9. THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL

Among the few practical plans in Lenin’s head when he seized power in Petrograd was one to establish a successor organisation to the Second International. He had talked about the need for a Third International throughout the Great War and this remained on his mind even after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. Yakov Sverdlov formed a small organising group working on a practical scheme in September 1918.1 Invitations to Moscow had therefore been prepared even before the German military surrender two months later. Lenin and Trotski were in exalted mood. The founding Congress of the Third International realised Lenin’s dream in March 1919. It was also known as the Communist International (or Comintern) to give a sharp signal that its purposes were more radical than those of the parties of the Second International. Fifty-two delegates arrived representing twenty-five countries. The ‘European socialist revolution’, they thought, was drawing near.

Communists aimed to split the worldwide socialist movement into two and bring the far left under their leadership. They themselves claimed that the objectives of socialism were unattainable without violent revolution and revolutionary dictatorship; they did not flinch at the possibility of civil war, foreign military intervention and terror. They scoffed at calls for multi-party elections and universal civil rights. They were determined to use coercion to eradicate religious, cultural and social traditions inimical to Marxism. They believed that they alone had the correct policies and regarded their enemies on the left as traitors to the cause. Their ambition was to foster the creation of communist parties in their own image around the globe. They shared many policies with the socialist, social-democratic and labour parties they despised. Common to them was a commitment to state economic ownership, a comprehensive welfare system, universal employment and an end to social privilege. All of them had once belonged to the same Socialist International. Some had been Marxists, others not. They had been held together by the belief that the future lay with political action of benefit to the working class – and they fervently believed that this would ultimately create a perfect earthly society.

But high walls now separated them. Communists wanted the kind of state which the enemies on the left thought the very antithesis of the socialist tradition. By renaming themselves the Russian Communist Party, the Bolsheviks had stressed the differences between themselves and the other socialists. Lenin’s theoretical disquisitions had deepened the rift. ‘Socialism’ for him and the other Bolsheviks was an inferior stage to ‘communism’ in the future development of humankind. Yet Bolsheviks still called themselves socialists as well as communists. The result was that liberals and conservatives were able to tar the socialist parties of their countries as being indistinguishable from the communist parties. It was a confusion that lasted for decades.

Lenin was a masterful manipulator. Many delegates arrived in Moscow without any formal mandate from their party. Some spoke on behalf of parties which did not yet exist. A few already lived in the Soviet republic and were members of the same party as Lenin and subject to its discipline. Those socialists who hated communism were neither invited nor tempted to participate. The assumption was that all the world’s potential member-parties would need to be represented before any gathering could be called a full congress. Lenin let the delegates think this until the opening session. He then announced that the gathering should designate itself as the founding congress. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had suspected Lenin of plotting to build a Moscow-directed world organisation; they had seen what he had got up to in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party before 1917 and knew about his methods.2 If Luxemburg had attended, she would have made difficulties since she was a match for Lenin in debate. Her death in the Spartacist uprising removed this possibility. The German delegate who turned up in Moscow, Hugo Eberlein, argued stoutly that the ‘congress’ had been called on a false premise; but he got nowhere as Lenin impressed himself on the proceedings.

He and the Soviet leaders saturated delegates to the First Congress of Comintern in experiences designed to induce a collaborative spirit. They were taken on a trip to Petrograd to visit the famous sites of the October Revolution: the Finland Station, the Smolny Institute and the Winter Palace. They were awed by the sense of history recently made. On the streets there were the banners and posters of the October Revolution. Principal speakers included the finest orators of the Russian Communist Party: Trotski, Zinoviev, Bukharin and – like an impassioned schoolmaster – Lenin himself. Workers and soldiers in Petrograd had a confidence not witnessed in other countries; their refusal of deference to their ‘betters’ contrasted with the behaviour of the lower social orders at home. From being the object of suspicion and condescension in the international socialist movement the ‘Russians’ had risen to pre-eminence. They had made a socialist revolution and acted while others – most others – had theorised or dithered. They had survived against every prediction. Now they were fighting their civil war, and it was by no means certain that the Reds would win. The sympathetic visitors, who were put up in comfort at the Hotel Lux, were minded to stand by their hosts.

An Executive Committee was then formed under Grigori Zinoviev with representatives from various countries. The Bolshevik central leaders handpicked the new body. They evidently intended to minimise any objections to Moscow’s ideas and practices. Soviet control was going to stay tight for the foreseeable future.

Diplomatic representatives and clandestine agents were dispatched to Europe and North America. They carried with them the bacillus of revolution. Communists as well as their enemies used this medical imagery; everyone at the time regarded the societies of advanced capitalism as organisms vulnerable to communist infection. Karl Radek was arrested in Germany in February 1919 but the authorities allowed him plenty of visitors and he turned his cell into a political salon for far-left socialists disaffected from the German Social-Democratic Party. Radek relished his role. A chain-smoking Polish Jew with a line in acerbic jokes, he grabbed the opportunity to ridicule his old political enemies while enjoying legal immunity from imprisonment. When Germany was defeated in the First World War the Soviet republic in Russia became internationally isolated again. It sought to rectify this situation by sending further representatives to Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Politburo member Lev Kamenev and Foreign Trade People’s Commissar Lev Krasin went to London seeking a trade deal and diplomatic recognition (and, in Kamenev’s case, to wine and dine himself at the Café Royal).3

The general aim of Comintern in its first few years was to enable leftist socialists to break away from their existing parties and set up their own communist parties. The Party Politburo and the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs released funds to the Communist International. Among the dispensers of money was Willi Münzenberg, known to Lenin in his years of Swiss exile. Münzenberg’s task was to travel around Europe searching out places and people for the making of revolution. He was a colourful figure. Like Kamenev, he had a penchant for the high life; and indeed he succeeded in combining politics with entrepreneurship. His business interests made him a very rich man before he was killed in 1940 by Soviet security agents.4

The Moscow leadership was falling back on techniques used before 1917, sending couriers with the finance for sympathisers abroad. A secret list was kept in the spidery handwriting of a People’s Commissariat of External Affairs official in 1919–20. Couriers could be searched at customs posts so that it was impractical to carry paper currency. Instead they travelled with diamonds and pearl necklaces. Although Soviet manufacturing was at a low ebb, Cheka-led expropriations were a thriving industry. The Imperial propertied elites had left behind whole cellars of valuables which were put to use in the cause of the Revolution. Jewellery was more easily hidden than cash; indeed it could be openly worn by female agents. On arriving at their destination, communist groups could sell the jewels and recoup their value in the local currency. Europe was the main recipient of this largesse. Krasin, according to the records, received goods worth more than seven million rubles for political use abroad.⁵ Not every emissary was very discreet; in the early days some of them broke their cover by giving fiery speeches en route.⁶ Such was the revolutionary spirit of the period. Nor were all of them honest, so that Comintern sent out agents to track down the swindlers. (The story went about that the bookish communist György Lukács was sent with a pistol to Vienna to get funds back from one of them.)

As Comintern adjusted and oiled its administrative machinery in Moscow, it assembled an international network of communists to counsel – really to instruct – the member-parties abroad. Individuals with multilingual skills, political reliability and experience of clandestine party work were favourite choices. They did not have to have been Bolsheviks before 1917. Above all, they were tested as instruments of the Executive Committee’s will. Thus a certain ‘Williams’, also known as Mikhailov among dozens of other aliases, was sent as Comintern representative in Berlin in 1922. He was present when the abortive 1923 rising took place in Hamburg. This did not blight his career. By 1924 he was performing the same functions for Comintern in Paris since his French was as good as his German. In 1926 he was moved to the United Kingdom, then back to Germany. From there he was dispatched to India to stir up anti-imperial sentiment. Arrested by the British secret services, he lay low after his release, and in 1930 was sent to Argentina and Chile. After a lifetime of false passports and ‘underground’ activity he ended up as press officer at the Soviet embassy in Paris.⁷

It was understood in Moscow that communism in other countries had to acquire a distinct political profile and organisational formation. Demarcation from mere ‘socialist’, ‘social-democratic’ and ‘labour’ parties was essential for this. Attracted by the Bolshevik example, many far-left activists readily agreed. The problem for Lenin was that their eagerness was a mite too casually developed. They could not be trusted. By July 1920, when the Second Congress of the Comintern took place in Moscow, the Politburo was confident of imposing its frame of desired behaviour on member-parties. The Reds had essentially won the civil war with the defeat of Anton Denikin at the end of 1919. The Whites were fleeing in disarray. The reputation of the leaders of the October Revolution was at an unprecedented height and the Red Army’s success in repelling Piłsudski’s invasion of Ukraine elevated it still further. The subsequent failure of central and western far-left socialists to reproduce this revolutionary success added to the status of Lenin, Trotski and their comrades. It was in this situation that the Comintern Second Congress agreed to the twenty-one conditions for membership which Lenin had drafted.

These conditions were modelled on the rules of the Russian Communist Party. Principles of centralism, obedience and selectivity were imposed. The Executive Committee of Comintern was empowered to guide and discipline member-parties. In theory, at least, the Russian Communist Party was equally subject to its command. Co-ordinated action was demanded on the ground that actions by communists in one country could affect the well-being of communist parties elsewhere. Every communist was to be a militant in the army of the world communist movement.

The claim of Comintern and its member-parties was that the Soviet order constituted the only authentic embodiment of socialism. Competition in the labour movement was intense after the world war. In its wake, several social-democratic, socialist and labour parties entered governmental office. The German Social-Democratic Party formed a national administration in November 1918 and remained formally committed to a Marxist party programme. The British Labour Party came to power in October 1924. The Second International, despite being badly disrupted in wartime, began to restore its old linkages between countries. Its member-parties aimed to eradicate inequalities in social opportunity and to provide education, healthcare, pensions and shelter free of charge. They planned an end to unemployment as well as to all corruption and injustice. They were committed to terminating discrimination based on race, nationality, gender or religion. The fact that communists and their left-wing rivals were dipping into the same baggage of objectives served to exacerbate hostility between them. Communists asserted that they alone were thoroughly implementing what they preached. Their enemies retorted that ideas of dictatorship and terror precluded communism from making fundamental improvement in the societies they wanted to rule.

Yet enough of a common purpose survived in the 1920s to dissuade anti-communist socialists in Europe from supporting military crusades against the Soviet republic. Socialists had discreet allies among businessmen who wanted to resume trading links with Russia. Western governments regardless of type – conservative, liberal or socialist – fitted in with the trend. Foreign companies turned a blind eye to Soviet dictatorial oppression. Entrepreneurs responded readily to the invitation to sign ‘concessions’ in industry. There was even a tender put out for companies abroad to set up farming enterprises,8 and the German firm Krupp negotiated just such a deal. The managers and experts sent by Krupp found it a dispiriting experience. It would have been surprising if the indigenous peasantry had welcomed the Germans any more warmly than they did the Bolshevik party officials who had made the first attempt at agricultural collectivisation during the civil war. But other sectors of the economy benefited from the infusion of foreign capital. Technological advances made in manufacturing and mining under the NEP were usually associated with the concessionaires.⁹ The difficulty was that businesses remained worried about the reliability of Soviet official promises, and this inevitably made for only a moderate infusion of European and American capital into the USSR.

What is more, the Politburo had acute concerns about the geostrategic pretensions of the great powers. There were recurrent war scares in Moscow. As there was no obvious sign of an imminent crusade by any of them against the USSR, Soviet leaders nervously expected that a ‘proxy’ state on their borders would move against the first socialist state – if not Poland, then probably Romania or Finland. The expectation was that Britain or France would arm such a state to the teeth and prod it into a military offensive.

Things were still creaky in practice. Comintern agent Ramison arrived in Rio de Janeiro to speed the foundation of a communist party in Brazil. Soon he encountered the prominent journalist and anarchist Edgard Leuenroth: ‘Why won’t the gentleman found the Communist Party of Brazil?’ Leuenroth replied: ‘Because I’m not a Bolshevist!’ Ramison would not be put off: ‘In that case give me the name of someone capable of this task.’ Leuenroth after a short pause relented: ‘I’ll give you a name. Make a call to Astrojildo Pereira. He’s living in Rio de Janeiro.’10 Ready-made communists existed nowhere outside Russia, where the Bolshevik ideology had been invented. The richest source of foreign left-wing ore from which to smelt communist iron lay in the existing socialist and labour parties. These were typically riven by disputes. Comintern’s device was to engineer a formal split and lead off the extreme leftists into forming national communist parties. The Great War and the October Revolution had shifted the contours of political discussion.¹¹ This was how the Italian Communist Party came into existence. Antonio Gramsci had long chafed against the compromises of the leadership of the Italian Socialist Party. Comintern’s foundation gave him the practical incentive he needed to make the organisational rupture.¹²

By the mid-1920s, when dozens of countries had established more or less normal relations of diplomacy and commerce with the USSR, Soviet agencies could abandon jewellery for paper currency. Young Henri Barbé, rising leader of the French Federation of Communist Youth, was surprised to be asked to take suitcases filled with three million dollars to Paris in denominations of between ten and a hundred dollars.¹³ World communism was becoming ever more self-assured and couriers now had to have the strength of weightlifters.

The Fifth Congress of Comintern in 1924 passed an explicit resolution on Bolshevisation. The few remaining peculiarities of organisational structures and practices were eliminated and Russia became the model of virtue and the judge of its imitators. Party schools were set up in Moscow for foreign communists from over the world. The curriculum involved physical exercise and training with guns as well as Marxism-Leninism; sometimes the students were sent out to work in factories in the provinces to get a close glimpse of the fabled Russian proletariat.¹⁴ This did not always turn out as Comintern wanted when inquisitive foreign youngsters witnessed the sloppy work and poor conditions of the labour force. Young Waldeck Rochet, later to head the French Communist Party, said to a friend while attending his courses in Moscow: ‘If we were to tell French workers what we are seeing here they would throw rotten apples at us.’¹⁵ Party schools were also established in those other countries where sufficient freedom existed. The French set one up northeast of Paris at Bobigny. This way of overcoming the shortage of qualified personnel was known in France as Bobignisation:¹⁶ the curriculum was subject to approval by Comintern officials who strove to produce a set of obedient parties at Moscow’s disposal.

Alongside Comintern there were other bodies designed to spread communist policies and organisation. These included the Red International of Trade Unions (Profintern), the International Organisation of Assistance to Fighters of the Revolution (MOPR), the International Peasants Council (Krestintern) and even the Red Sports International (Sportintern). It was hoped that, even if Comintern met political obstacles, influence could continue to be leached into the labour movement in all countries. Despite generous funding from Moscow, the new agencies made little impact. But their creation demonstrated that faith in worldwide communist revolution was by no means abandoned.

Comintern had to act with some circumspection after Lenin, in approving the Anglo-Soviet treaty in March 1921, agreed to suspend Soviet interference in the politics of the British Empire. Ambassadors from the USSR outwardly observed the diplomatic proprieties in the rest of the decade. The People’s Commissariat in Moscow insisted that it had no control over Comintern. This was indeed true. It was the Politburo of the Russian Communist Party which took the decisions, and throughout these years it searched for any sign that the ‘relative stabilisation of capitalism’ was coming to an end. Money, agents and instructions continued to issue from Moscow. The problem – the only problem for the Politburo and Comintern – was that the West’s great powers were successfully alleviating the social distress which motivated people to turn to communism. Marxism-Leninism contended that rivalries among these powers were ultimately uncontainable; it also laid down that capitalism could not avoid recurrent economic crises and that the working classes would inevitably turn to the political far left. But conditions in the middle of the decade were disturbingly placid. Harbingers of the final crisis of capitalism stubbornly refused to arrive.

Comintern was getting nowhere, and the Politburo gave the order for Comintern to instruct communist parties abroad to change policy and to establish a ‘united labour front’. The idea was that communists would get together with rank-and-file members of socialist, social-democratic and labour parties and campaign against the capitalist order. They would not stop denouncing such parties; indeed they would continue to declare that communists and communists alone had the necessary determination to effect a drastic improvement in working people’s conditions. They would also infiltrate those rival left-wing parties (and although the British Labour Party prohibited them from joining it as individuals from 1925, the ban was ineffectual).17 Communists were encouraged to achieve dual party membership and struggle for the communist party’s objectives. This later became known as ‘entryism’. Frustrated about making an independent impact, communist militants became parasites on socialist parties which had achieved a greater electoral impact than they had. The ‘united labour front’ was a total misnomer. Communist policy in the 1920s was to intensify the bitter polemics on the political left and the ‘class struggle’ against capitalism.

But in 1926 the politics of Europe suddenly entered a turbulent phase. The British Labour Party had been ousted from office two years earlier and the Conservatives formed a government. The new government was firmly anti-Soviet. It was also determined to rein in the pretensions of the labour movement in the United Kingdom. The Trades Union Council struck back in the same year by organising a general strike. The strikers’ demands were more material than political. This was a situation which could not be neglected by the Communist Party of Great Britain. With Comintern’s endorsement, it tried to politicise the discontent. But the British labour movement was averse to breaking the law. Communist agitators were welcomed when they urged the need for higher wages and were ignored when they espoused a total change of regime. Government and police handled the opposition intelligently and the strike petered out. This was the pattern across Europe. Germany disappointed the hopes that Comintern placed in it. Although France was repeatedly disrupted by industrial conflict, it never looked seriously likely to succumb to communism. Italy was firmly under the thumb of the fascist dictatorship installed by Benito Mussolini in 1922. Communists watched and waited.

They also continued to set up parties wherever they did not already exist. They made progress even outside the advanced capitalist countries. In 1920, balked by their failures in Europe, the Soviet leaders had called a Congress of Peoples of the East in Baku. They aimed to act as midwives at the birth of communism in Asia. If the great imperial powers would not succumb to red revolution, perhaps countries such as China, Turkey and India would. And surely such an outcome would disrupt political stability around the world. If revolution could not enter through the front porch, why not by the back door? Just one success occurred in those early years. As the civil war drew to a close in Siberia, the Red Army crossed over into Mongolia and occupied the capital Urga in July 1921. Soviet military power ensured the proclamation of the Mongolian People’s Republic in 1924. Essentially it became a puppet regime and conformed its internal policies to the changing shape of the Kremlin’s policies for the USSR. Repression of social and religious custom was severe even before Mongolia followed Russia into the bloodbath of the 1930s. The manhandling of the Mongolian People’s Republic gave an early sign of how the USSR would treat the so-called people’s democracies of eastern Europe after the Second World War.18

But Mongolia remained an isolated exception as a ‘fraternal’ regime for the USSR; and Comintern’s Executive Committee busied itself with setting up a permanent commission for each large region of the world. The appointment of commission chairmen was done cunningly. Citizens of countries in the region were not eligible; this was a provision designed to restrict the capacity of ‘nationals’ to interfere with the Executive Committee’s wishes and to prevent ‘national’ vendettas being played out in the Communist International. Russian Bolsheviks had behaved badly towards the Second International and its International Socialist Bureau before 1914, and they were not going to let others mess them around in the same way. The regions included ‘America’, the ‘East’ and Latin America. Comintern functionaries kept their political antennae attuned both to the demands of the Russian communist leadership and to shenanigans in the Communist International’s parties. Neither Comintern’s chairman Zinoviev nor, after his removal in 1926, his successor Bukharin had time to keep an eye on everything as their higher need was to attend to politics in the Russian Communist Party. They relied on the Secretary, Osip Pyatnitski, to keep them in touch. ‘Le père Piat’, as he was known to the French,¹⁹ did his level best. But he too was paddling against a fast current of work and the commission chairmen became the linchpins of the world communist movement.

