Confidential discussions to settle the state’s constitutional structure proceeded. In September 1922 Lenin, despite still convalescing from a major stroke in May, won his struggle against Stalin’s proposal for the RSFSR to engorge the other Soviet republics. Instead all these republics, including the RSFSR, were to join a federation to be called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (or USSR). This meant that Russia – in the form of the RSFSR – was for the first time given its own boundaries within the larger state it belonged to. At the time this hardly mattered in any practical way to most Russians; it was only in the late 1980s, when Boris Yeltsin campaigned for the Russian presidency before the USSR’s disintegration, that the potential implications of delineating ‘Russia’ as a cartographic entity became a realistic possibility. Under the NEP, however, the Bolsheviks anticipated not disintegration but, if anything, expansion. And so the decision on the USSR Constitution was ratified in principle by the First All-Union Congress of Soviets on 31 December 1922, and the central government newspaper lzvestiya hailed the events as ‘a New Year’s gift to the workers and peasants of the world’.19
In the communist party across the country only the Georgian leadership made strong objection. They had lobbied Lenin for several months, claiming that Stalin had ridden roughshod over Georgian national sensitivities. They particularly resented the plan to insert Georgia into the USSR not as a Soviet republic but as a part of a Transcaucasian Federation. In their estimation, this was a trick whereby Stalin could emasculate Lenin’s somewhat gentler attitude to Georgians as a people. They demanded that Georgia should enter the USSR on the same terms as Ukraine. But Lenin and the Politburo accepted Stalin’s advice in this specific matter. The formation of a Transcaucasian Federation would enable the curtailment of unpleasantries meted out to their respective ethnic minorities by the Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian Soviet republics: there was abundant evidence that the Georgians, sinned against by Stalin, were not blameless in their treatment of non-Georgians.20
The Transcaucasian Federation would also diminish Turkey’s temptation to interfere in Muslim-inhabited areas on the side of Azerbaijan against Armenia. Continuing nervousness about the Turks induced central party leaders to award Nagorny Karabakh to ‘Muslim’ Azerbaijan despite the fact that the local population were Armenian Christians.21
Azeri-inhabited Nakhichevan, too, was given to Azerbaijan even though Nakhichevan lay enclosed within Armenia and did not abutt upon Azerbaijani territory. The central party leadership’s measures were therefore not untainted by considerations of expediency, and Armenians had little cause to celebrate the territorial settlement. Cossack farmers in the North Caucasus were even less contented. The Politburo took the decision to secure the acquiescence of the non-Russian peoples of that region by returning land to them that had been taken from them in the previous century by the tsarist authorities. Thousands of Cossack settlers were rounded up and deported to other regions held by the Soviet authorities in April 1921.22 National deportations were to become a basic aspect of governmental policy in the 1930s and 1940s, but the precedent had been set under Lenin.
Yet there was a degree of justification in the party’s claim that its treatment of the national and ethnic minorities put many European governments to shame; and prominent Bolshevik C. G. Rakovsky argued that many peoples in eastern and central Europe would yearn for the degree of autonomy accorded in the USSR.23 Nevertheless several leading party figures were fearful of the long-term risks involved. The administrative demarcation of territory according to national and ethnic demography laid down internal boundaries that could become guidelines for nationalism. The opportunities for linguistic and cultural self-expression, too, allowed the different peoples to develop their respective national identities. Only ruthless interventions from Moscow stopped these chickens of official policy coming home to roost before the late 1980s. Lenin thought he was helping to resolve the national question; in fact he inadvertently aggravated it.
