Titans of History (64 page)

Chiang's militarily incompetent kleptocracy, heavily backed by America, collapsed as Mao, backed by massive Soviet aid and advice from Stalin, gradually drove the Kuomintang off the mainland.
In 1949, Mao declared the People's Republic of China, embarking on an imperial reign of willful caprice, ideological radicalism, messianic egotism, massive incompetence and mass-murder: “We must kill. We say it's good to kill,” ordered this “man without limits.” Three million people were murdered that year.

In 1951–2, Mao subjected China to his so-called Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns to eliminate China's bourgeoisie. Spies infiltrated everywhere, informing on supposed transgressors, who were heavily fined, sent to labor camps or executed. Mao ruled like a red emperor, paranoid about his security, always on the move, shrewdly manipulating his henchmen and pitilessly sacrificing old comrades to maintain power at all costs. He constantly declared: “Too lenient, not killing enough.” While he lived like an emperor on fifty private estates using military dancing girls as “imperial concubines,” he drove China to become a superpower, deploying Chinese troops against America in the Korean War as a way of persuading Stalin to give him military, especially nuclear, technology. It would not matter, he mused, “if half the Chinese were to die” in a nuclear holocaust.

Mao continued to wage war on his people throughout the 1950s. The 1958–9 Anti-Rightist Campaign—through which over half a million people were labeled rightists—saw hundreds of thousands consigned to years of hard labor or execution. The Great Leap Forward of 1958–62, a massive drive to increase steel production, encouraged villagers to create useless little forges, coupled with a move to collectivize China's peasantry into rural communes. Emulating Stalin with his manmade 1932–3 famine, Mao sold food to buy arms even though China starved in the the greatest famine in history: 38 million died. When defense minister Marshal Peng Dehuai criticized his policies, Mao purged him but his anointed successor, President Liu Shaoqi, managed to claw back some power from Mao in 1962.

Denouncing Liu, who was destroyed and allowed to die in poverty, Mao avenged himself by getting control of the army and state through his chosen successor, the talented, neurotic Marshal Lin Biao and supple chief factotum Premier Zhou Enlai. He masterminded another terror, the Cultural Revolution, in which he asserted his total domination of China by attacking the party and state, ordering gangs of students, secret policemen and thugs to humiliate, murder and destroy lives and culture. Three million were killed between 1966 and 1976; millions more were deported or tortured.

From 1966, Mao used his wife Jiang Qing to promote his purges. An only child and the daughter of a concubine, Jiang had become an actress after leaving university, acquiring an enduring belief in the importance of the arts. She had married Mao in 1939. Her call for radical forms of expression, instilled with “ideologically correct” subject matter, escalated into an all-out assault on the existing artistic and intellectual elites. Renowned for her inflammatory rhetoric, she manipulated mass-communication techniques to whip young Red Guards into a frenzy before sending them out to attack—verbally and physically—anything “bourgeois” or “reactionary.” In an orgy of denunciation, terror and murder, the Communist Party, including moderates like President Liu Shaoqi and General Secretary Deng Xiaoping, was purged. Mao personally directed both the individual persecutions of his closest comrades, using Jiang Qing, whom he hated, and the vast chaotic violence aimed at restoring his absolute tyranny.

The aging Mao fell out with Lin Biao, creator of the
Little Red Book
, who died in a plane crash while fleeing in 1971. This left Mao in the hands of the grotesque Jiang Qing and the Maoist radicals known as the Gang of Four.

Having fallen out with Moscow, Mao pulled off one last coup: US President Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972. Dying, Mao restored, then again purged, the formidable pragmatist Deng
Xiaoping. Mao disdained Jiang Qing but she and the Gang of Four remained powerful. Mao died in 1976.

Deng arrested Madame Mao in a palace coup. In 1981 Jiang was found guilty of “counter-revolutionary” crimes. Her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment but she committed suicide in 1991. A hated figure, she was described by one biographer as a “vicious woman who helped dispose of many people”; the “white-boned demon” who, in her own words (when on trial), was “Chairman Mao's dog. Whomever he asked me to bite, I bit.”

