The following figures were given for membership numbers and the numbers of those expelled. The roughly 2 million Party members had a hard time of it in the country as a whole, in the towns and factories. There were vast areas where there were simply no communists at all and no Party organization. This was particularly so in the regions and sectors of the economy affected by fluctuations in the workforce, where it was thought difficult to develop Party work on a continuing basis. In his report, Khrushchev mentioned quite frightening numbers of people excluded from the Party, who were often more strongly represented in the factories than Party members. And he also pointed to the reasons for this difficulty: the lack of visibility of an organization overwhelmed by a flood of immigrants and unable to keep tabs on their origins, lives and Party histories.47
And, wherever there were Party organizations, there were also a large number of ex-Party members who had been expelled in the course of inspections and purges. In many places there were more expelled members than existing ones – a huge army of disappointed, snubbed malcontents and a pool of potential oppositionists. In Western Siberia, 93,000 members were said to have been expelled in the previous eleven years, compared with the present complement of 44,000.48 In the transport system there were 156,000 Party members as against 75,000 who had been expelled in recent years. In some sectors there were eighty members for every hundred excluded persons.49 In the Party organizations of the Red Army in the previous ten to twelve years, around 47,000 members had been purged.50 In Kyrgyzstan, the Party organizations had dwindled in two years from 14,000 to 6,000 members, while in Odessa the numbers had been reduced between 1933 and 1937 from 61,000 to 33,500.51
Replenishing the ranks of the leadership by co-opting new members, the exclusion of Party members instead of debate, criticism and re-education – ‘formalism’, ‘soulless politics’ in dealing with human beings – all this was redolent of an organization terrified of criticism from below. The ordinary citizen was said to have no prospect of gaining a hearing for his own concerns; his letters to the leadership were ignored; in many cases disagreeable critics were persecuted and put under pressure. That made it easy for enemies of the Party to sow dissension or turn matters to their own advantage. Some people believed that, with a party 2 million strong, individuals or even 10,000 individuals were immaterial; they were mere ballast. But in fact, if you keep offending people, you just drive them into the Trotskyist camp. Our anti-human behaviour, our ‘bureaucratic soullessness’, Stalin maintained, had driven out 300,000, as many as half a million, if you go back to 1922. If you consider individual factories, such as the Kolomenskii Engineering Works, of its 30,000 workers, it had 1,400 Party members and 2,000 excluded persons. That was grist to the enemy’s mill; it increased the enemy’s reserves even though its hard core was actually weak. Stalin estimated it at around 30,000 – out of 2 million Party members in all – of whom 18,000 had already been arrested and only 12,000 were still at large.52
Setting the machinery in motion
In his closing remarks, Stalin concluded with assertions that would have significant effects on the rank and file activists and on the creation of new leadership personnel. ‘In my speech I have explained that we, the old members of the Politburo, will soon be taking our leave. That is the law of nature. And we want there to be change. But, in order to bring that about, we have to make a start now.’ He provided figures: 102,000 first secretaries of the grassroots organizations, 3,500 district secretaries, over 200 municipal committee secretaries, over 100 secretaries of the leaderships of the national Communist Parties in the republics. That was the leadership stock ‘that constantly has to start learning anew and to perfect itself’.53 This new leadership would oust the old one; it was the scaffolding of a new Party, which would replace the old one that was physically dying out, disintegrating or in the process of being eliminated. It was the young generation, he said, that was incomparably better qualified than the old Party elite and that was only waiting to step into its shoes. In 1927 there were only 9,600 Party members with university education; by 1937 there were already 105,000.54
What was basically a new Party would arise through a twofold process. On the one hand, there would be a storm of dissatisfaction, criticism from the masses, a mass movement from below; on the other hand, there would be the targeted destruction and elimination of the old Party elite – Stalin spoke of ‘grubbing up’, ‘eradication’ (vykorchevyvanie) and also of ‘smashing’ (razgrom).55 At the intersection, where mass criticism from below met criminalization and police repression from above, a vortex would arise that would give birth to the new situation. And it was the combination of terror from above and terror from below that enabled the group around Stalin to maintain its power.56 Only he who has learned from the masses was in a position to teach them. What the rulers saw, was seen by the ruled from the other side. ‘They look at the same situation from the reverse side. What we do not see may perhaps be seen by the foot soldiers, and what they see, we mainly do not see.’ The combination of the two things, pressure from above and pressure from below, was what produced the full understanding of a situation. The Party was like Antaeus, the son of Poseidon and Gaia. Antaeus was invincible as long as he retained contact with the earth, but he lost his strength and succumbed once he ceased to be in touch with it.57 Stalin also gave figures for the core that had to be wiped out, the still surviving 30,000 oppositionists.
The machinery was set in motion almost immediately after the plenum came to an end. Elections were fixed for 22 May in all Party organizations. Elections were supposed to be held also in other mass organizations, such as the trade unions and professional associations. They would be followed by preparations for elections to different levels of the Soviets and to the Supreme Soviet. And, after a four-year delay, the NKVD too would resume its function as a vanguard. The events of the coming months are incomprehensible if we fail to bear in mind the specific time pressure emanating from these deadlines. Thus a movement came together out of various sources and several overlapping waves which, once set in motion, made the situation seem even more chaotic and opaque than it was already, and even less susceptible to the control of even the most powerful dictator.
