The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert John Service

  16

  The Despot and his Masks

  Stalin could not dominate by terror alone. Needing the support of the elites in the government, the party, the army and the security police, he systematically sought favour among them. The privileges and power of functionaries were confirmed and the dignity of institutions was enhanced. By keeping the gulf between the rulers and the ruled, Stalin hoped to prevent the outbreak of popular opposition. What is more, he tried to increase his specific appeal to ethnic Russians by reinforcing a form of Russian nationalism alongside Marxism-Leninism; and Stalin cultivated his image as a leader whose position at the helm of the Soviet state was vital for the country’s military security and economic development.

  Such measures could delay a crisis for the regime; they were not a permanent solution. In any case Stalin did not adhere to the measures consistently. He was far too suspicious of his associates and the country’s élites to provide them with the entirely stable circumstances that would have alleviated the strains in politics, the economy and society. His health deteriorated after the Second World War. His holidays in Abkhazia became longer, and he sustained his efforts much more concentratedly in international relations than in domestic policy. But he could intervene whenever he wanted in any public deliberations. If an open debate took place on any big topic, it was because he had given permission. If a problem developed without reaction by central government and party authorities, it was either because Stalin did not think it very important or did not think it amenable to solution. He remained the dictator.

  He so much avoided flamboyance that he refrained from giving a single major speech in the period between mid-April 1948 and October 1952. At first he declined the title of Generalissimus pressed upon him by Politburo colleagues. In a characteristic reference to himself in the third person, he wondered aloud: ‘Do you want comrade Stalin to assume the rank of Generalissimus? Why does comrade Stalin need this? Comrade Stalin doesn’t need this.’1

  But assume it he did, and he would have been angry if the torrents of praise had dried up. His name appeared as an authority in books on everything from politics and culture to the natural sciences. The Soviet state hymn, which he had commissioned in the war, contained the line: ‘Stalin brought us up.’ In the film The Fall of Berlin he was played by an actor with luridly ginger hair and a plastic mask who received the gratitude of a multinational crowd which joyfully chanted: ‘Thank you, Stalin!’ By 1954, 706 million copies of Stalin’s works had been published.2 In 1949 a parade was held in Red Square to celebrate his seventieth birthday and his facial image was projected into the evening sky over the Kremlin. His official biography came out in a second edition, which he had had amended so as to enhance the account of his derring-do under Nicholas II. His height was exaggerated in newsreels by clever camera work. The pockmarks on his face were airbrushed away. This perfect ‘Stalin’ was everywhere while the real Stalin hid himself from view.

  Among the peoples of the USSR he strained to identify himself with the ethnic Russians. In private he talked in his native tongue with those of his intimates who were Georgian; and even his deceased wife Nadezhda Allilueva had Georgian ancestors.3 He ran his supper parties like a Georgian host (although most such hosts would not have thrown tomatoes at his guests as Stalin did).4 But publicly his origins embarrassed him after a war which had intensified the self-awareness and pride of Russians; and his biography referred just once to his own father’s nationality.5 Stalin placed the Russian nation on a pedestal: ‘Among all peoples of our country it is the leading people.’6 Official favour for things Russian went beyond precedent. The lexicographers were told to remove foreign loan-words from the dictionaries. For instance, the Latin-American tango was renamed ‘the slow dance’.7 The history of nineteenth-century science was ransacked and — glory be! — it was found that practically every major invention from the bicycle to the television had been the brainchild of an ethnic Russian.

  Simultaneously the Soviet authorities re-barricaded the USSR from alien influences. Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s wife, was imprisoned for greeting the Israeli emissary Golda Meir too warmly. The poet Boris Pasternak was terrified when the Russian-born British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, then serving as a diplomat in Moscow, paid him a visit at home. Stalin expressed the following opinion to Nikita Khrushchëv: ‘We should never allow a foreigner to fly across the Soviet Union.’8 After the war, Kliment Voroshilov placed a ban on the reporting of Canadian ice-hockey results.9 Great Russia always had to be the world’s champion nation. A propaganda campaign was initiated to stress that there should be no ‘bowing down’ before the achievements and potentiality of the West.

