BOOKS
Ruthless expediency
Ronald Hingley
Stalin's Secret War Nikolai Tolstoy (Cape pp. 463, £9.50) Nikolai Tolstoy describes his new work as 'an attempt to interpret Soviet policy, internal and external, during the crucial years 1938 to 1945.' The 'Secret War' of his title is the relentless campaign waged by Joseph Stalin against his own subjects — the peoples of the Soviet Union — over a quarter of a century.
Tolstoy views Stalin as history's nearest approximation to an absolute despot, one who had come to own the Soviet Union personally 'in as absolute a sense as property can acquire.' Stalin created a power apparatus specifically designed to preserve his own person as a priority overriding all other considerations. He fed into his infamous labour camps all conceivable sources of opposition to his rule, while introducing a form of slavery far more severe than that suffered by the American Negros in the past: it involved the systematic splitting of families; consignment to remote and barren areas; encouragement given to imprisoned criminals to torment political prisoners; and, above all, the policy of working his victims to death by their millions. These and other harsh measures were implemented over a longer period, they killed more people, and they caused more suffering than all the horrors of Hitlerism. As for Stalin's motive in constructing this apparatus of terror, this was a panic fear of his own subjects, whom he imagined as permanently poised on the brink of revolt. Having argued a not dissimilar case in my own biography of Stalin, I am not shocked into insensibility by these contentions. Indeed, my own interpretation agrees exactly with Nikolai Tolstoy's, except that I might place less emphasis on Stalin's personal cowardice and tendency to panic.
Using his central thesis as a key, Tolstoy offers explanations of various Soviet phenomena that have baffled earlier historians. He claims originality, for example, for his explanation of the timing of the Katyn massacre in May 1940. This was the month when some 15,000 Polish officers, held as prisoners-of-war in the Soviet Union, were shot or otherwise disposed of en masse, one group being buried in the forests at Katyn near Smolensk where their remains were later discovered by the Germans.
Tolstoy claims that Stalin's massacre of the Poles was provoked by British and French activity during the months before the German victories in Western Europe of mid-1940 revealed the relative powerlessness of the Western Allies at this phase of the hostilities. Before Hitler's attack on France, the British were doing feasability studies with an eye to taking out, by aerial attack, the Soviet oil fields at Baku which were the main source of fuel for Guderian's tanks in the West. Stalin presumably heard of this plan through one of his many spies in the British Foreign office. Then again, Britain and France were now engaged in military operations in Norway, and the fact that they faced defeat in that theatre was not yet obvious. All this confronted the cautious Stalin with the spectre of an internal revolt in which his Polish captives might officer a general uprising of Soviet slave peoples. And so the Poles must be killed.
The thesis is by no means fanciful, for this is exactly how Stalin's mind worked. It was by using such methods that he always came out on top in the end, becoming the most successful, as well as the most cruel, of politicians.
Why did Stalin trust Hitler so absolutely, while fearing and distrusting the Western allies — as he continued to fear and distrust them unabatedly, even after they had become his own allies with the German invasion of Russia in June 1941? Stalin possibly exaggerated British and French military capability. But it was British and French political institutions that he really feared; here was the infection that could spread, and destroy his power at home.
Of this point Nikolai Tolstoy makes little. But he is effectively eloquent on the affinities between Communism and National Socialism, claiming that to talk of the former as left-wing and the latter as rightwing is utterly misleading. They were blood brothers. The true distinction is not, he says, between forces purportedly leftist and rightist but between the totalitarian and the non-totalitarian way of doing things. The thesis is hardly original, but it is well worth repeating again in the hope that somebody, somewhere, may take more notice of it than hitherto.
One of Nikolai Tolstoy's virtues is his persistence in combing the vast literature of his subject — archival, as well as that to be found in obscure published works. Such material includes the acute report made, after investigation on the spot, by two British officers on the morale of Soviet prisoners-of-war in Finland during the Winter War of 1940-41. There is also an account, new to me, of Stalin seriously planning the military conquest of the entire European continent in 1951. Here, and everywhere, comprehensive documentary references are supplied, which makes the book a valuable quarry for future historians.
I am a little less happy about the organisation, and emphasis, of this book. There are considerable discursive tendencies, and the proportioning of the parts to the whole sometimes seems questionable. This is particularly true of the long chapter in which the theme of Victims of Yalta is revived, and which is largely devoted to the activities of those British officers and officials whom Tolstoy accuses of collaborating with Stalin in enforcing the repatriation of prisoners-of-war to the Soviet Union in 1945. The accent here is particularly on the enforced handover to the Soviet Union of individuals who, though Russians or members of one or other of the nationalities of the former Russian Empire, had never been Soviet citizens, and who were therefore not subject even in theory to repatriation in terms of the Yalta agreement.
In his Victims of Yalta, Nikolai TolstoY had previously put forward a typically well documented and powerfully-argued case against the British individuals who handed over so many Soviet citizens and others to almost certain death. It has never been answered comprehensibly or effectively by any of the accused who have survived. I am far from convinced that none of them have an answer, but the fact remains that they have not chosen to give one. Though they have every right to remain out of the controversy if they wish, it is also true that Nikolai Tolstoy is fully entitled to reopen the subject. His sincerity is patent, he believes in his own case, and he is tormented by the thought of the injustice done to his fellow Russians. He is also, to put it crudely, 'on to a good thing' in publicity terms, by aiming these accusations at various living and deceased Prime Ministers and lesser flunkeys. But that is a purely secondary matter. My criticism is only that he has permitted his concern to distort his new book.
However culpable the various individuals may or not be, the issue does not warrant the amount of space accorded to it here and sticks out as inelegant. Moreover, the author has failed to follow normal scholarly procedure. He presents no systematic account of the relations between this chapter and his previous findings, which are, to some extent, repeated here. Nor has he argued the case for the inclusion, in a study so general, of so much detailed material on one specific aspect of one specific episode. Here, surely, was a classic case for relegation to an appendix. But perhaps I am naive. These sensational accusations will sell the book and I do not propose to repeat them here, except to note that one particular sneer directed against Anthony Eden should either have been omitted or substantiated.
In sum, Nikolai Tolstoy's book is illuminating, well argued, admirably documented and absolutely correct in its political analysis, even though many will wish to suspend judgment on British official culpability for enforced repatriation until some kind of counter-case is argued. As for the intellectual organisation behind his study, it is far from despicable — but it is certainly not a major virtue.
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