Here is an epic book, the second of what will at some point be three volumes by Stephen Kotkin in the biography of Stalin. This authoritative text covers the collectivization of farming, the purge of the Party, and the run-up to the Second World War. The book is a tome, but is a great story and really good. The book is much more about high politics than the prior volume, and Kotkin addresses this--acknowledging that it is set in Stalin's "Little Corner." All in all, it's necessary reading for Russia in the 20th century.
The Collectivization of Agriculture
When the Great Depression hit the Western world, Stalin and the USSR were able to avoid it thanks to having already been cut off from the capitalist economies prior. Then, with the capitalist world in crisis, the Soviet Union could take advantage of the economic desperation of more developed countries and leverage it into development of the Soviet Union. Stalin signed technical assistance deals to build American-style factories in the USSR, with American companies constructing steel plants at Magnitogorsk (Urals), Kuznetsk (Siberia), and Zaporozhe (Ukraine). Ford Motor Company built a mass-production facility in Nizhny Novgorod for cars and trucks based on River Rouge. Caterpillar re-equipped factories in Kharkhov and Leningrad for tractors and harvesters, and new tractor plants were built in Stalingrad and Chelyabinsk. Dupont manufactured chemicals, Sweden and Italy ball bearings, France plastics and aircraft, and Britain electrical technology.
Concurrently with this technological-manufacturing revolution, Stalin was implementing an agricultural revolution in the countryside, perhaps better conceived of as a counter-counter-revolution. In Volume One, Kotkin asserts that the Russian Revolution consisted of two revolutions: the Communist revolution in the cities, and the peasant revolution in the countryside, in which peasants seized the land from the nobility. But a decade on, the two revolutions collided. Starting in 1928, Stalin blamed grain shortages on kulaks, wealthier farmers (but not by much), who he accused of hoarding grain in order to politically justify seizure of their land by the government in order to reorganize it into larger, state-run farms.
Collectivization spurred massive protests, violent rebellion, and then overwhelming famine across the Soviet Union. Protests were unsuccessful since peasants could not coordinate opposition across regions, despite OGPU recording many (6,500 in March 1930 alone). Peasants could rebel with hunting rifles, and assassinated more than 1,100 rural officials who sought to enforce collectivization, but most of the 2.5 million (according to secret police) did so peacefully. More common types of protest were arson and the destruction of their own livestock rather than see it fall into Communist hands. But because the "socialist sector" nor dominated the economy, Stalin declared that the USSR had entered the historical era of socialism. In this new era, the Soviets would export just over 5 million tons of grain, making up 15% of the world market share where they had once been near zero. Collectivization also helped Stalin build his cult of personality, sacking party bosses and so-called "Trotskyites" who couldn't keep up with production quotas.
Ukraine is an especially interesting case. Kotkin denies the idea of the Holodomor as an intentional, targeted famine weaponized against the Ukrainians specifically. But certainly all the famine across the Soviet Union at this time was man-made. Interestingly, Kotkin does note that the Ukrainians were particularly rebellious against the imposition of collectivization, with almost half of peasant mass actions occurring in Ukraine, with revolt taking over every inhabited settlement along the Polish border. Kotkin argues that Ukraine was not a special case in the Soviet Union, as upwards of 50-70 million Soviet inhabitants across the county were caught in regions with little to no food. The famine came with disease too, with more than a million cases of Typhus in 1932-33 and half a million of typhoid fever. In a March 1933 report, OGPU claimed to have stopped 219,460 runaways in search of food. Peasants ate dogs, cats, horses, gophers, anything they could get their hands on. Kotkin writes that death and disease affected Ukraine, Moldavia, the North Caucasus, the Middle and Lower Volga Valley, the Central Black Earth region, and the Kazakh autonomous republic.
Between 1931 and 1933, famine and related epidemics killed between five and seven million people, with perhaps ten million more starving but surviving. In the Kazakh autonomous republic, where nomads were forcibly settled, starvation and disease killed between 1.2 and 1.4 million people, the vast majority Kazakhs, in a population of 6.5 million (of which 4.12 million were Kazakhs). This was the highest death ratio in the USSR, whereas Ukraine lost 3.5 million to the Holodomor in a population of 33 million. In 1933, a Kazakh family owned, on average, 3.7 cattle, whereas they had 22.6 in 1929. Stalin never blinked. Perhaps if he had he would have been toppled at this point. But he banned fishing in state waters and private charity, blacklisted entire counties for food distribution, ordered forced return of peasant escapees, and was able to make it impossible to avoid the collectives. OGPU arrested 410,000 in 1932 and 505,000 in 1933. And, at the cost of millions of lives, the grain harvest was improved. Kotkin writes:
Indeed, it was the famished peasants who would lift the regime and the country out of starvation, producing between 70 and 77 million tons of grain in 1933, a bumper crop comparable to the miracle of 1930. The peasants, in their land hunger and separate revolution, had made possible the advent of a Bolshevik regime in 1917-18; now enslaved, the peasants saved Stalin's rule.