  All national groups suffered, but some suffered more than others. The cultures of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians — who had only recently been re-conquered — were ravaged. The same occurred to the Romanian-speaking Moldavians; in their case even their language was emasculated: first it was equipped with a Cyrillic alphabet and then its vocabulary compulsorily acquired loan-words from Russian so as to distinguish it strongly from Romanian.10 The Ukrainian language was decreasingly taught to Ukrainian-speaking children in the RSFSR.11 More sinister still was the experience of a philologist who was imprisoned simply for stating that some Finno-Ugric languages had more declensions than Russian. Historiography became ever more imperialist. Shamil, the leader of the nineteenth-century rebellion in the North Caucasus against tsarism, was depicted unequivocally as a reactionary figure. Anyone dead or alive who since time immemorial had opposed the Russian state was prone to be denounced.12

  The nationality which underwent the greatest trauma were the Jews. The Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee was closed down without explanation, and its leader and outstanding Yiddish singer Solomon Mikhoels was murdered in a car crash on Stalin’s orders. Several prominent Soviet politicians who happened to be Jewish, such as Semën Lozovski, disappeared into prison.

  Stalin, starting with his article on the national question in 1913, refused to describe the Jews as a nation since, unlike the Ukrainians or Armenians, they did not inhabit a particular historic territory. In 1934 he sought to give them a territory of their own by establishing a ‘Jewish Autonomous Region’ in Birobidzhan and asking for volunteers to populate it. But Birobidzhan lay in one of the coldest regions of eastern Siberia. Little enthusiasm was invoked by the project, and after the war there was tentative talk about turning Crimea instead into a Jewish homeland. But in the 1940s Stalin’s unease about the Jews had increased to the point that he cursed his daughter Svetlana for going out with a Jewish boyfriend. Particularly annoying to him was the admiration of many Soviet Jews for the Zionist movement which had founded the state of Israel in 1948. Stalin responded by denouncing ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘rootlessness’. He ignored the fact that Marxists had traditionally opposed nationalism in favour of cosmopolitan attitudes. Restrictions were introduced on the access of Jews to university education and professional occupations. Soviet textbooks ceased to mention that Karl Marx had been Jewish.

  Russian chauvinism was rampant. The first party secretary, the police chief and the governmental chairmen in other Soviet republics such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan were invariably of Russian nationality. There was similar discrimination in appointments to other important public offices. Russians were trusted because they, more than any other nation, were thought to have a stake in the retention of the USSR in its existing boundaries.

  This imperialism, however, was not taken to its fullest imaginable extent. Ordinary Russians lived as meanly as Ukrainians and Kazakhs; indeed many were worse off than Georgians and other peoples with higher per capita levels of output of meat, vegetables and fruit than Russia. Furthermore, Stalin continued to limit the expression of Russian nationhood. Despite having distorted Marxism-Leninism, he also clung to several of its main tenets. He continued to hold the Russian Orthodox Church in subservience, and practising Christians were debarred from jobs of responsibility throughout the USSR. Stalin also exercised
selectivity towards Russian literary classics and allowed no nostalgia about pre-revolutionary village traditions. His version of Russian national identity was so peculiar a mixture of traditions as to be virtually his own invention. The quintessence of Russia, for Stalin, was simply a catalogue of his own predilections: militarism, xenophobia, industrialism, urbanism and gigantomania.

  It also embraced a commitment to science. But as usual, Stalin gave things a political twist. His spokesman Zhdanov, despite negligible training, breezily denounced relativity theory, cybernetics and quantum mechanics as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘reactionary’. Crude, ideologically-motivated interventions were made in the research institutes for the natural sciences. The relativist concepts of Einstein were an irritant to the monolithism of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. Zhdanov proclaimed the axiomatic status of absolute notions of space, time and matter; he insisted that an unshifting objective truth existed for all organic and inorganic reality.13

