STALIN: MAN AND RULER

By the same author

THE BOLSHEVIK TRADITION: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev BRIDE OF THE REVOLUTION: Krupskaya and Lenin TSAR AND COSSACK, 1855-1914 STALIN: Works, vols XIV-XVI (editor) RESOLUTIONS AND DECISIONS OF THE CPSU, vols 1-5 (editor)

STALIN Man and Ruler

Robert H. McNeal Professor of History University of Massachusetts at Amherst

M MACMILLAN

PRESS in association with Palgrave Macmillan

©Robert H. McNeal 1988 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1988 978-0-333-37351-4

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First published 1988

Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

Typeset by Wessex Typesetters (Division of The Eastern Press Ltd) Frome, Somerset

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data McNeal, Robert H. Stalin: man and ruler.-(St. Antony's! Macmillan series). 1. Stalin, I. 2. Heads of state­Soviet Union-Biography I. Title II. Series 947.084'2'0924 DK268.S8 ISBN 978-1-349-07463-1 ISBN 978-1-349-07461-7 (eBook) DOl 10.1007/978-1-349-07461-7

For

Harold G. McNeal

Contents

List of Plates viii

Preface xi

Acknowledgements xiv

Note on Spelling and Dates XV

Map: Stalin's travels, 1918-20 xvi

1 Orthodoxy 1

2 Underground 11

3 Petro grad 27

4 Nark om 45

5 Deathwatch 68

6 Heirs 85

7 Kulaks 112

8 Builder 133

9 Murder 161

10 Y ezhovshchina 181

11 Peace 208

12 War 236

13 Generalissimus 264

14 Mortality 291

15 Judgements 312

Chronology of Stalin's Life 317

Sources and Abbreviations 324

Notes 335

Additional Reading 377

Index 378

Vll

List of Plates

1 Stalin's birthplace in Gori, Georgia. 2 The improved birthplace and its pavilion as they appeared in December

1983. 3 Pupils and teachers of the 'Gori Ecclesiastical Seminary'. 4 'Koba', the young revolutionary activist (1903). 5 Stalin in exile (1915). 6 The Sovnarkom in Smolny Institute, Petrograd (early 1918). 7 Portrait of Stalin in pencil and pastel by N. Andreev (1 May 1922). 8 Stalin with workers of the 'Stalin Railway Shops' (1 March 1927). 9 A cartoon of December 1927 ridiculing Trotsky, Zinoviev and

Kamenev. 10 Nadezhda Allilueva, Stalin's second wife (c. 1930). 11 A vel Yenukidze, Stalin and Maxim Gorky near the Lenin Mausoleum,

Red Square (May Day 1932). 12 Soviet drawing of Kirov showing Stalin and Klimenty Voroshilov the

White Sea-Baltic Canal (July 1933). 13 Svetlana, Stalin's daughter, with Kirov and her father on holiday at

Sochi (c. September 1934). 14 Painting by G. N. Gorelov of Stalin and his entourage admiring a model

of the planned 'Palace of Soviets'. 15 The aviator Valerii Chkalov receiving congratulations on 10 August

1936. 16 The corpse of Sergo Ordzhonikidze. 17 An example of mass-produced cult statuary of the late 1930s. 18 Stalin and Joachim von Ribbentrop at the signing of the Soviet­

German treaty (23 August 1939). 19 Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference (February

1945). 20 Oil painting of Stalin, in the Kremlin in 1942, planning the counter-

attack at Stalingrad. · 21 Stalin passing a British guard of honour at the Potsdam Conference

(July 1945). 22 A 1950 poster in which Stalin contemplates a map showing his scheme

to transform nature by planting huge shelter-belts. 23 A Chinese painting of the Mao-Stalin talks of December 1949-

February 1950. 24 Stalin's picture shimmers in spotlights on his 70th birthday in December

1949.

