by Martin Amis
Anyone who has ever received a poison-pen letter will have been struck by a sense of the author’s desperate impotence. In the USSR, under Stalin, the poison worked: it had power. That was how it was: the writer and the poison pen.
I have not read any account of the fate of Nikolaenko. Either she was reexpelled, or her subsequent denunciations were for the most part tactfully ignored. She might of course have been shot – though Stalin showed a slight but detectable squeamishness about killing Old Bolshevik women.
As for the impressionable Postyshev, condemned by Moscow for his lack of moderation and restraint … This is The Great Terror:
Postyshev’s oldest son, Valentin, was shot, and his other children were sent to labour camps. His wife, Tamara, was viciously tortured night after night in the Lefortovo, often being returned to her cell bleeding all over her back and unable to walk. She is reported shot.
Heavy Industry
Soviet industry moved forward, and staggered about the place, like a titanic infant, with every manner of thunderous accident (collisions, explosions), with peasant boys twirling off frozen scaffolding, with many deaths, sudden or premature, in the usual atmosphere of myth and coercion, of error and terror – but it did move forward. John Scott, an American volunteer at the Morlock newtown of Magnitogorsk (250,000 workers), wagered that ‘Russia’s battle of ferrous metallurgy alone involved more casualties than the battle of the Marne.’ And there were also fabulous inefficiencies: the regular unavailability, in the whole of Moscow, of a single ‘light bulb or a bar of soap’ (Tibor Szamuely), for instance, or the inability of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, constructed by the ‘fart power’ (Solzhenitsyn) of hundreds of thousands of slaves, to carry heavy shipping. Inefficiencies, when undeniable, had to be blamed on someone; and so Stalin (following Lenin) institutionalized the crime of wrecking – ‘notwithstanding’, as Solzhenitsyn says, ‘the nonexistence of this concept in the entire history of mankind’.14 Whereas the real wrecker, the ‘super-wrecker’ (Tucker), was of course Stalin.
One of the partial and deforming ‘triumphs’ of industrialization was ideological. Until now the Bolsheviks, contra Marx, formed a ‘superstructure’ without a proper proletarian ‘base’. During the decade of the Big Break, about 30 million peasants were forced to find work in the cities. Martin Malia is characteristically panoptic:
[Stalin] launched from above a second revolution that rebuilt Mother Russia as a Soviet pseudo-America and converted her superfluity of peasants into real proletarians. Thus the Party’s supreme achievement was to transmogrify its status as ‘superstructure’ into the demiurge for creating the industrial and worker ‘base’ that was supposed to have created it.
Soviet Communism can look back on two achievements. Industrialization made up for what Malia calls Russia’s ‘deficit of modernity’ – though it deepened the systemic abnormality that led to the state’s collapse. That was one achievement. The other was the defeat of Hitler. Both owed everything to the Russian people: their tears, their sweat, their blood.
14 John Scott did see one case during his several years at Magnitogorsk: some outgoing kulaks spiked a turbine.
Kazakhstan
Until 1930 the economy and culture of Kazakhstan, in Soviet Central Asia, was based on nomadism and transhumance (the seasonal movement of livestock). The plan was to Dekulakize these wanderers, and then Collectivize them. Once denomadized, the Kazakhstanis would devote themselves to agriculture. But the land was not suitable for agriculture. What it was suitable for was nomadism and transhumance. The plan didn’t work out.
Over the next two years Kazakhstan lost 80 per cent of its livestock. And 40 per cent of its population: famine and disease.
The plan didn’t work out.
Congress of Victors – 1
‘The year 1937 really began on the 1st of December 1934.’ This is the famous opening sentence of Eugenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind. The year 1937 refers to the onset of the Great Terror; and 1 December 1934, refers to the murder of Sergei Kirov. The Terror did ‘begin’ in 1934 – but earlier in the year. I think we can pinpoint it.
On 26 January the Seventeenth Party Congress opened in the conference hall of the Great Kremlin Palace. The Congress styled itself the Congress of Victors. In Stalin in Power Robert Tucker redubs it the Congress of Victims, and on understandable grounds: of its 1,996 delegates, 1,108 would perish in the Terror. One can think of other names for this Congress. Congress of Vultures, one might say, after briefly consulting the reality of the countryside – or Congress of Vampires. And Congress of Vaudevillians, too: in January/February 1934 the Party began to absent itself from actuality. It entered the psychotheatre in Stalin’s head.
