Among the peoples of the USSR he strained to identify himself with the ethnic Russians. In private he talked in his native tongue with those of his intimates who were Georgian; and even his deceased wife Nadezhda Allilueva had Georgian ancestors.3 He ran his supper parties like a Georgian host (although most such hosts would not have thrown tomatoes at his guests as Stalin did).4 But publicly his origins embarrassed him after a war which had intensified the self-awareness and pride of Russians; and his biography referred just once to his own father’s nationality.5 Stalin placed the Russian nation on a pedestal: ‘Among all peoples of our country it is the leading people.’6 Official favour for things Russian went beyond precedent. The lexicographers were told to remove foreign loan-words from the dictionaries. For instance, the Latin-American tango was renamed ‘the slow dance’.7 The history of nineteenth-century science was ransacked and – glory be! – it was found that practically every important invention from the bicycle to the television had been the brainchild of an ethnic Russian.
Simultaneously the Soviet authorities re-barricaded the USSR from alien influences. Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s wife, was imprisoned for greeting the Israeli emissary Golda Meir too warmly. The poet Boris Pasternak was terrified when the Russian-born British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, then serving as a diplomat in Moscow, paid him a visit at home. Stalin expressed the following opinion to Nikita Khrushchëv: ‘We should never allow a foreigner to fly across the Soviet Union.’8 After the war, Kliment Voroshilov placed a ban on the reporting of Canadian ice-hockey results.9 Great Russia always had to be the world’s champion nation. A propaganda campaign was initiated to stress that there should be no ‘bowing down’ before the achievements and potentiality of the West.
All national groups suffered, but some suffered more than others. The cultures of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians – who had only recently been re-conquered – were ravaged. The same occurred to the Romanian-speaking Moldavians; in their case even their language was emasculated: first it was equipped with a Cyrillic alphabet and then its vocabulary compulsorily acquired loan-words from Russian so as to distinguish it strongly from Romanian.10 The Ukrainian language was decreasingly taught to Ukrainian-speaking children in the RSFSR.11 More sinister still was the experience of a philologist who was imprisoned simply for stating that some Finno-Ugric languages had more declensions than Russian. Historiography became ever more imperialist. Shamil, the leader of the nineteenth-century rebellion in the North Caucasus against tsarism, was depicted unequivocally as a reactionary figure. Anyone dead or alive who since time immemorial had opposed the Russian state was prone to be denounced.12
The nationality which underwent the greatest trauma were the Jews. The Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee was closed down without explanation, and its leader and outstanding Yiddish singer Solomon Mikhoels was murdered in a car crash on Stalin’s orders. Several prominent Soviet politicians who happened to be Jewish, such as Semën Lozovski, disappeared into prison.
Stalin, starting with his article on the national question in 1913, refused to describe the Jews as a nation since, unlike the Ukrainians or Armenians, they did not inhabit a particular historic territory. In 1934 he sought to give them a territory of their own by establishing a ‘Jewish Autonomous Region’ in Birobidzhan and asking for volunteers to populate it. But Birobidzhan lay in one of the coldest regions of eastern Siberia. Little enthusiasm was invoked by the project, and after the war there was tentative talk about turning Crimea instead into a Jewish homeland. But in the 1940s Stalin’s unease about the Jews had increased to the point that he cursed his daughter Svetlana for going out with a Jewish boyfriend. Particularly annoying to him was the admiration of many Soviet Jews for the Zionist movement which had founded the state of Israel in 1948. Stalin responded by denouncing ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘rootlessness’. He ignored the fact that Marxists had traditionally opposed nationalism in favour of cosmopolitan attitudes. Restrictions were introduced on the access of Jews to university education and professional occupations. Soviet textbooks ceased to mention that Karl Marx had been Jewish.
Russian chauvinism was rampant. The first party secretary, the police chief and the governmental chairmen in other Soviet republics such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan were invariably of Russian nationality. There was similar discrimination in appointments to other important public offices. Russians were trusted because they, more than any other nation, were thought to have a stake in the retention of the USSR in its existing boundaries.
