By the late 1930s the term totalitarianism was being widely used to describe the kind of state and society engineered by Iosif Stalin. Benito Mussolini had used it in reference to his own fascist Italy nearly two decades before. Commentators on Soviet politics, while recognizing contrasts of ideology, saw the similarities among fascism, nazism and communism in their methods of rule. In Moscow as in Berlin there was a dominant leader and a one-party state. Both countries had witnessed a merciless crushing of internal opposition. The state not only monopolized the instrumentalities of coercion but also dominated the means of mass communication. It allowed no challenge to the single official ideology. There was persecution of any independent individual, organization or institution standing between the central state bodies and ordinary citizens. Total, unmediated pervasion of society by his power was each leader’s aspiration.
That something close to this had been Stalin’s underlying objective in carrying through the Great Terror there can be little doubt. Yet his power was not absolute. Those who had carried out the bloody purges knew that, in order to survive, they had to use the practices of patronage and mutual protection which Stalin had hoped to eradicate. And Stalin himself had had to scale down his totalist aims in the course of the Terror. Concessions to Russian national pride had been strengthened. Moreover, not all public entertainments were heavily political: frivolity existed even in Stalin’s USSR. Stalin felt the need to identify himself with the aspirations of the people he governed. This fearsome dictator had fears of his own.
Yet he could take comfort from the knowledge that he had promoted a vast number of newly-trained young activists. The central nomenklatura of personnel involved in state economic management had risen to 32,899 posts. Of these, 14,585 at the beginning of 1939 had been appointed in the past two years – forty-seven per cent of the total. In the Red Army the proportion was also remarkable: Stalin had purged the officer corps at its highest levels with particular thoroughness. The apparatus of the party, too, had been overhauled. Four out of five provincial committee first secretaries had joined the party after Lenin’s death; ninety-one per cent of them had yet to reach the age of forty (and sixty-two per cent were less than thirty-five years old).1 A cohort of young men gained advancement who were later to govern the country through to the early 1980s: Mikhail Suslov, Dmitri Ustinov, Leonid Brezhnev, Aleksei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny. It was a new élite and it was Stalin’s élite.
Most of its members were workers or peasants who had taken the opportunities offered by the Soviet authorities to get themselves educated. Over half of the voting delegates to the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 had completed their secondary schooling.2 Their adult life and their politics marked them off from the generation of Old Bolsheviks: they had not operated in the clandestine Bolshevik groups before 1917; they had not made the October Revolution or fought in the Civil War; and their Marxism was not their intellectual passion but a crude creed purveyed to them by the party’s agitation-and-propaganda departments.
They were taught to obey and be vigilant; their obligation was not only to ‘unmask’ traitors but also to engage in ‘self-criticism’ whenever they could not fulfil orders. Simultaneously they were cajoled to clamber up the ladder of promotion. The administrative hierarchy in the USSR was much simpler than in advanced capitalist societies: the duties, perks and authority accompanying each post were evident to every ambitious man and woman. The Soviet Union was distinguished by a uniformity of work-style and by great symbolism and ceremony. Not only military but also civilian medals were worn in normal public life: even Molotov sported a Hero of the Soviet Union badge on his suit’s lapel. Outstanding actors, opera singers and clowns were awarded the title of ‘People’s Artist of the USSR’; and when national gatherings were held in the capital, ritual obeisance to Stalin was compulsory: the major decisions had been taken in advance by the party leadership.
The promotees could hardly believe their luck. Most of them were persons who had not dreamed of staying in a hotel or even having a healthy diet earlier in their lives. As the Great Terror came to an end, they became able to enjoy their privileged conditions. The gap between the rulers and the ruled widened. In 1940, Stalin approved the introduction of fees to be paid by parents for students in the last three years of secondary school and at university. High-ranking administrators were in a better position to find the necessary finance than any other group in society. A new social class was in the process of formation.3
Its members acclaimed Stalin as the world’s outstanding philanthropist, leader and theorist. In the 1930s he attempted no lengthy contribution to the canon of Bolshevism: he was too busy killing Bolsheviks. Many among the party’s writers who might have written textbooks for him fell victim to his butchery. A new explication of the principles of Marxism-Leninism was essential for the regime. As regional party secretary M. M. Khataevich had put it in 1935, there was a need for ‘a book of our own, in place of the Bible, that could give a rigorous answer – correct and comprehensible – to the many important questions of the structure of the world’.4 Khataevich perished in the Great Terror; and the project for a grand treatise on Marxism was not realized until after Stalin’s death. In the meantime the gap was filled by a book with a narrower title, The History of the All-Union Communist Party: A Short Course.
