The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert John Service

  Reconditeness in theme or style was forbidden not only in literature but also in music. Stalin wanted melodies that were whistlable, and wonderful composers and Marxist-Leninist sympathizers such as Dmitri Shostakovich fell into disgrace for their atonalities and discords. Stalin’s taste leant in the direction of the less demanding pre-revolutionary Russian classics: he adored Glinka and Chaikovski. Indeed the ballet and the symphony concert were becoming the favourite evening entertainment for the central party élite. Patriotic (nay, chauvinistic!) films such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible and novels about the tsars by Aleksei Tolstoy were also admired. Lighter mental fare, too, was provided. Spy novels, patriotic doggerel and folk-songs were popular, and many theatres specialized in ‘light entertainment’. Love ditties were particular favourites with the audiences. Jazz and Western ballroom dancing were also increasingly common.32

  The opportunities for cultural self-edification and recreation were widely welcomed; but what most people wanted above all else was an improvement in their material situation. Food shortages had troubled most Soviet citizens since the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan. And things were gradually getting a little better. Bread, meat, sugar were among several staple products no longer rationed from 1934–5. All rationing was abolished in 1936, and material provision improved for most non-arrested people in the late 1930s. Cheap food in work-place cafeterias also made a difference to the average diet. Admittedly consumption per head of the population was still three per cent lower in 1940 than in 1928.33 But the general trend was towards betterment in the late 1930s. The network of free educational and medical establishments was also expanded and people in employment received their work-clothes free of charge. Such changes proved a surer means of ensuring acquiescence than compulsory study of the Short Course.

  Many workers and kolkhozniki were anyway pleased by the repression of peremptory, privileged administrators. Sometimes there was a xenophobic aspect to popular attitudes — and Pravda played cunningly upon worries about spies and about the military threats from abroad. Furthermore, the Bolsheviks who had made the October Revolution included a disproportionate number of non-Russians, especially Jews.34 Indeed many relished the discomfiture of such people. At last the biters were being bitten. Nor were the mass media always disbelieved when they claimed that ‘wreckers’ and ‘spies’ existed in a countless quantity.35 Practically everyone had experienced a breakdown in factory machinery, in public transport or in the supply of food. The years of industrialization and collectivization had been exceptionally turbulent, and it was not hard to persuade people that sabotage was widespread. Moreover, Russian peasants had a tradition of dealing severely with the wrong-doers in their midst. There was a certain amount of popular approval for the harsh punishment of those whom Stalin purged.

  The survival of old social attitudes was important in enabling Stalin to carry out the Great Terror and to deflect blame from himself. Among Russians there was a centuries-old assumption that, if the policies of the tsar were unfair, the fault lay with his malevolent advisers. Stalin persistently induced people to think that he had their interests at heart. It was necessary, he had declared, ‘to listen carefully to the voice of the masses, to the voice of rank-and-file party members, to the voice of the so-called “little people”, to the voice of simple folk.’36

  Nevertheless it is unclear whether his pose won him friends even among the most simple-minded of citizens. Of course, Stalin’s message appealed to the newly-promoted members of the various élites. Of course, too, it was attractive to youngsters who had been schooled to revere him and whose parents were too terrified to say anything even privately against him. But rural hatred of Stalin was visceral.37 He had identified himself so closely with agricultural collectivization that he could not easily disassociate himself from its horrors. And in the towns there were millions of inhabitants who had no reason whatsoever to regard the period of his rule with affection. Religious belief remained a solace for most people. In the USSR census of 1937, fifty-seven per cent of the population disclosed that they were believers — and the real percentage was probably a lot greater in view of the state’s aggressive promotion of atheism.38 All in all, little political acquiescence would have been obtained if people had not been afraid of the NKVD: silent disgruntlement was the norm.

