Books I have been reading: Joshua Rubenstein - The Last Days of Stalin

One cannot live by Brexit alone. There will be postings on other subjects. I have decided to start a new thread - books I have been reading (and not just detective stories). To start with, a fascinating new volume by Joshua Rubenstein about the last year of Stalin's life, his death and the months immediately after. So you can all wait for part 3 of my rant, my piece about the latest House of Lords reports and my views on David Cameron's extraordinary pronouncements (though I cannot help wondering whether he is secretly a Brexiteer).

Recent years have seen various biographies of Stalin and some books that concentrate on the last period of his life. This is justified: Stalin's rule and the legacy he left have been crucial to modern history. Also, certain new documents have become available but, more importantly, new analysis and thinking have to produce new books.

Professor Rubenstein starts his book with a detailed description of the tyrant's very last days, from his massive stroke on March 1 to his actual death on the 5th. The story is well known in general but it is good to have it retold in detail, based on various accounts. And a very bizarre story it is, too. Stalin, possibly the most powerful man in the world, so feared assassination that he created rings of security around himself wherever he went and even in one dacha he changed his bedrooms in order that nobody should know where he was sleeping. What it actually created is a situation in which he was safely protected from any help he might have had after his stroke.

Members of his personal guard did not dare to enter his bedroom though they suspected that something must be wrong till the evening of the day after, that is probably about twelve hours after the stroke. When they finally managed to send in a servant who found "Uncle Joe" on the floor, unable to move or to speak or even to control his bladder, they went through a number of stages before a doctor could be called. By that time the various Politburo members who were mostly terrified that Stalin was about to start another major purge had arrived and began their jockeying for position. And so on, and so on.

The book leaves the non-grieving colleagues, the permanently drunk son and the genuinely grief-stricken daughter to wait for the old man's death and moves back to take in the last few years of the great dictator's life, his worsening health, his growing paranoia, the new purge that focused to a great degree on Jews and the threat to his immediate colleagues with whom he played a cat and mouse game. Nobody knew for certain who was in favour and who was out of it. It is no wonder that for many years a story was going round that they actually finished him off when they found him incapacitated. A nice story like the various ones about Beria's end but the evidence is non-existent and Professor Rubenstein will have no truck with it.

There is at least one new aspect: at the time and in the decades since then an assumption has reigned that Stalin was meditating on a plan to exile all the remaining Jews who did not end up in the Gulag or the execution chamber to some part of Siberia with one or two suggestions as to where that might be. Professor Rubenstein has not been able to find any direct evidence that such a plan existed though people spoke of it unofficially and even, occasionally, called for such an act. Had it been Stalin's intention or was he merely encouraging rumours to create even more terror in people's minds? Impossible to tell.

Finishing Stalin off, so to speak, the author moves to the post-Stalin era, analyzing the immediate developments inside the country and in the world, the possible missed opportunities though these were somewhat chimerical. Inside the country and the Soviet colonies there were several developments: there was the inevitable struggle for power, which first destroyed Beria, leaving Malenkov in apparent command until he was outmaneuvered by Khrushchev and Bulganin. The book does not go far enough to show Nikita Sergeyevich emerging as the undisputed leader. It is worth noting that the people Khrushchev pushed aside with the exception of Beria and his immediate acolytes were not even imprisoned, let alone murdered. About Beria he was clear and his colleagues agreed: it was either him or them. Curiously enough, what Khrushchev said and thought about Beria echoed Bukharin's comments to the Menshevik Dan about Stalin. The difference was that Bukharin did not seriously try to prevent the destruction that Stalin, he knew, was planning; Khrushchev preferred to move in first.

There were some economic reforms, and gradual release of prisoners, first criminals, which was not exactly a huge success but, after a few months, politicals; there was the abrogation of the Doctors' Plot and the release of those medics who were still alive (if only just after the torture and maltreatment).

Then there were the uprisings in the camps, put down ferociously but they did signify that some changes would have to be made. There were riots in several East European colonies, culminating in the East Berlin uprising on June 17. After that the more open attitude to the West became once again closed but cautious changes inside the country continued: a slight weakening of censorship, a slightly different economic outlook, a possible greater openness towards other countries. The book stops with all these tentative steps being taken and with the power struggle gearing up. One cannot help hoping that Professor Rubenstein will pick up the story in a following volume that will take in the uneasy years that led up to the Twentieth Congress and what happened then. Meanwhile, let me recommend this book to anyone who seriously wants to understand events in the second half of the twentieth century (and, let us face it, the beginning of the twenty-first). It is informative and moves at a thriller's pace. What more could one want?