Party Control
In June 1933, the Party announced a purge. Membership had ballooned to include 2.2 million full members and 1.35 million candidates. The 1929-30 purge had removed about one in ten Party members, but this one would remove one in five, with nearly as many quitting, resulting in 800,000 not keeping Party cards. Despite the disaster of collectivization and the strengthening of Germany and Japan on the frontiers, elites rallied to Stalin. One correspondent wrote to Trotsky, exiled on a Turkish island, "they all speak about Stalin's isolation and the general hatred of him, but they often ad: 'If it were not for that (we omit the strong epithet), everything would have fallen to pieces by now. It is he who keeps everything together.'"
In 1934, there was only one man left who could threaten Stalin's sole rule. Sergei Kirov was an Old Bolshevik, a full member of the Politburo, and a close personal friend of Stalin. Supposedly, he was so popular that he actually won election to be General-Secretary of the Party in February 1934, but that Lazar Kaganovich, a Stalin loyalist, manipulated results to ensure Stalin would win. But on December 1, 1934, he was assassinated by Leonid Nikolayev, a former Party member without a clear motive. There are a couple explanations, generally either favoring the idea that Stalin or someone in the Party ordered the assassination or that Nikolayev acted alone. I won't get into them here. But the result is that there was no one left on the Politburo who would challenge Stalin. All the powerful original revolutionaries were either dead or exiled.
The assassination of Kirov by a fellow Party-member served as a pretext for a massive culling of the Communist flock. Nikolayev was made into a member of the 1920s Zinoviev opposition, and the regime started to accuse people of being Zinovievites and arrest them in waves. 843 "Zinovievites" were arrested in the ten weeks after the murder, and thousands were administratively exiled. Through these banishments, arrests, and executions, the Politburo was stacked with Stalin loyalists. With Stalin at the top, he had Molotov and Kaganovich, and then a troika of younger apparatchik deputies who owed loyalty to Kaganovich and Stalin: Yezhov, Zhdanov, and Andreyev. Kotkin writes, however, that the Kirov assassination was not necessary in order for Stalin to "take advantage" of the assassination to tighten his grip on the party. On the contrary, Kotkin writes that Stalin needed no such pretext to do what he did, and that he had no hand in Kirov's assassination and then genuinely engaged in a witch hunt for enemies out of anger and loss.
Stalin as a Person
Stalin's personal life is documented, but still somewhat mysterious. For fun, Stalin played billiards, and according to one anecdote sometimes even crawled under the table as punishment for losing. I think that we like to imagine that evil people are obviously evil and totally unpleasant, but Stalin was probably fun to be around for the people who were in his circle and who he wasn't actively executing. After rumors in the Associated Press that Stalin was ill or dead, he responded,
As far as I know from the foreign press, I long ago left this sinful world and moved on to the next. As it is impossible not to trust the foreign press, if one does not want to be crossed out of the list of civilized people, I ask you to believe this report and not disturb my peace in the silence of that other world.
But he was not really a family man. In 1932, Nadya, Stalin's wife, committed suicide. There may have been some kind of argument beforehand about Stalin flirting with another woman, but it all seems pretty unclear. She left behind three children, and Molotov recalled that it was the only time he had ever seen Stalin in tears, openly weeping. When Pravda mentioned her death the next day, it omitted that it was a suicide. It was also the first time Stalin's marriage was mentioned in the Soviet press. Years later, they daughter, Svetlana, would say that Stalin "was too intelligent not to know that people always commit suicide to punish someone."
