Stalin

By Simon Montefiore

The vanguard of Bolsheviks, many young and now blooded by the brutality of that struggle, found themselves a tiny, isolated and embattled minority nervously ruling a vast mined Empire, itself besieged by a hostile world. contemptuous of the workers and peasants, Lenin was nonetheless surprised to discover that neither of these classes supported them. Lenin thus proposed a single organ to rule and oversee the creation of socialism: the Party. It was this embarrassing gap between reality and aspiration that made the Party’s quasi-religious fidelity to ideological purity so important, its military discipline so obligatory. 

ln this peculiar dilemma, they improvised a peculiar system and sought solace in a uniquely peculiar view of the world. The Party’s sovereign organ was the Central Committee (CC), the top seventy or so officials, who were elected annually by Party Congresses which, later, were held ever less frequently.  The CC elected the small Politburo, a super-War Cabinet that decided policy, and a Secretariat of about three Secretaries to run the Party. They directed the conventional government of a radically centralized vertical one-party state: Mikhail Kalunin born in 1874, the only real peasant

in the leadership, known as the “All-Union peasant elder,” became Head of State in 1919.‘ Lenin ran the country as Premier, the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, a cabinet of ministers which executed the Politburo's orders. There was a sort of democracy within the Politburo but after the desperate crises of the Civil War, Lenin banned factions. The Party frantically recruited millions of new members but were they trustworthy? Gradually, an authoritarian bureaucratic dictatorship took the place of the honest debates of earlier days but in 1921, Lenin, that superlative improviser, restored a degree of capitalism, a compromise called the New Economic Policy (NEP), to save the regime. 

In 1922, Lenin and Kamenev engineered the appointment of Stalin as General Secretary-or Gensec-of the CC to run the Party. Stalin’s Secretariat was the engine mom of the new state, giving him extensive powers: he demonstrated these in the “Georgian Affair” when he and Sergo annexed Georgia, which had seceded from the Empire, and then imposed their will on the independent-minded Georgian Party. Lenin was disgusted but his stroke in December 1922 prevented him moving against Stalin. The Politburo, taking control of the health of the Party's greatest asset, banned him from working more than ten minutes a day. When Lenin tried to do more, Stalin insulted Lenin’s wife Krupskaya, a tantrum that could have ended his career. (Stalin’s row with Lenin’s Wife, Krupskaya outraged Lenin's bourgeois sentiments. But Stalin thought it was entirely consistent with Party culture: “Why should I stand on my hind leg for her? To sleep with Lenin does not mean you understand Marxism-Leninism. Just because she used the name toilet as Lenin . . . " This led to some classic Stalin jokes, in which he warned Krupskaya that if she did not obey, the Central Committee would appoint someone else as Lenin's wife. That in a very Bolshevik concept. His disrespect for Krupskayua was probably not helped by her complaints about Lenin’s flirtations with his assistants. including Yelena Susan, the one whom Stalin threatened to promote to “wife.' )

Lenin alone could see that Stalin was emerging as his most likely successor so he secretly dictated a damning Testament demanding his dismissal. Lenin was felled by a fatal stroke on 21 January 1924. Against the wishes of Lenin and his family, Stalin orchestrated the effective deification of the leader and his embalming like an Orthodox saint in a Mausoleum on Red Square. Stalin commandeered the sacred orthodoxy of his late hero to build up his own power. 

An outsider in 1924 would have expected Trotsky to succeed Lenin, but in the Bolshevik oligarchy, this glittery fame counted against the insouciant War Commissar. The hatred between Stalin and Trotsky was not only based on personality and style but also on policy. Stalin had already used the massive patronage of the Secretariat to promote his allies, Molotov, Voroshilov and Sergo; he also supplied an encouraging and realistic alternative to Trotsky’s insistence on European revolution: “Socialism in One Country.” The other members of the Politburo, led by Grigory Zinoviev, and Kamenev, Lenin’s closest associates, were also terrified of Trotsky, who had united all against himself. So when Lenin’s Testament was unveiled in 1924, Kamenev proposed to let Stalin remain as Secretary, little realizing that there would be no other real opportunity to remove him for thirty years. Trotsky, the Revolution’s preening panjandrum was defeated with surprising ease and speed. Having dismissed Trotsky from his power base as War Commissar, Zinoviev and Kamenev discovered too late that their co-triumvir Stalin was the real threat. 

By 1926, Stalin had defeated them too, helped by his Rightist allies, Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov, who had succeeded Lenin as Premier. Stalin and Bukharin supported the NEP. But many of the regional hardliners feared that compromise undermined Bolshevism itself, putting off the reckoning day with the hostile peasantry. In 1927, a grain crisis brought this to a head, unleashed the Bolshevik taste for extreme solutions to their problems, and set the country on a repressive martial footing that would last until Stalin's death. 

