It was in 1934 that the privileging of Russian nationhood began in earnest. Concerns about the USSR’s security had been growing in the early 1930s; and Stalin and the leadership felt edgy about Ukraine, about Polish infiltration into the western borderlands and about the threat posed by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Russian national feelings were nurtured more warmly, and nowhere was this more obvious than in the writing of history. The doyen of the academic profession until his death in 1932 had been M. N. Pokrovski, who had waged a vendetta in his books and in university administration against writers who failed to put class struggle at the centre of their interpretations. He had insisted, too, that Russian imperial expansion over the centuries had brought harm to the non-Russian peoples. This approach now fell into official disrepute; and Professor E. V. Tarle, the non-Marxist historian and Russian patriot, was released from prison to reoccupy his university chair in Moscow.
It remained obligatory to analyse the Soviet period predominantly in terms of class struggle, but the distant Russian past could now be handled more flexibly. Stalin himself was an admiring reader of the best works that appeared. As Russian emperors and commanders came in for gentler treatment, scholars still had to criticize their faults but were also required to accentuate the benefits brought to Russians by the tsarist unification of Muscovy and to the non-Russians by the growth of the Russian Empire. The Russian language was given heightened status. In the academic year 1938–9 it became one of the compulsory subjects of instruction in all schools; and from the late 1930s a campaign was begun to alter the various non-Russian languages to a Cyrillic-style alphabet on the Russian model. Thus in 1940 the Uzbek tongue was no longer allowed to be written in Arabic characters.37
Yet there were restrictions on the expression of Russian patriotism. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great could be praised, but not Nicholas II; and the aristocracy, gentry, merchantry and other so-called ‘former people’ had to be denounced. The expression of contemporary Russian nationhood, moreover, excluded the Orthodox Church. It rejected most village traditions. In literature it incorporated Alexander Pushkin and Maksim Gorki, but rejected the Christian nationalist Fëdor Dostoevski.38 For the central political leaders in the 1930s remained wary lest Russian national pride might get out of hand. They were willing to modify Marxism-Leninism and even to distort it by adding Russian national ingredients to it; but they insisted that Marxism-Leninism should remain at the core of the state ideology.
Russians anyway did not always do better than other peoples in the USSR. The famine that devastated society in Ukraine in 1932–3 was also grievous in southern Russia. The Russian nation, despite the accolades it received, could reasonably perceive itself as a victim people. Territorially the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR) abruptly lost much of its status. In 1936 the internal borders of the USSR were redrawn. The Transcaucasian Federation was dissolved and Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan became republics on a par with the RSFSR. At the same time a huge chunk of the RSFSR was hacked away when the territory previously known as the Turkestan Region became the Kazakh Socialist Soviet Republic, thereby supplanting Ukraine as the USSR’s second largest republic. Most significantly, the new republic of Kazakhstan acquired its own communist party whereas the RSFSR remained without one.
For Stalin feared a New Russia as much as the Old. He wielded the knout to discourage certain aspects of Russianness while waving a flag to foster others. But he could not do this without increasing the self-awareness of Russians as Russians. The process was driven also by other forces. Chief among these were urbanization and mass literacy; for as Russian-speaking peasants poured into the towns and as Russian-speaking workers moved from one town to another in search of jobs, so millions of Russians discovered how much they had in common.
A certain administrative measure gave unintended impetus to the process. From December 1932 urban inhabitants had to acquire identity booklets (or ‘internal passports’) specifying personal particulars. Item No. 5 referred to nationality. Labour books and other documents had long contained such information; but, unlike them, the new passports were mandatory for all town-dwellers. Many individuals might previously have described themselves as peasants or workers, as natives of Samara or Nakhichevan, as Christians or Muslims. They now had to make a definitive choice of their nationality. Should they be of mixed parentage, they had to opt for either the paternal or the maternal line of descent. Alexei Kulichenko, whose father was Ukrainian and mother was half-Russian and half-Tatar, decided to put ‘Ukrainian’ in his passport; and Avraam Epshtein, a Jew from the Belorussian capital Minsk who had lost his faith and was at ease linguistically in Russian, registered himself as a Russian.
