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6
Building Communism, 1921-1953
Communism alone is
capable of giving really complete democracy.
Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution
In order to
overthrow capitalism it was necessary not only to remove the bourgeoisie from
power, not only to expropriate the capitalists, but also to smash entirely
the bourgeois state machine, its old army, its bureaucratic officialdom and
its police force, and to substitute for it a new, proletarian form of state,
a new socialist state. And that, as we know, is exactly what the Bolsheviks
did.
Joseph Stalin, "Report to the Eighteenth Congress" ( 1939)
Stalin is the
personification of the bureaucracy.
Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed
The years of war, revolution, intervention,
civil war, and famine left Russia
exhausted, but established the Bolsheviks firmly in control of the country.
The expected world communist revolution had not material ized, so Russia's
new communist rulers turned their efforts toward building "socialism in
one country," as Stalin termed it. Aside from the loss of a few
territories on the periphery, Soviet Russia retained most of the domains of
the tsarist empire. Ethnic Russians constituted only threefifths of the
population of this multinational state; over one hundred separate ethnic groups
made up the remainder. The Soviet government's proclaimed commitment to
equality for all nations led to the formation of a unique structure of state
authority, national in form but socialist in content.
Although the Bolshevik leadership was
ideologically committed to centralized control, Lenin urged the creation of a
system of national republics, equal in status, to allow limited autonomy for
different ethnic groups. Stalin, who was Commissar of Nationalities, favored
subordination of the minority groups within Russia, but he lost to Lenin on
this issue. Russia's
second constitution, adopted in 1924, created the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR). In a concession to the national minorities, the USSR
was to be organized as a federal system providing for limited
autonomy--education and publishing in national languages, some cultural
freedom, and local control over minor matters. But this was a sham
federalism. The republics had no sovereign authority; that is, powers which
were legally guaranteed. Moscow
could override any actions that were deemed incompatible with the interests
of socialism, as defined by the Communist Party.
The Party itself was to remain highly
centralized, and of course Party decisions were final. Theoretically, the
Party was a democratic institution organized on the principle of
"democratic centralism": ideas and suggestions would be put forward
and voting would occur at each level of the Party, starting from the lowest
cell and eventually reaching the Politburo, the highest decision-making body.
Once decisions were reached at the center, they would be carried out loyally,
without question, by lower Party organizations. In reality, the process was
never very democratic, and provided an ideal vehicle for the concentration of
power. Stalin, who was appointed General Secretary of the Party in 1922, used
this position to build a loyal cadre of his supporters within the Party
bureaucracy. Stalin's organizational talents and his strategic position in
the Party would enable him to outmaneuver Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin,
Gregorii Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and the other more visible and gifted leaders
of the October Revolution, and establish an absolute personal dictatorship by
the early 1930s.
Although Lenin never possessed the power
that Stalin later accumulated, he was easily the dominant figure of the
Revolution. But Lenin had been in poor health since 1919, when he was wounded
in an assassination attempt. In 1922 Lenin had his first stroke; a second
followed in 1923, and the "old man" (he was not yet fifty-four)
died in January 1924. Absent any institutionalized means of succession, the
top Party leaders engaged in the behind-the-scenes jockeying for power
typical of authoritarian political systems. Lenin had left a "political
testament" assessing the characteristics of his potential successors,
which Joseph Stalin later suppressed. Trotsky, Lenin wrote, was clearly the
most intellectual and capable of the Bolshevik leaders, but too
self-confident. The Georgian Stalin had concentrated "boundless
power" in his hands through his control of the Party Secretariat, and
might not use it wisely. In any case, Stalin was rude--he had clashed with
Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife--and the dying leader recommended that his
comrades find a way of easing Stalin from power. But Stalin used the occasion
of Lenin's funeral to enhance his own legitimacy, employing pseudo-religious
imagery to create a cult worshipping the dead revolutionary. Busts and
statues of Lenin became ubiquitous; a mausoleum was built on Red Square to
house his remains; and the former capital was renamed Leningrad in his honor.
Stalin was born Josef Vissarionovich
Djugashvili, the son of a drunken Georgian bootmaker from Gori, in 1879. He
studied for five years at an Orthodox theological seminary in Tiflis. He joined a Georgian socialist movement in
1898, the year of the founding congress of the Russian Social Democratic
Labor Party. He joined Lenin's Bolshevik faction shortly before the outbreak
of the Revolution of 1905. Arrested several times in his revolutionary
career, Stalin (the name means "man of steel") spent close to seven
years in tsarist prisons or Siberian exile. Stalin, or "Koba," as
he liked to be called, helped fund the Bolshevik Party by organizing robberies
in his native Caucasus. Never a towering
intellect or a great orator (to the end of his life he spoke Russian with a
thick Georgian accent), Stalin was an adroit political infighter and a master
manipulator. Once he had consolidated power, he seldom ventured outside the
Kremlin, and had virtually no contact with the Soviet people.
Communist Party politics in the 1920s was
characterized by factionalism, as various coalitions formed and reformed in
the Party hierarchy based on their participants' positions on the New Economic
Policy (NEP). From the Revolution political power had been concentrated in
the Central Committee and especially the smaller Political Bureau (Po litburo) of the Communist Party. Government cabinets
had been renamed "commissariats" (which was deemed to be a more
revolutionary term than "ministries"), and the cabinet was called
the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom). The general governing pattern
was that government existed to carry out the Party's orders, and the Party
leadership was responsible to no one but itself. The fundamental democratic
principle of keeping rulers accountable to the public through elections had
been rejected by Lenin and his successors as "sham bourgeois
democracy."
In the early post- Lenin power struggle
Stalin first aligned himself with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky.
Stalin's chief theoretical contribution of the time--the idea of building
socialism in one country--was presented as an alternative to Trotsky's
insistence on pursuing world revolution. Soviet communists had established
the Third Communist International, or Comintern, in 1919 with the express
purpose of spreading communism around the world. By the time of Lenin's
death, however, the prospects that other industrial nations might go
communist seemed dim, and the Comintern became essentially an instrument of
Soviet foreign policy, forming and guiding communist parties in the colonial
regions of China, India, and Africa.
Stalin used his assertion that the Soviet Union
could build socialism by itself, together with his influential position in
the Party, to discredit Trotsky and secure his dismissal as head of the Red
Army in 1925.
In the latter half of the 1920s Stalin
deserted Zinoviev and Kamenev, and allied with Nikolai Bukharin, the Party's
chief theoretician. Stalin and Bukharin promoted their moderate positions on
NEP, critiquing the more radical, "leftist" positions of Trotsky,
Zinoviev, and Kamenev. By 1928 Stalin had forced all three out of the
Communist Party. Zinoviev and Kamenev admitted their mistakes and had their
Party membership reinstated. Trotsky refused to recant, was exiled briefly to
Alma Ata, the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan in Central Asia, and in the
following year was deported from the Soviet Union.
After brief stays in Europe and the United
States, he settled in Mexico City, where in 1940 an agent of
Stalin's secret police gained his confidence and subsequently murdered him
with an ice pick. Ironically, Trotsky was finishing a biography of his
nemesis at the time of his assassination.
