Tag Archives: Joseph Stalin

Our Next Series of Demands

03 Tuesday Nov 2015

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World Leaders at the Yalta Conference, 1945

“In November 1945 Maxim Litvinov, at that time Deputy Foreign Minister of the USSR (who, as his wife told me, had become not merely tactically but even ideologically disenchanted), was asked by the American envoy Averell Harriman what the West could do to satisfy Stalin. He answered: ‘Nothing.’ In June 1946, still in that post, he warned a Western journalist that the ‘root cause’ of the confrontation was ‘the ideological conception prevailing here that conflict between the Communist and capitalist worlds is inevitable’ — that is, no more than the doctrine long since announced by Lenin that ‘a series of frightful clashes’ were bound to occur between the two systems, leading finally to the world victory of communism. When the correspondent asked Litvinov, ‘Suppose the West would suddenly give in and grant all Moscow’s demands?… would that lead to goodwill and the easing of the present tension?’ Litvinov answered, ‘It would lead to you being faced, after a more or less short time, with our next series of demands.'”

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Excerpted from Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century. In the book, Conquest, who Paul Johnson calls “our greatest living historian,” offers a blistering critique of not just Marx and his acolytes, but of the more general tendency for human beings to believe too strongly in the redemptive power of radical ideas and institutions.

On another level, in reading Litvinov’s ominous response, I was struck not by its application to today’s Russia (though some may argue that), but by how it reflects the unspoken approaches of so many groups and movements, both internal and external.

The photograph was taken at the 1945 Yalta Conference. Harriman is in the background, second from the right.

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Why Stalin Hated Trotsky

01 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by in History, Political Philosophy

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Three Famous Russians

“One wonders whether Stalin’s hatred of Trotsky, one of the most passionate in history (with three floors of the Lubyanka [KGB headquarters] devoted to his destruction), was to some extent ‘racial.’ It is, anyway, all of a piece. Anti-Semitism is an announcement of inferiority and a protest against a level playing field – a protest against talent. And this is true, too, of the most hysterical, demonizing, millenarian versions of the cult, according to which a tiny minority, the Jews, planned to achieve world domination. Now how would they manage that, without inordinate gifts? It is said that anti-Semitism differs from other prejudices because it is also a ‘philosophy.’ It is also a religion – the religion of the inadequate. When tracing the fateful synergy between Russia and Germany, we may recall that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the ‘warrant for genocide’ as it is called in Norman Cohn’s book of that name, was a fiction composed by the Tsarist secret police. […]

The proximate cause of [Stalin’s] final delirium was evidently the emergence of the state of Israel in 1948 and the arrival, later that year, of the new ambassador, Golda Meir, who attracted a crowd of 50,000 Jews outside the Moscow synagogue. This was a shocking display of ‘spontaneity’; it also confronted Stalin with an active minority who owed an allegiance other than to ‘the Soviet power’. He is supposed to have said: ‘I can’t swallow them, I can’t spit them out.’ In the end, it seems, he decided to do both. The Jews who survived the gauntlet were meant to end up in Birobidzhan on the Chinese border and in other parts of Siberia where, according to Solzhenitsyn, ‘barracks had already been prepared for them’… Solzhenitsyn believes that the pogrom was to be launched at the beginning of March by the hanging of the ‘doctor-murderers’ in Red Square. But then, too, at the beginning of March something else happened: Stalin died.

It is perhaps controversial to suggest that Iosif Stalin in his last years was capable of further spiritual decline. But one is struck by the loss, the utter evaporation, of his historical self-consciousness, suggesting some sort of erasure in a reasonably important part of Stalin’s brain. ‘Anti-Semitism is counterrevolution,’ Lenin once claimed. Anti-Semitism was the creed of the Whites, of the Tsarists… against whom the young Stalin might have stood in line on the streets of Russia’s cities. Anti-Semitism was for the rabble and the Right. In turning to it, the world’s premier statesman, as he then was, also squandered the vast moral capital that the USSR had accumulated during the war: Hitler’s conqueror, incredibly, became Hitler’s protégé.”

