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Contemptuous of the workers and peasants, Lenin was none the less surprised to discover that neither of these classes supported them. Lenin thus proposed a single organ to rule and oversee the creation of socialism: the Party. It was this embarrassing gap between reality and aspiration that made the Party’s quasi-religious fidelity to ideological purity so important, its military discipline so obligatory.
The death toll of this ‘absurd’ famine, which only occurred to raise money to build pig-iron smelters and tractors, was between four to five, and as high as, ten million dead, a tragedy unequalled in human history except by the Nazi and Maoist terrors.
The peasants had always been the Bolshevik Enemy. Lenin himself had said: ‘The peasant must do a bit of starving.’
All declared Kirov dead but they still kept on giving him artificial respiration until almost 5.45 p.m. Doctors in totalitarian states are terrified of eminent dead patients – and with good reason. As the doctors surrendered, those present realized that someone would have to tell Stalin. Everyone remembered where they were when Kirov was assassinated: the Soviet JFK.
This 1st December Law – or rather the two directives of that night – was the equivalent of Hitler’s Enabling Act because it laid the foundation for a random terror without even the pretence of a rule of law. Within three years, two million people had been sentenced to death or labour camps in its name. Mikoyan said there was no discussion and no objections.
‘Finish it,’ the Vozhd ordered laconically. Following the 1st December Law, they were shot within an hour – and their innocent families soon after. In the month of December, 6,501 people were shot. Stalin had no precise plan for the growing Terror, just the belief that the Party had to be terrorized into submission and that old enemies had to be eradicated.
The flood of arrests was so huge that the camps were deluged by ‘Kirov’s Torrent’, yet, simultaneously, Stalin orchestrated a jazz-playing ‘thaw’: ‘Life has become merrier, comrades,’ he said. ‘Life has become better.’
He talked about films with his entourage and passed every film before it was shown to the public, becoming his own supreme censor. Stalin was Joseph Goebbels combined with Alexander Korda,
His humour was oafishly puerile: he presided over competitions to see which trouserless Commissar could fart away handfuls of cigarette ash. He cavorted at orgies with prostitutes, but was also an enthusiastic bisexual, having enjoyed avid encounters with his fellow tailoring apprentices, soldiers at the front and even high Bolsheviks like Filipp Goloshchekin, who had arranged the murder of the Romanovs. His only hobby apart from partying and fornicating was collecting and making model yachts. Unstable, sexually confused and highly strung, he was too weak to compete with bulldozers like
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this child of Georgia, a Persian satrapy for centuries, also identified with the Shahs. He named two monarchs as his ‘teachers’ in his own notes: one was Nadir Shah, the eighteenth-century Persian empire-builder of whom he wrote: ‘Nadir Khan. Teacher’. (He was also interested in another Shah, Abbas, who beheaded a father’s two sons and sent him their heads: ‘Am I like the Shah?’ he asked Beria.)
It is hard to imagine either Hitler or even President Roosevelt investigating urinals, soap or that smalltown teacher.
Even his subordinates found him a ‘sinister figure’ who, regardless of his ‘excellent education’, believed in the essential rule of Stalinist management: ‘I believe in keeping people on edge’ but he was always on the edge himself, suffering bouts of eczema, living in fear and helping to breed it.
‘That snake Beria has killed me.’ At 4.20 a.m., Lakoba died of a ‘heart attack’ aged forty-three. Beria saw off the coffin on its way back by train to Sukhumi. Lakoba’s doctors were convinced he had been poisoned but Beria had the organs removed, later exhuming and destroying the cadaver. Lakoba’s family were also killed. He was denounced as an Enemy of the People. Lakoba was the first of Stalin’s circle to be killed.
In Moscow, 200,000 people, bedazzled by propaganda, massed in Red Square, despite temperatures of –27°C, bearing banners that read: ‘The court’s verdict is the people’s verdict.’ Khrushchev addressed them, denouncing the ‘Judas-Trotsky’, a line that strongly implied that Stalin was the metaphorical Jesus.