The main authors were veteran party loyalists V. G. Knorin, E. M. Yaroslavski and P. N. Pospelov. But Stalin closely supervised the contents and personally wrote the sub-chapter on ‘dialectical and historical materialism’. To most intents and purposes he was the textbook’s general editor and hid behind the pseudonym of ‘a commission of the Central Committee’.
The Short Course traced the rise of the Bolsheviks from the political struggles against the Romanov monarchy through to Stalin’s ascendancy. The last section of the final chapter dealt with ‘the Liquidation of the Remnants of the Bukharinite-Trotskyist Gang of Spies, Wreckers and Traitors to the Country’. Hysterical self-righteousness imbued the book. Stalin wanted to stress that Marxism provided the sole key to understanding both the social life of humanity and even the material universe, and that only Stalin’s variant of Marxism was acceptable. Just as prophet followed prophet in the Old Testament, the Short Course traced a lineage of authentic scientific communism from Marx and Engels through Lenin down to Stalin. According to Stalin, Bolshevism had triumphed predominantly through struggle, often bloody, merciless struggle, and unceasing vigilance.5
Purportedly its victories had also resulted from the virtues of its leadership. Lenin and Stalin, and subsequently Stalin by himself, had led the Central Committee. The Central Committee had led the communist party and the party had led the masses. In each period of the party’s history there had been maleficent communists such as Trotski and Bukharin who had linked up with kulaks, priests, landlords and tsarist officers at home and capitalist espionage agencies abroad. But in vain! For Comrade Stalin had rooted out the traitors and pointed the party in the direction of the attainment of a perfect society!
The book divided everything between black and white (or, as Stalin preferred, White and Red). There was no palette of colours in this Stalinist catechism. Violence, intolerance, pitilessness, command, discipline, correctness and science were the central themes. In the USSR of the 1930s this was a conservative set of recommendations. Current holders of office could act without qualms. Stalin’s infallibility meant that they need not question their consciences, even when taking up the posts of innocent dead men and buying up their possessions in the special shops runs by the NKVD. By obeying the Leader, they were acting in complete accord with the requirements of patriotism, class struggle and History. Their power and their privileged life-style were in the natural order of things, and the existence of an impregnable, terrifying Soviet state was the guarantee of the October Revolution’s preservation. The Short Course was a manifesto for Stalin’s style of communist conservatism.
According to Lenin, however, the communist dictatorship would wither away and be succeeded by a society without any state bodies whatsoever. Stalin brazenly declared that much progress had already been made towards that ultimate goal. The bourgeoisie no longer existed, and a new social and economic order had been built.
Now it was stated that only three social classes existed: the working class, the peasantry and the ‘working intelligentsia’ (which included everyone with an administrative, managerial or educational post). Therefore the Soviet Union was still a society of classes. But supposedly it was different from all such previous societies inasmuch as the three classes had no reason to conflict with each other. Thus the working class, the peasantry and the intelligentsia had ‘non-antagonistic’ interests and drew common benefit from the state’s provision of employment, education, health care, nutrition and shelter.6 In November 1936, when introducing a new Constitution for the USSR, Stalin proclaimed: ‘Socialism, which is the first phase of communism, has basically been realized in our country.’7 He therefore proposed that the electoral franchise should be made universal. The ‘deprived ones’ (lishentsy) – including former kulaks, White Army officers and priests – should be allowed to vote.8
Universal civil rights were introduced on paper, and the freedoms of thought, the press, religion, organization and assembly were guaranteed. Furthermore, Stalin insisted that economic rights were as important as political ones. In particular, he drew attention to the guarantees of employment given in the Soviet Union. This led him to claim that the new Constitution proved that the USSR was the most democratic country in the world.
