Conversations with Stalin Read online

  Viewed from the standpoint of success and political adroitness, Stalin is hardly surpassed by any statesman of his time.

  I am, of course, far from thinking that success in political struggles is the only value. It especially does not occur to me to identify politics with amorality, though I do not deny that, by the very fact that politics involve a struggle for the survival of given human communities, they are thereby marked by a disregard for moral norms. For me great politicians and great statesmen are those who can join ideas and realities, those who can go forward steadfastly toward their aims while at the same time adhering to the basic moral values.

  All in all, Stalin was a monster who, while adhering to abstract, absolute, and fundamentally utopian ideas, in practice recognized, and could recognize, only success—violence, physical and spiritual extermination.

  However, let us not be unjust toward Stalin! What he wished to accomplish, and even that which he did accomplish, could not be accomplished in any other way. The forces that swept him forward and that he led, with their absolute ideals, could have no other kind of leader but him, given that level of Russian and world relations, nor could they have been served by different methods. The creator of a closed social system, he was at the same time its instrument and, in changed circumstances and all too late, he became its victim. Unsurpassed in violence and crime, Stalin was no less the leader and organizer of a certain social system. Today he rates very low, pilloried for his “errors,” through which the leaders of that same system intend to redeem both the system and themselves.

  And yet, despite the fact that it was carried out in an inappropriate operetta style, Stalin’s dethronement proves that the truth will out even if only after those who fought for it have perished. The human conscience is implacable and indestructible.

  Unfortunately, even now, after the so-called de-Stalinization, the same conclusion can be reached as before: Those who wish to live and to survive in a world different from the one Stalin created and which in essence and in full force still exists must fight.

  SELECTED BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

  (Prepared by the Publisher)

  GEORGI FEDOROVICH ALEKSANDROV (1908– )

  Leading Soviet philosopher and Communist Party member since 1928. He worked in the Agitation and Propaganda Section (Agitprop) of the Central Committee from 1934 and was its head from 1939 to 1947. His book History of Western European Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1944, was officially attacked by Zhdanov for presenting Marxism as a part of the Western philosophical tradition. In 1950 he was official commentator on the philosophical implications of Stalin’s articles on linguistics. He served as Minister of Culture in 1954–1955, after which he joined the Institute of Philosophy of the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences in Minsk.

  VLADIMIR BAKARIĆ (1912– )

  Croatian who joined the Communist underground in 1933 as a student and was sentenced in 1934 to three years in prison. In 1941 he joined the Partisans. After the war he became Premier of Croatia. In 1946 he was a member of the Yugoslav delegation to the Peace Conference in Paris. He is the ranking Communist leader in Croatia.

  LAVRENTY PAVLOVICH BERIA (1899–1953)

  Georgian Communist who made a career in the Soviet Secret Police—the Cheka, GPU, and NKVD. As Commissar for Internal Affairs from 1938 to 1948 and Deputy Prime Minister in charge of security from 1941 to 1953, he ended the Great Purge by liquidating his predecessor, N. I. Yezhov, and many other officials and also directed the reign of terror, not only in the Soviet Union but in the satellite states, that marked Stalin’s last years. He was purged in the power struggle following Stalin’s death.

  SEMËN MIKHAILOVICH BUDËNNY (1883– )

  Marshal of the Soviet Union, from 1935. He was active in the Revolution of 1917. From 1939 he has been a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and in 1940 was First Vice-Commissar of Defense.

  NIKOLAI IVANOVICH BUKHARIN (1888–1938)

  Leading Bolshevik theorist and member of the Politburo from 1918 to 1929 who supported Stalin against Trotsky but was himself stripped of power by Stalin as leader of the Right Opposition and executed during the Great Purge. Many of his ideas have found expression in post-Stalin revisionism, especially in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany.

