Killer of the Masses

Back in 1931, when Stalin was ruthlessly liquidating the kulaks in his drive to collectivize the land, he gave one of his rare interviews to outsiders. His guests were George Bernard Shaw and Lady Astor. As always, Nancy Astor was forthright : "When are you going to stop killing people?" she asked Stalin.

"When it is no longer necessary," Stalin replied. "Soon, I hope."

Eleven years later, in the dark war year of 1942, on Churchill's last night in Russia, Stalin invited Churchill to his quarters for drinks. After the drinks, after an improvised but excellent dinner with fine wines, and after the ice was broken, Churchill got Stalin to talking about the bloody liquidation of the kulaks.

"Ten millions," said Stalin, holding up his hands with stubby fingers extended. "It was fearful. Four years it lasted."

Joseph Stalin never gave up killing people. It was always necessary in the kind of regime he ran. He killed until he died. He killed methodically, almost as if to say: nothing personal, merely inevitable. Or was that all? "Stalin's . . . spite," wrote Lenin, ". . . is a most evil factor in politics." Said Trotsky: "He is a kind of opportunist with a bomb." In the outer world, in those days, many intellectuals excused Stalin's methodical slaughter as a necessary first step toward a Communist paradise on earth.

Calm & Cunning. Judgments on Stalin varied astonishingly among those free to assess him--outsiders who saw him compatriots who broke with him. U.S. Businessman Donald Nelson, caught up in the heady transactions of Lend-Lease, found Stalin "a regular fellow, and a very friendly sort of fellow, in fact." "He is the most vindictive man on earth," said Leonid Serebriakov, who had known Stalin for years. "If he lives long enough, he will get every one of us who ever injured him in speech or action." Stalin purged Serebriakov, along with some millions of others, in 1937. Wrote starry-eyed Joseph E. (Mission to Moscow) Davies, who was U.S. Ambassador during the purges: "His brown eyes are exceedingly kind and gentle. A child would like to sit on his knee."

A habitual doodler who doodled wolves, girls, castles and the word "Lenin" on paper pads during conferences and interviews, Stalin gave the impression of impassive calm. But a Tito aide once saw him angry: "He trembled with rage, he shouted, his features distorted, he sharply motioned with his hand and poured invective into the face of his secretary who was trembling and paling as if struck by heart failure." Wrote Biographer Boris Souvarine: "This repulsive character . . . cunning, crafty, treacherous but also brutal, violent, implacable ..." Said Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, who met Stalin at the Teheran conference: "Most of us, before we met him, thought he was a bandit leader who had pushed himself to the top of his government. That impression was wrong. We knew at once that we were dealing with a highly intelligent man . . ." Said Churchill: "Stalin left upon me an impression of deep, cool wisdom and absence of illusions," added that he had "a very captivating manner when he chooses . . ." Said Roosevelt: "Altogether, quite impressive, I'd say."

Polar Bear Erect. Stalin was a small, unhandsome man. Visitors were always surprised he was so short, guessed his height at 5 ft. 4 in., his weight from 150 Ibs. to 190 Ibs. His complexion was swarthy, sometimes yellowish, and his face was lightly pitted from a childhood smallpox. His hair was grey and stiff as a badger's, his mustache white. His expression was usually sardonic, his rare smile saturnine. When he laughed loudly he exposed a mouth full of teeth--jagged, yellow teeth--and the sound of his laughter was a controlled, relaxed, hissing chuckle.

His left arm was partly withered and sometimes in chilly weather he wore a glove on his left hand. Two toes of his left foot were grown together. He was stocky, but walked with the muffled ease of a polar bear erect, and, without being athletic, looked supple and active. At a Kremlin party in 1946, drinking Bruederschaft with Tito, he shouted: "There's still strength in me," and slipping his hands under bulky Tito's armpits, lifted him off the floor three times to the beat of a Russian folk melody on the phonograph.

On His Way. The steeling of his character began early; and never ceased. He was born on Dec. 21, 1879, in a humble cottage (now a shrine) in the tiny town of Gori in Georgia, an ancient province in transCaucasia. He was one of four children; the others died in infancy. He was baptized Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili. His father was a shoemaker, an alcoholic who beat Joseph unmercifully and finally deserted his family. But his mother loved her son. "[Soso] was always a good boy ... I never had to punish him," she said years later. Working as a laundress, she earned enough money to be able to send him to a parish school, later entered him in the Orthodox Theological Seminary in Tiflis. Her ambition was to make him a priest.

