THE SOVIET UNION UNDER LENIN AND STALIN
Rarely in the history of any country has one man cast so long a shadow as V. I. Lenin has over Russia. The basic contours of the communist system fashioned by Lenin remained intact for about seventy years. Not only was he indispensable in bringing Bolshevism to power, but he created the ideology of Bolshevism, he inspired and guided the organization of the communist movement, and he, more than anyone else, shaped the Soviet system of rule during the first six years of its existence. Anyone who examines the profound changes that Russia underwent after 1917 in its economy, political institutions, and legal order, in the government’s policy towards religion and the national minorities, and in the country’s moral climate invariably encounters the hand of Lenin. This is not to say that every domestic policy of Soviet leaders after Lenin’s death in 1924 followed in detail the lines set down by the architect of the revolution or that Lenin would have acted precisely in the way his successors did. But for over six decades Soviet leaders considered Lenin’s teachings to be sacrosanct and persistently invoked his name to justify their policies. And they spared no effort in disseminating his doctrines. It has been estimated that in 1990 there were no less than 653 million copies of Lenin’s writings in 125 languages in the Soviet Union, which one wag believed was ‘perhaps the only area of abundance achieved by communist efforts’.
Whichever policy Lenin pursued, and sometimes he shifted from one to another rather abruptly, he never lost sight of his final goal, socialism, and no matter how precarious his government’s hold on power, he never contemplated giving up. He was always certain that he was right and that his opponents were not only wrong but perverse in holding on to their position. As one of his contemporaries who knew him well put it, in speaking with Lenin one had the feeling that he had a piece of paper in his pocket with the truth written on it.
His zigzags were especially conspicuous in his attempt to cope with Russia’s crumbling economy. In the cities, there was a real danger of starvation because of a severe shortage of grain, a consequence of both the war and the reluctance of peasants to sell their produce at the prevailing, very low prices. Industrial production had declined by more than two-thirds, leaving many workers unemployed and therefore without the wherewithal to buy the food that was available. Moreover, the transportation system had deteriorated to such an extent that in some regions of the country products could not be shipped to markets. To deal with the mounting crisis, the government in June 1918 introduced a series of radical measures known as ‘War Communism’, the central feature of which was the creation of a state monopoly over all grain. On the government’s initiative, village committees of the poor peasants were formed to requisition the grain from well-off peasants, by force if necessary. As an incentive to the committees, their members were promised a share of the grain they seized as well as a share of the industrial goods available for the villages. The ideological underpinnings of War Communism were clear: it brought class warfare, often accompanied by ghastly outbursts of violence, into the countryside.
In November 1918, the government nationalized trade and established a network of state cooperative stores authorized to distribute goods. Because of the pervasive shortages, a system of rationing was introduced. Two months later, the government nationalized all banks and began to print money at a feverish pace to pay for its expenditure. The predictable result was rapid inflation, which prompted the government to replace the system of monetary taxation with a system of taxation in goods. Workers’ control in factories, which had been approved in November 1917, remained in force, even though industrial production declined at an alarming rate, by 1920 to about thirteen percent of the 1913 level. Meanwhile, by the second half of 1918, about twenty-eight percent of all wages were paid in kind and in three years this rose to ninety-four percent. Russia now in effect had a barter economy, which continued to deteriorate because the peasants, rather than turning their crops over to the committees of the poor, decided to reduce output. Within four years of the revolution, agricultural production had declined to fifty-four percent of the 1913 level. It has been estimated that in the years from 1918 to 1920 over seven million people died of malnutrition. Many citizens living in cities returned to the countryside; Moscow and St. Petersburg, to cite but two examples, lost about half their population. But the Bolsheviks could claim some positive results from War Communism: they secured control over the so-called ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, that is, over heavy industry, transportation, banks, and foreign trade. And they gained some administrative experience, which would serve them well in the future.
In addition to the economic crisis, Lenin had to contend with growing political and military opposition to his regime. For about three years, from 1918 to late 1920, a brutal civil war raged in the country, and to many observers at the time it seemed highly unlikely that the Bolsheviks would be able to retain power. Arrayed against the communists were a wide range of political parties, former officers of the imperial army, and nationalists who wished to secure independence from Russia. In the summer of 1918, small contingents of soldiers from France, Britain, Japan, and the United States landed in Russia and, although the major aim of the British and French was to restore the eastern front against Germany, they also helped the Whites, as the anti-Bolshevik forces were known. Japan landed troops in hopes of seizing territory, and the United States did so to check the Japanese. The main consequence of this ill-advised and ill-conceived foreign intervention was to enable Leninists to claim that they were the true patriots because they were defending Russian soil against the foreign invader.
The Whites scored some impressive victories against the communists and in the summer and fall of 1919 seemed to be on the verge of capturing Moscow and St. Petersburg, but in the end they failed to dislodge the new government. Too often involved in fierce squabbling among themselves, and politically inept, the Whites were incapable of arousing wide support among the people. Moreover, their forces were dispersed in the territorial periphery of the country, where the economy and the transportation system were especially underdeveloped. The Whites never managed to create a unified force that could launch a concerted attack on the government in Moscow. On the other hand, the Bolsheviks controlled a compact area in the center of the country, where the systems of communication and transportation were more efficient. With their land program, described in chapter 7, they succeeded in turning the peasants into a neutral, if not friendly, force. Perhaps equally important, Leon Trotsky, the minister of war, was highly effective in organizing and inspiring the Red Army, which quickly became a potent fighting force. It not only inflicted major defeats on the Whites; in 1920, it also managed to fend off the Poles, who had marched into Kiev in an attempt to restore the Polish frontiers of 1722.
By the spring of 1921, the Reds had defeated the Whites and had reestablished a semblance of order in most of what had been the Russian Empire. But there were important losses. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland became independent states, Romania annexed Bessarabia, Poland took parts of Belorussia and the Ukraine, the Japanese held on to some lands in the Amur region, Georgia remained independent, and there continued to be pockets of resistance to the communists in Bukhara (Central Asia). Still, the Leninists could now be said to have consolidated their power and so could turn their attention to the economy, which remained thoroughly enfeebled.
Major decisions on reviving the economy were taken at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, which in several respects marked a turning point in the history of Bolshevism and of Russia. There is little doubt that Lenin intended to chart a new course at the congress, but before the meetings began an unexpected and dramatic development strengthened his resolve to change direction. A sizable number of sailors, who had been among the most fervent supporters of communism, staged an anti-government uprising in Kronstadt, a naval base seventeen miles west of St. Petersburg. Motivated in part by news of industrial unrest in the capital and, probably more so, by the hardships of peasants, the sailors issued a series of demands to the communist authorities: they called for new and free elections of the soviets, freedom of speech for workers, peasants, anarchists, and Left Socialist Revolutionaries, recognition of the right of workers and peasants to form associations, and the liberation of all socialist political prisoners. On 2 March, the insurgents created a Provisional Revolutionary Committee to press for the implementation of their demands, none of which could be legitimately considered reactionary. Nonetheless, in calling for new elections the rebels challenged the legitimacy of the Bolshevik system of rule. Pointing to that demand, the government denounced the insurgents as counterrevolutionaries, and then launched a savage attack on the fortress in Kronstadt and crushed the uprising. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of rebels were executed without trial. The Communist Party throughout the country rallied around the government, although outside Russia some supporters of the Leninist experiment were shaken by the brutality.
