Stalin

Tsarist Russia had aimed in the Great War to destroy forever the threat of German power by breaking up the Hohenzollern and Habsburg realms and establishing a belt of Slavic states that would presumably be friendly to Russia. German and Austrian war aims, conversely, had sought to diminish a perceived Russian menace by stripping it of its western borderlands. If Russia had won the war, it would likely have enacted something like the German-imposed Brest-Litovsk Treaty in reverse. But Russia lost (on the eastern front), just as Germany and Austria-Hungary lost (on the western front), leading to the Versailles Peace. Contrary to received wisdom, Europe’s postwar security system did not disintegrate because of spinelessness or blundering. Only the dual collapse of Russian and German power had made possible Versailles, which could have succeeded only if German and Russian power never rose again. (Britain effectively recognized the instability of Versailles, for, having failed to reach a modus vivendi with German power before the Great War clash, would spend the entire postwar period pursuing an accommodation.) The two Versailles pariahs, Germany and the Soviet Union, entered into clandestine military cooperation. Then, in 1933, as we shall see, Hitler was handed the wheel of the great state Stalin admired. The lives of the two dictators, as the biographer Alan Bullock wrote, had run in parallel. But it was the intersection that would matter: two very different men from the peripheries of Russian power and of German power, respectively, who were bloodily reviving and remaking their countries, while unknowingly and then knowingly drawing ever closer. It was not only the German people who turned out to be waiting for Hitler.

A BRIEF NOTE ON SOURCES

This is a book about authoritarian rule, coercion, manipulation of social divisions and invention of enemies, institutionalized prevarication, but it is based on research into facts. Stalin left an immense historical record. His surviving personal archive (“fond” or collection 558) exists in two parts, now brought together. The first ten sections (identified in Russian by “opis” or finding aid) consist of materials systematized from his own and other archives in connection with a biography planned for his sixtieth birthday in 1939 by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute (now called RGASPI). These include his personal photo albums, correspondence, and reminiscences about him. Books from his personal library (opis 4) would be added after his death. The more valuable second part consists of one vast section (opis 11), which was his working personal archive, located in the “special sector” of the apparatus, later called the Politburo (now the Presidential) Archive, but transferred to RGASPI in 1998–99. Stalin decided what would go into this working archive, but these materials do not always show him in the best light; on the contrary, many documents he kept demonstrate his policy mistakes and his gratuitous cruelty to his opponents and loyalists (who, despite their own crimes, sometimes emerge worthy of sympathy). Some of Stalin’s personal archive—how much remains impossible to say—was destroyed by him and others. For example, he was known to make notes in two sets of notebooks, one black (for technology) and one red (for personnel), but none of these have turned up, save for a few pages. Files of compromising materials on the members of his inner circle, believed to have been in his Kremlin office safe or a cupboard at his Near Dacha, have not turned up. The invaluable logbooks for visitors to his two offices (Old Square and the Kremlin) have been published, but the ones for his Moscow dacha have not and are feared to have been lost or pulped. His enormous record collection vanished, and the bulk of his library was dispersed. Nonetheless, the amount of materials that has survived and become accessible is staggering.