Course
Course note · Lecture 2 slides (file not included in this release)
Source status
Verbatim transcript supplied by Anthony for Lesson 2, “Stalin’s Rise to Power,” on 2026-09-22. It has not been checked against the video. Transcription errors and unsupported historical assertions may be present; see the linked course note for selected source checks.
Transcript
The man who became known as Joseph Stalin was born Joseph Jugashvili in what is now the country of Georgia in the year 1878. Now, since the Bolsheviks, before they took power, had to engage in clandestine activities, many of them took on pseudonyms. Lenin’s real name was Vladimir Ulyanov, and Stalin’s name translates into Man of Steel.
The man was engaged in activities which, by any standard, would be regarded as criminal. The euphemism was expropriations, by which was meant armed robberies of banks, mail coaches, and steamships. They regarded it as permissible because this was a way to replenish the party treasury, to buy weapons, and to help take down the Tsar. Stalin was especially famous for the 1907 robbery of the Tiflis State Bank, which brought over 300,000 rubles into Bolshevik coffers. It goes without saying that many of these acts of expropriations alongside them brought killings in the interests of the cause.
You can see from the picture that young Stalin was, to put it mildly, a bit of a hunk. By 1920, Stalin had a fair bit of power within the Bolshevik Party. He had various roles, including editing their journal Pravda. “Pravda” is Russian for truth, a newspaper that continued throughout the entire reign of the Soviet Union. Now, while Trotsky, Lenin’s right-hand man, was very big on developing Bolshevik ideology—the philosopher, he was the brains of the operation—Stalin was working behind the scenes. He was more the glad-hander, more the politician, something that would come to fruition in a few short years with disastrous consequences for Trotsky and his associates.
Stalin did visit Lenin during his stroke, and he promised to put Lenin out of his misery if things ever reached that point. But he also convinced Lenin that suicide would be premature. Lenin was a fighter, and Stalin encouraged him to stay on and fight. What kind of message would that send to the revolutionaries if the man who brought the revolution to reality took his own life, if that was not absolutely necessary? That December, Lenin had two more minor strokes, followed by a major one, and he would never write another word until the day that he died.
The big distinction between Lenin and Stalin in their ideology was what this idea of communism meant. For Lenin, it was a worldwide movement, the workers all over the world uniting in a revolution and bringing forth this sort of heaven on Earth, here in reality and everywhere in Europe, Asia, US, and so on and so forth. Stalin, on the other hand, viewed the idea of socialism in one country as much more practicable and the best path forward. And in a way, both men got their way. On December 28, 1922, the USSR was proclaimed, which was a combination of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Transcaucasia. Now, on paper, each of these republics still had a great amount of autonomy, but in practice, Moscow was in charge, and increasingly so.
As Lenin recuperated, the Soviet Union was run by a troika consisting of Stalin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev. Stalin took control of Lenin’s living arrangements, his correspondence, who could visit him, and who Lenin could write to. He was effectively a prisoner of Stalin. On January 21st, 1924, Lenin took his last breath without Stalin’s assistance at all, and this left the Soviet Union at a crossroads. The great visionary was now gone. What would be the path forward for the Soviet Union? On the one hand, you had Stalin, on the other hand, you had Trotsky and his associates. The other two men sided with Trotsky against Stalin, but Stalin further consolidated his power, working the party members. And by 1927, Stalin succeeded in expelling Trotsky from the Communist Party, and by early 1928, succeeded in expelling him from the Soviet Union itself.
Trotsky continued to write about how the revolution was betrayed. He turned on Stalin publicly, and these books, published throughout the world, caused an enormous sense of embarrassment for those back home in the Soviet Union. For his part, Stalin was now in position to make Trotsky the scapegoat for everything that went wrong in the Soviet Union, something that was parodied very well by Orwell in 1984 with the character of Emmanuel Goldstein. Now, despite the civil war having won by the Bolsheviks, despite the communist revolution becoming manifest in what was now the Soviet Union, this idea of, without the capitalists withdrawing profits and having more to distribute to everyone, this cornucopia of wealth did not come to fruition.
A very easy example of how things became a problem was the idea of housing. As the cities became industrialized, more and more workers fled to them in search of work and food. Families were crammed into apartments already occupied by other families, and both eviction and finding a new place to live became impossible. Of course, a bit of this was by design. The vision in communist ideology was to have homes without kitchens so that everyone could eat equally in government-run cafeterias. In fact, hardcore communist architects began to design buildings where everyone would have to share bathrooms because this idea of shame and privacy in an individual were outdated bourgeois concepts.