Joshua Rubenstein:           The Last Days of Stalin
2016                                   Yale University Press

A few points that might interest people

A few days ago I quoted from Oleg Khlevniuk's recent biography of Stalin and I propose to do so again. I am going to avoid the description of the real horrors: the collectivization and subsequent famine or examples of Soviet "justice" first introduced by Stalin and some of his colleagues and henchmen during the Civil War (he and Voroshilov were highly unsuccessful commanders and strategists but rather good at torturing and murdering their opponents) and repeated subsequently until they reached their apogee during the first great purge in the thirties and the second purge (less well known) in the later forties early fifties.

What I want to concentrate on is the period when times were better. Some years ago a friend told me about reading Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich soon after it came out in English and being horrified by the ending. Some of my readers might remember how it ends. After a day of quite unspeakable horror for anyone who had not gone through those camps, Ivan Denisovich, the canny peasant, goes through the events and enumerates various small successes, sighing contentedly that it had been a good day. That? A good day? Well, all things are relative.

So let us look at the very end of Khlevniuk's book when he describes the situation in the Soviet Union not long before the dictator's death, in the "relatively prosperous year of 1952" not during the famine of 1931 -1933 or that of 1946 1947.

Most people lived primarily on grains and potatoes. Budgetary studies conducted on the eve of Stalin's death, during the relatively prosperous year of 1952, established the following daily nutritional intake in worker and peasant families: the average Soviet citizen consumed approximately 500 grams of flour products (primarily bread), a small amount of cereals, 400 - 600 grams of potatoes, and approximately 200 - 400 grams of milk and milk products.

These items accounted for the bulk of the typical diet. Anything else, especially meat, was a special occasion. The figure for per capita consumption of meant and meat products averaged 40 - 70 grams per day and 15 - 20 grams of fat (animal or plant oils, margarine or fatback). A few teaspoons of sugar and a bit of fish completed the picture. Average citizens could permit themselves an average of one egg every six days. These rations are approximately equal to the dietary norm for prison camps.

Let us not forget that these figures were compiled and published by the Central Statistical Directorate and were probably on the generous side. The reality was probably worse, especially for the peasants.

How very different from the descriptions of the long and, in their own way, painful suppers that Stalin held for his henchmen in the Kremlin or one of his dachas. Somewhat different from the lives of the various privileged sections of Soviet society, the bonzy, who could shop in special shops where many other goods were available, both home-grown and imported and whose salaries together with the special konverty (envelopes with extra bonuses that remained a secret between the organization and the recipient) amounted to a great deal more than the pay most people received.

Of the good listed above, the more luxurious ones, such as meat or sausage were not available outside the big cities and people from all over the country had to travel to them in order to buy a few things to feed their families with.

Those were the good years. What of the vozhd, the leader himself? We have had, as I mentioned above, many accounts of the sort of feeding that went on around his table, even during the hungry years of the war and the famine immediately after, never mind the relatively good years after that.

Here is an account of the sort of budget that went on the immediate Main Guard Directorate under its leader of many years, Nikolai Vlasik. (He, too, was demoted in 1951 and arrested in 1952 but released in 1956.) Some of the accounts, especially of Stalin's last days, come from him.

Under Vlasik, the Main Guard Directorate became a powerful and influential government agency. In early 1952 it comprised 14,300 people and had an enormous budget of 672 million rubles. Vlasik's directorate was responsible not only for protection, but also for the maintenance of the apartments and dachas of top-level Soviet leaders, keeping Central Committee members supplied with consumer goods, handling the transportation and lodging of foreign guests, and overseeing the construction of new government buildings. In 1951 approximately 80 million rubles of the directorate's budget went toward maintaining the dachas and apartments of the fourteen highest-ranking Soviet leaders (including expenses for protection and servants). Staling was, of course, the most expensive of the fourteen. A total of 26.3 million rubles were spent on his apartment and dacha in 1951. This sum probably did not include such expenses as automobile transport.

Serving in the Guard Directorate was both prestigious and lucrative. In 1951 the average compensation for members of Stalin's security team (including uniforms, housing, etc.) was 5,300 rubles per month, at a time when the average monthly wage throughout the Soviet Union was 660 rubles and the average per capita income for collective farm workers was approximately 90 rubles per month. In addition to material benefits, Vlasik's relationship with the leader gave him significant political influence, leading to his increasing involvement - with Stalin's encouragement - in the political intrigues that roiled round the vozhd (leader). Having a powerful patron and sense of impunity was intoxicating. Vlasik drank and enjoyed a promiscuous love life, and so did his subordinates.