Stalin was being monumentally insincere. The lishentsy were picked out for repression when the Great Terror began in full earnest in mid-1937. Moreover, the new Constitution itself was laden with stipulations that restricted the exercise of civil freedoms. In the first place, the USSR was defined as ‘a socialist state of the workers and peasants’. Thus the rights of citizens were made entirely subsidiary to the determination to preserve the existing structure and orientation of the Soviet state. No clause in the Constitution expressly sanctioned the All-Union Communist Party’s political monopoly; but only the existing public institutions, including the communist party, were allowed to put up candidates in elections. Formal approval was given in this indirect fashion to the one-party state. Stalin carefully supervised the wording of the final draft and, when introducing the Constitution, specified that the communist dictatorship was not going to be weakened.9
Not surprisingly the Constitution was not taken seriously by citizens of the USSR.10 Its main admirers were gullible foreigners. The most notorious of them were Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? sought to defend Stalin against the charge that dictatorship of any kind existed in the USSR!11 In the meantime Molotov bluntly affirmed that years would pass before full implementation of all the civil freedoms granted by the Constitution;12 and already in 1933 Stalin himself had contended that, as the party advanced to victory after victory, so the state required strengthening against the bitter onslaughts of its foes at home and abroad. In 1939 he expatiated on this point at the Eighteenth Party Congress: ‘Will our state be retained also in the period of communism? Yes, it will be retained unless capitalist encirclement is liquidated and unless the danger of a military attack from abroad is liquidated.’13
This contradicted Marxist doctrine inasmuch as communism was supposed to involve the ‘withering away of the state’. But Stalin ignored such a nicety; his overriding aim was to reinforce the regimentative aspects of Bolshevism. The Congress delegates were anyway not the sort to worry about interpretations of Marxism. They were also well accustomed to the fact that the USSR was a terror-state. At the same Eighteenth Congress Stalin alluded to this in his po-faced comment that, whereas the elections to the USSR Supreme Soviet yielded a 98.6 per cent vote in favour of the regime after the sentencing of Tukhachevski in 1937, the proportion rose to 99.4 per cent after Bukharin’s trial in 1938.14
Stalin, needless to say, knew that the more favourable vote derived not from the cogency of the evidence against the alleged traitors but from the intimidating example of their execution. Not even he, however, ruled exclusively through the violence of his security and judicial machinery. He had his equivalent of an old boys’ network, consisting of cronies who had supported him in his past battles and who served him through to his death. The first in political seniority was Molotov. Then came Kaganovich and Mikoyan, who had joined him in the early 1920s. Others included pre-revolutionary party veterans such as Andrei Zhdanov, Andrei Andreev, Nikolai Bulganin and Kliment Voroshilov. Nor did Stalin neglect the young: Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchëv and Georgi Malenkov were hauled up by him from the lower political echelons and promoted to supreme party and government posts.
The central leadership was like a gang, and Stalin as its leader relied upon his fellow members to organize the state’s institutions. Competence and obedience remained prerequisites of gang membership. The penalty for disagreement with Stalin was constant: ‘seven grams of lead’ in the head.
Stalin continued to make occasional arrests of cronies. Like Al Capone, he knew how to ‘keep the boys in line’.15 For instance, he asked Khrushchëv whether it was true that he was really a Pole.16 This was quite enough to terrify Khrushchëv, who knew that in 1938 Stalin had executed the Polish communist émigrés in Moscow. The nearer someone was to the apex of power, the more directly he was intimidated by Stalin. People’s commissars trembled at meetings of Sovnarkom. Stalin’s ploy was to get up from the long green-baize table and pad up and down in his soft leather boots behind the seats of his colleagues. It was an unnerving experience. In reply to Stalin’s enquiry about the number of recent plane crashes, air force commander Rychagov, being the worse for drink, blurted out: ‘There will continue to be a high level of accidents because we’re compelled by you to go up in flying coffins.’ The room fell silent as a graveyard, and after a long pause Stalin murmured: ‘You shouldn’t have spoken like that.’ Rychagov was shot a few days later.17
Yet the uppermost élite lived in greater safety than in 1937–8. Stalin could not afford to reduce his associates to the condition of robots: he needed them to accompany their self-abasement before him with a dynamic ruthlessness in the discharge of their tasks – and to give orders on their own initiative. Laws, decrees, regulations and commands were produced in profusion in this period of frightful legal abusiveness.18 But, as under Lenin, office-holders were given to understand that they would not be assessed on the basis of their adherence to procedural norms. What would ultimately count for or against them was their record of practical results.
