The situation in the factories, difficult and conflict-prone as it was, was merely exacerbated by the interventions of the politicians and the police.
The Moscow workplace during the 1930s was characterized by contestations between managers and newly urbanized workers and by arbitrary and often coercive interventions by the Party and the police. The workforce that emerged from these contestations was neither highly skilled nor well disciplined. The village networks and artels that had guided the former peasants to Moscow continued to serve them as means both to resist managerial control and to perpetuate pre-industrial forms of work organization and culture. Official policies intended to raise production, such as record-setting campaigns and police interventions, only further militated against systematic functioning in factories. The Soviet industrial system, with its undisciplined workforce, weakened management, and Party and police interference, never achieved rationalized and routinized production.33
The so-called development of socialist competition was one of the ways of arriving at a harmonious and coordinated method of work that fostered solidarity. However, the rivalry associated with it and the campaign-like style of working merely deepened the contradictions and the hatred between the ‘old working class’, which suffered from the zeal of the new one, and the anger of the new class towards the older one, which despised them.
This damned competition. They were not only competing among the workers but even between the gangs and the factories. The funny thing was, that really nobody cared about it, but when a young, stupid ‘komsomolets’ said publicly, ‘Let’s establish a socialist competition,’ everybody was too scared to say ‘No’.34
The consequence was that shock workers and high achievers found themselves under attack, posters and banners were torn down, and fights broke out between Russian and Tatar building workers, between Bashkirs and Tatars. Russian workers periodically attacked the barracks inhabited by workers belonging to the ethnic minorities. Anti-Semitism among Moscow factory workers was also common.35
The enormous influx of new workers threatened hierarchies and work routines. Established workers strove to protect their privileged status by challenging new arrivals’ legitimacy as workers. Young urbanites also denigrated workers of peasant origin and stressed their own working-class origin to define themselves as true proletarians.36
For all these reasons, factories resembled places of disorganization, of chaos and anarchy, and the idea that guilty parties must exist who could be held responsible must have been hard to resist, even if people such as Ordzhonikidze openly admitted such explanations had been a sham:
During nineteen years of Soviet power we have educated in our schools and institutions of higher education engineers and technicians, turning out better than 100,000 engineers and the same number of technicians. Should they, together with the old engineers, whom we have re-educated, all turn out, in 1936, to have been saboteurs, then we can congratulate ourselves on such a success. There are no such saboteurs! They are not saboteurs, but good people – our sons, our brothers, our comrades – wholly and completely in favour of Soviet power, ready to die at the front for Soviet power should it prove necessary.37
But, with the February–March plenum of 1937, the pattern was already set, and the decision had been taken to strengthen vigilance in all factories, to discover and expose wreckers and saboteurs, and to hand them over to the ‘people’s court’. The leadership evidently could not think of any way out of the crisis except to mobilize the masses against an imaginary enemy.
The February–March plenum of 1937 called on people to eliminate practices that had become widespread in recent years, and that resulted, in particular, from the fact that managements had not been elected but coopted through a process of self-recruitment, while secret voting had ceased to exist. Such practices were to be reversed by a critical movement from below, by new elections and by leadership changes. Following this decision, events moved fast. Meetings were convened in the factories between 23 and 25 March to discuss the documents produced by the plenum of the Central Committee, to launch communist criticism and self-criticism, and to discuss the relationship between political and economic work. In April 1937, with the growing involvement of the membership, Party organizations were forced to give an account of themselves and to organize elections. One problem in the car factories was that elections were supposed to involve the entire workforce, but no hall existed large enough to hold over 3,000 communists. This question was raised at the highest levels, resulting in a decision to hold the elections over two evenings in order to guarantee ‘Party democracy’. Party Secretary Y. Gubenko launched a direct attack on Ivan Likhachev and other managers, accusing them ‘of damaging Party democracy’ and ‘damaging production discipline’. This led to the election of a new Party secretary, A. Kriundel'. In April 1937, a discussion of the Economic Committee took place in which Likhachev acknowledged the legitimacy of the criticism. The trade unions were drawn in as well. In June 1937 union meetings were held in which reports were given and secret elections for the union committees were conducted with a high rate of participation. There were seventy-two meetings at the departmental level, in which 839 people spoke up. Criticisms included the claim that the union committee had failed to concern itself with wages and housing issues; it had also neglected its work of political education. The work of the factory committee was severely criticized. ‘The battle against bureaucracy, the broad democratization of the works union, the reporting procedures and new elections to the works committee all helped to bring life into the work in the factory.’
Figure 28.2 Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Moscow Committee of the Communist Party and Stalin’s man in the capital visits the ZIL automobile plant in the stormy times of 1938
‘The factories had been transformed into a genuine witches’ cauldron of permanent debate, permanent criticism and permanent denunciation.’
