Stalin

Despite the intense pressure on him, Stalin’s flashes of anger were rarely seen, although at the politburo on August 5, 1931, he exploded in full view at a fellow Caucasus comrade for not removing a skullcap.⁸⁴ The next day, evidently his last in Moscow, he convoked an ad hoc politburo “commission” to draft a party circular on the OGPU events. It explained that the dismissed operatives had “conducted a completely intolerable group struggle against the leadership of the OGPU” by spreading rumors that “the wrecking case in the military was artificially ‘inflated.’”⁸⁵ New rumors spread about what had really transpired.

⁸⁶ Yagoda dispatched his own secret circular, approved by Stalin, admitting that “some individual operatives” had “forced the accused to give untrue testimony,” but Yagoda denounced accusations of systematic falsification as slander by “our class and political enemies.”⁸⁷

HOLIDAY MAILBAG

Voroshilov traveled for more than two months in the summer of 1931, stopping in Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Blagoveshchensk, Ulan Ude, Chita, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, and Magnitogorsk, and writing to Stalin about the benefits. “You are right: we do not always take into account the colossal significance of personal travel and firsthand familiarization with people, with business,” Stalin answered. “We would gain a lot (and the cause would especially gain a lot) if we traveled more frequently to locales and got acquainted with people at work.” But the dictator did not follow his own advice, leaving Moscow only for Sochi: “I did not want to leave on holiday, but then I surrendered (I got tired).”⁸⁸

Stalin took full advantage of his southern holiday, writing to Yenukidze about having spent ten days in Tsqaltubo, in central-western Georgia, twelve miles from Kutaisi, where he had once sat in a tsarist prison. Its radon-carbonate springs boasted a natural temperature of 91 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. “I took twenty baths,” he observed. “The water was marvelous.”⁸⁹ But field couriers delivered regime business in staggering volume: OGPU reports about Japan’s aggressive behavior, fuel problems, foreign currency expenditures, forestry, nonferrous metals, politburo minutes.

⁹⁰ Functionaries often sat paralyzed until he responded. His mailbag was the nexus of what normally would be called the policy-making process. He chose what to read (or not), and his preferences and habits profoundly shaped state behavior. He tended to go on holiday during harvest season and inquired often about grain procurements while paying little attention to the cultivation of crops or animal husbandry.⁹¹ Stalin’s non-holiday mail was also voluminous. In the six months leading up to August 1931, the apparatus processed 13,000 private letters in his name—enumerating each writer’s identity, social origins, and employment and appending summaries of every letter, transferring most to the archives, sending some to government agencies for response, and forwarding 314 of them to Stalin.⁹²

His aides tended to pass him letters purporting to be from former acquaintances (requesting material aid or seeking the status of association with him); any that took up Marxist-Leninist theory; and those proposing scientific inventions (one letter from Egypt was forwarded with the annotation “not particularly trustworthy proposal for invention of ‘death rays’”).⁹³ Another type concerned allegations of abuse by officials. Stalin usually forwarded this filtered correspondence to responsible functionaries, expecting an answer. (In May 1931, a member of the Young Pioneers scouts group had written back to report that local officials had finally come through with a pair of boots, making school attendance possible, thanks to Stalin’s intervention.)⁹⁴ “You are now all-powerful,” wrote one correspondent. “Your word determines not only the life but even the freedom of a person.”⁹⁵