At the supreme and middling levels they had to combine the talents of cardinals, condottieri and landed magnates: they had to be propagators of Marxism-Leninism; they had to fight for the policies of the party; and each of them had to assemble a band of followers who would carry out orders throughout the area of their patron’s responsibility. The unavoidable result was that Stalin had to settle for a less amenable administration than he had aimed to establish by means of the Great Terror. Just as he needed his cronies, so they needed cronies of their own. The cliental groupings therefore stayed in place. For example, Postyshev’s team in the Ukrainian party leadership gave way to Khrushchëv’s team when Stalin sent Khrushchëv to Kiev in 1938; and Beria likewise cleared out Yezhov’s team from the NKVD and installed his own: it was the only available way to ensure the substitution of reliable anti-Yezhovites.
Not only vertically but also horizontally the old administrative practices stayed in place. In June 1937 Stalin had complained: ‘It’s thought that the centre must know everything and see everything. No, the centre doesn’t see everything: it’s not like that at all. The centre sees only a part and the remainder is seen in the localities. It sends people without knowing these people one hundred per cent. You must check them out.’19 But new local ‘nests’ or ‘family circles’ were formed almost as soon as Stalin destroyed the existing ones. Wheeling and dealing occurred among the heads of party, soviet, police, army and enterprise management; local officials protected each other against the demands made by central authorities. More than ever, lying to Moscow was a skill crucial for physical survival. Institutions had to fiddle the accounts so as to exaggerate achievements enough to win acclaim, but not to the point that the following year’s quotas would be raised intolerably high.
Such evasiveness was not confined to officialdom. A black market existed in those many types of product which were in severe deficit in the USSR. Moisei Kaganovich, brother of Stalin’s close associate, loudly objected to the general evidence of disobedience: ‘The earth ought to tremble when the director walks around the plant!’ In theory the managerial stratum was obliged to give its work-forces a harder time than since the October Revolution. But the potential for harshness was limited outside the forced-labour camps by the chronic shortage of skilled free labour. Strict time-keeping and conscientious work could not be enforced if hired labourers could simply wander off and find employment elsewhere. A kind of social concordat was established whereby managers overlooked labour indiscipline so long as they could hang on to their workers. Records were written to over-state a worker’s technical qualifications or his hours of attendance or his output. Managers had to break the law in order to fulfil their own quotas.20
In every branch of the economy it was the same story. Even in the kolkhozes and the sovkhozes the local authorities found it convenient to make compromises with the work-forces. A blind eye was turned to the expansion of the size of peasants’ private plots.21 Regular contribution of ‘labour days’ was not always insisted upon. Illicit borrowing of the farm’s equipment was overlooked by the chairman who needed to keep the peasants on his side in order to fulfil the governmental quotas.
The central political leadership had been encouraging the workers and kolkhozniki to denounce factory directors and farm chairmen for their involvement in sabotage; but the end of the Great Terror led to a renewed emphasis on labour discipline. Increasingly draconian punishments were introduced. Managers in town and countryside were threatened with imprisonment if they failed to report absenteeism, lack of punctuality, sloppy workmanship as well as theft and fraud. According to a decree of December 1938, labourers who were late for work three times in a month should be sacked. Another decree in June 1940 stated that such behaviour should incur a penalty of six months’ corrective labour at their place of work.22 Stalin also tightened his grip on the collective farms. A decree of May 1939 ordered local authorities to seize back land under illegal private cultivation by kolkhozniki.23 But the fact that such measures were thought necessary showed that, at the lower levels of administration, non-compliance with the demands of the central authorities was widespread. Sullen, passive resistance had become a way of life.
