The Red Flag: A History of Communism
Page 21
That is so… But here on the industrial front we must also have heroism… The mountain has fallen, crushing man like a frog. Now, for a real big effort, shoulder to the wheel, and shove the mountain back into its place. Impossible? That’s precisely it. Heroism means doing the impossible.28
But Gleb has to struggle with resistance in all quarters. Cossack bandits rebel and Whites attack, only to be repulsed. Kleist, the old German engineer, has collaborated with the Whites and is initially sceptical of Gleb’s plans. But Gleb, in a scene deliberately reminiscent of Bely’s Petersburg, plays the role of a revivified Bronze Horseman, placing his hands on Kleist’s shoulders and infusing him with the will to help the industrial effort. However, it soon transpires that the most dangerous enemies are not foreign experts, but home-grown bureaucrats. Shramm, the head of the Council of the People’s economy, though nominally a Communist, has the ‘soft face of a eunuch’, with a ‘gold pince-nez perched on an effeminate nose’, and is full of bourgeois affectation. He loves luxury and consumes corruptly acquired delicacies with his decadent cronies. He accuses Gleb of being a dreamer who is guilty of ‘disorganizing enthusiasms’ but is himself a passionless technocrat, signalled by his monotonous mechanical voice.29 Nevertheless Gleb is not to be deterred, and sets about mobilizing the workers to rebuild the factory. He is at once a human dynamo and descendant of the medieval Russian knight (bogatyr), the hero of the old Russian epics. Shramm, meanwhile, is exposed as a saboteur and arrested, and in the final scene the factory is opened in front of a blood-red banner declaring:
We have conquered on the civil war front.
We shall conquer also on the economic front.30
Few today would read Gladkov’s Cement for pleasure; nevertheless unlike some other ‘proletarian’ literature, it was not merely a Pravda editorial in novelistic garb. Despite its unpromising title, it had literary pretensions, was written in a highly emotional, even purple style, and became enormously popular. Party leaders praised it – Stalin himself was its main promoter. And though Gladkov has Gleb formally endorsing NEP, the novel is chiefly notable for capturing the disappointments common amongst many party members. And as the novel’s parting slogan illustrates, it both describes the new problems facing the regime, and suggests a way of solving them. The Soviet regime, having defeated internal ‘bourgeois enemies’, now faced (or thought it faced) external ones; and having achieved some measure of economic stability after the chaos of civil war, now had to think about economic growth and international competition. Gleb’s solution was to return to the methods of the civil war, when bands of committed party members had supposedly mobilized the ‘masses’ in a ‘class struggle’. And by the end of the 1920s, many Communists agreed.
Cement also revealed the profound contradictions embodied in NEP. Although Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin, NEP’s great supporter, told Communists that they must ‘learn from’ in order to compete with the bourgeoisie, the regime still defined itself as the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, and was based on class favouritism. ‘Class aliens’ – the aristocracy and bourgeoisie – and ‘former people’ – priests and supporters of the old regime – were deprived of the vote (7.7 per cent of the urban population by 1927–8), and found it difficult to enter university. And whilst everybody agreed that NEP was temporary, there were deep disagreements over how long it was to last. Radicals, like Gleb (and Gladkov), may have formally acquiesced in NEP, but they were profoundly out of sympathy with its principles. Meanwhile, more technocratic Communists – like Shramm – were convinced of the need for rational management and class reconciliation.
Both views coexisted within the collective party leadership that emerged during Lenin’s final months. The majority supported NEP’s survival, but of these only the intellectually gifted but politically weak Nikolai Bukharin was deeply committed. Other leaders, one by one, began to defect to the radical left oppositions. The first was Trotsky in 1923 – an unlikely convert to the left given his defence of harsh discipline and tsarist officers during the civil war. Lev Kamenev and Zinoviev formed their own opposition in 1925, and in 1926 all three joined together in a ‘United Opposition’, which berated the pro-NEP leadership of Stalin and Bukharin for its neglect of ‘class struggle’, egalitarian ‘democracy’ and international revolution.
This division between more inclusive technocrats and partisan radicals was hardened by the peculiar structure of the new Soviet system, which became the foundation of all Communist regimes thereafter. Although the small circle of leaders in the party’s Political Bureau (Politburo) decided all major issues, below them the power structure was divided into two parallel hierarchies – the party and the state. The state’s duty was to administer the country, and it tended to adopt a practical, managerial approach. It was generally run by party members with a Modernist bent – Communists like Shramm – and employed non-party bourgeois specialists. The party, by contrast, was to act as the ideological kernel of the state, to oversee policy and make sure that the regime retained its ideological spirit.31 In practice, of course, their roles often overlapped, and both sides, each with a different value system and culture, struggled for influence, sometimes viciously.
