The hierarchies of the mid-1930s had a more mixed effect on women. The state, partly because it wanted to encourage births and population growth, abandoned its earlier denunciations of ‘bourgeois patriarchy’ and embraced the traditional family. Divorce was now frowned on, and families given financial incentives to have children – much as happened in Western Europe in this period. The authority of parents was also strengthened. The cult of Pavlik Morozov – a child who denounced his kulak parents to the authorities – went into abeyance. It seems that this rehabilitation of the family was popular amongst many women, though less well received was the ban on abortion.96 Also, despite its rhetoric about family values, the Stalinist state was still determined that women should work, and they found themselves assuming a ‘double burden’, expected to follow a traditional role in the household, whilst working long hours in factories and on farms.
Less integrated into the Soviet order, and much less contented, were the peasants. Although life had improved since the virtual civil war of the early 1930s, and the consolidation of farms into collectives did allow some facilities like schools and hospitals to be built, many peasants were disgruntled and bitter. They might have accepted that collective farms were here to stay, but many felt like second-class citizens. Living standards were much lower than in the towns and peasants did not receive the benefits enjoyed by workers. Arvo Tuominen, a Finnish Communist who was a member of a grain procurement brigade in 1934, found that peasants were extremely hostile to the regime: ‘My first impression, which remained lasting, was that everyone was a counter-revolutionary, and that the whole countryside was in full revolt against Moscow and Stalin.’97
Andrei Arzhilovskii, formerly a ‘middle’ peasant (and old enough to remember pre-revolutionary Russia), was one of the disillusioned – understandably, as he had spent seven years in a labour camp for allegedly campaigning against collectivization. When he was released he kept a diary in which he recorded his alienation from the system and the people around him:
Yesterday the city celebrated the ratification of Stalin’s Constitution… Of course, there’s more idiocy and herd behaviour than enthusiasm. The new songs are sung over and over, with great enthusiasm… ‘I Know no Other Such Land Where a Man Can Breathe so Free’.98 But another question comes up: can it be that people under a different regime don’t sing or breathe? I suppose things are even happier in Warsaw or Berlin. But then maybe it’s all just spite on my part. In any case, at least the finger pointing [i.e. the anti-kulak campaign] has ended.99
A particular complaint amongst peasants was the abuse of power by collective farm officials. A secret police investigation of 1936, for instance, gave a long account of the ‘filthy, brazen, criminal, hooligan-like actions’ of a collective farm chairman in Southern Russia, Veshchunov, who regularly harassed the women farm-workers. When one of them married a certain Mrykhin, they needed the Chairman’s permission for him to join the collective farm – a tricky proposition as he had a criminal record. Veshchunov agreed to admit him if his wife slept with him first. She asked her husband, ‘What on earth should I do, go to bed with Veshchunov and buy you off, or you will be sent back to the Urals?’ Mrykhin agreed that this was the only thing to do. There had been complaints to the local prosecutors, and Veshchunov had been brought to trial, but he had been acquitted; the decision was then overturned, and the charges upheld, but he was still in post. Officials had influence and were remarkably difficult to remove.100
However, amongst those most alienated from the regime were undoubtedly the prisoners of the Gulag, the huge complex of labour camps, supposedly designed to ‘re-educate’ recalcitrants through work. In 1929 the leadership replaced institutions for long-term prisoners with work camps, designed to extract minerals in Siberia and other remote areas of the USSR where it was difficult to attract free labour. The Gulag soon expanded rapidly with the collectivization campaigns, as hundreds of thousands of kulaks, priests and other ‘enemies’ were imprisoned. By World War II, they had become subjects of an enormous slave state, and a central part of the Soviet economy, with a shocking 4 million people in the whole Gulag system.101 Prisoners were forced to do heavy labour in the harsh climate, and they only received full rations if they fulfilled their work plan. Those who did not often became ill, and were even less capable of meeting their targets. Many were therefore, in effect, worked to death. One prisoner, writing in the earliest, and worst, period of the Gulag, sent a complaint to the Red Cross (naturally intercepted by the police) about the appallingly cruel treatment:
Soon they started to force people to work in the forest, with no exception for mothers and sick children. There was no medical care for seriously ill adults either… Everybody had to work, including ten- and twelve-year-old children. Our four-day pay was 2.5 pounds of bread… After 30 March children were sent to load lumber… Loading lumber proved disastrous: bleeding, spitting of blood, prolapse, etc.102
Given the different treatment received by various groups within the Soviet population, it was inevitable that attitudes towards the regime varied enormously. But one message emerges from the evidence we have, much of it collected by the party and the secret police: a resentment of high-handed and privileged officials.103 And Stalin himself was well aware of this, for he regularly received secret police and party digests of popular opinion. He, of course, had no objections to strict, harsh discipline and he was prepared to mete out a great deal of violence himself, but he accused his officials of alienating, rather than mobilizing, the citizenry.104
It was not only the pretensions of the ‘little Stalins’ that angered a vengeful Stalin. He also believed that they were frustrating his efforts to prepare the economy for war. Just as Count Potemkin built fake ‘Potemkin villages’ along the River Dnepr to convince Catherine the Great of the value of his Crimean conquests, so local party bosses exaggerated their economic achievements and lied about Plan fulfilment in their reports to Stalin and Moscow. Officials protected one another, and whistleblowers or anybody who broke ranks paid a heavy price. The leadership’s demand that party officials support managers had led to ‘collusion’ to hide mistakes.105 And at the same time, these officials had their protectors within the top leadership in the Kremlin, among Stalin’s inner circle.
Stalin, determined to increase his power over the party, now insisted that there were drawbacks to the ‘retreat’ of the early 1930s and the accompanying ‘demobilization of the ranks’ of the party, as he put it in 1934.106 The party, it’s leader now aggressively warned, was in danger of becoming impure, much as it had during the NEP, and was losing its transformative power. This time, though, the dangers came from enemies and spies within the party. The party needed to purify itself, regain its messianic role, and rearm itself ideologically to prepare for the coming war.
VII
In May 1936, two months before Stalin sent the ‘Secret Letter’ detailing the activities of the ‘enemies of the people’, and thus initiating the bloody purges we call the ‘Great Terror’, Soviet cinema audiences were treated to another political melodrama: Ivan Pyrev’s Party Card.107 It tells the story of one of the virtuous but simple ‘children’ of the Stalinist era, the fair-haired Anka, who falls victim to an evil enemy, Pasha Kuganov. But unlike the enemies of the late 1920s – the obviously bourgeois specialists and kulaks – Pasha’s true nature is hidden. He arrives in Moscow from the provinces with a shabby wooden suitcase, the very image of the humble but ambitious Soviet ‘new man’. He is handsome (although, tellingly, rather dark), hard-working, and soon becomes popular in the factory; he then marries Anka, a good proletarian girl, defeating his rival in love, the good (and fair-haired) Communist Iasha. But it soon becomes clear that Pasha is not what he seems. A former lover reveals that his father was a kulak, a detail he has deliberately concealed by elaborately faking Communist virtue. His perfidy is compounded when he steals Anka’s party card and gives it to a foreign spy. When the card is recovered, the party puts Anka on trial for negligence, for a
s the film makes clear, the card is a ‘symbol of honour, pride and the struggle of each Bolshevik’ and it is the sacred duty of all party members to guard their party cards with their lives. Eventually, though, Pasha’s wicked nature is finally revealed to Anka. The foolish girl, who put romantic love over her duties to socialism, has been taught a lesson by the party; armed with a pistol, she hands her husband over to the secret police.
