The Penguin History of Modern Russia

sold on by individuals who had fallen on hard times since 1917.

By means of these blandishments the Politburo aimed to ensure that the stratum of newly promoted administrators would remain keen supporters of the NEP’s abandonment; and such persons were a large proportion of the fourfold increase in the number of state employees in institutions of education, health, housing, and public administration between 1926 and the end of the 1930s. But life was tough even for the middle-ranking administrators. The new schools, apartment blocks, hotels and kindergartens took years to build. Most working- class people, moreover, had yet to benefit at all from the general improvements promised by the Politburo. A generation was being asked to sacrifice its comfort for the benefit of its children and grandchildren. Hunger, violence and chaos were widespread, and the rupture of social linkages drastically increased the sense of loneliness in both the towns and the countryside. This was not a society capable of being at ease with itself.

Stalin, too, felt uneasy lest political opposition might arise inside or outside the party to exploit the situation. His attitude to Martemyan Ryutin, who was arrested in 1932 for leading a secret little group of communists who denounced his despotic rule and called for his removal from power, supplied a terrifying signal of his intentions. The fact that Ryutin had once belonged to the Central Committee apparently did not stop Stalin from calling for his execution. The Politburo instead ordered him to be sentenced to ten years’ detention in the Gulag. This treatment of an oppositionist was horrific by most standards, but was much too light for Stalin’s taste.

Yet he felt compelled to yield somewhat to the warnings being given, inside and outside the party, that failure to reduce the tempos of economic development would result in disaster. Even many of his central and local supporters stressed that conditions in industry were altogether too chaotic for the Second Five-Year Plan, introduced at the beginning of 1933, to be fulfilled in most of its objectives. A hurried re-drafting took place and a lower rate of growth was accepted. The new expectation was for a doubling of the output of industrial producers’ goods in the half-decade before the end of 1937. This was still a very rapid growth, but not at the breakneck speed of the First Five-Year Plan. The Politburo began to lay its emphasis upon completing the construction of the half- built factories and mines and getting them into full production. Consolidation of existing projects became the priority in the industrial sector.⁹

As policy was being modified in 1932, Bukharin was appointed chief editor of Izvestiya. Meanwhile Sergo Ordzhonikidze, as Chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy in 1930–32 and as People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry from 1932, protected managers and engineers from persecution.¹⁰

These modulations in official stance were extended to agriculture, which was in a frightful condition. In 1932 the fantastic scheme to increase state grain procurements by nearly thirty per cent over the previous year was quietly abandoned. The total of cereal crops actually obtained by the state did not rise at all, but dropped by nearly a fifth.¹¹ A decree was passed in the same year permitting the establishment of ‘kolkhoz markets’, where peasants could trade their surplus produce so long as they worked on those few kolkhozes which had fulfilled their quota of deliveries to the state. Another decree in 1933 allowed each household in a kolkhoz to cultivate a garden allotment for personal consumption or sale. Private profit was reintroduced even though it was banned from official terminology. In any case, these concessions were restricted to the margins of economic activity. Most industry, agriculture and commerce remained under strict state control; and the mass deportation of kulaks was intensified in the Kuban region and the North Caucasus. Yet the lesson had been learned that not even the economy of Stalin’s USSR could function without some residual components of the market.

And so the hope was inspired in some observers that Stalin’s demeanour during the First Five-Year Plan had been an aberration and that he would revert to less severe methods. Perhaps the party was about to return to the NEP. When he told the Central Committee plenum in January 1933 that he would not ‘go on whipping the country’, he was heard with relief by most of his listeners.¹²

Yet at the same plenum he bared his tigrine fangs as he advanced the following proposition: ‘The abolition of classes is not obtained through the elimination of class struggle but through its reinforcement.’¹³ For Stalin, his victory in the First Five-Year Plan was an occasion for the intensification rather than the relaxation of state violence. He pounced on his friend Ordzhonikidze for objecting to trials being held of officials from the People’s Commissariats for Heavy Industry and Agriculture. According to Stalin, Ordzhonikidze was guilty of hooliganism while Kaganovich, who was not unsympathetic to Ordzhonikidze, was accused of joining ‘the camp of the party’s reactionary elements’.¹⁴ The Boss, as his associates referred to him, was prowling with menace. The gravest snub he suffered face to face came not from an associate but from his wife Nadezhda, who seems to have agreed with Bukharin that the countryside had been ravaged by mass collectivization. Nor was she willing to tolerate his alleged flirtations with other women. After an altercation with him in November 1932, she had gone outside and shot herself.¹⁵

