Yet the uppermost élite lived in somewhat greater safety than in 1937–8. Stalin could not afford to reduce his associates to the condition of robots: he needed them to accompany their self-abasement before him with a dynamic ruthlessness in the discharge of their tasks – and to give orders on their own initiative. Laws, decrees, regulations and commands were produced in profusion in this period of frightful legal abusiveness.18 But, as under Lenin, office-holders were given to understand that they would not be assessed on the basis of their adherence to procedural norms. What would ultimately count for or against them was their record of practical results.
At the supreme and middling levels they had to combine the talents of cardinals, condottieri and landed magnates: they had to be propagators of Marxism-Leninism; they had to fight for the policies of the party; and each of them had to assemble a band of followers who would carry out orders throughout the area of their patron’s responsibility. The unavoidable result was that Stalin had to settle for a less amenable administration than he had aimed to establish by means of the Great Terror. Just as he needed his cronies, so they needed cronies of their own. The cliental groupings therefore stayed in place. For example, Postyshev’s team in the Ukrainian party leadership gave way to Khrushchëv’s team when Stalin sent Khrushchëv to Kiev in 1938; and Beria likewise cleared out Yezhov’s team from the NKVD and installed his own: it was the only available way to ensure the substitution of reliable anti-Yezhovites.
Not only vertically but also horizontally the old administrative practices stayed in place. In June 1937 Stalin had complained: ‘It’s thought that the centre must know everything and see everything. No, the centre doesn’t see everything: it’s not like that at all. The centre sees only a part and the remainder is seen in the localities. It sends people without knowing these people one hundred per cent. You must check them out.’19 But new local ‘nests’ or ‘family circles’ were formed almost as soon as Stalin destroyed the existing ones. Wheeling and dealing occurred among the heads of party, soviet, police, army and enterprise management; local officials protected each other against the demands made by central authorities. More than ever, lying to Moscow was a skill crucial for physical survival. Institutions had to fiddle the accounts so as to exaggerate achievements enough to win acclaim, but not to the point that the following year’s quotas would be raised intolerably high.
Such evasiveness was not confined to officialdom. A black market existed in those many types of product which were in severe deficit in the USSR. Moisei Kaganovich, brother of Stalin’s close associate, loudly objected to the general evidence of disobedience: ‘The earth ought to tremble when the director walks around the plant!’ In theory the managerial stratum was obliged to give its work-forces a harder time than since the October Revolution. But the potential for harshness was limited outside the forced-labour camps by the chronic shortage of skilled free labour. Strict time-keeping and conscientious work could not be enforced if hired labourers could simply wander off and find employment elsewhere. A kind of social concordat was established whereby managers overlooked labour indiscipline so long as they could hang on to their workers. Records were written to over-state a worker’s technical qualifications or his hours of attendance or his output. Managers had to break the law in order to fulfil their own quotas.20
In every branch of the economy it was the same story. Even in the kolkhozes and the sovkhozes the local authorities found it convenient to make compromises with the work-forces. A blind eye was turned to the expansion of the size of peasants’ private plots.21 Regular contribution of ‘labour days’ was not always insisted upon. Illicit borrowing of the farm’s equipment was overlooked by the chairman who needed to keep the peasants on his side in order to fulfil the governmental quotas.
The central political leadership had been encouraging the workers and kolkhozniks to denounce factory directors and farm chairmen for their involvement in sabotage; but the end of the Great Terror led to a renewed emphasis on labour discipline. Increasingly draconian punishments were introduced. Managers in town and countryside were threatened with imprisonment if they failed to report absenteeism, lack of punctuality, sloppy workmanship as well as theft and fraud. According to a decree of December 1938, labourers who were late for work three times in a month should be sacked. Another decree in June 1940 stated that such behaviour should incur a penalty of six months’ corrective labour at their place of work.22 Stalin also tightened his grip on the collective farms. A decree of May 1939 ordered local authorities to seize back land under illegal private cultivation by kolkhozniks.23 But the fact that such measures were thought necessary showed that, at the lower levels of administration, non-compliance with the demands of the central authorities was widespread. Sullen, passive resistance had become a way of life.