The search of Yagoda’s residences – he had two apartments in central Moscow and the luxurious dacha – revealed the debauchery of NKVD élite in the list of his possessions. His pornographic collection contained 3,904 photographs plus eleven early pornographic movies. His career as a womanizer was amply illustrated by the female clothing he kept in his apartment which sounds as if he was running a lingerie store not a police force, but then the NKVD bosses could never resist exploiting their power.
the rule in Stalin’s world was that when a man fell, all those connected to him, whether friends, lovers or protégés, fell with him.
‘You can put down in your report to Yezhov that I said there must be a God after all. From Stalin I deserved nothing but gratitude for my faithful service; from God, I deserved the most severe punishment for having violated his commandments thousands of times. Now look where I am and judge for yourself: is there a God or not?’
The army had been the last force capable of stopping Stalin, reason enough for the destruction of its High Command. It is possible that the generals knew about Stalin’s record as an Okhrana double agent and had considered action. The usual explanation is that German disinformation persuaded Stalin that they were plotting a coup. Hitler’s spymaster, Heydrich, had concocted such evidence that was passed to Stalin by the well-meaning Czech President Beneš.
They did not even specify the names but simply assigned quotas of deaths by the thousands. On 2 July 1937, the Politburo ordered local Secretaries to arrest and shoot ‘the most hostile anti-Soviet elements’ who were to be sentenced by troikas, three-man tribunals that usually included the local Party Secretary, Procurator and NKVD chief. The aim was ‘to finish off once and for all’ all Enemies and those impossible to educate in socialism, so as to accelerate the erasing of class barriers and therefore the bringing of paradise for the masses.
Terror differed most from Hitler’s crimes which systematically destroyed a limited target: Jews and Gypsies. Here, on the contrary, death was sometimes random: the long-forgotten comment, the flirtation with an opposition, envy of another man’s job, wife or house, vengeance or just plain coincidence brought the death and torture of entire families.
Many of the prisoners were beaten so hard that their eyes were literally popped out of their heads. They were routinely beaten to death, which was registered as a heart attack.
‘All Politburo members bear responsibility . . . But 1937 was necessary.’ Mikoyan agreed that ‘everyone who worked with Stalin . . . bears a share of responsibility’. It was bad enough to kill so many but their complete awareness that many were innocent even by their own arcane standards is the hardest to take: ‘We’re guilty of going too far,’ said Kaganovich. ‘We all made mistakes . . . But we won WW2.’ Those who knew these mass murderers later reflected that Malenkov or Khrushchev were ‘not wicked by nature’, not ‘what they eventually became’. They were men of their time.
the building of canals was the task of the NKVD’s slave labour.
Beria was a natural, the only First Secretary who personally tortured his victims. The blackjack – the zhguti – and the truncheon – the dubenka – were his favourite toys.
Stalin was now so omnipotent that when he mispronounced a word from the podium, every subsequent speaker repeated the mistake.
Khrushchev ruthlessly suppressed any sections of the population who might oppose Soviet power: priests, officers, noblemen, intellectuals were kidnapped, murdered and deported to eliminate the very existence of Poland. By November 1940, one tenth of the population or 1.17 million innocents had been deported. Thirty per cent of them were dead by 1941; 60,000 were arrested and 50,000 shot. The Soviets behaved like conquerors. When some soldiers were arrested for stealing treasures from a Prince Radziwill, Vyshinsky consulted Stalin.
Blokhin travelled down to the Ostachkov camp where he and two other Chekists outfitted a hut with padded, soundproofed walls and decided on a Stakhanovite quota of 250 shootings a night. He brought a butcher’s leather apron and cap which he put on when he began one of the most prolific acts of mass murder by one individual, killing 7,000 in precisely twenty-eight nights, using a German Walther pistol to prevent future exposure. The bodies were buried in various places – but the 4,500 in the Kozelsk camp were interred in Katyn Forest.
Only in Stalin’s realm could the country’s greatest armaments expert be imprisoned just weeks before a war.
On 20 June, Dekanozov, back in Berlin, warned Beria firmly that the attack was imminent. Beria threatened his protégé while Stalin muttered that ‘Slow Kartvelian’ ‘wasn’t clever enough to work it out’. Beria forwarded the ‘disinformation’ to Stalin with the sycophantic but slightly mocking note: ‘My people and I, Joseph Vissarionovich, firmly remember your wise prediction: Hitler will not attack us in 1941!’
