.

Lenin’s youngest sister Maria Ulianova was the second dowager. She was even more peremptorily disempowered (though she had always disclaimed privilege). Ulianova was a close friend, as well as political ally, of Bukharin and, on his breach with Stalin in 1929, she lost her post of secretary to
Pravda
. She died, ostracized in semi-exile, in 1937. Stalin rendered harmless a third widow without having to imprison or kill her.
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Until 1939 Gorky’s legitimate widow Ekaterina Peshkova ran the Political Red Cross, which in the 1920s had been able to monitor and even alleviate the conditions in which some political prisoners were held
by OGPU. While Iagoda was in office – if only because he was in love with her daughter-in-law – Peshkova secured a few reprieves, or at least relief, for the repressed and their families, but when he fell, Peshkova offered only guarded sympathy.

One woman, and the least likely, was singled out by Stalin for a real political role. Aleksandra Kollontai, daughter of one Tsarist general and, by her first marriage, the wife of another, left her husband and child in 1898 to become a feminist, a libertine and a Bolshevik. Exceptionally beautiful and a talented writer, although six years older than Stalin she enchanted him, as she did many men and women. She suspended his Georgian predilection for discreet, silent and chaste women.

Trotsky loathed Kollontai, and perhaps Stalin loved her for this alone. When revolution broke out, she began a torrid affair with a man seventeen years her junior, Pavel Dybenko, a muscular Ukrainian sailor who became commissar for the navy. Sailors ignored orders from Trotsky unless Dybenko confirmed them and Trotsky had Dybenko court-martialled. Kollontai, now commissar for social security, begged prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko to release Dybenko. Krylenko made her abjure her principles and become Dybenko’s wife. Kollontai’s love letters were copied by the Cheka to the Politbiuro and the couple inspired scabrous verse in Petrograd:

Russia has turned into a brothel,

The Bolsheviks’ orchestra roars out,

And various scum is dancing

A Soviet can-can with no knickers.

The crook Lenin greets the guests.

The glasses are brimming over,

And seeing the blood in them, hysterically

Bawls that whore Kollontai.

Kollontai had to be sent away until the scandals died down. Stalin appointed her a semi-official envoy to Sweden and Norway; the latter was persuaded into recognizing Soviet Russia partly because it had herrings to sell. Kollontai – an exemplary socialist – charmed the Scandinavian bourgeoisie and proved herself the Soviet Union’s most effective diplomat, even though the Swedes expelled her for political and
sexual profligacy (she had long since cast off Dybenko). Thanks to Kollontai, the USSR secured half a million tonnes of Norwegian herring, and a grateful fishing industry stopped the Oslo press calling her a whore.

In 1925, however,
Pravda
began attacking Kollontai’s depravity. She had helped write the first Bolshevik family code, which recognized a woman’s right to abortion and divorce on demand, but the party’s mood had changed. Again, Kollontai turned to Stalin for protection, professing loyalty to the ‘general’, in other words Stalinist, line.
Pravda
fell silent. Kollontai’s carefully edited diary shows that she was a genuine Stalinist, loyal to his every political twist, although she did admit to lingering unhappiness about the lack of democracy within the party.
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The memoirs of her lovers and the diary pages that she failed to edit suggest that her fondness for Stalin was like her infatuation with Dybenko: a love of coarse, self-assured authority. Her mind, however, was as clear as her conscience was murky. Stalin, she told one lover, lacked Trotsky’s culture and oratory but had two merits: ‘hellish patience’ and insight. She found Molotov, eventually commissar for foreign affairs and thus her boss, ‘the incarnation of greyness, dullness and servility’, but she still preferred Stalin’s entourage to the intellectuals of Zinoviev’s or Bukharin’s circles. She broke with anyone like Karl Radek who incurred Stalin’s disapproval. In 1923, with prescience, Kollontai asked Stalin never to link her name with Dybenko’s again.

Stalin enjoyed blackmailing Kollontai: he showed her a letter for his eyes only from Dzierżyński. The letter contained a semi-literate peasant’s complaints about the orgies at a Siberian peasant commune named after her. Kollontai rode out the storm: she went to Mexico City for a year before returning to Scandinavia. From Oslo Kollontai sent a photograph of herself to Stalin and consoled him for the deaths of Sergei Kirov and, two months later, Kuibyshev:

Dear, much respected Iosif Vissarionovich. On a day when two persons close to you have been ripped out of life, I couldn’t help having warm personal thoughts about you and what you are going through. Many years ago you helped me so responsively and simply at a very, very bad moment in my life. I shall never forget it.
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By 1935 Kollontai had many responsibilities including monitoring ‘deviations’ in the Norwegian Communist Party. When Trotsky was seeking asylum, Kollontai persuaded Stalin that assassinating Trotsky in Norway would be ‘too noisy’ and suggested a solution: to stop purchases of herring until he had been expelled to a country where Stalin’s NKVD could operate freely against him.
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Kollontai writhed in private: ‘Executions… They are always, invariably, my grief and agony,’ she wrote in the original version of her diary.
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She even wondered if Stalin were paranoiac. Soviet instructions often made her a laughing-stock in Oslo, for instance when she asked the Norwegian government to ban performances by the émigrée ballerina Anna Pavlova. Norwegians began to shun her; Stalin transferred her to the Stockholm embassy, where the military attaché and first secretary had just defected. Here too Kollontai looked foolish; the Swedes refused to hand over the two defectors. She confessed her failure to Stalin in terms that he would accept: ‘I consider the main reason for defection to be the presence of opposition in the party and the intensification of provocative work by foreign forces hostile to us.’ Kollontai remained an asset to Stalin: she soothed the Scandinavians even when Stalin invaded Finland.

No Soviet ambassador had so much leeway from Stalin as Kollontai. When she complained that OGPU’s arrest of a Swedish engineer, Rossel, undermined her position, Stalin telephoned Menzhinsky: ‘Make sure that Rossel is not on Soviet territory within twenty-four hours.’ In Moscow Stalin, with
schadenfreude
, invited Kollontai to dine with him and with her former husband Dybenko. Stalin poured wine and made Dybenko (whom he soon had shot) sing Ukrainian songs. When dinner was over, Stalin asked, ‘Why did you break up with Kollontai? You did a very stupid thing, Dybenko.’

Stalin disempowered women but empowered children. Stalin’s corruption of tens of millions of young people is perhaps an even greater evil than the premature deaths of so many millions of innocent adults.

When all ideological resistance had been crushed there still remained instinctive, family values. These had always been a hindrance to Russian tyrants. In medieval times the notion of ‘mutual responsibility’ (
krugovaia
poruka) held spouses, parents, children, even neighbours of miscreants
responsible for their actions. Lenin and Dzierżynśki reintroduced krugovai
a
poruk
a
to keep Tsarist officers loyal to the Red Army; Stalin extended it to defectors and any ‘traitor to the motherland’. A spouse had immediately to divorce a counter-revolutionary if they hoped to escape their fate. Such evil idiocies reached their nadir when in 1936 Georgi Piatakov, deputy commissar for heavy industry and under investigation, begged Nikolai Ezhov to let him shoot his convicted wife.