The Soviet order therefore continued to need a constant dosage of excitation in order to keep functioning. Otherwise the institutions of party and government would tend to relapse into quietude as officials pursued personal privilege and bureaucratic compromise. Ideological apathy would also increase. The provision of dachas, nannies, special shops and special hospitals was already well developed in the 1920s; and, with the termination of the Great Terror, these benefits were confirmed as the patrimony of Stalin’s ruling subordinates. How to ensure a lively discomfort among the central and local nomenklaturas?
Or indeed among all sections of the USSR’s society? Denunciation by ordinary workers became a routine method of controlling politicians and administrators. Stalin knew that anonymous letter-writing was open to abuse; and yet he fostered the practice in order to keep all leaders in a state of trepidation. Likewise he reinforced Pravda’s custom of carrying out muck-raking investigations in a specific locality. The idea was that an exposé of malpractice would stimulate the eradication of similar phenomena elsewhere. Stalin and his colleagues were attracted to a campaigning style of work. Time after time the central political authorities imposed a fresh organizational technique or a new industrial product, and used the press to demand enthusiastic local obedience. Reluctantly they had accepted that Stakhanovism caused more disruption than increase in output; but the pressurizing of managers and workers to over-fulfil plans was an unchanging feature.24
These traditions had existed since 1917; but Stalin relied upon them to a greater extent than Lenin. Organizational pressure and ideological invocation, in the absence of the predominant stimulus of the market, were the principal instruments available to him apart from resort to the security police. A structural imperative was at work. Stalin’s preferences gave strength to the practices, but the practices were also necessary for the maintenance of the regime.
The central authorities aimed at the total penetration of society. The Great Terror had smashed down nearly all associations that competed with the regime for popularity. The only surviving potential challenge of an organized nature came from the religious bodies, and all of these were in a deeply traumatized condition. It was the aim of the authorities that no unit of social life – not only the tribe and the clan but also even the family – might be left free from their control. Within the walls of each family home there could be talk about the old days before the October Revolution and about values and traditions other than the Marxist-Leninist heritage. Discussions between parents and their children therefore became a matter for governmental concern. In 1932 a fourteen-year-old village boy called Pavlik Morozov had denounced his father for fraud. The peasants on the same kolkhoz were enraged by such filial perfidy, and lynched the lad. Young Pavlik became a symbol of the official duty of each citizen to support the state’s interest even to the point of informing upon his parents.
Other groups, too, attracted Stalin’s persecution. No recreational or cultural club was permitted to exist unless it was run by the state; and harmless groups of philatelists, Esperantists and ornithologists were broken up by the arrest of their members. Labourers had to watch their tongues when gathering together over a glass of vodka in taverns; in
tellectuals were wary of sharing their thoughts with each other in the kommunalki in case their neighbours might overhear them. NKVD informers were everywhere and everyone learned to exercise extreme caution.
