Alongside the collectivization of farming and the forcible training of peasants as industrial workers, the need to enforce inequality invested the Stalinist terror with its prodigious momentum and pervasiveness. The terror matched the resistance which those policies encountered. Only with scorpions could tens of millions be driven into collective farms, multitudes be shifted to new industrial sites, and the vast majority of the people be forced to toil in misery and to suppress in silence the fury evoked by the privileges of a minority. The terror worked ruthlessly, sometimes blindly, but on the whole effectively. It owed its effectiveness to a moral backing as well as to the sheer mechanical weight of repression. The government had identified itself with a great national cause, or, as the Marxist would put it, with an historical necessity. This identification, in the last instance, accounted for the helplessness of the Soviet people against the terror, and for the complicity of the politically decisive elements, the party and the army.
But proportionately to the degree in which the government succeeded in enforcing inequality the necessity for the terror employed to enforce it decreased. The growing awareness of this process, even in the ruling group, has in recent years been reflected in the arguments over the tempo at which the State may ‘wither away’ in the transition to communism. Behind this dogmatic formula loomed the practical and insistent question: When are we going to mitigate the rigours of our criminal codes? When are we going to soften the draconic discipline in our factories, collective farms, offices, and schools? When are we going to sweep away our concentration camps?
Another source of the strength of Stalinism — Soviet Russia's isolation — has also run dry. The emergence of new communist regimes beyond Russia's frontiers has had profound repercussions inside Russia. Stalinism had justified its despotism with the argument that, as the sole bulwark of proletarian revolution, Russia was surrounded by a hostile world. The argument had great power: it disarmed or paralysed innumerable recalcitrant minds. It was, after all, true that twice within living memory German armies had marched towards the Dnieper and the Volga. It was also true that in its first days the revolution had had to struggle for existence against French, British, and even American intervention, against a blockade, a commercial and financial boycott, and a cordon sanitaire. Stalinism throve on the popular memory of these unhappy events. It kept alive that memory and fanned the smouldering hatreds and fears that went with it.
However, when new communist regimes had formed vast ‘security belts’ around Russia, in Asia and Eastern and Central Europe, it was no longer so easy to invoke isolation and capitalist encirclement as the justification for the harshness of Stalinism. For the first time in decades Russia seemed secure from foreign threats. For a short spell fear of American monopoly in atomic weapons once again appeared to justify in the eyes of the Russian people the Stalinist attitude towards the world. But this fear, too, soon subsided.
Even a regime armed with all the machinery of totalitarian control needs its moral justification. Without this, popular disillusionment and resentment clog and slow down the totalitarian machine. Fear of American atomic supremacy helped to keep the wheels of the machine turning, but they were not turning with their old impetus.
Yet such is the power of inertia that institutions and methods of government outlast the causes that have brought them into being; and they struggle to outlast them. In its last years and months Stalinism fought desperately to keep its hold on Russia. In doing so, it parodied its own previous performances, revealed its own grotesqueness, and betrayed its weakness. Before its extinction Stalinism experienced a spasm of deceptive vigour which contorted its face into a last repulsive grimace.
In these final years the primitive magic of Stalinism made an insolent mockery of Russia. The cult of the Leader assumed so nauseating and nightmarish a quality, especially after the celebration of Stalin's seventieth birthday in 1949, that it is difficult to describe it. For nearly two years the columns of Pravda, for instance, were filled with birthday greetings to the septuagenarian deity. No Soviet author, Journalist, scientist or general dared to write even a few sentences without referring to the Father of the Peoples, the Greatest and the Wisest Genius. An outsider could not help wondering how the Soviet people could put up with these wild extravagances of adulation, especially when the same issues of Pravda reported that 57 million Soviet citizens were receiving education in schools of all grades. How — one reflected — could the primitive magic of Stalinism ‘co-exist’ with modern knowledge and Marxist theories in the minds of millions?
The same air of bizarre unreality hung over the orgy of nationalism of these last years. The Russian people were constantly and insistently told that they, and they alone, were the salt of the earth; that they, and only they, had made all the great scientific and technological discoveries and initiated all the great philosophical, sociological, and other ideas. If such propaganda had been addressed to an illiterate people one might believe that it could be effective in some measure. But it could not possibly find much credence in a Russia in which the revolution and then Stalinism itself had aroused an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Nationalist self-glorification might have suited the isolated and self-centred Soviet people of the early years of the Stalin era, when, as a rule, it was not indulged in. But such self-glorification was quite out of date in 1950-2, when Russia's destiny had become inextricably bound up with that of the rest of the world. Even from the Stalinist viewpoint, it could not be reconciled with the spreading of revolution abroad. One-third of mankind already lived under communist regimes, and Stalinism spoke as if its realm had been confined to the old Tambov gubernia or to the Tula district. All account of time seemed to have been lost in the Kremlin.
