During August and September of 1917, Lenin had used his time in Finland to write a book, The State and Revolution, which he failed to finish. In a November postscript to the first edition, he wrote that his work ‘was “interrupted” by a political crisis – the eve of the October Revolution of 1917’, adding that it was ‘more pleasant and useful to go through the “experience of the revolution” than to write about it’.1 Compared with what was to follow the Bolshevik seizure of power, the work seems remote from reality. Yet Lenin was happy for it to be published even after Bolshevik rule had begun. It is reasonable to regard it as part of his belief system, rather than as dissemblance for tactical reasons, since it had no immediate relevance to the task of holding on to power.
It is clear that Lenin believed not only in the dictatorship of the proletariat – although, Kautsky suggested, in a different sense from that of Marx – but also in the eventual withering-away of the state. Even as he denies being a utopian, Lenin offers evidence of the utopianism which accompanied his ruthlessness, writing that ‘only communism makes the state absolutely unnecessary, for there is nobody to be suppressed–“nobody” in the sense of a class…’.2 He accepted that individual people would be guilty of ‘excesses’, but no special apparatus of suppression would be needed to deal with them. This would be done ‘by the armed people itself’. Moreover, it was ‘the exploitation of the masses, their want and their poverty’ which was the cause of ‘excesses’. With the removal of that cause, ‘excesses will inevitably begin to “wither away”’.3 Where Marx had spoken of a first, or lower, phase of communist society, Lenin prefers to call the first stage ‘socialism’ and the later stage ‘communism’.4 In this later stage, freedom will be combined with equality and the distinction between mental and physical labour will disappear – along with the state. ‘So long as the state exists’, writes Lenin, ‘there is no freedom. When there will be freedom, there will be no state.’5
Lenin’s The State and Revolution has often been hailed as evidence of a libertarian or democratic Lenin and contrasted with the Lenin of What is to be Done?, with its emphasis on hierarchy and discipline within the revolutionary party. It has been used in support of the contention that he was a ‘revolutionary humanist’ and by those who wish to distance him from the way the Soviet system developed after his death.6 It has been contrastingly assessed as ‘the crowning achievement of Lenin’s political thought in the latter period of his life’7 and as ‘the most simple-minded and improbable of all famous political pamphlets’.8 The more essential point is that even in this work of reflection on the state, with its apparent support for a fuller and more libertarian democracy than had hitherto been seen on earth, Lenin rejected any kind of political pluralism. He was oblivious to the fact that freedoms depend on institutions capable of defending them. The State and Revolution added to the doctrinal foundations of what became a highly authoritarian (and later totalitarian) regime. As A.J. Polan justly observed: ‘The central absence in Lenin’s politics is that of a theory of political institutions…Lenin’s state form is one-dimensional. It allows no distances, no spaces, no appeals, no checks, no balances, no processes, no delays, no interrogations and, above all, no distribution of power.’9
This rejection of institutions which would underpin accountability, individual freedoms and political pluralism became a common feature of Communist systems. Yet the ideas and utopian goals of the Communists exerted on their adherents a powerful attraction. The coming to power of the Bolsheviks in the Russia of 1917 was not only a matter of their willingness to use force against the Provisional Government. It was not simply a result of economic hardship, still less something which had been economically determined. Nor was it just a matter of the tactical skills and willpower of Lenin and Trotsky, important though they were. It was, in addition to all these things, a victory of ideas – of the idea that capitalism was doomed, the belief that the proletariat was destined to supplant the bourgeoisie as the ruling class, and that it would proceed to build socialism before merging into a classless, self-administering society bearing the name of ‘communism’. For a significant proportion of young workers, as well as intellectuals, this was an inspiring doctrine. Those who embraced it found it easy to dismiss the kind of parliamentary and judicial institutions needed to safeguard political freedoms as the mere optical illusions of ‘bourgeois democracy’.
The short-lived and somewhat anarchic democracy inaugurated by the February Revolution might well, given the discontent within Russian society, have led to change with a revolutionary dimension even in the absence of Lenin and Trotsky. If the election to the Constituent Assembly, in which the Bolsheviks received only a quarter of the votes, had been allowed to stand, a non-Communist socialist government would have emerged. Its ideas would, however, have been different from those which, after Lenin’s death, were to become known as Marxism-Leninism. Lenin’s own ideas did not remain static, and in his last years he had to modify some of them in the light of circumstances. Yet even when he made a major retreat on economic policy in an attempt to mollify the country’s largest social group, the peasantry, he not only stepped up the repression of political opponents but pejoratively labelled dissent within the Communist Party as opposition, and at the Tenth Congress of that party in March 1921 declared that it was time ‘to put the lid’ on it.10
The March congress followed almost immediately after the Kronstadt Revolt, an uprising by sailors in the naval base which had been in the vanguard of Bolshevik militancy in 1917. The protesters’ desires in 1921 were essentially democratic and not at all, as much Bolshevik propaganda against them suggested, in favour of restoration of the old regime. The main demands of the Kronstadt sailors were for the immediate re-election of soviets by secret ballot, for freedom of speech and assembly, for free trade unions, for equal rations for all, and for peasants to be allowed to do as they pleased with the land, ‘provided that they use no hired labour’.11 Lenin, in a moment of frankness at the March 1921 congress, went so far as to admit that the Kronstadt rebels ‘do not want the White Guards, and they do not want our power either’.12 He was also increasingly concerned by groupings within the Communist Party which questioned the way things were going, such as the Workers’ Opposition, led by Alexander Shlyapnikov. The latter was not quite an organized faction, but those who belonged to this group wanted trade unions and their worker representatives to be in control of industry. They were met with the rebuff that only the Communist Party could be in the vanguard of the proletariat, for otherwise the ‘working masses’ would fail to resist ‘petty bourgeois waverings’ and fall prey to ‘their trade-union prejudices’.13 Dissent on major policy was essentially classified as factionalism or opposition. Organized factions were discerned where they barely existed and a resolution on ‘party unity’ delegitimized intra-party dissent, although it was not until the 1930s that it was to be equated with treason.14
Lenin, NEP, and the Rise of Stalin
A political tightening of the screws at the Tenth Congress was, however, accompanied by economic liberalization. The attempt made soon after the Bolshevik revolution to nationalize all industry and deny peasants the right to trade had been disastrous. There was famine in many parts of the country and growing unrest. Accordingly, Lenin unveiled the New Economic Policy – subsequently known as NEP – at the March 1921 congress. In May of that year the decree which had earlier nationalized all small-scale industry was revoked. The Party held on to the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy – large-scale industry, banking, and foreign trade – but, in a retreat of major proportions, it now introduced what was ‘a form of mixed economy, with an overwhelmingly private agriculture, plus legalized private trade and small-scale private manufacturing’.15 In the course of the 1920s the economy revived, with agriculture in particular benefiting from the new freedoms. However, those who profiteered from the partial restoration of small-scale capitalism became known as Nepmen and were widely resented.