Now, one of the Achilles’ heels of the communist ideology is this idea that human beings often respond to incentives and in very nefarious ways. So quickly, now, if all it took for me to double my living space was to turn in the family who I was living with, many people were not hesitant to pick up that phone call. In fact, it became a joke, literally, in Russian culture, where someone would say, “Just think, Masha. I turned in a denunciation on Galkin, but Balkin had the bigger room.” People would laugh about families being arrested for no reason, simply for the sake of people increasing their living spaces. In a way, you can’t even really blame them, because the amount of concentration that these families had in tiny living spaces would make the legendary Lower East Side of New York City, where all the immigrants were crammed together, seemed like paradises in comparison.
As bad as housing was, the food situation was even worse, both in terms of production and in terms of distribution. In 1928, the Soviet Union implemented what was the first five-year plan. It was a complete reversal of Lenin’s NEP policies and an increasing centralization and central planning of the economy. As part of this was the idea to centralize and collectively plan farmland. Now, before, you’d have a farmer, and they had their plot of land, and that farmer knew his land very well. He knew how to work it and to produce. Now, the idea was to have all these farmlands collectivized into giant farms, centrally run. In effect, the farmer would be demoted from the one owning and running his own land to someone simply working the land on behalf of the state and for the greater good of the society.
Now, the main opponents to this were, of course, the wealthy farmers, the kulaks. Now, wealthy is a term that has a lot of different meanings. If everyone is starving and I have one cow, I’m pretty darn wealthy. I have access to milk. There were, of course, kulaks who had a lot more. But very quickly, the kulak became anyone who had enough food to put into his own mouth. As part of this class warfare and this idea that if you were a member of the wrong economic class, you were irredeemable, the government launched an assault on class enemies.
These kulaks were treated in several different ways. Some received prison sentences or even executed. Some were deported from their ancestral lands further into the Soviet Union, with over 2 million people being deported within the years 1930-31 alone. Of course, if you argued against these ideas, you were a kulak, or at the bare least a kulak sympathizer, which is hardly better than being a kulak yourself. As the Bolsheviks demanded more and more grain, the farmers rebelled. Land was abandoned. Farm animals were slaughtered and eaten or turned into leather simply to have something to show for it. Some state officials were met with violence, and riots broke out as peasants refused to hand over the fruits of their own labor. Again, this was food that was being taken out of their hands, not some kind of luxury indulgence.
Now, thanks to central planning and the Marxist ideology, the idea was, all right, if we produce, let’s suppose, 100 tons of wheat this year, next year it’ll be 101, next year 102, and we can increase exponentially. Now, this is something that might make sense mathematically, but in terms of practical terms, it’s completely nonsensical, especially when it comes to things like crops. You have to deal with weather, you have to deal with disease, you have to deal with all sorts of inputs and outputs. Also, there’s only so much that you can improve on a year-to-year basis. It might be easy to have some innovation, and this year to next year, we can improve a certain amount. But to say we’re going to be able to have similar innovation every single year and increase exponentially is something that makes a lot of sense theoretically, but makes no sense in practical terms.
The year 1930 was a very favorable one for crops in terms of weather. 1931 had far worse conditions. So according to even official Soviet figures, the harvest requisitions fell from 23.9 million tons in 1930 to 18.3 million tons in 1931, meaning fewer, as opposed to this idea of increasing bounties year upon year upon year. Now, as a result of this also, these hungry peasants had no choice but to consume the seeds that they would have planted for the next year’s harvest because they were starving, which meant the disaster was only going to increase exponentially. Even further, in their brilliance, the Soviet authorities took much of this grain not to feed the citizenry, but for export, to get currency for the Soviet government.
In 1932, an edict came, which said that public property is the basis of the Soviet system, and those attempting to steal public property must be considered enemies of the people. A punishment for being the enemy of the people was “the highest measure of social defense,” execution, or at the very least, a prison sentence of no fewer than 10 years. In America, Emma Goldman had urged the hungry workers to take bread, and in the Soviet Union, hunger became grounds for the death penalty.
In 1932, the Soviets introduced a law which the Tsar had had, which had constantly been a focus of criticism by his opponents, the internal passport system. As more and more people fled to cities in search of food, but this became a problem for the Bolsheviks, so everyone was issued a passport, and travel within the country was made highly regulated.
As the historian, S. J. Taylor wrote, “Victims who were about to be deported were stripped of their shoes. Their clothes were taken and given to lower peasants as a bribe to ensure their cooperation. Kulak children were left as beggars on the street. Those transported to Siberia faced hardships. If a village existed, they were squeezed into it. Otherwise, they were simply abandoned without shelter in extreme cold, in order to build dwellings. Many managed to do so by working around the clock without sleep in order that they and the others would not freeze to death. And those employed as forced labor in mining regions faced starvation rations of one bowl of gruel a day and 8 to 10 ounces of bread.”
