Stalin: A Brutal Legacy Uncovered

The Rise of Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, one of history’s greatest tyrants, died in March 1953. He had ruled over the 140 million people of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) for almost 30 years, and he passed away at night, alone, in his dacha — country house — without a last word to be recorded for posterity.

His obituary, delivered three years later by Nikita Khrushchev, one of Stalin’s closest collaborators and most fervent lackeys, had the spellbound audience of almost 2,000 delegates to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. The oration, officially titled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” lasted from midnight to 4 a.m., and included 61 specific charges of Stalin’s atrocities and blunders.

As Khrushchev informed the closed session of the Party apparatchiks, his report — which has entered history as the “Secret Speech” — was based on research by a special commission of senior leaders of the Communist Party. It covered primarily only one part of Stalin’s murderous record: the peak years of his savage “Great Purge” in the mid- and late 1930s, a massacre that wiped out a whole generation of Bolsheviks, the Party’s oldest and most faithful members.

Khrushchev, who went on to become the Soviet prime minister, said next to nothing about the rest of Stalin’s victims, who have been estimated at more than 20 million.

Stalin’s genocidal record was the product of a ruthless, steely personality hardened by searing hardships in his youth: first, brutal beatings by his alcoholic, dirt-poor father; and later, several rounds of imprisonment and exile — from which he often escaped — following his expulsion from a Russian Orthodox seminary for fomenting a strike of railroad workers. For the 20-year-old Stalin, an outstanding student with top marks in Bible and Church studies, the strike was the first step on a new road — a career of rebellion, crime, and radical politics that eventually made him the unquestioned boss of the Communist Party and of 140 million people in the Soviet Union.

Early Career in the Communist Party

At the start of the 20th century, during the dying years of the Russian monarchy, Stalin was an unlikely candidate for reaching the top of the greasy pole of the underground Communist Party. He was a native of Georgia, one of the 15 republics that later made up the Soviet Union; he spoke Russian with a thick accent; he was notorious for his vulgarity, crude anti-Semitism and rudeness; and his physique was marred by a short build, a pockmarked face, and a crippled left arm.

But what he lacked in polish and good looks, Stalin more than made up for with his remorseless drive, brutality, and ruthless disregard for anyone — including his closest and oldest collaborators — but himself.

Little is known for sure about how Stalin became a member of the Communist Party’s central organ, the Politburo, during the years preceding the February 1917 overthrow of Czar Nicholas II. Historians believe that the young Georgian was organizing bank robberies to finance the Party’s underground work, and his high rank was an award for being jailed or exiled by Okhrana, the czarist security police. 

But evidence of these activities is lost. In 1929, five years after Stalin succeeded the Russian leader Vladimir Lenin, he ordered the destruction of all documents about his rise to power. What is better documented are his nearly 30 years of blood-soaked reign as the head of the Communist Party and the Soviet government. Below are his most egregious crimes.

Stalinism

Collectivization and famines

In 1928, as part of his first five-year plan — an all-out effort that was supposed to dramatically increase Soviet food and industrial production — Stalin ordered the seizure and collectivization of all agricultural land. The huge farms, called kolchozes and sovchozes, were worked by the now-landless muzhiks, and were made responsible for ridiculously high deliveries of food to feed the workers in the rapidly built factories.

The program, which Edward Crankshaw, a British expert on the Soviet Union, called a “wholesale application of terror to the countryside,” was a total failure. Instead of increasing the food supply, the collective farms produced meager harvests and tried to meet their quotas by reducing the country’s livestock by a half. The resulting famines and shortages lasted for years and starved to death an estimated 6 million to 11 million peasants.

In his memoir Khruschev Remembers, the former Soviet premier quoted drastic reports that he’d received as the First Party Secretary in Ukraine about peasants who were driven to cannibalism. “The Stalin brand of collectivization,” Khrushchev charged, was conducted “with... reckless, bestial fervor (and) brought us nothing but misery and brutality.”

Purges

One of Stalin’s striking characteristics was his fear for his life. A forceful personality and a loud-mouthed bully, he avoided any situation or activity that that was physically dangerous. For example, he never took part in the early demonstrations against the monarchy or visited the front lines during World War II, even though he was the top commander of the Soviet Red Army. 

As Khruschev reported in his Secret Speech, the dictator was “sickly suspicious, distrustful” and so scared of being poisoned that he would not touch his food or drink until someone else had tasted it.

Stalin, Khrushchev said, saw “enemies,” “two-facers,” and “spies… everywhere and in everything” — an obsession that eventually turned him “against eminent Party workers whom he knew for years.” The upshot was an era of fraudulent trials whose victims were forced to confess to illusory crimes, knowing that they would be executed.

