The basic compound of the Soviet order had been invented by Lenin and his fellow communist leaders within a couple of years of the October Revolution. There had been created a centralized, one-ideology dictatorship of a single party which permitted no challenge to its monopoly of power. The Bolshevik party itself was strictly organized; the security police were experts at persecution and there was systematic subordination of constitutional and legal propriety to political convenience. The regime had also expropriated great segments of the economy. Industry, banking, transport and foreign trade were already nationalized and agriculture and domestic trade were subject to heavy state regulation. All these elements were to remain intact in ensuing decades.
The Civil War had added to the pressures which resulted in the creation of the compound. On taking power in 1917, the communist leaders had not possessed a preparatory blueprint. Nevertheless they had come with assumptions and inclinations which predisposed them towards a high degree of state economic dominance, administrative arbitrariness, ideological intolerance and political violence. They also lived for struggle. They wanted action; they could barely contain their impatience. And they were outnumbered by enemies at home and abroad. They had always expected the party to be ‘the vanguard’ of the Revolution. Leadership was a key virtue for them. If they wanted to prevail as the country’s rulers, the communists would have been pushed into introducing some kind of party-run state even in the absence of a civil war – and, of course, the way that the October Revolution had occurred made a civil war virtually certain.
This in turn meant that once the Civil War was over, the party-state was unlikely to be dismantled by the Russian Communist Party. The party-state was at the core of the Soviet compound. Without the party-state, it would not be long before all the other elements in the compound underwent dissolution.
Even as things stood, not all the elements were as yet sustainable – at least, not in their entirety – in the harsh conditions of 1920–21. Popular discontent could no longer simply be suppressed. Even among those segments in society which had preferred the Reds to the Whites in the Civil War there were many people unwilling to tolerate a prolongation of wartime policies. Administrative disorder was increasing. Whole nations and whole regions were supervised only patchily from Moscow. The technical facilities for control were in a ruinous state: transport and communications were becoming a shambles. Most industrial enterprises had ceased production: factory output in 1920 was recorded as being eighty-six per cent lower than in 1913. Agriculture, too, had been reduced to a shabby condition. The grain harvest of 1920 was only about three fifths of the annual average for the half-decade before the Great War.1
By the start of 1921, strategical choice could no longer be avoided. Lenin, having had conversations while visiting peasants, at last recognized the enormity of the emergency. For him, the ultimate alarm bell was sounded by the rural revolt in Tambov province. The last great peasant risings in Russia had occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under the leaderships of Razin, Bolotnikov and Pugachëv. Ancient Russia now confronted the Bolsheviks in struggle. Lenin foresaw that force alone would not be enough to quell the peasants, and he decided that in order to sustain the political dictatorship he had to offer economic relaxations.
In his opinion, the peasantry had to be placated by the replacement of grain requisitioning with a tax in kind. Knowing that this would evoke intense opposition in his party, he initially limited the discussion to the Politburo. On 8 February 1921 he convinced its members of the need for urgent measures and a resolution was passed calling for a partial re-legalization of ‘local economic exchange’ in grain.2 Such fussiness of language was necessary to avoid offending the ideological sensibilities among fellow Bolsheviks. But the underlying purpose was unmistakable: the Politburo intended to restore private commercial activity. In addition, the tax-in-kind was to be set at a much lower level than the grain-requisitioning quotas and would secure only the minimum of the state’s requirements on behalf of civilian consumers. These measures were the core of what quickly became known as the New Economic Policy (or NEP).
Some such gamble was essential for the regime to survive. The Politburo permitted a press campaign to commend the NEP’s merits to the rest of the party. Having had his fingers burnt in the Brest-Litovsk controversy, Lenin for some weeks distanced himself from the policy by getting obscure party officials to put his case; and the commission established by the Politburo to elaborate the details was headed not by himself but by Kamenev.3
But thereafter Lenin, supported by Trotski and Kamenev, canvassed for the NEP. It was of assistance to him that the party had exhausted itself in the winter’s dispute about the trade unions. A desire for unity had emerged before the opening of the Tenth Party Congress on 15 March 1921, a desire stiffened by news of the outbreak of a mutiny by the naval garrison on Kronstadt island. The sailors demanded multi-party democracy and an end to grain requisitioning. Petrograd was affected by discontent and strikes broke out in its major factories. Those many Congress delegates who had not accepted Lenin’s arguments were at last persuaded of the argument for economic reform. Lenin anyway stressed that he did not advocate political reform. Indeed he asserted that the other parties should be suppressed and that even internal factions among the Bolsheviks should be banned. The retreat in economics was to be accompanied by an offensive in politics.
Congress delegates from all factions, including the Workers’ Opposition, volunteered to join the Red Army units ordered to quell the Kronstadt mutineers. Mikhail Tukhachevski, a commander who had recently returned from the Polish front, clad his soldiers in white camouflage to cross the iced-over Gulf of Finland undetected. In the meantime a depleted Party Congress ungratefully condemned the Workers’ Opposition as an ‘anarcho-syndicalist deviation’ from the principles of Bolshevism.
Lenin had got his way at the Congress in securing an end to grain requisitioning. And yet there was trouble ahead. The NEP would remain ineffective if confined to a legalization of private trade in foodstuffs. Other economic sectors, too, needed to be removed from the state’s monopolistic ownership and control. Peasants would refrain from selling their crops in the towns until they could buy industrial goods with their profits; but large-scale state-owned factories could not quickly produce the shoes, nails, hand-ploughs and spades that were wanted by the peasantry. Rapid economic recovery depended upon a reversion of workshops and small manufacturing firms to their previous owners. There was no technical impediment to this. But politically it would be hard to impose on local communist officials who already at the Party Congress had indicated their distaste for any further compromises with the principle of private profit.4
Lenin had to come into the open to persuade these officials to soften their stance. Indefatigably he tried to attract Western capitalists to Soviet Russia. On 16 March, after months of negotiation, an Anglo-Soviet Trade treaty was signed; and Soviet commercial delegations were established in several other European countries by the end of the year. Lenin also continued to push for the sale of ‘concessions’ in the oil industry in Baku and Grozny. The Red Army’s defeat in the war in Poland convinced him that temporary co-operation with international capitalism would better facilitate economic reconstruction than the pursuit of ‘European socialist revolution’. If Lenin needed proof, it was supplied by the German communists. In the last fortnight of March 1921, encouraged by Zinoviev and Bukharin, they tried to seize power in Berlin. The German government easily suppressed this botched ‘March Action’; and Lenin roundly upbraided his comrades for their adventurism.