  NIKOLAI ALEXANDROVICH BULGANIN (1895– )

  Soviet politician. He joined the Communist Party in 1917, and was a member of the Supreme Soviet from 1937 to 1958. From 1941 to 1944 he was a member of the Military Council, and the following year served on the State Defense Committee. Other posts he has held have been: Deputy People’s Commissar of Defense (1944–1947), Minister of Defense (1947–1949 and 1953–1955), Chairman of the Council of Ministers (1955–1958), member of the Politburo (1948–1952), member of the Presidium (1952–1958), and Prime Minister (1955–1958).

  VLKO ČHERVENKOV (1900– )

  Bulgarian Communist leader who joined the Party in 1919. He was forced to flee Bulgaria for the USSR in 1915 with his wife, Dimitrov’s sister, for his complicity in the infamous bombing in the Sofia Cathedral. He completed his studies at the Lenin Party School in the USSR and joined the Agitation and Propaganda Section of the Communist International. In 1937, during the Great Purge, he was made director of the Lenin School, which post he held until the school was closed in 1941. During the Second World War he managed the Soviet radio station Khristo Botev, which broadcast to Bulgaria. On September 9, 1944, he returned to Bulgaria to take over the Secretariat of the Communist Party. In January 1950 he succeeded Kolarov as Premier. In November of the same year he became Secretary General of the Party but gave up the post after Stalin’s death. He served as Minister of Culture and was eventually reinstated in the Politburo.

  BOGDAN CRNOBRNJA (1916– )

  Yugoslav teacher who joined the Partisans during the Second World War. After the liberation, he served as Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade and of Foreign Affairs. Since 1955 he has been Yugoslav Ambassador to India.

  PEKO DAPČEVIĆ (1913– )

  Communist Yugoslav general. He joined the Party in 1933 as a student at the University of Belgrade. His first military experience came in 1936 as a company commander in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. With the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, he led the Partisan uprising in his native Montenegro and thereafter rose rapidly to the Supreme Headquarters of the Army of People’s Liberation. In 1945 he was awarded the medal of People’s Hero. The following year he commanded the Yugoslav Fourth Army in the Yugoslav zone of Veneria-Guilia, the hinterland of Trieste, and was then assigned to direct the guerrilla action in Northern Greece. From 1953 he served as Chief of the Yugoslav General Staff, but was demoted as a result of being indirectly implicated in the Djilas affair; it was his actress wife, Milena Vrajak, whom Djilas defended against the “New Class.”

  GEORGI DIMITROV (1882–1949)

  Bulgarian Communist leader who was one of the organizers of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1909. After a career as underground activist and union organizer in Bulgaria, he was released from prison through Russian intervention in 1921 and for the next two decades served in the Comintern. He was General Secretary of the Communist International in Moscow for nine years, and was the author of the Popular Front policy of the thirties. He gained world-wide prominence as a result of his trial, and acquittal, in Berlin in 1933 for complicity in the Reichstag fire. After the Second World War he gave up his Soviet citizenship and returned to Bulgaria to assume leadership of the Communists there and to carry out the Communization of that country. He became Premier in 1946.

  MAXIM GORKY (1868–1936)

  Russia’s leading revolutionary novelist. His works—notably Mother, The Artamonov Business, and Klim Samgin—were a condemnation of capitalist society. Though he gave considerable financial support to the Bolsheviks, he opposed their seizure of power and lived in exile from 1921 to 1928. Upon his return, he headed the Writers’ Union and was declared founder of the school of Socialist Realism. A close
friend of Stalin’s, he became a leading apologist for the Soviet regime. He died in allegedly mysterious circumstances in 1936. Official blame for his death was placed on the “Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rightists” and the Trotskyites during the Bukharin show trial of 1938. Since then, Stalin himself has been accused of complicity in his death.

  ANDRIJA HEBRANG (1899–1948)

  Yugoslav Communist leader from Croatia. He spent twelve years in prison before the Second World War for his activities in the trade-union movement. Upon his release he became Secretary of the Croatian Communist Party. He was a leader of the National Liberation Movement from the start, in 1941, and held high offices after the war, among them Minister of Industry, member of the Presidium of both the Yugoslav and Croatian Constituent Assemblies, and Chairman of the Federal Planning Commission. In 1946 the Party’s Central Committee investigated his past and found him guilty of cowardice during the war and of collaboration with the Croatian Fascist Ustaši. He was also declared a “fractionist” and relieved of his posts. In 1948 he was arrested, allegedly while trying to escape to Rumania. He committed suicide while awaiting trial. Some sources claim he was murdered in jail.

