Empires Apart (56 page)

For half a century it seemed that Russian and American imperialism had died and a new golden age had arrived. Both nations proclaimed their support for the world's poor and oppressed. Both ridiculed the creaking empires of western Europeans still locked in the past. Both turned their eyes inwards. And as both downplayed the imperial yearnings of their own people they underestimated the imperial yearnings of others. The passions that had driven Russians and Americans to the Pacific now fired imaginations in Rome, Berlin and Tokyo. The coming of the Second World War would rouse both nations to fury and the war's aftermath showed that their imperial pretensions, which had seemed to vanish with the First World War, had been not dead but dormant.

The civil war in Russia was won because the Reds were more popular than the Whites. However tiny the Bolshevik faction may have been when they seized power by the end of the civil war, they had made themselves into a genuinely popular force; not least by their control of the media. In that respect the parallels with the American Revolution are striking, but the Bolsheviks' popularity was not to last. While the Red Army was retaking the Trans-Siberian railway and chasing to and fro in Poland the economy collapsed. The resultant famine claimed 5 million
lives. Protests against the Bolsheviks increased in the very places where support had once been strongest, particularly in the great naval base at Kronstadt. The Bolshevik reaction showed dramatically the road Russia was destined to follow.

The Kronstadt mutineers and their anarchist leaders had been at the forefront of the revolution, and thought that this loyalty would protect them. They were wrong; the Red Army, under orders from Trotsky, launched a ferocious attack across the ice and the mutineers who survived were rounded up and shot. The crushing of the Kronstadt soviet not only demonstrated that Russian autocracy had lost none of its steel in the transfer from tsar to commissar but also illustrated for the first time another feature that would become a commonplace of Russian life: the deliberate fabrication of ‘history'. Lenin and Trotsky immediately announced that the Kronstadt protesters had been part of a White plot, something they knew to be absolute nonsense. American presidents have lied, and occasionally, as with the Watergate coterie around Richard Nixon, mendacity has been central to the governing culture, but never has an American regime set out with a conscious intent to achieve its ends by the deliberate and massive rewriting of events. The Bolsheviks could never concede that any other revolutionary group might legitimately represent the workers and peasants, and so by definition all dissent must be fomented from outside. Even when everyone involved knew this not to be the case, truth had to be subverted in the interests of the party and its historic destiny.

What many left-wingers outside Russia found hard to accept was that the Bolshevik leaders reserve their bitterest contempt for those on the left who refused to toe the party line. The case of Ukraine is a classic example. Anarchists under Nestor Mhakno fought pitched battles with both Ukrainian nationalists and Russian White Army troops, and in doing so they might have expected active support from their fellow revolutionaries in Russia; indeed the anarchist regime signed a series of co-operation treaties with the Bolsheviks. However, the promised Red Army support never materialised; Trotsky was determined that only his party would have the final victory. Eventually the Bolsheviks arranged a
joint military commission at which the Makhnovist delegates were seized and murdered. It was a pattern to be followed by Stalin's followers again eighteen years later, during the Spanish Civil War.

Lenin died in January 1924 after a long illness and the struggle for succession had all the bitterness, confusion and intrigue that had characterised the successions of so many tsars. Lenin's courtiers manoeuvred for power while publicly proclaiming the virtues of collective leadership. In June seven men, including Stalin, were elected full members of the politburo: only Stalin would survive.

A year before his death Lenin, already largely confined to bed, had written a ‘Testament' that was to become infamous. In it he warned the party of the dangers in the feud between Trotsky and Stalin, and in a devastating postscript urged that Stalin be removed from his post as secretary general of the Communist party. Only Lenin's illness allowed Stalin to retain any sort of powerbase, and yet six years later Stalin's position was unassailable. Painting a picture of the great Lenin reduced to incoherent ramblings, Stalin persuaded the party to ignore the Testament and then, by playing one faction against another, succeeded in removing everyone who had ever touched the levers of power. In this Stalin was totally ruthless: he eventually had all the other six politburo members killed (although one may have committed suicide). First Trotsky was forced into exile. Then Stalin and the ‘right' purged the ‘left', and when that was complete Stalin and his own followers purged the right. Finally Trotsky was hunted down and murdered in Mexico.