  Most adults in the Soviet Union knew all too well how far official rhetoric was at variance with their direct experience. Real wages per person in 1937 were about three fifths of what they had been in 1928.39 The material improvement for the average family since the mid-1930s was mainly the result of more members of each family taking up paid employment.40 People knew they were working much harder for their living. They also retained a keen memory of the military-style collectivization, the famine, the persecution of religion and the bludgeoning of all dissent, near-dissent and imaginary dissent. It is difficult to quantify the degree of hostility to Stalin’s regime. Who but a fool or a saint talked openly about these matters? But the NKVD did not delude itself that the voluntary communion of Stalin, the party and the masses was a reality. Police informers in Voronezh province, for example, indicated that the contents of the 1936 Constitution were widely regarded as not being worth the paper they were printed upon.41

  The conclusion must be that the Soviet state was far from its goal of reshaping popular opinion to its liking. But a caveat must be entered here. Interviews with Soviet citizens who fled the USSR in the Second World War showed that support for welfare-state policies, for strong government and for patriotic pride was robust — and this was a sample of persons who had shown their detestation of Stalin by leaving the country.42 Some elements in the regime’s ideology struck a congenial chord while others produced only disharmony. This was not a settled society, far less a ‘civilization’. People knew they lacked the power to get rid of the Societ order. While hoping for change, they made the best of a bad job. Probably most of them ceased to dream of a specific alternative to Stalinism. They tried to be practical in an efford to survive. All the more reason for Stalin to reward the men and women who staffed the institutions that administered society on his behalf. Insofar as it was a durable system, this was to a large extent because a hierarchically graduated system of power and emoluments held their loyalty. Even many doubters thought that the regime’s nastiness was not unreformable. Hope, too, endured in the USSR.

  A wilder misjudgement of Stalin is hard to imagine. Stalin was unembarrassed about the need to use force in order to maintain his rule. In August 1938, as the penal terms of a generation of convicts drew to a close, he playfully asked the USSR Supreme Soviet whether such convicts should be released on time. He declared that ‘from the viewpoint of the state economy it would be a bad idea’ to set them free since the camps would lose their best workers. In addition, convicts on release might re-associate with criminals in their home towns and villages. Better for them to complete their rehabilitation inside the Gulag: ‘In a camp the atmosphere is different; it is difficult to go to the bad there. As you know, we have a system of voluntary-compulsory financial loans. Let’s also introduce a system of voluntary-compulsory retention.’43 And so just as free wage-earners had to agree to ‘lend’ part of their wages to the Soviet government, so camp inmates would have to agree to the lengthening of their sentences.

  And so control over people came nearest to perfection in relation to two groups: those at the very bottom and those at the very top. Camp inmates had no rights: their daily routine ensured compliance with the instruction of their guards on pain of death. Politburo members, too, lacked rights, and their physical proximity to Stalin necessitated an unswerving obedience to the whim of the Leader. Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, Beria and their colleagues could never safely object to a line of policy which Stalin had already approved.

  But in between there were gradations of non-compliance which were possible and common. Policies could be obfuscated, modified and even emasculated. Choices could be made between one official priority and
another; for there was practically no message from the Kremlin that was not said to be a priority of the Politburo. Furthermore, the entire structure of public information, surveillance and enforcement was patchy. Such a state and such a society were clearly not totalitarian if the epithet involves totality in practice as well as in intent. Compliance with the supreme communist leadership was greater in politics than in administration, greater in administration than in the economy, greater in the economy than in social relations. The totalitarian order was therefore full of contradictions. Perfect central control eluded Stalin. The Soviet compound was a unity of extremely orderly features and extremely chaotic ones.

  It is plain that Stalin in the 1930s was driven by the will to destroy the old relationships and to build new ones within a framework entirely dominated by the central state authorities. He did not entirely succeed. Nor did his mirror-image adversary Adolf Hitler in Germany. But the goal was so ambitious that even its half-completion was a dreadful achievement.