This imperialism, however, was not taken to its fullest imaginable extent. Ordinary Russians lived as meanly as Ukrainians and Kazakhs; indeed many were worse off than Georgians and other peoples with higher per capita levels of output of meat, vegetables and fruit than Russia. Furthermore, Stalin continued to limit the expression of Russian nationhood. Despite having distorted Marxism-Leninism, he clung on to several of its main tenets. He continued to hold the Russian Orthodox Church in subservience, and practising Christians were debarred from jobs of responsibility throughout the USSR. Stalin also exercised selectivity towards Russian literary classics and allowed no nostalgia about pre-revolutionary village traditions. His version of Russian national identity was so peculiar a mixture of traditions as to be virtually his own invention. The quintessence of Russia, for Stalin, was simply a catalogue of his own predilections: militarism, xenophobia, industrialism, urbanism and gigantomania.
It also embraced a commitment to science. But as usual, Stalin gave things a political twist. His spokesman Zhdanov, despite negligible training, breezily denounced relativity theory, cybernetics and quantum mechanics as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘reactionary’. Crude, ideologically-motivated interventions were made in the research institutes for the natural sciences. The relativist concepts of Einstein were an irritant to the monolithism of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. Zhdanov proclaimed the axiomatic status of absolute notions of space, time and matter; he insisted that an unshifting objective truth existed for all organic and inorganic reality.13
Persecution of scholarship was accompanied by the continued promotion of cranks. By the 1940s the pseudo-scientist Lysenko was claiming to have developed strains of wheat that could grow within the Arctic circle. His gruff manner was attractive to Stalin. The result was disaster for professional biology: any refusal to condone Lysenkoite hypotheses was punished by arrest. Where biology led, chemistry, psychology and linguistics quickly followed. Physics escaped this mauling only because the scientists employed on the Soviet nuclear weapon project convinced Beria that the USSR would not acquire an A-bomb unless they were allowed to use Einstein’s concepts. Stalin muttered to Beria: ‘Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.’14 This grudging indulgence proved the rule. Researchers of all kinds, in the arts as well as in the sciences, were treated as technicians investigating problems strictly within the guidelines prescribed by the state authorities.
Stalin made this crystal clear when he intruded himself into erudite debates among linguisticians. In his quirky booklet of 1950, Marxism and Questions of Linguistics, he took it upon himself to insist that the Russian language originated in the provinces of Kursk and Orël.15 The entire intelligentsia was constrained to applaud the booklet as an intellectual breakthrough and to apply its wisdom to other fields of scholarship. Writers scrambled to outdo each other in praise of Stalin’s injunctions.
The arts suffered alongside the sciences and the wartime cultural semi-truce was brought to an end. Zhdanov again led the assault, describing the poet Anna Akhmatova as ‘half-nun, half-whore’. The short-story writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, who had avoided trouble by writing predominantly for children, was also castigated. Shostakovich could no longer have his symphonies performed. Zhdanov noted that several artists had with held explicit support for the official ideology, and he announced that this ‘idea-lessness’ (bezideinost) would no longer be tolerated. Essentially he was demanding overt adherence to a single set of ideas, ‘Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism’.The various official organ
izations of creative artists were trundled into action. Tikhon Khrennikov, chairman of the Union of Musicians, was rivalled only by Alexander Fadeev, leader of the Union of Writers, in fawning before Zhdanov’s judgements on particular composers, painters, poets and film directors. Such cheer-leaders cried that the arts should be the conveyor-belt for the regime’s commands.