The Soviet order therefore continued to need a constant dosage of excitation in order to keep functioning. Otherwise the institutions of party and government would tend to relapse into quietude as officials pursued personal privilege and bureaucratic compromise. Ideological apathy would also increase. The provision of dachas, nannies, special shops and special hospitals was already well developed in the 1920s; and, with the termination of the Great Terror, these benefits were confirmed as the patrimony of Stalin’s ruling subordinates. How to ensure a lively discomfort among the central and local nomenklaturas?
Or indeed among all sections of the USSR’s society? Denunciation by ordinary workers became a routine method of controlling politicians and administrators. Stalin knew that anonymous letter-writing was open to abuse; and yet he fostered the practice in order to keep all leaders in a state of trepidation. Likewise he reinforced Pravda’s custom of carrying out muck-raking investigations in a specific locality. The idea was that an exposé of malpractice would stimulate the eradication of similar phenomena elsewhere. Stalin and his colleagues were attracted to a campaigning style of work. Time after time the central political authorities imposed a fresh organizational technique or a new industrial product, and used the press to demand enthusiastic local obedience. Reluctantly they had accepted that Stakhanovism caused more disruption than increase in output; but the pressurizing of managers and workers to over-fulfil plans was an unchanging feature.24
These traditions had existed since 1917; but Stalin relied upon them to a greater extent than Lenin. Organizational pressure and ideological invocation, in the absence of the predominant stimulus of the market, were the principal instruments available to him apart from resort to the security police. A structural imperative was at work. Stalin’s preferences gave strength to the practices, but the practices were also necessary for the maintenance of the regime.
The central authorities aimed at the total penetration of society. The Great Terror had smashed down nearly all associations that competed with the regime for popularity. The only surviving potential challenge of an organized nature came from the religious bodies, and all of these were in a deeply traumatized condition. It was the aim of the authorities that no unit of social life – not only the tribe and the clan but also even the family – might be left free from their control. Within the walls of each family home there could be talk about the old days before the October Revolution and about values and traditions other than the Marxist-Leninist heritage. Discussions between parents and their children therefore became a matter for governmental concern. In 1932 a fourteen-year-old village boy called Pavlik Morozov had denounced his father for fraud. The peasants on the same kolkhoz were enraged by such filial perfidy, and lynched the lad. Young Pavlik became a symbol of the official duty of each citizen to support the state’s interest even to the point of informing upon his parents.
Other groups, too, attracted Stalin’s persecution. No recreational or cultural club was permitted to exist unless it was run by the state; and harmless groups of philatelists, Esperantists and ornithologists were broken up by the arrest of their members. Labourers had to watch their tongues when gathering together over a glass of vodka in taverns; intellectuals were wary of sharing their thoughts with each other in the kommunalki in case their neighbours might overhear them. NKVD informers were everywhere and everyone learned to exercise extreme caution.
Lower than this level, however, the Soviet state found it difficult to achieve its goals. The plan was to maximize the influence over people as individuals. Citizens were permitted to act collectively only when mobilized by party and government. But the groups based on family, wider kinship, friendship, leisure and a common culture were molecules resistant to disintegration into separate atoms.25 The difficulties for the authorities were compounded by the abrupt, massive process of urbanization: a third of the population of the USSR lived in towns and cities by 1940: this was double the proportion three decades earlier. The newcomers from the villages brought with them their folk beliefs, their religion and even their forms of organizations; for some of them, when leaving their villages, stayed together in zemlyachestva, which were the traditional groups based upon geographical origin. In the short term the influx had a ‘ruralizing’ effect as former villagers introduced their habits and expectations to the towns.26
If customary patterns of behaviour caused problems for the political leadership, so too did newer ones. Under the First Five-Year Plan there had been a drastic loosening of moral restraints and social ties. Juvenile delinquency reportedly increased by 100 per cent between 1931 and 1934. Hooliganism was rife not only in the new shanty-cities under construction but also in the old metropolitan centres. In 1935 there were three times as many abortions as births. The incidence of divorce rose sharply. Promiscuity was rampant. Vital social linkages were at the point of dissolution.27
Even before the Great Terror the authorities had seen the risks of this situation. Measures were taken to restore a degree of stability. Respect for parents and teachers was officially stressed from 1935. There were curtailments of the rights to get a divorce and to have an abortion in 1936. Awards were to be made to ‘mother-heroines’ who had ten or more children. School uniforms were reintroduced for the first time since 1917. Discipline at school, at work and at home was officially demanded and most of the new inhabitants of the towns went along with this. But their behaviour displeased the authorities in other respects. Peasants were thought unhygienic, ignorant and stupid. They needed, in the contemporary phrase, to become kul’turnye (‘cultured’). Campaigns were organized to rectify the situation. People were instructed to wash their hands and faces, brush their teeth and dress smartly in the dourly Soviet manner. Men were told that beards were unmodern. Even Kaganovich, at Stalin’s behest, had to shave off his beard.28
It was therefore for pragmatic reasons that political leaders began in the mid-1930s to give encouragement to the family and to rather traditional proprieties. But this shift in policy occurred within carefully-maintained parameters. Stalin was determined that it should not culminate in the disintegration of the October Revolution.
