Stalin was a liar, a chameleon, who talked out of both sides of his mouth and often said what interlocutors wanted to hear. But more than any other secretive dictator, except perhaps Hitler, he repeatedly explained himself. Everything Stalin did during the years 1936–38 he had been talking about for years. Some things he said only privately, such as his instructions to a Mongolia delegation to stage trials of lamas not merely as counterrevolutionaries but as spies for Mongolia’s foreign enemy Japan, because the lamas could become traitors in the rear in the event of war. Publicly, however, Stalin had stated that he was building socialism against all manner of implacable class enemies; that the class struggle sharpened as the country got closer to the full victory of socialism; that enemies with party cards were the most dangerous because they could secretly burrow into the heart of the system; that those who opposed collectivization wanted to restore capitalism; that all foreigners were spies; that the Zinovievites, Trotskyites, and the right deviation were interlinked and tied to the military; that the rightists wanted to remove him in a putsch, establish a puppet government, hand over Soviet territories, and make a rump USSR into a colony of Germany or Japan (or was it Poland or Romania?); that enemies had become desperate and resorted to all-out terror; that the big bosses were not as valuable as the lower levels; that legions of new people (a “Soviet intelligentsia”) needed to be promoted and nurtured in Marxism-Leninism; that a new imperialist war was inevitable; that the Soviet Union had to avoid becoming the target of an anti-Soviet bloc; that the country needed to become a great power with a military to match the imperialists; that a new imperialist war could enable socialism to expand the same way the previous imperialist war had enabled the Russian Revolution; that the British stood behind the entire imperialist order; that Hitler was an intelligent leader; and that Trotsky and his supposed followers were the most diabolical threat to socialism and the Soviet state.40 These various enunciations fit into a grisly logical whole, and Stalin had the untrammeled power to act on them.
CHAPTER 6ON A BLUFF
The cause of Spain is not solely the cause of the Spaniards, but the cause of all progressive and advanced humanity.
STALIN,
Stalin conducts a struggle on a totally different plane. He seeks to strike not at the ideas of an opponent, but at his skull.
TROTSKY,
STALIN DEPARTED FOR SOCHI ON AUGUST 14, 1936, and would remain down south through October 25. His absences from Moscow since 1930 (this holiday included) averaged seventy-eight days per annum. His Sochi dacha was not in the town proper, but on a zigzagging road about a mile up and in from the Black Sea. North led to Sochi, south to the sulfur baths of Matsesta (farther on were Gagra and Sukhum, in Abkhazia). The pristine setting offered the smell of pine trees and salty air, while the compound contained guest villas, tennis courts (where Nadya used to play), and a detached billiards hall, all surrounded by NKVD troops. The main dacha was an unpretentious wooden structure with an open-air veranda that Stalin prized. Matsesta’s curative sulfur waters were now being pumped in, obviating the trip. The staff and guards equipped the residence with the usual pianolas and phonographs, but holidays were not downtime. While away from the capital in 1930, Stalin had remade the Soviet government structure, and the next year he reorganized management of foreign affairs. The 1936 southern holiday would prove to be his most momentous yet as he further radicalized his pursuit of Trotskyites with his most frenzied public trial to date and upended international politics with a military intervention on the Iberian Peninsula.