The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  One of a motley tour party organized by Nancy and Waldorf Astor (among the other tourists was Philip Kerr, Marquis of Lothian), Shaw set off in his customary ironical mood, but soon succumbed to his Soviet hosts’ calculated flattery. Granted an audience with Stalin himself, Shaw was ‘disarm[ed]… by a smile in which there is no malice but also no credulity… [He] would pass… for a romantically dark eyed Georgian chieftain’. In an impromptu speech in Leningrad, Shaw declared enthusiastically: ‘If this great communistic experiment spreads over the whole world, we shall have a new era in history… If the future is the future as Lenin foresaw it, then we may all smile and look forward to the future without fear.’ ‘Were I only 18 years of age,’ he told journalists on his way back to England, ‘I would settle in Moscow tomorrow.’ In his hastily written book The Rationalization of Russia (1931), Shaw went still further: ‘Stalin has delivered the goods to an extent that seemed impossible ten years ago,’ he rhapsodized. ‘Jesus Christ has come down to earth. He is no longer an idol. People are gaining some sort of idea of what would happen if He lived now.’ For once, Shaw’s irony was unintended.

  ‘Socialism in one country’ was Stalin’s solution to the problem that had repeatedly divided the leadership of the Bolshevik Party since Lenin’s death in 1924. How could the revolutionary regime achieve the industrialization of Russia’s backward rural economy without the resources of the more developed West? Trotsky had seen world revolution as the only answer. When that failed to materialize, other Bolshevik leaders, notably Nikolai Bukharin, were inclined to conclude that rapid industrialization was no longer an option. The pace would have to be slow. Stalin, ruthlessly positioning himself to be Lenin’s successor – suppressing Lenin’s deathbed warning against him – rode roughshod over these rarefied debates. Rapid industrialization, he insisted, was possible within the borders of the Soviet Union. All that was needed was a plan, and the iron willpower that had won the civil war. What Stalin meant by ‘socialism in one country’ was a new revolution – an economic revolution that he, the self-styled ‘man of steel’, would lead. Under the first Five-Year Plan, Soviet output was to be increased by a fifth. Managers were encouraged to ‘over-fulfil their quotas’; workers were exhorted to work superhumanly long shifts in imitation of the heroic miner and shock worker (udarnik) Aleksei Stakhanov.

  Ostensibly, the aim was to strengthen the Soviet Union, to make it the economic, and hence the military, equal of the ‘imperialist’ powers still ranged against it. Yet Stalin always saw the strategic benefits of industrialization as secondary to the social transformation it implied. By forcing a huge transfer of manpower and resources from the countryside into the cities, he aimed to enlarge at a stroke the Soviet proletariat on which the Revolution was supposedly based. He succeeded: between 1928 and 1939 the urban labour force trebled in size. How precisely this was achieved was something Stalin’s star-struck Western admirers preferred to ignore. Even as the working class was artificially bloated in size, around four million people were ‘disfranchised’ because they had been ‘class enemies’ before the Revolution. ‘Non-toilers’ found themselves ousted from their jobs, from schools and hospitals, from the system of food rationing, even from their homes. In Stalin’s eyes, all surviving elements of the pre-revolutionary society – former capitalists, nobles, merchants, officials, priests and kulaks – remained a real threat ‘with all their class sympathies, antipathies, traditions, habits, opinions, world views and so on’. They had to be unmasked and expelled from the Soviet body politic. Only in late 1935, after years of denunciations, disfranchisements and all the attendant deprivations, did Stalin seem to signal an end to the campaign against the offspring of ‘class aliens’ – but only to turn public attention to a new category of ‘enemies of the people’.

  It is sometimes still said that Stalin’s crimes were ‘necessary’ to modernize an antiquated country. That was precisely how he justified the costs of collectivization to Churchill. But the human cost was out of all proportion to the gains in economic efficiency. And this was by no means accidental. The Dnipropetrovsk Party Secretary Mendal M. Khataevich made it clear to his party subordinates that the policy of collectivization of agriculture was only superficially an attempt to improve Soviet agriculture. Its true goal was the destruction of the class enemy – to be precise, ‘the liquidation of the kulaks as a class’:

  Your loyalty to the Party and to Comrade Stalin will be tested and measured by your work in the villages. There is no room for weakness. This is no job for the squeamish. You’ll need strong stomachs and an iron will. The Party will accept no excuses for failure.