NEP, therefore, was an unstable order. Whilst some officials happily spent their time trying to make ‘state capitalism’ work, others were deeply unhappy with the class compromises they had to make. They hated the regime’s relative inclusiveness, its toleration of merchants, street markets and conspicuous consumption. As one commentator, an academic, explained:
during War Communism we recognized only one social category within our camp – the ‘good’. ‘Evil’ was consigned strictly to the enemy camp. But then came NEP, injecting evil into the good… and disrupting all. No longer waging an open war against each other, good and evil coexist today in the same collective.32
The ‘evil’ he referred to was not just political, but moral and cultural, and even psychological. As Cement demonstrated, amongst many in the party virtue was intimately linked with class origin. The bourgeoisie was regarded as effeminate, selfish and luxury-loving; the proletariat as masculine, collectivist and self-sacrificing. For many Bolsheviks, Communist society could only be built by the virtuous ‘new man’, willing to sacrifice himself or herself to the common good. The real danger was that the market, and with it bourgeois influence, would corrupt workers, contaminating them with selfishness, smug philistinism and a shallow hedonism. So despite Marx’s, and some Bolsheviks’, claims that morality was an entirely bourgeois phenomenon, and would wither away under socialism, most Bolsheviks (like many other Marxists) were highly moralistic. Women’s behaviour was especially targeted as an index of virtue. One supposed expert, writing in the newspaper Komsomolskaia Pravda (Komsomol Truth), opined: ‘Contemporary female fashions are conditioned reflexes for the arousal of enflamed emotion. That is why it is essential to battle for the expulsion of “Parisian fashions” from our lives and for the creation of hygienic, simple and comfortable clothing.’33
So, whilst the party leadership and economic managers preached collaboration with the bourgeoisie, the party as an organization was obsessed with maintaining its ideological purity at a time of ‘retreat’, much as it was in Western Europe. As has been seen, Social Democratic parties had long shared some of the features of exclusive religious sects. The notion of ‘conversion’ to Marxism was a common one, as was the conception of the party member’s life as a journey from disorganized revolutionary ‘spontaneity’ to a disciplined ‘consciousness’.34 And once the party was in power, it was determined to make sure that all of its members had had the same experience. Those entering the party had to give an account of their lives, often in written autobiographies. They were expected to admit to earlier political ‘sins’ and show that they had truly converted. One student, Shumilov, described how he had read illegal Marxist literature when in a German prisoner-of-war camp. As a result he had ‘experienced a spiritual rebirth’; he ‘experienced the revelation of the essence of B
eing’, rejecting his old Christianity and embracing Marxism.35
Once members of the party, Communists were subjected to a whole range of tools and methods designed to keep them pure and exclude ‘alien’ ideological influences. The most important of these was the ‘purge’. Until the second half of the 1930s, the purge was not automatically connected with arrest and repression; those who fell foul of the purge were either expelled from the party or demoted to a lower status (for instance, from full member to ‘sympathizer’). First applied in the party in 1921, and extended to other institutions afterwards, the purge was a regular process, intended to check that party members were committed and morally pure, though of course it could be used to remove leaders’ opponents. Party members were questioned about their attitudes, their past and their knowledge of Marxism before a commission of three. Questionnaires were filled out, and members questioned on their past thoughts and behaviour. In 1922 and 1923 the Sverdlov Communist University in Moscow replaced termly exams with purges, in which academic achievement was judged alongside ‘party-mindedness’ and political or moral ‘deviations’.36 In 1924, purges were extended to all universities, and poor academic standards or political mistakes could lead to expulsion from the party.
Another way of discovering revolutionary commitment can be seen in the academic seminars of Communist universities. Academics were ‘worked over’, or subjected to aggressive questioning in public meetings; if they were discovered to be in error, they had to confess their sins. This was the root of the ‘criticism and self-criticism’ campaigns of the Stalinist period, and influenced the ‘struggle sessions’ used later by the Chinese Communist Party, experienced by the Chinese students of Moscow’s Communist University of the Toilers of the East.37 Such confrontational methods of interrogation also had much in common with the ‘agit-trial’ – a form of theatrical propaganda developed in the Red Army. These mass spectacles in which, for instance, soldiers participated in ‘trials’ of actors playing capitalists and Whites, were to become the basis of the Stalinist show trial.38
However, alongside detailed inquiries into individuals and their views, purges relied on the cruder criterion of class background, for it was assumed that proletarians were more collectivist and virtuous than the bourgeois. But defining class was not as easy as it sounded. Were workers from large factories to be favoured because they were ‘purer’ than those from small workshops? Was the class of one’s parents to be decisive, or could one overcome a bad class background by working in a factory or joining the Red Army? Members of ‘exploiting’ classes had to repudiate their parents if they were to gain admission to university by publishing an announcement in a newspaper: ‘I, so-and-so, hereby announce that I reject my parents, so-and-so, as alien elements, and declare that I have nothing in common with them.’ But this was not guaranteed to work. Inevitably, applicants for the party or university invented proletarian backgrounds for themselves, whilst denunciations for concealing class background proliferated.39
Despite the practical difficulties of ‘proletarianization’, however, party institutions became increasingly obsessed with class and ideological purity. Under Lenin, absolute unity had also been demanded, but by the end of the 1920s, any opposition was seen as a real evil, a danger to the party that needed to be extirpated.40 Communists increasingly resented the continuing influence of the bourgeois specialists in state administration. Following the so-called ‘Lenin Levy’ of workers into party ranks of 1924, party cells in factories were often very proletarian in composition, and could be very hostile to bourgeois specialists and the managers who worked with them. But particularly radical was a new ‘proletarian’ intelligentsia, angry at the continuing influence of the old bourgeois intellectuals, or ‘fellow travellers’ as Trotsky termed them. The NEP was a period of relative cultural liberalism compared with the 1930s, when great poets like Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova could be defined as ‘fellow travellers’ and were able to publish. But this was deeply resented by many of the new ‘proletarian’ party intellectuals.