In the 21st century, Mao's China has been tempered by capitalism but he remains its Great Helmsman, his mummy still worshipped in its tomb, his Communist Party still in absolute control, his secret police still brutally repressing political, cultural and personal freedom. Mao remains the most formative and powerful Chinese statesman of the last few centuries.

1894–1940

I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others … I am asking for only one thing—let me finish my work
.

Isaac Babel

The Soviet author Isaac Babel ranks alongside the Frenchman Maupassant (indeed he wrote a story called “Guy de Maupassant”) as one of the most gifted short-story writers of all—and his fate was
even more tragic. Babel's passionate, tender, original, sensual, violent and witty stories exemplify the beauty and power of the genre. His gift as a writer is encapsulated in the comment of his friend the poet Osip Mandelstam: “It is not often that one sees such undisguised curiosity in the eyes of a grown-up.”

Babel was born in the Jewish streets of the cosmopolitan port of Odessa in the Ukraine. The Jewish underworld of gangsters, whores and rabbis he observed there is vividly depicted in his
Tales of Odessa
. Babel's life was spent defying persecution. As a child, he had seen Odessa's Jews murdered in a pogrom. When he moved to St. Petersburg to study literature—a city where Jews were banned along with “traitors, malcontents and whiners”—he had to assume a false name.

Babel fought briefly on the Romanian front during the First World War, but he was injured and discharged. It was his experiences as a correspondent for the Red Army's savage and primitive Red Cossacks during Lenin's 1920 war to spread revolution into Poland that inspired his greatest collection of short stories,
Red Cavalry
. These tales of the brutality of war made Babel, in the words of his daughter, “famous almost overnight.” However, various Soviet commanders close to Stalin were disgusted by the frank and rambunctious portrayal of the Red Cossacks and became dangerous enemies.

Babel flourished in the relative liberality of the 1920s, but as Stalin's Terror intensified, he ceased to write as a sort of protest: “I have invented a new genre,” Babel told the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934, “the genre of silence.” In the 1920s his wife and daughter had moved to France, his mother and sister to Brussels; but despite increasing repression and censorship Babel kept faith with Russia's revolution and chose to remain. He was a raconteur and bon viveur. He was also fatally fascinated by the Terror and rashly but characteristically set about writing a novel about the secret police. Babel had had a long affair with the flirtatious wife of Nikolai
Yezhov, Stalin's secret-police boss at the height of the Terror. When Yezhov fell from power, his wife was driven to suicide and all her lovers, including Babel, were dragged into the case and destroyed.

In 1939 the Soviet secret service arrested Babel at his cottage in the writers' colony of Peredelkino, leaving behind his new wife and baby. Interrogated and tortured, he confessed to a long-held association with Trotskyites and to anti-Soviet activity. Tried in prison, he was shot on Stalin's orders for espionage in January 1940. His family was told that he had died in a Siberian prison camp. In 1954 Babel was posthumously cleared of all charges. His reputation as a great writer has risen steadily ever since.

1895–1940

If during this operation, an extra thousand people are shot, that's not such a big deal
.

Nikolai Yezhov, 1937

Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was the dwarfish Soviet secret policeman who organized and coordinated Stalin's Great Terror, during which a million innocent victims were shot and millions more exiled to concentration camps. Such was the frenzy of arrest, torture and killing under Yezhov's sometimes meticulous, sometimes drunken control that this murderous witch-hunt was known as the Meatgrinder.

Born in a small Lithuanian town to a forest warden (who also ran a brothel) and a maid, Yezhov only had a few years' schooling
before going to work in a factory. He joined the Red Army after the Revolution and served during the Civil War. He was a shrewd, able, tactful and ambitious party administrator and personnel expert. By the early 1930s, he was close to Stalin, in charge of all party personnel appointments and a central committee secretary. A colleague noted that “I don't know a more ideal worker. After entrusting him with a job, he'll do it. But he doesn't know when to stop.” But this suited Stalin, who called his new favorite “my blackberry”—a play on the word
yezhevika
.