They died in waves, but their numbers were replenished by the arrival of new deportees. In fact, only approved persons were allowed to reside within cities. When the secret police registered people, they made it a point to expel any kulaks or those who were otherwise disenfranchised. Government-approved activists descended upon the villages of the Ukraine, the bread basket of Europe, in the winter of 1932 to 1933. Everything that was edible was taken, and they were given special tools to ensure that every nook in every home could be searched for the slightest crust of bread or grain of wheat. Even a corn cob being dried out in order to have seeds for planting in the spring was fair game.
As historian Anne Applebaum recounts, “The activists had instructions to return, to surprise people in order to catch them unaware and with their food unguarded. Families were searched and then searched again to make sure that nothing remained.” One woman remembered how they came three times until nothing was left, and then they stopped coming. They would come at different times of day or night to make sure that whoever had food was being caught red-handed. If it happened that a family was eating dinner, the activists took bread off the table, and if soup was cooking, they pulled it off the stove and tossed out the contents. Then they demanded to know how it was possible that the family still had something to put in the soup. Because, again, keeping public property makes you an enemy of the people. By public property, we mean here food.
Not only was there no place to hide food, there was little possibility to hide having had food. Your own body would betray you. One look at a person would tell you if that person was starving or not. If someone had some fat to their face, you could tell at a glance that they were hiding food and therefore were an enemy of the people. This created an enormous incentive for villagers to spy and inform on each other. Turning in a neighbor for having a sack of grain was a great to ensure that you yourself would not be ransacked by these activists.
Not only that, those who couldn’t produce the grain quota that had been imposed on them by the brilliant central planners were subject to a fine of five times the value of what the grain would have been. So if you can’t produce one loaf of bread or the equivalent of grain that would make one loaf of bread, you are now fined with having to make five times that amount. Not having the food to fulfill your quota was proof that you were hiding food. And if you were hiding food, why aren’t you handing it over?
In some villages, the requisitioners went from house to house, killing all their dogs and taking the bodies with them for good measure because that could be meat. They would slam fingers into doorways, needles jammed under fingernails. Those found concealing food were robbed of their remaining possessions, evicted from their homes, and thrown into the street without any clothes. To make sure that the peasants did not somehow steal the food that they desperately needed, fields and barns were kept under armed guard.
The activists even came for the tools used to make food, breaking millstones necessary to procure grain. If they took soup from a hungry family, they made sure to take the pot as well. The media, hand-to-hand with this, began a major campaign, portraying the kulaks as illiterate, selfish, subhuman hicks. If you were hungry, and everyone in the Soviet Union is hungry, it’s because the kulaks were hoarding food and keeping it out of your mouth. The few Ukrainians who made their way to the cities, destitute and barely clothed, were treated with complete contempt and as worse than animals because it’s their fault that everyone was hungry.
One Soviet citizen discusses how he was waiting in line in front of a store to buy bread. He saw a girl, 15, in rags, with starvation looking at her eyes, stretching her hand to everyone who bought bread, asking for some crumbs. Eventually, she reached the storekeeper, and he began to berate her, telling her she was too lazy to work on a farm, and and he hit her hand with the blunt edge of a knife blade. She fell down, lost the crumb of bread that was in her hand. Then he stepped closer, kicked her, and said, “Get up, go home, and get to work.” She stretched out and died.
Some people in the line began to cry. But this was a country where basic human sympathy was grounds for suspicion, and then arrest, and then worse. The shopkeeper looked at the crowd and told them, “Some people are getting too sentimental here. It’s easy to spot enemies of the people.” Everyone in that line knew what he meant by those words and what danger they would have put themselves in, if they had given bread to a starving child. As one Soviet novel later put it regarding the kulaks, “Not one of them was guilty of anything, but they all belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.”
Pregnant women trying to steal food were beaten to death, and the remaining children invariably starving. Children who tried to feed themselves were shot. Digging mass graves was difficult work, so that barely-living kids and the elderly were tossed alongside the dead in order to save extra work, and their last hours on Earth would be spent slowly dying, surrounded by the corpses of their countrymen. While a kulak originally meant being a small-time farmer, such kulaks only counted for about 5% of the population. But the system in place to identify the kulaks created the worst incentives.
As one Ukrainian writer later recalled, “It was so easy to do a man in. You wrote a denunciation, and you didn’t even have to sign it. All you had to do was say that he had paid people to work for him or they had owned three cows.” Worse, the poorest could do little to defend themselves against these accusations, whereas the richest could bribe their way out of it. The interconnectedness of economics led to a huge ripple effect in the Soviet economy. So the mass slaughter of farm animals led to an acute leather shortage. And as a result, the Soviet government made making shoes on an individual level a felony in order to force everyone to have their own shoes from the government, which often fell apart immediately.
