The circumstances of the Kirov murder on 1 December 1934 are still disputed. The sticking point, for those who do not credit Stalin’s responsibility, is the supposed absence of any sign of his distrust of Kirov – indeed, of any post-1930 dispute in the Politburo. This can be refuted on several grounds. We now know from his personal records of Kirov’s own notably ‘incorrect’ attitudes over the whole period – and, indeed, even earlier.26 A long-known, and heated, dispute between Stalin and Kirov over food supplies in Leningrad was confirmed in Khrushchev’s time. Even lesser documents give evidence of such clashes, including a sharp dispute between Kirov’s number two, I. F. Kodatsky, and Molotov – i.e. between the Party and State machines (which the Russian historian Oleg V. Khlevniuk covers at length). They balked, in general, at what they saw as an unjustified extension of the class struggle to include themselves on the wrong side.
We do not have final ‘proof’ or ‘certainty’ of Stalin’s responsibility for the murder. Let me quote a competent historian. Macaulay writes, in his essay on Warren Hastings, ‘The rules of evidence in law save scores of culprits whom judges, jury and spectators firmly believe to be guilty… But it is clear that an acquittal so obtained cannot be pleaded in bar of the judgement of history.’ Instead of proof, we have an accumulation of suspicious facts and a highly suspicious suspect. Khlevniuk, when it comes to the Kirov murder, does not exculpate or accuse Stalin, saying merely, ‘there are not enough facts available to settle the question.’ ‘Political murders’, he adds, ‘are prepared in strict secrecy, and orders for them are not registered in documents.’27
As to the absence of direct written evidence, let us look at the murder of the Soviet Yiddish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels in 1948. If Stalin had survived Beria, or the latter had not repudiated the anti-Semitic line, no evidence of this supposed car accident would have emerged. As it is, we know the order came directly from Stalin to the MGB chief Viktor Abakumov, and from him to the actual murderers.
As to Kirov, it is not hard to construct a scenario: Stalin lets it be known to Yagoda that the interests of the Party require a terrorist act – and also the removal of a member of the Politburo, Kirov. Half of that membership was eliminated over the next few years, so that Stalin’s own attitude is clear, and that would also apply to the portion of the Party mind to be expected in Yagoda. Kirov had opposed and prevented an attempt of his to impose as head of the Leningrad NKVD the appalling E. G. Evdokimov. We now know that Evdokimov lasted three days. Kirov would not accept him, so he clearly got the post behind Kirov’s back. My unofficial source gave the date wrong (it was 1931, not 1933), but as so often is the case with these indirect reports, the facts were right.
But the case for Stalin’s supposed innocence seriously distorts a more important question: did Stalin meet any opposition, or reluctance, from the wholly pro-Stalin, anti-opposition Politburo after 1930? The argument put forward was that there was no ‘record’ of such. But this was based not on records of discussion, which indeed hardly existed, but on the documents finally agreed on in the Politburo. There have always been reports, from several good sources, of sharp disagreements.
Evidence of such was indeed unregistered. But when Stalin was on holiday, Lazar Kaganovich reported to him. We have for some time had a letter from him to Stalin of 2 August 1932, saying that two (unnamed) members of the Politburo had objected to or criticised the draft of the 7 August 1932 terror decree’s vital second and third paragraphs. On 29 August of that year Stalin complained that in his absence Kaganovich and Molotov had (on another issue) allowed the Politburo to take an ‘incorrect’ and dangerous position, sponsored by Ordzhonikidze, with even Kaganovich ‘in the camp of reactionary elements’ – soon overruled by the lone absentee.28 This question of opposition, also clear from Gorbachev’s testimony, is important to our understanding of the period. Stalin was later to obtain a more acceptable Politburo.
The finally revealed full text of Stalin’s speech at the crucial ‘February—March 1937’ plenum that followed the suicide of Ordzhonikidze (presented at the time as a heart attack) has him several times praising Ordzhonikidze, then deploring his having, behind the Party’s back, kept up a relationship with the deviationist V. V. Lominadze (himself a suicide in 1935).29 Such an accusation levelled at a living Communist at the time would have been followed by arrest and purge.
In a report on counter-revolutionary groups in Georgia (dated 20 July 1937) to Stalin (addressing him as ‘Dear Koba’) from Beria, then only Secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia, we read ‘evidence has been given that Sergo Ordzhonikidze had, willingly or unwillingly, given much moral and material support to former Georgians and Transcaucasians transferred from Georgia and Transcaucasia, giving factual help to them in their counter-revolutionary work against the Party’.30 Obviously Beria would not have dreamt of such a suggestion unless sure of a welcome. And he follows it up with a letter (20 September 1937) quoting the ‘confession’ of Orakhelashvili telling of Ordzhonikidze being ‘the soul of our counter-revolutionary struggle with the Party leadership of Georgia’.31
So now there is even a better reason than before to see a hostile relationship, already deducible from the later arrest of his family, the change of place names previously given in his honour and so on. And now, too, in the decensored version of Anastas Mikoyan’s Memoirs, the point is made that for several years Stalin suggested to his circle that Ordzhonikidze might have been a British spy.32
11
This book has been faulted for giving too little attention to the context of Russia and of the Russian historical and mental backgrounds.
George Orwell wrote more than half a century ago, ‘Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that human beings are very much alike, but in fact any one able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs from country to country. Things that could happen in one country could not happen in another.’
Much of that is implicit in the whole story. But I perhaps need to develop it a little more broadly and not merely in a general way, but as a particular insight into the minds of the main characters. How does this affect our subject? We find what seem to be contradictions. Any reader of the country’s great literature may feel an especially Russian humanism arising from the depths of the ‘national character’. On the other hand, Ronald Hingley (in his classic The Russian Mind) saw the fictional and the real Russian as living in great dullness interspersed with, or accompanying, extreme arbitrariness, but also possessed by a view of the country’s past and present as deplorable yet containing as recompense a wonderful future with some sort of national glory compensating for everything. A complementary trait often reported is the fear that a Russian, or Russia, is being deceived or cheated – the sort of thing we see in Gogol’s Dead Souls, and in Soviet xenophobia.
The broader problem is – to this day – not primarily economic or even political. It is a certain lack of much feeling for community in the sense of a civic or plural order. Both the new Western liberal element and the old traditional Christian element of Russia, facing their crisis before a truly successful amalgam had been attained, were to be crushed by a compound of a different kind, formed from an archaic brutality and an imported theoretical-terrorist tradition. An odd fideism.
Thus the ‘ruling class’ appears as the product of centuries of history of personal and collective experiences, of indoctrination, and of psychological suitability to surviving those experiences and accepting that indoctrination, while the country’s recent and present political structure derives in part from the entire Russian background and in part from the specific Communist inheritance.