Empires Apart (67 page)

As time goes by these perceptions change: history is rewritten, but rarely overnight. History evolves and evolves selectively. Just as George Washington is remembered as a freedom fighter not a slave owner, so Stalin is remembered by many Russians for bringing electricity not suppressing elections. Just as the
Mayflower
is remembered and the Mystic Massacre forgotten, so the battle for Stalingrad is remembered and the Gulags obscured. A more balanced view may yet emerge in Russia but American experience provides no guarantee that it will. In 1988 a Russian presidential commission on the crimes of communism estimated that there were 30 million victims of Lenin and Stalin. The commission has been largely ignored. It is not just that Stalin is still venerated by a few of the old guard but that Russian society as a whole has never been forced to come to terms with its past. There has never been an educational programme of de-Stalinisation similar to the de-Nazification in Germany. ‘Holocaust denial' in Germany is largely restricted to a lunatic fringe, but a recent poll showed that only 30 per cent of Russians thought that Stalin did more bad than good. And in another poll by the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Centre 20 per cent of respondents described Stalin's role in Russian history as ‘very positive' and 30 per cent as ‘somewhat positive'. Communist party leader Gennady Zyuganov was
still proclaiming the ‘great name of Stalin' more than half a century after his death, and calling for Volgograd to revert to the name Stalingrad.

Rayfield offers an illuminating example of modern Russia's attitude to its Stalinist past. In 2002 the Russian post office issued a series of stamps honouring the Russian Counter-Intelligence service; they featured some of the greatest mass murderers of modern times – men like Sergei Puzitsky, who organised the killing of half a million Cossacks, and Vladimir Styrne, who slaughtered thousands of Uzbeks on a whim of Stalin. The stamps excited virtually no comment inside Russia or outside.

Stalin's death fundamentally changed the course of Russian imperial history. By their very nature autocracies are more dependent on the character of individual autocrats than democracies are on the character of presidents or prime ministers. The Russian empire had sailed across the ocean of history for centuries, sometimes, when commanded by a Peter or Catherine, rushing forward, at other times appearing almost becalmed. Stalin took advantage of stormy seas to send the empire racing in new directions, and when he died it continued – still from a distance seeming to be under full sail, but actually drifting rudderless to its inevitable destruction on the rocks of nationalisms that only Stalin could suppress.

Just as the man Stalin most resembled, Ivan the Terrible, had surrounded himself with lesser mortals who proved incapable of following in his footsteps, so Stalin's entourage emerged blinking from his shadow and groped for a way forward. Cabinet posts were divided up among the most senior apparatchiks, who declared their commitment to collective leadership but were wracked with feuds and were devoid of anything that might be called vision. The one exception was the unlikely figure who immediately tried to seize the reins of power: the all-powerful interior ministry was taken by Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's last secret police chief, and a man who was if anything more manipulative, more sadistic and certainly more intelligent than Stalin himself. He rose up through the state apparatus on a tidal wave of blood. Unlike many who signed Stalin's death warrants, Beria personally tortured and murdered those in his way. For relaxation he was driven around Moscow in an American convertible,
abducting women and, especially, young girls for his personal pleasure. He was simultaneously the fawning sycophant, brilliant administrator and cold-blooded killer. Too late it also transpired that he alone had a vision that might have preserved the empire he nearly inherited.

American presidents might boast of being born in a log cabin, but Beria was born in a three-walled hovel with a hole in the roof as a chimney – in what is now the hotly disputed territory of Abkhazia. Like Stalin, Beria was not a Russian but a Georgian (or more accurately in his case a Mingrelian, one of Georgia's ethnic minorities). Both men emerged from the vicious quasi-tribal politics of Russia's colonies in the Caucasus.

