Soviet policy was not uniform in all the non-Russian republics in these years. In the Muslim areas Soviet leadership moved very cautiously against Islam. In Central Asia the main issue in the 1920s had been the abolition of the veil for Muslim women, an issue on which the small local intelligentsia was in general agreement. Most of the southern Islamic areas were also not yet the object of massive industrialization drives, though collectivization, when it came, was normally as harsh as in Russia and the Ukraine. The one great disaster in Central Asia was in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan was still to a large extent nomadic in 1930 and collectivization implied “sedentarization,” that is, nomadic herders were to settle down and raise their stock in one area. This policy set off internal struggles inside the clans that combined with intense party pressure and produced a massive crisis. The nomadic Kazakhs responded by slaughtering their animals or fleeing across the border to other Soviet republics and even to China. Over a million became refugees and over a million, some twenty percent of the Kazakh population, died of hunger or disease. In the succeeding years, the Kazakh authorities managed to resettle most of the refugees in Kazakhstan, and stock-raising slowly recovered, but the demographic catastrophe’s effects lasted for decades.
Another series of paradoxes grew from the outcome of the transformation of Soviet society. Though terrorized by the events of 1937–38, the population at the end of the 1930s was much better educated, more urban, and in most ways more “modern” than in 1928. Some thirty-one percent of the population lived in urban areas, double the pre-1917 figure, and almost all of the population had at least basic literacy. Ties with older traditions disappeared. The Orthodox Church and other religions were essentially smashed by the anti-religious campaigns: only a few hundred churches remained open in the entire country, and the great majority of the clergy were dead or in camps. The traditional rhythm of the Russian year, with Shrovetide, Lent, and Easter simply evaporated without churches to support it, and the Communist festivals, November 7 and May 1 replaced them, with a secular New Year celebration in between. The huge expansion in urban population meant that millions left the world of the peasantry. People who had never seen a complex machine before now ran tram lines and built airplanes. Basic consumer goods were scarce, but movies, popular music, and the radio provided mass entertainment of a more or less modern sort. Mass education, especially in technical subjects, was a priority and tens of thousands of students received the basics of modern science, while surviving crowded, unheated dormitories and wretched and erratic food. This sort of speeded-up education allowed Stalin to fill the positions left empty by the arrests of the great terror with people from peasant and working class backgrounds but who were more or less able to do their jobs.
The five-year plans were a qualified success. The Soviet leadership regularly used deceptive statistical methods to make the results look better, but the actual results in industry were impressive enough by 1940. The USSR was now the world’s third industrial power, after the United States and Germany. The new industrial plants had modern equipment, and many of them were located in the Urals and Siberia, places of yet untapped wealth that were also far from the increasingly threatened frontier. Small villages had turned into cities, and entirely new industrial areas came into being. Some of the promises of socialism were beginning to be realized. The People’s Commissariat of Health doubled the number of doctors and medical personnel between 1932 and 1940, and vaccination and hygiene programs markedly decreased the death rates from disease. At the same time, years of famine, deprivations, and crowded and unsanitary housing provided immense obstacles to the new and mostly female medical personnel. The Communists had always promoted the equality of women, and by the 1930s the work force was almost half female. Some women began to appear even as tractor drivers on the collective farms and workers in heavy industry. Some professions, such as medicine, were rapidly becoming primarily the domain of women. The successes of women pilots and workers were the subject of huge propaganda campaigns in the media. The large gap in education between women and men virtually closed, at least in the cities. As in all cases, the reality of daily life provided major obstacles: in light industry, where most workers were women, there was never enough daycare for children. Though women were paid the same as men for the same work, the predominantly female light industries were lower in priority and hence the wages were lower and fewer, and worse consumer goods were available through the workplace. The burden of family continued to fall on women even when daycare centers and kindergartens appeared. It was women who bore the brunt of standing in lines for scarce commodities and forming informal networks to obtain them.
In the late 1930s consumer goods continued to trickle back into the stores and the lives of women as well as men eased. The weak point of the Soviet economy was and remained in agriculture. The collective farms were just barely able to supply the burgeoning cities with grain, but pre-1940 meat production never reached the levels found in the late 1920s. Meat and milk came overwhelmingly not from the kolhoz but from the private plots the state had allowed the peasants to retain after collectivization. The population continued to rely heavily on the peasant market, more expensive than state stores, and on workplace distribution centers for anything beyond the most basic foodstuffs. Nevertheless, the country was able to vastly increase military production again at the end of the 1930s, in the face of the danger of war, without completely wrecking the plan and the supply of consumer goods. This was not nearly the promised utopia, but it did provide the basis of the Soviet version of a modern society. It was just barely enough.
