Stalin: A Biography Read online

  Stalin: A Biography

  Robert Service

  Overthrowing the conventional image of Stalin as an uneducated political administrator inexplicably transformed into a pathological killer, Robert Service reveals a more complex and fascinating story behind this notorious twentieth-century figure. Drawing on unexplored archives and personal testimonies gathered from across Russia and Georgia, this is the first full-scale biography of the Soviet dictator in twenty years.

  Service describes in unprecedented detail the first half of Stalin’s life—his childhood in Georgia as the son of a violent, drunkard father and a devoted mother; his education and religious training; and his political activity as a young revolutionary. No mere messenger for Lenin, Stalin was a prominent activist long before the Russian Revolution. Equally compelling is the depiction of Stalin as Soviet leader. Service recasts the image of Stalin as unimpeded despot; his control was not limitless. And his conviction that enemies surrounded him was not entirely unfounded.

  Stalin was not just a vengeful dictator but also a man fascinated by ideas and a voracious reader of Marxist doctrine and Russian and Georgian literature as well as an internationalist committed to seeing Russia assume a powerful role on the world stage. In examining the multidimensional legacy of Stalin, Service helps explain why later would-be reformers—such as Khrushchev and Gorbachev—found the Stalinist legacy surprisingly hard to dislodge.

  Rather than diminishing the horrors of Stalinism, this is an account all the more disturbing for presenting a believable human portrait. Service’s lifetime engagement with Soviet Russia has resulted in the most comprehensive and compelling portrayal of Stalin to date.

  Robert Service

  STALIN

  A Biography

  Preface

  Francesco Benvenuti, Adele Biagi, Geoffrey Hosking and Arfon Rees read the draft and, as so many times in the past, offered invaluable suggestions. Katya Andreyev (on the Second World War), Jörg Baberowski (on the ‘national question’), Yoram Gorlizki (on the years after 1945), Mark Harrison (on Soviet economics), George Hewitt (on Georgian language and culture), Stephen Jones (on Georgian Marxism and culture), John Klier (on Jews) and David Priestland (on the 1930s) read several chapters. I also appreciate advice on particular matters from Bob Allen, Rosamund Bartlett, Vladimir Buldakov, Bob Davies, Norman Davies, Simon Dixon, Richard Evans, Israel Getzler, Ali Granmayeh, Riitta Heino, Ronald Hingley, Vladimir Kakalia, Oleg Khlevnyuk, Vladimir Kozlov, Slava Lakoba, Melvyn Leffler, Hugh Lunghi, Rosalind Marsh, Claire Mouradiane, Zakro Megreshvili, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Silvio Pons, Al Rieber, David Saunders, Harry Shukman, Peter Stickland, Martin Stugart, Ron Suny, Steve Wheatcroft, Jerry White, Faith Wigzell and Jackie Willcox. I am grateful to Matthew Hingley for creating a CD of my 78 rpm discs of Stalin’s speeches and to Vladimir Kakalia for making a present of some of these discs. Georgina Morley, Kate Harvey and Peter James, on the editorial side, have been invariably helpful with their suggestions for improvements. I am grateful to Hugh Freeman, George Hewitt, Ron Hill and Brian Pearce for drawing my attention to errors which have been corrected for this paperback edition.

  The book benefited from discussions in the Institute of Russian History in the Academy of Sciences, the Institute of World History and the Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History, and more recently it was helpful to discuss the Stalin question at the International Summer University near Gagra in Abkhazia and at the National Library in Tbilisi. (Stalin as a student at the nearby Spiritual Seminary in the late 1890s was banned from using that library.)