  Persecution of scholarship was accompanied by the continued promotion of cranks. By the 1940s the pseudo-scientist Lysenko was claiming to have developed strains of wheat that could grow within the Arctic circle. His gruff manner was attractive to Stalin. The result was disaster for professional biology: any refusal to condone Lysenkoite hypotheses was punished by arrest. Where biology led, chemistry, psychology and linguistics quickly followed. Physics escaped this mauling only because the scientists employed on the Soviet nuclear weapon project convinced Beria that the USSR would not acquire an A-bomb unless they were allowed to use Einstein’s concepts. Stalin muttered to Beria: ‘Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.’14 This grudging indulgence proved the rule. Researchers of all kinds, in the arts as well as in the sciences, were treated as technicians investigating problems strictly within the guidelines prescribed by the state authorities.

  Stalin made this crystal clear when he intruded himself into erudite debates among linguisticians. In his quirky booklet of 1950, Marxism and Questions of Linguistics, he took it upon himself to insist that the Russian language originated in the provinces of Kursk and Orël.15 The entire intelligentsia was constrained to applaud the booklet as an intellectual breakthrough and to apply its wisdom to other fields of scholarship. Writers scrambled to outdo each other in praise of Stalin’s injunctions.

  The arts suffered alongside the sciences and the wartime cultural semi-truce was brought to an end. Zhdanov again led the assault, describing the poet Anna Akhmatova as ‘half-nun, half-whore’. The short-story writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, who had avoided trouble by writing predominantly for children, was also castigated. Shostakovich could no longer have his symphonies performed. Zhdanov noted that several artists had withheld explicit support for the official ideology, and he announced that this ‘idea-lessness’ (bezideinost) would no longer be tolerated. Essentially he was demanding overt adherence to a single set of ideas, ‘Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism’. The various official organizations of creative artists were trundled into action. Tikhon Khrennikov, chairman of the Union of Musicians, was rivalled only by Alexander Fadeev, leader of the Union of Writers, in fawning before Zhdanov’s judgements on particular composers, painters, poets and film directors. Such cheerleaders cried that the arts should be the conveyor-belt for the regime’s commands.

  Only rarely did Stalin intervene in Zhdanov’s campaign for Marxist-Leninist compliance. But when he did, his effect was terrifying. For instance, in 1947 Stalin, Zhdanov and Molotov paid a visit to the director Sergei Eisenstein, who was filming the second instalment of his two-part depiction of Ivan the Terrible. To Stalin’s mind, Eisenstein had failed to stress that Tsar Ivan’s terror against the aristocracy had been justified; he urged Eisenstein to ‘show that it was necessary to be ruthless’. The intimidated director — who already had a chronic cardiac complaint — asked for further detailed advice; but Stalin would only reply, in false self-deprecation: ‘I’m not giving you instructions but expressing the comments of a spectator.’ Eisenstein was deeply scared by the conversation. He died a few months later.16

  Meanwhile only a few works that were critical of social and economic conditions were permitted. Among the most interesting were the sketches of collective-farm life published by Valentin Ovechkin under the title Rural Daily Rounds. And so Stalin, probably at Khrushchëv’s instigation, permitted a portrait of the troubles of contemporary farming to appear in Pravda. This seepage through the Stalinist cultural dam occurred solely because Politburo members themselves were in dispute about agrarian policy. For the most part, in any case, official propagandists remained utterly self-satisfied, asserting that all Soviet citizens were living in comfort. A massive cookbook was produced in 1952, The Book of Delicious and Healthy Food, which took as its epigraph a quotation from Stalin: ‘The peculiar characteristic of our revolution consists in its having given the people not only freedom but also material goods as well as the opportunity of a prosperous and cultured life.’17

  The beneficiaries of the Soviet order were not the ‘people’, not the workers, kolkhozniki and office-clerks. Even doctors, engineers and teachers were poorly paid. But one group in society was certainly indebted to Stalin. This was constituted by the high and middling ranks of the bureaucracy in the ministries, the party, the armed forces and the security organs. The material assets of functionaries were small by the standards of the rich in the West. But they knew how hard life was for the rest of society; they also understood that, if they were unlucky in some way in their career, they might suddenly enter prison despite being innocent of any crime. Immediate pleasure was the priority for them.18

