In his 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom, Nobel Laureate, economist F. A. Hayek explained “why the worst get to the top.” And now in Stalin’s Secret War, Nikolai Tolstoy shows how “the worst” stay on top once they get there. Dictator of all the Russias for almost three decades, Joseph Stalin was certainly one of “the worst,” and the tactics he used to stay on top were brutal and barbaric.
Nikolai Tolstoy describes Stalin as physically unattractive—short, “only five feet four inches high, . . . thin, swarthy and heavily pock-marked.” As he aged, “his hair greyed and thinned considerably and his belly began to hang within the loose-fit-ting uniforms he affected. His pock marked features appeared more lined and pitted than hitherto, his moustache was scrawny and streaked, and his teeth blackened and stained.” He spoke in a “monotonous” tone and “with a harsh Georgian accent.”
However, physical appearances are not crucial. It is character that influences action. Stalin was ruthless, a characteristic his predecessor and idol, Lenin, apparently appreciated. He helped to finance the “revolution” by robbing banks. When imprisoned by the Tsarist regime, he associated, not with the “politicals,” but with the common criminals. He was vicious and crude. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor as Soviet dictator, described him as “brutish . . . harsh . . . coarse and abusive with everyone.” Yet he felt insecure; he had an inferiority complex, and this, according to Nikolai Tolstoy, led to fear and paranoia. He became obsessed with the belief that he was surrounded by enemies. The methods he used to stay on top, therefore, are explainable by his character—his ruthlessness, his respect for gangster types, his fears and his paranoia.
Ambition plus ruthlessness enabled Stalin to rise to power over Trotsky and all other contenders. In time he came to hold sway over millions and “virtually owned the Soviet Union in as absolute a sense as property can acquire.” The country’s fairly proper constitution, code of laws and regulations were largely ignored by Stalin and his gangster-type associates; they were above the law. “No real property rights existed in the Soviet Union except Stalin’s; he could literally do as he chose with anything.” Any who dared to hint, or who was suspected of hinting, at opposition was effectively silenced by the secret police. Yet these very police-state methods added to Stalin’s fears for his own personal safety. He trusted no one.
Stalin admired his fellow-despot, Adolf Hitler. He was apparently delighted when the German- Soviet Non-aggression Treaty was signed (1939), leading to the partition of Poland between their two countries. Stalin considered Hitler a friend. It was with complete disbelief that he ]earned, on June 22, 1941, that German military forces had attacked Russian soldiers stationed along their common border in the middle of Poland. Warnings of a possible German attack had reached Stalin from U.S., British and Russian intelligence sources, but he had chosen to ignore them. As a result, the Russians were utterly unprepared and chaos reigned. When his men at the front reported to Moscow they were under fire, they were told, “You must be feeling unwell,” or “Do not give in to provocation, and do not open fire!” According to Nikolai Tolstoy, “There was in fact no battle-plan; only Stalin could issue instructions.” And Stalin apparently panicked. His Foreign Minister, Molotov, announced the German attack to the Russian people.
Stalin had become a prisoner of his own paranoia. It was not until two weeks after the German attack that he came out of seclusion to broadcast to the Soviet nation. According to Tolstoy, Stalin appeared more fearful of assassination, an uprising in Russia and the possible overthrow of his own government than he was of the German invasion. These fears led to his “secret war,” the war against his own people. In one chapter, “War on Two Fronts,” Tolstoy describes Stalin’s two bitter struggles—one against the Germans at the fighting front and the other against the Russians behind the front.
As Stalin trusted no one, his secret police were ordered to arrest anyone suspected of opposition to him or his government. He especially feared persons with leadership qualities. Purges were carried out in Russian-occupied territories, and also in Russia, against military officers, professionals and intellectuals. To forestall a Polish uprising, thousands of Poles were arrested shortly after partition; many were executed, often after having been cruelly tortured. His henchmen were no less ruthless in their treatment of Russian nationals.
Stalin’s insecurity persisted even after the fighting stopped. He was still fearful of domestic uprisings and determined to liquidate all potential opposition before trouble could start. In his view, anyone who had observed life outside the Soviet Union might have acquired foreign ideas and thus become a threat to the Soviet regime. As the Yalta Agreement called for the repatriation of “Soviet citizens,” that Agreement became the grounds for the Soviet government’s demand that the thousands of refugees from the east who were in Allied hands at war’s end be “repatriated.” With Allied help and without adequate screening, therefore, many thousands, in cluding many non-Soviet citizens, were tricked into railroad box cars and lorries and then forcibly carted off to imprisonment, torture and death in the U.S.S.R. One important chapter in this book is devoted to this sad event in history.
This post-World War II forced-transport of refugees to Russia was not without precedent in Russian history, a precedent which drew it to Nikolai Tolstoy’s special attention. Petr Tolstoy (1645-1729), an ancestor of Nikolai’s, was an ambitious and unscrupulous aide to the Russian Tsar, Peter the Great. When the Tsar wished to change the succession, he commissioned Petr Tolstoy to bring the Tsar’s son, Alexius, back to Russia against his will. Petr deceived Alexius, returned him to Russia, where his father had him imprisoned, tried and eventually tortured to death.
Shakespeare wrote of Henry IV, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” Although Stalin wore no actual crown, his power was more absolute and his reign more ruthless and cruel than that of most kings. So his uneasiness was more profound and his position more precarious. This insight makes Stalin’s fears, his paranoia and his ruthless tactics comprehensible. It helps us to conclude with Nikolai Tolstoy that “Stalin was not mad.” As Adam Ulam wrote in Stalin: The Man and His Era: “The madness lay in the system that gave absolute power to one man and allowed him to appease every suspicion and whim with blood.”
Stalin’s Secret War is a remarkable book, not a pleasant one, but one that reveals a great deal about the nature of one-man government.