The passports had been introduced to control the surge of villagers into the towns in search of industrial work. The kolkhozniks were denied the automatic right to obtain them. More generally, passports were a signal of the party leaders’ concern that society remained outside their full control. The First Five-Year Plan had intensified state authority beyond precedent. The Politburo under Stalin decided every great aspect of policy in foreign affairs, security, politics, administration, economy, science and the arts. No organized hostile group, except for a few bands of Basmachi in central Asia, endured. Yet somehow the peoples of the USSR had resisted being pummelled into the shape prescribed by the Kremlin.
Thus the first half-decade of the 1930s was a time of sharp contrasts. Cultural work was strengthened, but in an atmosphere that induced fear among school-teachers, writers and even party propagandists; and the peoples of the USSR had succeeded in preserving their traditions and beliefs against the pressure of official Soviet doctrines. Economic relaxations were announced, but generally the methods of obtaining food supplies by intimidation and violence was kept in place. National and religious leaderships and organizations were attacked; and yet there was also an increasing indulgence to Russian nationhood. Internationalism and Russian semi-nationalism were engaged in uneasy cohabitation. The First and Second Five-Year Plans were meant to secure the voluntary allegiance of workers, peasants, administrators and intellectuals to the regime. But although some enthusiasm for Stalin’s policies undoubtedly existed, hostility was much more widely disseminated. The integration of the aspirations of party, state and society was a very distant goal. The USSR was a country in travail and the compound of the Soviet order had yet to be stabilized sufficiently for the central party leadership’s comfort of mind.
11
Terror upon Terror (1934–1938)
It was in this volatile situation that the engine of a Great Terror was cranked up and set in motion. The exact calculations of Stalin and his associates have not been recorded for posterity, but undoubtedly several leaders had been made edgy by the situation confronting them after the First Five-Year Plan. They knew that resentment of their rule in the rest of society was deep and wide, and they feared lest former Bolshevik oppositionists might exploit this circumstance. Stalin’s allies felt deeply insecure, and shared a rising sense of frustration. They were annoyed by the chaos that prevailed in the network of public institutions – and they had doubts about the loyalty of party, governmental, military and managerial officials, even including those who had implemented the First Five-Year Plan. They had few scruples about applying their repressive power. The thought, practices and institutions of the Civil War had set precedents for the horrors of the late 1930s.
Indeed state violence was already being applied widely under the First and Second Five-Year Plans. ‘Kulaks’, railwaymen-‘wreckers’, ‘nationalists’ and managerial ‘saboteurs’ were being arrested in large numbers. Nearly a million Soviet citizens languished in the forced-labour camps and colonies of the OGPU by 1933, and further millions were in prisons, deportation camps and compulsory resettlement areas.1 Consequently the Great Terror of 1937–8 was not a thunderclap in a cloudless sky but the worsening of a storm that was already raging.
None the less the Great Terror would not have taken place but
for Stalin’s personality and ideas. He it was who directed the state’s punitive machinery against those he identified as ‘anti-Soviet elements’ and ‘enemies of the people’. He needed to keep his mines, forests and construction sites constantly supplied with slave labour while pursuing his mode of industrialization. At the same time he was using his victims as scapegoats for the country’s pain. It was probably also his intention to take pre-emptive measures against any ‘fifth column’ operating against him in the event of war.2 These considerations, furthermore, fitted into a larger scheme to build an efficient Soviet state subservient to his personal dictatorship – and to secure the state’s total control over society. Such was the guiding rationale of the Great Terrorist.
Back in 1933, he and the OGPU were already conducting repression in the name of ‘social defence’ against ‘parasites’ and ‘hooligans’ whom he regarded as misfits in the new Soviet society.3 Political opposition was also vigorously eliminated. Official violence was never absent from the Politburo’s agenda for long, and Stalin reprimanded his Politburo colleagues whenever they failed to support him. The tensions in public life were maintained. Stalin and his most trusted associates saw a tightening of discipline as the main means to attain economic success and political stability. Repeatedly they affirmed the need to root out class enemies, saboteurs and spies.
