demolition of a church signalled the appearance of a Palace of Culture. The German Communist Wolfgang Leonhard, who arrived in Moscow with his parents in 1935, describes their confusion when they sought to replace their outdated 1924 map: the new map showed all the improvements which, according to the Master Plan, were destined for completion by 1945. ‘We used to take both town plans with us on our walks,’ Leonhard writes: ‘one showing what Moscow had looked like ten years before, the other showing what it would look like ten years hence.’76

The speed of change in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s was intoxicating. The illusion that a new world was being created led many people – including a large number of socialist intellectuals in the West – to delude themselves about the Stalinist regime. Nina Kaminskaia, a young law student, continued to believe in the new world even after her father was sacked from his job in a Soviet bank and evidence of a darker reality was mounting. In her memoirs she remembers a song she and her friends would sing, a song of joy at the happy life to come, which symbolized the optimism of their generation and their blindness to the tragedy which their parents were already going through:

Believing in our country is so easy,

Breathing in our country is so free:

Our glorious, beloved Soviet land…

Our Soviet life is so good and bright

That children in ages to come

Will probably cry in their beds at night

Because they were not born in our lifetime.77

Members of the Soviet intelligentsia were so swept up by this optimistic atmosphere that they closed their eyes to the horrors perpetrated by the Stalinist regime in the name of progress. Boris Pasternak wrote to Olga Freidenberg, in April 1935:

The fact is, the longer I live the more firmly I believe in what is being done, despite everything. Much of it strikes one as being savage [yet] the people have never before looked so far ahead, and with such a sense of self- esteem, and with such fine motives, and for such vital and clear-headed reasons.

Nadezhda Mandelshtam recalls how she and her husband, the poet Osip Mandelshtam, were also sometimes drawn to think this way, fearing momentarily that the Revolution would pass them by if they ‘failed to notice all the great things happening before our eyes’. Osip was arrested in 1934, after he had read out to his friends his seditious poem about Stalin (‘the murderer and peasant-slayer’). As Nadezhda Mandelshtam observed, it was easier to believe in what was being done for the Communist utopia than to insist, as her husband had, on confronting reality: ‘A man who knew that you cannot build the present out of the bricks of the future was bound to resign himself beforehand to his inevitable doom and the prospect of the firing squad.’78

To accept this vision of the future entailed adopting certain attitudes that smoothed the way to collusion with the regime. It meant the acceptance of the Party as the source of Truth. For many people this belief involved a constant struggle between the observed truth of existing reality and the higher Revolutionary Truth of the Party. They were forced to live in the margins between these two truths – to acknowledge the failures of the Soviet system while still believing in the promise of a better life to come – something they could only accomplish through a conscious act of political faith. Lev Kopelev, a young Communist who took part in some of the worst excesses against the ‘kulaks’ in 1932–3, recalls his efforts to subordinate his moral judgement (what he called ‘subjective truth’) to the higher moral goals (‘objective truth’) of the Party. Kopelev and his comrades were horrified by what they were doing to the peasantry, but they deferred to the Party: the prospect of retreating from this position, on the basis of what they had been brought up to dismiss as the ‘bourgeois’ ideals of ‘conscience, honour [and] humanitarianism’, filled them with dread. ‘What we feared most,’ recalls Kopelev, ‘was to lose our heads, to fall into doubt or heresy and forfeit our unbounded faith.’79

Wolfgang Leonhard was similarly conscious of a dual reality. By the time he joined the Komsomol, he had ‘long since realized that reality in the Soviet Union was completely different from the picture presented in Pravda’. His mother had been arrested in 1937; his friends and teachers had all been taken away; and he had been living in an orphanage. But, as he explains to his Western readers, who ‘might find it strange’ to read about his joy on being admitted to the Komsomol,

Somehow I dissociated these things, and even my personal impressions and experiences, from my fundamental political conviction. It was almost as if there were two separate levels – one of everyday events and experiences, which I found myself criticising; the other that of the great Party line which at this time, despite my hesitations, I still regarded as correct, from the standpoint of general principle.80

Even at the height of the Great Terror of 1937 – 8 there were many believers who managed to keep their faith. They explained away the mass arrests according to the abstract formula ‘les rubiat – shchepki letiat’ (‘When the forest is cut down the chips will fly’, or ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’).

Believing in the ‘march towards Communism’ required an acceptance of its human costs. The Party told its followers that they were involved in a life-or-death struggle against ‘capitalist elements’ at home and abroad which would end in the final victory of the Communist utopia. Hitler’s rise to power, in 1933, was a crucial turning-point in this struggle. It was taken as a vindication of Stalin’s theory that the further the Soviet Union advanced towards Communism, the greater its enemies’ resistance would be. The Party hardened its position, forcing sceptics to put aside their doubts and join the struggle against Fascism (or run the risk of being denounced as ‘Fascist hirelings’). From 1933, the purging of the Party was intensified, with closer scrutiny of individual deeds to root out passive members and ‘hidden enemies’. Whole sections of society were targeted as ‘enemies’ and ‘alien elements’, beginning with the remnants of the old nobility and the bourgeoisie in Leningrad, who were arrested and exiled in their thousands following the murder of the city’s Party boss, Sergei Kirov, in December 1934. Any group that was deemed to be a ‘relic of the capitalist past’ (former ‘kulaks’, petty traders, gypsies, prostitutes, criminals, vagrants, beggars and so on) was likely to be purged as an obstacle to the building of a Communist society. Between 1932 and 1936, tens of thousands of these ‘socially harmful elements’ were rounded up by the police and expelled from the towns.81 Most of them were sent to the Gulag.

4

In August 1933, a ‘brigade’ of 120 leading Soviet writers went on a boat tour of the White Sea Canal organized by Semyon Firin, the OGPU commander of the labour camps at the canal. The idea of the trip had its origins in a meeting that took place in Maksim Gorky’s Moscow house in October 1932, at which a number of the country’s leading writers discussed the tasks of literature with several Politburo members, including Stalin, and other Party functionaries. In one of the earliest statements of the Socialist Realist doctrine, Gorky called for a heroic literature to match the ‘grand achievements’ of the Five Year Plans, and Stalin, who compared the Soviet writers to ‘engineers of the human soul’, proposed a tour of the canal to inspire them. Everything was organized by OGPU. ‘From the minute we became the guests of the Chekists, complete Communism began for us,’ the writer Aleksandr Avdeyenko later commented ironically. ‘We were given food and drink on demand. We paid nothing. Smoked sausage, cheeses, caviar, fruit, chocolate, wines and cognac – all was in plentiful supply. And this was a year of famine.’82

After staying at the luxury Astoriia Hotel in Leningrad, the writers went by train to the White Sea Canal, where they inspected dams and locks and visited the cultural centre to watch a theatrical performance put on by the prisoners. From the safety of their ship, they saw convicts working, but were not allowed to talk to them. To many of the writers it was obvious that they were being presented with a sanitized version of camp life. ‘It was evident to me that they were showing us “Potemkin Villages”,’ recalled Tamara Ivanova in 1989. But if the writers had their doubts, few were brave enough to voice them at the time. During the trip the writers had the chance to question Firin, who acted as their guide. According to Avdeyenko, the only writer who asked about the use of forced labour was Dmitry Mirsky – a former prince (Prince Dmitry Sviatopolk-Mirsky) who had fought with the White Army in the Civil War, emigrated to Britain, joined the Communists and returned to the Soviet Union in 1932 because he believed that Stalin’s Russia was ‘going to play an enormous role in world history’,

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