He similarly aimed to hold expressions of Russian nationhood under control. His particular stratagem was to attempt to amalgamate ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet’ identities. Thus Russians were to be induced to take much pride in Russia but even greater pride in the USSR. There were indeed many achievements about which the Soviet state could boast in the 1930s. Daring expeditions were made to the frozen Russian north, where gold, oil and other precious deposits were discovered. Records were broken by Valeri Chkalov and other aviators who flew over the North Pole. Gymnastic displays were frequent and football became a major sport across the USSR. The Moscow Metro was renowned for its sumptuous frescos, candelabra and immaculate punctuality. Almost every edition of Pravda carried a large photograph of some young hero who had accomplished some great feat – and in 1937–8 there were more pictures of such persons than of Stalin himself on the first page of the newspaper.29 The popularity of such successes was among the reasons why he got away with his bloody mass purges.
Science, mathematics and technology were also celebrated. Bolsheviks had always dreamed of engineering an entirely new physical environment, and Lenin had minted the slogan: ‘Communism equals electrification plus soviet power.’ Under the NEP, few advances were made either in academic research or in the diffusion of up-to-date technology. But things changed under Stalin, who put the resources of the Soviet state firmly behind such efforts.
The authorities demanded that scientists should produce work that would benefit the economy. The goals included not only electrification but also ‘radiofication’ and ‘tractorization’. Close control was imposed upon research, often with baleful results: many researchers languished in Siberian labour camps. At the same time the fraudulent geneticist Timofei Lysenko, exploiting his access to Stalin, built up a sparkling career; and one particular foreign adventurer is alleged to have been given funds for the rearing of herds of giant rabbits.30 (This was surely the most hare-brained of all Stalinist schemes!) Nevertheless science in general made immense progress in the USSR and acquired world renown. Pëtr Kapitsa did brilliant work on low-temperature physics and became director of the Institute of Physical Problems in Moscow. Aleksei Bakh was a founding father of biochemistry. The veteran physiologist Ivan Pavlov remained at work through to his death in 1935, and other giants of the period were the physicists Lev Landau and Yevgeni Lifshits. Promising youths such as Andrei Sakharov were being trained by them to serve the country’s interests.
Literature, too, was accorded prestige; but, as with science, Stalin supported activity only insofar as it assisted his ulterior purposes and this naturally affected its quality. Notoriously, he dragooned Maksim Gorki and others to write a eulogistic account entitled ‘Stalin’s White Sea–Baltic Canal’.31 Other participating writers included Mikhail Zoshchenko, Valentin Kataev, Aleksei Tolstoy and Viktor Shklovski. All artistic figures went in fear of their lives. Many of the country’s most glorious poets, novelists, painters, film directors and composers came to an untimely end. Isaak Babel was shot; Osip Mandelshtam perished in the Gulag; Marina Tsvetaeva, whose husband and son were slaughtered by the NKVD, committed suicide. The despairing Mikhail Bulgakov died of nephritis outside prison. Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak lived a living death, not knowing why they had been spared the fate of others.
