Russia: A History

THE 1930s have long represented a watershed in the grand narratives of Soviet history. According to the Marxist-Leninist version, de rigueur in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s, it was the decade of ‘socialist construction’. Under the leadership of I. V. Stalin (or in the post-1956 de-Stalinized variant, the Communist Party), the Soviet people confounded sceptics, both domestic and foreign, by rapidly and enthusiastically constructing gigantic factories and dams, transforming backward villages into collective farms, and in the process becoming citizens of a genuinely socialist society. Their achievement was celebrated and formalized in the ‘Stalin Constitution’ of 1936, which guaranteed civil rights and equality among all the peoples of the USSR. But hectic industrialization and collectivization were not simply functions of ideological correctness. The threat of imperialist aggression that loomed throughout the period further justified this tremendous effort. Industrialization thus guaranteed survival of the nation and the cause of socialism that it represented.

Diametrically opposed is a version more familiar to Western scholars. It holds that in the 1930s the Soviet Union became a full-blown ‘totalitarian’ society in which formal legality—including the 1936 Constitution—was a mere smokescreen for the dictatorship of the Communist Party and the caprice of its General Secretary, Stalin. The labour camps that dotted the outer reaches of the nation represented one manifestation of the regime’s repressiveness; the collective farms, supposedly an advancement on small-scale private agriculture, were also a form of incarceration, a ‘second serfdom’ for the peasantry. Industrial workers, ostensibly the ruling class, found themselves subjected to a harsh regimen of speed-ups and without recourse to independent representation or organized protest, while the intelligentsia was cowed into silence or conformity.

As different as are these two renditions of the Soviet 1930s, they exhibit two common qualities. One is the emphasis on transformation. That is, both acknowledge that between 1929 and 1941 the Soviet Union changed dramatically and, so it seemed, irrevocably. The other is that they absolutize the transformations they register—categorically positive in the Marxist-Leninist version and no less categorically negative in the Western view.

Obviously, both cannot be right. Even in the heyday of the Cold War, when scholarship was at its most polarized, one could find formulations that fell somewhere between the two poles. On the left, non-Soviet Marxists posited a ‘state capitalist’ social formation in which the bureaucracy functioned as the ruling class. Others stressed the neo-traditionalist elements of Stalinism, perceiving a ‘Great Retreat’ to traditional Russian (Orthodox) values, while still others argued for a more polymorphic understanding of power and its exercise.

Only in the 1970s, however, did professional historians begin to contribute to the scholarly discourse, offering treatments more subtle than those available in earlier accounts. This new work, often social historical in nature, made a conceptual shift from preoccupation with the state to a focus on society.

Consequently, the totalitarian model of Soviet politics, which depicted the state as the absolute arbiter of people’s fortunes, began to yield to an understanding of how different social groups—workers and managers on the shop-floor, peasants on state and collective farms, and the non-Russian peoples—employed techniques of resistance and accommodation to ‘negotiate’ their relationship with party and state officials. Excursions into cultural history and anthropology have since deepened this understanding through the inclusion of such cultural practices as anniversary celebrations, polar expeditions, aviation, music, film, the theatre, and literature.

Ironically but understandably, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the annihilation of its Communist Party has led to the revival of the totalitarian model, especially within the Russian scholarly community. This is not necessarily a bad thing: ‘revisionist’ scholarship tended to obscure the total claim of the regime on its population, a claim that demanded acclamatory participation and was sanctioned by coercive, even arbitrary, forms of rule. Even if this claim was mythic and unrealizable, its very aspiration was of fundamental importance, for it shaped—or at least affected—social and personal lives in the 1930s, 1940s, and for some time thereafter. None the less, this ‘totalitarian’ state was rife with turbulence in the formal institutions of state and society in the 1930s; indeed, this instability was inherent in the Stalinist articulation of a totalistic agenda. In seeking to actualize its total claim on society, the Stalinist regime unleashed social mobility and flux; the lethal politics of implementation and a political culture of grandiosity and conformity masked an inherent unpredictability in political and social life.

‘There is no fortress the Bolsheviks cannot take’

After the confusion of NEP, a policy that purported to build socialism through capitalist practices but appeared to many communists to build capitalism through socialist retreat, the Stalinist initiatives—the ‘Great Turn’—appeared to set priorities right. Instead of letting the market mediate in relations between state-owned industry and peasant agriculture, the state would centrally allocate resources and assign prices according to its own determination of rationality and need. Instead of 25 million peasant households producing agricultural goods on small plots with primitive methods and inadequate machinery, the state would assist peasants to establish collective farms, practise scientific farming, and remit their surpluses as partial payment for the equipment they leased. And in contrast to high levels of industrial unemployment endemic to NEP, investment in construction and industrial expansion would provide millions of new jobs and expand the size of the proletariat.

