Born in Moscow on 9 October 1888 to two primary school teachers, the 17-year-old Bukharin joined the workers’ cause during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and, the following year, became a member of the Bolshevik Party. Like many of his radical colleagues, he was arrested at regular intervals to the point that, in 1910, he fled into exile.

At various times he lived in Vienna, Zurich, London, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Krakow, the latter where he met Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, and began working for the party newspaper, Pravda, ‘Truth’.  In 1916, he moved to New York where he met up with another leading revolutionary, Leon Trotsky.

‘Favourite of the whole party’

Following the February Revolution of 1917 and the overthrow of the tsar, Nicholas II, Bukharin returned to Moscow and was elected to the party’s central committee. Bukharin clashed with Lenin on the latter’s decision to surrender to Germany, thus ending Russia’s involvement in the First World War, believing that the Bolsheviks could transform the conflict into a pan-European communist revolution. Lenin got his way, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsky was duly signed in March 1918.

Bukharin was a thinker and produced several theoretical tracts, works that didn’t always meet with Lenin’s full approval. In Lenin’s Testament, in which he passed judgement on various members of his Central Committee, Lenin wrote that Bukharin was ‘rightly considered the favourite of the whole Party,’ but ‘his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with the great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him.’ (Lenin’s Testament was particularly damning of Joseph Stalin but, following Lenin’s death on 21 January 1924, was quietly suppressed).

‘Not a man, but a devil’

In 1924, Bukharin was appointed a full member of the Politburo. It was here, during the immediate post-Lenin years, that Bukharin became an unwitting pawn in Stalin’s deadly power games. Bukharin had opposed collectivization and believed agriculture was best served by encouraging the richer peasants, the kulaks, to produce more. In this he was supported by Stalin – but only in order for Stalin to marginalise then remove those he saw as threats, men such as Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev. Kamenev and Zinoviev soon caved in to Stalin. Trotsky, who did not, was exiled, first within the Soviet Union, then to Turkey and ultimately to Mexico where, in August 1940, he was killed by a Stalinist agent. Having defeated his opponents, Stalin then took their ideas and advocated rapid collectivization and the liquidation of the kulaks, criticizing Bukharin for holding opposite views.

Bukharin realised what Stalin was doing: ‘He [Stalin] is an unprincipled intriguer who subordinates everything to his appetite for power. At any given moment he will change his theories in order to get rid of someone.’

During a visit to Paris in February 1936, where, on Stalin’s orders, he was retrieving the archives of Marx and Engels, Bukharin visited an exiled Menshevik and there, momentarily free from the all-seeing eyes of the Soviet state, talked of his boss: ‘If anyone can talk better than him, that person is doomed, Stalin won’t let him live. Stalin is a little evil man; no, not a man, but a devil.’

Downfall

Bukharin’s downfall was rapid – Stalin removed anyone who showed support for Bukharin and, in 1929, expelled Bukharin from the Politburo. Bukharin, realising the danger he was in, renounced his views. In 1934, speaking at a party congress, he said meekly: “The members of the Communist Party ought to stand together to make the ideals of Comrade Stalin come true.” Stalin seemingly forgave him and appointed Bukharin editor of Izvestia and asked him to oversee the text for the new Soviet Constitution. But it was all part of the cat-and-mouse games Stalin revelled in.

Meanwhile, Bukharin’s old comrades, Kamenev and Zinoviev, were put on show trial, accused of ludicrous crimes, and, in 1936, executed. Bukharin was not sorry, crowing that he was ‘glad’ they had been shot like ‘dogs’. It would not be long until it was his turn.

(Bukharin was a competent cartoonist and pictured is a cartoon he did of the man that would one day order his execution).

‘It is impossible to live’

In February 1937, the arrest duly came. He responded by going on hunger strike. Stalin criticized him: ‘How dare you give us an ultimatum. Who are you to challenge the Central Committee?’ Bukharin responded, ‘With such accusations hanging over me, it is impossible to live’, to which Stalin accused him of blackmail.

During his year of incarceration, awaiting trial within the feared walls of Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, Bukharin wrote. And he wrote a lot – some 1,400 pages, including 200 poems and even a novel, How It All Began. Remarkable – given his circumstances, not just of imprisonment but knowing his life would soon end by an executioner’s bullet. The novel, a semi-autobiographical work, known in Russia as ‘the prison novel’, was left unfinished; indeed it ends mid-sentence.

Bukharin was accused, amongst many obviously false accusations, of planning to assassinate Stalin and of being a Trotskyite. (Soon, the word ‘Bukharinite’ came into common usage. To be labelled as such was almost as damning as being labelled a Trotskyite).

Bukharin only confessed when his interrogators used a favourite tack and threatened to bring in his wife and family. Later, however, he retracted his confession. Ultimately, his confession, or lack of it, was immaterial – the result was a foregone conclusion. ‘The monstrousness of my crime is immeasurable,’ he said on the final day of his trial; ‘Everybody perceives the wise leadership of the country that is ensured by Stalin.’ The state prosecutor assigned to preside over his trial, Andrey Vyshinsky, dismissed Bukharin as a ‘hybrid: half fox, half pig’.

Bukharin had married three times. All three wives ended up in a gulag. He married his third wife, Anna Larina, in January 1934, and as newly-weds they lived for a while in the Kremlin apartment where Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin’s second wife, had committed suicide in November 1932.

Anna Larina’s Great Ordeal

Soon after his arrest, Bukharin wrote a letter to Anna, in which he warned: ‘A great ordeal awaits you. I beg you, my dearest, muster all your strength, tighten all the strings of your heart, but don’t allow them to break.’ But Anna herself had been arrested. She received the letter fifty-four years later, in 1992. One can only imagine the impact – reading a desperate letter written over a half a century before.

