Conversations with Stalin Read online

  Stalin turned to Molotov: “Had they sent us a draft of the treaty?”

  Molotov, without getting confused, but also not without acrimony: “Well, yes.”

  Stalin, with angry resignation: “We, too, commit stupidities.”

  Dimitrov latched on to this new fact. “This was precisely the reason for my statement. The draft had been sent to Moscow. I did not suppose that you could have anything against it.”

  But Stalin remained unyielding. “Nonsense. You rushed headlong like a Komsomol youth. You wanted to astound the world, as though you were still Secretary of the Comintern. You and the Yugoslavs do not let anyone know what you are doing, but we have to find out everything on the street. You place us before the accomplished fact!”

  Kostov, who was in charge of Bulgaria’s economic affairs at the time, wished to say something too. “It is hard to be a small and underdeveloped country. . . . I would like to raise some economic questions.”

  But Stalin cut him short, directing him to the competent ministries and pointing out that this was a meeting to discuss the differences in foreign policy of three governments and parties.

  Finally Kardelj was recognized. He was red and, what was a sign of agitation with him, he drew his head down between his shoulders and made pauses in his sentences where they did not belong. He pointed out that the treaty between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, signed at Bled, had been previously submitted to the Soviet Government, but that the Soviet Government had made no comment other than with respect to its duration—instead of “for all time,” it suggested “twenty years.”

  Stalin kept glancing silently and not without reproach at Molotov, who hung his head and with clenched lips in fact confirmed Kardelj’s claim.

  “Except for that comment, which we adopted,” Kardelj corroborated, “there were no differences. . . .”

  Stalin interrupted him, no less angrily though less offensively than with Dimitrov. “Nonsense! There are differences, and grave ones! What do you say about Albania? You did not consult us at all regarding the entry of your army into Albania.”

  Kardelj stressed that there existed the consent of the Albanian Government for that.

  Stalin shouted, “This could lead to serious international complications. Albania is an independent state! What do you think? Justification or no justification, the fact remains that you did not consult us about the sending of two divisions into Albania.”

  Kardelj explained that all that had not yet been final and added that he did not remember a single foreign problem but that the Yugoslav Government did not consult with the Soviet.

  “It’s not so!” Stalin cried. “You don’t consult at all. That is not your mistake, but your policy—yes, your policy!”

  Cut off, Kardelj fell silent and did not press his view.

  Molotov took up a piece of paper and read a passage from the Yugoslav-Bulgarian treaty: that Bulgaria and Yugoslavia would “work in the spirit of the United Nations and support all action directed at the preservation of peace and against all hotbeds of aggression.”

  “What is the meaning of this?” Molotov asked.

  Dimitrov explained that these words signified solidarity with the United Nations in the struggle against hotbeds of aggression.

  Stalin broke in: “No, this is preventive war—the commonest Komsomol stunt; a tawdry phrase which only brings grist to the enemy mill.”

  Molotov returned to the Bulgarian-Rumanian customs union, underscoring that this was the beginning of a merger between the two states.

  Stalin broke in with the observation that customs unions are generally unrealistic. Since the discussion had again subsided somewhat, Kardelj observed that some customs unions had shown themselves not to be so bad in practice.

  “For example?” Stalin asked.

  “Well, for example, Benelux,” Kardelj said cautiously. “Here Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg joined together.”

  Stalin: “No, Holland didn’t. Only Belgium and Luxembourg. That’s nothing, insignificant”

  Kardelj: “No, Holland is included too.”

  Stalin stubbornly: “No, Holland is not.”

  Stalin looked at Molotov, at Zorin, at the rest. I had the desire to explain to him that the syllable ne in the name Benelux came from the Netherlands, that is, the original designation for Holland, but since everyone kept still, I did too, and so it remained that Holland was not in Benelux.

  Stalin returned to the co-ordination of economic plans between Rumania and Bulgaria. “That is senseless, for instead of co-operation there would soon be a quarrel. The unification of Bulgaria and Yugoslavia is another matter—there are similarities here, ancient aspirations.”

  Kardelj pointed out that at Bled it had also been decided to work gradually toward federation between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, but Stalin broke in by being more precise: “No, but immediately—by tomorrow! First Bulgaria and Yugoslavia ought to unite, and then let Albania join them later.”

  Stalin then turned to the uprising in Greece: “The uprising in Greece has to fold up.” (He used for this the word svernut’, which means literally to roll up.) “Do you believe”—he turned to Kardelj—“in the success of the uprising in Greece?”

  Kardelj replied, “If foreign intervention does not grow and if serious political and military errors are not made.”

  Stalin went on, without paying attention to Kardelj’s opinion: “If, if! No, they have no prospect of success at all. What do you think, that Great Britain and the United States—the United States, the most powerful state in the world—will permit you to break their line of communication in the Mediterranean Sea! Nonsense. And we have no navy. The uprising in Greece must be stopped, and as quickly as possible.”