  ENVER HOXHA (1908– )

  Leading Albanian Communist leader. He was educated in France and Belgium and taught French in Albanian schools. He was a founder of the Albanian Communist Party in 1941 and of the Albanian National Liberation Movement in 1942. In 1943 he became Secretary General of the Albanian Communist Party, which post he held until 1954, when it was abolished. He has since served as First Secretary of the Party’s Central Committee. In 1946 he was Premier, Foreign Minister, Defense Minister, and Commander in Chief of Albania’s armed forces.

  ARSO JOVANOVIĆ

  Professional prewar Yugoslav army officer from Montenegro. He joined the Partisans and organized the People’s Liberation Army, of which he was Chief of the General Staff until the end of 1946, when he was replaced by Koča Popović He was openly on the side of the Soviet Union in the Tito-Cominform break in 1948. He was shot by border guards while trying to escape to Rumania.

  LAZAR MOISEEVICH KAGANOVICH (1893– )

  Communist of humble Jewish origin who was a Party organization man. He rose to power as one of Stalin’s chief henchmen. During the Second World War he was a member of the State Defense Committee and subsequently held high posts in the Caucasus and the Ukraine. His influence declined in Stalin’s last years, perhaps in part because of the anti-Semitic campaign. After Stalin’s death he became prominent once again, but was divested of all power in 1957 as a member of the “anti-Party group.”

  EDVARD KARDELJ (1907– )

  Yugoslav Communist leader generally regarded as second to Tito. A Slovenian schoolteacher, he joined the Party in 1928. He was jailed for two years in 1931. From 1934 to 1937 he studied in the Comintern’s Lenin School in Moscow and served as a professor there. He collaborated with Tito in the reorganization of the Yugoslav Communist Party before the war, and became a member of its Politburo in 1940. During the war he served in the Partisan Supreme Command and became Vice-Premier of the Provisional Government founded in 1943. He retained this post when the Government was constitutionally established in 1945. Since 1951 he has also served as Foreign Minister and as president of the commission in charge of the reorganization of the Government. He is regarded as a top ideologist in the Yugoslav Communist Party.

  NIKITA SERGEEVICH KHRUSHCHEV (1894– )

  Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers and First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A locksmith by trade, he rose through the ranks of the Communist Party especially through his activities in the Ukraine. Following the Civil War, in which he served as a political commissar of a Partisan detachment, he was sent to the Workers’ School at Kharkov University. Thereafter he ascended the ladder of Party posts up to the Politburo (candidate member in 1935) and Central Committee. In 1938 he was put in charge of carrying out a purge in the Ukraine, and during the Second World War he served there in various army posts. After the war he was transferred from the Ukraine to Moscow, where he became a full member of the Party’s Central Committee and Presidium in 1952. After Stalin’s death, in 1953, he was elected First Secretary and eventually replaced Malenkov.

  BORIS KIDRIČ (1919–1953)

  Yugoslav Communist leader of Slovenian origin. He joined the Party in 1928 and lived the life of a constantly hunted underground activist. He joined the Partisans in 1941, and became political commissar for Slovenia. In 1945 he was made Premier of Slovenia and continued a harsh program of establishing Communist hegemony there. In 1946 he was sent to Moscow to study the Soviet economy. From his return, in the fall of the same year, to his death, he was virtual director of the entire Yugoslav economy. His administration is associated with the ruthless collectivization of agriculture, abandoned after his death, and highly demanding production drives in industry. He was a member of the Politburo.