Under NEP the economy recovered quickly,
although agriculture outpaced industry. A grain surplus in 1923 drove down
prices for farmers, while the prices of manufactured goods, still in short
supply, were increasing. This "scissors crisis" led peasants to withhold
their products in he hope of obtaining higher prices in the future. For many
Bolshevik leaders, this market behavior threatened their plans for
industrialization and reinforced their suspicion of the peasants' political
reliability.
During NEP most villages had reverted to
traditional practices--rotating land strips, governing through the mir--in short, to rural
Russian life much as it had been before the Revolution. One difference was
the existence of a network of private traders, or Nepmen, some of whom became
quite wealthy. Nepmen were frequently resented for their prosperity, as were
the kulaks, or prosperous peasants. By 1927-1928 NEP had succeeded in
restoring agriculture and industry to prewar levels. NEP's limited
capitalism, however, had also increased social differentiation. The
privileges and wealth of some private entrepreneurs and officials provoked
jealousy and conflicted with the egalitarian goals of the Revolution. Stalin
used this simmering resentment when in 1928-1929 he convinced the Politburo
to embark on a massive program of rapid industrialization.
CULTURE
The early revolutionary era was a time of
great expectations and great experimentation in culture. Lured by a radically
new vision of society, the avant-garde flocked to Petrograd and Moscow. Anna Akhmatova,
Aleksandr Blok, and Boris Pasternak read their poems to rapt audiences in
smoky cafes. Directors Vsevolod Meyerhold and Evgenii Vakhtangov staged
political plays for the masses. Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin
designed his model for a huge monument to the Comintern, consisting of three
geometric shapes. The top level of this 400-meter tower would rotate once a
day, the middle level once a month, and the base once each year. The project
was never begun; the model, however, can be seen today in Moscow's
Pushkin Museum.
Few Bolsheviks were enthusiastic about these
new art forms. They believed that art should be accessible to the masses,
promote communist values, and not be too complicated--in other words, art
should serve political purposes. This was the reasoning behind socialist
realism, the guiding principle of art which emerged in the 1920s and exerted
a stifling influence on creativity. Early on, democratically minded
intellectuals had resisted the authoritarian impulse of the Bolsheviks.
Evgenii Zamyatin, a freethinking member of the Party since 1905, published a
powerful dystopian novel in 1920, We,
about a society in which individualism was crushed by the collective, and
numbers replaced names. Reviled by the authorities, Zamyatin left Russia in 1922, as did the painters Marc
Chagall (after briefly serving as Commissar of Culture for his native Vitebsk province) and
Vassily Kandinsky. The poet Sergei Yesenin killed himself in a Leningrad hotel in 1925;
Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930. Those who stayed in Russia,
and stayed alive, were forced to work within the constraints of socialism.
The alternative was to write "for the drawer," hiding politically
unacceptable manuscripts from the authorities. Merely possessing such
material was grounds for a stiff sentence in the labor camps.
Socialist realist artists produced novels,
paintings, and music that advanced the cause of building socialism. Soviet
literature created idealized worlds where individuals sacrificed themselves
for the common good, whether fighting the Whites in the Civil War or
completing massive construction projects against great odds. Painters
portrayed hard-working peasants, heroic Lenins and Stalins inspecting the
progress of socialism, and dedicated factory workers or Red Army soldiers.
Vera Mukhina's massive statue of a worker and a kolkhoz (collective farm) woman, located
just outside the Exposition of the Achievements of the National Economy in
north Moscow,
is stereotypical socialist realism. Young, strong, and made of steel, the two
stand side by side, emblematic hammer and sickle raised skyward, pointing the
way toward the future.
Some examples of socialist realism rank as
solid artistic achievements. In film, for example, Sergei Eisenstein
Battleship Potemkin (about the sailors' revolt during the 1905 Revolution),
and October (the 1917 Revolution), both released in 1925, are superb examples
of early cinema. His 1938 movie, Aleksandr Nevskii, recounts the famous
battle on the ice of Lake Peipus, when the Novgorod leader defeated the Teutonic
Knights. Released shortly before Hitler launched World War II, Aleksandr
Nevskii was a patriotic call to arms for Russians, as well as superb cinema.
Mikhail Sholokov's And Quiet
Flows the Don ( 1927), a
novel about the Revolution and Civil War, won its author a Nobel Prize for
literature in 1965. Unfortunately, many other great novels, stories, plays,
and films could not pass Soviet censorship until the glasnost era under
Mikhail Gorbachev.
CREATING THE "NEW SOVIET
MAN"
Soviet communists
deliberately sought to transform society, breaking down the inegalitarian
class structures of the tsarist era. For Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels the
bourgeois family was based on property rela tions; women were
enslaved to their husbands in a form of legal prostitution. Proclaiming the
full equality of men and women, the new Soviet regime enacted legislation
weakening the family unit. Property inheritance was abolished, divorce
procedures were simplified, common law marriages were recognized, abortion
was granted on demand, and women were given equal legal status with men.
Prominent feminist revolutionary Aleksandra Kollontai argued that the family
was an outmoded institution repressive to women. Women, she insisted, had the
right to full sexual freedom, and family burdens such as child rearing could
be accomplished more effectively by the collective.
The task of achieving Revolutionary equality
for women was assigned to the Women's Department (Zhenotdel), created in
1919. However, the idea of true equality met with strong resistance from Russia's
maledominated culture. Claiming that equality between the sexes had been
achieved, the government abolished the Zhenotdel in 1930. With the increasing
regimentation of Soviet society in the 1930s, laws strengthening the family
were enacted. Abortion was made illegal in 1936, and divorce became more
difficult. Soviet art and propaganda glorified women's contributions in
building socialism, but much of the emphasis was on their traditional
familial roles.
Young people were a special target of the
regime, since the attitudes of youth are more malleable. The Communist Party
created a youth wing in 1918, the All-Lenin Communist League of Youth, or
Komsomol, with membership open to those between the ages of fifteen and
twenty-seven. Komsomol organization paralleled that of the Communist Party:
the chain of command was hierarchical, with units in high schools,
universities, workplaces, and military units. Furthermore, the Komsomol
functioned as the Communist Party's primary source of new members. Political
lectures, sports contests, chess clubs, nature hikes, and auxiliary labor
brigades (for example, to bring in the potato harvest) were organized through
the Komsomol. All activities were infused with a strong dose of communist
propaganda designed to socialize the participants to Marxist-Leninist values.
Younger children were taught obedience and loyalty through the Young Pioneers
in middle school and the Octobrists at the elementary school level.
Religion, like the family, was viewed by the
Bolsheviks as a mainstay of the old order and an ideological competitor.
Marxist theory held that religion, like the state and other parts of the
superstructure, would eventually wither away after the transition to
socialism. Many leading communists, however, preferred a more active program
to exterminate eligion. Thousands of Russian Orthodox priests, monks, and
nuns, who generally supported the White forces, were arrested or shot during
the Revolution and Civil War. Churches were razed or converted into
warehouses, and church property was nationalized. Patriarch Tikhon, leader of
the Russian Orthodox Church, was arrested and forced to recant his earlier
condemnation of the Soviet government.
