Engineers were also celebrated. Stalin had already signalled the official rehabilitation of the old technical intelligentsia in 1931, but no less important was a parallel and longer-lasting phenomenon—the rehabilitation of engineering as a profession. Symbolic of the engineers’ new stature was the injunction to writers at the founding congress of the Writers’ Union in 1934 that they become ‘engineers of human souls’. It has been pointed out that the engineer-designer, icon of technical mastery and order, began to supplant the production worker as the main protagonist in contemporary novels and films.
These changes in industrialization and labour policies constituted part of a larger process: consolidation of a system that was generally known, though not officially acknowledged, as Stalinism. If the Stalin revolution was more or less coterminal with the First Five-Year Plan, then Stalinism—the repudiation of egalitarianism and collectivist ‘excesses’ of that revolution—was its outcome.
Retaining the ideological prop of a dogmatized Marxism (officially renamed ‘Marxism-Leninism’), Stalinism identified the political legitimacy of the regime not only in the October Revolution, but also in pro-Russian nationalism and glorification of state power. It thus incorporated a conservative and restorative dimension, emphasizing hierarchy, patriotism, and patriarchy.
The Stalinist system depended on an extensive network of officials, the upper echelons of whom were included in the party’s list of key appointments (nomenklatura). Wielding vast and often arbitrary power, these officials ruled over their territories and enterprises as personal fiefs and were not above—or below—developing their own cults of personality. Leon Trotsky, one of the earliest and most trenchant critics of the Stalinist system, regarded it as essentially counter-revolutionary (‘Thermidorist’), a product of the international isolation of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian backwardness, and the political expropriation of the Soviet working class by the bureaucracy. But unlike many others who followed him down the path of communist apostasy, Trotsky did not consider the bureaucracy a ruling class. Bureaucrats, after all, were constrained from accumulating much in the way of personal property and, as the periodic purges of the decade demonstrated, lacked security of tenure. This was why Trotsky wrote that ‘the question of the character of the Soviet Union is not yet decided by history’. It was, rather, a ‘contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism’.
Notwithstanding its exercise of terror and monopolistic control of the means of communication, the bureaucratic apparatus alone could not sustain the Stalinist system. Another dimension of Stalinism, which has only recently received attention from historians, was its assiduous cultivation of mass support and participation—through education and propaganda, leadership cults, election campaigns, broad national discussions (for example, of the constitution, the Comintern’s Popular Front strategy, and the ban on abortions), public celebrations (such as the Pushkin centennial of 1937), show trials, and other political rituals. The system, then, was more than a set of formal political institutions and ‘transmission belts’. In addition to forging a new political culture, it also fostered and was sustained by a particular kind of mass culture.
James van Geldern has characterized this culture in spatial terms as ‘the consolidation of the centre’, a consolidation that ‘did not exclude those outside, [but] aided their integration’. The centre was Moscow, the rebuilding of which constituted one of the major projects of these years. Moscow came to represent ‘the visible face of the Soviet Union … a model for the state, where power radiated out from the centre to the periphery’. Corresponding to a shift in investment priorities, the heightened cultural significance of the capital ‘signalled a new hierarchy of values, by which society’s attention shifted from the many to the one outstanding representative’. The Moscow Metro, a massive engineering project that ‘mocked utility with its stations clad in semi-precious stone’, became an object of not only Muscovite but national pride. The towering Palace of Soviets (the excavation for which involved the razing of the great gold-domed Church of Christ the Saviour) would have been the source of even greater pride had the project not been abandoned and the pit turned into a large outdoor swimming pool.
The periphery was integrated not only through a vicarious identification with the centre but by being recast as an asset. Taming the vast wild spaces of the USSR (for example, through industrial projects such as Magnitogorsk or the settlement of nomads on collective farms) transformed them into both economic and cultural resources. Folklorism, characterized by Richard Stites as ‘politicized folk adaptation’, made a strong comeback via Igor Moiseev’s Theatre of Folk Art, founded in 1936, and a national network of amateur folk choirs and dance ensembles. These ‘prettified and theatricalized Stalinist ensembles … [promoted] images of national solidarity, reverence for the past, and happy peasants’, images that were re-inforced by highly publicized photographs of smiling peasants, decked out in ‘ethnic’ or folk garb, meeting Stalin in the Kremlin.
The imagined harmony of the mid-1930s went beyond folk ensembles and photo opportunities. At the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii—all vanquished political enemies of Stalin—repudiated their previous positions and heaped praise on Stalin’s wise leadership. The congress, in a show of reconciliation, applauded their speeches. The Kolkhoz Congress of 1935, where Stalin announced that ‘socialism’ had been achieved in the countryside, represented another type of reconciliation: shortly afterwards the government issued a kolkhoz statute (conferring certain guarantees and concessions) and dropped legal proscriptions against former kulaks.
