It would be wrong to deny that the “long waves” of Russian history helped shape the path toward Bolshevism and Stalinism. A strong state with authoritarian traditions, feeble private property and civil society institutions, and the colossal reach of a colonizing power that enabled, among other things, the creation of the Gulag Archipelago, all paved the way toward the Stalinist system. But elevating these factors to some sort of “Russian destiny” leads to the dead-end theory of “inevitable Stalinism.” Adherents of this theory have little interest in specific facts and prefer to recycle Stalinist interpretations of Soviet history, sometimes with a fresh twist, more often without. They adamantly dismiss questions about the price paid for transformations and military victories, alternative development paths, and the role of the dictator. They close their eyes to the fact that Stalin himself, when he brought matters to a state of crisis and ruin, was occasionally forced to soften his policies, thereby demonstrating that even within the framework of Stalinism there were multiple paths toward industrialization. They do not even try to explain how the executions of seven hundred thousand people in 1937–1938 alone, ordered by Stalin, served the goals of modernization. Overall, the theory of modernizing Stalinism makes no serious attempt to ascertain how effective the Stalinist system was or to evaluate Stalin’s own role in the development of the USSR from the 1920s to the early 1950s.
Reducing history to historical imperative is the least creative way of presenting the past. Historians are compelled to deal not with simple schemes and political conjecture but with concrete facts. Working with documents, they cannot avoid noticing the intricate dance between objective factors and personalities or between pattern and random occurrence. In a dictatorship, the role of the dictator’s personal predilections, prejudices, and obsessions is greatly magnified. What better medium than biography to unravel this complex tangle of problems?
Biography is a unique genre of research that can, at one extreme, be reduced to the minutia of historical context or, at the other, be bloated with novelistic details of human behavior. Context without soul and soul without context—these are the main pitfalls confronting the biographer. Navigating them was a challenge for me. In the end, I understood that it was simply not possible to squeeze into this book even a passing reference to every significant episode or aspect of the Stalin period. I was compelled to choose which phenomena and tendencies most deserved inclusion, selecting the facts and events that seemed to characterize Stalin, his time, and the system that bears his name with the greatest clarity and vividness. This selectivity was all the more necessary given the appearance, over the past twenty years, of so many new sources shedding light on Stalin and his period. These sources should be briefly identified.
First, because of the opening of the state archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union, historians now may consult original firsthand documents, whereas in the past they were forced to whittle layers of distortion from official publications. A good example is the works and speeches of Stalin himself. Most were published during the leader’s lifetime, but we now have the ability to work with the originals and compare what was actually said with edited versions. Furthermore, the body of Stalin’s published speeches can now be supplemented with those that did not appear in print. Among the most important documents are papers generated by governmental bodies that Stalin himself chaired, such as the protocols and stenographic records of Politburo meetings and wartime State Defense Committee decrees. These dry bureaucratic documents are tremendously important in understanding Stalin’s personality and life. They took up a huge portion of the dictator’s time and were the tools by which he exercised power. Many resolutions bear traces of his heavy editorial hand.
By themselves, of course, the orders issued under Stalin paint only a partial picture. Why were they adopted? What were the logic and motives behind his directives? Much more revealing is Stalin’s intermittent correspondence with his Politburo colleagues, conducted primarily when he was away on vacation and requiring letters to steer the actions of his fellow leaders back in Moscow. This correspondence was most prolific in the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s, before Russia had any reliable telephone service. It is a marvelous example of how sluggish technological progress can be a historian’s friend. After the war, telephone communication became more reliable, and Stalin, now securely at the pinnacle of power, felt less need for detailed correspondence with subordinates. Curt directives sufficed. Despite their fragmentary nature, Stalin’s letters constitute an important documentary whole and make for fascinating reading. They represent the most candid testaments he has left to posterity.4
Historians have been able to glean a great deal of important information from the logs of visitors to Stalin’s Kremlin office.5 These logs recorded visitors’ names and the times they entered and left the office and thus shed light on how Stalin conducted business. Comparing them with other sources (such as memoirs or the protocols of Politburo meetings) offers important clues to the circumstances surrounding the adoption of various resolutions. Still, like his correspondence, these logs reflect only a portion of Stalin’s activity. In addition to his Kremlin office, he occasionally worked in his office at Central Committee headquarters on Staraia Square and received visitors in his Kremlin apartment, as well as at his numerous dachas outside Moscow and in the south. Although we know that the service responsible for protecting Soviet leaders kept records of visits to Stalin’s Kremlin apartment, researchers have yet to be given access to this archive.6 There appears to be no sign of analogous records for the Central Committee office or the dachas.
The visitor logs were kept by Stalin’s secretariat and security team. It seems likely that these services also kept, for their own purposes, records of Stalin’s movements, as well as accounts by security personnel of what happened during their shifts. It goes without saying that these materials would be of tremendous value to Stalin’s biographers. At this point, there is no solid evidence that such records exist.
Stalin’s correspondence and the log of visitors to his Kremlin office are both part of his personal archive, which was compiled under his direct supervision and apparently with an eye toward history. Many documents in this collection feature the notations “my archive” or “personal archive.” An important addition to the personal archive is an assortment of materials about Stalin gathered from various repositories. This assortment, which includes books from Stalin’s library with notations by him, was concentrated in the Central Party Archive. Today both sets of materials have been brought together in the Stalin Collection of the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI, successor to the Central Party Archive, which comprises the bulk of its holdings),7 a key source of knowledge about Stalin now used extensively by historians.
Yet despite its importance, the Stalin Collection has serious deficiencies. It offers only limited insights into Stalin’s modi vivendi and operandi. Its primary shortcoming is the absence of much of the vast array of papers that made their way to Stalin’s desk on a daily basis. These include thousands upon thousands of letters, statistical compilations, diplomatic dispatches, and reports and memoranda from the various branches of state security. The lack of access to these documents hinders historians in their effort to develop a thorough understanding of how well informed Stalin was, what he knew about a given question, and thus the logic of his actions. The documents that would enable such insights have not been lost. They reside in the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation (APRF, the former Politburo Archive), organized into “thematic” folders.8 While working on this book, I was able to examine a few of them. For the time being, the Presidential Archive does not accommodate systematic scholarly study. However, the very fact that these folders exist encourages hope. The history of Russia suggests that sooner or later the archive will open.