For Stalin’s new industrial giant of a country was about to face a threat greater than any kulaks or imaginary Japanese spies. By 1938 the heart of Europe was under the power of Adolf Hitler, who had made it clear in Mein Kampf that Germany must conquer “living space” to survive, and that Germany’s living space was to be found in the Soviet Union. In 1931, Stalin had told a conference of industrial managers that Russia “was fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. Either we catch up in ten years or they crush us.” Perhaps his evaluation of the state of the Soviet economy had been too pessimistic at the time, but his prediction of the time they had at their disposal was right on the mark. They had exactly ten years.
20 War
From the very beginning the Soviet leadership expected an invasion sooner or later. This conviction grew from the actual situation of the Soviet Union since the revolution, the experience of intervention and hostility of almost all other states, and also from their analysis of the world. For they expected not just an attack on their own country but a war among the western powers as well, and thought it likely that the war in the West would come first. Their analysis of the world came from Lenin’s view of the most recent stage of capitalism, which he understood to be the period of imperialism. He believed that the First World War was the result of the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a small number of massive semi-monopolistic corporations and banks, which in turn led to a speeded up competition for markets and resources. The result was the division of the world among great empires, and the desire of the late-comers in that process, Germany in particular, to re-divide the world. Thus, even without the existence of the USSR, another war was inevitable. Stalin and the Soviet elite accepted this conception of the world without any doubts, and their own historic experience in the First World War, as well as their observation of the various rivalries in the world after 1918, only strengthened their conviction. At the same time they realized that the differences (“contradictions”) among the capitalist powers might be temporarily shelved in an anti-Communist alliance or that one or more of the western powers might be strong enough to attack them on its own. Until 1933 the principle threat seemed to come from the British Empire, the apparently hegemonic power of the time. The Red Army constructed its war plans on the assumption that an attack would come from Poland and Rumania with British (and perhaps French) backing or even participation. The de facto milita
ry arrangements with Weimar Germany were designed in part to obstruct such an eventuality. When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in January of 1933, the Soviets confronted an entirely new situation.
At first the Soviets were not excessively concerned. Since 1928 the Comintern had predicted a new crisis of capitalism, and the Depression seemed to bear out that prediction. The Soviet leadership, like many other observers, was not convinced that the Nazis were really much different from other reactionary German groups that had supported restoration of the Kaiser and suppression of the left parties. Anti-Semitism, the parades, and the uniforms, all seemed to be just trappings to deceive the naïve, not symptoms of a more serious and sinister purpose. Though Hitler eliminated the German Communist Party (and the Socialists) in a matter of months, the Soviets were still convinced that Hitler’s support was limited and his regime unstable. The 1934 purge of the Storm Troopers seemed to confirm this picture, and Soviet propaganda as well as internal discussion stressed the alleged unpopularity of Hitler’s economic and other programs with the German working class. At the same time, the Soviets noted the rearmament of Germany and its increasingly aggressive tone in international affairs. Late in 1934 the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations, a step both symbolic and practical, especially as Hitler had taken Germany out of the League the year before. Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov used the League as one of his principle stages on which to proclaim the need for the Western powers to make an agreement with the USSR to oppose Hitler.
Talk of opposing Hitler from the Soviets was not merely a gesture, for the Soviet Union now possessed a new army, much more powerful than the old-fashioned Red Army of the 1920s. Two factors were crucial in the transformation of the army. One was the pre-1933 cooperation with the army of the Weimar republic, which provided the Red Army with a complete picture of the most recent developments in military technology and organization. The turn of Western armies toward motorized units, tanks, and aircraft was perfectly clear, yet in 1928 the Red Army still relied on cavalry and infantry armed with rifles and machine guns. Even artillery was inadequate. The second factor was the first five-year plan. The five-year plan originally called for quite considerable increases in military production, but the highly charged atmosphere of world politics (the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931) impelled Stalin to raise the targets for military production even higher. In the next year, the Soviet Union produced four thousand tanks, an immense number by the standards of the time, and they reflected sophisticated designs, both foreign and Soviet. The same enormous effort was put into aircraft production, particularly of heavy bombers. These modern weapons reflected the military doctrine of the Soviet army staff, particularly that of Tukhachevskii, who believed that modern wars would be decided by fast mechanized and armored units as well as long-range aerial bombing. By 1935 the USSR had one of the most advanced armies in the world. Its only limitation was size, for budgetary constraints kept the standing army relatively small.
