Dressed in the black robes of a monk, Ivan the Terrible fell to contemplation, atoning for his sins and imagining his future. It was May 1567. He had come as a pilgrim to the monastery of Belo’ozero, or White Lake, an isolated religious settlement in the far north of Muscovy. The abbot offered him consolation. ‘I had found a divine bridle for my ungoverned heart and a refuge for my salvation,’ Ivan is recorded as saying.
Ivan IV (1533–84) was Russia’s cruellest Tsar. His wicked acts were probably shaped by mental illness, though retrospective diagnosis is impossible.1 He was periodically gripped by extreme suspiciousness and unlimited rage. With his own hands, he carried out acts of extreme violence. In November 1581, he murdered his own son. Time and again, when the fury abated, a sense of vulnerability seems to have enveloped him, as he came to terms with his own weakness and sinfulness.
One such moment was prompted by the events of summer 1566, when the nobles’ fears about Ivan’s rule got the better of them. Gathered together in an Assembly of the Land, or Zemsky sobor, they were discussing how best to support Ivan in the war against Livonia. But it was they who were under siege. Eighteen months earlier, unstable and unpredictable, Ivan had left Moscow, apparently forever, promising to abdicate. Abdication could be catastrophic, a prelude to anarchy. Back in the capital, the nobles pleaded for him to return. Ivan accepted the petition. But he had a big proviso. The nobles had to agree that he could set up a state-within-the-state, a territory that would be his own private domain, run and policed by his own private security force. They agreed, as did the other groups in the Zemsky sobor.
The state-within-the-state was called the oprichnina, and the private ‘policemen’ were known as the oprichniki. Between 1565 and 1572, when it was disbanded, the oprichnina became Ivan’s zone of terror. Located to the north of Moscow, it was a substantial area with major towns and economic activity, many of whose nobles and townsmen were recruited as oprichniki. It was the centre of cruel exploitation and mass violence. So much so that in their gathering of July 1566 the nobles exhaled a collective shout of protest: ‘Our Lord, most illustrious master, why do you order the deaths of innocent brothers?’ The oprichniki were, for them, agents of terror. ‘They kidnap our brothers and relatives, insult, harass, ill treat, ruin and finally kill us.’
Ivan could not tolerate such a statement of opposition, however loyally it was couched. Confused about how to respond, he ended up at Belo’ozero. He soon returned to the heartlands of his oprichnina, where he turned the oprichniki into a sinister monastic movement, clad in black monks’ robes. They sometimes hung a dog’s severed head from their horse’s neck; the image of the dog’s head and a broom symbolized the hunting down of enemies and the removal of filth.2 Their songs of repentance and the monastic routine were only the prelude to violence.
This violence was the result of Ivan’s uniquely dreadful interpretation of Muscovy’s geopolitical circumstances. Like the Russian Empire that emerged in the eighteenth century, though on a smaller scale, sixteenth-century Muscovy had long borders that were difficult to defend. Relations with neighbours, especially the emerging Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, were not easy; Sweden (which also possessed today’s Finland) was another source of worry. For Ivan, the borderlands might be full of treachery. The bigger towns too, away from the borders, might be seedbeds of opposition to Moscow. His rage grew, and it focused on distinguished old towns to the north-west of Moscow: Tver, Pskov and Novgorod. They felt the force of his wrath.
In December 1569, oprichniki blocked the route towards Novgorod. Marching onwards, they killed people on the way. When they reached Tver, they located Filipp, who had been removed as metropolitan for his opposition to the oprichnina. He refused to change his stance, and was suffocated. In only five days, the city was devastated, its inhabitants killed in terrible ways. One chronicle claims that 9,000 people were executed, with many others dying soon after the violence, not least of starvation. A similar fate came to the other cities in Ivan’s sights. He seems especially to have feared and detested Novgorod, a city with a record of stubborn independent attitudes. Here the great buildings were looted, hundreds of homes were destroyed, thousands executed. Amid an epidemic of plague and cholera and an encroaching famine, cannibalism spread. Pskov was hit next. But this was only one sequence in the much longer narrative of Ivan the Terrible’s violence.
On 25 July 1570, Ivan oversaw the construction of a killing ground in Moscow. At the city’s Poganaya meadow, the oprichniki built a massive wooden framework for multiple gallows. They dragged in cauldrons, which would be filled with either cold water or boiling water for torture. Ivan himself wore black clothes. He was armed with a bow and arrows, held an axe and observed events from the back of a horse. Ivan’s enemies were brought in for torture and execution. He imagined how they had conspired against him as he conducted their terrifying demise.3
These are just episodes in the terrible story of the oprichnina. Given what we know of Russian history – the merciless reforms of Peter the Great, the prison camps of nineteenth-century Siberia, above all, the terror of Stalin – it might seem obvious that Ivan the Terrible was only one act in a continuous history of violence which continues to define Russia today. Such a narrative is a foundation of the Russia Anxiety.
But is it true?
Faced with the awful human consequences of the industrial revolution in Britain and Germany, Marx and Engels concluded that any state which could make this possible must ultimately be founded on violence. Generations of Soviet historians followed their lead, looking for sources of violence in the long history of the Russian state. But the pre-modern East Slavic state lacked the capacity or will to rule by violence alone. Kievan Rus was not really a recognizable state at all, lacking fixed administrative structures, but it was built on compromises. It was a compact between the grand prince of Kiev, who was often politically weak, and other princes who had power over their own demesnes. During the Mongol period, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, an external power deployed violence and accommodation to oversee its alien and complicated Eurasian territory. As Muscovy emerged and flourished from the late fourteenth century through to the end of the sixteenth century, the grand prince, then tsar, became an increasingly powerful figure – but he neither owned his subjects nor everything within his realm, and did not possess the tools of violence to enforce such ownership. If he had, Ivan IV would not have had to invent the oprichnina, which stands as an exception rather than a rule in early Russian history.
Ivan devised the oprichnina because he was afraid of enemies. It allowed him to live in a physically separate zone from many of his fellow countrymen. From this base he eliminated alternative sources of power that seemed to be a threat: strong noblemen, different-thinking churchmen, robust towns. The method was terror. Suffering and fear spread across different parts of Muscovite society. Power was exercised in an arbitrary way. Autocracy as a functioning and sustainable system of power, rooted in legitimacy, was in abeyance. One prominent historian wrote a book drawing a straight line between the oprichniki and the agents of the NKVD.4
It’s a bold claim: that Russian history is a predictable structure defined by state violence. But the oprichnina belonged to its time and place. It was the consequence of Ivan’s worldview and personality. The particular connection between domestic and foreign threats, and Ivan’s perception of them, facilitated its creation: the conflict in Livonia was unresolved, Poland and Sweden seemed endemic threats, and nobles were either reluctant or not competent to prosecute war effectively. The consequences of the oprichnina were likewise fairly clearly defined rather than open-ended. It contributed to the disintegration of the Muscovite political order, a miserable process that reached its apogee during the Time of Troubles. And it made subsequent Muscovite political culture more risk-averse, less willing to innovate and embrace reform (because in a perverse way, the oprichnina was a kind of reform, and no one wanted to repeat it).5 But as the decades wore on, the imperative of reform returned, and Muscovy-Russia pursued it again in the seventeenth century under the new Romanov dynasty, though this time it was reform unaccompanied by mass terror.
The oprichnina did not set up a historic highway to Stalin, let alone Putin. It was a dead end.
And while it was Russian, it was also early-modern, a recognizable fragment of Europe’s sixteenth century. Ivan the Terrible had famous contemporaries, especially in the early part of his life: Martin Luther, Henry VIII and the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Such men made a world of violence whose logic and savagery gripped Western and Central Europe far longer than the oprichnina disabled Muscovy.
