Stalin had tried to root out every possible challenge to both domestic and foreign policies. His suspicions were not without foundation. Many party and state functionaries had supported his rupture with the NEP without anticipating the exact policies and their consequences. Most of them had not bargained for famine, terror and Stalin’s growing personal dictatorship. Small groupings therefore came together to discuss alternative policies. Beso Lominadze and Sergei Syrtsov, one-time supporters of Stalin, expressed their disgruntlement to each other in autumn 1929. An informer denounced them and they were expelled from the Central Committee.34 In 1932 another group was formed by Mikhail Ryutin, who sought Stalin’s removal from power; and yet another group coalesced under A. P. Smirnov, Nikolai Eismont and V. N. Tolmachev. Both groups were detected by the OGPU and arrested; but their existence at a time when the punishments for ‘factionalism’ were increasing in severity showed how restive the party had become.
Then there were the oppositionist leaders waiting for a chance to return to the Politburo: Kamenev and Zinoviev had publicly recanted and been allowed to return to the party in 1928; Bukharin had avoided expulsion from the party by publicly accepting official party policy in November 1929. Their professions of loyalty convinced no one, and Trotski was quick about publishing his Bulletin of the Opposition from abroad and initiating a secret correspondence with several disaffected communist officials.35 All these disgraced former leaders knew that they could count on many existing party functionaries, activists and rank-and-file members to support them if ever an opportunity arose.
They might also be able to appeal to the persons who had walked out on the party or had been expelled: there were about 1,500,000 such individuals by 1937.36 In addition, the Socialist-Revolutionaries had possessed a million members in 1917, the Mensheviks a quarter of a million. Dozens of other parties in Russia and the borderlands had also existed. Huge sections of the population had always hated the entire Bolshevik party. Whole social strata were embittered: priests, shopkeepers, gentry, mullahs, industrialists, traders and ‘bourgeois specialists’. Among these ‘former people’ (byvshie lyudi), as the Bolsheviks brusquely described persons of influence before the October Revolution, hatred of Bolshevism was strong. Many peasants and workers had felt the same. And Stalin had made countless new enemies for the party. Collectivization, de-kulakization, urban show-trials and the forced-labour penal system had wrought suffering as great as had occurred in the Civil War.
Stalin had engineered a second revolution; he had completed the groundwork of an economic transformation. But his victory was not yet totally secure. For Stalin, the realization of the First Five-Year Plan could only be the first victory in the long campaign for his personal dictatorship and his construction of a mighty industrial state.
10
Fortresses under Storm: Culture, Religion, Nation
Stalin’s ambition was not confined to economics and politics. Like other Bolsheviks, he had always seen that the creation of a communist society necessitated further changes. Communist leaders also aspired to raise the level of education and technical skills in the population. They wished to expand the social base of their support; they had to dissolve Soviet citizens’ attachment to their national identity and religion. Bolshevism stood for literacy, numeracy, internationalism and atheism, and this commitment was among the reasons for the replacement of the NEP with the First Five-Year Plan.
Of all the regime’s achievements, it was its triumph over illiteracy that earned the widest esteem – and even anti-Bolsheviks were among the admirers. Education was treated as a battlefront. Only forty per cent of males between nine and forty-nine years of age had been able to read and write in 1897; this proportion had risen to ninety-four per cent by 1939.1 The number of schools rose to 199,000 by the beginning of the 1940–41 academic year.2 They were built not only in the denser areas of habitation like Russia and Ukraine but also in the most far-flung parts of the country such as Uzbekistan. Pedagogical institutes were created to train a generation of young teachers to take up their duties not only in schools for children and adolescents but also in polytechnics, night-schools and factory clubs for adults. Compulsory universal schooling was implemented with revolutionary gusto. The USSR was fast becoming a literate society.
