The Penguin History of Modern Russia

shops runs by the NKVD. By obeying the Leader, they were acting in complete accord with the requirements of patriotism, class struggle and History. Their power and their privileged life-style were in the natural order of things, and the existence of an impregnable, terrifying Soviet state was the guarantee of the October Revolution’s preservation. The Short Course was a manifesto for Stalin’s style of communist conservatism.

According to Lenin, however, the communist dictatorship would wither away and be succeeded by a society without any state bodies whatsoever. Stalin brazenly declared that much progress had already been made towards that ultimate goal. The bourgeoisie no longer existed, and a new social and economic order had been built.

Now it was stated that only three social classes existed: the working class, the peasantry and the ‘working intelligentsia’ (which included everyone with an administrative, managerial or educational post). Therefore the Soviet Union was still a society of classes. But supposedly it was different from all such previous societies inasmuch as the three classes had no reason to conflict with each other. Thus the working class, the peasantry and the intelligentsia had ‘non-antagonistic’ interests and drew common benefit from the state’s provision of employment, education, health care, nutrition and shelter.⁶ In November 1936, when introducing a new Constitution for the USSR, Stalin proclaimed: ‘Socialism, which is the first phase of communism, has basically been realized in our country.’⁷ He therefore proposed that the electoral franchise should be made universal. The ‘deprived ones’ (lishentsy) — including former kulaks, White Army officers and priests — should be allowed to vote.⁸

Universal civil rights were introduced on paper, and the freedoms of thought, the press, religion, organization and assembly were guaranteed. Furthermore, Stalin insisted that economic rights were as important as political ones. In particular, he drew attention to the guarantees of employment given in the Soviet Union. This led him to claim that the new Constitution proved that the USSR was the most democratic country in the world.

Stalin was being monumentally insincere. The lishentsy were picked out for repression when the Great Terror began in full earnest in mid-1937. Moreover, the new Constitution itself was laden with stipulations that restricted the exercise of civil freedoms. In the first place, the USSR was defined as ‘a socialist state of the workers and peasants’. Thus the rights of citizens were made entirely subsidiary to the determination to preserve the existing structure and orientation of the Soviet state. No clause in the Constitution expressly sanctioned the All- Union Communist Party’s political monopoly; but only the existing public institutions, including the communist party, were allowed to put up candidates in elections. Formal approval was given in this indirect fashion to the one-party state. Stalin carefully supervised the wording of the final draft and, when introducing the Constitution, specified that the communist dictatorship was not going to be weakened.⁹

Not surprisingly the Constitution was not taken seriously by citizens of the USSR.¹⁰ Its main admirers were gullible foreigners. The most notorious of them were Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? sought to defend Stalin against the charge that dictatorship of any kind existed in the USSR!¹¹ In the meantime Molotov bluntly affirmed that years would pass before full implementation of all the civil freedoms granted by the Constitution;¹² and already in 1933 Stalin himself had contended that, as the party advanced to victory after victory, so the state required strengthening against the bitter onslaughts of its foes at home and abroad. In 1939 he expatiated on this point at the Eighteenth Party Congress: ‘Will our state be retained also in the period of communism? Yes, it will be retained unless capitalist encirclement is liquidated and unless the danger of a military attack from abroad is liquidated.’¹³

This contradicted Marxist doctrine inasmuch as communism was supposed to involve the ‘withering away of the state’. But Stalin ignored such a nicety; his overriding aim was to reinforce the regimentative aspects of Bolshevism. The Congress delegates were anyway not the sort to worry about interpretations of Marxism. They were also well accustomed to the fact that the USSR was a terror-state. At the same Eighteenth Congress Stalin alluded to this in his po-faced comment that, whereas the elections to the USSR Supreme Soviet yielded a 98.6 per cent vote in favour of the regime after the sentencing of Tukhachevski in 1937, the proportion rose to 99.4 per cent after Bukharin’s trial in 1938.¹⁴

Stalin, needless to say, knew that the more favourable vote derived not from the cogency of the evidence against the alleged traitors but from the intimidating example of their execution. Not even he, however, ruled exclusively through the violence of his security and judicial machinery. He had his equivalent of an old boys’ network, consisting of cronies who had supported him in his past battles and who served him through to his death. The first in political seniority was Molotov. Then came Kaganovich and Mikoyan, who had joined him in the early 1920s. Others included pre-revolutionary party veterans such as Andrei Zhdanov, Andrei Andreev, Nikolai Bulganin and Kliment Voroshilov. Nor did Stalin neglect the young: Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchev and Georgi Malenkov were hauled up by him from the lower political echelons and promoted to supreme party and government posts.