This programme was nothing if not ambitious. Devised and advertised as the ‘Five-Year Plan for Industrialization and Socialist Construction’, it represented a radical break with previous economic policy and previous understanding of economic laws—now condemned as ‘bourgeois’. For the first time, the state would not only intervene in economic relations but actually serve as the chief, even sole, manager of the economy. In its ‘optimal’ version, the Five-Year Plan aimed to increase investment by 228 per cent, industrial production by 180 per cent, electrical generation by 335 per cent, and the industrial labour force by 39 per cent. But even these levels were deemed too modest by the regime: by the end of 1929 ‘Five in Four’—that is, the fulfilment of the Plan in four years—became official policy.

How is this ‘riotous optimism’, in Alec Nove’s phrase, to be explained? Was it designed to mobilize available human resources—heedless of the real capabilities for reaching targets? This is an intriguing possibility, but not yet substantiated by concrete evidence. Or was this a political plan to provoke and discredit ‘Right Oppositionists’ (Nikolai Bukharin and others), who sought to scale down targets? It can be argued that Stalin exploited the ‘politics’ of the plan, but that the process of target inflation goes beyond such tactical manœuvres. The circumstantial should not be overlooked: with the onset of the Great Depression, the Five Year Plan had tremendous propagandistic value. Indeed, the Soviet regime expended much effort to demonstrate the contrast between general economic crisis in the capitalist world and the extraordinary feats of construction and industrial expansion in the Soviet Union. Technomania was a further impulse: the introduction of new mechanized technology, much of it imported from the West, promised bountiful, even unimaginable returns.

But the ‘over-ambitious’ Five-Year Plan (Holland Hunter), and in a larger sense the entire Stalin revolution, derived from the merger of two hitherto discrete elements within Bolshevism. One was Prometheanism, the belief that collective human effort could accomplish transformative miracles. The other was revolutionary maximalism, a psychology of egalitarianism, expropriation, even a belief in the creative role of violence. The former had its roots in nineteenth-century machine worship; the latter in the voluntarist strain of populists of the 1870s and Bolsheviks (in contrast to Mensheviks) after the turn of the century. Together, they comprised a new political culture, one that sought to ‘catch up to and overtake’ the advanced capitalist countries but, in its very haste, reproduced some elements of backward Russia.

Promoted from the top and exalted by the emerging cult of Stalin, the new political culture set the tone for industrialization and a good deal else. As Moshe Lewin has noted, ‘the readiness not to bother about cost, not being too squeamish about means, the ability to press hard on institutions and people—this was the style and the temperament of those Stalinists, for whom most old guard Bolsheviks were by now too European and too “liberal”’. Pressed by V. M. Molotov, G. K. Ordzhonikidze, L. M. Kaganovich, and other Politburo members who fanned out across the country on trouble-shooting missions, the directors of industrial enterprises and far-flung construction sites resorted to all manner of stratagems in their dealings with supply agencies and in turn pressed hard on their subordinates. Provincial (obkom) party secretaries experienced the same sort of pressure and likewise learned to deflect it downwards. As a result, Stalin concentrated power at the top even as he diffused responsibility downward through thousands of vintiki (little screws) who had their own strategies for survival.

Industrialization was analogous to a gigantic military campaign—with recruitment levies, mobilizations, ‘fronts’ (Donbas coal, the Dneprstroi dam, Magnitogorsk, the Stalingrad Tractor Factory), ‘light cavalry raids’ of the Komsomol against bureaucratic practices, heroic ‘shock troops of labour’ thrown into the breach, and victories (mostly symbolic) and frequent setbacks. In this frenzied atmosphere, replete with threats, verbal abuse, and recrimination, Angst was combined with enthusiasm, individual opportunism with collective effort. The result was a constant state of emergency, ubiquitous shortage, and near total chaos.

Yet, by 1932 the regime could boast of some real achievements. Gross industrial production, measured in 1926–7 roubles, rose from 18.3 milliards to 43.3 milliards, actually surpassing the optimal plan. Producers’ goods, valued at 6.0 milliards in 1927–8, reached 23.1 milliards in 1932 compared to a projected 18.1 milliards, and within that category, the value of machinery more than quadrupled. Even taking into account considerable statistical inflation (i.e. the overpricing of machinery), these were impressive results. Less impressive were the rise in consumer goods production—from 12.3 milliard to 20.2 milliard roubles—and significant shortfalls in the output of coal, electricity, and steel. Total employment in construction, transportation, and industry did surpass the plan, increasing from 11.3 million to 22.8 million people.

