The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Chaos and poor economic performance forced Stalin to retreat, and in June 1931 he announced the beginning of the end of his revolution. He declared that the class war against the bourgeois specialists was officially over; the authority of managers was restored and the fervour of party activists and secret police reined in: as Kaganovich declared, from now on the ground had to shake whenever the Soviet manager entered the factory. Stalin was also eventually compelled to abandon his economic utopianism. The Second Five-Year Plan of 1933 was, whilst still ambitious, more modest and pragmatic.

  Most significantly, this was also the beginning of the move to greater inequalities that marked mature Stalinism. Stalin severely trimmed his erstwhile enthusiasm for the achievements of ‘labour heroism’. Workers had to be paid according to how hard they worked; they were not yet ready, he declared, for equal wages and appeals to self-sacrifice. These, it now appeared, would only be practical under full Communism, not the lower phase of socialism that the USSR currently occupied.65 During the late 1920s special rations had been given to higher officials, but these privileges were extended to other officials, engineers and some other members of the ‘socialist intelligentsia’ in the early 1930s. Wages also became more differentiated, though engineers and technicians still only received 1.8 times the average worker’s salary.66

  Greater class peace might have been declared in industry, but it was to be almost another two years before it came to the countryside. Only disastrous famine and urban unrest forced Stalin to retreat in May 1933. Party officials were told to scale down repressions in the countryside, and in 1935 the regime began to compromise with the peasantry. Peasants were permitted to sell some of their produce on the local market, and on the collective farms wage incentives were improved.67 Though dubbed ‘neo-NEP’ by critics, this was not a return to the market of the 1920s. The distribution of most goods was now firmly in the hands of state bureaucrats, and remained so until the end of the USSR; peasants continued to resent the regime, and as a consequence agriculture remained a serious drag on the Soviet economy – as it did wherever collectivization was attempted. Peasants only worked with any energy on their private plots, and in 1950 almost a half of all meat was produced on them, though they constituted a tiny proportion of the land.

  Yoking together radical revolution and economic development in pursuit of a ‘great leap’ to Communism had failed. The militant party, far from mobilizing the whole population behind the regime, had caused chaos and division. Discontent also emerged within the party elite, and it may even be that some regional party bosses tried to persuade the Leningrad party leader, Sergei Kirov, to mount a challenge to his leadership in early 1934. In some ways, Stalin’s experience was similar to that of Lenin in 1921: like Lenin, Stalin had to retreat from a divisive policy of class conflict to one that embraced a larger proportion of the population. Unlike Lenin, though, Stalin did not embrace a technocratic socialism. Rather he continued to manipulate mass emotion by other means.

  V

  In 1938, ten years after October, Eisenstein completed Aleksandr Nevskii, the story of the medieval Prince Aleksandr Iaroslavovich of Novgorod, who resisted the Swedes and invading Teutonic and Livonian knights in 1242.68 It has a simple narrative: attacked by brutal Teutonic religious fanatics, the citizens of Novgorod debate what to do. Churchmen, merchants and officials counsel capitulation. But Domash, a noble, urges resistance, and the town entrusts Aleksandr with its leadership. Nevskii insists that the townspeople cannot defend Novgorod alone, but must arm the peasantry, and Ignat, the master armourer, eagerly contributes to the war effort. Ignat’s peasant infantry finally defeats the Teutonic knights on a frozen Lake Chud, employing a pincer manoeuvre. In one of the most influential scenes in the history of cinema, the Battle on the Ice, the Russians lure the knights onto the lake where the weight of their armour causes the ice to crack. Courage and cunning (and Russian weather) therefore allow the simple, peasant Slavs to defeat the technologically sophisticated, but hubristic Teutons.

  Aleksandr Nevskii, like October, was a party-commissioned historical drama, intended to stiffen Soviet resolve against the resurgent German threat. But in all other respects the two films could not have been more different. Stylistically Aleksandr Nevskii was much more conventional. With its Hollywood-style narrative and minimal use of montage, its hero was an individual, not the masses; its setting and imagery were archaic, not modern; and patriotic unity, not class struggle, is its theme: its original title had been Rus – the old name for the Russian people.

