Love in the Twilight

Lana Peters is alive, well and living Richland Centre, Wisconsin. Who is Lana Peters, you ask? She is the daughter of one of the most infamous tyrants in modern history; she is the daughter of Stalin.

Her full name is Svetlana and before her marriage she was generally known by the surname Alliluyeva, her mother’s maiden name, or occasionally Stalina. Now eight-four years old, she defected to the West from the old Soviet Union in 1967. She was eventually to publish Twenty Letters to a Friend, both a wistful memoir of a comfortable childhood and a denunciation of the crimes of her father. There is a profound ambiguity here, a contradiction between a daughter’s love of her father and the horror with which she perceives his actions. It’s an ambiguity that continues to the present day.

Although she now generally avoids any publicity I was interested to read a press report at the weekend of an interview she gave to David Jones, a British journalist she has spoken to in the past. She seems to despise her native land, to which she returned briefly, despising in particular the political leadership it has thrown up, from Lenin to Putin. And then, of course, there is Stalin, the bleak legacy that he left her.

It was Stalin’s notorious paranoia, his pathological distrust, that was the principal motor of the Great Purge, a process that destroyed so many lives; and his paranoia did not stop short of his own family. Svetlana, whose mother had committed suicide when she was only six years old, lost relatives, including an aunt to whom she was particularly close. At this point of the interview Jones remarked that her father was responsible for this. “No!” she replied in anger, “Not my father. It was Beria.”

Here we have the ambiguity, the denial at its deepest. Lavrenti Beria, who succeeded Nikolai Yezhov, as head of the NKVD, the secret police responsible for the mass arrests and deportations of the late 1930s, was indeed a repellent man; but he was never more than a tool. Indeed, the worst stages of the Purge were over before he took command of the security apparatus. This is where Svetlana’s memories become incredibly selective;

My mother would never allow Beria in the house. She knew what he was. But after she died, of course, things changed and he was promoted from the Caucuses to Moscow. He seemed to have some sort of hold on my father.

The truth is that Nadezhda Alliluyeva killed herself in November 1932 and Beria was only promoted from his post in the Caucuses in August 1938. When Jones reminded Svetlana of the Terror Famine of the early 1930s, which took so many lives in the Ukraine, she dismissed this with a wave of her hand, saying “Oh, yes, my father too.”

There is history, there is truth and there is the recognition of truth. But Stalin loved her, her father loved her, no matter how brutish he could behave; and it is that love that she cannot quite forget in the twilight of her life.

Remembering Stalin

I saw from a brief report in the British press that Stalin is set to return to Moscow. His portrait is to appear on public buildings prior to 9 May, the day the Russians celebrate the end of the Second World War. This is clearly part of the present drive to create a more ‘positive’ image of Russia’s past, embracing a repackaging of its bloodiest tyrant, a programme fully supported by Premier Putin, moving forwards on some fronts, backwards on others.

In responding to criticism that it is wrong to glorify a man who caused so many deaths, Vladimir Makarov, a city official, said “We need to remember the man who led our country in war.” Yes, that may be true, but there are other things worth remembering, not least of which that this is a man who nearly destroyed Russia in war.

In the original victory parade of May 1945 it was Marshall Zhukov who took the salute, because Stalin was too scared to sit on a horse. Zhukov was later to find himself a victim of the Great Leader’s paranoia and petty jealousy, although his demotion was nothing when compared with the almost total destruction of the senior command of the army, navy and air force in 1937 during the Purge.

Russia was robbed at a crucial time of the services of the likes of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, possibly the most talented soldier of the day, certainly the equal of any senior German officer in imaginative strategic thinking. In his place came Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny, whose servility was only equalled by their stupidity. These, along with Stalin, were the masters of the ‘don’t give an inch’ strategy which almost brought total defeat after the German invasion in 1941.