  The tone of their lifestyle was set by Politburo members as the ballet and the opera were given the imprimatur of official approval. Stalin patronized the Bolshoi Theatre, favouring its singers with coveted awards. The families of the Politburo went to the spa-town Pyatigorsk in the North Caucasus to take the waters. Occasionally they went to Karlovy Vary in Czechoslovakia. Flats were done up with wallpaper, lamps and chairs that were unobtainable in general stores such as GUM on Red Square. Special shops, special hospitals and special holiday-homes were available to persons of political importance. The compulsory fees that had been introduced in 1940 for pupils wishing to complete their secondary schooling meant that the proportion of working-class entrants to universities fell from forty-five per cent in 1935 to just above twenty-five by 1950.19 The central and local nomenklaturas were steadily turning into a hereditary social group.

  But the nomenklatura did not yet flaunt their perks which had to be enjoyed discreetly in deference to the official ultimate aim of social egalitarianism. The Politburo took care to wear modest tunics or dull suits and hats. Ordinary people were given no hint about the tables creaking under the weight of caviar, sturgeon and roast lamb served at Kremlin banquets. Stalin himself lived fairly simply by the standards of several Politburo members; but even he had a governess for his daughter, a cook and several maids, a large dacha at Kuntsevo, an endless supply of Georgian wine and so few worries about money that most of his pay-packets lay unopened at the time of his death. Armed guards secured the privacy of the apartment blocks of the central political élite. Only the domestic servants, nannies and chauffeurs knew the truth about the lifestyle of the nomenklatura.

  No wonder the emergent ruling class was determined to keep the foundations of the Soviet order in good repair. The mood of most functionaries was triumphalist; they felt that the USSR’s victory in the Second World War had demonstrated the superiority of communism over capitalism. They themselves were by now better qualified than before the war; they were more literate and numerate and most of them had completed their secondary education. But this in no way diminished their ideological crudity. Far from it: they did not distinguish between the interests of the regime and their own, and they would brook no challenge to their exploitative, repressive measures.

  Stalin and his subordinates still talked about the eventual realization of communism, reaffirming that ‘the state will not last forever’.20 Bu
t how to create a communist society was not a question under consideration. Far from it. The specific aspirations of the Soviet working class no longer figured prominently in Soviet propaganda. Workers in the rest of the world were called upon to engage in revolutionary struggle, but not in the USSR. At home the main requirement was for patriotism. Stalin implicitly laid down this line even in his Marxism and Questions of Linguistics. For example, he stressed the need to reject the notion that language was the product of class-based factors. This notion had conventionally been propagated by communist zealots who declared that words and grammar were the product of the social imperatives of the ruling class of a given society. Stalin instead wanted Soviet schoolchildren to admire the poetry of the nineteenth-century writer Alexander Pushkin without regard to his aristocratic background. Patriotism was to count for more than class.21

  Here Stalin was clarifying the doctrines of communist conservatism prominent in his thought immediately before the Second World War. As ruler and theorist he wished to emphasize that no transformation in the Soviet order was going to happen in the foreseeable future. The attitudes, policies and practices of the post-war period were meant to endure for many more years.

  Nowhere was this more obvious than in the discussions in 1950–51 among 240 leading scholars about a projected official textbook on political economy. Dauntlessly many of the 240 participants took issue with the premisses of current state policy.22 Stalin entered the debate in 1952 by producing yet another booklet, The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. He laid down that the objective ‘laws’ of economics could not be ignored by governmental planners and that there were limits on what was achievable by human will. This was a rebuff to S. G. Strumilin, who had been among his scholarly supporters at the end of the 1920s. On the other hand, Stalin offered no hope for the relaxation of economic policy. Taking issue with L. D. Yaroshenko, he argued that the primacy of capital goods in industrial planning was unalterable; and he reprimanded V. G. Venzher and A. V. Sanina for proposing the selling-off of the state-owned agricultural machinery to kolkhozes.23