Only rarely did Stalin intervene in Zhdanov’s campaign for Marxist-Leninist compliance. But when he did, the effect was terrifying. For instance, in 1947 Stalin, Zhdanov and Molotov paid a visit to the director Sergei Eisenstein, who was filming the second instalment of his two-part depiction of Ivan the Terrible. To Stalin’s mind, Eisenstein had failed to stress that Tsar Ivan’s terror against the aristocracy had been justified; he urged Eisenstein to ‘show that it was necessary to be ruthless’. The intimidated director – who already had a chronic cardiac complaint – asked for further detailed advice; but Stalin would only reply, in false self-deprecation: ‘I’m not giving you instructions but expressing the comments of a spectator.’ Eisenstein was deeply scared by the conversation. He died a few months later.16
Meanwhile only a few works that were critical of social and economic conditions were permitted. Among the most interesting were the sketches of collective-farm life published by Valentin Ovechkin under the title Rural Daily Rounds. And so Stalin, probably at Khrushchëv’s instigation, permitted a portrait of the troubles of contemporary farming to appear in Pravda. This seepage through the Stalinist cultural dam occurred solely because Politburo members themselves were in dispute about agrarian policy. For the most part, in any case, official propagandists remained utterly self-satisfied, asserting that all Soviet citizens were living in comfort. A massive cookbook was produced in 1952, The Book of Delicious and Healthy Food, which took as its epigraph a quotation from Stalin: ‘The peculiar characteristic of our revolution consists in its having given the people not only freedom but also material goods as well as the opportunity of a prosperous and cultured life.’17
The beneficiaries of the Soviet order were not the ‘people’, not the workers, kolkhozniks and office-clerks. Even doctors, engineers and teachers were poorly paid. But one group in society was certainly indebted to Stalin. This was constituted by the high and middling ranks of the bureaucracy in the ministries, the party, the armed forces and the security organs. The material assets of functionaries were small by the standards of the rich in the West. But they knew how hard life was for the rest of society; they also understood that, if they were unlucky in some way in their career, they might suddenly enter prison despite being innocent of any crime. Immediate pleasure was the priority for them.18
The tone of their lifestyle was set by Politburo members as the ballet and the opera were given the imprimatur of official approval. Stalin patronized the Bolshoi Theatre, favouring its singers with coveted awards. The families of the Politburo went to the spa-town Pyatigorsk in the North Caucasus to take the waters. Occasionally they went to Karlovy Vary in Czechoslovakia. Flats were done up with wallpaper, lamps and chairs that were unobtainable in general stores such as GUM on Red Square. Special shops, special hospitals and special holiday-homes were available to persons of political importance. The compulsory fees that had been introduced in 1940 for pupils wishing to complete their secondary schooling meant that the proportion of working-class entrants to universities fell from forty-five per cent in 1935 to just above twenty-five by 1950.19 The central and local nomenklaturas were steadily turning into a hereditary social group.
But the nomenklatura did not yet flaunt their perks which had to be enjoyed discreetly in deference to the official ultimate aim of social egalitarianism. The Politburo took care to wear modest tunics or dull suits and hats. Ordinary people were given no hint about the tables creaking under the weight of caviar, sturgeon and roast lamb served at Kremlin banquets. Stalin himself lived fairly simply by the standards of several Politburo members; but even he had a governess for his daughter, a cook and several maids, a large dacha at Kuntsevo, an endless supply of Georgian wine and so few worries about money that most of his pay-packets lay unopened at the time of his death. Armed guards secured the privacy of the apartment blocks of the central political élite. Only the domestic servants, nannies and chauffeurs knew the truth about the lifestyle of the nomenklatura.
No wonder the emergent ruling class was determined to keep the foundations of the Soviet order in good repair. The mood of most functionaries was triumphalist; they felt that the USSR’s victory in the Second World War had demonstrated the superiority of communism over capitalism. They themselves were by now better qualified than before the war; they were more literate and numerate and most of them had completed their secondary education. But this in no way diminished their ideological crudity. Far from it: they did not distinguish between the interests of the regime and their own, and they would brook no challenge to their exploitative, repressive measures.