Following Bukharin’s arrest, Anna Larina spent 18 months in a cell, ankle-deep in water, during which time she learned from another prisoner, via the tapping on her cell wall, that her husband had been executed. She served a further eighteen years in a gulag and was only released in 1959. She spent years trying to clear Bukharin’s name which, in 1988, fifty years after his execution, she finally managed to achieve. She wrote This I Cannot Forget, published 1993, about Bukharin and their life together. She died in 1996 – five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Letters of a condemned man

While in prison awaiting his fate, Nikolai Bukharin wrote thirty-four desperate letters to Stalin. Not one was answered. In one he promises that if released he would ‘wage a mortal war against Trotsky’, even offering up his wife as a hostage for six months as an ‘added insurance’. In another letter, he asks of Stalin, ‘Koba, why do you need me to die?’ (‘Koba’ being a revolutionary nickname used by Stalin in his younger days. The letter was found hidden in Stalin’s desk following his death 15 years later.)

In his last letter to Stalin, Bukharin writes pathetically, ‘[I] have learned to cherish and love you wisely.’ He begs Stalin to allow him to die by poison not by a bullet: ‘I implore you beforehand, I entreat you … let me have a cup of morphine.’ Not only did Stalin ignore this request, but Bukharin was forced to sit and watch as others were shot before him.

In the same letter, Bukharin maintains his innocence, writing, ‘My heart boils over when I think that you might believe that I am guilty of these crimes … Standing on the edge of a precipice, from which there is no return, I tell you on my word of honour, as I await my death, that I am innocent of those crimes to which I admitted.’ 

It did him little good – Nikolai Bukharin was executed 15 March 1938, aged 49, a victim of the system he helped create.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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The Youngest First Secretary

Mikhail Gorbachev was an up-and-coming star in the Communist Party and, following the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, became a protégé of the new Party leader, Yuri Andropov. But on Andropov’s death in February 1984, the post of First Secretary fell, not to Gorbachev, but to the aging Konstantin Chernenko. However, Gorbachev spread his influence further so when Chernenko died after only thirteen months as leader, the post finally fell to him. Aged 54, Gorbachev was the youngest First Secretary in Soviet history, and the first to be born after the Russian Revolution of 1917.

His youth and progressive ideas alarmed the Communist hardliners and traditionalists, whose fears were confirmed when Gorbachev ushered in a reformist programme, and introduced into the political lexicon the words perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness). The Soviet’s system inept handling of the Chernobyl crisis highlighted the need for reform.

“I like Mr Gorbachev”

The international community welcomed the appointment of a man who seemed open and not ruled by cloak and dagger diplomacy and mistrust. Margaret Thatcher said of him, “I like Mr Gorbachev, we can do business together.”

Immediately on coming to power Gorbachev was proposing a reduction in the number of nuclear arms held between the superpowers. In November 1985 Gorbachev met US president, Ronald Reagan, for the first time. Reagan, who had referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire”, was also impressed by the new man in the Kremlin.

In January 1986 Gorbachev made what is known as his ‘January Proposal’ by proposing a radical strategy for removing all nuclear weapons by 2000. Another meeting with Reagan in October 1986 brought this deadline forward to 1996.

Through their several meetings, Reagan and Gorbachev helped ease international tension. Despite their ideological and cultural differences, the two men build a rapport that was to have a real and lasting effect on the ending of the Cold War.

“We can’t go on living like this”

“We can’t go on living like this,” was Gorbachev’s considered summary of life in 1980s Soviet Union. The economy lagged behind that of the West, the people lived in poverty and without hope. The cost of being a superpower was crippling – the commitment to conventional and nuclear arms, the funding of communist regimes elsewhere in the world, and the costly and unpopular war in Afghanistan were all taking their toll on the economy and the everyday lives of the Soviet citizen.

Initially, Gorbachev increased spending on Afghanistan, hoping that a deeper commitment would bring about a decisive outcome and shorten the war. Although Soviet troops did benefit in the short term by penetrating deeper into the Mujahedeen heartlands, they were unable to sustain the initiative and would subsequently lose the ground they fought so hard to win.

Referring to Afghanistan as a “bleeding wound”, Gorbachev admitted defeat and in 1988 announced the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from a conflict that had become their ‘Vietnam’. A year later, in February 1989, the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan.

At home, Gorbachev toured the country, met its workers and, as no Soviet leader had done before, listened.

An “instrument of foreign policy”

On the eve of 1989, Gorbachev delivered a speech to the UN that acted as the starting pistol for the tumultuous change in Eastern Europe. He talked of nations having the right to freedom of choice: “the threat of force cannot be and should not be an instrument of foreign policy.” As a backup to his words, he promised the withdrawal of troops from the Soviet satellites.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Eastern Bloc, the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia (unwilling and resentful Soviet satellites since Stalin’s annexation at the start of the Second World War) all declared themselves independent. But Gorbachev, not wanting to see the break-up of the union, resisted.

In Russia, demonstrations in Moscow called for the end of one-party rule. In June 1990, Boris Yeltsin, recently elected Mayor of Moscow, was also elected president of the Russian Federation, stating that Russian legality took precedence over the Soviet Union’s. Yeltsin was determined to finish off the Communist Party, and with it the Soviet Union.

On 19 August 1991, the remaining communist hardliners within the Kremlin decided that Gorbachev was no longer the man to lead the Communist Party. Gorbachev, on holiday on the Black Sea, was declared too ill to perform his duties and placed under house arrest. The hardliners imposed emergency rule but lacked the support to succeed in their coup.