Lenin now made several pronouncements at the congress on the organization of the Communist Party that proved to be fateful. Although Lenin had been the first among equals within the Bolshevik leadership, and although he had long favored a highly centralized party, he had tolerated some political disagreement and had allowed individuals to express their personal views. But now that the leadership faced a serious political challenge and was about to embark on a new economic program, Lenin put an end to the relative freedom to discuss political issues. On the second day of the Tenth Party Congress, he declared that the time had come to ‘put a lid’ on all opposition to his program. He insisted that it was pointless to reproach him for advocating such a course, for it followed ‘from the state of affairs’, by which he presumably meant that the Bolsheviks were politically too weak to allow freedom of speech. A few days later, the congress, at Lenin’s urging, adopted by very large majorities a resolution dissolving all ‘groups with separate platforms’. Those who refused to abandon ‘factionalism’, as it came to be called, would be expelled from the party by the Central Committee. The provision on expulsion, which remained secret until 1923, became a powerful weapon for the silencing of any opposition to the leadership. It marked a very significant step towards the formation of what has been called the ‘communist autocracy’.
Lenin’s new economic program, also announced at the Tenth Party Congress, marked a decisive shift away from the highly centralized and coercive policies embodied in War Communism, which had been a major cause of economic disintegration since 1918. But the abandonment of War Communism had for some time been advocated by the Mensheviks, long a rival of the communists for working-class support. Under the circumstances, Lenin found it inconvenient to allow the Mensheviks to continue operating as a political party. People might ask why the Mensheviks, who, it now turned out, had been right all along, should not be permitted to exercise power. To forestall such embarrassing queries, the Bolsheviks stepped up the repression of the Mensheviks and soon also of other non-communist socialist parties.
In introducing what came to be known as the ‘New Economic Policy’ (NEP), Lenin sought not only to revive industry and agriculture but also to grapple with the political tensions caused by the growing split between the peasants and the workers. There were signs that the goodwill that Lenin had gained in 1917 with his pro-peasant policies was disappearing. Peasant uprisings, which had increased at an alarming rate in the fall of 1920 and became especially intense in Tambov, did not end until 1924, despite the government’s extensive use of force against the insurgents. To appease the peasants and revive the economy, Lenin was prepared to make concessions to them and to a lesser extent to industrial entrepreneurs and workers, even to the point of abandoning War Communism, but he would not give up his ultimate goal, the establishment of socialism.
The main features of the NEP can be easily summarized. Most important, the government abolished compulsory requisitioning of agricultural products and, instead, imposed a tax that in 1922 was set at ten percent of the peasants’ crops. The peasants could then sell the remainder of their produce on the free market and pocket the profits. The peasants were also permitted to hire labor and to lease land, which, however, they still could not buy or sell. In another break with War Communism, the government reintroduced a currency and created a state bank that conducted its business along traditional lines. By 1924, all taxes in kind were replaced by a tax in cash and the barter economy came to an end.
Industry was divided into two sectors. On the one hand, the state retained ownership of about 8.4 percent of all enterprises, but these comprised all the large ones that together employed about eighty-four percent of the labor force. On the other hand, small enterprises could be owned by individuals, and within a few years over eighty-eight percent of all enterprises fell into this category, but these employed only about 12.5 percent of all industrial workers. Although progress was not always smooth, within a few years the economy revived to a remarkable degree. By early 1928, the output of many branches of industry equaled that of 1913, the last year before the decline that set in during the war. Agricultural production also increased greatly, and the standard of living of most people more or less returned to the prewar level, which was not exactly high but was much better than during the grim years from 1917 to 1921. It has been estimated that if so-called ‘socialized wages’ such as health benefits, state insurance schemes, and educational scholarships are taken into account, urban workers were actually better off in 1927 than they had been in 1913.
In the meantime, the political landscape had changed fundamentally. Early in 1924, Lenin, the undisputed leader of the country, died after a series of debilitating strokes. The death of a tsar in imperial Russia generally provoked anxiety about the views and abilities of the new ruler, but ever since 1825 the succession at least had been clear-cut and no one was in doubt about who the new ruler would be. The constitution of 1918, never taken very seriously by Lenin, described the Marxist principles that would guide the administrations of the state and guaranteed the vote to all except the bourgeoisie, but beyond that did not specify how the political leadership would be selected. Late in 1923, when he was already incapacitated, Lenin seems to have realized that the Bolshevik party and the country would face a crisis of leadership after his death. He drafted a testament, in which he passed judgment on prominent men in the national leadership and found all of them wanting. He was so negative in his judgments that every effort was made to conceal the document, and it came to light in the West only because Max Eastman, an American writer then sympathetic to communism, smuggled it out of the country. Lenin regarded Trotsky, his right-hand man since 1917, as the most gifted man in the Central Committee but also as too self-confident and too interested in the ‘purely administrative side of affairs’. He thought that N. I. Bukharin was ‘the most significant theoretician’ but weak in dialectics. Lenin reserved his sharpest barbs for J. V. Stalin, whom he considered to be too concerned with amassing power, which he did not always use wisely. Lenin also warned that Stalin was ‘too rude’ and suggested that he be removed from the very important post of general secretary of the party. If that were not done, Lenin warned, there would be a split among the party leaders. In making this last point, Lenin proved to be uncannily omniscient.
For four years, the leaders of the Soviet Union engaged in a brutal struggle for power that they liked to portray as essentially a conflict over profound ideological issues touching on the interpretation of Marxism and Leninism. It was that to some extent, but the endless intrigues and constantly shifting alliances suggest that it was even more a conflict over who would inherit the mantle of Lenin and become the undisputed leader of the socialist cause. In terms of achievements, prominence, and ability, the most likely successor to Lenin would appear to have been Trotsky, a powerful orator, a highly effective military leader during the civil war who had also demonstrated a capacity for brilliant and original thought in the arcane area of Marxist thought. But he could not restrain his arrogant behavior and, despite his acute intelligence, he was not a talented politician capable of persuading colleagues to accept him as their leader. Moreover, he was a Jew and it seemed unlikely that the Russian masses would be willing to be ruled by him even though his religious background was totally unimportant to him.
Trotsky’s main rival, Stalin, seemed unqualified for other reasons: he was not an intellectual with a deep understanding of Marxism, he was not known as an innovator, and he certainly was not a charismatic personality. But he was extremely shrewd and knew how to ingratiate himself among members of the communist bureaucracy. He carefully cultivated contacts at all levels of the party, never tired of listening to people with complaints, and never gave the impression of harboring great personal ambitions. His obscurity made him in many ways an ideal person for leadership in a political movement that derided the role of individuals and emphasized the critical importance of social forces in history. Not to be overlooked is the fact that during Lenin’s lifetime Stalin accepted party positions that the more colorful and brilliant men shunned. He was the commissar of nationalities, the commissar of the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate, and in the Politburo, the real government of the country, he took on more of the day-to-day tasks of the party than anyone else, tasks that the intellectuals scorned as drudgery. In 1922, he was appointed general secretary of the Central Committee, whose function it was to coordinate the work of the numerous branches of the committee. In that post, Stalin set the agenda of the Politburo and then supervised the implementation of its decisions. The general secretary also was in charge of the appointments and promotions of party functionaries. It soon became a position of enormous power and within a few years the general secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and in every other country with a Communist Party became the preeminent leader of the movement. Stalin never relinquished the title, even when he was the undisputed ruler of Russia.