The War against the Peasants

Simultaneously Stalin launched an assault on the final bastion of the old order—the hinterlands that encompassed the predominantly grain-growing provinces of Russia and Ukraine, the arid steppes of Central Asia, and the hunting and fishing preserves of the far north and Siberia. Here, according to the census of 1926, lived nearly 80 per cent of the Soviet Union’s 142 million people. Here too was the greatest challenge to the Communist Party leadership and its ambitions for socialist construction. Communists were few and far between in the Soviet countryside: in July 1928 they numbered 317,000 (22.7 per cent of the party’s total membership)—one communist for every 336 rural dwellers. Most were recent recruits with only the most tenuous grasp of communist ideology. Although teachers, agronomists, and other white-collar professionals represented the state and could propagandize the fruits of Soviet rule, the peasant masses generally were distrustful of ‘their’ village soviets and the Soviet government at large, a wariness borne of a history of endless depredations by outsiders.

This attitude was mutual. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of ‘alliance’ (smychka) or rather because prosperous peasants (kulaks, literally ‘the tightfisted’) seemed to profit from the concessions associated with NEP, Soviet authorities regarded the peasantry as a petty bourgeois mass of small property-holders and a major barrier to the building of socialism. By all accounts, the grain procurement crisis of 1927–8 was the turning-point in this conflictual relationship. Having personally supervised the campaign to seize grain and other foodstuffs in the Urals and western Siberia, Stalin hit on the idea of organizing collective and state farms to pump out surpluses. These rural production units, fitfully and ineffectually sponsored in the past, henceforth became the regime’s formula for socialist construction in the countryside that was to serve the over-arching goal of industrialization.

The industrialization drive itself was suffused with military metaphors, but collectivization was the real thing, a genuine war against the peasants. The ‘fortresses’ in this war were the peasants’ ‘material values’—their land, livestock, draught animals, and implements, all of which were to be confiscated and pooled as collective property. Party propagandists characterized mass collectivization as a ‘rural October’, analogous to the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Petrograd in 1917. But collectivization and the resistance it provoked among the peasants cost vastly more in lives than the October Revolution or even the ensuing civil war.

Not all peasants opposed collectivization. The poorest elements in the villages (the bedniak families without land or the means to work it) probably welcomed the prospect of gaining access to the property of their better-off neighbours. But the mass of ‘middle peasants’ (seredniaki) was not swayed by promises of tractors and credits. As a peasant told Maurice Hindus (a Russian-Jewish émigré who visited his native village), ‘Hoodlums and loafers … might readily join a kolkhoz. What have they to lose? But decent people? They are khoziaeva [independent producers and householders], masters, with an eye for order, for results. But what could they say in a kolkhoz? What could they do except carry out the orders of someone else. That’s the way I look at it.’

The way Stalin looked at it, as he made clear at a party conference in April 1929, was that the kulaks were fomenting opposition to collectivization. This ad hoc ‘theory’ of the ‘intensification of the class struggle’ henceforth guided party policy as if it were a universal truth. Over the ensuing months, the party sought to accelerate the formation of collective farms. By June, one million—out of some 25 million—peasant households had enrolled in 57,000 collectives. Obviously, though, the vast majority still held back. Regional party appa-ratchiki, spurred on by directives and plenipotentiaries from the centre, pleaded with and cajoled village assemblies. ‘Tell me, you wretched people, what hope is there for you if you remain on individual pieces of land?’ an agitator shouted at the peasants in Hindus’s village. ‘You will have to work in your own old way and stew in your old misery. Don’t you see that under the present system there is nothing ahead of you but ruin and starvation?’ ‘We never starved before you wise men of the party appeared here,’ was the reply.

The rhythm of collectivization, like much else during the First Five-Year Plan, proceeded in fits and starts. During the summer and autumn of 1929, the rate accelerated largely due to two initiatives: the enactment by local officials of ‘wholescale’ (sploshnaia) collectivization in certain grain-growing areas of the North Caucasus and lower Volga; and the establishment of giant collectives absorbing whole groups of villages. Most were of the relatively loose kind (i.e. tozy rather than arteli or kommuny), whereby households retained ownership of seed, machinery, and draught animals. Meanwhile, the administrative infrastructure for collective farming began to take shape with the formation of an all-Union Kolkhoztsentr for channelling credits and equipment, and a Traktortsentr (Tractor Centre) for overseeing the establishment of machine tractor stations (MTS).

The most intense phase occurred during the winter of 1929/30. The signal was Stalin’s article in Pravda, published on the thirteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Entitled ‘The Great Turn’, it claimed that the ‘middle peasant’—that 80 per cent mass of the village—‘is joining the collective’. On the basis of recommendations produced by a special Politburo commission under A. Iakovlev, the Commissar of Agriculture, the party’s Central Committee issued its fateful decree, ‘On the Tempo of Collectivization’, on 5 January 1930. The decree called for collectivizing not merely the 20 per cent of arable land envisioned by the First Five-Year Plan, but ‘the huge majority of peasant farms’ in the most important grain regions by the autumn of 1930. It also rejected the toz in favour of the more ‘advanced’ arteli.