In 1934 the assassination of Stalin's closest henchman, Sergei Kirov, allowed him to unleash the Great Terror against “enemies of the people,” real and imagined. In 1935 Stalin gave Yezhov special responsibility for supervising the NKVD, the secret police. The chief of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda, was out of favor; Yezhov aimed to destroy him and take his place. But Yezhov's first task was to take over the case against Stalin's former allies, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Yezhov supervised their interrogations, threatening to kill their families, turning up the heating in their cells in midsummer—but also promising them their lives if they confessed to absurd crimes at the first show trial. They finally agreed. The show trial, staged in 1936, was a success, but despite Yezhov's promises, Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot in his presence. Yagoda had the bullets dug out of their brains so he could keep them in his desk; later Yezhov found the bullets, and kept them in his own drawer. In September 1936 Stalin sacked Yagoda and promoted Yezhov to people's commissar of internal affairs (NKVD).

As Yezhov supervised the spread of the Terror, arresting ever-larger circles of suspects to be tortured into confessing imaginary crimes, the Soviet press worked the population up into a frenzy of witch-hunting against Trotskyite spies and terrorists. Yezhov claimed that Yagoda had tried to kill him by spraying his curtains with cyanide. He then arrested most of Yagoda's officers and had
them shot. Then he arrested Yagoda himself. “Better that ten innocent men should suffer than one spy get away,” Yezhov announced. “When you chop wood, chips fly!”

On Stalin's orders, in May 1937 Yezhov arrested Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the most talented Red Army officer, together with many other top generals. The idea was to break the independent power of the army, but the generals had to confess to convince the other Soviet leaders that they were guilty of crimes against the state. Yezhov personally supervised their savage torture: when Tukhachevsky's confession was found in the archives in the 1990s it was covered in a brown spray that was found to be the blood spatter of a human body in motion. The generals were all shot in Yezhov's presence. Stalin, who never attended torture sessions or executions, questioned him on their conduct at the final moment. In all, some 40,000 officers were shot.

Yezhov now expanded the Terror in a bizarre way, clearly on Stalin's orders, by initiating random killing by numbers, giving each city and region a quota of two categories: category one was to be shot and category two to be exiled. These quotas constantly expanded, until approximately a million were shot and many millions more deported to hellish labor camps in Siberia. Wives of the more prominent victims were arrested and usually shot too. Children between the ages of one and three were to be confined to orphanages, but children older than that could be shot. “Beat, destroy without sorting out,” Yezhov ordered, adding, “Better too far than not far enough.”

By 1938 the Soviet Union was in a turmoil of fear and killing, all supervised by Yezhov. Stalin kept a low profile, but Yezhov was now everywhere, hailed as the hero-avenger of a society in which enemies were omnipresent. He was now almost as powerful as Stalin, worshipped in poems and songs, with towns named in his honor. Yezhov devised special execution chambers at Moscow's
notorious Lubyanka Prison and elsewhere; the chambers had a sloping concrete floor like an abattoir, wooden walls to absorb bullets and hoses to wash away the blood.

But by now Yezhov was cracking up and losing control. He constantly toured the country arresting and killing; he worked all night, torturing suspects and drinking heavily; he was becoming more and more paranoid, fearing that at any moment Stalin would turn against him. He had many of his close friends, ex-girlfriends and his own godfather shot. The stress ate at him: he boasted drunkenly that he ruled the country, he could arrest Stalin. As the third show trial starring Bukharin and Yagoda opened in Moscow, even Stalin became alarmed by the uncontrolled nature of the Terror he had unleashed. It had served its purpose, and now he needed a scapegoat. Stalin was hearing about Yezhov's excesses, drunkenness, debauchery and boasting. He ordered Yezhov to kill his top lieutenants, including his deputy, who was chloroformed in Yezhov's own office and then injected with poison. As he felt Stalin's disapproval, Yezhov started to kill anyone who could incriminate him—a thousand were killed in five days without Stalin's permission.

“I may be small in stature,” Yezhov once said, “but my hands are strong—Stalin's hands!” Yezhov was so tiny—just 5 feet (151 cm) tall—that as a young man he had been rejected by the tsarist army. He was also unstable, sickly, sexually confused, frail and skinny, but at the same time jovial, hard-drinking and possessed of a puerile sense of humor (including a taste for farting competitions). With his handsome face, blue eyes and thick dark hair, and his fondness for dancing, singing and playing the guitar, he was a popular figure, especially with women—although, unusually for the Soviet leadership, he was promiscuously bisexual.