Inside the Stalin Archives
Introduction
I threw myself at the hangman's feet, You are my son, my horror. Everything's mixed up for me forever, And who is a man and who a beast Will never now be clear ... —Anna Akhmatova, Requiem, 1937
At the funeral of Josef Stalin on March 9, 1953, Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin's comrade since the revolution, bid farewell to his beloved vozhd, his leader, with the words: "The immortal name of Stalin will always live in our hearts, in the hearts of the Soviet people and of all progressive humanity." Even though Stalin had imprisoned Molotov's wife in 1949 and sent her into exile; even though Molotov had seen many signs that he himself was out of favor with the master and in imminent danger of being purged and possibly executed, his complete devotion to Stalin never wavered to the end of his long life in 1986.
Molotov was not alone. Two days later, on March 11, Ilya Ehrenburg, the Jewish journalist and writer who found himself on the verge of arrest many times in the 1930s, wrote in Pravda:
These words of Stalin were uttered at his grave: "We are the true servants of the people, and the people want peace and hate war. Yes, all of us are dedicated to the desire of the people not to allow the spilling of blood of millions and to safeguard the peaceful structure of a happy life." These were the thoughts of Comrade Stalin, his care, his will.... These words touch every simple person and together with us they say: "Stalin lives."
"Stalin lives" — something mesmerizing shines in those words. On February 3, 1940, Nikolai Yezhov, the man who had directed the secret police during the height of the Great Terror and who knew intimately all of Stalin's secret methods and designs, begged the court at the end of his trial — during which he had been falsely accused of, among other things, being an English spy — to "tell Stalin that I shall die with his name on my lips." "I am a victim of circumstances and nothing more," he told the court, "yet here enemies I have overlooked may have also had a hand in this." He was shot the next day. It was incomprehensible to him that he could have been abandoned and betrayed by the very man for whom he had executed so many so ruthlessly, and Yezhov clung to the belief that only "enemies" he may have overlooked could have been responsible for the judgment against him. "At the preliminary investigation," Yezhov told the court, "I said that I was not a spy, that I was not a terrorist, but they didn't believe me and beat me up horribly. During the twenty-five years of my party work I have fought honorably against enemies and have exterminated them. I have committed crimes for which I might well be executed." What were these crimes? "My great guilt lies in the fact that I purged so few [from the security services]." Yezhov arrested and executed some 3,800 security officials in 1937 and
Yet fifty-five years after Stalin's death, the place of Stalin in Russian life remains enigmatic, and many in Russia and around the world might utter the same words as Yezhov at his trial; there are many for whom "Stalin lives." How can this be? After Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956 denouncing the cult of personality, Stalin's crimes became public knowledge and his body was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum; after the revelations of glasnost, outrage against the cruelties and stupidities of the Soviet police state was publicly aired; after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the nation that Stalin had killed and tortured so mercilessly to construct seemed a thing of the past. How could anyone believe any longer in Stalin's vision of the "peaceful structure of a happy life"? Facts and figures do not explain it.
When I recently asked an officer from the the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB; one of the successor organizations to the KGB) whether he thought Stalin could be rehabilitated, he looked at me in horror. "No," he said. "Impossible. It would be like rehabilitating Hitler." He spoke for many, yet the numerous books published in Russia and elsewhere in recent years praising Stalin signify something else. While new extremist political groups make undisguised use of Stalin's image and accomplishments, and his picture can be found on a box of chocolates today on sale at the duty-free shop at Sheremetyevo Airport outside Moscow, few would wish a return to the dark days of the 1930s. Nevertheless, it is fair to ask whether an airport in Berlin, Frankfurt, or Munich could sell a box of chocolates bearing Hitler's image. Though long ago removed from public buildings, Stalin's name and sayings remain on the lips of ordinary people, and in remote districts busts and statues of Stalin can still be found.
Could the legacy of Stalin be on the verge of a rebirth, and if so, in what form? Did it never die in the hearts of "progressive humanity?" Would it be like "rehabilitating Hitler"? If we follow the long road Russia has traveled since the Soviet Union was dissolved by Boris Yeltsin in December 1991, do we end up close to where we began? These questions have haunted the history of the "new" Russia and bear upon Yale University Press's sixteen-year project of publishing material from the Soviet archives — a task that has now culminated in the Russian government's approval to publish Stalin's personal archive.
