The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  He had broken the party as an independent, supreme political agency. Five years passed after the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 before he would permit another Congress to convene, and he restricted the Central Committee to one plenum in 1939. The Politburo was ceasing to meet on a regular, formal basis: Stalin preferred to hold discussions with whatever group of Politburo members suited his purposes at the time.69 The NKVD’s star had risen while the party’s had fallen; and Beria, when replacing Yezhov, entered the small circle of Stalin’s close advisers. The ‘organs’, as the security police were known, were at Stalin’s elbow whenever he needed them. Fearsome as it was, moreover, the NKVD itself operated in dread of Stalin. In consequence of the Great Terror of 1937–8, therefore, Stalin had succeeded in elevating himself above party, people’s commissariats, army, trade unions and police.

  He fostered tension among these powerful institutions so as to maintain his towering position. Communists had typically given little mind to the demarcation of functions among state bodies since the October Revolution; they despised such pernicketiness as an obstacle to communist progress. Stalin exploited this attitude to his personal advantage. The NKVD conflicted with the Red Army, the Red Army with various People’s Commissariats, the Commissariats with the Central Council of Trade Unions and the Central Council with the Party Central Committee.

  After 1938 these clashes were mainly bureaucratic squabbles; they often involved differing orientations of policy, but they were less frequently accompanied by mass arrests. All public institutions, while abjectly professing loyalty to Stalin, were confirmed in their power over the rest of society. The Soviet state was authoritative as never before. Satisfied that he had brought the party to heel, Stalin restored its prestige and authority somewhat. The salaries of its functionaries were raised. In December 1938 the NKVD was ordered to seek permission from the party apparatus before taking any official of the party into custody; and, at the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, Beria stressed that not all the economic problems of the USSR were attributable to sabotage. It was even admitted that a great many expulsions from the party – which in 1937–8 had typically led to arrests – had been unjustified. Stalin confirmed the fresh attitude by asserting the necessity to ‘value cadres like the gold reserves of the party and state, esteem them, have respect for them’.70

  The applause which greeted this statement of monumental hypocrisy stemmed from a feeling of relief that the party might again enjoy durable favour. Other institutions were similarly reassured; but the party remained rather special. It incarnated continuity with the October Revolution, with Lenin, with Marxism-Leninism, with the Communist International. It provided the ideological cement to help to maintain the Soviet state. Its cohesive capacity was equally important organizationally: holders of governmental, administrative and military office were virtually obliged to be party members and to operate under the party’s discipline; and the party apparatus, at the centre and elsewhere, helped to co-ordinate state institutions.

  Furthermore, citizens of the USSR were acutely aware of their state’s immense and pervasive powers. The Great Terror, following quickly after the violent campaigns of collectivization and industrialization, left no one in doubt about the consequences of overt disobedience. The kind of conversation held by the visiting American engineer John Scott with Soviet managers in the early 1930s about the inefficiency of a particular coal-mine no longer took place. Similarly, the complaining talk among workers recorded at the beginning of the decade by the ex-Menshevik Viktor Kravchenko became more discreet by its end. Oppositional leaflets of discontented party activists, which still appeared as late as 1933, had become antiquarian artefacts. Officials in every institution and at every level were wary of saying the slightest thing that might conceivably be interpreted as disloyal. The traumatization had been profound, and the carnage of 1937–8 left a mark on popular consciousness that endures.

  12

  Coping with Big Brothers

  By the late 1930s the term totalitarianism was being widely used to describe the kind of state and society that Stalin had engineered. Benito Mussolini had applied it in reference to his own fascist Italy nearly two decades earlier. Commentators on Soviet politics, while recognizing contrasts in ideology, saw fascism, nazism and communism as sharing basic features in their methods of rule. In Moscow as in Berlin there was a dominant leader and a one-party state. Both countries had witnessed a merciless crushing of internal opposition. The state not only monopolized the instrumentalities of coercion but also dominated the means of mass communication. It allowed no challenge to the single official ideology. There was persecution of any independent individual, organization or institution standing between the central state bodies and ordinary citizens. Total, unmediated pervasion of society by his power was each leader’s aspiration.