As workers and ex-peasants thronged into the new educational institutions, they could buy reading materials at minimal cost. Pravda and Izvestiya in the 1930s were sold daily for ten kopeks, and the print-run of newspapers rose from 9.4 million copies in 1927 to 38 million in 1940.3 Other literature, too, was avidly purchased. The poet Boris Slutski recalled: ‘It may have been stupid economically, but books were sold for next to nothing, more cheaply than tobacco and bread.’4
Revenues were also channelled into the provision of inexpensive facilities for relaxation. By the end of the 1930s the USSR had 28,000 cinemas.5 Football, ice-hockey, athletics and gymnastics were turned into large sports for both participants and spectators. All-Union, republican, regional and local competitions proliferated across the country. For those who wanted quieter forms of recreation, ‘houses of culture’ were available with their own reading-rooms, notice-boards, stages and seating. Each medium-sized town had its theatre. Drama and ballet became popular with a public which looked forward to visits by companies on tour from Moscow. The authorities also laid aside space for parks. Families took Sunday strolls over public lawns – and the largest of all was the Park of Culture, which was named after the novelist Maksim Gorki, in the capital.
As in other industrial countries, the radio was becoming a medium of mass communication. Performers and commentators based in Moscow became celebrities throughout the USSR. News reports vied for attention with symphony concerts and variety entertainments. The telephone network was widened. Communications between district and district, town and town, republic and republic were impressively strengthened.
The foundation of new cities such as Magnitogorsk was celebrated (although Pravda was not allowed to report that a segment of the labour-force used for the construction consisted of Gulag prisoners).6 Housing was not built as fast as factories. But Russian towns whose houses had been chiefly of wooden construction were becoming characterized by edifices of brick and stone; and most new dwellings were apartments in immense blocks whose heating was supplied by communal boilers. The steam escaping through air-vents was a feature of the broad thoroughfares. The internal combustion engine took the place of horse-drawn vehicles for people going about their working lives. Goods were transported in lorries. In Moscow, the first section of the underground railway came into operation in 1935. A fresh style of life was introduced in remarkably short time so that Stalin’s slogan that ‘there are no fortresses the Bolsheviks cannot storm!’ seemed justified.
Thus a triumph for ‘modernity’ was claimed as the USSR advanced decisively towards becoming an urban, literate society with access to twentieth-century industrial technology; and Stalin’s adherents declared their modernity superior to all others by virtue of its being collectivist. The typical apartment block contained flats called kommunalki. Each such flat was occupied by several families sharing the same kitchen and toilet. Cafeterias were provided at workplaces so that meals need not be taken at home. The passenger vehicles produced by automotive factories were mainly buses and trams rather than cars – and such cars as were manufactured were bought mainly by institutions and not by individuals. State enterprises, which had a monopoly of industrial output from the end of the NEP, were steered away from catering for the individual choices of consumers. Whereas capitalism manufactured each product in a competitive variety, communism’s rationale was that this competition involved a waste of resources. Why waste money by developing and advertising similar products?
And so a pair of boots, a table, a light-bulb or a tin of sardines bought in Vladivostok or Archangel or Stavropol would have the same size and packaging. Clothing, too, became drab; local styles of attire disappeared as kolkhozniks were issued with working clothes fr
om the factories and as village artisans ceased production. Standardization of design, too, was a basic governmental objective. Uniformity had been installed as a key positive value. Stalin was proud of his policies. Brazenly he announced to a mass meeting: ‘Life has become better, life has become gayer!’7
The changes in life were not better or gayer for everyone. Wage differentials had been sharply widened; material egalitarianism, which had anyway not been practised even in the October Revolution, was denounced. The administrative élites were amply rewarded in a society which had undergone huge structural change since the NEP. Spivs, grain-traders, shopkeepers and workshop owners had gone the way of the aristocracy, the gentry and the ‘big bourgeoisie’. The administrators had the cash to pay for goods in the sole retail outlets where high-quality consumer goods were on legal sale. These were state shops belonging to the Torgsin organization. In a Torgsin shop a previously well-off citizen could deposit some family heirloom which the shop would sell at a commission on the citizen’s behalf.8 Stalin’s economy was not all tractors, tanks and canals; it was also luxury goods, albeit luxury goods that were not being made in Soviet factories but were being sold on by individuals who had fallen on hard times since 1917.
