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Volume
51, Number 8 · May 13,
2004 Master
of Fear By
Ian Buruma Stalin:
The Court of the Red Tsar by
Simon Sebag Montefiore Knopf, 785 pp., $30.00 Dictators come in many forms. Some
are religious maniacs, and some total cynics; some are mama's boys with a
lust to dominate, and some are compelled by a higher cause or mission; some
wish to be worshiped as gods, some just want to be feared, and most are
probably a mixture of all these things. But they all have one quality in
common: striving for absolute power consigns them to a world of lies. And one
is tempted to assume that if a dictator such as, say, Mao Zedong really
believed his own press—that he was the greatest genius who ever lived, the
greatest statesman, general, scientist, poet, or whatnot—he would surely be a
madman. The Great Leader Kim Il Sung
fashioned a kind of dictator's heaven (or hell), where his face was virtually
the only image shown in public, and politics, arts, and science were
distilled into a collection of books under his name. His life story, almost
entirely mythical, became the subject of a sacred cult. If he thought all
this was nothing but a ghastly hoax played on his subjects, his cynicism
would have been so boundless as to constitute a form of madness too. And yet
to assume that these monsters are mad is usually a mistake. It is to
underrate the cruel lucidity of their will to power. Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was
not a madman. But his true nature remains hard to pin down. He was a cynic,
yet also a believer. He would betray any promise, any ideal, any moral or
political principle, or anybody, even members of his own family, to maintain
his grip on power, yet he also seems to have been driven by a quasi-religious
millenarian zeal. According to Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador in
Washington and later Leonid Brezhnev's foreign minister, Stalin only
occasionally gave "way to positive human emotions." Yet he could be
a man of great charm, and had a sentimental streak. It was not always easy
for him to sentence an old friend to death, but alas it had to be done. The
cause was greater than any human feeling. So who was this man, who consigned
tens of millions—including some of his closest comrades—to horrible deaths
with a mere gesture to the minions who carried out the slaughter? Many books
have been written on this question, and we still don't really know. Robert
Conquest, whose classic The Great Terror is still one of the best
books on the subject, describes the Vozhd (Leader) as a kind of capo
di tutti capi, the boss of a huge crime syndicate. He compares Andrei
Vyshinsky, Stalin's hanging judge, to a "gangland lawyer,"[1]
and likens the Soviet Communist Party to cosa nostra. He cites with
approval the verdict of the Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas: All in all, Stalin was a monster who, while adhering to
abstract, absolute and fundamentally utopian ideas, in practice had no
criterion but success—and this meant violence, and physical and spiritual
extermination. But Conquest also concluded that
the personal side of Stalin's character "must remain to a large degree
enigmatic." Simon Sebag Montefiore's superb
book offers a closer look at this personal side of Stalin and his top
collaborators.[2] Indeed, no
Western writer has got as close. He trawled through newly opened (and often
subsequently closed) Soviet archives, which brought some astonishing material
to the surface. Even more remarkable are his interviews with the relatives
and offspring of Stalin and his entourage. Montefiore tracked them down in
Moscow, Tbilisi, Western Europe, the US, or wherever else they may be, and
recorded their stories, which were often told to him as excuses and
justifications, but are no less terrifying, grotesque, or damning for that. An excellent writer, Montefiore
uses hundreds of vignettes to pull us right into the action. He reserves some
of the best for his footnotes. Thus we learn how Stalin loved to attend
performances of his favorite opera, Glinka's Ivan Susanin, "but
only waited until the scene when the Poles are lured into a forest by a
Russian and freeze to death there. He would then leave the theater and go
home." Or how Stalin, Marshal Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and other
Politburo members feasted on mountains of food, danced through the night, and
sang Cossack ballads while millions were starving to death in the man-made
famines of 1931. Or how Stalin had his bodyguard, Karl Pauker, reenact for
the amusement of the Vozhd and his cronies the pathetic pleadings of
Grigory Zinoviev, a Politburo member who was executed on Stalin's orders for
disloyalty. Or how every leading Bolshevik family had its own
"expunger," usually one of the children, whose task it was to purge
family photo albums of pictures of friends and relatives who were arrested
and shot as Enemies of the People. And so on and on it goes, one horrific
scene after another, often played out in the heavy, puritanical, uncouth, and
above all paranoid atmosphere of Stalin's many country houses, where the
extreme boredom of the Leader's rambling monologues could instantly turn to
panic at the smallest hint of his displeasure. Montefiore sees Stalin less as a
gangster boss than as a malevolent high priest of a sinister cult. Stalin's
background as a seminary student in Georgia strikes him as significant. He
writes about Stalin: "...Raised in a poor priest-ridden household, he
was damaged by violence, insecurity and suspicion but inspired by the local
traditions of religious dogmatism, blood-feuding and romantic
brigandry." Again and again, Montefiore stresses the fanaticism of the
early Bolsheviks. Stalin's zeal, he writes, was "quasi-Islamic,"
and this was "typical of the Bolshevik magnates." Montefiore points
out that most of the old Bolsheviks "came from devoutly religious
backgrounds." Stalin, Yenukidze, and Mikoyan were seminarists.
