Stalin's Genocides (5 page)

The lives of Soviet citizens that were entrusted to his leadership were to Stalin—for all intents and purposes—

without inherent value. Much is made of Stalin’s later leadership during World War II, especially in today’s Russia. But too few Russians ask the question how many of the twenty-seven million Soviet victims of the war could be attributed to Stalin’s indifference to their loss, his readiness to place them in the line of fire without adequate weapons or protection, his continued willingness during the war to sentence hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens to exile and potential death in the Gulag, and his countless mistakes as “generalissimo” and commander-in-chief.

Even after the war and the securing of Soviet status as a great power, the repressions and political murders continued, though on a reduced scale. His personal vainglory only became more pronounced with the victory over Nazism, while his xenophobia was fed by the outbreak of the Cold War. In late 1948 Stalin initiated a campaign against Soviet Jews as “cosmopolitans,” spies for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and agents of the “Joint” (the Joint the making of a genocidaire 33

Distribution Service, a Jewish philanthropic organization). In June 1952 Stalin’s security agencies concocted a conspiracy of mostly Jewish Kremlin doctors, the so-called Doctors’ Plot, which may well have ended in the deportation to Siberia and the Far North of the Soviet Union’s entire Jewish population. We still do not have convincing documentation on the plan to deport the Jews. Nevertheless, one can conclude with certainty that it was most for-tunate for the Jews of the Soviet Union that Stalin died in March 1953, before any mass deportation action could have been implemented.

How does one account for the making of a mass murderer like Stalin? Was he born to kill? Or did the circumstances of his childhood and youth in the mountains of Georgia turn him into the brutal dictator who took so many millions of innocent lives? How does one factor in the influence of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, a small and highly disciplined elite group of professional revolutionaries, which Stalin joined as a young radical? The Bolsheviks were led by Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, himself a figure ready to sacrifice innocent lives for the greater cause of making the revolution and securing its gains. Stalin genuinely thought that Lenin was the “mountain eagle” of the revolutionary movement and learned at his feet. During the Civil War Lenin advocated applying “the most draconian measures” to fight the counterrevolution and personally signed execution lists of hundreds of alleged members of the White forces.2 Can we attribute Stalin’s brutality to being the “best student of Lenin,” as he was so often portrayed in Stalinist cant?

34

chapter 2

Further, one might ask whether the circumstances of Stalin’s seizure of power in the 1920s, which required craftiness, guile, and conspiracy, fed the blood lust of the victor against those whose political fortunes fell before him. From being the supposed “errand boy” of the revolution and a problematic leader during the Civil War, Stalin was elevated to become general secretary of the Central Committee of the party and one of the major contestants to replace Lenin. Stalin was not a political leader to tolerate resistance in any form, real, potential, or imagined.

Instead, he crushed his enemies, drove them into exile, and had them killed. The actual circumstances of assert-ing power against his rivals no doubt contributed to the killing carried out by the Soviet government under Stalin’s leadership. The very smell of blood, which was in the Kremlin air in the 1930s, might well have fed the growing violence of Stalin’s regime.

Some of his biographers suggest that the death of his first wife, Ekaterina (Kato) Svanidze, in 1908, soon after the birth of their son Iakov, and the suicide of his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, in 1932 prompted Stalin to cut off his feelings for fellow human beings. Others have asserted that Alliluyeva’s death and the assassination of Stalin’s close confederate Sergei Kirov in December 1934

were the crucial set of events that isolated him from his comrades and intensified his cold cruelty. His daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva wrote that after the assassination of Kirov, “Maybe he never trusted people very much, but after their deaths [her mother’s and Kirov’s] [he] stopped trusting them at all.”3 But the evidence for his coldness the making of a genocidaire 35

in face of human suffering is more cumulative than that; it includes aspects of his childhood and immersion in the revolutionary movement, as well as his performance in the Russian Civil War and the political struggles of the 1920s.

Nevertheless, until the early 1930s, Stalin was still able to experience periods of filial warmth in his family life and genuine friendship in moments of relaxation.