The question of what to do with the kulaks was finally resolved in a Central Committee decree of February 1930. They were to be expropriated—‘liquidated as a class’—and subjected to one of three fates: (1) resettled on inferior land outside the kolkhoz; (2) deported and resettled on land in other districts; or (3) arrested and sent to prisons or labour camps in remote parts of the country. By 1933 approximately 1.5 million people had been subjected to the second form of dekulakization and 850,000–900,000 to the third. That almost any peasant who agitated against collectivization could be labelled a kulak (or ‘subkulak’ a kulak sympathizer) was the key point: ‘dekulakization’ was as much a weapon of intimidation against non-kulaks as it was a sledge-hammer against the well-to-do peasants.

By March 1930 an estimated 55 per cent of peasant households at least nominally had enrolled in collective farms. At this point, however, Stalin decried the excesses of local officials, claiming that they were ‘dizzy with success’. This admonition let loose the floodgates holding peasants within the kolkhoz and, as recently declassified archival documents testify, caused acute consternation among provincial agents of collectivization who feared ‘re-kulakization’. By June only 23 per cent of households remained within collective farms. The reversal was short-lived, however. Fines and compulsory sales of property for peasants unable (or unwilling) to meet delivery quotas drove many back into the kolkhoz system; by July 1931 the proportion of households had risen to 53 per cent, and a year later to 61.5 per cent. This included the pastoral Kazakhs who were subjected to ‘denomadization’, a process that virtually wiped out their sheep herds and, in conjunction with a typhus epidemic, led to the death of approximately 40 per cent of the population between 1931 and 1933. Throughout the Soviet Union, the losses of livestock due to slaughter and neglect were enormous: by 1933 the numbers of cattle, pigs, and sheep were less than half what they had been in 1928.

The peasants’ traditional strategies in this war of survival—prevarication, dissimulation, and other ‘weapons of the weak’—were of limited utility. They also resorted to more direct forms of resistance—theft of kolkhoz property, the slaughter of livestock, women’s riots, and murder of collective farm officials (including workers dispatched to the countryside as ‘Twenty-Five Thou-sanders’ to assist in the collectivization drive). All this suggests the scale of peasant desperation. As if calculated to intensify the apocalyptic mood, the authorities intensified anti-religious campaigns, including pogroms against priests and church property. Thousands of churches, synagogues, and mosques were closed or converted into meeting-halls, cinemas, cowsheds, and the like. The exact number of peasants executed, killed in skirmishes, or dead from malnutrition and overwork in the labour camps defies precise determination, but undoubtedly ran into millions.

Peasant resistance to collectivization also spawned opposition, if less dramatic, in the party itself. Some who had supported Stalin against Bukharin and the ‘Right Opposition’ began to have second thoughts in the wake of the collectivization drive. By late 1930 several prominent party members of the RSFSR and Trans-caucasian governments expressed misgivings that Stalin construed as factionalism and opposition (‘the Syrtsov–Lominadze Right-Left Bloc’). Retribution did not prevent the formation of other groups in 1932, most notably the conspiratorial circle of M. N. Riutin and the group of A. P. Smirnov, G. G. Tolmachev, and N. B. Eismont. Even loyal Stalinists such as S. V. Kosior, I. M. Vareikis, K. Ia. Bauman, and M. A. Skrypnyk began to question the growing centrism of power as well as Stalin’s pro-Russian nationality policy.

In sum, the state won only a partial victory over the peasantry. True, it did bring the peasants under its administrative control and, through the machine tractor stations, made them technologically dependent. The kulaks and the clergy, rival élites in the village, had been annihilated. But peasant resistance extracted certain concessions, such as the legalization of private plots and the exclusion of domestic animals from the collective. In the longer term, a combination of administrative incompetence, underinvestment, and peasant alienation led to extremely low levels of productivity and thus an agricultural sector that, rather than providing resources and capital investment for industrial development, became a net drain on economic growth.

A Nation on the Move

Not unlike the enclosures at the dawn of the English Industrial Revolution, collectivization ‘freed’ peasants to work and live else where. Of course, there was nothing new about peasant seasonal out-migration (otkhod), particularly from villages in the ‘landhungry’ provinces of central Russia. But during the First Five-Year Plan, the number of peasant departures increased dramatically, in 1931–2 reaching an all-time high. Between 1928 and 1932, according to a recent estimate, at least ten million peasants joined the urban work-force as wage or salary earners.

In general, departures took three forms: involuntary deportations (through dekulakization); relocation through agreements between collective farms and individual industrial enterprises (a process known euphemistically as orgnabor or ‘organized recruitment’); and voluntary independent movement officially labelled samotek or ‘drifting’. These distinctions are analytically useful but hardly capture the scale or complexity of population movement in the 1930s. There was much ‘push’ (to leave the village), but also much ‘pull’ (demand for labour at the other end). Such was the competition among recruiters that train-loads of recruits were waylaid and rerouted to other destinations. In other cases, recruits upon arrival found working or living conditions so unappealing that they soon moved on—via samotek—to places where conditions were reportedly better. As Stephen Kotkin has noted, ‘The train, that ally of the Bolshevik leadership and its bureaucrats and planners, was being used against them: construction workers were using the trains to tour the country’.

