Committees of the Poor (
* The Golovins had two barns, several pieces of machinery, three horses, seven cows, a few dozen sheep and pigs, two carts, as well as household property, which included iron bedsteads and a samovar, both signs of wealth in the Soviet countryside.
* The Christmas tree was banned in the Soviet Union in 1929, but in 1935 it was reinstated as the New Year tree. The New Year holiday shared many of the attributes of the traditional Christmas (the family gathering, the exchange of presents, the Father Christmas figure of Uncle Frost, etc.).
* The foundations leaked, even after they were blocked with tombstones from the city’s cemeteries. Children jumped the fences to swim in the foundations or to fish for carp. Building was halted by the outbreak of the war in 1941. It was not resumed. But pictures of the Palace continued to appear on matchboxes, and the local Metro stop (today’s Kropotkin Station) continued to be known as the Palace of the Soviets. The site was later turned into a swimming pool.
* Pavel Galitsky (b. 1911) remembers being questioned by his Party bosses at the Red Arsenal Factory in Leningrad during the purges of 1932. The son of a priest, Galitsky was the editor of the factory’s wall-newspaper. He had recently joined the Party, but his family background made him vulnerable. The head of the purge committee, who was the chairman of the regional Party committee and the factory’s director, put Galitsky on the spot by asking him to give a summary of ‘Lenin’s book
* In August 1935, the Donbass coalminer Aleksei Stakhanov dug a record amount of coal. Widely applauded in the national press, his achievement began a movement of rewarding skilled and devoted workers, efficiency being one of the stated aims of the Second Five Year Plan. Stakhanovism soon developed into another form of ‘shock labour’ in which workers who had exceeded the production quotas were rewarded with bonuses in pay, consumer goods, better housing and even promotion to administrative jobs (especially in the police). For the Stalinist regime, the movement was a means of raising the production norms and of lowering the basic rates of pay by making workers more dependent on piece rates. It placed enormous pressure on managers and officials, who took the blame (and were frequently denounced as ‘saboteurs’ and ‘wreckers’) when shortages of fuel or raw materials prevented the Stakhanovites from meeting their targets.
* In October 1935, Stalin made a well- publicized visit to his mother in Tbilisi. It began a press campaign to show the Party leader as a family man. Stalin was photographed in the Kremlin gardens with his children, something he had never permitted before (most Soviet people had never even known that Stalin had children).
* For this reason she wishes to remain anonymous.
* Psychiatrists have also found a high proportion of people suffering from paranoia and schizophrenic delusions among long-term residents.
* It is possible that Simonov was thinking here of Pyotr Palchinsky (1875–1929), the mining engineer whom Kerensky placed in command of the Winter Palace in October 1917. Imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, Palchinsky was released and subsequently allowed to resume his work at the Russian Technical Institute during the 1920s. He was rearrested in 1928 and executed the next year. There were many camp legends about famous prisoners like Palchinsky, and it seems that Simonov was taken in by one of them.
* There is no record of Piatnitsky’s speech, and no surviving stenographic record of the June plenum, although there is evidence which suggests that whatever Piatnitsky had said was erased from the corrected stenogram (a common practice in the archives of the Central Committee) where it might encourage other dissidents. Before closing the last plenum session on 29 June, Stalin announced: ‘As far as Piatnitsky is concerned, the investigation is ongoing. It should be completed in the next few days.’ At the bottom of the page there is a handwritten note by one of Stalin’s secretaries: ‘This communication was crossed out by comrade Stalin because it should not go into the stenogram’ (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 622, l. 220). There may be other records of the alleged incident in closed archives (such as the Presidential Archive in the Kremlin). Until that evidence becomes available, the only record of Piatnitsky’s stand against the mass arrests of the Old Bolsheviks comes from his son Vladimir, who claims to have reconstructed the events of the June plenum from his father’s personal file in the FSB archive, fragmentary evidence in other archives and the alleged reminiscences of Kaganovich, as related to him by Samuil Guberman, the head of Kaganovich’s secretariat (
* It is possible that Stalin had a hand in the murder of Kirov. The Leningrad Party boss was a very popular and more moderate leader than Stalin, who had good reason to be afraid that Kirov might emerge as a serious rival to his leadership. No hard evidence has ever come to light of Stalin’s role in his murder. But Stalin used the murder to pursue his obsession with an internal threat and to persecute his ‘enemies’.
* They are epitomized by Rubashov, the old revolutionary in Arthur Koestler’s novel
