Stalin's Letters to Molotov: 1925-1936 (Annals of Communism Series)

383 Pages·1996·5.585 MB·English

by  Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumoy (editor), Oleg V. Khlevniuk (editor)

title : Stalin's Letters to Molotov, 1925-1936 Annals of Communism
Stalin, Joseph.; Lih, Lars T.; Naumov, Oleg V.; Kosheleva, L.; Khlevniuk, O.
author :
V.; Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich
publisher : Yale University Press
isbn10 | asin :
print isbn13 : 9780300068610
ebook isbn13 : 9780585349473
language : English
Stalin, Joseph,--1879-1953--Correspondence, Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhay-
subject lovich,--1890---Correspondence, Heads of state--Soviet Union--Corre-
spondence, Soviet Union--Politics and government--1917-1936.
publication date : 1995
lcc : DK268.S8A4 1995eb
ddc : 947.084/2/092
Stalin, Joseph,--1879-1953--Correspondence, Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhay-
subject : lovich,--1890---Correspondence, Heads of state--Soviet Union--Corre-
sponde nce, Soviet Union--Politics and government--1917-1936.
Stalin's Letters to Molotov 19251936

Page i

ANNALS OF COMMUNISM

Each volume in the series Annals of Communism publishes selected and previ-
ously inaccessible documents from former Soviet state and party archives in the
framework of a narrative text that focuses on a particular topic in the history of
Soviet and international communism. Separate English and Russian editions are
prepared. Russian and American scholars select and annotate the documents for
each volume; together they explain the selection criteria and discuss the state of
relevant research and scholarly interpretation. Documents are chosen not for
their support of any single interpretation but for their particular historical im-
portance or their general value in deepening understanding and facilitating dis-
cussion. The volumes are designed to be useful to students, scholars, and inter-
ested general readers.

Page ii

EXECUTIVE EDITOR, ANNALS OF COMMUNISM

Jonathan Brent, Yale University Press

AMERICAN EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Ivo Banac, Yale University
Jeffrey Burds, University of Rochester
William Chase, University of Pittsburgh
Victor Erlich, Yale University
Sheila Fitzpatrick, University of Chicago

Gregory Freeze, Brandeis University
J. Arch Getty, University of California at Riverside
Robert L. Jackson, Yale University
Leon Lipson, Yale University
Czeslaw Milosz, University of California at Berkeley
Norman Naimark, Stanford University
General William Odom, Hudson Institute and Yale University
Daniel Orlovsky, Southern Methodist University
Mark Steinberg, Yale University
Mark von Hagen, Columbia University
Piotr Wandycz, Yale University

RUSSIAN EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

K. M. Anderson, Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents
of Recent History (RTsKhIDNI)
N. N. Bolkhovitinov, Russian Academy of Sciences
A. O. Chubarian, Russian Academy of Sciences
V. P. Danilov, Russian Academy of Sciences
F. I. Firsov, formerly of Moscow State University and the Comintern Archive in
the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent His-
tory (RTsKhIDNI)
V. P. Kozlov, State Archival Service of the Russian Federation

V. S. Lelchuk, Russian Academy of Sciences
S. V. Mironenko, State Archive of the Russian Federation
O. V. Naumov, Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of
Recent History (RTsKhIDNI)
R. G. Pikhoia, State Archival Service of the Russian Federation
A. N. Sakharov, Russian Academy of Sciences
T. T. Timofeev, Russian Academy of Sciences
Ye. A. Tiurina, Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE)
General D. A. Volkogonov, advisor to the president of the Russian Federation

SERIES COORDINATOR, MOSCOW

N. P. Yakovlev

Page iii

Stalin's Letters to Molotov 19251936
Edited by

Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov, and Oleg V. Khlevniuk

Russian Consulting Scholars
L. Kosheleva and L. Rogovaia
V. Lelchuk and V. Naumov

Translated from the Russian by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Foreword by Robert C. Tucker

Page iv

Published with assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities and

the Open Society Fund.

Copyright © 1995 by Yale University.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in
any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.

Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written per-
mission from the publishers.

Designed by James J. Johnson and set in Sabon Roman type by The Composing
Room of Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States of America by Vail-Ballou
Press, Binghamton, New York.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stalin's letters to Molotov, 19251936 / edited by Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov,
and Oleg V. Khlevniuk ; Russian consulting scholars L. Kosheleva . . . [et al.] ;
translated from the Russian by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick,; foreword by Robert C.