On 8 December 1991, Yeltsin, on behalf of Russia and with other former Soviet republics, formed the Commonwealth of Independent States, the CIS. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had ceased to exist. On Christmas Day the hammer and sickle flag of the Soviet Union was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time as Gorbachev delivered his farewell speech: “The threat of a world war is no more.”

2022 Update: Mikhail Gorbachev died aged 91 on 30 August 2022 following a ‘severe and prolonged illness’.

Rupert Colley.

Read more about the Cold War in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Cold War (75 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Joseph Stalin married twice. His first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, died in December 1907, aged 22, from typhus. His second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, shot herself and died on 9 November 1932, aged 31.

As a two-year-old in 1903, Nadezhda, or Nadya, Alliluyeva was reputedly saved from drowning by the visiting 25-year-old Stalin. When staying in St Petersburg (later Petrograd), Stalin often lodged with the Alliluyev family. We don’t know for sure but he may have had an affair with Olga Alliluyeva, Nadya’s mother and his future mother-in-law.

In March 1917, Stalin returned to Petrograd from exile to join the unrest following the February Revolution and the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II. By then Nadya was 16 and she fell for the romantic revolutionary with his sweep of jet-black hair.

Mr and Mrs Stalin

Following the October Revolution of 1917, Nadya became Stalin’s personal assistant as he embarked on his job as the People’s Commissar for Nationalities and joined him in the city of Tsaritsyn during the Russian Civil War. They married in 1919 and had two children: Vasily, born 1921, and Svetlana, born 1926. (In 1967, Svetlana was to defect to the US, became known as Lana Peters and died in Wisconsin on 22 November 2011).

Following the civil war, they returned to the capital. Nadya found life in the Kremlin suffocating. Her husband, whom she once saw as the archetypal Soviet ‘new man’, turned out to be a quarrelsome bore, often drunk and flirtatious with his colleague’s wives. A manic-depressive and prone to violent mood swings, Stalin’s colleagues thought her ‘mad’.

Chemistry student

In 1929, bored of being cooped up in the Kremlin, Nadya enrolled on a course in chemistry. She diligently went to university each morning by public transport, shunning the official limousine. Her new-found student friends, not realising who she was, told her horrific stories concerning Stalin’s collectivization policy. When she confronted her husband, accusing him of ‘butchering the people’, he reacted angrily and had her friends arrested.

Days before her death, according to her daughter, Nadya confided to a friend that ‘nothing made her happy’, least of all her children.

The Banquet

On the evening of 8 November 1932, Stalin and Nadya hosted a banquet to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. They often argued and this party was no different, with Nadya accusing Stalin of being inconsiderate towards her. His response was to humiliate her in front of their guests by flicking cigarettes at her and addressing her ‘hey, you!’  Nadya stormed out. Molotov’s wife chased after her and together they walked around the Kremlin grounds until Nadya calmed down and retired to bed.

The following morning, servants found Nadya dead – she had shot herself with a pistol given to her by her brother, Pavel Alliluyev, as a present from Berlin. (Pavel, who was there that morning and comforted his grieving brother-in-law, would die in suspicious circumstances six years later, aged 44. Indeed, most of the Alliluyev clan would suffer early deaths on the orders of Stalin. His daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, wondered whether Stalin would eventually have had her own mother arrested).

Straightaway, the rumour was that Stalin himself had killed her. But those who saw him in the immediate aftermath witnessed his heartbreak and the incomprehension that his wife should have punished him so by taking her own life.

Reproach and accusations

Nadya had left a note for Stalin which, according to Svetlana, was both personal and ‘partly political’. Although she never saw it, Svetlana described it as being ‘full of reproach and accusations’. Stalin certainly took Nadya’s death badly, believing that she had taken her own life to punish him. His anger and grief seemed genuine and he was unable to bring himself to attend her funeral or, later, visit her grave.

The public was told that Nadya Alliluyeva had died from appendicitis – as was her daughter, then aged six. It wouldn’t have been good for Stalin’s image to have a wife who had committed suicide. Svetlana found out the truth quite by accident a decade later.

On the day of her State funeral, Stalin muttered, ‘She went away as an enemy’.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Born Lev Bronshtein on 7 November 1879 in the village of Yanovka in Ukraine, Leon Trotsky, the son of a prosperous Jewish farmer, became involved in politics from a young age. Arrested in 1898, the 19-year-old Trotsky was exiled to Siberia where he married and had two daughters, both of whom predeceased him. In 1902, he escaped exile using a forged passport bearing the name Trotsky, the name, he later claimed, of a prison guard he had met in Odessa. He made his way to London where, for the first time, he met Vladimir Lenin and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Following the split of the RSDLP, Trotsky’s loyalty floated between the two factions, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, often repudiating any party ties and holding a stance of non-allegiance. He opposed Lenin on many issues, a stance that was later held against him.

Leon Trotsky, 1915.

Following the outbreak of disturbances throughout Russia in 1905, Leon Trotsky arrived in St Petersburg and there joined its council of workers, or ‘Soviet’, becoming its chair until its forced break-up by tsarist troops in December. Trotsky, along with other leaders, was arrested and again sentenced to exile in Siberia. But en route, he escaped and made his way to London before settling in Vienna where he founded and wrote a newspaper for Russia’s workers, Pravda, ‘Truth’, earning the nickname, ‘the Pen’, for his writing. With the outbreak of war in 1914, Trotsky, as a Russian, was forced to leave Austria. He lived in Paris until, expelled for his anti-war writings, he emigrated to Spain and then New York, arriving in January 1917.

