Stalin

Rumors that Stalin had been killed were being spread out of independent Latvia, where many governments ran their intelligence operations against the Soviet Union, and on November 22 Eugene Lyons, a Belorussia-born, New York–raised UPI correspondent in Moscow and a Soviet sympathizer, suddenly got summoned to Old Square for a seventy-minute audience. Stalin had last granted an interview four years earlier, to the American Jerome Davis, and was still pursuing the same aim of normalizing relations with the United States, which had become the USSR’s third-largest trading partner, after Germany and Britain, but remained the only great power that withheld diplomatic recognition. In Stalin’s office, Lyons noted portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin on the wall. “My pulse, I am sure, was high,” he would recall. “No sooner, however, had I stepped across the threshold than diffidence and nervousness fell away. Stalin met me at the door and shook hands, smiling. . . . He was remarkably unlike the scowling, self-important dictator of popular imagination. . . . ‘Comrade Stalin,’ I began the interview, ‘may I quote you to the effect that you have not been assassinated?’ He laughed.”

Lyons established for a foreign audience that Stalin had a wife and three children (the Soviet populace did not know), and that he could be charming. “Commenting on the fact that he is called Russia’s Dictator,” Lyons wrote, “Comrade Stalin exclaimed with another hearty laugh: ‘It is just very funny!’”³²⁸ Lyons was treated to tea and sandwiches in an adjacent room while typing his dispatch. Russia’s dictator approved the typescript (“in general, more or less correct”), allowing it to be transmitted to New York, where the scoop created a sensation. Lyons returned to the United States for a twenty-city lecture tour. “One cannot live in the shadow of Stalin’s legend,” he observed, “without coming under its spell.”³²⁹

The Soviet-friendly New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty erupted at his handlers over Lyons’s scoop. Belatedly, Duranty, too, was granted an interview, also of seventy minutes, on November 27. He wrote that Stalin believed that the current global crisis in capitalism would deepen but not mark its demise, and yet the result would be a war over markets in the future, and the downfall of the the Versailles settlement.³³⁰ “Stalin is the most interesting personality in the world,” Duranty enthused in his telegram to the United States, which passed Soviet censors. “But of all national leaders he is the least known, he remains removed from everyone, mysterious, like a Tibetan Dalai Lama.”³³¹

A friend of Duranty’s, H. R. Knickerbocker, got his own scoop: an interview with Stalin’s mother, Keke Geladze, in Tiflis, for the New York Evening Post (December 1, 1930). “Revolutionary posters and the eternal appeal for harder work on the Five-Year Plan reminded one that all the way from Siberia to the edge of Persia the Soviet Union is dominated today by a single purpose, and a single will,” Knickerbocker wrote. Keke, speaking through an interpreter of Georgian, took responsibility for Stalin’s failure to finish the seminary: “He was not expelled. I took him out on account of his health. He did not want to go. I took him out. He was my only [surviving] son.” She pointed at a pile of periodicals, all mentioning Stalin. “See how he works,” she said. “All this he has done. He works too hard.” The article was titled “Stalin Mystery Man Even to His Mother.”³³²

STOUT INNER CIRCLE

All authoritarian regimes require a sense of being under siege by sinister “enemies.” The inhabitants of the USSR found themselves exhorted to relentless vigilance against class enemies, supposedly longing for foreign military intervention to overturn the Soviet regime, restore capitalism, and exact revenge. Under such a vision, even diehard socialists could be denounced as “White Guards”—as Lenin and Trotsky had denounced the Kronstadt sailors in 1921—if they opposed the Soviet regime. Pervasive domestic difficulties rendered the treason tales plausible, press reports gave them life, and Stalin afforded them great intensity.³³³ During the proceedings against Syrtsov and Lominadze, he had interrupted Mikoyan to say of his Communist party critics, “Now they are all White Guards.”³³⁴ Working intimately with the obliging Mężyński, he had elaborated a comprehensive scenario: a right deviation, a right-left bloc, “bourgeois specialist” wreckers, and a military conspiracy with right-deviation links, all of them with foreign ties, aiming to bring on war, reverse collectivization, sabotage industrialization, and remove him.³³⁵ He was the fulcrum.