Martin Luther, the German monk whose Theses of 1517 promised a more democratic Christianity based on popular involvement, comprehensible language and the primacy of an individual’s faith, did not hesitate to embrace violence when it seemed right. In 1525, he spoke out against rebellious peasants, whom he compared to mad dogs that must be killed, calling on the faithful to ‘smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel.’6 Henry VIII destroyed England’s established links with Rome, dissolved the monasteries, quelled rebellions and crushed dissent. He might have believed that his actions were the manifestation of divine will and self-evident law rather than egoism and arbitrariness, but some of his subjects disagreed. For a priest from Middlesex, Henry was ‘a great tyrant rather than a king’; he was the worst ‘robber’ and ‘pillager’ ever to have been the English monarch.7 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1521–55), held talks with Luther and toyed with the compromises that could have preserved his Central European empire in peace, but when the time came, he used great force to defeat the heretics and preserve Catholicism.
Muscovy was not directly touched by the religious struggles of the sixteenth century, a fact which is sometimes regretted: another Western rite of passage missed. But the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation were very violent processes. They were given force by a language of purification and elimination. Clergymen released the lethal energy of crowds which performed ‘rites of violence’ against their enemies – dwellers of the same town who now practised their religion slightly differently. Local authorities followed centralized orders and carried out mass executions, such as the Paris-directed killings of Protestants in Provence in the 1540s; unleashing the violence of the crowd, officials accepted orders to torture and even to desecrate the bodies of the dead.8 In Geneva, the home of John Calvin, torture defined the symbolic and practical pursuit of justice: a study of the early 1560s shows that more than one-third of all judicial investigations made use of torture, and that torture was used in 84 per cent of cases that led to capital punishment.9
In places like Geneva, the aim was to use violence to systematize power and enforce purity. The oprichnina was part of a more personalized and perhaps more arbitrary form of political violence, whose very peculiarity lent it scant possibilities of becoming a system that could be passed on down the ages. By contrast, the ethics of Reformation violence were part of a historic approach to politics that has shaped the modern period, including, perhaps ironically, in the Stalinist USSR. Take the language of Henry’s Act of Supremacy of 1534, which made him head of the Church of England. The Act granted the King and his successors ‘full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, reform, order, correct, restrain and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offences, contempts and enormities’, and in so doing, to ensure ‘the conservation of the peace, unity and tranquillity of the realm’.10
The foundations of Stalinism were as generally European as they were specifically Russian. In England, the state used violence against the people in a systematic and brutal way. Historians of Tudor and Stuart England estimate that 75,000 people were executed between 1530 and 1630; adjusted to early twenty-first-century United States population size, so that the comparison is meaningful, this would be the same as today’s US executing 46,000 people per year for the next hundred years. In sixteenth-century England, the number of capital crimes increased, the clergy lost their immunity from certain prosecutions, vicious forms of corporal punishment were increasingly common, and martial law was introduced in 1589. Political rebels and those suspected of thinking differently were crushed with extreme prejudice: hanged, quartered, burned. The extent of the violence suggests that Tudor politics was not merely legitimated by laws and culture, or by organic compromises between people and power, but by arbitrary coercion.11 The Tudors colonized Ireland, whose inhabitants they considered barbarous and savage, and where brutality had few limits. The numbers killed in the pacification of Munster – up to one-third of the population, or 48,000 – and perhaps 9.2 per cent of the population of Ireland as a whole12 – outstrip the work of the oprichniki, and the violence was probably more embedded, and ordinary, than it was in the time of the oprichnina.
The devastation that swept across Muscovy at the start of the seventeenth century during the ‘Time of Troubles’ (1598–1613) took place amidst dynastic crisis, foreign invasion and economic disaster. Awful as it was, it was not a wilful episode of state-driven political violence. But it fitted its European context. Compare the Thirty Years War, which ravaged Western Europe between 1618 and 1648. By its end, 20 per cent of the population of the Holy Roman Empire – at their core, the German lands – was lost, more than three times the percentage killed during the First or Second World Wars.13 Magdeburg, for example, was destroyed in 1631, when 80 per cent of its population of 25,000 was killed. Christian II, prince of nearby Anhalt, wrote in his diary on 11 May: ‘News that yesterday morning at eight o’clock Magdeburg was captured, plundered, set ablaze, men, women and children cut down.’ He went on: ‘Prisoners brought here from Magdeburg repeat that the slaughter continued this morning and the city is completely burnt down, that no building remains but the cathedral which burnt down this morning.’14 Meanwhile, the death rate in the British Civil Wars of the 1640s was greater than during the First World War.15 Functional violence was embedded into the society of the British Isles as much as it was anywhere. And the Spanish had been laying waste to the Americas for more than a century.
In 2006, the novelist Vladimir Sorokin published The Day of the Oprichnik, a fictional blend of killing, rape, drug-taking – and politics. It describes Moscow in 2028, when ‘Rus’ is brutally governed by a new oprichnina, with the old symbols of broom and dog’s head moulded onto the futuristic technologies of a new age. This small-minded world of nationalism, surveillance, conspiracy, beatings and murder updates Ivan the Terrible’s reign as science fiction. The novel apparently gives a warning for contemporary Russia about the dreadful tendencies of violent dictatorship. Critics of government violence have always been quick to look back to the precedent of the oprichnina. One Socialist Revolutionary leaflet that was distributed in the provinces during the height of the early twentieth-century terrorist campaign called for ‘Death to the soulless oprichniki shooting the defenceless people!’16 The message is: the oprichnina might be encoded into Russia’s DNA, and so it might happen again.
Vladimir Sorokin was part of the large crowd on Lubyanka Square, outside the yellow-and-red headquarters of the KGB, in August 1991. It was the end of the putsch against Gorbachev. The KGB looked as if it had played its last card and lost. Unbelievably, the most formidable intelligence agency in the world seemed vulnerable. The crowd wanted to pull down the massive statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky that dominated the square. ‘Iron Felix’ was the Polish revolutionary and founding chairman of the Cheka. If anyone had a claim to being the Soviet Union’s prototypical secret policeman, the first boss of the security organs, the chekist nonpareil, it was Dzerzhinsky. The crowd’s hatred and frustration, and also its caprice, and its wilful, hazy judgement, focused on the statue.
Sorokin remembers what happened next. The crowd was gearing up to tear the statue down with its bare hands. But a leading supporter of Boris Yeltsin appeared on the scene and warned that the massive statue might crash into the underground pipes and cables beneath the tarmac and cause severe damage to surrounding infrastructure. Instead, he’d called for a crane to remove the object in a more orderly fashion. It took two hours, but the crane arrived and the statue was taken down safely. ‘Doubts about the success of the coming anti-Soviet revolution first stirred in me during those two hours,’ wrote Sorokin in May 2014. The moment to take control from the KGB seemed to dissipate; something primeval in the Russian-Soviet state was not snuffed out, but went into safe hibernation. The statue was stored for safe-keeping in a museum of Soviet antiquities, not ripped to pieces. Perhaps the statue will come back. And why? Because of something deep in Russian history, ‘the vicious nature and archaic underpinnings of the Russian state’s “vertical power” structure’.17
A different lesson from history, and one that takes more account of the clash between structures and contingencies that marks the Chernomoyrdin Dictum, would be to imagine a modern Russian state that is apparently built on a ‘power vertical’ but is really characterized by overlapping institutions like all states are. It is strong in some ways – it has a big police force, and a powerful presidency – and weak in others, with an uncertain reach into the most distant periphery, and an excessive reliance on things beyond its control, like foreign trade or the price of oil. Agencies of the state inevitably channel imperfect information up to decision-makers, who in turn misperceive some threats, are excessively worried about the stability of their ruling order, and take precipitate action as a result. This was the context of the Great Terror of the 1930s.18 That scale of Terror never came back, but the complexities of ruling Russia, where state violence is a possibility, though usually a remote one, have never gone away.