The year 1922 was an especially significant one. In April, Josif Stalin was chosen, with Lenin’s full approval, to occupy the new post of General Secretary of the Communist Party. This did not seem such a momentous event at the time, but Stalin thereby became the only person to be a member of all three of the party’s leading executive bodies: the Political Bureau, or Politburo; the Organizational Bureau, or Orgburo; and the Secretariat. The Orgburo was merged with the Secretariat in 1952, but what mattered is that from 1922 Stalin headed the general staff of the party, leading both the Orgburo and Secretariat. Since the Politburo, in which Lenin was the most authoritative member, was, in principle, a higher organ, and since much policy was made in the Sovnarkom, chaired by Lenin, it was not immediately obvious in 1922 what great potential levers of power were being placed in Stalin’s hands. Nevertheless, power had already been moving from Sovnarkom to party organs. The author of the major study of Sovnarkom’s first five years observes that ‘by 1921 the Central Committee and its inner organs were well on the way to becoming the true government of the Soviet Republic, while the hierarchy of party officials was emerging as the key instrument of rule throughout the country’.16
The potential the General Secretaryship offered was given a still greater chance of becoming reality when in May 1922 Lenin suffered a stroke. This was the second of three events with immense long-term consequences to occur in that same year, Stalin’s accession to the post of General Secretary having been the first. Lenin resumed his duties in the autumn, and by the end of the year he had became so critical of Stalin’s high-handedness that he concluded it had been a mistake to put the substantial powers of the General Secretaryship into the Georgian’s hands. He was not against those powers as such, but against Stalin continuing to wield them.17 Lenin was not, however, able to achieve his desired outcome – to remove Stalin as General Secretary. His health had become too weak and a further stroke in March 1923 effectively ended his political career. He died in January 1924. With Lenin out of the way, Stalin spent the rest of the 1920s discrediting his rivals (many of whom had underestimated both his ability and his ambition) and consolidating power. Although Trotsky had played a more important role than Stalin in 1917 and in the civil war, during which time the two men had often clashed, he was notable among those who made the mistake of overlooking Stalin’s intelligence and political skills, as well as underestimating the significance of the power base Stalin had acquired in the form of the Secretariat.18
The third event of great long-term importance to occur in 1922 came at the end of the year, when the four republics then under Communist rule, namely the Russian republic, Ukraine, Belorussia, and Transcaucasia, came together to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – the USSR, or the Soviet Union as it became more generally known. The name was deliberately coined to avoid mentioning any particular nationality, since the idea behind it was that other countries would gradually become part of this new socialist entity. It was established as a federation, although throughout almost the whole of the Soviet era this was a highly centralized state which was far from meeting the criteria normally associated with federalism. Nevertheless, within that formal federation which, in Stalin’s words, was to be ‘national in form, socialist in content’, new possibilities for the flourishing of national cultures and languages were opened up.19
This last development was of long-term significance. Prior to 1917 in, for example, the important case of Ukraine, Russian had been the language in which literacy was taught – to the extent it was taught, for in 1920 only 24 per cent of the Ukrainian population was literate.20 In spite of shortage of textbooks and other difficulties, that changed in the 1920s. By 1927, 76 per cent of pupils in the Ukrainian republic were attending Ukrainian-language schools.21 Some of the many languages spoken in the USSR were only given written form in the first decade after the civil war. Soviet policy, especially from 1922–23 onwards, was to recognize numerous national territories in which one or other of the many different nationalities in the country predominated, and to train and promote into leadership positions people who belonged to the local nationality. At the same time they took steps to establish the local language as the official language in that territory.22 Both measures had important long-term consequences. Although there was to be a substantial reversal of the 1920s policy of ‘indigenization’ from the early 1930s until at least Stalin’s death, the Communist state, both by promoting the spread of education and by embedding national structures in its institutional framework from the 1922 constitution onwards, had sown the first seeds of its ultimate destruction.
Stalin had earlier been commissar for nationalities within Lenin’s government, and he regarded himself, and was so regarded by others, as a specialist on the national question. Over time, however, his views developed in a direction close to Russian chauvinism. As noted earlier, Stalin was a Georgian whose original name was Djugashvili, the name Stalin being just one of his pre-revolutionary pseudonyms, derived from the Russian word for steel (stal’). He became an admirer of the strongest and harshest of tsars, those who had both ruled with an iron fist and expanded Russian territory, especially Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. In other respects, too, Stalin departed from Lenin’s ideas and practices. Unlike Lenin – who had been very ready to employ the weapon of terror against opponents of the Bolshevik revolution but was content to out-argue his intra-party opponents – Stalin, by the time he felt sufficiently powerful in the mid-1930s, used terror against his fellow Bolsheviks. He also subsequently allowed a cult of his personality to be carried to extreme lengths. This even involved, by the later 1930s, people leaping to their feet at public meetings and conferences whenever his name was mentioned. It was, said Nikita Khrushchev – Stalin’s successor as Soviet leader–‘a sort of physical culture we all engaged in’.23 Unlike Peter the Great, who at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries sought advanced ideas in Europe, Stalin in his later years encouraged the propagation of an absurd version of Russian history in which almost every major scientific invention, normally attributed (as orthodox Marxists would expect) to more economically and educationally advanced countries, turned out to have been anticipated by a Russian.