As the Congress of Victors opened, the USSR was just steadying itself after veering back from total ruin. Collectivization had resulted in a series of world-historical catastrophes. Something like 10 million peasant dead (this was Stalin’s own figure, in conversation with Churchill) might be acceptable to a good Bolshevik, the political objective having been achieved (unmediated control of peasant produce). But a moment of tranquil thought would have told anyone that Stalin’s Big Break had turned out to be a primitive fiasco. The USSR had lost more than half of its livestock. About a quarter of the peasantry had fled the countryside for the cities, where the housing crisis was already legendary. In 1932 Moscow itself tottered with hunger – and Moscow, as Reader Bullard noted, was ‘much better off for food than the provinces, even a short distance away’. (The long entry on ‘shortages’ in Bullard’s index itemizes, among other things, books, candles, cement, clothing, coal, door handles and locks, electricity, fertilizers, fuel, glass, household utensils, lightbulbs, matches, metal, onion-seed, paper, petrol, rubber, salt, soap, and string. When you sent a parcel, you asked the recipient to return the wrapping.) Six-fold inflation coincided with sharp cuts in wages and the extortion of regular ‘state loans’. It was a Russia of ration cards and labour books – and of increasing ‘passportization’, a most un-Leninist, not to say frankly tsarist, imposition. Such was the background, then, as the Old Bolsheviks (most of the comrades were of the October generation) gathered in Moscow for the Congress of Victors. These ageing idealists would also have been aware that the showpiece advances of industrialization had been achieved through a vast and burgeoning network of slave labour.15
It would not be true to say that Stalin got through the cataclysms of 1929–33 without hearing some sceptical murmurs from his colleagues. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin were by now abject and impotent figures (who would humble themselves further in the course of the Congress). But the Bolshevik fetish of unity, or of helpless and desperate cohesion, was not quite universal. Dissidence emerged most strongly in the person of M. N. Ryutin, who serves, in the present context, as something of a hero – minor, tarnished, yet unbroken. In 1930 he circulated an anti-Stalin treatise later known as the Ryutin Platform, was denounced, arrested, imprisoned, released and reinstated ‘with a warning’. In 1932 he circulated the much shorter and more trenchant ‘Appeal to Party Members’. He was again denounced, arrested, imprisoned. And here we see a crucial escalation in the level of the Stalin malevolence: its glandular sensuality, and its passionate attention to detail … The Politburo was now faced with Stalin’s demand that Ryutin be executed for treason. With Kirov leading, the Politburo refused to cross that line: it refused to kill an old comrade (or, more precisely, it refused to seal an old comrade’s fate before trial). Even Molotov was against it. Stalin could only carry Kaganovich. In the meantime he had Ryutin transferred from a political prison to a tougher one in Verhne-Uralsk. We can imagine his continuing interest in Ryutin’s welfare. And this went on for five years: Stalin, we may be sure, threw absolutely everything he had at him, and Ryutin never confessed. (He was shot in 1937, as were his two sons; his wife was killed in a camp near Karaganda.) Dissidence, in the end, was effortlessly crushed; it simply informed Stalin, with incensing clarity, that there were things he couldn’t yet do, and t
hat his version of reality had not yet prevailed.
So, just after ‘the culmination of the most precipitous peacetime decline in living standards known in recorded history’,16 Stalin took the podium at the Congress to a standing ovation – of which, said Pravda, ‘it seemed there would be no end’.
But then something went wrong with the authorized reality, and eight days later the Terror was entrained.
15 Agriculture, it would eventually emerge, did not subsidize industry: industry subsidized agriculture. And Dekulakization was a net loser, too. Total dispossession of the supposed peasant plutocrats failed to cover the cost of their deportation.
16 From Alec Nove’s evenhanded An Economic History of the USSR: 1917–1991. The cover of my paperback bears the striking advisory, ‘New and Final Edition.’
