rooting out the final remnants of the capitalist economy (petty trade and peasant farming), which, he claimed, had blocked the country’s progress to socialist industrialization.
Stalin’s violent rhetoric – his calls for a return to the class war of the Revolution and the Civil War – appealed to a broad section of the Party’s proletarian base, among whom there was a growing sense that the bourgeoisie was returning in another form through the NEPmen, the ‘bourgeois specialists’ and the ‘kulaks’. Many felt that the NEP was a retreat from the Bolshevik ideal of social justice and feared that it would lead to the restoration of a capitalist economy. ‘We young Communists had all grown up in the belief that money was done away with once and for all,’ recalls one Bolshevik. ‘If money was reappearing, wouldn’t rich people reappear too? Weren’t we on the slippery slope that led back to capitalism? We put these questions to ourselves with feelings of anxiety.’ Stalin’s call for a return to the methods of the Civil War had a special appeal to younger Communists – those born in the 1900s and the 1910s – who were too young to have taken part in the revolutionary fighting of 1917 – 21 but who had been educated in the ‘cult of struggle’ based on stories of the Civil War. One Bolshevik (born in 1909) maintained in his memoirs that the militant world-view of his contemporaries had prepared them to accept Stalin’s arguments about the need for ‘renewed class war’ against the ‘bourgeois specialists’, NEPmen, ‘kulaks’ and other ‘hirelings of the bourgeoisie’. Young Communists had become disheartened, as one Stalinist explains:
The Komsomols of my generation – those who experienced the October Revolution at the age of ten or younger – chafed at our fate. In the Komsomol, in the factories, we lamented that there was nothing remaining for us to do: the Revolution was over, the harsh but romantic years of the Civil War would not come again, and the older generation had left us only a boring, prosaic life devoid of struggle and excitement.
Aleksei Radchenko wrote in his diary in 1927:
Progressive youth today has no real interest or focus for activity – these are not the years of the Civil War but just the NEP – a necessary stage of the Revolution but a boring one. People are distracted by personal affairs, by family matters… We need something to shake us up and clear the air (some people even dream of war).114
Stalin played on these romantic notions, of the Civil War as the ‘heroic period’ and the Soviet Union as a state engaged in a constant struggle with capitalist enemies at home and abroad. He manufactured the ‘war scare’ of 1927, filling the Soviet press with bogus stories about British ‘spies’ and ‘invasion plans’ against the Soviet Union, and used this fear to call for mass arrests of potential ‘enemies’ (‘monarchists’ and ‘former people’). He also used the threat of war to support his arguments for a Five Year Plan and building of the armed forces. The NEP, he argued, was too slow as a means of industrial armament, and not secure enough as a means of procuring grain in the event of war. Stalin’s conception of the Five Year Plan was wholly predicated on ceaseless struggle with the enemy. In his political battles with Bukharin for the control of the Party in 1928 – 9, Stalin accused him of subscribing to the dangerous view that the class struggle would lessen over time and that ‘capitalist elements’ could be reconciled with a socialist system (in fact Bukharin argued that the struggle would continue in the economic sphere). This view, Stalin argued, would lead the Party to lower its defences against its capitalist enemies, allowing them to infiltrate the Soviet system and subvert it from within. In a precursor to the claims by which he rationalized the expanding waves of state repression in the Great Terror, Stalin insisted, on the contrary, that the resistance of the bourgeoisie was bound to intensify as the country moved towards socialism, so that renewed vigour was constantly required to ‘root out and crush the opposition of the exploiters’.115 This was the rationale that rallied Stalin’s forces and secured his victory against Bukharin. Terror was the inspiration, not the effect, of the Five Year Plan.
The assault against the private traders was the opening battle of a renewed revolutionary war. Thousands of NEPmen were imprisoned or driven from their homes. By the end of 1928, more than half the 400,000 private businesses registered in 1926 had been taxed out of existence or closed down by the police; by the end of 1929, only one in ten remained. New restrictions on the
Samuil Laskin returned to Moscow from exile in Nizhny Novgorod at the height of this class war. In the spring of 1929 the Laskins moved into their new home on Zubov Square. Samuil and Berta had one room, Sonia another, while Fania and Zhenia shared the living room. But Samuil’s dreams of owning his own home were soon dashed by the abolition of private ownership, which followed the overturning of the NEP. The Laskin home was nationalized by the Moscow Soviet, which turned it into a communal apartment and moved in an old couple (both well known as police informers), who were given the two largest rooms, leaving all the Laskins to share just one rented room. In November 1929, Samuil’s herring business was expropriated by the state. Samuil was arrested for a second time, held for several weeks in the Butyrki jail, and then exiled to Voronezh, from which he returned in 1930 to begin a new life as a Soviet employee in the fish trade.117
Samuil had lost everything. But he bore his reduced conditions, as he bore everything, without complaining once about the Soviet regime. Nadezhda Mandelshtam, a friend of Zhenia in the 1950s, wrote about this aspect of Samuil’s character in her memoirs about the Stalin years:
Zhenia’s father was a small, indeed, the smallest imaginable, tradesman, who brought up three daughters and dealt in salted herring. The Revolution made him blissfully happy: it proclaimed equal rights for Jews and enabled him to realize his dream of giving his three clever daughters a good education. When the NEP was launched, he took it at face value, and, to feed his daughters, started up his salted herring business – only to have it confiscated when he was unable to pay his taxes. No doubt he too did sums on his abacus to see how he could save his family. He was shipped off to Narym, or some such place. But he was broken neither by this nor by his previous stretch in prison – to which he went at a time when ‘new methods’, that is, tortures of a more refined kind than primitive beating, were being introduced in cases involving ‘the confiscation of valuables’. From his first place of exile he sent a letter of such heartrending tenderness to his wife and three daughters that they decided to show it to no one outside the family. His whole life was spent in and out of exile, and later the same thing started with his daughters and their husbands, who also went into exile and camps. If it had not been for the father, who stood at the centre of it and never changed with the years, the fate of this family would have epitomized the typical Soviet life story. He was the quintessence of Jewish saintliness, possessing those qualities of mysterious spirituality and goodness which sanctified Job.118
2
The Great Break
(1928–32)
1
On 2 August 1930, the villagers of Obukhovo celebrated Ilin Day, an old religious holiday to mark the end of the high summer when Russian peasants held a feast and said their prayers for a good harvest. After a service in the church, the villagers assembled at the Golovins, the biggest family in Obukhovo, where they were given home- made pies and beer inside the house while their children played outside. As evening approached, the village dance (
That year the holiday was overshadowed by violent arguments. The villagers were bitterly divided about whether they should form a collective farm (kolkhoz), as they had been ordered by the Soviet government. Most of the peasants were reluctant to give up their family farms, on which they had worked for generations, and to share their property, their horses, cows and agricultural equipment in a kolkhoz. In the collective farm all their land, their livestock and their tools would be collectivized; the peasants’ individual plots of land would be grouped together in large fields suitable for tractors; and the peasants would become wage labourers, with only tiny kitchen gardens on which to keep their poultry and grow a few vegetables. The villagers of Obukhovo had a fierce attachment to the principles of family labour and property and they were frightened by the stories they had heard about collectivization in other northern villages. There were terrifying tales of soldiers forcing peasants into the kolkhoz, of mass arrests