In 1923, while Lenin was still alive but greatly weakened from his strokes, two Politburo members, G. E. Zinoviev and L. B. Kamenev, formed an alliance with Stalin, giving the three, known as the ‘triumvirate’, a majority that could administer the country. Zinoviev and Kamenev worked with Stalin not because they favored his rise to power but because they wished to stop Trotsky from attaining the top post in the party. It did not even occur to them that Stalin viewed himself as a candidate for that post. Ideological differences did not surface until 1924, when the triumvirate charged Trotsky with subscribing to three heresies: he advocated the theory of permanent revolution, he failed to understand the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, and he rejected the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’. The latter doctrine, most vigorously advocated by Stalin, was a clear deviation from classical Marxism, which had always maintained that socialism could triumph only on a worldwide basis. Indeed, Zinoviev and Kamenev initially adopted the doctrine only because they believed that Stalin had come up with a clever weapon in the increasingly bitter conflict with Trotsky.
But Stalin was dead serious. He insisted that Russia was so rich in raw materials that it could on its own proceed to build socialism. Close examination of Stalin’s and Trotsky’s position on this question shows that they were not all that far apart. Trotsky also believed that Russia should adopt policies that would move the country towards a socialist order, but he contended that the process of creating a fully developed socialist society could not be completed in one country alone. Even though Stalin conceded that to complete the process of building socialism in Russia alone would take a long time, he had devised a doctrine that resonated widely among the people who followed politics. It was a shrewd doctrine bound to appeal to a population that had endured terrible hardships and was therefore inclined to clutch at any suggestion that their sufferings were not in vain, that if they persisted they would be able to reach the ultimate goal of an affluent and egalitarian social order.
Step by step, the triumvirate pressed its campaign against Trotsky, who early in 1925 felt obliged to resign as commissar of war. Now that Trotsky’s political power had been undermined, Stalin turned his attention to Zinoviev and Kamenev by forming an alliance with other members of the Politburo against them. He kept shuffling his alliances and it took him until 1929 to emerge as the ultimate leader of the Communist Party and the state. When on the tenth anniversary of the revolution, on 7 November 1927, Trotsky and Zinoviev led a peaceful procession separate from the official one, both men were immediately expelled from the party. Early in 1929, the Politburo adopted Stalin’s recommendation that Trotsky be expelled from Russia. Other opponents or presumed opponents of Stalin were also driven from their positions of authority. Several of them abjectly renounced their views, pledged loyalty to Stalin, and thus gained readmission to the top echelons of the party, where, however, they remained for only a few years. Trotsky never renounced his views and for eleven years traveled from one country to another – several refused to give him refuge – before settling down in Mexico, where in 1940 Stalin’s henchman murdered him in cold blood.
On Stalin’s fiftieth birthday, 21 December 1929, it became clear that his triumph over his rivals would usher in a form of personal rule remarkable even in a country accustomed to the ritualistic glorification of the tsars. Unlike Lenin, who in 1920 insisted on a relatively modest celebration of his fiftieth birthday, Stalin approved of an elaborate campaign that has been called a ‘symbolic celebration’ of him as the ‘party’s new vozhd’ (leader). In numerous articles the press referred to him as Lenin’s worthy successor and he promised ‘to devote to the cause of the working class, the proletarian revolution and world communism, all my strength, all my ability and, if need be, all my blood, drop by drop’. Within a few years he was glorified as almost a sacred figure who was infallible, the repository of ultimate wisdom in all fields of endeavor, a kind and gentle man who ranked with Marx and Lenin as a theorist of Marxism and who cared deeply about his people. But what his program would entail was not yet clear. He had not articulated his views during the struggle for power and over the preceding five years he had gravitated from one position to another depending on the perceived political requirements of the moment. But it soon became clear he and his close advisers were committed to a series of policies that would amount to nothing less than a second Bolshevik revolution, a revolution from above that would transform Russia perhaps even more radically than had Lenin’s in 1917.
The new revolution, initiated in 1928, was designed to deal with the economic and social consequences of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. Although Russia at the time was better off than it had been for close to fifteen years, it still was a predominantly agrarian country and the concessions of 1921 to capitalism seemed to suggest that socialism was but a distant dream.
Under the NEP large-scale industry had made considerable progress, but it remained a tiny sector of the economy. Moreover, for some time, the left within the Politburo had argued that the peasants were becoming so powerful economically that they would soon be capable of undermining the Soviet system of rule by threatening to withhold agricultural products from urban centers. The only way to counter the leverage of the countryside was for the government to spur rapid industrialization, which would provide Bolshevism with a solid base of support and would turn Russia into a modern state militarily capable of defending itself against capitalist countries still bent on destroying socialism. The proponents of this position favored the establishment of collective farms to increase agricultural production rapidly and to free up labor needed in industrial areas. An underlying assumption of the leftists was that revolutions in the West remained possible, and that the program they favored would encourage communist parties in industrially advanced countries to make renewed efforts to gain power.
On the other hand, the rightists in the Politburo, led by Bukharin, contended that a policy of rapid industrialization was feasible only if private businesses were heavily taxed to pay for the creation of new factories. In an economy that was already shaky, that would cause serious disruptions. Bukharin’s proposal was to let the private sector continue to operate on the profit principle. He adopted the provocative slogan of the nineteenth-century French prime minister François Guizot, generally regarded as the spokesman par excellence of bourgeois interests, who urged entrepreneurs to ‘enrich yourselves’. Bukharin believed that socialism would still be safe in Russia because the communists would continue to control industry, banking, and the system of transportation. He also believed that in the West capitalism had been stabilized and that therefore there was little likelihood of socialism spreading in the foreseeable future.
In 1928, Stalin, who during the struggle for power had posed as a moderate, sided with the left and came out for a radical restructuring of the economy. The chief proponent of ‘socialism in one country’ since 1925, he now feared that the countryside, led by the ‘rich’ peasants (kulaks, as they were known in Russian), would soon be strong enough to turn Russia back to capitalism. Was this fear justified? In 1927 there had been a decline in the amount of grain shipped to urban centers, but this does not seem to have been the result of a political decision by the peasants to undermine socialism. Most of the agricultural surplus came from middle and poorer peasants, who together constituted about eighty-seven percent of the rural population and who were now living better by consuming a larger share of their total produce than in previous years. That was why less food was being sent to the cities. Nor did the kulaks, long derided by the Bolsheviks as particularly dangerous villains, have enough economic power to shape the nation’s economic system. They made up only 3.9 percent of the rural population and could hardly be considered truly wealthy. They were better off than most peasants in that they owned larger plots of land and some draft animals and equipment and often leased land from poorer peasants. But in 1927, they produced only thirteen percent of the total amount of grain, which was hardly enough to give them the clout necessary to determine the shape of the national economy.