  Predictably, the consequence of the systematic annihilation of any farmer suspected of being a kulak was not economic growth but one of the greatest man-made famines in history. As Party functionaries descended on the countryside with orders to abolish private property and ‘liquidate’ anyone who had accumulated more than the average amount of capital, there was chaos. Who exactly was a kulak?* Those who had been better-off before the Revolution or those who had done well since? What exactly did it mean to ‘exploit’ other peasants? Lending them money when they were short of cash? Rather than see their cattle and pigs confiscated, many peasants preferred to slaughter and eat them, so that by 1935 total Soviet livestock was reduced to half of its 1929 level. But the brief orgy of eating was followed by a protracted, agonizing starvation. Without animal fertilizers, crop yields plummeted – grain output in 1932 was down by a fifth compared with 1930. Grain seizures to feed Russia’s cities left entire villages with literally nothing to eat. Starving people ate cats, dogs, field mice, birds, tree bark and even horse manure. Some went into the fields and ate half-ripe ears of corn. There were even cases of cannibalism. As in 1920–21, typhus followed hard on the heels of dearth. Perhaps as many as eleven million people died in what was a wholly unnatural and unnecessary disaster. In addition, almost 400,000 households, or close to two million people, were deported as ‘special exiles’ to Siberia and Central Asia. Many of those who resisted collectivization were shot on the spot; perhaps as many as 3.5 million victims of ‘dekulakization’ subsequently died in labour camps. It was a crime the regime did its utmost to conceal from the world, confining foreign journalists to Moscow and restoring the Tsarist passport system to prevent famine victims fleeing to the cities for relief.* Even the 1937 census was suppressed because it revealed a total population of just 156 million, when natural increase would have increased it to 186 million. Only a handful of Western reporters – notably Gareth Jones of the Daily Express, Malcolm Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian, Pierre Berland of Le Temps and William Cham-berlin of the Christian Science Monitor – had the guts to publish accurate reports about the famine. The bulk of the press corps in Moscow, notably Walter Duranty of the New York Times,†knowingly connived at the cover-up for fear of jeopardizing their access to the nomenklatura.

  Meanwhile, behind the bombast of Stalinist propaganda, the Five-Year Plans were turning Russia’s cities into congested hellholes, with vast mills both darker and more satanic than anything ever seen in the West. New industrial metropolises like Magnitogorsk in the southern Urals could never have been constructed without massive coercion. With temperatures plunging to –40°C in winter and rising to 40°C in summer, conditions for those who built the city’s vast steelworks – which was intended to be the world’s largest single milling and shaping factory – were close to unendurable. For years after work began there in March 1929, many of the workers were housed in tents or mud huts. When finally residential buildings were constructed, only the most rudimentary resources were made available. Even when complete, the new apartment blocks had no kitchens or toilets, since workers were supposed to use communal facilities. These, however, did not exist. The ‘linear city’ model proposed by the German architect Ernst May proved wholly unsuitable to the winds of the steppe, which howled between the long rows of apartment blocks. All over the Soviet Union, the haste with which people were drafted into indust
ry condemned a generation to live in the most cramped conditions imaginable, with only the most basic amenities. Their places of work were even worse, with horrendous rates of industrial injury and mortality, as well as life-shortening quantities of toxins in the air (in Magnitogorsk the snow was black with soot). The American John Scott, who spent five years in Magnitogorsk, guessed that ‘Russia’s battle of ferrous metallurgy alone involved more casualties than the battle of the Marne’. He was almost certainly right. One who survived was a young man from a village near Kursk named Alexander Luznevoy, who had been sent to Magnitigorsk by his mother to escape the famine at home. Underclad and underfed – he received just 600 grams of bread a day, provided he fulfilled his quota of eight cubic metres of ditch – Luznevoy soon realized that his only hope was to seize the opportunities for social mobility that were inherent in the Stalinist system.* He learned to read, became a lathe operator, studied at night and joined the Komsomol youth organization, which entailed voluntary work at weekends. Taking up poetry, he ended his career as a member of the Writers’ Union – a self-made member of the nomenklatura.

