but also Ukrainians suspected that he aimed at their extermination under cover of his economic policies. Collectivization, according to surviving nationalists, was Stalin’s equivalent of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’. Purportedly, the difference was that Stalin had it in for the Ukrainians whereas Hitler wished to annihilate all Jews.
Certainly Ukraine was subject to perniciously peculiar dispensations. Passenger traffic between the Russian and Ukrainian republics was suspended in 1932 and the borders were sealed by Red Army units.31 From village to village the armed urban squads moved without mercy. ‘Kulaks’ were suppressed and the starving majority of the Ukrainian peasantry had to fulfil the state’s requirements or else face deportation. Famine was the predictable outcome. It is true that the central authorities cut the grain-collection quotas three times in response to reports of starvation. Yet the cuts were a long, long way short of the extent sufficient to put a quick stop to famine. Horrendous suffering prevailed over Ukraine in 1932–3.
Were not these official measures therefore genocidal? If genocide means the killing of an entire national or ethnic group, the answer has to be no. The centrally-imposed quotas for grain deliveries from Ukraine were in fact somewhat reduced from the second half of 1932. The evidence of millions of starving people gave even the Politburo some pause for thought. It must be stressed that the reductions were nothing like enough to end the famine; but the occurrence of any reductions at all casts doubt on the notion that Stalin had from the start intended to exterminate the Ukrainian nation. Furthermore, Ukrainians were only seventy-four per cent of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic’s population before the First Five-Year Plan, and to this extent the infliction of famine was not nationally specific.32 In any case Stalin needed Ukrainians as well as Russians to take up jobs in the factories, mines and railheads being opened in Ukraine and elsewhere.
Indeed Stalin did not go as far as banning their language from the local schools. To be sure, Russian- language schooling assumed much greater prominence than in the 1920s; and the ability of Ukrainian educationists and writers to praise specifically Ukrainian cultural achievements was severely limited. Nevertheless Stalin — albeit with great reservations — accepted Ukrainian linguistic and cultural distinctness as a fact of life (and in 1939 he sanctioned sumptuous celebrations of the 125th anniversary of the birth of the great Ukrainian national poet and anti-tsarist writer Taras Shevchenko). But Stalin also wanted to teach Ukraine a political lesson; for Ukraine had always appeared to Bolsheviks as the black heart of kulakdom and national separatism. The bludgeoning of its inhabitants, going as far as the killing of a large number of them, would serve the purpose of durable intimidation.
A logical corollary was the resumed persecution of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church. Indeed the authorities were zealous in smashing the foundations of organized religion of all kinds and in all places. The God of the Christians, Muslims and Jews was derided as that ‘nice little god’. The limited tolerance afforded to religion since the middle of the NEP was thrown aside.
Unlike de-kulakization, de-clericalization was not explicitly announced as a policy, and there were no quotas for elimination. Yet a licence was given for physical attacks on religious leaders. Stalin thought godlessness the beginning of righteousness and had no compunction about the mass slaughter of clerics. The number of killings during the First Five-Year Plan outdid even the record of the Civil War. In the Russian Orthodox Church alone the number of active priests tumbled from around 60,000 in the 1920s to only 5,665 by 1941. No doubt many of them fled in disguise to the towns in order to escape the attentions of the armed squads that were searching for them. But many priests were caught unawares and either imprisoned or executed.33 Thousands of other Christian leaders, mullahs, both Shi’ite and Sunni, and rabbis were also butchered. The one-ideology state was imposed with a vengeance.
Political pragmatism as well as a philosophy of militant atheism spurred on the campaign. Stalin and his associates remembered that in 1905 a demonstration headed by Father Gapon had touched off an avalanche that nearly buried the monarchy. Churches, mosques and synagogues were the last large meeting-places not entirely controlled by the state authorities after the October Revolution of 1917.