Now, the Russians use, to this day, a use of humor called “anekdoty.” These are little stories they tell each other when they meet, and they’re often used to speak truths that are otherwise forbidden. There’s one “anekdot” at the time, which is Soviet President Mikhael Kalinin was in Moscow, making a speech about how much the country had improved, and he was really excited about the new 20-story skyscrapers on Karl Marx Street in Kharkov. And a worker in the audience stood up to protest. He goes, “Comrade Kalinin, I live in Kharkov. Almost every day, I take a long walk on Karl Marx Street. There aren’t any skyscrapers.” Kalinin goes, “That’s the trouble with you. You waste your time promenading instead of reading the newspapers and learning what’s going on in the country.”
It was a given that what was written in Pravda (truth), was “nepravda” (not true), but at the same time, those in the cities had no way of understanding what was actually happening in Ukraine. Now, this might make sense within a totalitarian dictatorship where the press is under strict government control. It made less sense for the Western newspapers. Now, the Western newspapers were in a difficult position because working in the Soviet Union meant that you’re facing the Soviet apparatus. You were living in Soviet quarters at the leisure of the state. Your internal communications are often monitored. You were often followed around as well. Any story that you’re trying to file has to make it through the Soviet censors who have no real incentive to be accommodating.
In fact, their job, or their lives possibly, would often be on the line to making sure that the story you’re trying to file was in line with the Soviet line of the day. A censor could easily claim that he’s waiting to hear from his supervisors before allowing the story to be released, and those supervisors had absolutely no incentive or any sense of urgency to release it. This obviously created an enormous incentive for Western journalists to file stories that were at least sympathetic to the Soviet point of view. In fact, many Western journalists were sympathetic to the Soviet point of view, because this was a country built on equality, where everyone’s provided for, where there’s no hunger or poverty. This certainly sounds like a noble goal, even if things are a little messy in the meantime.
When it came to coverage of the Soviet Union, first and foremost, then and now, was the paper of record, the New York Times. The New York Times’ man in Moscow was someone by the name of Walter Duranty. As a young man, he was friends with Aleister Crowley, the satanist whose shaved head and declaration that, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” so shocked the Victorians. In addition to smoking opium with Crowley, Duranty had an intimate relationship with Crowley’s mistress before marrying her himself.
In 1929, Duranty managed to secure an interview with Stalin, and his reporting from within the USSR in 1932 earned him the Pulitzer, which then and now was journalism’s highest honor. As early as 1921, the New York Times’ Duranty was insisting that, “in a country rotten with corruption, the communists are honest.” In 1923, after that famine that I mentioned earlier, Duranty wrote that “Lenin has often been called the red dictator, but Lenin never had the right to dictate, although in practice, his opinion generally carried the day, and that the secret of Lenin’s authority, which did, in fact, amount to dictatorship, was that long experience had proved him right far oftener than his colleagues.”
Duranty also told Westerners that all these concerns about the secret police, the Cheka, that Emma Goldman was so concerned about, were highly overblown. As he put it, “It is doubtful whether the total number of Cheka executions throughout the whole period, up to 1922, surpassed 50, 000. Though lives were cheap in Russia, and the Cheka leaders pitiless in defending the revolution when in danger, they would have defeated their own object by the wholesale slaughter of workers and peasants on the scale reported abroad.” They couldn’t have killed so many people because it would have been counterproductive, and therefore they didn’t.
He also said that, “I venture to say that no one who behaves himself, behaves himself, has any more reason to fear the secret police than the average American has to fear from the Department of Justice.” After all, in his words, “Stalin is anything but remote or autocratic in method.” As Hitler was coming into power with consequences that we’re all quite familiar with, in November 1932, Duranty was explicitly saying, “There is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be.” As he went on, “The Russians have tightened their belts before to a far greater extent than is likely to be needed this winter.” It goes without saying that the reason people tighten their belts is because they don’t have enough food and they’re losing body fat.
He continued to report that the food shortage is insignificant as compared with conditions in 1920 and that the Bolsheviks are simply trying to introduce a new form of farming which they believe to be better and more efficient, not only for the peasants, but for the nation as a whole. As people went insane from hunger and sometimes ate their own children, New York Times readers could rest assured that this was simply a new form of farming. In fact, Duranty went out of his way to insist to his readers that he was not speaking from some ivory tower, but from first-hand experience.