  That something close to this had been Stalin’s underlying objective in carrying through the Great Terror there can be little doubt. Yet his power was not absolute. Those who had carried out the bloody purges knew that, in order to survive, they had to use the practices of patronage and mutual protection which Stalin had hoped to eradicate. And Stalin himself had had to scale down his totalist aims in the course of the Terror. Concessions to Russian national pride had been strengthened. Moreover, not all public entertainments were heavily political: frivolity existed even in Stalin’s USSR. Stalin felt the need to identify himself with the aspirations of the people he governed. This fearsome dictator had fears of his own.

  Yet he could take comfort from the knowledge that he had promoted a vast number of newly-trained young activists. The central nomenklatura of personnel involved in state economic management had risen to 32,899 posts. Of these, 14,585 at the beginning of 1939 had been appointed in the past two years – forty-seven per cent of the total. In the Red Army the proportion was also remarkable: Stalin had purged the officer corps at its highest levels with particular thoroughness. The apparatus of the party, too, had been overhauled. Four out of five provincial committee first secretaries had joined the party after Lenin’s death; ninety-one per cent of them had yet to reach the age of forty (and sixty-two per cent were less than thirty-five years old).1 A cohort of young men gained advancement who were later to govern the country through to the early 1980s: Mikhail Suslov, Dmitri Ustinov, Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny. It was a new élite and it was Stalin’s élite.

  Most of its members were workers or peasants who had taken the opportunities offered by the Soviet authorities to get themselves educated. Over half of the voting delegates to the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 had completed their secondary schooling.2 Their adult life and their politics marked them off from the generation of Old Bolsheviks: they had not operated in the clandestine Bolshevik groups before 1917; they had not made the October Revolution or fought in the Civil War; and their Marxism was not their intellectual passion but a crude creed purveyed to them by the party’s agitation-and-propaganda departments.

  They were taught to obey and be vigilant; their obligation was not only to ‘unmask’ traitors but also to engage in ‘self-criticism’ whenever they could not fulfil orders. Simultaneously they were cajoled to clamber up the ladder of promotion. The administrative hierarchy in the USSR was much simpler than in advanced capitalist societies: the duties, perks and authority accompanying each post were evident to every ambitious man and woman. The Soviet Union was distinguished by a uniformity of work-style and by great symbolism and ceremony. Not only military but also civilian medals were worn in normal public life: even Molotov sported a Hero of the Soviet Union badge on his suit’s lapel. Outstanding actors, opera singers and clowns were awarded the title of ‘People’s Artist of the USSR’; and when national gatherings were held in the capital, ritual obeisance to Stalin was compulsory: the big decisions had been taken in advance by the party leadership.

  The promotees could hardly believe their luck. Most of them were persons who had not dreamed of staying in a hotel or even
having a healthy diet earlier in their lives. As the Great Terror came to an end, they became able to enjoy their privileged conditions. The gap between the rulers and the ruled widened. In 1940, Stalin approved the introduction of fees to be paid by parents for students in the last three years of secondary school and at university. High-ranking administrators were in a better position to find the necessary finance than any other group in society. A new social class was in the process of formation.3

  Its members acclaimed Stalin as the world’s outstanding philanthropist, leader and theorist. In the 1930s he attempted no lengthy contribution to the canon of Bolshevism: he was too busy killing Bolsheviks. Many among the party’s writers who might have written textbooks for him fell victim to his butchery. A new explication of the principles of Marxism-Leninism was essential for the regime. As regional party secretary M. M. Khataevich had put it in 1935, there was a need for ‘a book of our own, in place of the Bible, that could give a rigorous answer – correct and comprehensible – to the many important questions of the structure of the world’.4 Khataevich perished in the Great Terror; and the project for a grand treatise on Marxism was not realized until after Stalin’s death. In the meantime the gap was filled by a book with a narrower title, The History of the All-Union Communist Party: A Short Course.