For most of the 1920s, however, Stalin was an orthodox enough Leninist. While Lenin had been sufficiently pragmatic to place a lot of post-revolutionary power in the hands of the new government, Sovnarkom, as distinct from the Communist Party, few Marxists prior to 1917 had accorded a greater role in principle to a disciplined, revolutionary party than Lenin himself. Thus, for the party to emerge as a more powerful instrument of rule than the government (in the Soviet sense of that term), as it did in the course of the 1920s, was scarcely at odds with the Bolshevik tradition. What became a Communist Party dictatorship was not called that by the leaders of the USSR. They described their rule both as ‘Soviet power’ and as a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. They also increasingly claimed, especially from the time of the adoption of the ‘Stalin Constitution’ in 1936, that the regime was democratic.
None of these three ascriptions made much sense. The soviets were of some consequence in the revolutionary year of 1917, but even then it was the Bolshevik party which seized power in November. Thereafter, the soviets were never the principal organs of political power. For the first few post-revolutionary years the ministries (or commissariats, as they were then known) were arguably even more important than the party leadership in political decision-making, but that had changed by 1921. In subsequent years it became especially clear that the Communist Party leadership had a superior power and authority to that of Sovnarkom (which in 1946 became the Council of Ministers).
The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was also a misnomer. The proletariat as a whole could not dictate. It was the Communist Party which did this in the name of the proletariat. The party leadership simply assumed that they represented the will of the workers – or, at least, their ‘real will’, if only they recognized where their true interests lay – and substituted itself for the actual proletariat. For a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ to be compatible with even a minimal notion of democracy, one would have to assume, first, that the proletariat constituted an absolute majority of the population, which in the USSR of the 1920s was far from being the case (in 1926 urban dwellers made up only 18 per cent of the population), and, second, that within the proletariat itself there were no real and persistent differences of opinion, something which has never been true in Russia or anywhere else. The notion of unity of opinion within any working class, however sociologically defined, is scarcely less fanciful than the idea that a universal consensus would be achieved in the communist society of the future.24
Stalin’s Revolution
The concessions made to the peasantry by the New Economic Policy were not popular with many rank-and-file Communists. Stalin staked out from the mid-1920s two major positions which he made his own. The first was the possibility of ‘Socialism in One Country’. That is to say, he argued that even without revolution in advanced industrial countries, the USSR could thrive independently. This gave him a political weapon with which to attack Trotsky, whose internationalism could be represented as a lack of patriotism. Stalin’s line went down well with party workers who disliked Trotsky’s emphasis on the necessity of Communists taking power in other major European countries.25 Stalin’s second, and closely linked, emphasis was on the paramount importance of speedy industrialization, to be accompanied by the forcible collectivization of agriculture. Between 1928 and 1932, some twelve million people, mainly young men, left the villages.26 Some were sent into forced labour for having resisted collectivization, or were arrrested as kulaks, the name given to the richer peasants. ‘Kulak’ was, however, so loosely defined that anyone opposing the compulsory incorporation of their village, along with other villages, into a single vast collective farm could be put into that category. Other peasants voluntarily migrated to the towns and the developing industry.
Stalin advocated indiscriminate war against the kulaks and ruthless collectivization – until peasant resistance forced him into making a tactical retreat. In many areas the peasants chose to kill their farm animals rather than have them collectivized. There were also, in the first three months of 1930 alone, more than 1,600 cases of armed resistance.27 In November 1929 Stalin said: ‘We have gone from a policy of limiting the exploiting tendencies of the kulak to a policy of eliminating the kulak as a class.’ By the beginning of March 1930, he was already taking a different line, writing an article for the main Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, in which he said that some comrades, in their pursuit of collectivization, had become ‘dizzy with success’. He hypocritically complained that they had inappropriately used force, rather than allowing the peasants a choice, in the creation of collective farms.28
Forced collectivization and massive upheaval in the countryside had dire consequences. Millions of peasants were uprooted and at least 63,000 ‘heads of households’ had been imprisoned or executed by the end of 1930. Well over a million ‘kulaks’ were deported between 1929 and the beginning of 1932.29 Collectivization proceeded more rapidly in Ukraine than in the Russian republic, and when famine struck, as a result of state requisitions of grain and the turmoil in the countryside, this hit Ukraine especially hard. By the summer of 1933, some five million people had died. Corpses lay beside the roads and there were cases of cannibalism. Famine severely hit the North Caucasus and Kazakhstan as well as Ukraine, and it was the direct result of policies pursued by Moscow – the combination of compulsory collectivization and the seizure of grain by the central authorities to feed the towns, and even to export grain, while people in the Soviet countryside were starving.30
The radicalization of policy was accompanied by the General Secretary’s consolidation of his power. At Stalin’s behest, Trotsky was sent into internal exile in the Soviet Union in 1927 and expelled from the country in 1928. He lived the rest of his life abroad, penning eloquent critiques of what he called ‘the Revolution Betrayed’ and ‘the Stalin School of Falsification’.31 Although much of what he wrote about the Soviet Union was true, he got some prophecies badly wrong. For example, he believed in the late 1930s that if the Soviet Union were to be involved in major war, this would lead to the overthrow of Stalin’s regime, whereas in reality the Second World War strengthened the Stalinist political order. While Stalin had much more to think about than Trotsky, out of sight for him never meant out of mind. With the help of his spies, he closely monitored the activities of his defeated rival throughout his various foreign travels. The Soviet secret police succeeded in penetrating Trotsky’s entourage in Mexico in 1940, and one of their assassins killed him with a blow from an ice-pick.
