The Stalin we hardly knew

Stalin is in the air. The Medvedev brothers, Roy and Zhores, neither of whom fared especially well under Soviet communism, have jointly written a revisionist work, “The Unknown Stalin.” Just published in English, it depicts him as intelligent, patriotic and a better military leader than most previous biographies have. A few years back, I tried my hand at the dictator’s psychology in a novel. This spring, Russian television plans a major special on the private life of Josef Stalin. Now Simon Sebag Montefiore weighs in with a nearly 800-page volume.

Why all the interest? It’s been a little more than 50 years since Stalin died in 1953, the half-century mark being always a convenient point to look back and sum up. And it’s already been 13 years since the house that Stalin built, the USSR, collapsed and vanished. We now have a perspective that was impossible as long as the Soviet Union was a going concern. Most important, some of the secret archives have been opened, affording new insights that shade nuances, shift emphases. However, many of Stalin’s own papers were destroyed immediately after his death so they would not come back to haunt henchmen such as Nikita Khrushchev, who made a career of anti-Stalinism.

Montefiore, author of a previous book on Catherine the Great’s lover Prince Grigory Potemkin, has made use of archival material and new interviews in his effort “simply to write a portrait of Stalin, his top twenty potentates, and their families, to show how they ruled and how they lived in the unique culture of his years of supreme power.” It is definitely a portrait and not a biography in the traditional, historical sense. Stalin’s obsessive rivalry with and assassination of Leon Trotsky are mentioned only in passing; the Battle of Kursk, arguably the turning point of World War II, is treated in a few paragraphs. But love affairs, erotic escapades and perversions are treated in the kind of detail that makes sense only in a history of a court, courtiers and courtesans. As the author puts it nicely, in Stalin’s entourage, “People died of gossip.”

Fittingly, for a book that will concentrate on the personal, the domestic and the sexual, the tale begins in 1932 with the suicide of Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin’s second wife and mother of two of his three children. At the time of her death, he was 53, she 31. He had known her as a little girl, staying often in the home of her father, a radical worker. The couple clashed often about everything from how to run the country to how to raise the children. She was the strict one, Stalin spoiled them rotten.

Montefiore depicts Stalin as a changed man after his wife’s suicide and the assassination two years later of his friend Sergei Kirov, leader of the Leningrad Communist Party. “I am absolutely an orphan,” Stalin confided to a relative. When exactly his connection with the rest of humanity snapped is difficult to date, but it is a fact that by the time of her suicide Stalin already was sending people to their deaths in great numbers in two campaigns with gray Soviet names: collectivization and industrialization. And Stalin used Kirov’s assassination to launch the Great Terror, a purge of potential opponents that would result in millions perishing. Even during that period, Montefiore presents him as something of a human being, “before the Terror turned him into a latter-day Ivan the Terrible.” Revisionism is one thing, but to present Stalin as a victim of the Terror is absurd.

Once the Terror was underway, the chief of the secret police became of special importance in Stalin’s inner circle, though the job was always crucial in an agency formed only weeks after the Bolshevik Revolution. It was a most dangerous job. Those who had it were the sorcerer’s apprentices consumed by the fury they unleashed. The first to go was Genrikh Yagoda, who during interrogation turned metaphysical: “[T]here must be a God after all. From Stalin I deserved nothing but gratitude for my faithful service; from God, I deserved the most severe punishment for having violated his commandments thousands of times. Now look where I am and judge for yourself: is there a God or not?”

Yagoda’s successor was Nikolai Yezhov, whose wife ran one of the more chic literary salons of Moscow; great writers like Isaac Babel rubbed shoulders with the people who would send them to the camps or death, if they weren’t dispatched first themselves. Yezhov’s wife was supposed to have had an affair with Babel, a dangerous game to be playing in Stalin’s Moscow, where everyone seemed related by blood, marriage or adultery.

Yezhov, known as the “Bloody Dwarf,” presided over the worst of the Terror, which reached its apogee in 1937. The work was so intense, Montefiore writes, that Yezhov would go straight from the torture chambers to Politburo meetings, “spots of clotted blood on the hem and cuffs of [his] peasant blouse.” The narrative adroitly catches the atmosphere of the time, the “evangelical enthusiasm of their blood-lust.” Yezhov’s own downfall, a mixture of decadent sexuality and touching loyalty, makes for one of the better tales in the book.

Stalin was both near and far, a distant figure waving from on top of Lenin’s tomb or phoning Boris Pasternak (author of “Doctor Zhivago”) for his opinion of a recently arrested fellow poet Osip Mandelstam. Taking the moral high ground though he had ordered the poet’s incarceration, Stalin said: “If I was a poet and my poet-friend found himself in trouble, I would do anything to help him.” Pasternak did make some defense of his friend but seemed more interested in discussing the great issues of life and death. “The baffled Stalin rang off,” writes Montefiore, though how he knows Stalin was “baffled” and not, say, irked or just plain busy isn’t clear.