While religion was sporadically persecuted
in the 1920s, agricultural collectivization in the following decade was
accompanied by a comprehensive attack on all forms of religion. In Russia,
religion was strongest in the rural areas, where 80 percent of the population
lived. Priests were equated with rich peasants (kulaks) as reactionary
elements. A League of the Militant Godless, aided by the Komsomol, organized
atheist lectures, satirized religious holidays, published anti-religious
posters and pamphlets, and confiscated church bells and icons. Schools
required coursework in scientific atheism, and the newspapers attacked
religion as the enemy of socialism. Of more than 54,000 Orthodox churches
active before the Revolution, only a handful still functioned in 1939, and
those were heavily taxed. Jewish temples, Muslim mosques, and Protestant
congregations suffered the same fate. Believers were excluded from Communist
Party membership, denied access to prominent positions, and actively harassed
in schools and by Soviet youth groups.
Religious persecution eased during World War
II, when Stalin discovered that the Church could be useful in mobilizing
public sentiment against fascism. The Russian Orthodox Church under
Metropolitan Sergei readily lent its support to the struggle against the
German invaders. In turn, Stalin permitted churches to reopen, religious
literature to be disseminated, and the Patriarchate to be restored.
Restrictions were relaxed on other major denominations. However, it was the
reinvigoration of Russian Orthodoxy, combined with patriotic Russian
nationalism, that strengthened the will to resist Nazism. Marxism-Leninism
could not command the same allegiance.
INDUSTRIALIZATION AND COLLECTIZATION
Lenin and the other
Bolshevik leaders had intended NEP to be only a temporary retreat. The
country had recovered to prewar levels of industrial and agricultural
production by the late 1920s, but the accompanying social and economic
inequalities and the growth of bureaucracy troubled many communists. There
was a consensus that the Soviet Union was vulnerable to
capitalist remnants internally, and to hostile nations in Europe and Asia, and that the country needed to industrialize
rapidly.
The leadership, however, was divided over
the pace of renewed industrialization. Party theoretician Nikolai Bukharin
led the "Right Opposition," those who wanted to prolong NEP and
allow some limited market forces to operate in Soviet Russia. Stalin, in
contrast, advocated rapid development, essentially adopting Trotsky's
position, which he had previously criticized. In 1928 Stalin got his way, and
the Communist Party released the first Five Year Plan, which based industrial
production on mandated quotas and shifted the economy toward a command
structure. The basic mechanism of supply and demand was ignored. The emphasis
was on rapid expansion of heavy industry--approximately 84 percent of
investment went into coal, steel, cement, electric power, machine tools, and
tractors, rather than consumer goods. Soviet workers were to postpone
improvements in their standard of living to build the country's industrial
base. Furthermore, the rapid development of heavy industry was judged vital
to Soviet national security. In a 1931 speech Stalin observed, "The
history of old Russia
consisted, among other things, in her being beaten continually for her
backwardness." The Mongols, the Swedes, the Poles, the Japanese, the
Turks, and the AngloFrench capitalists had defeated and exploited Russia in
the past, Stalin continued; transforming the Soviet Union into an industrial
power would make it militarily invincible.
The idea of the centrally planned economy
was the following. The Party Politburo would set general targets for
production of major sectors of the economy, dictating minimal growth rates
that must be achieved. The State Planning Committee (Gosplan) would
coordinate production among the different government ministries that were
tasked with actually carrying out production. Each ministry would have a
complex of factories and enterprises to supervise, and just as each ministry
was responsible for fulfilling its quota, each enterprise would have a
production quota it was required to meet. Quotas were based on the Five Year
Plan, broken down into annual and monthly quotas, and were based on
quantitative indicators.
It mattered little to the planners in Moscow whether a factory
produced poor-quality products, as long as it produced the required amount.
The reward system was geared toward fulfilling (and overfulfilling) one's
quota; a factory manager who failed could lose bonuses or might even lose his
position. In any case, Soviet consumers had no competing products from which
to choose. Production was standardized, so that consumers found the same
generic products at the same prices on shelves from Vladivostok
to Vitebsk.
The central planning system encouraged
deception at all levels of the economy. Government officials responsible for
fulfilling Party directives were afraid to point out to their superiors that
their quotas were impossibly high. They in turn passed along impossible
demands to the factories, where records were routinely falsified to make it
appear that the quotas had been fulfilled when in reality they had not.
"Family circles" of local Party officials and factory managers,
acting out of a perfectly rational sense of self-preservation, assured their
superiors that the plans were being fulfilled. This cycle of impossible
demands from the top down and falsification from the bottom up built into the
Soviet economy misinformation and inaccuracies. Officials and economists, as
well as outside observers, found it extremely difficult to gauge the real
performance of the Soviet economy.
Capitalist incentives such as pay were
rejected in favor of moral exhortations. Party propaganda and agitation
organs promoted campaigns, like that based around the coal miner Alexei
Stakhanov, who overfulfilled his norm by 800 percent, to motivate workers to
accomplish great feats. The intent was to create a climate of heroism,
urgency, selfsacrifice, and emulation of model workers who were glorified by
the state. Since exhorting workers grew old after a while, Soviet planners
eventually went to a system of bonuses to encourage higher production. They
also encouraged factory teams to engage in "socialist competition"
to try and outdo one another in overfulfilling their quotas. Since this
competition took place within a socialist system, it was judged to be
superior to capitalist competition.
Stalin was convinced that the resources for
a successful industrialization program would have to come from the peasantry
by extracting enough food from the countryside to feed the new armies of
labor and exporting the surplus to pay for foreign machinery and technology.
To do this the Soviet government undertook a program of
"collectivization"--appropriating private land from the peasants to
form large socialist farms. Collectivization of agriculture initially was not
part of the first Five Year Plan. When faced with the prospect of grain
shortages in 1929, Stalin approved the use of force to requisition grain from
the peasants. Under pressure from Moscow,
young industrial workers sent from the cities and Party officials began
fomenting "class warfare" in the countryside, pitting poor and
middle peasants against the "rich" kulaks. The Marxist
terminology of class struggle meant nothing to the peasants, who were either
confused by it or who saw an opportunity to dispossess their richer neighbors
of their property or to settle scores with personal enemies. The result was
chaos in the countryside.
On the eve of collectivization only about
3-4 percent of holdings had been converted to collective farms during the
eight years of NEP.
Of the different models that had evolved, the most acceptable was the artel, in which land, barns,
and most livestock were socialized, while peasant families were allowed to
retain their homes and a small private plot of land about an acre in size. In
these collective farms, or kolkhozy,
workers were paid a share of the total farm income for the year.
Theoretically, if the entire kolkhoz did well, so would the individual
peasants. Of course, if blight or drought ruined the crops, the peasants
would suffer commensurately. Because of this, many peasants in the
post-Stalin period preferred to live on state farms (sovkhozy) where
they were paid a set wage regardless of output.