The central leadership was like a gang, and Stalin as its leader relied upon his fellow members to organize the state’s institutions. Competence and obedience remained prerequisites of gang membership. The penalty for disagreement with Stalin was constant: ‘seven grams of lead’ in the head.

Stalin continued to make occasional arrests of cronies. Like Al Capone, he knew how to ‘keep the boys in line’.¹⁵ For instance, he asked Khrushchev whether it was true that he was really a Pole.¹⁶ This was quite enough to terrify Khrushchev, who knew that in 1938 Stalin had executed the Polish communist emigres in Moscow. The nearer someone was to the apex of power, the more directly he was intimidated by Stalin. People’s commissars trembled at meetings of Sovnarkom. Stalin’s ploy was to get up from the long green-baize table and pad up and down in his soft leather boots behind the seats of his colleagues. It was an unnerving experience. In reply to Stalin’s enquiry about the number of recent plane crashes, air force commander Rychagov, being the worse for drink, blurted out: ‘There will continue to be a high level of accidents because we’re compelled by you to go up in flying coffins.’ The room fell silent as a graveyard, and after a long pause Stalin murmured: ‘You shouldn’t have spoken like that.’ Rychagov was shot a few days later.¹⁷

Yet the uppermost elite lived in greater safety than in 1937–8. Stalin could not afford to reduce his associates to the condition of robots: he needed them to accompany their self-abasement before him with a dynamic ruthlessness in the discharge of their tasks — and to give orders on their own initiative. Laws, decrees, regulations and commands were produced in profusion in this period of frightful legal abusiveness.¹⁸ But, as under Lenin, office-holders were given to understand that they would not be assessed on the basis of their adherence to procedural norms. What would ultimately count for or against them was their record of practical results.

At the supreme and middling levels they had to combine the talents of cardinals, condottieri and landed magnates: they had to be propagators of Marxism-Leninism; they had to fight for the policies of the party; and each of them had to assemble a band of followers who would carry out orders throughout the area of their patron’s responsibility. The unavoidable result was that Stalin had to settle for a less amenable administration than he had aimed to establish by means of the Great Terror. Just as he needed his cronies, so they needed cronies of their own. The cliental groupings therefore stayed in place. For example, Postyshev’s team in the Ukrainian party leadership gave way to Khrushchev’s team when Stalin sent Khrushchev to Kiev in 1938; and Beria likewise cleared out Yezhov’s team from the NKVD and installed his own: it was the only available way to ensure the substitution of reliable anti-Yezhovites.

Not only vertically but also horizontally the old administrative practices stayed in place. In June 1937 Stalin had complained: ‘It’s thought that the centre must know everything and see everything. No, the centre doesn’t see everything: it’s not like that at all. The centre sees only a part and the remainder is seen in the localities. It sends people without knowing these people one hundred per cent. You must check them out.’¹⁹ But new local ‘nests’ or ‘family circles’ were formed almost as soon as Stalin destroyed the existing ones. Wheeling and dealing occurred among the heads of party, soviet, police, army and enterprise management; local officials protected each other against the demands made by central authorities. More than ever, lying to Moscow was a skill crucial for physical survival. Institutions had to fiddle the accounts so as to exaggerate achievements enough to win acclaim, but not to the point that the following year’s quotas would be raised intolerably high.

Such evasiveness was not confined to officialdom. A black market existed in those many types of product which were in severe deficit in the USSR. Moisei Kaganovich, brother of Stalin’s close associate, loudly objected to the general evidence of disobedience: ‘The earth ought to tremble when the director walks around the plant!’ In