FACES AND PLACES: "Genghis Khan with a telephone" (07/25/04)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

"Genghis Khan with a telephone"

Who were Stalin's comrades? Who were Stalin's victims? According to Simon Montefiore's "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar," they were usually one and the same.

Being Stalin's closest confidante, an old Bolshevik, a fellow revolutionary, a personal secretary, a close family or social friend, even a son or a wife, meant nothing. All were expendable. No one was safe. All were suspect. One could break bread with Stalin one day and disappear the next.

A charming cruelty devised by Stalin was to arrest a family member of one of his close colleagues and expect that co-worker to remain loyal and to continue working as if nothing had happened. Thus it was that Viacheslav Molotov's Jewish wife was sent to the gulag and Lazar Kaganovich was forced to turn against his innocent brother, who committed suicide as a result.

Most of us know that Stalin was an unpredictable sadist who loved to play with his victims as a cat will sometimes play with a mouse it has caught. "What greater superiority and control over another person is there?" asked psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in his classic study "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness."

Having thoroughly researched Stalin's personal papers and interviewed the children and grandchildren of his closest associates, Mr. Montefiore provides more details about the man than we really wanted to know. We learn, for example, that Stalin was bright, had a phenomenal memory, was an intellectual of sorts, was a voracious reader of Western literature whose favorite book was James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans," was charming, warm and cuddly on occasion, had a fine singing voice, hated to change clothes, and remained a lifestyle Georgian all of his life. He regularly checked his daughter's homework; his favorite painting was Repin's "The Zaporozhian's Letter to the Sultan"; his favorite flower was the mimosa; he suffered from tonsillitis; and he kept Lenin's death mask on a wall in his living quarters, "where it was illuminated like an icon with a burning lamp." He could be kind to his subordinates, rewarding them with Buicks for their private use and sending them to Europe for medical treatment if necessary. He also enjoyed listening to Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23, as well as American jazz.

Just about the time the reader begins to warm to Stalin, Mr. Montefiore reminds us of the evil that Stalin created, sustained and enjoyed. Tsar Ivan the Terrible was Stalin's heroic model. "The Terror was not just a consequence of Stalin's monstrosity," writes the author, "but it was formed, expanded and accelerated by his uniquely overpowering character, reflecting his malice and vindictiveness. ... The greatest delight," he told Lev Kamenev, "is to mark one's enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly and then go to sleep." Stalin, the terrorist apparition, the man Leon Trotsky once described as "Genghis Khan with a telephone," prowls every page of the Montefiore book.

The chapter titled "Trains Full of Corpses: Love, Death and Hysteria" is devoted to Stalin's man-made famine in Ukraine. During the summer of 1932, as millions were suffering an agonizing death in Ukraine, food was plentiful in Sochi, where Stalin and his family were vacationing. On June 6, 1932, he demanded that deadlines for grain deliveries should be met with no deviations. He ignored Ukrainian Soviet leaders' pleas for relief. Ukraine, he said, "has been given more than it should get." Kaganovich, patrolling Ukraine, "was unmoved," writes Montefiore. "He was more outraged by the sissy leaders there." Revolts in Ukraine frightened Stalin and he demanded that Ukraine be brought to heel.

Nadya Alliuyeva, 22 years younger than Stalin, and mother of his two children, Vasily and Svetlana, was horrified by Stalin's brutality and begged him to help the starving of Ukraine. Stalin was outraged by her interference, but Nadya persisted. It all came to a head at a festive banquet on November 8, 1932. Stalin raised his glass to toast the destruction of the "enemies of the state" and noticed that Nadya had not raised her glass. "Why aren't you drinking?" he called over truculently, aware that she and Bukharin shared a disapproval of his starvation of the peasants," writes Mr. Montefiore. Nadya ignored him. Enraged, Stalin tossed an orange peal at her and flicked a cigarette in her direction. "Hey you," he shouted, "Have a drink!"

"My name isn't 'hey!'" she screamed as she stormed out of the room. A few hours later Nadya committed suicide.

Stalin's gruesome grandees - Molotov, Kaganovich, Khrushchev, Voroshilov, Malenkov, Beria, Bulganin, Mikoyan and countless others who made cameo appearances in his court (Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kirov, Yagoda, Yezhov) only to be eliminated by the exalted exterminator himself - were shoulder deep in innocent blood. They turned on their compatriots, signed their death warrants and approved death quotas for millions throughout the USSR, all to gain Stalin's approval. They were very busy. In one day alone, November 12, 1938, Stalin and Molotov signed 3,167 execution orders. "The responsibility," Mr. Montefiore writes, "lies with the hundreds of thousands of officials who ordered or perpetrated the murders. Stalin and his magnates enthusiastically, recklessly, almost joyfully, killed, and they usually killed more than they were asked to kill. None were ever tried for these crimes."

Stalin knew that he and his murdering magnates would never be called to account for their genocide. "Who's going to remember all of this riffraff in 20 years' time?" he asked.

"No one." Molotov agreed. "The people understand you, Joseph Vissarrionovich, they understand and they support you," he replied.

The lives of Stalin's gangster circle are chronicled throughout the book. With the exception of Beria, they stood around the death bed of the "supreme pontiff of their international creed" and wept. "Perhaps 20 million had been killed," writes Mr. Montefiore, "28 million deported, of whom 18 million had slaved in the gulags. Yet after so much slaughter, they were still believers."

The USSR was the devil's workshop and if ever evil personified walked the earth, it was Stalin.

Myron Kuropas's e-mail address is: [email protected].

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