Parallel to the ‘democratization’ of the Party and trade union organizations, preparations were made for the first elections to the Supreme Soviet, which took place on 12 December 1937. As part of the preparations, a works meeting was held on 13 October 1937. On 20 October, P. Pichugin was unanimously nominated as a candidate for the elections to the Supreme Soviet at a meeting attended by 15,000 workers, engineers and white-collar workers. The elections to the Supreme Soviet on 13 December 1937 turned into a national holiday. Likhachev had also been nominated as a candidate, admittedly by a different constituency in the Kursk region. On 14 December the last meetings took place to prepare for the post mortem on the election results.38 This series of dates makes it clear that the workforce was in a state of constant agitation for almost the entire year.
When we examine the course of these factory meetings, it becomes clear that the factories had been transformed into a genuine witches’ cauldron of permanent debate, permanent criticism and permanent denunciation. ‘At once the production conferences ceased to be boring.’39 Of course, there had been criticism by the masses in the past when Party documents had been reviewed, but on this occasion such criticism could well have lethal effects. There were ‘few industrial enterprises of which the managing staff has not changed several times during the last twelve months as a result of arrests and executions’.40 There was really no lack of grounds for criticism: the catastrophic housing conditions, the fitful food supply, the frequent accidents at work, as well as interruptions to work which resulted in the loss or reduction of earnings, and the filth. In the meetings, the new proletarians, who were normally silent and long-suffering, felt encouraged to let fly with their criticism of an intimidated management that feared for its own position and even its life. Everything took place on a public stage, in the factory, with hundreds and even thousands of participants, who seized the opportunity to get things off their chests, pay back old scores and attack hated officials. There were speeches, ripostes, applause, and, in short, the situation was inflamed.41 Those in charge were afraid to contradict because this might
be regarded as suppression of criticism, but, even the frank confession of their mistakes could be interpreted as an especially sophisticated tactic. The workers who spoke up soon began to grasp the rules and master the vocabulary of signals and emotive terms – Trotskyite, Bukharinist, wrecker, saboteur, opposition – and they learned how to make conscious use of them to discomfort the management or even one another. ‘The key terms had the effect of such magic phrases as “Open sesame”.’42 The scene was dominated by the young, by the loudmouths, by those who seized the opportunity to get their own back. The people under attack were the top management – in other words, the generation that had come to the top through the Revolution and the Civil War, members of the Party, union and factory management establishment. The wave of mass criticism and denunciation simply swept aside the old generation of leaders. While the political leadership used the campaign to track down and eliminate potential opposition and to mobilize the workforce against the ‘enemy’, the workers hoped to be able to blacken the characters of unpopular bosses or even to get rid of them entirely. ‘The new elections opened a Pandora’s box of grudges, charges, and grievances.’43
The message that the Central Committee plenum had formulated in February–March 1937 was taken up with gusto in the factories and put into practice during the spring. It ran roughly as follows:
Your bosses, especially the top management of the factory, may be enemies of the people. You should watch for the signs that enemies are at work and denounce them fearlessly, no matter how powerful and respected they may be, both in public and in private communications.
Have there been accidents in which workers lost their lives, caused allegedly by ‘negligence’? This is probably intentional sabotage. If so, the prime candidate for suspicion is the director of the factory or one of his close associates. Regardless of whether accidents have actually occurred at your plant, are safety requirements regularly violated? That may be a more subtle form of sabotage – an attempt to provoke worker discontent by raising the level of work-related injuries and illnesses.
Are you a Stakhanovite or would-be Stakhanovite who thinks the bosses in your factory have not given you the necessary support and cooperation? Or, for that matter, are you a Stakhanovite who did receive support from the bosses but was not adequately protected against the hostility of other workers who regarded you as a norm buster? In either case consider the possibility that the bosses in your factory are trying openly or covertly to sabotage the Stakhanovite movement.
Are your bosses authoritarian, making you afraid to criticize them? Is it hard for workers with complaints to gain access to the top management? Do they expect workers to treat them deferentially? Is there a local cult of personality of the factory director (portraits, placards on May Day, etc.)? These may all be signs that the bosses are hidden counter-revolutionaries.
Finally, have you a personal grievance against anyone? Is there one particular boss who has treated you badly? Did you ever offer a criticism or suggestion at work that was ignored? Do you know of any minor wrong-doing that might indicate the presence of graver crimes? Have you ever been insulted, abused, passed over for a bonus, unfairly punished? If so, this is your moment. The person who has offended you was probably an enemy of the people and it is your duty to unmask him.44
It is not difficult to imagine the effects of such a message. It was the signal to unleash all the pent-up fury, aggression, lust for revenge, and an inextricable tangle of justified criticism and the basest possible desire to settle old scores.