Voroshilov was a choirboy. Kaganovich came from a devout Jewish family, and
Beria's mother was so pious, she died in a church. "They hated
Judeo-Christianity," writes Montefiore, "but the orthodoxy of their
parents was replaced by something even more rigid, a systematic
amorality." Nadezhda Mandelstam observed: This religion—or science, as it was modestly called by its
adepts—invests man with a godlike authority.... In the Twenties, a good many
people drew a parallel to the victory of Christianity and thought this new
religion would last a thousand years. When Stalin was about to order the
murder of hundreds of thousands of people in The Great Terror of 1937,
he said the following to some of his oldest collaborators who were about to
be swept away in the purges: "Maybe it can be explained by the fact that
you lost faith." Here, writes Montefiore, "was the essence of the
religious frenzy of the coming slaughter." In this scheme of things,
Vyshinsky was less a gangland lawyer than a grand inquisitor. Then again, the
two roles are not incompatible. This is all perfectly plausible.
It may be precisely their sincerity that enables mass murderers to use any
means to achieve the ends they desire. And Stalin was only the chief among
killers. His magnates had unlimited powers in their own domains. Montefiore
quotes something Nikita Khrushchev, who was responsible for countless deaths
in the Ukraine, said about a junior agronomist who crossed him during the
Terror: "Well of course I could have done anything I wanted with him, I
could have destroyed him, I could have arranged it so that, you know, he
would disappear from the face of the earth." But since the slightest suspicion
of doubt or dissent could lead even Stalin's closest associates straight to
the torture cellars, one should be cautious about taking any stated belief at
face value. Top Party bosses, such as Khrushchev, Vyacheslav Molotov,
Stalin's foreign minister, Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad Party boss, and even
Beria, head of Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, lived in more or less
constant fear. If the Leader told them to dance, they danced; if he tapped their
heads with his pipe and declared their skulls to be empty, as Stalin did to
Khrushchev in public, they laughed with him; and if he told them to kill
thousands, they killed thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or whatever it
took to keep the Vozhd happy and off their own backs. They were quite right to be
fearful. Pauker, the court jester who had entertained his master by mocking
Zinoviev's pleas for his life, was shot for knowing too much. Molotov's wife
was deported for alleged sexual debauchery and being part of a Jewish
conspiracy. Kirov was murdered in Leningrad, in 1934, most likely on the
orders of the NKVD. In 1938, Nikolai Bukharin, who disagreed with Stalin's
war against the peasants, was sentenced to death in a show trial for being a
Trotskyist spy, a wrecker, a terrorist, and for plotting to assassinate
Lenin. His crippled first wife was interrogated and then shot. His second
wife spent eighteen years in the Gulag. Montefiore claims that Bukharin was
not tortured. This matches Robert Conquest's conclusion in his earlier
editions of The Great Terror. But in the revised edition of his book
Conquest writes that "methods of physical influence" were in fact
employed, and that not only Bukharin's wife but their infant son was
threatened as well. Even Stalin's most ferocious
butchers, the heads of his secret police, never felt safe, and again with
good reason: all secret police chiefs know too much, and this makes them
dangerous. Genrikh Yagoda, who built up the NKVD, was tried and shot in 1938
as a rightist and a Trotskyist spy. Nikolai Yezhov, the dwarfish architect of
the Terror, a man who took personal pleasure in clubbing people to death, was
arrested and executed in 1940 for being a British spy and plotting to
assassinate Stalin. His successor, Lavrenti Beria, whose relish for methods
of physical influence was as voracious as Yezhov's, survived Stalin's death,
but was liquidated by Khrushchev. How could each of these former
bigwigs have believed the absurd accusations leveled against the others? And
what did the magnates think when their best friends disappeared? Yezhov, who
had tortured the most bizarre confessions out of numerous people, was
obviously not a British spy, and indeed refused to confess, but it is
possible that at least some Party stalwarts, betrayed by the very cause that
they had served, still believed that the Party and its Leader were infallible
and thus that their death sentences had in some sense to be deserved. This is
one of the underlying themes of Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon.
But Koestler also pointed out that at least some people "were silenced
by fear" and "some hoped to save their heads; others at least to
save their wives or sons...." I once glibly cited Koestler's
description of true believers going to their deaths to Leo Labedz, the
brilliant Polish intellectual who helped to found Encounter magazine.