Yet in some respects the Bolsheviks had reason to be nervous about developments in the countryside. They had not been able to impose their political will on the villages, where traditional peasant institutions continued to play an important role in the lives of the vast majority of the people. For example, in many regions the age-old commune was still a center of administration, more active than the local soviets. A report to the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1927 indicated that, whereas the communes and various other informal peasant organizations had a budget of eighty million rubles, the 2,300 soviets in the countryside disposed of only sixteen million rubles. At the same time, kulaks were accepted by the peasants as the leaders of local social organizations and this did not sit well with administrators selected by the Communist Party. The authorities in Moscow were also troubled by the fact that despite their campaign in favor of atheism, religious observance was rising in the countryside. In 1928 alone, 560 new associations of Orthodox believers had been formed, and in the Ukraine the number of priests had risen sharply.
A final consideration for Soviet leaders in their drive to modernize the national economy was the belief that war with the Western powers was a real possibility. In 1927, a war scare became acute because Great Britain had broken off relations with the Soviet Union in retaliation for the help that the Bolsheviks had given British workers during the general strike of 1926. But the more one studies the economic upheaval unleashed by Stalin in 1928, an upheaval that lasted for at least a decade and caused an unprecedented degree of suffering and dislocation, the harder it is to avoid the conclusion that at bottom Stalin’s motivation was ideological. He was determined, once and for all, to abolish private property in the means of production and to turn the entire population into employees of the state. The grandiosity of the scheme and the single-mindedness and ruthlessness with which it was pursued suggest that the revolution from above launched in 1928 was the brainchild of a man, or group of men, obsessed with a vision that they were determined to pursue regardless of human cost.
A few statistics about the Five Year Plan, as the new initiative was called, will indicate the scope of Bolshevik ambitions. Within a mere five years, by 1932–3, total industrial production was to rise by 235.9 percent. Electric power was to be quadrupled, the output of coal was to double, and the output of pig iron was to triple. Moreover, industrial production was slated to become more efficient: costs would be reduced by thirty-five percent but wholesale prices would be reduced by only twenty-four percent, and the difference – eleven percent – would be applied to investments, for the most part in heavy industry. Such an ambitious plan required a major increase in the industrial labor force and a large increase (of about 150 percent, it was estimated) in the food supply. The Soviet leadership planned to achieve their goal in the agrarian sector by initiating a policy of collectivization, the merging of individual farms into collectives known as kolhkozy. The collectives were expected to be much more efficient than small private farms, and Soviet leaders planned to move the excess manpower to the cities.
Although the government vowed to implement the policy of collectivization on a voluntary basis, once it was in full swing, in mid 1929, that commitment became a dead letter. For it turned out that only the poor peasants, slightly over twenty percent of the total village population, stood to benefit from the new policy and only among them was there strong support for it. Nearly all the others were passionately attached to their land, as peasants have always been in all countries at all times. Huge numbers of Russian peasants resisted the authorities with every weapon at their disposal, and it is no exaggeration to say that class warfare spread to almost the entire countryside. Rather than give up their belongings, peasants would destroy their livestock, eat to capacity, and then give away or burn what they could not consume. In many instances, they also destroyed their equipment and burned their crops. The point was to reduce to a minimum what the state would be able to confiscate. In many villages, troops charged with enforcing the directive on collectivization were met by peasants refusing to leave their land. The soldiers responded by surrounding the villagers and then firing their machine-guns into the crowds, killing large numbers. Another form of coercion was to exile recalcitrant peasants to distant places such as Siberia. During a two-year span from 1930 to 1931, about 400,000 households (roughly two million people) were forcibly deported from the countryside. The disruptions in the villages greatly reduced agricultural output and caused widespread famines.
Russia paid a staggering price for Stalin’s agrarian policy. According to conservative estimates, some five million villagers lost their lives during the five-year collectivization drive. Moreover, by 1933, the number of horses in Russia had declined by one-half, the number of cattle by one-third, and the number of sheep and goats by one-half. Midway in the process, in March 1930, Stalin himself acknowledged, in a famous article entitled ‘Dizziness with Success’, that the process had proceeded too rapidly and stated that force should not be used to compel peasants to enter the collectives. He blamed the excesses on low-level functionaries in the Communist Party. Within two months, about six million peasant families out of fourteen million left the collective farms. But a few months later, the government reapplied pressure on peasants to give up their private farms and by 1932 about sixty percent of all families were once again in collectives. To maintain control over the workforce in the countryside, the government instituted a system of internal passports. Only those who received such a passport could move to another part of the country. This meant that the peasants were bound to the land on which they worked, a throwback to the serfdom of the pre-1861 era.
The government did make some concessions to the peasants. Instead of forcing them into the preferred type of collective, the state farm (sovkhoz), in which peasants worked full time on the commonly held land, it gave them the option of entering a kolkhoz, in which the peasants divided their working time between their own small plots and the land under control of the collective. Most collectives fell into the latter category. Ironically, this two-fold arrangement not only deviated from the principles of socialism but also demonstrated the effectiveness of economic incentives. Peasants would work leisurely during the sixty to one hundred days they devoted to the collectivized land and would preserve their energy for their own plots of land, the proceeds of which they could sell directly to consumers. Although only three percent of all the land was under private cultivation, that sector produced roughly a third of the country’s food. During the next six decades – for as long as the Soviet Union existed – agricultural productivity remained very low, as did the quality of food products. And since the transportation system was primitive, a high percentage of the produce rotted before it ever reached the market.
In the industrial sector, progress was more impressive, though not nearly as great as Soviet leaders claimed. Within four years, rather than the anticipated five, the country could boast of having developed entirely new industries that produced tractors, automobiles, agricultural machinery, and airplanes. Whereas, in 1928, industrial output amounted to forty-eight percent of the country’s total output, in 1932, it amounted to seventy percent. But there were major setbacks. Again, the cause of the failures could be traced to the confusion resulting from the incredible speed with which the government sought to reach its goals. In some regions, managers of newly constructed factories often discovered that machines they needed were not available. Elsewhere, machines turned out to be available for factories that were not built to accommodate them or where the manpower capable of running them was not at hand. In general, skilled labor remained in short supply. It was one thing to bring men and women from the countryside to the cities to work in industrial plants. But it was quite another matter to transform peasants, used to working hard but accustomed to being masters of their own schedules, into disciplined operatives in a factory, where workers on an assembly line are dependent on the prompt completion of tasks by their colleagues.
To imbue factory employees with the necessary work habits, early in the 1930s, the government introduced a rigid system of discipline. For example, factory managers controlled the issuance of ration cards, which until 1935 were required for the purchase of food and manufactured goods. Workers dismissed from their jobs for one or another reason would lose their card and might also lose their place of residence, which was under the control of the enterprise. After 1932, factory managers were directed to dismiss and deprive of their housing any workers absent from their job without good reason for just one day. The growing intrusion of the state in the affairs of the citizens was an integral aspect of Stalin’s revolution from above and thus marked the beginning of a new political system, totalitarianism.