It’s often said that Stalin trusted nobody, not even his closest acquaintances. That’s not true; there was one man he trusted- he trusted Adolf Hitler. In the early months of 1941 the Kremlin received report after report that German forces were massing on their western frontier. Stalin ignored communiqués from Churchill; he ignored communist agents in the west; he ignored the reports of Richard Sorge, his best agent by far. He even ignored German deserters who crossed the border with a warning. They were simply tortured and then shot as provocateurs. His trust was deep, naïve and child-like in the extreme, so much so that he lapsed into a kind of mental seizure after the German onslaught began in June 1941, refusing to believe what was happening, even blaming the invasion on ‘renegade’ generals.

It was Stalin’s errors that caused the catastrophic early defeats, costing Russia millions of men, killed or captured. It was wasteful, it was stupid and but for even greater stupidity on the part of Hitler it would almost certainly have ended in defeat. As it was Stalin continued to waste men and materials in needless and pointless offensives. So, if Stalin is to be remembered it should be for these things; for this was the style of the leadership that he brought to Russia.

Was Stalin's Foreign Policy a Failure?

This is a question that can, I think, be tackled on a purely empirical level, proceeding by example and analysis.

Stalin was in many ways a superb tactician; cool, rational, intelligent and utterly ruthless. However, his grasp of international relations was never the strongest of his talents. On occasions his miscalculations had disastrous implications, both for the immediate and long-term security of the Soviet Union. To begin with the problem was one of ideological rigidity. That is to say, once a policy was adopted by the Third International it was followed without deviation, regardless of local circumstances and changing political conditions. In the 1920s the United Front strategy favoured by Stalin, and held to throughout angry debates with Trotsky and the United Opposition, lead to major setback in China, where the local Communist party was all but destroyed by the nationalist Kuomintang, at a time when Chiang Kai-shek was an honorary member of the Comintern!

Having learned nothing by the China debacle Soviet and Comintern policy was then piloted by Stalin into the even more disastrous Third Period, an ultra-left switch based on the contention that all Social Democratic Parties, no matter what their policies, were forms of Social fascism. By this understanding all Communist parties were instructed to concentrate their efforts on defeating their rivals in the labour movement, thus ignoring the threat presented by real Fascism. The implications for Russian security in this strategy were quite profound; for it divided the German left in the face of Hitler, and led to the destruction of the KPD in 1933, and the creation of a new and dangerous threat to the Soviet Union. There is, of course, no guarantee that a united front strategy in Germany would have stopped Hitler; but the divisions among his enemies made things considerably easier for him.

Stalin then sought to check the further development of Fascism, and the threat posed by Germany, by a new emphasis on political unity in Popular Fronts, paralleled by an attempt to advance notions of collective security through the League of Nations. When this was perceived to have failed he then reached an understanding with Hitler, turning the political and diplomatic world upside down in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, an important preamble to the Second World War. Looked at in strictly rational terms the Pact was perfectly understandable from Stalin's point of view; what was not understandable was the continuing trust he placed in Hitler, which led to near disaster in 1941.

So, by the first and most important standard of all, that an adequate foreign policy has to be premised on national security, safeguarding the country from attack, Stalin's must, in my estimation, be judged a serious failure. What of the post-war period? Well here Stalin's actions in Eastern Europe, and his failure to come to terms with the United States, were crucial factors in the onset of the Cold War, the formation of NATO and the acceleration of the arms race. What might be termed the 'Politics of Force' was to place an intolerable burden on the Soviet economy, without measurably increasing national security. It was a burden that, in the end, the system could not stand, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union was perhaps Stalin's final legacy.

Stalin and the Nudes

I mentioned in a previous blog that I’m reading Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, an account of Stain’s Purge of the mid to late 1930s, the latest in a series of books I have read on the dictator’s life and career. I think, on a rough calculation, that I have now read more books and articles on Stalin than I have on Hitler.

While I cannot truly claim to know what motivated the latter I think I have a slightly better understanding of him than I do of the former. Stalin, I have to say, as a human being, remains a complete enigma. The core question, one I simply cannot answer, is why would such a man, cruel, vindictive and malevolent to a quite unbelievable degree, ever have embraced an ideology like Marxism, which, no matter how perverse, advances a model of human enlightenment and liberation? All I will say is that Stalin is a figure who can only be understood in the context of Russian history, in all of its grandeur and all of its tragedy.