Prolonged and Stormy Applause
No doubt Stalin ended the applause himself, on that occasion – with a diffident elevation of the palms, perhaps. But ending the applause for Stalin was a mortally serious business. Who could end the applause for Stalin when Stalin wasn’t there?
At a Party conference in Moscow Province, during the Terror years, a new secretary took the place of an old secretary (who had been arrested). The proceedings wound up with a tribute to Stalin. Everyone got to their feet and started applauding; and no one dared stop. In Solzhenitsyn’s version of this famous story, after five minutes ‘the older people were panting with exhaustion’. After ten minutes:
With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers!
The first man to stop clapping (a local factory director) was arrested the next day and given ten years on another charge.
There existed at the time a gramophone record of one of Stalin’s longer speeches. It ran to eight sides, or rather seven, because the eighth consisted entirely of applause.
Now close this book for a moment and imagine sitting there and listening to that eighth side, at night, in the Moscow of 1937. It must have sounded like the approach of fear, like the music of psychosis, like the rage of the state.
Congress of Victors – 2
As the Congress of Victors proceeded, the Stalin confabulation seemed remarkably robust. Six months after the culmination of the worst famine in Russian history, the country’s rulers proceeded in a spirit of raucous triumphalism. The smile of Stalin’s moustache presided over the self-abasements of his most distinguished adversaries. Bukharin:
In his brilliant application of Marx-Lenin dialectics, Stalin was entirely correct when he smashed a whole series of theoretical premises of the right deviation which had been formulated above all by myself.
Zinoviev:
We now know that in the struggle which Comrade Stalin conducted on an exclusively high level of principle, on an exclusively high theoretical level, we know that in that struggle there was not the least hint of anything personal.
And Kamenev, incredibly, described Ryutin and his bloc as ‘rabid kulak scum’ who deserved ‘more tangible’ disciplining than mere theoretical refutation. Kirov was positively boyish:
Our successes are really tremendous. Damn it all, to put it humanly, you just want to live and live – really, just look what’s going on. It’s a fact!
It was not a fact. It was data from Stalin’s parallel universe. When unpleasant truths did succeed in fighting their way to the surface, the Bolshevik template supplied the expected scapegoats: those stunning losses of livestock, for example, were attributed to the characteristic barbarism of the kulaks.
The fact was that facts were losing their value. Stalin had broken the opposition. He was also far advanced towards his much stranger objective of breaking the truth. Or it may have been the other way about: actuality, under Stalin, was such that dread and disgust forbade you to accept it – or even to contemplate it. As the onetime Marxist Leszek Kolakowski persuasively writes:
Half-starved people, lacking the bare necessities of life, attended meetings at which they repeated the government’s lies about how well off they were, and in a bizarre way they half-believed what they were saying … Truth, they knew, was a Party matter, and therefore lies became true even if they contradicted the plain facts of experience. The condition of their living in two separate worlds at once was one of the most remarkable achievements of the Soviet system.
The astounding servility of the Victors of 1934, who were as yet unterrorized, is usually explained as follows: if Stalin could not now be removed (they reasoned), he could at least be softened and mollified, flattered, humoured. What this amounted to was collusion in psychosis. They acted out Stalin’s psychosis, and in so doing, predictably and disastrously, they fed and fattened it.
But now reality intervened.
On the last day of the Congress the delegates were as usual given their say on the composition of the new Central Committee. While neither universal nor equal, the vote was at least direct and secret. Just over 1,200 delegates were handed a list of nominees and then crossed out the names of the men they were voting against. Volkogonov describes the result as ‘unbelievable!’ Most of the vote-counters were, of course, later shot, but one survivor claimed that Stalin had received 120-odd negative votes (to Kirov’s three). Other sources, including Khrushchev, give a figure of 300. Stalin fudged the figures and went on, in any case, to pack the Central Committee with Stalinists …
Those 300 votes would mean the death of a generation. As Tucker points out, Stalin had always suspected that he was surrounded by dissemblers and double-dealers: now he had proof. How many of the Congress eulogists had struck his name from the ballot? Tucker adds that he had further evidence of treachery. He knew of another person who had dissembled, who had feigned moderation and indifference to advancement, who had schemed and dreamed and finally prevailed. That person was himself.
