The Penguin History of Modern Russia

Communist International. It provided the ideological cement to help to maintain the Soviet state. Its cohesive capacity was equally important organizationally: holders of governmental, administrative and military office were virtually obliged to be party members and to operate under the party’s discipline; and the party apparatus, at the centre and elsewhere, helped to co-ordinate state institutions.

Furthermore, citizens of the USSR were acutely aware of their state’s immense and pervasive powers. The Great Terror, following quickly after the violent campaigns of collectivization and industrialization, left no one in doubt about the consequences of overt disobedience. The kind of conversation held by the visiting American engineer John Scott with Soviet managers in the early 1930s about the inefficiency of a particular coal-mine no longer took place. Similarly, the complaining talk among workers recorded at the beginning of the decade by the ex-Menshevik Viktor Kravchenko became more discreet by its end. Oppositional leaflets of discontented party activists, which still appeared as late as 1933, had become antiquarian artefacts. Officials in every institution and at every level were wary of saying the slightest thing that might conceivably be interpreted as disloyal. The traumatization had been profound, and the carnage of 1937–8 left a mark on popular consciousness that endures.

12 Coping with Big Brothers

By the late 1930s the term totalitarianism was being widely used to describe the kind of state and society engineered by Iosif Stalin. Benito Mussolini had used it in reference to his own fascist Italy nearly two decades before. Commentators on Soviet politics, while recognizing contrasts of ideology, saw the similarities among fascism, nazism and communism in their methods of rule. In Moscow as in Berlin there was a dominant leader and a one-party state. Both countries had witnessed a merciless crushing of internal opposition. The state not only monopolized the instrumentalities of coercion but also dominated the means of mass communication. It allowed no challenge to the single official ideology. There was persecution of any independent individual, organization or institution standing between the central state bodies and ordinary citizens. Total, unmediated pervasion of society by his power was each leader’s aspiration.

That something close to this had been Stalin’s underlying objective in carrying through the Great Terror there can be little doubt. Yet his power was not absolute. Those who had carried out the bloody purges knew that, in order to survive, they had to use the practices of patronage and mutual protection which Stalin had hoped to eradicate. And Stalin himself had had to scale down his totalist aims in the course of the Terror. Concessions to Russian national pride had been strengthened. Moreover, not all public entertainments were heavily political: frivolity existed even in Stalin’s USSR. Stalin felt the need to identify himself with the aspirations of the people he governed. This fearsome dictator had fears of his own.

Yet he could take comfort from the knowledge that he had promoted a vast number of newly-trained young activists. The central nomenklatura of personnel involved in state economic management had risen to 32,899 posts. Of these, 14,585 at the beginning of 1939 had been appointed in the past two years — forty-seven per cent of the total. In the Red Army the proportion was also remarkable: Stalin had purged the officer corps at its highest levels with particular thoroughness. The apparatus of the party, too, had been overhauled. Four out of five provincial committee first secretaries had joined the party after Lenin’s death; ninety-one per cent of them had yet to reach the age of forty (and sixty-two per cent were less than thirty-five years old).¹ A cohort of young men gained advancement who were later to govern the country through to the early 1980s: Mikhail Suslov, Dmitri Ustinov, Leonid Brezhnev, Aleksei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny. It was a new elite and it was Stalin’s elite.

Most of its members were workers or peasants who had taken the opportunities offered by the Soviet authorities to get themselves educated. Over half of the voting delegates to the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 had completed their secondary schooling.² Their adult life and their politics marked them off from the generation of Old Bolsheviks: they had not operated in the clandestine Bolshevik groups before 1917; they had not made the October Revolution or fought in the Civil War; and their Marxism was not their intellectual passion but a crude creed purveyed to them by the party’s agitation-and-propaganda departments.