As he put it, “I have just completed a 200-mile auto trip through the heart of the Ukraine and can say positively that the harvest is splendid and all talk of famine now is ridiculous and that the populace, from the babies to the old folk, look healthy and well-nourished.” As to why so many peasants were fleeing their ancestral lands looking for food, he said, “Today, the labor turnover runs to 100% or more per year, due partly, no doubt, to hard conditions and the hope of finding something better elsewhere, but even more to an ancient habit of wandering and the desire for change.” Russian people starving and fleeing to the cities is simply a tradition.
When an article was released in the London Times, giving some indication of the mass carnage that was happening in Ukraine, Duranty swiftly went on the attack. To the London Times correspondent, collectivization is one the blackest spots in his gloomy picture. He writes, “During the last two years, 70 million peasants have been driven, 14 million holdings, onto 200,000 collective farms. For anyone who knows the situation here as well as the writer in question clearly does, this is deliberate and ingenious perversion of fact.”
As he put explicitly and dishonestly, “The Soviet press has made no secret of the food shortage and its effects. ” And for a journalist to say the following, it’s mind-boggling in retrospect. He said, explicitly, “There is no need for a foreign observer to tour the villages where it commonly happens that disgruntled or disaffected elements talk loudest while others are busy working.” The idea of any journalist saying, “There’s no need to look into this mass starvation,” is something that, it’s hard for us, I think, to make sense of, other than in the most uncharitable interpretation.
However, there was one reporter who disagreed with Duranty, who thought, “There is a need to tour these villages,” travel to which was forbidden, of course, by Soviet law. There was a young British man named Gareth Jones. He had been a private secretary to the Prime Minister of the UK, Lloyd George, before becoming a journalist. He used his connections to Lloyd George to get access to the Soviet Union and saying that this was to further ties between the USSR and the UK. On March 10, 1933, Jones took a train from Moscow toward the Ukrainian capital of Kharkiv. He was only 27, but he also knew something wasn’t adding up.
So, what did Jones do? He got off the train 40 miles early and proceeded to walk through the Ukrainian countryside for himself and see what was going on. He knew better than to accept the words of the Soviet authorities. This was a time when cameras were nowhere near as ubiquitous as they are now, so we have little photographic evidence for what Jones saw. But as he went from village to village and saw the mass starvation, all the peasants told him the same thing. “We haven’t had bread for over two months. We are doomed.” After he left the Soviet Union, Jones held a press conference announcing what he saw with his own eyes. His articles were syndicated in various publications, making complete fools of the Moscow press corps.
Jones was not entirely alone. There was someone by the name of Malcolm Muggeridge. His father had been one of the founders of the Fabian Society, which led to the Labour Party. This was the big organization which introduced democratic socialism into the UK. What Muggeridge had done was filed his stories in a diplomatic bag as a way to get them out of the USSR without passing through the censors. Of course, as a result of what Muggeridge saw and what Jones saw, Duranty went on the attack. In a 13-page New York Times article headlined, “Russians hungry but not starving,” Duranty claimed that the deaths were from diseases, and that larger cities have food, and that what these foreign observers saw in the country was no grounds for predicting disaster.
The current historical consensus of what became known as the Holodomor is almost 4 million people starved in Ukraine alone, with over 1 million others in the broader Soviet Union. Now, on the other hand, the media in the USSR was talking about bumper crops. We have more food than we know what to do with. So statistically, the predicted population, 1937, was going to be 170 million. And when the census came in, the number came in at 162 million, 8 million people discrepancy. Now, these results were never published because, of course, now it meant that the census had been disrupted by contemptible enemies of the people.
The head of the census bureau was executed, along with his colleagues. The editor of Soviet statistics was killed, as was the head of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ economics department. Their replacements knew what their job was, and they redid the census. Wouldn’t you know it, 170 million, just as the central planners had predicted. Malcolm Muggeridge was asked years later for what the consequences were for him telling the world that this famine was an organized one. He said, “Me? What happened to me? Oh, yeah, I couldn’t get work.” He was blacklisted. As for Gareth Jones, he was on location in northern China in 1935, when he was murdered one day short of his 30th birthday.
In September 1957, Walter Duranty, without a penny in his pocket, wrote to Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, asking for a monthly pension. By 1934, even Duranty was admitting that, “I, myself, was lamentably wrong about the extent in gravity of the manmade famine in Russia during the fight to collectivize the farms in 1930 to 1933.” But every reporter worth his salt tries always to tell the truth. Now, whether he’s telling the truth or that he wasn’t worth his salt is a question we can all ask ourselves. Sulzberger chose not to give Duranty a pension. And despite the fact that Duranty hadn’t worked for the Times in 17 years, and despite the fact that Duranty had repeatedly lied about the mass starvation of millions of people in the New York Times, Sulzberger cut Duranty a check for $2,500, which was exactly half the average annual salary of a worker at the time.