Meanwhile, in the world outside the Stalin psychosis … A population that is utterly crushed, in all senses, has only one means of protest: in a kind of genetic hunger strike, it starts to cease to reproduce itself. Since 1917 the Bolsheviks had systematically undermined the family. Divorce was encouraged (to achieve it you were simply obliged to notify your spouse by postcard); incest, bigamy, adultery and abortion were decriminalized; families were scattered by labour-direction and deportation; and children who denounced their parents became national figures, hymned in verse and song. This is Moshe Lewin:
The courts dealt with an incredible mass of cases testifying to the human destruction caused by [the] congestion of dwellings. The falling standards of living, the lines outside stores, and the proliferation of speculators suggest the depth of the tensions and hardship. Soon the cumulative results of such conditions were to cause widespread manifestations of neurosis and anomie, culminating in an alarming fall in the birth-rate. By 1936, in fact, the big cities experienced a net loss of population, with more children dying than being born, which explains the alarm in governing circles and the famous laws against abortion proclaimed in that year.
Even Stalin bestirred himself. He was photographed with his smiling children, and duly trundled down to Tiflis to pay that single visit to his mother.
Kolyma Tales
Varlam Shalamov was arrested and sent to camp in 1929. He was twenty-one, and a law student; and unlike many other millions so designated, he really was a Trotskyite. That ‘T’ in his crime-description folder (‘Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Activities’) would have dramatically worsened his first two terms. He was tried and sentenced a third time in 1943 – for having praised Ivan Bunin – and reclassified as a mere Anti-Soviet Agitator. He got out of Kolyma in 1951 and, after two years of internal exile, he got out of Magadan. Then he wrote Kolyma Tales.
Nature simplifies itself as it heads towards the poles (and we head north now because so many scores of thousands were doing so, as Stalin’s rule developed, and as the camps crazily multiplied). Nature sim
plifies itself, and so does human discourse:
My language was the crude language of the mines and it was as impoverished as the emotions that lived near the bones. Get up, go to work, rest, citizen chief, may I speak, shovel, trench, yes sir, drill, pick, it’s cold outside, rain, cold soup, hot soup, bread, ration, leave me the butt – these few dozen words were all I had needed for years.
Life was reduced. Kolyma Tales is a great groan from someone chronically reduced. Solzhenitsyn captured the agony of the gulag in the epic frame, in 1,800 unflagging, unwavering pages. Shalamov does it in the short story – for him, the only possible form. His suffering in the gulag was more extreme, more complete and more inward than that of Solzhenitsyn, who candidly observes:
Shalamov’s experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than my own, and I respectfully confess that to him and not me was it given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair towards which life in the camp dragged us all.
Shalamov told Nadezhda Mandelstam that he could have spent a lifetime ‘quite happily’ in the camp described in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Whereas Kolyma, in the late 1930s (after Stalin’s speech demanding worse conditions), amounted to negative perfection. Osip Mandelstam was on his way to Kolyma, in 1938, when he died of hunger and dementia in the transit prison at Vtoraya Rechka.
Kolyma Tales … Two prisoners take a long trek, at night, to exhume a corpse: they will exchange its underwear for tobacco. One prisoner hangs himself in a tree fork ‘without even using a rope’. Another finds that his fingers have been permanently moulded by the tools he wields (he ‘never expected to be able to straighten out his hands again’). Another’s rubber galoshes ‘were so full of pus and blood that his feet sloshed at every step – as if through a puddle’. Men weep frequently, over a lost pair of socks, for instance, or from the cold (but not from hunger, which produces an agonized but tearless wrath). They all dream the same dream ‘of loaves of rye bread that flew past us like meteors or angels’. And they are forgetting everything. A professor of philosophy forgets his wife’s name. A doctor begins to doubt that he ever was a doctor: ‘Real were the minute, the hour, the day … He never guessed further, nor did he have the strength to guess. Nor did anyone else.’ ‘I had forgotten everything,’ says one narrator: ‘I didn’t even remember what it was like to remember.’ All emotions evaporate: all emotions except bitterness.