For a viewer today the film seems bizarre, with its obsession with the apparently trivial party card – a document lent almost sacred significance in the film. Equally strange is the notion that the USSR was threatened by a phalanx of foreign spies armed with these stolen documents. Even at the time some found the film incredible. The Mosfilm studios, describing it as ‘unsuccessful, false and distorting Soviet reality’, refused to distribute it.108 Only Stalin’s intervention secured its release, and he clearly had a better sense of popular taste. Party Card had a real resonance with some of its audience, who expressed disgust at the sentimental and unreliable Anka. The press was full of discussions of the film, and the great film-maker Fridrikh Ermler explained to a friend how much it had affected him, even undermining his trust in his wife: ‘You see, I saw this film and now, more than anything I’m afraid for my party card. What if someone stole it? You won’t believe it, but at night I check under my wife’s pillow to see if maybe it’s there.’109 To understand the politics of the time, and in particular one of the most traumatic, and mysterious, events in Communist history – the ‘Great Terror’ – we could do worse than watch the strange and sinister Party Card.
The Terror of 1936–8 still mystifies historians, because it seems so irrational, and profound disagreements amongst scholars over its origins and nature remain.110 That Stalin should have ordered the arrest and executions of hundreds and thousands of party members and ordinary people, many of them perfectly loyal to Soviet power, and, moreover, precisely the educated experts and experienced officers he needed to help him win the approaching war, seems inexplicable.
Clearly, Stalin’s psychological peculiarities played an enormous role. He was deeply suspicious, and seems to have been willing to believe some of the extraordinary conspiracies he charged people with, even as he cynically concocted others. He was the figure who ordered the killings, and his thinking will always remain difficult to fathom. However, many, at all levels of the party and society, participated in the Terror, and these complex events make more sense if we also understand the radical, messianic aspects of Bolshevik culture, and its response to the threat of war. As in the late 1920s, the leadership claimed that the best way to counter the foreign threat was to purify the party, removing ‘enemies’ and ‘waverers’ from it, so it could then ‘remobilize’ a newly militant society against the foreigner. But the fear of internal enemies was much greater than before, and the Terror was a much more controlled, less ‘inclusive’ campaign than the ‘Great Break’ of the late 1920s. Leaders did try to whip up the ‘masses’ against ‘enemies’, but the Terror was an organized series of arrests and executions, carried out in secret by the police.
The first signs of the search for ‘enemies’ within the party emerged in the aftermath of the murder of the Leningrad party leader, Sergei Kirov, on 1 December 1934. We still do not know for sure whether Stalin was involved, but whoever was responsible, Stalin sent the rising party official Nikolai Ezhov to investigate the murder, with a view to blaming it on the local secret police or his former opponent, Zinoviev. Lev Kamenev and Zinoviev were imprisoned and the case closed. Even so, Ezhov – partly because he had his own ambitions within the NKVD – continued to warn of the continuing dangers from the former oppositions, and by early 1936 Stalin allowed him to reopen the case of the Kirov murder.111 In July 1936 Stalin and the Politburo issued a ‘Secret Letter’ to all party organizations, announcing that a grand conspiracy between Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev had been discovered. It was this letter, and the subsequent show trial in August, that launched the first campaign in the ‘Great Terror’.
We still do not know why Stalin let Ezhov off the leash when he did. It is most likely that he cynically smeared people he wanted to purge, but it is possible he believed in the conspiracies. Certainly the Stalinists commonly argued that any ideological doubts ‘objectively’ aided the enemy, and were therefore tantamount to a real crime. As Stalin declared in November 1937, anyone who ‘with his deeds or his thoughts – yes also with his thoughts – attacks the unity of the socialist state will be mercilessly destroyed by us’.112 But whatever Stalin’s intentions, the search for ‘enemies’ was presented as part of a broader campaign to purify and mobilize the party, and this is how it was understood by party organizations.113 And the leadership was especially concerned that this new party activism should reinvigorate the economy, for with Hitler in power in Germany, war was becoming more likely.