By means of these blandishments the Politburo aimed to ensure that the stratum of newly promoted administrators would remain keen supporters of the NEP’s abandonment; and such persons were a large proportion of the fourfold increase in the number of state employees in institutions of education, health, housing, and public administration between 1926 and the end of the 1930s. But life was tough even for the middle-ranking administrators. The new schools, apartment blocks, hotels and kindergartens took years to build. Most working-class people, moreover, had yet to benefit at all from the general improvements promised by the Politburo. A generation was being asked to sacrifice its comfort for the benefit of its children and grandchildren. Hunger, violence and chaos were widespread, and the rupture of social linkages drastically increased the sense of loneliness in both the towns and the countryside. This was not a society capable of being at ease with itself.
Stalin, too, felt uneasy lest political opposition might arise inside or outside the party to exploit the situation. His attitude to Martemyan Ryutin, who was arrested in 1932 for leading a secret little group of communists who denounced his despotic rule and called for his removal from power, supplied a terrifying signal of his intentions. The fact that Ryutin had once belonged to the Central Committee apparently did not stop Stalin from calling for his execution. The Politburo instead ordered him to be sentenced to ten years’ detention in the Gulag. This treatment of an oppositionist was horrific by most standards, but was much too light for Stalin’s taste.
Yet he felt compelled to yield somewhat to the warnings being given, inside and outside the party, that failure to reduce the tempos of economic development would result in disaster. Even many of his central and local supporters stressed that conditions in industry were altogether too chaotic for the Second Five-Year Plan, introduced at the beginning of 1933, to be fulfilled in most of its objectives. A hurried re-drafting took place and a lower rate of growth was accepted. The new expectation was for a doubling of the output of industrial producers’ goods in the half-decade before the end of 1937. This was still a very rapid growth, but not at the breakneck speed of the First Five-Year Plan. The Politburo began to lay its emphasis upon completing the construction of the half-built factories and mines and getting them into full production. Consolidation of existing projects became the priority in the industrial sector.9
As policy was being modified in 1932, Bukharin was appointed chief editor of Izvestiya. Meanwhile Sergo Ordzhonikidze, as Chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy in 1930–32 and as People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry from 1932, protected managers and engineers from persecution.10
These modulations in official stance were extended to agriculture, which was in a frightful condition. In 1932 the fantastic scheme to increase state grain procurements by nearly thirty per cent over the previous year was quietly abandoned. The total of cereal crops actually obtained by the state did not rise at all, but dropped by nearly a fifth.11 A decree was passed in the same year permitting the establishment of ‘kolkhoz markets’, where peasants could trade their surplus produce so long as they worked on those few kolkhozes which had fulfilled their quota of deliveries to the state. Another decree in 1933 allowed each household in a kolkhoz to cultivate a garden allotment for personal consumption or sale. Private profit was reintroduced even though it was banned from official terminology. In any case, these concessions were restricted to the margins of economic activity. Most industry, agriculture and commerce remained under strict state control; and the mass deportation of kulaks was intensified in the Kuban region and the North Caucasus. Yet the lesson had been learned that not even the economy of Stalin’s USSR could function without some residual components of the market.