Now a little piece in Saturday’s Telegraph complicates the picture still further. Stalin, I know, liked to doodle when he was thinking. What I did not know was that he took classical nude drawings and defaced them with messages ridiculing opponents and colleagues. These ‘art works’ have now gone on exhibition in Moscow.

On one of the nude male figures Stalin has written “Ginger bastard Radek, if he had not pissed against the wind, if he had not been angry, he would still be alive.” Karl Radek, a former Secretary of the Comintern and one-time supporter of Trotsky, was jailed for ten years in the second Moscow Show Trial but never emerged alive from the labour camps.


In a sketch of a bearded nude man Stalin has drawn a red inverted triangle over his penis with the comment “Why are you so thin?” According to experts the insult was specifically directed at Mikhail Kalinin, one of the dictator’s own circle, a nonentity who served as the nominal head of state from 1919 to his death in 1946.

I’m not sure what these drawings tell us other than perhaps to throw a little more light on the darker recesses of the tyrant’s psyche.

Terror, nothing but Terror

Amongst my other reading at present I’ve been working my way through Robert Conquest’s classic The Great Terror, an exploration of the Stalinist purge in Russia in the mid-1930s. I’ve reached the most terrible phase of that terrible part of the nation’s history, the so-called Yezhovchina, named after Nikolai Yezhov, then head of the NKVD, the Soviet security police.

It’s difficult to know how the nation was able to survive the ever growing spiral of denunciations, arrests and executions, embracing the whole of society, high and low, in and out. It’s difficult to know how people, ordinary people, could go to sleep at night, knowing that they might very well be visited by the secret police in the early hours of the morning, their favourite time. It’s difficult to know how Russia avoided a collective breakdown in the midst of this horror.

Here’s one story that caught my attention, a demonstration of the manic stupidity of the whole period, the kind of thing that emerged in the process of lunatic denunciations. It concerns one Sylakov, a deserter from the Red Army. He gave himself up in Kiev claiming that, for whatever reason, that he had been involved in an anti-Soviet plot. He told of a planned raid on a post office in which he had a leading part, intended to provide funds for a terrorist cell. This was not enough for the NKVD, so after a good kicking, he implicated the whole of his old military unit, right up to the commanding officer. The attacks planned were not now on a post office, no, but on government leaders.

Following this almost the whole of his unit was arrested, from the commanding officer right down to the drivers, wives included. Sylakov’s family were also drawn in, his two sisters, his father and his old and crippled mother. So, too, was an uncle, who had only ever met his nephew once. The said uncle was discovered to have served once as a corporal in the old Imperial Army, and was immediately promoted by the NKVD into a Tsarist general!

As with a rock thrown into a silent pool, the rings grew ever wider as this absurd tale progressed, embracing more and more, to the point that every cell in Kiev prison was occupied by someone implicated in the ‘Sylakov Plot.’ But no sooner had the intensity of the Terror slackened with the fall of Yezhov in late 1938 than the NKVD began to re-examine the whole case, now a complete embarrassment. The suspects were all interrogated again, with a view to getting them to withdraw their forced confessions. Some, fearing a trick, refused and had to be given another kicking, to get them to reject statements that carried the death sentence! Is there any greater madness than this?

Khrushchev contra Stalin

To begin with it should be noted that the whole speech was built on the oddest of paradoxes: a denunciation of Stalin's personality cult and authoritarian style by a man who had spent the three years since the dictator's death in undermining collective leadership, and establishing his own unparalleled power! By the time of the 20th Congress, in other words, Khrushchev’s political authority was almost as great as that previously enjoyed by Stalin.

Delegates at the Congress were given no advance warning of what to expect. Indeed, proceedings were opened by Khrushchev’s call for all to stand in memory of the Communist leaders who had died since the previous Congress, with Stalin being mentioned in the same breath as Klement Gottwald. Hints of a new direction only came out gradually over the next ten days, which must have left those present highly perplexed. On the 25 February, the very last day of the Congress, it was announced that an unscheduled secret session had been called for the Soviet delegates.