Stalin had earlier been supported in the New Economic Policy stage of concessions to the peasantry by one of the other major figures in the Bolshevik leadership, Nikolay Bukharin, who was, however, a much more genuine enthusiast for NEP. Lenin had viewed this change of course as a strategic retreat, not just a tactical one – something, accordingly, that would need to last for several decades. Bukharin shared this view. With his willingness to tolerate concessions to private enterprise, Bukharin was regarded by the late 1920s as being on the ‘right’ of the party. He had been Stalin’s ally in the fight against Trotsky, who headed the ‘left opposition’. Stalin, in contrast, had managed to portray himself during much of the 1920s as a centrist, and having defeated the ‘left’, he turned on the ‘right’.
This involved a fundamental shift of policy, not just the settling of scores with potential rivals. So radical were the changes that they have been variously described as a ‘revolution from above’, ‘Stalin’s revolution’, ‘the second revolution’, or (by not conflating the February and October revolutions of 1917) the ‘third revolution’. Simultaneously with dramatic change in the economy, there was a ‘cultural revolution’, involving massive upheaval in the professions and a clear-out of students and teachers of bourgeois origins from higher educational institutions.32 The end of the 1920s saw not only the abandonment of NEP, and the start of the forcible collectivization of agriculture, but also, in 1928, the introduction of the First Five-Year Plan, geared to speeding up dramatically Russia’s industrialization. Stalin had no difficulty in reducing the influence of his erstwhile ally, Bukharin, who was removed from the Politburo in 1929. Although Bukharin kept a tenuous position within the Central Committee of the party until the mid-1930s, in 1937 Stalin had him arrested and then, following a show trial, executed in 1938. For later reformist Communists, including some in the mid-1980s, Bukharin became a symbol of a non-Stalinist way of ‘building socialism’.33 Although personally honest and courageous, Bukharin had, however, helped to construct the highly authoritarian system which made Bolshevik power (that turned into Stalin’s power) uncheckable.
In a much-quoted speech in 1931, Stalin, after referring to the USSR as ‘our socialist fatherland’, spoke of the need ‘to develop a genuine Bolshevik tempo in building up its socialist economy’, for ‘those who fall behind get beaten’ and ‘we refuse to be beaten!’ He declared: ‘We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it or we shall go under.’34 Since Stalin’s reference to making up the leeway of half a century or even a century in ten years came precisely a decade before the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany in 1941, it has often been lauded as a tribute to his foresight. Ten years hence the USSR did indeed have the industrial base which could provide for a vast armaments industry and the wherewithal to prevail in a desperate and protracted war against Germany.
The price paid for the industrialization, however, was horrendous. And Stalin was not as far-sighted as his Communist admirers throughout the world believed. He credulously entered into a pact with Hitler in 1939 which he did not expect Hitler to breach in a surprise attack, as he did in June 1941. The Soviet Union’s unpreparedness for war had been greatly exacerbated by Stalin’s purges. For some reason he trusted Hitler more than he trusted many of the senior officers who had fought in the Red Army during the civil war. In the late 1930s he killed off a high proportion of the Soviet army officer corps. Thus the Soviet Union suffered heavier losses in the earliest stages of the war on the Russian front than would have occurred if their army had been properly prepared and professionally led.
Social Transformation and Political Repression
Enormous political and social changes differentiated the Soviet Union in the 1930s from the 1920s. In the course of the twenties, Stalin, through skilful appeal to the party rank and file, as well as use of the resources of the Secretariat, defeated his potential rivals in the Communist Party politically. In the later 1930s, he destroyed them physically. More will be said shortly about the scale of the bloodletting, but the regime survived not only through the ruthless deployment of terror against enemies, whether real or imagined. It prevailed also because it seemed to be holding out hope of a better future, making people believe that history was on its side. It was, furthermore, consolidated because even in the short run there were many winners as well as losers.
The Communists in power undertook a massive educational programme. At the time of the outbreak of the First World War less than 40 per cent of the population of the Russian Empire was literate. By 1926 this had risen to just over 50 per cent, although there were great discrepancies between urban and rural areas and between men and women. Two-thirds of women in the countryside, where the bulk of the population still lived in the mid-1920s, were illiterate.35 The beginning of the 1930s saw a still greater emphasis than in the twenties placed upon raising literacy levels. The years children spent at school were extended and adult literacy classes expanded. Whereas in 1926 only 39 per cent of females and 73 per cent of males in rural Russia could read and write, that figure by 1939, according to the official Soviet sources (possibly inflated, although by how much cannot be ascertained), had become 79 per cent for women and 95 per cent for men.36 There were huge differences in the 1920s in the levels of literacy from one nationality to another. Russians had 45 per cent literacy at that time, but at the other end of the scale were the Kirgiz, Uzbeks, Chechens, Turkmen and Tajiks who all had literacy rates below 5 per cent of the population. There was, in other words, an enormous east – west divide within the country, as well as a gender division.37
The Communist Party was concerned to create, along with an industrialized society, its own new elite by promoting workers and peasants and educating them and their children. In this they succeeded. The Soviet Union had seven leaders in seven decades, and only the first was from an educated professional background. Lenin’s father, as noted in Chapter 2, made such a successful career in tsarist Russia that he was promoted to the ranks of the nobility. Stalin was the son of a drunken cobbler who for a time worked on his own account and later in a shoe factory. Of the five remaining Soviet leaders – Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yury Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev – all but Andropov (who was the son of a white-collar railway employee) came from peasant or worker families.38 Countless thousands of officials of similar origins occupied posts at all levels of the party hierarchy.