The ruthless application of terror, the treachery to allies and the total disregard for truth that characterised the Bolshevik regime sprang from the ideology that Marx and Lenin had evolved under which the ends justified any means. They were all attributes totally incompatible with the ideologies prevalent in the west, but all were mere shadows of what was to come under Lenin's successor. There were limits to Lenin's fanaticism: for example, however rancorous the internal party struggles no Communist party member was ever executed under Lenin. That soon changed. Under Stalin the Bolsheviks turned terror on themselves.

Significantly the first communist to be sentenced to death was not one of Stalin's rivals but the Tartar leader, Mir Said Sultan-Galiev, who was charged with the classic imperial crime of demanding an autonomous Tartar republic in the Urals. In supporting Stalin in this case the rest of the politburo seemed not to see that they were creating a precedent that would soon be used against them. (As a footnote, when Soviet archives were opened up under Gorbachev it was discovered that Sultan-Galiev had not in fact been executed in 1928 but imprisoned and then quietly released, only to rounded up in a later purge and shot in 1940.)

Stalin achieved what the tsarist secret police had only dreamed of: he annihilated a whole generation of Russian revolutionaries, men and a few women, who had been part of an international, intellectual, revolutionary ferment, replacing them with men, and even fewer women, who had joined the cause after the revolution, who had no interest in theory or debate, who had virtually no experience of the wider world (and indeed whose contact with that wider world was limited to the foreign forces who had tried to stop their revolution) and whose whole mindset was conditioned by their experience of the chaos of civil war. Unsurprisingly, just as they had after the Time of Troubles, the Russian people, and especially the new communist establishment, responded to a form of government they believed would save them from a repetition of such chaos: autocracy.

It is almost impossible to convey the depth of horror that Joseph Stalin embodied. However many similarities there are between Russian and American histories, there is nothing to compare for sheer scale with the evils of Stalinism; he probably killed in a few decades more human beings than died in centuries of trans-Atlantic slave trading. Parallels with Ivan the Terrible, and in the twentieth century with Hitler, are obvious but recent research shows that Stalin exceeded both in the sheer number of human beings sent to their deaths. In addition to all those executed or consigned to the camps millions died in famines that Stalin quite deliberately inflicted. According to Rayfield, ‘The number of excess deaths between 1930 and 1933 attributable to collectivisation lies
between a conservative 7.2 and a plausible 10.8 million.'The statistics are too horrendous to comprehend.

Stalin is said to have personally signed 383 printed lists containing around 230,000 names of those to be executed, with the names carefully divided into four categories: military, secret police, general and ‘wives of enemies of the people'. And these were just the most senior victims. The terror reached into every corner of Soviet life. An NKVD circular in 1938 detailed how ‘socially dangerous children exhibiting anti-Soviet attitudes' were to be sent to the Gulags. Petya Yakir was arrested and tortured for forming an ‘anarchist mounted band': he was just fourteen.

Half the membership of the Communist party was arrested and a million party members were executed or died in the camps. The Great Terror unleashed in the mid-1930s was, according to Robert Conquest, the ‘defining event' in Stalin's reign. In it Stalin ‘finally crushed not merely opposition but any trace of overt independent thought'. Seventy per cent of the Communist party central committee was killed. The great majority of the Union of Writers was executed or sent to the gulags. Quotas were given to death squads throughout the country, and closer at hand Stalin turned on those closest to him, even on those who had carried out his executions. In a series of show trials men who had once been among the most powerful in Russia confessed to the most absurd ‘crimes' like ‘oppositionism' and ‘Social Democratic Deviation' in return for promises that their lives would be saved; promises that were almost never honoured. Torture was meted out to high and low alike. Leading politicians like Kalinin, the Soviet head of state, and Molotov, one time foreign minister, were made to continue as normal while their wives languished in the gulags (remarkably Polina Molotov, a Jew who had made the mistake of suggesting the creation of a Jewish homeland in the Crimea, outlived Stalin and returned from six years in the camps to remarry her husband).