The growth of Magnitogorsk, the celebrated socialist ‘planned’ city built on the steppe behind the Urals, was spectacular: from 25 inhabitants in March 1929 to 250,000 by the autumn of 1932. But older cities swelled too. Moscow’s population increased from 2.2 million in 1929 to 3.6 million by 1936; Leningrad’s rose from 1.6 million in 1926 to 3.5 million by the end of the 1930s. Regional centres, particularly in the industrial heartland, were also inundated by newcomers. Stalino (Donetsk), a coal and steel town in the Donbas, doubled its population between 1926 and 1937, reaching 246,000 by the latter year.

This phenomenal growth in urban population did not in itself constitute urbanization, a process that normally suggests qualitative as well as quantitative change. Indeed Moshe Lewin’s neologism, ‘ruralization’—the squeezing of the village into the city and the subjection of urban spaces to rural ways—is more accurate. Railway stations became temporary shelters, clearinghouses of information, informal labour exchanges, and (illicit) bazaars. Factories took on many of the same functions, as did parks.

Housing construction could not possibly keep pace with the population increase. At Magnitogorsk and other construction sites, newcomers were ‘housed’ in tents and hastily constructed dormitories where bedspace was often assigned in shifts. To accommodate the in-migrants, in 1931 municipal authorities in Leningrad deported thousands of ‘parasites and other nonworking elements’—i.e. the pre-revolutionary nobility, the clergy, youths expelled from the student body because of their ‘old regime’ backgrounds, and those who had been purged from the Soviet apparatus. This social cleansing freed some 200,000 sq. m. of living space, mostly in the form of communal apartments where several families shared a kitchen, bathroom, and toilet. Global statistics for per capita living space in the entire USSR show a decline from a crowded 5.65 sq. m. in 1928 to an even more crowded 4.66 sq. m. by 1932.

Food too was in short supply. The shortages were due not only to disruptions caused by collectivization and increased urban demand (from the influx of peasants), but also because of the low priority given to food-processing in the First Five-Year Plan. The state imposed a ration on most foodstuffs in 1929, whereby urban residents exchanged their coupons at Workers’ Co-operative stores. They also relied on cafeterias and other communal dining facilities, government stores (where the quality—and prices—of food was higher), or, if they could afford it, the peasant markets.

In December 1932 the state introduced internal passports for urban dwellers, thereby making flight to the cities more difficult for the dispossessed and hungry in the villages. This measure, which remained in effect for decades, closely followed a decree denying ration cards to those guilty of absenteeism from work. Their combined effect was to put a temporary halt to in-migration and to trigger the deportation or ‘voluntary’ exodus of several hundred thousand people from the cities. The timing of the passport law was all-important. Harsh climate, primitive technology, and the necessity of marketing or turning over a substantial proportion of the crop had left peasant producers without a margin to build up reserves. After three years of borrowing from the previous year’s seed grain to deliver to an expanding urban population, the Red Army, and foreign consumers, there was no margin left.

The resulting famine of 1933 has been described by both Western and Russian scholars as ‘man-made’ or ‘artificial’ on the grounds that its primary cause was the excessively high procurement quotas set by the state. Some note the disproportionate effect on Ukrainian peasants and claim that the famine was deliberate and genocidal. But recent analyses of the data on the 1932 harvest have shown that, contrary to the official yield of 69.9 million metric tons (which approximated the grain harvests for preceding and successive years), the real output was well below 50 million tons. If so, the famine was precipitated by an absolute shortage of grain. That the rural population (not only in Ukraine) suffered disproportionately and that this deprivation was due to a political decision are not in question: procurements displaced famine from the city to the village. Altogether, it is estimated that the famine took 2.9 million lives in Ukraine and 4.2 million throughout the USSR in 1933.

Cultural Revolution

In addition to industrialization and agricultural transformation, the 1930s witnessed a third revolution—in culture. This ‘cultural revolution’ signified not only the overturning of previously existing scientific standards and aesthetic values, but full-scale assaults against their bearers—the technical and cultural intelligentsia—and their replacement by workers from the bench as well as (often self-designated) representatives of the proletariat. In retrospect, the cultural revolution underscores the instability and provisionality of the modus vivendi between the intelligentsia (the sole collective survivor among the prerevolutionary élites) and the Communist Party. Lenin’s conception of cultural revolution—essentially, raising the masses to the level of the bourgeoisie by enlisting the aid of ‘bourgeois specialists’—was pursued more or less faithfully by his lieutenants who came from relatively cultured backgrounds, relied on the expertise of such specialists, and rewarded them accordingly. But to many party militants, such dependence merely perpetuated the cultural dominance of a group that displayed haughtiness and condescension towards the masses (and, not incidentally, party members) and dubious loyalty to the ideals of communism.