More broadly, peasants became workers and many workers became managers. The children of workers and, to a somewhat lesser extent, peasants were given possibilities on a hitherto unimagined scale to go into higher education and become professionals in a variety of occupations – as engineers, architects, doctors, and many other specializations. The massive industrialization drive alone was responsible for much of this social mobility – modernization on the Stalinist model. The most appalling aspects of Stalinism also contributed in their own way to social mobility. The purging of hundreds of thousands of people (many killed, others sent to labour camps) produced an equivalent number of job vacancies. As a much higher proportion of intellectuals and white-collar workers than of manual workers were swept away by the purges, the promotion prospects of the new beneficiaries of Soviet education were correspondingly improved.
Alexander Zinoviev, who won a reputation as a scholar in the field of formal logic, and then much wider fame as a writer of a devastatingly witty satirical account of Soviet politics and society, The Yawning Heights (the publication of which in the West, during the Brezhnev years, led to his dismissal from academic work and his subsequent emigration to Germany), has described what happened in his own family:
Before the Revolution 80 per cent, if not 90 per cent of the Russian population were peasants living at subsistence level at the bottom of the social pyramid. They lived miserable lives, only an iota above the level of serfs. The Revolution did produce changes. Take my own family, who were peasants. As a result of the collectivization of agriculture my parents lost everything they had. But my elder brother eventually rose to be a factory manager; the next one to him in age made it to the rank of colonel; three of my other brothers qualified as engineers; and I became a professor at Moscow University. At the same time millions of Russian peasants were given a formal education and some became professional men and women.39
In spite of the appalling suffering which had been inflicted on the peasantry, many of the beneficiaries of rapid social mobility, including Zinoviev himself, came to the conclusion that it had all been worthwhile. There were those who drew a less lucky ticket in the lottery of life under Stalin and took a different view. Such was the success, however, in building an image of Stalin as a strict but just paternal figure that vast numbers of his victims, awaiting execution or doing forced labour in the camps, believed that he would intervene on their behalf if only he knew how unfairly they had been treated. A majority blamed neither Stalin nor the system, viewing their fate as a malfunctioning of the system rather than as a feature of the system itself.
The sheer numbers who were victims of state terror in the 1930s greatly exceeded those of the 1920s. In the distinctive ‘show trials’ the victims were beaten into reciting a script that had been prepared by the political police, admitting to crimes they could not have imagined, still less committed. These were an invention of the era of ‘high Stalinism’ – the period from the mid-1930s until Stalin’s death. By that time even a hint of opposition to his policies by members of the ruling Communist Party led to imprisonment and, usually, execution. Although the idea of murdering his party comrades would have been unthinkable for Lenin, it was he who was instrumental in setting in motion the ruthless killing machine which Stalin ‘creatively developed’.
A meeting of Sovnarkom, presided over by Lenin in December 1917, had established the Cheka. There was not even a decree setting up this ancestor of the NKVD and the KGB. Thus, strictly speaking, it did not have a legal basis, but that did not inhibit its functioning. The prime movers in establishing this political and punitive police arm of the state were Lenin himself and the Polish revolutionary who became the first head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky.40 Lenin’s willingness to use violence ruthlessly is illustrated in a letter he sent to Vyacheslav Molotov, later to become one of Stalin’s closest allies, chairman of Sovnarkom and Soviet foreign minister. Writing on 19 March 1922, Lenin declared: ‘The more representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed…in killing the better. We must right now teach this public [such a lesson] that for several decades they will not even dare to dream about any resistance.’41 Even so, Lenin’s use of terror was much more selective than that of Stalin, and it was directed at opponents of the Bolshevik revolution, not (as was the case with tens of thousands of Stalin’s victims) supporters of it.42
The earliest trial of people who had actually co-operated with the Soviet authorities was of engineers of ‘bourgeois’ origin who, in what became known as the Shakhty Trial, were found guilty in 1928 of sabotage. More than fifty engineers and technicians working in the Donetsk basin (Donbass) of Ukraine were accused of sabotage. The trial saw the launch of an orchestrated campaign against ‘wreckers’, even though most of the evidence of deliberate sabotage by the Shakhty accused was flimsy. Those who confessed did so under duress. Five of the Shakhty defendants were executed in July 1928, and a majority of the others were imprisoned. A few were released.43 Compared with the period between 1928 and 1931, the three or four years which followed, between 1932 and the first part of 1936, were something of a breathing space before the Great Purges of 1937–38.
WOMEN IN SOVIET SOCIETY
Among the many social transformations which occurred in this period of Soviet history, one of the greatest was in the position of women. This was far from being the unalloyed liberation of women proclaimed by Soviet propaganda, but one of the early acts of the Bolsheviks in power was to place women on an equal legal footing with men. While women were brought into the industrial and professional workforce in the Soviet Union to a far greater extent than in pre-revolutionary Russia, the majority of them, who were peasants, had long played an important part in the rural economy – taking part in mowing, raking and hay-baling as well as tending the vegetable garden – in addition to assuming virtually all the household tasks, including those of childcare.44 Yet whether married or unmarried, a woman had no rights of inheritance apart from her dowry and some domestic utensils, so long as a male relative lived (although in some regions exceptions were made for widows).45 Changing the legal framework helped, only slowly and extremely partially, to alter deeply rooted social attitudes.
In the earliest years of Communist rule, religious control over marriage and divorce was swept away, only civil marriage was recognized, and divorce was made easy and inexpensive. Abortion was legalized in 1920, although it was viewed not as an integral part of the liberation of women, but as a necessary and temporary evil. State-sanctioned abortion was required in order to reduce the high incidence of mortality associated with illegal abortions.46 Women under Soviet rule were not only given the right to paid work, they were also expected to join the workforce, and the great majority of them did so. In the period up to the outbreak of war (in wartime the conditions became devastatingly worse), women in the Soviet Union had not only the notorious double burden of full-time work in the factory, fields, or office, combined (far more often than not) with full responsibility for the domestic household. They had to do this in the absence of the kind of labour-saving devices which were increasingly available to their Western counterparts, all the while coping with the queues and shortages which were part and parcel of the Soviet economy. This was not simply because the USSR had a command, rather than market, economy, but because the political priorities of the planners lay in the sphere of heavy and defence industry, with a concomitant underdevelopment of the service sector and of consumer goods production.47 On the positive side, the rapid improvement in educational opportunities for women, noted earlier in this chapter, enabled a significant minority to achieve professional qualifications and career opportunities which were open to few before 1917. Others, however, found themselves undertaking heavy physical labour of a kind which, in the urban environment at least, had previously not been carried out by women.
