The ‘Second Revolution’ has always been identified with the name of Josef Stalin, but it was the consequence not just of Stalin, who for much of the 1920s had been uncertain about how to approach issues of economic expansion and social reconstruction, but of pressure from thousands in the Party who wanted more aggressive modernization. They were intolerant of the backwardness of the peasant masses; they disliked their reliance on older experts who had served the Tsarist regime. Stalin came to identify with the radical element in the Party because he saw in the strategy of forced economic change the only way of strengthening the Soviet state, and with it his own position in the Party hierarchy, which had not yet reached the scale of full-fledged dictatorship. By the end of the first Five-Year Plan, launched in October 1927, that position had changed. He successfully isolated and eclipsed potential rivals in the Party. By the late 1920s Party organs began to address him by the simple term vozhd, or leader.
Stalin's rise to supreme power in the Soviet Union was slow and unobtrusive. Trotsky dismissed him as a political simpleton; Lenin condemned him in his final testament, written in December 1922, as a man too rude and impatient to be trusted with power. To outward appearances he was obliging, even-handed and modest, a dull official. His secretary recalled that Stalin would often sit for hours at meetings, at the side of the room, puffing on his pipe, asking the occasional question, proffering few opinions. His ‘gift for silence’ made him unique ‘in a country where everybody talked too much’.23 The contrast between the image of placid ordinariness and the historical picture of Stalin as the enslaver and butcher of his people has no easy explanation. It may never be fully explained, for Stalin left no secret diary and seldom revealed his inner thoughts. The official letters and speeches cannot be taken at face value, though they should not be discarded out of hand. The inner motives, the demons that drove Stalin on, are still the stuff of speculation. More than any other modern historical giant, Stalin remains an enigma. The story of his life is composed of effects as much as of causes. Why he chose to play the dictator's part is open to wide and conflicting interpretation.
The details of his life are well known. Stalin was born in 1879 in the small Georgian town of Gori. He had a squalid and brutalized upbringing. Regular beatings by his father, a failed and drunken cobbler, produced a personality that in the view of a boyhood friend was ‘grim and heartless’.24 He caught smallpox when he was six, which left him with the tell-tale marks on his sallow complexion. One arm was slightly withered from an infected ulcer. He escaped from penniless obscurity thanks to the exceptional memory that turned him into a star pupil at the local school. He was sent to a seminary school in Tiflis, where he made contact with the local social democrats. He was immediately attracted to Marxism in its Russian guise, with its emphasis on violent confrontation with the Tsarist state and an uncompromising terrorism. He carried with him all his life a hatred of privilege. He became a revolutionary activist, robbing banks to fund his politics. He was in and out of jail, fortunate to avoid execution. He emerged in 1917, at thirty-seven a revolutionary of wide experience, an agitator and terrorist by profession.
In 1917 Stalin was catapulted onto the national stage. He became one of the inner circle of Bolshevik leaders. In October he was rewarded by Lenin with the job of Commissar for the Russian Nationalities. As a Georgian, Stalin was thought to understand the problems of the smaller non-Russian peoples more than the westernized Bolshevik intellectuals. It could be said that he understood that mentality too well. He stamped hard on the drift towards autonomy, even on his own Georgian people. His second appointment, as Commissar for the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, came in 1919. The office was created by Lenin to ensure that the Party could monitor what the sprawling bureaucratic apparatus was doing. Stalin used the position as a lever to examine the whole apparatus of state. He understood the machinery of government and its wide-flung personnel better than any other Communist leader. In 1922 his administrative skills and wide knowledge of the apparatus brought him the post of General Secretary of the Party, a position which he used to create his own power base and his only official role until he assumed high political office in 1941. There is no dispute that he had considerable political skills. He was not a dilettante dictator like Hitler. He worked long hours, late into the night. He paid extraordinary attention to detail.25 He became adept in the art of dissimulation, so much so that he was usually able to get others to take the blame for unpopular decisions or political errors. He sheltered behind a carefully crafted myth of infallibility.
Those who knew Stalin well were only too aware that behind the austere and modest exterior there lurked another, coarser side to his personality. He was rude, cruel and vindictive. He bore grudges, thanks perhaps to his remarkable memory, for years. He was capable of displaying a ferocious temper; he treated those around him with a peremptory disdain. With a bullying sarcasm he could reduce those he summoned to stuttering confusion. He induced fear, not because people knew what he was capable of, but because there was no way of knowing. He was capricious – Lenin's word – and devious.26 He had a deep, almost obsessive distrust of everyone around him, learned from his revolutionary youth lived in a world of police spies and agents provocateurs. He had no scruples whatsoever about the use of violence nor about the betrayal of trust. He was amoral, rather than immoral. In 1931 he told the biographer Emil Ludwig that he had learned from experience that ‘the only way to deal with enemies is to apply the most ruthless policy of suppression.’27 For one so personally self-effacing – Stalin, as we have seen, always chose to sit to one side in meetings, never to preside – he displayed a powerful vanity. His habits were modest enough. He dressed simply, worked in his unostentatious lodgings in the Kremlin, drank sparingly of vodka and Georgian wines and ate traditional Russian food. He liked to remain sober on most occasions, but encouraged a repulsive licence amongst those he invited to his conventional late-night feasting. The vanity was about power and its trappings. At some point in the early 1920s, in his new career as a revolutionary statesman, Stalin became an avid seeker after power.