The nation with the greatest potential to upset Bolshevik policy were the Russians themselves. According to the census published in 1927 they amounted to nearly three fifths of the population,24 and it could not be discounted that one day they might prove susceptible to nationalist ideas. Under the NEP they were therefore the nationality most tightly restricted in their cultural self-expression. Classic Russian nineteenth-century writers who had disseminated anti-socialist notions lost official approval; and Fëdor Dostoevski, who had inspired thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche and Freud, was no longer published. Russian military heroes such as Mikhail Kutuzov, the victor over Napoleon, were depicted as crude imperialists. Allegedly no emperor, patriarch or army general had ever done a good deed in his life. Non-Bolshevik variants of Russian socialist thought were equally subjected to denigration, and Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary policies were denounced as hostile to the requirements of working people. Traditions of Russian thought which were uncongenial to Bolshevism were systematically ridiculed.
The Russian Orthodox Church especially alarmed the Bolsheviks. A survey of Russian peasants in the mid-1920s suggested that fifty-five per cent were active Christian worshippers. This was almost certainly a large underestimate; and there can be no denying that the Russian Orthodox Church constituted part and parcel of the Russian identity in the minds of most ethnic Russians. In 1922 Lenin arranged for the execution of several bishops on the pretext that they refused to sell their treasures to help famine relief in the Volga region. Anti-religious persecution did not cease with the introduction of the NEP, and Lenin’s language in Politburo discussions of Christianity was vicious, intemperate and cynical.25
Yet generally the Bolsheviks became more restrained in the mid-1920s. The OGPU was instructed to concentrate its efforts on demoralizing and splitting the Church by indirect methods rather than by physical assault. This policy took the form of suborning priests, spreading disinformation and infiltrating agents; and when Patriarch Tikhon died in 1925, the Church was prevented by the Soviet authorities from electing a successor to him. Metropolitan Sergei, who was transferred from Nizhni Novgorod to Moscow, was allowed to style himself only as Acting Patriarch. Meanwhile Trotski had observed the rise of a ‘Living Church’ reform movement in the Church that despised the official ecclesiastical hierarchy and preached that socialism was Christianity in its modern form. The adherents of this movement were reconcilable to Soviet rule so long as they could practise their faith. Trotski urged that favourable conditions should be afforded to ‘Living Church’ congregations in order that a wedge could be driven down the middle of the Russian Orthodox Church.26
Other Christian denominations were handled less brusquely. Certain sects, such as the Old Believers, were notable for their farming expertise and the central party leadership did not want to harm their contribution to the economy as a result of clashes over religion. Non-Russian Christian organizations were also treated with caution. For instance, the harassment of the Georgian and Armenian Orthodox Churches diminished over the decade. Islam was left at peace even more than Christianity (although there was certainly interference with religious schools and law-courts). The Politburo saw that, while secularism was gaining ground among urban Russians, Muslims remained deeply attached – in towns as in the villages – to their faith. In desperation the party tried to propagate Marxism in Azerbaijan and central Asia through the medium of excerpts from the Koran that emphasized communal, egalitarian values. Yet the positive results for the party were negligible: ‘the idiocy of religion’ was nowhere near as easy to eradicate as the communists had imagined.27
They had a nerve in being so condescending. Leading Bolshevik cadres themselves were intense believers in a faith of a certain kind. The works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were like prophetic works in the Bible for most of them; and Lenin as well as Marx and Engels were beatified. Marxism was an ersatz religion for the communist party.
Real religious belief was mocked in books and journals of the state-subsidized League
of the Militant Godless. Citizens who engaged in public worship lost preferment in Soviet state employment; and priests had been disenfranchised under the terms of successive constitutions since 1918. In local practice, however, a more relaxed attitude was permitted. Otherwise the middle strata of the Azerbaijani government would have had to be sacked. Even in Russia there was the same problem. Officials in Smolensk province decided that since a disavowal of God did not appear in the party rules, it should not be a criterion for party membership.28 Such pragmatism, as with other aspects of the NEP, stemmed from a sense of short-term weakness. But this did not signify any loss of medium-term confidence: both the central and local party leadership continued to assume that religious observance was a relic of old ‘superstitions’ that would not endure.