Even though Stalin was largely able to keep the famine from Western eyes, it ‘s very hard to tell a population that you’re not really hungry. So every hungry mouth, every person unhappy with this workers’ paradise, was a threat to Stalin’s hold on power. Now, he had a scapegoat in Trotsky, but of course, that only went so far. It became illegal to read foreign material, which helped the media very effectively create a false reality within this closed society.
But there developed a joke. Decades later, there’s a Russian leader, and he has in his desk two letters from his predecessor. Shit’s really hitting the fan. He knows in moments of crisis, those are what the letters are for. He opens the first letter, reads it, and the letter says, “Blame everything on me.” Great. He goes out there, blames everything on his predecessor. The crisis passes and moves on. A few years later, there’s another crisis in Russian culture. Things are reaching a boiling point. He doesn’t know what to do. He reaches in his desk, reads the second letter, and the letter says, “Sit down and write two letters.”
But at a certain point, there’s only so many people you can blame. So the question became, what happens when Stalin passes? Who is Stalin’s successor going to be? Lenin had died at a mere 53 years of age, and Stalin was a heavy smoker, and he had already been having some heart disturbances by the 1930s. January 26, 1934 was the beginning of the 17th Communist Party Congress, and with it came talk of who would be Stalin’s successor, and his health gave them cover to discuss what that would mean. Now, I think we can all understand, if you’re the man on the top and people start talking about who your successor is, that means they’re already thinking about you not being in power, which is not what you want them to be thinking about.
The man that they settled on was someone named Sergei Kirov. He had received greater applause than Stalin at the event, which would be unthinkable a few years after that. And what they didn’t realize was having a quasi-official replacement for Stalin meant that each of those people now had a target on their own backs. At the end of that year, December 1st, 1934, a young man named Leonid Nikolaev entered Communist Party headquarters, waited outside Kirov’s office. And when Kirov came, for some reason without his bodyguard, Nikolaev shot him in the back and killed him.
The idea that such a brazen assassination could be the work of a lone gunman defied belief, just as it defied belief with the McKinley assassination in the United States. Rumors within the secret police began to point to Stalin himself. Now, whether Stalin can be blamed for Kirov’s assassination or not, what there is no question of is that he took enormous advantage of this murder to unleash a terror upon the Soviet Union, the likes of which the world had never seen before. Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had worked with Stalin after Lenin had become incapacitated, were put on trial. And in 1936, they and several other old Bolsheviks confessed to conspiring with Trotsky to try to kill Stalin and overthrow the revolution.
Other trials quickly followed. Men who had fought alongside Lenin when Bolshevism was completely marginalized, radical ideology now claimed that they were working with Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan to restore capitalism to Russia. The intensity with which they stood up and claimed their guilt contrasted strongly with their zombie -like demeanor. The trials raised more questions than they answered. What made them switch sides, if they had switched sides? Or what could possibly be done to such hardened revolutionaries to get them to admit their betrayals?
As one reporter put it, “Certainly one expects false evidence in a trial involving capital crimes, but one expects it in the direction of self-defense.” The Society of Old Bolsheviks were among the many groups targeted with mass terror. These were the ones who had fought against the Tsar when it was really, really tough, and Stalin’s name was not part of their memoirs. He had not been a major player, and they had all been eyewitnesses to that very simple fact. One by one, they began to disappear. Many were transferred to new jobs in new cities, but they never showed up.
There was another group called the association of the former political exiles and katorga prisoners. Before 1917, men who struggled against the Tsar often ended up with imprisonment in the katorga system, which was a series of labor camps in Siberia and the Russian far east that served the dual purpose of isolating those prisoners from the population at large, as well as breaking their spirits due to forced labor. And worse, since the environment was so inhospitable, they wouldn’t have to do much to enforce discipline upon these men. Not only did they barely have enough food, but they had to work hard merely to stay alive from one day to the next.
These men who had been regarded by the Tsar as the biggest threats to his rule were now regarded by Stalin in the exact same way. But in this case, there would be no release of them from imprisonment. Many were deported to the far east, but others simply vanished. As one journalist put it, “Imagine if you can, the 3 million Americans holding the most strategic posts of power and influence in our country, suddenly being subjected to a public inquiry into their past history, even onto their grandparents, their political faith, private conduct, and more intimate personal foibles. Imagine this inquiry conducted under conditions which made it the duty of every neighbor and charwoman and office boy to question and accuse these upper three million. Imagine that and you have some inkling of what took place in Russia.”