On countless stages from Kiev to Khabarovsk, local actors played in petty dramas packed with political accusations, trivial details, personal grudges, and grubby entanglements. Charges and countercharges flew back and forth, dense with the rich trivia of daily life: who drank with whom, who earned more than he was worth, who had made an improper political remark. This was not a story of one villain and many victims, but a far richer drama in which political repression became a convenient expression for resentment toward officials, organizational rivalries, and personal ambitions. Daily workplace gossip turned deadly, creating an ugly mess that the NKVD was all too eager to ‘investigate’ under the watchword of democracy. There was no dearth of villains or victims: officials in every union were soon caught up in the deadly game.45
‘By the end of 1937, new central committees were elected in 146 of the country’s 157 unions … About 1,230,000 people or 6 per cent of the 22 million membership were elected to union posts … More than 70 per cent of factory committee workers were replaced, 66 per cent of the … factory committee chairmen, and 92 per cent of the … members of the regional committee plenums.’46 By the end of 1937 one-third of all union secretaries had been dismissed and the overwhelming majority of them arrested.47 Something similar took place with the elections and replacement posts in the Party leadership. ‘The Dynamo factory, also situated in Proletarskii District, had 561 party members and 178 candidates in a factory of 6,991 workers. Of these 561 members, a total of 62 were arrested, or 11 per cent. Within a space of two years Dynamo had three directors in rapid succession: two were expelled from the Party and one was arrested.’48
Everything developed precisely as had been discussed and resolved during the plenum of February–March 1937:
For Stalin and his supporters, democracy was a way to rebuild working-class support, and to forge a united Party, purged of opposition and corruption. They viewed the personal fiefdoms that had developed around regional elites as obstacles to these aims. For workers, the campaign for union democracy offered the opportunity to elect officials who would address accident rates, working conditions, housing, food supply, and wages. They voted the old leadership out, especially at the lower levels, in the hope of creating unions that would represent their interests. For union officials, the campaign initiated a desperate struggle to maintain their standing. And they were largely successful in preserving control, especially at the higher levels.
By 1938, thousands of union leaders had picked up the double-edged sword of terror and democracy and were slashing each other to ribbons. The new leaders attacked the old, and everyone scrabbled frantically to find someone to blame for problems in the factories. It became impossible to disentangle the knot of charges and counter-charges. The leaders all portrayed themselves as avatars of democracy and defenders of the working class … The campaign for union democracy targeted both former oppositionists and corrupt officials. Yet once the slogans of democracy became the lingua franca of struggle within the unions, there was no way to distinguish the true Stalinist from the oppositionist, the honest from the corrupt, or even the sane from the mad. In the end, the Party lost control of the ‘action text’ as its phrases and intentions were twisted to serve a variety of personal, political, and class interests. Repression was not something done to the Soviet people by an evil ‘other.’ It was actively supported and spread by people in every institution, who used it to pursue their own ends. The campaign for union democracy not only paralleled the mass repression of 1937–1938, it became the very means by which groups with different aims were transformed into the willing, even enthusiastic, proponents of purge and repression.49
Proletarskii District and the car factory formed the site of a great social transformation, bursting with contradictions. The strategy of playing on the idea of an outsize enemy and unleashing a struggle of all against all made the district more readily amenable to control. Faced with a hurricane in which criticism could no longer be distinguished from denunciation, the community responded by closing ranks against an imaginary common enemy, while at the same time the autonomous structures that might have been able to withstand unlimited caprice were destroyed. The formation of a new class rendered homogeneous by industrial labour was made more difficult by this process, but was not prevented.
29
Dzhaz: The Sound of the Thirties
For Soviet musicians, 1937 was a year of triumph. Soviet pianists, violinists and cellists walked away with the most valued
prizes in many international competitions. Among them were performers who subsequently achieved world fame: David Oistrakh, Emil Gilels, Busia Goldshtein (Boris Goldstein), Misha Fikhtengol'ts, Roza Tamarkina and others. The decline of Europe and the rise of the new Russia appeared to manifest itself in music as elsewhere.
The ranks of young talented performers constitute a phenomenon of massive significance. In the West we are literally witnessing the tragic ‘ageing’ of talented artists. Almost all European performers began their concert careers in the last decade of the past century. There is no one to succeed them, and, if there is, it is no more than a series of isolated individuals. Our situation is the reverse of this. We have an entire pleiad of young masters in every field of musical performance.1
This account goes on to explain that the Soviet performers who followed Stalin’s advice to produce a ‘Soviet musical culture’ avoided the error of mere musical virtuosity. It would be well understood abroad that the USSR was not only the land of technological revolution but also the country where classical music was cultivated.
Announcements of the successes of Soviet musicians were mixed with news about the latest production records, the unmasking of spy networks and the neutralization of Trotskyite agents. Even more impressive were the musical successes, especially those of the new light music. The power of the 1930s is inconceivable without the thirties’ sound. The Great Terror was accompanied by a curious ‘Din of Time’, to quote the title of a volume of poetic essays from fin-de-siècle St Petersburg by Osip Mandelstam. 1930s Russia would be a particularly grateful subject for a study of the transformation of the acoustic cosmos. The new civilization came in the form of machines, blast furnaces, rail tracks and the sounds associated with them: the steady hum of machinery, the hissing of molten metal and factory sirens. Buses passed over asphalt, replacing the coaches that had rattled over wood or stone cobbles. The cinemas abandoned silent films and were equipped for sound; the accompanying piano or orchestra was replaced by film music. The radio generated a Union-wide audience. Via loudspeakers installed in parks, in public squares and now also in private homes, power achieved direct access to the citizens’ ears – whether they wanted it or not – But the ‘din of time’ includes above all music conceived of as ‘time, embodied in sounds’.
Moscow, 1937 Page 61