Not only priests but also all potentially hostile groups in society were denied civic rights. The last remaining industrialists, bankers and great landlords had fled when Vrangel’s Volunteer Army departed the Crimean peninsula, paying with their last rubles to take the last available ferries across the Black Sea or to hide in haycarts as they were trundled over the land frontier with Poland.
As the ‘big and middle bourgeoisie’ vanished into the emigration or into obscurity in Russia, the Politburo picked on whichever suspected ‘class enemies’ remained. Novelists, painters and poets were prominent victims. The cultural intelligentsia had always contained restless, awkward seekers after new concepts and new theories. The Bolshevik leaders discerned the intelligentsia’s potential as a shaper of public opinion, and for every paragraph that Lenin wrote castigating priests he wrote a dozen denouncing secular intellectuals. The most famous representatives of Russian high culture were held under surveillance by the OGPU and the Politburo routinely discussed which of them could be granted an exit visa or special medical facilities:29 the nearest equivalent would be a post-war British cabinet deciding whether George Orwell could visit France or Evelyn Waugh have a gall-bladder operation.
In summer 1922 the Soviet authorities deported dozens of outstanding Russian writers and scholars. These included a philosopher of world importance, Nikolai Berdyaev, who was interrogated by Dzierżyński. Berdyaev complained that he, too, was a socialist, but one with a more individualist outlook than Dzierżyński. His assertion was rejected; for the Bolsheviks treated non-Bolshevik varieties of socialism as an acute threat to the regime. The deportations taught the intelligentsia that no overt criticisms of the regime would be tolerated; and in June 1922 the Politburo drove home the lesson by reintroducing pre-publication censorship through the agency of a Main Administration for Affairs of Literature and Publishing Houses (which became known as Glavlit and which lasted until its abolition by Gorbachëv). The aim was to insulate Soviet society from the bacillus of ideas alien to Bolshevism.30
The dilemma for Politburo members was that they badly needed the help of intellectuals in effecting the cultural transformation essential for the creation of a socialist society. Scarcely any writers of distinction were Bolsheviks or even sympathizers with the party. An exception was the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovski. Not all central party leaders regarded him as a boon to Bolshevism. Lenin remarked: ‘I don’t belong to the admirers of his poetic talent, although I quite admit my own incompetence in this area.’31 A warmer welcome was given to the novelist Maksim Gorki even though he had often denounced Leninism and called Lenin a misanthrope before 1917. Gorki, however, had come to believe that atrocities committed in the Civil War had been as much the fault of ordinary citizens in general and of the Soviet state in particular; and he began to soften his comments on the Bolsheviks. Even so, he continued to prefer to live in his villa in Sorrento in Italy to the dacha he would obtain if he returned home.
Trotski and Zinoviev persuaded the Twelfth Party Conference in 1922 that as long as writer-Bolsheviks were so few, the regime would have to make do with ‘fellow travellers’.32 Writers and artists who at least agreed with some of the party’s objectives were to be cosseted. Thousands of rubles were thrown at the feet of those who consented to toe the political line; and Mayakovski, taking pity on the plight of his friends who opposed Marxism-Leninism, discreetly left his banknotes on their sofas. But acts of personal charity did not alter the general situation. Large print-runs, royalties and fame were given to approved authors while poverty and obscurity awaited those who refused to collaborate.
Dissentient thought continued to be cramped under the NEP. The authorities did not always need to ban books from publication: frequently it was enough to suggest that an author should seek another publisher, knowing that Gosizdat, the state publishers, owned practically all the printing-presses and had reduced most private publishers to inactivity. Nevertheless the arts in the 1920s could not have their critical edge entirely blunted if the state also wished to avoid alienating the ‘fellow travellers’. Furthermore, the state could not totally predetermine which writer or painter would acquire a popular following. Sergei Yesenin, a poet and guitar-player who infuriated many Bolshevik leaders because of his Bohemian lifestyle, outmatched Mayakovski in appeal. Whereas Mayakovski wrote eulogies for the factory, twentieth-century machinery and Marxism-Leninism, Yesenin composed nostalgic rhapsodies to the virtues of the peasantry while indulging in the urban vices of cigar-smoking and night-clubbing.