These same chairmen knew that their power hung by a thread spun down to them from the Politburo. A few maintained their youthful exuberance and stood up for themselves. These included occasional visitors to Comintern offices in the Kremlin who refused to toe the official line automatically. The Italians were frequent troublemakers. (German, French and British militants were always tame in comparison through to the 1980s.) From Amadeo Bordiga in 1922 to Angelo Tasca at the end of the decade they spoke their mind to Muscovite authority.²⁰ But independent spirits became ever rarer. Comintern had a whole apparatus for isolating them and, if they persisted in being troublesome, sacking them from the leadership of their party.

The model of a communist party member was a person who was studious, punctilious and devoted to the cause. Zhen Bilan, a young woman who joined the Chinese Communist Party, rescinded her engagement to be married to a family friend and renounced any interest in ‘love’. She was taking a frightful risk: families in China sometimes murdered disobedient fiancées.21 Zhen, though, was determined to deepen her Marxist education. Members of study circles had to explain their conclusions and open themselves to criticism. Once the official line was set, all had to accept it. Faith in the distant communist future – but perhaps it was really going to be sooner rather than later – was compulsory. Communists were thrust into trade unions, schools and many kinds of bodies hostile to the ruling classes. It was a criterion of party membership that they should be highly active. They also had to give automatic allegiance to the policies of Comintern. Zhen Bilan was a thoughtful, independent individual. She objected to the Chinese Communist Party incorporating itself in the nationalist Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai-shek. In 1929 she was expelled from membership.²²

But generally the mentality of obedience was quickly assimilated. The Northern Regional Committee of the Chinese Communist Party sent out a circular to subordinate bodies describing the party cell as follows:

1)	It is the basic organ and organisational unit of the party.
2)	It is the school of the party for education and propaganda.
3)	It is the kernel of the party among the masses.
4)	It is the instrument for development of the party.
5)	It is the centre of life of the party.
6)	It is the party’s weapon of struggle.23

This mantra was designed to raise spirits and improve co-ordination and unity, as well as to point the entire party in the direction demanded by the central leaders – and the leaders themselves were to behave like the Kremlin’s political annexe.

Comintern – and the Politburo as its overseer – seized whatever opportunities came its way. Under constant criticism from the Bolshevik left, it also itched to prove its internationalist credentials. If an opportunity failed to arise, it would make one by artifice. In 1925 the Bulgarian Communist Party, which had already organised a rising two years earlier, was encouraged to undertake armed action again. Commissions of the Politburo and Comintern had spent two years discussing the question so as to avoid the casual planning of the German revolutionary putsches in Germany in 1921 and 1923.²⁴ The authorities in Bulgaria, however, pre-empted such a scheme and the party was vigorously suppressed. The Bulgarian disaster did nothing to staunch the flow of revolutionary orders from Moscow. The focus next time was on China. Stalin and Bukharin through to the mid-1920s had insisted that the communists should ally themselves with nationalists such as Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang. Abruptly they changed their stance, having convinced themselves that the Chinese Communist Party was strong enough to stand alone. A revolution was heralded and a rising duly took place in Shanghai in April 1927 on Comintern’s orders. But instead of defeating the Kuomintang, the Chinese communists suffered a savage beating.

The ascendant group in the Politburo had got everything badly wrong. Defeated in the factional struggles in Moscow, Trotski crowed over the misjudgements by Stalin and Bukharin. Comintern’s reputation lay in shreds. The only positive aspect was the proof given, not for the first or last time, that the Kremlin was by no means reconciled to the containment of communism within the borders of the Soviet Union. It still thought that, if the October Revolution was to survive, eventually it had to spread abroad. Lenin’s original vision had not yet faded.

Trouble arose two months later for communism in the United Kingdom. The Anglo-Soviet treaty stipulated that the USSR would not use Comintern to subvert governments and private enterprises. Communists winked at each other while signing such documents. Comintern, working to the Kremlin’s orders, turned London into a clandestine hub of communications and organisation for worldwide political subversion. British security officers knew that the All-Russia Co-operative Society (Arcos) in Hampstead was a front for Soviet intelligence. They raided the premises in May 1927 and carted off compromising documents. The Conservative cabinet immediately broke off diplomatic relations with the USSR. The Politburo’s worries increased that a crusade might be started against the Soviet Union. The Arcos affair appeared to indicate that ‘international imperialism’ was about to go on the march yet again. The volatile condition of world politics was exposed. Trotski suggested that the episode constituted a case for a more aggressive foreign policy. He wanted to put global socialist revolution back on the immediate agenda. Comintern policy towards the great capitalist powers, he complained, had been neither chalk nor cheese. He had no inkling that his enemy Stalin was about to order communist parties around the world to become more militant.

 

10. PROBING AMERICA

American communism was spawned in pools of political sectarianism imported from the Russian Empire. The October Revolution excited all left-wing militants in the USA. Some were enraptured, others were sceptical or downright hostile. Among the enthusiasts for Lenin and his comrades were socialist veterans who had never had much time for each other. Their disputes were conducted with vicious intensity at both the ideological and personal levels. The result was chaos. In fact not one but two parties formed themselves in 1919. These were the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party. Each claimed to stand for Leninism better than its rival. Charles Ruthenberg stated bluntly on behalf of the Communist Party of America: ‘We reaffirm our opposition to unity with the Communist Labor Party.’1 The Communist Labor Party reacted in kind. Each party banked on winning the political beauty contest in Moscow. They were disappointed. The Comintern Executive Committee insisted on amalgamation. Otherwise neither party would be allowed to affiliate itself to Comintern.²

This conclusion was unavoidable once the details of the dispute reached Moscow from across the Atlantic. Comintern leaders, arch-splitters to a man and woman before 1917, could not afford to allow a couple of competing communist parties to represent it in challenging the world’s most advanced capitalist economy. Personal jealousies and factional disagreements were to be set aside and priority was to be given to the tasks of making revolution. In December 1921 a founding convention took place in New York. The united organisation was baptised as the Workers’ Party of America, which pulled together all parties willing to accept Comintern as the supreme authority. This designation, it was hoped, would ward off the attention of the government and police at a time when known communists were routinely being arrested as subversives.

There had never been a realistic chance of communist revolution in the USA. And this continued to hold true. Informed Marxists before the First World War had always been pessimistic about the American labour movement.3 But Russia’s communists did not speak like this in public in their euphoria after the October Revolution. Forgetting earlier doubts, they treated all capitalist societies as ‘ripe’ for ‘the transition to socialism’. Two leading members of the Moscow leadership, Bukharin and Trotski, had been resident in the USA before 1917. They knew the country well enough. Party duty, however, required them to parrot that American conditions were propitious for communist revolution. They knew in their marrow that it was going to be an uphill struggle for the comrades across the Atlantic. Comintern’s line was that the USA was one of the prime targets for revolution and Sovietisation. The newly formed communists of America agreed. They had joined their party because they shared a belief in revolutionary possibilities – and they accused the country’s socialist parties of lacking the stomach and strategy to bring about fundamental changes in the American order.

The USA bore similarities to the old Russian Empire. Factory working conditions and wage rates were abysmal and the influx of European immigrants made it difficult for trade unions to secure betterment. The labour movement was persecuted. Police and courts supported employers. Violent gangs were paid to break strikes. The Italian immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested in 1920 in Boston and charged with murdering a factory paymaster. The accusation was baseless; but the pair were found guilty after a trial tainted by bias. They were executed in the electric chair in 1927. Judicial murder served to warn radicals about the dangers of joining subversive groups. Such conditions had existed in Russia where the outcome of the struggle between the government and the revolutionaries had been the overthrow of the Romanovs and, months later, the October Revolution. Oppression had made heroes of the Bolsheviks in the eyes of radical opinion before 1917, and the tsarist authorities had not succeeded in extirpating Bolshevism. Communists in the USA hoped for a similar denouement.

American industrial growth after the First World War was impressive, turning the country into the first economic power around the globe. Technological advances in the automotive, electrical and chemical sectors were enormous. The universities were turning out graduates of quality. This success was achieved despite elections which, after Woodrow Wilson left office in 1921, produced a string of presidents undistinguished by abundant initiative. America stood out as a society that was thrusting forward despite its political leadership.

Mass immigration assisted the economic upsurge; for without cheap foreign labour it would have been impossible to sustain the remarkable rates of growth. Newcomers swarmed across the Atlantic, especially from Russia and eastern Europe. Few measures were taken by the authorities to welcome and assimilate them. They lived huddled in the factory and mining districts. They were poorly paid and badly treated. Their presence in the workforce introduced resentment and division, as had been the case in Petrograd in the First World War. Many refugees from Russia also brought radical political ideas with them. Communists hoped to exploit this situation. They were not going to have to start from scratch. A Socialist Party already existed, led by Eugene Debs, which took 6 per cent of the votes in the 1912 presidential election.4 The socialists were divided by strategic dispute and factional conflict, and local groups in that vast country frequently acted in defiance of national policy. If strong communist parties could emerge from the womb of socialist parties in old Europe, there was no reason why the New World could not follow suit.

Comintern increased its contacts with the Workers’ Party of America. Telegrams were regularly dispatched between New York and Moscow and agents criss-crossed the Atlantic by steamer. Soviet leaders were annoyed by the endless internal American wrangling, and sprinkled their correspondence with detailed instructions: they were determined to keep a tight hold on the emergent communist organisation.

When police raided the party’s offices in New York in August 1922 they found a ten-page document signed by Nikolai Bukharin, Karl Radek and Otto Kuusinen ‘concerning the next tasks of the Communist Party of America [sic]’. Communists were told that their primary task was to support Soviet Russia in every way. They were also to form a legal party without dropping illegal forms of activity – it would be foolish to ‘liquidate’ work in the ‘underground’.⁵ Their practical task was to be the building of a mass party. Yet the ‘real party’ would remain the core of leaders and militants who flouted the law in their operations. Theirs would continue to be the supreme power and responsibility. They had to train the new recruits. And the mass party was to infiltrate and manipulate left-wing organisations. The Politburo and Comintern leadership could hardly disguise its low expectations of the American comrades. Moscow patiently explained that they should enter trade unions and ‘Negro’ bodies but on no account should they function inside the Ku Klux Klan. They should campaign against anti-strike legislation such as the Kansas Industrial Court Law. They should link up with small-holding farmers and agitate against bank foreclosures. They were also to set up a communist press: ‘As long as the party does not possess at least one or two legal dailies in the English language, it is still crawling around on all fours.’6

Jules Humbert-Droz, a boisterous, multilingual Swiss, headed Comintern’s American Commission and liaised with the Americans from Moscow. He did not always get the results demanded by Zinoviev and the Executive Committee. The problems for communist strategy in the USA were complex. Furthermore, Moscow could not operate without detailed information and advice from the American comrades themselves. This made an opening for the same comrades to skew decisions in the direction they desired. Sometimes the Americans appeared to have the upper hand. Their emissary to Moscow in May 1924 exulted that the Communist International had ‘accepted our basic analysis which stated that there is a social-political crisis in the United States’.⁷ Yet his satisfaction was also a sign that the key to success was a capacity to plead a national case at the ‘centre’. American communist leaders had to be effective supplicants.

Their authority was sapped by internal party conflicts. Policies were endlessly disputed. Clashes among personalities bedevilled party life. It often seemed that leaders were more exercised in doing each other down than in proselytising for communism. The party’s multinational composition did not help the situation. The industrial workforce had a heavy component of recent immigrants who spoke little English, and this was also true of recruits to communism: half of them in the mid-1920s were born outside the USA.⁸ Sections were established for Czechs, Estonians, South Slavs, Lithuanians, Italians, Jews, Bulgarians, Germans, Finns, Hungarians and several others. There was even an English section.⁹ All the Slavs caused endless trouble and American communist Max Eastman wrote to Trotski and Lenin in 1923 urging that the party should cut its ties with them. Eastman thought them just too much trouble.¹⁰ The Jews were the most disputatious, always saying the worst of each other and arguing with the party leaders (nearly half of whom were themselves Jewish).¹¹ A report despaired of sorting them out: ‘This is chaos.’¹² Only the ‘hundred odd farmers’, who had their own small section, failed to cause trouble – and probably this was only because it was not a very active section.¹³ Comintern instructed the party to scrap all its national sections in June 1925.¹⁴

The American leadership put on a brave face and took pride in holding together a party combining people from all backgrounds. Comintern was unconvinced. The largest national or racial minority in the USA were the Negroes (as Blacks or African-Americans were known). The party was formally committed to integrating them in its ranks but did next to nothing. When in 1925 the American delegation to Moscow was quizzed about this by Stalin, its members admitted that ‘prejudice and discrimination’ existed.15 Moscow put its foot down. In 1927 Comintern ordered the party leadership to send ten suitable Negroes for training at the Communist University for the Toilers of the East in Moscow.¹⁶ This caused panic in the American party. The Political Committee thought it possible to round up two or three suitable candidates at the most.¹⁷ Comintern had its own concealed racism; for why should American Negroes, descendants of slaves from Africa and wholly assimilated to America’s culture and economy, be associated with Asia? On arrival in Moscow the Negro students objected to being segregated and made to suffer from ‘white’ chauvinism.¹⁸ Problems also remained in the party in the USA. To its shame, the Negro members were still being refused admission to its miners’ relief ball in 1929.¹⁹

Comintern eventually got its way. American communists did not confine themselves to reaching out to Negroes but disseminated a project to carve an independent republic for them in the southern states. The chief promoter of such ideas was Harry Haywood, himself a Negro. Haywood had gone to party school in Moscow and worked there for Comintern till 1930.²⁰ His project became Comintern policy. The same ideas were relayed to communists in South Africa, where the party was told to campaign for ‘an independent native South African republic’.²¹ In neither party was this popular, but Comintern insisted on it. No one seems to have queried how a Second Civil War would be avoided in the USA. Perhaps it was only as a device to win Negro recruits for the communist party.

Some communists had always disliked Comintern’s interference. A letter to party leader Charles Ruthenberg complained: ‘Essentially the [communist party] was a hip-hip-hurrah society for the celebration of good news from Russia.’²² But this sort of complaint became rare as the grumblers and sceptics left the ranks. American comrades bowed regularly to the east like Moslems praying to Mecca – and ‘Mecca’, as it happens, was the codeword for the Moscow leadership in their telegrams.²³ A demeaning psychology developed among them. The ascendant leadership in a message to the party in March 1926 stated: ‘If we are trying to be Bolsheviks we must practise the method of ruthless self-criticism.’ This attitude was displayed whenever criticism was relayed from Moscow. And joy was unrestrained when Moscow gave its nods of approval: ‘We are the party. The Communist International has said so.’24 Young James Cannon, later to walk out and join the Trotskyists, was not one to toe any line automatically; but even he was bowled over by the opportunity to meet Politburo members in the 1920s. Late in his life he still remembered his experience in Soviet Russia as ‘an incomparable school’.²⁵

The factions in the Workers’ Party of America saw Moscow as the court of arbitration in disputes. The Comintern Executive Committee was not always pleased. In April 1927 it told the party to end its internal disputes and to agitate against the invasion of Nicaragua by the American Marine Corps.²⁶ Jay Lovestone and the ascendant group in the leadership obeyed the injunction. But they did not stop conspiring; they informed Comintern that they had achieved only an artificial unity and that the opposition continued to agitate for Lovestone to be sacked as General Secretary in favour of William Weinstone. Nevertheless, they claimed, they themselves were resolutely avoiding provocative activity.²⁷

Eventually Lovestone was sacked even though he apparently had the support of nine-tenths of the membership.²⁸ This happened in 1929 on Moscow’s orders, and what did for him was his political closeness to Bukharin. In September 1928 Lovestone had warned Bukharin in writing that foreign leaders, notably Heinz Neumann from Germany, were speaking ill of him.²⁹ This was like shouting to a drowning man that the water was coming over his head. It was not as if Bukharin was unaware that Stalin’s group was moving among the delegations spreading dirt on his reputation. This was always how Stalin operated before organising an open assault. Lovestone was called to the Comintern offices and given a dressing-down by Otto Kuusinen in April 1929 for being sympathetic to the Right Deviation.³⁰ A few weeks later a delegation of American communists came to supplicate before the victorious Stalin. He judged them insufficiently compliant: ‘Who do you think you are? Trotski defied me. Where is he? Zinoviev defied me. Where is he? Bukharin defied me. Where is he? And you? When you get back to America, nobody will stay with you except your wives.’³¹

Comintern’s disappointment in the USA was constant. William Z. Foster stood as the party’s candidate in the American presidential elections in 1924. He scored a pathetic 0.1 per cent of the votes cast. The communists alleged that they had been the victims of electoral fraud. Secretary Ruthenberg and candidate Foster cabled to Russia: ‘Capitalist dictatorship will not count communist votes.’32 The capitalist order would always connive at doing them down.

The subsequent history of American communism confirmed the frail potential revealed in the party’s first decade. The Wall Street Crash in April 1929, according to Comintern’s global prognosis, should have led to a massive increase in the party’s popularity. Yet membership grew from 7,500 in 1929 to only 90,000 in 1939.³³ By the mid-1930s Stalin had concluded that Comintern should moderate its struggle against F. D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal included a commitment to state intervention in the workings of the economy.³⁴ The Kremlin sanctioned the formation of an Abraham Lincoln battalion to fight in the Spanish civil war. Not a Lenin battalion but one commemorating an American president not known for his socialist sympathies. Earl Browder became the communist leader in 1934, and it was he who stood as the party’s candidate in the US presidential elections of 1936. He fought a languid campaign and garnered a little over eighty thousand votes. In effect Roosevelt was allowed to run less as a Democrat than as the unofficial leader of a coalition for ‘progressive’ politics. The Kremlin, at least temporarily, identified its interests with helping to secure his victory and gave appropriate instructions to the American communist leadership. If it had been a horse race, there would have been a stewards’ inquiry.

Nevertheless the Communist Party of the USA, as it was known from 1930, enjoyed its growing prominence. Browder appeared in published photos smoking a pipe like his overseer in the Kremlin. The difference was that, with an eye towards gaining conventional respectability, he wore a striped tie. Priority was given to making an impact on public opinion. Approaches were made to fellow travellers who submitted pro-communist articles to weekly journals. The party dressed itself up as the only organisation in American politics with an unconditional devotion to social justice, economic fairness, racial equality and the struggle against fascism and imperialism. It put a new slogan into circulation: ‘Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism’. Although the communists were a spectacular failure at every election, they undoubtedly increased their influence, especially among intellectuals. What is more, companies with contracts for business in the USSR had no incentive to criticise Stalin or Browder.³⁵

The party’s general policies were controlled from Moscow, and Browder was an obedient enthusiast for them. When the Second World War erupted in September 1939 after the signature of the Nazi–Soviet pact and the German invasion of Poland, he urged that the USA should stay out of the conflict as Stalin required. Communist militants, whatever their private opinions, were told to show as much reluctance as any conservative isolationists to pull European chestnuts out of the fire. Until December 1940 Browder toured the country making the case at factory and dockyard gates. Arrested and tried, he was thrown into Atlanta prison ‘as the first political prisoner in the second imperialist war’.36 He and his party continued to declare that the United Kingdom was tricking the USA into an unnecessary and undesirable alliance. Browder vigorously supported Irish neutrality and did not object to the Dublin government’s soft policy towards the Third Reich. At the same time he opposed the ‘forces in Jewish life’ which he alleged were inveigling the USA into the military carnage in Europe.³⁷ The gains in the party’s influence were tossed away by this subservience to the instructions of the Communist International.