Equally parochial and anachronistic was the interference of Stalinist dogma with biology, chemistry, physics, linguistics, philosophy, economics, literature, and the arts. This interference, more obtrusive and noisier than at any earlier stage, was reminiscent of the days when the Inquisition decided for the whole Christian world which were the right and the wrong ideas about God, the universe, and man. The intrusion of theological or bureaucratic dogma on the working of the scientific mind belongs essentially to a pre-industrial epoch. In contemporary Russia it amounted to virtual sabotage of science and technology. It was possible only because the rulers who had taken charge of Russia's education were themselves inadequately educated; and Stalin behaved like a half-educated, capricious guardian constantly tampering with the curriculum of his ward and imposing his own fancies and tastes.
But even while Stalin was alive it was easy to see that the primitive magic of Stalinism was losing its last battle. The heresy hunt was never at a standstill and yet it was producing little effect. Its victims did not suffer the cruel fate of their unhappy predecessors of the 1930's. There were no new purge trials in Russia, although such trials were staged in Budapest, Prague, and Sofia. As a rule the ‘deviationists’ were not imprisoned or deported. They were required to confess the error of their ways and were punished by some mild form of demotion. Sometimes the government honoured them with the highest awards only a short time after they had been singled out for attack. Even the confessions of error were different in kind from those to which Russia had become accustomed earlier on. Having uttered the conventional words of recantation, the ‘deviationists’ often defended themselves and their views in a veiled yet transparent manner. This seems to have been the regular pattern from the time of the attack on Professor Varga, the well-known economist, in 1946, up to the campaigns against the unorthodox biologists, linguists, musicians, and others. A notable exception was the case of Voznessensky, the disgraced member of the Politbureau and chief economic planner, who completely disappeared from the public eye.
Those who viewed the Russia of Stalin's last years through the prism of the 1930's saw in the heresy hunts a repetition of the great purges and hardly noticed their very different and much milder consequences.
What was the reason for this relative m
ildness?
In the first instance, the new heresies contained no immediate or visible threat to the regime, let alone to Stalin's position. In this they differed from the genuinely political ‘deviations’ of earlier periods inspired by Stalin's real rivals and opponents. Since the suppression of the latter, Stalin's position was so secure that he could well afford to show a certain degree of indulgence.
On the other hand, the new opposition to Stalinist orthodoxy, predominantly intellectual, was so widespread and elusive that it could not be uprooted without a blood bath similar to that of the 1930's, if not worse. This would have entailed disastrous consequences to the State, the economy, and morale. As Stalin could not risk such consequences, the new heresy hunt amounted to little more than shadow-boxing. It was just enough to irritate the intelligentsia; to keep it in a state of suspense; to feed and fan its resentments; and to speed up its spiritual alienation from Stalinism.
About a hundred years ago Alexander Herzen, the great Russian revolutionary, wrote that the West saw only Russia's government and facade but had no inkling of her people. He blamed the secretiveness of the Russian government for this but also the West's superficiality and partisanship. Herzen's observation has not lost its topicality. Behind the facade of rigid official uniformity, the attitude of the Russian people towards Stalinism has been so complex as to elude the over-simplified formulae of Western propagandists during the cold war.
The people ‘behind the facade’ were and are proud of the achievements of the Stalin era, and deeply attached to what was and has remained great and universal in the Russian revolution; and at the same time they suffocated in the stuffy air of Stalinist despotism.
The craving for a purifying change in the moral climate grew not only among the ruled: it infected many of the rulers as well. The bureaucracy felt oppressed by the anachronistic methods of Stalinism as much as the workers and the peasants did, or even more. The educated, intelligent men in the civil service had been deprived of all initiative and the right to exercise their own judgment and talent. They had to couch their ideas and aspirations carefully in arid and turgid official lingo. They had to speak with Stalin's voice instead of with their own. They were constantly harassed by a mania for secrecy which reached its greatest intensity during the last years: it became a ‘State crime’ for any official to divulge the most trivial fact about national life or governmental work. (Secrecy is usually the weapon of the weak, anxious to conceal weakness from a stronger enemy. Like so many other devices of Stalinism, it had its relative justification when Russia was really weak; but it has been rapidly losing any such justification with the growth of Russian power.)
Soviet publications reflected these strains and stresses only negatively and indirectly, and still do so even after Stalin's death. Thus, for instance, the March 1953 issue of the Kommunist (the former Bolshevik) says:
‘We must definitely put an end to opportunistic indifference and eliminate the anti-Marxist theory that the class struggle is calming down, a theory which starts from the premiss that as we are moving forward towards communism, even though we are doing so in capitalistic encirclement, the enemy becomes more and more harmless…’
The polemical distortion of the criticized view is obvious enough; but one would look in vain for any exposition in the Soviet Press of this view or for any indication of the persons holding it. Another paper, brought out some time before Stalin's death, castigated members of the intelligentsia — their names and academic titles were given — who set out unorthodox views in special memoranda and circulated these in typescript among friends and even in official institutions. This detail revealed more about the actual ferment of ideas than reams of Stalinist and anti-Stalinist writings. It indicated a relaxation of totalitarian control: no one would have dared thus to circulate unorthodox views under his own signature in the late 1930's or perhaps even in the 1940's.