This did not happen without dissension in the Politburo. Three great power-bases had been consolidated during the First Five-Year Plan: the All-Union Communist Party, the People’s Commissariats and the OGPU. Relations between the party and the commissariats caused heated controversy. To Stalin’s fury, Ordzhonikidze as People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry prevented local party bodies from interfering in the activity of factory directors.4 But at the same time Stalin was angered by the power of the party at its lower levels, power that was frequently used to thwart the central party apparatus’s instructions. So Stalin was unhappy with both the party and the government. Debate about this in the Politburo ensued in the winter of 1933–4 and the balance of opinion was in favour of letting the commissariats get on with fulfilling the Second Five-Year Plan without interference by local party bodies.5
But how could this be achieved without losing control of the commissariats? Kaganovich suggested that the party should be given a crucial supervisory role at the local level. Thus the party committees would establish an internal department for each main branch of the economy. The task of the departments would be to check on the implementation of central economic objectives at the local level without taking over the functions of detailed management.
Kaganovich’s proposal had the virtue, from Stalin’s standpoint, of strengthening compliance with the Second Five-Year Plan. Each local party secretary would be reduced in authority when his committee was turned into ‘a small apparatus subordinate to the People’s Commissar’,6 and the party as a whole was subjected to greater control from the centre. In 1933 yet another purge of the membership was undertaken, resulting in the withdrawal of party cards from 854,300 persons identified as careerists, drunkards, idlers and unrepentant oppositionists.7 While all this was sweet music to Stalin’s ears, there remained much to annoy him. Firstly, the trimming of the party’s sprawling powers served to increase hostility to Stalin’s policies and mode of leadership among many party secretaries in the provinces. Stalin was less and less their hero. Secondly, the enhanced autonomy of the governmental organs made them still less amenable to Stalin’s control. Stalin was not the sort of leader who found this a tolerable situation.
Basic questions about how to consolidate the regime were therefore yet to be resolved. The Politburo reserved the right to take any definitive decision. No one was allowed to refer directly to these questions at the Seventeenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party, which opened in Moscow on 26 February 1934. The press had indicated that it would be a Congress of Victors. The internal communist oppositions had been defeated; industrialization and agricultural collectivization had been imposed; military security had been reinforced. The party’s unity under its great leader was to be celebrated.
Stalin in his speech to the Congress, however, indicated that he was not going to be gracious in victory: ‘Consequently it is necessary not to sing lullabies to the party but to develop its vigilance, not to send it to sleep but to keep it in a condition of militant readiness, not to disarm but to arm it.’8 He warned against complacency about the party’s economic achievements and against indulgence towards the former oppositionists. His associates were equally intransigent. Molotov asserted that ‘vestiges of capitalism’ continued to affect thinking in the party; Kaganovich added that anti-Leninist deviations still threatened the party.9 Lesser figures added to the belligerent chorus. M. F. Shkiryatov suggested that the central leadership needed to intervene more vigorously to make improvements in local party life; and R. I. Eikhe declared that Bukharin had not done enough to prevent the emergence of ‘Ryutin and other counter-revolutionary swine’.10
They did not have everything their own way. Politburo members Kuibyshev and Mikoyan refrained from calling for a sharpening of political struggle.11 Similar reluctance was shown by influential regional party first secretaries including Pëtr Postyshev of Ukraine, I. M. Vareikis of the Central Black-Earth Region and B. P. Sheboldaev of the Azov-Black Sea Region.12 Molotov bridled at any such signs of diminishing militancy, and in his report on the economy he proposed – presumably with Stalin’s approval – to raise the projected annual industrial growth rate by another five per cent.13 Ordzhonikidze’s intervention led to a limitation of the increase to three per cent.14 The intensity of the dissension between Molotov and Ordzhonikidze ought not to be exaggerated. Nevertheless the Congress’s other decisions were generally in favour of slackening the political tensions, and it would seem that Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov, too, was popular among Congress delegates for favouring such a relaxation. Pointedly Kirov had stated in his main speech: ‘The fundamental difficulties are already behind us.’15
There is also fragmentary evidence that Stalin did so poorly in the elections to the new Central Committee that the number of votes cast for each candidate was withheld from publication. Another story is that several Congress delegations asked Kirov to stand against Stalin for the General Secretaryship – and that Kirov declined the request.16 The full truth remains beclouded. What is clear is that Stalin lost his title of General Secretary and was redesignated simply as Secretary, and that Kirov was given the same rank.17 On the other hand, it remains far from clear that Kirov’s policies were really very different from those of Stalin and Molotov. Certainly he eulogized Stalin in his same speech to the Congress;18 and probably, too, he actually tried to resist his own promotion to Central Committee Secretary.19 Nevertheless Stalin had not had the enjoyable time during and after the Congress which he had thought his due: this much appears clear. His usual reaction in such a situation was to search for ways to settle accounts finally with those whom he regarded as his enemies.