Policy was turned on its head when Hitler invaded the USSR in June 1941 and the party was instructed to be the cheerleader for America to open a ‘second front’ in western Europe. This made no difference until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. War broke out between the USA and Japan, and Hitler declared war on the USA. American communists could suddenly parade theirs as a patriotic party and Browder was released from prison in May 1942.³⁸ Hammering nails into the coffin lid of past policy, he – dutiful as ever but this time with a more natural fervour – eulogised the potential of a Grand Alliance of the USSR, USA and UK. According to Browder, the objective of military victory overrode the traditions of ‘class struggle’. He opposed strikes and protests for the duration of the war. Stalin wanted to assure Roosevelt of his commitment to the wartime partnership. (Not that this stopped Stalin from getting American communist agents, with Browder’s connivance, to go on spying for political and technological secrets.)³⁹ In May 1944 Browder shut down the party and formed a Communist Political Association – this was really a way of retaining a party organisation without appearing to have one: the aim was somehow to reassure the American government.⁴⁰ Communist community clubs were set up to promote the Grand Alliance, study Marxism-Leninism and lobby national and local politicians.⁴¹ Browder and his comrades canvassed for harmony between the USA and USSR. They urged workers to intensify production. They encouraged voluntary enlistment in the army and navy in the war against Germany and Japan.

Browder’s perspective on the post-war future was distinctively his own. He sprayed his ideas out on the world. In 1943, for example, he called on Roosevelt not to demand that the USSR should enter the Pacific theatre of the world war once Germany had been defeated.42 More importantly, he asserted that ‘capitalism and socialism have begun to find a way to peaceful co-existence and collaboration’ on a durable basis.⁴³ This was an idea that a later communist generation known as the Eurocommunists redeveloped. He also proposed continued collaboration between employers and workers. Moscow became perplexed about Browder and knew that he had aroused opposition from his rival William Z. Foster.⁴⁴ Moscow sought each side’s explanation. Foster criticised Browder for recommending an avoidance of industrial strikes and other forms of ‘class struggle’ in the post-war future – and the International Department of the Soviet Party Secretariat agreed with Foster.⁴⁵ Stalin did not immediately become involved. But Browder’s ideas grated with him and leading French communist Jacques Duclos, encouraged by Moscow, denounced him in April 1945.⁴⁶ This started the ball rolling for Browder to be expelled from the ranks of American communism as a revisionist. Although Moscow did not supervise all details of policies in the communist parties around the world, it demanded obedience to its strategic standpoint. Browder had gone out on a limb and paid the price.

Yet the newly reconstituted Communist Party of the USA was a weak force in American politics. The communists therefore supported Roosevelt’s former Vice-President Henry Wallace, who stood against both Democrats and Republicans as presidential candidate of the Progressive Party in the electoral campaign of 1948. Wallace had shown eager favour to the USSR in earlier years.⁴⁷ But the Democrats under Harry Truman after the Second World War treated Stalin as the greatest threat to world peace. The Cold War had begun.⁴⁸ American communists continued to fetch and carry on the orders of the Kremlin. This stretched far beyond campaigning against US foreign policy. Soviet intelligence agencies continued to recruit party members and sympathisers as spies. Confidential diplomatic files were passed to Moscow. The secrets of the US atomic bomb projects were made available to scientists in the USSR.⁴⁹ Yet the party’s puppy-like devotion to the USSR had thoroughly discredited it. Senator Joe McCarthy in the early 1950s campaigned noisily against communist infiltration of government and media.⁵⁰ Communist party members fell in number. By 1957 there were only three thousand of them.⁵¹ By then their internal disputes and public campaigns hardly merited attention in the national media.

General Secretary Gus Hall, the dullard devotee of the USSR, welcomed the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968.52 If the USSR had invaded Alaska he would probably have interpreted it as a happy incursion of garlanded peace-lovers. This was no more and no less than Moscow expected of a CPUSA leader. Just a few embers of indigenous Marxist fire were still glistening in America. The young black woman Angela Davis emerged from the anti-government movement of students and Blacks in the late 1960s. She joined the party. But her fame flickered briefly on TV screens and then faded. The communist party never pushed its way to the front of the public protests against American military intervention in the war in Vietnam.

Hall and his comrades as Soviet stooges through all the years of détente between the USA and the USSR urged the maintenance of diplomatic, commercial and cultural exchanges. They eulogised Leonid Brezhnev as the world’s greatest promoter of peace and progress. The Soviet Union was represented as a beacon of democracy. Gorbachëv’s reforms in the late 1980s came as an unwelcome surprise to Hall.⁵³ The worm turned in the American communist party only when the USSR embarked on fundamental reform. Hall signed a receipt for two million dollars from the Soviet party in 1988.⁵⁴ But his scarcely veiled criticisms annoyed Gorbachëv, who withdrew Moscow’s subsidy in the following year. Hall scoffed that Gorbachëv’s ‘new thinking’ had nothing new about it but was essentially the same as what the disgraced Earl Browder had been saying in the Second World War.⁵⁵ (This was not wholly inaccurate about Gorbachëv in respect of USA–USSR relations.)⁵⁶ He was therefore delighted by the coup attempt against Gorbachëv in August 1991. But when Gorbachëv was freed from confinement and returned to Moscow, it was Hall who was in trouble. An initiative group, including Angela Davis, emerged in the American party to challenge Hall at its national convention in November 1991.

By then in his eighties, Hall complained angrily about Gorbachëv’s ‘misleadership’.⁵⁷ Facing down the ‘Dump Gus’ campaign, he came out the winner. He had been party leader since 1959 and the party’s vanquished candidate in four presidential elections. He died in 2000, unlamented except by the dwindling band of comrades who kept the faith even after the fall of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. They no longer had many foreign countries to admire. China and Vietnam were taking the capitalist road in economic policy. Although Cuba was still thought worth supporting as a plucky survivor of the American blockade, its reliance on tourism and its rapprochement with the Catholic Church were hardly propitious for communist advancement. Only North Korea was left for the armadillo minds of the USA’s communist veterans to approve.

The communist party in the USA had never had a healthy, independent life since its birth in 1921; and the American ‘failure’ to go communist exemplifies the inherent flaw in the vision of Marx and Engels. The USA was the world’s largest industrial power from the First World War onwards. Its technological dynamism over the generations had no equal. The assumption had been that miserable living conditions would turn the American working people into followers of communism. Tens of millions of Americans indeed lived and live in poverty. But most people experienced material betterment. Marx and Engels had begun to take this into account even at the end of the nineteenth century. Kautsky, Lenin and Trotski recognised that capitalist America was going to be a difficult political nut for communists to crack. They rightly indicated that American workers shared in the benefits brought to their country by its leading position in the global economy and politics. They were correct in stating that the more skilled members of the working class were drawn away from radicalism by high wages and that they became – in the Marxist jargon – a ‘labour aristocracy’.

But they stuck to the tenet that capitalism in the USA was on the brink of irretrievable collapse. Successive generations of the American communist party, following the Soviet leadership from Lenin onwards, upheld those basic assumptions in the teeth of their lived experience. In the end, in 1991, it was to be the USSR and not the USA which tumbled into oblivion.

 

11. MAKING SENSE OF COMMUNISM

Bolsheviks declared that a ‘proletarian revolution’ had taken place in Russia and that a workers’ state was being created. Occasionally they admitted to having failed to prevent ‘bureaucratic distortions’, but generally they claimed to be realising the dream of Marx and Engels. Nikolai Bukharin and his friend Yevgeni Preobrazhenskii explained the rationale for this state order in The ABC of Communism in 1920. They intended it as a primer for the party.1 Their chapters, however, scarcely mentioned the party itself. Only in 1924 did a party functionary, Lazar Kaganovich, produce a pamphlet on the party’s workings.² Kaganovich, already one of Stalin’s close associates, spelled out the system of vertical command needed in the party-state if the communists were to enhance their power.³ Most Bolshevik ‘theoreticians’ said little about the discrepancy between pre-revolutionary promises and post-revolutionary realities. The party had been meant to seize power and then let the proletariat rule. This was the fundamental theme of Bolshevik policies in 1917.⁴ Occasionally Lenin and other party leaders blurted out the truth that politics were characterised by a dictatorship of the party; but usually they preferred to draw a veil over reality.⁵ Yet they had to concede, however faintly, that the working class was not really running the Soviet state. They blamed this mainly on Russia’s cultural backwardness. It would not be long, they asserted, before the situation was rectified.

Most commentators abroad rejected this rosy view of Bolshevism. But accurate information was difficult to obtain. After the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, when the Western Allies withdrew their embassies, only the Central Powers maintained their representation. German ambassador Count Wilhelm von Mirbach paid the ultimate price in July 1918 when he was assassinated by a Left Socialist-Revolutionary hit squad. The German embassy disappeared at the end of the Great War. Meanwhile London and Paris sent counsellors not to Moscow but to the high commands of the White armies. The West relied ever more heavily on its clandestine spy networks to keep itself acquainted with communism in Russia.

The British did not succeed in providing their agent Sir Paul Dukes in Petrograd with a regular stream of funds. Dukes enlisted in the Eighth Army of the Reds in order to receive food rations and even joined the Russian Communist Party: ‘My party ticket was everywhere an Open Sesame.’6 He was free from rancour about how the Secret Intelligence Service had handled him. His last instructions in London, before his mere three weeks of training, had been: ‘Don’t go and get killed!’ He spoke Russian with a bit of an accent and decided to pass himself off as a Ukrainian. To throw off surveillance he took out (or put back in) his front tooth.⁷ His memoir on escapades in Petrograd and on the fronts of the civil war is among the harum-scarum classics. Another raconteur was Robert Bruce Lockhart, both in the reports he made to the Secret Intelligence Service and in his subsequent memoirs. Lockhart, like Dukes, was a confirmed conservative in politics. He had been ordered to get on friendly terms with the Bolsheviks and to try and keep them in the Great War. He met Lenin and Trotski and had hopes of bringing Trotski over to some kind of alliance against the Germans. Then came the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Lockhart maintained a precarious presence in Moscow and, after the attempt on Lenin’s life in August 1918, Dzieryski ordered the Cheka to seize him. He was later released in an exchange with a Russian communist suspect held by the British.⁸ Such misfortunes disrupted the flow of information and analysis available to the cabinet in London. Policy was made on guesswork.

American officials hoped to do a better job in the early Soviet years. President Woodrow Wilson, ever the optimist, sought to bring the civil war in Russia to an early end. For this purpose in 1919 he sent his personal emissary William C. Bullitt to negotiate with Lenin in Moscow. Bullitt was a bright young man who wanted Washington to accord official recognition to the Soviet regime. He took the Bolsheviks at their word when they claimed to be willing to compromise with the Whites. He also believed that Bolshevism would moderate its dictatorial ferocity. Bullitt did not stay long enough to test out his judgements – and the Reds went on fighting the Whites into the ground until they achieved unconditional victory.

Intelligence agencies sought help from newspaper correspondents. Several brilliant reporters, exploiting the chance to interview Bolsheviks, gained privileged access to the party leadership. The Manchester Guardian correspondent Arthur Ransome was one of them. Ransome publicly endorsed the Bolsheviks so warmly that leading Soviet propagandist Karl Radek wrote an introduction to Ransome’s Letter to America which was translated for distribution in New York.9 Ransome in the course of his work had fallen in love with Trotski’s attractive secretary Yevgenia Shelepina. Later they married and moved to Cumbria in the north of England.¹⁰ All the time he was in Russia, however, Ransome was an informer for the Secret Intelligence Service.¹¹ Undoubtedly he played down the oppressive nature of the Soviet state. But he was also a British patriot, thinking that friendly relations with the Bolsheviks would serve the interests of the United Kingdom. This is not the end of the tangled thread of intrigue because the new Mrs Ransome was not the innocent secretary she seemed. In October 1922 she was the recipient of a gift from the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs beyond the wildest dreams of Soviet citizens: diamonds to the value of 1,039,000 rubles.¹² She and her husband were leaving the country for good and the Soviet state was not in the habit of handing out wedding presents. Obviously she was a Soviet agent in some capacity. In all probability she was smuggling financial assistance to the British communists.

Whether she did sustained work for the Leninist cause in the Cumbrian fells, three hundred miles from the English capital, is doubtful. She and Arthur gave up their previous lives for the rural idyll they had promised themselves, and Arthur achieved fame not for his politics but for Swallows and Amazons and the other books he wrote for children. It is an intriguing episode: a British secret informer married a Soviet secret agent. There was really no basic contradiction here. Ransome had been an enthusiast for the Bolsheviks and his purpose in reporting to the Secret Intelligence Service was to bring the United Kingdom’s policy over to acceptance of Sovnarkom; Yevgeniya had volunteered to work for the Bolshevik leadership. The likelihood is anyhow that she passed her valuable package to a designated contact as she had passed through London and then had nothing more to do with Bolshevism; but the truth at present remains as unfathomable as the deepest waters of the Lake District.

Other journalists kept a greater distance between themselves and their intelligence agencies. Among them was the American reporter Albert Rhys Williams, a Congregational minister and socialist of Welsh descent. Williams worked in Russia for the New York Evening Post. His sympathy for Sovnarkom was such that Bolshevik newspapers reproduced some of his dispatches on their pages.¹³ John Reed was another supporter of revolutionary politics in Russia. He too was a socialist journalist. Reed was drawn to the world’s trouble spots like a moth to a lighted candle and was present at the Second Congress of Soviets when power was seized from the Provisional Government. His book Ten Days that Shook the World earned the approval of Lenin, who read it ‘with never-slackening attention’ and wrote a preface for editions worldwide.14 Reed and his wife Louise Bryant went back from Moscow to the USA on a speaking tour to expound the merits of communism – they were given items valued at over one million rubles to assist revolutionary propaganda and organisation.¹⁵ They founded the Communist Labor Party. On returning to Russia, however, Reed contracted typhus and died in 1920. He received a state funeral and was buried beneath the Kremlin Wall with the fallen heroes of the Revolution. American communists established John Reed Clubs in his honour.

In fact Reed had broken with Zinoviev over American trade union strategy and resigned from the Comintern Executive Committee. A hail of criticism was directed at Reed until he retracted.¹⁶ Whether he would have maintained an allegiance to Comintern is an open question. What is clear is that many on the political left in the West came to abhor Soviet communism. Anarchists were to the fore in this. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, arriving from the USA in 1919, were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the Leninists. They were horrified by the persecution they witnessed everywhere in Soviet Russia, including the brutal treatment meted out to their anarchist comrades. Communists had needed the assistance of anarchists in their civil war. As soon as the military balance tilted decisively in favour of the Reds, the political conflict was resumed and the Cheka arrested and killed prominent anarchists.¹⁷ Goldman and Berkman learned from their anarchist friends how cunningly the communists sanitised the political scene before visitors came to Soviet cities. The troublesome leaders of non-communist groups were invariably removed. Everything was done to create the illusion of a regime beloved of its people. The lie was put about that those who struggled against the Bolsheviks – including the Kronstadt mutineers of March 1921 – were the willing tools of foreign capitalist powers.

Goldman’s experiences turned her forever against the October Revolution. She was furious with Lenin and Trotski. Reviewing her general principles, she abjured her lifelong advocacy of violence as a means of changing society. ‘Never before in all history’, she wrote, ‘has authority, government, the state, proved so inherently static, reactionary, and even counter-revolutionary.’¹⁸

Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin’s long-standing antagonist, had criticised the Soviet regime. She detested his contempt for democracy and universal civil rights as prerequisites for socialism. No pacifist, she was convinced that force of some kind would be needed to consolidate any socialist government in power; but she railed against Russian communism’s contempt for democracy. She also despised Lenin’s readiness to compromise with the aspirations of Russian peasants and non-Russian national minorities. In her eyes he was turning his back on the urban and internationalist traditions of Marxism. Luxemburg’s critique was published posthumously as The Russian Revolution.19 Another opponent of Leninism, Karl Kautsky, shared several of her ideas on democracy. Kautsky responded with alacrity to the writings of the Bolsheviks in 1917 with his own Dictatorship of the Proletariat in the following year. He denied that Marx and Engels had intended a constriction of civil rights as their revolutionary strategy; he also pointed out that Lenin’s assumption that society would irresistibly become divided between two great classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, was not borne out by demographic trends. A strategic gamble on proletarian leadership of the transition to socialism was therefore neither scientific nor likely to be effective.²⁰

Kautsky’s arguments dovetailed with the thought of the Menshevik leader Yuli Martov. After his death in 1922 a collection of Martov’s writings on the Soviet communist regime was published in Berlin.²¹ His work had not appeared in his own country since the civil war. The Mensheviks in Russia had no legal facilities to spread their ideas. Their party organisations had been closed down, their leaders banned from standing in elections to public office. Many of them were imprisoned on the old monastery island of Solovki in the White Sea or sent into administrative exile, and the rest lived under the menace of persecution. Martov, however, had already sketched out the reasons why he thought the October Revolution was a ghastly mistake. The Bolsheviks in his estimation had introduced ideological contraband into Russian Marxism, especially with their absolute adherence to dictatorship and terror. Mensheviks traced the onset of an oppressive bureaucracy with an interest in aggrandising its economic and social power. They hoped – and they persuaded themselves – that the Revolution could be ‘straightened out’ when the Bolsheviks were forced to recognise that they had driven the country into a cul-de-sac. The October Revolution was deeply flawed, but it was the only revolution that was available and it had to be reformed.

While censorship prevented Soviet readers from learning what the anti-Bolsheviks had written, the USSR poured funds into translating works by Lenin, Trotski and other communists. Left-wing bookshops in central and western Europe sold tens of thousands of cheap copies. Bukharin’s ABC of Communism was popular as a statement of communist intent. The best face was put on developments in the USSR. The Red barbarities in the civil war with the Whites went unmentioned and the official line on the malign involvement of capitalist powers in the Kronstadt mutiny of 1921 was maintained.

Yet not even Soviet propaganda could drown out everybody on the left of Western politics. Socialists went out to Moscow in delegations to discover the situation for themselves.22 Two British authors of the first rank were so intrigued by the Soviet experiment that they too travelled out to Russia to interview Soviet leaders. These were the novelist H. G. Wells and the philosopher Bertrand Russell. The authors had read up on Lenin and Trotski as well as Marx and Engels. They were impressed by Lenin’s intelligence when they met him; but they disliked having to endure his diatribes against capitalist iniquities before they had their chance to put their own points. Wells drew attention to the chaos and inefficiencies of administration in Russia; he also remarked on the oppressive methods of communism.²³ Russell levelled criticisms at Lenin for Red behaviour at the front and in the rear in the civil war. Wells, a member of the Fabian Society in the United Kingdom, had a soft spot for radical social engineering, but he understood the dangers of Lenin’s utopianism and impatience and said so. Russell too was a Fabian Society member; but he was also a liberal in politics and was even more appalled than Wells about the treatment of the individual in Soviet official policy and practice.²⁴ The books by Wells and Russell were bestsellers. They gave the communists a fair hearing before delivering their damning verdict: neither of them wanted the replication of the Soviet regime in England’s green and pleasant land or anywhere else.

Yet they had a lingering affinity with certain socialist objectives proclaimed by the Bolsheviks. They could not but admire them for striving after a welfare state system, free education, central economic planning and the abolition of social privilege. (Russell was himself an aristocrat who decried the British class system.) Austrian Marxists such as Otto Bauer shared the willingness to show some approval. Unlike Kautsky, Bauer did not come out unequivocally against the Soviet regime even though Lenin continued to harangue him over his writings on the ‘national question’. Bauer was a democrat and an enemy of dictatorship. His opinion was that the Soviet order, barbaric as it was, was suited to the conditions of the former Russian Empire. Austria and Germany, he thought, could do better for themselves. But Marxists in Russia had to contend with a society lacking in traditions of political and social forbearance. The Great War had aggravated the difficulty. It was altogether unrealistic to expect backward Russia to develop the sophisticated socialism propagated by Marx and Engels. The Bolsheviks were themselves barbarians; they were the kind of modernisers appropriate for the country they ruled.