viii

List of Plates IX

25 G. M. Malenkov delivering the principal report to the Nineteenth Party Congress, 5 October 1952.

26 Beria Malenkov and Voroshilov at Stalin's bier.

Preface

Stalin was, and remains, a hard man to know. After pursuing him for about thirty-five years I still am not confident that I know him well. He was devious in life for sound political reasons, and left a legacy of repressed and concealed biographical records. Almost thirty-five years after his death we know the official file number of the Stalin papers in the Central Party Archive (fond 558), but that is all we know about this presumably vast store of information. Compared to his major contemporaries, such as Churchill, Hitler or Roosevelt, the available body of Staliniana is modest. But some important pieces of evidence are buried in obscure sources that previous researchers have not probed. One of the purposes of this book, then, is to ventilate a number of previously unused or under-used sources on Stalin.

Much of this material consists of legal, which is to say official, Soviet publications. Obviously this evidence must be treated with critical reserve, but there are some things to be said in its favour. First, there is a large body of material, for example party resolutions, that was published for operational, internal purposes of the regime rather than for propaganda. For this reason it merits guarded credibility. Second, it is reasonably well established that neither in Stalin's day nor afterwards did Soviet officialdom manufacture for publication any significant volume of documents. There is a well-known instance when the regime made some use of forged documents that inculpated certain Soviet military leaders, but it is not clear who initiated the forgery, which was in any case not circulated outside of high circles and still remains secret. The point is that the regime has resisted the temptation to invent documents showing, for example, Lenin's admiration or distaste for Stalin, depending on the period in which such an item might have been welcome. In attempting to exaggerate his role in leading the October Revolution, Stalin made do with a most inadequate short document that almost surely was not forged, rather than producing a more satisfactory piece of evidence. (Had the document been forged it surely would have been more useful to Stalin's case.) This is not to argue that deliberate lies have not been disseminated by the Soviet regime. They have been and often. But in matters pertaining to the present subject the lies, such as courtroom confessions or newspaper assertions, have not been buttressed with phony official records.

Nor is this to argue that the official records have not been sanitized by the removal of unwanted evidence. A particularly important case in point for the biography of Stalin is his Works. In using these thirteen volumes the researcher cannot always obtain writings or portions of writings that are believed to have existed but which were excluded from this

xi

xii Preface

compilation. In 1964, while preparing an annotated bibliography of Stalin's works, I came across an impressive example of such sanitary engineering. Unable to obtain in the West, Moscow or Leningrad any file of a provincial newspaper that presumably contained one piece by Stalin that had not appeared in his Works, I was gratified to have a bound volume of the newspaper delivered to me in the Rostov-na-Donu Public Library. Only to find that the page (and only that page) that I wanted had been neatly excised, surely by Stalin's long arm, which had preceded me in this remote library. But the majority of the papers of Stalin that appear in the Works can be checked against an earlier, published version, sometimes with interesting results. Apart from utilizing this kind of textual criticism, this book attempts to take a close look at key items in Stalin's papers, for example his speeches of March and December 1937, which in some respects probably reveal more than he intended.

Paradoxically, some of the important documentation on Stalin's career has escaped substantial investigation by scholars not because his regime suppressed it but because it was for many years in the glare of excessive, redundant publicity. This is the large body of material on the cult of Stalin, which, with some justification, was usually treated as junk by those who did not feel obliged to regard it with uncritical reverence. The point in studying this material is not, of course, to judge whether Stalin was the kindly, all-wise teacher, leader and friend of progressive humanity, as asserted. It is rather to describe a basic component of his system of rule, the image of Stalin. He ruled as much by the manipulation of images as by repression, and his handling of the civic cult of his own person was by no means static or uniform over the many years in which he was General Secretary of the Communist Party. Another purpose of this book, then, is to integrate the evidence of the Stalin cult into his biography. This is especially desirable because Stalin's successors have thoroughly dismantled the cult and have suppressed recollection of it. Even the partial restoration of his good name in the Soviet pantheon has carefully avoided resurrection of the embarrassing image of the super-hero Stalin. But it is too important a dimension of the Soviet and Communist experience to be banished from historical memory.

