Stalin полностью

Genius and madness may be two sides of the same coin (as Aristotle wrote), but Stalin was neither. He showed himself capable of immense foresight but also blindness. He was astonishingly hardworking yet often self-defeating, uncannily shrewd yet often narrow-minded and mulish. He possessed an inordinately strong will that brooked little or no challenge to his views.²⁹⁵ This ferocious willpower emanated from a transcendent sense of personal destiny and of historical necessity. Stalin, too, intrigued ceaselessly, but he was utterly absorbed in the matter of Soviet statehood and statecraft. Moreover, he had authority, not just power. He inhabited the Kremlin—he filled the offices and the parade halls built by Catherine the Great and Alexander I. Combining the majesty of imperial Russian power with the seeming sureties of Marxism-Leninism, a great state with socialism, proved to be his masterwork.²⁹⁶ Its expression was the new people, his people, not those of a bygone epoch destined to be crushed like whole classes under the wheels of history. It was a vision in which terror could make sense. And yet, what transpired in 1936–38 cannot be made wholly rational any more than absolute evil can.²⁹⁷

Stalin murdered from the Little Corner. He was a distant murderer. He took no part in the bloody rituals. He was not an assassin, nor a witness to assassinations, although he did sometimes witness the results of torture when the accused were brought before him and others of the politburo in so-called confrontations with their accusers. He wrote the execution directives and signed the lists of names. He did not allow the public to know of his signatures but made sure his inner circle, too, were implicated. He spoke to them all the time about the accusations in the same way as the propaganda related them in public—in terms of legions of hidden spies everywhere, traitors, and confessions to these crimes that he referred to literally—and instructed his police minions to employ torture, frequently using euphemisms, though sometimes being explicit (“Beat Ryabinin all over for not implicating Vareikis”).²⁹⁸

Letters detailing torture, abuses, and injustices continued to reach Stalin.²⁹⁹ Few grasped the depth of his malice.³⁰⁰ Molotov came to see it and, further, to understand that it was not solely personal but rooted in a sense of raison d’état and core political convictions. Was showing pity to enemies and double-dealers Marxist? Did alleged Marxists not understand capitalist encirclement? Did they not understand class struggle? Who would be responsible if pity were shown and Soviet power were defeated in war and overthrown? Stalin would be responsible. A light tenor, he continued to sing romantic songs such as the Georgian “Suliko” (“I sought my sweetheart’s grave, but could not find it”), but running the Soviet state did not afford him much scope for sentimentality. His ruthlessness was dictated, in his own mind, by the laws of history and social development. Nonetheless, Stalin’s terror went beyond reckless. And soon, he himself would indirectly recognize as much.

———PART III———THREE-CARD MONTE

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is, that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.

PRIME MINISTER NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, radio broadcast, September 27, 1938, speaking of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia¹

COLONEL JEAN DELMAS, French military attaché in Romania: “Do you not think it is time and possible to arrest Germany’s expansion?”

LIEUTENANT GENERAL GHEORGHE ŞTEFAN IONESCU, Romanian chief of staff: “In my view, it is the last opportunity. If we let it pass, we can no longer contain Germany and, in that case, enormous sacrifices would be required, while today the victory appears certain.” (September 28, 1938)²