Stalin

Not only do we have Stalin’s personal archive, but also colossal party and state archives, in the capital and in regions, while for foreign affairs there are the archives of other governments, too. Even though in Stalin’s case we lack a Mein Kampf, recorded “table talks,” or bona fide accounts by mistresses, we do have his voluminous correspondence while on holiday in Sochi or Gagra, when he issued detailed instructions to those running affairs on his behalf back in the capital. In addition, many other minions recorded his instructions—the boss of the film industry, the head of the Comintern, the notetaker for the government—in real time. Subsequent memoirs, some of which are revealing, enhance and sometimes unlock the archival materials. Regime transcripts for instructional dissemination were made of all party congresses, most of Stalin’s extended remarks at Kremlin receptions, and a handful of key politburo and Central Committee meetings. The central press, which he tightly controlled, also affords excellent material on his thinking. Archives of the secret police, counterintelligence, and bodyguard directorate remain almost entirely closed, and those for the military and foreign policy arm can be very difficult to access, but these institutions have published enormous quantities of document collections, and those scholars who have enjoyed unusually good access, including to the secret police materials, have published monographs with extensive quotations. There is also the phenomenon of scanning, which permits the quiet sharing of documents. So the evidentiary record, while not complete, is astonishingly rich.

Many scholars have been working on these materials, and this volume is indebted to the excellent research produced by R. W. Davies on the economy, Oleg Khlevniuk on the party-state machinery, Vladimir Khaustov on the secret police, Matthew Lenoe on events surrounding Sergei Kirov, Vladimir Nevezhin on the conception of the Soviet state as a great power, Adam Tooze on Nazi Germany’s grand strategy, Gabriel Gorodetsky on the British establishment and on Stalin’s foreign policy, and countless others, acknowledged in the endnotes.

Words cannot express how much better this book became thanks to my U.S.-based editor, Scott Moyers, and the rest of the team at Penguin. It exists at all thanks to him and my agent, Andrew Wylie. Many others—alas, far too numerous to list—deserve to be singled out for their kindness and perspicacity. Let me here express my gratitude to all, particularly archivists, librarians, and fellow scholars in Russia. Oleg Budnitskii took me on as an associate senior researcher at his International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, in Moscow. I have also benefited tremendously from being a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, whose Library and Archives are a treasure beyond belief, and I am deeply grateful to the L&A director, Eric Wakin. Above all, Princeton University has provided me a dream scholarly home and spectacular students for the better part of three decades.

———PART I———EQUAL TO THE MYTH

Here he is, the greatest and most important of our contemporaries. . . . In his full size he towers over Europe and Asia, over the past and the present. He is the most famous and yet almost the least known man in the world.

HENRI BARBUSSE, Stalin, 1935¹

IOSIF STALIN WAS A HUMAN BEING. He collected watches.² He played skittles and billiards. He loved gardening and Russian steam baths.³ He owned suits and ties but never wore them, unlike Lenin, and, unlike Bukharin, he did not fancy traditional peasant blouses or black leather jackets. He wore a semi-military tunic of either gray or khaki color, buttoned at the top, along with baggy khaki trousers that he tucked into his tall leather boots. He did not use a briefcase, but he sometimes carried documents inside folders or wrapped in newspapers.⁴ He liked colored pencils—blue, red, green—manufactured by Moscow’s Sacco and Vanzetti factory (originally built by the American Armand Hammer). He drank Borjomi mineral water and red Khvanchkara and white Tsinandali wines from his native Georgia. He smoked a pipe, using the tobacco from Herzegovina Flor brand cigarettes, which he would unroll and slide in, usually two cigarettes’ worth. He kept his desk in order. His dachas had runners atop the carpets, and he strove to keep to the narrow coverings. “I remember, once he spilled a few ashes from his pipe on the carpet,” recalled Artyom Sergeyev, who for a time lived in the Stalin household after his own father’s death, “and he himself, with a brush and knife, gathered them up.”⁵