  St Antony’s College’s Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre has been an incomparable environment for the research. My colleagues Archie Brown, Alex Pravda and Jackie Willcox have supplied constant counsel and encouragement. I have also benefited from the Monday seminars run by our Centre, where several of my papers touching the Stalin question have been discussed. Oxford librarians Jackie Willcox and Angelina Gibson have looked out for material being published in Russia. Simon Sebag Montefiore generously shared with me his notes on the unpublished memoirs of Kandide Charkviani. Heinz-Dietrich Löwe and Shaun Morcom obtained other material for me. Liana Khvarchelia and Manana Gurgulia, organisers of the Abkhazian Summer University with Rachel Clogg and Jonathan Cohen of Conciliation Resources, secured access for me to Stalin’s dacha at Kholodnaya Rechka, Rachel Polonsky to Molotov’s apartment in central Moscow: my thanks to all of them them. Zakro Megreshvili assisted me in obtaining and translating Georgian political memoirs; Elin Hellum rendered a Swedish newspaper article into English.

  The line of influential interpretations of Stalin and his career has remarkable homogeneity in several basic features overdue for challenge. This book is aimed at showing that Stalin was a more dynamic and diverse figure than has conventionally been supposed. Stalin was a bureaucrat and a killer; he was also a leader, a writer and editor, a theorist (of sorts), a bit of a poet (when young), a follower of the arts, a family man and even a charmer. The other pressing reason for writing this biography is that the doors of Russian archives have been prised ajar since the late 1980s. Difficulties of access remain, but many dusty corners of Stalin’s life and career can now be examined. Documentary collections have also appeared which have not yet entered a comprehensive biography. Historians and archivists of the Russian Federation in particular have been doing significant work which has yet to be widely discussed.

  Stalin’s life calls up questions of historical approach. Most accounts have fallen into one of two categories. Some have been focused on his personality and motives and the effect of these on politics and society; others illuminate the general history of the USSR and elsewhere and take for granted that we already know most of what we need about him as an individual. Neither category is adequate by itself and I offer a synthesis in the following chapters. Thus while it is vital to examine Stalin’s peculiar personality, it is equally necessary to analyse the environment in which he grew up and the political and other pressures under which he operated. Accounts are also divided between those which highlight the specificity of a given period and those which pick out the more durable factors in his career and his party’s history. This book is intended to bridge that artificial dichotomy. Thus, while detailed investigations of the Great Terror are essential, so too is a consideration of the whole set of circumstances produced by the October Revolution (and indeed by earlier situations). The aim is to bring together what are usually called intentionalism and structuralism as well as to combine what may be termed synchronic and diachronic approaches.

  Several sections of the book have involved examination of records from archival files and recent documentary collections: on Stalin’s childhood in Gori; on his education; on his 1904 ‘Credo’; on his armed robbery campaign; on his time in Siberia; on his activity in 1917, in the Civil War and in the Soviet–Polish War; on the politics of 1922–3; on his marriages; on his motives in the Great Terror; on his leadership in the Second World War; and on his speeches and manoeuvres in 1952–3. Significant factual data have been unearthed in this process. The chapters also reinterpret certain important aspects of his life: the Georgian national background; his cultural development; the political authority of Stalin before, during and soon after the October Revolution; the rupture with Lenin in 1922–3; the origins and consequences of the Great Terror; the oddly impersonal ‘cult’; the style of rulership and the constraints on his despotic power; and the multidimensionality of his political career. A final point is that the book is intended as a general depiction and analysis. From his birth in 1878 to his death in 1953 Stalin was a human earthquake. Each episode in his lifetime of impact requires careful attention. But sense also has to be made of the interconnectedness of him and his times across a
long — altogether too long — existence.

  One personal experience in the course of the research stands out from the others. In December 1998 I interviewed Kira Allilueva, Stalin’s niece, in her flat in north Moscow for a radio programme I was making with Sheila Dillon of the BBC. Kira Allilueva’s refusal to be embittered by her uncle’s imprisonment of her — and her zest for life and fun — is a vivid memory. On that occasion she presented me with a copy of her uncle’s poetry. (The early chapters show why Stalin’s verses are important to an understanding of him.) It was the first time I had met someone who had known Stalin intimately. (An attempt in 1974 to interview Lazar Kaganovich, whom I spotted in Moscow’s Lenin Library, met with a curt refusal. Still, it was worth a try.) Kira Allilueva’s insistence that all the many sides of Stalin need to be understood before he can be comprehended is a principle that informs this book.