He was expelled from the seminary for reading radical literature. He had joined a clandestine Socialist organization. He got a job at Tiflis Geophysical Observatory and the group began holding secret meetings in his room. Police raided the room; young Djugashvili went underground, taking his first revolutionary nickname: Koba (meaning Indomitable). He became a strike agitator among Tiflis railroad men, but was soon run down by Czarist police, jailed and deported to Siberia. In absentia, he was elected a member of the executive of the All-Caucasian Federation of Social Democratic groups. He was 23, and on his way.

Siberia was the university of the revolution. Here Koba followed the sharp controversies between the right (Menshevik) and left (Bolshevik) wings of the Social Democrats, without committing himself on either side. He also had time to observe his fellow exiles and to study their weaknesses. That maneuvering, waiting, ruthless mind of his was already shaping. Russia's defeat by Japan in 1904-05 brought on the October 1905 Revolution. Koba escaped from Siberia, traveled hundreds of miles by peasant cart, suffered frostbite, and arrived back in Tiflis. Here he married Katerina Svanidze, an illiterate Georgian girl, who bore him a son, Yakov. It was a strange kind of domesticity, being married to an agitator.

While Lenin masterminded the revolution from Geneva and Trotsky formed the first Workers' Soviet in St. Petersburg, Stalin wrote fiery pamphlets in Georgia: "Russia is like a loaded gun, at full cock, ready to go off at the slightest concussion. Rally around the Party Committees . . . Only they can lead us in a worthy manner." Thus early he revealed his bent: control through committees. But what committees! "Our committees ought at once to set out to arm the people . . . to set up regional centers for the collection of arms, to organize workshops for the preparation of ... explosives." The revolution failed, Trotsky was sent to Siberia, and Koba's young wife died of tuberculosis. These were hard days for Koba, the Indomitable.

Disappointing Eagle. But his pamphlets had caught the eye of Lenin. That year young Djugashvili met the famous Lenin at a party conference in Finland. At that point (as today), Lenin was a certified god in the world Pantheon of social progress, but hard-boiled Djugashvili was not impressed: "I had hoped to see the mountain eagle of our party," he wrote. "How great was my disappointment to see a most ordinary looking man, below average height, in no way distinguishable from ordinary mortals."

But, listening to Lenin's cold, hard logic, Stalin became a devoted disciple. A cold and careful mind responded to a cold and brilliant mind. The party was flat broke and Koba became the appropriations member of the Caucasian Bolshevik Bureau, i.e., he directed "fighting squads" which robbed banks, public treasuries, steamships. His biggest haul: a quarter of a million rubles in a stickup in the main square of Tiflis. Among those arrested as a result of this raid was Litvinov, future Commissar for Foreign Affairs, who was trying to dispose of the loot in Paris. Koba, although on the police "wanted" list, managed to keep in the background. He was a terrorist, but a terrorist who operated through committees. This was caution; none ever questioned his personal courage.

Mass Leader. Czarist rule toughened. Koba spent a total of seven of the next ten years in prison. During periods of freedom he organized the oil workers in Baku which, he afterwards said, "hardened me as a practical fighter ... I first learned what it means to lead masses of workers." He began using the name Stalin (Man of Steel).

In 1912 the young (33) terrorist visited Cracow, where Lenin, in exile, trying to build up a group of hard-core professional revolutionaries inside Russia, was delighted with him, wrote to Maxim Gorky about his "wonderful Georgian." In Vienna he met Trotsky, who paused to note "the glint of animosity" in "Stalin's yellow eyes." Stalin wrote in Pravda (which he had helped to found): "Trotsky's childish plan for the merging of the unmergeable [Bolsheviks and Mensheviks] has proved him ... a common, noisy champion with faked muscles." In St. Petersburg in 1913, police got wind of Stalin's presence at a party musical matinee. His friends tried to smuggle him out of the trap dressed in a woman's coat, but Stalin was arrested again and sent into exile for the sixth and last time.

