Stalin: A Biography

Many of the scientists, scholars and artists who thrived under Stalin were third-raters. Chairman of the USSR Writers’ Union was the talentless Alexander Fadeev, not Bulgakov or Pasternak; and it was the mediocre Tikhon Khrennikov rather than the musical genius Dmitri Shostakovich who led the USSR Union of Composers. Political reliability was what counted with the Agitprop Department of the Party Secretariat. The organisations gave the permits for individuals to function in the Soviet Union; they could make or break the careers of their members. They disposed of funds, food packs, sanatoria and holiday dachas. Their leaders — the Fadeevs and the Khrennikovs — went to social gatherings hosted by Stalin. Each Soviet republic had its own unions. The Kremlin conferred awards and medals. Not only scholars but also aviators, footballers, opera singers and even circus clowns hoped to win them. The annual Stalin Prizes brought prestige and a handsome cheque in the bank account. Stalin was the architect of this system of control and reward. He carried through the cultural revolution of his choice, and was proud of the achievements under his rule.²⁰

By 1939 about 87 per cent of Soviet citizens between the ages of nine and forty-nine were literate and numerate. Schools, newspapers, libraries and radio stations proliferated. Factory apprenticeships had hugely expanded in number. The universities teemed with students. An agrarian society had been pointed in the direction of ‘modernisation’. The cultural revolution was not restricted to the dissemination of technical skills; it was also aimed at spreading science, urbanism, industry and Soviet-style modernity. Attitudes and manners were to be transformed.²¹ Schools, newspapers and radio trumpeted this official priority. Soviet spokesmen — politicians, scholars, teachers and journalists — asserted that the USSR was a beacon of enlightenment and progress. Capitalist states were depicted as forests of ignorance, reaction and superstition. Physics, the ballet, military technology, novels, organised sport and mathematics in the USSR were touted as evidence of the progress already made.

The USSR had in many ways dragged its society out of the ruts of traditionalism. But the process was not unidirectional. Marxism–Leninism, despite its pretensions to ‘scientific analysis’, rested on assumptions inherited from earlier centuries. This was particularly true of Stalin’s way of thinking. He had never eradicated the superstitious worldview he had encountered as a small boy; and his attitudes were transferred to cultural life as a whole once he had supreme power. Official Soviet thought, consolidated in the Civil War, postulated the existence of alien, maleficent forces acting against the common weal. Conspiracies were supposedly being formed everywhere. The appearance of sincerity had always to be queried. Foreign agencies were alleged to be ubiquitous in the USSR. Such thinking did not begin with Stalin. Lenin during the Kronstadt Revolt and on other occasions had ascribed outbreaks of dissent and resistance to the activity of capitalist powers abroad. Under Stalin, though, this mode of perception became an ever more cardinal feature. The testing of political and economic assertions against empirical evidence fell into desuetude; open discussion on the scientific model ceased. Pronouncements from the Kremlin served as the regime’s kabbalah. Anyone refusing to accept the existence of fiends using diabolical methods to overturn the regime was liable to be treated as an infidel or heretic deserving summary punishment.

A corpus of magical writ was purveyed. Its texts were not the works of Marx, Engels or even Lenin. Soviet culture from the late 1930s was dominated by The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): A Short Course and the official biography of Stalin. Excerpts from both were accorded quasi-Biblical authority. Marxism–Leninism in general, and Stalin’s version of it in particular, was reproducing a mentality characteristic of peasant traditionalism. Customs in the countryside were associated with belief in spirits, demons and sorcerers. Witchcraft was a normal phenomenon and spells were regularly employed to ward off evil (or to inflict it on enemies). This syndrome suffused Stalinism and its culture. Without using the term, Stalin suggested that black magic had to be confronted if the forces of good — Marxism–Leninism, the communist party and the October Revolution — were to survive and flourish. Not every novelist, scholar or scientist went along with such idiocy. Quite the contrary: the best cultural achievements under Stalin were devoid of it. But in key sectors, especially the schools and the print and broadcast media, he could impose the pattern very effectively. Despite its achievements in twentieth-century culture, the USSR was being dragged back to older modalities of thought. Stalin, far from being the clean-limbed titan of modernity, was a village sorcerer who held his subjects in his dark thrall.