Wells, Russell and Bauer wrote in a measured tone and were widely influential. Generally, however, such self-restraint was not in vogue, and most people looked for simple descriptions and a simple prognosis. Supporters of the Soviet political experiment were drawn to John Reed; the opponents welcomed memoirs in the style of Sir Paul Dukes. On both sides there was a strongly exotic flavour. Pro-Soviet writers insisted that citizens of the USSR had been elevated in spirit and been granted opportunities to improve their conditions to a level unparalleled in other countries. Supposedly communists were developing a model of society surpassing every great achievement of humankind. Such writings had a vivid touch of otherworldliness. Russians were made to appear unlike the rest of the nations of the world. This experiment in exotic portraiture had a hostile twin in the work of anti-Soviet writers. For them, the entire period since October 1917 had been a human abattoir. Communists, far from being inspiring idealists, were depicted as fanatics who had steeped their hands in the blood of their victims. The Soviet republic was no utopia but a nightmare for its people. The Bolshevik party had presided over some of the greatest horrors in history: police terror, dictatorship, fiendish tortures, military carnage, malnutrition and disease.

Communist parties used fair means or foul to refute their critics and concentrated their effort on workers and intellectuals. They also appealed to national groups which suffered from discriminatory treatment. They went on fostering communist ideas in the colonies of the European empires as well as in South America. Angry, alienated and idealistic men and women existed in the working classes of the world. Communist parties worked to bring them into their ranks. The recruits were offered a vision of a perfect future as well as a sense of dignity and purpose through party membership. Rivalry among the parties on the political left remained ferocious; but although the communists had no monopoly of success in their recruitment campaigns, they did increasingly well in the course of the 1920s.

They also had greater success with some national, ethnic or religious groups than with others. Jews had supplied leaders and activists to revolutionary parties in the Russian Empire wildly out of proportion to their size in the population. Not only the Bolsheviks but also the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries attracted many talented Jewish recruits. The anti-socialist political parties, both in Russia and abroad, exploited this. The most extreme position was taken by the European far right, which called the October Revolution a Jewish conspiracy against civilised values. Hitler, the Austrian corporal who fought in the German armed forces in the First World War, was already putting this accusation into his rabble-rousing speeches in the Weimar Republic. Antisemitism, stretching back nearly two millennia, was abruptly intensified by the reports that Jews filled crucial posts in Sovnarkom. The fact that Sovnarkom also aimed unequivocally at world governance fed resentment towards Jewish people living in many societies which faced basic problems of recovery from the Great War. Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev became whipping boys for fascist agitators, cartoonists and sensationalist authors.

But, if the unwholesome propaganda is laid aside, Jews were certainly attracted to communism in the 1920s to an extraordinary extent. Not all Jews joined communist parties. Far from it: most of them stayed outside politics altogether. In New York the authorities were amazed by the higgledy-piggledy complexion of Jewish religious sectarianism which had flooded into the city since the turn of the century. But an important and noticeable minority of young Jews, including women as well as men, took up Marxism as they rejected the faith of their ancestors.25 The leadership of the Communist Party of the USA was overwhelmingly Jewish by background. Why did they and their followers flock to Marxism? Among the factors was a quest for a set of ideas resting on internationalist premises. Communists were meant to be nationally blind. Another specific attraction of communism was its replication of Judaic traditions of book-learning, exegesis and prediction. And since Jews in many countries, including the USA, came from communities still mired in poverty and exhausting labour it was no surprise that they turned in large numbers towards an ideology of the far left. They could immerse their religious identity in a secular credo which promised heaven on earth to those who were willing to struggle for their beliefs.

Marxism was immensely inspiring to those national minorities in many societies which placed a premium on educational achievement and social advancement. This characteristic was not confined to Jews. Wherever minorities felt that the existing order of things was tilted against them there was an opportunity for communist organisers to make their presence felt. The Chinese in south-eastern Asia were to be notable examples after the Second World War. What impressed many recruits to communism around the world was the determination of Marxists to eliminate racist prejudices. The Indian communist M. N. Roy recalled attending congresses where people had their first experience of ‘brown and yellow men [meeting] white men who were not overbearing imperialists but friends and comrades, eager to make amends for the evils of colonialism’.26

Soviet communist leaders exploited their opportunity with muscular panache. Their Agitation-and-Propaganda department in the central party apparatus, abetted by Comintern’s publishing arm, turned out newspapers and pamphlets extolling the policies of the day. Pluralism existed only to the extent that factional disputes arose in Moscow. These usually took place in a circumscribed fashion. Although Trotski called for an increased amount of state economic planning, he still supported the NEP. Kamenev and Zinoviev too asked that the policy should be adjusted rather than jettisoned. The Democratic Centralists urged the adherence to democratic procedures in the one-party state while seeing no contradiction between their calls for ‘soviet democracy’ and the dictatorship of a single party. The nearest that any Bolshevik faction came to overturning basic principles of Bolshevism occurred with the Workers’ Opposition. Shlyapnikov and Kollontai in 1921 had campaigned for the ‘producers’ – the workers and the peasants – to have some control over decisions about how the production of goods was organised and how their subsequent distribution was undertaken. Lenin called the Workers’ Opposition an anarcho-syndicalist deviation. This was polemical hyperbole. The Workers’ Opposition had put together a mishmash of ideas. Their wish was to reform the system of power sufficiently to allow ordinary working people to have influence; but they did not advocate the dismantlement of a centralised party dictatorship.

Outside the ranks of organised Marxism, Alexander Bogdanov continued to agitate for ‘proletarian culture’ (which had been among the reasons for his rift with Lenin in 1908).²⁷ The communist authorities indulged him to the extent of subsidising the Proletkult movement which ran classes for workers in sculpture, painting and natural sciences as well as reading, writing and arithmetic. Bogdanov was firmly convinced that a socialist seizure of power was worthless unless the working class developed confidence in its autonomous capacities. He hated the bossiness of the intelligentsia and thought Lenin and Trotski were prime examples of the type. Authoritarian thought, according to Bogdanov, pervaded official Bolshevism. Salvation lay in getting workers to apply their collectivist mentality to the tasks of building a new and better society without interference by the radical bourgeoisie. He did not welcome the October Revolution but accepted it as a fact of life and tried, within the limits imposed by the Soviet regime, to strengthen Proletkult. He was the movement’s inspiration. Yet he was soon a disappointed man: his dream of helping the working class to attain the collective confidence, ambition and independence to elaborate their own version of socialism was unfulfilled. Bogdanov killed himself in a mysterious blood-transfusion accident – or was it suicide? – in 1928.

Another Marxist who thought about such questions was Antonio Gramsci, who founded a Proletarian Culture Institute.28 Gramsci was a communist with a touch of the libertarian about him. Friendly, even boyish in appearance, he was the Italian Communist Party’s much loved leader. Unlike Bogdanov, he revered Lenin. But he told a friend: ‘I’m Italian, I study Marx, I study the Russian revolution, I dwell on Lenin and see that he did not apply Marxist theory by simply parroting it. So why shouldn’t I adapt Marxism and the Russian revolution to the Italian situation?’²⁹ Gramsci never forgot his experience of revolutionary ferment in Turin in 1919–20. He remembered his Italian cultural heritage and cherished the works of the great Italian social thinkers, especially Niccolò Machiavelli and Benedetto Croce. Apparently he had never heard of Bogdanov but he would surely have queried whether the autonomous development of a ‘proletarian culture’ was truly practicable. Yet he shared with Bogdanov a distaste for the narrowing confines of Soviet communism. Gramsci understood the need to change the fundamental culture if ever politics were to be basically changed.

What did he mean by this? As leader of the Italian Communist Party, he wanted his own ideas to be taken seriously. He never advertised his objections to Comintern’s instructions. Imprisoned by Mussolini in 1926, he cloaked his written thoughts in Aesopian language as the authorities were ever on the alert. Gramsci also lost close contact with what was happening in the world communist movement. He had a lot to say none the less. He was deeply affected by what he had learned about ancient Roman and then Renaissance Italian history. As a Marxist he accepted that economic and political coercion was important for feudal or capitalist society, but he did not stop at that: he asserted that the ruling classes under both feudalism and capitalism had depended on asserting their cultural ‘hegemony’. The monks gave indispensable help to the feudal knights; the clergy, academics and scientists assisted the bankers and industrialists. In order for socialism to succeed, its advocates had to impress their ideas on the working class. Workers needed to have the self-confidence in their culture which would impress most other groups in socialist society: they had to develop their own hegemonic position.

Gramsci disliked the militaristic side of Bolshevism. In his Prison Notebooks he pointed to the undesirability of Trotski’s labour armies, and he was to reach a similar verdict on Stalin’s reliance on ‘the virtue of arms’. He also had his reservations about Bukharin, who seemed to him to hold to a crude belief in the objective reality of the external world. Gramsci wanted communists to test out all their ideas in practice rather than start from axiomatic propositions.30 He detected problems in the ‘rigidification’ of the communist party. Among the books from his library he sent for was the classic study of political parties by Robert Michels, who exposed the tendency of leaders to cut themselves off from their followers.³¹

Sick and neglected, Gramsci was to perish in prison in April 1937. Even if he had escaped his confinement, it is doubtful that he would have been gently treated by a Comintern that stuck to the current Bolshevik precepts. (He had been beaten up by his comrades in confinement for objecting to Stalin’s execution of Zinoviev in 1936.) Gramsci was not the only foreign Marxist to pursue the quest for a less rigid and narrow Marxism. György Lukács, People’s Commissar for Public Education in the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, had found refuge in the USSR and wrote History and Class Consciousness. Like Gramsci, he retained belief in the need for a ‘proletarian revolution’ characterised by the working class emancipating itself. In 1917 such a notion would have been acceptable among most Bolsheviks. At least, it could have been accepted if it could have been understood; for Lukács expressed himself in Hegelian terminology impenetrable to anyone lacking postgraduate competence in philosophy. Be that as it may, times had changed. In a period when the primacy of the party’s role in revolutionary action was axiomatic, Lukács’s book was thought heretical. When Zinoviev denounced the ideas, Lukács immediately recanted: he could not bear to live outside the embrace of official communism.

The global wrangling among Marxists went entirely over the heads of most people who took an interest in communism. But by the end of the 1920s the reportage on Soviet Russia had greatly improved. The structures, practices and policies of communism were becoming better known through the work of diplomats, newspaper correspondents and intelligence agents. Emigré revolutionaries added their informed perspective to the picture. Their statements were contested by the communist parties and their fellow travellers. Throughout the decade there was a wrestling over ideas as each side laid claim to an exclusive capacity to make sense of communism.

 

12. THE USSR IN TORMENT

In January 1928 Joseph Stalin set off on a tour of inspection in the Urals and Siberia. With him he took a picked team of officials. The stimulus was the deficit of food supplies to the cities. Famine seemed possible by the winter’s end if nothing was done. The terms of Stalin’s assignment had not been defined; he relished the vagueness. He travelled along the Trans-Siberian Railway in a carriage that was far from being luxurious – it was not until the Second World War that he had one built for his exclusive personal use. His destination was Novosibirsk in mid-Siberia. En route he barked at administrators at the meetings he held at his stopovers. No longer watched over by Politburo members, he behaved as he pleased.

Party officials in the region heard from Stalin’s lips that something far beyond the restoration of commercial equilibrium was required. On his own initiative he ordered the seizure of grain and, ultimately, the formation of collective farms. Functionaries would be assessed severely. Only practical results counted for him. Some of the recommended procedures were akin to those used in the civil war – Stalin did not have to invent them. The kulaks – the better-off peasants – were to be isolated from the other rural inhabitants. The party was to work with poor peasants to uncover grain hoards, and those who helped would be rewarded with a share of what was found. The General Secretary was changing policy out of sight of the Politburo. His intimidating presence had an immediate impact and he returned to Moscow in February with wagonloads of grain. But he had shredded any lingering trust in the government among the peasantry. Having withheld grain from the market because of the low agricultural prices as well as the shortage of industrial products on sale, rural households reacted angrily to what became known as Stalin’s ‘Urals–Siberian method’. He had not just undermined the NEP: he had destroyed it.

Brusque and volatile, Stalin declared that the time had come to thrust the party on to the road of fundamental economic transformation. He aimed to resolve the other basic questions that had been tormenting the minds of party leaders. He would settle accounts once and for all with his internal party enemies as well as with the social groups hostile to the October Revolution; and he would answer all criticism that the objectives of Bolshevism had been forgotten. He bristled at Trotski’s jibe that he was the ‘gravedigger’ of the Revolution. One advantage that he had over his enemies was that they underestimated him. They frequently expressed fears about his conduct.1 But they did nothing serious in consequence; and Stalin, like Napoleon, thought it bad form to interrupt his enemies while they were making mistakes. They relapsed into complacency until such time as he went after them. They never got the true measure of him. His rivals for the succession to Lenin gauged him by the wrong criteria. He did not speak German, French or English. He was a poor public speaker. He had never been an émigré. He lacked poise in any genteel milieu. He was downright ill-mannered.²

But he was more intelligent and dynamic than his enemies appreciated, and no one was more concupiscent of power. Born in 1878 to the family of a poor cobbler in Georgia, he had been picked out to train for the priesthood. Bright and unruly, he hated the seminary discipline. First he turned to poetry and then he found Marxism. Despite often being imprisoned, he stuck to the life of the revolutionary. Stalin was a competent organiser and editor; and although he cultivated a working-class image, he was a well-schooled man with a voracious eagerness for books. By 1912 he had been co-opted to the Central Committee. Four years in Siberia followed before he returned to active politics. In 1917 he undertook important political, editorial and administrative work for the party. After the October Revolution he was the People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs. He entered the first permanent Politburo and Orgburo in 1919. He knew his Marxism and was a dedicated Leninist. He was bursting to prove his worth; he raged to avenge the many slights that, in his own mind, he had unfairly endured. He would be the leader to take the October Revolution forward. He did not intend to go down in history as a bureaucratic footnote.

Stalin was the most violent of the leading Bolsheviks. His terror campaigns in the civil war were gruesome. He adopted a military-style tunic and knee-length black boots, and his soup-strainer moustache indicated a pugnacious man. At tactics and conspiracy he was masterful. He had reached dominance in the party before Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin knew what had happened. There was no keeping a bad man down in the politics of the USSR. He was moving with the current of attitudes of many officials in the party, its youth organisation – the Komsomol – and the Cheka. The USSR was falling behind the advanced capitalist countries in industrial technology and military might. The NEP was never going to close the gap. Existing policies, moreover, generated social, national, religious and cultural problems for the Soviet state. Militant Bolshevism was becoming humbled. Veteran Bolsheviks had not made the October Revolution and fought the civil war in order to preside over such a deviation from their revolutionary dreams. Stalin knew that he could count on the support of central and local elites if he threw aside the NEP. All he needed was tactical finesse and political willpower, and he had both these qualities in superabundance.3

Returning from the Urals and Siberia in February 1928, he broke up his partnership with Bukharin. As Bukharin predicted, rural intransigence intensified. The Politburo zigzagged in policy over subsequent months but in the end decided that Stalin’s emergency measures had to be prolonged if grain supplies were to be secured. Stalin began to argue that the moment had arrived to replace household-based peasant agriculture with collective farms. Traders in towns and villages were put under arrest.⁴ Stalin’s hostility to the kulaks was equally fierce. No kulak or his relatives could enter the new farming system. Severe repression was ordered for them. Some were shot, others deported to inhospitable regions of the USSR like Siberia and Kazakhstan; the luckier ones were simply banished from the district of their current residence and forced to start their lives again with meagre resources. Officially the rest of the peasantry was to be induced to accept collectivisation by methods of persuasion. In reality the authorities used whatever force was required to herd peasants into the system devised for them in Moscow. The centre fixed the tempos for collectivisation. Stalin sent emissaries to enforce compliance and they dared not return without being able to report success. A blitzkrieg was waged on the countryside.

The assaults in 1929 took the peasantry unawares. As the intentions of the authorities became plain, there was active resistance. It was strongest in regions like the north Caucasus and central Asia where national and religious sentiment was strong. Southern Russia too was on fire with revolts against communism. The regime smashed down these peasant uprisings. The Politburo deployed the Red Army despite having worried that the conscripts might side with the peasantry. The regime also assembled 25,000 volunteers in armed squads empowered to enforce agricultural collectivisation. Party and soviet officials too were mobilised. All these agencies had been indoctrinated to look on starvation as the outcome of kulak sabotage and resistance. As peasants got wind of the fate intended for them they banded together to repel the collectivisers. The insurgents were no match for the invaders. The authorities possessed vastly superior firepower and were better placed to co-ordinate their operations over large areas.

A millennium of peasant customs was violently cast aside. By March 1930 the proportion of collectivised households in the countryside had reached 55 per cent. Complaints about ‘excesses’ disconcerted Stalin at this point, and he called for moderation. But he had let loose the collectivisers again within months. He chastised any party committee which failed to ensure an uninterrupted realisation of policy. He achieved what he wanted. Almost 99 per cent of all cultivated land had been pulled into collective farms by the end of 1937. The ghastly price paid by the peasantry has yet to be established with precision, but probably up to five million people died of persecution or starvation in these years.5 Ukrainians and Kazakhs suffered worse than most nations. Ukraine, rich in agricultural soil and independent farmers, was afflicted by famine in 1932–3. Stalin’s instruction to stop people leaving Ukraine in search of work and food made things worse. The situation was no better for the Kazakhs. These people belonged to tribal groups of nomads who knew nothing of settled agriculture. About half their population perished while undergoing sedentarisation. Ukrainians and Kazakhs trapped mice, chewed bark and boiled leaves as their normal supplies vanished. The rest of them perished.

Stalin had originally intended that the revenues from grain exports – or the ‘tribute’, as he privately called it – would pay for higher real wages as well as for investment in rapid industrial growth. The working class was promised a drastic betterment in conditions. The State Planning Committee (Gosplan) was ordered to compose a five-year plan for industrialisation. Whenever Gosplan submitted a draft, the Politburo raised the targets of output still higher. Iron, coal, steel and machine tools were given greatest emphasis. Advice from most economists was ignored. Sergei Strumilin, a proponent of ‘teleological’ planning, was a rare one who spontaneously supported Stalin. The Politburo and Gosplan thought up quotas for the economy regardless of predicted difficulties. The goal of the first five-year plan, scheduled for completion by the end of 1933, was to secure the USSR’s progress along the road to becoming a modern, industrial and socialist society.

Industrial managers and local party bosses were commanded to achieve the dream. Rough methods were condoned; results alone counted. This was hardly planning as anyone had ever envisaged it. The communist leadership was like a blind man painting a picture. The idea had been to export grain in return for technological imports. Yet world cereal prices had unexpectedly collapsed. Stalin did not flinch. Rather than do without up-to-date machinery, he budgeted for a lowering of living standards. Wages tumbled. Shop shelves were poorly stocked. Factory labourers, even those with skilled jobs and above-average wages, could rarely feed themselves well. Most of them became involuntary vegetarians. Cities were founded in places where valuable natural resources had been discovered. Magnitogorsk, the new steel-making centre, was the great example. Conditions were grim for most urban inhabitants there and elsewhere. Budgetary precedence was given to industrial output over the housing and feeding of employees and their families. The barracks where they sheltered at night were little better than byres.