  Eisenstein’s film was a cinematic reflection of the fundamental ideological changes Stalin and his circle had wrought in the mid-1930s. Like Aleksandr Nevskii, Stalin was intent on resisting the Germans; he was never under any illusions about the Nazis’ objectives, and the rise of Hitler to power in 1933 reinforced his conviction that the divisiveness of the Great Break could not be repeated. And just as Aleksandr insisted that the urban population alone could not defeat the Teutons, Stalin now moderated his old civil-war reliance on a vanguard group of militant party members to spread Communism. From the mid-1930s Communist ideology was gradually refashioned to attract a broader spectrum of support, including the peasantry and the skilled (Eisenstein’s armourer). This, of course, entailed replacing a highly divisive class message with a more inclusive one. Stalin pressed for the end to discrimination on the basis of class background, declaring in 1935 ‘a son does not answer for his father’, and he favoured the return of the children of kulaks to the collective farms.69 In 1936 the new constitution announced that the USSR had achieved ‘socialism’, meaning that the old bourgeoisie had been defeated, whilst the ‘former people’ were now enfranchised. Specialists and scientists, previously suspect, were now to be given back some of their old power and status. Though Stalin never formally declared the ‘class struggle’ over (it was only on Stalin’s death that the Soviet leadership was prepared to declare social peace), and the party remained a ‘vanguard’, he was unmistakeably implying that the internal class enemy had been largely defeated, and that most of the Soviet people could unite against the enemy beyond the USSR’s borders.

  Nonetheless, Stalin was not prepared to adopt Lenin’s recipes for class peace, neither envisaging society as a well-oiled machine nor reasserting the market inequalities of NEP. The Plan remained, and Stalin’s Soviet Union would remain a land of revolutionary heroes rather than philistine merchants.70 The future of the USSR lay with characters of the type that featured in Aleksandr Nevskii: proud citizens, defending their nation against foreign threats, with the help of experts, but organized hierarchically by leaders with an almost aristocratic military ethos. The model of socialism was shifting again, from the fraternal band of true believers of the late 1920s, towards a more inclusive conventional army.

  The USSR, then, was transformed from a land of angry siblings, completing an interrupted revolution against aristocratic or bourgeois fathers (represented in October). It was, rather, supposed to be a society of friendly brothers, big and little, the older guiding the younger. Society was hierarchical, but it was also fluid, and one’s place in it depended on political ‘virtue’ rather than birth. Big brothers were leading their less developed siblings to the shining future of Communism; the more politically ‘conscious’ – the party ‘vanguard’ (generally of non-bourgeois class origin) – were ‘raising’ the less conscious; a new Soviet ‘intelligentsia’ (a term that now meant anybody with a higher education) was organizing workers and peasants; and amongst ordinary people, a new cadre of worker and peasant heroes was emerging – most notably the ‘Stakhanovites’, the imitators of the extraordinarily productive hero-miner Alexei Stakhanov.

  This was, then, a more ‘meritocratic’ – or perhaps ‘virtuocratic’ – version of the old tsarist ‘service aristocracy’, whereby the state gave status and privileges to those who displayed ‘virtue’ and served it. The party elite and other favoured people, like some Stakhanovites, were given comfortable apartments and access to
consumer goods and special food supplies. A new symbolism of hierarchy was also introduced in the mid-1930s, which had echoes of the tsarist era. Before 1917 civil servants had ranks and uniforms, but they were abolished as signs of the ancien régime, as were the old military ranks. But in 1935 ranks were reintroduced in the Red Army, signified by epaulettes and other decorations. Special uniforms were also given to workers in a range of areas, from the waterways to the railways; meanwhile a plethora of medals, orders and prizes was awarded to people at all levels in the hierarchy – from the Stalin Prize, the equivalent to the Nobel, at the top, to ‘hero of socialist labour’ for Stakhanovites and lesser workers.71 The socialist value system was merging with an aristocratic one: the ‘new socialist person’ was now described as the person of ‘honour’, earned through service and heroic self-sacrifice.72 However, in contrast to tsarist Russia, this heroic, aristocratic ideal was supposedly open to all. Everybody, in theory, could become an ‘honourable’ person, both members of the party and ‘non-Party Bolsheviks’ – even if some were more honourable than others.