The form of the oprichnina was a bizarre aberration, but the extent of its violence was the European norm. Whether in peacetime or wartime, whether targeting outsiders or one’s own people, state and popular violence engulfed Europe from Ireland to the Urals in the early-modern period. Meanwhile, Ivan’s reign combined violence and reform. Despite the elemental catastrophe of the oprichnina, Ivan the Terrible set in train processes that led eventually to modern life in Russia. Most significant was the introduction of a law code (sudebnik) in 1550 that rationalized and codified court practices. The Church was better organized in theological and administrative life alike after the ‘Stoglav’ church council, held a year later. Administration in the provinces was bolstered by the local appointment of elders. The conquest of Kazan took place amid army reforms that removed numerous inefficient traditions.
Even the reign of Ivan the Terrible – the stand-out cruellest tsar – suggests no cultural disposition to state violence in Russia. Most Russians for most of history were not troubled by such barbarity. Many Russian rulers were not terrifying. Some were so banal that there is no folk memory of them at all. The Russia Anxiety is right that violence has marked Russian history, but wrong to neglect the wider European violence of which Russia is a ‘normal’ part. And it does not see that Russia’s history of violence is sporadic and not continuous, and is, above all, a modern tragedy, not an ancient, eternal or inescapable one.
Count Aleksei Arakcheyev, who exercised power at the apex of Alexander I’s government, was one of the great pantomime villains of imperial Russia. Contemporaries swapped stories about his capacity to bite off a man’s nose or rip off his moustache.19 As a man whose ‘name should be written not in ink but in blood’,20 he seemed to have a sense of the potential of total power. For Joseph de Maistre, philosopher, ambassador to Alexander’s court, and no gentle soul himself, Arakcheyev was ‘evil, and even very evil’, but there was a design behind the wickedness: ‘it is probably true that at present only such a man can restore order’.21 From 1808, Arakcheyev served as Minister of War and from 1810 as chairman of the military committee of the newly founded State Council. A traditionalist in his political and cultural commitment to autocracy, Arakcheyev was nevertheless a socio-economic modernizer avant la lettre. Like many other modernizers, his work combined creation and destruction.
Having risen from obscurity to become a favourite of both Paul and then Alexander, Arakcheyev was gifted 2,000 serfs and the village of Gruzino in the province of Novgorod. As yet unburdened by high office and still only in his thirties, he developed the estate and built a model rural community. He constructed functional roads, bridges and farm buildings, drained the land, and aimed for symmetry, uniformity and cleanliness throughout the estate. The measures seemed to exemplify his precise and rational approach. Obsessed with detail and improvement, he tutored the peasants on good farming and child-rearing, and launched a bank that dispensed credit to those who sought to buy livestock or build a house. Ascetic and unsmiling, Arakcheyev was a man who knew best. He even designed the gardens that lay between the peasants’ huts.22
In 1810, two years after Arakcheyev’s elevation to high office, the tsar visited him at Gruzino. Alexander greatly admired the ‘order’ and ‘neatness’ of the settlement, and reflected on how a social reform might simultaneously improve standards of living and enhance popular discipline. This was a time when Alexander was considering new ideas for recruiting troops in the most efficient way. He had resolved on the idea of military colonies in the first part of 1809.23 Perhaps this famous visit crystallized in the tsar’s mind what the military colonies, the new self-sustaining, prosperous and hygienic settlements of a caste of army recruits and their families, should look like. Drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precedents, with roots in the Roman Empire, these colonies were to be model villages. The men would be away for part of the year with the army, and be at home for part of the year on the land; they should later form a military reserve. This promised to solve the financial burden of the army draft and the social dislocation that arose when recruits were indefinitely extracted from their home villages. Such a scheme offered the possibility of building the prototype of a rational universe of work, welfare and service. Since Peter the Great, the monarchy had adapted, reformed and modernized the autocracy. Peter and his successors were fascinated by the capacity of the state to engineer people’s souls for secular ends, a fascination only increased by the arrival of Enlightenment ideas in the Russia of Catherine the Great.
But when you cut wood, chips fly. Even while the Napoleonic Wars were still being fought, in 1810, a colony was established in Mogilev province: peasants owned by the crown were removed, and settlers brought in from Novorossiya.24 Colonies were developed on a larger scale from 1816, after the war was over. Arakcheyev, unfazed by cruelty, coordinated the programme. New villages were to be built by soldiers and peasants, and locals moved from their homes to inhabit them, in what amounted to coercive resettlement. Force and ruthlessness underwrote Alexander’s practical and ideal goals. The military colonists were supposed to be equals before the law. Their environment should not be backward or poor. The settlers were required to make the most of their land. They would enjoy decent primary education, limited care for the elderly and medical assistance. Resources were focused on the construction of hospitals (in 1820, every colony for the infantry had its own hospital), together with provision of medical orderlies and midwives. All of this was run by a major military bureaucracy.25 Up to a million people lived in the colonies by 1823, which Alexander visited on a number of occasions and for which he expressed enthusiasm.
Yet the settlers’ former communities, many of which were centuries old, were eliminated. Arakcheyev was obsessed with the tiniest details of these welfare schemes, considering the appointment of particular midwives and tormenting schoolteachers who were insufficiently obsequious.26 He oversaw arrangements that came close to forcing soldiers to marry particular women. Most brutally, Arakcheyev put down uprisings in the colonies, at one point forcing court-martialled rebels repeatedly to run the gauntlet of 1,000 of their peers. Alexander Herzen called the colonies ‘the greatest crime of the reign of Alexander I’.27 Even Charlotte, the wife of the future Nicholas I, who observed the colonies during Alexander’s reign, wrote in her memoir: ‘The emperor had the idea, but the execution was entrusted to Arakcheyev, who did not do it gently but on the contrary with hard and cruel measures that made the poor peasants discontented.’ The picture was bleak: ‘Going about, we found here and there the residents of some villages on their knees, imploring us that their traditional way of life not be changed.’28 On top of all this, the finances of the colonies did not add up. The grandiose project was perhaps doomed on those grounds alone by the end of Alexander’s reign. But the colonists themselves protested on a mass scale, too, at Slobodskaya Ukraina in 1819, Staraya Rusa in 1831 and at numerous other locations in the 1820s and 1830s,29 before the experiment came to a close in the 1850s.
One might argue that it failed for the reason that utopian projects always fail: because they fail to take account of the humanity of their subjects. A British doctor with extensive experience of the Russian Empire, Robert Lyall, wrote in 1823 of ‘how bitterly’ the peasants ‘regret their fate in being forced to become colonists; and how warmly they talk of [the colonies’] utter ruin’. Even serfdom was better. ‘Their former state of civil slavery,’ concluded Lyall, ‘seems perfect freedom in comparison of the new military arrangement of their affairs.’30 The peasants did not seek this aggressive interference, even if its aim was their improvement. They wanted to run their own lives, in line with the rhythms and the mutual responsibilities – the basic peasant justice – of the village commune.
Arakcheyev knew better. He sets the scene of modernity’s dangerous potential. But the point about modernity is that it is a universal: it is a set of practices that have been applied across the globe, sometimes with less violence than in Russia, sometimes with more violence. What the Russia Anxiety often misses is that Russia’s history of violence is a history of modernity. The encounter between Russia and modernity can be pivoted on two dates, one a century before Arakcheyev, one a century later. First, Peter the Great set about the construction of his new capital city, St Petersburg, on 16 May 1703. Second, an awful massacre disfigured the centre of that city on 9 January 1905.