Yet this was also a period of revolutionary élan and a cultural revolution was proclaimed. The authorities were bent on transforming an entire society as they reinforced the drive for industrialisation. The network of schools was expanded. Evening classes were organised for the illiterate and innumerate. No sooner had teachers been trained than they were sent out to staff the new schools. Workers who gave any sign of talent were guaranteed the chance of academic or professional training. Promotees bustled around enterprises and offices spouting the official rationale for state policy. There were hundreds of thousands of them.6 They joined the party, urging workers and peasants to work hard to build the foundations of a perfect society. The task of the current generation was to devote itself to the ideals of Marxism-Leninism. Communism was thought constructible within a single lifetime. Youngsters lined up to carry out the ruthless measures demanded by Stalin and the Politburo. Industry was expanding rapidly and jobs were abundant in the cities. Demoralised peasants were spilling in from the countryside in search of employment. Anything was better than what they left behind. The migrants, arriving fearful and penniless, put up with conditions which in the 1920s would have sparked strikes and demonstrations.

Industrialisation was undertaken with coercion. At Shakhty in the Donets Basin, on Stalin’s orders, dozens of directors and engineers were arrested and charged with industrial sabotage. Among them were foreign advisers. Stalin was going for broke as he terrorised the entire managerial stratum into compliance. The defendants were brought out on ‘show trial’. After being beaten up by the OGPU, they were in no condition to resist the demand that they confess to criminal activity. Trials followed in the big cities elsewhere and Stalin supervised the process. He organised the fabrication of cases against anti-Soviet conspiracies by former Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries working in the state planning agencies. These included brilliant economists such as Nikolai Kondratev, Vladimir Groman and Alexander Chayanov. Stalin arranged for the ‘conspirators’ to be accused of having links to the Rightists in the communist party itself. Bukharin was made to look like a traitor to the party’s cause. The Shakhty trial ended in sentences ranging from long prison terms to execution. Judges in the other cases, which were directed by the Moscow political authorities, usually consigned the defendants to years of hard labour.

These travesties of judicial process achieved their intended outcome as Soviet planners, directors and managers strove to prove their enthusiasm for the economic transformation. The linkage between industry and agriculture was stressed. According to the Politburo and Gosplan, the rural economy would be boosted by ‘tractorisation’. One hundred thousand tractors were to be manufactured as the modernisation of the economy picked up pace. Up-to-date weaponry was to be made available to the Soviet armed forces. The USSR was set to become a great power again in Europe and Asia. The first five-year plan was completed a year ahead of schedule in December 1932. Although the authorities fiddled the books and pretended that practically every sector of the economy had hit its official targets, there was no denying that the country had gone a long way towards achieving industrialisation.

Economic policy began to be moderated in 1933. The second five-year plan specified that priority should be shifted to bringing the newly built factories into production and eliminating the disorder in industry and trade. Output quotas were lowered. Managers and workers were called upon to toil as hard as ever but were promised a higher level of reward. The budget for consumer goods, welfare and shelter was increased; schools, theatres and parks were to be constructed. Military requirements were not to be forgotten. The worsening international situation, especially after Hitler came to power, accentuated the need for the technological modernisation of the armed forces. Yet the emphasis remained on making the best use of what had already been put in place rather than continuing with reckless industrial expansion. This did not happen without heated discussion in the Politburo, but Stalin came down on the side of those advocating moderation. Yet the little internal grouplets in the party which levelled criticisms at him kept reproducing themselves. For the moment he found it prudent to go easy on lower-level politicians, enterprise directors and society at large. But he remained edgy about the political situation.

The Politburo had also changed policy on the ‘national question’ at the end of the 1920s. Previously the non-Russian peoples had been allowed considerable scope for self-expression in their press, schools and administration. The party leadership became determined to tame their assertiveness. Public figures who had promoted their respective nations’ causes during the NEP were denounced and sacked. Mykola Skrypnik, an outstanding Ukrainian communist veteran, committed suicide in despair at the new political line. Trials were held of professors, clerics and old activists who were accused of ‘bourgeois nationalism’. The charges were trumped up that they had formed counter-revolutionary organisations and were plotting the overthrow of the communist party. At first the anti-nationalist repression was applied as much to the Russians as to the other peoples. Proceedings were instituted in 1930 against the fictitious All-People’s Union of Struggle for Russia’s Regeneration.7 But Stalin decided that it was mistaken to treat the Russian nation in this fashion. In 1932 he stopped arresting Russians for ‘bourgeois nationalism’. Russia and its virtues started to be celebrated. At the same time he drastically restricted the already limited freedom of the other peoples.

The idea was to assimilate the Russians to a Soviet identity which everyone else would copy. This would exclude all association with religion. Stalin let loose the League of the Militant Godless to persecute clerics. Priests, imams, rabbis and shamans were liable to arrest. Thousands were shot. Churches, mosques and synagogues were razed to the ground. Religious treasures were ransacked. ‘Little god’ was mocked in official publications.

The Seventeenth Party Congress in the USSR, opening in January 1934, was called the Congress of Victors. Stalin had defeated the internal party opposition, secured his industrialisation and collectivisation programme and defended the rationale of ‘Socialism in One Country’. Delegates hailed him as the ‘Lenin of Today’. He towered over his own Politburo in power and prestige. Yet there was disquiet in the party as the delegates massed in Moscow. A rumour spread that a sizeable proportion of the Congress delegates were minded to replace him with his Politburo colleague Sergei Kirov. Yet Stalin survived and enjoyed his public triumph. But he remained wary – and on a personal level he was extremely lonely and anxious after his wife’s suicide in 1932. Then in December 1934 an assassin killed Kirov in Leningrad. Whether Stalin had ordered the murder remains unproven. What is certain is that he exploited the situation as an opportunity to introduce emergency powers enabling three-person tribunals (troiki) to hold trials of suspects without the usual judicial procedures. Stalin aimed to eliminate any real or potential resistance among the upper echelons of the communist party.

He also moved to get rid of ‘anti-Soviet elements’ in the wider society. His measures since 1928 had caused immense resentment. He had persecuted kulaks, clerics, ‘bourgeois nationalists’, members of already suppressed parties, ex-oppositionists and ‘former people’. Tens of millions of people fell into these categories. Many of them were returning from the camps and resettlement areas after serving out their time. Others had escaped the clutches of the OGPU during the first five-year plan. They hated Stalin and his associates. The cult of Stalin left no doubt about who was responsible for the traumas they had been suffering. Stalin did not have to invent his enemies. His activity had created a vast number of them in town and countryside in the USSR.

Repressive activity was intensified after the Kirov assassination. Hundreds of thousands of ‘former people’ – the surviving old nobles, bankers, landlords and their families – were deported at a moment’s notice from the largest cities. This programme of social ‘cleansing’ was designed to increase political security. Passports had been introduced for urban residents in December 1932, which made it easier for the police to ‘cleanse’ the cities. On the slightest pretext the returnees from the camps were resentenced and sent back to confinement. Penal servitude was run by the Main Administration of Camps (or Gulag) – and the term Gulag quickly became a synonym for the entire camp network. Political prisoners, especially ex-Trotskyists, were never released from it. Stalin was ensuring that the resentful strata of Soviet society could never find a leadership to guide them. Blame for the death of Kirov was attributed to Kamenev and Zinoviev. The actual killer was Leonid Nikolaev, who had adhered to a Zinovievite group in the late 1920s. This was enough for Stalin to load moral and ideological responsibility on to the heads of Kamenev and Zinoviev and to put them on trial. The proceedings were filmed for the newsreels. Threatened with capital punishment, the defendants agreed to admit guilt in return for a term of imprisonment. They agreed to be suitably abject. At the same time a hunt was started to discover anyone harbouring sympathy for the ideas of the crushed internal oppositions of left and right.

By the winter of 1936–7 Stalin had made up his mind to conduct a systematic campaign of arrests and executions nowadays known as the Great Terror. His Politburo was accustomed to bending to his demands. Even so, he had to cajole them. One Politburo member, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, committed suicide when he saw where things were heading. The Central Committee too had to be brought to heel. Stalin arranged plenary sessions where Nikolai Yezhov, recently appointed head of the NKVD, explained that treacherous activity had been detected throughout the party. The NKVD was the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs; in 1934 it had taken over the functions of the OGPU. Yezhov said that reports indicated that Bukharin and others were up to no good. When Bukharin denied the charge, Stalin brought him face to face with his denouncer. Not only Bukharin but also the entire Central Committee were being terrified and demoralised.

Stalin wished to impose his unconditional despotism. The party was the sole remaining institution with the capacity to change the direction of events. Many communist leaders in the republics and the provinces, even while praising him in public, were horrified by his political and economic fanaticism. Stalin cut into the flesh of the party to assure himself that only the ‘healthy’ elements survived. He had the same intentions towards the Red Army high command. Mikhail Tukhachevski and other military leaders were arrested in May 1937; they were shot in June after being forced to admit to state treason – the bloodstains remained on Tukhachevski’s signed confession. The Central Committee met in plenary session and was asked to sanction what had been going on. Osip Pyatnitski, high-ranking functionary in Comintern, objected to the massacres. He expressed doubt that the charges against party comrades were valid. This was tantamount to calling Stalin a tyrant and fraudster, but Pyatnitski refused to back down. His Central Committee membership was withdrawn and then he was snatched by the NKVD and executed. No one in the supreme party organs repeated his suicidal act of courage.

Yezhov and Stalin together formulated a plan for a mass ‘operation’, scheduled to start in late summer. Decree 00447 stipulated that 259,450 ‘anti-Soviet elements’ should be taken into custody. Twenty-eight per cent of them were to be executed, the rest to be sent to labour camps for lengthy periods. Categories of people were specified who were to be hunted down; they included anyone who had been a kulak, priest, Menshevik, Socialist-Revolutionary, ‘bourgeois nationalist’, aristocrat or banker.8 Other such operations followed. Particular national groups, especially those living in the borderlands of the USSR with compatriots in nearby foreign states, were targeted: Poles, Greeks, Germans and Koreans.

The Great Terror was not brought to an end until November 1938; Stalin started to behave with greater prudence only after exhausting the alternatives. It had been carried out according to the system of numerical quotas established in economic planning. Stalin could not trust the NKVD and party to go about their tasks effectively without this. The result was the chaos characteristic of the Soviet industrial campaign. When the purgers could not find people in the social and political categories set for them by Stalin and Yezhov, they simply set out to meet the numerical quotas – and frequently they set out to over-fulfil them. Local police chiefs who failed to achieve their quotas immediately became victims themselves. The incentive was to seize just about anyone off the streets. Stalin himself chose his victims in the most arbitrary fashion. Three hundred and eighty-three ‘albums’ were presented to him. Against some names he scrawled a ‘1’ (for shooting), against others a ‘2’ (for ten years in the Gulag). Where he placed a ‘3’, he left the decision to Yezhov’s discretion.9 Evidently he was intent on replacing most of the USSR’s public leadership. His working assumption was that holders of high posts should be treated as traitors unless there was pressing reason to spare their lives. Although he had reason to suspect that many wanted him removed from power, the real plots against him were few and weak. Essentially Stalin was overseeing a preventive operation to get rid of people who had the slightest potential to oppose him.

Stalin had a gross personality disorder: he did not care that he was murdering wholly innocent comrades, including several who were shot while proclaiming their affection for the Leader. He could not have got away with this unless he had the co-operation of Politburo members. He also relied on the party, the police and the government; he had built up their institutional strength in previous years and could deploy state power without fear of popular resistance. He could draw on the ruthless ideology of Leninism.¹⁰

The process was facilitated by the opportunity it offered for promotion. Plenty of ambitious young officials in every institution were ready to denounce their superiors. They took their jobs and apartments and bought up their personal possessions; they themselves hoped against hope to stay out of range of the terror machinery. Workers and peasants were not always averse to collaborating with the NKVD. There had been awful hardship for most members of society. The authorities suggested that responsibility lay with treacherous officials who had acted as saboteurs and spies for foreign powers and sought the restoration of capitalism. Working people, after years of resentment, eagerly denounced their tormentors: party militants, farm directors, enterprise managers, teachers and engineers. It was dangerous to be thought to have protected an ‘enemy of the people’. The best way to stay on the right side of the NKVD was to be eager to denounce. There had been huge disruption of the settled patterns of social life. Millions had moved from the countryside to the cities. Neighbours were strangers to each other. Families had been broken up. It was tempting for individuals to look after themselves by showing unkindness to others.

From the mid-1930s there were always around two million convicts in the labour camps. There were further millions of forced settlers torn from their homes and livelihoods and hurled into the grimmest parts of the country. They were used as labour for important projects of the second and third five-year plans. They dug canals, sawed timber, mined for gold and built new cities. Labour camps were set up in Siberia and north Russia wherever an economic purpose was served.

 

13. THE SOVIET MODEL

Stalin and his cronies had stirred up the revolutionary storm and must have worried that it would end up by blowing them away. But, if they felt such concerns, they kept quiet about them. Stalin stamped on any vacillation inside the leading group. He would finish the job he had started. They would obey or suffer his punishment.

The last components of the Soviet model of communism had been bolted into place. Other variants of the model would have been tried out if Trotsky, Zinoviev or Bukharin had secured the political succession; but quite what each alternative leader would have developed is difficult to say. Like Stalin, they had frequently changed their policies since 1917 and could easily have done so again. The important point, however, is that they approved of many features of the USSR under Stalin. They agreed that communism should include the one-party dictatorship, the ideological monopoly, revocable legality, societal mobilisation and militant urbanism. Even Bukharin went along with this. Nor is it clear that they would have stuck with their alternatives if there were to have been resistance in the country (as would surely have been the case). Trotski in particular had a record of talking sweet reason in opposition and behaving ferociously in power. He had been beaten to supreme power in the party by a man who had consistently talked and acted ferociously in the early years after the October Revolution. Yet no one had expected even Stalin to build the ziggurat of the Soviet terror-state so high. They repeatedly claimed that Lenin’s legacy had been abused.

Stalin’s personal supremacy was not yet entirely secure in the early 1930s. Trotski and Bukharin still hoped to return as leaders of the USSR, and both of them retained their admirers. Bukharin was rehabilitated in 1934 and made chief editor of the government newspaper Izvestiya; he was no longer in the Politburo, but if Stalin had stumbled he would have been in a useful position to tread him underfoot. Trotski, after having been deported from the USSR in 1929, kept up limited clandestine contact with supporters in Moscow and published his Bulletin of the Opposition. He said that collectivisation should have been undertaken on a voluntary basis. He also claimed that he would have managed state affairs much more competently across the range of policies. Since 1923 he had criticised the decline in democratic procedures in the party. He had even come to call for greater authority for the soviets. Bukharin, while agreeing with Trotski in condemning the violence of collectivisation, was eager to reinstate the NEP in full order (whereas Trotski had been demanding a rapid increase in industrial investment throughout its duration); he also gave much emphasis to a scheme for workers and peasants to write and publish complaints about corruption and inefficiency in politics.

These differences, however, were mainly about tactics and strategy and not about ultimate objectives. Bukharin in the mid-1920s had urged the removal of the regime’s harshness: ‘I consider that we must as soon as possible move towards a more “liberal” form of Soviet power: fewer repressions, more legality.’1 Yet this was hardly a proposal for fundamental reform, and anyway it was contained in a confidential letter to the security police and he never campaigned openly for his proposal.

Bukharin, like all Bolsheviks, aimed to sustain communist political power and prevent the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries or Kadets from returning to public life. The USSR was to remain a communist monopoly. Both Trotski and Bukharin wanted an economy entirely owned and planned by the state. The market sector in industry, agriculture and trade was supposed to disappear as soon as was feasible. Although this might take longer than Stalin had allowed, no leading Bolshevik intended to allow capitalism to exist for ever. It is true that Trotski and Bukharin called for increased freedom of discussion for Bolsheviks, but they did not abandon their commitment to a strictly centralised party. They idealised the party’s organisational arrangements in the civil war which had been criticised by oppositionists at the time as intolerably authoritarian. They had no objection to severe censorship or to the state monopoly of the press. Like Stalin, they aimed to expunge religion, national assertiveness and other anti-communist ideologies from the media. While disapproving of the mayhem of the early 1930s, they endorsed the persecution of communism’s enemies in general terms. In fact they no longer thought of it as persecution: they shared the assumption that revolutions had to be defended by merciless measures.

They went on believing, with minor reservations, that the central party leadership had the right and duty to decide everything. Popular opinion could always be rejected. Bolshevism after 1917 picked up its old theme that the ‘masses’ needed to be told what was good for them. Constitutional and legal discrimination against the former ruling classes and their supporters was to be maintained. Aristocrats, priests and ex-policemen could be discarded as ‘former persons’. Meanwhile party organisers and communist propagandists should work on the rest of society – the ‘people’ itself. Demands by workers for higher wages should be resisted. Peasants who called for a lowering of taxes should be ignored. Everyone should struggle for the greater communist good.

Communists had preached and commanded since the October Revolution, and the habit was reinforced in the 1930s. Party officials became punitive know-alls. As the NEP was eliminated, the state penetrated more and more areas of life. Space for a civil society was virtually abolished; all organisations with the slightest autonomy from communist control came under attack. The Russian Orthodox Church was subjected to the harshest treatment. Tens of thousands of priests were killed. Ecclesiastical buildings were demolished – most notoriously, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in central Moscow was blown up at night in 1932 to make room for a Palace of Soviets which was so grandiose in conception that it could never be built. The League of the Militant Godless was let loose with its propaganda. Publication of sacred texts, including the Bible, was forbidden. No religious edifices were built in the new cities that were constructed across the country. Church bells were removed to foundries to be melted down for industrial use. The auditory landscape was transformed. No longer did the peals of bell-ringers summon the faithful to services. Not that there were many bell-ringers, vergers or priests at liberty after their intensive violent suppression.

The Academy of Sciences was intimidated. This was one of the bodies which even the Romanov emperors had been reluctant to bully. Stalin refrained from actually appointing academicians but he arrested those whom he suspected of disloyalty, and he was pleased to accept honorary membership of the Academy. The radio and press, moreover, were state monopolies. Nothing could be broadcast or printed without prior clearance by the authorities. Even musical scores were checked in this way.

Several great artists were summarily arrested by the NKVD and thrown into the Gulag or executed. The poet Osip Mandelshtam was sent into exile in Voronezh. Temporarily reprieved, he perished of malnutrition and exhaustion on his way to a labour camp in 1938. In all the arts – literary prose, poetry, painting, film and drama – the repression continued. Stalin set up a structure of institutional control. In 1932 he induced the novelist Maxim Gorki to convoke a congress to establish the USSR Union of Writers. Individuals wanting to make a living as authors had to join it and operate inside its regulatory framework. Its secretary, Alexander Fadeev, was literature’s policeman. With membership of the Union of Writers there came attractive benefits: access to dachas and sanatoria, large royalties and official prestige. On every branch of the arts and scholarship there sat a pot of gold available to intellectuals of the slightest talent if only they would bow down before Stalin. Trade unions and professional organisations were run by stooges subject to control by party and government. Whatever the occupation, there was an agency for it: lawyers, metalworkers, physicists and even militant atheists. This had been Trotski’s idea in 1920 in calling for the ‘statification’ (ogosudarstvlenie) of the unions.

