This attitude accords with Stalin’s notoriously suspicious nature. Khrushchev tells us:
… Stalin was a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious; we knew this from our work with him. He could look at a man and say: “Why are your eyes so shifty today?” or “Why are you turning so much today and avoiding looking me directly in the eyes?” The sickly suspicion created in him a general distrust even toward eminent Party workers whom he had known for years. Everywhere and in everything he saw “enemies,” “double-dealers” and “spies.”10
A result of this attitude was that he almost never let down his guard. In politics, particularly in those of the sharpest style, this was to prove an excellent tactical principle.
We cannot know how far Stalin really cherished the principles he professed. Khrushchev, in his Secret Speech of February 1956, concluded a series of appalling revelations of terror by remarking of them that
Stalin was convinced that it was necessary for the defense of the interests of the working class against the plotting of the enemies and against the attack of the imperialist camp. He saw this from the position of the working class, the interests of the working people, the interests of the victory of Socialism and Communism. We cannot say that these were the deeds of a giddy despot. He considered that this should be done in the interests of the Party, of the working masses, in the name of defense of the revolution’s gains. In this lies the whole tragedy.
Most people would not perhaps regard it as the whole tragedy. But, more to our point, there is no way of telling what Stalin’s true motivation was. The fact that to all appearances he took the view attributed to him by Khrushchev does not prove that he held it sincerely. Whether he consciously thought of the state of things he created and found good as the Socialism taught in his youth, or whether he saw it as an autocracy suitable to his own aims and to Russian reality, we cannot say.
A Soviet Air Force expert who had attended a number of meetings with the top Soviet leadership in connection with plans for an intercontinental rocket mentions Stalin saying that the project would make it “easier for us to talk to the great shopkeeper Harry Truman and keep him pinned down where we want him,” but then turning to him with a curious remark: “You see, we live in an insane epoch.”11
None of the Soviet leaders of the time was ever reported as expressing in private anything but a straightforward and cynically put desire to crush the West. This philosophical comment certainly goes deeper. Whether it represents Stalin’s real thinking and self-justification, or is a sign of that sensitivity to the attitude of others occasionally reported of him, cannot be guessed.
When Litvinov was discarded in 1947, he used to meet regularly with his old friend Surits, another of the rare survivors of the old Soviet diplomatic service. They frequently discussed Stalin. They both agreed that he was a great man in many ways. But he was unpredictable. And he was stubborn, refusing to consider facts which did not correspond to his wishes. He imagined, they thought, that he was serving the people. But he did not know the people and did not wish to know them, preferring the abstract idea “the People,” made up to his own liking.12
For what it is worth, the evidence seems to be that Stalin really believed that the abolition of incomes from capital was the sole necessary principle of social morality, excusing any other action whatever. Djilas’s summary is perhaps correct: “All in all, Stalin was a monster who, while adhering to abstract, absolute and fundamentally utopian ideas, in practice had no criterion but success—and this meant violence, and physical and spiritual extermination.”13
Except for the priceless, though limited, light thrown on it by Stalin’s daughter’s books, the more personal side of his character must remain to a large degree enigmatic.
But it seems that the human moments, few as they were, arose in connection with his wives. When the first, Ekaterina Svanidze, died, a friend who went to the cemetery with him says that he remarked, “… this creature softened my stony heart. She is dead and with her died my last warm feelings for all human beings.”14
His second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, held to the old revolutionary ideas. She is said to have become horrified with what she had learned of the sufferings of the collectivization campaign. She seems to have obtained most of her information from students at a course she had been allowed to take, and they were arrested as soon as Stalin found out.
Her suicide on 9 November 1932 took place as the result of the last series of violent quarrels with her husband, whom she accused of “butchering the people.” All early accounts agree that Stalin lost his temper with her and cursed her in front of his friends (though this is somewhat toned down in the version later given to his daughter).15 For if Nadezhda, following Ekaterina, touched him in a comparatively soft spot, it was not as soft as all that, and remarkable only in comparison with his usual conduct. She left him a letter which “wasn’t purely personaclass="underline" it was partly political as well.”16 We are told that this made him think—and, of course, rightly—that he had enemies everywhere, and that it much exacerbated his suspiciousness. Stalin seems to have been deeply affected by Nadezhda’s death. He felt it for the rest of his life, blaming it on “enemies” (and on Michael Arlen, whose book The Green Hat she had been reading at the time).17
Nadezhda’s brother, the Old Bolshevik Paul Alliluyev, was Political Commissar of the Armored Forces. After a time, he was put under special surveillance. Later he told an old acquaintance that he was being kept away from Stalin and had had his Kremlin pass taken from him. It was clear to him that Yagoda and Pauker had suggested that he might be personally dangerous to Stalin in revenging his sister. He was removed from his post in 1937 and given a minor job in the Soviet Trade Delegation in Paris.18 The causes of his early death in 1937 have been variously interpreted, but his wife was later given ten years for allegedly poisoning him.19
An interesting family sidelight arises too in Stalin’s attitude toward his younger son, Vasili. With his elder son, Yakov, by his first wife, he was always on poor terms, occasionally subjecting him to minor persecutions. The feeling was mutual. With Vasili, Nadezhda Alliluyeva’s son, his attitude was quite different. The young man is described with contempt and detestation by all who came in contact with him. He was a stupid bully, a semiliterate drunkard, “a beastly pampered schoolboy let out into the world for the first time.”20 In spite of a very poor record at the Kachinsky Flying School, where he received special tuition, he was passed into the Soviet Air Force without a single bad mark, and by the time he was twenty-nine was already a Lieutenant General. In his intemperate outbursts, he invariably traded on his father’s name.21
But Stalin finally removed Vasili from his command for drunken incompetence. And it does not seem that he ever intervened directly to advance his career. It was rather that his subordinates did not dare to do other than recommend the young man enthusiastically in spite of his lack of qualifications. All the same, there seems to be a faint echo here of Napoleonic vulgarities. H. G. Wells writes of Napoleon’s relation to the French Revolution:
And now we come to one of the most illuminating figures in modern history, the figure of an adventurer and a wrecker, whose story seems to display with an extraordinary vividness the universal subtle conflict of egoism, vanity and personality with the weaker, wider claims of the common good. Against this background of confusion and stress … this stormy and tremendous dawn, appears this dark little archaic personage hard, compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative and neatly vulgar.22