By then Lenin was no longer looking only to foreign concessionaires for help with economic recovery. In April he argued in favour of expanding the NEP beyond its original limits; and he achieved his ends when the Tenth Party Conference in May 1921 agreed to re-legalize private small-scale manufacturing. Soon afterwards peasants obtained permission to trade not only locally but anywhere in the country. Commercial middlemen, too, were allowed to operate again. Private retail shops were reopened. Rationing was abolished in November 1921, and everyone was expected to buy food from personal income. In August 1921, state enterprises had been reorganized into large ‘trusts’ responsible for each great manufacturing and mining subsector; they were instructed that raw materials had to be bought and workers to be paid without subsidy from the central state budget. In March 1922, moreover, Lenin persuaded the Eleventh Party Congress to allow peasant households to hire labour and rent land.
Thus a reintroduction of capitalist practices took place and ‘War Communism’, as the pre-1921 economic measures were designated, was ended. A lot of Bolsheviks felt that the October Revolution was being betrayed. Tempers became so frayed that the Tenth Conference proceedings were kept secret.5 Not since the Brest-Litovsk controversy had Lenin had to endure such invective. But he fought back, purportedly shouting at his critics: ‘Please don’t try teaching me what to include and what to leave out of Marxism: eggs don’t teach their hens how to lay!’6
He might not have succeeded at the Conference if his critics had not appreciated the party’s need for unity until the rebellions in the country had been suppressed; and Lenin sternly warned about the adverse effects of factionalism. Throughout 1921–2 there persisted an armed threat to the regime. The Kronstadt mutiny was put down; its organizers were shot and thousands of ordinary sailors, most of whom had supported the Bolsheviks in 1917, were dispatched to the Ukhta labour camp in the Russian north.7 The rural revolts, too, were crushed. Red Army commander Tukhachevski, after defeating the Kronstadters, was sent to quell the Tambov peasant uprising in mid-1921.8 Insurrections in the rest of the Volga region, in Ukraine, Siberia and the North Caucasus were treated similarly. The Politburo also smashed the industrial strikes. The message went forth from the Kremlin that the economic reforms were not a sign of weakened political resolve.
Not only real but also potential trouble-makers were dealt with severely. Those members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party’s Central Committee who were still at liberty were rounded up. In summer 1922 they were paraded in Soviet Russia’s first great show-trial and given lengthy prison sentences. There was a proposal by Lenin to do the same to the Menshevik Organizational Committee, and he was annoyed at being overruled by the Politburo.9 But the lesson was administered that the Bolshevik party, having won the Civil War, would share its power with no other party.
Nor were there to be illusions about national self-determination. It is true that Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had gained independence and that provinces had been lost to Poland, Romania and Turkey. Yet by March 1921, when Georgia was re-conquered, the Red Army had largely restored the boundaries of the Russian Empire. Russian nationalists applauded this. It would not be long, they surmised, before the Bolsheviks accommodated themselves to Russia’s geo-political interests and abandoned their communist ideas. Red Army commanders, some of whom had served as officers in the Imperial Army, were delighted that Russian military, political and economic power had risen again over two continents. In the People’s Commissariats, too, many long-serving bureaucrats felt a similar pride. The émigré liberal Professor Nikolai Trubetskoi founded a ‘Change of Landmarks’ group that celebrated the NEP as the beginning of the end of the Bolshevik revolutionary project.
The Bolsheviks responded that they had made the October Revolution expressly to establish a multinational state wherein each national or ethnic group would be free from oppression by any other. They refused to accept that they were imperialists even though many nations were held involuntarily under their rule. They were able to delude themselves in this fashion for two main reasons. The first was that they undoubtedly wanted to abolish the old empires around the world. In this sense they really were anti-imperialists. Secondly, the central Bolshevik leadership had no conscious desire to give privileges to the Russian nation. Most of them were appalled by the evidence that Russian nationalist sentiment existed at the lower levels of the Soviet state and even the communist party. And so by being anti-nationalist, Lenin and his colleagues assumed that they were automatically anti-imperialist.
But how, then, were they going to resolve their very complex problems of multi-national governance in peacetime? Probably most leading Bolsheviks saw the plurality of independent Soviet republics as having been useful to gain popularity during the Civil War but as being likely to reinforce nationalist tendencies in the future.10 There was consensus in the party that a centralized state order was vital; no one was proposing that any of the republican governments or communist parties should have the right to disobey the Bolshevik leadership in the Kremlin. But how to achieve this? Stalin, who headed the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities, wished to deprive the Soviet republics of even their formal independence by turning them into autonomous republics within the RSFSR on the Bashkirian model. His so-called federalism would therefore involve the simple expedient of incorporating Ukraine, Belorussia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia into an enlarged RSFSR, and he had been working along these lines since mid-1920.11
Lenin thought Stalin’s project smacked of Russian imperial dominance; and his counter-proposal was to federate the RSFSR on equal terms with the other Soviet republics in a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.12 In summer 1922 their disagreements became acrimonious. Yet it must be noted that the ground separating Lenin and Stalin was narrow. Neither aimed to disband the system of authoritarian rule through a highly centralized, unitary communist party run from Moscow. While castigating the United Kingdom’s retention of India with her empire, the Politburo had no scruples about annexing states which had gained their independence from Russia between 1917 and 1921.