Just a few works of merit, such as Andrei Platonov’s stories, were published in the late 1930s. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, with its phantasmagoric portrayal of the clowns and bureaucrats of contemporary Moscow, lay in his desk drawer. None of the wonderful elegies by Mandelshtam, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva on the fate of their country appeared in print. Pasternak wanted to survive and, if this involved keeping his decent poems to himself, he understandably thought it a price worth paying. In 1934 the founding Congress of the Union of Writers was held and the principle of ‘socialist realism’ became officially mandatory. This meant that ‘the truthfulness and historical concreteness of artistic portrayal must be in harmony with the objective of the ideological transformation and education of the workers in the spirit of socialism’. Above all, the arts had to be optimistic. The typical novel would involve a working-class hero who undertakes a task such as the construction of a dam or a housing block and fulfils it against near-miraculous odds.
Reconditeness in theme or style was forbidden not only in literature but also in music. Stalin wanted melodies that were whistlable, and wonderful composers and Marxist-Leninist sympathizers such as Dmitri Shostakovich fell into disgrace for their atonalities and discords. Stalin’s taste leant in the direction of the less demanding pre-revolutionary Russian classics: he adored Glinka and Chaikovski. Indeed the ballet and the symphony concert were becoming the favourite evening entertainment for the central party élite. Patriotic (nay, chauvinistic!) films such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible and novels about the tsars by Aleksei Tolstoy were also admired. Lighter mental fare, too, was provided. Spy novels, patriotic doggerel and folk-songs were popular, and many theatres specialized in ‘light entertainment’. Love ditties were particular favourites with the audiences. Jazz and Western ballroom dancing were also increasingly common.32
The opportunities for cultural self-edification and recreation were widely welcomed; but what most people wanted above all else was an improvement in their material situation. Food shortages had troubled most Soviet citizens since the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan. And things were gradually getting a little better. Bread, meat, sugar were among several staple products no longer rationed from 1934–5. All rationing was abolished in 1936, and material provision improved for most non-arrested people in the late 1930s. Cheap food in work-place cafeterias also made a difference to the average diet. Admittedly consumption per head of the population was still three per cent lower in 1940 than in 1928.33 But the general trend was towards betterment in the late 1930s. The network of free educational and medical establishments was also expanded and people in employment received their work-clothes free of charge. Such changes proved a surer means of ensuring acquiescence than compulsory study of the Short Course.
Many workers and kolkhozniki were anyway pleased by the repression of peremptory, privileged administrators. Sometimes there was a xenophobic aspect to popular attitudes – and Pravda played cunningly upon worries about spies and about the military threats from abroad. Furthermore, the Bolsheviks who had made the October Revolution included a disproportionate number of non-Russians, especially Jews.34 Indeed many relished the discomfiture of such people. At last the biters were being bitten. Nor were the mass media always disbelieved when they claimed that ‘wreckers’ and ‘spies’ existed in a countless quantity.35 Practically everyone had experienced a breakdown in factory machinery, in public transport or in the supply of food. The years of industrialization and collectivization had been exceptionally turbulent, and it was not hard to persuade people that sabotage was widespread. Moreover, Russian peasants had a tradition of dealing severely with the wrong-doers in their midst. There was a certain amount of popular approval for the harsh punishment of those whom Stalin purged.
The survival of old social attitudes was important in enabling Stalin to carry out the Great Terror and to deflect blame from himself. Among Russians there was a centuries-old assumption that, if the policies of the tsar were unfair, the fault lay with his malevolent advisers. Stalin persistently induced people to think that he had their interests at heart. It was necessary, he had declared, ‘to listen carefully to the voice of the masses, to the voice of rank-and-file party members, to the voice of the so-called “little people”, to the voice of simple folk.’36
Nevertheless it is unclear whether his pose won him friends even among the most simple-minded of citizens. Of course, Stalin’s message appealed to the newly-promoted members of the various élites. Of course, too, it was attractive to youngsters who had been schooled to revere him and whose parents were too terrified to say anything even privately against him. But rural hatred of Stalin was visceral.37 He had identified himself so closely with agricultural collectivization that he could not easily disassociate himself from its horrors. And in the towns there were millions of inhabitants who had no reason whatsoever to regard the period of his rule with affection. Religious belief remained a solace for most people. In the USSR census of 1937, fifty-seven per cent of the population disclosed that they were believers – and the real percentage was probably a lot greater in view of the state’s aggressive promotion of atheism.38 All in all, little political acquiescence would have been obtained if people had not been afraid of the NKVD: silent disgruntlement was the norm.
