Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

The party had underestimated the dangers facing the Soviet state in conditions of ‘capitalist encirclement’, said Stalin, notably the penetration of the USSR by numerous imperialist wreckers, spies, diversionists and killers. Pretending to be loyal communists, the Trotskyists had ‘deceived our people politically, abused confidence, wrecked on the sly, and revealed our state secrets to the enemies of the Soviet Union’.

The strength of the party, said Stalin, lay in its connection to the masses. By way of illustration he cited the ancient Greek myth of Antaeus, the son of Poseidon, god of the seas, and of Gaea, goddess of the earth. In battle, Antaeus was invincible because of the strength he drew from his mother via the earth. But one day an enemy appeared who vanquished him. It was Hercules, who held him aloft and prevented him from touching the ground:

I think that the Bolsheviks remind us of the hero of Greek mythology, Antaeus. They, like Antaeus, are strong because they maintain connection with their mother, the masses who gave birth to them, suckled them and reared them. And as long as they maintain connection with their mother, with the people, they have every chance of remaining invincible.⁷¹

The military purge began in May 1937 with the arrest of Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky and seven other Soviet generals, who were accused of a fascist plot to overthrow the government.

Stalin’s doubts about the loyalty of the Red Army dated back to the civil war debate about the recruitment of bourgeois military specialists. In the 1920s White émigré circles fantasised about Tukhachevsky as a ‘Red Napoleon’ and there were fears the armed forces would be infiltrated by former Tsarist officers. There were many Trotsky supporters in the highly politicised armed forces and in 1927 the head of Stalin’s political police warned him they were plotting a military coup. During the forced collectivisation campaign, elements of the Red Army wavered when faced with orders to seize peasant lands and produce.

None of this stopped Tukhachevsky from rising to the rank of deputy defence commissar or from being promoted to marshal in 1935. But Stalin’s attitude towards him changed drastically during the feverish atmosphere that developed after Kirov’s assassination. The trigger for his arrest seems to have been a report from Voroshilov in early May 1937 that the armed forces had been infiltrated by foreign agents and that sabotage and espionage were rife.⁷² After a summary trial, Tukhachevsky and his colleagues were executed, as were several thousand other officers, in an extensive purge that lasted until the end of 1938. Among those who perished were three marshals, sixteen generals, fifteen admirals, 264 colonels, 107 majors and seventy-one lieutenants. By the time the purge had run its course, 34,000 officers had been dismissed from service, although 11,500 of them were later reinstated.

On 2 June 1937, Stalin addressed the country’s Military Council about the existence of a military-political conspiracy against Soviet power. Its political leaders were Trotsky, Rykov and Bukharin; its military core, the High Command group led by Tukhachevsky. The chief organiser of this conspiracy was Trotsky, who dealt directly with the Germans, while Tukhachevsky’s group acted as agents of the Reichswehr, which controlled them like ‘marionettes and puppets’.

Stalin cautioned against persecuting people just because they had a dubious political background but bemoaned the weakness of Soviet intelligence services, which were ‘childlike’ compared to those of bourgeois states. Intelligence was the Soviet state’s eyes and ears and, for the first time in twenty years, it had suffered a severe defeat, he said.⁷³

Stalin was also perturbed by the subversive activities of so-called kulaks, allegedly rich peasants who had been deprived of their property during the forced collectivisation drive. In early July 1937, the Politburo directed local and regional party leaders to draw up lists of anti-Soviet ‘kulaks and criminals’ who had returned home from deportation exile in Siberia, ‘so that the most dangerous of them can be arrested and shot’.⁷⁴ At the end of that month the Politburo approved a proposal from the NKVD to repress nearly 300,000 kulaks and criminals, including more than 72,000 summary executions. The stated rationale for this ‘mass operation’ was that anti-Soviet elements were involved in extensive crime, sabotage and subversion, not only in the countryside but in urban areas, too. By the end of the operation, the NKVD had exceeded its target for arrests by 150 per cent and for executions by over 400 per cent.⁷⁵