Towering above his subjects, driven by massive ambition, playful and cruel by turn, Peter the Great wanted to build a perfect city. Quixotically he chose Russia’s empty north-west marshlands, by the Neva river and the Baltic Sea. This was a defensive zone on the edge of Russian lands, from which the main enemy of the day, Sweden, could be faced down. But it also looked out of the Russian interior and down onto the heartlands of Europe. Two hundred and forty-nine years later, Vladimir Putin was born there.
On 16 May 1703, according to tradition, the city of St Petersburg began. The fortress of Saints Peter and Paul was its foundation, and was dedicated on 29 June. Surrounding buildings were hewn roughly out of earth and wood, but star architects were brought in, palaces and cathedrals were imagined, and, within a year, Peter was writing to Prince Menshikov, one of his right-hand men, about this new ‘capital’. Peter moved there properly in 1710.
The scale of the project was vast. In the summer of 1703, 20,000 soldiers were at work constructing the Peter and Paul Fortress. Thousands more workers supplied the site with building materials, cutting down trees and lifting the trunks so that they would float downriver towards the would-be city. From 1704, the authorities demanded the employment of 44,000 workers for up to half a year at a time. This was a press-ganging operation. Those with specific skills were especially vulnerable to being uprooted and drafted to the wasteland in the north. At any one time in the twenty-two years between the foundation of the city and Peter’s death, up to 30,000 labourers worked on the city’s building sites.31
Building paradise was a project of both biblical and all-Russian dimensions. In May 1706, Peter wrote to Menshikov about how pleased he was to be in Petersburg, because ‘in God’s heaven there can be no evil’; four years later, he wrote to him of ‘the beauty of this Paradise’.32 Although Peter in some ways continued the reforms of the late Muscovite period, and brought his modernizing energies to the city of Moscow as well as his new capital, St Petersburg took on a novel and even dangerous form. It brought into focus themes that would feature again in Russia’s modern period: imperial ambition, rooted in the inheritances of ancient Rome, Byzantium, Rus and Muscovy, but reshaped into a modern European state; colonial force, pushing back frontiers and developing territory; the harnessing of large numbers of people in vast peacetime construction projects; and the elevation of an ideology.
But it came at a terrible cost. The labourers who built the city had no proper housing or nutrition and quickly succumbed to cholera and other diseases. Often lacking tools in the early days, many were reduced to digging with their hands. Vasily Klyuchevsky, whose seminal historical account appeared nearly two centuries later, wrote that the construction project of St Petersburg ‘turned out to be a huge graveyard’.33
Peter’s construction of St Petersburg was the prototypical act of urban modernization in Russia. It was not deliberate state violence; it had nothing in common with the oprichnina, and there was no cultural or political line of continuity between the two. But its epic disregard for the wellbeing of its subjects – its self-conscious sense of sacrificing life in the mundane here and now for the good of the future – had its analogues in the industrial revolutions and imperialism that dominated Western Europe’s experience of modernity. New cities in the Americas, constructed at the same time, bore similar material and human costs. Peter’s reign came in Russia’s early-modern era, a short post-medieval forcing house that prefigured modern life. His life’s work was Russia’s ‘modernization’, on permanent display in the architecture of his new capital.
The reign of Peter the Great does not belong to the modern period. Traditional life, the world we have lost, began to give way to modernity, a world marked by glimmers of things we might recognize, later in the eighteenth century. It was the ideas of the Enlightenment, the politics of the French Revolution and the economics of industrialization that made the fundamental changes that led to modern life. Russia started to become deliberately modern during the reign of Catherine the Great (1762–96), at least in government policies and the worldview of those who fashioned them. Peter lacked the language of modernity. But he and the men who surrounded him were, nonetheless, according to one of their leading historians, ‘self-conscious modernizers’.34 They wilfully set about creating a new world that aggressively discounted tradition. Aspects of this world would soon have more in common with our own times than with the medieval past. State violence was built into modernity from the start, whether it was in the Terror of the French Revolution or the perfect prisons dreamed up by Jeremy Bentham in England. Sadly, Russia later encountered the state violence of the modern period in dreadful ways, thanks not to the predispositions of its people or the failure of its cultural ‘system’, but to the decisions of its rulers.
On 4 January 1905, radical Petersburg workers struck for better working conditions. They were led by Father Gapon, a charismatic political organizer with shadowy connections to the security services. It was a mass event, bringing out 100,000 workers within three days. Gapon collected a petition and planned a march to the tsar for 9 January. The petition professed loyalty and begged for protection, though its specific demands, such as the eight-hour day, were radical. The procession to the Winter Palace included women and children, together with male workers; they carried icons and pictures of the tsar. Even in this single event, tens of thousands marched. It seems that, in response, the authorities lacked precise orders and plans, and that the soldiers who guarded the approaches to the Winter Palace panicked. They opened fire. The government itself admitted to killing 130 people and causing serious injury to a further 299; presumably there were many more.35
Thus began the Revolution of 1905, finally defeated in Moscow in December. At that point, Muscovites rose up, their organization and energy focused on the radical working-class Presnya district. The governor-general of Moscow directed the fury of the autocracy against them, giving orders to ‘exterminate the gangs of insurgents’. The best estimate was that 1,059 Muscovites were killed, including 137 women and 86 children. Much of the state’s violence was indiscriminate; it seems that the majority of the dead were innocent of involvement in the uprising. They were collateral damage, the cost of the state expressing its power.36 For comparison, think of what the French government did to its own people when crushing the Paris Commune in 1871, killing perhaps 10,000 and executing the same number out of hand.37
Socialist Revolutionary terrorists responded with their own exterminatory political violence. Between 1905 and 1908, the SRs’ Combat Organization and their even more extremist offshoot, the Maximalists, conducted the terrorist operations and assassinations that caused the deaths of 2,563 government officials; a further 2,954 were wounded.38 These are official figures, and they might well be underestimates. The Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, younger brother of Alexander III and governor general of Moscow under Nicholas II, was one of the most famous victims, killed by a bomb thrown by an assassin called Ivan Kalyaev in 1905. A few days earlier, Kalyaev had deliberately foregone his first chance to carry out the assassination because there were children in the grand duke’s carriage. In the revolutionary movement, this decision first to spare and then to murder became a legendary narrative that could justify crime and honour alike. Virtue and violence became indistinguishable. In any case, the lines of guilt and innocence ran through both state and terrorists, rather than dividing them.39
The government replied in turn. Military courts were given the authority quickly to execute civilians charged with political crimes. In the six months between the publication of the October Manifesto and the convening of the Duma in April 1906, as many as 15,000 people were executed, and 45,000 sent to Siberia. Perhaps another 20,000 were killed or wounded in such events as the crushing of the Moscow Uprising. There were multiple accounts of soldiers firing into crowds in different parts of the country. In the three years after that, the courts passed death sentences on 5,000 political prisoners, and the ‘Stolypin wagons’, named after the prime minister who oversaw the repression, continued to trundle to Siberia.40
This polarization set the scene for the Russian Revolution of 1917. It did not make revolution inevitable. Nor did it make Russia unique. Political extremism had its limits, and people of conscience in government, Duma and wider society continued to work on sensible social reforms – but it brought a brutal quality to political and social life, which would soon be magnified horribly during the First World War. The intelligentsia was infected by the symbols of apocalypse, while some members of the government became prematurely fatalistic about the monarchy and empire. The violence went on, and revolution – the force that would increase the killing a thousandfold – became more plausible. By 1914, Russian society was divided, unable to generate a consensus, tense, accustomed to violence. Yet political collapse and unlimited violence required the First World War to activate them. They did not derive from the imaginary Russian tendency to violence that turns the country into a phantasmogoria.
