The Great Terror

Of his leading opponents in post-Revolutionary Georgia, while he had Mdivani shot, he made a remarkable exception to the Purge in sparing Philip Makharadze. Makharadze, though publicly censured for various errors in the particularly sensitive field of Georgian Party history,⁶⁰ remained Chairman of the Presidium of the Georgian Supreme Soviet until he died, in good odor, in 1943. His survival is very peculiar—unless, indeed, we regard the reprieve as amounting to no more than four years’ imminent expectation of arrest, and see in it a particularly subtle piece of revenge.

What may be a curious remnant of Caucasian chivalry can be seen in one of Stalin’s more general omissions from the Purge lists. He had no objection to killing or imprisoning women—in fact, “wife” is mentioned as a normal category for execution (see here). But within the inner Party itself, there is a curious survival of Old Bolshevik women. Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, is in a sense a special case, though she had been strong in the opposition to Stalin in the 1920s and had given him personal offense. But it would not by any means be beyond Stalin’s powers or beyond the usual scope of his malice to prove that Lenin’s wife had betrayed her husband.

But there are many other cases of Old Bolshevik women surviving. Elena Stasova lasted right through the Stalin epoch. L. A. Fotieva, Lenin’s secretary, who must also have known a good deal about what was one of Stalin’s most sensitive points—the quarrel with Lenin in his last days—was also spared. So was K. I. Nikolayeva, the only woman full member of the 1934 Central Committee apart from Krupskaya, who was one of the few who was carried over into the Committee elected in 1939, and she was an ex-Zinovievite at that. Another case was R. S. Zemlyachka, member of the 1904 Central Committee. A brutal terrorist, she had been Bela Kun’s chief colleague in the great slaughter in the Crimea in 1920, to which Lenin himself had objected. She survived, while Kun went to the execution cellars. Alexandra Kollontai, the star of the Workers’ Opposition, had been married to Dybenko and had lived with Shlyapnikov. On top of all this, after her acceptance of the Stalin line she remained as Ambassador (to Sweden), a profession which was anyhow almost invariably fatal. Yet she survived the Stalin epoch unscathed, en poste

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Psychologists might make something about this trait of Stalin’s. In any case, it is a comparatively human characteristic and one perhaps harking back to Caucasia as much as the blood feud does. Another “category” to be spared has no such obvious source: the former Bolshevik members of the Duma (including Grigori Petrovsky, who was under the direct threat in 1939) all survived.

But when all is said, we are still peering into the glooms of an extreme reticence. A shrewd Soviet official, who was impressed by Stalin’s patience and also by his capriciousness, comments, “That rare combination is the principal key to his character.”⁶¹ Doubtless this is a sound view, yet it only takes us into the outskirts of a full understanding.

Even as to his political aims, he never spoke his mind. That he knew in general what he was doing cannot be doubted. It is much more difficult, as we have seen, to tell how far he had made his aims explicit even in his own mind, and how far ahead he looked during a given crisis. What he had, politically speaking, was less definite than a planned control of developments. It was, rather, the feel of events, the flow. In this he was unsurpassed among his contemporaries.

We do not need to posit a conscious long-term plan to say that in a general way the drive for power was Stalin’s strongest and most obvious motivation. There have been men, like Cromwell, whose paths to supreme power were truly accidental, who neither planned nor particularly wished for the result. This is quite certainly not true of Stalin.

Bukharin said plainly, “At any given moment he will change his theories in order to get rid of someone.”⁶² But politically speaking, this shows a basic consistency. The one fundamental drive that can be found throughout is the strengthening of his own position. To this, for practical purposes, all else was subordinate. It led him to absolute power. As Machiavelli points out, though the actual seizure of power is difficult in despotic States, once seized, it is comparatively easy to hold. And Stalin seized it and held it.