In fact, the opposite was true. The cartoonist Boris Efimov describes his brother Mikhail Koltsov telling him of a conversation with Mekhlis, who explained how the arrests were taking place. Mekhlis showed him, in confidence, “a few words in red pencil addressed to Yezhov and Mekhlis, laconically ordering the arrest of certain officials.” There were, Koltsov noted, “people still at liberty and at work, who had in fact already been condemned and … annihilated by one stroke of this red pencil. Yezhov was left with merely the technical details—working up the cases and producing the orders for arrest.”39
Stalin’s achievement is in general so extraordinary that we can hardly dismiss him as simply a colorless, mediocre type with a certain talent for terror and intrigue. He was, indeed, in some ways a very reserved man. It is said that even in his younger days if beaten in an argument, he would show no emotion, but just smile sarcastically. His former secretary penetratingly remarks, “He possessed in a high degree the gift for silence, and in this respect he was unique in a country where everybody talks far too much.40 His ambitions, and even his talents, were not clear to most of his rivals and colleagues.
Because he did not elucidate and elaborate his views and plans, it was thought that he did not have any—a typical mistake of the garrulous intellectual. “His expression,” an observer writes, “tells nothing of what he feels.”41 A Soviet writer speaks of “the expression which he had carefully devised for himself over the years as a fixture and which Comrade Stalin, as he had long been in the habit of calling himself in his thoughts and sometimes aloud, in the third person, had to assume in the presence of these people.”42 He would listen quietly at meetings of the Politburo, or to distinguished visitors, puffing at his Dunhill pipe and doodling aimlessly—his secretaries Poskrebyshev and Dvinsky write that his pads were sometimes covered with the phrase “Lenin-teacher-friend,” but the last foreigner to visit him, in February 1953, noted that he was doodling wolves.
All early accounts agree that one of Stalin’s characteristics was “laziness” or “indolence,” which Bukharin impressed on Trotsky as Stalin’s “most striking quality.43 Trotsky remarked that Stalin “never did any serious work” but was always “busy with his intrigues.” Another way of putting this is that Stalin paid the necessary attention to the detail of political maneuver. In his words, “Never refuse to do the little things, for from the little things are built the big.”44 One may also be reminded of a remark by a former German Commander-in-Chief, Colonel-General Baron Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, about his officers:
I divide my officers into four classes…. The man who is clever and industrious is suited to high staff appointments; use can be made of the man who is stupid and lazy; the man who is clever and lazy is fitted for the highest command, he has the nerve to deal with all situations; but the man who is stupid and industrious is a danger and must be dismissed immediately.
In the political struggle, Stalin’s great characteristic was precisely “nerve.” He had complete determination and considerable patience, together with an extraordinary ability to apply and to relax pressure at the right moment, which carried him through a series of critical situations, until his final victory.
At the center of Stalin’s superiority over his competitors was certainly his intense will, just as Napoleon ranked what he called “moral fortitude” higher in a general than genius or experience. When Milovan Djilas said to Stalin during the Yugoslav–Soviet discussions in Moscow during the war that the Serbian politician Gavrilovid was “a shrewd man,” Stalin commented, as though to himself, “Yes, there are politicians who think shrewdness is the main thing in politics….”45 His was a will power taken to a logical extreme. There is something nonhuman about his almost total lack of normal restraints upon it.
He is said to have been a constant reader of Machiavelli, as indeed is reasonable enough. In Chapter 15 of The Prince, he would find the simple advice that rulers should in no case practice villainies which might lose them the State, but must nevertheless, if it comes to the worst, “not flinch from being blamed for vices which are necessary for safeguarding the State,” making whatever effort is feasible to “escape the evil reputation” involved. Or, again, in Chapter 18, Machiavelli recommends the appearance of mercy, faithfulness, and so forth, while noting that the Prince “and especially a new Prince, must often act in a fashion contrary to those virtues.”
When the great film director Eisenstein produced his film on Ivan the Terrible, Stalin objected to his attitude. He had been inclined to treat Ivan, in the way most people have, as a ruthless and paranoid terrorist. Stalin told Eisenstein and the actor N. K. Cherkasov that, on the contrary, Ivan had been a great and wise ruler who had protected the country from the infiltration of foreign influence and had tried to bring about the unification of Russia. “J. V. Stalin also remarked on the progressive role played by the Oprichnina [Ivan’s Secret Police]”; Stalin’s criticism of Ivan was limited to his having “failed to liquidate the five remaining great feudal families.” On that point, Stalin added humorously, “There God stood in Ivan’s way”—since Ivan, after liquidating one family, would repent for a year “when he should have been acting with increasing decisiveness.”fn2
Stalin also understood how to destroy his enemies’ political reputations. He could have learned in certain respects from another totalitarian leader whom he to some extent admired. Hitler gives a recipe for the whole tenor of the Purges:
The art of leadership, as displayed by really great popular leaders in all ages, consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary…. The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to the one category; for weak and wavering natures among a leader’s following may easily begin to be dubious about the justice of their own cause if they have to face different enemies…. Where there are various enemies … it will be necessary to block them all together as forming one solid front, so that the mass of followers in a popular movement may see only one common enemy against whom they have to fight. Such uniformity intensifies their belief in their own cause and strengthens their feeling of hostility towards the opponent.46
But Stalin was deeper and more complex than Hitler. His view of humanity was cynical, and if he, too, turned to anti-Semitism, it was as a matter of policy rather than dogma. We can see traces of this later anti-Semitism, or rather anti-Semitic demagogy, as early as 1907, when he was remarking, in the small underground paper he then controlled at Baku, “Somebody among the Bolsheviks remarked jokingly that since the Mensheviks were the faction of the Jews and the Bolsheviks that of the native Russians, it would be a good thing to have a pogrom in the Party.”47
The Yiddish writers shot in August 1952 were accused of the political offense of wishing to set up a secessionist state in the Crimea—a charge faintly linked with reality through the fact that a proposal had indeed arisen in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, after the war, to resettle Jews in the then-desolate peninsula. In the Doctors’ Plot of 1952–1953, a majority of those accused were Jews, but some were not. The Jewish element was publicly emphasized, but it was under the guise of a link with “Zionism,” just as in the campaign leading up to it, Jewish literary men were called “cosmopolitans” (“cosmopolitans … that long-nosed lot,” a bureaucrat comments in one of Avram Tertz’s stories). When critics in the West pointed out the undoubted anti-Semitic element in the alleged “Plot,” there were still people to come forward and say that, no, Gentiles were being accused too, and that Zionism was, after all, more or less implicitly anti-Soviet. For, as we shall see, Stalin’s policies in strictly political matters were never elaborated clearly in such a fashion that they could be refuted. There was never any complete certainty in an individual case about what his disposition would be.