The Great Terror

Napoleon was, of course, a vain man. Stalin’s vanity has also been much remarked on. But it did not, at least until his last years, run to palatial ostentation. Until the Second World War, he dressed with traditional Bolshevik modesty in a plain brown military coat and dark trousers stuffed into leather boots. He lived unpretentiously in a small house in the Kremlin, formerly part of the Tsar’s servants’ quarters. Ownership and money as such played no part in his life. In the 1930s, his official salary was about 1,000 rubles a month—in purchasing power, perhaps $40. One of his secretaries accepted and dealt with this small sum, paying the superintendent of the Kremlin a modest rent for his apartment, and dealing with his Party dues, his payment for his holiday, and so on. He owned nothing but had immediate right to everything, like the Dalai Lama or the Mikado in the old days. His country villa at Borovikha and his seaside Government Summer House No. 7 at Sochi were “State property.”²³

With all this personal simplicity, Stalin’s reputation for envious emulation arose early among his colleagues. When the Order of the Red Banner began to be awarded in the Civil War, and was to be given to Trotsky, Kamenev proposed that Stalin should receive it too. Kalinin, the new Head of State, asked in surprise, “For what?” Bukharin intervened: “Can’t you understand? This is Lenin’s idea. Stalin cannot live unless he has what someone else has. He will never forgive it.”²⁴

In the final stages of the “cult of personality,” he was built up with the most astonishing adulation as a genius not only in politics, but also in strategy, the sciences, style, philosophy, and almost every field. His picture looked down from every hoarding; his bust was carried by Soviet alpinists to the top of every Soviet peak. He was elevated to be, with Marx, Engels, and Lenin, the fourth of the great political geniuses of the epoch. The histories were, of course, rewritten to make his role in the Revolution a decisive one. Khrushchev describes him inserting in a draft of his own Short Biography

the following passage: “Although he performed his task as leader of the Party and the people with consummate skill and enjoyed the unreserved support of the entire Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation.”

Khrushchev goes on to say:

In the draft of his book appeared the following sentence: “Stalin is the Lenin of today.” This sentence appeared to Stalin to be too weak, so, in his own handwriting, he changed it to read: “Stalin is the worthy continuer of Lenin’s work, or, as it is said in our Party, Stalin is the Lenin of today.” You see how well it is said, not by the nation but by Stalin himself.

… I will cite one more insertion made by Stalin concerning the theme of the Stalinist military genius. “The advanced Soviet science of war received further development,” he writes, “at Comrade Stalin’s hands. Comrade Stalin elaborated the theory of the permanently operating factors that decide the issue of wars, of active defense and the laws of counter-offensive and offensive, of the cooperation of all services and arms in modern warfare, of the role of big tank masses and air forces in modern war, and of the artillery as the most formidable of the armed services. At the various stages of the war Stalin’s genius found the correct solutions that took account of all the circumstances of the situation.”

And further, writes Stalin: “Stalin’s military mastership was displayed both in defense and offense. Comrade Stalin’s genius enabled him to divine the enemy’s plans and defeat them. The battles in which Comrade Stalin directed the Soviet armies are brilliant examples of operational military skill.”²⁵

It can be argued, though, that precisely because his claim to leadership was shakily based, it had to be exaggerated and made unchallengeable. Lenin, whose dominance in the Party was genuine and accepted, had had no need of such methods. For Stalin they were, in part at least, the necessary cement of autocracy. One shrewd Soviet diplomat in the 1930s writes, “Anyone who imagines that Stalin believes this praise, or laps it up in a mood of egotistical willingness to be deceived, is sadly mistaken. Stalin is not deluded by it. He regards it as useful to his power. He also enjoys humiliating these intellectuals….”²⁶