In Europe

by Geert Mak

  What effects did all these events have on daily life in an average Russian village?

  In 1997, the former editor of the New York Times’ desk in Moscow, Serge Schmemann, published a detailed history of daily life in Sergiyevskyo, also known as Koltsovo. The village lay about 130 kilometres south of Moscow, not far from the city of Kaluga, and Schmemann came there because his mother's family had once owned an estate nearby. The Great Revolution had reached the village in autumn 1918, when an ad hoc committee of farmers seized the estate. Schmemann's family got up from the breakfast table, left everything where it was, packed a few clothes and left.

  The name of the village was considered too feudal, so a few months later it was given a new one: Koltsovo, after the writer Koltsov – who, incidentally, had never set foot in the area. A group of Bolshevik officials came to Koltsovo. They set up a commune on the abandoned estate, consisting of two widows with their children and a number of outsiders. The chairman was a veteran of the revolution from Moscow, a former printer. The farmers saw the group primarily as a gang of thieves: they confiscated cows, horses, pigs and machinery everywhere, in the name of the revolution.

  Schmemann found the minutes of a meeting held in a neighbouring village in 1919. ‘Kulaks shouted “Godless coercion!”, “Down with the Communists!”, “You were given 1,500 hectares, give us bread!” Some threw stones.’ Ten years later the farmers were still refusing to take part in the kolkhoz, but now the chief troublemakers among them were labelled enemies of the people. Seven ‘kulak families’ from Koltsovo were sent into exile, their possessions went to the kolkhoz. On the heels of revolutionary enthusiasm, Stalin's revolutionary coercion crept into the village.

  This growing repression had everything to do with the first five-year plan launched in October 1928. The plan was intended to make of the Soviet Union a ‘second America’, and before long the whole country was suffering under ‘five-year hysteria’. It was decreed that the production of iron was first to increase threefold, then fivefold, and finally sevenfold. The farms were to be merged into huge, modern collectives – Stalin spoke of ‘grain factories’ of tens of thousands of hectares – villages were to be converted into ‘socialist agro-cities’, the wooden houses replaced with prim flats, the stuffy churches with airy schools and model libraries, the heavy manual labour would be taken over by hundreds of thousands of farming machines.

  Joseph Roth, who toured Russia in August 1926, wrote that the young Soviet cities reminded him of the little towns of America's Wild West, ‘the same atmosphere of noise and constant childbearing, the quest for happiness and the lack of roots, the courage and self-sacrifice, the suspicion and fear, the most primitive forestry beside the most complicated technology, the romantic horsemen and down-to-earth engineers’.

  Between the utopia and the reality lay an obstacle: the farmers did not want it. The situation in Koltsovo was typical of that which pertained throughout the Soviet Union. In summer 1929, only three per cent of the farmers were actively taking part in collective and/or state farms. The big estates, most of the revenues from which had previously gone to the cities, had been disbanded. The small farmers produced largely to meet their own needs, and stockpiled the rest of their grain; they could earn nothing on it anyway. Grain stocks were commandeered and fixed quotas imposed, but it didn't help much. The farmers skirted the rules, hid their supplies or sold them on the black market.

  For the first time since the civil war, winter 1929–30 saw lines at the greengrocers and bakeries in the cities. ‘It is normal for a worker's wife to spend the whole day standing in line, her husband then comes home from work, dinner is not ready, and everyone curses the Soviet authority,’ said a (secret) summary of readers’ letters to Pravda. On 27 December, 1929, therefore, Stalin decided to collectivise at one fell swoop all agriculture in the nation's grain-producing areas. In addition, he singled out a general culprit for all the earlier failures, a new and well defined class enemy: ‘We must destroy the kulaks, eliminate them as a class!’

  The Politburo's resolution of 30 January, 1930 – ‘On measures to eliminate kulak households in areas of mandatory collectivisation’ – is not as well known as the protocol drawn up twelve years later beside the Wannsee, but for millions of farmers the results were much the same: mass deportation, followed by death. Stalin needed no gas chambers: the starvation and cold in the distant reaches of his empire turned his camps into natural death factories.

