The Red Flag: A History of Communism
Page 24
There was, though, no necessary contradiction between the paternalistic idea that Father Stalin looked after the nation, and a belief in social mobility. Pasha Angelina, the first woman tractor brigade leader and a famous Stakhanovite, reconciled the two in a verse (chastushka) recited at a regional conference in 1936:
Oh, thank you, dear Lenin,
Oh, thank you, dear Stalin,
Oh, thank you and thank you again
For Soviet power.
Knit for me, dear Mama
A dress of fine red calico.
With a Stakhanovite I will go strolling,
With a backward one I don’t want to.81
In line with the official message, Pasha thanked Father Stalin for helping young, ambitious people who helped themselves – people like herself. Like an idealized form of the tsarist ‘service aristocracy’, the state awarded privileges and rewards in return for service. But it was a short step from a world in which one father presided over a fluid hierarchy of virtue, to a fixed, unchangeable pyramid of superior fathers and subordinate children.
This transformation became increasingly apparent in ethnic politics: Russia emerged more and more as the superior nation, ruling over a graded ethnic hierarchy. And whilst the USSR was not the continuation of the tsarist empire by other means, several features of the ancien régime, albeit in diluted form, were recreated. After 1932 all citizens had their class and ethnic status inscribed in their passports, and this affected how the state treated them. Peasants, in theory, could not leave the countryside without permission (an echo of the restrictions binding their serf ancestors); class background continued to affect educational and career chances; and party bosses started to become a privileged, ‘proletarian’ stratum. The nomenklatura, as they were known, with special housing, shops and food supplies, was becoming a new privileged status group, with distinct echoes of a tsarist estate.82
In Stalinist culture, also, the figurative ‘Soviet family’ increasingly looked like one of fathers and sons rather than bands of brothers. Soviet heroes did populate official discourse, but they differed from those of the 1920s: unlike Gladkov’s Gleb, they never attained full maturity as Soviet leaders; they were impulsive and spontaneous figures who always needed the fatherly guidance of mentors in the party. The most famous hero of this type was Pavel Korchagin, the hero of Nikolai Ostrovskii’s semi-autobiographical novel, How the Steel was Tempered, of 1934. Set in civil-war Ukraine, the novel tells of Korchagin’s extraordinary will-power: he fights against all the odds, narrowly avoiding death on several occasions, and even continues to struggle for the common cause when paralysed. Although his character, like steel, is ultimately ‘tempered’, he remains immature throughout his life: he is poorly educated and unruly at school; he puts class above love, breaking up with the petty-bourgeois Tonia, but only after a great deal of agonizing; and he remains devoted to the Communist cause, but only following a period of suicidal depression. He is guided by several party mentors in the course of his heroic career, and never himself becomes a party boss, schooled in Marxism-Leninism.83 Korchagin was only one of the most prominent of the son-heroes who populated 1930s Stalinist culture, both within literature and outside it. Arctic explorer pilots (‘Stalin’s fledgling-children’) and hero-worker ‘Stakhanovites’ were all shown as valued, but junior, members of the Soviet family. Presiding over the new ‘Soviet family’ were several grandfather-heroes. Aleksandr Nevskii, Peter the Great and other historical figures were now revalorized, but they too knew their place as modest forerunners of the ur-father, the great Stalin.
Stalin, however, was not the only father within the party. The USSR became a matrioshka-doll society and ‘lesser’ fathers appeared in a seemingly endless hierarchy. Many local bosses, their high status earned by their service during the civil war, behaved like ‘little Stalins’, with their own patronage networks – or so-called ‘tails’ – which they dragged behind them when moved from one post to another. They encouraged their own cults, copied from the great vozhd (leader);84 like him, they claimed credit for every achievement that had taken place in their region. Sometimes these cults loomed much larger in the popular consciousness than Stalin’s own. In 1937 one collective farm-worker, when asked ‘Who is the boss now in Russia?’, answered ‘Ilyin’ – the chairman of the local village soviet; it seems that he had never heard of the supreme vozhd.85
Stalin’s attempts to spread the appeal of an aristocratic military heroism effectively authorized an increasingly paternalistic political culture. The noble warriors of Aleksandr Nevskii were powerful role models. Nevertheless it would be an exaggeration to suggest that Stalinist Russia had simply reverted to the ancien régime. Party members were expected to absorb not only military heroic values, but Lenin’s almost Protestant ideal of sober asceticism. Party members were expected to follow a strict moral code. They were also, unlike Peter’s nobles, expected to master science – of the conventional ‘bourgeois’, rather than utopian Marxist variety – and the leadership placed enormous emphasis on the creation of a new cadre of ‘red experts’, indoctrinated with an ideological message strictly controlled by the party.