Stalin didn't even really see himself as Stalin. Maybe some level of dissociation was necessary to do what he did. Kotkin writes that when Stalin's son, Vassily tried to "trade on his lineage," Stalin exploded at him, "You're not Stalin and I'm not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no, not even me!" But Joseph Jugashvili didn't have much of an internal life separate from "Stalin," despite what he may have said to Vassily. One example comes from Kotkin's comparison to Mussolini. Describing a typical day for Mussolini, Kotkin writes that he would have sex with his mistress, nap, listen to music, eat fruit, complain about the women vying for his attention, and reminisce about his wild youth. He told his son-in-law that "genius lies in the genitals," and he told his mistress that Jews are pigs, the English are disgusting, and the Spanish are lazy. He was inattentive to the state and blamed others. But Stalin had few women in his life, and
was profoundly alone in the sulfuric aquifers of his being. But he hated to be alone. His awkward character exacerbated the isolation that inevitable befalls a tyrant upon whom everyone's life depends. Not only had he driven his second wife to suicide, but most of his closest friends were gone: Kirov, Lakoba, Orjonikidze. Stalin was complicit in the death of the third, and perhaps of the second, while being blamed, in whispers, for the first. He had deliberately murdered almost all his comrades in arms, including those he had been genuinely fond of, such as Bukharin. The few who survived—Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan—had largely been reduced to minions.
But Stalin certainly shared Mussolini's contempt for others. That said, it was colder, as cold as any dictator has ever felt about expendable human life. After General Blyukher objected to bombings in Eastern Siberia for the collateral effects on civilians and the USSR's own troops, Stalin replied, "I do not understand your fear that the bombing will hit the Korean population ... What do the Koreans matter to you, if the Japanese are hitting our batches of people?"
The Terror
Stalin's reign of terror was unique in modern history, at least, for its inward focus on his own regime, his own party, his own friends. Before Kirov's assassination, the peak year for Soviet executions was 1930, with 20,201 of them during dekulakization. After Kirov was killed, from December 1934 to 1936, the NKVD arrested 529,434 people, and executed 4,402 of them. But between 1937 and 1938, the NKVD arrested 1,575,259, 87 percent for political offenses, and executed 681,692 of them. With a working age population of 100 million, this meant that 1.5 percent of working people were arrested and nearly half of them were executed. In fact, even more were executed, since many records are inaccurate because "an untold number of people sentenced to incarceration were actually executed , and many others died during interrogation or transit and fell outside of execution tabulations, the total who perished directly at the hands of the Soviet secret police in 1937-38 was likely closer to 830,000."
A tremendous motivation for the purging was the continued existence of Trotsky, in exile in Turkey, then Norway, then Mexico. Stalin had spies working for Trotsky, and gathering all of Trotsky's writings before he could publish them. Trotsky viciously attacked Stalin in his writings, and served as Stalin's chief critic from the left. Trotskyism was a geopolitical concern for Stalin and a direct threat to his rule. In the Spanish Civil War, Stalin wasn't just fighting fascists and propping up a left-wing government, he was also sabotaging the Trotskyists in that government, thereby undermining it.
Stalin also destroyed the officership of his military. Of 144,000 officers in the Red Army, Stalin had 33,000 removed and 7,000 executed between 1937-38. Of the top 767 high-ranking commanders, 503 were executed or imprisoned. Of the highest levels of the 186 division commanders, 154 were executed or imprisoned, "as well as 8 of the 9 admirals, 13 of the army's 15 full generals, and 3 of its 5 marshals. What great power has ever executed 90 percent of its top military officers?" The Red Army personnel department required the submission of autobiographies that identified that many of the officers at high levels had worked for Trotsky or worked for someone who had worked for Trotsky. This was obvious because Trotsky had run the Red Army until 1935--it was a fatal association. Mikhail Tukhachevsky, called the Red Napoleon, was the highest level military figure to be purged, as he was an individual who could truly threaten Stalin:
In the cellars on May 26, a mere four days after his arrest, Tukhachevsky began to sign whatever interrogators put in front of him. Zinovy Ushakov, who prided himself on obtaining confessions no other investigator could extract, mercilessly beat Tukhachevsky, whose blood dripped onto the pages of a confession to crimes he did not commit. By some accounts, Tukhachevsky’s teenage daughter, Svetlana, was brought to the prison, where the interrogators told him they would rape her.
One of the individuals who approved the post-facto arrest order for Tukhachevsky was himself dismissed eight days later. He knew what to expect. He killed himself the next day in his apartment. This was happening all over the place. One NKVD operative, after being ordered by Yezhov to board a Soviet ship to Antwerp for a rendezvous, fled with $60,000 to the United States. But it turned out that he wasn't being recalled for execution, he was going to be promoted. Meanwhile, Hitler, just as much of a monster, was sending his disliked generals into exile in Italy with pensions, not having them executed or tortured. Stalin was unique.
