STALIN
STALIN
NEW BIOGRAPHY OF A DICTATOR
Oleg V. Khlevniuk
Translated by NORA SELIGMAN FAVOROV
Yale University Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support given for this publication by the Smith Richardson Foundation.
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College.
Copyright © 2015 by Oleg Khlevniuk.
English translation copyright © 2015 by Yale University.
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In memory of my wife Katya (1961–2013)
CONTENTS
Preface
The Seats of Stalin’s Power
1. BEFORE THE REVOLUTION
The Bulwarks of Stalin’s Power
2. IN LENIN’S SHADOW
A World of Reading and Contemplation
3. HIS REVOLUTION
Trepidation in the Inner Circle
4. TERROR AND IMPENDING WAR
Patient Number 1
5. STALIN AT WAR
Family
6. THE GENERALISSIMO
The Dictatorship Collapses
THE FUNERAL: THE VOZHD, THE SYSTEM, AND THE PEOPLE
Illustrations
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
PREFACE
For more than two decades, I have been studying this man and the causes and logic underlying his actions, which upended or utterly destroyed millions upon millions of lives. This work has been stressful and emotionally draining, but it is my vocation. Lately, the paradoxical turns of recent Russian history, the large-scale poisoning of minds with myths of an “alternative” Stalin—one whose effective stewardship is held up as a model worthy of emulation—have given my research more than scholarly relevance.
The literature on Stalin and his era is impossibly vast. Even scholars of Stalinism freely admit to not having seen the half of it. Within this vastness, serious, meticulously documented research coexists with slapdash pen-pushing carelessly cobbled together out of anecdotes, rumors, and fabrications. The two camps—historical scholarship and lowbrow (usually pro-Stalin) ramblings—rarely cross paths and have long since given up the idea of reconciling.
Scholarly biographies of Stalin have gone through the same stages as the historiography of the Soviet period overall. I have a high regard for some classics written at a time when Soviet archives were completely inaccessible. Two authors who stand out are Adam Ulam and Robert Tucker.1 Back in the 1970s, historians of the Stalin period resembled specialists in antiquity: they tended to know the few available documents and memoirs inside out and had little ability to expand their number. This dearth of documentation encouraged the painstaking study of these sources and elegant and thoughtful extrapolation. The situation was bound to change after the archival floodgates were opened in the early 1990s, and it took us some time to get our heads above water. The eventual appearance of new works informed by archival materials—including scholarly biographies of Stalin, as well as other investigations of the man and the political system—signal that historians have begun to cope with the inundation.2
The opening of the archives gave rise to a new genre of Stalin biography that one might call “the archival exposé.” It’s trailblazers include Dmitri Volkogonov, a former party loyalist who became a driving force for perestroika, and the Russian playwright Edvard Radzinsky. This genre favors personal accounts over “dry” statistics or administrative paper trails and page-turning narratives over painstaking research and historical contextualization. For many readers, the archival exposé has played an important role in shaping Stalin’s image.
One of the most successful Western authors working to feed appetites for newly available details about the Stalin era is Simon Sebag Montefiore. A notable feature of his method is the citation of a broad spectrum of sources, not only from memoirs and interviews, but also from the archives. Montefiore struck a sort of middle ground, striving to instill some scholarly discipline into the “archival exposés” genre while producing readable history capable of attracting a wider audience than more scholarly texts.3
In today’s Russia, on the other hand, Stalin’s image is primarily being shaped by pseudo-scholarly apologias. An extremely diverse array of authors, all with their own motivations, contributes to Stalinist mythology. Most of these authors blend a lack of the most elementary knowledge with a willingness to make bold assertions. Their apologias typically cite fabricated sources or shamelessly misrepresent real ones. The impact of this powerful ideological assault on readers’ minds is intensified by the circumstances of Russian life, which include rampant corruption and outrageous social iniquities. When they reject the present, people are more likely to idealize the past.
Apologists for Stalin no longer try, as they once did, to deny the crimes of his regime. Instead they resort to more subtle rewritings of history. In their version of events, lower-level officials, such as secret police chiefs and the secretaries of regional party committees, supposedly hiding their actions from Stalin, instigated mass repression. The most cynical Stalinists take a different tack, claiming that the Terror was just and that the millions destroyed on Stalin’s orders really were “enemies of the people.”
Many Russian Stalinists find it convenient to draw on theories developed by various Western historians: that the Terror developed spontaneously, that Stalin was not deeply involved in it, and that he was a far more “ordinary” political leader than usually thought. It is certainly not my intention to accuse my Western colleagues of fomenting re-Stalinization. They bear no more responsibility for Russia’s contemporary political battles than Marx did for the Bolshevik revolution. Still, we should be aware that our words can have bizarre reverberations.
One variety of apologia widely cultivated in Russia’s intellectual and political soil is the relatively moderate idea of “modernizing Stalinism.” While this ideology formally acknowledges the Terror’s countless victims and the high price paid for the “great leap” strategy, it sees Stalinism as an organic and unavoidable means of addressing the need to modernize and prepare for war. Within these postulates we can detect prejudices deeply rooted in the Russian social consciousness: that the interests of the state take absolute priority, that the individual is insignificant, that the flow of history is governed by higher-order laws. According to this paradigm, Stalin was the expression of an objective historical need. His methods were regrettable but necessary and effective. Furthermore, it is inevitable that the flywheel of history will become spattered with blood.