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Pulled from Martin Amis’s engrossing short history of Stalin and the origins of the Soviet Union Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.

Among the most renowned Anglo-American historians of the Soviet Union is 98-year-old Hoover Institute fellow Robert Conquest, a familial friend of Amis and the first Western scholar to describe Stalin’s terror-famine as a purposeful, premeditated genocide. The book in which he makes that claim, The Harvest of Sorrow, opens with the following:

We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.

That single sentence is 3,040 lives. His book runs over 400 pages.

Pictured: Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky at the Eighth Bolshevik Conference in March, 1919.

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The Fitting Final Days of Joseph Stalin

23 Monday Mar 2015

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Stalin

“‘I’m finished,’ Stalin had recently been heard to say to himself: ‘I trust no one, not even myself.’ Svetlana says of this period that a visit to her father would physically wipe her out for several days; and Svetlana was in no fear of her life.

On 1 March Stalin stirred at midday, as usual. In the pantry the light came on: MAKE TEA. The servants waited in vain for the plodding instruction, BRING TEA IN. Not until 11 P.M. did the duty officers summon the nerve to investigate. [Stalin] was lying in soiled pyjamas on the dining-room floor near a bottle of mineral water and a copy of Pravda. His beseeching eyes were full of terror. When he tried to speak he could only produce ‘a buzzing sound’ – the giant flea, the bedbug, reduced to an insect hum. No doubt he had had time to ponder an uncomfortable fact: all the Kremlin doctors were being tortured in jail, and his personal physician of many years, Vinogradov, was, moreover (at the insistence of Stalin himself), ‘in irons’. […]

Stalin’s right side was paralysed; his left side twitched at random. Over the next five days, as the doctors trembled over their work, Vasily Dzhugashvili would sometimes stagger in and shout, ‘They’ve killed my father, the bastards!’ At 9:50 P.M. on 5 March Stalin began sweating heavily. His blue face turned bluer. Svetlana watched and waited. This is her valediction:

For the last twelve hours the lack of oxygen became acute. His face and lips blackened… The death agony was terrible. He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed like the very last moment, he opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry, and full of fear of death… [Then] he suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something up above and bringing down a curse on all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace.

What was he doing? He was groping for his power.

Stalin was dead – but he wasn’t yet done. He had always loved grinding people together, pestling them together, leaving them without air and space, without recourse; he had always loved hemming and cooping them, penning them, pinning them: the Lubyanka reception ‘kennel’, with three prisoners for every yard of floor space; Ivanovo, with 323 men in a cell intended for twenty, or Strakhovich, with twenty-eight men in a cell intended for solitary confinement; or thirty-six in a single train compartment, or a black maria packed so tight that the urkas can’t even pickpocket, or the zeks trussed in pairs and stacked like logs in the back of the truck – en route to execution… On the day of Stalin’s funeral vast multitudes, ecstatic with false grief and false love, flowed through Moscow in dangerous densities. When, in a tightening crowd, your movements are no longer your own and you have to fight to breathe, a simple and sorrowful realization asserts itself through your panic: that if death comes, it will be brought here by life, too much life, a superabundance of life. And what were they all doing there anyway – mourning him? On that day well over a hundred people died of asphyxiation in the streets of Moscow. So Stalin, embalmed in his coffin, went on doing what he was really good at: crushing Russians.”

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Pulled from Martin Amis’s engrossing short history of Stalin and the origins of the Soviet Union Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.

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Stalin funeral

Stalin’s Son

20 Tuesday Jan 2015

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Stalin and daughter

“Stalin really hated him. It took me several days of subliminal work to accept this. The standard interpretation may seem ridiculous, but it is probably the right interpretation. We have seen something of Stalin’s violent insecurity about his provenance. This insecurity was now turned on Yakov. Stalin hated Yakov because Yakov was Georgian. Yakov was Georgian because his mother was Georgian; Yakov was Georgian because Stalin was Georgian; yet Stalin hated Yakov because Yakov was Georgian. The racial and regional tensions within the USSR constitute an enormous subject, but Stalin’s case was, as usual, outlandish. We have to imagine a primitive provincial who (by 1939 or so) had started to think of himself as a self-made Peter the Great: an Ivan the Terrible who had got where he was on merit. Thus Stalin was Russia personified; and Yakov was Georgian. Yakov is said also to have been of a mild and gentle disposition, to his father’s additional disgust.