The speech itself began with vague references to the harmful consequences of elevating a single individual so high that he took on the "supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god." Khrushchev went on to say that such a mistake had been made about Stalin. He himself had been guilty of what was, in essence, a distortion of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism. The attention of the audience was then drawn to Lenin's Testament, copies of which had been distributed, criticising Stalin's 'rudeness'. Further accusations, and hints of accusations, followed, including the suggestion that the murder of Sergey Kirov in 1934, the event that sparked of the Great Terror, could be included in the list of Stalin's crimes. While criticising the Man, Khrushchev carefully praised the Party, which had the strength to withstand all the negative effects of imaginary crimes and false accusations. The Party, in other words, had been a victim of Stalin, not an accessory to his crimes. He finished by calling on the Party to eradicate the cult of the personality and return to "the revolutionary fight for the transformation of society."

So, what were his motives? Was it really a call for a return to Leninist 'collective leadership' destroyed by Stalin? Well, here we have to remember that Lenin himself had only called for collective leadership in his final days, in the belief that no single individual was fit to follow in his singular path. Khrushchev himself, moreover, had, as I have said, effectively destroyed the new forms of collectivity that emerged after Stalin's death in 1953. In a sense, the Secret Speech was his own triumphal declaration, and he used it to undermine still further some senior Soviet politicians, including Georgy Malenkov and Kliment Voroshilov.

The implication was clear enough: he was innocent and the rest were guilty, though the simple truth was that he was just as bloody as any of the others. He was simply shifting the burden of responsibility. Exempting himself and blaming others: the whole speech was not about principles and ideals-it was about politics, and it was about power. Khrushchev had to demolish Stalin to establish his own imperium; Augustus had to give way to Tiberius. It may be of passing interest to make note of the fact that Stalin's portrait continued to hang in Khrushchev’s office long after 1956, as a kind of spiritual avatar. And those who took the speech at face value were soon to face the simple truth that the ideal was not reborn

War Lords

What is the difference between Stalin and Hitler as military leaders? Well, that's simple enough: Hitler thought he was a genius and acted like a genius, with disastrous consequences for the whole German war effort. Stalin thought he was a genius and acted like a politician, giving the initiative to the people who had the talent and skill to realise his strategic vision. Stalin learned from his mistakes; Hitler did not learn from Stalin's mistakes.

Possibly the worst order that any leader can give to his generals is 'hold on at all costs and do not retreat.' All this means is that the enemy finds a weak point, advances and then destroys the defending forces in battles of envelopment, precisely what happened in western Russia in the summer and autumn of 1941. But by 1942 Stalin had learned the advantages of trading territory for military advantage.

The Second Battle of Kharkov was to be the last truly serious Russian defeat in the war. Thereafter, with minimal interference from Stalin, soldiers like Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Koniev were allowed sufficient inititive to bring their formidable talents to bear. Hitler, in contrast, began to interfere with military operations, down to the most basic levels of command, robbing the German army of the flexibility and initiative which had long been the chief mark of its battle-field effectiveness. The German Sixth Army could have withdrawn from Stalingrad even after it was surrounded in November 1942; but Hitler insisted that it remain. A new pattern of fight and defend at all costs was established, leading to the destruction of one German force after the other as the Russians pushed westwards in 1943-44.

There are other factors to consider in the respective war-time roles of Stalin and Hitler. As a leader Stalin was an inspiration, and his decision to remain in Moscow, and be seen in public, as the Germans advanced towards the city, had an incalculable effect on Russian morale. W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow from 1943-45, was to say of him "I'd like to emphasize my great admiration for Stalin the national leader in an emergency, one of those historical occasions when one man made such a difference." Contrast that with Hitler who, as the German emergency deepened, sunk further and further into the background, leaving Goebbels to fill the gap in national leadership. For all his faults Stalin was an asset for the Russian war effort; for all his talents Hitler was a disaster for the German