In the 1930s, further legal as well as social changes occurred in the position of women in Soviet society. Stalin, paradoxically – in the light of his notable contribution to reducing the number of Soviet citizens through executions – became concerned about insufficient population size. Living conditions were such – the extremely cramped communal apartments in the towns, taken in conjunction with women’s double burden – that it was extraordinarily difficult for urban dwellers to have large families. Soviet officialdom decided that the answer to the problem was to make divorce more difficult, abortion illegal, and to celebrate the family as an institution. A June 1936 decree outlawed abortion except when there were strong medical reasons for it, and in November of the same year the exceptions became subject to more stringent criteria. These measures were accompanied by an extensive propaganda campaign on the dangers of abortion, with no reference to the still greater risks of termination of pregnancy by illegal abortionists. Financial inducements were offered for large families, the bonuses being especially high for each child in addition to ten in the family. The beneficiaries of this state largesse were overwhelmingly peasants rather than city dwellers. The latter, however, benefited from an extension of nurseries and paediatric clinics as part of the pro-natalist drive.48 In the Soviet mass media there was a new emphasis on the sanctity of the family. As David L. Hoffmann has noted: ‘By the mid-1930s, Soviet officials’ perceptions of the family had evolved. Not only did they see strong families as a means to maximize the birth rate but they had come to believe that the family could instill Soviet values and discipline in children, and thereby serve as an instrument of the state.’49
While the Soviet policies intended to promote a higher birth rate had something in common with pro-natalist policies in other countries, they also had some distinguishing features. Women were encouraged to continue to work during pregnancy and to return to work after giving birth. The Politburo in 1936 approved a decree which made it a criminal offence to refuse work to a pregnant woman or to lower her pay during pregnancy. And ‘at no time during the campaign to bolster the family did Soviet officials suggest that a woman’s place was in the home’.50
Cultural policy changed in many ways during the 1930s, including visual representations of women. The muscular, plainly dressed women portrayed in posters and the mass media during the First Five-Year Plan gave way in films and newspapers to pictures of women which emphasized femininity.51 More generally, the 1930s saw some rehabilitation of aspects of bourgeois life, among them ballroom dancing. Whereas the 1920s had produced more impressive ‘high culture’, the years 1932–36 saw an expansion of popular culture. Folklore, often pseudo-folklore, was officially encouraged, although minus its religious ingredients. By way of contrast, this was also the ‘red jazz age’, when Western as well as Soviet bands visited many cities.52 In spite of the doctrine of ‘socialist realism’ which was supposed to permeate all art – and which in practice meant exposing the degradation of capitalism, glorifying Soviet life, and maintaining an obligatory optimism about the society’s future – some popular mass art existed throughout the Soviet period. There was a great expansion in the number of cinemas in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, but as the decade went on the most popular foreign films were seen less and less. The turning point came in 1936, when repression was stepped up. Soviet mass culture became more thoroughly ‘folklorized’ and foreign imports more deeply suspect.53 Soviet citizens were also presented with an artistically enhanced and sanitized version of their own post-revolutionary experience. As the historian of the Soviet cinema Richard Taylor has noted, however, audiences in the USSR between the two world wars preferred Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford ‘to tractors and the history of what was, after all, supposed to be their Revolution. In other words they preferred escapism to realism, however unreal that realism might in fact have been.’54
Stalin’s Personal Dictatorship
In a number of respects, at the end of the 1920s and especially after the early 1930s, there was a great leap backwards as well as forwards.55 The celebration of the official date of Stalin’s fiftieth birthday–21 December 1929–saw the launch of what was later to be called ‘the cult of personality’. While this helped to bolster Stalin’s inordinate power, he believed it also suited the Russian psyche. A case can be made that it was, at least, in keeping with a strong Russian tradition. The revolutions of 1917 had ‘in rapid succession ousted both tsar and God, those age-old supports and foci of devotion’.56 With the death of Lenin, followed rapidly by the removal from power and subsequent exile of Trotsky, the regime was deprived of its most inspirational, albeit highly authoritarian, leaders. It was not willing to resort to democracy as a basis of its legitimacy, since that would have led to electoral rejection and the defeat of the Leninist project, as interpreted by Stalin. Accordingly, as the British historian John Gooding put it:
…the regime under Stalin took the unBolshevik but deeply Russian course of restoring the charismatic element. So successfully did Stalin do this that by the late 1930s much of the population had become abjectly dependent upon him. Lenin’s aim of genuine mass support and a real bonding between people and rulers was thus achieved, yet it was achieved by means that had nothing whatever to do with socialism or the Bolsheviks’ original ambitions.57
The Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party, held at the beginning of 1934, was called ‘the Congress of Victors’. The internal enemies had, apparently, been defeated, collectivization of agriculture had been accomplished, and rapid industrialization was well under way. The mood changed with the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the head of the Communist Party in Leningrad (the name given to the former capital, St Petersburg – renamed Petrograd during the First World War – after Lenin’s death). Kirov’s shooting in December 1934 led to a wave of arrests. There has been speculation that Stalin himself was responsible for ordering his assassination, both because he may have feared him as a potential rival and as an excuse to launch a new wave of terror. No evidence for Stalin’s complicity (strongly hinted at by Nikita Khrushchev in his speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956) has, however, been adduced, even following the partial opening of the Soviet archives at the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s. Certainly, however, Stalin took full advantage of the atmosphere created by Kirov’s assassination to settle many scores. Some of the most prominent old Bolsheviks, who had crossed swords with him in the 1920s and earlier, among them Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, were arrested and imprisoned, although they had no connection whatsoever with Kirov’s death. They were both executed in 1936.