Between 1929 and Stalin's death in 1953, 18 million people were sent to the gulags. There were thousands of prison camps organised into nearly five hundred distinct complexes and producing a third of
the country's gold, vast amounts of coal and timber and manufactured goods as varied as artillery shells and office furniture. Men and women were arrested simply because the prison industries needed people with particular types of expertise. Not only were the conditions in the camps unimaginable but many died before even getting there. One report showed that for every eight prisoners dispatched on the three-month train and boat trip to camps in the goldfields of Kolyma in the far north-east of Russia only five reached the port of Magadan alive. After enduring backbreaking labour in temperatures more than 45°C below freezing even fewer returned.

On top of the millions of prisoners dispatched to the gulags 6 million people were exiled to the wastes of Siberia and the Kazakh deserts, and all this with utmost cruelty. During the Second World War Stalin deported more than 2 million ethnic minority men, women and children to Siberia, supposedly for their collaboration with the Nazi invaders. Germans, Crimean Tartars, Chechens, Ingushi, Kalmyks, Karachai and Balkars were loaded into thousands of trucks supplied by the United States government, carted to railway depots and then shipped east. At least a third died en route or soon after arrival. Like so much else in Russian history the deportations mirrored what had happened in America, but did so on a scale whose horror dwarfed the ethnic cleansing of the American natives. Scale is also the main difference between Stalin's actions and those of earlier Russian leaders. During the First World War the tsarist regime deported 250,000 Germans, Gypsies, Hungarians, Jews and Turks from the Russian empire's western provinces for fear they would collaborate with the enemy. Yet again Stalin showed himself to be an old-style autocrat rather than a new-style communist.

In other areas too Stalin acted like the most reactionary of his tsarist predecessors. Genuine scientific enquiry that produced the ‘wrong' answer was suppressed; lunatic ideas that provided the ‘right' ideas were glorified. Trofim Lysenko promised Stalin that he would produce vast amounts of food by a succession of mad schemes such as freezing wheat seeds to shock them into super growth and making
all offices and factories keep rabbits. Lysenko became the most powerful scientist in Russia and sent thousands of his critics to the gulags. The nearest American equivalent operated on a far, far smaller scale. Ewen Cameron, one time president of the American Psychiatric Association, expounded mad theories about ‘depatterning' the human mind by giving his victims massive electrical shocks and cocktails of hallucinogenic drugs in order to reorder their ‘psychic driving'. His grotesque experiments at McGill University in Canada were funded by the CIA in the hope that he could help improve their interrogation techniques. Cameron's experiments eventually became public, and following a class-action lawsuit the CIA paid massive compensation to his victims (albeit not until 1988, nearly thirty years later). The victims of Lysenko were never compensated.

Like Ivan the Terrible by the end of his reign Stalin was clearly mad. He began to believe his own paranoid fantasies. During the Second World War he spent hours carefully annotating reports on suspects, like the Russian journalist purportedly recruited into French Intelligence by the novelist André Malraux, despite the fact that any sane person could see that the reports were entirely fictitious.

Stalin was a monster with few parallels in human history, who spouted a radically new ideology, and yet what stands out above all is the continuity of the Stalinist period with the preceding centuries of tsarist autocracy. Stalin, like Lenin before him, was a tsar in all but name. On one occasion in 1920 Lenin calmly ordered the execution of the wife and four young daughters of a man who refused to join the Red Army; such callous and casual terror sprang not from intellectual theorising about the inevitability of the proletarian revolution but from the Russian tradition of the unfettered use and abuse of power. Stalin merely carried that tradition to extremes – extremes seen already in the days of rulers like Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.