And so the hope was inspired in some observers that Stalin’s demeanour during the First Five-Year Plan had been an aberration and that he would revert to less severe methods. Perhaps the party was about to return to the NEP. When he told the Central Committee plenum in January 1933 that he would not ‘go on whipping the country’, he was heard with relief by most of his listeners.12
Yet at the same plenum he bared his tigrine fangs as he advanced the following proposition: ‘The abolition of classes is not obtained through the elimination of class struggle but through its reinforcement.’13 For Stalin, his victory in the First Five-Year Plan was an occasion for the intensification rather than the relaxation of state violence. He pounced on his friend Ordzhonikidze for objecting to trials being held of officials from the People’s Commissariats for Heavy Industry and Agriculture. According to Stalin, Ordzhonikidze was guilty of hooliganism while Kaganovich, who was not unsympathetic to Ordzhonikidze, was accused of joining ‘the camp of the party’s reactionary elements’.14 The Boss, as his associates referred to him, was prowling with menace. The gravest snub he suffered face to face came not from an associate but from his wife Nadezhda, who seems to have agreed with Bukharin that the countryside had been ravaged by mass collectivization. Nor was she willing to tolerate his alleged flirtations with other women. After an altercation with him in November 1932, she had gone outside and shot herself.15
He had always been a solitary fellow, but the suicide of Nadezhda, whom he had loved despite their stormy relationship, shoved him further into himself. Stalin’s early life had been hard. Born to a Georgian couple in the little town of Gori near Tiflis, his real name was Iosif Dzhugashvili. His birthday was given out officially as 21 December 1879; but the parish records indicate that he entered this world a year earlier.16 Why he wished to alter the date remains a mystery; but, whatever his reasons, such a desire was in keeping with a man who liked to manipulate the image that others held of him.
Iosif’s father was a child-beating drunkard who died leaving the family penniless; but Katerina Dzhugashvili, the mother of Iosif, managed to have him enrolled in the Tiflis Ecclesiastical Seminary. He quickly picked up the Russian language and the rhythms of the catechism; but he was also rebellious: like thousands of adolescents of his generation, he preferred revolutionary literature to the Bible. After being expelled from the seminary, he wandered over the Transcaucasus picking up odd jobs and getting involved with clandestine political circles. When news of the split of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party reached him, he sided with the Bolsheviks whereas most Georgian Marxists became Mensheviks. Young Dzhugashvili, whose pseudonym was first Koba and then Stalin (or ‘Man of Steel’), reacted positively to themes of dictatorship, terror, modernity, progress and leadership in Lenin’s writings.
Stalin became an organizer for the Bolsheviks and so underwent arrest several times. His articles on the ‘national question’ commended him to Lenin as ‘the wonderful Georgian’, and he was co-opted to the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912. He was sent to St Petersburg to edit th
e legal Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, but was quickly captured and exiled to Siberia. There he stayed until 1917. A street accident he had suffered as a lad left him with a slightly shortened arm, and because of this he escaped conscription into the Imperial Army.
Returning to the Russian capital after the February Revolution, he was not fêted to the extent of Lenin and the émigré veterans. He seemed unimpressive alongside them. Unlike them, he had made only brief trips abroad. He could not speak German or French or English. He was a poor orator, a plodding theorist and a prickly character. Yet his organizational expeditiousness was highly valued, and he joined the inner core of the Central Committee before the October Revolution. Thereafter he became People’s Commissar for Nationalities in the first Sovnarkom and served uninterruptedly in the Party Politburo from 1919. In the Civil War he was appointed as leading political commissar on several fronts and was regarded by Lenin as one of his most dependable troubleshooters, acquiring a reputation for a fierce decisiveness. In 1920 he added the chairmanship of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate to his list of posts, and in 1922 became General Secretary of the Party Central Committee.
Stalin’s rivals in his own party would soon pay dearly for their condescension. He was crude and brutal even by Bolshevik standards, and was proud of the fact. On the Southern front in 1918 he had put villages to the torch to terrorize the peasantry of an entire region, and but for Lenin’s intervention would have drowned scores of innocent former Imperial Army officers on a prison barge moored on the river Volga.
But Stalin’s rivals had no excuse for underestimating Stalin’s intelligence. His lack of intellectual sophistication did not mean that he was unmotivated by ideas; and he was conscious enough of the gaps in his education to take on Jan Sten as a private tutor in philosophy in the 1920s.17 He was also a voracious reader, supposedly getting through a daily quota of 500 pages.18 Although his objects of study changed, his orientation was constant. He despised middle-class experts, believing that the regime could train up its own ‘specialists’ in short order. The ‘filth’ from the old days ought to be cleansed (or ‘purged’); social, economic and political problems should not be allowed to await solution. Those persons deemed responsible for the survival of such problems had to be physically exterminated. Let saboteurs and renegades perish! Let there be steel, iron and coal! Long live comrade Stalin!
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 24