The old Bolshevik Zinoviev was no relation of the writer Alexander Zinoviev, whose positive account of his family’s ascent on the Soviet professional ladder has already been cited. The latter’s characteristically Russian name was his own, but both Grigory Zinoviev and Kamenev had changed their Jewish surnames to Russian ones. Although Stalin’s suspicion of Jews was to become more overt in the post-Second World War years, even in the 1930s Jewish origins were not a recommendation in his eyes. Kamenev had made matters much worse both by marrying Trotsky’s sister and by then oscillating in the dispute between Stalin and Trotsky. In the earlier 1920s he had supported Stalin against Trotsky, but later in the decade he became closer to the ‘left opposition’. He was three times expelled from the Communist Party and on the first two occasions subsequently readmitted. When he was expelled for the last time in 1934, this was the prelude to his arrest in 1935 and execution the following year.
Stalin’s personal power had been increasing throughout the first half of the 1930s, but it was with the mass purges between 1936 and 1938 that the last vestiges of oligarchical rule gave way to personal dictatorship. As the Russian historian (and senior researcher at the Russian state archives) Oleg Khlevniuk has observed:
The thesis of the decisive role of the ‘Great Terror’ in the consolidation of Stalin’s personal dictatorship has long been accepted in the historiography and new documents completely confirm it. Relying on the punitive organs, Stalin had several members of the Politburo executed and subordinated his remaining colleagues with threats of violence to them and their families…Younger leaders brought into the Politburo by Stalin were raised…in a different tradition, the essence of which was personal loyalty to [Stalin]…In this new order, key political decisions were Stalin’s exclusive prerogative. The Politburo as a collective organ ceased to function, and was replaced by meetings of Stalin and certain colleagues…58
‘Socialism’, Stalinist-style
The mid-1930s saw the emergence of what became known as the Stakhanovite movement. Alexey Stakhanov, a miner, was said to have ‘hewed 102 tons of coal in a single six-hour stint in August 1935’, fourteen times higher than the norm established by the mine’s managers.59 The authorities immediately encouraged others to emulate such labour feats and thus hasten the development of the economy. While some workers were inspired by patriotism or the ‘building of socialism’ to make such attempts, there was a large element of subterfuge involved in most Stakhanovite achievements. Stalin claimed that the Stakhanovite movement was an expression of ‘socialist competition of a new type’, differing from the old because it was based on new technology.60 These exemplary workers, however, required the co-operation of the management to produce maximally favourable conditions, not to mention statistical inflation of their output. And those who achieved the accolade of Stakhanovite naturally made other workers seem laggards by comparison. The Stakhanovites were also given special privileges, such as access to scarce goods. As a result, the praise bestowed on them in the Soviet press was not matched by popularity among fellow workers. This is illustrated by the 1930s story about a deaf old woman who joined a queue in Russia, not knowing what it was for. That was a common practice in Russia throughout virtually the whole of the Soviet period. Most goods and foodstuffs were in short supply, so a long queue was a sign that something had just become available. People often enquired what they were standing in line for only after they had joined the queue. In this case the old woman asked ‘What are they giving out?’, to which someone answered, ‘A slap in the face.’ The deaf newcomer in the queue enquired, ‘To everyone, or just Stakhanovites?’61 (Even in Stalin’s time, though on a less widespread scale than in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods, Soviet citizens told political jokes. There were, indeed, jokes about political jokes, such as the response to the question: ‘Who are the bravest people in the world?’ The answer was: ‘The Russians, for every fourth person is an informer, and still they tell political jokes.’ In reality, the proportion of informers was not as high as one in four, but high enough to make a report to the political police all too grim a possibility during the 1930s and 1940s.)
An event which produced an enormous fanfare of self-congratulation in the Soviet Union, and congratulations also from many credulous foreigners, was the adoption of a new Soviet constitution in 1936. This was actually the third constitution – the previous ones were promulgated in 1918 and 1924–and on paper it was the most democratic. The 1918 constitution had, for example, disenfranchised undesirable elements such as clergymen of all denominations and people who employed hired labour for profit. By 1936 there were far fewer of the former and none of the latter in existence, and in the new constitution, no one was disenfranchised. That was, however, of absolutely no consequence, since the elections for soviets had but a single candidate. Stalin, in his speech of 25 November 1936 introducing the constitution, contrasted it with the constitutions of bourgeois countries which were purely formal and sometimes contained restrictions based on gender or property. Lauding the new constitution as more democratic than any hitherto seen, Stalin said that it provided ‘not only democratic freedoms’ but also the ‘material means’ for realising them. ‘It is understandable’, he added, ‘that the democratism of the draft of the new Constitution is not “ordinary” and “universally recognized” democratism in general, but socialist democratism [emphasis in the original].’62
In fact, the superficially democratic constitution had many reservations and ways of constraining the rights of citizens, quite apart from the qualification implied by Stalin’s understanding of ‘socialist’, should anyone dare to appeal to the constitution against the dictatorial state. The very first article stated: ‘The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a socialist state of workers and peasants.’ That immediately put the intelligentsia, who were regarded in Soviet ideology as a distinctive social stratum, but not a class, at something of a disadvantage. Article 125 began: ‘In conformity with the interests of the toilers, and in order to strengthen the socialist system, citizens of the USSR shall be guaranteed (a) freedom of speech; (b) freedom of the press; (c) freedom of assembly, including the holding of mass meetings; (d) freedom of street processions and demonstrations.’ Not one of these freedoms existed in reality, and admirers of Stalin’s constitution and the supposed bestowal of such freedoms missed the qualification in the introduction to the article. Should anyone wish to assert those freedoms, who would decide whether they were in conformity ‘with the interests of the toilers’ or whether their actions were designed ‘to strengthen the socialist system’? The answer, of course, was the Communist Party leadership and the political police who did Stalin’s bidding.