Such attempts to propagate heretical ideas are in line with a good old Russian tradition. A hundred years ago Russia's progressive thinkers, unable to air their views in the licensed Press, similarly circulated their manuscripts, which made history. It was in this way that, for instance, Belinsky, the great radical critic and precursor of revolutionary trends, spread his ideas under the rule of Nicholas I, the Iron Tsar.
Unlike their predecessors, however, the Belinskys of contemporary Russia, if they exist, can be only reformers, not revolutionaries. They can aim only at improving and cleansing the existing social order, not at overthrowing it. That the main trend of Soviet anti-Stalinism was reformist could be seen even in the distorting mirror of recent emigre writings. Some time ago the Russian emigre Press reported that by far the most numerous party among post-war Russian refugees was one which described itself as the ‘Lenin Party’ and advocated a return to the democratic origins of the Bolshevik revolution. Hostile correspondents who reported this pointed out with some alarm that ‘at least a good half’ of the mass of refugees belonged to that party, although it had no periodicals and no organization, and although its adherents in the camps for displaced persons lived in constant terror of being denounced either to Soviet or to Western ‘security organs’.
The ‘Lenin legend’ is surviving the Stalin cult, although the latter cynically exploited and abused it for its own purposes. It is difficult to define the implications of this fact. Leninism is subject to widely differing interpretations; and it may be held that the slogan about a ‘return to Lenin’ is unreal: history rarely, if ever, returns to its starting-point. But what the slogan sums up is a yearning for regeneration of ‘Soviet democracy’ and a desire to reform the present order, not to overthrow it.
The strength of the ‘Lenin legend’ may be judged from many indications. We can cite here one other instance which seems as convincing as it is strange. It will be remembered that during the Second World War the Soviet General A. Vlasov, taken prisoner by the Nazis, later fought on the German side and commanded a Russian army formed of prisoners of war. After the war Vlasov was handed over to Soviet military authorities and executed as a traitor. Recently a book on Vlasov was published by a Russian emigre who was Vlasov's adjutant and was by his side when the Nazis conducted him from a prison camp to Berlin. The author describes that on the way Vlasov argued thus with the German officers who were escorting him: ‘I want to give you my advice on how to overthrow Stalin. This can be done only with the help of Lenin.’ There was, Vlasov said, only one way of gaining the confidence of the Soviet people, and this was to tell them that Stalin had distorted and falsified Lenin's teaching, and that the time had come to restore the true Leninist republic of workers and peasants. ‘We ought to tell the people that we are going to begin anew where the great Lenin left off — if Lenin had been alive everything would have been different.’
It is difficult to imagine a scene of greater bathos than this, in which a Soviet general, setting his foot on the slippery road of treason, pleaded with the Nazis that they should appeal to the Russian people in the name of Lenin. Vlasov hated the Stalin regime and allowed himself to be carried away by this hatred. The Nazis were willing to use him, but, of course, his advice sounded to them like the raving of a disordered mind. No anti-communist power could risk conjuring up the spirit of Lenin. Nevertheless there was a great truth behind Vlasov's grotesque pleading: The hope of a renascence of the revolution has never been extinguished in the Soviet people, and it has been kept alive by remote memories of the Leninist period. This hope still remains an imponderable and most vital factor in the political climate of Russia.
Significantly during Stalin's last months there re-sounded throughout Russia a warning against those who argued that now, when Russia was no longer the only
communist country in the world, the old ways and habits of Stalinism had become outdated. With one foot in the grave, Stalin heard his lieutenants raising the alarm about the recurrence of ‘Bukharinist and Trotskyist deviations’ in the party. And Stalin himself, in his last published letters, had to rebuke young Soviet e
conomists for a relapse into these long-suppressed heresies.
At that late stage, barely two months before Stalin's death, the story about the ‘plot’ of the Kremlin doctors burst upon Russia. Its specific political meaning will be discussed later — here we are concerned only with its bearing upon the moral crisis of Stalinism.
It is not certain whether or to what extent Stalin himself was responsible for the frame-up. But, regardless of this, in the eyes of Russia and of the world Stalinism reduced itself to a ghastly absurdity through this incident. It committed moral suicide even before the physical death of its author. The official revelations about the ‘plot’ looked like an attempt to re-enact in Moscow the Witches' Sabbath of the 1930's. As has been pointed out before, the purge trials of the 1930's could not be repeated in the Russia of the early 1950's without ruining the regime, the economy, and the morale of the country. A repetition would have clashed so obviously with Russia's interests and frame of mind that a reaction against it, unthinkable earlier, had to come.
The untamed nationalism of recent years was also driven to a self-destructive extreme during the campaign about the doctors' plot. The tale about the anti-Soviet conspiracy of world Jewry had the flavour of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and of the concoctions of Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda. It provided grist to the mills of those anti-communists who had always maintained that there was no difference between Stalinism and Nazism and now argued that the inherent kinship of the two was ‘bound’ to make Stalinism adopt the tenets of racial hatred and anti-Semitism. The argument was superficial and fallacious: it ignored the socialist background of Soviet Russia and the contradictions in the educational influence of Stalinism.
Russia After Stalin Page 10