The Penguin History of Modern Russia

That this maladjusted character, whose mistrustfulness was close to paranoia, should have won the struggle to succeed Lenin boded ill for his opponents past and present and for his potential opponents as well. It has been speculated that his vengefulness was influenced by the beatings he supposedly had received from his father or by the traditions of honour and feud in the Caucasian region. Yet his fascination with punitive violence went far beyond any conditioning by family or national customs. Stalin supposedly remarked: ‘To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed… there is nothing sweeter in the world.’¹⁹

He also had a craving for adulation. As his doings were celebrated in the public media, only his ageing mother, to whom he dutifully sent packets of roubles, was oblivious of his status. Official history textbooks by Nikolai Popov and Emelyan Yaroslavski exaggerated his importance. Articles were published on the Civil War which treated the battles around Tsaritsyn in 1918, when Stalin was serving on the Southern front, as the turning point in the Red Army’s fortunes. Already in 1925, Tsaritsyn had been renamed Stalingrad. The phrase was put into circulation: ‘Stalin is the Lenin of today.’ Ostensibly he shrugged off claims to greatness, complaining to a film scriptwriter: ‘Reference to Stalin should be excised. The Central Committee of the party ought to be put in place of Stalin.’²⁰ He also repudiated the proposal in 1938 that Moscow should be renamed as Stalinodar (which means ‘Stalin’s gift’)!²¹ His modesty on this and other occasions was insincere, but Stalin knew that it would enhance his popularity among rank-and-file communists: in reality he was extremely vainglorious.

Egomania was not the sole factor. The cult of Stalin was also a response to the underlying requirements of the regime. Russians and many other nations of the USSR were accustomed to their statehood being expressed through the persona of a supreme leader. Any revolutionary state has to promote continuity as well as disruption. The First Five-Year Plan had brought about huge disruption, and the tsar-like image of Stalin was useful in affirming that the state possessed a strong, determined leader.

Full regal pomp was nevertheless eschewed by him; Stalin, while inviting comparison with the tsars of old, also wished to appear as a mundane contemporary communist. Audiences at public conferences or at the Bolshoi Ballet or on top of the Kremlin Wall saw him in his dull-coloured, soldierly tunic — as he mingled with delegates from the provinces to official political gatherings — and he always made sure to have his photograph taken with groups of delegates. The display of ordinariness was a basic aspect of his mystique. The incantations of public congresses and conferences included not only Stalin but also ‘the Leninist Central Committee, the Communist Party, the Working Class, the Masses’. It was crucial for him to demonstrate the preserved heritage of Marxism-Leninism. The heroism, justice and inevitability of the October Revolution had to be proclaimed repeatedly, and the achievements of the First Five-Year Plan had to be glorified.

There is no doubt that many young members of the party and the Komsomol responded positively to the propaganda. The construction of towns, mines and dams was an enormously attractive project for them. Several such enthusiasts altruistically devoted their lives to the communist cause. They idolized Stalin, and all of them — whether they were building the city of Magnitogorsk or tunnelling under Moscow to lay the lines for the metro or were simply teaching kolkhozniki how to read and write — thought themselves to be agents of progress for Soviet society and for humanity as a whole. Stalin had his active supporters in their hundreds of thousands, perhaps even their millions. This had been true of Lenin; it would also be true of Khrushchev. Not until the late 1960s did Kremlin leaders find it difficult to convince a large number of their fellow citizens that, despite all the difficulties, official policies would sooner or later bring about the huge improvements claimed by official spokesmen.²²

Stalin’s rule in the early 1930s depended crucially upon the presence of enthusiastic supporters in society. Even many people who disliked him admired his success in mobilizing the country for industrialization and in restoring Russia’s position as a great power. There was a widespread feeling that, for all his faults, Stalin was a determined leader in the Russian tradition; and the naivety of workers, peasants and others about high politics allowed him to play to the gallery of public opinion more easily than would be possible for Soviet leaders in later generations.