12
Moscow in Paris: the USSR Pavilion at the International Exhibition of 1937
The Paris International Exhibition which opened its doors from 25 May to 25 November 1937 was an event in Moscow as well as in Paris. The press there had reported on the planning and the preparations well in advance.1 Right from the start, Vera Mukhina’s monumental sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, which crowned the Soviet Pavilion, became a symbol of the Soviets’ first participation in a world exhibition, and even an emblem of the Soviet Union’s entrance onto the world stage. It was reproduced again and again in newspapers, posters and films. There were detailed accounts in the Soviet press of successes in Paris, of the award of distinctions, grands prix and successful premieres. These reports emphasized visitors’ impressions above all else, and one might easily have come to believe that their resonance in the USSR was at least as important as their impact on the more than 60 million visitors from all over the world. The traffic between Paris and Moscow increased enormously during the exhibition, more than it had done at any time since the twenties – artists, actors, prominent Soviet visitors of every kind assembled at Belorusskii Station for the Paris express, or were welcomed home from Paris – including the ensemble from the Moscow Arts Theatre, to name but one.2
The Soviet Union’s involvement in the exhibition was not self-evident from the outset. The socialist workers’ movement had a divided attitude towards industrial and world exhibitions. On the one hand, they were a celebration of handicraft, a paean to the inventive power of the human mind and especially of labouring man – think of the first industrial exhibition mounted on the Champ de Mars in 1798. On the other hand, Marx had described them as ‘the Pantheon in which the bourgeoisie of the world can exhibit with proud self-satisfaction the gods it has made to i
tself.’3 On the one hand, it was a major event in which the bourgeoisie brought together and celebrated its activities spanning the entire globe; on the other hand, with its glass palaces and technical innovations, it realized fantasies and dreams of a happier future to come. On the one hand, it was a mass spectacle, foreshadowing an entertainment and tourism industry of the future; on the other, it was the site from which messages could be directed at mankind as a whole. At the Paris exhibition of 1867, for example, Victor Hugo had released his manifesto ‘To the Peoples of Europe’.4
In the course of over a century, world exhibitions had undergone a noticeable change of function. ‘World exhibitions are places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish’, according to Walter Benjamin in his sketch ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’. In contrast we might say that the 1937 International Exhibition, in which forty-six countries took part, was a manifestation of national achievement, a show put on by the nations. But time and place made sure that the Paris exhibition seemed special – and not just with the hindsight of history. Paris and the Champ de Mars were not just places where earlier world exhibitions had taken place – the Eiffel Tower had been built for the 1889 World Fair. Paris was also the city of the peace treaties that had sealed the end of the First World War and created the new European order. And Paris in 1937 was also the place where the front lines of the coming conflicts and catastrophes came into view. The spectacle that was to display the state of our civilization two decades after the Great War led straight into the coming war. It was not by chance that the centre of attention was not so much the Column of Peace between the two wings of the rebuilt Palais de Chaillot as Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica, which had been finished shortly before the opening and which brought the Spanish Civil War and the horrors of the first air bombardment of a civilian population into the Paris exhibition. Chance had arranged the pavilions in such a way that visitors were compelled to pass between the Soviet and German pavilions, which stood opposite each other.
Paris itself had become a contested terrain. In autumn 1936, French voters, faced with the crisis in their own country and also with the advance of fascism and National Socialism in Europe, had decided on the formation of a Popular Front government.
From the distance of fifty years, the exhibition of 1937 seems to be the end of the world, the last party before the catastrophe of the war that people already saw approaching and which they tried to prevent by erecting a Column of Peace, a totem of melancholy despair. An ageing society that had barely recovered from the trauma of the previous war attempted to forget the economic, political and social crisis, and sought its identity by publicly exhibiting itself to the entire world.5
The exhibition trail: a journey through the map of the Soviet Union
The appearance of the USSR at the Paris International Exhibition had been preceded by lengthy and thorough preparations. The Soviet Union had abandoned its confrontational stance and the pariah status it had partly brought upon itself and had joined the League of Nations. In the light of the threat of a new war emanating from National Socialism, its participation in the International Exhibition was the equivalent in the fields of technology and culture to a diplomatic demarche in the spirit of collective security. The Soviet leadership wished to demonstrate above all how much the country had changed in recent years. In its pavilion the USSR celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Visitors were invited to take a journey through the map of the USSR. The pavilion contained a map of the country that was 19.5 metres square, finished in minerals and semi-precious stones. All the Union’s achievements – the conquest of the north, the development of air travel and construction – were to be put on display, with the aid of models of newly completed buildings such as the Kuznetsk Iron and Steel Works, the Moscow–Volga Canal and a section of a Moscow metro carriage.6
Figure 12.1 Interior of the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition
‘Visitors were invited to take a journey through the map of the USSR.’