There was, of course, a down side: if the vozhd so desired you could be arrested with all that entailed. Earlier a number of the personal security guards were executed or chose to commit suicide as an easier way out.

By and large it was Stalin's colleagues who trembled with fear and tried to protect themselves at all costs. Towards the end of Stalin's life, as the second purge raged, Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgy Malenkov had been demoted and were waiting for worse. Molotov's wife had been arrested during the second purge, largely because she was Jewish, and not only did her husband not dare to speak up for her but he he agreed to divorce her on Stalin's orders. She was released after the dictator's death and, as far as I know, the two re-married.

Stalin's invitations to come sup with him and watch a film or just "have a bit of fun" were never refused though guests tended to wonder whether they would be returning home after the party or going somewhere quite different. And those were the "good years".

Little Joe the Rustler will rustle never more

One of my favourite LPs (or as they are known these days, vinyls) is this one: My Darling Party Line, given my father by one of the performers on it, Abe Brumberg, in real life a well-known expert on the Soviet Union (and many other things). The other performer is Joe Glazer a well-known writer and singer of labour songs but, clearly, a man who had no truck with the Communist party either in the Soviet Union or, more to the point, in the United States. To say that the songs are irreverent is to use an understatement. The album is a wonderfully funny though often rather sad send-up of many things to do with Communism in the east and west, but particularly the west. The words are written by Glazer and sometimes Brumberg, the tunes are mostly traditional and well known.

I picked one that is very appropriate for today: Little Joe the Rustler to the tune of Little Joe the Wrangler. The only text I could find on line is inadequate and incomplete. So, kind person that I am, I have copied out the much better text from the well-worn leaflet that goes with the LP. (Actually, I know the song by heart.)

Little Joe the Rustler will rustle never more,
His scheming in the Kremlin is all through. 
'Twas back in 1907 that he robbed the Tiflis bank
And he landed in a prison in Baku.

CHORUS:
He rustled all through Europe,
And he rustled through the world,
From Germany out to the China sea.
Joe Stalin purged and plundered 
As his black moustache he twirled -
And he did it in the name of liberty.

He rode with comrade Lenin who was leader of the band,
But Stalin had ambitions of his own.
He learned to shoot and rope and ride
Until he led them all,
And he succeeded Lenin to the throne.

CHORUS

Little Joe, he purged Bukharin, Trostsky and the rest,
Zinoviev and many others too. 
He said they all were traitors
And he shot them down like dogs -
Till he alone remained of all that crew.

CHORUS

'Twas in the spring of '53 that Joseph Stalin died,
They laid him next to Lenin in a tomb.
There were no tears, no broken hearts,
No grief throughout the world
When Little Joe the Rustler meat his doom.

CHORUS

Now we come to '61, Nikita is the boss. 
He said to Joe: "We're changing history.
You used to be a hero, Joe, but now you are a bum -
Move over, Joe, you've gotta make room for me!"

CHORUS

Of course, there is one slight inaccuracy in the text. As we know, there were people who mourned the old gangster and mass murderer, people such as Paul Robeson and many others like him.

The last Stalinist show trial

Sixty years ago this week, on November 20, 1952, the last of the Stalinist show trials, that against the "Trotskyit, Titoist, Zionist" agents Rudolf Slansky and cohorts, opened in Prague. It lasted several days and at the end eleven of the fourteen accused were condemned to death. They were executed on December 3 and their ashes thrown out of a car onto an icy road because the people in charge could not be bothered to carry them to the appointed destination. Three months later Stalin died and much of the Communist world changed.

On another blog I have written a long piece about the Stalinist purges and trials of post-Second World War Eastern Europe. I can't say enjoy it but I hope people will read it and find it interesting. It is not possible to understand developments in Eastern Europe without knowing something about those events.

A day to celebrate

Today is the anniversary of Joseph Stalin's death on March 5, 1953. Well, OK, it is the anniversary of the day on which his death was announced since there are a few murky details around his death as there were around almost every part of his life. His funeral on March 8 was another bloody occasion as hundreds of people were crushed in a stampede caused, most likely by inefficiency and paranoid security.

One wonders whether the renewed President Putin remembers the date.