A photograph in Rayfield's classic work
Stalin and His Hangmen
shows Beria seated between the party secretaries of Abkhazia and Armenia at a conference in 1935. Within a year Beria had personally shot the Armenian and invited the Abkhaz, Nestor Lakoba, to dinner at his apartment, where he was poisoned. The fate of Lakoba perfectly illustrated the character of both Stalin and Beria. The Abkhaz leader had once been possibly the only close friend Stalin ever had. Year after year the men holidayed together with their families. Beria long conspired to undermine the influence Lakoba had on the Soviet dictator without success. Eventually Lakoba made the mistake of trying to persuade Stalin not to unleash the full force of his blood lust on Abkhazia, and Stalin turned on his supposed friend. Seizing his opportunity, Beria not only murdered Lakoba but also had his mother bludgeoned to death, his wife tortured for two years until she died, and his children held in prison until old enough to be tortured and executed.

Conspiracy theorists have held that Beria even murdered Stalin. The evidence is flimsy, although it is seems clear that Stalin had been planning yet another purge, with Beria marked as a potential victim, and when the Russian leader collapsed into a coma Beria delayed sending for medical support until it was too late.

Beria had an almost unique insight into the real working of the Russian empire. After decades in the secret police he knew better than anyone the strains that Stalin's terror and constant purges were creating
on Russian society; through the immense network of prison industries he had his finger on the economic pulse of the nation, and his agents around the world provided massive amounts of sometimes fanciful data about the outside world. Beria saw what the rest of the communist oligarchs barely glimpsed: the Russian empire was overstretched and could not continue as it was; Stalin's legacy could not survive Stalin. The signs were already there. Red Army soldiers had returned from captured territory in Central Europe unsettled by the relative wealth they had encountered (and many had been shot or sent to the gulags to stop the contagion of their experience from spreading). Lend-Lease had demonstrated that the American economy was simply in another league. Unrest continued to simmer not just in the new colonies but also in many of the pre-war colonies in the Caucasus.

Within three days of Stalin's death Beria was starting to dismantle the gulag system and change the country's economic priorities. Massive civil engineering projects with little real benefit were stopped and 1.2 million prisoners were released. Half a million prosecutions that were in the pipeline were cancelled. The vast majority of political prisoners remained incarcerated, but some of the most famous were publicly rehabilitated; for example, Foreign Minister Molotov's wife was flown back from her camp, and remarried. Beria banned torture and had the notorious Leforotovo torture chambers in Moscow dismantled. More fundamentally, he started to dismantle the apparatus of empire. He rehabilitated nationalists in his native Georgia. Starting in Ukraine and Lithuania, and quickly spreading to Belarus and Latvia, he replaced Russian officials with locals. Official proceedings were once again to be conducted in the local language. It was an amazing turnaround. Beria had been responsible for ethnic and class cleansing in the occupied territories on a massive scale. He had arranged for hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to be deported from frontier regions before or during the war: Belarussians, Estonians, Finns, Germans, Iranians, Koreans, Kurds, Latvians, Lithuanians, Moldavians, Poles, Romanians, Western Ukrainians (Ruthenians) – and that ignores Caucasian tribes like the Chechens, which until recently few
in the west had ever heard of. After the war hundreds of thousands more had been deported from the newly conquered territories. In the most famous case Beria recommended to Stalin in March 1940 the execution of 14,700 Polish prisoners of war and 11,000 other Polish prisoners: 4,143 were famously buried in the forest at Katyn – and the Katyn massacre of army officers and intellectuals became the most well known of hundreds of similar horrors organised by Beria.

The sudden storm of change unleashed by Beria on Stalin's death alarmed the rest of the cabinet, and their unease boiled over with Beria's next proposal: granting independence to the new colony of East Germany. Half a million East Germans, including 3,000 Communist party members, had fled to the west, and there were riots in the streets. Beria proposed reaching an agreement with the United States to create a unified and neutral Germany with a mixed economy. This was too much for the rest of the cabinet to stomach. After just a hundred days in power Beria was seized at a cabinet meeting, thrown into prison and six months later shot.