Neither Yesenin nor Mayakovski, however, was comfortable in his role for very long. Indeed both succumbed to a fatal depression: Yesenin killed himself in 1925, Mayakovski in 1930. Yet several of their friends continued to work productively. Isaak Babel composed his masterly short stories about the Red Cavalry in the Polish-Soviet War. Ilf and Petrov wrote The Twelve Chairs poking fun at the NEP’s nouveaux riches as well as at the leather-clad commissars who strutted out of the Red Army into civilian administrative posts after the Civil War. Their satirical bent pleased a Politburo which wished to eradicate bureaucratic habits among state officials; but other writers were less lucky. Yevgeni Zamyatin wrote a dystopian novel, We, which implicitly attacked the regimentative orientation of Bolshevism. The novel’s hero did not even have a name but rather a letter and number, D-503, and the story of his pitiful struggle against the ruler – the baldheaded Benefactor – was a plea for the right of the individual to live his or her life without oppressive interference by the state.
Zamyatin’s work lay unpublished in the USSR; it could be printed only abroad. The grand theorizings of Russian intellectuals about the meaning of life disappeared from published literature. Painting had its mystical explorers in persons such as Marc Chagall (who, until his emigration to western Europe in 1922, went on producing canvasses of Jewish fiddlers, cobblers and rabbis in the poverty-stricken towns and villages around Vitebsk). Practically no great symphonies, operas or ballets were written. The October Revolution and the Civil War were awesome experiences from which most intellectuals recoiled in shock. Many entered a mental black hole where they tried to rethink their notions about the world. It was a process which would last several years; most of the superb poetry of Osip Mandelshtam, Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova came to maturity only in the 1930s.
Central party leaders endeavoured to increase popular respect for those works of literature that conformed to their Marxist vision. They used the negative method of suppression, seizing the presses of hostile political parties and cultural groups and even eliminating those many publications which took a non-political stance. Mild social satire such as Ilf and Petrov’s Twelve Chairs lay at the limits of what was allowed.33 Party leaders also supplied their own propaganda for Bolshevism through Pravda and other newspapers. Posters were produced abundantly. Statues and monuments, too, were commissioned, and there were processions, concerts and speeches on May Day and the October Revolution anniversary.
The regime gave priority to ‘mass mobilization’. Campaigns were made to recruit workers into the Russian Communist Party, the trade unions and the communist youth organization known as the Komsomol. Special attention was paid to increasing the number of Bolsheviks by means of a
‘Lenin Enrolment’ in 1924 and an ‘October Enrolment’ in 1927. As a result the membership rose from 625,000 in 1921 to 1,678,000 at the end of the decade;34 and by that time, too, ten million workers belonged to trade unions.35 A large subsidy was given to the expansion of popular education. Recreational facilities also underwent improvement. Sports clubs were opened in all cities and national teams were formed for football, gymnastics and athletics (in 1912 the Olympic squad had been so neglected that the ferry-boat to Stockholm left without many of its members). Whereas tsarism had struggled to prevent people from belonging to organizations, Bolshevism gave them intense encouragement to join.
The Bolshevik leaders were learning from recent precedents of the German Social-Democratic Party before the Great War and the Italian fascists in the 1920s. Governments of all industrial countries were experimenting with novel techniques of persuasion. Cinemas and radio stations were drawn into the service of the state; and rulers made use of youth movements such as the Boy Scouts. All this was emulated in the USSR. The Bolsheviks had the additional advantage that the practical constraints on their freedom of action were smaller even than in Italy where a degree of autonomy from state control was preserved by several non-fascist organizations, especially by the Catholic Church, after Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 18