In any case Lenin and Stalin themselves faced common opposition in the localities. Their adversaries fell into two main groups. The first group demanded a slackening of the Kremlin’s grip on republican political bodies.13 Even so, none of these persons demanded a complete release. They wished to remain part of a common Soviet state and understood that they depended upon the Red Army for their survival in government. The other group of adversaries felt that official policy was not too strict but too indulgent towards the non-Russian republics. Both Lenin and Stalin wished to keep the promises made since the October Revolution that native-language schools, theatres and printing presses would be fostered. Stalin in 1921 was accused of ‘artificially implanting’ national consciousness; the charge was that, if the Belorussians had not been told they were Belorussians, nobody would have been any the wiser.14
This debate was of great importance (and the reason why it remains little noticed is that Stalin suppressed discussion of it in the 1930s when he did not wish to appear indulgent to the non-Russians). Stalin’s self-defence was that his priority was to disseminate not nationalist but socialist ideas. His argument was primarily pragmatic. He pointed out that all verbal communication had to occur in a comprehensible language and that most of the people inhabiting the Soviet-held lands bordering Russia did not speak Russian. A campaign of compulsory Russification would therefore cause more political harm than good.
Nor did Stalin fail to mention that the vast majority of the population was constituted by peasants, who had a traditional culture which had yet to be permeated by urban ideas.15 If Marxism was to succeed in the Soviet Union, the peasantry had to be incorporated into a culture that was not restricted to a particular village. Whatever else they were, peasants inhabiting the Belorussian region were not Russians. It behoved the communist party to enhance their awareness of their own national culture – or at least such aspects of their national culture that did not clash blatantly with Bolshevik ideology. Thus would more and more people be brought into the ambit of the Soviet political system. Bolshevism affirmed that society had to be activated, mobilized, indoctrinated. For this reason, in contrast with other modern multinational states which had discouraged national consciousness, Politburo members fostered it. They did so because they worried lest there should be further national revolts against Bolshevism; but they also calculated that, by avoiding being seen as imperial oppressors, they would eventually win over all their national and ethnic groups to principles of international fraternity. The central party leaders had not ceased being militant internationalists.
A few leading Bolsheviks resented this as being a cynical approach. Practically all these critics were post-1917 recruits to the party, and prominent among them was a young Tatar named Mirza Said Sultan-Galiev. As a functionary in the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities, he had impugned any action that seemed to favour Russians at the expense of the other national and ethnic groups.16 Matters came to a head in 1923 when Sultan-Galiev advocated the desirability of a pan-Turkic socialist state uniting the Muslim peoples of the former Russian and Ottoman Empires. Sultan-Galiev was arrested for promoting a scheme that would have broken up the Soviet state. This first arrest of a senior communist leader by the communist authorities was a sign of the acute importance they attached to the ‘national question’.
Yet Politburo members remained worried about the potential appeal of pan-Turkism, and sought to accentuate the differences among Muslims by marking out separate administrative regions for the Uzbeks, Tajiks and Kazakhs. Stimulation was given for their paths of cultural development to diverge. This was not the sole method whereby the Bolsheviks tried to divide and rule: they also bought the acquiescence of majority nationalities in each Soviet republic at the expense of the local minorities. Romanians, Greeks, Poles and Jews in Ukraine did not receive as much favourable attention as Ukrainians. And if the attempt to rule the nations by dividing them among themselves ever became ineffectual, the Cheka – which was known from 1923 as the United Main Political Administration (or by its Russian acronym OGPU) – arrested troublesome groups and individuals. In the last resort the Red Army, too, was used. A Georgian insurrection against the Soviet regime in 1924 was ferociously suppressed.17
Nations picked up whatever scraps the Bolshevik leadership was willing to toss from its table. These scraps were far from insubstantial. Native-language schooling flourished as never before in Russian history (and the Soviet authorities provided the Laz people, which numbered only 635 persons, with not only a school building but even an alphabet).18 Ukraine had not been an administrative-territorial unit before 1917; in formal terms it had been only a collection of provinces subject to the tsar. In the 1920s the Politburo sanctioned the return to Kiev from abroad of the nationalist historian Mihaylo Hrushevskyi, who made no secret of his nationalism.
At the same time the Bolshevik central leadership wanted to give stiff ideological competition to Hrushevskyi and his counterparts in other Soviet republics. The difficulty was that the party’s rank-and-file membership even in the non-Russian regions consisted overwhelmingly of Russians. Steps were taken to train and promote cadres of the local nationality. This was the policy known as korenizatsiya (or ‘the planting down of roots’). Initially it could not be done, especially in central Asia but in other places too, without appeals being made to young men and women who were not necessarily of working-class background. Many potential recruits would have to be drawn from the local traditional élites. The hope was that the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment and the Party Central Committee’s Agitation and Propaganda Department would succeed in nudging the promotees towards feeling that their national and cultural aspirations were compatible with Bolshevik revolutionary aims.