The state’s reach was meant to be ubiquitous. Football, gymnastics and other sports were under exclusive state-sponsorship. The NKVD ran the Moscow Dinamo soccer club, the Komsomol was in control at Spartak. Stalin was present in Red Square to watch a demonstration football match on Physical Culture Day in 1936.2 Even tiny recreational groups were pulled into the maw of the state. Harmless pursuits such as Esperanto or philately were judged subversive. By 1937 Esperantists were routinely arrested as agents of the great powers; enthusiasts who collected foreign stamps fared no better. The rule of thumb was that people who gathered together under one roof for any leisure pursuit had to be regulated.

The nomenklatura system of graduated privileges was reproduced in all spheres of public life. The only men and women who were not state employees in some fashion or other were the criminals, the mentally ill, the priests and the very elderly. Most people of pensionable age needed a job of some kind to have any income. Even the worst-paid workers, however, could use the cafeterias, kindergartens and residence-barracks of their enterprises. Incentives fostered active co-operation at least among a minority of the labour force. In 1935 the Donets Basin miner Alexei Stakhanov broke the records for hewing coal on a single shift. His example was advertised in Pravda, and the call went out for Soviet workers to emulate him. They received prizes in the form of extra rations and wages. The luxuries available at the apex of power were unimaginable to ordinary citizens. Kremlin politicians had dachas, nannies, governesses, special food deliveries and smart clothes. The system of privileges was extended in a calibrated form down through the administrative levels. If an office clerk received only a packet of sugar or butter over and above his salary, this was more than the average person could get from the shops.

People had to fight to look after themselves and their families. Manners were rough and ready. Life was never ‘a stroll across a ploughed field’ and was unendurable without the dodges developed in the 1920s. People idled knowing they would not be sacked. They showed no conscientiousness on the job; they stole from their enterprises and sold products illegally on the side. Groups of friends showed solidarity with each other, thumbing their noses at state policies. The system of patrons and clients existed throughout the regime.

The central authorities in the 1930s regretted the abandonment of the old social proprieties. The cohesion of communities was breaking down. The Kremlin therefore changed direction and demanded that youngsters should automatically defer to their elders and betters. Women were encouraged to have as many children as they could – and kindergartens and cafeterias were made available to enable them to remain in the workforce. Divorce and abortions were made more difficult. In 1932 the media praised a boy, Pavlik Morozov, who had been murdered after denouncing his father for undermining the management of their kolkhoz (which was the name for the most widespread type of collective farm). Patriarchal authority was subsequently reasserted. Stalin demanded orderly relationships at home and at work. School uniforms were reintroduced and the girls had to wear their hair in pigtails. Military training was expanded. Even the personnel in the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs dressed like soldiers. The turbulence of industrialisation and collectivisation had to be moderated. Order, hierarchy, compliance and vigilance were the watchwords. The social effervescence of the first decade after the downfall of the Romanov monarchy became an object of disapproval. In return the regime widened the avenues for promotion. Opportunities for education, industrial training and cultural access were guaranteed. Citizens were told to expect ever better provision of material goods and recreational facilities.

The architecture of the Soviet order as redesigned by Stalin was not like one of those rambling country houses where wings, turrets and pigeon lofts were added at the whim of the generation of the family in possession. The USSR has frequently been compared to an Egyptian pyramid with the stones at the top supported by a widening platform of layers from top to bottom. Yet the resemblance is not a close one. The simple outward appearance of a typical pyramid hid a maze of secret tunnels; and many pyramids over the ages lost their highest stones without collapsing under the winds of the desert. Without its supreme leadership the USSR would not have survived a single day. The communist order had an architectonic tautness unknown in physical buildings. Politics was highly centralised and, at local levels, reduced as much as possible to a process of administrative instruction and compliance. Central politicians intruded directly and deliberately into all sectors of social existence. Ideology, economics, leisure, family life and personal habits were subject to state penetration and held together by unbreakable cross-ties.

The elimination of autonomous civil associations strengthened the Soviet order. The Kremlin could set policies without consultation across the entire range of politics, economics, society, ideology and culture. Drastic switches of line were possible whenever the ascendant leadership required. Equally impressive was the capacity to concentrate resources. Factories could be nationalised, farms collectivised and social groups arrested. The organisational hierarchies were trained to relay decisions from the centre to the furthest tiny corners of the periphery with implicit obedience. The supreme leadership had endless punitive sanctions at its disposal. Communist ideology gave validation and confidence to the administrators who carried out the instructions. The country’s insulation from the rest of the world facilitated operational efficiency; and the authorities were in a better position to inoculate citizens against the contagion of alien ideas.

Questions arose about the nature of the USSR. A fresh answer began to be offered in the last years before the Second World War. This was that the Soviet Union constituted a new kind of state. The word for it was ‘totalitarian’. It had been coined by Benito Mussolini, who produced it to define his purposes for fascist Italy. It acquired currency in descriptions of Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany. Precise definitions were few on the ground until after 1945, but the general idea was widely agreed. What struck the minds of observers was the common imperatives of these three dictators to suppress political pluralism, quell criticism in the media and minimise the propagation of alternative ideologies. Due legal process was overthrown. The cult of the Leader was installed. A single party operated. A millenarian creed was poured into the minds of all citizens. Commands came down from on high without recourse to consultation with the lower levels of the political system or with the people. Associations of civil society were eliminated or emasculated. It was recognised that none of these three dictatorships fully achieved its objectives. Mussolini left the monarchy in place and signed a concordat with the Catholic Church. Hitler co-opted big business to his purposes without wholly eradicating its freedom. Stalin never liquidated the Orthodox Church or eradicated private profit from the economy. Totalitarianism failed to be comprehensively realised anywhere.

The order entrenched by Joseph Stalin involved centralism, hierarchy, discipline, mobilisation and terror; state power on a scale unprecedented in world history – until Hitler’s Third Reich – had been amassed. Political intrusion into social life was like a dagger plunged into butter. Privacy was devalorised. The state counted for everything, the individual for nothing. People were treated like coal or wheat: they became a resource exploitable for the public cause. To outsiders it appeared that communism had already acquired a comprehensive – perhaps even a total – control over an entire society.

Yet fraud, corruption and misinformation inevitably proliferated even more strongly than in most liberal-democratic states. Measures were formulated on the basis of false data. Although the supreme leaders wanted to know about difficulties, lower-level officials had reason to keep the truth to themselves and deliberately misled the leadership.3 Governments in the West operated alongside bodies which on occasion might oppose them: churches, the press, the judiciary and the various social associations of citizens. Communists regarded such bodies as a ‘bourgeois’ scam. The Marxist-Leninist argument was that capitalist society gave the impression of looseness and diversity while ruthlessly pursuing the fundamental interest of the ruling class. Communists grossly overstated the monolithic nature of capitalist societies; this had been a principal defect in Lenin’s The State and Revolution and was not peculiar to Stalin and his clique. The Soviet order consequently lacked the components which enable the self-correction and self-renewal of looser systems of rule. In the USSR there was no press to object to politicians who acted dishonestly or incompetently. There was no religious institution which could point up the moral inadequacies of rulers. There were no universities whose scholars could publish criticism of official policy with impunity.

As administrative arbitrariness mounted, the amount of compulsion needed to get anything done had an effect on popular attitudes. Although sections of society were enthusiastic about Stalin’s policies, millions of individuals complied only out of dread of punishment. Genuine approval was always difficult to obtain from society. Such a situation created a cycle of passive disobedience by ordinary people – and, in many cases, administrators – followed by massive state pressure to mobilise them to carry out their designated tasks. It is true that this had been an old Russian tradition. The communists were stultifying the developments which had been moving in the opposite direction before 1917. They did this unconsciously; after seizing power with the intention to destroy old Russia, they restored many of its worst customs; and when further communist states were installed after the Second World War, the same phenomenon of popular resentment and alienation occurred because of the same imposition of unelected and unconsultative authority.

The way round this was to establish bureaucracies to supervise and regulate bureaucracies. So-called control organs proliferated. Neither party nor government bodies could be trusted to get on with their tasks. The organs of control intervened regularly in institutional affairs to carry out checks on personnel, finance and due procedure. This had been happening in the first decade of communist power. The difference in the 1930s was the regular prominence of the NKVD in the investigations. From having been subordinate to the party it rose to being a counterweight to its authority. Stalin used it to keep party officials and committees in a condition of constant willingness to carry out his orders. The NKVD was also the agency for surveying and analysing popular opinion. Confidential reports were forwarded to Stalin on a monthly basis; they were directed at gauging the extent and nature of any discontent. The authorities were always especially concerned about attitudes among workers, peasants and national minorities.4 Of course, the reports were not unbiased. The police had an interest in playing up discontent so as to justify their existence; they also understood the need to provide Stalin with the kind of information he liked or else risk being purged. Yet Stalin too was a prisoner of the system. Without the control organs he would have been even worse informed about affairs. The Soviet order could not function without them.

It also needed a reinforced barrage of propaganda. The official party history textbook was published to ceaseless acclaim in 1938. So was Stalin’s approved biography. Pravda as the central party newspaper dutifully and eagerly disseminated the changing communist line of the day.

Even so, the people of the USSR proved remarkably resistant to Marxism-Leninism. Believers of every faith had been used to the open practice of their beliefs, and the secular authorities assumed that the amputation of this tradition would bring an end to religion. This did not occur. When a census was taken in 1937, some 55 per cent of citizens said they believed in a deity. The true percentage was surely even higher; it was perilous for anyone to profess religious faith in that year of savage state terror, and millions of people must have pretended to be atheists. So beliefs went on being nurtured; and when the Third Reich invaded the USSR in the Second World War, Stalin recognised reality by calling the Metropolitan of Moscow to the Kremlin and offering a modest degree of freedom to the Russian Orthodox Church in return for its support for the military effort. Religious activity would seem to have intensified rather than diminished among some groups. This was true of various Christian sects which saw Stalin as the Antichrist. It was also the reaction of many Moslems who found consolation in the Koran after the social and economic depredations of the 1930s. The hatred for Stalin in the collectivised villages in particular was acute. If Stalin reviled religion, believers thought this a good reason for going on believing.

Atheism, however, undoubtedly picked up supporters. Youngsters at school were particularly vulnerable to indoctrination. From generation to generation the demographic arithmetic was on the side of the authorities even if secularisation was taking longer than had originally been intended. Marxist-Leninist indoctrination worked its effects; so too did the surgical removal of the public religious presence. Urbanisation itself had a secularising impact, as it did in most other countries of the world apart from the USA. The space occupied by faith in the USSR was reduced.

Yet even those Soviet citizens who came to share the official atheist notions were likely to think a lot differently in private about many matters. What George Orwell dubbed double-think was a pervasive phenomenon. Everybody but saints, daredevils and nincompoops parroted the communist verities when at the factory or office. Failure to do this could have disastrous consequences. If an old peasant woman was heard grumbling about conditions in her collective farm, forced labour in Siberia would follow. Most people were clever at keeping their dangerous private thoughts private. At most they would divulge them to their spouses or closest friends in the seclusion of their apartments. Even this was risky. The homes of high-ranking officials were often bugged. The NKVD summoned individuals and demanded that they reveal secrets of recent conversations. Maids, porters and drivers were routinely employed to file reports.5 The USSR was a listening state with an insatiable curiosity. Anonymous denunciation was encouraged. This had a deleterious effect on ordinary social solidarity. Informing on others was a tempting way to get one’s own back on overbearing foremen or awkward neighbours. It was also a method of getting rid of a rival and taking his job. No one could have complete confidence, however upright he or she was, that a false delation would not bring disaster in its train. The NKVD was not renowned for its investigative scruples, especially at times when it was under pressure to fulfil its arrest quotas.

Hypocrisy exists to a large or small extent in all societies – a dose of it is frequently a necessary lubricant for the functioning of social intercourse. But the arts of subterfuge were turned into a fundamental feature of the entire Soviet order. Double-speak became a way of life. Citizens needed to say one thing and do another if they wanted to survive the terror.

Another bolthole was supplied by Russian literary classics. Many of these were issued as exemplars of the country’s greatness. It was an understandable device whereby the authorities sought to identify themselves with past cultural achievement. But it exploded in their hands. The works of Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev and Lev Tolstoi were avidly bought by readers who gained a glimpse of the world they had lost since the October Revolution. The non-Russians were allowed access to at least a few of their national literary giants. Across the USSR the light of a culture which shared nothing with Marxism-Leninism was kept aflame. Those works which were banned or heavily restricted – such as the novels of Fëdor Dostoevski and the poetry of Alexander Blok and Anna Akhmatova – became the object of furtive enthusiasm. The lesson was quickly learned. People found that it was a route towards retaining their sanity in a phantasmagorical world. At a lowly level there was the eagerness to poke fun at the authorities, including Stalin himself. His cult raised him above the rest of humankind. In popular anecdotes he was a villain and a fraud. Peasants routinely called him the Antichrist.

Meanwhile the old superstitions died hard. Party functionaries, teachers and journalists railed against ancient folk beliefs in wood demons and lake spirits. Witchcraft was derided. Gypsy astrologers were scoffed at. It was not just because the young, recently educated propagandists did not seem to have lived long enough to be convincing. Another factor was that the Soviet order had deprived most citizens of the mental comforts needed at a time of tumultuous change. Marxism-Leninism was always predicting the paradise of a distant future. Organised religion was pinioned by the commissar’s jackboot. Customary ideas that might otherwise have expired instead gained second wind – and there were few priests, imams or rabbis around to expose them as irrational. The trend was abetted by the sheer rapidity of urbanisation; this was a congenial trend for communist leaderships everywhere until Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia in the mid-1970s. Peasants streamed into cities to escape the collective and obtain paid employment. Attitudes were transferred from countryside and were hard to dislodge. Having evacuated the space reserved for religion, communist officials witnessed it being filled by notions which predated the spread of Christianity to Russia.

 

PART THREE

DEVELOPMENT

1929–1947

 

14. WORLD STRATEGY

The jettisoning of the New Economic Policy in 1928 helped to buoy up the revolutionary radicalism of Soviet foreign policy. Comrades around the globe were ordered to adopt a more militant posture and ‘world revolution’ returned to Comintern’s immediate agenda. Europe became the main arena; the prize was the spread of communism. It was a fissile situation, and no leading Bolshevik in the Soviet Union felt any comfort while so little was being done to promote revolution abroad. The policy of the ‘united labour front’ was thrown out. Instead the Politburo instructed its people in Comintern to treat the rest of the European labour movement – social-democrats and socialists – as the mortal enemies of communism. Communists were to refer to them as ‘social-fascists’. The Sixth Congress of Comintern endorsed the ‘turn to the left’ in summer 1928. The October Revolution had initiated the first period, which was characterised by revolutionary upsurge. The second period, beginning with the defeat of the Red Army at the battle of Warsaw, had witnessed the ‘relative stabilisation’ of capitalism. Proclaiming the start of a ‘Third Period’, Stalin maintained that the prospects for revolution had suddenly improved. Comintern was told to instruct its member parties accordingly. The final, decisive struggle with world imperialism was heralded.

Many communist leaders in Europe were only too eager to follow Comintern’s new line. They had entered their parties hoping to reproduce the achievements of Bolshevism in Russia, and their detestation of social-democrats and socialists was visceral. They relished the opportunity to prove their credentials as revolutionaries. Although the fact that they accepted orders and money from Moscow occasionally embarrassed them,1 they took pride in the general connection with the USSR. Responding to critics in December 1929, the Czechoslovak communist leader Klement Gottwald declared: ‘We go to Moscow to learn from the Russian Bolsheviks how to wring your necks!’²

Yet official policy continued to pull in more than a single direction. Stalin still aspired to the construction of ‘socialism in one country’ and badly needed commercial ties with the advanced capitalist countries if he was going to sell Soviet grain abroad and buy foreign technology and expertise for industrialisation. Peace between the USSR and the great powers was essential and the People’s Commissariat for External Trade sought out suppliers of the machinery required by the five-year plans. Stalin, however, simultaneously insisted on absolutely every communist party striving for a speedy revolution in its country. He disguised this by getting Comintern to give the appropriate orders. Perhaps Stalin calculated that world capitalism was so rotten that it was about to tumble to the ground and that the USSR would acquire its needed machinery from new revolutionary states. Politburo members were constantly gauging the revolutionary prospects in Europe. The question never absent from their minds was what measures would help in this direction without endangering the interests of the USSR. Doubtless factional considerations also prompted Stalin to be bold: if he wanted to remove the Bukharinists he needed a rationale in the shape of a new policy.

The General Secretary was the despair of his specialists in international relations. He did not go abroad after the October Revolution except when on campaign in the Polish–Soviet War in 1920; and his earlier trips before the Great War had been few and of short duration. Georgi Chicherin, who was External Affairs People’s Commissar until 1930, expressed his concern: ‘How good it would be if you, Stalin, were to change your appearance and travel abroad for a certain time with a genuine interpreter rather than a tendentious one. Then you’d see the reality!’3 Chicherin, despite being a former Menshevik who depended on the Politburo’s appreciation of his professional competence, did not worry about being sacked. He regarded it as dangerous nonsense to denounce the other socialists as ‘social-fascists’, and he made the Soviet leadership aware of his opinion.⁴

The idea got around that Stalin left foreign policy to others while he himself focused on internal party manoeuvres and on the USSR’s economic transformation. He did not head Comintern, and the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs appeared to create foreign policy. In fact no one dared to take an initiative without consulting Stalin – and this included Politburo members.⁵ Comintern was no less tightly supervised. Osip Pyatnitski as Secretary to the Executive Committee and then, from 1935, Georgi Dimitrov as Secretary-General dutifully carried out the orders from the Kremlin. Dimitrov had made his name as a brave defendant in a trial held by the Third Reich in Leipzig in 1933. On release from prison in 1934, he was given Soviet citizenship and political asylum in Moscow. He never allowed Comintern to flout the Politburo’s official line. The same was true of the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs under Chicherin’s successor Maxim Litvinov, who had co-operated with Stalin in the Bolshevik bank robberies before the First World War. But Stalin was no sentimentalist. If Litvinov was going to influence the shaping of foreign policy he needed to persuade Stalin and the Politburo of his case.

Not that Pyatnitski, Dimitrov or Litvinov failed to speak their minds to power. This indeed was their assigned function. With their factual knowledge and technical expertise they were expected to sound alarms and suggest initiatives. But when the Politburo had settled on a policy, they were just as firmly expected to implement it without complaint. They were treated more as senior technicians than as politicians who could determine the course of Soviet diplomacy or world communist activity.

Stalin and his cronies retained their internationalist perspective while giving their greatest attention to the political and economic tasks of the first and second five-year plans. They had been brought up this way as Marxists. They were also thinking pragmatically – and people at the time and afterwards failed to recognise this. The Soviet leadership understood very well that, until the USSR ended its isolation, it would remain vulnerable to invasion by capitalist states. All through the 1920s they had feared that the great powers would arm and let loose Poland, Finland or Romania against them. Until the USSR could compete in military and industrial strength, Soviet diplomacy would continue to be hobbled. It made sense to direct efforts at building up military and economic strength. (Not that the murderous methods of Stalinist industrialisation were necessary or justifiable.) It was also reasonable for Comintern to search out opportunities for revolutionary upsurge in Europe and elsewhere. If Germany could be destabilised and thrust towards communist revolution, the end of the USSR’s political quarantine would come into sight. What is more, Comintern’s activities were not very costly: Moscow could supply subsidies, party schools and advisers without excessive expenditure. Not for the first time after the October Revolution the Soviet leadership was riding two horses at once.