Revolution

Trotsky returned to Russia and Petrograd (as St Petersburg was now known) in March 1917 and became, in effect, Lenin’s second-in-command as the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government and set up a new socialist order. (Trotsky turned 38 the day of the October Revolution.)

In forming the Council of People’s Commissars, Russia’s new government, Lenin initially offered the post of chair, in effect head of state, to Leon Trotsky but Trotsky declined the offer, fearing that having a Jew in charge of a country that was still strongly anti-Semitic could be problematic. Instead, Trotsky was appointed the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.

Following Russia’s withdrawal from the First World War, Trotsky was appointed War Commissariat, responsible for strengthening and injecting much-needed discipline into the Red Army. His use of former officers of the tsar’s imperial army caused much disquiet within the party, Joseph Stalin being particularly critical, and was another tool later used against him.

The most capable man

Trotsky seemed the natural successor to Lenin. In Lenin’s ‘Testament’, (Lenin’s written assessment of his underlings), he was described as having ‘outstanding ability’ and ‘perhaps the most capable man in the present Central Committee’ but was prone, according to Lenin, of displaying ‘excessive self-assurance’. But Trotsky’s succession was blocked by a troika consisting of Stalin, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev. Trotsky greatly underestimated Stalin, once referring to him as ‘an excellent bit of mediocrity’.

Following Lenin’s death in January 1924, Stalin ensured he was centre place during the funeral arrangements and the funeral itself. Trotsky had been ill and was recovering in a resort in the Caucasus and Stalin’s telegram to him purposefully gave the wrong date for the funeral.

Trotsky was increasingly marginalised by the party to the point in January 1925, he was relieved of his ministry. Kamenev and Zinoviev, two-thirds of the troika, themselves fell out with Stalin and belatedly joined forces with Trotsky. In October 1927, Trotsky was expelled from the Central Committee and the following month from the Communist Party altogether.

Exiled

In January 1928, Trotsky, accompanied by his wife, Natalia Sedova, was exiled to Kazakhstan and finally banished from the Soviet Union altogether in February 1929. After four years in Turkey, two years in France and two in Norway, always heavily under guard, Trotsky settled in Mexico. For a while, he lived in the house of the artist Diego Rivera and, while there, had an affair with Rivera’s wife and fellow artist, Frida Kahlo. Moving into a house in a leafy suburb of Mexico City, Trotsky began writing prolifically – penning, amongst several books and articles, an autobiography, a history of the Russian Revolution and embarking on a biography of Stalin, in which he described Stalin as having ‘played a dismal role during the 1917 revolution’. (The book remained unfinished). 

Meanwhile, Moscow hosted the first of the infamous Show Trials in which old Bolsheviks, such as Kamenev and Zinoviev, confessed to various anti-state conspiracies and having acted under the instructions of Trotsky. All were sentenced to death, including Trotsky who was found guilty in absentia.

Leon Trotsky, Natalia Sedova and their son, Lev Sedov, 1928.
State Museum of Russian Political History.

Trotsky’s two sons from his second marriage both predeceased him: Sergei Sedov was eliminated in 1937 during Stalin’s ‘Great Purge’ while, in February 1938, his brother, Lev, died on the operating table from a supposed acute appendicitis (very likely on the orders of the NKVD). 

Assassination

Despite having up to ten guards at a time, in May 1940, Trotsky survived a raid on his house in Mexico, in which his 25-year-old assistant was abducted, tortured and later murdered, and his grandson, Esteban Volkov, was shot in the foot. Trotsky was unharmed but he was less fortunate three months later. 

During this time, Trotsky and his wife were befriended by a Canadian called Frank Jacson, who was introduced to them by Trotsky’s secretary who happened to be Jacson’s lover. Jacson was, in fact, Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río, a Spanish communist and agent for Stalin’s NKVD, who had seduced Trotsky’s secretary in order to get close to his intended victim. 

On 20 August, about 5.30 pm, Ramon Mercader turned up at Trotsky’s home, asking if Trotsky would read something he’d written. A hot day, Sedova, Trotsky’s wife, asked Mercader, ‘Why are you wearing your hat and topcoat?’ Refusing Sedova’s offer of tea, Mercader followed Trotsky into the study. Sitting down, Trotsky began to read Mercader’s work. Mercader then retrieved the ice pick he’d been hiding within his coat (he had shortened its handle to better conceal it) and struck such a heavy blow to the back of Trotsky’s head that it impacted the brain. Having heard a ‘terrible, soul-shaking cry’, Sedova found her husband ‘leaning against the door…. His face covered with blood, his eyes, without glasses, were sharp blue, his hands were hanging’.

Rushed to hospital, Leon Trotsky died in hospital the following day. It had taken over a decade, but Stalin had got his man.

Sedova hoped that ‘retribution will come to the vile murderers’. Claiming he had acted alone, Ramón Mercader served twenty years in a Mexican prison but never suffered much by way of retribution. Released in 1960, he received a warm welcome from Fidel Castro in Cuba before making his way to the Soviet Union where he was presented with a ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ award. He died in 1978.

The house in which Trotsky was attacked was later made into a museum, run by Esteban Volkov, the grandson who had been shot in the foot.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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The two men were Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet Premier, and Richard Nixon, the US Vice President. The occasion, on 24 July 1959, was the American National Exhibition in Sokolniki Park in Moscow, part of a cultural exchange between the two superpowers. Although in Moscow, this was an American exhibition, and Nixon, for the benefit of Khrushchev, was its proud host.

Communism v. Capitalism

At times polite, at times restrained, mocking, jibing, or heated, the two men debated the relative merits of communism and capitalism, from nuclear weapons to washing machines, over several hours across many venues. At one point Nixon makes his point by jabbing his finger into Khrushchev’s chest whilst the Soviet leader listens, his bottom lip jutting out in anger.

