While Nikolayev reclaimed a sense of higher purpose from his despair, Stalin’s regime made the Kirov assassination into an epoch-defining event. Most people in Leningrad and elsewhere, living in communal apartments, barracks, and mud huts, were preoccupied with material hardship. Apparatchiks complained that the discussions they were ordered to oversee of Kirov’s murder were overtaken by the pending end of bread rationing and threatened price increases.281 The end of rationing had generated significant anxiety and resentment.282 All the while, conspiracy theories flourished: Medved had slipped Nikolayev a pass to Smolny; Chudov had ordered a hit to take Kirov’s place; foreign agents had penetrated the building; it was Stalin’s doing (a rumor that grew over time). Police informants hastened to capture or invent such gossip. In Leningrad: “I like brave men like Nikolayev who must have gone to a certain death.” “It’s clear not all the Zhelyabovs have disappeared in Rus; the struggle for freedom goes on.” “The murderer wanted good for the people, that’s why he killed Kirov.” In the miners’ region of Donetsk: “Kirov was killed; it’s not enough; Stalin should have also been killed.”283
Speculation that the affable provincial party leader constituted a threatening political rival to Stalin is without foundation.284 Similarly, the regime folklore that Yagoda’s NKVD had “resisted” the direction of the investigation was largely invented. Yagoda had no issues with framing Zinoviev and “Zinovievites,” a scenario that Stalin, in any case, did not come to immediately. The dictator drove an overkill response to the murder, relying not just on the hyper-ingratiating Yezhov, Agranov, and Zakovsky, but also on Yagoda. Yagoda had suggested the foreign angle—textbook Stalinist practice—calling from Stalin’s office the first night.285 It was Stalin who had chosen not to investigate Nikolayev’s visits and telephone calls to the German and Latvian consulates. The fabrications, moreover, exacerbated the professional degradation of the secret police, which enraged Stalin, and for which he had recently abolished the OGPU in favor of the NKVD. The fabrications also hurt the USSR’s reputation internationally, to which Stalin had become more sensitive. At the same time, it is wrong to assert that Stalin “took advantage” of the Kirov assassination. He needed no such pretext to act as he chose. He pushed for fierce revenge against “enemies” and prevention of recurrences out of anger, and loss.
One of Stalin’s prime fixations was confirmed: the NKVD was asleep on the job. In a city teeming with foreigners and presumed foreign agents, with innumerable “former people” and other presumed class enemies, with even much of the lower orders disaffected by the sacrifices of building socialism, Leningrad’s secret-operative department had only a short, pathetic list of potential terrorists—and did not even share that list with the bodyguard department.286 A parallel obsession of Stalin’s was also confirmed: an enemy terrorist in possession of a party card, taking advantage of ties to party members, had penetrated security with ease and assassinated a top leader.287 In fact, Nikolayev had been purged, for a time, but the episode had only rendered him more dangerous, just as Stalin was warning (the “class struggle” sharpened). But Stalin chose not to make this the object of the investigation and trials. Nikolayev’s individual terrorism—which had grown from his violated sense of worker empowerment and Communist justice—was altered, at Stalin’s behest, into the mythology that Zinoviev and Kamenev, both powerless, were somehow behind the assassination. Then Stalin remained bothered by their sentencing for creating a “moral atmosphere” conducive to terrorism, because it had fallen short of convictions for direct preparation in terrorist acts by his old critics or direct links to his arch-nemesis Trotsky, who remained out of reach in foreign exile.288
Stalin increasingly was alone. Not only had both of his wives died, but now his closest friend was gone. Henceforth he went to the steam bath alone. Relations with Orjonikidze had become strained, and Stalin’s ardor for Lakoba was cooling, partly as a result of Beria’s intrigues. Stalin’s newer associates, Andreyev, Yezhov, and Zhdanov, were minions, not social peers, and he was not socially close to the unlettered Kaganovich or the stiff Molotov. But Stalin had the Soviet state, which he had helped build into a major military power.289 Still, despite joining the League of Nations, the Soviet state was also to a considerable extent alone. And, more and more, the militarized state and its ruler were being stalked from afar by a nemesis the likes of which, inside the party, Stalin had never faced: Adolf Hitler.
CHAPTER 5 A GREAT POWER
They talk about it in Soviet institutions, factory smoking rooms, student dormitories, and commuter trains. The most widespread sentiment is the feeling of national pride. Russia has again become a Great Power whose friendship even such powerful states as France desire. . . . In Soviet institutions the philistine functionaries, silent for years, now speak confidently about national patriotism, about the historical mission of Russia, about the revival of the Franco-Russian alliance.
Émigré Socialist Herald, May 1935 1
FRANCE AND BRITAIN, to the west, and the Soviet Union, to the east, had a Hitler problem. All the powers were slowly coming to grips with the Nazi leader, whose turgid masterpiece, Mein Kampf (a crisp title suggested by his publisher), had been reissued after he became chancellor.2 The prison-dictated autobiography, first published in 1925–26, had been issued in English translation only in 1933, and in abridged form, cleansed of “offensive” paragraphs; Britain’s foreign office possessed a single copy of an unexpurgated edition (which it misplaced for a time). A French translation had finally appeared only in 1934 (few French politicians read German).3 A Russian translation would be published only in 1935, and only in the Shanghai emigration.4 Soviet foreign affairs commissariat personnel, many of whom were Jewish, could read the original German with all the “Drang nach Osten” and “Judeo-Bolshevism” riffs.5 Still, people were unsure what to make of the book’s ravings in policy terms. Hitler’s calls for rearmament could be misread as standard German nationalism. His radical anti-Semitism could be misconstrued as in line with remarks by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had blamed the Jews for the Great War.6 Even the Führer’s expansionist Lebensraum could be stretched to resemble a defensible, if emotional, reaction to the circumstance that so many German speakers had been left out of Bismarck’s “unified” Germany.
While Hitler exploited a national politics of salvation and an international politics of national self-determination, Stalin was conjuring up a domestic politics of siege and anticapitalist mobilization and an international politics of anti-imperialism. But he did no better than his British and French counterparts in taking the measure of the Nazi regime. Between January and March 1935, the newspaper Red Star published a series of articles about supposed tensions between Hitler and his Nazi entourage, on one side, and the German military on the other. The German army supposedly “sought to reestablish the old relations with Russia,” and German generals “foresee a military clash with France in the first instance.”7 Alongside this provocation—or was it a fantasy?—the Soviet war plan for the western theater still identified Poland as the main enemy, anticipating that Romania would join Poland’s side, but assuming that Germany, because it coveted Polish territory, would at least indirectly support Soviet defense by threatening Poland’s rear. Soviet intelligence, however, forwarded a report of intensified rumors of a Franco-German rapprochement, possibly leading to a larger bloc with Poland—supposedly Piłsudski’s dream—and maybe drawing in Finland, Hungary, Romania, even Italy.8 In fact, Poland had no intention of sacrificing its precious independence to the victor of a German-Soviet clash, continuing its neutrality toward both of its giant neighbors, along with separate alliances with France and Romania—in short, bilateralism, not multilateralism.9 This was a truth the British understood, the French regretted, Hitler relished, and Stalin never accepted.