Book review: Stalin understood the power of terror so well because he constantly feared for his own life
Stalin Oleg Khlevniuk
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‘Lately, the paradoxical turns of recent Russian history…
have given my research more than scholarly relevance,’ remarks Oleg Khlevniuk
in his introduction. Indeed, in Putin’s Russia Stalin’s apologists and admirers
seem daily to become more vocal. The language of the 1930s is used in televised
tirades against ‘internal enemies’ and ‘foreign agents’. Stalin himself is
upheld not only as a strong leader, but also as an ‘effective manager’ who,
despite his mistakes, did what was necessary to modernise the Soviet Union; or,
contrarily, as a benevolent dictator who was unaware of the corrupt actions of
his officials.
In short, there could hardly be a more opportune moment for
the publication of this authoritative, fluently written, concise life, the
pinnacle of current scholarship on its subject. Khlevniuk, who has spent many
years working in the Russian archives, commented in an interview that his aim
was to produce ‘a narrative that rests entirely on what we know for certain
about Stalin and his time’. So he swiftly dispatches several myths about the
man. There is no evidence to suggest Stalin was an informer for the Tsarist
police before the Revolution, and none, either, that he ordered the murder of
Kirov in 1934; no record has emerged of him refusing a prisoner exchange for
his son Yakov during the war, and the most likely cause of his wife’s suicide
in 1932 was the combination of her mental fragility and his philandering.
What remains surpasses any fabricated horror. Terror was
Stalin’s first choice as a means of government and his early control of the
secret police was a key reason for his rise to power. Arbitrary torture and
murder, applied via campaigns against various largely fictitious ‘internal
enemies’, ‘fifth columnists’, ‘terrorists’ and so on, were used to subdue the
country, Stalin’s closest associates, and the security forces themselves. Under
Stalin’s aegis, over a million Soviet citizens each year were imprisoned,
tortured, executed and exiled; many more — at least 60 million, or a third of
the population — were affected by some type of repression.
Far from being unaware of his subordinates’ actions, Stalin
was a micro-manager, as determined to oversee every seed sown in his dacha
garden as every piece of fabricated evidence. In small details, as in large:
‘We do not know of a single decision of major consequence taken by anyone other
than Stalin,’ states Khlevniuk baldly. Quite an extraordinary statement, when
one considers the length and eventfulness of his regime.
The sociopathic cruelty of this approach was matched by its
incompetence in all other areas. Stalin appears to have been completely
ignorant of economics, believing that ‘class war’ and ‘revolutionary spirit’
were all that was needed to industrialise effectively. Fear and turmoil caused
by constant purges did not make for a productive workforce, particularly with
little or no financial incentive to work. Before the Revolution the Russian
economy was growing at one of the fastest rates in Europe. Yet in the
reasonably prosperous year of 1952 — after almost 30 years of Stalin’s
management — the Central Statistical Directorate made a study of the country’s
average daily nutrition. Free Soviet citizens, it discovered, were eating a
very similar diet to the inhabitants of the Gulag.
The living standards of the Soviet people were of little
concern to their Generalissimo. Khlevniuk argues convincingly that Stalin’s
prime obsession was not the advance of socialism, not the might of the USSR,
but overwhelmingly ‘the task of bolstering his personal power’. It is all the
more extraordinary, therefore, that when Stalin achieved his goal of
totalitarian power in 1929 it was only the beginning of the savagery.
Thereafter each of his bloody campaigns served a dual purpose — to terrorise
the people while dealing a pre-emptive strike against some perceived threat.
Millions died for him to score his miserable political victories within the
Politburo.
It is tempting to see his paranoid vengefulness as a
pathology, and Khlevniuk includes a report from one of his doctors that his
personality was affected by the hardened arteries in his brain. Nonetheless,
Khlevniuk also shows that Stalin’s first essay in terror came in 1918, long
before his illness. What’s more, one of his defining traits was his very lack
of mental instability: his iron self-control. Throughout his long life there is
no record of him ever hinting at what he knew to be true — that he had murdered
dozens of his close friends and family. In the absence of any evidence, I still suspect this
corrupt, vicious, lonely man understood the power of fear so well only because
he felt it himself so intensely. In Stalin’s library, Khlevniuk finds a
quotation that is attributed to Genghis Khan ominously underlined: ‘The
conqueror’s peace of mind requires the death of the conquered.’
See also
Book review: new
biography of Stalin Reviewed by Donald Rayfield