But it was the image of Nixon and Khrushchev leaning on the railing in front of the model General Electric kitchen, surrounded by interpreters and reporters that captured the moment. The Cold War in a make-believe kitchen. Following in the footsteps, looking somewhat distracted, was the future Soviet premier and Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev.

The make-believe kitchen

The kitchen was part of a showroom house which, according to Nixon, almost any worker in America could afford. “We have such things,” said Khrushchev, adding that they had much the same for the Russian worker, but better built.

Nixon boasted of the processes and appliances available to the modern American housewife, “In America, we like to make life easier for women”. Khrushchev shot back, “Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under communism”.

Khrushchev, exasperated and perhaps intimidated by the display of modernity, asked, “Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you’ve shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely gadgets.”

At one point, Nixon says to the Soviet leader, “You do all the talking and don’t let anyone else talk.” For the full text of this terse and entertaining exchange, see this pdf on the CIA’s website.

“We will wave to you.”

In one notable exchange Khrushchev asks Nixon how long America had been in existence, “Three hundred years?” he asks, making the mistake to emphasis a point. 150 years, Nixon corrects him.

Khrushchev’s answer captured the essence of the Soviet Union’s paranoia and jealousy of the USA: “One hundred and fifty years? Well then, we will say America has been in existence for 150 years and this is the level she has reached. We have existed not quite 42 years and in another seven years, we will be on the same level as America. When we catch you up, in passing you by, we will wave to you.”

Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way.

Rupert Colley.

Read more about the Cold War in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Cold War (75 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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The industrial city of Kursk, 320 miles south of Moscow, had been captured by the Germans in November 1941, during the early stages of the Nazi-Soviet war, and retaken by the Soviets in February 1943. Now held by the Soviets, Kursk and the surrounding area comprised a salient, or a ‘bulge’, 150 miles wide and 100 miles deep, into German-held territory.

‘My stomach turns over’

Soviet M3 Lee tanks, Kursk July 1943

German Field-Marshall Erich von Manstein wanted to recapture Kursk as early as March 1943 by ‘pinching the salient’ from the north and south, thereby cutting it off from the rest of the Soviet territory. ‘Operation Citadel’ would also provide, argued Manstein, an immediate morale booster following the German humiliation suffered at Stalingrad, but Hitler wanted to have a new generation of tanks ready before doing so. The normally bellicose Hitler was unusually nervous about the planned offensive, confessing to his general, Heinz Guderian, ‘Whenever I think of this attack, my stomach turns over’. Three times he delayed the date of the attack. The delays were to prove fatal.

Intelligence had forewarned the Soviets of Nazi intentions and coupled with the delays on Hitler’s part, by the time the Germans did launch their counterattack, starting at 3 am on 4 July 1943, Kursk was fully fortified and prepared. One German soldier, on the eve of the attack, thought the mission suicidal, writing bleakly, ‘It is time to write out the last will and testament’. Almost a million men, 2,000 German tanks and supporting aircraft attacking, as originally planned, from north and south of the salient, were more than matched by the Soviets.

‘Furious hail of bombs and shells’

The Soviets had built a line of defence up to 200 miles deep, stretching over 3,800 miles. Hundreds of anti-tank guns were put in place, half a million mines were laid in the first trench alone – the equivalent of two mines per German soldier. 1.3 million men were waiting on the Soviet side, a further million in reserve. Leading the defence at the Battle of Kursk was Stalin’s top commander, Georgi Zhukov, pictured, defender of Moscow and Leningrad. As the Red Army let ripped its barrage on the German lines, even Zhukov felt a degree of pity for the enemy ‘hiding in holes, pressed to the earth to escape from the furious hail of bombs and shells’.

The Germans’ hope for a blitzkrieg victory, which depended on the element of surprise, had already evaporated with Hitler’s dithering, and as the Russians held out and engaged the Germans into a war of attrition, greatly favouring the Soviets, any hope of a German victory soon faded. Instead of blitzkrieg, the German soldier found himself fighting hand-to-hand, trench-by-trench. It was akin to the fighting of the First World War. Initial German gains, modest as they were, were soon lost as the Soviets counterattacked. The closest the two German attacks, north and south, got to one another was 40 miles.

Prokhorovka

The climax of the Battle of Kursk took place near a village called Prokhorovka on 12 July, when one thousand tanks and a thousand aircraft on each side clashed on a two-mile front, fighting each other to a standstill. The melee was intense as tanks bumped into each other, the German tanks liable to burst into flames as their engines overheated. The Battle of Kursk dragged on for another month but with the German lines continuously disrupted by partisan activity and the Russian capacity of putting unending supplies of men and equipment into the fray, the Germans ran out of energy and resources.

Losses on both sides were huge (70,000 Germans and probably an equal if not greater number of Soviets) but with the Soviet Union’s vast resource of manpower and with huge amounts of aid coming in from the US, Stalin could sustain his losses. Hitler, however, could not. Germany never again launched an offensive in the East.

Hitler, on hearing that the Western Allies had landed in Sicily, ordered a withdrawal. The Battle of Kursk came to an end on 23 August 1943.

Meanwhile, the Soviet march west had begun.

Rupert Colley.

Read more about the war in The Clever Teens Guide to World War Two available as an ebook and 80-page paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

The post The Battle of Kursk – an outline first appeared on Rupert Colley.

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But they hadn’t come to arrest him, they’d come to plead with him, begging him to return and take control. Stalin had survived and was to remain in power until his death twelve years later. But what had brought about Stalin’s temporary collapse, and why did his Politburo colleagues fail to bring to an end his murderous rule?