In short, there is no single key to understanding Stalin’s violence in the 1930s, but rather—as is so often the case in the history of genocide—a perfect storm of factors intersected that brought Stalin to engage in the mass murder of millions. There was his own violent personality and development as a young man and revolutionary; his attachment to Bolshevism and the “hard” approach of Lenin to the problem of seizing and maintaining power; the very nature of Soviet power and its transformative Utopian communist ideology in a backward and traditionalist country; and the circumstances of Stalin’s victorious struggle for power and his maximalist ideological goals.

But before everything else, there was the malevolent and murderous leader. As Martin Malia writes: “The personal paranoia and the individual sadism of Stalin the man must constitute the decisive element that made his reign seem, in Bukharin’s metaphor, like the return of Genghis Khan.”4

Stalin was born Iosif Djugashvili in the Georgian mountain town of Gori, some fifty miles west of Tblisi (then Tiflis). This region of the Caucasus—beautiful and majestic—was also beset by poverty, economic backwardness, and Russian exploitation. The Georgians are a proud 36

chapter 2

and boisterous people who fostered their national identity through traditional song, the Georgian Orthodox Church, which predated Russian orthodoxy, and tales of bandits and fighters, who defended Georgia’s independence and culture from the country’s Iranian, Turkish, and Russian enemies. Most biographers give Stalin’s birth date as December 6, 1878, when Georgia was under the thumb of the tsarist imperial administration and subjected to Russianization campaigns directed from St. Petersburg and carried out by local governors. As the son of Vissarion (Besarion or Beso) Djugashvili, a young, handsome, and rough-hewn shoemaker, and Ekaterina (Keke) Geladze, the intelligent, strong-willed, and pious daughter of Georgian peasants, Stalin grew up amid both the poverty and the religiosity of Georgian urban dwellers of peasant background.

Some biographers would like to attribute Stalin’s murderousness of the 1930s to the fact that his father was known to have beaten him, sometimes quite brutally. In fact, Beso grew increasingly fond of drink, and by the time he finally abandoned his family in 1890, he had become something of an alcoholic. At the same time, Stalin’s mother was enormously devoted to her young son, especially given the fact that two other children had died in infancy. But the picture of Stalin’s youth is more complicated than that proffered by some of his biographers. His mother was sometimes known to have beaten her son and was very strict with him, while his father was probably not untypical in using physical punishment against his son, especially after having a lot to drink. In neither case does the making of a genocidaire 37

the explanation of excessive physical abuse stand up to close scrutiny. Stalin himself mentioned to Emil Ludwig in an interview: “My parents were uneducated people, but they treated me not badly at all,” and Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, notes that her father told her: “Fights, crudeness were not a rare phenomenon in this poor, semi-literate family where the head of the family drank. The mother beat the little boy, the husband beat her. But the boy loved his mother and defended her: once he threw a knife at his father.”5

In fact, young Stalin—Soso, as he was known to his family and friends—cannot be said to have had such an unusual upbringing for the Georgian urban lower-class milieu. He ran with his young friends in the streets of Gori and engaged in fisticuffs and unruly gang behavior, which were common at that time and place. He contracted a bad case of smallpox as a boy, leaving his face permanently scarred with unsightly pockmarks He also limped slightly from injuries sustained after being run over by one car-riage and had a withered left shoulder and arm from being hit by another one. But it is also the case that at the religious school he attended in Gori, he was known as a very fine student and for having a beautiful singing voice. He read a lot and studied hard. Until very late in his life, he continued the habits of an autodidact that he picked up as a boy.6 While some biographers portray young Stalin as a ruffian and thug, mean to animals and always ready for a fight, more characteristic of his youth was a proclivity to romanticism, traditional Georgian song, and poetry. This strong streak of romanticism deepened Soso’s attachment 38

chapter 2

to the Georgian national tradition and to the epic songs that were memorized by its youthful adherents.7

