A locksmith from Lugansk (renamed Voroshilov), he had, like many of Stalin’s leaders, barely completed two years at school. A Party member since 1903, Klim had shared a room with Stalin in Stockholm in 1906 but they had become friends at Tsaritsyn. Henceforth Stalin backed this “Commander-in-Chief from the lathe” all the way to become Defence Commissar in 1925. Out of his depth, Voroshilov loathed more sophisticated military minds with the inferiority complex that was one of the moving passions of Stalin’s circle. Ever since he had delivered mail on horseback to the miners of Lugansk, his mind was more at home with the equine than the mechanized.
Usually described as a snivelling coward before his master, he had flirted with the oppositions and was perfectly capable of losing his temper with Stalin whom he always treated like an old buddy. He was only slightly younger than Koba and continued to call a spade a spade even after the Terror. Fair-haired, pink-cheeked, warm eyes twinkling, he was sweet-natured: the courage of this beau sabreur was peerless. Yet beneath his cherubic affability, there was something mean about the lips that revealed a petulant temper, vindictive cruelty, and a taste for violent solutions.[22] Once convinced, he was “narrow-minded politically,” pursuing his orders with rigid obedience.
His cult was second only to Stalin’s: even in the West, the novelist Denis Wheatley published a panegyric entitled The Red Eagle—“the amazing story of the pitboy who beat professional soldiers of three nations and is now Warlord of Russia.”21
In one note passed round the table, Voroshilov wrote: “I cannot make the speech to the brake-makers because of my headache.”
“To let off Voroshilov, I propose Rudzutak,” replied Stalin, suggesting another Politburo member.
But Voroshilov was not escaping so easily: Rudzutak refused so Kalinin suggested letting him off, providing Voroshilov did the speech after all.
“Against!” voted Voroshilov, signing himself: “Voroshilov who has the headache and cannot speak!”22
If Stalin approved of a leader’s speech, he sent an enthusiastically scatological note: “A world leader, FUCK HIS MOTHER! I’ve read your report—you criticized everyone—fuck their mother!” he wrote approvingly to Voroshilov23 who wanted more praise: “Tell me more clearly—did I fail 100% or only 75%?” Stalin retorted in his inimitable style: “it was a good… report. You smacked the arses of Hoover, Chamberlain and Bukharin. Stalin.”24
Serious questions were decided too: during a budget discussion, Stalin verbally nudged Voroshilov to stand up for his department: “They’re robbing you but you’re silent.” When his colleagues went back to discuss something Stalin thought had already been decided, they received this across the table: “What does this mean? Yesterday we agreed one thing about the speech but today another. Disorganization! Stalin.” Appointments were made in this way too. Their tone was often playfuclass="underline" Voroshilov wanted to inspect the army in Central Asia: “Koba, can I go… ? They say they’re forgotten.”
“England will whine that Voroshilov has come to attack India,” replied Stalin, who wanted to avoid all foreign entanglements while he industrialized Russia.
“I’ll be as quiet as a mouse,” Voroshilov persisted.
“That’s worse. They’ll find out and say Voroshilov came secretly with criminal intent,” scrawled Stalin. When it came to appointing Mikoyan to run Trade, Voroshilov asked, “Koba, should we give Fishing to Mikoyan? Would he do it?”25 The members often bargained for appointments. Hence Voroshilov proposed to Kuibyshev, “I was first to propose the candidature of Pyatakov in conversation with Molotov and Kaganovich, and I’ll support you as your second…”26
The Politburo could sit for hours, exhausting even Stalin: “Listen,” he wrote to Voroshilov during one session, “let’s put it off until Wednesday evening. Today’s no good. Already it’s 4:30 and we’ve still got 3 big questions to get through… Stalin.” Sometimes Stalin wrote wearily: “Military matters are so serious they must be discussed seriously but my head’s not capable of serious work today.”27
However, Stalin realized that the Politburo could easily unite to dismiss him. Rykov, the Rightist Premier, did not believe in his plans, and now Kalinin too was wavering. Stalin knew he could be outvoted, even overthrown.[23]28 The new archives reveal how openly Kalinin argued with Stalin.