From spring to autumn 1934 some impression was given that Stalin was making compromises just as Lenin had done in introducing the NEP. Kirov went on speaking in support of increased rations for workers, greater respect for legal procedures and an end to the violent extortion of grain from peasants.20 Restrictions were placed on the arbitrary arrest of economic experts.21 The OGPU lost its separate institutional status, and its activities and personnel were transferred under the control of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). Thus the state’s mechanisms of arbitrary repression appeared to have been weakened. Yet the changes for the better were nugatory. Massive instrumentalities of violence remained intact, and the NKVD’s engorgement of the OGPU had the result of constructing an even mightier centralized organ for policing and security. Political passions therefore remained high: the Congress had ultimately resolved little.
On 1 December 1934 an astonishing event triggered an upward ratcheting of the level of repression. A young ex-Zinovievite, Leonid Nikolaev, wa
lked into Kirov’s office in Leningrad, pulled out a revolver and shot him. Stalin exploited the assassination as a pretext to rush through a set of decrees granting full authority to the NKVD to arrest, try and execute at will. This gave rise to the belief that Stalin connived in the killing. Nikolaev had previously been caught in possession of a firearm in suspicious circumstances. He was executed before any exhaustive interrogation could take place and an improbably large proportion of those who handled Nikolaev after Kirov’s death, including the van-drivers, quickly perished in mysterious circumstances. Yet Stalin’s complicity in the Kirov murder remains unproven. What is beyond dispute is that the assassination enabled him and his associates to begin to move against the somewhat less militant among the Stalinists and their tacit supporters.
Stalin first took revenge upon Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were accused of conniving in Kirov’s death. They agreed to accept moral and political responsibility for their former minor adherent in return for an assurance that they would receive a light sentence. Their trial was held in camera in January 1935. On Stalin’s orders Zinoviev and Kamenev were consigned to ten and five years of imprisonment respectively. Stalin’s prisons were not rest-homes. Furthermore, 663 past supporters of Zinoviev in Leningrad were seized and sent into exile in Yakutia and other bleak Siberian locations. There were over 30,000 deportations of members of social groups regarded as hostile to the communism in Leningrad and other cities as the security agencies intensified its years-old campaign against undesirables.22
Stalin was cranking up the motor of prophylactic repression. Neither the exiled communist ex-oppositionists nor the deported former middle-class city dwellers had been conspiring against Stalin. But Stalin did not want to give them the chance to do so. His desire for complete control was even extended to ordinary communists who had never belonged to an oppositional faction. Yet another clear-out of undesirable rank-and-file members was ordered in 1934 and a block was placed on recruitment for the second half of the year. Coming after the purge of 1933, this measure was a sign of the Secretariat’s undispelled concern about the revolutionary ‘vanguard’. In January 1935, as Kamenev and Zinoviev received their prison sentences, a general exchange of party cards was announced. This would be a purge under a different name: the aim was to identify and remove those many members who did nothing for the party while deriving advantage from having a card. In consequence, by May 1935, 281,872 persons had ceased being Bolsheviks.23
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 26