Stalin became an organizer for the Bolsheviks and so underwent arrest several times. His articles on the ‘national question’ commended him to Lenin as ‘the wonderful Georgian’, and he was co-opted to the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912. He was sent to St Petersburg to edit the legal Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, but was quickly captured and exiled to Siberia. There he stayed until 1917. A street accident he had suffered as a lad left him with a slightly shortened arm, and because of this he escaped conscription into the Imperial Army.
Returning to the Russian capital after the February Revolution, he was not fêted to the extent of Lenin and the émigré veterans. He seemed unimpressive alongside them. Unlike them, he had made only brief trips abroad. He could not speak German or French or English. He was a poor orator, a plodding theorist and a prickly character. Yet his organizational expeditiousness was highly valued, and he joined the inner core of the Central Committee before the October Revolution. Thereafter he became People’s Commissar for Nationalities in the first Sovnarkom and served uninterruptedly in the Party Politburo from 1919. In the Civil War he was appointed as leading political commissar on several fronts and was regarded by Lenin as one of his most dependable troubleshooters, acquiring a reputation for a fierce decisiveness. In 1920 he added the chairmanship of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate to his list of posts, and in 1922 became General Secretary of the Party Central Committee.
Stalin’s rivals in his own party would soon pay dearly for their condescension. He was crude and brutal even by Bolshevik standards, and was proud of the fact. On the Southern front in 1918 he had put villages to the torch to terrorize the peasantry of an entire region, and but for Lenin’s intervention would have drowned scores of innocent former Imperial Army officers on a prison barge moored on the river Volga.
But Stalin’s rivals had no excuse for underestimating Stalin’s intelligence. His lack of intellectual sophistication did not mean that he was unmotivated by ideas; and he was conscious enough of the gaps in his education to take on Jan Sten as a private tutor in philosophy in the 1920s.17 He was also a voracious reader, supposedly getting through a daily quota of 500 pages.18 Although his objects of study changed, his orientation was constant. He despised middle-class experts, believing that the regime could train up its own ‘specialists’ in short order. The ‘filth’ from the old days ought to be cleansed (or ‘purged’); social, economic and political problems should not be allowed to await solution. Those persons deemed responsible for the survival of such problems had to be physically exterminated. Let saboteurs and renegades perish! Let there be steel, iron and coal! Long live comrade Stalin!
That this maladjusted character, whose mistrustfulness was close to paranoia, should have won the struggle to succeed Lenin boded ill for his opponents past and present and for his potential opponents as well. It has been speculated that his vengefulness was influenced by the beatings he supposedly had received from his father or by the traditions of honour and feud in the Caucasian region. Yet his fascination with punitive violence went far beyond any conditioning by family or national customs. Stalin supposedly remarked: ‘To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed… there is nothing sweeter in the world.’19
He also had a craving for adulation. As his doings were celebrated in the public media, only his ageing mother, to whom he dutifully sent packets of roubles, was oblivious of his status. Official history textbooks by Nikolai Popov and Emelyan Yaroslavski exaggerated his importance. Articles were published on the Civil War which treated the battles around Tsaritsyn in 1918, when Stalin was serving on the Southern front, as the turning point in the Red Army’s fortunes. Already in 1925, Tsaritsyn had been renamed Stalingrad. The phrase was put into circulation: ‘Stalin is the Lenin of today.’ Ostensibly he shrugged off claims to greatness, complaining to a film scriptwriter: ‘Reference to Stalin should be excised. The Central Committee of the party ought to be put in place of Stalin.’20 He also repudiated the proposal in 1938 that Moscow should be renamed as Stalinodar (which means ‘Stalin’s gift’)!21 His modesty on this and other occasions was insincere, but Stalin knew that it would enhance his popularity among rank-and-file communists: in reality he was extremely vainglorious.
Egomania was not the sole factor. The cult of Stalin was also a response to the underlying requirements of the regime. Russians and many other nations of the USSR were accustomed to their statehood being expressed through the persona of a supreme leader. Any revolutionary state has to promote continuity as well as disruption. The First Five-Year Plan had brought about huge disruption, and the tsar-like image of Stalin was useful in affirming that the state possessed a strong, determined leader.
Full regal pomp was nevertheless eschewed by him; Stalin, while inviting comparison with the tsars of old, also wished to appear as a mundane contemporary communist. Audiences at public conferences or at the Bolshoi Ballet or on top of the Kremlin Wall saw him in his dull-coloured, soldierly tunic — as he mingled with delegates from the provinces to official political gatherings — and he always made sure to have his photograph taken with groups of delegates. The display of ordinariness was a basic aspect of his mystique. The incantations of public congresses and conferences included not only Stalin but also ‘the Leninist Central Committee, the Communist Party, the Working Class, the Masses’. It was crucial for him to demonstrate the preserved heritage of Marxism-Leninism. The heroism, justice and inevitability of the October Revolution had to be proclaimed repeatedly, and the achievements of the First Five-Year Plan had to be glorified.