For the next forty years Soviet leaders persisted in their doomed attempt to keep Stalin's empire alive. Khrushchev, who became the next leader, really believed that the supposedly rational central planning of the Russian economic model would ultimately prove superior to the corporatist model in the west, but increasingly his successors came to realise that the economic gap between the two superpowers was continuing to widen. By the end of the century Russia produced around 1 per cent of world output, the US around 30 per cent. The Russian empire could only be held together with brute force, and without economic muscle and the manic spirit of Stalin himself brute force could not be sustained, although parts of the Soviet state machine tried to continue as if it could.

The KGB provided a route to the top for men like Yuri Andropov and Vladimir Putin, but it could not hold the empire together. The Red Army had the numbers to crush uprisings in eastern Europe, but when it came to colonial conflicts in Afghanistan or the Caucasus its numerical and nuclear superiority counted for nothing. Above all the economy could
not keep pace with the rest of the world; in the age of the microchip the regimented armies of unskilled workers that had dragged Russia into the twentieth century stopped it entering the twenty-first.

It is obvious now that the Russian empire, which had seemed so threatening in the first decade after the Second World War, was destined to collapse – leaving America as the sole imperial power. It was not so obvious at the time. Two things seemed to stand in the way of the United States achieving global supremacy. The Soviet Union appeared to be proclaiming the dawning of its own new quasi-imperial era, and these pretensions had not yet been exposed for what they were. And while the Soviet dawn was breaking the banners of other empires still fluttered limply in the dusk. To establish and maintain its global supremacy the United States had to deal not only with Russia and recalcitrant banana republics but with its former allies in western Europe.

Ever since Thomas Paine urged the colonists to revolution, America's relationship with Britain had been ambivalent. Enemies as often as allies in the nineteenth century, the two nations joined together to fight two world wars in the twentieth, but there remained tensions. After the First World War the British ambassador in Washington had complained about being treated as a ‘vassal', and there were times during the the Second World War when the patience of both governments wore thin.

There were fundamental differences between the way Britain and the other European imperial powers saw the world and the way it was seen from Washington. British wartime cabinet minutes show that disagreements between the allies were not restricted to political and military matters. The cabinet, for example, was much exercised by the racial policies of the US military. Churchill pleaded for understanding, but members of his cabinet – especially fellow Tory Viscount Cranbourne – were bitterly opposed to any ‘colour bar' on British soil. (It was eventually decided that the US would be allowed to enforce racial segregation on its bases but British pubs and cinemas would be open to all.) Immediately after the war there were bitter disputes about the US assumption that the starving populations of liberated Europe should be fed from the carefully
hoarded British reserves, without any rationing being imposed in the US; as Churchill said, the ‘US soldier eats five times what ours does', and yet it was always British food stocks that were ‘raided' when needed.

The root cause of tensions between the two nations was that psychologically Britain had not adjusted to the new global economic and military realities after 1918. The British empire had appeared to continue unchanged, but the Second World War made its fragility apparent to all and its dissolution inevitable. Exactly the same happened to the French empire. The batons of empire had passed across the Atlantic but the politicians in London and Paris failed to see how comprehensively the world had changed. Their illusions collapsed in 1956. The Egyptian dictator Gamel Abdul Nasser seized control of the Suez canal. Britain and France promptly invaded Egypt. President Eisenhower was furious. He was not concerned with the morality or legality of the invasion – indeed the United States used exactly the same arguments thirty-three years later when it invaded Panama – but with the fact that not only did the Anglo-French invasion, conducted in collusion with Israel, threaten America's strategy of buying Arab friendship to protect its oil supplies, but Britain and France had launched the attack without American knowledge, let alone permission. Eisenhower ordered the two European powers to withdraw immediately or face severe American sanctions. They had no choice but to obey; it was an ignominious end to three centuries of European imperial supremacy.

A new imperial age had arrived.

CHAPTER 14

WINNING THE WAR THAT WASN'T