Stalin Read online

  ALSO BY EDVARD RADZINSKY

  THE LAST TSAR:

  THE LIFE AND DEATH

  OF NICHOLAS II

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1997

  Copyright © 1996 by Edvard Radzinsky

  English language translation copyright © 1996 by Doubleday a division of Random House, Inc.

  Translated from the Russian by H. T. Willetts

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday in 1996. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday hardcover edition of this book

  as follows:

  Radzinskiĭ, Ėdvard.

  Stalin: the first in-depth biography based on explosive new

  documents from Russia’s secret archives / Edvard Radzinsky;

  translated by H. T. Willetts. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Stalin, Joseph, 1878–1953—Sources. 2. Heads of state–Soviet

  Union–Biography–Sources. 3. Soviet Union—History—1925–1953—

  Sources. I. Title.

  DK268.S8R29 1996

  947.084′2—dc20 95-4495

  eISBN: 978-0-307-75468-4

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Note

  Preface

  Prologue: The Name

  Introduction: An Enigmatic Story

  ONE:

  SOSO: HIS LIFE AND DEATH

  1. The Little Angel

  2. Childhood Riddles

  3. The End of Soso

  TWO:

  KOBA

  4. Enigmatic Koba

  5. The New Koba

  6. A Grand Master’s Games

  7. The Great Utopia

  8. The Crisis Manager

  9. The Birth of Stalin

  THREE:

  STALIN: HIS LIFE, HIS DEATH

  10. The October Leaders Meet Their End: Lenin

  11. The End of the October Leaders

  12. The Country at Breaking Point

  13. The Dreadful Year

  14. The Congress of Victors

  15. The Bloodbath Begins

  16. “The People of My Wrath” Destroyed

  17. The Fall of “The Party’s Favorite”

  18. Creation of a New Country

  19. Night Life

  20. Tending Terror’s Sacred Flame

  21. Toward the Great Dream

  22. Two Leaders

  23. The First Days of War

  Interlude: A Family in Wartime

  24. Onward to Victory

  25. The Leader’s Plan

  26. The Return of Fear

  27. The Apocalypse That Never Was

  28. The Last Secret

  Afterword

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  NOTE

  The dates used in this book up to February 1918 follow the old-style Julian calendar, which was in use in Russia until that month. In the nineteenth century the Julian calendar lagged twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar used in the West; in the twentieth century, the Julian calendar lagged thirteen days behind.

  PREFACE

  I have been thinking about this book all my life. My father dreamt of it till the day of his death. It is to him that I dedicate it.

  I can still see that antediluvian day in March 1953 when the improbable happened: the event which it would have been a crime even to think of in our country.

  I can see the unbearably bright March sunshine and the endless line of those eager to make their farewells to him. I see myself in the crowd of mourners. How lonely I felt among all those grief-crazed people. Because I myself hated him.

  I had suffered a revulsion of feeling toward Stalin as an upper-classman at school: a transition from mindless adoration to a no-less ardent hatred, such as only the very young experience and only after mindless love.

  This change of heart was brought about by my father and by his dangerous stories about Stalin. The real Stalin. Whenever my father spoke of him, he ended with the same words: Perhaps someday you will write about him.

  My father was an intellectual with a passionate love of European democracy. He often repeated a saying which he attributed to President Masaryk of Czechoslovakia: “What is happiness? It is having the right to go out onto the main square and to shout at the top of your voice, ‘Lord, what a bad government we have!’ ” My father came from a well-to-do Jewish family. He was a rising young lawyer, twenty-eight years old, when the February Revolution brought down the monarchy. He enthusiastically welcomed the bourgeois Provisional Government. This was his revolution. This was his government.

  But the few months of freedom were soon at an end, and the Bolsheviks came to power.

  Why did he—a highly educated man fluent in English, German, and French—not go abroad? It is the old, old story: he was always devoted to that great and tragic country.

  In the early twenties, while some vestige of freedom survived, my father edited an Odessan magazine called Shkvall (Squall) and wrote screenplays for early Soviet films. His close friends at the time were the writer Yuri Olesha, the theorist of the avant-garde Viktor Shklovsky, and also the film director Sergei Eisenstein. After my father’s death I discovered, miraculously preserved between the pages of one of his books, a letter from Eisenstein complete with a number of brilliant indent drawings—relics of their youthful amusements.

  But the epoch of thought control arrived, and the country became a great prison. My father did not grumble but went on living, or rather existing, quietly, inconspicuously.

  He gave up journalism and began writing for the theater. He dramatized novels by one of the writers most esteemed by Stalin, Peter Andreevich Pavlenko, author of the scenarios for two famous films, The Oath and The Fall of Berlin, in which Stalin is among the dramatis personae. Pavlenko’s ultrapatriotic screenplay Alexander Nevsky, about the thirteenth-century Russian warrior who defeated the Teutonic Knights, was filmed by the great director Eisenstein.

