Stalin полностью

323. Countless examples could be adduced. For ex., when Yezhov sent Stalin a list of people “who were being checked for possible arrest,” Stalin wrote on it: “Don’t check, arrest.” Mironov, “Vosstanovlenie i razvitie Leninskikh printsipov,” 19. One scholar has noted that “to attribute events that cost tens of millions of lives to the agency of a few individuals violates historians’ sense of proportion, not to speak of theoretical commitments.” Pomper, “Historians and Individual Agency.” This issue is readily resolved, however, by the distinction between causative agency and collaborative agency. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain.

324. Cherushev, “Dorogoi nash tovarishch Stalin!”

325. Suvenirov, Tragediia RKKA, 31 (citing RGVA, f. 9, op. 29, d. 318, l. 103: Prokofyev).

326. Mikoian, “V pervyi raz bez Lenina,” 6; Chuev, Tak govoril Kaganovich, 154; Chuev, Kaganovich, Shepilov, 211; Khrushchev, Vospominaniia, I: 85–6; Khrushchev, Memoirs, I: 79. Although Bukharin grasped that Stalin was evil, he, too, failed to take the full measure of Stalin’s enigmatic character. Dan, “Bukharin o Staline,” 181–2. See also Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite, 3–7.

327. Stalin (film by Thames Television, London, 1990); Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 113.

328. Robert Tucker offered the most detailed and thought-through portrait of Stalin as psychopath, which he attributed, among other factors, to Stalin’s childhood years. But many of the observations (in memoirs) of Stalin’s early years are dubious, while Tucker’s clever additional arguments—e.g., that Stalin had a “Lenin complex” and craved the feat of a “second October”—border on reducing to matters of psychology colossal events of geopolitics, Russian historical legacies, and Bolshevik ideas. In less capable hands than Tucker’s, the psychologizing gets absurd. A bastardization of his argument portrays Stalin as a deformed product of his abusive father and overly devoted mother, motivated by unconscious urges, a need to alleviate anxieties arising out of an impaired narcissism (his “core”), and thus fundamentally irrational. Stalin, we are told, identified with “aggressors,” and his favorite was Hitler, to whom he was homosexually attracted, and turned his “inner conflict” outward, with murderous results. Rancour-Lafferiere, Mind of Stalin.

329. These came not just from the secret police but from such sources as Pravda correspondents, forwarded to him by Mekhlis, which presented highly tendentious characterizations of the situation in localities or institutions. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 153.

330. “We knew exactly by whom and where anti-Soviet conversations were conducted, badmouthing Stalin,” recalled one NKVD operative of those years. “We opened dossiers [formuliary] on everyone.” Kirillina, “Vystrely v Smol’nom,” 73 (Popov).

331. Rudzutaks, for example, an erstwhile deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, regaled cellmates with how during the early civil war Lenin had informed him he was being assigned to the Southern Front, where he would be working with Stalin. Rudzutaks had quickly affirmed his readiness to carry out the assignment, but Lenin, according to Rudzutaks, warned him it would be difficult: Stalin was an unscrupulous intriguer. Vladimir Khaustov, personal communication (Dec. 2012), referring to material in the APRF. Khlevniuk speculates that Stalin knew he was not held in high regard by those who knew earlier times. Khlevniuk, Khoziain, 303–4.

332. Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 78. As an illustration, see the summer 1938 incident involving the Communist Youth League chief Alexander Kosaryov, as described by his widow, when Stalin clinked glasses with and kissed Kosaryov, then is said to have whispered in his ear, “If you’re a traitor, I’ll kill you.” Kosaryov was arrested. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 595 (citing an unpublished memoir).

333. Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 318. One scholar has elaborated a so-called dictator’s dilemma: the more powerful, the less he can trust his minions who claim to be loyal. Wintrobe, Political Economy of Dictatorship, 335–7. See also Harrison, Guns and Rubles, 7.