The greater the number of men who could be made to confess to plotting with Trotsky against Stalin, the greater Stalin looked and the more justified this mass terror became. As early as 1928, Stalin was decreeing that “as we move forward, the resistance of the capitalist elements will increase, and that the class struggle will intensify,” meaning, we are going to get more repression and more authoritarianism over time, not what Lenin had promised to Berkman and to Goldman. As he put it, “We are ousting and ruining, perhaps without noticing ourselves, by our progress towards socialism, thousands upon thousands of small and medium capitalist industrialists. Is it possible to think that these ruined people will sit in silence, not trying to organize resistance? Of course not.”
The problem is, Trotsky hadn’t even been in the Soviet Union since 1929. So how is he organizing all these people to create this kind of coup and to murder Stalin? So during his trial, 1936, Edouard Holtzman, who was one of the old Bolsheviks, testified that he had arranged with Trotsky ‘s son to be in Copenhagen within two or three days, to put up at the Hotel Bristol, and to meet him there. Now, it’s very easy or relatively easy if you’re a totalitarian dictatorship to have control of the media within your own country. It’s impossible to have control of the media in other countries. Six days after this, a newspaper in Denmark broke the news that there was no way for Holtzman or anyone else to have met Trotsky at the Hotel Bristol because the hotel didn’t exist. It had been demolished in 1917.
As time went on, more and more innocent people were drawn to the Great Terror, and the stories used to retroactively establish their crimes not only were increasingly implausible, but were often literally impossible. There was a Bolshevik leader by the name of Pyatakov, and he went to being one of Lenin’s rivals to being a member of the Supreme Economic Council, to being Stalin’s prisoner. He was made to sign a confession that when he had been abroad, he had corresponded with Trotsky. Then they also made him say that he had met with Trotsky as well. Now they had to figure out where and when he could have met with Trotsky.
The problem was that Trotsky at the time was living at the Norwegian town of Veksal. And Pyatakov, to get from where he was, from Berlin to Oslo, then drive to Veksal, have a meeting and return, would have taken two days, but there were enough eyewitnesses to show that he had been in Germany pretty much every day. So if he couldn’t take a non-existent train, they’d just say he took a non-existent plane. So he stood up in court and said he had taken a plane near Oslo, drove to meet Trotsky to talk about overthrowing the Soviet government. And two days later, the Norwegian press exposed this as a lie because there ‘s only one airfield near Oslo where the plane could have landed, and no plane landed there during December 1935. And in fact, no foreign plane landed there from September 1935 through May 1936.
The Russians issued a statement saying that the arrival and departure of airplanes is possible in winter months, something which is true and of no relevance here. And what happened to Pyatakov? Well, this was an opportunity for Trotsky. He said, “I can prove that the story of the visit is false from beginning to end, and therefore, the entire system, these voluntary confessions, would be thoroughly discredited.” And he demanded that Pyatakov’s testimony be verified immediately before Pyatakov was shot. Stalin did not take the bait, and Pyatakov was shot alongside 12 of his fellow defendants shortly thereafter.
Then came the story of Lenin’s last will and testament. As he was dying, Lenin wrote out what he wanted to happen after he passed. He criticized both Trotsky and Stalin and predicted that their rivalries would lead to an enormous split within the party. And Lenin had grave misgivings about Joseph Stalin, as he put it. “Stalin is too coarse, and this defect becomes intolerable in a secretary general. This is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead.”
The document was immediately suppressed in Russia when Lenin’s widow released it, but the entire testament was published in Western newspapers in 1926. One man who knew the truth behind this document was Ivan Smirnov. And of course, Stalin put Smirnov up for trial as well. Smirnov had been in jail for several years when the accusation came that he had been plotting with Trotsky. As far as alibis go, being in a Soviet prison is a pretty good one to argue against being a plotter. The prosecutor said that, “We know while in prison, Smirnov organized contacts with Trotskyites, for a code was discovered by means of which Smirnov communicated with his companions outside. ”
As one refugee put it, “What could he write to them? Aim at Stalin ‘s head, not his belly?” To Westerners, this might sound plausible because, in our prison system, people in jail can write in and out. They can get letters, they get packages. But to Russians, this, of course, was a farce. Political prisoners were often vanished without a trace. Their friends and families had no idea what happened to them or where they were, if they were still alive. It goes without saying that Smirnov was, of course, convicted and executed of plotting with Stalin in May of 1937.
Even on his way out of power, Trotsky was insisting that the party is always right and that one cannot be right against the party. And on this, Stalin agreed. As he put it, “An enemy of the people is not only one who does sabotage, but one who doubts the rightness of the party line. And there are a lot of them, and we must liquidate them.” Even doubting the party was itself grounds for being an enemy of the people, which was grounds for execution. As a result of this, people were judged by their allegiance to the party as opposed to the quality of their work, which led to perhaps predictable but nevertheless deranged consequences.