The programme had basically been formulated in autumn 1935 and was finalized in the summer of 1936. The intention was to design a modern building which would make use of expensive materials but would rely, in addition to interior design and ornamentation, above all on electric lighting effects, while consciously abstaining from attempting to copy any historical building. Leading Soviet architects were invited to take part in a closed competition, among them Moisei Ginzburg, Karo Alabyan, Dmitrii Chechulin, Boris Iofan, Vladimir Shchuko, Vladimir Gel'freikh and Konstantin Mel'nikov.7 The commission was finally given to Boris Iofan, who had also designed the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow. The project specified the functions and dimensions of the rooms and the themes. What visitors could see was described as follows by a Soviet reviewer:
Before our eyes we have the prototype of a particular architectural idea acquiring a definite and clear shape. It has emerged from and been nurtured by an entire phase of Soviet architecture … There can be no doubt that the first and most significant feature of the Paris pavilion as a work of architecture is the artistic complexity of this building. The exhibition pavilion should serve not just as a repository and ‘showcase’ for the exhibits but itself act as the principal exhibit that may be said to represent the state as a whole in an international setting. Its architect has understood his task in precisely that way … Its shape stands in sharp and bold contrast to its surroundings on the exhibition site. Conviction and clarity are achieved not only through the use of symbols and emblems. The realistic, living shape, with its strength, beauty, agility and youthfulness, the shape of the new human being, filled with an inner truth and the conviction that right is on his side – those are the features with which Vera Mukhina had endowed her gigantic, stainless steel sculpture group.8
The pavilion, mirroring the German Pavilion opposite, had a very narrow, lofty entrance façade which rose up over 34 metres and was topped by a towering 24.5 metre-high sculptural group that thrust forwards beyond the building line. The pavilion and the sculpture were conceived together by Iofan and Mukhina as a dynamic unity, intensified further by the length of the pavilion, which retreated in stages towards the end of the plot, an expression of a flowing, dynamic crescendo whose aim was to draw the visitor into the building via a flight of steps.9
The interior was designed by Nikolai Suetin,10 a pupil of Malevich’s. It proved to be a good illustration of the way in which the lines of a radical modernist – Malevich – could be combined with those of an academician trained in Rome – Iofan. Suetin’s design for the staircase reveals a subtle instinct for brilliant effects.11 Five rooms and a Great Hall contain representations of various spheres of political, social and cultural life, assisted by an array of models, maps and charts. The development of the USSR since 1917 was illustrated vividly by means of figures and statistics about the growth of industry, the population as a whole and especially the proletariat, with pictures of the emergence of the largest agricultural industry in the world – with figures relating to acreage under cultivation and information about the network of state farms and machinery and tractor stations.12 A second theme in the First Room was the development of science and planning, the reorganization of the Academy of Sciences, the systematic exploration of mineral resources, the development of energy sources, new methods for developing agriculture in the north and the training of scientific personnel. A special stand was dedicated to Stalin’s new constitution and some of its key provisions. This was underlined by a monumental painting depicting the acceptance of the constitution by the Extraordinary Eighth Congress of the Soviets. The aim was to convey what twenty years of Soviet power had achieved for ordinary citizens, workers, peasants, white-collar workers and ethnic minorities– the elimination of unemployment, social insurance, health and safety at work, access to education and many other benefits. The theme of Room Two was the development of town planning and architecture. The visitor could acquaint himself with the General Plan for the Reconstruction
of Moscow, the progress of the Metro, designs for individual major projects – the Sovnarkom Building, the House of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, the Red Army Theatre, the Gorky Park of Culture and Rest – in short, the highlights of the reconstruction of the city. Room Three documented the state of national education, libraries, museums, the press and publishing. Room Four was devoted to painting, sculpture, drawing and folk art. Room Five was dedicated to cinema, radio, music and theatre. This is evidently where the 5 metre-high plaster model of the Palace of the Soviets, which had been borrowed from the Moscow Building Exhibition, had been placed.13 Room Six was to be dedicated to an exhibition of rail transport, the growth of shipping and, above all, the development of air travel.14 After passing the model of the Palace of the Soviets, the sequence of rooms returned to the Great Hall, in the centre of which stood Merkurov’s 3.5 metre-high statue of Stalin, while the sidewalls and the back wall were covered with murals. The central picture was The Noble People of the Land of the Soviets, by Aleksandr Deineka, in which a lifesize column of men marches straight out towards the spectator, clad mainly in elegant white suits or made-to-measure national costumes. Young men and old march out onto Red Square, while in the background the tower of the as yet non-existent Palace of the Soviets can be glimpsed – representatives of the new proletarian aristocracy that had crystallized from the new society, the image of the new elite captured at the moment of its emergence. On the right, a painting by Aleksei Pakhomov depicted young pioneers, both boys and girls, taking part in a model aeroplane competition in the Leningrad sports stadium. On the left, a painting by Aleksandr Samokhvalov featured sportsmen and women in a stadium helping to fly a balloon decorated with the Soviet flag. All three paintings ran right along the walls, and each measured 6 by 6 metres. In each mural light colours predominate: the white of the suits and the sports shirts, the bright colours of the sky punctuated by planes, towers or parachutes; the paintings are full of the dynamism of athletic bodies.15
Moscow, 1937 Page 30