Lower than this level, however, the Soviet state found it difficult to achieve its goals. The plan was to maximize the influence over people as individuals. Citizens were permitted to act collectively only when mobilized by party and government. But the groups based on family, wider kinship, friendship, leisure and a common culture were molecules resistant to disintegration into separate atoms.25 The difficulties for the authorities were compounded by the abrupt, massive process of urbanization: a third of the population of the USSR lived in towns and cities by 1940: this was double the proportion three decades earlier. The newcomers from the villages brought with them their folk beliefs, their religion and even their forms of organizations; for some of them, when leaving their villages, stayed together in zemlyachestva, which were the traditional groups based upon geographical origin. In the short term the influx had a ‘ruralizing’ effect as former villagers introduced their habits and expectations to the towns.26
If customary patterns of behaviour caused problems for the political leadership, so too did newer ones. Under the First Five-Year Plan there had been a drastic loosening of moral restraints and social ties. Juvenile delinquency reportedly increased by 100 per cent between 1931 and 1934. Hooliganism was rife not only in the new shanty-cities under construction but also in the old metropolitan centres. In 1935 there were three times as many abortions as births. The incidence of divorce rose sharply. Promiscuity was rampant. Vital social linkages were at the point of dissolution.27
Even before the Great Terror the authorities had seen the risks of this situation. Measures were taken to restore a degree of stability. Respect for parents and teachers was officially stressed from 1935. There were curtailments of the rights to get a divorce and to have an abortion in 1936. Awards were to be made to ‘mother-heroines’ who had ten or more children. School uniforms were reintroduced for the first time since 1917. Discipline at school, at work and at home was officially demanded and most of the new inhabitants of the towns went along with this. But their behaviour displeased the authorities in other respects. Peasants were thought unhygienic, ignorant and stupid. They needed, in the contemporary phrase, to become kul’turnye (‘cultured’). Campaigns were organized to rectify the situation. People were instructed to wash their hands and faces, brush their teeth and dress smartly in the dourly Soviet manner. Men were told that beards were unmodern. Even Kaganovich, at Stalin’s behest, had to shave off his beard.28
It was therefore for pragmatic reasons that political leaders began in the mid-1930s to give encouragement to the family and to rather traditional proprieties. But this shift in policy occurred within carefully-maintained parameters. Stalin was determined that it should not culminate in the disintegration of the October Revolution.
He similarly aimed to hold expressions of Russian nationhood under control. His particular stratagem was to attempt to amalgamate ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet’ identities. Thus Russians were to be induced to take much pride in Russia but even greater pride in the USSR. There were indeed many achievements about which the Soviet state could boast in the 1930s. Daring expeditions were made to the frozen Russian north, where gold, oil and other precious deposits were discovered. Records were broken by Valeri Chkalov and other aviators who flew over the North Pole. Gymnastic displays were frequent and football became a popular sport across the USSR. The Moscow Metro was renowned for its sumptuous frescos, candelabra and immaculate punctuality. Almost every edition of Pravda carried a large photograph of some young hero who had accomplished some great feat – and in 1937–8 there were more pictures of such persons than of Stalin himself on the first page of the newspaper.29 The popularity of such successes was among the reasons why he got away with his bloody mass purges.
Science, mathematics and technology were also celebrated. Bolsheviks had always dreamed of engineering an entirely new physical environment, and Lenin had minted the slogan: ‘Communism equals electrification plus soviet power.’ Under the NEP, few advances were made either in academic research or in the diffusion of up-to-date technology. But things changed under Stalin, who put the resources of the Soviet state firmly behind such efforts.
The authorities demanded that scientists should produce work that would benefit the economy. The goals included not only electrification but also ‘radiofication’ and ‘tractorization’. Close control was imposed upon research, often with baleful results: many researchers languished in Siberian labour camps. At the same time the fraudulent geneticist Timofei Lysenko, exploiting his access to Stalin, built up a sparkling career; and one particular foreign adventurer is alleged to have been given funds for the rearing of herds of giant rabbits.30 (This was surely the most hare-brained of all Stalinist schemes!) Nevertheless science in general made immense progress in the USSR and acquired world renown. Pëtr Kapitsa did brilliant work on low-temperature physics and became director of the Institute of Physical Problems in Moscow. Alexei Bakh was a founding father of biochemistry. The veteran physiologist Ivan Pavlov remained at work through to his death in 1935, and other giants of the period were the physicists Lev Landau and Yevgeni Lifshits. Promising youths such as Andrei Sakharov were being trained by them to serve the country’s interests.