Russia’s modern age began twice in St Petersburg – first on 16 May 1703, then on 9 January 1905 – and it did so both times in a context of violence. But violence was a malfunction of modern Russian politics, not its purpose. Violence was made by political leaders: by their bad judgement, or personal choice of utilitarian ethics, or malice. In the first fifty years of the twentieth century, Russia’s leaders created violence without limits; their successors ended the violence, or most of it. What we understand by modern Russian political violence was largely limited to the years between 1904, when Russia went to war with Japan, and 1953, when Stalin died. During that time, the Russian political machine broke down, generating a catastrophic sequence, which had no obvious precursor in Russian history, and was not thereafter repeated. That’s no consolation to the tens of millions of victims, but this chronological exactitude is an important truth to set against the fictions of the Russia Anxiety.
Alexander Askoldov directed only one film. Made in 1967, The Commissar was about the Russian Civil War. This conflict took place more than a decade before Askoldov was born, but the heart of his film, the moral of the tale, was probably autobiographical.
Askoldov was five years old in 1937. This was the most infamous year in Russian history, the core of the Great Terror of 1936–8. During that brief time, 692,000 innocent citizens were shot on trumped-up charges as enemies of the people. To some it was a ‘meat grinder’, to others a ‘whirlwind’ of unlimited state violence.
Alexander was born in Moscow, but the family moved to Kiev when he was small. His father was a factory director. No professional people were more important in Stalin’s industrial revolution than the industrial bosses. Since the start of the first five-year plan of 1928, the country had been turned upside down by record-busting industrial expansion, mass migration, and ‘cultural revolution’. The industrial achievements were unmistakable: new cities, massive factories, catapulting growth. But mistakes were made. Targets were missed. Machinery was damaged. Foolish things were said. The political culture of the Bolshevik Party and the logic of the Russian Revolution had always amounted to a project of purification, a purging of enemies in the pursuit of utopia. In 1936, in the context of Stalinist politics and foreign threats, this visceral fear of enemies was unleashed across society. It was easy to imagine that any factory worker, not least the boss, was a saboteur or a wrecker.
As the terror gathered pace, it was no surprise that Alexander’s father was arrested. Soon after that, in the middle of the night, the secret police came back. They hammered on the door. The boy woke up to find that they had come back, this time for his mother. Spouses were often implicated in the grotesque imaginary conspiracies and denunciations that fed the Great Terror. Alexander’s mother was a doctor, acquainted with many people. No doubt she was unsurprised that the NKVD had come for her. But she still asked the policemen to look away while she got dressed. They laughed in her face. You’d better get used to it, they said; no one will give you a second’s privacy where you’re going.
The five-year-old boy watched them leer. Decades later, he said that this was the instant of the whole tragic story that he remembered most piercingly. The arrest was in itself a much greater violation, but the policemen’s refusal to turn away their gaze summed up for him, and always did thereafter, the power of the Stalinist state to destroy people in an arbitrary way, to deny their individuality and humanity, and to create a hierarchy of power that demeaned every member of it.
‘We’ll come back for the boy,’ they said, pushing the mother out of the flat and clicking the door behind them. Alexander remembered how he felt at this moment of eerie silence: he knew that his home was now a place of utter peril. He had to leave. Telling the story decades later, he said that there were two insuperable obstacles on his path. The first was that he could not tie up his shoelaces. The second was that he could not work out how to unlock the door. Adults had shown him many times how to lace up his boots, and yet he’d never managed it. This time, though, he put the boots on and the bow somehow formed. He stood on a chair and stared at the mechanism of the lock. Somehow it clicked open in his hand.
It was dark outside. The pavements were menacing. He walked on and on, deciding eventually to walk down the middle of the traffic-less roads, where the lighting was better. By now he was in the very centre of the city, in Kiev’s main thoroughfare, the Kreshchatyk. Bit by bit, or almost automatically, he was making his way towards some friends of his parents. They were a Jewish family, more modest in material circumstances than his own, with several children. He found his way to their front door, and kicked at it gently.
They opened it straight away, fell upon him and brought him inside. Their pity and affection was as unlimited as the violence of the secret police. They knew straight away what had happened. They hid him away, kept him quiet and helped him mend, until his grandmother came to collect him some time later. She took him back to Moscow, where she worked as a cleaner in a tram depot, and brought him up.
As a young man, after the end of the Stalin era, Alexander Askoldov visited Kiev. He went to try to find the Jewish family that had saved him. But they had long gone, he told an interviewer much later: to Babyi Yar, the ridge above Kiev where the Nazis killed the city’s Jews in 1941.41
The Commissar was Askoldov’s vision of the violence that created Soviet society. It told a story of the Civil War, drew obliquely on his childish experience of the Great Terror and made connections with the Holocaust. There are hints of redemption and hope in The Commissar, but they’re the consequence of common humanity, not Soviet ideology.
Between 1918 and 1920, the Russian lands were devastated by civil war as the Bolsheviks secured their revolution by force. The Revolution of October 1917 was a coup d’état that possessed some democratic credentials: the country unmistakably turned socialist during 1917, even if there was no national majority for the extremist variant of socialism put forward by Lenin’s party. For many of its proponents, the October Revolution promised a democracy of liberation and dignity, but events showed that its democracy was that of implied violence: of the loudest shouts in the crowd, and the elimination of opposing points of view.
The Russian Civil War, during which both sides terrorized opponents, murdered innocent bystanders, and requisitioned grain, always without limits, anticipated the mass destructiveness of Stalinism fifteen years hence, and learned from the political violence of fifteen years earlier. It magnified the assassinations, uprisings and state reaction that surrounded the Revolution of 1905, as well as the mass violence of the First World War and the murderous rhetoric of the revolutionary year of 1917. One historian describes a ‘continuum of violence’ that stretches across the period from 1905 to 1921. Some of its features looked Russian, others had a Marxist tint, but above all it was a modern phenomenon.42 It gathered momentum thanks to the technologies of food requisitioning that the tsarist state used during the First World War, as well as its methods of cataloguing the population by such criteria as name, gender, ethnicity, tax status and address, which made possible the labelling and rounding-up of ‘enemies’ and their easier transfer to refugee camps.43 These were wartime phenomena, owing something to modern developments elsewhere, such as the Defence of the Realm Act in Britain, which in 1916 greatly increased the power of the UK state, and the formation of the FBI in the USA. Government in Russia learned from foreign examples, and made its own contribution to the universal trend. As a result, the violence of the Russian Civil War was nothing if not the ugly side of modernity. But it could not have happened without Lenin and Trotsky, and the White leaders, such as Kolchak. This was not an explosion of ancient Russian hatreds or a magnification of the barbarism of the Russian village writ large. Neither of these existed in a measure greater than anywhere else in Europe. Proponents of the Russia Anxiety should remember how quickly any society can disintegrate when processes that take place in all modern societies combine with a contingent crisis, and a particular collection of personalities have the gifts and skills to take advantage.
Askoldov wanted to make a film about the violence in which Soviet power was forged. A female commissar, Vavilova, has served in the Russian Civil War with courage and strength at the head of a detachment of Red soldiers. They have taken the town of Berdichev. But she is heavily pregnant. She is billeted with a Jewish family, who are angry at the huge reduction in their living space: young mother, grandmother and blacksmith father now sleep in one room with their many children, while the commissar takes the other. Yet they come to protect Vavilova when they discover her pregnancy. They cherish the little boy when he is born, and the commissar herself begins to imagine a life of motherhood alongside them, beyond the Red Army. But the Whites are still nearby. The news comes that they are about to launch an attack to retake the city. Residents spend the day before the onslaught hunkering down. While they are doing so, the children play at enacting a pogrom.