  13

  The Second World War

  (1939–1945)

  Stalin had always expected war to break out again in Europe. In every major speech on the Central Committee’s behalf he stressed the dangers in contemporary international relations. Lenin had taught his fellow communists that economic rivalry would pitch imperialist capitalist powers against each other until such time as capitalism was overthrown. World wars were inevitable in the meantime and Soviet foreign policy had to start from this first premiss of Leninist theory on international relations.

  The second premiss was the need to avoid unnecessary entanglement in an inter-imperialist war.1 Stalin had always aimed to avoid risks with the USSR’s security, and this preference became even stronger at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in mid-1936.2 The dream of Maksim Litvinov, People’s Commissar for External Affairs, of the creation of a system of ‘collective security’ in Europe was dissipated when Britain and France refused to prevent Germany and Italy from aiding the spread of fascism to Spain. But what could Stalin do? Complete diplomatic freedom was unfeasible. But if he dealt mainly with the victor powers of the Great War, what trust could he place in their promises of political and military cooperation? If he attempted an approach to Hitler, would he not be rebuffed? And, whatever he chose to do, how could he maintain that degree of independence from either side in Europe’s disputes he thought necessary for the good of himself, his clique and the USSR?

  Stalin’s reluctance to take sides, moreover, increased the instabilities in Europe and lessened the chances of preventing continental war.3 In the winter of 1938–9 he concentrated efforts to ready the USSR for such an outbreak. Broadened regulations on conscription raised the size of the Soviet armed forces from two million men under arms in 1939 to five million by 1941. In the same period there was a leap in factory production of armaments to the level of 700 military aircraft, 4,000 guns and mortars and 100,000 rifles.4

  The probability of war with either Germany or Japan or both at once was an integral factor in Soviet security planning. It was in the Far East, against the Japanese, that the first clashes occurred. The battle near Lake Khasan in mid-1938 had involved 15,000 Red Army personnel. An extremely tense stand-off ensued; and in May 1939 there was further trouble when the Japanese forces occupied Mongolian land on the USSR–Mongolian border near Khalkhin-Gol. Clashes occurred that lasted several months. In August 1939 the Red Army went on to the offensive and a furious conflict took place. The Soviet commander Zhukov used tanks for the first occasion in the USSR’s history of warfare. The battle was protracted and the outcome messy; but, by and large, the Red Army and its 112,500 troops had the better of the Japanese before a truce was agreed on 15 September 1939.5

  Hitler was active in the same months. Having overrun the Sudeten-land in September 1938, he occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, thereby coming closer still to the USSR’s western frontier. Great Britain gave guarantees of military assistance to Poland in the event of a German invasion. All Europe already expected Warsaw to be Hitler’s next target, and the USSR engaged in negotiations with France and Britain. The Kremlin aimed at the construction of a military alliance which might discourage Hitler from attempting further conquests. But the British in particular dithered over Stalin’s overtures. The nadir was plumbed in summer when London sent not its Foreign Secretary but a military attaché to conduct negotiations in Moscow. The attaché had not been empowered to bargain in his own right, and the lack of urgency was emphasized by the fact that he travelled by sea rather than by air.6

  Whether Stalin had been serious about these talks remains unclear: it cannot be ruled out that he already wished for a treaty of some kind with Germany. Yet the British government had erred; for even if Stalin had genuinely wanted a coalition with the Western democracies, he now knew that they were not to be depended upon. At the same time Stalin was being courted by Berlin. Molotov, who had taken Litvinov’s place as People’s Commissar of External Affairs in May, explored the significance of the German overtures.7 An exchange of messages between Hitler and Stalin took place on 21 August, resulting in an agreement for German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to come to Moscow. Two lengthy conversations occurred between Stalin, Molotov and Ribbentrop on 23 August. Other Politburo members were left unconsulted. By the end of the working day a Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty had been prepared for signature.