The term ‘totalitarianism’ has come under considerable criticism. Many scholars consider it a term of opprobrium coined during the Cold War as a weapon with which to stigmatize the Soviet Union. In fact, the word was already in use in the 1930s and the person who popularized its usage was none other than Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator of Italy. Mussolini was proud to be striving for the establishment of totalitarianism in his country, by which he meant a polity in which the state seeks to control every facet of economic, social, and political life. In this sense, Russia under Stalin became totalitarian, for the government sought to secure total control over national institutions and over the people’s affairs, private as well as public, even though it did not fully succeed in achieving its ultimate goal.
A brief sketch of Stalin’s system of rule in the 1930s will demonstrate this. But first it may be instructive to touch upon another vexing issue in modern Russian history, the relationship between what are now known as Stalinism and Leninism. Put differently, was Stalinism a mere continuation of Leninism, or did the two represent quite different polities? Scholars who take the latter position argue that Lenin was far more pragmatic and tolerant and much less ruthless than Stalin. They also argue that Lenin would probably have continued the New Economic Policy and almost certainly would not have embarked on so radical a program as the Five Year Plan and collectivization. There may be some merit to this line of reasoning, but it should not be forgotten that Lenin resorted quite freely to terror during his period in power and that War Communism, his creation, was also an extraordinarily harsh social and political system. Moreover, throughout the eleven years of Bolshevik rule before Stalin’s ascendancy there was no legal order in the Soviet Union. The best evidence for this is the Criminal Code of 1922, which adopted the essence of Lenin’s draft of a statement on governmental discretionary power. It stated that any action – be it merely propaganda, agitation, or support of anti-communist organizations – by a citizen ‘helping in the slightest way that part of the international bourgeoisie’ that is committed to overthrowing the communist system is ‘punishable by death or imprisonment’. So vague a formulation is a citizen’s nightmare and a policeman’s dream. There can be little doubt that Lenin’s legacy, ideological as well as institutional, helped pave the way for Stalinism. The terror, the absence of a legal order, and rule by a hierarchically organized party not only facilitated Stalin’s rise to power but also constituted central features of both Leninist Bolshevism and Stalinism.
And yet it cannot be denied that Stalin’s ‘excesses’ went well beyond those of Lenin and hence it is appropriate to consider the Stalinist polity of the 1930s distinctive. In its determination to control society from above it marked the apotheosis of totalitarianism, unmatched at the time by any other regime. Stalin was the paramount leader, or dictator, without whose approval no major initiative was undertaken, but even he had to rely on a vast apparatus to implement his directives and to maintain order. The Soviet system had three pillars that kept it functioning for several decades: the Communist Party, the secret police, and what might be called the system of incentives.
The Communist Party, an elite organization, or the ‘vanguard’ of the proletariat, never numbered more than about ten percent of the adult population, and the core of the party, the functionaries who were full-time employees, was a smaller group of about 200,000 (in the 1950s). The party’s members were chosen with the greatest care. Children in kindergarten belonged to the Little Octobrist movement; at the age of nine they joined the Young Pioneers and at fourteen they could, after careful screening, be admitted into the Komsomol, in which they generally remained until the age of twenty-six, when a decision would be made about admission into the party as full members. It was a long process designed to weed out those who were insufficiently committed to the cause or who were insufficiently energetic to carry out the numerous tasks of party members. They were expected to serve as models for the rest of society (by avoiding hooliganism and heavy drinking), to agitate among the masses to support the party’s decisions, to help recruit new members and to indoctrinate them, to energize the masses to fulfill the various economic plans, and to maintain a watchful eye on mismanagement or laxity in workplaces. They also had to adhere to the principle of ‘democratic centralism’, the central organizational tenet of the party, which stipulated that the decisions of the higher party units were absolutely binding on the lower ones.
The highest organ, the Politburo, chose its members by co-optation, not election, and its directives had to be carried out without reservation. The lower party members could discuss how best to implement the directives, but they were not free to debate the substance of the directives. By the 1930s, the party had a strong foothold in every sector of society – the economy, military services, media, educational institutions, high as well as low culture, even associations devoted to sports. Moreover, the higher a person’s position in any of these sectors the more likely it was that he or she would be a member in good standing of the Communist Party. To serve the party was not easy by any means: members had to devote much of their time after work to endless meetings and were required at all times to be vigilant and to report any sign of indifference or hostility to the regime among their colleagues.
But rewards for loyal and energetic party members, especially those who rose to the upper reaches of the organization, often referred to as the ‘nomenklatura’, were substantial. They would receive faster promotions in their places of work, more spacious apartments, attractive summer homes in the country, admission for their children into the best schools, and access to special medical facilities and special stores that stocked products not available to the general public. Among industrial workers a system of differential pay was established in the mid 1930s, creating a hierarchy within the alleged mainstay of the regime, the proletariat. This began with a public relations campaign about the feats of a coal miner, Alexei Stakhanov, who during one night in August 1935 mined 102 tons, far above the normal amount of 7.3 tons, in a six-hour shift. Stakhanov was said to have been so productive not only because he worked harder but also because he had devised more efficient methods of mining. The authorities did not reveal that Stakhanov had been especially well rested and well fed before his performance. Nonetheless, the government now decreed that in order to encourage greater productivity workers would be paid on a piecework basis, which led to wide discrepancies in income. There is little doubt that the various incentives, the second pillar of the Stalinist system of rule, help explain that system’s durability.
But no less important was the third pillar of the Stalinist system, the secret police. In tsarist Russia, the secret or political police devoted itself to protecting the autocratic order, often by extra-legal means. In communist Russia, its task was to protect first the revolution and then the socialist order, but it adopted means that in ruthlessness and scale far surpassed those of the tsarist police. The Soviet secret police had numerous names over the years – Cheka, GPU, OGPU, MVD, NKVD, and KGB – but for several decades its principles remained essentially unchanged: that the revolution was the supreme law and that whatever was done in its name was justifiable; that the counterrevolutionary forces were intransigent in their opposition to socialism and would do all in their power to undermine the Soviet Union. Eternal vigilance and terror against actual or presumed enemies were therefore necessary. Institutionalized by the 1930s, terror was so pervasive that even when it was not being applied everyone knew that the machinery of terror existed and could be applied whenever the authorities considered it necessary. Not a single sector of society escaped the vigilance of the secret police, always on the alert for the slightest expression of discontent with the government.
Political terror reached its highest level after an incident that is still shrouded in mystery. On 1 December 1934, Leonid Nikolaev, an unemployed man with a troubled past who apparently was a party member with oppositional views, assassinated Sergei Kirov, the party boss in Leningrad widely believed to be Stalin’s heir. It has been charged that Stalin was behind the murder – the evidence is inconclusive though circumstantially strong. Be that as it may, on the very day of Kirov’s murder the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party announced a crackdown on its presumed opponents. The committee issued a decree that stripped anyone accused of anti-government terror of virtually all rights for a legal defense, and a few hours later it issued another decree, which was distributed only to officials in the police and the party. This stated that the investigations of people accused of anti-government terrorism should be carried out more expeditiously (within ten days), and that once a verdict of guilty had been reached those sentenced to death should be executed immediately. There was no provision for an appeal or for a petition for clemency. Then, exactly three weeks after Kirov’s assassination, the government announced that Nikolaev was part of a conspiracy that sympathized with the views of Zinoviev, who had at one time been Stalin’s ally against Trotsky but had at various times wavered in his support of the dictator. There was a trial of sorts (in secret) of fourteen alleged conspirators, all of whom were sentenced to death. On 29 December, barely four weeks after the murder, Nikolaev was executed.