Stalin and his subordinates still talked about the eventual realization of communism, reaffirming that ‘the state will not last forever’.20 But how to create a communist society was not a question under consideration. Far from it. The specific aspirations of the Soviet working class no longer figured prominently in Soviet propaganda. Workers in the rest of the world were called upon to engage in revolutionary struggle, but not in the USSR. At home the main requirement was for patriotism. Stalin implicitly laid down this line even in his Marxism and Questions of Linguistics. For example, he stressed the need to reject the notion that language was the product of class-based factors. This notion had conventionally been propagated by communist zealots who declared that words and grammar were the product of the social imperatives of the ruling class of a given society. Stalin instead wanted Soviet schoolchildren to admire the poetry of the nineteenth-century writer Alexander Pushkin without regard to his aristocratic background. Patriotism was to count for more than class.21
Here Stalin was clarifying the doctrines of communist conservatism prominent in his thought immediately before the Second World War. As ruler and theorist he wished to emphasize that no transformation in the Soviet order was going to happen in the foreseeable future. The attitudes, policies and practices of the post-war period were meant to endure for many more years.
Nowhere was this more obvious than in the discussions in 1950–51 among 240 leading scholars about a projected official textbook on political economy. Dauntlessly many of the 240 participants took issue with the premisses of current state policy.22 Stalin entered the debate in 1952 by producing yet another booklet, The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. He laid down that the objective ‘laws’ of economics could not be ignored by governmental planners and that there were limits on what was achievable by human will. This was a rebuff to S. G. Strumilin, who had been among his scholarly supporters at the end of the 1920s. On the other hand, Stalin offered no hope for the relaxation of economic policy. Taking issue with L. D. Yaroshenko, he argued that the primacy of capital goods in industrial planning was unalterable; and he reprimanded V. G. Venzher and A. V. Sanina for proposing the selling-off of the state-owned agricultural machinery to kolkhozes.23
Stalin made no mention of topics such as the party, the government, elections, relations between classes, participation, international communism, authority or terror. On a single great subject he was expansive: global capitalism. He began by declaring that the economies of war-beaten Germany and Japan would soon recover. This accurate prediction was accompanied by a prognosis which has proved awry: namely that after communism’s victory in China, the market for global capitalism would be too limited for capitalist countries to be able to expand their economies. According to Stalin, the result would be yet another world war among the big non-communist powers, and he reaffirmed Lenin’s thesis on the inevitable recurrence of such wars so long as capitalist imperialism endured. Stalin repeated that the most acute danger of a Third World War occurring lay in rivalry between one capitalist coalition and another and not between communism an
d capitalism.24
His plan was to go on and compose a broader work; but it is unlikely that he would have tugged such a work out of the rut worn by his previous writings. Stalin had accommodated his thought to the kind of Soviet state that already existed. He ruled over this state, but needed also to rule through it.
And so relations among the various public bodies by the late 1940s were entering a stable period by the measure of the past two decades. In order to indicate that revolutionary disturbance would not recur in the institutional framework, Stalin in 1946 renamed the People’s Commissariats as Ministries. He also ordered that the Red Army should henceforward be called the Soviet Army. This emphasis on continuity with the pre-revolutionary state was reinforced artistically. In 1948 the octocentenary of Moscow’s foundation was celebrated, and a statue of the medieval patriot Prince Dolgoruki was commissioned for erection on Gorki Street. Dolgoruki’s stern visage and muscular limbs gave monumental expression to Stalin’s vision of Soviet statehood.25 Architects abetted the process. The power and dignity of the USSR acquired visible form in the vast granite buildings, topped by fairy-castle decorations. Six of them were constructed in central Moscow. A seventh was added in Warsaw, as if to emphasize Poland’s inclusion in the Soviet imperial domain.
And yet Stalin could not afford to allow institutional stabilization to be carried too far. As he well understood, his despotism required him periodically to re-agitate the elements in the Soviet order. In the post-war years there remained much to worry him. Those vertical clienteles and horizontal local groups were an object of continuing concern. So, too, was the fact that each of the great organizations of state was developing its own corporate identity. Soviet Army officers, like their predecessors in the tsarist forces, had begun to see themselves almost as a separate caste. The same phenomenon – albeit to a lesser degree – was visible in the economic ministries, the security police and the party.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 38