He had always been a solitary fellow, but the suicide of Nadezhda, whom he had loved despite their stormy relationship, shoved him further into himself. Stalin’s early life had been hard. Born to a Georgian couple in the little town of Gori near Tiflis, his real name was Iosif Dzhugashvili. His birthday was given out officially as 21 December 1879; but the parish records indicate that he entered this world a year earlier.¹⁶ Why he wished to alter the date remains a mystery; but, whatever his reasons, such a desire was in keeping with a man who liked to manipulate the image that others held of him.

Iosif’s father was a child-beating drunkard who died leaving the family penniless; but Katerina Dzhugashvili, the mother of Iosif, managed to have him enrolled in the Tiflis Ecclesiastical Seminary. He quickly picked up the Russian language and the rhythms of the catechism; but he was also rebellious: like thousands of adolescents of his generation, he preferred revolutionary literature to the Bible. After being expelled from the seminary, he wandered over the Transcaucasus picking up odd jobs and getting involved with clandestine political circles. When news of the split of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party reached him, he sided with the Bolsheviks whereas most Georgian Marxists became Mensheviks. Young Dzhugashvili, whose pseudonym was first Koba and then Stalin (or ‘Man of Steel’), reacted positively to themes of dictatorship, terror, modernity, progress and leadership in Lenin’s writings.

Stalin became an organizer for the Bolsheviks and so underwent arrest several times. His articles on the ‘national question’ commended him to Lenin as ‘the wonderful Georgian’, and he was co-opted to the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912. He was sent to St Petersburg to edit the legal Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, but was quickly captured and exiled to Siberia. There he stayed until 1917. A street accident he had suffered as a lad left him with a slightly shortened arm, and because of this he escaped conscription into the Imperial Army.

Returning to the Russian capital after the February Revolution, he was not feted to the extent of Lenin and the emigre veterans. He seemed unimpressive alongside them. Unlike them, he had made only brief trips abroad. He could not speak German or French or English. He was a poor orator, a plodding theorist and a prickly character. Yet his organizational expeditiousness was highly valued, and he joined the inner core of the Central Committee before the October Revolution. Thereafter he became People’s Commissar for Nationalities in the first Sovnarkom and served uninterruptedly in the Party Politburo from 1919. In the Civil War he was appointed as leading political commissar on several fronts and was regarded by Lenin as one of his most dependable troubleshooters, acquiring a reputation for a fierce decisiveness. In 1920 he added the chairmanship of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate to his list of posts, and in 1922 became General Secretary of the Party Central Committee.

Stalin’s rivals in his own party would soon pay dearly for their condescension. He was crude and brutal even by Bolshevik standards, and was proud of the fact. On the Southern front in 1918 he had put villages to the torch to terrorize the peasantry of an entire region, and but for Lenin’s intervention would have drowned scores of innocent former Imperial Army officers on a prison barge moored on the river Volga.

But Stalin’s rivals had no excuse for underestimating Stalin’s intelligence. His lack of intellectual sophistication did not mean that he was unmotivated by ideas; and he was conscious enough of the gaps in his education to take on Jan Sten as a private tutor in philosophy in the 1920s.¹⁷ He was also a voracious reader, supposedly getting through a daily quota of 500 pages.¹⁸ Although his objects of study changed, his orientation was constant. He despised middle-class experts, believing that the regime could train up its own ‘specialists’ in short order. The ‘filth’ from the old days ought to be cleansed (or ‘purged’); social, economic and political problems should not be allowed to await solution. Those persons deemed responsible for the survival of such problems had to be physically exterminated. Let saboteurs and renegades perish! Let there be steel, iron and coal! Long live comrade Stalin!