Meanwhile, Yefim, the blacksmith, is putting up makeshift barricades around his modest property. ‘I must tell you, Madame Vavilova,’ he says, ‘this is the best time for the people. One power has gone and the next hasn’t yet arrived. No contributions, no pogroms.’
Modern violence in the twentieth century was unleashed most unstoppably in Germany and Russia. Yefim and his family faced the results of both. He carried on talking to the commissar, as he hammered planks of wood across the gate: ‘I tell you, when a new power comes, first it says that everything will be fine, then it says that things have got worse, then it says we’ve got to find those who are guilty. And’ – he asks in the Russian way – ‘who’s guilty in this life? Who?’
There are two great Russian questions: who is guilty, and what is to be done. Although the mass violence of the Stalin period was a Soviet phenomenon, and had no direct causes in the deep history of Russia, it was still shaped by Russian people and their culture. When the secret policemen denied Alexander Askoldov’s mother her dignity by watching her undress in front of them, they did so because she was an enemy of the people, a label which they viewed through a Russian lens. She was one of the guilty ones. As the fate of the Askoldov family showed, however, guilt was nearly always something ascribed to the innocent.
During the Civil War, Reds and Whites alike ran their own programmes of terror, sweeping up potential opponents, torturing known enemies, razing villages. Hundreds of thousands were killed in atrocities that were fired by ideology, racial prejudice, class hatred, military exigency and specific contexts of the Civil War rather than some kind of Russian national character. The Bolsheviks continued after the Civil War had ended. Political violence flowed naturally out of the Revolution. Laws of 1921 and 1922 targeted non-Bolshevik socialists for arrest and extended detention before trial. In January 1922, the Cheka was repackaged as the OGPU, the ‘political administration’ arm of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (or NKVD). The aim of the organizational change was to promote more thorough and effective surveillance and coercion. When the Soviet Union formally came into being in 1922, its Criminal Code included Article 58, defining political and counter-revolutionary crimes. Article 58 was the legal basis of much of the Great Terror and the dramatic expansion of the Gulag in the 1930s.44
Yet the 1920s also indicated that a different path was possible, and that the Russian Revolution contained within it multiple possible futures. The atrocities of the Civil War were largely coterminous with the fighting itself. When the Party purged itself, as it did, for example, in August 1921, the aim was not to eliminate and kill, but to systematize membership rolls that had got out of control during the Civil War, to cut out double counting and to deprive of Party cards those opportunists who had joined during chaotic times, despite demonstrably lacking a commitment to Bolshevik principles. More generally, the period of the New Economic Policy was not unmarked by diversity and pluralism. This was evident in the overlapping Soviet worlds of urban trade, high and popular culture, village life and the exchange of ideas, all of which unfolded in part beyond the Bolshevik gaze. Between 1922 and 1927, the annual number of people who received custodial sentences for political crimes ranged from 2,336 to 7,547, whereas in the 1930s it was usually above 100,000 and sometimes above 400,000.45
Even in the middle of the most terrible half-century, therefore, there were peaks and troughs of violence. For quite extended periods, it seemed that the direction of Russian or Soviet life had changed. Between 1904 and 1953, violence was not consistently encoded into Russian and Soviet politics; even at this time, it was not an inevitable outgrowth of the Russian experience of modernity. Instead, it took Stalin to write the most terrible chapter yet in the period’s chronicle of political violence.
Stalin became increasingly powerful as the 1920s wore on. Among all his contemporaries, he was the most effective politician, the most charismatic patron, the toughest enforcer, the clearest communicator. He was not the grey nonentity of Trotskyite legend. Instead, he accrued power in a brilliantly systematic way. By the late 1920s, he was the most powerful figure in Soviet politics, impossible to remove, and the subject of a growing cult of personality. He used this position to articulate a far-Left interpretation of revolutionary progress. Out went the compromises of the New Economic Policy; in came the five-year plans, with their collectivization of agriculture and breakneck industrialization. At the end of the 1920s, the Soviet Union was upended by mass mobility, as the migration of millions of peasants to cities began, and by social mobility at a pace that was unprecedented perhaps anywhere in history, as the most modest factory workers and just-migrated former peasants raced up the career ladder. Thanks to the explosion of new factories and jobs, many became managers and technical professionals. This ‘Stalin revolution’ was administered by a growing state apparatus, animated by ideological enthusiasm, typified, on the ground, by chaos and misery, and bolstered, increasingly, by the demands of political conformity. It was the ‘great break’ in Soviet life.
The Stalinist order engaged in the most dramatic process of creation and destruction. Its vision of a communist utopia was given energy not by harmony but by violence. The collectivization of agriculture was a ‘civil war against the peasantry’. The peasants’ consistent wish to be autonomous was violated. Their traditions, embodied in the self-governing commune, were liquidated. The very slightly more prosperous among them (the so-called ‘kulaks’) were arrested, shot or exiled. Grain was ripped from children’s hands, and famine spread across parts of the Ukrainian, Kazakh and Russian republics. In the Ukrainian republic alone, 3.9 million people died in a process labelled the Holodomor (terror-famine). (Some historians call the Ukrainian famine a genocide, arguing that Stalin deliberately sought to destroy an ethnic group in whole or part, but the evidence for this motive, unlike for the numbers of victims, is disputed, and it remains one of the most politicized issues in the historiography of Soviet life; more of this in chapter 7.)46 Meanwhile, cities grew at a rapid pace, some springing out of nothing. Migrant workers slept in barracks, tents and on factory floors; bunks might be time-shared by shift. New factories were put together so quickly that industrial accidents were an epidemic.
Agricultural and industrial modernization caused millions of casualties in the 1930s. The process illustrated the ethics and mood of Stalinism, prefiguring the great political violence that was about to break out. It also explains its likely cause, and why people like Askoldov’s father, a factory boss, were victims.
When Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad Party leader, was shot dead by a lone assassin in December 1934, Stalin took full advantage. He explained the shocking event with reference to an imaginary conspiracy, which he then crushed without mercy. The middle 1930s were characterized by a growing emphasis on purity – of belief, expression, behaviour – in Soviet life. Past events in one’s biography could come back to haunt one. There were Party purges, whose expellees were not yet shot, and show trials. Between 1936 and 1938, the process escalated. Party functionaries, industrial managers and professional people were targeted; ordinary citizens were swept up; orders were sent out to arrest members of particular ethnic groups, such as Poles and Koreans; local branches of the NKVD were given targets and invited to exceed them. In all, 692,000 people were shot, typically on trumped-up charges of espionage, industrial wrecking, ideological transgression or orchestrating far-fetched conspiracies.
The Great Terror of 1936–8 – to Russian people, ‘the repressions’, or ‘1937’ – seems to defy explanation. Why, for example, execute hundreds of senior army officers if you are worried about a Nazi invasion? Historians have argued that the Terror might have had different causes.47 Perhaps it was the work of a deranged Stalin, making use of unlimited power; perhaps it was driven from below, by denouncers and collaborators robbed of moral sensibility by totalitarianism, driven to ideological frenzy by the promises of the extreme Left, or pushed on by fear or ambition; perhaps it showed that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were really the same place, not least because ethnic identity became an important factor as the Terror went on; perhaps it was the latest chapter in a political history of violent cabals.
None of these explanations is wholly correct. The Great Terror started and stopped because Stalin ordered the NKVD to get on with and then desist from its work, and in that sense it was never out of control, but was personally directed from the top. Stalin was driven by ideology, politics and the brutal logic of administration, not to mention great personal cruelty – but not by madness.48 Terror gained force because ordinary people denounced their neighbours or bosses, but such behaviour was sporadic and not the Terror’s origin. The repressions were a strike against the body politic, an act of vicious self-harm. They were not an aggressive push outwards, of the type that Europe’s fascists aspired to. And they came out of a unique political system, the world’s first socialist state.