Tensions exploded in the spring of 1928 when fifty-three mining engineers were charged with wrecking and sabotage of mining installations in the Shakhty district of the North Caucasus. What set off the explosion was not so much the trial itself, as the ‘lessons’ that Stalin drew from the affair. In contrast to other high-ranking officials, who warned of the economically disruptive consequences of igniting mass resentment against specialists and therefore sought to play down the case, Stalin invoked ‘class vigilance’, warned that ‘Shakhtyites are now ensconced in every branch of our industry’, and demanded extensive purges not only of industrial administration, but throughout the Soviet, trade-union, and party apparatuses, educational institutions, and central economic organs.

The purges were essentially of two kinds, each extensive and feeding off the other. ‘Social purging’ (i.e. the exclusion of individuals from privileged backgrounds from institutions of higher education) was most pronounced in 1928–9. Usually carried out by Komsomol and local party committees, this type of purge was often spontaneous, irritated authorities in the affected commissariats, and ultimately provoked resolutions of condemnation. The second, more formal, purge was conducted by special commissions of Rabkrin (the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate) and the party’s Central Committee. With a mandate from the Sixteenth Party Conference, Rabkrin removed some 164,000 Soviet employees in the course of 1929–30. The purge in the party, which removed about 11 per cent of its members in 1929, sought primarily to expel careerists, corrupt elements, and those guilty of criminal offences, but it also took into account political criteria, such as the failure to carry out the party line in the countryside.

Purges constituted one aspect of the cultural revolution: no less important was the intensification and politicization of struggles within the professions. These conflicts generally pitted the pre-revolutionary (predominantly non-Marxist) intelligentsia against the new Soviet intelligentsia (overwhelmingly communist). What the former interpreted as a full-scale assault against culture itself, the latter saw only as its ‘proletarianization’. The former expected intellectuals to set an example for the masses or to take them under their wing; the latter advocated subordination to and learning from the masses. This reversal of valorization prematurely terminated many careers and led to the temporary abolition of secondary-school education. Not for nothing did the Marx–Engels metaphor of ‘withering away’ of school and law appeal to cultural revolutionaries.

Perhaps the best-documented struggle of the cultural revolution was in literature. Thus, writers and critics affiliated with the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (with the Russian acronym RAPP) fought bitterly against their Marxist rivals in the ‘Literary Front’ (Litfront). And both stridently attacked the political aloofness of ‘fellow travellers’, as well as the decadent individualism of the literary avant-garde. The former Komsomol activist, L. L. Averbakh, helped RAPP to establish, if only briefly, ‘proletarian hegemony’ (typified by its cult of the ‘little man’) over literature. Time Forward!, Valentin Kataev’s novel of 1932 about a record-breaking shift at Magnitogorsk, represented its apotheosis. But what has been called a ‘wave of reaction’ against this ethos of the First Five-Year Plan was apparent even before the end of the Plan. ‘It was as if’, writes Katerina Clark, ‘everyone had tired of the “little man”, of sober reality and efficiency; they looked for something “higher”.’ This yearning corresponded to Stalin’s own impatience with the turbulence of literary politics. On 23 April 1932 a Central Committee resolution ‘On the Reformation of Literary-Artistic Organizations’ formally abolished RAPP and called for the creation of a ‘single Union of Soviet Writers with a communist fraction in it’.

The ‘proletarian episode’ in Soviet literature had its analogues in other fields such as legal theory, pedagogy, and architecture. In each case, rival claimants to the correct interpretation of Marxism battled it out, employing such terms of abuse as ‘bourgeois pseudo-science’, ‘Menshevizing idealism’, and ‘right deviation-ism’. As in literary criticism, the iconoclastic and even nihilistic tendencies of the cultural revolutionaries (E. B. Pashukanis’s ‘commodity exchange’ theory of the law; V. N. Shulgin’s notion of the ‘withering away of the school’; anti-urbanism among town planners) ran their course until the Central Committee—or, in the case of historical writing, Stalin himself—intervened to restore order if not the status quo ante.

