By process of elimination: Louis D’Ascoine and Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin with Dennis Price as Louis Mazzini and Alec Guinness as Admiral Lord Horatio in 'Kind Hearts and Coronets' (1949)
Last Christmas I revisited many of the Ealing comedies. My favourite was Kind Hearts and Coronets. It is the story of a young man, Louis, whose mother has been disowned by the aristocratic D’Ascoine family because she married for love. He vows revenge. He decides to kill all those members of the family who are between him and the title. All the victims are played by the same actor, Alec Guinness. It is an ingenious plot. I wondered, could something like this be done in real life? Surely not.
And then I thought of Stalin. He did something very similar. Against the odds, he became the undisputed leader of the Soviet Communist Party. When Lenin died a century ago in 1924, the Politburo, the highest organ of the Communist Party, had seven members: Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, Mikhail Tomskii, Nikolai Bukharin — and Stalin. They all knew that the best successor to Lenin would be Trotsky. And they were determined not to elect him. They all believed that Trotsky had Napoleonic ambitions or, even worse, he might want to outdo Robespierre and send all of them to the guillotine.
As it happened, Trotsky did not bid for the leadership. He did not even attend Lenin’s funeral. He very likely hoped to see all the other leaders begging him to accept the role of leader. But that was the last thing the other leaders wanted to do. Did they have a clear idea of what they wanted to do? Probably not. The only man who knew all the time what he wanted was Stalin. He was very modest. His only interest, apparently, was in a lowly job nobody else was interested in: administration, boring administration.
In 1922 Stalin had become the General Secretary of the Party. He was recommended as the ideal man for the job both by Lenin and by Zinoviev. Trotsky must have approved that appointment too. Not for nothing did he call Stalin “the Outstanding Mediocrity of the Party”. A secretarial job seemed about right. Stalin read everything, remembered everything. He probably knew who slept with whom, who liked whom, who hated whom, who was ambitious, who was not, who had principles, who had none. He promoted like-minded people upon whom he could rely on later. He knew everything that was worth knowing.
My aim in this article is to relate the extraordinary story of how, of the seven members mentioned above, only one was still alive sixteen years later. The elimination started with Trotsky. It was an easy job, helped enormously by Trotsky himself. He wrote an article remembering the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, saying that Zinoviev and Kamenev were not real Bolsheviks because they opposed the overthrow by force of the existing Provisional government.
Stalin saw his opportunity. He allied himself with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky. This alliance (known as the triumvirate) was successful. Within the next 5 years Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo, from the Party and eventually from the country. I shall need to say a few more words about Trotsky towards the end of this article, but for the moment I want to continue the elimination process.
The next one was Tomskii. As soon as he realised that he was in Stalin’s way, he did not wait, he committed suicide. The next two to be eliminated were Zinoviev and Kamenev. With Trotsky gone, Stalin did not need them any longer. He had an ingenious plan to put them in prison while simultaneously eliminating a new rival: Sergey Kirov. Stalin’s plan was to rely on the NKVD (secret police) to find a man who could be forced to assassinate Kirov and then blame Zinoviev and Kamenev for creating the political atmosphere that made Kirov’s assassination possible. It is very likely that the archives covering the period of Stalin’s purges will never be fully opened. One difficulty is that every single member of the NKVD who initiated or knew anything about Kirov’s assassination was speedily killed and their killers were also killed.
Who next? In 1938 there were still two members of the Politburo, Bukharin and Rykov, who opposed Stalin’s policy of confiscating practically all the agricultural produce of Ukraine, a policy that had caused millions to starve to death, known in history as the Holodomor. Bukharin and Rykov were tried in 1938, found guilty and executed. That was the end of Stalin’s efforts to eliminate his rivals in the Politburo. By 1939 of the seven members of the Politburo after Lenin’s death, only one remained, Joseph Stalin. He had eliminated all of them.
Well, nearly. One of them was still alive, but living in exile in Mexico. That was Leon Trotsky. Some dictators would have been happy to stop at that stage. Not Stalin. Presumably he made great efforts to find an assassin who would kill Trotsky. Apparently a faithful Spanish Communist, Caridad Mercader, offered the services of her son, Ramon. Under a different name. He managed to gain entrance to Trotsky’s house and when the opportunity arose he killed Trotsky with a pick-axe hidden in his coat. Mercader was tried by a Mexican court and was sentenced to twenty years in prison for killing Trotsky. At the end of the 20 years he first returned to Czechoslovakia by then under Communist rule. His next trip was to the Soviet Union where, although Stalin was no longer alive, he received the highest Soviet decoration, the Order of Lenin.
Finally, back to Stalin. A rough estimate of the number of people executed during his bloody purge is about a million people. When did it end? The only way it could end was with Stalin’s death. In 1952 he was still looking for victims. One of the last show trials was that of the wartime Anti-Fascist Committee. The executions following the trial were known as the Night of the Murdered Poets. Stalin’s last trial was the so-called Doctors’ Plot. A group of medical doctors (most of them Jewish) were accused of killing a number of Soviet leaders. They were all arrested and tortured, many of them dying under interrogation. The day after Stalin’s death the interrogations stopped; all the survivors were released.
Was Stalin a better tactician than Louis? I think they were comparable. They both had the ability to find the weak points in their competitors’ armour. But Kind Hearts and Coronets, despite its murderous protagonist, succeeded brilliantly as a comedy. There was nothing funny about Stalin’s Terror.
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