There is no doubt that many young members of the party and the Komsomol responded positively to the propaganda. The construction of towns, mines and dams was an enormously attractive project for them. Several such enthusiasts altruistically devoted their lives to the communist cause. They idolized Stalin, and all of them — whether they were building the city of Magnitogorsk or tunnelling under Moscow to lay the lines for the metro or were simply teaching kolkhozniki how to read and write — thought themselves to be agents of progress for Soviet society and for humanity as a whole. Stalin had his active supporters in their hundreds of thousands, perhaps even their millions. This had been true of Lenin; it would also be true of Khrushchëv. Not until the late 1960s did Kremlin leaders find it difficult to convince a large number of their fellow citizens that, despite all the difficulties, official policies would sooner or later bring about the huge improvements claimed by official spokesmen.22
Stalin’s rule in the early 1930s depended crucially upon the presence of enthusiastic supporters in society. Even many people who disliked him admired his success in mobilizing the country for industrialization and in restoring Russia’s position as a great power. There was a widespread feeling that, for all his faults, Stalin was a determined leader in the Russian tradition; and the naïvety of workers, peasants and others about high politics allowed him to play to the gallery of public opinion more easily than would be possible for Soviet leaders in later generations.
But enthusiasts remained a minority. Most people, despite the increase in cultural and educational provision, paid little mind to communist doctrines. They were too busy to give politics more than a glancing interest. It was a hard existence. The average urban inhabitant spent only an hour every week reading a book or listening to the radio and twenty minutes watching films or plays.23 Adulatory newsreels were of limited help to Stalin while there remained a paucity of spectators. Furthermore, in 1937 there were still only 3.5 million radios in the country.24 The authorities placed loudspeakers on main streets so that public statements might be broadcast to people as they travelled to work or went shopping. But this was rarely possible in the countryside since only one in twenty-five collective farms had access to electrical power.25 Several weeks passed in some villages between visits from officials from the nearby town, and Pravda arrived only fitfully. The infrastructure of intensive mass indoctrination had not been com
pleted before the Second World War.
The underlying cause for the ineffectiveness of official propaganda, however, was the hardship caused by official measures. The non-Russian nationalities were especially embittered. The assertiveness of national and ethnic groups in the 1920s had been among the reasons for the NEP’s abolition. Several imaginary anti-Soviet organizations were ‘discovered’, starting with the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine in July 1929.26 Artists, scholars and novelists were arraigned in Kiev and sentenced to lengthy years of imprisonment. Analogous judicial proceedings took place in Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Communist officials thought to have shown excessive indulgence to the sentiments of nations in their republics suffered demotion. The prime victim was Mykola Skrypnik in Ukraine. In 1933 he was dropped as Ukraine’s People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, and committed suicide. Simultaneously those writers and artists who had developed their national cultures under the NEP were subject to ever stricter surveillance.
Nor was the menace of Russian nationalism ignored. In 1930 the historians S. F. Platonov and E. V. Tarle, famous Russian patriots, were put on trial and imprisoned for leading the non-existent All-People’s Union of Struggle for Russia’s Regeneration.27 Three thousand Red Army commanders who had been officers in the Imperial Army were also arrested.28 Russian-language literary figures, too, were persecuted. Novels dealing sensitively with the peasants, rural customs, spirituality and individual emotions had appeared in the 1920s and had offered consolation to readers who disliked Marxism-Leninism. With the occasional exception such as Mikhail Sholokhov’s stories of Cossack life in Quiet Flows the Don, this artistic trend was eradicated. The field was dominated during the First Five-Year Plan by writer-activists belonging to the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. Works depicting working-class selflessness and internationalism flooded from Soviet publishing houses.
Each nationality felt itself to be suffering worse than all the others: such is the norm for national and ethnic groups in times of stress and privation. In 1934 some daredevils in the Russian city of Saratov produced an illicit poster of a broad river with two bands of men lining up on opposite banks to give battle to each other. On one bank stood Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev, all of them being Jewish; the other was held by the Georgians: Stalin, Yenukidze and Ordzhonikidze. Underneath was the caption: ‘And the Slavs fell into dispute over who was to rule in Old Russia.’29 The message was that Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians were being humiliated in their own lands. Even under Stalin, in the early 1930s, the composition of the central party leadership failed to mirror the country’s demography even though it was not so much out of focus as previously. To a popular tradition of anti-Semitism was added a resentment against the nations of the Transcaucasus.
In reality the Georgians were tormented along with the other peoples. The local OGPU chief in Tbilisi, the Georgian Lavrenti Beria, was winning plaudits from Stalin for his ruthlessness towards Georgian nationalist dissent and peasant resistance. And those Jewish institutions of the USSR which had flourished in the 1920s were either emasculated or crushed. Winter followed the springtime of the nations.