  It was all economic lunacy, perfectly symbolized by the palm trees the workers at Magnitogorsk built for themselves out of telegraph poles and sheet steel in lieu of real foliage. Collectivization wrecked Soviet agriculture. Forced industrialization misallocated resources as much as it mobilized them. Cities like Magnitogorsk cost far more to support than the planners acknowledged, since coal had to be transported there from Siberian mines more than a thousand miles away. Just heating the homes of miners in Arctic regions burned a huge proportion of the coal they dug up. For all these reasons the economic achievements of Stalinism were far less than was claimed at the time by the regime and its numerous apologists. Between 1929 and 1937, according to the official Soviet statistics, the gross national product of the USSR increased at an annual rate of between 9.4 and 16.7 per cent and per capita consumption by between 3.2 and 12.5 per cent, figures that bear comparison with the growth achieved by China since the early 1990s. But when allowances are made for idiosyncratic pricing conventions, real GNP growth was closer to 3–4.9 per cent per annum, while per capita consumption rose by no more than 1.9 per cent and perhaps by as little as 0.6 per cent per annum – roughly a fifth or a sixth of the official figure. In any case, what do per capita figures mean when the number of people is being drastically reduced by political violence? If there was any productivity growth under the Five-Year Plans – and the statistics suggest that there was – it was partly because so much labour was being shed for political rather than economic reasons. No serious analysis can regard a policy as economically ‘necessary’ if it involves anything up to twenty million excess deaths. For every nineteen tons of additional steel produced in the Stalinist period, approximately one Soviet citizen was killed. Yet anyone who questioned the rationality of Stalin’s policies risked incurring the wrath of his loyal lieutenants. As Khataevich explained to one waverer:

  I’m not sure that you understand what has been happening.A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime. It’s a struggle to the death. This year was a test of our strength and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay. We’ve won the war.

  Breakneck industrialization, in short, was always intended to break necks.

  This was the crucial point that Western dupes like Shaw failed to see: the planned economy was in reality a slave economy, based on levels of coercion beyond the darkest nightmares of Bloomsbury. Like so many of the grandiose Soviet construction projects of the 1930s, the Moscow–Volga Canal was in fact built by thousands of convicts. The workforce that built Magnitogorsk also included around 35,000 deported prisoners. Lurking behind the seeming miracles of the planned economy was the giant network of prisons and camps known simply as the Gulag.*

  THE BIG ZONE

  It was in the former monastery on the Solovetsky Islands, a barely habitable archipelago in the White Sea just ninety miles from the Arctic Circle, that the Gulag was born. There had of course been camps since the earliest days of the Revolution. As early as December 1919, there were already more than twenty; within a year that number has quintupled. But it was not at first quite clear what the purpose of incarcerating ‘class enemies’ was: to reform them, to punish them, or to kill them? The camp established at Solovetsky in 1923 provided the answer. The initial objective was simply to send the opponents of the Bolsheviks as far away as possible from the centre of political decision-making. But as the number of political prisoners grew – so rapidly that the Cheka’s successor organization, the OGPU,* could barely cope – an ingenious possibility suggested itself. The commander of Solovetsky, Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel, was himself a former prisoner.† Instead of merely starving or freezing the inmates, Frenkel came to realize, the camp authorities could make them work. After all, their labour was free. And there was no task the so-called zeki could refuse to perform. In 1924 the Solovetsky camp journal called for ‘re-educat[ing] prisoners through accustoming them to participating in organized productive labour’. However, re-education mattered less to Frenkel than the possibility of profiting from slave labour. The authorities in Moscow merely wanted the camps to be self-supporting sinks that would reduce the country’s overcrowded prisons. Frenkel believed he could do better than that. By the end of the 1920s Solovetsky and the other ‘northern special significance camps’ had become a rapidly growing commercial operation involved in forestry and construction.