Confidential discussions to settle the state’s constitutional structure proceeded. In September 1922 Lenin, despite still convalescing from a major stroke, won his struggle against Stalin’s proposal for the RSFSR to engorge the other Soviet republics. Instead all these republics, including the RSFSR, were to join a federation to be called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (or USSR). This meant that Russia – in the form of the RSFSR – was for the first time given its own boundaries within the larger state it belonged to. At the time this hardly mattered in any practical way to most Russians; it was only in the late 1980s, when Boris Yeltsin campaigned for the Russian presidency before the USSR’s disintegration, that the possible implications of delineating ‘Russia’ as a cartographic entity became evident. Under the NEP, however, the Bolsheviks anticipated not disintegration but, if anything, expansion. And so the decision on the USSR Constitution was ratified in principle by the First All-Union Congress of Soviets on 31 December 1922, and the central government newspaper Izvestiya hailed the events as ‘a New Year’s gift to the workers and peasants of the world’.19
In the communist party across the country only the Georgian leadership made strong objection. They had lobbied Lenin for several months, claiming that Stalin had ridden roughshod over Georgian national sensitivities. They particularly resented the plan to insert Georgia into the USSR not as a Soviet republic but as a part of a Transcaucasian Federation. In their estimation, this was a trick whereby Stalin could emasculate Lenin’s somewhat gentler attitude to Georgians as a people. They demanded that Georgia should enter the USSR on the same terms as Ukraine. But Lenin and the Politburo accepted Stalin’s advice in this specific matter. The formation of a Transcaucasian Federation would enable the curtailment of unpleasantries meted out to their respective ethnic minorities by the Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian Soviet republics: there was abundant evidence that the Georgians, sinned against by Stalin, were not blameless in their treatment of non-Georgians.20
The Transcaucasian Federation would also diminish Turkey’s temptation to interfere in Muslim-inhabited areas on the side of Azerbaijan against Armenia. Continuing nervousness about the Turks induced central party leaders to award Nagorny Karabakh to ‘Muslim’ Azerbaijan despite the fact that the local population were Armenian Christians.21
Azeri-inhabited Nakhichevan, too, was given to Azerbaijan even though Nakhichevan lay enclosed within Armenia and did not abutt upon Azerbaijani territory. The central party leadership’s measures were therefore not untainted by considerations of expediency, and Armenians had little cause to celebrate the territorial settlement. Cossack farmers in the North Caucasus were even less contented. The Politburo took the decision to secure the acquiescence of the non-Russian peoples of that region by returning land to them that had been taken from them in the previous century by the tsarist authorities. Thousands of Cossack settlers were rounded up and deported to other regions held by the Soviet authorities in April 1921.22 National deportations were to become a basic aspect of governmental policy in the 1930s and 1940s, but the precedent had been set under Lenin.
Yet there was a degree of justification in the party’s claim that its treatment of the national and ethnic minorities put many European governments to shame; and prominent Bolshevik C. G. Rakovsky argued that many peoples in eastern and central Europe would relish the degree of autonomy accorded in the USSR.23 Nevertheless several leading party figures were fearful of the long-term risks involved. The administrative demarcation of territory according to national and ethnic demography laid down internal boundaries that could become guidelines for nationalism. The opportunities for linguistic and cultural self-expression, too, allowed the different peoples to develop their respective national identities. Only ruthless interventions from Moscow stopped these chickens of official policy coming home to roost before the late 1980s. Lenin thought he was helping to resolve the national question; in fact he inadvertently aggravated it.
The nation with the greatest potential to upset Bolshevik policy were the Russians themselves. According to the census published in 1927 they amounted to nearly three fifths of the population,24 and it could not be discounted that one day they might prove susceptible to nationalist ideas. Under the NEP they were therefore the nationality most tightly restricted in their cultural self-expression. Classic Russian nineteenth-century writers who had disseminated anti-socialist notions lost official approval; and Fëdor Dostoevski, who had inspired thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche and Freud, was no longer published. Russian military heroes such as Mikhail Kutuzov, the victor over Napoleon, were depicted as crude imperialists. Allegedly no emperor, patriarch or army general had ever done a good deed in his life. Non-Bolshevik variants of Russian socialist thought were equally subjected to denigration, and Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary policies were denounced as hostile to the requirements of working people. Traditions of Russian thought which were uncongenial to Bolshevism were systematically ridiculed.
The Russian Orthodox Church especially alarmed the Bolsheviks. A survey of Russian peasants in the mid-1920s suggested that fifty-five per cent were active Christian worshippers. This was almost certainly a large underestimate; and there can be no denying that the Russian Orthodox Church constituted part and parcel of the Russian identity in the minds of most ethnic Russians. In 1922 Lenin arranged for the execution of several bishops on the pretext that they refused to sell their treasures to help famine relief in the Volga region. Anti-religious persecution did not cease with the introduction of the NEP, and Lenin’s language in Politburo discussions of Christianity was vicious, intemperate and cynical.25
Yet generally the Bolsheviks became more restrained in the mid-1920s. The OGPU was instructed to concentrate its efforts on demoralizing and splitting the Church by indirect methods rather than by physical assault. This policy took the form of suborning priests, spreading disinformation and infiltrating agents; and when Patriarch Tikhon died in 1925, the Church was prevented by the Soviet authorities from electing a successor to him. Metropolitan Sergei, who was transferred from Nizhni Novgorod to Moscow, was allowed to style himself only as Acting Patriarch. Meanwhile Trotski had observed the rise of a ‘Living Church’ reform movement in the Church that despised the official ecclesiastical hierarchy and preached that socialism was Christianity in its modern form. The adherents of this movement were reconcilable to Soviet rule so long as they could practise their faith. Trotski urged that favourable conditions should be afforded to ‘Living Church’ congregations in order that a wedge could be driven down the middle of the Russian Orthodox Church.26
Other Christian denominations were handled less brusquely. Certain sects, such as the Old Believers, were notable for their farming expertise and the central party leadership did not want to harm their contribution to the economy as a result of clashes over religion.27 Non-Russian Christian organizations were also treated with caution. For instance, the harassment of the Georgian and Armenian Orthodox Churches diminished over the decade. Islam was left at peace even more than Christianity (although there was certainly interference with religious schools and law-courts). The Politburo saw that, while secularism was gaining ground among urban Russians, Muslims remained deeply attached – in towns as in the villages – to their faith. In desperation the party tried to propagate Marxism in Azerbaijan and central Asia through the medium of excerpts from the Koran that emphasized communal, egalitarian values. Yet the positive results for the party were negligible: ‘the idiocy of religion’ was nowhere near as easy to eradicate as the communists had imagined.
They had a nerve in being so condescending. Leading Bolshevik cadres themselves were intense believers in a faith of a certain kind. The works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were like prophetic works in the Bible for most of them; and Lenin as well as Marx and Engels were beatified. Marxism was an ersatz religion for the communist party.
