Stalin полностью

Stalin’s darkening mental disposition has often been attributed to the 1932 protest-suicide of his second wife, Nadya. Some have also pointed to the December 1934 assassination and loss of his rare close friend Sergei Kirov in Leningrad (for which Stalin was blamed). That these events had an outsized emotional impact on him is plausible. One of his bodyguards recalled late in life that Stalin would sit for long periods at Nadya’s grave, in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery. Svetlana, who was six at the time of her mother’s death and kept away from the funeral, asserted that her father never visited the grave, but she, too, insisted that her father never got over Nadya’s death.³²⁷ That said, direct evidence regarding the evolution of Stalin’s psychology remains extremely thin. Moreover, much of the core terror scenario in Stalin’s mind predated 1932, while the mass murders did not follow closely after the 1932 or 1934 events. So, although the assertion that he snapped in 1932 (or 1934) might well be true, it does not solve the riddle of why he launched and saw through such a mass killing several years later.

By far the simplest of all explanations would be to attribute the terror to paranoia, a kind of hallucinatory aria.³²⁸ Stalin suspected the worst of people, and he received an endless stream of reports confirming his suspicions.³²⁹ Never mind that he was the arch-plotter: They were out to get him. Never mind that he was an inveterate liar: They were lying to him, sabotaging his directives, covering up their mistakes. He suspected that the effusive affirmations of his leadership were two-faced, and that officials were privately thinking critical thoughts. Yezhov, like Yagoda before him, dutifully assembled overheard remarks (real or invented), and the despot read them.³³⁰ The prisons, too, were eavesdropped on, and the transcripts delivered to Stalin.³³¹ Stalin was compulsively eager for denunciations (and therefore susceptible to people’s efforts to annihilate rivals), and once he had read a denunciation about someone, he found it difficult to put it out of mind: suspicions had been raised. When informed that someone had bad-mouthed him behind his back, Stalin would undergo a “psychological metamorphosis,” according to Svetlana. “At this point—and this was where his cruel, implacable nature showed itself—the past ceased to exist for him. Years of friendship and fighting side by side in a common cause might as well never have been. . . . ‘So you’ve betrayed me,’ some inner demon would whisper. ‘I don’t even know you anymore.’”³³²

Distrust is the disease of the tyrant. Stalin’s “maniacal suspiciousness” was extreme even by those standards, something he himself would occasionally acknowledge.³³³ And yet, even beyond the fact that none of the psychological diagnoses of him have been based upon direct medical evidence, the emphasis on his paranoia can be overdone. He showed tremendous self-control, rarely raised his voice, rarely displayed anger (and if so, usually with his eyes).³³⁴ At the parades on Red Square, he did not wear a bulletproof vest under his overcoat.³³⁵ He did not employ a double. His chief bodyguard would recall not only that “Stalin did not like it when he was accompanied by security,” but that he would walk the streets of Sochi and greet the crowds, shaking hands. (We have already noted similar behavior in his one joyride on the metro.) Stalin’s obsession over poison and assassination ran deep. But if he was paranoiac, he was also lucidly strategic. The evidence for an extremely high degree of calculation behind the terror is overwhelming.³³⁶

A THEORY AND PRACTICE OF RULE

The terror was not about some imagined Georgian national proclivity to violence, Stalin’s supposed criminal energy, an outgrowth of beatings by his father, a result of the authoritarian snitch culture of the Tiflis seminary, feelings of inadequacy and shame before genuine Bolsheviks, the suicide of his wife, the death of Kirov, or Stalin’s paranoiac streak. It was an outgrowth of his rule.