  The main authors were veteran party loyalists V. G. Knorin, E. M. Yaroslavski and P. N. Pospelov. But Stalin closely supervised the contents and personally wrote the sub-chapter on ‘dialectical and historical materialism’. To most intents and purposes he was the textbook’s general editor and hid behind the pseudonym of ‘a commission of the Central Committee’.

  The Short Course traced the rise of the Bolsheviks from the political struggles against the Romanov monarchy through to Stalin’s ascendancy. The last section of the final chapter dealt with ‘the Liquidation of the Remnants of the Bukharinite-Trotskyist Gang of Spies, Wreckers and Traitors to the Country’. Hysterical self-righteousness imbued the book. Stalin wanted to stress that Marxism provided the sole key to understanding both the social life of humanity and even the material universe, and that only Stalin’s variant of Marxism was acceptable. Just as prophet followed prophet in the Old Testament, the Short Course traced a lineage of authentic scientific communism from Marx and Engels through Lenin down to Stalin. According to Stalin, Bolshevism had triumphed predominantly through struggle, often bloody, merciless struggle, and unceasing vigilance.5

  Purportedly its victories had also resulted from the virtues of its leadership. Lenin and Stalin, and subsequently Stalin by himself, had led the Central Committee. The Central Committee had led the communist party and the party had led the masses. In each period of the party’s history there had been maleficent communists such as Trotski and Bukharin who had linked up with kulaks, priests, landlords and tsarist officers at home and capitalist espionage agencies abroad. But in vain! For Comrade Stalin had rooted out the traitors and pointed the party in the direction of the attainment of a perfect society!

  The book divided everything between black and white (or, as Stalin preferred, White and Red). There was no palette of colours in this Stalinist catechism. Violence, intolerance, pitilessness, command, discipline, correctness and science were the central themes. In the USSR of the 1930s this was a conservative set of recommendations. Current holders of office could act without qualms. Stalin’s infallibility meant that they need not question their consciences, even when taking up the posts of innocent dead men and buying up their possessions in the special shops runs by the NKVD. By obeying the Leader, they were acting in complete accord with the requirements of patriotism, class struggle and history. Their power and their privileged life-style were in the natural order of things, and the existence of an impregnable, terrifying Soviet state was the guarantee of the October Revolution’s preservation. The Short Course was a manifesto for Stalin’s style of communist conservatism.

  According to Lenin, however, the communist dictatorship would wither away and be succeeded by a society without any state bodies whatsoever. Stalin brazenly declared that much progress had already been made towards that ultimate goal. The bourgeoisie no longer existed, and a new social and economic order had been built.

  Now it was stated that only three social classes existed: the working class, the peasantry and the ‘working intelligentsia’ (which included everyone with an administrative, managerial or educational post). Therefore the Soviet Union was still a society of classes. But supposedly it was different from all such previous societies inasmuch as the three classes had no reason to conflict with each other. Thus the working class, the peasantry and the intelligentsia had ‘non-antagonistic’ interests and drew common benefit from the state’s provision of employment, education, health care, nutrition and shelter.6 In November 1936, when introducing a new Constitution for the USSR, Stalin proclaimed: ‘Socialism, which is the first phase of communism, has basically been realized in our country.’7 He therefore proposed that the electoral franchise should be made universal. The ‘deprived ones’ (lishentsy) – including former kulaks, White Army officers and priests – should be allowed to vote.8

  Universal civil rights were introduced on paper, and the freedoms of thought, the press, religion, organization and assembly were guaranteed. Furthermore, Stalin insisted that economic rights were as important as political ones. In particular, he drew attention to the guarantees of employment given in the Soviet Union. This led him to claim that the new Constitution proved that the USSR was the most democratic country in the world.