This did not mean that nations suffered equally. Most deaths caused by the Soviet state during the First Five-Year Plan were brought about by the collectivization of agriculture. Consequently the less urbanized nationalities were victimized disproportionately. For example, it is reckoned that between 1.3 million and 1.8 million Kazakh nomads died for this reason;30 and the imposition of agricultural quotas upon such a people led to the destruction of an entire way of life. Kazakhs, who knew nothing of cereal cropping, were ordered to cultivate wheat on pain of execution. The Soviet economy’s patchwork quilt was being replaced by a blanket cut from a single bloodied cloth. Several victim-nations concluded that Stalin was bent on genocide. Not only Kazakhs but also Ukrainians suspected that he aimed at their extermination under cover of his economic policies. Collectivization, according to surviving nationalists, was Stalin’s equivalent of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’. Purportedly, the difference was that Stalin had it in for the Ukrainians whereas Hitler wished to annihilate all Jews.
Certainly Ukraine was subject to perniciously peculiar dispensations. Passenger traffic between the Russian and Ukrainian republics was suspended in 1932 and the borders were sealed by Red Army units.31 From village to village the armed urban squads moved without mercy. ‘Kulaks’ were suppressed and the starving majority of the Ukrainian peasantry had to fulfil the state’s requirements or else face deportation. Famine was the predictable outcome. It is true that the central authorities cut the grain-collection quotas three times in response to reports of starvation. Yet the cuts were a long, long way short of the extent sufficient to put a quick stop to famine. Horrendous suffering prevailed over Ukraine in 1932–3.
Were not these official measures therefore genocidal? If genocide means the killing of an entire national or ethnic group, the answer has to be no. The centrally-imposed quotas for grain deliveries from Ukraine were in fact somewhat reduced from the second half of 1932. The evidence of millions of starving people gave even the Politburo some pause for thought. It must be stressed that the reductions were nothing like enough to end the famine; but the occurrence of any reductions at all casts doubt on the notion that Stalin had from the start intended to exterminate the Ukrainian nation. Furthermore, Ukrainians were only seventy-four per cent of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic’s population before the First Five-Year Plan, and to this extent the infliction of famine was not nationally specific.32 In any case Stalin needed Ukrainians as well as Russians to take up jobs in the factories, mines and railheads being opened in Ukraine and elsewhere.
Indeed Stalin did not go as far as banning their language from the local schools. To be sure, Russian-language schooling assumed much greater prominence than in the 1920s; and the ability of Ukrainian educationists and writers to praise specifically Ukrainian cultural achievements was severely limited. Nevertheless Stalin — albeit with great reservations — accepted Ukrainian linguistic and cultural distinctness as a fact of life (and in 1939 he sanctioned sumptuous celebrations of the 125th anniversary of the birth of the great Ukrainian national poet and anti-tsarist writer Taras Shevchenko). But Stalin also wanted to teach Ukraine a political lesson; for Ukraine had always appeared to Bolsheviks as the black heart of kulakdom and national separatism. The bludgeoning of its inhabitants, going as far as the killing of a large number of them, would serve the purpose of durable intimidation.
A logical corollary was the resumed persecution of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church. Indeed the authorities were zealous in smashing the foundations of organized religion of all kinds and in all places. The God of the Christians, Muslims and Jews was derided as that ‘nice little god’. The limited tolerance afforded to religion since the middle of the NEP was thrown aside.
Unlike de-kulakization, de-clericalization was not explicitly announced as a policy, and there were no quotas for elimination. Yet a licence was given for physical attacks on religious leaders. Stalin thought godlessness the beginning of righteousness and had no compunction about the mass slaughter of clerics. The number of killings during the First Five-Year Plan outdid even the record of the Civil War. In the Russian Orthodox Church alone the number of active priests tumbled from around 60,000 in the 1920s to only 5,665 by 1941. No doubt many of them fled in disguise to the towns in order to escape the attentions of the armed squads that were searching for them. But many priests were caught unawares and either imprisoned or executed.33 Thousands of other Christian leaders, mullahs, both Shi’ite and Sunni, and rabbis were also butchered. The one-ideology state was imposed with a vengeance.
Political pragmatism as well as a philosophy of militant atheism spurred on the campaign. Stalin and his associates remembered that in 1905 a demonstration headed by Father Gapon had touched off an avalanche that nearly buried the monarchy. Churches, mosques and synagogues were the last large meeting-places not entirely controlled by th
e state authorities after the October Revolution of 1917.
The feasts of the religious calendar also stood as marking points for the farming year. Particularly in Russia the tasks of ploughing, sowing, reaping and threshing were deemed incomplete unless a priest was present to pray for success. Agriculture and religious faith were intimately entwined. From its own fanatical standpoint, the League of the Militant Godless had logic on its side in pressing for the demolition of the houses of ‘god’. Priest and mullah and rabbi were vilified as parasites. In reality most parish clergy were as poor as church mice and, after the separation of Church from state in 1918, depended entirely on the voluntary offertories from their congregations. The same was usually true of other faiths. Clerics of all religions were integral parts of social order in their small communities. They welcomed children into the world, blessed marriages and buried the dead. They alternately rejoiced and commiserated with ordinary peasants. A village without a church, mosque or synagogue had lost its principal visible connection with the old peasant world. A countryside deprived of its priests, shrines, prayers and festivities was more amenable to being collectivized.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 25