Literature, too, was accorded prestige; but, as with science, Stalin supported activity only insofar as it assisted his ulterior purposes and this naturally affected its quality. Notoriously, he dragooned Maksim Gorki and others to write a eulogistic account entitled ‘Stalin’s White Sea – Baltic Canal’.31 Other participating writers included Mikhail Zoshchenko, Valentin Kataev, Alexei Tolstoy and Viktor Shklovski. All artistic figures went in fear of their lives. Many of the country’s most glorious poets, novelists, painters, film directors and composers came to an untimely end. Isaak Babel was shot; Osip Mandelshtam perished in the Gulag; Marina Tsvetaeva, whose husband and son were slaughtered by the NKVD, committed suicide. The despairing Mikhail Bulgakov died of nephritis outside prison. Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak lived a living death, not knowing why they had been spared the fate of others.
Just a few works of merit, such as Andrei Platonov’s stories, were published in the late 1930s. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, with its phantasmagoric portrayal of the clowns and bureaucrats of contemporary Moscow, lay in his desk drawer. None of the wonderful elegies by Mandelshtam, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva on the fate of their country appeared in print. Pasternak wanted to survive and, if this involved keeping his decent poems to himself, he understandably thought it a price worth paying. In 1934 the founding Congress of the Union of Writers was held and the principle of ‘socialist realism’ became officially mandatory. This meant that ‘the truthfulness and historical concreteness of artistic portrayal must be in harmony with the objective of the ideological transformation and education of the workers in the spirit of socialism’. Above all, the arts had to be optimistic. The typical novel would involve a working-class hero who undertakes a task such as the construction of a dam or a housing block and fulfils it against near-miraculous odds.
Reconditeness in theme or style was forbidden not only in literature but also in music. Stalin wanted melodies that were whistlable, and wonderful composers and Marxist-Leninist sympathizers such as Dmitri Shostakovich fell into disgrace for their atonalities and discords. Stalin’s taste leant in the direction of the less demanding pre-revolutionary Russian classics: he adored Glinka and Chaikovski. Indeed the ballet and the symphony concert were becoming the favourite evening entertainment for the central party élite. Patriotic (nay, chauvinistic!) films such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible and novels about the tsars by Alexei Tolstoy were also admired. Lighter mental fare, too, was provided. Spy novels, patriotic doggerel and folk-songs were popular, and many theatres specialized in ‘light entertainment’. Love ditties were particular favourites with the audien
ces. Jazz and Western ballroom dancing were also increasingly common.32
The opportunities for cultural self-edification and recreation were widely welcomed; but what most people wanted above all else was an improvement in their material situation. Food shortages had troubled most Soviet citizens since the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan. And things were gradually getting a little better. Bread, meat, sugar were among several staple products no longer rationed from 1934–5. All rationing was abolished in 1936, and material provision improved for most non-arrested people in the late 1930s. Cheap food in work-place cafeterias also made a welcome contribution to the average diet.33 Admittedly the meals were basic, lacking in taste and favourite traditional ingredients. But the general trend was at last turning towards betterment. The network of free educational and medical establishments was also expanded and people in employment received their work-clothes free of charge. Such changes proved a surer means of ensuring acquiescence than compulsory study of the Short Course.
Many workers and kolkhozniks were anyway pleased by the repression of peremptory, privileged administrators. Sometimes there was a xenophobic aspect to popular attitudes – and Pravda played cunningly upon worries about spies and about the military threats from abroad. Furthermore, the Bolsheviks who had made the October Revolution included a disproportionate number of non-Russians, especially Jews.34 Indeed many relished the discomfiture of such people. At last the biters were being bitten. Nor were the mass media always disbelieved when they claimed that ‘wreckers’ and ‘spies’ existed in a countless quantity.35 Practically everyone had experienced a breakdown in factory machinery, in public transport or in the supply of food. The years of industrialization and collectivization had been exceptionally turbulent, and it was not hard to persuade people that sabotage was widespread. Moreover, Russian peasants had a tradition of dealing severely with the wrong-doers in their midst. There was a certain amount of popular approval for the harsh punishment of those whom Stalin purged.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 30