When Yeltsin decreed that the previously secret Soviet state and party archives would be opened, researchers from around the world began to flock to Moscow in anticipation, and ordinary Russian citizens along with scholars, politicians, partisans — victimizers as well as victims — impatiently awaited the opportunity to scrutinize these secret books and files, gain access to KGB dossiers and interrogations, and read for the first time speeches, diaries, and letters of Kremlin leaders. Secret Central Committee decrees, deliberations of the Communist International (Comintern), and directives of the intelligence organizations, along with the daily traffic of the inner party bureaucracy that once determined so much for so many lives would now be openly studied.
With these perhaps naively euphoric expectations, I flew to Moscow in January 1992 to initiate the Annals of Communism project for Yale University Press. My purpose was to publish documents from the Soviet period that would help explain abiding questions of twentieth-century Soviet history: Was the 1934 murder of Sergei Kirov (first secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee and secretary to the Communist Party Central Committee) the work of a lone assassin or a conspiracy that reached to Stalin? Was there a rupture between Lenin and Stalin or was there continuity? Did the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) engage in espionage? What was the real role of the Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War? Why did Stalin not act on the intelligence he received daily before the Nazi invasion of June 1941? Who initiated and controlled the Great Terror of 1936-1938? How and why did the tragedy of the Katyn massacre of Polish officers take place? Was the 1932-1933 famine in the Ukraine and elsewhere a natural disaster or a politically motivated, state-sponsored mass murder? These were among the questions I hoped the Annals project would answer.
Answers were, inevitably, not easy to produce. The Central Party Archive alone held some 250 million documents, very few of which might be considered "smoking guns." Many essential high-level decisions were never written down; some documents had been destroyed. All this pointed to the need for a long-term program of painstaking research and integration of materials from many disparate sources. Over time, a larger question began to take shape: what was the mechanism by which the Soviet system operated as a whole? Understanding that mechanism eventually became the overriding goal of the Annals series. The project continues to this day and has now published over twenty-five separate volumes with many others still under contract.
"Everything should take place slowly and incorrectly so that man doesn't get a chance to start feeling proud, so that man is sad and perplexed," Venedikt Erofeev refl ected in his masterpiece, Moskva petushki (Moscow to the End of the Line), through his tragicomic hero, Venechka. I have kept these beautiful words before me over the past sixteen years of working in the Soviet archives, and I remain humble before the immensity of reconstructing the history of the Soviet period. During this time the situation in Russia itself has been perplexing and often sad. The slow and difficult rebuilding of the Russian nation has left many in despair, and while events often seem to have overtaken all predictions, the country finds itself poised in what Alexander Yakovlev evocatively called a "twilight" — the threshold between old and new, past and future, authoritarianism and freedom, between dreams of past glory and the reality of its present difficult economic and geopolitical place at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Though much has changed, much remains unchanged in fundamental outlook, or what the Russians call "mentality," prompting one Russian scholar essential high-level decisions were never written down; some documents had been destroyed. All this pointed to the need for a long-term program of painstaking research and integration of materials from many disparate sources. Over time, a larger question began to take shape: what was the mechanism by which the Soviet system operated as a whole? Understanding that mechanism eventually became the overriding goal of the Annals series. The project continues to this day and has now published over twenty-five separate volumes with many others still under contract.
"Everything should take place slowly and incorrectly so that man doesn't get a chance to start feeling proud, so that man is sad and perplexed," Venedikt Erofeev reflected in his masterpiece, Moskva petushki (Moscow to the End of the Line), through his tragicomic hero, Venechka. I have kept these beautiful words before me over the past sixteen years of working in the Soviet archives, and I remain humble before the immensity of reconstructing the history of the Soviet period. During this time the situation in Russia itself has been perplexing and often sad. The slow and difficult rebuilding of the Russian nation has left many in despair, and while events often seem to have overtaken all predictions, the country finds itself poised in what Alexander Yakovlev evocatively called a "twilight" — the threshold between old and new, past and future, authoritarianism and freedom, between dreams of past glory and the reality of its present difficult economic and geopolitical place at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Though much has changed, much remains unchanged in fundamental outlook, or what the Russians call "mentality," prompting one Russian scholar and reconciliation has ever taken place. Unlike Germany, de-Nazified after World War II, Russia has never been completely de-Bolshevized. Instead, a widespread effort is underway to "normalize" the Soviet past.