The new union of quasi-aristocratic father figures and quasi-bourgeois scientists was abundantly clear in the regional and local elites of the USSR. After the chaos of the early 1930s, Stalin now stressed strict obedience in the economy. Engineers and managers acquired high status, and party officials, once encouraged to adopt a suspicious, ‘vigilant’ attitude to them, were now expected to help and support them. The party had been partially ‘demobilized’, whilst its officials and managers now became a more coherent and unified administrative elite. Viktor Kravchenko, who had become an engineer at the new metallurgical plant in Nikopol in the Ukraine in 1934, describes well his entry into the new elite, and his tense relations with the workers:
Personally I was installed in a commodious five-room house about a mile from the factory. It was one of eight such houses for the use of the uppermost officials… here was a car in the garage and a couple of fine horses were at my disposal – factory property, of course, but as exclusively mine while I held the job as if I had owned them. A chauffeur and stableman, as well as a husky peasant woman who did the housework and cooking, came with the house…
I wanted sincerely to establish friendly, open relations with the workers… But for an engineer in my position to mix with ordinary workers might offend their pride; it smacked of patronage. Besides, officialdom would frown on such fraternization as harmful to discipline. In theory we represented ‘the workers’ power’ but in practice we were a class apart.86
Kravchenko’s observation that a ‘new class’ was emerging in the USSR – the apparatchiki, with new, bourgeois tastes – was a common one amongst critics of Stalinism, and became central to the Trotskyist analysis (although Trotsky himself never went so far as to allege that the Communists had become a new bourgeoisie). Undoubtedly, during the 1930s a new, powerful social group had emerged. Stalin’s own policies were, in part, responsible: he had deliberately reasserted control after the chaos of the early 1930s by strengthening a new hierarchy, with party bosses and Communist experts, often of Russian, proletarian or poor peasant background, at the summit. Unconscious paternalistic attitudes from the tsarist era may also have played a part. But more important was the absence of any authority genuinely independent of an increasingly unified party-state apparatus, whether an autonomous judiciary or a propertied class. In abolishing the market, the regime gave enormous powers to party bosses and state officials, at all levels of the system; they exerted huge influence in economic as well as political life. Moscow attempted to control this burgeoning bureaucratic power with a panoply of ‘control commissions’ to investigate corruption. Moreover, everybody was supposed to check up on everybody else – party leaders on state officials, the secret police (in 1934 renamed the NKVD) on the party, and the party on itself, through purges, ‘self-criticism’ campaigns and elections. But in reality officialdom was v
ery difficult to control. Local cliques could protect themselves, persecuting critics.
The ‘retreat’ from the militant fraternity of the early 1930s had therefore created a highly contradictory system: the rhetoric of equality was still present, but it coincided with a new value system of reward according to achievement, and in practice fixed, almost ancien-régime hierarchies were emerging. This system was probably more stable than either the tense standoff of the NEP period, or the violent radical enthusiasms of the late 1920s, for it established a group of white-collar, educated officials committed to the objectives of the regime. But it also created tensions, as, for different reasons, both the supreme leader above and ordinary people below became increasingly hostile to the new bureaucracy.
VI
In the summer of 1935, an ambitious 22-year-old student at the Sverdlovsk Mining Engineers’ Institute, Leonid Potemkin, tried to show his effectiveness as a student leader by arranging a group holiday on the Black Sea coast. However, after consultation with the Institute’s All-Union Voluntary Society of Proletarian Tourism and Excursions, he discovered it was too expensive for most students. He therefore put a proposal to the Director of the Institute: the Institute should organize a ‘socialist competition’, and give a holiday subsidy to the students who did best in their annual military training classes. The idea was a good one because it gave the Institute ideological cover to help its students. The Director readily agreed, and, as Potemkin recorded in his (private) diary, he threw himself into the tasks with enthusiasm:
I’m so pleased with the training course. Here I am, a middle-rank commander of the revolutionary, proletarian Army. My heart clenches up with joy. I am all wrapt in ardour and impatience to work with my platoon… I motivate people with my mood… No shouts or cursing. But a strictness that is inseparable from mutual respect, but at the same time by no means subordinate to it… But if I do have a defect, it is that I’m still not always sufficiently cheerful and self-confident. I need to develop my role and my mission and elevate them in the light of consciousness.87
Potemkin was Stalin’s ideal ‘middle-rank’ citizen. He had embraced the new morality of competitive virtue, and had absorbed Stalinist ideas about leadership – a mixture of strictness and mobilizing enthusiasm. He also had a ‘mission’ to contribute to society. He was determined to become a New Soviet Person, partly because he could see there were advantages for him – as his skilful manoeuvring over his student holiday showed – but also because he wanted to remake himself and society. He came from a poor background (though not formally ‘proletarian’; his father was a postal employee), and he had to leave school to earn a living. He remembered how he had been ‘weak-willed, sickly, physically ugly, and dirty… I felt that I was the lowest, most insignificant of all people.’88 But the new system allowed him to enter higher education despite his poor qualifications, and he was determined to better himself, whilst improving society. His diary was an essential tool in this self-transformation – a place where he could reflect on his mistakes and successes and vow to do better next time.
