An even more extraordinary example is that of another Georgian, S. I. Kavtaradze. He had been Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars in Georgia from 1921 to 1922, and had fallen with the rest of the Georgian leadership during Stalin’s clash with them before and after Lenin’s death. He was expelled from the Party as a Trotskyite in 1927, and was among those not readmitted during the following years. He was arrested and sentenced in connection with the Ryutin affair, and is reported in Maryinsk and Kolyma labor camps in 1936, thoroughly disillusioned.58 In 1940, he was still in camp. One day the commandant called him, and he was sent off to Moscow. Much to his surprise, instead of being shot, he was taken directly in his prison clothes to see Stalin, who greeted him affably, asking him where he had been all these years. He was at once rehabilitated, and sent to the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, where he shortly became Assistant People’s Commissar. After the war, he was Ambassador to Romania for a time. In his biography, as given in various Soviet reference books, a bare mention is made of the thirteen-year gap in his Party membership between December 1927 and December 1940!59 This is a clear and conscious example of Stalin indulging a caprice.
Of his leading opponents in post-Revolutionary Georgia, while he had Mdivani shot, he made a remarkable exception to the Purge in sparing Philip Makharadze. Makharadze, though publicly censured for various errors in the particularly sensitive field of Georgian Party history,60 remained Chairman of the Presidium of the Georgian Supreme Soviet until he died, in good odor, in 1943. His survival is very peculiar—unless, indeed, we regard the reprieve as amounting to no more than four years’ imminent expectation of arrest, and see in it a particularly subtle piece of revenge.
What may be a curious remnant of Caucasian chivalry can be seen in one of Stalin’s more general omissions from the Purge lists. He had no objection to killing or imprisoning women—in fact, “wife” is mentioned as a normal category for execution (see here). But within the inner Party itself, there is a curious survival of Old Bolshevik women. Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, is in a sense a special case, though she had been strong in the opposition to Stalin in the 1920s and had given him personal offense. But it would not by any means be beyond Stalin’s powers or beyond the usual scope of his malice to prove that Lenin’s wife had betrayed her husband.
But there are many other cases of Old Bolshevik women surviving. Elena Stasova lasted right through the Stalin epoch. L. A. Fotieva, Lenin’s secretary, who must also have known a good deal about what was one of Stalin’s most sensitive points—the quarrel with Lenin in his last days—was also spared. So was K. I. Nikolayeva, the only woman full member of the 1934 Central Committee apart from Krupskaya, who was one of the few who was carried over into the Committee elected in 1939, and she was an ex-Zinovievite at that. Another case was R. S. Zemlyachka, member of the 1904 Central Committee. A brutal terrorist, she had been Bela Kun’s chief colleague in the great slaughter in the Crimea in 1920, to which Lenin himself had objected. She survived, while Kun went to the execution cellars. Alexandra Kollontai, the star of the Workers’ Opposition, had been married to Dybenko and had lived with Shlyapnikov. On top of all this, after her acceptance of the Stalin line she remained as Ambassador (to Sweden), a profession which was anyhow almost invariably fatal. Yet she survived the Stalin epoch unscathed, en poste.
Psychologists might make something about this trait of Stalin’s. In any case, it is a comparatively human characteristic and one perhaps harking back to Caucasia as much as the blood feud does. Another “category” to be spared has no such obvious source: the former Bolshevik members of the Duma (including Grigori Petrovsky, who was under the direct threat in 1939) all survived.
But when all is said, we are still peering into the glooms of an extreme reticence. A shrewd Soviet official, who was impressed by Stalin’s patience and also by his capriciousness, comments, “That rare combination is the principal key to his character.”61 Doubtless this is a sound view, yet it only takes us into the outskirts of a full understanding.
Even as to his political aims, he never spoke his mind. That he knew in general what he was doing cannot be doubted. It is much more difficult, as we have seen, to tell how far he had made his aims explicit even in his own mind, and how far ahead he looked during a given crisis. What he had, politically speaking, was less definite than a planned control of developments. It was, rather, the feel of events, the flow. In this he was unsurpassed among his contemporaries.
We do not need to posit a conscious long-term plan to say that in a general way the drive for power was Stalin’s strongest and most obvious motivation. There have been men, like Cromwell, whose paths to supreme power were truly accidental, who neither planned nor particularly wished for the result. This is quite certainly not true of Stalin.
Bukharin said plainly, “At any given moment he will change his theories in order to get rid of someone.”62 But politically speaking, this shows a basic consistency. The one fundamental drive that can be found throughout is the strengthening of his own position. To this, for practical purposes, all else was subordinate. It led him to absolute power. As Machiavelli points out, though the actual seizure of power is difficult in despotic States, once seized, it is comparatively easy to hold. And Stalin seized it and held it.
Over the next four years, he carried out a revolution which completely transformed the Party and the whole of society. Far more than the Bolshevik Revolution itself, this period marks the major gulf between modem Russia and the past. It was also the deepest trauma of all those which had shaken the population in the turbulent decades since 1905. It is true that only against the peculiar background of the Soviet past, and the extraordinary traditions of the All-Union Communist Party, could so radical a turn be put through. The totalitarian machinery, already in existence, was the fulcrum without which the world could not be moved. But the revolution of the Purges still remains, however we judge it, above all Stalin’s personal achievement. If his character is to some degree impenetrable to direct investigation, we shall see it adequately displayed in his actions over the following years, and in the State he thus created and found good.
4
OLD BOLSHEVIKS CONFESS
“In what did his fascism show itself?”
“His fascism showed itself when he said that in a situation like the present we must resort to the use of every possible means.”
Exchange between Vyshinsky and Zinoviev at the August 1936 Trial
The six months following the Medved—Zaporozhets Trial is one of the most obscure periods of the Purge. It starts with the death, in circumstances which are still unknown, of another member of the Politburo, and ends with another trial, of which even the charges were only made public in 1989, of Kamenev and others. But the pattern is clear, and much of the detail can now be reconstructed.
After the first wave of terror following the Kirov murder, the “moderate” faction in the Politburo continued to urge the policy of relaxation. It could, after all, equally well be argued that the assassination was the sign of tensions which might best be dealt with by a more popular policy, as the opposite, that it indicated the need for further terror.
In the Politburo, Valerian Kuibyshev, Head of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), is believed to have been particularly active along Kirov’s line, and is said to have opposed the January Zinoviev—Kamenev Trial.1 Outside, the influence of Maxim Gorky and of Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, was of importance. The Society of Old Bolsheviks, which had long acted as a sort of Party conscience, strongly opposed the idea of death sentences for the opposition. Among Stalin’s immediate entourage, Abel Yenukidze, who was Secretary of the Central Executive Committee and (among other duties) responsible for the administration of the Kremlin, urged the same view.