According to provincial church records, Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili was born in Gori, Georgia, on December 18, 1878 (December 6 by the old calendar), in the aftermath of the disastrous Russo-Turkish War, a time that marked both the height of imperial Russian power and the onset of its twisting pathway into impotence and eventual dissolution. Unlike his mentor, Vladimir Lenin, whose family was bourgeois and well-educated, Josef Djugashvili was born into impoverished circumstances, the son of a shoemaker given to heavy drinking and violent outbursts against both his son and his wife, and who was left by them to die alone in a Tiflis apartment. According to Stalin's biographer, Dmitri Volkogonov, after 1903, when Stalin became a revolutionary, he may not have seen his mother more than four or five times. He did not attend her funeral in 1937.
Stalin stood five feet four inches tall. Two toes on his left foot were fused. His sallow complexion was heavily marked by the smallpox he suffered as a child. But he possessed penetrating black eyes and the confidence of a man possessed by history. To the end of his life he wore his thick, black hair combed back, revealing a prominent widow's peak. Whether from childhood accident or disease, he had a slightly withered left arm, which he generally kept less exposed to public view, and his left hand often curled inward like an injured paw.
Stalin's life was marked by contradictions and continuous efforts at self-reinvention. In 1912, Djugashvili became Stalin, the "Man of steel." He became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1922, and then, after Lenin's death in 1924, he and Leon Trotsky struggled for control of the Soviet state. Trotsky was expelled from the party in 1927 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Stalin, victorious, changed the date of his birth to December 21, 1879, possibly so that his fiftieth jubilee could be celebrated in 1929, after he had firmly consolidated his rule. By 1937, together with Marx and Lenin, the image of this small, pockmarked son of an illiterate shoemaker billowed on giant banners over Moscow's Red Square during parades or floated in the sky on giant blimps; by 1953, the year of his death, his visage was identified in the minds of people all over the world with political terror on an unprecedented scale. As he reinvented himself, he reinvented Russia, transforming his nation into a military power with the ability to reach around the globe. Unlike Hitler, Stalin died in his bed.
The image of Stalin's strength, however, always seemed paired with the fact of his withered limb, and it may not too great an overstatement to suggest that it was this often invisible hand that held so much of Soviet and world history in its grasp.
Toward the end of 1930, Stalin wrote to Maxim Gorky, the world-famous Russian writer who emigrated to Italy after the revolution, hoping to lure him home:
Things aren't going badly here. In industry and in agriculture the successes are undeniable. Let them, each and every medieval fossil, caterwaul there in Europe, at the tops of their voices, about the "downfall" of the USSR. They aren't going to change our plans or our affairs one iota that way. The USSR is going to be a first-rate country with the biggest technically equipped industrial and agricultural production. Socialism is invincible. There's not going to be any more "beggarly" Russia. That's over! There's going to be a mighty and plentiful vanguard Russia.
Not long after Stalin's confident vision of "a first-rate country with the biggest technically equipped industrial and agricultural production," the writer Isaac Babel returned to Moscow from a tour of the famine-stricken Ukraine. He confided to a friend that he had witnessed things impossible to speak or write about — cannibalism and inhuman destitution. After a similar trip, Boris Pasternak wrote to a friend, "There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness. I fell ill. For an entire year I could not write." What made it worse was the suspicion that this "inhuman, unimaginable misery" was somehow being engineered or at least managed by the government, by Stalin, for reasons no one could understand. Stalin's "vanguard Russia" would never be realized.
But the cruelty underlying that vision was not Stalin's alone. Lenin invoked it in 1922 when he ordered a final assault on the Orthodox Church for the purpose of confiscating its immense wealth. The document issuing this order was discovered by Richard Pipes in the secret Lenin archive in Moscow; it was published for the first time in
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Excerpted from Inside the Stalin Archives by Jonathan Brent Copyright © 2008 by Jonathan Brent. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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