The first sign of serious efforts to galvanize the economy came in August 1935, when Alexei Stakhanov, a miner in the Donbass, dug 102 tons of coal in one shift, fourteen times the average. This kind of stunt had been staged before, but it was Stalin’s response that lent it enormous significance. Stalin hailed Stakhanov’s achievement as a sign that the age of mobilization had returned. Workers were again capable of heroic feats; they were only being held back by conservative and bureaucratic technicians. Predictably, the ‘Stakhanovite movement’ soon acquired a strongly anti-elitist character. Whilst workers were given incentives to become Stakhanovites, the campaign was unpopular amongst managers and technicians, who had to reallocate resources so that the Stakhanovite brigades could achieve their records, whilst maintaining normal production in the rest of the factory. Naturally, they were the scapegoats when things went wrong, especially now that the party and secret police were again in the ascendant. As Kravchenko, one of those engineers tasked with staging a Stakhanovite event, recorded:
Engineers and administrators as a class were being denounced, day after day, for supposed ‘conservatism’, for ‘holding back’ the pace-setters… Our authority kept falling. Politics, flying the banner of efficiency, had the right of way. Communist and police officials had the final word against the engineer and the manager, even on purely technical problems.114
It was therefore no surprise that the search for ‘enemies’ within the party soon led to the economic managers, accused of ‘wrecking’ the economy – especially as some of them had been closely associated with Trotsky in the past. The Shramms condemned by Gladkov in the 1920s were being attacked again. But they were not the only targets. The party was urged to search for anybody who showed signs of ‘bourgeois’ corruption, or who might not be activist and politically enthusiastic enough. It was not sufficient to be a ‘narrow-minded’ and ‘pragmatic’ official ‘blindly and mechanically’ obeying orders from above, as Stalin put it in 1938. Party officials were also, like Anka, blamed for lack of ‘vigilance’.
Given the broad definition of the ‘enemy’, it was very likely that the purge would spread throughout the party. Denunciations proliferated, and virtually any failing could be interpreted as a sign of hostile intent. Expulsion from the party followed, and then, in many cases, arrest by the NKVD, imprisonment and possibly execution.
Responses to the Terror amongst the party faithful varied. Evgenia Ginzburg, an academic, historian and writer, and the wife of a regional party boss in Kazan, Tatarstan, simply could not understand the hysteria. She was damaged by a rather distant association with another historian, Elvov, and was accused of making ‘Trotskyist’ errors in an article on the 1905 revolution. After expulsion from the party she was summoned to the office of a Captain Vevers of the NKVD, who berated her as an enemy. ‘Was he joking?’ she remembered. ‘He couldn’t possibly mean such things. But he did. Working himself up more and more, he shouted across the room, pouring invective on me.’115 The reaction of the playwright Aleksandr Afinogenov, however, was very different. As the historian Jochen Hellbeck has shown, when expelled from the party Afinogenov struggled to understand it,
and, despite doubts, saw his expulsion as an opportunity to destroy the negative, bourgeois parts of his personality and transform himself into a virtuous party member. ‘I killed the self inside me – and then a miracle happened… I understood and suddenly saw the beginning of something altogether new, a new “self”, far removed from previous troubles and vanity.’116 Unexpectedly, he escaped the police and arrest, and was restored to the party, convinced of its justice. Afinogenov may not have been typical of party members, but others also believed that the purge was an essential tool to purify the party, even if ‘mistakes’ were made in particular circumstances.
The Terror also made sense to others, lower on the social scale. There was a populist element to it, and the leadership now tried to whip up antagonisms against the elite. For the first time in years, Stalin announced that party committees were to be subjected to multi-candidate elections, in which the rank and file were allowed to criticize their bosses. He doubtless hoped that criticism ‘from below’ would reveal what was really happening in the regional cliques, but would also replace any disobedient officials with loyal enthusiasts. He also probably realized that he could improve the standing of the regime amongst ordinary people, hostile as they were to the privileged officials.
Stalin was returning to the strategies of the late 1920s, and he was stirring up the deep resentments many ordinary people felt for local elites, as John Scott remembered:
… chaos reigned in the plant. A foreman would come to work in the morning and say to his men, ‘Now today we must do this and that.’ The workers would sneer at him and say: ‘Go on. You’re a wrecker yourself. Tomorrow they’ll come and arrest you. All you engineers and technicians are wreckers.’117
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