  In a matter of years, there were camps dotted all over the Soviet Union: camps for mining, camps for road building, camps for aircraft construction, even camps for nuclear physics. Prisoners performed every conceivable kind of work, not only digging canals but also catching fish and manufacturing everything from tanks to toys. At one level, the Gulag was a system of colonization enabling the regime to exploit resources in regions hitherto considered uninhabitable. Precisely because they were expendable, zeki could mine coal at Vorkuta in the Komi Republic, an area in the Arctic north-west, benighted half the year, swarming with blood-sucking insects the other half. They could dig up gold and platinum at Dalstroi, located in the equally inhospitable east of Siberia.* Yet so convenient did the system of slave labour become to the planners that camps were soon established in the Russian heartland too. The author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the Gulag as ‘an amazing country… which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically… crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located… cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets.’ To prisoners within the Gulag, the rest of the Soviet Union was merely bolshaya zona, ‘the big [prison] zone’.

  The key thing in this vast system of slavery was to ensure a sustained flow of new slaves. The alleged spies and saboteurs convicted in show trials like the Shakhty Trial (1928), the Industrial Party Trial (1930) and the Metro-Vickers Trial (1933) were victims of only the most spectacular of innumerable legal and extra-legal procedures. By defining the slightest grumble as treason or counter-revolution, the Stalinist system was in a position to send whole armies of Soviet citizens to the Gulag. Files now available in the Russian State Archives show just how the system worked. Berna Klauda was a little old lady from Leningrad; she could scarcely have looked less like a subversive element. In 1937, however, she was sentenced to ten years in the Perm Gulag for expressing anti-government sentiments. ‘Anti-Soviet Agitation’ was the least of the political crimes for which one could be convicted. More serious was ‘Counter-revolutionary Activity’; worse still, ‘Counter-revolutionary Terrorist Activity’ and, worst of all, ‘Trotskyist Terrorist Activity’. In fact, the overwhelming majority of people convicted for such offences were guilty – if they were guilty of anything at all – of trivial misdemeanours: a word out of turn to a superior, an overheard joke about Stalin, a complaint about some aspect of the all-pervasive system, at worst some petty economic infraction like ‘specul
ation’ (buying and re-selling goods). Only a tiny fraction of political prisoners were genuinely opposed to the regime – revealingly, in 1938 little more than 1 per cent of camp inmates had higher education; a third were illiterate. By 1937 there were quotas for arrests just as there were quotas for steel production. Crimes were simply made up to fit the punishments. Prisoners became mere outputs, referred to by the NKVD as ‘Accounts’ (male prisoners) and ‘Books’ (pregnant female prisoners).

  At the height of the Gulag system, there was a total of 476 camp systems scattered all over the Soviet Union, each, like Solovetsky, composed of hundreds of individual camps. All told, around eighteen million men, women and children passed through the system under Stalin’s rule. Taking into account the six or seven million Soviet citizens who were sent into exile, the total percentage of the population who experienced some kind of penal servitude under Stalin approached 15 per cent.

  Many of the camps were located, like Solovetsky, in the remotest, coldest regions of the Soviet Union; the Gulag was at once colonial and penal. Weaker prisoners died in transit since the locked carriages and cattle trucks used were unheated and insanitary. The camp facilities were primitive in the extreme; zeki at new camps had to build their own barracks, which were little more than wooden shacks into which they were packed like sardines. And the practice – also pioneered by Frenkel – of feeding strong prisoners better than weak ones ensured that, literally, only the strong survived. The camps were not primarily intended to kill people (Stalin had firing squads for that) but they were run in such a way that mortality rates were bound to be very high indeed. Food was inadequate, sanitation rudimentary and shelter barely sufficient. In addition, the sadistic punishments meted out by camp guards, often involving exposing naked prisoners to the freezing weather, ensured a high death toll. Punishment was as arbitrary as it was brutal; the guards, whose lot in any case was far from a happy one, were encouraged to treat the prisoners as ‘vermin’, ‘filth’ and ‘poisonous weeds’. The attitudes of the professional criminals – the clannish ‘thieves-in-law’ who were the dominant group among inmates – were not very different. On December 14, 1926, three former Solovetsky inmates wrote a desperate letter to the Presidium of the Party’s Central Committee, protesting against