Power is what Stalin got, more of it than he could ever have imagined in the Party squabbles that followed Lenin's death in 1924. Was it power for himself? His Russian biographer, Dmitri Volkogonov, has argued that power became an end in itself: ‘the more power he had, the more power he accumulated and kept in his hands, the more power he wanted.’28 The view of Stalin first as power-hungry, then power-crazed, has a long and respectable pedigree. But it is not entirely convincing. Stalin sought not simply power, but revolutionary power. His own advance, the survival of his personal power, depended upon the course of the revolution. No one doubts the sincerity of his revolutionary zeal before 1917. Lenin expressed open doubts in his testament as to whether Stalin could use ‘power with sufficient caution’, but he does not seem to have hesitated over Stalin's commitment to the cause. Stalin's bodyguard recalled his master's words, uttered in the civil war during the defence of the city of Tsaritsyn: ‘I shall ruthlessly sacrifice 49 per cent, if by doing so I can save the 51 per cent, that is, save the Revolution.’29 Stalin was unashamedly ruthless all his life; his egotism persuaded him that he was indispensable to the survival of Lenin's revolution. Power for himself was power to pursue his own narrow vision of what that revolution constituted.
Stalin was the driving force behind the ‘Second Revolution’. His ambition was to turn a backward and inefficient state into a modern industrial society in ten years. It was a uniquely revolutionary ambition, which shaped the Soviet state and the Soviet peoples down to the collapse of the system in the 1990s. Together with the Five-Year Plans for industrial modernization the Party radicals recognized that the countryside *he prime cause of Soviet backwardness in the Communist view – had to undergo its own social revolution. In place of the millions of small private communes which had been formed since the revolution, as peasants seized the land for themselves, the state began to impose collectivization (the substitution o
f large state-owned farms run by Communist managers) and a new rural wage-labour force. The assault on peasant independence began in 1927 and was completed almost five years later. Millions were moved from the villages to the cities, where they were compelled to adopt an utterly different life. Millions refused or resisted and were taken as forced labour to build the infrastructure of the new economic system under the harshest conditions of work. The damage done to peasant life produced wide unrest in what was largely a peasant-based army. The collectivization programme was enforced not by the military, whose loyalty was doubtful, but by the special troops of the NKVD, the Internal Affairs Commissariat. In a little over ten years Soviet cities swelled by more than 30 million people; in 1926, four-fifths of Soviet society had lived and worked on the land; in 1939 the figure was down to just half. The industrial and agricultural policies of the 1930s produced the social revolution that Lenin could not produce in 1917.
Despite formidable obstacles to the provision of skilled labour, capital equipment and finance, the industrial revolution was pushed through. Behind the revolutionary rhetoric and dubious statistics there lay real achievement. The latest Western estimates of Soviet production in the 1930s still tell a remarkable story: steel output rose from 4.3 million tons in 1928 to 18.1 million a decade later; coal production more than trebled, from 35 million tons to 133 million; truck production, an insignificant 700 at the start of the plans, reached 182,000 in 1938.30 The programme of industrialization was presented as a second civil war against the enemies of social change, chief among them the rich peasant or kulak, the saboteur and hooligan who held back economic progress, and the ideological deviationist who undermined popular commitment to change. The military language of ‘struggle’, ‘battle’, ‘victory’ and ‘enemy’ was not accidental. The regime saw counter-revolutionaries as the shock troops of foreign imperialism. The campaign for modernization was not simply about the survival of Communism in a backward society, but about the survival of the Soviet Union in a world of hostile capitalist powers.