World War I broke Czarist power, brought about the 1917 short-lived Kerensky government and the Bolshevik coup d'etat. Stalin got out of Siberia, but took small part in these momentous events. U.S. Journalist John Reed did not even mention him in Ten Days That Shook the World. But Stalin, the Inside Man, emerged as one of the seven members of the party's political bureau and was appointed Commissar of Nationalities. Joked Lenin: "No intelligence is needed, that is why we've put Stalin there.''

War & Marriage. Trotsky skyrocketed into world prominence as organizer and Commissar of the Red army in the civil war. Stalin, in charge of the defense of Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad), kept up a running feud with Trotsky and carried the war, against orders, into his native Georgia. In these violent days, he was married a second time, to Nadezhda Allilueva. the pretty daughter of the Petrograd worker in whose house he had once been arrested.

Among the Socialist intellectuals of her home town, the swarthy, shock-haired Georgian added nothing to the brilliant debates in which such men as Lunacharsky, Commissar of Education, the historian Pokrovsky, and Ryazanov, biographer of Marx, took part. His harsh Georgian accent put him at a disadvantage in public speechmaking. Someone asked: "Who is Stalin?" Snapped Trotsky: "The most eminent mediocrity in the Party." But Stalin worked purposefully in committees. His Nationalities Commissariat, which had begun with a bare table in a bare room, numbered hundreds of "experts" and his control extended over 65 million of Russia's 140 million people.

At the end of the Civil War, Lenin decided to remove hostile, corrupt and unreliable elements from his organization and created the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, called Rabkrin (to purge the administration), and the Orgburo (to purge the party). Joseph Stalin directed both. Soon he was running the party's day-to-day business. Early in 1922 the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee was created for him. The title suited him: it sounded innocuous. Stalin was ever contemptuous of trappings; the job could be made all powerful, and to Stalin, reality counted.

Power & Glory. In May Lenin had a stroke and at the end of the year a second stroke. His place was taken by a troika or triumvirate. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin. Trotsky was already aware of, and alarmed at, Stalin's stealthy grasp of power. Lenin defended Stalin and warned against a split in the party. He began dictating a testament in which he reviewed his possible successors: "The two most able leaders of the present Central Committee are Stalin and Trotsky . . . Stalin has concentrated enormous power in his hands; and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution . . . [Trotsky displays] too far-reaching a self-confidence and a disposition to be too much attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs." But after a word with Cheka Boss Dzerzhinsky about the affairs of Rabkrin and Orgburo, Lenin added a postscript: "Stalin . . . becomes unbearable in the office of General Secretary ... I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin . . . and appoint another man . . . more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc." Two months later Lenin had a third stroke which left him paralyzed, without the power of speech.

In the ruthless quarrel over the succession, Stalin showed his cold genius as a political boss: patience to wait, sureness in striking. Instead of attacking Trotsky he began flattering him, suggested he take Lenin's place as principal speaker at the next Party Congress, which Trotsky nobly refused because it might look as if he were stepping into Lenin's shoes before he was dead. Stalin played a humble role, making reverential references to the sick Lenin and to the need for unity, but succeeded in arousing Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky.

This marked the first public display of a wondrously effective device--the canonization of Lenin--to which Stalin held and preserved all the patents. It enabled Stalin to accuse his enemies not of disagreeing with Stalin, but of disobedience to the gospel of Marxist-Leninism, a monolithic dogma which he could quote, interpret or pervert to meet any need.

When Lenin died in January 1924, Trotsky was on his way to a Black Sea resort, and failed to return to Moscow for the funeral. He still expected the comrades to call him into the leadership, and proudly made no move himself. It was one of the greatest political misjudgments in history.

Master of All. A year later Stalin, now master of all appointments, had Trotsky deposed as Commissar for War. Taking fright, Zinoviev and Kamenev sought to re-establish friendship with Trotsky, but the new boss was listening. In 1926 Stalin got from a party conference a sweeping condemnation of Trotskyites and Zinovievites alike. Trotsky and his erstwhile friends were through. A year later, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev were formally expelled from the party. Soon after that, Trotsky was forcibly removed from Moscow and sent to Alma Ata in Central Asia. He was expelled from Russia in January 1929.