  Pavlenko also wrote novels. Stalin conferred on him the highest of literary awards, the Stalin Prize, four times. Pavlenko had seen the Leader on a number of occasions. He had the entrée to the magic circle surrounding the God-Man.

  Pavlenko’s name saved my father. Many of his friends vanished in the camps, but he himself was not touched. According to the logic of the time, my father’s arrest would have cast a shadow on the famous Pavlenko himself.

  My father realized, however, that this protection might end at any moment. He expected, and was prepared for, something horrible. Yet in spite of living under the ax, in spite of his thwarted career, he never stopped smiling. His favorite hero was the skeptical philosopher in Anatole France’s novel Les Dieux ont soif, a man who observed the horrors of the French Revolution with mournful irony. My father observed the dreadful life of Stalin’s Russia with the same sort of smile. Irony and compassion were his watchwords.

  In my memory he always wears that smile.

  My father died in 1969. That is when I began writing this book. I have written it with no feeling of hatred for the Boss. I wanted only to understand the man himself and the horror through which we lived: I wrote surrounded by ghosts of those whom I saw in my childhood. I have included their stories about the Boss in this boo
k, stories which my father loved to retell, always ending with the same refrain: Perhaps someday you will write about him.

  PROLOGUE: THE NAME

  And authority was given it over every tribe and people and tongue and nation … and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast should even speak, and to cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain.

  —Revelation 13:7, 15

  Then a mighty angel took up a stone … and threw it into the sea, saying: “So shall Babylon the great city be thrown down with violence, and shall be found no more … for … all nations were deceived by thy sorcery. And in her was found the blood of prophets and of saints and of all who have been slain on earth.”

  —Revelation 18:21–24

  Every day the largest country in the world woke up with his name on its lips. All day long that name rang out in the voices of actors, resounded in song, stared out from the pages of every newspaper. That name was conferred, as the highest of honors, on factories, collective farms, streets, and towns. During the most terrible of all wars, soldiers went to their deaths intoning his name. During that war the city of Stalingrad bled almost to death; it lost all of its inhabitants, the ground became one great scab bristling with shells, but the city that bore his name was not surrendered to the enemy. During the political trials organized by him, his victims glorified his name as they died. Even in the camps, his portrait looked down on millions of people who, corralled behind barbed wire at his behest, turned rivers back in their course, raised cities beyond the Arctic Circle, and perished in their hundreds of thousands. Statues of this man in granite and bronze towered over the immense country.

  A gigantic statue of Stalin stood beside the Volga-Don canal—one of several built by his prisoners. One event in the history of that statue seems comically symbolic of the Stalin era: the custodian who looked after the statue was horrified to discover one day that migrating birds had taken to resting on its head. Birds cannot be punished. But people can. So the mortally terrified oblast authorities found a solution. They ran a high-tension electric current through the gigantic head. So now the statue stood there surrounded by a carpet of dead birds. Every morning the custodian plowed the little corpses under, and, thus manured, the ground brought forth flowers. While the statue, cleansed of bird droppings, gazed out on the great expanse beyond the Volga, fertilized by the bodies not of birds but of human beings, by the unmarked graves of those who had built the great canal.

  To think how much he meant to us! Yuri Borisov, an important industrial manager in Stalin’s time, used to tell this story in the sixties:

  Comrade Stalin sent for me. I had been in conversation with him before. I went there with a mist before my eyes. I rapped out the answer to his question looking him straight in the eye and trying not to blink. We all knew that saying of his: “If a man’s eyes wander his conscience isn’t clear.” He listened to my answer, then held out his hand and said, “Thank you, comrade.” When I felt his handshake it was like being struck by lightning. I hid my hand inside my coat cuff, got into my car, and rushed home. Without stopping to answer my worried wife’s questions I went to the cot where my small son was sleeping, stretched out my hand, and rubbed his head with it, so that he too would feel the warmth of Stalin’s touch.

  Winston Churchill recalled, “Stalin made a very great impression on us.… When he entered the conference room at Yalta everybody stood up as if at a word of command. And, strange to tell, for some reason stood with their hands along the seams of their trousers.” Churchill also said that on one occasion he was determined not to stand up, but when Stalin entered it was as if some extraterrestrial force lifted him from his seat.

  During the war President Roosevelt used to speak warmly of Stalin—“good old Uncle Joe.”

  Even in 1959, when the whole world had heard of good old Uncle Joe’s crimes, Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons on the eightieth anniversary of Stalin’s birth, said, “It was Russia’s great good luck that in the years of its greatest tribulations the country had at its head a genius and an unyielding military leader like Stalin.” If only Churchill had known what the “unyielding military leader” had been planning in the distant days of March 1953.

