faults but were also required to accentuate the benefits brought to Russians by the tsarist unification of Muscovy and to the non-Russians by the growth of the Russian Empire. The Russian language was given heightened status. In the academic year 1938–9 it became one of the compulsory subjects of instruction in all schools; and from the late 1930s a campaign was begun to alter the various non-Russian languages to a Cyrillic-style alphabet on the Russian model. Thus in 1940 the Uzbek tongue was no longer allowed to be written in Arabic characters.37
Yet there were restrictions on the expression of Russian patriotism. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great could be praised, but not Nicholas II; and the aristocracy, gentry, merchantry and other so-called ‘former people’ had to be denounced. The expression of contemporary Russian nationhood, moreover, excluded the Orthodox Church. It rejected most village traditions. In literature it incorporated Alexander Pushkin and Maksim Gorki, but rejected the Christian nationalist Fedor Dostoevski.38 For the central political leaders in the 1930s remained wary lest Russian national pride might get out of hand. They were willing to modify Marxism-Leninism and even to distort it by adding Russian national ingredients to it; but they insisted that Marxism-Leninism should remain at the core of the state ideology.
Russians anyway did not always do better than other peoples in the USSR. The famine that devastated society in Ukraine in 1932–3 was also grievous in southern Russia. The Russian nation, despite the accolades it received, could reasonably perceive itself as a victim people. Territorially the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR) abruptly lost much of its status. In 1936 the internal borders of the USSR were redrawn. The Transcaucasian Federation was dissolved and Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan became republics on a par with the RSFSR. At the same time a huge chunk of the RSFSR was hacked away when the territory previously known as the Turkestan Region became the Kazakh Socialist Soviet Republic, thereby supplanting Ukraine as the USSR’s second largest republic. Most significantly, the new republic of Kazakhstan acquired its own communist party whereas the RSFSR remained without one.
For Stalin feared a New Russia as much as the Old. He wielded the knout to discourage certain aspects of Russianness while waving a flag to foster others. But he could not do this without increasing the self-awareness of Russians as Russians. The process was driven also by other forces. Chief among these were urbanization and mass literacy; for as Russian-speaking peasants poured into the towns and as Russian-speaking workers moved from one town to another in search of jobs, so millions of Russians discovered how much they had in common.
A certain administrative measure gave unintended impetus to the process. From December 1932 urban inhabitants had to acquire identity booklets (or ‘internal passports’) specifying personal particulars. Item No. 5 referred to nationality. Labour books and other documents had long contained such information; but, unlike them, the new passports were mandatory for all town-dwellers. Many individuals might previously have described themselves as peasants or workers, as natives of Samara or Nakhichevan, as Christians or Muslims. They now had to make a definitive choice of their nationality. Should they be of mixed parentage, they had to opt for either the paternal or the maternal line of descent. Aleksei Kulichenko, whose father was Ukrainian and mother was half- Russian and half-Tatar, decided to put ‘Ukrainian’ in his passport; and Avraam Epshtein, a Jew from the Belorussian capital Minsk who had lost his faith and was at ease linguistically in Russian, registered himself as a Russian.
The passports had been introduced to control the surge of villagers into the towns in search of industrial work. The kolkhozniks were denied the automatic right to obtain them. More generally, passports were a signal of the party leaders’ concern that society remained outside their full control. The First Five-Year Plan had intensified state authority beyond precedent. The Politburo under Stalin decided every great aspect of policy in foreign affairs, security, politics, administration, economy, science and the arts. No organized hostile group, except for a few bands of Basmachi in central Asia, endured. Yet somehow the peoples of the USSR had resisted being pummelled into the shape prescribed by the Kremlin.
Thus the first half-decade of the 1930s was a time of sharp contrasts. Cultural work was strengthened, but in an atmosphere that induced fear among school-teachers, writers and even party propagandists; and the peoples of the USSR had succeeded in preserving their traditions and beliefs against the pressure of official Soviet doctrines. Economic relaxations were announced, but generally the methods of obtaining food supplies by intimidation and violence was kept in place. National and religious leaderships and organizations were attacked; and yet there was also an increasing indulgence to Russian nationhood. Internationalism and Russian semi-nationalism were engaged in uneasy cohabitation. The First and Second Five-Year Plans were meant to secure the voluntary allegiance of workers, peasants, administrators and intellectuals to the regime. But although some enthusiasm for Stalin’s policies undoubtedly existed, hostility was much more widely disseminated. The integration of the aspirations of party, state and society was a very distant goal. The USSR was a country in travail and the compound of the Soviet order had yet to be stabilized sufficiently for the central party leadership’s comfort of mind.
11
Terror upon Terror
(1934–1938)
It was in this volatile situation that the engine of a Great Terror was cranked up and set in motion. The exact calculations of Stalin and his associates have not been recorded for posterity, but undoubtedly several leaders had been made edgy by the situation confronting them after the First Five-Year Plan. They knew that resentment of their rule in the rest of society was deep and wide, and they feared lest former Bolshevik oppositionists might exploit this circumstance. Stalin’s allies felt deeply insecure, and shared a rising sense of frustration. They were annoyed by the chaos that prevailed in the network of public institutions — and they had doubts about the loyalty of party, governmental, military and managerial officials, even including those who had implemented the First Five- Year Plan. They had few scruples about applying their repressive power. The thought, practices and institutions of the Civil War had set precedents for the horrors of the late 1930s.
Indeed state violence was already being applied widely under the First and Second Five-Year Plans. ‘Kulaks’, railwaymen-‘wreckers’, ‘nationalists’ and managerial ‘saboteurs’ were being arrested in large numbers. Nearly a million Soviet citizens languished in the forced-labour camps and colonies of the OGPU by 1933, and further millions were in prisons, deportation camps and compulsory resettlement areas.1 Consequently the Great Terror of 1937–8 was not a thunderclap in a cloudless sky but the worsening of a storm that was already raging.
None the less the Great Terror would not have taken place but for Stalin’s personality and ideas. He it was who directed the state’s punitive machinery against all those whom he identified as ‘anti-Soviet elements’ and ‘enemies of the people’. Among his purposes was a desire to use his victims as scapegoats for the country’s pain; and in order to sustain his mode of industrialization he also needed to keep his mines, timber forests and construction sites constantly supplied with slave labour.2 It was probably also his intention to take pre-emptive measures against any ‘fifth column’ operating against him in the event of war.3 These considerations, furthermore, fitted into a larger scheme to build an efficient Soviet state subservient to his personal dictatorship — and to secure the state’s total control over society. Such was the guiding rationale of the Great Terrorist.
Back in 1933, not even Stalin had been urging repression on that scale: he was still selecting specific ‘anti- Soviet elements’ as targets for the OGPU. Yet official violence was never absent from the Politburo’s agenda for long, and Stalin reprimanded his Politburo colleagues whenever they failed to support him. The tensions in public life were maintained. Stalin and his most trusted associates saw a tightening of discipline as the main means to attain economic success and political stability. Repeatedly they affirmed the need to root out class enemies, saboteurs and spies.
This did not happen without dissension in the Politburo. Three great power-bases had been consolidated during the First Five-Year Plan: the All-Union Communist Party, the People’s Commissariats and the OGPU. Relations between the party and the commissariats caused heated controversy. To Stalin’s fury, Ordzhonikidze as People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry prevented local party bodies from interfering in the activity of factory directors.4 But at the same time Stalin was angered by the power of the party at its lower levels, power that was frequently used to thwart the central party apparatus’s instructions. So that Stalin was unhappy with both the party and the government. Debate about this in the Politburo ensued in the winter of 1933–4 and the