One central aspect of agricultural
collectivization was the goal of establishing complete Communist Party
control over the rural villages, where four-fifths of the population lived.
Formation of the collective farms was supervised by the Party, and eventually
each kolkhoz andsovkhoz would have a Party cell headed by a
secretary to monitor its operation. Large machinery was owned by the state;
tractors, combines, and other implements were rationed out to the collective
farms through machine-tractor stations, adding another element of political
control.
The so-called enemies of Soviet power,
kulaks were to be "liquidated" as a class. What this meant was that
over a million families, 5 to 7 million of the most productive peasants, had
their farms and belongings confiscated. Often the "kulaks" were not
much better off than their neighbors--they might have a cow and a few extra
chickens. These supposed class distinctions were artificial, but necessary
from Stalin's perspective in order to implement his goal of subjugating the
Russian peasantry. Most of the households dekulakized were deported to bleak
regions in central Siberia, Kazakhstan, or northern Russia and were allowed to start
over with nothing. Those who were especially suspect, or who resisted (about
100,000) were shot. Rather than have their land, homes, and animals
confiscated, many peasants chose to burn their farms and slaughter their
livestock. Occasionally they formed armed bands of resistance.
The process of collectivizing agriculture
was brutal and inflicted tremendous damage on Soviet agriculture. Peasants
could be arrested or shot for withholding grain for next season's planting or
merely to survive hrough the winter. In 1932-1933 the Party had extracted so
much grain from the countryside that it created a massive famine in Ukraine, southern Russia,
and Kazakhstan.
In Ukraine, the
breadbasket of the USSR,
an estimated 5 million peasants died of starvation. Collectivization in Kazakhstan
consisted of changing an entire way of life--destroying the nomadic existence
of this Turkic Muslim people by forcing them into a sedentary lifestyle,
appropriating their livestock, and forcing them to plant grain on land
unsuitable for cultivation. Robert Conquest in his 1986 book The Harvest of Sorrow estimates that well over a million
Kazakhs died in the repressions of collectivization and the 1932-1933 famine;
thousands more fled into neighboring China.
The Soviet government succeeded in obscuring
the depth of this tragedy. Many Western observers were already favorably
inclined toward the Bolshevik experiment and refused to believe the stories
of mass repression. Walter Duranty, a correspondent for the New York Times, toured the
famine areas, but his readers learned nothing of the starvation and
cannibalism taking place in the countryside. President Herbert Hoover,
defeated in 1932 by the Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, once again organized
relief supplies for the famine victims. The horrors of collectivization did
little to dissuade left-wing idealists in the West. Entranced by the massive
Soviet effort to transform society and nature, adventurers came from Europe,
the United States, and Australia
to be a part of this utopian experiment. Compared to the poverty and
unemployment of the Great Depression, Soviet Russia may have seemed the wave
of the future. In reality, Stalin was leading the country on a "journey
into the whirlwind," as writer Evgeniia Ginzburg expressed in her book
of the same title.
THE PURGES
Stalin inherited the
secret police and concentration camps Lenin had created; he greatly expanded
the powers of the former and the scope of the latter. In order to complete
the social and economic transformations of the 1930s, Stalin turned toward
the massive and indiscriminate use of terror. "Show trials" were
often utilized to make an example of "enemies of the state." In the
first of these, the 1928 Shakhty
coal miners' trial, fifty-three engineers, technical specialists from the
tsarist era, were charged with being part of a foreign conspiracy trying to
sabotage the coal industry. There was no evidence of guilt, but after days of
sleep deprivation, threats, and torture the accused confessed. Most of the de fendants were convicted;
five were executed. The Shakhty
trial established a pattern of fabricating charges against innocent
individuals, coercing confessions from them, threatening retaliation against
families to encourage the accused to implicate others, and then staging a
trial to demonstrate the government's vigilance against spies and wreckers.
Terror was used against all social and
occupational groups--no one was spared. Terror directed against the kulaks,
who were only marginally better off than their fellow villagers, served to
intimidate the rest of the peasantry. Arresting and executing those engineers
and specialists who resisted the imposition of unrealistic production targets
frightened the remainder into working at breakneck speed to overfulfill the
plan. Used against loyal Party members, terror combined with iron discipline
to produce abject displays of public abasement and humiliation in the show
trials of the 1930s.
The assassination of Sergei Kirov, popular
Secretary of the Leningrad Party organization, by a disgruntled Party member
in December 1934 touched off a wave of arrests. Although the evidence is not
clear, the assassin may have been encouraged by the NKVD (secret police) to
kill Kirov; he was twice arrested with a
loaded pistol and maps of Kirov's
routes, and each time was released with his weapon. Stalin affected dismay at
the incident; in fact, it was a golden opportunity to initiate a purge of
those deemed disloyal. Kirov's
assassination touched off a wave of arrests in 1935, including those of the Old
Bolsheviks Zinoviev and Kamenev. Robert C. Tucker in his book Stalin in Power refers to this period as the
"quiet terror," the prelude to a full-blown assault on the
population.
The Terror, or Purges (the Russian term is chistka, or
"cleaning"), at its height from 1936 to 1938, was directed largely
against officials in the upper levels of the Communist Party and government,
members of the Comintern, leading cultural figures, officers in the Red Army,
scientists, and others in prominent positions. Partly driven by Stalin's
paranoia, the Purges had the effect of eliminating all possible opposition to
him. The Old Bolsheviks--those who took part in the Revolution--submitted to
the Party out of a strong sense of discipline, but Stalin was determined to
ensure that no trace of possible resistance remained.
Zinoviev and Kamenev, two leading figures of
the Revolution, were accused of plotting with Trotsky to murder Stalin, of
having planned the attack on Kirov,
and of being German agents. Pressured to admit their fictitious crimes at a
staged trial in 1936, they were convicted and executed. The state prosecutor,
Andrei Vyshinsky, railed against the defen dants, declaring that for justice
to be served "the mad dogs must be shot." They were. Other prominent
Bolshevik leaders came to a nasty end during this period. Mikhail Tomsky,
head of the trade unions, committed suicide following an argument with
Stalin. Minister of Heavy Industry Sergo Ordzhonikidze also killed himself.
The Czech communist Karl Radek was sentenced to prison, where he was killed
by inmates. In the last major purge trial, Alexei Rykov, Nikolai Bukharin,
and nineteen others were accused of heading an anti-Soviet bloc of Rightists
and Trotskyists; they were executed in 1938.
Marxist theory had predicted that with the
triumph of communism, the state, which had only served as a repressive
mechanism to maintain the ruling classes in power, would begin to wither
away. In Stalinist Russia the reverse happened--the state grew and became
extraordinarily powerful. The new Soviet Constitution of 1936 proclaimed that
the gains of the Five Year Plans had established socialism in the USSR.
However, Stalin argued that progress toward the final goal of full communism
would intensify resistance by counterrevolutionary forces, and so increased
oppression would be necessary to crush the opposition.
THE FIRST TOTALITARIAN SYSTEM?