Stalin stood at the apex of this system, uneasily calculating how to preserve the revolutionary state that the Bolsheviks had been building since 1917 against any reasonable odds. By 1936, the top Bolsheviks knew two things. First, the achievements of collectivization and industrialization were self-evident. Second, these achievements were self-evidently vulnerable. They could still not believe their luck in rising to power; their sense of the world was shaped by chance and risk. For one leading historian of the Terror with an eye for a paradox, Stalin was in command of a strong state, capable of turning society on its head, but a state which to him looked weak, beset by enemies on the borders, in the Party, and in the heartlands. Capitalists and fascists were waiting to invade. After all, Franco’s conspirators had just risen up against Spain’s progressive republican government and started the Civil War, and Hitler’s hatred of Bolsheviks and Slavs was clear for everyone to see. Meanwhile, any shortfalls in the economic plans – so carefully designed, so well informed by Marx – could surely only be caused by conspiracy, so there must be spies and wreckers in the factories. Enemies of the people were everywhere. The NKVD gathered intelligence about all this. Their agents’ training and ideological sympathies – their basic raison d’être – required them to expose the existence of enemies. Stalin read their reports. His conclusions made sense in the context of his worldview and the flawed information that was presented to him. In the strange world of the Soviet 1930s, but not before or after, unrestrained judicial killing, whose causes looked incomprehensible to outsiders, possessed their own logic to the executioners, especially the dictator who oversaw the process.49
While the Great Terror would never be repeated, the population of the Gulag continued to grow. At the time of the Terror, the great majority of people convicted for political crimes under Article 58 were shot, and the population of the Gulag was relatively stable, around three-quarters of a million in total, mostly made up of apparently ordinary criminals. By 1941, however, it had doubled in size, with nearly one-third of the inmates ‘politicals’. It contracted during the war, until its population was little more than half a million in 1946. In line with old Russian traditions, the authorities called an amnesty at the time of victory: many were released, and the judiciary was apparently more lenient – though the flow into the Gulag did not stop. Thereafter the number of convicts rose relentlessly, reaching a peak of almost 1.75 million in 1953, when Stalin died. At this point, one-quarter were inside for counter-revolutionary crimes; in 1947, of a population of just over 600,000, half had been politicals.50 Meanwhile, by 1953, a further 750,000 arrestees were trapped in so-called special settlements: brutal townships which they had been forced to build themselves.51
Not separate from Soviet society but deeply intertwined within it, the camps conformed to many of the system’s ideological precepts. They had the same functions as society as a whole: to create a secure, future-facing workers’ state driven by an industrial economy, where all right-thinking people were convinced communists, and enemies had been eliminated. Even though death rates in the camps were very high, many prisoners were given a chance to recant. The Stalinist project destroyed while it created, killed while it redeemed. While the Gulag was at the sharp edge of this destructiveness, and was often characterized by the most extreme brutality, this double ambition was its mission too.52 In such ways it differed from the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, where the possibility of redemption and reforging did not exist. It also differed from its forerunners. The Siberian incarceration system of nineteenth-century Russia, cruel for sure, bore little resemblance to the Gulag. Locations could be the same, and sometimes the extent of brutality was similar. But in imperial Russia the numbers were much smaller, the economy was different, the ideological coercion was absent.
Although one can draw out the origins and consequences of Stalinist violence, it was strikingly of its time. It had no forerunners in Russian history and it never recurred. Even in the late Stalinist period, the post-war years of 1945–53, political killings were much reduced. While political terror was still arbitrary, and the moral value of each individual case was the same as before, the overall scope of violence was now precisely controlled and carefully limited. The ‘Leningrad Affair’ of 1948–50 was the stand-out post-war case: a terrifying purge that ripped through the political elite of the second Soviet city. It led to about 200 executions, vastly fewer than during the Great Terror. Stalin’s Terror must remain a warning, a set of lessons. But misreading these lessons, and constantly imagining that the past is about to repeat itself, is also risky. After all, the 1930s were not even a precedent for the 1940s. It is almost impossible to see how Stalinism’s combination of extremist ideology, police power, state-building, social flux, long-term brutalization, popular mobilization, and personal dictatorship in a closed-off society could have any explanatory power for twenty-first century Russia, which is not to say that bad things won’t or don’t happen. Recognizing this might damp down the Russia Anxiety a bit.
Huddling in the cellar as the Whites bombard the town, Yefim and the other adults comfort the children. In a lull, Vavilova points out that the Reds are fighting for the future, for the destruction of the old ways. For her, religion and tradition are fairy tales, supporting repressive property relations and class injustice. But Yefim is bemused and angry too. ‘If you take fairy tales away from people,’ he asks her, ‘how would you tell them what to live for?’
‘People don’t need fairy tales,’ she replies. ‘People need the truth, for which they wouldn’t complain about dying!’
‘To die?’ asks Yefim. ‘And when will they live?’
Yefim’s story seems born out of centuries of Eurasian suffering: Russian, Ukrainian and Jewish. But it took place at a very specific moment, in the heart of the Russian lands’ most terrible half-century. This violence emerged from ‘modernity’ more than it did from Russia itself: it belonged in the modern spectrum of administrative and technological ‘practices’, though it took on a Russian form. But political leaders designed the policies, built up the forces, and made the ideological weather that could make the storm of violence happen.
There are two facts about Stalinism. First, it was one of the most terrible phenomena in human history. Second, it ended. There was a dreadful continuation of Stalinism in some parts of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe – it never ceased in communist Romania, for example – but in the Soviet Union, Stalinism effectively ended on 5 March 1953, when Stalin died, and the half-century of unlimited violence came to a close. Askoldov probably didn’t mean it like this, but the answer to Yefim’s question – ‘when will they live?’ – would be: after Stalin had gone.
Stalin’s demise was a life-and-death moment not only for the dictator himself, but for tens of millions of people. Take the story of another little boy – Pasha.53
His family’s great fear unfolded during their longest day and night. It was the post-war Stalinist period. Pasha was six years old and at kindergarten in Moscow (where children start school at six or seven). One morning, invited by his teacher to utter some pleasantry about Stalin, he refused. He stood on his chair so that his voice would carry better. ‘Lenin is better than Stalin!’ he declared, having little idea why he said it. Then he said it again.
The children around showed only passing interest, but the teacher turned ashen. She looked at Pasha, first mournfully, then with fear, then with resentment. She spoke to the director of the kindergarten. The child’s parents were called. When they eventually arrived, having made feeble excuses to their bosses, they took their son home early. They were as terrified and exhausted as the kindergarten staff.
In the main room of their flat in central Moscow – they had their own apartment, and enjoyed a decent standard of living – the young parents sat in silence with their small child. The clock ticked. Nobody was hungry, apart from the boy. Of course he sensed their fear and could still feel it decades later. But he still went to the kitchen with his mother and ate a bowl of buckwheat. He went to bed, and his mother tossed and turned in the same room.
His father sat up all night. He didn’t even remove his coat. The curtains did not quite meet in the middle of the window. A small bag with a change of clothes and a bar of soap was at his feet. No doubt he rehearsed his explanation in his mind. How could it have been that his son came up with such a form of words, his interrogators would ask him. What have you been saying? Who’ve you been saying it to? Is it because you’re a Jew? All night he waited for a knock on the door.