  SERGEI MIRONOVICH KIROV (1886–1934)

  Leading Bolshevik revolutionary and Politburo member in 1930. He at first supported Stalin in the latter’s rise to power but opposed his personal rule after the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934. His assassination in December 1934, probably at Stalin’s behest, set off the Great Purge.

  VASSIL KOLAROV (1877–1950)

  Bulgarian Communist who succeeded Dimitrov as Premier in 1949. Like Dimitrov, he was a veteran of the Communist International and was its General Secretary in 1922. Following the Second World War, he left the USSR to return to Bulgaria, where he held the posts of Provisional President of the Bulgarian Republic (1946), Vice-President of the Council of Ministers and Foreign Minister (1949).

  IVAN STEPANOVICH KONEV (1897– )

  Marshal of the Soviet Union. He distinguished himself during the Second World War, especially in the liberation of Kharkov (1943) and Kirovograd (1944). After the war he was Soviet representative on the Allied Control Commission in Vienna. From 1946 to 1955 he was Commander in Chief Land Forces, and from 1955 First Deputy Minister of Defense and Commander in Chief of the Warsaw Pact forces. He resigned from this post in 1960 on grounds of ill health. He was chairman of the special court that sentenced Beria in 1953.

  TRAICHO KOSTOV (1897–1949)

  Bulgarian Communist leader. He was a member of the Politburo and Deputy Prime Minister who, though an anti-Titoist, was associated with a “Bulgaria-first” outlook. Stripped of power in March 1949 and indicted in December of that year, he created a sensation by repudiating his confession at the trial. He was executed.

  GEORGI MAXIMILIANOV1CH MALENKOV (1902– )

  Soviet Communist Party leader who worked his way through the Party apparatus to become a member of the Central Committee, in 1939, where he was placed in charge of the administration of cadres. In 1941 he became a candidate member of the Politburo and served on the State Defense Committee throughout the Second World War. After the war he served as Secretary of the Central Committee and Deputy Prime Minister. He succeeded Stalin as Prime Minister in the era of “collective leadership” but was forced to step down after a public admission of failure in 1955. In 1957, as a member of the “anti-Party group,” he was stripped of power.

  DMITRI ZAKHAROVICH MANUILSKY (1883– )

  Soviet Communist Party official and diplomat. He joined the Party in 1903. As an underground activist, he experienced arrest and exile. After the Revolution of 1917 most of his posts were in his native Ukraine. However, he was even more active in the Communist International, serving as Secretary of the Presidium from 1928 to 1943. During the war he served as a political officer in the Red Army. He was also Foreign Minister for the Ukraine from 1945 to 1952, and head of the Ukrainian delegation to the United Nations in 1952.

  ANASTAS IVANOVICH MIKOYAN (1895– )

  Armenian Communist who has been especially prominent as director of Soviet foreign trade and food industries. A candidate member of the Politburo in 1926, he became a full member in 1935. He has also been Deputy Prime Minis
ter since 1937. After Stalin’s death he consistently supported Khrushchev and has become one of the most influential leaders of the Soviet Communist Party. He is generally regarded as a “reasonable” Communist and achieved some popularity in the West, especially as a result of his American visit in 1958.

  MITRA MITROVIĆ (1912– )

  Yugoslav Communist Party member since 1933. She was prominent in the Partisan ranks during the Second World War. After 1945 she served for several years as Minister of Education for Serbia. More recently she has risen to posts of federal rank in both the Executive Council of the Government and the Central Committee of the Party.

  VYACHESLAV MIKHAILOVICH MOLOTOV (1890– )

  A Bolshevik since 1906 and a specialist in Party organization. He ascended the ladder, largely as Stalin’s lieutenant, until he was second in power only to Stalin. From 1926 he was a member of the Politburo and of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. He was Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars—that is, Prime Minister—throughout the thirties, and Deputy Chairman until 1957. He was best known to the world as Soviet Commissar (from 1946, Minister) for Foreign Affairs. In 1957 he was stripped of power as a member of the “anti-Party group” in association with Malenkov, Kaganovich, and others, and has since held relatively minor posts abroad.