With this new army in the background, Stalin and the Soviet leaders still had to confront an increasingly dangerous world situation. The most important consequences of the new situation created by Hitler and his allies were the new policies enunciated at Geneva by Litvinov and also a sharp turn in the strategy of the Comintern. At the Seventh Comintern Conference in 1935 the Bulgarian Communist leader Georgii Dimitrov announced the new policy: the Popular Front. The new policy abandoned the attacks on the Socialists as agents of the ruling class and the orientation toward revolution, putting in its place the demand for Communists to make an alliance with the Socialists and indeed any group opposed to fascism for the purpose of preventing the extension of fascist power. At the same time the Soviet state began to try to form alliances with Western powers, signing mutual aid pacts with France and Czechoslovakia in May of 1935. Soviet relations with Britain, however, remained poor, and Hitler was on the march: in 1936 he remilitarized the Rhineland to thundering silence from London and Paris. A few months later the Civil War broke out in Spain with General Francisco Franco’s revolt against the Republic, now governed by a popular front elected by the people. Soviet reaction was initially cautious, as they feared that overt aid to the Republic would provoke intervention by the Western powers on the side of the monarchist-fascist rebels. Hitler and Mussolini soon solved that problem, for their supplies of troops and munitions gave the Soviets an opening. Stalin also sent tanks, aircraft, and many officers to Spain through the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean. In Spain, Stalin and the Comintern followed the popular front strategy, the Spanish Communists being instructed that they were not to make revolution but to continue to ally with the Socialists and Liberals to support the Republic. The Spanish situation revealed the limits of that strategy, for Stalin also wanted the Communists to control things as much as possible and insisted on eliminating the Trotskyists and Anarchists, powerful especially in Barcelona. In the long run, neither the Popular Front strategy nor Soviet aid and interference made much difference. The Spanish Republic succumbed to brute force and was extinguished by the end of 1938.
The defeat of the Republic only increased the danger for the USSR. The lack of enthusiasm on the part of Western powers for the Spanish Republic only revealed – in Stalin’s mind – the increasing chances of his nightmare scenario, a four-power pact that included Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, which would be directed against the Soviet Union. And Hitler continued to move. In 1936–37 Germany, Japan, and Italy signed the “Anti-Comintern Pact,” forming the alliance that came to known as the Axis. In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria, again causing no reaction from Britain and France, and soon began to make demands on Czechoslovakia, the only power in Eastern Europe with a substantial and modern armed force. For the Soviets as well as Europe as a whole, this was a crisis.
Soviet actions were stymied by two factors. One was the generally pro-German policy of Poland, which controlled the corridors through which any Soviet aid to Czechoslovakia had to pass. The other factor was the suspicion on the part of the Western powers, especially Britain – both of the Soviet Union in general and the capacities of the Red Army in particular. The Soviet mutual assistance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia hinged on cooperation, which was not forthcoming from Paris. In the days leading up to the final crisis at Munich, the Soviets did actually begin to mobilize the Red Army in secret, but all was in vain. Chamberlain surrendered the Czechs to Hitler in what from the Soviet point of view was a four-power pact. Such a pact, in their view, must be directed against the Soviet Union.
In this situation the Soviet leadership, convinced that war was coming, moved to its other possible strategy, making a deal with Hitler. Off and on since 1933 the Soviets had put out feelers to Berlin, but nothing had come of them. Early in 1939 discussions with the Nazis suddenly became serious, and the attitudes in London and Paris propelled them forward. Though Chamberlain began to realize that Hitler was a threat, he was not willing to discuss a serious agreement with Stalin. In the summer of 1939 a British mission to Moscow explored the possibilities of cooperation, but when Commissar of Defense Voroshilov asked for specifics on military cooperation, the British could reply only that they had no instructions. The result was the German-Soviet pact of August 23, 1939, signed in Moscow by Ribbentrop and Molotov, now Litvinov’s replacement as Commissar of Foreign Affairs.
The pact unleashed Hitler to attack Poland, which brought declarations of war against Germany from Britain and France. The German invasion of Poland was so successful and so quick that Stalin was caught off-guard. He was also preoccupied with the Japanese probing attack on Mongolia at the end of August, thrown back at Khalkhin Gol by some hundred thousand Soviet troops. Though the pact implied a partition of Poland, it had not included any delimitation of frontiers. The Red Army hurriedly marched into the eastern territories of the Polish state inhabited mainly by Belorussians and Ukrainians, annexing the new territories to the respective Soviet republics. The Communists quickly established Soviet instituti
ons and deported the Poles in the area. Most went to camps or as “special settlers” to Siberia and Kazakhstan, but the army officers, police, and other officials were executed in the camp at Katyn forest and elsewhere early in 1940.
The pact also put the Baltic states into the Soviet sphere of influence. Stalin moved quickly to assert control over the area, in the process awarding the city of Vilnius to Lithuania, a city then almost entirely Polish and Jewish in population. By 1940, control was sufficient that the three states were incorporated into the USSR as Soviet republics, after “popular assemblies” went through the ceremony of “requesting” incorporation. Stalin thought his western border was now secure except for one area: Finland.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 44