Stalin: A Biography

Despite what he said in public about the warmongering tendencies of the Western Allies, he expected a lengthy period of peace from 1945. The Soviet Union and the states friendly to it in eastern Europe would not have an easy time. Devastation by war and the complications of postwar consolidation would exert the minds and energy of the communist movement for many years. But the USSR was secure in its fortress.

For many, especially those who were unaware of Stalin’s homicidal activities, there would have been no Soviet victory in the Second World War but for his contribution — and perhaps Germany would permanently have bestridden the back of the European continent. In the USSR, too, the acclaim for him had intensified although it would be wrong to think that the exact degree of approval for him is ascertainable. Nor would it be right to assume that most citizens had uncomplicated feelings about him. Throughout the war he had held back from identifying himself with specific political and social policies. He had made that mistake during agricultural collectivisation in the late 1920s, and the self-distancing manoeuvre of ‘Dizzy with Success’ had not succeeded in saving him from the peasantry’s opprobrium. Quite who was responsible for the avoidable horrors of Soviet wartime measures was therefore not clear to everyone. Millions of citizens were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt: they wanted a relaxation of the regime and assumed that this would come about as the war came to an end.

Stalin was more widely loved than he had any right to expect. In his more relaxed moods he liked to compare himself with the Allied leaders. His qualities, he told others, included ‘intelligence, analysis, calculation’. Churchill, Roosevelt and others were different: ‘They — the bourgeois leaders — are resentful and vengeful. One ought to keep feelings under control; if feelings are allowed to get the upper hand, you’ll lose.’¹⁵ This was rich coming from the lips of a Leader whose own violent sensitivities were extreme. But Stalin was in no mood for self-criticism. In a confidential meeting with Bulgarian communists he derided Churchill for failing to anticipate his defeat in the British parliamentary elections in July 1945 — and Churchill, according to Molotov, was the foreign politician whom Stalin respected the most. The conclusion was obvious: Stalin had become convinced of his own genius. He was master of a superpower beginning to fulfil its destiny. His name was as glorious as the victory being celebrated by the communist party and the Red Army. World renown had settled upon the cobbler’s son from Gori.

PART FIVE The Imperator

45. DELIVERING THE BLOW

Stalin’s mind was a stopped clock. There was no chance in 1945 that he would satisfy popular yearnings for reform. His assumptions about policy had hardened like stalactites. He knew what he was doing. If he had relaxed the regime, he would have imperilled his personal supremacy. This consideration counted more for him than evidence that his mode of rule undermined the objective of durable economic competitiveness and political dynamism. Stalin thought strictly within the frame of his worldview and operational assumptions. The habits of despotism had anaesthetised him to human suffering. The man who digested a daily multitude of facts disregarded information he found uncongenial.

Only his death or drastic physical incapacitation might have moved the mechanisms towards reform. He might easily have died in the first half of October 1945 when the condition of his heart gave him problems.¹ The years were catching up with him. He had had patches of ill health since the Revolution, and the Second World War had levied a heavy toll. At the age of sixty-six he was long past his physical prime. His cardiac problem was kept a state secret and he took a two-month vacation;² but this had been nothing unusual for him in the inter-war years. Not even the members of his entourage were initiated into the details of his condition — they were simply left to surmise that he was suffering from an illness of passing significance. Apart from his physician Vladimir Vinogradov, no one had an inkling of the medical prognosis. Politburo members knew they had to desist from any display of inquisitiveness. It would have been dangerous for Stalin to think they were aware of his growing frailty. He would instantly have suspected that a coup against him was in the offing. He needed only a scintilla of doubt about individuals to flash in his mind before consigning them to the security police.