Stalin saw himself as having a unique place in the lineage of Marx and Lenin, and he believed that he had something valuable to contribute to humankind. From his privileged position in the movement of world history, so went the direction of his thinking, he could make way for future Stalins who would continue to work for the elimination of capitalism. The ascetic dictator and former theology student, uninterested in the pleasures of the flesh, apart from notorious drinking bouts with his guests, was transfixed on the big question of a final reconciliation in this earthly world. Having found his mission in life, his thoughts on a last will and testament were necessarily political.
This rational side of Stalin, his analytic intelligence, so attuned to strategy and calculation, deeply impressed the intellectuals and professors charged with ironing out the details of a great book he wanted to pass on to those who would follow in his footsteps. At the same time, Stalin’s personality had a ruthlessly irrational side, one that latched onto conspiracies, rumors, wild speculations, and spy manias. Among his phobias, as we have seen, was anti-Semitism, which to some extent he let loose as he solidified his grip on the Eastern European satellites.
Not only did Stalin never resolve these contradictory sides of his nature, but at the end of his life, there were disturbing signs that the strong, irrational urges were getting the upper hand.
THE POLITICAL TESTAMENT
Stalin began the project of setting down his political testament decades before, in the 1930s. At that time he saw to the production of The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. It was meant to teach political lessons and appreciation for the great accomplishment of getting into power, creating the dictatorship of the proletariat, and establishing the Soviet Union. In 1937, in the midst of the Great Terror, Stalin commissioned companion volumes on economics, one an introductory textbook and the other an advanced version. A team of authors set to work and sent him something like fourteen or fifteen drafts over the years. He scrupulously read and edited each one, ultimately finding all of them inadequate.
Somewhere along the way he came to regard a book on economics as his magnum opus, a treatise that would outdo both Marx, who tended to be abstract and philosophical, and even Lenin, who knew how to seize power but had died after only a few years. Stalin ruled far longer, introduced the new system, and one way or another managed to get it going. The book he wanted would detail his accomplishments and serve as a catechism, a textbook and font of wisdom for future generations on how to establish and run a Stalinist economy. Such a work would reveal “scientific socialism” in action and its superiority to capitalism as an economic system.
Although this book would represent his political testament, the economists who slaved on it had a tall order to fill. In 1950 he finally approved an initial text.1 This submission would be used as a starting point for more intensive work by top party officials and experts. On February 22 he appointed a special commission led by Secretary to the Central Committee Georgi Malenkov and gave them a month to make revisions. The results disappointed him, so he added new people and set them up in style in Maxim Gorky’s house. The team, inspired by the surroundings and with Stalin’s confidence, worked fiendishly. He was at their disposal and met with them as needed, and they later admitted that they were overwhelmed by the depth of his knowledge. Discussions continued.
In November 1951 the revised text was taken up by a conference with 247 experts, whose comments filled three large volumes. The Master studied all this material and in early 1952 wrote lengthy “remarks” on it. Then on February 15 he had the team of authors, the Politburo, and more than a dozen leading economists discuss the textbook and his remarks. In all of Soviet history, no book or study ever received anything close to as much scholarly and political attention before publication.2
Stalin devoted so much time and energy to this project because the finished book would convey the lessons of Stalinist economics as codified into a textbook, accessible to all and less than six hundred pages long. It would be the Stalinist bible. Marx had laid out the principles of socialism, Lenin had provided a theory of revolution, and the new textbook would show the world that Stalin was the genius who got it all up and running. The book would reveal, he declared, “how we escaped from the bondage of capitalism; how we transformed the economy along socialist lines; how we won the friendship of the peasantry; and converted what was until recently a poor and weak country into a rich and powerful one.”3
Although he was emphatic—just like Marx and Lenin—about wanting a “scientific” and “objective” book, he gave the authors politically charged instructions and met with them to ensure that they kept to the “correct” political line.
The only way they could produce a “rational,” as opposed to a political, account of Stalinist economics was to ignore a host of monumental facts. For starters, they all knew that to the extent that the Soviet Union had attained economic success at all, it was because of its resort to the overwhelming use of violence and force. To break away from “capitalist slavery,” the Soviets had killed off or intimidated the industrialists and the bourgeoisie. To win the peasants’ “friendship,” Stalin had mounted a sustained war against them; the regime shot or exiled the kulaks—the keenest and most economically efficient peasants. That war in the countryside led to disastrous famines in the early 1930s and again after World War II. To explain what collective farms were and why the peasants “loved them,” as Stalin said, the authors would have to overlook the compulsion that had been needed to make them function. Even then their productivity paled in comparison to that of capitalist American or Canadian farmers. Stalin knew little about the countryside, let alone how agriculture worked—he visited farms exactly once (in 1928) and at best had only general ideas about the agricultural system.4
In order to convert the country from military weakness to strength, the regime poured vast sums into five-year plans and heavy industry at the expense of consumers and society at large, with the result that in terms of housing space and real wages, most people were materially worse off in 1952 than they had been back in lean 1928, before the five-year plans began. Even in basics like hourly wages measured in terms of food, workers in the United States were over three times better off in 1928 than their Soviet counterparts at that time, and well over five times better off in 1951–52.5
When the writers of Stalin’s economics textbook huddled with him in February 1952, he was in high spirits, liked the way things were going, and gave them yet another year to finish the job. They would use his remarks and suggestions as a guide. The finished product was due in March 1953, but he died before reading it. The text, finally published in 1954, was allowed to fade into obscurity.
Alongside this rational if exaggerated effort to codify his “lessons,” Stalin simultaneously pursued patently absurd leads, such as one alleging that Jewish doctors had already killed several prominent Soviet leaders and even sought to kill the great dictator himself.
THE DOCTORS’ PLOT
The predisposition to conspiracy thinking, present among the socialist elite almost from the birth of Marxism in the nineteenth century and shared by Stalin during his long career, became more pronounced in the last years of his life. The secret police, during their investigation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC) in the late 1940s, unearthed information that led on November 18, 1950, to the arrest of a certain Dr. Yakov Etinger. Viktor Abakumov, head of State Security (MGB, formerly NKVD), halted Etinger’s questioning because the suspect was in poor health. However, Mikhail Ryumin, an enthusiastic member of a special investigative branch, continued to grill Etinger who, aged sixty-four and suffering heart problems, died suddenly on March 2, 1951. After several months passed, Ryumin began to feel threatened by his immediate superiors and opted to write Stalin. Dr. Etinger, he alleged, had confessed that back in 1945, when treating top Soviet leader Alexandr Shcherbakov, that he had “shortened” the man’s life. Ryumin claimed that in spite of the likelihood of solving that crime, his boss Abakumov had ordered him to shelve the case and had Etinger transferred to the notorious Lefortovo prison, where he died in a damp cell of natural causes.6