Stalin: A Biography полностью

Such was the chaos of the Great Terror that despite Stalin’s insistence that each victim should be formally processed by the troiki, the number of arrests and executions has not been ascertained with exactitude. Mayhem precluded such precision. But all the records, different as they are about details, point in the same general direction. Altogether it would seem that a rough total of one and a half million people were seized by the NKVD in 1937–8. Only around two hundred thousand were eventually released. To be caught in the maw of the NKVD usually meant to face a terrible sentence. The troiki worked hard at their appalling task. The impression got around — or was allowed to get around — that Stalin used nearly all of the arrestees as forced labourers in the Gulag. In fact the NKVD was under instructions to deliver about half of its victims not to the new camps in Siberia or north Russia but to the execution pits outside most cities. Roughly three quarters of a million persons perished under a hail of bullets in that brief period of two years. The Great Terror had its ghastly logic.

The Lenin cult glistened like a film of oil over the dark ocean of Soviet reality in the late 1930s. Stalin had always presided over its rites. It had been he who arranged for the corpse of the Soviet leader to be displayed in the Mausoleum. He organised the publication of Lenin’s memoirs and helped to set up an Institute of Lenin. He vowed undying allegiance to Lenin’s ideas and practices. During the New Economic Policy he claimed to be a mere pupil of the great man.

The ‘biography’ by Lenin’s aide Ivan Tovstukha in 1927 was really just a catalogue of his arrests, places of exile, main publications and official posts. Although it mentioned Stalin’s support for Lenin against Kamenev and Zinoviev in October 1917, there was no reference to subsequent factional campaigns, and he was listed as being merely ‘one of the secretaries of the Party Central Committee from 1922’: his full title of General Secretary was omitted.¹ With Stalin’s rise to political supremacy at the end of the 1920s all this started to change. After sending Bukharin and the Right Deviation down to defeat, he demanded appreciation as more than a party administrator. On 21 December 1929 Stalin’s (supposed) fiftieth birthday was celebrated with the fanfares of a ceremony of state.² Even if he had been bashful (and in fact he was wary of making himself look ridiculous by permitting excessive praise),³ political self-interest dictated the need for media acclaim in a period when oppositionist leaders were making scathing criticisms. Stalin aspired to his own personal cult.

He continued to express admiration for his predecessor. Although he allowed others to use the term ‘Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism’, he himself avoided it. Stalin even refused to sanction a complete edition of his collected works (whereas Trotski had already published twenty-one volumes of his writings before falling from grace). Addressing a large Moscow conference on propaganda in 1938, he condemned attempts to put him on the same level as Lenin as a party theorist. His Foundations of Leninism, Stalin insisted, was only a work of exegesis. The originality of thought lay with Lenin, which was why it made sense to talk of Marxism–Leninism and not just Marxism. But the teacher ought not to be confused with the pupil.⁴

Nevertheless he often allowed his light to outshine the aureole surrounding his predecessor. Comparisons of the two men began to be made at Lenin’s expense. The party historian Yemelyan Yaroslavski opined that Stalin was the more decisive of the two leaders and that the reason lay in the excessive number of years spent by Lenin in emigration.⁵ But usually the downgrading of Lenin was done in a visual fashion rather than in texts. On New Year’s Day in 1931 Pravda carried a line drawing of Stalin on its front page — and Lenin appeared in it only as a name printed on a banner.⁶ A similar picture was used to emphasise Stalin’s greatness in the annals of Soviet communism on New Year’s Day in 1937.⁷ Line drawings continued to be preferred to cartoons. Pravda had always avoided carrying humorous representations of the party’s leaders. (Foreign anti-communist politicians, though, were thought fair game.) This tradition endured through the 1930s. No levity was permitted to infringe Stalin’s dignity; and whenever his image appeared in Soviet newspapers, it was in contexts that corroborated his supreme status. Commissioned pictures had to convey the impression of an inspiring genius with the determination and wisdom to change the face of state and society in the USSR, and both editors and censors were careful to comply.