  Sixty years later, Schmemann sat beside an old woman on the bench in front of her wooden hut in Koltsovo; together, they ran down a list of the nearby houses: ‘The Ionovs, they were kulaks, were thrown out of that first one, over there; Uncle Borya, a simple farmhand was arrested in that red one, his only crime was cursing at the wrong moment; the next one, there, where the Lagutins live, belonged to the Chochlovs …’ Eight of the fifteen households on her street were evicted in the early 1930s, and the families disappeared without a trace.‘The Zabotnys,’ another woman said, ‘there, where the telephone booth is now. They took away everything they had and sent them into exile. They'd had some stupid conflict with the leaders of the collective.’ A third villager said; ‘They took our neighbour too. He had flour and bread. He had a horse.’

  According to the latest and most accurate estimates, Stalin's breakneck collectivisation cost the lives of seven million people: five million in the Ukraine, two million in the rest of the Soviet Union. The famine grew worse, because the enormous cost of the five-year plan was being deducted largely from the nation's food supply. Foreign material and equipment and specialised manpower were paid for mostly with the revenues from grain exports. In 1932, the Soviet Union exported two million tons of grain. In the catastrophic year 1933 that was 1.7 million tons, while the country's population starved. In 1935, domestic grain consumption in the Soviet Union was less than that of Russia in 1890.

  After a tour of the Soviet Union in 1932, a gullible George Bernard Shaw wrote in The Times: ‘I did not see a single undernourished person in Russia, young or old. Were they padded? Were their hollow cheeks distended by pieces of India rubber inside?’

  In Moscow the women stand on the staircases of the metro stations, holding their scanty merchandise: a couple of sausages, a few pots of jam, a home-made vest, a little kitten. In the station corridor, Natascha Burlina sings one aria after the other, a box of change at her feet. She's a professional singer, yes, in the opera, but no one can live from that. A little further along one finds the busy shopping streets with all the major brands, Armani, Dunhill, Dior. In a side corridor I sidle past a group of young men selling anti-Semitic literature of a venomousness I recognise only from old back copies of Der Stürmer.

  They have Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Hitler's Last Will and Testament, books, cartoons and newspapers, all for sale right next to the former Lenin Museum. A Russian acquaintance translates for me a few lines of verse from the Russian Messenger:

  Russia stand up

  Try to free yourself from the darkness

  Don't give your life for the Jews

  So, Russia, stand up

  And destroy the Jewish Freemasons

  And wash the planet clean

  Of the Jewish plague

  A few years earlier I had dined with some friends at Hotel Moskva, the huge hotel beside the Kremlin. There were a total of six guests in the dining room, a bedraggled magician was gathering roubles by going from table to table, a plate of chicken soup was almost impossible to get. I am told that the building is about to close down. I hope it remains standing, however, for Hotel Moskva is one of the most characteristic monuments of the Stalin era; because of its megalomaniacal entranceways and staircases that crush the visitor like an ant, because of the insanely huge dining room where thousands of cheering party members once stuffed their faces, but above all because of its bizarre appearance from the street.

  Hotel Moskva is a monument to fear. Looking closely, you can see that the side of the building looks very di
fferent from the front. Soviet legend has it that this asymmetry was caused by a single twitch of one of Stalin's fingers. In 1931, when architect Alexey Shchusev presented his two alternative designs, the Greatest Genius of All Time accidentally approved both of them. No one dared to tell him that he had to choose one of the two. Finally, the story goes, the architect simply warped his design into one building with two different façades.

  True or not, it reflects the mentality that prevailed into the furthest reaches of Soviet society: thousands of party bosses ruled their districts, cities, villages, enterprises, trade unions and collectives with ironclad chaos. The Politburo was often unable to explain precisely what it wanted, and that uncertainty was compounded even further by a sluggish bureaucracy that reacted only to simple commands like faster, slower, stop. As a result, the average Soviet citizen was constantly plagued by whimsical policy changes, impracticable directives and incomprehensible sanctions. And when anything went wrong – which was more the rule than the exception – there were always ‘saboteurs’ and other scapegoats to take the blame.