Timoshenko telephoned to report that a German deserter had revealed the German invasion plan for dawn. Stalin swung between the force of reality and the self-delusion of his infallibility.
a third deserter, a Communist labourer from Berlin named Alfred Liskov, had swum the Pruth to report that the order to invade had been read to his unit. Stalin checked that the High Alert order was being transmitted, then commanded that Liskov should be shot ‘for his disinformation’. Even on such a night, it was impossible to break the Stalinist routine of brutality – and entertainment:
Stalin uttered his first words of truth since the war began: ‘Everything’s lost. I give up. Lenin founded our state and we’ve fucked it up.’ Stalin cursed all the way to Kuntsevo. ‘Lenin left us a great heritage and we his successors have shitted it all up . . .’ Even when they had arrived at the house, Molotov remembered him swearing, ‘“We fucked it up!” The “we” was meant to include all of us!’ Stalin said he could no longer be the leader. He resigned. At Kuntsevo, Molotov ‘tried to cheer him up’. They left the broken Stalin sulking at the dacha.
Stalin ‘looked alert, somewhat strange’, recalled Mikoyan, ‘and his question was no less strange. Actually he should have summoned us himself. I had no doubt: he decided we had arrived to arrest him.’ Beria watched Stalin’s face carefully. ‘It was obvious,’ he later told his wife, ‘Stalin expected anything could happen, even the worst.’
Within three weeks of war, Russia had lost around 2,000,000 men, 3,500 tanks, and over 6,000 aircraft.
Stalin devised draconian measures to terrorize his men into fighting. In the first week, he approved NKGB Order No. 246 that stipulated the destruction of the families of men who were captured, and now he made this public in his notorious Order No. 270.
On 19 July, Berlin announced that, amongst the teeming mass of Soviet prisoners, was Yakov Djugashvili. Zhdanov sent Stalin a sealed package that contained a photograph of Yakov that his father examined closely, tormented by the thought of his weak son breaking and betraying him. For the second time in Yakov’s life, Stalin cursed that his own son could not kill himself:
There is a myth that the only time Stalin ceased the war against his own people was during 1941 and 1942; but during that period, 994,000 servicemen were condemned, and 157,000 shot, more than fifteen divisions.
‘Have the stresses of this war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of collective farms,’ Churchill asked. ‘Oh no,’ replied Stalin revealingly. That had been ‘a terrible struggle’.
The military defeat became a human struggle for survival, as the Germans ate horsemeat, cats, rats, each other, and finally nothing. On 31 January, Field Marshal Paulus surrendered and 92,000 starving, frostbitten scarecrows, barely recognizable as men let alone soldiers, became prisoners.
Stalin got out of the car and asked ‘whether the bushes along the roadside were mined. Of course no one could give such a guarantee . . . Then the Supreme Commander-in-Chief pulled down his trousers in everyone’s presence.’ In a metaphorical commentary on his treatment of the Soviet people, and his performance as military commander, he ‘shamed himself in front of his generals and officers . . . and did his business right there on the road.’
The cost of Stalin’s victories were vast: almost 26 million were dead, another 26 million homeless. There was a raging famine, treason among the Caucasian peoples, a Ukrainian nationalist civil war, and dangerous liberalism among the Russians themselves. All these had to be solved with the traditional Bolshevik solution, Terror.
By the time he had finished, a triumphant Beria had removed 1.5 million people. Stalin approved 413 medals for Beria’s Chekists. More than a quarter of the deportees died, according to the NKVD, but as many as 530,000 perished en route or on arrival at the camps. For each of these peoples, this was an apocalypse that approached the Holocaust.
On 22 November 1944, Beria reported to Stalin another case of cannibalism in the Urals when two women kidnapped and ate four children.
It was now twelve hours since Stalin’s stroke and he was still snoring on the sofa, wet from his own urine. The magnates surely discussed whether to call doctors. It was extraordinary that they had not called a doctor for twelve hours but it was an extraordinary situation. This is usually used as evidence that the magnates deliberately left Stalin without medical help in order to kill him. But in their fragile situation, at a court already bristling with spymania against the killer doctors, it was not just hyperbole to fear causing panic. Stalin’s own doctor was being tortured merely for
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Perhaps 20 million had been killed; 28 million deported, of whom 18 million had slaved in the Gulags. Yet, after so much slaughter, they were still believers.