Most adults in the Soviet Union knew all too well how far official rhetoric was at variance with their direct experience. Real wages per person in 1937 were about three fifths of what they had been in 1928.39 The material improvement for the average family since the mid-1930s was mainly the result of more members of each family taking up paid employment.40 People knew they were working much harder for their living. They also retained a keen memory of the military-style collectivization, the famine, the persecution of religion and the bludgeoning of all dissent, near-dissent and imaginary dissent. It is difficult to quantify the degree of hostility to Stalin’s regime. Who but a fool or a saint talked openly about these matters? But the NKVD did not delude itself that the voluntary communion of Stalin, the party and the masses was a reality. Police informers in Voronezh province, for example, indicated that the contents of the 1936 Constitution were widely regarded as not being worth the paper they were printed upon.41
The conclusion must be that the Soviet state was far from its goal of reshaping popular opinion to its liking. But a caveat must be entered here. Interviews with Soviet citizens who fled the USSR in the Second World War showed that support for welfare-state policies, for strong government and for patriotic pride was robust – and this was a sample of persons who had shown their detestation of Stalin by leaving the country.42 Some elements in the regime’s ideology struck a congenial chord while others produced only disharmony. This was not a settled society, far less a ‘civilization’. People knew they lacked the power to get rid of the Societ order. While hoping for change, they made the best of a bad job. Probably most of them ceased to dream of a specific alternative to Stalinism. They tried to be practical in an efford to survive. All the more reason for Stalin to reward the men and women who staffed the institutions that administered society on his behalf. Insofar as it was a durable system, this was to a large extent because a hierarchically graduated system of power and emoluments held their loyalty. Even many doubters thought that the regime’s nastiness was not unreformable. Hope, too, endured in the USSR.
A wilder misjudgement of Stalin is hard to imagine. Stalin was unembarrassed about the need to use force in order to maintain his rule. In August 1938, as the penal terms of a generation of convicts drew to a close, he playfully asked the USSR Supreme Soviet whether such convicts should be released on time. He declared that ‘from the viewpoint of the state economy it would be a bad idea’ to set them free since the camps would lose their best workers. In addition, convicts on release might re-associate with criminals in their home towns and villages. Better for them to complete their rehabilitation inside the Gulag: ‘In a camp the atmosphere is different; it is difficult to go to the bad there. As you know, we have a system of voluntary-compulsory financial loans. Let’s also introduce a system of voluntary-compulsory retention.’43 And so just as free wage-earners had to agree to ‘lend’ part of their wages to the Soviet government, so camp inmates would have to agree to the lengthening of their sentences.
And so control over people came nearest to perfection in relation to two groups: those at the very bottom and those at the very top. Camp inmates had no rights: their daily routine ensured compliance with the instruction of their guards on pain of death. Politburo members, too, lacked rights, and their physical proximity to Stalin necessitated an unswerving obedience to the whim of the Leader. Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, Beria and their colleagues could never safely object to a line of policy which Stalin had already approved.
But in between there were gradations of non-compliance which were possible and common. Policies could be obfuscated, modified and even emasculated. Choices could be made between one official priority and another; for there was practically no message from the Kremlin that was not said to be a priority of the Politburo. Furthermore, the entire structure of public information, surveillance and enforcement was patchy. Such a state and such a society were clearly not totalitarian if the epithet involves totality in practice as well as in intent. Compliance with the supreme communist leadership was greater in politics than in administration, greater in administration than in the economy, greater in the economy than in social relations. The totalitarian order was therefore full of contradictions. Perfect central control eluded Stalin. The Soviet compound was a unity of extremely orderly features and extremely chaotic ones.
It is plain that Stalin in the 1930s was driven by the will to destroy the old relationships and to build new ones within a framework entirely dominated by the central state authorities. He did not entirely succeed. Nor did his mirror-image adversary Adolf Hitler in Germany. But the goal was so ambitious that even its half-completion was a dreadful achievement.