Tucker.
p. cm. (Annals of communism)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-300-06211-7
1. Stalin, Joseph, 18791953Correspondence. 2. Molotov, Vyacheslav
Mikhaylovich, 1890- Correspondence. 3. Heads of stateSoviet Union
Correspondence. 4. Soviet UnionPolitics and government19171936. I. Lih,
Lars T. II. Naumov, Oleg V. III. Khlevniuk, Oleg V. IV. Kosheleva, L.
IV. Series.
DK268.S8A4 1995
947.084'2'092dc20 94-44050
CIP

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Li-
brary Resources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Page v

Contents

Foreword, vii

Robert C. Tucker

Preface, xiii

Russian Editors and Scholars

Acknowledgments xv

Note on the Documents and the Narrative xvii

Introduction, 1

Lars T. Lih

Chapter One 67

1925

Chapter Two 97

1926

Chapter Three 133

1927

Chapter Four 145

1929

Chapter Five 187

1930

Chapter Six 224

19311936

Appendix: The Eastman Affair 241

Glossary of Names 251

Index 269

Page vii
Foreword

On his accession to power in Moscow in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev set out to re-
form the crisis-ridden Soviet system and sponsored openness (glasnost') as a
means to that end. Events of the Soviet past, and especially of Stalin's autocratic
rule, became subjects of discussion in the press, and researchers began to receive
access to long-closed official archives containing documents bearing on those
events. After the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991, access to the archives further
improved.

One of the significant consequences is the appearance of this volume. It contains
letters and notes written by Stalin to his trusty follower Viacheslav Molotov dur-
ing the years from 1925 to 1936. In 1969, then in retirement at the age of seventy-
nine, Molotov turned these materials over to the Central Party Archive. Now, at
long last, they see the light of publication.

The reader of this volume has been well served by its editors. Oleg V. Naumov,
assistant director of the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Docu-
ments of Recent History, Oleg V. Khlevniuk, and their associates have provided a
general preface, highly informative introductions to the letters for each year or
group of years covered, notes to the letters themselves, and a glossary of names.
The introductions include, in some instances, the texts of other formerly top se-

cret letters by one or another high-placed person in Stalin's entourage. The Amer-
ican editor, Lars T. Lih, a foremost Western specialist on the 1920s in the Soviet
Union, has contributed an interpretive general introduction that provides ample
background information and develops the view that the letters cast much light on
how Stalin went about running the Soviet state during those years. That they cer-
tainly do.

It was Stalin's custom to spend lengthy periods from the later summer into

Page viii

the fall at his villa on the Black Sea coast, where he would devote himself to think-

ing out state affairs while at rest. He corresponded with Molotov (in some
instances letters are addressed to other Politburo members as well). Molotov, for
his part, kept him informed of developments in Moscow and carried out direc-
tions contained in Stalin's letters. No copies of Molotov's letters to Stalin in the
course of this correspondence have come to light.

The question of selectivity on Molotov's part arises. The Russian editors point out
that most of the letters are from 1925, 1926, 1927, 1929, and 1930, and that only
a relative few are from 1931 through 1936 (there is only one from 1936). There
are no letters for 1928 and 1934, two key years in Soviet history and in Stalin's
rule. Commenting on the small number of letters from 1931 through 1936, the

Russian editors state that these letters represent just a small portion of the corre-
spondence between Stalin and Molotov during this period and add: "The con-
tents of these letters suggest that only the most 'harmless' documents, those that
in no way touched upon Stalin's and Molotov's darkest and most criminal activi-
ties, were selected for the archive." This point is presumably well taken.

Molotov's own life was in grave danger from Stalin in 1952 and early 1953, when
the now increasingly crazed dictator was preparing to do away with him and pos-
sibly other members of his entourage in a new bloody purge that only his sudden
death from a stroke forestalled. Speaking of that time in one of his conversations
with Feliks Chuev, Molotov observed: "I think that if he [that is, StalinR.T.] had
lived another year or so, I might not have survived, but in spite of that, I have be-

lieved and believe that he carried out tasks so colossal and difficult that no one of
us then in the party could have fulfilled them."1 Naturally, since Molotov remained
true to Stalin to the very end of his own life (he died in 1986 at the age of ninety-
six), he would hardly have turned over to posterity any letters from Stalin that
would reveal him and by implication Molotov himself as his henchman in an evil
light.