The political system that evolved in the Soviet Union has often been called totalitarian. As the
name implies, a totalitarian system seeks to exercise total control over the
thoughts and behavior of the population. Political power is highly
centralized in a single party headed by a dictator; all other political
parties, interest groups, and social and cultural organizations are either banned
or thoroughly dominated by the ruling party. The economy is tightly
controlled by the government; business and agriculture are either owned
outright by the state or run by government bureaucrats. Virtually all aspects
of life, including those usually reserved to the private sphere, are
politicized. Education and the mass media are controlled by the state,
censorship is exercised, and the public is subject to government propaganda
and attempts at behavior modification. Government actions are justified through
a single ideology, and ideological competitors such as religion and other
philosophies are harassed or destroyed. State-sponsored terror is employed to
ensure complete obedience.
Stalin established the first totalitarian
regime. Later totalitarian systems included China
under Mao Zedong ( 1949-1976), North Korea
under Kim Il-sung ( 1946-1995), and Cambodia under Pol Pot (
1975-1978). Although none of the communist countries succeeded in exercising
abso lute control over their people, they did create dictatorships that were
far more repressive than most authoritarian systems. The peculiar nature of
totalitarianism is captured in several excellent novels--Arthur Koestler's
Darkness at Noon, George Orwell 1984 and Animal
Farm, and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit
451. Each of these depicts the horrors of life in a society where
individual desires are completely subordinated to the goals of the state.
In Stalin's Soviet
Union real political power was concentrated in the upper levels
of the Communist Party--the Central Committee and the smaller Politburo--and
the government ministries. Major decisions on foreign and domestic policies
were made in the Politburo, with Stalin having the decisive voice. Government
ministers were charged with devising plans and carrying out Party directives;
they had very little chance to exercise initiative. Appointments to positions
of responsibility--Party secretaries, government officials, military
officers, heads of schools and universities, newspaper editors--were
controlled through a list of names, the Nomenklatura, coordinated through the
Party Secretariat in Moscow.
The Nomenklatura was similar to a security background check--it ensured that
candidates for a position were politically reliable. Those with questionable
class backgrounds, religious believers, criminals, and those not
wholeheartedly committed to the Soviet cause were screened out.
Was the Soviet Union
under Stalin totalitarian? Scholars disagree. Certainly the state exercised
greater control over its subjects than had any other of the world's great
dictatorships, including Hitler's. But the Smolensk
archives, captured by the Germans during World War II and then retrieved by
the Americans, demonstrate that local Party and government officials often
colluded to frustrate Moscow's,
and Stalin's, orders. Constant pressures from the center to achieve
unrealistic goals fueled a culture of deception, where the localities
inflated production figures and assured Moscow
that the assigned plans were always fulfilled (or even better,
overfulfilled). Deception was very rational behavior in the Soviet
Union, and it pervaded public life. This inherent logic of lies
and deception poisoned social relations. When Soviet communism finally
collapsed, Russian society lacked the trust necessary to build a truly
democratic political culture.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND THE GREAT
FATHERLAND WAR
The question of the Soviet Union's role in world affairs was problematic
from the very beginning. First, the course of history did not unfold according to Marx's
or Lenin's predictions, since no other industrialized nations experienced a
socialist revolution. Second, the Bolsheviks' vitriolic condemnation of
capitalist states, their repudiation of all foreign debts, and their avowed
goal of fomenting world revolution ensured their international isolation.
Third, the hostile approach of the Bolsheviks to capitalist Europe and America--their
bitter propaganda campaigns, for example--generated hostility in turn from
the West. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 1918 in which the new Bolshevik
government readily gave up huge territories in exchange for peace with Germany
demonstrated an ability to deal pragmatically with their enemies in order to
preserve the nascent Soviet state, while continuing to promote the goal of
revolution abroad.
Spurned by France,
Britain, and the United States, Soviet Russia turned to the
other pariah nation of post-World War IEurope, Germany. During a 1922 economic
conference in Italy, the
two countries signed the Rapallo Treaty, in which Russia
obtained formal diplomatic recognition from Germany and expanded trade
relations. More important, a secret agreement allowed Germany to construct arms factories and to
train troops within the Soviet Union. This
arrangement provided the Soviet Red Army with valuable technology and
experience in joint military exercises while allowing Germany to circumvent the
provisions of the Treaty of Versailles ( 1919) against rearming. This
punitive treaty, with its reparations payments and other humiliating conditions,
had been forced on Germany
by the victorious allies and was greatly resented by Germans.
Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s evolved
into a curious blend of revolutionary expansion and routine diplomacy. By the
time of Lenin's death in 1924, the Soviet Union
was no longer threatened by imminent attack. There were, however, potential
threats to Soviet security, from Britain
and France in the West,
and from Japan
in the East. Japan
had withdrawn from the Soviet Far East in late 1922, but clearly had plans to
expand onto the Asian mainland in its imperial quest. China at that time was extremely
weak and fragmented, presenting an ideal opportunity for foreign
intervention. Concern about Japan
led Soviet leaders, through the Comintern, to help establish the Chinese
Communist Party, in 1921. Mikhail Borodin, a Comintern official, reorganized
the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) along Leninist lines and sponsored
a coalition of the Kuomintang and Chinese Communists in 1924. Moscow reasoned that a strong, unified China could more easily withstand
Japanese penetration. When Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Nationalists, turned
on his communist allies and massacred some 10,000 of them in 1927, Soviet
influence in China
was severely curtailed. Japan
invaded Manchuria in northern China
in 1931 and threatened the Soviet border throughout the 1930s.
The United
States refused to grant formal diplomatic recognition
to the USSR
until 1933, but there were substantial economic contacts during the 1920s.
Ford Motor Company sold tractors, General Electric provided electrical
equipment, Standard Oil and Sinclair signed contracts to develop Soviet
energy reserves, and American cotton was exported to Soviet textile mills.
Armand Hammer, the American entrepreneur, philanthropist and art collector,
laid the foundations for his massive fortune by setting up factories to
manufacture pencils. An astute businessman, Hammer realized that the
revolutionary state would soon become heavily bureaucratic, and pencils would
be in great demand. Although he was one of the world's richest capitalists,
Armand Hammer had close ties with every Soviet leader from Lenin to Brezhnev.
Stalin was initially slow to perceive the
threat presented by Hitler's rise in Germany. From 1927 to 1934 he was
convinced that the Social Democrats (SPD), the moderate, Western-oriented
left wing of German politics, were a greater enemy of communism than the
growing National Socialist Party. Stalin chose to overlook Hitler's tirades
against communism, preferring to view the fascist movement as a manifestation
of capitalism that might result in war within Europe, but which would leave
the Soviet Union untouched. Through the
Comintern Stalin instructed the German Communist Party (KPD) to shun any form
of cooperation with the SPD. By refusing to work with the German socialists,
the communists helped destroy the Weimar
democracy and facilitated Hitler's rise to chancellor in 1933.
By 1934 Hitler had destroyed the KPD and
dissolved the military cooperation agreement signed at Rapallo. Stalin realized that Nazi Germany
presented a real threat to the Soviet Union.