Real religious belief was mocked in books and journals of the state-subsidized League of the Militant Godless. Citizens who engaged in public worship lost preferment in Soviet state employment; and priests had been disenfranchised under the terms of successive constitutions since 1918. In local practice, however, a more relaxed attitude was permitted. Otherwise the middle strata of the Azerbaijani government would have had to be sacked. Even in Russia there was the same problem. Officials in Smolensk province decided that since a disavowal of God did not appear in the party rules, it should not be a criterion for party membership.28 Such pragmatism, as with other aspects of the NEP, stemmed from a sense of short-term weakness. But this did not signify any loss of medium-term confidence: both the central and local party leadership continued to assume that religious observance was a relic of old ‘superstitions’ that would not endure.
Not only priests but also all potentially hostile groups in society were denied civic rights. The last remaining industrialists, bankers and great landlords had fled when Vrangel’s Volunteer Army departed the Crimean peninsula, paying with their last roubles to take the last available ferries across the Black Sea or to hide in haycarts as they were trundled over the land frontier with Poland.
As the ‘big and middle bourgeoisie’ vanished into the emigration or into obscurity in Russia, the Politburo picked on whichever suspected ‘class enemies’ remained. Novelists, painters and poets were prominent victims. The cultural intelligentsia had always contained restless, awkward seekers after new concepts and new theories. The Bolshevik leaders discerned the intelligentsia’s potential as a shaper of public opinion, and for every paragraph that Lenin wrote castigating priests he wrote a dozen denouncing secular intellectuals. The most famous representatives of Russian high culture were held under surveillance by the OGPU and the Politburo routinely discussed which of them could be granted an exit visa or special medical facilities:29 the nearest equivalent would be a post-war British cabinet deciding whether George Orwell could visit France or Evelyn Waugh have a gall-bladder operation.
In summer 1922 the Soviet authorities deported dozens of outstanding Russian writers and scholars. These included a philosopher of world importance, Nikolai Berdyaev, who was interrogated by Dzierżyński. Berdyaev complained that he, too, was a socialist, but one with a more individualist outlook than Dzierżyński. His assertion was rejected; for the Bolsheviks treated non-Bolshevik varieties of socialism as an acute threat to the regime. The deportations taught the intelligentsia that no overt criticisms of the regime would be tolerated; and in June 1922 the Politburo drove home the lesson by reintroducing pre-publication censorship through the agency of a Main Administration for Affairs of Literature and Publishing Houses (which became known as Glavlit and which lasted until its abolition by Gorbachëv). The aim was to insulate Soviet society from the bacillus of ideas alien to Bolshevism.30
The dilemma for Politburo members was that they badly needed the help of intellectuals in effecting the cultural transformation essential for the creation of a socialist society. Scarcely any writers of distinction were Bolsheviks or even sympathizers with the party. An exception was the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovski. Not all central party leaders regarded him as a boon to Bolshevism. Lenin remarked: ‘I don’t belong to the admirers of his poetic talent, although I quite admit my own incompetence in this area.’31 A warmer welcome was given to the novelist Maksim Gorki even though he had often denounced Leninism and called Lenin a misanthrope before 1917. Gorki, however, had come to believe that atrocities committed in the Civil War had been as much the fault of ordinary citizens in general and of the Soviet state in particular; and he began to soften his comments on the Bolsheviks. Even so, he continued to prefer to live in his villa in Sorrento in Italy to the dacha he would obtain if he returned home.
Trotski and Zinoviev persuaded the Twelfth Party Conference in 1922 that as long as writer-Bolsheviks were so few, the regime would have to make do with ‘fellow travellers’.32 Writers and artists who at least agreed with some of the party’s objectives were to be cosseted. Thousands of roubles were thrown at the feet of those who consented to toe the political line; and Mayakovski, taking pity on the plight of his friends who opposed Marxism-Leninism, discreetly left his banknotes on their sofas. But acts of personal charity did not alter the general situation. Large print-runs, royalties and fame were given to approved authors while poverty and obscurity awaited those who refused to collaborate.
Dissentient thought continued to be cramped under the NEP. The authorities did not always need to ban books from publication: frequently it was enough to suggest that an author should seek another publisher, knowing that Gosizdat, the state publishers, owned practically all the printing-presses and had reduced most private publishers to inactivity. Nevertheless the arts in the 1920s could not have their critical edge entirely blunted if the state also wished to avoid alienating the ‘fellow travellers’. Furthermore, the state could not totally predetermine which writer or painter would acquire a popular following. Sergei Yesenin, a poet and guitar-player who infuriated many Bolshevik leaders because of his Bohemian lifestyle, outmatched Mayakovski in appeal. Whereas Mayakovski wrote eulogies for the factory, twentieth-century machinery and Marxism-Leninism, Yesenin composed nostalgic rhapsodies to the virtues of the peasantry while indulging in the urban vices of cigar-smoking and night-clubbing.
Neither Yesenin nor Mayakovski, however, was comfortable in his role for very long. Indeed both succumbed to a fatal depression: Yesenin killed himself in 1925, Mayakovski in 1930. Yet several of their friends continued to work productively. Isaak Babel composed his masterly short stories about the Red Cavalry in the Polish-Soviet War. Ilf and Petrov wrote The Twelve Chairs poking fun at the NEP’s nouveaux riches as well as at the leather-clad commissars who strutted out of the Red Army into civilian administrative posts after the Civil War. Their satirical bent pleased a Politburo which wished to eradicate bureaucratic habits among state officials; but other writers were less lucky. Yevgeni Zamyatin wrote a dystopian novel, We, which implicitly attacked the regimentative orientation of Bolshevism. The novel’s hero did not even have a name but rather a letter and number, D-503, and the story of his pitiful struggle against the ruler – the baldheaded Benefactor – was a plea for the right of the individual to live his or her life without oppressive interference by the state.