The devious process, which was best described in Arthur Koestler’s classic novel Darkness at Noon, was for the first time officially admitted in the Secret Speech:

“Soviet and economic activists who were branded in 1937-1938 as ‘enemies’ were actually never enemies, spies, wreckers,” Khrushchev told the delegates. “They were always honest Communists; they were only so stigmatized and often, no longer able to bear barbaric tortures, they charged themselves with all kinds of grave and unlikely crimes.”                      

By focusing on the two years, Khrushchev told the shocked gathering, the investigating commission found evidence that “over one-and-a-half million individuals were arrested for ‘anti-Soviet activities,’” and “over 680,500 (of them) were executed.”

For example, Khrushchev said, of the 139 veteran Bolsheviks who were promoted in 1937 to the Party’s Central Committee, “98 — that is, 70 percent of them — were arrested and shot” by the end of 1938. Lower-ranking apparatchiks, Khrushchev added, were no safer. Of the 1,966 ordinary delegates, he said, “many of (whom) had suffered and fought for the Party’s interests, 1,108 were arrested on charges of anti-revolutionary crimes.”

World War II murders

Khrushchev was less explicit about Stalin’s murders just before and during World War II. The first mass executions took place shortly after the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a treaty of “Friendship and Cooperation” in August 1939, and both countries invaded Poland (the Wehrmacht from the west and the Red Army from the east).

Preparing to make “his” half of the occupied country part of the Soviet Union, in May 1940, Stalin ordered NKVD, the Soviet secret police, to identify and “eliminate” Polish “intelligence agents, gendarmes, landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers, officials, and priests” who might turn out to be difficult citizens.

NKVD checked more than 110,000 Poles and murdered 22,000 of them, including all captured officers of the Polish army. Most of the victims were shot and dropped into a mass grave in Katyn Forest in Russia. Stalin never admitted to or apologized for the amply documented crime.

The second wave of murders followed the staggeringly successful June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union — in brazen violation of the 1939 treaty — by the Wehrmacht. Stalin, who had ignored all warning of the impending attack, was at a loss for how to explain series of defeats by the totally unprepared Red Army and Air Force.

His solution was to order a crackdown that started with the arrest of eight top Air Force generals, and continued — during the desperate “Battle of Moscow” — with the execution of at least 300 Red Army high-ranking officers and generals.

The lack of experienced commanders was later blamed for the slaughter of many of the more than 11 million brave Soviet soldiers who died in the war. They were poorly led, frequently untrained, and, as late as 1943, were sent to the front unarmed with the instruction to use the weapons of their fallen comrades.

As the supreme commander, Stalin prohibited the Red Army to retreat and frequently ordered the troops to fight hopeless battles against the superbly equipped Wehrmacht. He regarded Soviet POWs as “traitors,” and when his own son, Yakov, was captured by the Germans, he refused to trade him for a German general.

Khrushchev, who served in the war as a political commissar, charged in his memoirs that Stalin’s conduct of the war “cost us much blood.”

The Doctors’ Plot

Stalin’s remorseless pursuit of victory regardless of casualties eventually routed the invaders and made a major contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945. But rather than resting on the hard-won laurels, the dictator ended his rule with a scandal that nearly cost more lives.

In January 1953, the official Soviet daily Pravda (meaning “truth”) startled the world by announcing the arrest of 15 top medical doctors — almost all Jews — who were treating Stalin’s atherosclerosis and other ailments. They were accused of trying to poison the ultra-suspicious and openly anti-Semitic Stalin, and he was expected to deal with them in his customary way.

There were several theories on what saved their lives. One of them, according to Russian historian Zhores Medvedev, a co-author of The Unknown Stalin, was a concern that “the execution of prominent physicians inevitably would lead to an unprecedented anti-Semitic campaign and an international outcry (over) the possibility of mass deportation of Jews from Moscow to remote regions of the country.”

More important in all likelihood was that Stalin died two months later, and there was not enough time to prepare the fraudulent trials. The doctors were all exonerated within days after his death.

In a rare surviving letter to her son, Stalin’s mother wished him “Victory!” and an “annihilation of all your enemies.” But in the end, Stalin was a loser. At first, he was embalmed and placed “for eternity” in a mausoleum alongside Vladimir Lenin, the idolized founder of the Russian Communist Party and the Soviet Union.

Six years later, following the revelation of his bloody deeds, Stalin’s body was quietly removed and buried in an obscure place behind the Kremlin walls.