Even after all this is taken into account, we must agree with the Russian and Amer-
ican editors of this volume that the letters Molotov allowed to survive throw val-
uable light on various events of those years and help resolve some matters on
which historians have differed. Take, for example, the subject of Stalin and foreign
affairs. He was not only concerned with economic policy and the internal power
struggle in the 1920s (as some have thought) but also engrossed in foreign affairs.
This we see in letters bearing on China and Great

1. F. Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym: Iz dnevnika F. Chueva (Moscow, 1991), 279.

Page ix

Britain, where revolutionary tendencies seemed afoot in 1926-1927. Stalin went
beyond being interested and took it upon himself to be his own foreign commissar
acting through Molotov. He was critical, not to say contemptuous, of his official
foreign commissar, Maksim Litvinov, a basically Western-oriented old Bolshevik
and a Jew, whom he would replace with Molotov in 1939 to signal his readiness

to do business with Hitler. Western leaders who negotiated with Stalin during
World War II would have been interested in his comment in a letter to Molotov
(9 September 1929), apropos negotiations with the British government: "Re-
member we are waging a struggle (negotiation with enemies is also struggle), not
with England alone, but with the whole capitalist world."

Lih raises the question: Did Stalin dismiss world revolution in favor of building up
the Soviet state (as Trotsky, for one, alleged at the time), or did he remain dedi-
cated to world revolution? Lih's answer, based on the letters, is that in Stalin's
mind the Soviet state and international revolution coalesced, and the letters pro-
vide support for this view. They likewise bear out the proposition, which has been
developed in the scholarly literature, that Stalin was a Russian imperial Bolshevik
for whom the further progress of the international Communist revolution and the
territorial expansion of Soviet Russia around its periphery were one and the same
process.2 Thus Stalin's letter of 7 October 1929 bruits the idea of organizing "an

uprising by a revolutionary movement" in adjacent Manchuria. Armed interven-
tion (with mainly Chinese-manned brigades) would "establish a revolutionary
government (massacre the land-owners, bring in the peasants, create soviets in
the cities and towns, and so on)." Here is a preview of the efforts that Stalin made
beginning in 1945 to encourage separatist movements in Manchuria and Sinkiang
provinces in China, and, more broadly, of the sovietization imposed after World
War II on Soviet-occupied neighboring countries in the process of imperial ag-
grandizement under Communist banners. Also revelatory of Stalin's Russian im-
perial bolshevism is a passage inspired by a public speech of Molotov's in January
1933: "Today I read the section on international affairs. It came out well. The con-
fident, contemptuous tone with respect to the 'great' powers, the belief in our own
strength, the delicate but plain spitting in the pot of the swaggering 'great powers’
very good. Let them eat it."

What can Stalin's letters to Molotov tell us about his personality? Insofar as

2. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 19281941 (New York, 1990),

4550.

Page x

the letters that Molotov was willing to share with posterity cast light on the matter,
they tell us, first of all, that Stalin was totally consumed by politics. The lengthy
sojourns in the south were less vacations in the ordinary sense than opportunities
to concentrate his boundless energy on politics, to read Soviet newspapers and
other official documents, to think out his political positions on men and events,
and to communicate his political will to the oligarchy via the ever-obedient Mol-
otov. Although he sometimes added regards to Molotov's wife at the end of a let-
ter, one would not know from them that he too had a wife (until late 1932, when
she committed suicide) and children of his own. Unlike most Russians, who have
their easygoing interludes, this Georgian-born leader was a thinking, reacting,
plotting politician during every waking hour. As Lih puts it, he was Stalin ''at
work." Indeed, until the day of his fatal stroke, 1 March 1953, at which time he was
actively plotting and preparing his own "final solution" for the Jews of Soviet Rus-
sia and the elimination of, among highly placed others, Molotov (and his Jewish
wife), Stalin remained actively "at work."

The Stalin of the letters, as Lih again argues, was an astute and effective leader who
came to the fore in the post-Lenin Bolshevik hierarchy largely by virtue of his un-
common leadership capability: his capacity to assess personalities and situations
and prescribe measures for dealing with them that served his interests. He was

neither the mediocrity that an old stereotype made him out to be, nor just a polit-
ical boss and machine politician who rose to supreme power by exploiting the au-
thority to make appointments that he possessed as the party Central Committee's
general secretary. Not that placement and replacement of cadres was a matter of