Labedz reminded me that most men will say anything once their bodies and
spirits are broken by torture. And even those who died as convinced
Bolsheviks probably did so, as it were, faute de mieux. Conquest cites
Bukharin's last plea in 1938: For three months I refused to say anything. Then I began
to testify. Why? Because while I was in prison I made a revaluation of my
entire past. For when you ask yourself: "If you must die, what are you
dying for?"—an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with
startling vividness. There was nothing to die for, if one wanted to die
unrepented.... And when you ask yourself, "Very well, suppose you do not
die; suppose by some miracle you remain alive, again what for?" Isolated
from everybody, an enemy of the people, an inhuman position, completely
isolated from everything that constitutes the essence of life.[3] Of all Stalin's cohorts, Beria was
perhaps the most ruthless but also the most lucid. Montefiore sums him up
like this: "This deft intriguer, coarse psychopath and sexual adventurer
would also have cut throats, seduced ladies-in-waiting and poisoned goblets
of wine at the courts of Genghis Khan, Suleiman the Magnificent or Lucrezia
Borgia." In the early years of his ascent to the highest ranks, Beria
"worshipped Stalin." "Theirs was the relationship of monarch
and liege." He treated the Leader "like a Tsar instead of the first
comrade." And Beria became "less devoted to Marxism as time went
on." As soon as Stalin died in 1953,
Beria proposed to liberalize the regime and free East Germany, which shows
that even monsters can have the right policies. Montefiore claims that
Beria's new liberal enthusiasm so alarmed the magnates that Khrushchev had
him arrested and swiftly executed. But Khrushchev, who was probably more of a
true believer than Beria, was hardly acting solely out of idealism either.
This was a power play in the Soviet cosa nostra. The magnates knew
their man: they took no chances and got Beria before he could get them. But
this still leaves the question of Stalin himself: gangster boss, tsar, or
Bolshevik grand patriarch? Stalin has often been compared to
Hitler. This makes a certain sense. Stalinism was in many ways an inspiration
to the Führer, and the Vozhd was fascinated by Hitler. Again
Montefiore offers a telling anecdote. After Hitler had murdered potential
rivals in the Nazi movement in the Night of the Long Knives, Stalin observed
to Mikoyan: "Did you hear what happened in Germany?... Some fellow that
Hitler! Splendid! That's a deed of some skill!" But in some ways Stalin had more
in common with Mao. Both were provincial men who fancied themselves as
thinkers. They were fascinated by artists and intellectuals, and deeply
suspicious of them. Stalin, like Mao, was a voracious reader, with a special
taste for history. (His granddaughter said she saw him reading Balzac and
that he "worshipped" Zola.) Mao liked to identify himself with the
Qin Emperor, a savage tyrant in the second century BC who was known (insofar
as we know anything for sure) for burning Confucian scholars as well as their
books. Stalin, we learn from Montefiore, saw himself in the mold of Ivan the
Terrible, his "teacher." "The Russian people," he said,
"are Tsarist." "The people need a Tsar, whom they can worship
and for whom they can live and work." When it wasn't Ivan who served as
his historical mirror, it was Peter the Great, or Alexander I, or the Persian
shahs. This would seem to be a long way
from the theories of scientific socialism. But Stalin shared with Mao one
conviction that does fit the logic of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism, namely
the belief that society was a tabula rasa, that man could be remade, from
scratch, given superior will and a sufficient degree of ruthlessness. Nature
could be safely ignored. That is why both appear to have been sincerely
taken in by the crackpot science of Trofim Lysenko. "Lysenkoism,"
or "creative Darwinism," promised a new kind of agriculture in
which hitherto unheard-of varieties of Soviet wheat would be created that
would solve all the food problems in Stalin's empire. The experiments in
Soviet wheat were as disastrous as, a few decades later, Mao's high-yield
Chinese wheat (planted in such wholly unsuitable soil as the highlands of
Tibet), but these failures were blamed on "saboteurs" and
"bourgeois scientists," many of whom were killed, even as people
were dying of hunger in far greater numbers than ever. Such things might not
have happened if Stalin and Mao had been complete skeptics. But they were
gullible as well as cynical, and that is why millions had to die. What makes a tyrant like Stalin
especially terrifying, however, is that one could never be sure what he
thought at any given time. Reality, like Soviet Man, was endlessly malleable;
it was what the Vozhd said it was. Stalin also used capriciousness as
a political tool to keep his subordinates constantly guessing: orders would
suddenly be reversed; men and women would be wined and dined one night and
tortured the next; you could be praised for doing something and then punished
for it; Stalin's NKVD chiefs, like the egregious Yezhov, would be unleashed
like savage dogs on enemies, and then themselves shot for going too far. This
tyrannical whimsy got worse as Stalin felt death's chill on his own neck. In the
last year of his life, he believed, or said he believed, that
Jewish-Crimean-American plots were threatening his empire. Jewish poets were
arrested as American spies. Jewish doctors were tortured by Semyon Ignatiev,
Stalin's last secret police chief, for being "terrorists" and
"saboteurs." No one was above suspicion in this insane universe.