The third dimension of the cultural revolution, which has received much attention from historians, was the rapid and systematic promotion of workers into white-collar positions, either directly from ‘the bench’ or after crash-course training programmes at institutions of higher education. As Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown, this programme of proletarian ‘advancement’ (vydvizhenie) represented ‘the positive corollary of the campaign against the “bourgeois” intelligentsia and the social purging of the bureaucracy’. In time, the beneficiaries of this process (the vydvizhentsy), formed the new Soviet intelligentsia, which was more numerous, plebeian, and (befitting an industrializing nation) technically oriented than its bourgeois predecessor. And it was also more beholden to the political leadership. Two themes thus dominate most accounts of the cultural revolution. One was its anti-intellectualism, tinged with a certain xenophobic colouring. The other was its social radicalism, rendered as ‘revolution from below’, where ‘below’ signified three distinct phenomena: the spontaneous actions of lower-level party committees and the Komsomol, the revolt of younger and previously marginal elements within the professions, and the promotion of proletarians. But one should not overlook the degree to which the cultural revolution was coded as a male pursuit and the advantage that proletarianism gave to ethnic Russians at the expense of peoples in less industrialized areas. Dissolution of both the party’s women’s department (Zhenotdel) and Jewish section (Evsektsiia) in 1930 may well have reflected these biases.

Communist Neo-Traditionalism

In 1933, after several years of almost unceasing tumult, the Soviet Union embarked on the Second Five-Year Plan. Early drafts of the Plan exhibited the same ‘great leap forward’ psychology that had characterized its predecessor. But by late 1932, when it became clear that the economy was overstrained, the key indices were scaled back. Instead of the 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity originally projected for 1937, the revised version (adopted by the Seventeenth Party Congress in February 1934) called for 38 billion; the target for pig iron was cut from 22 million to 14.5 million tons, and so forth. Referring to the famine, Alec Nove observes: ‘The terrible events of 1933 may have had their influence, by a kind of shock therapy’. The plan, still ambitious if scaled back, shifted the emphasis from ever-increasing inputs of labour, punctuated by occasional bouts of shock work (now deprecated as ‘storming’), and towards the assimilation and mastery of technology. As Stalin told a plenary session of the Central Committee in January 1933, the ‘passion for construction’ of the First Five-Year Plan had to be replaced by the passion for mastering technology. That required more vocational training, but also more labour discipline.

Few terms appeared more frequently in Bolshevik discourse in the early 1930s than ‘labour discipline’. Precisely because the industrial labour force had absorbed millions of male peasants and unskilled urban women, the demands for increasing labour discipline became ever shriller, the measures to combat violations ever harsher. Stricter control over the organization of production led to the abrogation of several First Five-Year Plan innovations: the ‘continuous work week’ (nepreryvka, a staggered schedule of four days on and one day off); the ‘functional system of management’ (a Taylorist approach that in its Soviet application encouraged parallel lines of authority and avoidance of personal responsibility); and production collectives and communes (shopfloor units that workers organized to protect themselves from the fluctuations in wages and the general disorganization of production).

The restoration of a more hierarchical approach to management entailed an expansion of the responsibilities, prestige, and privileges of managerial and technical personnel. ‘The ground should shake when the director goes around the factory,’ declared M. M. Kaganovich in a pep talk to managers, adding that ‘workers like a powerful leader’. Successful directors had to do more than shake the ground. Presiding over vast complexes with tens of thousands of workers, they learned how to wheel and deal for scarce resources, establish cosy relations with local party and NKVD officials, read the signals emanating from Moscow, and above all fulfil—or at least appear to fulfil—the quantitative targets of the plan. As a veteran journalist later recalled, ‘it was during those years that the names of metallurgical factory directors became known, not only to a narrow circle of economic officials, but broad sections of the Soviet public. For their work, for their successes, the country celebrated them as in wartime it had followed the successes of military leaders.’

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 Stakhanovite 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 they 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’.

Such letters—and there are many in recently opened archives—should not be construed as prima facie evidence of popular support for the terror. But they do suggest that the machinations in the Kremlin were not the whole story. In Belyi Raion of the Smolensk district, the defining political issues were not ‘Trotskyite and fascist wrecking’, but the crop failure of 1936, shortfalls in procurement targets, admission of former kulaks into collective farms, and other local issues. But at a certain point in 1937 local élites responsible for economic failures or bossism could find themselves so labelled.

As to the number of people arrested and shot by the NKVD, research by Russian and Western scholars in recently opened archives has produced estimates that are considerably lower than those previously posited. According to Viktor Zemskov, slightly less than one million people were confined in NKVD run camps on 1 January 1937, a number that rose to 1.3 million by 1939; another 315,000 people were in ‘corrective labour colonies’ in 1940. These figures are a good deal lower than earlier estimates (for example, Robert Conquest’s number of seven million in the camps by 1938), but they do not include people incarcerated in prisons, special resettlements, or other places of detention. It also remains unclear how many were ‘politicals’, convicted of engaging in ‘propaganda or agitation’ against the Soviet state, a crime punishable by five to eight years in a camp; an archival document indicates that the GULAG population sentenced for ‘counter-revolutionary offences’ was 12.6 per cent in 1936 and 33.1 per cent in 1940. As for executions by order of military tribunals, ‘troikas’, and other special bodies, official figures show 1,118 executions in 1936, 353,074 in 1937, 328,618 in 1938, and 2,552 in 1939. According to information released by the KGB in 1990, the total executed in 1937–8 represented 86.7 per cent of all death sentences carried out ‘for counter-revolutionary and state crimes’ between 1930 and 1953. Mass burial sites, recently uncovered at Kuropaty in Belarus and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, constitute one of the most horrifying relics of the Stalin era.