Meteorologists were imprisoned for failing to predict weather that would harm crops. There was a linguist named Nikolai Marr who had idiosyncratic views about how language was developed. Now, his proletarian science, which is the good science as opposed to bourgeois science, which is the bad science, said that all the languages of the Earth not only came from one original language, but from four sounds, specifically, rosh, sal, ber, and yon. And professors who were opposed to this linguistic nonsense were exiled, their books withdrawn from circulation, and they were finally arrested. One year, many horses lost their lives due to an epidemic. The vaccines offered did not work. So the bacteriologists were arrested for sabotage. Astronomers rounded up since their theories of sunspot development were decreed to be decidedly un-Marxist.
The most famous example of this was someone named Trofim Lysenko, because when it comes to nature and nurture, the Bolsheviks were entirely on the nurture side, because they believed in a materialistic view of man that can be reshaped by society to create a perfect being in their own image. Therefore, this whole idea of genetics and carrying on what happened through ancestry was something that should be rejected. Lysenko thought that Mendel’s idea that genes exist and that they can transmit characteristics was a reactionary idea, and therefore must be wrong. Because of this, Soviet biology became worldwide laughingstock for years, including Lysenko’s claim that he managed to cross a tomato with a potato.
What happened was, anyone with technical expertise inevitably became a suspect when something went wrong. In 1937, a photographer was executed after one of his apprentices turned him in, simply because he pointed out that, before the revolution, the quality of photographic paper was better. Served him right for lying, right? As the kulaks were to blame for issues with food and agriculture, now there was a new class of invisible foes responsible for all the problems in the industry, the wreckers. Because the Soviet system was perfect, and not just perfect, but ideologically correct, therefore, all these problems in the industry must be the result of sabotage, conscious sabotage, by invisible omnipresent wreckers.
In 1937, the railway minister said, “I cannot name a single line, a single road, where there is no Trotskyite Japanese wrecking. What is more, there is not a single branch of railway transport where such workers have not turned up.” He ordered the arrest of thousands of railway administrators and managers, which is an enormous attack on technical skill. The more evidence came that communism wasn’t delivering on what it promised, the more proof you had that these wreckers were omnipresent and pernicious and affecting these catastrophes.
Eventually, showing up 20 minutes to work was not just grounds for dismissal, but a felony. Losing your job was regarded as sort of a treason against society because everyone was supposed to work as hard as they could on behalf of everybody else. The Russian newspapers ran articles where people stood up in court, admitting to things like placing bombs in mines to wreck the mines and the productivity.
As one member of the French National Federation of Miners pointed out, “I defy any technician, however competent, to organize the systemic placing of a mine in an explosive state without the inspectors, even if they were complete idiots, perceiving it within an hour.” Let’s just talk this through. Imagine you have a mine. Someone just walks in, they’ve got this thing of dynamite with the blasting cap. ” What’s that?” “Oh, it’s nothing. This is just to help.” No one’s going to notice this? But this is what the Russian people were expected to believe.
The arts themselves were even worse, because artistry, by its nature, is subjective and open to interpretation. Shostakovich is one of the greatest composers of all time. He’s still listened to and heavily admired today. On January 26, 1936, Stalin stormed out of the premiere of Shostakovich’s new opera. A couple of days later, there were headlines talking about muddle instead of music and called the work “a grotesquery suited to the perverted taste of the bourgeois.” Now, some members in the artistic community stood up for Shostakovich. There was a writer named A. Leznyev who said that, “I view the incident of Shostakovich as the advent of the same order that burns books in Germany.” He was tortured and shot.
A theater director denounced the angry, cruel headlines. His wife was stabbed to death in the eyes. He was tortured and shot, his body dumped in a landfill. Shostakovich ‘s ex-girlfriend, who was a writer named Galina, was vanished. His brother -in-law, his sister, his mother-in-law, his uncle, all were arrested. Things got even more clever on behalf of the Soviet authorities to instill a false reality into the workers. After all, words are one thing, but photographs are indisputable proof. So what they began to do was falsify history itself.
Here we have an example of Lenin standing behind Trotsky. On the left, and if you turn to the right, you can see that Trotsky vanishes from the photograph. You could remember one thing, but you could just look at the picture and see for yourself that Trotsky was never there. Here’s another example of Lenin giving a speech and Trotsky standing before him on the steps, and then Trotsky vanishes. Things got even more extreme, as you had a photograph of four men, Stalin among them, then down to three, then down to two, and then Stalin stood alone.