  The party’s attitude towards nationalism shows the same combination of greater inclusiveness and hierarchy. Stalin realized how powerful a force nationalism was, but had to find a set of ideas and symbols that appealed to everybody – a difficult task given that the USSR was in effect an empire rather than a single nation state, and included a large number of ethnic groups from Russians to Ukrainians, Tajiks to Georgians. Stalin’s solution was to return, to some extent, to the tsarist past and appeal to a Russian nationalism, whilst rejecting the tsar’s Russian chauvinism. He and his ideologists therefore fabricated a ‘Soviet patriotism’. At its core was the Russian identity, stripped of such ideologically unacceptable elements as Orthodox Christianity and racial superiority. Audiences of Aleksandr Nevskii would therefore not have surmised that Aleksandr was a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church; indeed the principal religious figure in the film, the monk Ananias, is depicted as a snivelling traitor.

  According to the new Soviet patriotism, Russia was the ‘first among equals’, within a union bound together by ‘peoples’ friendship’. In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks had been very wary of emphasizing Russianness, and had tried to attract non-Russian support by encouraging the development of minority cultures and languages, and even discriminating in favour of non-Russians. But from the early 1930s, Stalin began to alter the balance to benefit the Russians, though in a manner that fell short of Russification.73 Non-Russian languages continued to be taught, and elements of non-Russian traditions were added to the Russian core. During World War II cinematic epics based on the lives of national heroes were made for the major minorities: Bogdan Khmelnitskii for the Ukrainians, Georgii Saakadze for the Georgians and David Bek for the Armenians.74 A new ‘Soviet’ history was being created in which the benign fraternal Russians led their neighbouring ‘little brothers’ towards modernity and greatness. Unlike Nazi nationalism, which emphasized innate racial and cultural superiority and exclusivity, Soviet nationalism, at least in theory, saw history as an escalator; all nations could reach the summit of historical development if they followed the Russian example.

  A selective, socialist version of nationalism was carefully manufactured by party ideologists – a type of ‘National Bolshevism’.75 History was pillaged for heroes who could be shoehorned into a progressive story of Russian modernization and state-building; however unreliable a historian, Stalin always thought carefully about the best way to mobilize the population. Well aware that a pantheon of politically acceptable historical heroes was going to appeal to a broader section of the population than the old dry and divisive class-based propaganda, he convened a meeting of historians in March 1934 to discuss the teaching of history in schools. He railed at the old textbooks with their dry structuralism:

  These textbooks aren’t good for anything… What… the hell is ‘the feudal epoch’, ‘the epoch of industrial capitalism’, ‘the epoch of formations’ – it’s all epochs and no facts, no events, no people, no concrete information, not a name, not a title, and not even any content itself… History must be history.76

  The new ‘National Bolshevism’ seems to have had some success in expanding support for the regime beyond the narrow party sect, and had more with the onset of war. Aleksandr Nevskii, Eisenstein’s only box-office hit, became especially popular. Withdrawn shortly after its release when the Nazi–Soviet pact was concluded, it was shown again following the German invasion, and audiences welcomed the heavy-handed anti-German message. As a Muscovite engineer who saw the film told the local newspaper: ‘May the contemporary “mongrel knights” remember the tragic and shameful role played by their forefathers, the “crusader-scum”.’77 Amongst non-Russians it may have been less effective. But the War provided a powerful external enemy to meld the ‘Soviet people’ together.

  The regime’s values had become strikingly less egalitarian than those of the early 1930s, and the new medieval and aristocratic imagery worried some. But the ideology was still, in theory, inclusive and modern. Virtue in the ‘new socialist person’ included ‘culture’ and ‘Enlightenment’, alongside political reliability and a collectivist mentality. The concept of ‘culture’ was inextricably linked with the notion that humanity was progressing along a steeply ascending path from ‘backwardness’ – poverty, filth, ignorance and coarseness – to a bright new modernity of comfort, cleanliness, education and politeness (though politeness was not always a virtue in party circles).