Amidst the poverty and violence of working-class life in the Soviet Union under the three Five-Year Plans which spanned the period from 1927 to the outbreak of war, there surfaced a genuine popular enthusiasm for the tasks set by the Party. It was expressed in a country-wide culture of ‘socialist emulation’, exemplified by the young peasant-turned-miner from the Donbas region, Aleksandr Stakhanov. On 30 August 1935, Stakhanov, already deemed to be a model worker for regularly exceeding the modest norm of 6.5 tons per five-hour shift, worked non-stop through the night to produce 102 tons of coal. This was double the amount normally produced by the whole squad of eight miners working at the coalface, and it earned Stakhanov 200 roubles instead of the usual 30. At six in the morning the mine manager, Konstantin Petrov, called an emergency meeting of the Party committee of the enterprise. The early hour was explained by the news Petrov had to announce: a new world record for mining productivity. Not to be outdone, Stakhanov's comrades rushed to exceed his achievement: three days later the record tumbled. On 7 September a miner at the Karl Marx mine hewed 125 tons. A day later the editors of Pravda, keen to make what capital they could out of a man they nicknamed ‘the Soviet Hercules’, reported that a Red Army soldier on leave had dug 240 tons in six hours. The results were in fact achieved with a good deal of assistance from other workers, but the new soldiers of the industrial front won instant recognition. The ‘shock workers’, as they were called, were rewarded with extra pay and rations and better housing. By 1939 there were over 3 million exceptional workers, laden with medals for industrial heroism. When Stakhanov died at a ripe age in 1977, his home town was renamed in his honour, the only Soviet city to bear the name of a humble worker.31
The military strengthening of the Soviet Union was the most significant consequence of the ‘Second Revolution’. The first Five-Year Plan gave priority to heavy industry and machine engineering, as Lenin's theory of economic development dictated. But from the early 1930s the industrial system began to turn out large quantities of weapons. At the beginning of 1928 the Red Army had 92 tanks; by January 1935 there were 10,180. In 1928 the air force had 1,394 aircraft of all kinds; in 1935 6,672. Fighter output increased fivefold between 1930 and 1934, bomber output by a factor of four. The significant figure was the proportion of the national product devoted to the defence sector. In 1913 it was 5.2 per cent; in 1932 it was already 9 per cent, more than double the figure at the outset of the plans; by 1940 it was 19 per cent. By 1932 one-quarter of all capital investment in heavy industry and engineering was in defence-related areas.32 These figures represented an exceptional level of commitment to defence in peacetime. Arms were bought at the expense of living standards. Under the economic regime of the Five-Year Plans consumer goods were suppressed in favour of military output and the heavy industrial sectors vital to future war-making. The turning point in the military effort came in 1931. In February of that year Stalin addressed the first All-Union Congress of Managers, where he emphasized the priority of Soviet security in what became one of the few memorable speeches of his career:
One feature of the old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered for falling behind, for backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her – for her backwardness…. We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.33
This was Stalin's most important statement on the relationship between military power and economic modernization. It was followed by a sharp acceleration in military output and the military budget.
One of the first results of Stalin's new military course was the rehabilitation of Tukhachevsky. In May 1931 he was brought back from exile in the Leningrad Military District to become Chief of Armaments; he was chief of staff again by 1934. Stalin and Voroshilov were now inclined to accept the Tukhachevsky strategic vision of massed tanks and aircraft, even to endorse the strategy of deep penetration, now that tanks and military vehicles were pouring off the assembly line. The Tukhachevsky plan called for 15,000 operational aircraft. In 1930 there were just over 1,000. By 1935 there were between 4,000 and 5,000, vastly greater than the air force of any other power. The mechanization plan called for a total of 90,000 tanks on mobilization. Tukhachevsky favoured bridging the gap between the modest tank force available in the mid-1930s and the giant tank armies of the future by utilizing 40,000 tractors from the factories supplying the collective farms, protected with armour plate and each carrying a heavy machine-gun. The development of fast tanks with large-calibre guns was made a priority, producing by the late 1930s the prototype of the famous T-34, the chief Soviet battle tank of the Second World War.34
From a policy of economic caution, Stalin moved to a strategy of massive stockpiling. The purpose was to provide the Red Army with the striking force necessary to destroy the putative enemy in a battle of annihilation, but the effect was to saddle the Soviet Union with a defence sector far larger than current international dangers justified and the armed forces with matériel that would soon be obsolescent. Nor, until the necessary personnel training was completed, could effective use be made of the strategy of ‘deep operations’ and the extensive stocks of current weapons. These issues were gradually addressed as Tukhachevsky took up the torch of professionalization once again. By 1932 two-thirds of the officer corps had been formally trained in military academies. Two years later the political officers were removed from all field formations, and their remaining influence at higher levels was much reduced. In 1935 the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union was introduced, giving the military leadership a status it had not enjoyed since Tsarist times. The five new marshals included Voroshilov and Tukhachevsky and the former Tsarist general, Aleksandr Yegerov.35 By the mid-1930s the military had become a par
t of the new Soviet élite. That achievement alone may explain the paradox of its downfall. For at the very moment that Tukhachevsky had begun to build up large, modern armed forces, freer than ever before of narrow political interference, the military leadership was swept away in a violent, nation-wide purge.
The crisis that destroyed the military establishment in 1937 can be understood only against the wider background of the state terror practised from the first weeks of the infant Bolshevik regime in 1917. One of Lenin's first acts was to re-form Russia's political police force, the Cheka, an organization that may have been responsible for the violent deaths of at least 250,000 people during the civil war. The Cheka conditioned Communist leaders to the brutalization of the revolution. They were brought up to believe that class war was to be fought with a merciless ferocity against anyone, enemy and erstwhile friend alike, who threatened to undermine the revolutionary achievement or challenge the authority of the Party, the vanguard of the proletarian movement. During the civil war there was real resistance, but the term ‘class enemy’ was applied without discrimination against whole groups whose social position or national loyalty defined them as counter-revolutionaries. The nature of the terror changed from a savage reaction to civil conflict to an instrument for sustaining popular mobilization and allegiance. The creation of imagined enemies, and the constant fear of conspiracy, foreign spies and sabotage to which it gave rise, became a central feature of Soviet political culture. It encouraged a popular vigilance, whose darker face was revealed in the hysterical climate of denunciation and betrayal by which Soviet society, like other revolutionary societies before and since, was periodically engulfed.
Russia's War Page 4