This was only the beginning of what can be called Stalin’s second war against his own people – the first was carried out under the banner of collectivization. On 16 January 1935, the secret police arrested Zinoviev and Kamenev and some other activists who had at one time belonged to the opposition to Stalin. They were to be put on trial for having secretly fomented opposition, for lying when they had repented of past political deviations, and for having ‘indirectly’ influenced Nikolaev’s decision to kill Kirov. These people, too, were tried in secret and then sentenced to imprisonment. It was an ominous event because it was the first time that individuals who had been loyal and distinguished members of the Communist Party were formally accused of criminal conduct and were then put on trial.
A year later, in 1936, the Stalinist leadership undertook a vast purge of the party to rid it of what were called ‘hidden enemies’. Such purges were repeated over the next couple of years and it has been estimated that all in all about 800,000 were expelled from the party. In mid August 1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev, among others, were subjected to another trial, this time accused of having formed a ‘terrorist center’ guided directly by Trotsky. They all confessed and were immediately shot. Early in 1937, there was yet another trial of former party leaders and this time the charges were even more serious. The men in the dock were said to have conspired with Japanese and German officials to dismember the Soviet Union. They, too, confessed. A few months later, several military leaders, most of whom had rendered distinguished service to the Soviet Union, were secretly tried for having committed sabotage for Germany and Japan. It turned out that a hotel in Copenhagen where the conspirators were supposed to have met with foreign contacts had been razed some years before the alleged ‘meeting’. The notion that so many leaders of Russian communism and the Soviet military had been spies and traitors is utterly unbelievable. They were dedicated to the party and thoroughly patriotic.
A few statistics will reveal the scope of Stalin’s war against his own people. According to information released by the Soviet government after Stalin’s death, about half the entire officer corps of the army (35,000 men) were arrested, including three out of five marshals, thirteen out of fifteen army commanders, fifty-seven out of eighty-five corps commanders, 110 out of 195 division commanders, 220 out of 406 brigade commanders, all eleven vice commissars of war, seventy-five out of eighty members of the Supreme Military Council, ninety percent of all generals, and eighty percent of all colonels. The number of people in high positions in the civilian sphere who were charged with crimes against the state is equally astonishing: over 1,100 out of 1,966 voting and non-voting delegates at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934; seventy percent of the 139 members and candidates of the Central Committee of 1937. Many of the accused were shot. As already noted, many lower-ranking party members were purged and then either executed or sent for long periods to one of the corrective labor camps (part of the Gulag),1 where conditions were ghastly. A large number of ordinary citizens too were shipped off to these camps for minor infractions of regulations or for no reason except that they were suspected of counterrevolutionary sympathies.
It is not known exactly how many ended up in the camps, but there is no doubt that the number ran to millions. Even the most conservative estimate is that in January 1953 there were 5,221,880 citizens in various camps, colonies, and ‘special settlements’. Other estimates that cannot be dismissed put the figure closer to ten or twelve million. No one disputes that the security forces, which administered the Gulag, were the single largest employer in the Soviet Union. It is also difficult to determine how many were executed or died because of the horrendous conditions in the camps, but, again, the number was huge. Respected historians have suggested that if one adds up all the people who died as a result of official policies (including Stalin’s agrarian polices from 1919 to 1932) a figure of fifteen to twenty million is not unreasonable.2
At least two questions about the terror are worth pondering. Why did people who were obviously innocent confess to the crimes with which they were charged? It must be stressed that although the show trials were among the more striking events of the 1930s and have received a great deal of attention from historians, only a handful of people actually made confessions. It used to be assumed that these men, all of them dedicated to communism, had agreed to confess as a last service to the party. They were allegedly prepared to sacrifice themselves in order to save the revolution, which was threatened by deep political divisions within the Communist Party. If those divisions had been made public, the people would have become disillusioned and would have abandoned the party. Moreover, the accused might also have thought that they could serve as scapegoats for the failings of communism and for the terrible hardships that the people were enduring. But information found in Soviet archives opened only recently makes it clear that the men who caved in to their captors had been subjected to various forms of physical torture and also mental torture such as threats to their families. They were probably incapable of acting as autonomous human beings.
The second question is even more complicated and certainly more important to students of history. What possessed Stalin to unleash violence against his own people on such a vast scale? To say that he was insane is unconvincing because we know that on many occasions during the 1930s and 1940s he made rational decisions on weighty issues. He surely was a deeply insecure and sadistic person, but these are not necessarily the traits of a man who has lost the power to think rationally. He was also a man obsessed with power, and it is possible that he feared that once the Five Year Plan had ended in 1933 the party would no longer consider it wise to keep him in power. Or it may well be that Stalin, who had become paranoid, instinctively sensed that under totalitarianism, which demands total subordination of the citizen to the state, everyone was potentially disloyal for the simple reason that total subordination is ultimately intolerable. Under such circumstances, the leader would believe that he could be fully secure in the exercise of power only if all citizens were so terrorized that they were rendered incapable of independent behavior.
In the course of 1938, the purges of party members ended, as did mass arrests of citizens. A fair number of inmates in the labor camps were released and some secret police officers were now sent to jails and labor camps, where, it has been reported, they met people they had interrogated only months earlier. Nikolai Yezhov, the sinister head of the secret police, was replaced by Lavrenti Beria, who, initially at least, gave the impression of being less ruthless. Beria had Yezhov arrested and it seems that in 1939 Yezhov was executed. But neither Stalin nor his subordinates repudiated the four-year campaign of terror, although they did concede that there had been excesses, which they blamed on traitors and Trotskyites trying to make a political comeback. Still, it was clear that the party had changed direction, most probably because it had concluded that the terror was causing irreparable damage to the country and perhaps even to the party itself. Fear of state institutions and distrust of almost everyone had become so prevalent that there was a real danger that the social bonds holding society together would disintegrate. There is also evidence that it was becoming more difficult to find individuals willing to replace the party members who had been purged; people were simply afraid of assuming positions of responsibility, and this was bound to harm the economy at a time when rapid industrialization was still the order of the day.
The everyday life of the citizens of the Soviet Union in the 1930s was extraordinarily grim, and not only because of the terror. For one thing, shortages of essential goods, including bread, a staple at every Russian meal, were widespread. In recently opened archives, a scholar found a letter sent to Stalin in the late 1930s by a housewife from the Volga region, who complained: ‘You have to go at two o’clock at night and stand until six in the morning to get two kilograms of rye bread.’ In Alma-Ata in 1940 there were huge lines for bread and ‘[o]ften, going past these lines, one can hear shouts, noise, squabbling, tears, and sometimes fights.’ Other foods such as meat, milk, butter, and vegetables, as well as salt, soap, kerosene, and matches were also often difficult to obtain. The shortages of clothing were perennial, and the garments that were on sale were of shoddy quality. Citizens who wished to mend their clothing could not find thread, needles, or buttons.