They were taught to obey and be vigilant; their obligation was not only to ‘unmask’ traitors but also to engage in ‘self-criticism’ whenever they could not fulfil orders. Simultaneously they were cajoled to clamber up the ladder of promotion. The administrative hierarchy in the USSR was much simpler than in advanced capitalist societies: the duties, perks and authority accompanying each post were evident to every ambitious man and woman. The Soviet Union was distinguished by a uniformity of work-style and by great symbolism and ceremony. Not only military but also civilian medals were worn in normal public life: even Molotov sported a Hero of the Soviet Union badge on his suit’s lapel. Outstanding actors, opera singers and clowns were awarded the title of ‘People’s Artist of the USSR’; and when national gatherings were held in the capital, ritual obeisance to Stalin was compulsory: the major decisions had been taken in advance by the party leadership.

The promotees could hardly believe their luck. Most of them were persons who had not dreamed of staying in a hotel or even having a healthy diet earlier in their lives. As the Great Terror came to an end, they became able to enjoy their privileged conditions. The gap between the rulers and the ruled widened. In 1940, Stalin approved the introduction of fees to be paid by parents for students in the last three years of secondary school and at university. High-ranking administrators were in a better position to find the necessary finance than any other group in society. A new social class was in the process of formation.³

Its members acclaimed Stalin as the world’s outstanding philanthropist, leader and theorist. In the 1930s he attempted no lengthy contribution to the canon of Bolshevism: he was too busy killing Bolsheviks. Many among the party’s writers who might have written textbooks for him fell victim to his butchery. A new explication of the principles of Marxism-Leninism was essential for the regime. As regional party secretary M. M. Khataevich had put it in 1935, there was a need for ‘a book of our own, in place of the Bible, that could give a rigorous answer — correct and comprehensible — to the many important questions of the structure of the world’.⁴ Khataevich perished in the Great Terror; and the project for a grand treatise on Marxism was not realized until after Stalin’s death. In the meantime the gap was filled by a book with a narrower title, The History of the All-Union Communist Party: A Short Course.

The main authors were veteran party loyalists V. G. Knorin, E. M. Yaroslavski and P. N. Pospelov. But Stalin closely supervised the contents and personally wrote the sub-chapter on ‘dialectical and historical materialism’. To most intents and purposes he was the textbook’s general editor and hid behind the pseudonym of ‘a commission of the Central Committee’.

The Short Course traced the rise of the Bolsheviks from the political struggles against the Romanov monarchy through to Stalin’s ascendancy. The last section of the final chapter dealt with ‘the Liquidation of the Remnants of the Bukharinite-Trotskyist Gang of Spies, Wreckers and Traitors to the Country’. Hysterical self-righteousness imbued the book. Stalin wanted to stress that Marxism provided the sole key to understanding both the social life of humanity and even the material universe, and that only Stalin’s variant of Marxism was acceptable. Just as prophet followed prophet in the Old Testament, the Short Course traced a lineage of authentic scientific communism from Marx and Engels through Lenin down to Stalin. According to Stalin, Bolshevism had triumphed predominantly through struggle, often bloody, merciless struggle, and unceasing vigilance.⁵

Purportedly its victories had also resulted from the virtues of its leadership. Lenin and Stalin, and subsequently Stalin by himself, had led the Central Committee. The Central Committee had led the communist party and the party had led the masses. In each period of the party’s history there had been maleficent communists such as Trotski and Bukharin who had linked up with kulaks, priests, landlords and tsarist officers at home and capitalist espionage agencies abroad. But in vain! For Comrade Stalin had rooted out the traitors and pointed the party in the direction of the attainment of a perfect society!

The book divided everything between black and white (or, as Stalin preferred, White and Red). There was no palette of colours in this Stalinist catechism. Violence, intolerance, pitilessness, command, discipline, correctness and science were the central themes. In the USSR of the 1930s this was a conservative set of recommendations. Current holders of office could act without qualms. Stalin’s infallibility meant that they need not question their consciences, even when taking up the posts of innocent dead men and buying up their possessions in the special