28. FEARS IN VICTORY

Even as the First Five-Year Plan had neared completion in 1932, the strains in the economy and in society were becoming intolerable. The famine deepened in Ukraine, south Russia, the north Caucasus and Kazakhstan. Rural rebellions had not been completely suppressed. Attacks on collectivisation squads, OGPU officials and local soviets continued. Having been bludgeoned into joining kolkhozes, hundreds of thousands of peasant families left the countryside rather than endure further hardship.¹ Trouble started to spread to the towns. Strikes and demonstrations against the regime were organised in the textile city of Ivanovo.²

Like Lenin in 1921, Stalin saw the need for a temporary economic retreat. The difference was that, whereas Lenin had introduced the New Economic Policy mainly for fear of a universal revolt by the peasantry, it was the workers who brought Stalin to his senses. If industrialisation were to be disrupted, the foundations of his power would be undermined. There was recognition that the problems in the towns and villages were linked. From May 1932 the peasants were permitted to trade their agricultural surplus at so-called kolkhoz markets. Between August 1932 and February 1933 the state’s planned collection quotas for grain were reduced from 18.1 to 14.9 million tons.³ The industrial component of the retreat took shape in a slackening of the tempo of capital investment during the Second Five-Year Plan. The rampant dash for expanded output in factories and mines was to be slowed.⁴ The living conditions of citizens were at last given prominence. Industrial consumer products were planned to increase by 134 per cent and agricultural output by 177 per cent in 1933–7. Housing space was to expand by two fifths.⁵ Apparently he was beginning to see sense. The objective was to avoid a second headlong dash for growth in capital projects and to consolidate the gains already won.

There was more discussion in the Politburo about industry than about agriculture. Stalin knew his mind about the countryside even though he felt the need to make concessions. Industrial policy put him in a quandary, and he listened to the debate in the Politburo as Molotov and Kaganovich argued for a slowing down against the wishes of Ordzhonikidze in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Stalin’s instincts tugged him towards Ordzhonikidze but he moved increasingly against him. At the January 1933 Central Committee plenum Stalin announced a lowering of the industrial growth target to 13–14 per cent.⁶

The pressure on society was only moderately relieved. The reduced agricultural collections did little to stave off starvation since the 1932 harvest, badly affected by the weather, was a poor one. Stalin’s concessions to the peasants had their limits; and the insistence on keeping up grain exports was maintained. The penal sanctions for disobedience were made more severe than ever. On 7 August, at his personal instigation, peasants who stole even a handful of grain became liable to the death sentence or a minimum of ten years’ imprisonment.⁷ At a time when peasants in several regions were so desperate that some turned to cannibalism, this was a decree of extraordinary ferocity even for Stalin. The yeast in the bread of reform was repression. He also instructed the OGPU to see that kulaks and ‘speculators’ did not take advantage of the concessions being made.⁸ Police, army and party were used to ensure that the basic economic and political changes introduced since 1928 would stay intact. Stalin was completely in charge of economic policy. The slightest sign of disagreement from communist leaders in Moscow or the provinces earned his instant rebuke. The result was that not once after the second half of 1932 did a fellow Politburo member dare to challenge any of his decisions.⁹

At times Stalin seemed baffled by the abuses and chaos he had caused through his policies. Writing to Kaganovich and Molotov in June 1932, he mentioned that party committees in Ukraine and the Urals were crudely dividing the centrally assigned quotas for grain procurement among the lower territorial units of each province. He asked why such committees did not take local peculiarities into account.¹⁰ But in order to fulfil the quotas imposed from Moscow there was little that provincial administrators could do but use rough and ready methods. They were only doing at the local level what Stalin was doing in the Kremlin. Being cut off from rural and administrative realities, he assumed that the problem was local incompetence or mischief.

Yet reports on the poor harvest and spreading famine caused even Stalin, comfortably on vacation by the Black Sea, to lighten Ukrainian grain collections in mid-August; and once his sanction had been secured, the Politburo halved its quotas to alleviate the hardship.¹¹ (Not that he stopped feeling let down by the