  But on March 1, 1953, Stalin lay on the floor of his room, felled by a stroke. In the capital of his empire, an empire replete with his glory, in which he had made himself a god in his own lifetime, he lay helpless in an empty room, in a pool of his own urine.

  At different times he was called a paranoiac, a monster, or just a common gangster.

  But his character and the motives for his actions remain just as mysterious now as they were on the sunny March day of his death. Stalin stole away into the shadows of history in his soft Caucasian boots. But now after the fall of the Soviet empire, his own menacing shadow looms again on the horizon. The fallen empire, once the greatest of the twentieth century, remembers its founder more and more frequently, and “the Boss,” “Our Father and Teacher,” is returning to his country in a cloud of new and menacing myths.

  THE SECRET

  He had succeeded in plunging the story of his life and the whole history of his country into impenetrable darkness. Systematically destroying his comrades-in-arms, he at once obliterated every trace of them in history. He personally directed the constant and relentless purging of the archives. He surrounded with the deepest secrecy everything even remotely relevant to the sources of his power. He converted the archives into closely guarded fortresses. Even now, if you are given access to the documents which used to be so jealously guarded, you find yourself confronting yet another mystery.

  He had foreseen this too.

  Here are a few excerpts from the secret minutes of Politburo meetings, preserved in the President’s Archive:

  1920. “Decisions of the Politburo on particularly serious matters must not be recorded in the official minutes.”

  1923. “… in confirmation of a previous decision of the Politburo nothing except the final resolutions should be noted in the minutes of the Politburo.”

  1924. “The work of all employees of the Secretariat of the Central Committee is to be treated as a Party secret.”

  1927. Adoption of measures “to ensure maximum secrecy.”

  This secrecy was not his invention. It was traditional in the Order of Sword Bearers, as its leader, Stalin, once called the Communist Party.

  Stalin made the tradition absolute.

  So that the moment we set about writing his life, we set foot in that great darkness.

  THE PRESIDENT’S ARCHIVE

  As a student at the Institute of Historical-Archival Studies, I already knew about this most secret of all archives. It contained, my professor said, a wealth of secrets with which only those of the Vatican could compete.

  This archive was directly controlled by the leadership of the Communist Party and located in a secret department of its own. This was where documents originating in all those higher Party organs which governed the country for seven decades were preserved, together with Stalin’s personal archive. This was only right, since by then the history of the Party, and that of the country, had become Stalin’s history. This collection subsequently formed the basis of the “President’s Archive,” which was put together under Gorbachev. It was where the new president, Boris Yeltsin, discovered the secret agreements that Stalin made with Hitler’s Germany.

  I was given the unique opportunity to work in the President’s Archive.

  Documents from two other archives are also used in this book. First, there is the former Central Party Archive, the holy of holies of the Communist Party, previously inaccessible to historians. This is where the history of the underground group of revolutionaries who, in 1917, seized power over one-sixth of the world is preserved—in steel safes behind special doors. Documents in this archive are more often than not marked “Strictly Secret.” Now that the Party itself has collapsed, the Party Archive has bashfully changed it
s name and is now called the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents Relating to Modern History (RTsKhIDNI). But to me it will always be the Party Archive, and that is what I shall call it in this book. I yearned for so long to enter the Party Archive and have set foot in it only now that the reign of that incorrigibly conspiratorial party of which our hero was the head has ended.

  There are also, of course, what used to be the secret holdings of the State Archive of the October Revolution. After the collapse of the USSR, it swiftly changed its name to State Archive of the Russian Federation. This too I shall call by its former name—Archive of the October Revolution, a more accurate description. It contains documents relating to the Revolution and to famous Bolsheviks—Stalin’s murdered comrades-in-arms—as well as Stalin’s Special Files (secret reports to the Leader).

  These are the three main archives in which I carried out my search for Stalin. The secret Stalin. The Stalin hidden from us for half a century.

  I shall also make use of documents from another archive that is inaccessible even now. This is the archive of the former KGB. That is where we find the biggest “blood bank” in the world—the case records of those who were shot. Hundreds of thousands of them. I have been able with the help of “third parties” to consult certain documents of interest to me in that archive.

  It should be noted that the KGB Archive itself has begun lavishly publishing its documents since perestroika. But I never forget the words of a former KGB officer: “Just remember that this is sometimes one of the KGB’s little games—‘fabrication with a view to publication.’ ” Putting it more simply—“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.” This applies particularly to the memoirs of former KGB officers. Those of Ivan Sudoplatov, one of Stalin’s spies, may serve as an example. Special Assignments is their splendid title. Special assignments meant directing the enemy along a false trail, smearing Western idols, covering agents in the field, and naming nonexistent agents. Sudoplatov was still carrying on the struggle with one foot in the grave. Could the final “special assignment” for such people have been deathbed disinformation?