  Oxford, June 2004

  A Note on Renderings

  Stalin changed his name many times before the Great War and only started consistently calling himself Stalin in 1912. In the interests of clarity I have called him Dzhughashvili until 1912 and Stalin thereafter even though many acquaintances knew him by nicknames (Soso, Soselo and Koba) and by pseudonyms (including Ivanovich and several others) both before and after that year. And although he was christened Yoseb Dzhughashvili, I have mainly used the more familiar Joseph Dzhughashvili. The names of other Georgians are given by a conventional transliteration into English but without the diacritic signs. The territory to the south of the Caucasus mountain range presents a nomenclatural difficulty. In order to emphasise its intrinsic significance, especially in part one of the book, I refer to it as the south Caucasus rather than — as in Russian geographical and administrative parlance — the Transcaucasus; the exceptions to this are official Soviet designations such as the Transcaucasian Federation. As for transliteration from Russian, I have used a simplified version of the Library of Congress system with the qualification that endnotes are given in line with the full system. Dates are given according to the calendar in official use at the time in Russia. The authorities employed the Julian calendar until 1918, when they switched to the Gregorian one.

  Maps

  1. The Caucasus: North and South in 1921

  2. Stalin’s Last Exile, 1913–17

  3. Places Associated with Stalin’s Career

  4. The USSR and Eastern Europe After the Second World War

  PART ONE

  The Revolutionary

  1. STALIN AS WE HAVE KNOWN HIM

  Joseph Stalin is one of the most notorious figures in history. He ordered the systematic killing of people on a massive scale. In his years of power and pomp, from the late 1920s until his death in 1953, he personified the Soviet communist order. The October Revolution of 1917 in Russia had given rise to a one-party, one-ideology dictatorship serving as a model for the transformation of societies across a third of the globe’s surface after the Second World War. Although Lenin had founded the USSR, it was Stalin who decisively strengthened and stabilised the structure. Without Stalin, the Soviet Union might have collapsed decades before it was dismantled in 1991.

  After Lenin died in 1924, most people were surprised when Stalin emerged the victor from the ensuing conflict among the party’s leaders. By the end of the decade he had rejected the compromises the party had reluctantly accepted in order to survive in power after the Civil War in the former Russian Empire. Stalin marched the Soviet Union in the direction of industrialisation. Millions of peasants died while agriculture was collectivised. The network of labour camps was expanded and Stalin reinforced his despotism through the Great Terror of the late 1930s. Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa against the USSR in 1941 caught Stalin disastrously off guard. But the Red Army fought back and, with Stalin as supreme commander, defeated the Wehrmacht. After the Second World War the USSR asserted its dominion across the eastern half of Europe. Stalin’s reputation, for good or evil, rose to its climax. When he died in 1953, he was mourned by millions of fellow citizens who had abundant reason to detest him and his policies. He left the Soviet Union as a world power and an industrial colossus with a literate society. He bequeathed institutions of terror and indoctrination with few rivals in their scope. The history of the USSR after his death was largely a series of attempts to conserve, modify or liquidate his legacy.

  Stalin left no memoirs. Before the late 1920s no one troubled to write more than a brief sketch of him. Those who did put words into print scorned him. The unsurpassed chronicler of Russia in the year 1917, Nikolai Sukhanov, dismissed him as ‘a grey, dull blank’.1 Trotski and his sympathisers such as Boris Souvarine and Isaac Deutscher ridiculed Stalin as a bureaucrat without an opinion or even personality of his own; this had also been the line taken by leaders of other revolutionary parties — Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries — who had been forced into foreign exile.2 Despite the diversity of their political orientations, all such writers agreed when characterising Lenin’s successor. Stalin’s lack of talent appeared to them as axiomatic. His defects were thought obvious. Stalin had not lived as an émigré before the fall of the Imperial monarchy in the February Revolution! He was neither a polyglot nor a decent orator! He was a mere administrator! Such features were offered as proof that he deserved second-rate status among the party’s leaders. Even friendly comrades in the decade after the October Revolution thought that his only strong suit was administration and that the important decisions of state should be left to them and not to Stalin.3