  This document had two main sections, one made public and the other kept secret. Openly the two powers asserted their determination to prevent war with each other and to increase bilateral trade. The USSR would buy German machinery, Germany would make purchases of Soviet coal and oil. In this fashion Hitler was being given carte blanche to continue his depredatory policies elsewhere in Europe while being guaranteed commercial access to the USSR’s natural resources. Worse still were the contents of the secret protocols of the Non-Aggression Treaty. The USSR and Germany divided the territory lying between them into two spheres of influence: to the USSR was awarded Finland, Estonia and Latvia, while Lithuania and most of Poland went to Germany. Hitler was being enabled to invade Poland at the moment of his choosing, and he did this on 1 September. When he refused to withdraw, Britain and France declared war upon Germany. The Second World War had begun.

  Hitler was taken aback by the firmness displayed by the Western parliamentary democracies even though they could have no hope of rapidly rescuing Poland from his grasp. It also disconcerted Hitler that Stalin did not instantly interpret the protocol on the ‘spheres of influence’ as permitting the USSR to grab territory. Stalin had other things on his mind. He was waiting to see whether the Wehrmacht would halt within the area agreed through the treaty. Even more important was his need to secure the frontier in the Far East. Only on 15 September did Moscow and Tokyo at last agree to end military hostilities on the Soviet-Manchurian frontier. Two days later, Red Army forces invaded eastern Poland.

  This was to Germany’s satisfaction because it deprived the Polish army of any chance of prolonging its challenge to the Third Reich and the USSR had been made complicit in the carving up of north-eastern Europe. While Germany, Britain and France moved into war, the swastika was raised above the German embassy in Moscow. Talks were resumed between Germany and the USSR to settle territorial questions consequent upon Poland’s dismemberment. Wishing to win Hitler’s confidence, Stalin gave an assurance to Ribbentrop ‘on his word of honour that the Soviet Union would not betray its partner’.8 On 27 September 1939, a second document was signed, the Boundary and Friendship Treaty, which transferred Lithuania into the Soviet Union’s sphere of interest. In exchange Stalin agreed to give up territory in eastern Poland. The frontier between the Soviet Union and German-occupied Europe was stabilized on the river Bug.

  Stalin boasted to Politburo members: ‘Hitler is thinking of tricking us, but I think we’ve got the better of him.’9 At the time it seemed unlikely that the Germans would soon be capable of turning upon the USSR. Hitler would surely have his hands full on the W
estern front. Stalin aimed to exert tight control in the meantime over the sphere of interest delineated in the Boundary and Friendship Treaty. The governments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were scared by Stalin and Molotov into signing mutual assistance treaties which permitted the Red Army to build bases on their soil.

  On 30 November 1939, after the Finns had held out against such threats, Stalin ordered an invasion with the intention of establishing a Finnish Soviet government and relocating the Soviet-Finnish border northwards at Finland’s expense. Yet the Finns organized unexpectedly effective resistance. The Red Army was poorly co-ordinated; and this ‘Winter War’ cost the lives of 200,000 Soviet soldiers before March 1940, when both sides agreed to a settlement that shifted the USSR’s border further north from Leningrad but left the Finns with their independence. Thereafter Stalin sought to strengthen his grip on the other Baltic states. Flaunting his military hegemony in the region, he issued an ultimatum for the formation of pro-Soviet governments in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in June. Next month these governments were commanded, on pain of invasion, to request the incorporation of their states as new Soviet republics of the USSR. Also in July 1940, Stalin annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania.

  The Sovietization of these lands was conducted with practised brutality. Leading figures in their political, economic and cultural life were arrested by the NKVD. Condemned as ‘anti-Soviet elements’, they were either killed or consigned to the Gulag. The persecution also affected less exalted social categories: small traders, school-teachers and independent farmers were deported to ‘special settlements’ in the RSFSR and Kazakhstan;10 4,400 captured Polish officers were shot and buried in Katyn forest. Thus the newly-conquered territory, from Estonia down to Moldavia, lost those figures who might have organized opposition to their countries’ annexation. A Soviet order was imposed. A communist one-party dictatorship was established, and factories, banks, mines and land were nationalized.