Stalin’s speech introducing the 1936 constitution was, nevertheless, an important one. It was in that oration that, for the first time, he declared unambiguously that the Soviet Union had become a socialist state. Until that point they had been ‘building socialism’. Stalin, whose didactic style included much intentional repetition for rhetorical and pedagogical effect, declared: ‘Our Soviet society has already succeeded in bringing about socialism in the main; it has created a socialist structure, that is to say it has realized what Marxists call either the first or lower phase of communism. It means we have already in essence accomplished the first phase of communism, socialism.’63
In terms of Soviet self-perceptions and ideology, it was a significant moment when it was decided that ‘socialism’ had ‘in the main’ been built. In objective reality, though, it was about as meaningful as the claim that Soviet society had also by 1936 become democratic. (I have more to say later in the book – in Chapter 6–about why it is greatly preferable to call this system Communist, not socialist). What became immediately obvious was that the 1936 Soviet constitution did not herald an era of respect for human rights, democracy or freedom. In fact, the two years which followed were those of the Great Purge, when arrests and executions reached a new intensity and when the revolution devoured both its fathers and its children – old Bolsheviks who had been Stalin’s comrades-in-arms in the late tsarist period and the civil war, and people who had joined the Communist Party when it was already in power and had been rapidly promoted to senior positions in party and state institutions.
When, for the first time, a Soviet leader drew attention to some of the crimes of Stalin, it was not surprising that the focus should be on 1937–38, for these were the years when the full force of the terror was turned against members of the Communist Party, including very notable ones. The person who broke the taboo on criticising Stalin was Khrushchev, and more will be said in a later chapter about the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 at which he did so. Far more peasants than party workers were imprisoned or killed at Stalin’s behest in the 1930s, and earlier many priests and ‘bourgeois’ opponents of the Communists met the same fate. These were passed over in silence by Khrushchev when he drew attention to some of Stalin’s crimes. The seniority within the system of many of the people executed in the second half of the 1930s was, however, remarkable. Because those who appeared in court confessed to various plots, with each person’s story generally corroborated by other defendants in accordance with the pre-rehearsed script, their guilt was assumed by many Western ambassadors and journalists – notwithstanding the fact that old Bolsheviks were confessing to such outlandish crimes as having been German, British or Japanese spies. The ranks of the gullible included the American ambassador to Moscow, Joseph E. Davies, who wrote: ‘The extraordinary testimony of Krestinsky, Bukharin, and the rest would appear to indicate that the Kremlin’s fears were well justified…But the government acted with great vigor and speed. The Red Army generals were shot and the whole party organization was purged and thoroughly cleansed.’64
Khrushchev himself had a differentiated view of the legitimacy of violence in the course of building socialism and communism, and what most shocked him was the deaths of dedicated Communists. His party audience was even more shocked than he (who knew so much more) when he told them that ‘of the 139 members and candidates of the party’s Central Committee who were elected at the 17th Congress [in 1934], 98 persons, i.e. 70 per cent, were arrested and shot (mostly in 1937–1938)’.65 The same fate, Khrushchev added, was met by a majority of delegates to that congress (which he reminded his audience had been called the Congress of Victors). Of the 1,966 delegates, 1,108 were arrested on charges of counterrevolutionary crimes.66 Given that Khrushchev was himself addressing the delegates to a party congress (the Twentieth), it is hardly surprising that the official report records that his revelation met with ‘Indignation in the hall’.67
There has been much controversy about the numbers of those imprisoned and killed at various times in the Stalin years, but the opening of the archives has led to some convergence towards a middle (but still horrific) figure, some millions fewer than the earlier highest estimates and some millions more than the estimates of those who downplayed the scale of Stalin’s terror. Ronald Suny, the editor of a recent major volume on twentieth-century Russian history, suggests that the ‘total number of lives destroyed by the Stalinist regime in the 1930s is closer to 10–11 million than the 20–30 million estimated earlier’.68 Anne Applebaum, the author of a detailed study of political prisoners in the Soviet Union, arrives at a figure of 28.7 million forced labourers over the whole Soviet period. She includes in that number the ‘special exiles’, such as ‘kulaks’ and particular nationalities, among them the Tatars and Volga Germans, who were deported during World War Two. Applebaum notes that a figure of around 786,000 political executions between 1934 and 1953 is now quite widely accepted, although her own view is that the true figure is probably significantly higher than that number.69 The Russian non-governmental organization Memorial, dedicated to investigating the cases of repression in the Soviet period, more recently came up with the figure of 1.7 million people arrested in 1937–38 alone, of whom, they say, at least 818,000 were shot.70
Some of the earlier purges were a logical consequence of the choice of the Soviet leadership not to embrace what Stalin called ‘ordinary democratism’ or ‘universally recognized democratism’ but to impose their will, and many harsh policies, on the population by dictatorial fiat. Other purges, including those of party workers and of the officer corps of the Red Army, went well beyond the logic of Communist rule. Stalin was both a true believer in the strand of Leninism he had himself developed and a disordered personality who, as Lenin had recognized too late, should never have had great power placed in his hands. As Stalin grew older, he became increasingly paranoid. However, his pre-revolutionary experience had provided a rational element in the distrust he was later to harbour. As a Bolshevik revolutionary activist, he had failed to spot that one of his colleagues whom he trusted, Roman Malinovsky, was an agent of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. For that blind spot he subsequently overcompensated spectacularly. Chronic suspicion, a love of power (behind a façade of modesty), and bloodthirsty vindictiveness became ever more prominent features of Stalin’s personality. Stalinism thus became a distinctive form of Communism, one whose excesses had devastating consequences for Soviet society and whose extremes incorporated much more than was required to maintain a Communist Party in power.