There is no way of knowing whether Stalin was haunted by the memory of his victims. But the strategies employed during the Second World War had been brilliantly foreshadowed by Tukhachevsky, who virtually bombarded Stalin with memos and articles about the need to prepare for a war that would require massive technological resources and in which mobile armies, geared to breakthroughs and encirclements, would play an unprecedented role. All this required a new system of command and coordination. At the beginning of the war, the Germans employed such a strategy against Soviet troops to devastating effect. Of course, no one asked Stalin why he had killed the most brilliant generals. Who was the real traitor? With the likes of Tukhachevsky, Blucher and Yegorov, the tragedy of 22 June 1941 could have been avoided.
We can cite one occasion where Stalin received a moral slap in the face, though we do not know whether he registered it at the time. After the liquidation of the high command, Stalin and Voroshilov attended a meeting of air force commanders to discuss how to rescue the air force from the lamentable state it found itself in following the purges. The officers set out the position: everything was in a woeful state – planes, weaponry, repairs, fuel, provisions, finances, administration. Training was disastrous and the number of planes and pilots lost alarming. Stalin listened carefully, requested details, and posed concrete questions to demonstrate his competence and mastery of the subject. Voroshilov took a less active part, but he was the one who closed the meeting with an explosion of anger against the officers, whom he accused of failing to mention the ‘obvious fact’: the situation had been caused by the sabotage and treason of the former high command, which had been justly punished. The minutes of the meeting indicate that of the dozens of officers who commented on the situation, not one uttered the word ‘sabotage’. Such silence made it plain that their explanation was quite different: the dire state of the air force was due to the destruction of a group of highly capable senior officers. Voroshilov’s explosion may well have been provoked by his perception that the silence implied condemnation of his leadership and his fear of Stalin’s possible reaction on learning that his subordinates lacked the requisite vigilance against enemies of the USSR. We do not know what Stalin said to Voroshilov. At all events, doubtless preoccupied by the fact that the air force was far from battle-ready, he preserved his equanimity on this occasion.
Another example, which also concerns the air force, reveals Stalin’s other side. It figures in the memoirs of the writer Konstantin Simonov. He recounts a high-level conference that he attended at the beginning of the war, devoted to the excessively high number of accidents involving planes and the heavy losses in terms of pilots. A young air force general came forward with a simple answer: the poorly constructed planes were veritable ‘flying coffins’. Stalin was now commander-in-chief. Confronted with such a blunt accusation, his face convulsed with rage. He restrained himself from a public outburst, but murmured: ‘You would have done better to keep quiet, general!’ The brave young man disappeared for good the very same day.[4]
NOT SO QUIET FLOWS THE DON
Our last example involves the writer Mikhail Sholokhov, who after Stalin’s death became the spokesman for a nationalist and conservative current, earning him strong enmity. But the events recounted here go back to 1933, when the Cossack region of Kuban, so dear to Sholokhov, was stricken by famine, like many other regions of Russia and the Ukraine.
Sholokhov wrote to Stalin to condemn the tragedy of the Kuban peasants, forcibly deprived of their harvest on the orders of the grain procurement agencies at the very moment when famine was setting in. Sholokhov was being bold, but Stalin tolerated the dramatic description of the results of his own policies. Why? In fact, it was calculated. Stalin literally forced himself to read Sholokhov’s powerful denunciation of the mistreatment of peasants condemned to starvation, the arbitrariness of the local administration, and the provocative activities of the secret police. Once he had finished reading it, he ordered the region to be supplied with the quantity of grain that Sholokhov estimated was required to prevent a calamity. He even protected Sholokhov from the enraged local authorities (including the secret police), who did everything in their power to discredit this direct communication between the two men, which was causing them so much trouble. The game here was utterly devious and Stalin played every role in it: he convened phoney ‘confrontations’, pretended to have checked the facts himself, and rehabilitated Sholokhov’s friends in the local party apparatus. He did all this because he wanted something that Sholokhov possessed: prestige with the Russian public. The man was an authentic Russian Cossack – which Stalin was not – a powerful writer, and a good speaker – again, not Stalin’s strong points. He therefore pretended to accept the facts and criticisms set out by the writer, even though he was intensely irritated by the whole business. Finally, however, he gave the game away. In one short passage in a supposedly friendly letter to Sholokhov, he vented his anger. It was pure Stalin:
You only see one side of the story. But in order to avoid political errors (your letters are not literature, they are political), you have to see the other side. Your highly respectable cereal-growers are in fact conducting a ‘secret’ war against Soviet power – a war that uses famine as a weapon, comrade Sholokhov. Obviously, this in no way justifies the scandalous treatment inflicted on them. But it is clear as daylight that these respectable cereal-growers are not as innocent as it might seem from a distance. Well, all the best. I shake your hand. Yours, J. Stalin.
Setting to one side the question of who starved whom in 1933, what we read in this letter (and what Sholokhov read) is an expression of Stalin’s real policy – a politico-ideological summons to arms against sabotage by ‘respectable cereal-growers’. This war was launched by Stalin in similar terms at the January 1933 Central Committee meeting, when he called on the party and the country to mobilize against the hordes of shadowy enemies who were ‘perniciously undermining’ the regime’s foundations. In his letter to Sholokhov, he even implied that a still greater enemy – the peasantry in its entirety – was engaged in a war of starvation against the system.
It is likely that Sholokhov appreciated the precariousness of his position. Stalin was actually accusing him of defending ‘pernicious’ enemies for whom Stalin had a visceral hatred. Sholokhov’s prestigious correspondent was signalling that his life could be on the line at any moment. Stalin might have hated Sholokhov, but he needed his talents for his own ends at this point.
Stalin was unconcerned about the suffering of masses of people. Yet he knew that he was responsible for the calamity and that his image would suffer gravely if the peasant masses actually turned against him. There would be immediate repercussions in the army and the police, composed in the main of young people from the countryside who were never shy about protesting when they learnt that their parents were starving or suffering injustice at the hands of the authorities.
4
Konstantin Simonov,