The management of official information on Stalin during and after his life inevitably encouraged a flourishing culture of unofficial rumour. Some of this folklore developed in Stalin's Gulag, the labour camps in which the inmates were more inclined to talk than their 'free' compatriots. Anecdotes and oral history achieved greater scope in the post-Stalin dissident sphere in the Soviet Union and its transplanted colonies in emigration. There is valuable evidence on Stalin's career in this material, but it is a culture that understandably did not attach great importance to the criticism of sources. Limited opportunities for research and seething moral indignation saw to that. Another aim of this book, therefore, is to subject some of the more

Preface Xlll

important emigrant and underground sources on Stalin to such critical examination as circumstances permit. One means of evaluation is the checking of unofficial sources against official sources, where it seems likely that the latter are reliable. Another means is the consideration of internal consistency of the unofficial sources, when that is possible.

Finally, Stalin is an elusive, in a sense devious, man in another respect. If he was not actually as omnipotent and omniscient as his cult alleged, he was for many years extremely powerful. For this reason, his life, especially after about 1930, tends to dissolve into the general history of the Soviet system. While there is some justification for attributing to Stalin responsibility for a wide range of policies and events, it is possible to exaggerate his personal role or to make unwarranted assumptions about it. And the merging of the man and the system vitiates the purpose of biography. This book therefore attempts to pursue as closely as the sources permit the activities of one person. If this approach underrates some matters in which Stalin's involvement is highly probable but not documented, it is hoped that appraisal of his documented role in a wide range of matters will add something important to the understanding of this perplexing and extremely consequential life.

Leverett, Mass. R. H. MeN.

Acknowledgements

Having been involved for many years in the study of Stalin and his times, I am unable to recall all the people who have assisted me in one way or another and therefore regret that I cannot thank them appropriately. Just in the last few years, while working on the present book, I have become indebted to the following people for their help on a great many specific points: John L. Black, Bohdan Bociurkiw, Stephen F. Cohen, Peter Czap, Ralph Carter Elwood, George Enteen, Yuri Glazov, Robert Griffith, J. Arch Getty, Horst Herlemann, Robert Herrick, Dee Holisky, Jerry Hough, Robert E. Jones, Edward Kassinec, Galina and Robert Rothstein, Karl Ryavec, Boris Sapir, Louise Shelley, H. Gordon Skilling, William Taubman, Laszlo Tikos, Ilya Tabagua, Leo Van Rossum, Tova Yedlin. Abel Alves' careful proof-reading has spared this book many errors. Roy Doyon generously applied his cartographic expertise to the preparation of the map of Stalin's travels.

xiv

Note on Spelling and Dates

Russian proper names are spelled according to the English convention, except in the Bibliography and Notes, where they are spelled according to the simplified Library of Congress transliteration convention.

Dates prior to February 1918 are given in the Old Style, which is twelve days behind the New Style, or Western calendar, for the nineteenth century and thirteen days for the early twentieth century.

XV

5 ""'"' ~

Kursk • Voronezh

•• 6 DEN II(IN 50

STALIN'S TRAVELS, JUNE 1918 - NOVEMBER 1920

I • Ot fMC:O of Tsaritsyn, June • Ocl. 1918.

2- .-.spection o f Eastem Front. Jan. 19 19.

3 • Oetence ol PetrOQrad. May - June 1919,

• - OtgenizaUon ot Western Front, ..Uy - Sei)L 1919.

Generalized Travel Areas

5 · SUOer'llisiOn ot Southern Front. Oct 19 19 · Jan. t920.

6 - OW'ectJOn or lltl:tartlan aria Irs, Feb. · Match t920.

7 • SuperYI$ion ol Southwestern Front, May • Auo. 1920.

a - Organi:zation o f SoYiet rule rt North CaucaSU$ and

Azerbaijan. Oct - Nov. 1920.

POLEI • A.nti·Soviel forces

XVI