  That could take extreme forms: in 1937, for example, all the members of the Soviet census committee were arrested for having ‘treacherously attempted to reduce the population of the USSR’. The number of those killed by famine was so huge that it could no longer be expunged from the population figures. The results of the 1937 census, obviously, were never published.

  At Novodevitshe Cemetery, located today in a Moscow suburb, all Stalins great and small of that day lie safely buried, by the dozen, beside the likes of Gogol, Chekhov and poor Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's second wife. His right-hand man and successor Nikita Khrushchev can be visited there as well, as can his faithful foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, but also the brilliant engineer Andrei Tupolev – his tomb marked, of course, with an airplane – as well as dozens of lesser gods. Khrushchev's monument is a fairly subtle one, showing his round head stuck between a lighter and a darker stone, but even on the far shore of the River Styx most of the other apparatchiks remain hard at work; a general is cleaning his pistol, a paediatrician is slapping a newborn baby on the buttocks, a minister is conferring, a staff officer even stands atop his own grave, talking to his superiors on the field telephone.

  The average Soviet citizen wanted nothing more than to lead a normal life, but in this perfectly achievable society that, too, was in store for almost no one. The daily chore of shopping was ‘a survival tactic’. At the end of the 1930s, the police in Leningrad reported a line of some 6,000 people before a single shoe store. The housing shortage in the cities was reminiscent of that in London, Vienna and Berlin fifty years earlier. Most Soviet citizens lived cooped up in flats with one family, and sometimes two, to each room. A third of all Moscow's flats were not connected to the public sewers.

  Most forms of distribution no longer had anything to do with money, so words such as ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ soon disappeared. People spoke of ‘organising’ and ‘getting hold of’, products were not sold but ‘issued’. Major and minor bosses rewarded their vassals with better housing, extra food and other favours. Everyone had a ‘patron’, even if it was only the accountant of the kolkhoz, the floor supervisor, the newspaper editor or the party boss of the neighbourhood committee. In this way, life in a city like Moscow was ruled by an immense barter system of services and services in return, a sort of gigantic clearing house that did not officially exist, but in which every citizen was involved.

  When I first visited Leningrad in 1990 – then, too, a time of long lines and bitter poverty – that jargon still existed. You went out to buy bread, but came across a big line at the greengrocer's and came home with a giant pot of sour pickles. Because you never knew what the shops would have, you took a shopping bag (an avozka, meaning a ‘perhaps-bag’) wherever you went. The couple in whose house my colleague and I camped out lived in one and a half rooms, almost filled with a table, a bed and a dog. Both of them survived thanks to three jobs, plus a kitchen garden and aid packages from their parents in the provinces. Our hostess was able to get hold of a new pair of shoes: ‘organised’ for her by a friend for whom she had done some translating. Our host had his car repaired: through a friend at a travel agency, he had been able to arrange two airline tickets for the boss at the garage. The friend at the travel agency had been favoured in turn with a couple of music cassettes we had brought with us. In that way, everything fitted together.

  That system was called blat (protection), and it was the lubricant of society. If there was no way for you to get something – from train tickets to building materials – by normal means, you went blat, you sought out a few contacts, you pulled a few strings. Thanks to their little gardens and to these ‘leaks’ in the official economy, Soviet citizens were able to survive. As one of them wrote in 1940: ‘To have no blat is the same as having no civil rights, the same as being robbed of all your rights.’

  Despite all these concerns, many people experienced the 1930s as a special period. ‘We were young Soviets,’ Anna Smirnova had told me in St Petersburg, still with a certain pride. The boundless optimism during the first five-year plan was not simply a matter of inflated propaganda. Most Russians truly believed that a better future lay just around the corner, and that the hardships were only a temporary phase on the road from a ‘backward’ past to a ‘modern’ future. They saw Moscow filling up with monumental buildings, they saw a fairy-tale-like metro system being built, factories rising everywhere, all harbingers of the new age. Stalin was not the only one convinced that almost everything between heaven and earth was ‘achievable’; the vast majority of his subjects felt exactly the same way.