Having disposed of the so-called Left opposition, Stalin had no trouble dealing with the Right opposition, Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, and was then supreme in the Politburo, the real governing body. By virtue of his patronage and purge powers, the General Secretary was able to dominate the Central Committee. He did so cleverly. He had a studied technique--to say little, to puff his pipe, while others talked and fought, then to announce quietly at the end which Comrade was right. He thus profited by their arguments and throve on their differences.

The first Five Year Plan was launched by Stalin in 1929, and the collectivization of land and the liquidation of the kulaks began at the same time. The orders were simple, abrupt, brutal. Collectivization never fully succeeded, for the peasants began burning their barns and cutting the throats of their cattle, threatening the entire economic life of the country. It was Stalin's biggest, and perhaps only, political defeat. After millions had been starved and shot, he softened the program. Even today the peasants maintain a hold on the country's economy. There never have been enough staunch Communists to create party cells in all of Russia's scores of thousands of small villages. Many "collectivized" villages are in fact tight family communities, loyal to their family interests. Hence Stalin's effort in 1949 to amalgamate the villages into large, well-policed agricultural towns, called agrogoroda. The attempt was quietly abandoned. Russia needs more & more bread for her expanding industrial cities. To the end. Stalin dared not risk another setback like that of 1929-33.

During the kulak crisis his young (31) wife Nadezhda died, some sources say by her own hand, some say by Stalin's. Stalin buried her with honors in Novodevichy Monastery in Moscow, and erected a marble statue. Said he: "She is dead, and with her have died my last warm feelings for all human beings."

In 1934, the residue of restlessness among the Bolsheviks came to a head with the assassination of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad Party boss, and one of Stalin's stooges in the Politburo. Stalin went to the scene and took charge. He ordered 117 suspects to be shot without trial; thousands of Leningrad Party members were sent to Siberia. It was the beginning of a huge purge. From 1935 through 1938 successive trials were held of all prominent Bolsheviks who were not Stalin's sycophants, with Andrei Vishinsky prosecuting. They appeared a craven lot:

Vishinsky: What appraisal should be given to the articles and statements you wrote in 1933, in which you expressed loyalty to the party? Deception?

Kamenev: No, worse than deception.

Vishinsky: Perfidy?

Kamenev: Worse!

Vishinsky: Worse than deception; more than perfidy--would the word be treason?

Kamenev: You have found the word!

To Kamenev, former comrade on the Politburo, Stalin had once said: "To choose one's victim, to prepare one's plan minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed--there is nothing sweeter in the world."

Sleep Well. One after the other the Old Bolshevik leaders confessed and were led away to be shot. The purge reached its peak in 1937 when the Soviet's leading generals were secretly tried, and together with thousands of Red army officers, including all but twelve members of the general staff, were shot. But the trials were only a fraction of the picture. The GPU reached out into every small town and village, arresting minor party members, doctors, engineers, professional men & women, beating them into confessions of sabotage and treachery. In 1938 Stalin called a halt, ordered a purge of the purgers. Henry Yagoda. GPU boss, was tried and shot and so were most of his operatives.

When it was all over, perhaps 7,000,000 people had disappeared, either into the GPU mass burial pits or into the vast slave camps of Siberia. But Stalin could rest: he had destroyed many innocent people, but with the good grain he had also burned the chaff of the old Bolshevik Party, the chief challenge to his power. He himself slept well. The new generation of party members, which he set about recruiting and educating, were functionaries, meek & mild bureaucrats, with a mortal fear in their bowels.

He chose doers, despising the contemplative and the idealistic--the kind who in other nations joined the party in the credulous '30s. Stalin was an administrative genius--with the advantage of being able to concede his errors and bury his mistakes. It took skill to pick devoted men, to enlist their talents while subduing their ambitions, to reward or discard, flatter or blackmail, soothe or scourge, at the necessary moment. Stalin governed by a cunning balancing of tensions, and was himself aloof and unhurried.

There was just one Old Bolshevik left: Stalin sent out his new operatives after him. Halfway round the world, a young Spanish Communist named Mercader, alias Monar (with an assist from the New York Communist Party), found Trotsky in Mexico City and killed him with an alpenstock.