In place of his earlier policy of semi-isolation, Stalin now initiated a
collective security policy aimed at linking Soviet security to that of Europe. Maksim Litvinov, Commissar of Foreign Affairs,
vigorously courted the former "capitalist aggressor" nations to
contain Nazi expansion. The Soviet Union joined the League of Nations and in
1935 concluded mutual defense pacts with France
and Czechoslovakia.
Soviet diplomacy above all sought to prevent having the USSR dragged into a war before
military and economic preparations had been completed.
By 1938 it was clear that the policy of
collective security was seriously flawed. The West was unwilling to stand up
to Hitler's aggressive actions--his move into the Rhineland ( 1936), his
assistance to General Franco's fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War
(1936-1939), the annexation of Austria ( 1938), and the move into Czech
Sudetenland and the eventual occupation of all Czechoslovakia ( 1938-1939)
had drawn no more than muted protests. In May 1939 Stalin replaced the Jewish
Litvinov with his close confidant, Viacheslav Molotov, and in August of that
year the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact) was concluded. In addition to pledges not to attack the other party,
the pact also included a secret protocol dividing up the territories that lay
between the two countries. The Soviet Union would acquire the eastern third
of Poland, the Baltic states,
and Bessarabia (present-day Moldova);
Germany could invade and
occupy western Poland
without fear of Soviet retaliation. The German attack on Poland one week later launched
World War II.
The Non-Aggression Pact was signed to buy
time for the Soviet Union, as was a neutrality treaty signed with Japan
in April 1941. The first and second Five Year Plans had laid the foundations
for an industrial economy, but collectivization and the Purges had greatly
weakened Soviet capabilities. Stalin's Terror had decimated the top officers
of the Red Army, leaving it unprepared to deal with a German invasion. Robert
C. Tucker notes that of 101 members of the Soviet high command, 91 were
arrested and more than 80 were shot. Some 3,000 naval commanders and 140 of
186 division commanders were executed during the Purges. After the
Non-Aggression Pact was signed Stalin ordered the western military
fortifications in Belorussia dismantled, possibly to convince Hitler that the
Soviet Union posed no threat to Germany, but also to build fortifications
further westward in the newly acquired territories.
The suspicious Soviet leader was so
determined to avoid provoking the Germans that he consistently ignored
warnings by his own and Western intelligence services that Hitler was planning
to attack the USSR.
Very likely, Stalin had hoped Germany
would be exhausted from a protracted war with Britain
and France.
He did not envision Germany's
rapid victories in Europe, nor could he
believe Hitler would be so rash as to fight on two fronts simultaneously.
When 3 million German troops invaded Soviet territory on June 22, 1941, the
Red Army was completely unprepared. Stalin was so shocked he went into
seclusion for nearly two weeks. Britain
and France quickly joined
the USSR as allies, and America entered the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
The Great Fatherland War, as it
patriotically came to be known, caused immense destruction. German forces
quickly overran the western part of the USSR,
including Ukraine and Belorussia, and advanced through Russia along a front stretching from Leningrad in the north, past Moscow,
to Stalingrad and the Caucasus in the south.
They eventually occupied some 400,000 square miles of Soviet territory with
65 million people, controlled much of the best agricultural land, and
approached the outskirts of Moscow.
Leningrad was
cut off and besieged for nearly three years; some 900,000 inhabitants of the
city died, mostly from cold and starvation. Altogether, about 20 million
people perished from various causes, eighty times the number of Americans
killed.
Most Soviet people fought fiercely in
defense of their homeland. Military historian William Fuller (in Gregory
Freeze, ed., Russia: A
History) claims that the Soviet Union was fairly even with Germany in
weapons and men at the start of the war; Germany's initial successes were due
in large part to failures of leadership in the Soviet regime and to the vast
destruction visited on Soviet society in the 1930s. It is a telling comment
on Stalin's cruelties that in many parts of Ukraine,
Belorussia,
and the Baltics the Germans were welcomed as potential liberators. Peasants
often met the advancing German troops with the traditional Slavic welcome of
bread and salt. It is also estimated that about 1 million defected and served
the Axis war machine in various capacities. However, the barbaric treatment
of Slavs, classified as "subhumans" fit only for slave labor
according to Hitler's racial scheme, quickly turned the population against
the invaders. Jews and Communist Party officials fared the worst--they were
shot, while others were herded into concentration camps. Nazi atrocities
encouraged the Soviet people to fight doggedly, either in the regular forces
or in partisan detachments, and this dogged resistance contributed to the
eventual defeat of the Germans.
The magnitude of Soviet losses in World War
II is difficult for Americans to comprehend. Virtually everyone lost at least
one relative, and many lost entire families. Millions were uprooted, suffered
from hunger and privation, and saw their homes destroyed. The country's
national wealth had been reduced by approximately 30 percent. The war
reinforced Soviet patriotism, magnified Stalin's personality cult, and
strengthened his hold on power. It also reinforced the perception of
vulnerability to outside aggression, making it easier for Soviet leaders to
demand continued sacrifices in the interest of state security. Finally,
Soviet victory in World War II added new territory to the USSR--the Baltic states
of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia,
Moldavia, and new areas in
the west of the Belorussian and Ukrainian republics--and secured Eastern Europe as a communist buffer zone.
THE COLD WAR
World War II led to the formation of a new
international order in which there were two dominant superpowers: the United States and the USSR. The Soviet
Union was virtually exhausted by 1945; agricultural production
had declined by two-thirds, industrial production was skewed toward military
needs, and housing was in such short supply that 25 million people were
homeless or living in makeshift shelters. On the plus side, the USSR had incorporated parts of the Russian
empire lost after the Revolution--the Baltic states and Moldavia--and annexed East Prussia and new territory in
Transcarpathia. The Soviet Union was now the
second most powerful nation in the world, even after demobilizing the bulk of
its 11 million man army.
There was no one reason why relations
between the former allies deteriorated into the Cold War, a period of tension
and competition between the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc and the American-led
West. However, Stalin's renewed repression and isolation within the USSR,
and the expansion of communism externally, reinforced the conviction in the
West that the communists were indeed intent on world revolution. Over the
next five years communist governments came to power in Eastern
Europe, North Korea,
and China.
A strong communist movement threatened to take power in Greece, and large communist parties existed in
France and Italy.
Soviet forces occupied northern Iran
until May 1946 and stayed in Austria
until Nikita Khrushchev withdrew them in 1955. No longer an isolated pariah
state, the Soviet Union was now the
acknowledged leader and role model for a dozen communist countries. Marxist
predictions that communism would replace capitalism finally seemed to be
coming true, although the victories were secured by force of arms, or by
revolutions in poor agricultural societies rather than developed industrial
ones.
Of immediate importance for Stalin was the
creation of a buffer zone of friendly communist states in Europe,
in reality a Soviet empire. As the Red Army had pushed the Germans back
through Eastern Europe it had occupied Poland,
Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria,
and Czechoslovakia.