  Someone mentioned the recent successes of the Chinese Communists. But Stalin remained adamant: “Yes, the Chinese comrades have succeeded, but in Greece there is an entirely different situation. The United States is directly engaged there—the strongest state in the world. China is a different case, relations in the Far East are different. True, we, too, can make a mistake! Here, when the war with Japan ended, we invited the Chinese comrades to reach an agreement as to how a modus vivendi with Chiang Kai-shek might be found. They agreed with us in word, but in deed they did it their own way when they got home: they mustered their forces and struck. It has been shown that they were right, and not we. But Greece is a different case—we should not hesitate, but let us put an end to the Greek uprising.”

  Not even today am I clear on the motives that caused Stalin to be against the uprising in Greece. Perhaps he reasoned that the creation in the Balkans of still another Communist state—Greece—in circumstances when not even the others were reliable and subservient, could hardly have been in his interest, not to speak of possible international complications, which were assuming an increasingly threatening shape and could, if not drag him into war, then endanger his already-won positions.

  As far as the pacification of the Chinese revolution was concerned, here he was undoubtedly led by opportunism in his foreign policy, nor can it be excluded that he anticipated future danger to his own work and to his own empire from the new Communist great power, especially since there were no prospects of subordinating it internally. At any rate, he knew that every revolution, simply by virtue of being new, also becomes a separate epicenter and shapes its own government and state, and this was what he feared in the Chinese case, all the more since the phenomenon was involved that was as significant and as momentous as the October Revolution.

  The discussion began to flag in tempo, and Dimitrov mentioned the development of further economic relations with the USSR, but Stalin cut him off again: “We shall speak of this with the joint Bulgarian-Yugoslav Government.”

  To Kostov’s complaint concerning the injustice of an agreement on technical aid, Stalin replied that he submit a note—“zapisochka”—to Molotov.

  Kardelj asked what stand should be taken concerning the demand of the Italian Government that Somalia be placed
under its trusteeship. Yugoslavia was not inclined to support that demand, but Stalin held the opposite view and he asked Molotov if a reply had been made to that effect. He motivated his stand thus: “Once kings, when they could not agree over the booty, used to give disputed territories to their weakest vassal so they could snatch them from him later at some opportune moment.”

  Stalin did not forget, somewhere before the close of the meeting, to cloak the reality—his demands and orders—with Lenin and Leninism. He declared, “We too, Lenin’s disciples, often had differences with Lenin himself, and even quarreled over some thing, but later we would talk it all out, establish our positions and—we would go forward.”

  The meeting had lasted about two hours.

  This time Stalin did not invite us to dinner in his home. I must confess that I felt a sadness and an emptiness because of this, so great was my own human, sentimental fondness for him still.

  I felt a cold void and bitterness. In the car I tried to express to Kardelj my indignation over the meeting, but, being crushed, he gave me a sign to be still.

  That does not mean that we did not agree, but we reacted in different ways.

  How great was Kardelj’s confusion was most evident the next day, when they took him to the Kremlin to sign—without explanation or ceremony—with Molotov a treaty on consultation between the USSR and Yugoslavia, and he put his signature in the wrong place, so that he had to sign over again.

  The same day, according to an agreement made in Stalin’s anteroom, we went to Dimitrov’s for lunch—to agree on a federation. We did it mechanically—the remnant of discipline and the authority of the Soviet Government. The conversation over this was short and listless on both sides; we agreed that we would get in touch as soon as all had arrived in Sofia and Belgrade.

  To be sure, all this came to nought, for a month later Molotov and Stalin began to attack the Yugoslav leadership in their letters, finding in this the support of the Bulgarian Central Committee. The federation with Bulgaria turned out to be a snare—to crack the unity of the Yugoslav Communists—a snare into which no idealist wished to place his neck any longer. Although on the surface all was quieted, and it appeared that we were united, the protagonists were taking exaggerated positions. This was the prelude to what was to come later, the open division between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, which occurred in June of 1948.

  There has remained in my memory of that meeting with the Bulgarian delegation the remembrance of Rostov’s amenity, almost tenderness toward us. This was all the more unusual inasmuch as in high Yugoslav Communist circles he was considered an opponent of Yugoslavia, and by the same token a Soviet man. Yet he was also for Bulgarian independence, and therefore looked on the Yugoslavs with displeasure in the belief that they were the chief henchmen of the Soviets, and even inclined to place Bulgaria and its Communist Party under themselves. Kostov was later shot on the false charge that he was in the service of Yugoslavia, while the Yugoslav press kept attacking him, so to speak, to the last day—such was the distrust and misunderstanding under Stalin’s shadow.

  It was on that occasion that Dimitrov said what he did about the atom bomb, and then, as though in passing, while accompanying us out of his villa, “What is involved here is not criticism of my statement but something else.”

  Dimitrov certainly knew as much as we did. But he did not have the forces, and perhaps he himself lacked the strength of the Yugoslav leaders.

  I did not fear that anything could happen to us in Moscow; after all, we were the representatives of a foreign independent state. And yet there frequently came before my eyes the vision of Bosnian forests, in whose depths we found refuges during the most violent German offensives and at whose clear cold springs we always found rest and comfort. I even told Kardelj, or someone else, thus laying myself open to reproof for exaggerating, “Just as long as we get to our hills and forests as soon as possible!”