We doubt the veracity of your information

On 23 August 1939, the Nazis and Soviets had signed a non-aggression pact. But both sides knew it was never meant to be more than a postponement of hostilities.

In September 1940, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, invited the Soviet Union to join the Tripartite Pact, an alliance of initially three Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) that was drawing more nations to its mast, including Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. In response, Stalin sent his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, to Berlin for talks. The talks failed dismally (Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister for Propaganda, described Molotov and his companions as ‘Bolshevik subhumans’). Molotov returned empty-handed to Moscow whilst Hitler announced plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Over the next few months, Stalin permitted limited fortification of his western border but otherwise was determined not to do anything that might provoke the Germans. Stalin’s spies had forewarned him time and again of the expected attack but he refused to believe it. A German Communist spy, Richard Sorge, based in Tokyo, microfilmed detailed reports on the impending invasion, including troop numbers and even the date – 22 June 1941. His efforts were dismissed with the curt “We doubt the veracity of your information.”

Stalin even refused to listen to Winston Churchill, who warned him of an imminent attack, dismissing the British prime minister’s advice as provocative. When, on the eve of invasion, a German deserter crossed the border into the Soviet Union and informed the Red Army of the attack, Stalin ordered him shot for spreading misinformation.  Stalin even allowed the continuation of Russian food and metal exports to the Germans, as agreed in the Pact, and forbade the evacuation of people living near the German border and the setting up of defences.

War

At 3 a.m. on 22 June 1941, Stalin went to bed. An hour later, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s determination not to prepare for war came at a heavy cost. Within the first day, one-quarter of Russia’s air strength had been destroyed – rows of planes sat on the airfields without camouflage providing the Luftwaffe, the German air force, an easy target. His soldiers were unprepared, often in the wrong place and lacking ammunition. Stalin’s generals believed that Hitler’s main thrust would aim towards Moscow via Minsk and Smolensk. Stalin, thinking he knew best, believed Hitler’s main thrust would be southwards towards the rich resources of Ukraine, so, accordingly, the bulk of the Red Army was moved south. The generals were proved right but no one dared remind Stalin.

Stalin went into overdrive despite looking, as Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, later described him, “a bag of bones in a grey tunic.” Everything went through Stalin – from what journalists wrote for the Soviet newspaper Pravda, down to the length of bayonet to be manufactured.

On 28 June, news came through that the Germans had taken Minsk, 300 miles into Soviet territory. The road to Smolensk and ultimately to Moscow lay open. Stalin, furious and by now exhausted after days without sleep, paid a visit to his top generals, including Georgy Zhukov. Stalin’s anger reduced Zhukov, a hard-nosed, bull-necked, merciless commander, to tears. Molotov offered Zhukov his handkerchief.

“We’ve fucked it up”

The very survival of the Soviet Union was at stake and Stalin was at a loss. “Lenin founded our state,” he said despondently as he left, “and we’ve fucked it up.” And with that, he retired to his dacha.

And there he stayed for three days – refusing to answer the telephone, refusing to see anyone. He may well have suffered a form of collapse. He had made some disastrous decisions in the years leading up to the war and now they were coming back to bite him.

During the late 1930s, in an act of paranoia and jealously, he purged his military, getting rid of his ablest field marshals and generals and decimating the officer corp. 40,000 Red Army personnel, deemed politically out of step, were purged. Amongst the victims were men who advocated a reform of the Soviet Union’s military methods, calls that Stalin, on the whole, ignored. Stalin now found himself bereft of his finest military thinkers.

Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, “There is no question that we would have repelled the fascist invasion much more easily if the upper echelons of the Red Army command hadn’t been wiped out. They had been men of considerable expertise and experience.”

But Stalin’s motive for disappearing for three days may have been more sinister. Ivan IV, the sixteenth-century Russian tsar, more commonly remembered as Ivan the Terrible, had once faked a disappearance to see how his men reacted, and which ones remained loyal. Stalin, who knew well the history of Ivan the Terrible, may have been employing the same trick.

None more worthy

Either way, after three days, a small delegation came knocking at his door. Headed by Molotov (pictured to Stalin’s right), Lavrenty Beria (Stalin’s Chief of Secret Police), Kliment Voroshilov (Defence, to Stalin’s left) and Anastas Mikoyan (Foreign Trade), they found Stalin sitting at his desk. He had on his face a look of fear. Mikoyan later wrote, “I have no doubt – he decided we had come to arrest him.” Stalin was looking thinner, haggard and hadn’t changed his clothes.

“Why have you come?” he asked.

Molotov stepped forward, “We’re asking you to return to work.”

Stalin dithered, “But can I live up to people’s expectations? Can I lead the nation to a final victory? There may be more deserving candidates.”

“There’s none more worthy,” said Voroshilov.

Molotov told Stalin of their idea to form a State Defence Committee, to which Stalin asked, “Yes, but with whom at its head?”

”You, Comrade Stalin,” came the answer, “You.”

The Politburo was nothing without their leader, and at this time of national crisis only Stalin had the force to lead them out of danger, only Stalin had the strength to unite the vast empire. And thus, Stalin survived.

“We were witness to his moment of weakness,” recalled Beria later, “and for that he’ll never forgive us.”

On 3 July, Stalin delivered his first speech to the nation since the invasion eleven days previously. His usual political rhetoric, whilst still there, was played down, instead, he spoke in patriotic terms, pulling together his people to defeat the beast that was now in their midst: “Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, men of our Army and Navy! My words are addressed to you, dear friends!” he began. “The Red Army, Red Navy and all citizens of the Soviet Union must defend every inch of Soviet soil, must fight to the last drop of blood for our towns and villages, must display the daring, initiative and mental alertness that is inherent in our people.”

