Stalin: A Biography

This book is intended to show that Stalin’s worries went wider and deeper than his concern about internal party critics. He really did have a multitude of enemies. None of them had much chance against him. His defeated opponents gossiped against him, and some subordinates in the party formed little groups to conspire against him. There were plenty of delegates to Party Congresses who felt that his power had become overmagnified after the First Five-Year Plan of 1928–32. More broadly, outside the party, multitudes of people had reason to bear him a grudge: Bolsheviks expelled from the party; priests, mullahs and rabbis; Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries; nationalists among the non-Russians — and indeed among the Russians; peasants; even workers and soldiers. His unpopularity was as great as his power at its peak, and the fact that he fostered a cult of the individual for himself meant that no one in the country could fail to identify him as being personally responsible for the policies that had brought suffering to the country. This was a situation that was unlikely to improve in the near future. At the very moment of his political victory Stalin had much cause to be worried.

The following chapters offer a comprehensive portrait of Stalin in his time. They investigate not only what he did but also why he did it and how he was allowed to do it. He is examined simultaneously as leader, administrator, theorist, writer, comrade, husband and father. His social background, schooling, nationality and ways of work and leisure are analysed. Stalin as a psychological type also needs to be considered — and his habits of daily life as well as the large scale of his political manoeuvres and statesmanship enter the account.

The charge has been laid that such an approach runs the risk of ‘humanising’ the communist leaders. I plead guilty. Stalin carried out campaigns of carnage which have been described with words outside the lexicon of our species: monstrous, fiendish, reptilian; but the lesson to be learned from studying several of the twentieth century’s most murderous politicians is that it is wrong to depict them as beings wholly incomparable to ourselves. Not only is it wrong: it is also dangerous. If the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot are represented as having been ‘animals’, ‘monsters’ or ‘killing machines’, we shall never be able to discern their successors. Stalin in many ways behaved as a ‘normal human being’. In fact he was very far from being ‘normal’. He had a vast desire to dominate, punish and butcher. Often he also comported himself with oafish menace in private. But he could also be charming; he could attract passion and admiration both from close comrades and from an immense public audience. On occasion he could be modest. He was hard-working. He was capable of kindliness to relatives. He thought a lot about the good of the communist cause. Before he started killing them, most communists in the USSR and in the Comintern judged him to be functioning within the acceptable bounds of political conduct.

Of course, they overlooked the other side of Stalin. It was a side that had been plentifully evident after the October Revolution. He had killed innumerable innocents in the Civil War. He had gone on to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths in the First and Second Five-Year Plans. He was a state murderer long before instigating the Great Terror. The neglect of his propensities appears inexplicable unless account is taken of the complex man and politician behind the ‘grey blur’ he presented to a multitude of observers. Stalin was a killer. He was also an intellectual, an administrator, a statesman and a party leader; he was a writer, editor and statesman. Privately he was, in his own way, a dedicated as well as bad-tempered husband and father. But he was unhealthy in mind and body. He had many talents, and used his intelligence to act out the roles he thought suited to his interests at any given time. He baffled, appalled, enraged, attracted and entranced his contemporaries. Most men and women of his lifetime, however, underestimated Stalin. It is the task of the historian to examine his complexities and suggest how better to understand his life and times.

2. THE FAMILY DZHUGHASHVILI

Stalin’s official biography appeared in 1938. His early life was described in the five opening sentences:¹