Like an entire generation of disaffected Georgian youth, Sosa recited the verses of Shota Rustaveli’s
The Knight in
Panther’s Skin
, a twelfth-century epic poem that glorified Georgian national and heroic traits. One of Stalin’s biographers writes that Stalin took some of his favorite say-ings from Rustaveli, including: “My life is pitiless, like the beast,” and “A close [friend] turned out to be an enemy more dangerous than a foe.”8 Among Stalin’s favorite works were those of the Georgian patriotic writer A. Kazbegi, whose famous epic poem,
The Patricide
, extolled the virtues and heroism of Koba, the just avenger of the Georgian people. Koba, writes another recent biographer,

“represented a noble ideal of a man of honor unwilling to submit to injustice.”9 Stalin clearly identified with Koba, adopting the name as his first underground pseudonym in 1903, and a few of his friends called him Koba until the end of his life. Even when he adopted the underground name of “Stalin”—man of steel, a perfect reflection of the image he wanted to project—shortly before World War I, for several years he would continue to use the letter “K”

for Koba before Stalin.10

Stalin’s mother was determined that her talented and beloved son should become a priest. For that purpose, she managed only with great determination and conviction to have him accepted as a scholarship student at the Georgian Orthodox Seminary in Tiflis. There, in 1894, young Sosa was forced to study Russian subjects in the Russian language under mostly Russian priests, which grated on the making of a genocidaire 39

him and his classmates. Tiflis was the great multinational center of the western Caucasus. Unlike the provincial backwater of Gori, Tiflis exposed Sosa to the development of political radicalism in the Russian Empire, and the emergence of the working-class movement. It was at the seminary that Soso first read the radical literature that suffused student circles throughout the empire in this period. For the first time, Stalin was introduced to Spencer and Chernyshevskii, Darwin and Marx. Especially crucial for Soso was the potent mixture of Georgian radical literature with the arguments of the Marxists against the populists. Even as the eventual fount of Marxist-Leninist ideology in the Soviet Union and around the world, Stalin never lost his attachment to the Georgian literary tradition he absorbed as a seminary student.

But soon, too, Stalin would fall in with serious radical groups in the city, where he got involved as a propagan-dist among workers. In 1899 Stalin left the seminary for good to engage full time in social-democratic circles. With the police on his tail, Stalin went underground, moving to Batumi, where he actively organized strike activities. Like many young, educated, and idealistic imperial subjects of the “periphery” (Congress Poland, Georgia, Armenia, or the Pale of Settlement), Stalin was attracted to the growing strength and militancy of the workers’ movement and its social-democratic leadership. Already, Stalin demonstrated a number of character traits as a young revolutionary that persisted throughout his adulthood: intolerance of differing opinions; a penchant for making enemies; and a sullen, private demeanor. Many memoirists from the time 40

chapter 2

mention his “wry,” “slight,” or “mocking” smile, as if he knew something they did not and would not reveal it. At the same time he was restrained, quiet, and focused. His long-time associate Lazar Kaganovich remembered: “Stalin was not at all as he is portrayed [today]. . . . I know Stalin from the first period of his work, when he was a modest person, very modest. He not only lived modestly, but he carried himself modestly with all of us.”11

Between 1902, when he was arrested in Batumi, and the revolution of 1917, Stalin was pursued by the police, was arrested and exiled twice, and lived underground as a social-democratic agitator. For short periods of time he managed to find his way to Europe and St. Petersburg on party business. He spent an especially formative period in Baku from 1907 to 1910, where his exposure to the powerful multinational oil workers’ movement in the city convinced him that open agitation could often be as effective as underground propaganda. Above all, he learned flexibility in his methods and a realistic take on revolutionary opportunities. Dealing with the powerful Baku trade union movement forced him into a number of tactical adjustments. This hard-nosed pragmatism characterized his politics almost until the very end of his life, when he succumbed to the self-absorbed hubris of his old age.

Stalin’s attachment to Bolshevism and to the radicalism of Lenin came quickly and unambiguously. Everything about Lenin appealed to the young Georgian radical: Lenin’s dedication to a party of professional revolutionaries and to an uncompromisingly revolutionary brand of Marxism; Lenin’s polemical style and intraparty com-the making of a genocidaire 41