  Stalin was being monumentally insincere. The lishentsy were picked out for repression when the Great Terror began in full earnest in mid-1937. Moreover, the new Constitution itself was laden with stipulations that restricted the exercise of civil freedoms. In the first place, the USSR was defined as ‘a socialist state of the workers and peasants’. Thus the rights of citizens were made entirely subsidiary to the determination to preserve the existing structure and orientation of the Soviet state. No clause in the Constitution expressly sanctioned the All-Union Communist Party’s political monopoly; but only the existing public institutions, including the communist party, were allowed to put up candidates in elections. Formal approval was given in this indirect fashion to the one-party state. Stalin carefully supervised the wording of the final draft and, when introducing the Constitution, specified that the communist dictatorship was not going to be weakened.9

  Not surprisingly the Constitution was not taken seriously by citizens of the USSR.10 Its main admirers were gullible foreigners. The most notorious of them were Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? sought to defend Stalin against the charge that dictatorship of any kind existed in the USSR!11 In the meantime Molotov bluntly affirmed that years would pass before full implementation of all the civil freedoms granted by the Constitution;12 and already in 1933 Stalin himself had contended that, as the party advanced to victory after victory, so the state required strengthening against the bitter onslaughts of its foes at home and abroad. In 1939 he expatiated on this point at the Eighteenth Party Congress: ‘Will our state be retained also in the period of communism? Yes, it will be retained unless capitalist encirclement is liquidated and unless the danger of a military attack from abroad is liquidated.’13

  This contradicted Marxist doctrine inasmuch as communism was supposed to involve the ‘withering away of the state’. But Stalin ignored such a nicety; his overriding aim was to reinforce the regimentative aspects of Bolshevism. The Congress delegates were anyway not the sort to worry about interpretations of Marxism. They were also well accustomed to the fact that the USSR was a terror-state. At the same Eighteenth Congress Stalin alluded to this in his po-faced comment that, whereas the elections to the USSR Supreme Soviet yielded a 98.6 per cent vote in favour of the regime after the sentencing of Tukhachevski in 1937, the proportion rose to 99.4 per cent after Bukharin’s trial in 1938.14

  Stalin, needless to say, knew that the more favourable vote derived n
ot from the cogency of the evidence against the alleged traitors but from the intimidating example of their execution. Not even he, however, ruled exclusively through the violence of his security and judicial machinery. He had his equivalent of an old boys’ network, consisting of cronies who had supported him in his past battles and who served him through to his death. The first in political seniority was Molotov. Then came Kaganovich and Mikoyan, who had joined him in the early 1920s. Others included pre-revolutionary party veterans such as Andrei Zhdanov, Andrei Andreev, Nikolai Bulganin and Kliment Voroshilov. Nor did Stalin neglect the young: Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchëv and Georgi Malenkov were hauled up by him from the lower political echelons and promoted to supreme party and government posts.

  The central leadership was like a gang, and Stalin as its leader relied upon his fellow members to organize the state’s institutions. Competence and obedience remained prerequisites of gang membership. The penalty for disagreement with Stalin was constant: ‘seven grams of lead’ in the head.

  Stalin continued to make occasional arrests of cronies. Like Al Capone, he knew how to ‘keep the boys in line’.15 For instance, he asked Khrushchëv whether it was true that he was really a Pole.16 This was quite enough to terrify Khrushchëv, who knew that in 1938 Stalin had executed the Polish communist émigrés in Moscow. The nearer someone was to the apex of power, the more directly he was intimidated by Stalin. People’s commissars trembled at meetings of Sovnarkom. Stalin’s ploy was to get up from the long green-baize table and pad up and down in his soft leather boots behind the seats of his colleagues. It was an unnerving experience. In reply to Stalin’s enquiry about the number of recent plane crashes, air force commander Rychagov, being the worse for drink, blurted out: ‘There will continue to be a high level of accidents because we’re compelled by you to go up in flying coffins.’ The room fell silent as a graveyard, and after a long pause Stalin murmured: ‘You shouldn’t have spoken like that.’ Rychagov was shot a few days later.17