  An interesting travelogue has been handed down to us from the 1930s, written by André Gide. In those years Gide was at the height of his literary fame. He was seen as the aesthetic and critical arbiter of the French people. Like many intellectuals he became enamoured of ‘the experiment without precedent’ taking place under Stalin's leadership, and he had defended the Soviets in numerous public debates. That was why this literary star was invited to visit the Soviet Union, along with several other authors. The trip took place in June 1936 – Gide arrived in time to attend Maxim Gorky's funeral – and his report, Retour de l'URSS, was published in November. During those few months, Gide's politics made a 180-degree turn.

  The booklet, thin and yellow, looks like a pamphlet, and in it Gide's tone is at first flattering. He loves the Russians, he expounds time and again, and everywhere he goes he experiences ‘moments of deep happiness’. The children he sees at a holiday camp are handsome, healthy, cheerful and well dressed. ‘Their gaze is clear, full of confidence; their smile is naïve, innocent.’ On a train he meets a group of young Komsomol members, on their way to a holiday resort in the Caucasus. They spend a hilarious evening in the luxurious compartment reserved for the writers, laughing, singing and dancing.

  Despite all the wining and dining, however, Gide gradually begins to sense that all is not as it appears. In Moscow he is struck by the long lines in front of the shops, the ugly and tasteless products, the sluggish masses of humanity, the bare living rooms in the kolkhoz buildings from which all personality has been erased. In Sebastopol he remarks upon great troops of street urchins, abandoned children whose parents have disappeared or been killed during the forced collectivisations, and who now wander the country by the thousands, hungry and lonely.

  After a while, Pravda begins to irritate him as well: every morning the paper dictates precisely what everyone should know, think and believe. ‘If you wish to be happy, conform.’ Gide says that ‘every time you talk to a Russian, you get the feeling that you are talking to all Russians.’ It's not that people speak only in slogans, but everything has its own iron logic. The cult around Stalin does not please him, either: the leader's name is on everyone's lips, and his portrait hangs even in the plainest of farm huts. ‘Adoration, love or fear, I do not know; he is present, everywhere and always.’

  He is struck by the Russians’
complete ignorance of the rest of the world: in this way Gide's enthusiasm made way in the space of a few weeks for doubt and finally abhorrence. ‘I doubt whether there is any other country at this moment, including Hitler's Germany, where the mind is less free, more bowed by coercion, more fearful and more dependent.’

  A Russian joke from the 1930s.

  A group of rabbits turns up at the Polish border asking for political asylum. ‘Why do you want to emigrate?’ the border guard asks. ‘The NKVD has ordered the arrest of every camel in the Soviet Union,’ the senior rabbit says. ‘But you're not camels, are you?’ ‘No, but try telling that to the NKVD!’

  The word ‘Gulag’ is an acronym of ‘Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel'no-trudovykh lagerei’, the Main Directorate of Corrective Labour Camps. In summer 1937, Stalin, just like Hitler, started on a ‘campaign of social purification’, in which ‘criminals’, ‘riot mongers’ and ‘socially dangerous elements’ were to be rounded up en masse. In accordance with the tradition of the planned economy, quotas were established even here: each region had to achieve a given ‘production’. The objective for the entire Soviet Union, according to the resolution of 2 July, 1937, was fixed at 70,000 executions and 200,000 people sent to the Gulag. Moscow's Communist Party boss, Nikita Khrushchev, had already been presented with a quota of 35,000 ‘enemies’ to arrest, 5,000 of whom were to be shot. Khrushchev asked whether he could also liquidate 2,000 ‘former kulaks’ as part of this quota. By 10 July he was able to report to Stalin that he had arrested no fewer than 41,305 ‘kulaks and hostile elements’, including some 8,500 ‘first-category enemies’ absolutely deserving of death.