We cannot say how many Potemkins there were. He was an unusually successful product of the system, and became an explorer and prospector for metals, ending up as Vice-Minister of Geology between 1965 and 1975. But his attitudes may not have been unusual amongst the new white-collar ‘intelligentsia’. This group was given concrete advantages: from the early 1930s, many of lowly origin benefited from the massive expansion of white-collar jobs and from the purges of the late 1930s. They were being given a new status: as the new ‘command staff’ of the regime, they were entrusted with the transformation of the USSR. At the same time, however, they were being offered a messianic ‘mission’, together with a way of transforming themselves into ‘conscious’, ‘advanced’ people who were taking part in the making of history. Some had doubts, as will be seen, and hid them; others had strong incentives to suppress them, surrounded as they were by a very powerful value system. Some even accepted the Bolshevik view that any critical thoughts were signs of class alien and enemy influence, and had to be removed through internal self-criticism, often practised by keeping diaries.89 Responses to the regime were therefore complex, and are difficult to categorize as simple ‘support’ or ‘opposition’.
A survey of Soviet citizens who had left the USSR during and after the war, interviewed in Harvard in 1950–1, provides some evidence that certainly suggests that Potemkin’s attitudes may not have been that unusual for somebody of his social position.90 Regardless of the many complaints they had about specific policies and low living standards, most people of all classes approved of industrialization, and considerable state involvement in industry and welfare – although they favoured the mixed economy of NEP, not the total state control imposed by Stalin. But the younger and better educated amongst them were more collectivist than workers and peasants. The regime was clearly having some success in integrating this influential group into the system.91
The Harvard interviews suggest that the regime was less successful in absorbing workers as a whole into the new order – perhaps unsurprisingly given that wages, whilst higher than in the crisis years of 1932–3, were still by 1937 only 60 per cent of their 1928 level. The picture, however, was again complex. Despite the end of class discrimination in the mid-1930s, the regime’s rhetoric still gave workers high status, and they could take part in the idealism of the times. Workers were told that this was ‘their’ regime, and John Scott found that despite complaints about food and supplies, Magnitogorsk workers still accepted that they were making sacrifices to build a system superior to a capitalism that was in crisis.92 There were strong reasons to become committed ‘Soviet workers’, playing by the rules and learning how to use official Bolshevik language to better themselves.93 A particularly attractive prize was elevation to Stakhanovite status, at least in the early years of the movement when the wages and benefits were good.
Workers also had new educational opportunities. Scott found that twenty-four men and women in his barracks were attending some course or other, from chauffeuring and midwifery to planning. The more ambitious and politically loyal could enrol in the Communist Higher Education Institute (Komvuz) to prepare for a career as an official, though the quality of that education was dubious. Scott, who attended the Magnitogorsk Komvuz, found that the students were barely literate and learnt a particularly dogmatic version of Marxism-Leninism:
I remember one altercation about the Marxian law of the impoverishment of the toilers in capitalist countries. According to this law, as interpreted to the students of the Magnitogorsk Komvuz, the working classes of Germany, Britain, and the United States… had become steadily and inexorably poorer since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. I went up to the teacher after class, and told him that I happened to have been in Britain, for example, and that it seemed to me that conditions among workers there were unquestionably better than they had been during the time of Charles Dickens… The teacher would have none of me. ‘Look at the book, Comrade,’ he said. ‘It is written in the book.’… The Party made no mistakes.94
There were also, though, many reasons for dissatisfaction, and foot-dragging was commonplace. Some workers also resented the new hierarchies, especially as promotions depended on foremen and managers who often behaved arbitrarily. Stakhanovism sharpened the tensions between workers and managers, and amongst workers themselves: the factory administration decided which workers would be Stakhanovites, and their partiality could lead to discontent and envy. That could be directed against managers or individual Stakhanovites, who were sometimes the victims of intimidation.
Many workers had more general objections to the end of egalitarianism in the early 1930s. Already angry at party privileges, many were even more incensed by the new official acceptance of inequalities, which seemed to have little to do with socialist morality. One Leningrad worker declared in 1934:
How can we liquidate classes, if new classes have developed here,
with the only difference being that they are not called classes. Now there are the same parasites who live at the expense of others. The worker produces and at the same time works for many people who live off him… There are many administrative workers who travel about in cars and get three to four times more than the worker.95
Much working-class criticism of the regime, therefore, came from the ‘left’, and perhaps most worryingly for the party, the terms used were often strikingly similar to the revolutionary language of 1917. Sharp divisions were perceived between those at the top (the verkhi) and those at the bottom (the nizy), and objections to them were as much moral and cultural as economic: those at the top were ‘aristocrats’ who ‘insulted’ the workers and treated them like ‘dogs’. As during the Russian revolution, social divisions were sometimes seen less as Marx’s ‘class’ tensions based on economic differences than as cultural conflicts, between ancien régime-style estates.
Even so, this was far from a revolutionary situation. Serious strikes did occur in the early 1930s – especially during the famine of 1932–3 – and workers could express their discontent passively, by ‘going slow’, but many accepted the system and tried to do their best within it. Surveillance and repression also effectively headed off any real opposition.