The Great Terror

There are, anyhow, probably few historians today who would care to deduce the essentials of a personality from a few secondhand reports about a long-past childhood. With Stalin, moreover, the bare facts are in dispute. His father was, according to some accounts, a worthless drunkard; according to others, this was not so. The biographers are faced with pursuing the matter, but in the circumstances we may be excused. This is a pity, in a way, for if it were possible to describe with rigor a set of childhood conditions likely to produce a Stalin, worldwide legislation to prevent their recurrence would be a laudable enterprise.

Legends clung even about his birth. Georgians, anxious for the reputation of their country, represented him as really of Tatar or Ossetian origin.⁵ In the period of his greatness, there was a story that he was the illegitimate son of a Georgian prince.⁶

Other putative fathers include the explorer Przhevalsky and, more plausibly, a local merchant. At any rate, his accepted father was a peasant cobbler (who treated him either well or badly—for as early as this, discord descends on the accounts). His father died when he was eleven, leaving a hard-working and strong-minded mother to bring up the boy. When nearly fifteen, Stalin left the Gori elementary school for the Theological Seminary at Tbilisi, being expelled, or removed for health reasons, when he was nineteen.

This was in 1899. He had already joined the Party circles in which he was to pass the remainder of his life, and by 1901 had given up all other activity to become a professional revolutionary.

His early life in the Social Democratic organizations in the Caucasus is still a very obscure subject. The Trotskyite line, that he was unimportant and inactive, is clearly exaggerated. The hagiological stories which appeared in the 1930s and 1940s representing Stalin as a “Lenin of the Caucasus” are even more baseless. But he seems at least to have been elected a member of the Executive of the All-Caucasus Federation of the Social Democratic Party in 1903. The whole early history of the Bolsheviks in Transcaucasia has been thoroughly obfuscated by a series of historians. The main point is that Bolshevism never struck root in Georgia, and most of those who later became Bolsheviks were little more than occasionally mutinous hangers-on of the large and efficient Menshevik organization.⁷

When, after the failure of the 1905 Revolution, Lenin started to rely on bank robbery as a source of funds for the Party, Stalin was involved in organizing raids on banks in the Caucasus, though he never directly took part in them. At this time, these “expropriations” were being widely condemned in the European and the Russian Social Democratic movement, and Trotsky, among others, was pointing to the demoralization involved. Even Lenin saw this to some degree, and attempted to bring the “fighting squads” under strict control and to eliminate the semibandit elements which had got into them. But Stalin seems to have had no qualms of any sort. However, after his rise to power, nothing was ever said about this activity.

Whatever Lenin’s tactical qualms, this ruthlessness appealed to him, and in 1912 Stalin was co-opted on to the Central Committee of the Party. Thenceforward, in Siberian exile or at the center of power, he remained a high though unobtrusive figure in the Bolshevik leadership. In Lenin’s last days, his estimate of the “wonderful Georgian” changed. He said of him, “This cook’s dishes will be too peppery.” Trotsky tells us, plausibly enough, that Lenin admired Stalin for “his firmness and his direct mind,” but finally saw through “his ignorance … his very narrow political horizon, and his exceptional moral coarseness and unscrupulousness.”⁸ It was on grounds of personal unpleasantness—not of political unreliability—that he urged Stalin’s removal, not from positions of power, but from the particular post of General Secretary. Only at the very last—too late—did Lenin plan Stalin’s ruin.

At about the same time, Stalin is reported as saying to Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky, “To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed … there is nothing sweeter in the world.”⁹

This often quoted story is entirely in accord with Stalin’s practice, but it is perhaps a little unlikely that he would have spoken in quite these terms in front of possible, and not yet forewarned, rivals. His opponents, on the whole, only realized his implacability too late. But it is unnecessary today to labor the point of Stalin’s unscrupulousness or yet the extreme vindictiveness of his nature.