Stalin: Breaker of Nations

383 Pages·1992·9.86 MB·English

by  Robert Conquest

STALIN
Breaker of Nations
Also by Robert Conquest
History and politics
Power and Policy in the USSR
Common Sense about Russia
Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair
Russia after Khrushchev
The Great Terror
The Nation Killers
Where Marx Went Wrong
V. I. Lenin
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps
Present Danger: Towards a Foreign Policy
We and They: Civic and Despotic Cultures
What to Do When the Russians Come (with Jon Manchip White)
Inside Stalin’s Secret Police: NKVD Politics 1936—39
The Harvest of Sorrow
Stalin and the Kirov Murder
Tyrants and Typewriters
The Great Terror: 3 Reassessment
Poetry
Poems
Between Mars and Venus
Arias from a Love Opera
Coming Across
Forays
New and Collected Poems
Verse Translation
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Prussian Nights
Fiction
A World of Difference
The Egyptologists (with Kingsley Amis)
Criticism
The Abomination of Moab
STALIN
Breaker of Nations
Robert Conquest
VIKING
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,
London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,
Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Suite 300,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182—190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First American Edition
Published in 1991 by Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
13579108642
Copyright © Robert Conquest, 1991
All rights reserved
Illustration credits appear on pages vii and viii.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Conquest, Robert.
Stalin—breaker of nations / Robert Conquest.
. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-670-84089-0
1. Stalin, Joseph, 1879—19 5 3. 2. Statesmen—Soviet Union—
Biography. 3. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1917—
I. Title.
DK268.S8C65 1991
947.084’2’092—dc20
[B] 91-28782
Printed in the United States of America
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form
or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording or otherwise), without the
prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
Contents
List of Illustrations Vii
Prefatory Note xi
Introduction xiii
1 GORI
2 SEMINARY 16
3 UNDERGROUND 27
4 RISING REVOLUTIONARY 50
5 REVOLUTION 58
6 CIVIL WAR 72
7 THE LONG DEATH OF LENIN 96
8 THE FIGHT FOR POWER 105
9 TOWARDS SUPREMACY 141
10 TERROR 171
11 WITH HITLER 222
12 WAR 236
13 POSTWAR: COLD WAR 269
14 LAST YEARS 301
15 STALIN TODAY 314
Bibliographical Note 328
Index 335

Illustrations
Between pages 108 and 109
Gori church school (Weidenfeld 85 Nicolson Archives)
Stalin at Tiflis Seminary (Weidenfeld 86 Nicolson Archives)
Stalin’s birthplace (Weidenfeld 86 Nicolson Archives)
Stalin in exile at Monastyrskoye, with Spandaryan (Weidenfeld 86
Nicolson Archives)
The house in Kureika Stalin shared with Sverdlov (Topham)
A group of exiled Bolsheviks, I915 (Hulton Deutsch Collection)
The same group, with Kamenev erased (Weidenfeld SC Nicolson
Archives)
Stalin in a tsarist police register (Weidenfeld 85 Nicolson Archives)
Stalin’s first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze (Topham)
Nadezhda Alliluyeva aged thirteen (Topham)
Stalin in 1911 (Topham)
Stalin in 1917 (Topham)
Stalin as a member of the Revolutionary Military Soviet of the
Southwestern Front, 1918 (Hulton Deutsch Collection)
Stalin in I919 (Topham)
Lenin and Stalin in 1922 (Weidenfeld 8C Nicolson Archives)
Krupskaya and Lenin (Weidenfeld 85 Nicolson Archives)
The Stalin leadership 192.9 (Weidenfeld 8c Nicolson Archives)
The funeral of Kirov (David King Collection)
Opening the Moscow Metro, 193 5 (David King Collection)
Stalin as children-lover (David King Collection)
Between pages 172 and 173
Vasily Stalin with Sergei Alliluyev (Topham)
vii
ILLUSTRATIONS
Svetlana Stalin with Lavrenty Beria (Topham)
Nadezhda Alliluyeva, I932 (Topham)
Nadezhda Alliluyeva’s grave (Topham)
Lenin’s Politburo, I917 (Weidenfeld 8C Nicolson Archives)
Stalin with Poskrebyshev (Weidenfeld 8C Nicolson Archives)
Stalin with Yezhov, Molotov and Voroshilov at the opening of the
White Sea—Baltic canal (Weidenfeld 8c Nicolson Archives)
Stalin and Ribbentrop at the signing of the Nazi—Soviet Pact
(Weidenfeld 85 Nicolson Archives)
Stalin’s mother in old age (Weidenfeld 86 Nicolson Archives)
Vasily and Svetlana in wartime (Topham)
Stalin’s son Yakov as a German prisoner of war (Hulton Deutsch
Collection)
Stalin kissing the sword of Stalingrad (Weidenfeld 8C Nicolson
Archives)
Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, Teheran, 1943 (Central Press Photos)
Celebrating Stalin’s seventieth birthday (David King Collection)
Stalin exhibition in Budapest, 1967 (David King Collection)
Stalin lies next to Lenin in the Red Square mausoleum (Weidenfeld 8C
Nicolson Archives)
viii
REPORTER: Does the date 21 December mean anything to
you?
WOMAN: No.
REPORTER: On this day was born I. V. Stalin.
WOMAN: Better if he hadn’t been born.
(Moscow street interview on Radio Rossiya,
2 pm, 21 December 1990)