“You defend the kulaks?” scribbled Stalin. He pushed it across the table to Papa Kalinin, that mild-mannered former peasant with round spectacles, goatee beard and droopy moustache.
“Not the kulaks,” Kalinin wrote back, “but the trading peasant.”
“But did you forget about the poorest ones?” Stalin scrawled back. “Did you ignore the Russian peasantry?”
“The middling sort are very Russian but what about non-Russians? They’re the poorest,” argued Kalinin.
“Now you’re the Bashkir President not the Russian one!” Stalin chided him.
“That’s not an argument, that’s a curse!”29 Stalin’s curse did descend on those who opposed him during this greatest crisis. He never forgot Kalinin’s betrayal. Every criticism was a battle for survival, a question of sin versus goodness, disease versus health, for this thin-skinned, neurotic egotist on his Messianic mission. During these months, he brooded on the disloyalty of those around him, for his family and his political allies were utterly interwoven. Stalin had every reason to feel paranoid. Indeed the Bolsheviks believed that paranoia, which they called “vigilance,” was an almost religious duty.[24] Later Stalin was to talk privately about the “holy fear” that kept even him on his toes.
His paranoia was part of a personal vicious circle that was to prove so deadly for many who knew him, yet it was understandable. His radical policies led to excessive repressions that led to the opposition he most feared. His unbalanced reactions produced a world in which he had reason to be fearful. In public he reacted to all this with a dry humour and modest tranquillity but one finds ample evidence of his hysterical reactions in private. “You cannot silence me or keep my opinion confined inside,” Stalin wrote to Voroshilov during the struggles with the Rightists, “yet you claim ‘I want to teach everyone.’ When will these attacks on me end? Stalin.”30 It extended to the family. One of his letters to Nadya went missing. Stalin was obsessed with the secrecy of his letters and travel plans. He impulsively blamed his mother-in-law but Nadya defended her: “You unfairly accused Mama. It turns out the letter was never delivered to anyone… She’s in Tiflis.”31
Nadya laughed that the students at the Academy were divided into “Kulaks, middle-peasants and poor peasants,” but she was joking about the liquidation of over a million innocent women and children. There is evidence that Nadya happily informed Stalin about his enemies, yet that was changing. The rural struggle divided their friends: her adored Bukharin and Yenukidze confided their doubts to her. Her fellow students had “put me down as a Rightist,” she joked to Stalin, who would have been troubled that they were getting to his wife at a time when he was entering stormy waters indeed.32
On holiday in the south, Stalin learned that Riutin, an Old Bolshevik who had been in charge of Cinema, was trying to create an opposition to dismiss him. He reacted fast to Molotov on 13 September: “with regard to Riutin, it seems it’s impossible to limit ourselves to expelling him from the Party… he will have to be expelled somewhere as far as possible from Moscow. This counter-revolutionary scum[25] should be completely disarmed.”33 Simultaneously, Stalin arranged a series of show trials and “conspiracies” by so-called “wreckers.” Stalin redoubled the push for collectivization and race to industrialize at red-hot speed. As the tension rose, he stoked the martial atmosphere, inventing new enemies to intimidate his real opponents in the Party and among the technical experts who said it could not be done.
22
“You know Marapultsa,” Voroshilov wrote to Stalin in October 1930. “He was condemned for five years… I think you agree with me that he was condemned rightly.” On another occasion, Voroshilov appealed to Stalin for a “semi-lunatic” he had known since 1911 who was in jail. “What do I want you to do? Almost nothing… but for you to consider for one minute the destruction of Minin and decide what to do with him…”
23
They frequently disagreed with him, certainly on small matters such as a discussion about the Kremlin military schooclass="underline" “Seems that after the objections of Comrade Kalinin and others (I know other Politburo members object too), we can forgive them because it’s not an important question,” Stalin wrote to Voroshilov. Having defeated Bukharin in 1929, Stalin wanted to appoint him Education Commissar but as Voroshilov told Sergo in a letter, “Because we were a united majority, we pushed it through (against Koba).”
24
Doing nothing and lacking “vigilance” was an equally sacred sin in Stalin’s eyes: he called it “thoughtlessness.”