The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin: A Novel

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Chapter One

Leon Trotsky is trying to kill me.

    He has every right and reason. By hook or by crook, I defeated him in the power struggle after Lenin's death in '24. I expelled him from the Party. I banished him from Moscow. I exiled him from Russia. I hounded him across Europe and drove him to seek refuge in Mexico earlier this year.

    I am destroying his organization, annihilating his followers. In his opinion, I have "betrayed" the Revolution and fouled its honor with unspeakable crimes.

    As a communist, it is Trotsky's mission to rescue Soviet Russia from me. He knows he is the only man in the world capable of the task. Hitler could invade Russia and burn Moscow to the ground, but Hitler could never take my place in the Kremlin. But Trotsky could. And believes he should.

    The past demands, that he kill me. The future demands that he kill me. In a word, history demands that he kill me. And history is our element, our god.

    But exactly how will Leon Trotsky try to kill me? That's the question. He'd be a fool to pin his hopes on a single method. As the former leader of the Red Army, Trotsky knows that victory in combat results from using all possible means at the proper time and in the proper sequence—artillery, cavalry, infantry. So, to get at me, he'll do anything and everything—infiltrate the secret police, subvert the army, rile up the working class, corrupt my guards, enlist my cooks and food tasters, my doctors and dentists. And I would be twice a fool if I did not operate from the assumption that Trotsky willstrike at me in all these different ways.

    But now Trotsky has hit upon yet another way to destroy me and, though he may not have fully realized it yet himself, it is the surest way of all. Trotsky is writing my biography.

    Yes, the Russians attribute great significance to literature, even exiling and executing writers, but isn't this a bit much, the great Stalin afraid of a book? No, it is not a bit much at all.

    Though he's barely begun work, it's already clear that Trotsky's book about me will be both character assassination and indictment. I can be a touchy man, but I am able to bear his attacks on my person. And nearly all the crimes he will accuse me of are already a matter of public record—that I do not fear. In fact, certain crimes must be known if they are to have their proper effect, though I have always taken pains to shroud my own responsibility in ambiguity. It wasn't Stalin's fault, the secret police were too zealous, that sort of thing.

    But there are also crimes that must remain forever unknown. In my case there is one crime that must remain forever unknown. Instinctively, Trotsky, in the writing of my biography, has to be searching for that, the one crime whose revelation would destroy the mystique of authority by which I rule. After all, what is authority but a trance of obedience? Certainly, power does not reside in physical strength. I am as easy to kill as anyone else. A touch under five feet four, I may be even easier than most. One strong man could throttle me in the night. One cook could slip enough poison into my stew to stop my heart. Why hasn't that happened yet? Because no word has yet been spoken to break the spell.

    Since the very logic of his being and situation compel Trotsky to kill me, every time he puts pen to paper he is searching for the words that can break that spell and bring me down.

    So, even though the year '37 has brought immense problems—orchestrating the terror, running the country, dealing with the threat of Adolf Hitler—nothing in all the world is of greater concern to me than what Leon Trotsky is writing about me.

    Through comrades loyal to my person, I regularly read snippets of Trotsky's biography of me, entitled with appropriate simplicity: STALIN.

    One of his housekeepers in Mexico, a peasant woman urbanized, proletarianized, and radicalized by coming to the city, is as good at microfilming as at dusting. I can just see Trotsky looking up from his desk as she comes in to empty the wastebaskets. He doesn't really see her. She's not important, she's not attractive. Maybe he smiles, maybe he nods, but then he goes right back to his writing. Once again, Trotsky is making the same fatal mistake he made at our first meeting thirty years ago in London in 1907 when, done talking with Lenin, he brushed right by me as if I were no more than a coatrack.

    And he's still doing it. Because I can see into that room in Mexico City through the eyes of that woman. I am still in the room with him and he still doesn't see me.

    My suspicions of hostile intent quickly prove well founded. No sooner does Trotsky claim that he will be "objective" and overlook no fact "redounding" to the hero of his book than he begins attacking that hero. Great leaders are masters of the "living word," says Trotsky, who puts Lenin and Hitler in that category. But Stalin?

    "In this respect Stalin represents a phenomenon utterly exceptional. He is neither a thinker, a writer, nor an orator."

    When Trotsky says Stalin is no thinker, what he really means is that Trotsky is by far the more brilliant. No matter what they say, egotists are always talking about themselves.

    Now if thinking means comparing what one German philosopher said about another German philosopher and coming up with your own independent opinion, then I concede the point, Trotsky is the better thinker. But if thinking means using your mind to get what you want, then Stalin is a better thinker than Trotsky. We both wanted the same thing, the only thing worth wanting in Russia—the Kremlin. I've got it and Trotsky's raising rabbits in Mexico City.

    And when Trotsky claims that Stalin is no orator, he is really only wondering how it could possibly have happened that he, famed as a great speaker, could have been hurled so far from Russia that his voice is not even a whisper here.

    In the first place, he was not that great a speaker. I admit that during the Revolution and Civil War he was able to stir workers to revolt and soldiers to attack. But there were many people with that gift and the workers were ready to rise, the soldiers to fight. Otherwise there would have been no revolution. As a Marxist, Trotsky knows that.

    And even if the workers and soldiers were ready for revolution, there would have been no successful revolution if the Communist Party had not been prepared to lead it, as demonstrated by the failure of previous revolts and revolutions. The critical element was the Communist Party, and the true test of any speaker was his ability to influence that critical element.

    And Trotsky was not a great success with the comrades.

    He had the too-perfect Russian of a Jew and spoke for hours on end, spraying saliva when excited, wagging his index finger when instructing. And after four hours of brilliant oratory, what would Trotsky do? He'd walk off the stage and disappear. Like an angel from heaven who delivers a message and then is gone. Angels don't stay and hang around with the people, ask after their parents' health, share a smoke.

    The comrades didn't like that. The comrades don't believe in angels.

    Trotsky has the intellectual's wit and irony but he couldn't joke. And the boys always like a little joking.

    In the days when it was not yet so vital to win my favor, many of the comrades told me they much preferred my ability to sum things up in a few sharp words that stuck in your mind. Trotsky made speeches; I made allies.

    And so then, who was the "living word" with?

    The "living word" was with Stalin.

    And Trotsky is also wrong about being a more important writer than me.

    As a communist, Trotsky knows that the significance of literature is determined exclusively by how well it serves the cause. His own writing must be of no significance because, so far at least, his own cause is lost. But the fact that Trotsky is alone in exile surrounded by a mere handful of devoted followers does not reassure me in the least. Lenin too was alone in exile surrounded by a mere handful of devoted followers and he overturned all Russia.

    Impact is what counts. And, by that standard, all of Trotsky's tomes are dwarfed by four lines of poetry I wrote in my youth:

Know this, he who fell to earth like ashes,
and was so very long oppressed,
will rise higher than great mountains
on the wings of shining hope.

    These lines capture the spirit of that Georgian youth who would rise from poverty and obscurity to rule all Russia. The power of that young man's aspiration! Who in all the world had ever dared hope that much? It would even be no exaggeration for scholars to say that in his youth Stalin was a "Poet of Hope."

    Certainly no other poem, nothing by Homer, Shakespeare, Pushkin, has ever played a role in human events like those four lines. At one of the great low points of my life, when I was lost in doubt and despair, those lines gave me the heart to commit the one crime that Trotsky must never live to uncover.

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