This enigmatic attitude misled even experienced and clever people. Lion Feuchtwanger (Ehrenburg remarks), a passionate defender of the Jews, could never believe that Stalin persecuted Jews—just as Romain Rolland, devoted to freedom in the arts, was easily deceived by Stalin on the absence of freedom in Soviet literature.48
The “anti-Semitism,” thus disguised, was in accord with Stalin’s general exploitation of prejudices and of the gullibility and pliability of men in general. In a broader sense, this was doubtless at the root of Stalin’s acceptance of the theories of the physiologist Pavlov (who loathed the Soviet regime). Moreover, he interpreted Pavlov in the crudest way as applying to human beings, sponsoring an attack on the view that Pavlov had dealt with the elementary nervous process of animals only and that in the case of man it was necessary to take into account the phenomenon of “resistance to the formation of conditioned reflexes.”49
But the dull, cool, calculating effect given cumulatively through Stalin’s long career, the air of a great glacier moving slowly and by the easiest path to overwhelm some Alpine valley, is only part of the picture. At various times—and especially in his early career—the calm of his general manner was broken, and expression given to the driving emotions that possessed him.
In Lenin’s time, if offended, Stalin would sulk and stay away from meetings for days.50 Lenin noted of him that he often acted out of anger or spite and that “spite in general plays the very worst role in politics.” He also noted Stalin’s hastiness and his tendency to solve everything by administrative impulse. At the time of Lenin’s death, he had nearly ruined himself by this “capriciousness” and needed all his skill to retrieve the situation.
Nor, later, was his terrorism wholly rational. He “practiced brutal violence, not only toward everything that opposed him but also toward that which seemed, to his capricious and despotic character, contrary to his concepts.”51 As George Kennan has remarked, to Stalin’s “darkly mistrustful mind no political issue was ever without its personal implications.”52 His daughter takes it as central to his character that “once he had cast someone he had known a long time out of his heart, once he had mentally relegated that someone to the ranks of his enemies, it was impossible even to talk to him about that person any more.”53 There can be no doubt that Stalin pursued his grudges implacably, even after many years. But, of course, this cannot be more than a partial motive for the killings he ordered. For these involved friends as well as enemies, and men he hardly knew as much as personal rivals. Men who had injured him did not survive the Terror. And nor, of course, did men whom he himself had injured, like Bauman.
Nevertheless, when Khrushchev represents Stalin as a capricious tyrant, this is not necessarily incompatible with a basic rationale. It is true that anyone Stalin had a personal grudge against was almost automatically included on the death list, but even a long life of quarrelsome intrigue could not provide anything like the required number of victims from that source alone. To obtain the terror effect, after all those who really had stood in his way or annoyed him had been dealt with, the quota could just as efficiently be made up by caprice as by any other method.
Stalin’s Terror, in fact, begins to show a more rational pattern if it is considered as a statistical matter, a mass phenomenon, rather than in terms of individuals. The absence of strict categories of victims, such as a Trotsky might have listed, maintained the circumspect deviousness of the Purge and avoided presenting any clear-cut target to critics. The effect of terror is produced, he may have argued, when a given proportion of a group has been seized and shot. The remainder will be cowed into uncomplaining obedience. And it does not much matter, from this point of view, which of them have been selected as victims, particularly if all or almost all are innocent.
Ilya Ehrenburg, as late as 1964, still asked himself why some were shot and some spared. Why Litvinov was never in serious trouble (though kept away from active work for years), while all the diplomats associated with him were eliminated; why Pasternak, independent and unyielding, survived, while Koltsov, anxious to do everything required of him, was liquidated; why the biologist Vavilov perished, and the even more independent-minded Kapitsa remained in favor.54
Whatever the “statistical” rationale, the way Stalin’s caprice operated is a useful sidelight on his character. A British writer of great political experience noted in the 1940s, “It seemed almost … as if Stalin simultaneously demanded and hated the sycophancy of absolute obedience.55 This was confirmed and elaborated in a more recent Soviet account by the novelist Konstantin Simonov, who had much direct contact with the high Soviet leadership. In his Soldiers Are Made, Not Born, Stalin receives a letter from a general during the war asking for the release of a colleague, whose Civil War services he recounts:
Serpilin’s recalling of past efforts had failed to touch Stalin. It was the directness of the letter that had interested him. In his ruthless character side by side with a despotic demand for total subservience, which was the rule with him, there lay the need to come across exceptions—which was the obverse side of the same rule. At times he evinced something akin to flashes of interest in people who were capable of taking risks, of expressing opinions which ran counter to his own opinions, whether genuine or assumed. Knowing himself, he knew the degree of this risk and was all the more capable of setting store by it. Sometimes, that is! Because it was far more frequently the other way around and this was where the risk lay.
Stalin gives Serpilin an interview, which goes fairly welclass="underline"
Still, on his way out, Serpilin considered that his fate had already been finally settled during his conversation with Stalin. But in actual fact it had been settled not while they had been talking but a moment ago when Stalin had silently looked at his back as he left. That was the way he often finally decided people’s fate, looking at them not in the eyes but from behind as they left.56
With certain categories, Stalin seems to have had different standards. His former Georgian rivals and friends were mostly shot, like their Russian counterparts. But whereas Stalin showed nothing but contempt for most of his victims, the execution of his Georgian Old Bolshevik brother-in-law Alyosha Svanidze in 1942, on charges of being a Nazi agent, brought out a different attitude:
Before the execution, Svanidze was told that Stalin had said that if he asked for forgiveness he would be pardoned. When Stalin’s words were repeated to Svanidze, he asked: “What am I supposed to ask forgiveness for? I have committeed no crime.” He was shot. After Svanidze’s death, Stalin said: “See how proud he is: he died without asking forgiveness.”57