The NKVD, the Soviet FBI-equivalent that carried out the massacre of the purge, was also suffering its own massacre, "not after it had arrested at least 1.6 million people but all the while it was doing so. Between 1936 and 1938, arrests of NKVD personnel exceeded 20,000. All eighteen "commissars of state security" who served under Yagoda were killed. Among the NKVD it was chaos, as bosses and underlings fed each other to the execution machine to keep their jobs or take someone else's. They would ramp up arrests to make themselves more innocent in some perverse way, and then find themselves arrested. The terror primarily affected the highest rungs of Bolshevik society. Kotkin describes the environment:
[T]he postmidnight knock, the search and confiscations in the presence of summoned neighbors (“witnesses” were required by law), the wailing of spouses and children, the disappearances without trace, the fruitless pleading for information at NKVD reception windows, the desperate queues outside transit prisons and unheard screams inside, the bribes to guards for scraps of information on whereabouts. But ordinary Soviet inhabitants mostly did not feel an immediate threat of arrest. As the morbid joke had it, when uniformed men arrived and said “NKVD,” people answered, 'You’ve got the wrong apartment—the Communists live upstairs.' Newspaper editorials complained that collective farmers were illegally enlarging household plots, reducing compulsory deliveries, and avoiding tax payments after the arrests of all their supervisors.
The terror was no spiraling out of Stalin's control. Indeed, in the summer of 1937, Stalin adopted "quota-driven eradication of entire categories of people in a planned indiscriminate terror known as mass operations." Yagoda, and Yezhov after him, became some of Stalin's closest advisors during each of their times as leaders of the NKVD (both were eventually executed). In tsarist day, the head of the okhranka met with Nicholas II just once in his entire career--political policing was necessary, but not honorable. In 1935-36, Yagods was in Stalin's office every month, and from 1937 through August 1938, when Stalin received visitors on 333 days, Yezhov made 288 appearances, second only to Molotov. From 1937-38, there were on average nearly 2,200 arrests and over 1,000 executions per day.
The terror reached the civil leadership of the party as well. The 1934 party congress had 71 members and 68 candidates for membership to the Central Committee. By the opening of the June plenum in 1937, thirteen had been arrested, three had committed suicide, four had died of natural causes, and one was assassinated. During the plenum, Stalin approved the destruction of another thirty-one, so that more than 50 of the 139 did not finish the sessions. Around 100 of the 139 Central Committee members would not survive to the next party congress. The vast majority of them had not even opposed Stalin in the 1920s or even come up against him subsequently. Most had been loyal party members all through Stalin's rise and dekulakization, but they and their subordinates and associates were all destroyed, and in many cases, so were their replacements. Among party functionaries, 15,485 of the 32,899 positions in the 1939 nomenklatura had been appointed between 1937 and 1938, and 6,909 of the 10,902 party secretaries of counties, cities, and districts were appointed in the same period. Of 333 regional party bosses, 293 had assumed their posts since the 17th Congress, and 91 percent were between 26 and 40 years old. 85 percent of Red Army officers were under 35. The New York Times summed it up: "It is as if twenty years after Yorktown somebody in power at Washington found it necessary for the safety of the State to send to the scaffold Thomas Jefferson, Madison, John Adams, Hamilton, Jay and most of their associates."
Kotkin's Theory of Power
There's an interesting aside at the beginning of the second part of the book that feels like a response to Robert Caro in which Kotkin writes that
To an extent, power reveals who a person is. But the effects on Stalin of accruing and exercising power unconstrained by law or constitutional limits--the power of life and death over hundreds of millions--were immense. Alongside the nature of Bolshevism, the setting of his regime--Russia with its fraught history and geopolitics, its sense of historic mission and grievance, which were given new impetus and form by socialism's fixation on capitalist encirclement--also indelibly shaped who he became.
Caro believes that power doesn't corrupt, it reveals. But Kotkin identifies in Stalin a change that occurs due to the absolute nature of his power and the nature of the Russian state. This might be less present in Lyndon Johnson or Robert Moses because their power was not absolute and the American state and New York and Texas aren't the same as Georgia or Russia. Kotkin also writes that the cult of personality that existed around Stalin, like that around Hitler, was not just about Stalin or Hitler, but about their devotees, and something inherent to them, as Russian or German people, that created not just a powerful individual but a powerful relationship between the individual and the masses. Power isn't really encapsulated in a person, it is a relationship between people.
Hitler and Stalin, despite many dictatorial and murderous similarities, were very different people. Hitler owed his power to rhetoric, while Stalin was not known for his speeches, but his work behind the scenes. Hitler's desk was empty and he almost never worked at it. Hitler decided on important issues without reading. Stalin read prodigiously, and was known to cite from long reports from memory. Stalin certainly could improvised, but according to Kotkin, he "devoured documents." Stalin was dedicated to ideological development, and put lots of time and difficult effort into developing six versions of a second version of A Course on Political Economy, last published in 1910 and meant to be an update on the authoritative lessons of two decades of Soviet experience.