Raised by his maternal grandparents, Yakov joined the Stalin household in the mid-1920s. He spoke little Russian, and did so with a thick accent (like Stalin). Nadezhda seems to have liked him and fully accepted him. But Stalin’s persecution was so systematic that toward the end of the decade Yakov attempted suicide. He succeeded only in wounding himself; and when Stalin heard about the attempt he said, ‘Ha! He couldn’t even shoot straight” (Volkogonov has him actually confronting his son with the greeting, ‘Ha! You missed!’) Soon afterward Yakov moved to Leningrad to live with Nadezhda’s family, the Alliluyevs.

Like Vasily, Yakov joined the armed forces, as a lieutenant (rather than a field marshal), reflecting his more peripheral status. He was the better soldier, and fought energetically until his unit was captured by the Reichswehr. This placed Stalin in a doubly embarrassing position. A law of August 1941 had declared that all captured officers were ‘malicious traitors’ whose families were ‘subject to arrest.’ Thus Yakov came under the first category – and Stalin came under the second. As a kind of compromise, Stalin arrested Yakov’s wife. When the Nazis tried to negotiate an exchange, Stalin refused (‘I have no son called Yakov’). He feared all the same that the supposedly feeble Yakov might be pressured into some propagandist exhibition of disloyalty. He need not have so feared. Yakov passed through three concentration camps – Hammelburg, Lubeck, Sachsenhausen – and resisted all intimidation. It was precisely to avoid succumbing (Volkogonov believes) that Yakov made his decisive move. In a German camp, as in a Russian, the surest route to suicide was a run at the barbed wire. Yakov ran. The guard did not miss.”

Stalin's son 2

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Pulled from Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis.

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Stalin's children

The Tragic Paradox at the Center of Twentieth Century History

05 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by in History, War

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Adolf Hitler

“Barbarossa, as the invasion of the Soviet Union was codenamed, unleashed the greatest, bloodiest and most difficult land campaign ever fought in the history of warfare. The failure of the German army to conquer Russia did indeed guarantee that Germany as a nation would be destroyed and that the eastern half of Europe would remain in bondage to the Communists until 1989. The tragic paradox at the center of mid- to late-twentieth century history is that Europe, and the world, owed its deliverance from the tyranny of Hitler to the heroism of the Red Army. Of course, Britain’s resistance to Hitler in 1940 played its part at the beginning of the conflict, as did the enormous contribution of men and arms by the United States when they eventually entered the conflict. But the Russian contribution was crucial: it was the resistance of the Russian people to invasion, siege, and starvation, and the preparedness of Stalin to sacrifice millions of lives, both military and civilian in what Russians still call the Great Patriotic War, which secured Hitler’s defeat. To be delivered from the tyranny of Hitler, it was necessary to be delivered into the tyranny of Josef Stalin. If you were a Pole, a Czech, an East German, a Hungarian, a Serb or a Croat you did not have to be A. J. P. Taylor to see that this was a questionable form of liberation. […]

The immense strength and skill of the Red army and the titanic heroism of the Russian people in resisting invasion must have taken Hitler by surprise. To the reader sixty and more years later, the sheer scale of the campaign is not possible to absorb. Within one day, German attacks had demolished a quarter of the entire Soviet air force. Within four months, the Germans had occupied 600,000 square miles of Russian soil, captured 3 million Russian troops, butchered countless Jews and other civilians as they went, and come within sixty-five miles of Moscow. But within a further four months, more than 200,000 German soldiers had been killed, a staggering 726,000 wounded, and a further 113,000 incapacitated by frostbite.”

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Excerpted from A. N. Wilson’s Hitler — one of the more absorbing biographies I’ve read in a long while. At just shy of 200 pages, the book pays significant dividends of insight for the time and attention it demands.

Joseph Stalin