‘Life has become more joyous,’ Stalin exulted in November 1935. Endlessly repeated and even set to song, the ‘life is joyous’ theme—the myth of a joyful people achieving great feats and adoring their genial leader (vozhd’)—was woven into the fabric of Soviet life. If previously life’s satisfactions were derived from the knowledge that one’s work was contributing to the building of socialism, now the formula was reversed: the achievement of socialism, officially proclaimed in the 1936 Constitution, was responsible for life’s joyfulness which in turn made work go well. It suddenly became important to demonstrate the prowess of outstanding individuals in a variety of fields: Soviet aviators, dubbed ‘Stalin’s falcons’, took to the skies to set new records; arctic explorers trekked to the North Pole in record time; mountain climbers scaled new peaks; the pianist Emil Gilels and the violinist David Oistrakh won international competitions. All covered the Soviet Union with national glory.
But the most celebrated individual feat of the decade was fittingly in the field of material production. On the night of 30 August 1935, Aleksei Stakhanov, a 30-year-old Donbas coalminer, hewed 102 tons of coal—more than fourteen times the norm for a six-hour shift. Stakhanov achieved his record thanks to a new division of labour that enabled him to concentrate on coal-cutting while others cleared debris, installed props, and performed other auxiliary tasks. Within days of the record, which Pravda had rather perfunctorily reported, other miners were surpassing it. But only after some prompting from the People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry, ‘Sergo’ Ordzhonikidze, did the Stakhanovite movement take off, spreading rapidly to other industries and to agriculture.
Stakhanovism was a complex phenomenon, both something more and something less than what higher political authorities intended. Idiomatically, it encompassed such a broad range of themes—mastery of technology, the creation of the New Soviet Man, the cultured working-class family, role reversal (the Stakhanovite was the expert; the expert became student of the Stakhanovite), upward social mobility—that internal contradictions were bound to occur. It tapped into popular desires for public recognition, adequate conditions of work, and consumer goods that at least some Stakhanovites enjoyed. At the same time, it raised these same expectations among workers who either could not become Stakhanovites or, having achieved that status, did not receive commensurate rewards. Resentment also increased as Stakhano
vite records inexorably led to higher output norms for rank-and-file workers.
Moreover, expectations of political leaders that Stakhanovites’ innovations and production records would raise labour productivity all around were largely unfulfilled. Indeed, in some measure Stakhanovism was dysfunctional, as managers concentrated on supplying workers in the ‘leading’ professions, machinery became overstrained, and inter-shop deliveries broke down. Just three months into the ‘Stakhanovite year’ of 1936, speeches of political leaders and the press began to use words like ‘saboteur’ and ‘wrecker’ to describe managers and engineers who had ostensibly blocked the application of Stakhanovites’ methods or whose enterprises had failed to meet their targets. It was all Ordzhonikidze could do to deflect these charges and prevent the demoralization of industrial cadres in the face of what looked like a revival of cultural revolution specialist-baiting. In fact, something far more lethal was in store not only for enterprise directors, but also for Soviet officials, political functionaries, and military officers.
The Great Purges
The subject of harrowing memoirs and painstakingly researched academic studies, of folk legend and official investigations, the Great Purges continue to fascinate and appall. Emblematic of Stalinism, the ‘repressions’—to employ the term more common in Russian parlance—of 1936—8 seem to have been so arbitrary in victimization, so elusive in motivation as to defy explanation. Access to long-closed archives of the NKVD, while clarifying some issues, has not yet yielded a satisfactory explanation. Indeed, even what hitherto were assumed to be incontrovertible, basic facts are now in question.
According to the once standard version, Stalin initiated the Great Purges by arranging the assassination of the Leningrad Party boss, Sergei Kirov, in December 1934. Stalin’s purpose here was twofold. First, he sought to eliminate a potential rival. Reputedly the leader of a ‘moderate’ faction within the Politburo, Kirov had also received more votes than Stalin himself in the elections to the Politburo at the Seventeenth Party Congress. Second, by claiming that the assassination was the work of ‘Zinovievists’ and ultimately inspired by Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin could legitimize the physical annihilation of former leaders of the opposition, their retinues, and eventually anyone else on whom he chose to pin the label ‘enemy of the people’. This grand scheme for mounting a campaign of terror included the verification of party documents in 1935, the three public show trials of former oppositionists (Zinoviev and Kamenev in August 1936; Piatakov and Radek in January 1937; and Bukharin and Rykov in March 1938), the execution of Marshal Tukhachevskii and most of the Red Army general staff in June 1937, the elimination of nearly the entire regional leadership of the party later that year, and the arrest and disappearance of prominent persons from a wide variety of fields. The NKVD and its commissar, N. I. Ezhov, were the ruthless executors of Stalin’s designs, and indeed the entire period is sometimes referred to as the ‘Ezhovshchina’ (the evil epoch of Ezhov).
Treating these events as instances of a single phenomenon, most scholars assumed that Stalin was intent on eliminating any potential source of opposition, beginning with past opponents but eventually including any who might appear to be unreliable in the future. Some have suggested that the Nazis’ assumption of power in Germany and the increasing prospect of international war provided the impetus—or at least pretext—for Stalin’s actions. Other accounts have emphasized the pathological nature of Stalin’s suspiciousness and his psycho-dramatic replay of Ivan the Terrible’s elimination of the boyars. Still others stress an inherent imperative of the totalitarian system: not only to atomize and terrorize society, but to achieve a turnover of cadres. Another interpretation derives the Great Terror from the bureaucratic imperatives associated with the NKVD’s aggrandizement of power and its supervision of the GULAG. Whatever the dynamics, the traditional historiography shared a consensus that the Great Terror and purges represented a unitary process and that they served some rational function.
