Titans of History

In 1934, despite a triumphant party congress, there was a plot to replace Stalin with his young henchman, Sergei Kirov, who was later assassinated in Leningrad. Stalin may or may not have ordered the killing, but he certainly used it to launch the Great Terror to regain control and crush any dissent. With the aid of the NKVD secret police, Stalin subjected those he regarded as his leading political enemies to a series of show trials, extracting false confessions by torture. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin were all found guilty of fabricated crimes and shot, as were two successive leaders of the NKVD, Yagoda and Yezhov. But the show trials were just the tip of the iceberg: in 1937–8 Stalin drew up secret orders to arrest and shoot thousands of “enemies of the people” by city and regional quotas. The politburo and central committee were purged; 40,000 army officers were shot, including three of the five marshals. Even Stalin’s closest friends were not immune: he signed death lists of 40,000 names. Soviet society was terrorized and poisoned. In those years approximately one million were shot, while many millions more were arrested, tortured and exiled to the labor camps of Siberia, where many died. “You can’t make an omelet without cracking eggs,” he said.

In 1939, faced with a resurgent Nazi Germany and distrusting the Western democracies, Stalin put aside his anti-fascism and signed the Nonaggression Pact with Hitler. Poland was partitioned between Germany and the USSR, and 28,000 Polish officers were murdered in the Katyn Forest on Stalin’s orders. Stalin also seized and terrorized the Baltic States, and launched a disastrous war against Finland.

Stalin ignored constant warnings that Hitler was planning to attack the USSR. The invasion came in June 1941, and within days the Soviet armies were retreating. Stalin’s inept interference in military matters led to colossal losses—some 6 million soldiers—in the first year of war. But by late 1942 he had finally learned to take advice, and his generals scored a decisive victory over the Germans at Stalingrad. This was the turning point in the war, and by the time Berlin fell to the Red Army in May 1945, the Soviets controlled all of eastern Europe—and were to maintain a steely grip on it for the next forty-five years. Stalin was indifferent to the cost of victory: some 27 million Soviet citizens—both soldiers and civilians—perished during the war, during the course of which Stalin had ordered the deportation of entire peoples to Siberia, including a million Chechens, of whom half died in the process.

During the war, Stalin built personal relationships with the Allied war leaders, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, charming and manipulating both in a series of summit meetings of the Big Three at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. He proved an adept diplomat.

Just when he was at his apogee in 1945, President Harry Truman (Roosevelt’s successor) revealed that America had the atomic bomb, which they went on to use against Japan. Faced with rising US power, Stalin successfully threw all his resources into a secret project to create a Soviet A-bomb, which was achieved by 1949.

Stalin’s last years were spent in glorious, paranoid isolation. Soon after the end of the war he relaunched his reign of terror. In 1949 two of his own chosen heirs were shot in the Leningrad case, along with many others. In 1952, apparently convinced that all Jews in the USSR were in alliance with America, he planned to execute his veteran comrades, implicating them in the fabricated Doctors’ Plot, alleging that Jewish doctors were conspiring to assassinate the Soviet leadership. Stalin died after a stroke in March 1953.

A master of brutal repression, subtle conspiracy and political manipulation, this cobbler’s son became both the supreme pontiff of international Marxism and the most successful Russian tsar in history. Stalin and the Bolsheviks, along with his great foes Hitler and the Nazis, brought more misery and tragedy to more people than anyone else in history.

Tiny in stature, with inscrutable features, honey-colored eyes that turned yellow in anger, Stalin was gifted but joyless, paranoid to the point of insanity, utterly cynical and ruthless, yet a fanatical Marxist. A terrible husband and father who poisoned every love relationship in his life, he believed that human life was always expendable and physical annihilation was the essential tool of politics. “One death,” he told Churchill with characteristic gallows humor, “is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” Stalin had no illusions about his brutality: “The advantage of the Soviet model,” he said, “is that it solves problems quickly—by shedding blood.” Ten to 20 million died at his hands and 18 million passed through his Gulag concentration camps.