Living conditions were another burden of daily life. The average living space of Muscovites in 1940, for example, was slightly over four square meters. It was not uncommon for three or four families to share one communal apartment, which had one kitchen and one toilet. It was also not uncommon for couples who were divorced to continue living in one room because no other space could be found. In Magnitogorsk in Siberia, early in the 1930s, ninety-five percent of the workers at a new industrial enterprise lived in barracks. In 1933, Dnepropetrovsk, a city of almost 400,000 inhabitants in the Ukraine, still lacked a sewage system, electric lighting, and running water. Many smaller provincial towns had no paved roads and only the most rudimentary public transport services. Hooliganism and criminality were so widespread in the 1930s that citizens in many cities found it dangerous to walk in the streets.
Given these circumstances, it is remarkable that the Soviet people were able to rise to a severe challenge early in the 1940s – war with Germany. Ideologically, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party had posed a clear threat to communism ever since their rise to power in Germany in 1933. Marxism and Judaism were, in Hitler’s view, Germany’s greatest enemies and he vowed to crush both, although in his many political campaigns and in his writings he did not indicate precisely how he would achieve his two-fold goal. During much of the 1920s, the Soviet Union and Germany, the two pariahs after the end of the First World War, had collaborated on several matters. In the Treaty of Rapallo (1922) the two countries committed themselves to improving trade relations, and shortly thereafter the Soviet Union secretly agreed to allow the German army to conduct various training exercises on its soil in return for an annual fee and for providing training to Russian soldiers. When Hitler became chancellor the Bolsheviks believed that his regime would not last long and that his reactionary policies would in the end help the cause of communism. He would embark, so the Stalinists claimed, on a highly reactionary program that would antagonize the working class, who would be radicalized to the point of staging a successful revolution against Nazism. It did not take the Soviet leadership long to recognize the flaws in their analysis.
By the mid 1930s, it was clear that Hitler had crushed the working-class movement in Germany and that Nazism posed a potential threat to the left and to democracy in other countries, most notably in Spain, and, even more ominous, that Hitler had expansionist ambitions that could be harmful to the Soviet Union. By the late 1930s, the Western powers and the Soviet Union sought a unified policy to stop the expansion of Nazism, but the distrust between them was too great. Statesmen in Great Britain and France feared Germany but they also feared the spread of communism, which after the brutalities of Stalin’s industrialization and collectivization seemed to be more menacing than ever. On the other hand, Stalin suspected that the leaders of the West were prepared to strike a deal with Hitler against the Soviet Union. In the end, Stalin calculated that Germany was the lesser danger to his country, and on 23 August 1939, he signed the Nazi–Soviet Non-aggression Pact, an agreement that struck many people, among them ardent radicals, as a horrendous betrayal of all that was decent. The pact gave Hitler a free hand to attack Poland and several secret provisions stipulated that after Poland’s defeat Eastern Europe would be divided between Germany and the Soviet Union. Finland, Estonia, and Latvia were placed in the Russian sphere of influence and the Russians were also given carte blanche to annex Bessarabia. On 1 September, Hitler attacked Poland, and three weeks later, after the country lay prostrate, the secret provisions went into effect. Great Britain and France, sensing that Hitler’s appetite for conquest was insatiable, declared war on Germany, thus initiating the Second World War.
Over the next two years, Hitler scored one military victory after another and became the master of Central and Western Europe. The one major power in Europe that he could not subdue was Great Britain, which inflicted such severe blows on the German air force during the Battle of Britain in the summer and fall of 1940 that Hitler gave up his plans to conquer the island. Instead, he turned his attention to the east. Despite extensive evidence that Hitler was massing troops in the east, and despite many warnings from Winston Churchill and others that Germany was on the verge of attacking the Soviet Union, Stalin looked the other way. He simply would not believe that Hitler would betray him. When, on 21 June 1941, Stalin was told that a deserter from the German army had informed Russian border guards that the German army would attack early on the morning of 22 June, Stalin dismissed the report as an obvious provocation and ordered his commanders to be on the alert but not to take any action. When the German attack came, precisely as the deserter had predicted, Stalin fell into a state of shock, utterly paralyzed, and for about seven days he was incapable of running the government.
The German army was unstoppable. In armor, in strategy and tactics, and in determination, it easily outclassed the Soviet army. In the Ukraine, the Germans were aided by the defection to their side of hundreds of thousands of soldiers as well as civilians who believed that life under the conquerors would be preferable to rule by Stalin. In one month, the German army under General von Bock’s leadership advanced five hundred miles before encountering major resistance. In mid October, the German army stood at the gates of Moscow, and for four days, from 15 to 19 October, Stalin suffered another nervous breakdown. By that time, the Germans had gained control over territories in which sixty million Russians (about thirty percent of the total) lived and that contained two-thirds of the country’s coal reserves and three-quarters of its iron ore. The Red Army had suffered staggering losses: thousands of Russian tanks, guns, and airplanes had been destroyed or captured and the number of casualties endured during the first four months of the war ran to over three million.
Remarkably, after the second nervous breakdown, Stalin became a highly effective leader of the nation at war. He appealed to the patriotism of the people, invoking many of the symbols of Russian nationalism, and he also mastered military strategy and tactics and supervised the reorganization of the army and the restructuring of industry for the manufacture of military equipment. He quickly established close relations with Great Britain and later with the United States, both of which sent large amounts of supplies to the Soviet Union. He was also helped by Hitler, who, it now turned out, was not the infallible leader his earlier diplomatic and military successes had suggested. One of Hitler’s biggest mistakes was to treat the Ukrainians, potential allies, as racial inferiors and thus to convert them into mortal enemies who within a year of the invasion began to subject German troops to savage partisan attacks. By October 1942, partisan units were active in seventy-five percent of the forests behind the German lines, and a year later no less than ten percent of all German troops in the Russian war zone were bogged down fending off the partisans. Nor had Hitler learned any lessons from Napoleon’s defeat in 1812. The Russian winters were once again a trap; the German army was not properly outfitted to withstand the bitter cold and German armor could not move with its usual speed in the snow, or in the mud after the thaw. The Germans had conquered vast stretches of European Russia, but they failed to capture the two most important cities, Moscow and Leningrad, and in their drive into southern Russia they badly overextended their lines of communication. In the end, Hitler also misjudged the morale and fighting ability of Soviet soldiers. Sometimes, it is true, Stalin used hardfisted methods to make sure that the soldiers would not flee from battle (such as placing machine-gunners behind the front lines to keep an eye on the troops), but once the people became convinced that they were protecting the motherland many fought with remarkable bravery.