J. Arch Getty was the first to challenge the prevailing consensus. He noted the heavy reliance on rumour and gossip in memoirs, questioned the existence of a Stalin–Kirov rivalry or a moderate faction in the Politburo, and denied the existence of a master plot concocted by Stalin. Basing his analysis primarily on materials in the Smolensk Party Archive (seized first by the German army in the Second World War, then taken by American forces from the Germans) he argued that the party apparatus was hardly an efficient machine implementing the dictates of its leader, but a ‘petrified bureaucracy’ incapable even of keeping track of its members. According to Getty, the Great Purges actually derived from the failure of two campaigns to renovate the party: a series of operations to purge passive and degenerate members, and the initiatives spearheaded by Andrei Zhdanov to give party cadres a political education and to introduce ‘party democracy’ through contested secret ballot elections. The anti-bureaucratic impulse here struck a responsive chord with lower-ranking party members, but aroused resistance from regional party secretaries. As Ezhov undertook a search for enemies, which had extended from former oppositionists to regional military commanders, such resistance took on a sinister colouring. ‘Anti-bureaucratic populism and police terror’ created a vicious cycle of accusation, denunciations, and arrests that decimated the ranks of the party and certain high profile professions.
When Getty recently revisited the ‘politics of repression’, he concluded that ‘glasnost’ and the collapse of the Communist Party have put the secretive history of Stalinism on a more evidentially sound footing’. He notes that the investigation of a Politburo commission found no evidence of Stalin’s participation in Kirov’s assassination or the prior or subsequent existence of a moderate bloc; he therefore reiterates his scepticism about the planned nature of the terror. ‘Indecision and chaos’, he argues, were more evident in the evolution of repression before mid1937. Thereafter, it is at least as plausible that Ezhov was pursuing his own agenda, which may—or may nothave coincided with Stalin’s. Not that, in Getty’s view, this exonerates Stalin from responsibility; on the contrary, Stalin was an active participant, personally edited lists of defendants and their statements for the 1936 and 1937 show trials, signed tens of thousands of death sentences, and established target figures for executions in each province. But some scholars remain dissatisfied with Getty’s interpretation and even assert that Getty glossed over ‘one of the darkest and most tragic episodes in Soviet history’.
As in the historiographical controversy among Germanists over ‘intentionalist’ vs. ‘function-structuralist’ interpretations of the Holocaust, this debate raises some complex and profound issues: the process of decision-making at the highest levels, the role of Stalin himself, popular attitudes and participation, the actual quantitative scale of the repression, and its immediate and longer-term psychic effects. Neither orthodox nor revisionist, Moshe Lewin suggests that the terror was a function of Stalin’s unwillingness to be bound by the system he himself had built and presided over. This system had brought to the fore new social groups, especially state functionaries, who though powerful, lacked security of office and sought it in greater social stability and ‘socialist legality’. It was just this craving that threatened Stalin’s role as unfettered autocrat. Thus, two models coexisted uneasily and at some point collided. In the long run, the bureaucratic model, relying on the nomenklatura, would prevail; but during 1936–8, the autocratic model, consisting of the cult, the police, and a demonological mentality, was in ascendance.
That mentality was not Stalin’s alone. Gabor Rittersporn has argued that attributing political conflict and the shortcomings of daily life to ‘plots’, ‘wrecking’, and the ‘intensification of the class struggle’ was not simply a matter of scapegoating, but reflected real belief. Subjected to a public discourse that postulated the achievement of socialism and the ubiquity of subversion, many people understood irregularities, shortages, or other deviations from what was supposed to happen in Manichean terms. They knew that the
y were not enemies or conspirators, but had no way of being sure about their bosses, colleagues, neighbours, even friends and relatives. Bukharin, who believed the accusations against Kamenev, was no different from Lev Kopelev and other ‘true believers’ convinced of the need for unrelenting cruelty to deal with enemies. Those lower down the social hierarchy, including many workers with grievances against their bosses and peasants still angry over collectivization, evidently considered the reprisals against party and state functionaries to be just retribution.
Even those who knew that innocent people had been arrested recoiled from the idea that Stalin condoned such action. ‘We thought (perhaps we wanted to think) that Stalin knew nothing about the senseless violence committed against the communists, against the Soviet intelligentsia’, the novelist and journalist Ilia Ehrenburg recalled. Many blamed Ezhov, whose removal as People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs in December 1938 prompted one self-described ‘ordinary citizen of the USSR’ to write to the Central Committee urging it to ‘correct the Ezhovite mistakes so that the NKVD will really begin to fight against elements hostile to Soviet power, and honest working people will be guaranteed normal and peaceful work’.
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