  We left three or four days later. They drove us to the airport at Vnukovo at dawn and stuck us on the plane without any honors. As we flew, I felt more and more the happiness of a child, though also a serious, stern joy, and kept thinking less and less of Stalin’s story concerning General Sikorski’s fate.

  Was I that same person who four years earlier had sped to the Soviet Union devoted and candid in all his being?

  Once again a dream was snuffed out on contact with reality.

  Could this mean that a new one might sprout?

  Conclusion

  MANY PERSONS, among them Trotsky, of course, stress Stalin’s criminal, bloodthirsty passions. I have no intention of either denying or confirming them, since the facts are not that well known to me. Recently it was made public in Moscow that he had probably killed the Leningrad Secretary, Kirov, in order to gain a pretext for settling accounts with the intra-Party opposition. He probably had a hand in Gorky’s death; that death was depicted too prominently in his propaganda as the work of the opposition. Trotsky even suspects that he killed Lenin, with the excuse that he was shortening his misery, it is claimed that he killed his own wife, or in any case, through his harshness, he caused her to kill herself. The romantic legend spread by Stalin’s agents, and which I, too, had heard, is truly too naïve—that she was poisoned while tasting food before her good husband.

  Every crime was possible to Stalin, for there was not one he had not committed. Whatever standards we use to take his measure, in any event—let us hope for all time to come—to him will fall the glory of being the greatest criminal in history. For in him was joined the criminal senselessness of a Caligula with the refinement of a Borgia and the brutality of a Tsar Ivan the Terrible.

  I was more interested, and am more interested, in how such a dark, cunning, and cruel individual could ever have led one of the greatest and most powerful states, not just for a day or a year, but for thirty years! Until precisely this is explained by Stalin’s present critics—I mean his successors—they will only confirm that in good part they are only continuing his work and that they contain in their own make-up those same elements—the same ideas, patterns, and methods that propelled him. For in carrying out his undertakings not only did Stalin find it to his advantage to deal with an exhausted and desperate Russian postrevolutionary society, but it is also true that certain strata of that society, to be more exact, the ruling political bureaucracy of the Party, found use for just such a man—one who was reckless in his determination and extremely practical in his fanaticism. The ruling Party followed him doggedly and obediently—and he truly led it from victory to victory, until, carried away by power, he began to sin against it as well. Today this is all it reproaches him for, passing in silence over his many greater and certainly no less brutal crimes against the “class enemy”—the peasantry and the intelligentsia, and also the left and right wings within the Party and outside of it. And as long as that Party fails to break, both in its theory and especially in its practice, with everything that comprised the very originality and essence of Stalin and of Stalinism, namely, with the ideological unitarianism and so-called monolithic structure of the Party, it will be a bad but reliable sign that it has not emerged from under Stalin’s shadow. Thus the present joy over the liquidation of the so-called anti-Party group of Molotov, despite all the odiousness of his personality and the depravity of his views, seems to me to be shallow and premature. For the essence of the problem is not whether this group is better than that, but that they should exist at all—and whether, at least as a beginning, the ideological and political monopoly of a single group in the USSR shall be ended. Stalin’s dark presence continues to hover and—assuming that there will not be a war—one can fear that it will hover over the Soviet Union for a relatively long time. Despite the curses against his name, Stalin still lives in the social and spiritual foundations of the Soviet society.

  The references to Lenin in speeches and solemn declarations cannot change the substance. It is much easier to expose this or that crime of Stalin’s than to conceal the fact that it was
this man who “built socialism,” who gave rise to the foundations of present Soviet society and of the Soviet empire. All this bespeaks the fart that Soviet society, despite its gigantic technical achievements, and perhaps largely because of them, has barely begun to change, that it is still imprisoned in its own, Stalinist, dogmatic framework.

  Despite this criticism, the hopes do not seem entirely baseless that in the foreseeable future new ideas and phenomena may appear which, though they may not shake Khrushchev’s “monolithism,” will at least cast light on its contradictions and on its essence. At the moment the conditions for more substantial changes do not exist. Those who govern are still themselves too poor to find dogmatism and monopoly of rule a hindrance or superfluous, while the Soviet economy can still exist enclosed in its own empire and can absorb the losses caused by its separation from the world market.

  To be sure, much that is human assumes proportions and values according to the corner from which it is viewed.

  So it is with Stalin.

  If we assume the viewpoint of humanity and freedom, history does not know a despot as brutal and as cynical as Stalin was. He was methodical, all-embracing, and total as a criminal. He was one of those rare terrible dogmatists capable of destroying nine tenths of the human race to “make happy” the one tenth.

  However, if we wish to determine what Stalin really meant in the history of Communism, then he must for the present be regarded as being, next to Lenin, the most grandiose figure. He did not substantially develop the ideas of Communism, but he championed them and brought them to realization in a society and a state. He did not construct an ideal society—something of the sort is not even possible in the very nature of humans and human society, but he transformed backward Russia into an industrial power and an empire that is ever more resolutely and implacably aspiring to world mastery.