The feasts of the religious calendar also stood as marking points for the farming year. Particularly in Russia the tasks of ploughing, sowing, reaping and threshing were deemed incomplete unless a priest was present to pray for success. Agriculture and religious faith were intimately entwined. From its own fanatical standpoint, the League of the Militant Godless had logic on its side in pressing for the demolition of the houses of ‘god’. Priest and mullah and rabbi were vilified as parasites. In reality most parish clergy were as poor as church mice and, after the separation of Church from state in 1918, depended entirely on the voluntary offertories from their congregations. The same was usually true of other faiths. Clerics of all religions were integral parts of social order in their small communities. They welcomed children into the world, blessed marriages and buried the dead. They alternately rejoiced and commiserated with ordinary peasants. A village without a church, mosque or synagogue had lost its principal visible connection with the old peasant world. A countryside deprived of its priests, shrines, prayers and festivities was more amenable to being collectivized.
The destruction continued through the 1930s. Only one in forty churches was functioning as such by the decade’s end; the others had been reduced to rubble or recommissioned for secular purposes.34 Equally significantly, no place of worship was built in the new cities and towns arising in the Soviet Union. Stalin and Kaganovich, as the capital’s party first secretary from 1930 to 1935, implemented schemes for the re-creation of the vista of central Moscow. They knocked down the little streets around the Kremlin so that great parades might be held along broad new avenues. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was blown up; the plan was to use the site for the construction of the world’s tallest building, which would house a Palace of Soviets with a massive statue of Lenin on its roof.35 Kaganovich, a Jewish atheist, had no compunction in assailing a Russian Orthodox Church notorious for its anti-Semitism before 1917. But even he was wary, and instructed that the demolition of the Cathedral should take place secretly at dead of night.
The leaders of the various faiths had been traumatized. The Acting Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Sergei lived in perpetual fear of arrest. The violence threw the communist party’s campaign for cultural and national reconstruction into grotesque relief. Indisputable gains were made in literacy, numeracy, industrial skills and urban infrastructure. The account-sheet, however, was in debit: both culturally and nationally there had been more destruction than construction. A society had gone into semi-dissolution. Nations, religions and popular traditions had been ground into the dust.
Among the reasons for this was Stalin’s desire to produce ‘Soviet’ men and women and create a ‘Soviet’ people. As a follower of Marx and Engels, he held that the ultimate antidote to conflicts among national groups was the ‘fusion’ of all nations. The post-national compound would supposedly include ingredients from each nationality. Among Stalin’s acolytes during the First Five-Year Plan there had been several who assumed the moment of fusion to be imminent in the USSR. But Stalin recognized that this might damage the last elements of cohesion in society. Some binding factor had to be introduced. By 1934 he had come to the opinion that the Soviet state, for reasons of security, needed to foster Russian national pride. Russians were fifty-two per cent of the USSR’s population in the late 1930s.36 A large number of them lived in each republic, especially after the migration of people during the First Five-Year Plan; and they were disproportionately well-represented in administrative posts. Russians were anyhow used to inhabiting a state larger than mere Russia as defined by Soviet communists and had no wish to see this state dismembered.
Already in 1930 the communist versifier Demyan Bedny had been reprimanded for insulting the Russian people in one of his doggerel verses. Marxism-Leninism was not to be used as a cover for humiliating a nation whose workers had been the vanguard of the October Revolution; limits existed on the deprecation of Russianness.
It was in 1934 that the privileging of Russian nationhood began in earnest. Concerns about the USSR’s security had been growing in the early 1930s; and Stalin and the leadership felt edgy about Ukraine, about Polish infiltration into the western borderlands and about the threat posed by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Russian national feelings were nurtured more warmly, and nowhere was this more obvious than in the writing of history. The doyen of the academic profession until his death in 1932 had been M. N. Pokrovski, who had waged a vendetta in his books and in university administration against writers who failed to put class struggle at the centre of their interpretations. He had insisted, too, that Russian imperial expansion over the centuries had brought harm to the non-Russian peoples. This approach now fell into official disrepute; and Professor E. V. Tarle, the non-Marxist historian and Russian patriot, was released from prison to reoccupy his university chair in Moscow.
It remained obligatory to analyse the Soviet period predominantly in terms of class struggle, but the distant Russian past could now be handled more flexibly. Stalin himself was an admiring reader of the best works that appeared. As Russian emperors and commanders came in for gentler treatment, scholars still had to criticize their