The greatest test of battle began in the fall of 1942 outside Stalingrad, an industrial city of some 500,000 inhabitants on the right bank of the Volga river in the south-eastern region of European Russia. In itself, the city was not all that important militarily, but Hitler was obsessed with its capture mainly because of its name. He apparently believed that its fall would be a devastating psychological blow for the Russians, who, however, put up a determined defense of the city. It soon emerged that the Germans had miscalculated in launching the attack and Wehrmacht generals urged Hitler to withdraw from Stalingrad to more secure lines, but the Führer ignored them. In fact, he dismissed his chief of the general staff, Franz Halder, and ordered General Friedrich Paulus, in command of the Sixth Army, to persist in the attack; under no circumstances was he to retreat or to give up. For four months the battle raged, the fiercest in the entire war, and on 31 January 1943, Paulus, surrounded by Soviet troops and short of food, ammunition, and winter clothing, had no choice but to surrender. It was Germany’s single greatest military defeat and proved to be a turning point in the war. The war dragged on for another two and a half years, but it was now obvious that Hitler had made a fatal mistake in attacking the Soviet Union in the first place.
The Soviet Union’s contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany did much to enhance the stature of Stalin and of the country at large, and for decades the experiences of the war were regarded by many citizens as the most challenging and uplifting in their lives. But the price had been horrendous. It has been estimated that over eight million soldiers died and more than fifteen million civilians lost their lives. In European Russia, perhaps as many as 25 million people lost their homes because of the devastation wreaked by the German military. The production of grain fell by two-thirds and production of consumer goods fell almost as much, and yet Stalin would not abandon his failed, prewar economic policies. During the war the government had tolerated some private farming, but now it ordered the land to be returned to the collectives. As for shortages in consumer goods, a few statistics tell the story. In the immediate postwar years only 63 million pairs of leather shoes were produced annually as against 211 million in 1940. Steel production declined by one-third, oil by forty percent, and wool fabrics by over fifty percent.
Many Russians hoped that their sacrifices and heroism would prompt their leader to relax the controls, economic and political, he had imposed on the country in the 1930s. It was a hope Stalin quickly dashed. In his first major speech of the postwar era, on 9 February 1946, Stalin announced that in view of the imperialist danger that continued to threaten Russia the country would have to endure at least three or four more Five Year Plans so that the Soviet Union would be able to face ‘all contingencies’. An American diplomat who listened to the speech in the home of an older Russian recalled that at the end of the speech his host ‘put his head down on his folded arms on the table as he heard’ Stalin’s words. It seemed to the listener to mark ‘the end of hopes for a better life in the postwar period’. The man’s anxieties were justified. Stalin wasted little time before returning to the harsh policies of the 1930s.
The first victims in the postwar period were the large number of Russians who had spent some time abroad during the war either on official assignments or as prisoners of war. The Soviet authorities feared that these citizens had been contaminated by alien ideas on economic matters or the advantages of civic and political freedom. On their return to the Soviet Union, therefore, they were closely interrogated by the secret police and many of them were sent to labor camps. A fair number of the returnees suffered a worse fate: they were shot soon after they set foot on Soviet soil. Entire groups of ethnic minorities were shipped to the Gulag because some among them had collaborated with German troops. In 1947 and 1948, an anti-Semitic campaign, inspired by the government, led to the arrest of Jewish writers and artists. Under A. A. Zhdanov, the secretary of the Central Committee in charge of ideological matters, all the controls of the 1930s were reimposed on literature and the arts, forcing creative men and women to echo the party line in whatever works they produced. Economic policy, too, returned to the prewar pattern, which meant an emphasis on heavy industry to the neglect of consumer goods. The battle cry was to overtake the West in economic production and to produce as quickly as possible an atomic bomb, which the United States had developed during the war and had used against Japan to end the conflict. In part because of the bomb, the United States had become a superpower. Russia, too, had to achieve that status no matter what the cost.
Relations between the Soviet Union and the West had improved during the war but the two sides never fully overcame their distrust of each other. The communists were enraged at the failure of the West to open a second front in 1942 and 1943 against the Germans and believed that Churchill and Roosevelt had deliberately delayed an attack to allow Germany and Russia to bleed each other to death. Meanwhile, Churchill and to a lesser extent other Western leaders continued to believe that Stalin was determined to export revolutionary socialism. Stalin contended that all he was interested in after the war was a security sphere in Eastern Europe to protect Russia against future attack. But once Stalin gained a foothold in Poland, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, and eventually Hungary and Czechoslovakia, he imposed upon these countries regimes – known as ‘people’s democracies’ – that closely resembled the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union. Churchill, for many years a Cassandra about communism, in a famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, asserted that ‘an iron curtain has descended across the continent’ that stretched ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’, and urged cooperation between the United States and Britain to nip in the bud any ‘temptation to ambition or adventure’, a clear reference to what he believed to be the expansionist dreams of Stalin. The speech marked the official beginning of the Cold War, a bitter conflict that lasted forty-four years and for the most part was confined to economic, political, and military rivalries between the communist/totalitarian world and the capitalist/democratic world. Although each side was protecting its national interests as it interpreted them, ideology also played a critical role in the conflict. The two sides represented two fundamentally different worldviews: one upheld the principles of free enterprise, personal freedom, popular participation in government, though it is true that these principles were not perfectly implemented; the other upheld the principles of one-party rule, public ownership of the means of production, state control over all institutions, and economic and social egalitarianism, though here, too, the principles were not perfectly implemented.
As Stalinism per se breathed its last, it behaved true to form. Ever since 1947, the Soviet leadership had fomented anti-Semitism, a prejudice that had surfaced as official policy from time to time since the 1920s. Now, however, it was more intense than ever, probably as a result of growing sympathy among Russian Jews for the newly created state of Israel. Initially, the Soviet Union had favored the establishment of the Jewish state, but when it became clear that Israel would not become a Soviet outpost in the Middle East, Stalin’s attitude changed abruptly. Probably, he also feared that if Jews were permitted to express support for Israel it would be very difficult to prevent other minorities from supporting national movements of their own. Whatever the reason, the government now applied rigid quotas on the admission of Jews to institutions of higher learning, closed the Yiddish theater in Moscow, ordered the arrest of numerous people prominent in Yiddish culture, and denounced Zionists as traitors. Most ominous of all, in January 1948, the famous Yiddish dramatist Solomon Mikhoels was murdered, almost certainly on Stalin’s orders.
Four years later, there were rumors, widely credited, that Stalin intended to send all the Jews in the country – about 2.3 million – to Siberia. Then, in January 1953, the government announced that thirteen doctors, most of them with Jewish-sounding names, had been arrested as wreckers and terrorists who had used medical procedures to murder several prominent leaders, including Andrei Zhdanov, and had also planned ‘to wipe out the leading cadres of the USSR’. The authorities put much of the blame for the doctors’ successes in their nefarious work on the security police, who allegedly had not been sufficiently vigilant in rooting out the enemies of communism. Many in the Soviet elite now feared that Stalin intended to stage a new purge of party activists and that the charges against the doctors were simply a pretext for such a cleansing of party ranks.
But the country was spared another convulsion. On 5 March 1953, the seventy-three-year-old Stalin unexpectedly died. As so often in the long history of Russia, the death of a ruler provoked questions about foul play. Perhaps it is because people in Russia tend to attach God-like qualities to their rulers that they do not readily accept the possibility of a natural death even for a man like Stalin, who was old, in poor health, and had suffered a stroke some years earlier. It must also be conceded that Stalin inspired deep antipathies, and some of his subordinates could have wished for his speedy end. Nonetheless, despite some mysterious circumstances surrounding his last hours of life, the evidence is not compelling that he died from other than natural causes.