The Penguin History of Modern Russia

autumn 1929.An informer denounced them and they were expelled from the Central Committee.³⁴ In 1932 another group was formed by Mikhail Ryutin, who sought Stalin’s removal from power; and yet another group coalesced under A. P. Smirnov, Nikolai Eismont and V. N. Tolmachev. Both groups were detected by the OGPU and arrested; but their existence at a time when the punishments for ‘factionalism’ were increasing in severity showed how restive the party had become.

Then there were the oppositionist leaders waiting for a chance to return to the Politburo: Kamenev and Zinoviev had publicly recanted and been allowed to return to the party in 1928; Bukharin had avoided expulsion from the party by publicly accepting official party policy in November 1929. Their professions of loyalty convinced no one, and Trotski wasted no time in publishing his Bulletin of the Opposition from abroad and in initiating a secret correspondence with several disaffected communist officials.³⁵ All these disgraced former leaders knew that they could count on many existing party functionaries, activists and rank-and-file members to support them if ever an opportunity arose.

They might also be able to appeal to the persons who had walked out on the party or had been expelled: there were about 1,500,000 such individuals by 1937.³⁶ In addition, the Socialist-Revolutionaries had possessed a million members in 1917, the Mensheviks a quarter of a million. Dozens of other parties in Russia and the borderlands had also existed. Huge sections of the population had always hated the entire Bolshevik party. Whole social strata were embittered: priests, shopkeepers, gentry, mullahs, industrialists, traders and ‘bourgeois specialists’. Among these ‘former people’ (byvshie lyudi), as the Bolsheviks brusquely described persons of influence before the October Revolution, hatred of Bolshevism was strong. Many peasants and workers had felt the same. And Stalin had made countless new enemies for the party. Collectivization, de- kulakization, urban show-trials and the forced-labour penal system had wrought suffering as great as had occurred in the Civil War.

Stalin had engineered a second revolution; he had completed the groundwork of an economic transformation. But his victory was not yet totally secure. For Stalin, the realization of the First Five-Year Plan could only be the first victory in the long campaign for his personal dictatorship and his construction of a mighty industrial state.

10 Fortresses under Storm: Culture, Religion, Nation

Stalin’s ambition was not confined to economics and politics. Like other Bolsheviks, he had always seen that the creation of a communist society necessitated further changes. Communist leaders also aspired to raise the level of education and technical skills in the population. They wished to expand the social base of their support; they had to dissolve Soviet citizens’ attachment to their national identity and religion. Bolshevism stood for literacy, numeracy, internationalism and atheism, and this commitment was among the reasons for the replacement of the NEP with the First Five-Year Plan.

Of all the regime’s achievements, it was its triumph over illiteracy that earned the widest esteem — and even anti-Bolsheviks were among the admirers. Education was treated as a battlefront. Only forty per cent of males between nine and forty-nine years of age had been able to read and write in 1897; this proportion had risen to ninety-four per cent by 1939.¹ The number of schools rose to 199,000 by the beginning of the 1940– 41 academic year.² They were built not only in major areas of habitation like Russia and Ukraine but also in the most far-flung parts of the country such as Uzbekistan. Pedagogical institutes were created to train a generation of young teachers to take up their duties not only in schools for children and adolescents but also in polytechnics, night-schools and factory clubs for adults. Compulsory universal schooling was implemented with revolutionary gusto. The USSR was fast becoming a literate society.

As workers and ex-peasants thronged into the new educational institutions, they could buy reading materials at minimal cost. Pravda and Izvestiya in the 1930s were sold daily for ten kopeks, and the print-run of newspapers rose from 9.4 million copies in 1927 to 38 million in 1940.³ Other literature, too, was avidly purchased. The poet Boris Slutski recalled: ‘It may have been stupid economically, but books were sold for next to nothing, more cheaply than tobacco and bread.’⁴

Revenues were also channelled into the provision of inexpensive facilities for relaxation. By the end of the 1930s the USSR had 28,000 cinemas.⁵ Football, ice-hockey, athletics and gymnastics were turned into major sports for both participants and spectators. All-Union, republican, regional and local competitions proliferated across the country. For those who wanted quieter forms of recreation, ‘houses of culture’ were available with their own reading-rooms, notice-boards, stages and seating. Each medium-sized town had its theatre. Drama and ballet became popular with a public which looked forward to visits by companies on tour from Moscow. The authorities also laid aside space for parks. Families took Sunday strolls over public lawns — and the largest of all was the Park of Culture, which was named after the novelist Maksim Gorki, in the capital.

As in other industrial countries, the radio was becoming a medium of mass communication. Performers and commentators based in Moscow became celebrities throughout the USSR. News reports vied for attention with symphony concerts and variety entertainments. The telephone network was widened. Communications between district and district, town and town, republic and republic were impressively strengthened.

The foundation of new cities such as Magnitogorsk was celebrated (although Pravda was not allowed to report that a segment of the labour-force used for the construction consisted of Gulag prisoners).⁶ Housing was not built as fast as factories. But Russian towns whose houses had been chiefly of wooden construction were becoming characterized by edifices of brick and stone; and most new dwellings were apartments in immense blocks whose heating was supplied by communal boilers. The steam escaping through air-vents was a feature of the broad thoroughfares. The internal combustion engine took the place of horse-drawn vehicles for people going about their working lives. Goods were transported in lorries. In Moscow, the first section of the underground railway came into operation in 1935. A fresh style of life was introduced in remarkably short time so that Stalin’s slogan that ‘there are no fortresses the Bolsheviks cannot storm!’ seemed justified.

Thus a triumph for ‘modernity’ was claimed as the USSR advanced decisively towards becoming an urban, literate society with access to twentieth-century industrial technology; and Stalin’s adherents declared their modernity superior to all others by virtue of its being collectivist. The typical apartment block contained flats called kommunalki. Each such flat was occupied by several families sharing the same kitchen and toilet. Cafeterias were provided at workplaces so that meals need not be taken at home. The passenger vehicles produced by automotive factories were mainly buses and trams rather than cars — and such cars as were manufactured were bought mainly by institutions and not by individuals. State enterprises, which had a monopoly of industrial output from the end of the NEP, were steered away from catering for the individual choices of consumers. Whereas capitalism manufactured each product in a competitive variety, communism’s rationale was that this competition involved a waste of resources. Why waste money by developing and advertising similar products?

And so a pair of boots, a table, a light-bulb or a tin of sardines bought in Vladivostok or Archangel or Stavropol would have the same size and packaging. Clothing, too, became drab; local styles of attire disappeared as kolkhozniki were issued with working clothes from the factories and as village artisans ceased production. Standardization of design, too, was a basic governmental objective. Uniformity had been installed as a key positive value. Stalin was proud of his policies. Brazenly he announced to a mass meeting: ‘Life has become better, life has become gayer!’⁷

The changes in life were not better or gayer for everyone. Wage differentials had been sharply widened; material egalitarianism, which had anyway not been practised even in the October Revolution, was denounced. The administrative elites were amply rewarded in a society which had undergone huge structural change since the NEP. Spivs, grain-traders, shopkeepers and workshop owners had gone the way of the aristocracy, the gentry and the ‘big bourgeoisie’. The administrators had the cash to pay for goods in the sole retail outlets where high-quality consumer goods were on legal sale. These were state shops belonging to the Torgsin organization. In a Torgsin shop a previously well-off citizen could deposit some family heirloom which the shop would sell at a commission on the citizen’s behalf.⁸ Stalin’s economy was not all tractors, tanks and canals; it was also luxury goods, albeit luxury goods that were not being made in Soviet factories but were being