Stalin полностью

There could have been no such terror without the Communist party and its ideology, but there would have been no such terror without Stalin, and his profoundly dark personality, immense strength of will, and political skill.³²¹ At least 383 execution lists signed by him have survived, containing the names of more than 43,000 “enemies of the people,” mostly the highest-level officials and officers. The terror was centrally implemented by Nikolai Yezhov and Mikhail Frinovsky of the NKVD.³²² Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Zhdanov, Andreyev, and Malenkov cosigned the mass sentencing lists prepared for the “politburo,” and traveled as emissaries to multiple locales to pour oil on the flames. Pravda, under the frenzied editorship of Lev Mekhlis—whose deeply tortured soul even Stalin remarked upon—served as an indispensable fulcrum of public direction of the terror. Of those who implemented the terror regionally, among the most rabid proved to be such NKVD operatives as Sergei Mironov (Western Siberia and Mongolia) and Leonid Zakovsky (Leningrad and Moscow). But Stalin relentlessly drove them.³²³ Had he wanted only to break the will of his own inner circle, he could have accomplished that without mass graves. Had he, despite his dictatorial grip, felt a need to subjugate even more the secret police and the military brass, he could have done that with a surgical strike. Had he wanted to force supposedly noncompliant elites to become more obedient, he did not need to have so many sitting officials killed—and then, often, their replacements as well.

Stalin showed no sign that he was in the least tormented by the slaughter—he received an outpouring of furious or grief-stricken letters from wives, mothers, daughters, sons, brothers of the arrested, begging for his intercession to stop the madness, and he ignored them—but he did show awareness of the security consequences of what he was doing.³²⁴ In August 1937, at a large gathering of political workers in the Red Army, he had asked the rapporteur “how Red Army soldiers were reacting to the fact that there were commanders who were trusted, and suddenly criticized, and arrested?” The rapporteur was put on the spot—was the question a provocation? In response, he gently admitted the obvious: doubts were being expressed about the guilt of accused Red Army commanders. Stalin shot back: “Are there facts here of a loss of authority of the party, the authority of the military leadership?” Was it a rhetorical question, even a kind of confession? The despot continued: “Like this: One tries to parse this out, today one turns in so and so, and then they arrest him. God parse it out, whom to believe?” The rapporteur responded: “Comrade Stalin here put the question about whether the authority of the party, the authority of the army, has been undermined. I must say, no.” Stalin interjected: “A little undermined.”³²⁵ He knew.

NONCAUSES

Very few people had come to know Stalin well, and those who did, he confounded. “Speaking about myself, I can say that I knew two Stalins,” Mikoyan would write. “The first, whom I valued a great deal and respected as an old comrade, for the first ten years, and then a completely different person in the later period. . . . I was able to grasp the full measure of Stalin’s dictatorial tendencies and actions only when it was already too late to struggle against him. Orjonikidze and Kirov, with whom I was very close and whose attitudes I understood, ended up in the same position of being deceived by the ‘first’ guise of Stalin.” However self-exculpatory, Mikoyan’s assessment rings true. Kaganovich, late in life, said much the same. “The postwar was a different Stalin,” he remarked. “The prewar, different. Between ’32 and the ’40s, different. Until ’32, completely different. He changed. I saw no fewer than five-six different Stalins.” Khrushchev, too, differentiated an earlier from a later ruler. “In the early 1930s, Stalin was very simple and accessible,” he recalled, but then Stalin changed, for reasons that Khrushchev, who continued to worship him, never figured out.³²⁶