  Ambitious and resentful, Stalin set about embellishing his reputation. In 1920 he stressed that Lenin, at their first meeting in 1905, had struck him as an unobtrusive figure. The aim was clear. Stalin was indicating that this was the kind of man who had founded the communist party and whom he sought to emulate: he was offering a self-portrait. But showiness was not for him. Stalin’s aide Ivan Tovstukha produced a biographical sketch in 1924, mentioning his postings in the October Revolution and Civil War;4 but this was hardly a coloratura piece of writing. Always Stalin and his associates stressed his eagerness to fit into a political collective. The self-preening political protagonists in the Soviet Union — Lev Trotski, Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin — were contrasted with the modest Party General Secretary.

  Resuming his ascent to the political summit, Stalin arranged for weightier claims to be made on his behalf. Approved biographies appeared, each more hagiographical than the previous one. In 1938 a grandiose account was published, written by Party Central Committee stooges and anonymously edited by Stalin.5 The chapters represented him as the contemporary genius of world communism; and the growing tendency was to depict him as the equal of Lenin as party leader, exponent of Marxist theory and global statesman. This image was picked up in the West by commentators impressed by the industrial and educational progress made in the USSR in the 1930s. From 1941, when the USSR entered the struggle against Nazi Germany, the praise for Stalin was unstinted. Time magazine fêted him as its Man of the Year, who alone had the tenacity to lead his country to military triumph. After the Second World War, when the Cold War broke out and the Western Allies turned him from hero into villain, the number of Stalin’s admirers fell drastically away. Yet among his critics there were few who still thought him a mediocrity. Revered or detested, he was recognised as one of the twentieth century’s outstanding politicians.

  Some saw him as Lenin’s authentic successor who drove the automobile of Revolution along a road mapped out by Lenin. Others regarded him as Leninism’s great betrayer. Playing up Russian national interests, he was painted as little different from the emperors of old. Supposedly Stalin wanted to achieve chiefly the objectives that had eluded the greatest of the Romanovs.6 Such a desire was reflected in Stalin’s foreign policy of westward expansion. In the USSR this took the form of privileging the ethnic Russians in postings, education and status. Stalin was depicted as an exponent of traditional Russian imperialism.

  Another image of Stalin had him mai
nly as a power-hungry killer. Once having gained supreme authority, supposedly, the latent psychotic urges were released and the carnage of the 1930s began. Some contended that this could not have happened unless the doctrines and practices of the Soviet one-party state had already been put in place; but they also insisted that the mayhem would not have occurred in 1937–8 unless an unhinged dictator had controlled the party and the political police.7 Stalin did not just incarcerate and murder. In applying physical and mental torment to his victims, he degraded them in the most humiliating fashion. He derived deep satisfaction from this. Although he himself did not beat those whom the police held in the Lubyanka prison, he encouraged the most brutal measures. He delighted in keeping even his closest associates in unrelieved fear. Definitions of insanity are controversial, but undeniably Stalin’s personality was a dangerously damaged one and this personality supplied the high-octane fuel for the journey to the Great Terror.

  Or was he just a bureaucratic mediocrity protecting the interests of the administrative cadres of the one-party state? According to this interpretation, the administrators in party, police and economic commissariats aspired to expand their authority and privileges. Already in the 1920s they had abandoned their revolutionary commitment. Thus Stalin understood what they wanted and used his position in the Central Committee Secretariat to fulfil their desires. As the USSR’s supreme bureaucrat he too was bound to benefit from such an outcome. That the administrative cadres should have come to wield this power was attributed to deep tensions in Soviet state and society. The October 1917 Revolution had been made in the name of the working class and the poorest sections of the peasantry. But these groups failed to confirm themselves in power. The resultant tensions made for a situation that gave opportunities to the ‘bureaucracy’. Unscrupulous and well disciplined, the functionaries of party and state steadily formed themselves into a caste separate from the rest of society, and Stalin’s grey eminence was their leading incarnation.8