Zamyatin’s work lay unpublished in the USSR; it could be printed only abroad. The grand theorizings of Russian intellectuals about the meaning of life disappeared from published literature. Painting had its mystical explorers in persons such as Marc Chagall (who, until his emigration to western Europe in 1922, went on producing canvasses of Jewish fiddlers, cobblers and rabbis in the poverty-stricken towns and villages around Vitebsk). Practically no great symphonies, operas or ballets were written. The October Revolution and the Civil War were awesome experiences from which most intellectuals recoiled in shock. Many entered a mental black hole where they tried to rethink their notions about the world. It was a process which would last several years; most of the superb poetry of Osip Mandelshtam, Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova came to maturity only in the 1930s.
Central party leaders endeavoured to increase popular respect for those works of literature that conformed to their Marxist vision. They used the negative method of suppression, seizing the presses of hostile political parties and cultural groups and even eliminating those many publications which took a non-political stance. Apolitical light-heartedness virtually disappeared from the organs of public communication.33 Party leaders also supplied their own propaganda for Bolshevism through Pravda and other newspapers. Posters were produced abundantly. Statues and monuments, too, were commissioned, and there were processions, concerts and speeches on May Day and the October Revolution anniversary.
The regime gave priority to ‘mass mobilization’. Campaigns were made to recruit workers into the Russian Communist Party, the trade unions and the communist youth organization known as the Komsomol. Special attention was paid to increasing the number of Bolsheviks by means of a ‘Lenin Enrolment’ in 1924 and an ‘October Enrolment’ in 1927. As a result the membership rose from 625,000 in 1921 to 1,678,000 at the end of the decade;34 and by that time, too, ten million workers belonged to trade unions.35 A large subsidy was given to the expansion of popular education. Recreational facilities also underwent improvement. Sports clubs were opened in all cities and national teams were formed for football, gymnastics and athletics (in 1912 the Olympic squad had been so neglected that the ferry-boat to Stockholm left without many of its members). Whereas tsarism had struggled to prevent people from belonging to organizations, Bolshevism gave them intense encouragement to join.
The Bolshevik leaders were learning from recent precedents of the German Social-Democratic Party before the Great War and the Italian fascists in the 1920s. Governments of all industrial countries were experimenting with novel techniques of persuasion. Cinemas and radio stations were drawn into the service of the state; and rulers made use of youth movements such as the Boy Scouts. All this was emulated in the USSR. The Bolsheviks had the additional advantage that the practical constraints on their freedom of action were smaller even than in Italy where a degree of autonomy from state control was preserved by several non-fascist organizations, especially by the Catholic Church, after Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922.
Yet most Soviet citizens had scant knowledge of Marxism-Leninism in general and the party’s current policies. Bolshevik propagandists acknowledged their lack of success,36 and felt that a prerequisite for any basic improvement was the attainment of universal literacy. Teachers inherited from the Imperial regime were induced to return to their jobs. When the Red Cavalry rode across the borderlands in the Polish-Soviet War, commissars tied flash-cards to the backs of the cavalrymen at the front of the file and got the rest to recite the Cyrillic alphabet. This kind of commitment produced a rise in literacy from two in five males between the ages of nine and forty-nine years in 1897 to slightly over seven out of ten in 1927.37 The exhilaration of learning, common to working-class people in other societies undergoing industrialization, was evident in day-schools and night classes across the country.
Despite all the problems, the Soviet regime retained a vision of political, economic and cultural betterment. Many former army conscripts and would-be university students responded enthusiastically. Many of their parents, too, could remember the social oppressiveness of the pre-revolutionary tsarist regime and gave a welcome to the Bolshevik party’s projects for literacy, numeracy, cultural awareness and administrative facility.
This positive reception could be found not only among rank-and-file communists but also more broadly amidst the working class and the peasantry. And experiments with new sorts of living and working were not uncommon. Apartment blocks in many cities were run by committees elected by their inhabitants, and several factories subsidized cultural evenings for their workers. A Moscow orchestra declared itself a democratic collective and played without a conductor. At the end of the Civil War, painters and poets resumed their normal activity and tried to produce works that could be understood not only by the educated few but by the whole society. The Bolshevik central leaders often wished that their supporters in the professions and in the arts would show less interest in experimentation and expend more energy on the basic academic education and industrial and administrative training of the working class. But the utopian mood was not dispelled: the NEP did not put an end to social and cultural innovation.38
For politically ambitious youngsters, furthermore, there were courses leading on to higher education. The new Sverdlov University in Moscow was the pinnacle of a system of ‘agitation and propaganda’ which at lower levels involved not only party schools but also special ‘workers’ faculties’ (rabfaki). Committed to dictatorship of the proletariat, the Politburo wished to put a working-class communist generation in place before the current veteran revolutionaries retired. (Few of them would in fact reach retirement age, because of Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s.) Workers and peasants were encouraged, too, to write for newspapers; this initiative, which came mainly from Bukharin, was meant to highlight the many petty abuses of power while strengthening the contact between the party and the working class. Bukharin had a zest for educational progress. He gathered around himself a group of young socialist intellectuals and established an Institute of Red Professors. In 1920 he had shown the way for his protégés by co-authoring a textbook with Yevgeni Preobrazhenski, The ABC of Communism.
Thus the tenets of Bolshevism were disseminated to everyone willing to read them.39 The Soviet proletariat was advertised as the vanguard of world socialism, as the embodiment of the great social virtues, as the class destined to remake history for all time. Posters depicted factory labourers wielding hammers and looking out to a horizon suffused by a red dawn. On everything from newspaper mastheads to household crockery the slogan was repeated: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’
Bolshevik leaders, unlike tsars, strove to identify themselves with ordinary people. Lenin and head of state Mikhail Kalinin were renowned for having the common touch. As it happens, Kalinin – who came from a family of poor peasants in Tver province – had an eye for young middle-class ballerinas. But such information did not appear in Pravda: central party leaders tried to present themselves as ordinary blokes with unflamboyant tastes. This was very obvious even in the way they clothed themselves. Perhaps it was Stalin who best expressed the party’s mood in the 1920s by wearing a simple, grey tunic: he thereby managed to look not only non-bourgeois but also a modest but militant member of a political collective. The etiquette and material tastes of the pre-revolutionary rich were repudiated. Any interest in fine clothes, furniture or interior décor was treated as downright reactionary. A roughness of comportment, speech and dress was fostered.