Stalin was back.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

The post The Day Stalin Almost Had a Breakdown first appeared on Rupert Colley.

The post The Day Stalin Almost Had a Breakdown appeared first on Rupert Colley.

Alexander II had been a reformer and a liberal, introducing 20 years earlier the emancipation of the serfs and keen to introduce a raft of new reforms. In consequence of the tsar’s violent end, his son and the new tsar, Alexander III, undid much of Alexander II’s reforms, suppressed liberalism and brought back the full force of autocracy.

The new tsar intended to start teaching his son the art of statesmanship once Nicholas had reached the age of 30. But on 1 November 1894, aged only 49, Alexander III died of kidney disease. His son was still only 26. Thus, following the death of his father, Nicholas was thrust unprepared into the limelight. Fearful of the responsibility that was now his to bear, he reputedly asked, ‘What will become of me and all of Russia?’

The Khodynka Tragedy

From the start, the omens were not good. Four days after his coronation on 26 May 1896, Nicholas II and his wife of 18 months, Alix of Hesse, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, attended the public celebration held in their honour in Khodynka Field, on the outskirts of Moscow. 100,000 people gathered to enjoy the coronation festivities but a stampede caused the death of 1,389. Many more were injured. In a state of shock, Nicholas wished to pray for the dead. But he was persuaded by his advisors to attend a planned gala at the French embassy, arguing that not insulting the ambassador was more important than praying for his subjects. His subsequent attendance may have soothed the ambassador’s vanity but it showed the new tsar in the worst possible light. He later visited the injured in hospital and donated vast sums to help the affected families. But the damage had been done.

Nicholas II ruled as his father had done. But whereas his father had been a physically domineering man, strong, brash and confident, Nicholas was slight, unsure of himself and prone to agree with whoever spoke to him last. Although aware of his own weakness, once describing himself as ‘without will and without character’, Nicholas II saw his rule as one sanctioned by God – ‘I regard Russia as one big estate, with the tsar as its owner’, he said in 1902. Nicholas could speak English with a refined accent and was known as the ‘most civil man in Europe’.

The Romanov dynasty had ruled Russia and its empire since 1613. Nicholas II would prove to be its last tsar. His wife, Alix of Hesse, was German, which caused considerable disquiet amongst his nationalistic subjects. Her attempts to become more Russian, changing her name to Alexandra and accepting the Russian Orthodox faith, did little to overturn their prejudice.

Bloody Sunday

The seeds of the tsar’s downfall began on 22 January 1905, ‘Bloody Sunday’, when he was held responsible for turning on his own people and gunning down unarmed, peaceful demonstrators. His half-hearted efforts to appease the masses by replacing his autocracy with a constitutional monarchy did little to ease the widening discontent throughout the empire. Nicholas, deeply anti-Semitic, was quick to blame Jews for the country’s discontent. During the strikes of 1905, he wrote to his mother, ‘Nine out of ten troublemakers were Jews’.

Having witnessed another assassination, this time of his uncle, the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich on 17 February 1905, Nicholas II withdrew from public life, affecting further his popularity. His credibility was not helped by allowing his wife to become overly dependent on the mystic, Grigori Rasputin, who seemed to be the only one able to stem the bleeding of his haemophiliac son, the tsarevich Alexei.

Following early defeats during the First World War, Nicholas took personal command of his army and left the everyday administration of government to his wife. It was a mistake – every Russian setback was now his responsibility; as commander, the tsar took the blame. Meanwhile, his wife’s nationality and her continued reliance on Rasputin earned the Imperial Family much criticism, both within the Russian parliament, the Duma, and among the general population. Russia’s appalling record in the war, and the amount of territory lost to the Germans on its Western borders, further discredited the monarchy.

The Tsar’s Abdication

Strikes broke out, first in Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg), then other cities, but Nicholas II failed to judge the import of the situation and refused to leave his command post at the front. On 11 March, the Chairman of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko, sent the tsar a desperate telegram, ‘The situation is serious. Measures must be taken at once; tomorrow will be too late. The capital is in a state of anarchy; troops of the Petrograd garrison cannot be relied upon. The Government is powerless to stop the disorder… General discontent is growing… Your majesty, do not delay. Any procrastination is tantamount to death.’ Nicholas wrote in his diary, ‘this fat Rodzianko has written me lots of nonsense, to which I shall not even deign to reply’. Nicholas did, however, do as he had warned – on 12 March, he dissolved the Duma.

Finally, Nicholas decided to return to Petrograd – but it was too late. On 15 March 1917, the tsar was forced to abdicate, thus ending the three-century-old Romanov dynasty. Few mourned its passing.

The British government had wanted to offer Nicholas II and his family asylum but King George V, the tsar’s cousin, refused, fearing that the presence of the fallen tsar in Britain could cause trouble.

The House of Special Purpose

Following the tsar’s abdication, the Imperial Family (pictured in 1913) was kept under house arrest first in the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, 15 miles south of Petrograd, then, from August 1917, in Tobolsk in Western Siberia. In April 1918, they were transferred to Yekaterinburg in the Urals and kept in a former merchant’s house, known by the Bolsheviks obscurely as the ‘House of Special Purpose’.

Meanwhile, in November 1917, the Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Lenin, seized power.

In July 1918, a legion of Czech troops was closing in on the town, and the Bolsheviks, fearing the Romanovs might be rescued and become a rallying point for their enemies, decided to act, probably under the orders of Vladimir Lenin. Around midnight on 17 July 1918, the family was awakened, told to get dressed and washed, and taken down to the basement of the house.