"Waiting for Hitler"
Kotkin finishes with the part of the book that gives it's name to the volume: "Waiting for Hitler," which I found to be the least interesting part of the book since it's been covered so much before in other books I've read. However, Kotkin is a great writer and still has lots of insights. One that I particularly liked was that in WWI, "Russian general staff had shuddered at the thought that a quick German rout of the French would lead to a separate peace on the western front," giving Germany a free hand to attack Russia, but "their fears were misplaced: the fighting had lasted four stalemated years. Surely France, assisted by Britain, even with the Soviet Union on the sidelines, could again stalemate Germany" in the Second World War? Ha ha.
Kotkin discusses something regarding Hitler's analysis that I remember from Tooze's Wages of Destruction, in that Hitler launched a surprise attack against the USSR not because his primary worry was eclipsing British power, but American power. Hitler understood that American support for Britain would eventually lead to an American war with Germany, and that at that point, "the only way to escape a two-front war was to knock out the Soviet Union before the United States joined Britain in a genuine war in the west." Invading Russia was obviously idiotic and doomed in retrospect, but since the war against Britain wasn't a land war, Germany's strength in land warfare wasn't being effectively used. And if the United States did join the war in full, then Hitler would be hugely vulnerable to Stalin in the east. It is a perpetual problem for Germany. Stalin, on the other hand, fooled himself. He could see how insane it would be for Hitler to start a war with Russia, and couldn't believe that the Germans would do it. He thought that the German plan was to use the threat of war to extract some concessions from Stalin.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Marshal Voroshilov would drink vodka and chase it with slices of butter.
- Stalin also had control over international communism through the Comintern. For example, in France, Stalin was able to stop the French Communists from opposing France's military budget and a two-year service requirement as part of a deal with the Prime Minister, Laval.
- During the Spanish Civil War, Nationalist troops "engaged in gang rapes of women, marching with panties flying from their bayonets. Women in the tens of thousands had their hair shaved off and their mouths force-fed castor oil, a laxative, so that, when paraded through the streets, they would soil themselves."
- The Spanish Republic sent most of their hard gold to Russia for safekeeping and ended up using it to buy weapons from the Soviets at inflated prices that bankrupted the Spanish government.
- Stalin reduced the rise of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (Russia) by turning two of its autonomous republics (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) into full Union republics and giving Karakalpak to the Uzbek republic. The South Caucasus Federation was also dissolved to create the republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. These would become the fault lines for the dissolution of the Soviet Union five decades later. Stalin also chose not to require education to be in Russian, and most non-Russian schoolchildren were illiterate in Russian. It was a subject in school, but not all school was taught in Russian.
- Yezhov was a raging alcoholic. While in charge of the NKVD, he had to be carried away from vents blackout drunk. Reminds me of how Nazi death squads often needed to get drunk before committing their murders.
- Huge numbers of foreign Communists were killed in the purges as well. But British, French, American, and Czechoslovak Communists largely survived because they belonged to legal parties that did not require refuge in the Soviet Union. Chinese Communists also survived hidden in the Chinese interior. Of the 68 German Communists who fled to the USSR after Hitler came to power, Stalin had forty-one put to death.
- Czechoslovakia was dubbed by Mussolini "Czecho-Germano-Polono-Magyaro-Rutheno-Romano-Slovakia" because the Czechs comprised a bare majority of the population, with 3.25 million Germans, 3 million Slovaks, 750,000 Hungarians, 100,000 Ruthenians (Ukrainians), and 100,000 Poles.
- France had 16 governments between 1932 and 1940.
- Poland wasn't just a passive victim in 1939. Poland was the first government to recognize Germany's March 1938 takeover of Austria, and then took advantage of the moment to compel Lithuania to recognize Poland's annexation of Wilno. At the same time, Poland issued an ultimatum to Czechoslovakia to hand over two-thirds of its ethnically Polish territory in Silesia, and the Czechs capitulated.
- Stalin viewed his son, Vasily, as basically a spoiled youth, and didn't see much potential in him.
- Between 1935-37, 79 Polish Jews were killed in anti-Jewish violence, with significant incidents of anti-Jewish violence in 97 towns. Poland implemented quotas in 1937 to limit the number of Jewish university students, and excluded Jews from certain professional associations. In 1937 alone, 7,000 trials took place of Jews accused of insulting the Polish nation.
- Right until the moment that the Germans launched the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviets were still shipping oil, manganese, grain and other exports to Germany--that's how surprised they were.