But enthusiasts remained a minority. Most people, despite the increase in cultural and educational provision, paid little mind to communist doctrines. They were too busy to give politics more than a glancing interest. It was a hard existence. The average urban inhabitant spent only an hour every week reading a book or listening to the radio and twenty minutes watching films or plays.²³ Adulatory newsreels were of limited help to Stalin while there remained a paucity of spectators. Furthermore, in 1937 there were still only 3.5 million radios in the country.²⁴ The authorities placed loudspeakers on main streets so that public statements might be broadcast to people as they travelled to work or went shopping. But this was rarely possible in the countryside since only one in twenty-five collective farms had access to electrical power.²⁵ Several weeks passed in some villages between visits from officials from the nearby town, and Pravda arrived only fitfully. The infrastructure of intensive mass indoctrination had not been completed before the Second World War.

The underlying cause for the ineffectiveness of official propaganda, however, was the hardship caused by official measures. The non-Russian nationalities were especially embittered. The assertiveness of national and ethnic groups in the 1920s had been among the reasons for the NEP’s abolition. Several imaginary anti-Soviet organizations were ‘discovered’, starting with the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine in July 1929.²⁶ Artists, scholars and novelists were arraigned in Kiev and sentenced to lengthy years of imprisonment. Analogous judicial proceedings took place in Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Communist officials thought to have shown excessive indulgence to the sentiments of nations in their republics suffered demotion. The prime victim was Mykola Skrypnik in Ukraine. In 1933 he was dropped as Ukraine’s People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, and committed suicide. Simultaneously those writers and artists who had developed their national cultures under the NEP were subject to ever stricter surveillance.

Nor was the menace of Russian nationalism ignored. In 1930 the historians S. F. Platonov and E. V. Tarle, famous Russian patriots, were put on trial and imprisoned for leading the non-existent All-People’s Union of Struggle for Russia’s Regeneration.²⁷ Three thousand Red Army commanders who had been officers in the Imperial Army were also arrested.²⁸ Russian-language literary figures, too, were persecuted. Novels dealing sensitively with the peasants, rural customs, spirituality and individual emotions had appeared in the 1920s and had offered consolation to readers who disliked Marxism-Leninism. With the occasional exception such as Mikhail Sholokhov’s stories of Cossack life in Quiet Flows the Don, this artistic trend was eradicated. The field was dominated during the First Five-Year Plan by writer-activists belonging to the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. Works depicting working-class selflessness and internationalism flooded from Soviet publishing houses.

Each nationality felt itself to be suffering worse than all the others: such is the norm for national and ethnic groups in times of stress and privation. In 1934 some daredevils in the Russian city of Saratov produced an illicit poster of a broad river with two bands of men lining up on opposite banks to give battle to each other. On one bank stood Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev, all of them being Jewish; the other was held by the Georgians: Stalin, Yenukidze and Ordzhonikidze. Underneath was the caption: ‘And the Slavs fell into dispute over who was to rule in Old Russia.’²⁹ The message was that Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians were being humiliated in their own lands. Even under Stalin, in the early 1930s, the composition of the central party leadership failed to mirror the country’s demography even though it was not so much out of focus as previously. To a popular tradition of anti-Semitism was added a resentment against the nations of the Transcaucasus.

In reality the Georgians were tormented along with the other peoples. The local OGPU chief in Tbilisi, the Georgian Lavrenti Beria, was winning plaudits from Stalin for his ruthlessness towards Georgian nationalist dissent and peasant resistance. And those Jewish institutions of the USSR which had flourished in the 1920s were either emasculated or crushed. Winter followed the springtime of the nations.

This did not mean that nations suffered equally. Most deaths caused by the Soviet state during the First Five-Year Plan were brought about by the collectivization of agriculture. Consequently the less urbanized nationalities were victimized disproportionately. For example, it is reckoned that between 1.3 million and 1.8 million Kazakh nomads died for this reason;³⁰ and the imposition of agricultural quotas upon such a people led to the destruction of an entire way of life. Kazakhs, who knew nothing of cereal cropping, were ordered to cultivate wheat on pain of execution. The Soviet economy’s patchwork quilt was being replaced by a blanket cut from a single bloodied cloth. Several victim-nations concluded that Stalin was bent on genocide. Not only Kazakhs