The militant, civil-war culture of class struggle had retreated from society at large to the confines of the party after 1921, much as had happened in Western Europe. The difference, of course, was that the Communist party was in power. The gap between official ideology and a reality of trade, merchants and unemployment was therefore stark. The NEP merely reinvigorated radicals’ class hatred and socialist radicalism.
The main supporters of this radical line within the party leadership were the members of the leftist United Opposition, and they subjected the leadership’s policies to harsh criticism. But in late 1927 Stalin and Bukharin succeeded in having them removed from the party: in October Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Central Committee, and from December purges of the left took place throughout the party. Trotsky was exiled to Kazakhstan in 1928, and left the USSR in 1929, for Turkey, France, Norway and, finally, Mexico.
However, paradoxically, the defeat of the United Opposition coincided with the victory of much of its programme. Now Stalin had worsted his great enemy Trotsky, he could steal the left’s ideas, though he gave them a more nationalistic colouring. The deteriorating international environment after 1926 was central to his calculations. The NEP strategy seemed most convincing in the mid-1920s, at a time of relative peace with the West, because it promised growth through foreign trade. But worsening diplomatic relations only strengthened those who favoured a more self-reliant economic policy. Many Bolshevik leaders were convinced from 1926–7 that the British and the French were planning an invasion with the help of East Europeans. This was, of course, untrue, and the fears seem enormously exaggerated in retrospect. But Stalin, ever suspicious of the foreign ‘bourgeoisie’, and seeing the world through the eyes of the former colonized Georgian, seems to have been genuinely fearful. If the Soviet Union was to ‘avoid the fate of India’ and not become a colony of the West, he warned, it had to build heavy industry and increase its military budget.41
In these circumstances Stalin adopted much of the left’s critique of NEP, and concluded that the Plan was not delivering the industrial development the USSR required. The NEP strategy was a fundamentally slow and gradual one: the peasantry would be allowed to profit from producing food, and as they used their profits to buy industrial goods – such as textiles and tools – their increased prosperity, it was reasoned, would benefit industry. At the same time the government could export now-plentiful grain in exchange for much-needed imported machinery. However, whilst grain production did improve and industrial production increased to pre-war levels, this was not a strategy that was going to deliver rapid industrialization – especially at a time when international grain prices were low.
In 1927 a poor harvest and food shortages forced the leadership to make a decision: to maintain the prices paid to peasants for grain, at the expense of industrialization, or to cling on to ambitious investment targets and use state power (and ultimately force) to extract grain from the peasantry, thus effectively ending the market in grain and destroying NEP. Stalin chose the latter. Echoing his modus operandi as food commissar in the South during the civil war, he went on a highly publicized visit to Siberia to ‘find’ grain, though in reality he had already decided where it was – in the coffers of ‘selfish’ kulak hoarders. The party, he declared, had to wage a class struggle against kulaks; poor peasants were to be mobilized against the rich proprietors to seize the hidden food, so contributing to the industrialization and defence of the USSR.
Stalin’s revolution was not confined to agriculture. It was a grand ideological campaign, an opportunity to end the retreat of 1921 and ‘leap forward’ to socialism on all fronts, much as the Radical United Opposition had proposed. The market was to be outlawed, and with it all forms of inequality, between intellectuals and workers, and between workers themselves. At the same time the USSR was to be dragged out of its backward state and brought into an advanced socialist modernity. The era was described as one of radical ‘Cultural R
evolution’. Religion and peasant ‘superstition’ were to be eliminated, and ‘backward’ ethnic cultures brought up to the level of the advanced Russians. The party was to be reinvigorated with messianic zeal so that it could mobilize the masses to achieve miraculous feats of development.
Stalin encountered stiff resistance from Bukharin and his allies, accused of being a ‘Right deviation’, and at first he faced a majority of opponents in the Politburo. He had embarked on what he was to call the ‘Great Break’ with the past. Prometheus had again been unbound, as both modernizer and violent revolutionary.
IV
In his memoir I Chose Freedom (written in 1947 after his defection to the United States), Viktor Kravchenko reminisced about his time as a 23-year-old technical foreman and Communist Youth (Komsomol) activist in a Ukrainian metallurgical factory during the year 1929:
I was… one of the young enthusiasts, thrilled by the lofty ideas and plans of this period… We were caught up in a fervour of work at times touched with delirium… Industrialisation at any cost, to lift the nation out of backwardness, seemed to us the noblest conceivable aim. That is why I must resist the temptation to judge the events of those years in the light of my feelings today… the nagging of the ‘outmoded liberals’, who only criticised while themselves remaining outside the effort, seemed to me merely annoying.42