Since Stalin had promised to support "democracy" in Eastern Europe after the war, he directed communist
parties to form coalitions, or "Na tional Fronts," with parties of
the democratic left and center in each of these countries. Over the next
three years the communist parties, with Soviet support, gradually discredited
or destroyed their coalition partners and established communist
dictatorships. Even in those countries where support for communism was
strong, as in Czechoslovakia
and Yugoslavia, Stalin
insisted on replication of the Soviet model and complete subordination to Moscow.
Thorough control was difficult to achieve,
however, when communist forces had attained power without direct Soviet
assistance, as occurred in Yugoslavia,
Albania, and China.
In Yugoslavia, communist
partisans under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito fought the Germans, and by
war's end had secured a dominant position in their country and in neighboring
Albania.
At first the Yugoslav communists adamantly proclaimed their loyalty to Moscow. Soviet attempts
to bind Yugoslavia
into a web of controls, through the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform,
the successor to the Comintern) and the Soviet secret police, backfired. In
1948 Tito announced that Yugoslavia
would quit the Cominform and pursue its own path toward socialism,
infuriating Stalin, who correctly perceived it as a challenge to Soviet
leadership of world communism.
Following the conquest of Berlin
and the division of Germany
into four occupation zones by the Allies, Soviet-occupied East Berlin and East Germany
were taken over by the German Communist Party, renamed the SED (Socialist
Unity Party of Germany). Stalin was keen to keep Germany divided and weak. When in
1948 the United States
introduced a currency reform in the western sectors without consulting the USSR, Stalin ordered Berlin, located over 100 miles inside the
eastern sector, blockaded. The United States
and Britain
responded with an elevenmonth airlift of supplies to the beleaguered city.
Stalin finally lifted the blockade in May 1949, but the crisis resulted in
the formation of separate East and West German states, solidifying
indefinitely the postwar division. The Western allies also created the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 as a means of containing Soviet
aggression in Europe.
Stalin's actions at the wartime conferences
in Teheran, Potsdam, and Yalta
were directed toward the complete destruction of Germany
and the creation of a protective buffer zone between the Soviet Union and Western Europe. A Communist Eastern Europe where Soviet
troops were deployed, where the communist parties and security forces were
thoroughly penetrated by and responsible to Soviet Party and secret police
organs, and where Western Europe and the United States were denied any influ
ence constituted just such a zone. Winston Churchill in his 1946 speech at Westminster College
in Fulton, Missouri, aptly described this dividing
line between communist East and democratic West. "From Stettin in the
Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,
an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."
Certainly one factor contributing to the
tension between the Soviet Union and the United States was the refusal of
the latter to share the secrets of the atomic bomb. Both countries had been
working on this superweapon throughout the war, but America's technological edge
proved superior. When President Truman approved the August 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
he apparently hoped that this destructive weapon would encourage Stalin to
act more cautiously. However, Stalin could not tolerate an American nuclear
monopoly, and ordered his scientists (and spies) to build a Soviet weapon
with all dispatch. The first Soviet atomic (fission) bomb was successfully
tested in 1949; a thermonuclear device was exploded in 1953.
In the Far East, Stalin's goals included
regaining territory lost to Japan
in the Russo-Japanese War (southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands),
establishing a presence in northern China and on the Korean peninsula,
and limiting the American presence in the region. Soviet forces had not
fought Japan during the
war, but did move very quickly into northern China
and the northern part of the Korean peninsula in the few weeks before Japan's
surrender in August 1945. While the United
States willingly divided Korea
into two zones of occupation along the 38th parallel, Stalin's attempt to
secure a foothold in Japan
was successfully resisted by General Douglas MacArthur and President Harry
Truman. However, Soviet troops did manage to regain control of southern
Sakhalin, and occupied the entire chain of the Kuril
Islands, including the four southernmost islands, which had
never been under Russian control. Continued occupation of these Northern Territories, as the Japanese call them,
poisoned relations with Japan
throughout the rest of the Soviet period. As late as 1999 Russia and Japan had still not reached a
territorial settlement, and so had not signed a peace treaty formally ending
the state of war between them.
As in Eastern Europe,
Soviet occupying forces backed a pliant communist, Kim Il-sung, and helped
his political faction consolidate power in the North. In June 1950 Kim
convinced a reluctant Stalin to support his invasion of U.S.-backed South Korea.
Kim also managed to gain support from Mao Zedong and the new communist
government established in the People's Republic of China in 1949. In June 1950 North
Korean orces struck southward across the 38th parallel, thus starting the
Korean War (1950-1953). Stalin cautiously supported North Korea with supplies,
pilots, and military advisors. It was not until his death that the stalemate
on the Korean peninsula was broken and a peace agreement was negotiated.
Moscow did not seem very
confident of a communist victory in China in the immediate postwar
period, and signed a treaty of friendship and alliance with Chiang Kai-shek's
Kuomintang government in August 1945. By 1947 the Chinese communists under
Mao were scoring major successes against the Nationalists; Chiang's forces
were driven off the mainland and onto the island
of Taiwan, and the People's Republic
of China
was proclaimed on October 1, 1949. Although they had provided only minimal
support to the Chinese communists during the civil war, the Soviets extended
warm wishes to Mao and invited him to Moscow
for a two-month conference in 1950, during which a mutual assistance treaty
was signed. But personal relations between Stalin and Mao were not cordial,
and the interests of these two large communist nations were incompatible. Communism
was not a monolithic bloc as so many in the West thought, and the communist
world would soon fracture along the Sino-Soviet axis.
STALIN'S FINAL YEARS
Soviet priorities after the war included
rebuilding the industrial base and restoring strict controls over society.
After years of sacrifice, many were hoping for some easing of the repressions
of the 1930s, some reward for their loyal defense of the motherland. But they
would be disappointed. True, political terror was sporadic rather than
pervasive, and the material well-being of the population was restored to
prewar levels within a few years. But private agricultural production,
tolerated as a necessity during the war, came under renewed attack as
resources were drained from the countryside to finance industry. Tens of
thousands of collective farms had disintegrated under the German onslaught;
now the Soviet state set about rebuilding the kolkhozes and forcing peasants to deliver
grain to the cities. Renewed pressure on the countryside led once again to
famine. The young and able left the countryside for the cities, further
aggravating the poverty of Russia's
rural areas.
Stalin was determined to punish all those
suspected of not being totally loyal to the motherland. Those who had
collaborated with the Germans either fled to the West or were shot. Prisoners
captured by the Germans were automatically suspect. If they survived the
German concentration camps, then they must have been collaborators, since the
Germans treated POWs so cruelly. By the same twisted reasoning, escapees must
have been working with their captors, given German efficiency. Sadly, many
soldiers were repatriated from German POW camps to Soviet concentration
camps.
Stalin also suspected the loyalty of
national minorities within the former occupied territories. In 1937,
concerned that they might cooperate with the Japanese, he ordered hundreds of
thousands of Koreans living in the Soviet Far East rounded up and deported to
Central Asia. During and after the war many
of the small nations of southern Russia
and the Caucasus were brutally resettled in the vast expanses of Siberia or Kazakhstan.