Years of condescension by the party’s intellectuals were flaking away as Stalin’s supremacy was confirmed. Even before his demotion from the Executive Committee of Comintern, Bukharin was demoralised, and in July 1928 he wrote to Stalin: ‘I don’t wish to and won’t fight.’6 Not all Comintern functionaries were so craven. Trying to protect the ‘rightists’, Jules Humbert-Droz contended that Stalin’s speeches had ‘the same relation to the truth as to say that two and two make five’. Angelo Tasca, an Italian communist of independent mind, pronounced that Stalin was ‘the standard bearer of counter-revolution’.7 Both were removed from positions of any influence. It was not only Bukharin’s supporters who were aghast. György Lukács in Moscow exile and Antonio Gramsci in an Italian prison protested at the neglect of slogans demanding democratic reforms in Europe.⁸ Talk of revolutionary vanguards and insurrections was all very well, but thoughtful Marxists understood that the chances of early success were no greater than they had been in the mid-1920s. Stalin, however, was sure about what he wanted to do. He did not want a loyal opposition: he wanted no opposition at all. He wanted total victory and removed Bukharin from the Executive Committee of Comintern in April 1929.

Whenever foreign communists would not recognise him as the new boss, he cast them out into the wilderness. The leading supporters of Bukharin were dislodged from their parties. Only a full recantation of ‘right-deviationist’ ideas could save them – and even this was not always enough. Identifiable Bukharinists were removed from Comintern’s posts in Moscow. No factional allegiance was tolerated except to his own side in the Kremlin’s disputes. Stalin’s personal supremacy was internationalised.

Three months later he had objective grounds for believing that global politics were moving in communism’s favour. In October 1929, after chaotic weeks of trading in the world’s stock markets, panic broke out among American brokers and bankers. Shares were frantically sold off, debts peremptorily called in. The result was the Wall Street Crash. National economies around the globe were convulsed and President Herbert Hoover, hero of famine relief in Europe after the First World War, had no practical ideas about how to ensure an American recovery. The world capitalist order was driven into a crippling depression. Stalin had already radicalised communist world strategy before the Crash. It looked as if his gamble was paying off. Communist parties everywhere expected to benefit from the global financial crisis. The calculation was a simple one: the worse the situation, the better the prospects of revolution. Germany, which had always been the focus of Bolshevik hopes, was worse hit than any other advanced economy. German unemployment and inflation rocketed. Wages failed to cover living expenses; the cities suppurated with discontent. Comintern relished the growing opportunities. Hitler and the Nazis were treated as a symptom of capitalism’s rottenness, not as a force which might stave off the advance of communism on power.

Both Trotski after being deported to Turkey in 1929 and Bukharin deposited into disgrace in Moscow had disagreed with each other about Soviet foreign policy throughout the 1920s. But as veteran observers of global politics they concurred about the flaws in the thinking of Stalin and the Politburo. Mussolini, according to them, was bad enough but Hitler would be even worse. Trotski and Bukharin properly appreciated the dangers of fascist and other extreme-right politics in Europe; they foresaw that, if Hitler ever came to power, his first action would be to suppress the German Communist Party and arrest its militants. They were right that Stalin’s insouciance about the Nazis was a stupendous blunder. Trotski also noted that Stalin’s foreign policy in no way involved abandoning the commitment to building ‘socialism in one country’. He was right: the Politburo continued to give priority to Soviet state security and to rule out foreign adventures by the Red Army in advance. What Trotski – and indeed Bukharin – failed to discern was that Stalin did not discount Germany’s potential to disrupt international security and political stability in Europe. Unlike Stalin, however, they understood that communists would have a hard time under Nazism. They therefore urged that every effort should be made to thwart Hitler’s accession to power.

Then the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931. There was consternation in the USSR as Tokyo’s rulers established a puppet regime and set up their Kwantung Army on the newly conquered territory. The fear was that Japan had its eyes fixed on the natural resources of Siberia and could at any time throw its forces across the Manchurian border. Worries about the Far East remained a constant factor in the Soviet leadership’s decisions through to the early weeks of the Second World War.

Right-wing organisations including fascists were on the rise in central and eastern Europe. Hitler’s Nazi Party, whose popularity had been dipping, benefited from German economic depression. Yet Stalin instructed Comintern to command the communist parties to concentrate their fire on the other parties of the left. No trace of solidarity was to remain. Socialist, social-democratic and labour parties were to be denounced as promoters of ‘social-fascism’. This was extremist language and dangerous politics. The policy of the ‘united labour front’, which enjoined communists to proselytise among the rank-and-file members of the other parties of the political left, was abandoned. Instead of arranging a combined preventive attack on Nazism, Stalin diverted the German Communist Party into vilifying potential allies. Street battles between the communists and the social-democrats were not uncommon in Berlin. Several German communist leaders were uneasy about the new policy but Stalin told them not to worry. His prediction was that, if ever the Nazis came to power, they would rip up the treaty of Versailles and cause a political crisis across Europe. This, Stalin suggested, would create a revolutionary situation for communists to exploit. Thus the Nazis would act inadvertently as facilitators of communist revolution: history was on the side of Comintern and the working class.

The German communists called loudly for a general strike. In a period when workers feared being laid off as the economy suffered depression, this was not a policy with wide appeal. In April 1929, when the party issued its first summons for such a strike, the labour force of only one factory (which made chocolates) downed tools. Things were hardly better for communists in later years even though party membership grew in number. Communism in Germany marched into a strategic impasse.

At the end of 1932 the Nazis emerged as the biggest party at the national election. Although they failed to gain an absolute majority, Hitler put pressure on President Hindenburg to make him Germany’s Chancellor. This duly occurred on 30 January 1933. The USSR had had cordial relations with fascist Italy despite Mussolini’s persecution of the Italian Communist Party; but the Third Reich was different. The Nazis did not seek friendship with Stalin. Hitler withdrew from the secret military collaboration with the USSR that had continued since the treaty of Rapallo in 1922. He restricted economic ties. The German Communist Party was suppressed and its leaders thrown into concentration camps. Hitler continued to inveigh against ‘Judaeo-Bolshevism’. Yet Comintern went on concentrating on vilifying European socialists for their ‘class collaboration’ with the bourgeoisie. As the spectre of fascism had assumed bodily form at the heart of Europe, the German Communist Party merely polemicised with fellow parties on the left. Germany and its working class, according to the Marxist-Leninist prognosis, still offered the greatest chance of a successful revolutionary regime. Stalin and the Politburo were guilty of a total poverty of the political imagination, and they bore the principal responsibility for stopping parties on the political left from forming a united front.

People’s Commissar Litvinov considered that something drastic had to be done to end the USSR’s international isolation. The danger of a German crusade was too obvious to be ignored and Litvinov as a Jew was acutely aware of Nazi racialism. His position was shared by Secretary-General Georgi Dimitrov in Comintern. They badgered Stalin with requests to alter European policy. Individuals in the French and Czechoslovak parties had urged the same thing after Hitler outlawed the Communist Party of Germany in March 1933. They were told to keep quiet.9 Yet they could not permanently be treated this way if international communism was to have any serious influence. France and Czechoslovakia had Comintern’s biggest parties outside the USSR and China. Both had borders with Germany and their communist leaders and their militants did not want to share the fate of the German comrades.¹⁰ Change at last started to come from below when, in February 1934, the militants of the communist and socialist parties combined in Paris to organise a general strike against the spread of fascist activity to France. Discipline was breaking down among the communists, and by then there was nothing that French Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez could do to stop the co-operation.

Unless Stalin could be persuaded, however, nobody could tamper with policy for the USSR and Comintern. The change came at last in September 1934, when he took the Soviet Union into the League of Nations. This was a complete turnabout. Previously the communist position had been that the League was merely an organisation whereby the capitalist powers victorious in the Great War secured their global dominance. Now Stalin ordered his diplomats to seek co-operation with such powers with a view to limiting the further expansion of the influence of Germany and Japan. Collective security became his slogan. Diplomatic overtures were made to all states concerned about the spread of fascism and militarism in Europe and Asia.

The implications for Comintern were profound. Instead of haranguing socialists and social-democrats as traitors to the labour movement, communists were to seek them as allies. Liberals too were to be approached. A way had to be found for all anti-fascist parties to unite their efforts. Italy and Germany were already a lost cause, but the French Communist Party – at Stalin’s instigation – concluded a pact with socialists and liberals for the formation of a Popular Front in July 1935. This was not just a reheated dish of the ‘united labour front’ policy of the 1920s.¹¹ The idea was that French communists should work with their socialist partners at every level. They would enter electoral pacts with them and even governments. They were to moderate ‘class struggle’. Obviously this would involve ceasing to refer to socialists as social-fascists. The Third Period was over; ultra-leftism in communist parties was disowned. Italy and Germany had gone fascist; France had to be saved from the same fate. Addressing the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in August 1935, Georgi Dimitrov defined fascism as ‘the open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital’.

At last the message went forth that Hitler and Mussolini represented a terrifying political order without precedent. Soviet politicians continued to treat the fascist dictators as the playthings of economic forces and to predict the imminent end of capitalism, but the new policy recognised the practical need for allies; and the USSR aligned itself with all those in Europe willing to fight fascism wherever it raised its head. Delegates to the Comintern congress found it hard to switch their ideas overnight but found a way of obfuscating this in their speeches. Several leaders were anyway relieved that the change had been made. Palmiro Togliatti, resident in Moscow exile after fleeing Italy in 1926, wrote eloquently in support of popular fronts. As a victim of Mussolini he needed no one to explain to him how pernicious a right-wing dictatorship might become to the labour movement.12

While focusing on matters of diplomacy and security, Stalin also had an economic dimension in mind. He talked publicly as if he was introducing industrial autarky; he never mentioned the Soviet state’s purchases abroad. In reality he and the Politburo knew that technological self-reliance could only be a long-term objective. The USSR depended on being able to buy from the countries of advanced capitalism. It sold its grain and natural resources abroad so as to be able to pay its bills on time; and Western companies were more than willing to do business. The Wall Street Crash had shattered the world economy, and Stalin’s eagerness to trade was a godsend to American industry. Ford Motors transferred equipment and expertise for the construction of the immense automotive works in Nizhni Novgorod by the River Volga.¹³ The new city of Magnitogorsk had its main plant designed by the McKee Corporation in Cleveland, Ohio.¹⁴ Having failed to tempt the Nobel Oil Company back to Azerbaijan during the New Economic Policy, the Politburo induced European and American companies to assist with renovating the Baku refineries and starting up production near Ufa.¹⁵ Thus the USSR was tied into the world economy. Underlying the global political struggle between capitalism and communism was the contest between capitalists competing with each other to enable communist economic development.

And so Americans replaced Germans as Stalin’s principal economic facilitators.16 The businessmen themselves kept quiet about this. Being anti-communist in their own politics, they did not want to be seen as soft on the world’s first communist state. Although they wanted to advance themselves as Stalin’s little helpers, they did not want anyone noticing. Their wishes were respected by President F. D. Roosevelt. From the White House he smoothed the path towards diplomatic recognition of the USSR.

A Franco-Soviet pact had been signed in May 1935. Comintern and the French Communist Party saw these developments as the beginning of genuine collective security in Europe. Yet the international situation continued to worsen. When Italian leader Benito Mussolini conquered Abyssinia in October 1935, the League of Nations blustered a lot but remained a mere spectator. Comintern reinforced its policy of popular fronts across Europe. Communist parties were instructed to form alliances that would enable countries to stand strong against the expansionism of the Third Reich. The policy had its most notable success in France. National elections gave it a stunning victory in May 1936 and the socialist Léon Blum formed a cabinet. The French Communist Party refused to supply ministers but, with its seventy-two elected representatives, regularly supported him in the Chamber of Deputies. It also sought to put a stop to industrial conflict. When a vast strike movement erupted that summer, communists preached the need for negotiations. It was a highly volatile situation. Nearly two million workers were on strike by June and there were many occupations of factories. Yet Thorez held the line that the supreme priority was to sustain Blum in power. Revolutionary action was forbidden. ‘One must’, explained Thorez, ‘know how to terminate a strike.’¹⁷

Then in July 1936 a civil war broke out in Spain when General Franco brought his rebel forces over from Africa and began his steady advance on Madrid. Blum’s desire was to send arms to the Spanish government. Pressure, however, was brought to bear upon him. It was made clear in the Chamber of Deputies that such national unity as had been achieved would collapse if he took sides in Spain. The British government too warned against active involvement for fear of drawing the Germans and Italians into active assistance for Franco. London and Paris consequently declared their diplomatic neutrality and erected an arms embargo (although Blum secretly allowed military supplies across the Franco-Spanish border).¹⁸ This self-restraint had no impact on Hitler and Mussolini, who more or less openly sent forces to Franco’s aid. Comintern, which had been urging co-operation among the parties of the left, expressed disgust at what it denounced as Blum’s fecklessness. The Madrid government rallied support from the country’s left-wing organisations, including the minuscule communist party, to throw back Franco’s advance. Faced with the prospect of a third fascist state on France’s borders and the collapse of the policy of European collective security, Stalin sent tanks, fighter aircraft, guns and military advisers;19 and Comintern encouraged the formation of international brigades of volunteers to strengthen the cause. Madrid was saved and the Spanish Communist Party experienced a sharp growth in membership and influence.

The communist leaders agreed with the liberal Republicans and the bulk of the Socialist Party that the war effort had to take precedence over all other ambitions; they repudiated the revolutionary priorities of the anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT (National Labour Confederation) and the quasi-Trotskyists of the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). Strict military and political discipline was imposed. And Stalin took the drive for centralisation of the war effort still further by ordering the Spanish Communist Party to conduct a violent purge of the POUM. Thus he relocated the methods, if not the scale, of the Great Terror of the USSR to Iberian soil.²⁰ Trotski fulminated against such barbarity. He also condemned Comintern and the French Communist Party for failing to strive for revolution in France in mid-1936. Trotski, as usual, overestimated the likelihood of success. If the communists had adopted an insurrectionary strategy, they would have isolated themselves on the French political left. Unlike Russia in 1917, France did not have an overwhelming mass of the industrial working class in favour of a seizure of power. Trotski was correct, though, in highlighting Stalin’s caution. He rightly asked what kind of situation was ever going to induce Comintern to sanction a communist uprising. Comintern had long ceased to answer his criticisms. Its apparatus was the handmaiden of Soviet security interests. Anti-fascism had replaced socialist revolution as its immediate strategic objective.

Yet Stalin had grounds to conclude that neither the European democracies nor the USA had the nerve to stand up to Hitler. Franco’s army seized the main cities one by one, and the result by February 1939 was the overthrow of the government and the assumption of power by Franco. Hitler shook off all restraint. In November 1936 Germany and Japan had signed a treaty aimed against international communism, and Italy joined them in the following year. This Anti-Comintern Pact, as it was known, was dedicated to extirpating communist influence around the world. Events in central Europe had yet greater immediate importance as the Third Reich expanded its power and its borders with impunity. It had started by reoccupying the demilitarised Rhineland in March 1936. Austria was annexed in March 1938. Britain and France, victors in the Great War, made concession after concession to Nazi demands. Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier agreed in Munich in September 1938 to consign Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to the Third Reich. Hitler devoured the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. His anti-Soviet writings and speeches treated Moscow as the centre of a Judaeo-Bolshevik world conspiracy allied to Wall Street’s financial interests.

The occupation of the Sudetenland was one act of appeasement too many for Comintern, and the French Communist Party withdrew its support for the Daladier government and organised a general strike in November.21 The policy of popular fronts in Europe lay in pieces. The dream of collective security in Europe was defunct: the liberal democracies had been put to the test by Nazi diplomacy-by-ultimatum and found wanting.

Stalin and his subordinates were becoming desperate about the security of the USSR. At the governmental level it had no reliable allies and faced threats from east and west; and the Kremlin had to assume that the great powers might turn a blind eye if the USSR was invaded by Germany or Japan. Communism in Europe was noisy but ineffectual in its efforts to gain power. Its greatest impact – in France, Britain and the USA – was in influencing the general climate of opinion without standing a chance of forming a government. This is not to say that the more distant parties of Comintern went into oblivion. Chinese communists had undertaken their Long March to the country’s north and were assembling a formidable Red Army. The Communist Party of India was prominent in the agitation against British rule. In Vietnam and the rest of Indochina the anti-colonial struggle was bolstered by communist participation. Comintern had affiliated parties throughout Latin America, and organisations were sprouting even across Africa. But this was treasure for tomorrow, not for today. The USSR was at the centre of the world communist movement. It would stand or fall because of what was done by the great powers on earth, and its vulnerability to assault had not diminished since the 1920s despite the increase in Soviet military and industrial capacity.

Politburo members including Stalin still believed in the superiority of communism over rival state orders. They went on professing that their kind of revolution was an inevitable denouement around the world. Their achievements were impressive. Much had been accomplished since 1928 to build up the USSR’s industrial, educational and military might – and the Soviet leaders were not in the least troubled by the price paid in human losses. Business transactions, especially with American firms, had been numerous and successful. Even so, ‘history’ was proving too laggardly for Soviet interests. The USSR remained a beleaguered state. But the Politburo under Stalin could reasonably claim to be conducting foreign affairs as Lenin would have done. Stalin himself, furthermore, was forever citing the Leninist recommendation to stay out of any war among the principal capitalist states. The USSR was not going to ‘pull the chestnuts’ out of the fire for capitalism. Stalin also repeated – and firmly believed in – Lenin’s prediction of an unending sequence of world wars until such time as capitalism was overthrown. He lived and breathed the dangers confronting the USSR.

 

15. STALINIST IDEOLOGY

Marxist-Leninist ideology in the Stalin years was extremely crude. But it was a house with many rooms. Stalin and his propagandists intended to appeal to the scientist and the worker, the engineer and the milkmaid, the Uzbek party functionary and the recruit to communism in France, India or the USA, so space was deliberately left at the margins for diverse interpretation and adaptation. They were successful in their own time in appealing to millions of people; and, in amended versions, basic features of the ideology were relayed to subsequent generations in the USSR and other communist states.

The constitution of 1936 categorised the Soviet Union as a ‘socialist state of workers and peasants’ issuing from ‘the overthrow of the landlords and capitalists’. The clauses were unceasingly vaunted by the propagandists. Foreign commentators – there were of course no unofficial commentators in Moscow – failed to notice that the constitution avoided saying whether the Soviet Union remained a dictatorship. They also ignored the fact that Stalin, when introducing the document, emphasised that dictatorial methods brought benefit to the people. This inattentiveness was regrettable but unsurprising while Stalin and his spokesmen went about highlighting the claim that the exploitation of man by man had ceased in the USSR. The rights of Soviet citizens were painted in the brightest colours. The constitution upheld freedom of speech, religious conscience, the press, assembly and street demonstrations. Citizens were guaranteed rights to employment (at a time when the world’s other economies were hit by the Great Depression), education, rest and leisure. There was a pledge of universal suffrage and secret ballot. Spokesmen boasted that the USSR’s people enjoyed guarantees which elsewhere could only be dreamed about – a paradise on earth was being created without the need for divine intervention.

In fact the constitution did not even enshrine principles of democracy. None of its articles used the term even once. Mainly it was gullible foreigners who said Stalin stood for democratic ideas or practices. Only the article about the right to employment reflected reality. The authorities, as every worker or peasant had cause to rue, had a bottomless ingenuity in finding work for people.