Alexandra’s request for a couple of chairs was granted. The former royal couple sat down, with the 13-year-old Alexei sitting on his father’s lap (both wore soldiers’ shirts and caps) and the girls gathered behind their mother. Also with them, the family doctor and three servants that had remained loyal to the last. Yakov Yurovsky, in charge of the house, led in a squad of executioners and read a short statement announcing the order for execution. An incredulous Nicholas said, ‘What?’ before being shot dead by Yurovsky. The squad then opened fire. Alexandra and her daughters had, over the weeks, sewn their jewellery into their undergarments (lest they could be used for bartering at some point) and thus to a degree were protected from the bullets. But they were finished off by bayonet and finally a shot each to the head.

The following day, Lenin announced to a Danish newspaper that the tsar was well and that rumours concerning his death were ‘lies put out by the capitalist press’.

Initially dumped down a mineshaft, the bodies were hastily buried in nearby forests. Their exact location remained a mystery until their discovery in 1979, although it would be another 19 years before DNA confirmed their identification. On 18 July 1998, exactly 80 years after their execution, the family was given a state funeral and a Christian burial and, in August 2000, the tsar was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

The post Tsar Nicholas II – a brief biography first appeared on Rupert Colley.

The post Tsar Nicholas II – a brief biography appeared first on Rupert Colley.

Alexander instigated a vast improvement in communication, namely expanding Russia’s rail network from just 660 miles of track (linking Moscow and St Petersburg) in the 1850s to over 14,000 miles within thirty years, which, in turn, aided Russia’s industrial and economic expansion.

Alexander’s reformist zeal restructured the judicial system which included the introduction of trial by jury. Military reform saw the introduction of conscription, the reduction of military service from 25 years to six, and the establishment of military schools. He expanded Russia’s territory in Central Asia, up to the borders of Afghanistan, much to the worry of the British government.

Emancipation of the Serfs

But reform only opened the eyes of what could be, thus came the demand for more, which brought about a number of active groups demanding greater reform and revolution. Thus, on 3 March 1861, Alexander II issued what seemed on the face of it the most revolutionary reform in Russia’s history – his Manifesto on the Emancipation of the Serfs. The edict freed 23 million serfs from their bondage to landowners, and the ownership of 85 percent of Russia’s land was wrestled from private landowners and given to the peasants. The landlords, understandably, opposed such a sweeping change but were told by the tsar, ‘It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for the time when it will begin to abolish itself from below’.

But the high ideals of Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs fell very short of its ambition. The 15 percent of land the landowners held onto was, invariably, the best, most sought-after, and the peasants had to buy back their land from the nobles, usually at an inflated price. Those unable to afford the cost, which was virtually all, were given a loan by the government, repayable at 6 percent over 49 years. The peasant, freed from serfdom, was no better off and no happier.

Assassination target

But Alexander’s reforms did not extend to democracy and he resisted all calls for a parliament or freedom of expression – it remained illegal to criticize the tsar or his government. Frustrated by the tsar’s autocracy, anti-government groups formed and met in clandestine, many prepared to use violence to achieve their aims. On 20 April 1879, Alexander survived an assassination attempt when a 33-year-old revolutionary and former schoolteacher, Alexander Soloviev, shot at him five times but missed. Soloviev was hanged the following month.

A year later, on 5 February 1880, Stepan Khalturin, a carpenter working within the tsar’s Winter Palace, planted a bomb beneath the tsar’s dining hall timed to go off at the time Alexander was expected to sit for dinner. But a late guest that evening delayed the start of dinner. The bomb killed several staff but the tsar was unharmed.

The People’s Will

But on 13 March 1881, the tsar was not so lucky. A group calling themselves the People’s Will threw a bomb at the tsar’s carriage as it drove through St Petersburg. Initially unharmed, Alexander, against advice to stay in the carriage, emerged to check on his wounded guards. A second bomb was thrown, this one severely wounding him. He was carried back to the Winter Palace, both his legs blown away and his stomach ripped open, where he died. He was 62. The tsar’s son (Alexander III) and 12-year-old grandson (Nicholas II) were witness to Alexander’s violent end. As future tsars they never forgot.

Ironically, Alexander II had just, hours before his death, put his signature to a draft decree to establish a parliament, a Duma, the first step towards a constitutional monarchy. He knew that the emancipation of the serfs had failed and that his reforms, although laudable, merely created the demand for greater reform. Thus, by their very action, the terrorists had unwittingly aborted any chance of constitutional reform. Instead, they got a new tsar, Alexander’s son, Alexander III, who immediately tore up his father’s parliamentary proposal, undid his reforms and intensified the level of repression.

Alexander III

The new tsar’s Manifesto on Unshakable Autocracy, issued within two months of his father’s death, summed up Alexander III’s view on how Russia should be ruled. Liberalism and democracy were signs of weakness. For the benefit of all, his people needed to be ruled with a firm hand and the nation needed to be more Russian. Ethnic languages and nationalistic tendencies were repressed. The vast empire was to be subject to the new tsar’s Russification and autocratic rule.

The new tsar intended to start teaching his son the art of statesmanship once Nicholas had reached the age of 30. But on 1 November 1894, aged only 49, Alexander III died of kidney disease. His son was still only 26. Thus, following the death of his father, Nicholas was thrust unprepared into the limelight. Fearful of the responsibility that was now his to bear, he reputably asked, ‘What will become of me and all of Russia?’

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

The post Alexander II of Russia – a brief biography first appeared on Rupert Colley.

The post Alexander II of Russia – a brief biography appeared first on Rupert Colley.