Molotov, whose wife was Jewish, was nicknamed "Molotstein" by
Stalin. Montefiore asks: "Did Stalin
really believe it all?" His answer: "Yes, passionately, because it
was politically necessary, which was better than mere truth. 'We ourselves
will be able to determine,' Stalin told Ignatiev, 'what is true and what is
not.'"[4] The result, of
course, is paranoia, indeed a form of madness. A dictator, no less than his
collaborators, has to live in a self-made palace of lies, where no one can
ever be trusted. Mao Zedong's doctor, Li Zhisui, observed of Mao's court that
the Chairman and many of his satraps suffered from chronic stomach cramps, a
classic symptom of nervous tension. (Himmler had the same complaint, which
only his masseur, a massive Balt named Kersten, affectionately known as the
Fat Buddha, knew how to alleviate.) In the case of Stalin's court, alcoholism
and strokes were the most common afflictions. Paranoia, then, perhaps more than
sadism, explains why Stalin had to go on constant murder sprees, in the
country at large, and among those clustered around him. Stalin told Beria
that "an Enemy of the People is not only one who does sabotage but one
who doubts the rightness of the Party line. And there are a lot of them and
we must liquidate them." Since the Party line was made up and constantly
changed by Stalin himself, this meant no end of liquidations. If you
disturbed Stalin's picture of reality at any given time, you had to be
killed. Not only doubters had to be murdered but even potential
doubters. This is indeed a form of religious persecution, and in the hands of
a vengeful and capricious God. Montefiore relates a story about a hysterical
old woman in Kiev who recognized Enemies of the People by the look in their
eyes. Her public denunciations sent thousands to their deaths. Stalin praised
her. Millions of Soviet citizens had to
pay a terrible price for the Leader's paranoia, not only in the form of
terror and purges, but in catastrophic blunders made by Stalin. Before the
German armies swept into the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin had received
several clear warnings that this was about to happen. But he dismissed all
such intelligence reports as lies and provocations. For he had decided that
Hitler would never attack the Soviet Union, and thus that any information to
the contrary—that German battleships were swarming around Riga, or German war
plans revealed an imminent invasion—was a malicious lie. When a Communist
from Berlin deserted from his German army unit to inform the Soviets of
German battle orders to attack, Stalin had him shot "for his
disinformation." It has become customary to credit
Stalin for his ultimate victory over the Nazis. But if he had spent more time
preparing for the German invasion and less on torturing his best generals to
death for criticizing the state of Soviet defenses, countless lives would
surely have been saved. In the end, Hitler's armies were defeated less by
Stalin's genius than by the vastness of the land to be conquered, the
tenacity of Soviet soldiers and citizens, Hitler's tactical blunders, and the
bitter Russian winter. Stalin's magnates, Montefiore's
true subject, paid a special price for their leader's paranoia, apart from
being shot. Too terrified to contradict Stalin, most of them tried
desperately to pander to all his whims. This allowed the Vozhd to have
all manner of sport with them: making them dance together, or forcing them to
drink until they dropped—the kind of thing enjoyed by many strongmen and
quasi-macho monarchs. But it is probable that in the ghastly loneliness of
his despotic throne, Stalin knew his power rested on a pack of lies, and
though he demanded their subservience, he despised his most loyal courtiers
for it. If he did not already, this was reason enough to loathe mankind. Sometime in the 1930s, Stalin told
the following joke to a man who had actually been tortured. "They
arrested a boy," said Stalin, "and accused him of writing Eugene
Onegin. The boy tried to deny it.... A few days later, the NKVD
interrogator bumped into the boy's parents: 'Congratulations!' he said. 'Your
son wrote Eugene Onegin.'" Stalin and his gang found this
hilarious. Of all the awful stories recounted by Simon Sebag Montefiore in
his dark and excellent book, this is surely one of the most unnerving. Notes [1] The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford
University Press, 1990), p. 15. [2] It is actually hard to know what to call these brutal,
frightened, scheming, unscrupulous, power-hungry, but also, in some cases,
fanatically idealistic men. They were neither politicians, nor bureaucrats in
the conventional sense. What then? Courtiers? Henchmen? Satraps? Paladins?
Montefiore prefers "magnates." [3] The Great Terror, p. 118. [4] One is reminded of the Viennese mayor Karl Lueger, who,
when asked why he had some Jewish friends, despite his known animosity to
Jews, replied that he would decide who was a Jew. |