In fact these leaders were emphasizing what appealed to them in working-class culture and discarding the rest. Much as they extolled the virtues of the industrial worker, they also wanted to reform him or her. Ever since 1902, when Lenin had written his booklet What Is To Be Done?, Bolshevik theory had stressed that the working class would not become socialist by its own devices. The party had to explain and indoctrinate and guide.
The authorities emphasized the need not only for literacy and numeracy but also for punctuality, conscientiousness at work and personal hygiene. The desirability of individual self-improvement was stressed; but so, too, was the goal of getting citizens to subordinate their personal interests to those of the general good as defined by the party. A transformation in social attitudes was deemed crucial. This would involve breaking people’s adherence to the way they thought and acted not only in public life but also within the intimacy of the family, where attitudes of a ‘reactionary’ nature were inculcated and consolidated. Official spokesmen urged wives to refuse to give automatic obedience to husbands, and children were encouraged to challenge the authority of their fathers and mothers. Communal kitchens and factory cafeterias were established so that domestic chores might not get in the way of fulfilment of public duties. Divorce and abortion were available on demand.40
Social inhibitions indeed became looser in the 1920s. Yet the Great War and the Civil War played a more decisive role in this process than Bolshevik propaganda. For the popular suspicion of the regime remained acute. A particular source of grievance was the fact that it took until the late 1920s for average wages to be raised to the average amount paid before 1914. This was unimpressive to a generation of the working class which had felt exploited by their employers under Nicholas II. Strikes were frequent under the NEP. The exact number of workers who laid down tools is as yet unascertained, but undoubtedly it was more than the 20,100 claimed by governmental statisticians for 1927.41
Not that the Politburo was greatly disconcerted by the labour movement. Conflicts tended to be small in scale and short in duration; the raging conflicts of 1920–21 did not recur. The long-standing policy of favouring skilled workers for promotion to administrative posts in politics and industry had the effect of removing many of those who might have made the labour movement more troublesome; and although wages were no higher than before 1914, the state had at least increased rudimentary provision for health care and unemployment benefit.42 Above all, the party and the trade unions had offices in all factories and were usually able to see off trouble before it got out of hand; and the resolution of disputes was facilitated by arbitration commissions located in the workplace. The OGPU, too, inserted itself into the process. Once a strike had been brought to an end, the Chekists would advise the management about whom to sack in due course so that industrial conflict might not recur. Sometimes strike leaders were quietly arrested.
Obviously the party leaders could not be complacent about the situation. They could never be entirely sure that a little outbreak of discontent in some factory or other would not explode into a protest movement such as had overwhelmed the monarchy in February 1917. Through the 1920s the Politburo was fumbling for ways to understand the working class in whose name it ruled the USSR.
Workers were not the only group to cause perplexity: the whole society baffled the authorities. The NEP had reintroduced a degree of capitalism; but it was a capitalism different from any previous capitalism in Russia or the external world. Bankers, big industrialists, stockbrokers and landlords were a thing of the past. Foreign entrepreneurs were few, and those few kept out of public view. The main beneficiaries of the NEP in the towns did not conform to the stereotype of a traditional high bourgeoisie; they were more like British spivs after 1945. As a group they were called ‘nepmen’ and were quintessentially traders in scarce goods. They trudged into the villages and bought up vegetables, ceramic pots and knitted scarves. They went round urban workshops and did deals to obtain chairs, buckles, nails and hand tools. And they sold these products wherever there were markets.
It was officially recognized that if the market was to function, there had to be rules. Legal procedures ceased to be mocked as blatantly as in the Civil War. A Procuracy was established in 1922 and among its purposes was the supervision of private commercial transactions. More generally, people were encouraged to assert their rights by recourse to the courts.43
But arbitrary rule remained the norm in practice. The local authorities harassed the traders, small-scale manufacturers and stall-holders: frequently there were closures of perfectly legal enterprises and arrests of their owners.44 Lenin had anyway insisted that the Civil Code should enable the authorities to use sanctions including even terror.45 This had the predictable effect of inducing the nepmen to enjoy their profits while they could. The dishonest, fur-coated rouble millionaire with a bejewelled woman of ill-repute on either arm was not an excessive caricature of reality in the 1920s. Yet if many nepmen had criminal links, the fault was not entirely theirs; for the regime imposed commercial conditions which compelled all traders to be furtive. Without the nepmen, the gaps in the supply of products would not have been plugged; with them, however, the Bolsheviks were able to claim that capitalist entrepreneurship was an occupation for speculators, sharpsters and pimps.
Yet the Bolshevik belief that the middle class was striving to grab back the economic position it had occupied before 1917 was untrue not only of the higher bourgeoisie but also of lower members of the old middle class. The Russian Empire’s shopkeepers and small businessmen for the most part did not become nepmen. Instead they used their accomplishments in literacy and numeracy to enter state administrative employment. As in the Civil War, they found that with a little redecoration of their accounts of themselves they could get jobs which secured them food and shelter.