These deported peoples included Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and the Volga
Germans, for example--as well as nationalists from the newly annexed Latvia, Lithuania,
and Estonia.
In his memoirs, General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev claims that Stalin
contemplated deporting the entire Ukrainian nation of 40 million, but the
logistics of moving so many people were simply unmanageable!
As the Cold War heated up, paranoia and
isolationism reached new heights in the USSR. One of Stalin's top
lieutenants, Andrei Zhdanov, party boss of Leningrad and cultural watchdog, initiated
a campaign against all forms of "cosmopolitanism" in 1947.
Cosmopolitanism was a code word for cultural influences that were not purely
Russian, particularly those which were Jewish. Zhdanov publicly attacked the poet Anna
Akhmatova and satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko for not publishing idealized, moral
works in the vein of socialist realism. The zhdanovshchina,
as it was called, exercised a stifling influence over the arts, social
sciences, and even natural sciences. In biology, for example, Western
genetics was rejected in favor of the quack theories of Trofim Lysenko, who
claimed that characteristics acquired from the environment could then be
transmitted to succeeding generations. Lysenko used his highlevel connections
to ruin his critics and to establish himself as dean of the Soviet scientific
establishment. His ideas exercised a pernicious influence on Soviet science
and agriculture well into the Khrushchev era.
Soviet culture during Stalin's final years
suffered greatly from the repressive atmosphere of thezhdanovshchina.
Many of the best writers and artists had already fled to the West years
before: the painter Marc Chagall and novelist Vladimir Nabokov are two
notable examples. The late Stalin era was even more stultifying than the
prewar USSR.
Socialist realism sacrificed creativity for ideology, as painters churned out
scenes of construction sites, idyllic collective farm life, heroic military
battles, and of course scores of Lenins and Stalins. In music, talented
composers such as Sergei Prokofiev, who had written the delightful children's
score Peter and the Wolf in 1936, were accused of creating
disharmonious music that was not appreciated by the working masses. The
brilliant poet and novelist Boris Pasternak published mostly translations
during the Stalin period; his masterpiece Dr. Zhivago, described by the
author as "a spiritual history of the Russian revolution," was not
published until 1957, and even then was available only to readers in the
West.
Stalin's cult of personality rose to new
heights during this period. The victory over Germany had confirmed his
absolute power. Portraits, statues, and busts of the supreme leader adorned
town squares, schools, offices, and many homes. Soviet newspapers such as Pravda andIzvestiia declared him "Friend and
Teacher of All Toilers," the "Greatest Genius in History," and
other absurdities; they carried stories glorifying Stalin for his political
leadership, philosophical contributions, literary talents, even his
(nonexistent) expertise in linguistics, agronomy, and art. Academic writings
would cite Stalin's works as the ultimate authority on every topic. The once
minor Bolshevik functionary who, as the Russian General Dmitrii Volkogonov
explains in his biography, "had no skills or profession, unless being a
half-baked priest can be considered a profession," became a godlike omnipotent
figure in the last years of his life.
Constant public adulation did little to
assuage Stalin's paranoia. The great dictator secluded himself in the Kremlin
or various palatial retreats, surrounded by loyal retainers and under tight
security. He seldom appeared in public, and in later years traveled abroad
only for the wartime conferences in Teheran ( 1943) and Potsdam ( 1945). Stalin worked late into
the night, often summoning officials or experts for late-night Kremlin
conversations. All "suggestions" conveyed at such meetings were
understood to be orders and were carried out without question.
Soviet life in the late Stalin era was
dreary, poor, and insulated from the rest of the world. Those few foreigners
who were allowed entry were closely watched by the secret police. Even
accidental contact with foreigners was cause for suspicion; marrying one was
strictly forbidden. Soviet propaganda depicted life in the United States and other
capitalist countries as wretched while exalting Russian and Soviet accomplishments
as the greatest in history. As Isaac Deutscher expressed it in his biography
of Stalin, "Megalomania and xenophobia were to cure the people of their
sense of inferiority, render them immune to those attractions of the western
culture by which generations of the intelligentsia had been spellbound,
protect them against the demoralizing impact of American wealth, and harden
them for the trials of the Cold War and, if need be, for armed
conflict."
Political control at this time was exercised
through the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), headed by Lavrentii Beria, a
Georgian and close friend of Stalin. Beria, who had succeeded Nicholas Yezhov
as head of the NKVD in 1938, was a complete moral degenerate. In Moscow, as in Tbilisi,
where he had served as head of the Transcaucasian secret police, Beria used
his unlimited power to abduct young girls off the streets and rape them.
Fearful that Beria would use the MVD's vast power to assume the top position,
his colleagues quickly engineered his arrest and execution immediately after
Stalin's death.
Toward the end of Stalin's life there were
indications that he was laying the groundwork for a new purge. At the
Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952 a new, greatly enlarged Central
Committee was elected; in addition, the Politburo was renamed the Presidium
and was doubled in size. Stalin was very possibly getting ready to dismiss
those Party veterans who in the 1930s had vaulted into the top ranks over the
bodies of the Old Bolsheviks. In another ominous development, in January 1953
nine high-level Kremlin doctors were accused of plotting to use medicine to
assassinate Soviet military leaders. This fabrication, termed the Doctors'
Plot, reflected a growing anti-semitism, since many of the doctors had Jewish
surnames. Mercifully, the "Father of the Peoples" died before the
next round of bloodletting got under way.
Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, at age
seventy-three shocked a nation that, perhaps, had come to believe the
propaganda that its god-leader was truly omnipotent. He suffered two strokes
within a week, and his daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, recalled that leeches
were used in the final hours to treat his illness. Beria clearly expected to
succeed the great dictator, but the fear he inspired in other Presidium
members led to his arrest and execution. A massive public funeral was held
for Stalin, with thirty-gun salutes and thousands of mourners filing past the
bier. Afterward, Stalin's body was preserved and his remains interred next to
those of Lenin in the mausoleum on Red Square.
With Stalin and Beria gone, the most
repressive aspects of Soviet rule abated. Those accused in the Doctors' Plot
were released. Senior Party leaders--Nikita Khrushchev, Georgii Malenkov,
Nikolai Bulganin, Anastas Mikoyan, Kliment Voroshilov, and Lazar
Kaganovich--now spared a second purge, reduced the Presidium from twenty-five
to ten and agreed to rule the Soviet Union
collectively. None of Stalin's successors concentrated
in their hands the absolute power he had acquired; they did not resort to
terror as he had, nor did they seek to remake society. But for the next three
decades they preserved the essentials of the Stalinist system--the
single-party monopoly of political power, socialized industry and collective
agriculture, censorship and indoctrination. The camps would eventually
disgorge many of their political prisoners, but they were not closed down.
Stalinism proved much more durable than Stalin himself.
CHARLES
E. ZIEGLER is Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Louisville. He is the author of Foreign Policy and East Asia ( 1993), Environmental Policy in the USSR ( 1987), and dozens of scholarly
articles and book chapters.
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