  This new idea of ‘culturedness’ – universalizing rather than rejecting a semi-bourgeois lifestyle – is especially obvious in the new socialist ‘consumerism’ of the period. Marx, of course, was no ascetic, and had promised that plenty and abundance would accompany the coming of Communism. But there were other, more immediate reasons why the leadership began to emphasize consumption. The urban unrest caused by food shortages in 1932–3 forced the leadership to accept that it would have to aim at providing a decent standard of living, and the new emphasis on payment according to work done demanded that workers have something to spend their hard-earned money on. The Stakhanovites were the models of the new ‘culturedness’. They were labour heroes, fighting for socialism, and they were rewarded with ‘honour’, medals and the collected works of Lenin and Stalin. But they also earned higher wages than the average, and were able to live a more comfortable lifestyle. As Stakhanov’s party-boss mentor Diukanov explained, ‘Now that we have begun to earn decent wages, we want to lead a cultured life. We want bicycles, pianos, phonographs, records, radio sets, and many other articles of culture.’78

  The new age of consumption was made official with Stalin’s constantly repeated slogan of 1935: ‘Life has become better, comrades, life has become more cheerful.’79 The economy, however, remained overwhelmingly oriented towards heavy industry, and many consumer goods were only available to parts of the socialist managerial and Stakhanovite elite. But some efforts were made to give a wider group at least a taste of the good life. That ‘good life’ was, in part, a copy of capitalist consumer culture – a culture that reconciled mass production and choice. But the party’s objective was not a ‘consumerist’ society, in the sense we use that word today – that is, one in which people measure their status by the consumer goods they own, and compete with each other to buy more and better. Rather, consumer goods were, like education, things that would allow the Soviet people to live the good, ‘cultured’ life, worthy of heroes; a few people could enjoy them now, but eventually everybody would. Also, most importantly, the goods reflected a status hierarchy founded on politics and ideology, not one based on wealth, as in capitalist societies. Stalin’s ideal was a society in which people were motivated, and rewarded, according to their heroic self-sacrifice, not money. As he explained, ‘Soviet people have mastered a new way of measuring the value of people, not in roubles, not in dollars… [but] to value people according to their heroic feats.’ After all, ‘What is the dollar? A trifle!’80

  It was, h
owever, the state that was to judge people’s achievements, and their rewards, and underlying Stalin’s ideal society was a fundamentally paternalistic outlook: the state was the father, giving rewards to its children depending on how well they behaved. Paternalism was absolutely central to Stalinist propaganda, and its most visible element – Stalin’s leadership cult. The Soviet ‘welfare state’, the schools, hospitals and social protection which were seen by many as amongst the main advantages of the new order, were all commonly presented as gifts from father Stalin to his grateful children, rather than the just entitlements of a hard-working citizenry. As Komsomol’skaia Pravda declared, ‘The Soviet people know to whom they owe their great attainments, who led them to a happy, rich, full and joyful life… Today they send their warm greeting to their beloved, dear friend, teacher, and father.’ Meanwhile, school pupils chanted, ‘Thank you comrade Stalin, for a happy childhood!’ Some responded to these signals, and the tsarist-era habit of sending supplicating petitions to the authorities became a common one.

  The first signs of Stalin’s leadership cult were evident in 1929 as he sought to marginalize Bukharin and the ‘Right’, but it really began to flourish in 1933 when Stalin, vulnerable after the failures of the ‘Great Break’, used the cult of his image to consolidate central control. The cult was largely directed at ordinary workers and peasants, and not so much at the white-collar workers, who were thought to be too sophisticated for it. Though embarrassed by its incongruity in a socialist society, Stalin realized that it had a real resonance; in a widely publicized interview with the ‘fellow-travelling’ German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger, Stalin conceded that the cult was ‘tacky’, and joked about the proliferation of mustachioed portraits. But, he explained, it had to be tolerated because workers and peasants had not attained the maturity necessary for ‘taste’. The party tried to discourage some of the more extreme manifestations of paternalism, which they saw as redolent of the old regime. Whilst ordinary citizens’ letters often referred to Stalin as ‘diadia’ (‘uncle’) and ‘batiushka’ (‘little father’ – a term used of the tsars) these epithets never became part of official language. The official cult depicted Stalin as a hybrid Marxist intellectual and charismatic magus – ‘great driver of the locomotive of history’ or ‘genius of Communism’, but these images had far less purchase than the popular notion of Stalin as father of the nation.