The civil bureaucracy included some famous adversaries of the communist party. Among them were several economists, including the former Menshevik Vladimir Groman in the State Planning Commission and ex-Socialist-Revolutionary Nikolai Kondratev in the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture. But such figures with their civic dutifulness were untypical of bureaucrats in general. The grubby, unhelpful state offices became grubbier and even less helpful. Citizens got accustomed to queuing for hours with their petitions. Venality was endemic below the central and middling rungs of the ladder of power. Even in the party, as in Smolensk province in 1928, there was the occasional financial scandal. A pattern of evasiveness had not ceased its growth after the Civil War, and it affected the workers as much as the bureaucrats. In the factories and mines the labour force resisted any further encroachment on their rights at work. Although by law the capacity to hire and fire was within the gift of management, factory committees and local trade union bodies still counted for something in their own enterprises.46
Older workers noted that infringements which once would have incurred a foreman’s fine resulted merely in a ticking off. The workers sensed their worth to a party which had promulgated a proletarian dictatorship; they also knew the value of their skills to enterprises which were short of them. One task for the authorities was to inhibit the work-force from moving from job to job. Other jobs and enterprises were nearly always available at least for skilled labour (although unemployment in general grew in the 1920s). Managers were commencing to bribe their best men and women to stay by conceding higher wages.47
All these factors reduced the likelihood of the working class revolting against ‘Soviet power’. The mixture of blandishment, manipulation and coercion meant few labourers were keen to join the scanty, scattered groups of anti-Bolshevik socialists – be they Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries or disillusioned former Bolsheviks – who tried to stir them into organized resistance. Nor is it surprising that the peasants were not minded to challenge ‘Soviet power’. The peasantry had not forgotten the force used by the party to obtain food-supplies, labour and conscripts in the Civil War. They also remembered that the NEP, too, had been introduced by means of unremitting violence. The Red Army, including cavalry units, had been deployed not only to suppress revolts but also to force peasants to increase the sown area in 1921–2. A deep rancour was still felt towards the town authorities, but it was the rancour of political resignation, not of rebellious intent.
In any case, not everything went badly for the peasantry. The total fiscal burden as a proportion of the income of the average peasant household differed little from the normal ratio before the Great War; and their standard of living recovered after the Civil War. Certainly the pattern of the grain trade changed in the 1920s. This was mainly the result of the fall in prices for cereals on the world market. Consequently most of the wheat which had gone to the West under Nicholas II stayed in the country. A large amount of any harvest was not sold to the towns, for peasant households could often get better deals in other villages. Alternatively they could feed up their livestock or just hoard their stocks and wait for a further raising of prices. The villages were theirs again, as briefly they had been in 1917–18. Rural soviets were installed by visiting urban officialdom, but their significance consisted mainly in the creation of an additional layer of administrative corruption. Moscow’s political campaigns went barely noticed. Peasants continued to have a hard, short and brutish life; but at least it was their own style of life, not a style inflicted upon them by Emperor, landlord or commissar.
This was a phenomenon regretted by the Bolsheviks, who managed to establish only 17,500 party groups in the countryside by 192748 – one for every 1200 square kilometres. It was bad enough that workers preferred Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford to Soviet propaganda films.49 Worse still was the fact that few peasants even knew what a cinema was or cared to find out. The USSR was a predominantly agrarian country with poor facilities in transport, communication and administration. As a result, it was virtually as ‘under-governed’ as the Russian Empire.
Such a structure of power was precarious and the Soviet regime reinforced its endeavour to interpose the state into the affairs of society. The stress on ‘accountancy and supervision’ had not originated in Russia with the Bolsheviks: it had been a feature of the tsarist administrativetradition. But Leninist theory gave huge reinforcement to it. Surveillance, both open and covert, was a large-scale activity. Contemporary bureaucracies in all industrial countries were collecting an ever larger amount of information on their societies, but the trend was hyper-developed in the USSR. Vast surveys were conducted on economic and social life: even the acquisition of a job as a navvy entailed the completion of a detailed questionnaire. For example, Matvei Dementevich Popkov’s work-book shows that he was born in 1894 to Russian parents. He had only a primary-school education. Popkov joined the Builders’ Union in 1920 but refrained from entering the communist party. He had had military experience, probably in the Civil War.
The distrust felt by the central party leadership for both its society and even its own state continued to grow. Control organs such as the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate and the Party Central Control Commission had their authority increased. Investigators were empowered to enter any governmental institution so as to question functionaries and examine financial accounts.50
And yet who was to control the controllers? The Bolshevik leaders assumed that things would be fine so long as public institutions, especially the control organs, drew their personnel mainly from Bolsheviks and pro-Bolshevik workers. But how were the leaders to know who among such persons were genuinely reliable? Under the NEP the system known as the nomenklatura was introduced. Since mid-1918, if not earlier, the central party bodies had made the main appointments to Sovnarkom, the Red Army, the Cheka and the trade unions. In 1923 this system was formalized by the composition of a list of about 5,500 designated party and governmental posts – the nomenklatura – whose holders could be appointed only by the central party bodies. The Secretariat’s Files-and-Distribution Department (Uchraspred) compiled a file-index on all high-ranking functionaries so that sensible appointments might be made.51
And provincial party secretaries, whose posts belonged to this central nomenklatura, were instructed to draw up local nomenklaturas for lower party and governmental posts in analogous fashion. The internal regulation of the one-party state was tightened. The graded system of nomenklaturas was meant to ensure that the policies of the Politburo were carried out by functionaries whom it could trust; and this system endured, with recurrent modifications, through to the late 1980s.
This same system, although it increased central control, had inherent difficulties. Candidates for jobs knew in advance that overt political loyalty and class origins counted for more than technical expertise. But this induced people to lie about their background. Over-writing and over-claiming became a way of life. The state reacted by appointing emissaries to check the accuracy of reports coming to Moscow. Yet this only strengthened the incentive to lie. And so the state sent out yet more investigative commissions. The party itself was not immune to the culture of falsehood. Fiddling and fudging pervaded the operation of lower Bolshevik bodies. Each local leader formed a group of political clients who owed him allegiance, right or wrong.52 There was also a reinforcement of the practice whereby local functionaries could gather together in a locality and quietly ignore the capital’s demands. Although the party was more dynamic than the rest of the Soviet state, its other characteristics gave cause for concern in the Kremlin.
The NEP had saved the regime from destruction; but it had induced its own grave instabilities into the compound of the Soviet order. The principle of private profit clashed in important economic sectors with central planning objectives. Nepmen, clerics, better-off peasants, professional experts and artists were quietly beginning to assert themselves. Under the NEP there was also a resurgence of nationalist, regionalist and religious aspirations; and the arts and sciences, too, offered cultural visions at variance with Bolshevism. Soviet society under the New Economic Policy was a mass of contradictions and unpredictabilities, dead ends and opportunities, aspirations and discontents.