But the knock on the door never came. Scattered light started to shine through the gap in the curtains. It showed up the dust on the floor. Pasha came in, yawning. It was 6 March 1953. The world was about to hear that Stalin had died the day before. So perhaps the secret police never heard about the incident. They certainly had other priorities. The Soviet Union was about to change for ever. Its Stalinist chapter was over. A new Soviet Union was coming into being. The prospects for Pasha’s family, like those of families across the USSR, were changed out of recognition by Stalin’s demise. Their family would not be ripped in two by a stray childish comment in a kindergarten, repeated from a whispered kitchen conversation, overheard when the boy woke up the night before and wanted a drink of water. No longer would political violence define the Soviet Union.
Vladimir Putin was not yet five months old. This was the world he was born into: the aftermath of violence, when Soviet society attempted to come to terms with what had happened.
Immediately after Stalin died, the Bolsheviks dismantled their system of violence. Not completely: many camps remained, and some prisoners, such as the dissident Anatoly Marchenko, endured experiences that replicated those of the Stalin period. But the system was dramatically reduced in size and transformed in function. Many people were released. For those who remained, most of whom were regular criminal convicts, conditions usually improved considerably. Outside, the experience of arbitrary arrest became rare. People were now pretty sure that if they didn’t talk out of turn they could live to some extent as they pleased – though they were very unlikely to be able to travel abroad, and had to put up with censored media and economic shortages. Still, the rules of how to live were clearer. Arbitrary rule, and Stalin-style political violence, had gone.
No one expressed the transformation more dramatically than Lavrenty Beria. Beria had been Stalin’s secret police chief for nearly fifteen years, since the Terror had consumed his predecessor, Nikolai Yezhov. He had built a massive empire, running the Gulag, managing the nuclear weapons programme and eliminating enemies. He knew where all the bodies were buried. He was personally cruel, too, kidnapping and raping young women.54 No wonder his colleagues were so afraid of what he might know about them and of what he could do to them.
Beria understood the limits of Soviet power and his ability to shape them for his own benefit. The Gulag was probably still economically viable, and Beria had not become a man of peace, so it was the perception of political advantages that made him press so quickly for reform. He argued in spring 1953 in favour of a Gulag amnesty, and also for a more conciliatory attitude in Cold War diplomacy. Within less than a year, from 1 July 1953 to 1 April 1954, the population of the Gulag and special settlements fell by half, to 1.27 million. Big Gulag projects, such as a major railway line in north-western Siberia, were immediately suspended.55 But on 26 June 1953, Beria’s two rivals for power, Georgyi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, struck, theatrically arresting him during a Presidium (Politburo) meeting. He was executed in secret at the end of the year.
Beria’s demise was the last major act of Stalinist political violence. The reforms he cynically proposed were amplified over the next two years. They were given ideological clarity and political direction by the most dramatic moment of the post-Stalin years, the Secret Speech of February 1956, when Khrushchev, now dominant, confirmed the course of de-Stalinization. The Secret Speech, which we will return to in more detail in chapter 9, transformed the Soviet Union. The Communist Party still gripped power and controlled a police state. But for the vast majority of the population – and there were exceptions, not least in the western borderlands – a kind of normal life began, though one that continued to be shaped in part by economic shortages and relative isolation from the outside world.
Alexander Askoldov made The Commissar in 1967, three years after Khrushchev had been deposed by Brezhnev’s clique. In those early Brezhnev years, there was scope for artistic experimentation, but the artist had to know how to work with the authorities.
Askoldov refused to do that. His film was uncompromising. It did not even pay lip service to the aesthetic of socialist realism, which, officially at least, still governed Soviet cultural production. There was no trajectory from loss to hope, mediated by class triumph and socialist power. Askoldov made the Civil War seem pointlessly barbaric, and he implied certain equivalences between the Whites and the Reds. At the end of the film, while the family is holding out in the cellar, there is a fantasy sequence in which Vavilova looks on while Yefim and his family, and all the other Jews of the town, are rounded up. Dressed in prison clothes and Jewish stars, they are herded towards a camp. What to make of this foretelling of the Holocaust by a Civil War commissar? At the very least, it raised problematic questions about Jewish life in the USSR that by the late 1960s were better ignored.
And there was a final twist. When morning came, Vavilova let herself out of the cellar. She understood that the Reds were evacuating the town. It was a moment of agony for her. She had to choose between joining them, so that she would get the chance to fight another day, and staying with her baby. If she left, she might also help her protectors: under the impending White occupation, sheltering a Red commissar was an obvious capital crime. But if she stayed, she had a chance to raise her boy. She pulled on the remnants of her uniform and her commissar’s overcoat, placed the baby on the ground, shouted out to Maria, Yefim’s wife, and ran off. Emerging into the morning light, cradling the Bolshevik child, the Jewish couple wondered – with curiosity, not condemnation – what sort of person would do that. What kind of alien force were these Bolsheviks?
It was an open-and-shut case for the State Cinema Authority. The Commissar could not be salvaged. There was no chance it could ever be shown. The censors said that the film portrayed the Bolshevik Revolution as ‘a force that opposes the very essence of human existence, a phenomenon that destroys personal ties by causing alienation, despair, and uncertainty about the future’.56 Askoldov was prevented from working as a film director, exiled from Moscow, removed from Party membership. It was a career catastrophe and a personal disaster. But it was a different fate from his father’s: no arrest in the middle of the night, no bullet in the back of the head. In 1967, it had been possible to make The Commissar, with all its personal vision and subversive potential, using the facilities of one of the country’s most famous film institutions, the Maxim Gorky Studios, and employing some of the country’s greatest actors and actresses, imagining that it might be shown in some form in cinemas. In retrospect, it seems less important that the film was banned than that it was made. Stalinism had plainly gone.
The Russian Revolution would have contrasting futures ahead of it. It was born in violence, and its first goal was the elimination of its enemies with extreme prejudice. Yet it promised liberation. It turned the world upside down, creating winners and losers. In time it gave Pasha and millions of others the chance to live in a kind of peace and normality, at least without fear of arrest. There was not even much need to conform: just to keep quiet. Askoldov, of course, crossed the wrong line. When the film was banned, he protested, appealed to the authorities, ‘knocked at all sorts of doors’. But it was only during the Gorbachev era that he got the chance to stand up for his film in public. In the context of reform and openness, perestroika and glasnost, books by the likes of Boris Pasternak and Vasily Grossman were emerging from the hidden archives of the KGB. Askoldov had to fight for it, even in 1987, but The Commissar was finally shown at home and abroad, to rapturous acclaim.
The searing experience of his mother’s arrest gave Aksoldov his personal insight, at full magnification, into the Stalinist dictatorship. But that terrible night, when he learned to lace up his boots and make his own way to safety, was not the last time he saw her. Unlike his father, she was not shot. Instead, she was sent to a camp.
Her medical qualifications, at a premium during the wartime emergency, saved her. Four years after her arrest, she was freed, and was given the opportunity to redeem herself by serving the country in the army. She came back to Moscow, and mother and son were briefly reunited. Now she abandoned him in a different way. ‘My own mother, a military doctor, left me alone to go to the front,’ he told an interviewer in 1988.57
What was the difference between Comrade Vavilova and Comrade Askoldova, the commissar and the physician? They both left their sons. Vavilova chose to. Askoldova had no choice. Vavilova participated in building the Soviet dictatorship. Askoldova was victimized by it. Vavilova was a true believer who thought that destruction could lead to creation. Askoldova, whatever her beliefs, can scarcely have thought that. They both wore the uniform of Soviet power during its most violent incarnations, in the Civil War and the Stalin period respectively. Who was the victim and who was the perpetrator? They were fighting for different things. But how do you tell the difference so many decades later?
The question is more important than the answer. There is no answer. If you’ve asked the question seriously, if you’ve paused, looked away, and really thought about it – if you’ve removed yourself from the equation and treated these people on their own terms – then you’re free of the Russia Anxiety.