Trotski put down his recollections (and this became one of his main activities after being deported from the USSR in 1929). Molotov, Kaganovich and Mikoyan wrote informative memoirs.4 Stalin’s daughter and some of his in-laws also recorded their experiences.5 Sometimes Stalin blurted out something in their presence that gives us a piece of his mental jigsaw. This could be a casual statement to Molotov or to a close relative; it could equally be an improvised speech or a toast at a private banquet.6 Of course it would be foolish to forget that, when he spoke, he usually concealed something. Stalin watched people always as if they might be his enemies. Constantly he presented himself to individuals with a purpose in mind. He decided in advance what he wanted from them and adjusted his behaviour to this. He rarely raised his voice and his self-control was legendary among his associates.7 Even many of the intimate files are ambiguous evidence on the workings of Stalin’s mind. Yet he gave himself away in dribs and drabs; enough is available for subsequent generations to make plausible guesses.
What has always been intriguing is how an undemonstrative bureaucrat of the 1920s turned into a mass killer.8 This puzzle results from analytical laziness. Even anti-communist scholars copied Trotski’s brilliant portraiture of Stalin.9 Yet Trotski gave a self-serving account. Remembering the Civil War, he stressed in particular how Stalin had conspired against party policy on the Red Army’s organisation; he failed to mention the vicious terror perpetrated by Stalin at that time. Trotski himself was an enthusiastic perpetrator of terror in the Civil War and had no incentive to castigate behaviour which he too displayed. He also disliked admitting that he should have been able to predict how Stalin might behave in the 1930s.
Stalin’s propensity for violence, excessive even by Bolshevik norms, was observable soon after the October Revolution. In the Civil War he had put whole villages to the torch near the Southern Front in order to inspire fear among the peasantry.10 He had arrested Imperial Army officers in the Red forces on the slightest pretext and loaded them on to a barge on the River Volga: only a last-minute intervention from Moscow prevented him from drowning them.11 Even the ordinary conscripts in the Red Army had had grounds to be afraid. Stalin and his comrades on the Southern Front were reckless in their operational dispositions: the human losses in the forces under their command were unjustifiably high. Lenin, while confessing that he was no military expert, rebuked him for this at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919.12 A handful of ruthless comrades gathered around him as if he was their gang leader. His friends plotted together and stuck up for each other whenever the gang’s interests were threatened. Stalin was willing to pay any price in lives to attain his objectives. In all lives except his own. For Stalin the supreme criterion of political judgement was the need to protect and enhance his personal power.
He was in his element when functioning in a chaotic environment. The trick he perfected in the Civil War had been the concoction of an atmosphere of suspicion and fanaticism unrestrained by moral scruple. He issued general objectives without specifying how they were to be attained. His supreme stipulation was that the objectives would be met; and if the measures involved heads being broken, he did not mind. While the world spun wildly, Stalin alone stayed tranquil and unmoved. This is how Stalin had liked it in the Civil War. His record as a political and military leader had been known at that time but subsequently ignored.
Yet although Stalin was ruthless and cynical, he was also optimistic in his own peculiar way. He regularly got rid of associates who queried his policies. His assumption was that people could always and easily be found to replace those who were deliberately slaughtered or who were inadvertently lost in the mayhem. ‘When the people makes its wishes clear,’ he said in a characteristically Delphic pronouncement, ‘people start to appear.’13 He was an eager promoter of the young and talented, and assumed that recruits from the working class and the peasantry could quickly master most specialised tasks. Middle-class experts in his opinion were a bane, and none were worse than the officers in the Imperial Army. Trotski stipulated that promotion should be given only on the basis of professional criteria; Lenin wavered from time to time, but he too was loath to get rid of individuals merely because of their class origins if genuine expertise was needed. Stalin was the real enthusiast in the party leadership for choosing on the premise of class. He took seriously the Leninist nostrum that communist leaders should release the potential of the lower social orders in the old society and that the tasks of socialist management were in fact simpler than the ‘bourgeois specialists’ contended.