The Ideology. Stalin learned something from the purges: the power that ideas have over men's minds. Since the death of Lenin he had repeated, to the point of nausea, the old Leninist slogans. Now he began to develop the myth of Leninist-Stalinist infallibility. Every Soviet writer, poet, musician and painter was expected to devote his energies to enlarging the myth by incessant repetition. The highest peak in Russia was named for him, as were at least 15 towns, innumerable factories and streets. Copies of his collected works were printed in scores of millions. A new metal was called Stalinite, an orchid was named Stalinchid. Children stood before their desks every morning saying: "Thank Comrade Stalin for this happy life."

The Stalin myth was in working order just in time for the Soviet Pact with Hitler in 1939, and it survived even that cynical deal. The great Stalin myth did not prevent the German army from sweeping through western Russia less than two years later. In the space of four months it had reached the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad: a feat made possible, in part, by the defection of hundreds of Stalin-hating Russian generals and the surrender of 4,000,000 peasant soldiers. But other millions of Russian soldiers held out, and so did Stalin's luck: General Winter stepped in, as he had 130 years before, when Napoleon was in Moscow.

In war, the propaganda line switched: the old Marxist slogans were dropped, the emphasis was on national patriotism. "Let the manly images of our great ancestors--Alexander Nevsky, Dimitri Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov, and Mikhail Kutuzov--inspire you!" exhorted Stalin. At this point the cruel, cumbersome five-year industrialization plans paid off. During the long winter of 1941-42, guns, tanks and planes came rolling out of the Ural factories, to be supplemented later by a stream of armaments from the U.S. and Britain. To a U.S. visitor who explained that strikes were holding up U.S. war production, Stalin snapped: "Don't you have police?"

That winter Stalin created a new army by drafting every able-bodied man & woman in Russia. From the Kremlin, which he never left, he directed the fighting. "No matter how they cry and complain," he told Chief of Staff Vassilevsky, when hard-pressed generals were calling for help at Stalingrad, "don't promise them any reserves. Don't give them a single battalion from the Moscow front." On a Kremlin visit shortly before the war's end, Tito heard Stalin call up Marshal Malinovsky whose army had been halted. "You're asleep there, asleep!" Stalin shouted. "You say you haven't tank divisions. My grandma would know how to fight with tanks. It's time you moved. Do you understand me?"

Stalin's armies beat their way to Berlin --at a cost of nearly 8,000,000 dead--and what his armies took he kept.

Talk & Doubletalk. In 1943, at a time when the Germans were still in Russia, Stalin was ready to talk with his wartime allies. "I think I can personally handle Stalin ..." confident Franklin Roosevelt had written to Winston Churchill. At Teheran, Roosevelt was persuaded by Stalin to take up residence in the Russian embassy. When Churchill raised the question of supervised elections in Poland, Stalin snapped: "You cannot do that. The Poles are an independent people and they would not want to have their election supervised by others." When Churchill mentioned the Vatican, Stalin asked: "How many divisions has the Pope got?" Reported Churchill later: "Stalin said the Russians did not want anything belonging to other people, although they might have a bite at Germany."

At Yalta, over a year later, Stalin bargained for Port Arthur, Dairen and the Kuril Islands in return for a promise to enter the war against Japan. "I only want to have returned to Russia what the Japanese have taken from my country," he said. "That seems," said Franklin Roosevelt, "like a very reasonable suggestion."

With his fellow Communist leaders, Stalin was also reasonable--in the same way. Making it clear to Tito that he had agreed to share Yugoslavia as a sphere of influence with the British, he asked that King Peter be reinstated: "You need not restore him forever," he told Tito. "Take him back temporarily, and then you can slip a knife into his back at a suitable moment." His agents had reported Tito's partisans flourishing red stars. "What do you need the red stars for?" he asked Tito. "You are frightening the British. The form isn't important."

Ever willing to wait, he told Mao Tse-tung to come to terms with Chiang Kai-shek,. dissolve his army and refrain from making a bid for power in China. But in 1949 Mao drove Chiang Kai-shek out of the Chinese mainland, and proclaimed a People's Republic of China. Then Mao began the familiar technique: purge, consolidate, purge. The addition of China's 400 million to Russia's 200 million was the high tide of world Communism. Stalin's empire occupied a fourth of the world's land surface, claimed a third of its people. It was the largest empire ever put together by any one man, and at his death it was still intact --except that it no longer had Stalin, a man of ceaseless evil and immense success.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.