Stalin was a great micromanager. He checked and signed the execution lists himself and supposedly had a sound system that allowed him to listen in on interrogations. As with all criminal dictators, many of his orders were never written and could depend on a gesture or tone of voice. There were too many to keep track of. Once, asking about a friend, Stalin was informed that the man had been executed. He replied: “Pity! I wanted to make him Ambassador to Yugoslavia.... “

That may also have been an example of Stalin’s humor, which always had a sardonic, perverted twist to it. When Bulgarian communist Georgi Dmitrov asked for help with some of his jailed comrades, Stalin replied: “What can I do for them, Georgi? All my own relatives are in prison too.” The joke was, of course, that not only could Stalin have his relatives released in two seconds’ time but he had them imprisoned in the first place. Stalin liked to play helpless, powerless. His favorite game with daughter Svetlana was making her “the Boss” and obeying her orders. It was the luxury of the supremely powerful -- a way of extending one’s power by giving it away or at least pretending to.

The little anecdotes work when well rendered in English, but too much poor translation has wormed its way into this book. Threats by another secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria (“Do you care about seeing the sun rise and fall every day? Be careful!”), sound wooden and idiotic. A note from Stalin to Yagoda, quoted in full, sounds like some early, botched translation of a 19th century novel: “[A]rrange this business of Troyanovsky. He’s entangled, the devil, and we are responsible [for helping him out]. Oh to God, or to the Devil, with him! Arrange this business and make him a calm bloke [muzhik]. Stalin.”

At times, Stalin’s inner circle comes vividly to life: Anastas Mikoyan, the dapper Armenian who, in a popular joke, was so tricky he didn’t need an umbrella but just dodged the raindrops and who survived Stalin and company, dying in 1978; Lazar Kaganovich, the one Jew in the inner circle, who built the Moscow subway and betrayed his brother; Khrushchev, who like all the rest of them was “up to his elbows in blood” but somehow managed to keep some of his humanity intact; Vyacheslav Molotov, the diplomat, who went so far back with Stalin that he could even disagree with him; the little known but powerful and fearsome Alexander Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s private secretary, so trusted he even had blank papers signed by Stalin at his disposal; Beria, the unctuous rapist, head of the secret police and the Soviet equivalent of the Manhattan Project, who, the atomic scientists agreed, was an excellent manager and organizer, the only Soviet leader “one could imagine becoming Chairman of General Motors,” to use his daughter-in-law’s words.

One way Stalin tested the men around him was by arresting their wives. Neither Poskrebyshev nor Molotov protested, though Molotov did gallantly abstain from the Politburo decision condemning his wife. His Jewish wife was arrested in a wave of anti-Semitism that Stalin unleashed late in his reign, culminating in the “Doctors’ Plot,” which “brought together Stalin’s fear of ageing, doctors and Jews.” Montefiore is right that Stalin’s anti-Semitism, though genuine, was always subordinated to realpolitik, one difference between him and Hitler.

Stalin’s three children and those of his cronies lived in a world of opulence, license and danger. Stalin’s daughter Svetlana had complexes for which psychologists don’t even have names. When Stalin’s son Yakov was captured during the war, Stalin refused a German offer to swap him for a field marshal. Montefiore springs to Stalin’s defense: “The refusal to swap Yakov has been treated as evidence of Stalin’s loveless cruelty but this is unfair. Stalin was a mass murderer but in this case, it is hard to imagine that either Churchill or Roosevelt could have swapped their sons if they had been captured -- when thousands of ordinary men were being killed or captured.” Yakov, apparently less understanding of his father’s nobility, committed suicide by throwing himself against the barbed wire of the POW camp.

The war changed Stalin. It sapped his vitality while increasing his confidence and paranoia. He was, to use Montefiore’s title for the last section of the book, a “lame tiger.” Though still cunning and dangerous, Stalin increasingly began to exhibit signs of senility -- forgetting the names of high government officials, repeating the same stories. Vacationing with Stalin, never exactly a pleasure, became a comical nightmare of enforced tedium. “One thing united virtually all his guests: the desire to escape ... his alternation of vicious, dangerous explosions, self-pitying regrets and excruciatingly boring reminiscences.” It remains a mystery whether his death in 1953 was natural or caused, or at least accelerated, by his entourage, who feared being swept away in the horror Stalin was concocting.

A significant portion of this otherwise well-researched and insightful book is spoiled by flippancy and infatuation. The author describes the Kremlin as a “theme park” inhabited by Oxford “dons.” Sentences of exile to Siberia under the tsars are “almost reading holidays” spiced by “affairs with local girls.” Montefiore gushes like a groupie. By Page 34, Stalin and company (“the most dynamic administrators the world has ever seen”) have been called “macho” four times. Here’s the entourage: “In their tunics and boots, they were macho, hard-drinking, powerful and famous across the Imperium, stars with blazing egos, colossal responsibilities, and Mausers in their holsters.” Though shown with grave faults, Stalin is also presented as “exceptional in every way,” “a super-intelligent and gifted politician” who “regarded himself as history’s lone knight riding out, with weary resignation, on another noble mission, the Bolshevik version of the mysterious cowboy arriving in a corrupt frontier town.” As if that weren’t enough, Montefiore calls him a “people person.”

Not to worry, Stalin’s inhumanity comes shining through. *