Stalin полностью

Great powers, when menaced by a rising or aggressive power, usually build up their militaries and seek strategic alliances, but leadership in the international arena has always been costly, and each power had drawn the lesson from the Great War experience that defense trumped offense, such that any new war could not be won easily. The benefits of getting someone else to do the fighting appeared to be very high, while the risks of that other side succumbing quickly appeared to be low.¹¹¹ And so, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union were each keen to afford the others the “honor” of standing up to Germany. Stalin worried about a linkup of the others behind his back (“a united imperialist front against the USSR”). His energetic feelers for political rapprochement with Germany and, less energetically, for a binding military dimension to his mutual assistance pact with France had failed to make headway. Facing two blind alleys—Paris/London and Berlin—he opened the 18th Party Congress on March 10, in the combined Andreyev-Alexander hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace.

Stalin had not been compelled to convoke a congress. This was the first since the January 1934 “Congress of Victors,” and thus the first to take place in the wake of his terror (a “congress of survivors,” as it were). Back when admission to the party had been closed, in January 1933, membership had stood at 2.2 million, and although it had been reopened in November 1936, the ranks were still thinner by 700,000.¹¹² The congress was attended by 1,569 delegates with voting rights and another 466 without, who had been “elected” (without alternatives) in primary party organizations. Once in Moscow, as per custom, they sat with their province or republic delegations for formal photographs with Stalin and others in his inner circle. Their local newspapers, in turn, featured their presence at the congress. Factories and collective farms had sent greetings to Stalin and affirmations of the congress agenda. All this was captured in newsreels.¹¹³ Identification of congress delegates by social origin (worker, peasant, white collar) ceased—the class question having supposedly been resolved—but markers for occupation, age, and education remained. Only 63 voting delegates worked in agriculture, 230 in industry, and 110 in transport. Military and NKVD made up the second-largest group, at 283 (18 percent), while the largest comprised apparatchiks—those for whom their sole occupation was party work—with 659 voting delegates (42 percent). Another 162 (10 percent) served as functionaries in trade unions and soviets. Nearly half the delegates were thirty-five years of age or under; four fifths were no older than forty. Just under half (46 percent) had not graduated from high school.¹¹⁴

Krupskaya missed the congress, having died in agony on February 27, 1939, one day after her seventieth birthday. She had been suffering from acute appendicitis, peritonitis, thrombosis, and arteriosclerosis and appears to have had an abdominal embolism, though the precise cause of death remains uncertain.¹¹⁵ She was the only former avowed member of an opposition group in the party (in her case, from fall 1925 to fall 1926) to die naturally.¹¹⁶ Olga Ulyanova (b. 1922), the daughter of Lenin’s brother Dmitry, who lived in the Kremlin Cavalry Building, recalled that upon coming home from school, she would look up across the way to the apartment of her aunts, Krupskaya and Ulyanova, in the nearby Imperial Senate. If a light was on in the second window, it meant Krupskaya was in; if in the fifth, then Maria; if in the fourth, they were in the dining room. “I came home in the evening and looked at the window of their apartment,” Olga recalled of late February 1939. “The windows were dark. They had no light, and no longer ever would.”¹¹⁷