TLS on Stalin

on Stalin

New research shows how the Soviet Politburo and the secret police served a single man
by Donald Rayfield

The torrent of documentary material released in the 1990s on the workings of Stalin’s totalitarian rule is still more than a trickle – despite Putin’s repression of the Russian media and NGOs, despite the overt rehabilitation of Stalin as the great personnel manager and author of military victory, and despite the restrictions on historical archives and foreign researchers. In 1995, Oleg Khlevniuk, perhaps the doyen of archival researchers into the Soviet period, published a slim volume on the Politburo and the mechanisms of power. Since then it has expanded, in German and English, as well as in Russian, to become a more detailed examination of how the system worked. From 1925, when Stalin began to dominate the “collective” leadership, to 1936, when he had physically eliminated every possible opponent, rival or even plausible successor, the Politburo gradually lost any resemblance it had once had to a Cabinet of ministers. All the evidence we have shows that, except for very rare occasions, the Politburo acted more as a secretariat; any demurral, let alone dissent, was quickly suppressed. Its members were called on to sign their names, or telephone their assent, when Stalin proposed a particularly gruesome process, such as the annotated “shooting lists” of 1937–8 for 44,000 persons holding posts important enough to require Politburo sanction for execution, or the 1940 decision to murder 22,000 captive Polish officers (the Katyn affair). Otherwise, they were the muscles that tensed or relaxed their grip on the population according to the impulses that came from Stalin’s brain.
Two major sources of information have been in the public domain since 1998: one is the apparently complete list of visitors to Stalin’s Kremlin office, with the length of time they were closeted with the leader; the other is the correspondence between Stalin and two of his most trusted and hard-working Politburo subordinates, Molotov and Kaganovich, during the months that Stalin spent relaxing on the Black Sea between 1925 and 1936. The absence of effective long-distance telephone lines and Stalin’s mistrust of the channels of his own secret police (until he could appoint his own head of the NKVD) meant that for those summer holidays he relied on letters and couriers. Many other sources have now been published, including virtually all Stalin’s written enquiries and orders to the Lubyanka, and the agendas, if not the minutes, of all Politburo meetings. Stalin took all the decisions, though he was sometimes moved to frenzy by his Politburo’s sycophancy. The only exception was in the autumn of 1945 when, exhausted by the war, especially by cajoling Churchill and Roosevelt into ceding most of Central and Eastern Europe to USSR control, Stalin allowed the Politburo to run the country without referring every detail to him. His anger in December 1945 at the “rotten” liberalism that Molotov and Malenkov had shown when unsupervised did not translate into arrests and shootings, but only because Stalin was now too tired to see anything through. From 1946 to Stalin’s death none of the Politburo could rely on the relative constancy that Stalin had shown them a decade earlier: he sadistically played them against each other. The result was unexpected: the scorpions thrown together in the jar learnt to cooperate as well as to devour each other, which is one reason why Stalin’s system survived his death so smoothly and for so long, despite the coup against Beria, and Khrushchev’s manoeuvring to oust Malenkov and Molotov.
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Khlevniuk’s study is heavily weighted to the early 1930s, when we have the extraordinary correspondence (franker than that of most “democratic” ministers), and relies on extrapolation and logic to follow the workings of this system of rule in the years (1938–41, 1947–53) for which our best sources are only the undoctored minutes of party meetings. The book puts paid to a number of fashionable theories, notably that Stalin (like Napoleon in Tolstoy’s interpretation) was merely riding the crest of waves generated by forces below him: he is clearly his system’s author and operator, convinced, against all the evidence, of his genius and infallibility. And to judge by the Stalins of recent years – the North Korean Kims, Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe – the Stalinist system of intransigent rule over a cowed populace through a totally subservient Politburo still works.
Paul R. Gregory, a Professor of Economics, focuses on Stalin’s other instrument of tyranny, the secret police that he inherited from Lenin and which Stalin definitely made his own only in 1936 when he replaced Genrikh Yagoda with his own protégé from the Politburo, Nikolai Yezhov. From 1918 until 1936, the secret police enjoyed unique autonomy. It chose its own heads: Felix Dzerzhinsky nominated Vyacheslav Menzhinsky as his second in command, and Yagoda as the next in line. Stalin swung all three round to his side mainly because he promised them a permanent role in the state (Trotsky was more interested in the military, while liberals like Bukharin proposed reducing, even abolishing, the secret police after Lenin’s death). Stalin offered them the task of eliminating, first enemies abroad and then, more controversially (for some secret policemen), enemies within the party.
As in Khlevniuk’s study, Gregory’s facts and figures for the numbers executed, imprisoned, deported and worked to death are documented and undisputed. Here too, enough correspondence has been published to show that the decisions were taken by Stalin. The difference between the secret police and the Politburo was that persons such as Menzhinsky and Yagoda had their own agendas, styles of working and even inhibitions. In some initiatives, such as the destruction of the more prosperous peasantry and the persecution of foreign specialist engineers, Stalin had enthusiastic encouragement from Menzhinsky; in others, such as blaming the murder of Kirov on the “left opposition”, Yagoda dragged his feet. Even when Stalin appointed his own chiefs, they were harder to control than Politburo members. Yezhov went into a feeding frenzy that threatened to destroy the professional cadres on whom the working of the country’s infrastructure depended and to reduce the whole population to a state of petrified incompetence. Beria proved so efficient and ingenious that he became capable of neutralizing many steps that Stalin took to ensure that his secret police never became more powerful than the party. Yezhov was shot, but Beria, especially following his involvement in building the Soviet atom bomb, became what Stalin had once declared undesirable for a human being: indispensable.
Paul Gregory has written a book which is, on the whole, well researched, but is vitiated by a predilection for mathematical formulae. The graphic presentation of the waves of arrests and executions is effective, but the Loyalty/Repression and “Power-Maximizing” graphs and formulae to predict “defection” or “loyalty” of a Praetorian guard rely on false assumptions. The Yagodas and Yezhovs did not take cool rational decisions based on the likelihood of survival, reward or execution. (Earlier secret police bosses, like Dzerzhinsky and Menzhinsky, did show some calculation in swinging their men round to Stalin, but it was more of a company decision: choosing the client that would offer them the most business.) Even Beria, the most versatile of all, was no Talleyrand. Such men were caught up in a psychotic whirlpool. The only rational response (and a very few did make it) when offered advancement by Stalin was to make an excuse and find a job as a park keeper or morgue attendant in a remote town, so that nobody could accuse you of sabotage or spying.
The biggest surprise is that Gregory virtually ignores Menzhinsky, the effective chief of the secret police from 1921 until his death in 1934, a man of such satanic genius and cool control that Stalin overcame his distaste for bourgeois intellectuals and trusted his advice as he trusted no one else’s. Menzhinsky can be held responsible for more deaths than all the other secret police heads taken together, and to reduce him, in a study of Lenin’s and Stalin’s state security, to just a few mentions as “Yagoda’s official boss” is in itself a remarkable piece of Stalinist revisionism.

Oleg V. Khlevniuk
MASTER OF THE HOUSE
Stalin and his inner circle
Translated by Nora Seligman Favorov
313pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $38).
978 0 300 11066 1

Paul R. Gregory
TERROR BY QUOTA
State security from Lenin to Stalin (An archival study)
346pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $35).
978 0 300 13425 4



Donald Rayfield is Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary College, University of London. He is the editor of A Comprehensive Georgian – English Dictionary, 2006.