In January 1928, Stalin himself travelled to Siberia to investigate the drop in grain deliveries. Replaying his glorious role as Civil War commissar, Stalin ordered the forcible gathering of grain and blamed the shortage on the so-called kulaks, who were hoarding their harvest in the hope of higher prices. “Kulak” usually meant a peasant who employed a couple of labourers or owned a pair of cows. “I gave a good shaking to the Party Organs," Stalin said later but he soon discovered that “the Rightists didn’t like harsh measures . . . they thought it the beginning of civil war in the villages.” 

On his return, Premier Rykov threatened Stalin: “Criminal charges should be filed against you!" However, the rough young commissars, the “committee men” at the heart of the Party, supported Stalin’s violent requisitioning of grain. Every winter. they headed into the hinterlands to
squeeze the grain out of the kulaks who were identified as the main enemies of the Revolution. However, they realized the NEP had failed. They had to find a radical, military solution to the food crisis. 

Stalin was a natural radical and now he shamelessly stole the clothes of the Leftists he had just defeated. He and his allies were already talking of a final new Revolution, the “Great Turn” leftwards to solve the problem of the peasantry and economic backwardness. These Bolsheviks hated the obstinate old world of the peasants: they had to be herded into collective farms, their grain forcibly collected and sold abroad to fund a manic gallop to create an instant industrial powerhouse that could produce tanks and planes. Private trade of food was stopped. Kulaks were ordered to deliver their grain and prosecuted as speculators if they did not. Gradually, the villagers themselves were forced into collectives. Anyone who resisted was a “kulak enemy." 

Similarly, in industry, the Bolsheviks unleashed their hatred of technical experts, or “bourgeois specialists”--actually just middle-class engineers. While they trained their own new Red elite, they intimidated those who said Stalin’s industrial plans were impossible with a series of faked trials that started at the Shakhty coal mine. Nothing was impossible. The resulting rural nightmare was like a war without battles but with death on a monumental scale." Yet the warlords of this struggle, Stalin’s magnates and their wives, still lived in the Kremlin like a surprisingly cosy family.' 

(Stalin was never the titular Head of State of the Soviet Union, nor was Lenin. Kalinin's title was the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee, technically the highest legislative body, but he was colloquially the “President.” After the 1936 Constitution, his title was Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Only with the Brezhnev Constitution did the Secretary-General of the Party add the Presidency to his titles. The Bolsheviks coined a new Jargon of acronyms in their effort to create a new sort of government. )

and 

The murder of Kirov:

Draped in garlands, the death train shunted into darkness after midnight, leaving behind Kirov's brain which was to be studied for signs of revolutionary brilliance in the Leningrad Institute. (This brain study was part of the rationalist-scientific ritual of death of great Bolsheviks. Lenin's brain had been extracted and was now studied at the Institute of the Brain. When Gorky died, his brain was delivered there too. This was surely a scientific Marxist distortion of the tradition in the Romantic age for the hearts of great men.whether Mirabeau or Potemkin to be buried separately. But the age of the heart was over.

and

Zinoviev shouted that this was a “Fascist coup” and begged the executioners: “Please, comrade, for God’s sake, call Joseph Vissarionovich! Joseph Vissarionovich promised to save our lives!" Some accounts have him actually hugging and licking the Chekist’s boots. Kamenev reportedly answered: “We deserve this because of our unworthy attitude at the trial” and told Zinoviev to be quiet and die with dignity. Zinoviev made such a noise that an NKVD lieutenant took him into a nearby cell and despatched him there and then. They were shot through the back of the head. 

The bullets, with their noses crushed, were dug out of the skulls, Wiped clean of blood and pearly brain matter, and handed to Yagoda, probably still warm. No wonder Vyshinsky found these events sickening. Yagoda labelled the bullets “Zinoviev” and “Kamenev” and treasured these macabre but sacred relics, taking them home to be kept proudly with his collection of erotica and ladies’ stockings.f The bodies were cremated. 

Stalin was always fascinated by the conduct of his enemies at the supreme moment, enjoying their humiliation and destruction: “A man may be physically brave but a political coward,” he said. Weeks later, at a dinner to celebrate the founding of the Cheka, Pauker, Stalin’s comedian, acted the death and pleadings of Zinoviev. To the raucous guffaws of the Voz/Jd and Yezhov, plump, corseted and shiny-pated Pauker was dragged back into the room by two friends playing the role of guards. There he performed Zinoviev’s cries of “For God’s sake call Stalin” but improvised mother ingredient. Pauker, a Jew himself, specialised in telling Stalin Jewish jokes in the appropriate accent with much rolling of“R”s and cringing. \Iow be combined the two, depicting Zinoviev raising his hands to the {eavens and weeping. “Hear oh Israel the Lord is our God"

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