Fundamental for Soviet ideology was the official history of the communist party which was published to fanfares in 1938. Pravda carried excerpts daily. This Short Course gave an account of communism from Marx and Engels to the show trials of 1936–7 and covered history, politics, economics and philosophy. Stalin himself wrote the lengthy sub-chapter on ‘dialectical materialism’. The book was intended as the Bible of the regime. People were expected to read the chapters at home after work.1 (This was rather like early Protestants studying the New Testament.) It became conventional to present a copy as a rite of passage. Students finishing school or university would be given one inscribed with comradely injunctions. No one with ambition could afford to be without the book. Stalin’s idea was that the chapters would provide everyone except professional ideologists with access to a sufficient understanding of communist purposes. Tens of millions of copies were printed in smart aubergine covers and on decent paper. Instant translations into the world’s main languages were prepared. Comintern proclaimed the work as the highest pinnacle of wisdom; nobody could remain in any of its parties without acknowledging the Short Course as the crystal-clear fount of revolutionary analysis.

Contrary to today’s conventional assumptions, the book itself did not entirely lack subtlety. Stress was placed on the need for communists to weigh up policies in the light of changing situations. Marxism, it was asserted, required flexibility of theory and practice. What was suitable for one historical situation was not automatically applicable to another. The proportions in Marxism-Leninism’s mixture had to be adjusted from generation to generation. Organisation, slogans, class struggle and international relations had to be adapted to circumstances which would require constant reconsideration by the communist leadership. Although the October Revolution in Russia was to be regarded as the greatest event in the liberation of humankind the supreme goal had yet to be attained: the spreading of the communist order to the entire world.² Evidently there had to be limits to Soviet self-congratulation in this primary text of the official doctrines of world communism. It had been written for all the parties of Comintern. Attentive readers who wanted to believe the best in pronouncements issuing from Moscow persuaded themselves to put their trust in Stalin. And they had to suspend their doubting faculties at the same time.

Stalin, like Lenin, anyhow denied that the premises of doctrine were liable to reconsideration. Capital was said to be infallible and, although layers of polish might be added in the light of subsequent development, the original furniture was said to be the absolute truth. The passage from Marx to Stalin via Lenin was treated as the only line of legitimate succession in Marxism.

It had become obligatory to acknowledge Stalin’s wondrousness. The French writer André Gide wanted to send him a friendly telegram from the south Caucasus: ‘Travelling to Gori in the course of our marvellous trip, I feel the need from the bottom of my heart to address you . . .’ His Soviet translator interrupted him. Stalin could not be addressed merely as ‘you’. Gide was told he should add a phrase such as ‘leader of the workers’ or ‘teacher of the peoples’. The telegram would not be sent unless he touched it up. (When he returned home he found that Soviet journalists had meddled with his spoken and written words without permission on many occasions.)3 Soviet citizens, of course, could not quibble like Gide. Although Stalin affected to resent all the adulation and asked for the number of references to him in the Short Course to be reduced, this was just a pretence. It is true that the Short Course quoted him less frequently than Marx and Lenin,⁴ but no doubt was left that ‘Stalin is the Lenin of today.’ He was treated as the perfect exemplar of the human species. As builder of the Soviet state order since 1928, he had no rival. Communists were taught that ‘Stalin, the party and the masses’ were linked by their zeal to help communism to mount the heights of revolutionary achievement.

The rise of communism in Russia was told as a saga of continuous struggle. False prophets had arisen one after another seeking to divert true socialists from the path of truth and virtue. Russian Marxists had had to contend with those socialists – the narodniki – who wanted to found socialism on an idealised concept of peasant life. Then the Marxists of Russia fell into internal dispute. Lenin’s Bolsheviks attacked the perfidious Mensheviks led by Martov. The Bolsheviks themselves had their own disputes stretching through to 1917 when Lenin, aided by Stalin, saw off the oppositionists who opposed the seizure of power. Through the ensuing years the pattern was repeated as a succession of groups tried to overturn correct Leninist policy. The alleged offenders were Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin. Their hostility to the dual leadership of Lenin and Stalin put them in league with anti-Soviet foreign powers, and they worked consciously for the restoration of capitalism. Stalin’s courage and wisdom had saved the USSR from perdition. Everything was light against darkness. In politics there could only be one correct line at any given time. Communists were put on alert that enemies of the people, including those disguised as communists, were everywhere. Vigilance had to be constant.

Stalin contended that the ‘dialectical materialism’ of Marx and Engels was not simply an irrefutable mode of understanding society in the past, present and future – and this in itself was a gigantic claim – but was also the compass necessary to guide research in the natural sciences. The Soviet contention was that communist-inspired science was inherently superior to its Western rivals.5

The Teacher of the Peoples did not leave things at that. Despite having no training in the natural sciences, he issued rulings on genetics. He favoured the scientific charlatan Timofei Lysenko, who was trying to breed a fresh species of wheat by exposing seeds to the cold of the Russian winter. Lysenko upheld the idea that plants could adapt themselves to virtually any conditions, acquire new characteristics and pass them on to the next generation.⁶ This way of thinking in the natural sciences gelled with how Stalin thought about humanity and about its potential for transformation. Outstanding genuine biologists such as Nikolai Vavilov perished in labour camps as counter-revolutionaries. Stalin later also laid down that Einstein’s theory of relativity was ‘bourgeois mystification’. Hitler did the same but held back from persecuting German scientists – so long as they were not Jews – who followed in Einstein’s footsteps. Stalin treated any support for relativity theory as conniving at the overthrow of the Soviet order. When Beria pleaded after the Second World War that Soviet physicists needed Einstein’s equations in order to make a nuclear bomb, Stalin made the magnanimous concession: ‘Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.’⁷

The physical environment was to be conquered. Lenin had postulated that a country’s economic development had to proceed by building up the capital-goods sector of industry. This meant that the demands of consumers had to be delayed and priority had to be given to the machine-tool sector. Lathes, tractors, trucks and tanks were the criterion of successful industrialisation. The output of iron, steel, nickel and gold needed to be maximised. Stalin’s name derived from the Russian word for steel, Molotov’s from the word for hammer. Metal was turned into an object of veneration. Ecological concerns were ignored. The USSR was not the first or last state where this happened. Yet the intensity of its commitment to industrial development regardless of the consequences was unique. The Soviet precedent was to become a template for later communist states. Forests were cut down indiscriminately. Factories belched out noxious smoke to the skies. Dams were built and rivers diverted to the detriment of the local habitat. Poisonous liquids were leached into the water courses.

Official propaganda occluded this by publishing wonderful scenes of clean rivers, virgin birchwoods and snow tigers. It also stressed that human interests were being looked after. State welfare had supposedly rendered obsolete the whole idea of charity. The giving of money to beggars was therefore prohibited. André Gide noted that the ban was ignored. People simply could not understand why they should withhold compassion from the unfortunates who approached them for help.8 They found it less easy to avoid the demands made upon them at their place of work. Pravda editorials praised the unforced devotion of workers and peasants who ‘chose’ to toil to the point of exhaustion. Citizens were expected to sacrifice their comforts for the benefit of generations as yet unborn. Elementary safety precautions lapsed. The health of the workforce was neglected for the good of the cause. The press did not comment on this; it carried no material about how to prevent accidents – and if mention was made of them, they were routinely ascribed to acts of sabotage. Fulfilment of the quotas specified in the five-year plans was designated as the supreme goal. Animate and inanimate nature, including living human beings, had become merely a resource for exploitation.

If the USSR had not been so immense in territory and so rich in resources, the communist leadership might have faced up to the damaging effects – and then perhaps the experiment would not have been repeated in eastern Europe after 1945. Instead the ecological devastation was often distant from the main cities. Ambitious local officials knew that their promotion – and physical survival in the late 1930s – depended on their hitting the targets of the five-year plans. Lodged in the core of Marxist-Leninist ideas, it was to be transmitted to communists in later generations everywhere. The assumption was that a country should ruthlessly exploit whatever natural assets it possessed. The authorities admitted that progress would involve human hardship. Much had yet to be achieved. Many ‘mistakes’ and ‘excesses’ had been recorded but, as communists used to put it, ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking an egg.’ Traditional morality was to be abandoned. Communists should strive for seemingly impossible ends. ‘There are no fortresses’, Stalin declared in 1931, ‘we Bolsheviks cannot storm.’⁹

Stalin – and Lenin before him – had stripped off many of communism’s utopian vestments. Hierarchy, discipline and punishment had become the keystones of the Soviet order. And yet even in the 1930s the authorities went on encouraging the belief that a perfect world was eventually attainable. Millenarian ideas stuck like burrs to communism. The current difficulties were ascribed to the external and internal forces ranged against the party. If perfection was not yet achieved, apparently it was not the fault of Bolshevik doctrines, analysis and practices. Christians awaiting the Second Coming of Jesus Christ in the weeks after his ascension had had to cope with the same jolt to their expectation. As their initial disappointment gave way to an acceptance that the timing of Christ’s return was unpredictable, they did not abandon faith: Christ would indeed come again. Groups of Christians in subsequent centuries convinced themselves that the moment was imminent. Communists behaved similarly. They had a certainty that their analysis and policies were blessed by the omniscient contributions of the Marxist classics. They believed they were special people. The world communist movement was a gathering of the select enlightened few. The parties might make occasional mistakes in practice but the fundamental line of historical development was fixed, and the future lay with communism.

These were not the only aspects reminiscent of early Christianity. At the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 the bishops of the Church determined which books should be included in the Holy Bible. Several gospels then in circulation were ruled inauthentic or inappropriate. Thus the New Testament was assembled, and it has remained undisturbed in this shape to the present day.

A similar process occurred in Moscow in the 1930s. Certain works of Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin and Stalin were inserted into the canon. As it happens, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism was in possession of a vastly bigger cache of original texts. A call had been put out to gather every single thing written by Lenin. Even his holiday postcards were to be jealously preserved. The Bolshevik scholar David Ryazanov, who knew his Marx as well as anyone, was sent to Amsterdam to negotiate the purchase of the literary legacy of Marx and Engels. Not everything he found in Moscow and Amsterdam was acceptable to the official party line. Lenin had written much that was critical of Stalin. Marx had written newspaper pieces that repudiated the Russian role in international relations in the mid-nineteenth century whereas Stalin was increasingly showing sympathy with the statecraft of the Romanovs. Stalin’s Marxologists also knew better than to publish the Grundrisse which Marx had drafted in 1857–8. The Grundrisse was a philosophical treatise stressing the supreme priority of creating a society wherein individuals could develop to their full human potential without external coercion. In the USSR of the Great Terror this would not have been music to the Leader’s ears.

Official Marxism was emptying the minds of its adherents and then filling them with its potent tincture. (And Trotskyism, despite castigating ‘the Stalinist school of historical falsification’, did little to alter the essential ingredients.) Marx, Engels and Lenin had declared themselves children of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and affirmed their commitment to science and reason; they savaged rival ideologies, including socialist ones, as being based on implausible premises. Marxists liked to brandish their scientific credentials. Yet there had always been a suspicion that the founders of Marxism themselves, while castigating metaphysical modes of thought as reactionary, were imbued with religiosity of a secular kind. Brought up in the Judaeo-Christian traditions, they never fully left them behind. They remained unconsciously influenced by religious ideas about the perfect future society and the salvation of humanity. They were fixed in their godless faith as solidly as any Jewish or Christian believer. Lenin treated Marx and, to a slightly lesser extent, Engels as infallible progenitors of an omniscient world-view; and any criticism of their works and activities were treated by Leninists as a cardinal political offence. Soviet communists quoted excerpts from books by Marx, Engels and Lenin after the fashion of religious people with their sacred texts.

The mind of Stalin himself was deeply impregnated with the religiosity he had imbibed with his mother’s milk. Although he trained for the priesthood, he lived in a milieu where people blended their formal Christianity with older ideas such as belief in wood spirits, witchcraft and nocturnal maleficence. Good had to be protected, if necessary by magic spells, against attack by dark forces.

Typical of this mentality was the notion that the appearance of people and things could be deceptive. Reality could be other than it seemed, and every decent person had to be wary of being fooled. Trickery was on the loose everywhere. This outlook, handed down from generation to generation in peasant families in Russia as well as Georgia, was reproduced in Marxist language in the Short Course. Stalinists saw themselves as fighting in the cause of righteousness; and since many of them came from rural families it was easy for the official propaganda to take root. Stalinism was Janus-faced: in one direction it nodded towards modernity, in the other it looked fondly, albeit unknowingly, at the ancient past. Opponents were never mere opponents but were agents in the pay of foreign powers. Their only aim was to do harm to the USSR and world communism. The Short Course pulled no punches and delivered them well below the belt. The world had to be rid of them. No pity was to be shown. Stalin, still more than Lenin and Marx before him, condemned all softness and sentimentality. Communists had to be coolly analytical and determinedly merciless; they had to fulfil their responsibilities by carrying out repression without limit.

The ‘enemies of the people’, furthermore, were allegedly more dangerous after they had been politically defeated. This was one of Stalin’s few original contributions to Marxist thinking. Marxists had previously believed that as enemies went down to defeat, the passage towards communism would get easier. Stalin rejected this. For him, there was a need to establish a perpetual state of alert. Conspirators were always at work. Many of them were communist party members. He offered no proof of this. The only people brave enough to contradict him in the USSR had already been executed or were being exhausted to death in the forced-labour camps.

Opponents or critics were labelled ‘stooges’, ‘lackeys’, ‘toadies’ or ‘hirelings’;10 it was as if Stalin was stuffing official communist publications with the vocabulary of cheap historical fiction. These were words that hardly appeared in ordinary Russian speech. At the same time he used the full supply of Marxist terminology. He spoke of the ‘relations of the means of production’ when talking about the economy. He expatiated about the ‘imperialist’ powers. His descriptions of those whom he disliked drew on popular idioms: ‘disgusting’, ‘putrid’, ‘foul’, ‘vicious’. Constantly he alleged insincerity. Everyone from internal party dissenters to hostile foreign political leaders were criminals who ‘looted’, ‘assaulted’, ‘bribed’, ‘tricked’ and ‘camouflaged’ their way to power and wealth. They were ‘vermin’ or ‘swine’. They were not simply to be counteracted: they had to be ‘crushed’, ‘exterminated’, ‘liquidated’.¹¹ Stalin and his party were not alone in using language of such violence and crudity. The Nazis matched them entirely. What was different about Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism was its greater capacity to export its discourse. The world communist movement picked up the jargon developed in Moscow and employed it with little modification for consumption in the various countries.

Yet the question arises why many millions of people in the USSR and abroad were attracted to such ideas and such discourse. What seems to have been important was the balance between unpleasant crudity and uplifting promise in the propaganda. Pravda and Izvestiya in fact carried little about the Great Terror except for detailed reports of the big show trials of 1936–8. Most issues of the central newspapers instead had a picture of a young Stakhanovite factory worker or a record-breaking milkmaid. Obviously the authorities, while expunging ‘enemies of the people’, wanted to concentrate on the positive future heralded for the country. This was accomplished with cleverness. Arctic explorers, longdistance aviators and leading sportsmen were celebrated even more eagerly than party officials and NKVD chiefs. Efforts were made to associate the regime with youthfulness, progress and modernity. Science and atheism were praised as antidotes to superstition, organised religion and outmoded custom.

This was strengthened by the output of novels and poems. Stalin put an end to the lingering diversity of cultural trends and insisted that writers should adhere to ‘socialist realism’. This concept was very vaguely formulated. But the basic requirement was that works of art should tell stories in accessible language about noble workers, engineers or party officials. Stalinist doctrine demanded uplifting themes of revolution. Books could no longer end tragically: they had to suggest that history was moving in the direction predicted by the Soviet state. Writing would no longer be allowed to be apolitical. Socialist realism was introduced at the Congress of Writers, held in the presence of Maxim Gorki, in 1934. The intention was to extend its application to all the other arts. This was easier in representative painting than in wordless music. None the less Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera, offended Stalin by its display of feminine sexuality and – just as bad – its failure to supply the public with tunes they could whistle. Shostakovich was buried in an avalanche of criticism, and compelled to repudiate his own work and promise to do better in future. More compliant figures in the cultural activity of the USSR emphasised that the genuine hero in the contemporary world was the communist who strove for better conditions for the working class. The sensibilities of the bourgeoisie were no longer a fit subject for serious art.

The campaign to eradicate illiteracy and innumeracy facilitated the dissemination of such notions. Textbooks for children and adults extolled the advances being made under the ‘wise leadership’ of ‘the Leader of the Peoples’. In some cases the entire ideology penetrated minds. In others it was the sense of successful modernisation or patriotic pride which won admirers for Stalin. The message was adjusted to particular audiences. Foreigners were assured that the internationalist purposes of Marxism-Leninism remained the fulcrum of the Politburo’s activities. (Allegedly, though, Stalin confided to his entourage that Marx and Engels had been under the excessive influence of German classic philosophy, especially Kant and Hegel.)12 But in the USSR there was a deliberate attempt to cultivate Russian national opinion. Even tsars and their generals – or at least those who were seen as having been ‘progressive’ – were restored to prestige. The October Revolution was depicted as predominantly the achievement of Russian workers, Russian soldiers and Russian peasants. The Russian nation was represented as the ‘elder brother’ of the national and ethnic groups of the USSR. Alexei Tolstoi’s novel Peter the Great and Sergei Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevski reinforced the claim that the Soviet Union had built on the best elements in the traditions of old Russia.

If there was one word which was brandished more than any others it was ‘modernity’ (sovremennost). Stalin made much of his commitment to catching up with the West and then surpassing it. The USSR was going to develop more advanced forms of technology than any yet invented, and finance, training and research would be directed at making things which met popular needs and strengthened the country’s power and prestige. Capitalism was excoriated as inherently wasteful and vulnerable to recurrent crisis. It was written about as ‘rotten’, ‘decadent’ and ‘doomed’. Cartoons in Pravda settled for stereotypes of bloated American businessmen in top hats, their pockets bulging with dollar bills and armaments. Another favourite image was of the jackbooted Nazi; usually he appeared as a feckless boaster rather than the bringer of mortal danger to the USSR: Stalin told Soviet citizens or communists that the Red Army would repulse and crush any invasion. The Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression were not an accident. Communists avoided predicting whether capitalism’s end would occur through a political revolution, a financial crash or a world war. Just one of these events could produce the conditions for the ‘transition to socialism’. The world communist movement was put on the alert that it had to be ready to seize whatever opportunity came its way.

It was not just his vision of communist modernity which Stalin used to win over the world communist movement. Marxism-Leninism since Lenin had extolled the virtues of political leadership and ruthless methods. Suitably obfuscating the dreadful realities of terror after the October Revolution, Stalin suggested to foreign communists that firm direction by a single party could make a positive impact on every country’s society. He mentioned that Russia before 1917 was economically backward and, to a large extent, was beholden to external ‘imperialist powers’ such as the United Kingdom and France. Soviet modernisation offered itself as a model of how to break free from both backwardness and colonial subjection. If the communists could do it in the former Russian Empire, why could not the same thing happen in China or Nigeria?

The claim was that the central planning modalities of the USSR had already rendered capitalism obsolete. Marxism-Leninism under Stalin did not promise a swift end to material and social inequalities. It might indeed be many years before this happened. The people had to toil, sweat and obey. Their comforts might be few in the factories, mines and collective farms, but, according to Stalin in 1935, ‘life is becoming more joyful’. Even convicts doing forced labour had good prospects according to a book published on the digging of a canal to the White Sea and Moscow. Tens of thousands of the prisoners perished on the project. But the authors contended that convict labourers were rehabilitated by working for the common good and learning the principles of Marxism. The Gulag was compared favourably with the penal system in the USA where inmates were given next to no facilities for rehabilitation. The fact that the novelist Maxim Gorki belonged to the editorial board added lustre to the book’s acclaim.13 The Soviet order from top to bottom was proclaimed as the most progressive, most humanitarian and most sincere in the world’s recorded history. Stalin applied the rule of thumb announced by Joseph Goebbels: the bigger the lie, the more influence it would have on its audience.