Who were the victims? We have long known about the prominent party officials, military officers, and members of the scientific and cultural élites. The publications of Conquest and Roy Medvedev in the early 1970s added more names, notably from the non-Russian republics. More recently, thanks to greater archival access and innovative research, the sociology of victimization has become more precise. It now seems clear that the most vulnerable groups were the party élite, former oppositionists, high-ranking economic officials, and military officers. Contrary to earlier assumptions, Old Bolsheviks—those who joined the party before the October Revolution—and members of the intelligentsia were not disproportionately repressed.

Several conclusions are in order here. First, vulnerability or risk must be correlated with proportionality: even if the majority of camp inmates were peasants and workers, those in élite positions were at greater risk if the data are compared to their numbers in the population at large. Second, the tragic fate of family members—vividly and movingly described in the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Anna Larina (wife of Bukharin), and others—must be taken into account in any overall assessment of the purges. Notwithstanding Stalin’s earlier injunction (‘sins of the fathers should not be visited upon their sons’), said in reference to the offspring of dekulakized peasants, family members—sons, daughters, wives, and even more distant relatives—were frequently subjected to interrogation and incarceration in orphanages and camps. Third, no amount of statistical work is likely to explain why so many individuals were summarily executed in 1937–8 and why this ‘ultimate sentence’ was prescribed more sparingly after Lavrentii Beria became the NKVD’s commissar. Finally, to comprehend the repression of these years, use of a term like ‘the Terror’, with its implication of unitariness, tends to obfuscate the overlapping patterns and cross-currents of repression.

The Enemy Without/The Enemy Within

Corresponding to the Great Turn of the late 1920s, the Comintern directed communist parties to expel ‘Right opportunists’ from their ranks and abandon tactical alliances with Social Democrats, henceforth labelled ‘social fascists’. This ‘class war’ strategy, which persisted until the mid-1930s, disorganized working-class opposition to fascism and proved particularly disastrous in Germany. The call by the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel) for total disarmament evoked nothing but scepticism in European capitals, but the Soviet Union did succeed in normalizing relations with neighbouring countries and establishing full diplomatic relations with the United States in 1933.

The triumph of the Nazis in Germany and the consolidation of a Japanese puppet state (Manchukuo) on the Soviet Union’s eastern borders precipitated the Comintern strategy of Popular Fronts with all ‘progressive forces’ and an intensification of Soviet efforts to achieve collective security with the European democracies. These policies bore fruit in the form of mutual assistance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia (in 1935) and the election of a Popular Front government in France (in 1936). But the great test of the European commitment to contain fascism—the chief aim of the popular fronts—was the Spanish Civil War. Despite Soviet assistance to the Republic—or perhaps because European statesmen feared a ‘red’ Spain more than one ruled by Franco—the Western powers failed the test. The betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich (September 1938) confirmed Soviet suspicions that neither Britain nor France were unduly concerned about Nazi expansion to the East.

For the Soviet Union, the decade of the 1930s lasted until the Nazi invasion of 22 June 1941. The increasing likelihood of war in Europe precipitated a radical shift in foreign policy away from seeking collective security with the Western democracies and towards an accommodation with Hitler. Acting on secret provisions of the Soviet–German Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939, Soviet armed forces occupied eastern Poland, the three Baltic republics, and the Romanian province of Bessarabia. Finland resisted territorial concessions along its eastern border; in the ensuing ‘Winter War’ (1939–40) the Red Army triumphed, but with difficulty and only because of superior numbers.

In the mean time, the regime moved to restore the authority, if not security of cadres in state and industrial management—badly shaken by the Great Purges and wary of denunciations from below. Laws stipulating a longer working day and draconian punishment for tardiness and absenteeism put teeth into demands for labour discipline. The Stakhanovite movement continued to celebrate high achievers among workers; but as the regime sought to close ranks with managerial and technical personnel, it now tended to attribute innovations to engineers. A steady diet of Soviet patriotism—psychological preparation for war—accompanied a massive build-up of the armed forces and defence industries.

Ten years earlier, in the midst of the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin told a conference of economic officials that they could not afford to slacken the pace of industrialization because to do so ‘would mean falling behind. And those who all behind get beaten’. He thereupon recited all the beatings ‘backward’ Russia lad suffered—by ‘Mongol khans’, ‘Turkish beys’, Swedish feudal lords, the Polish and Lithuanian gentry, British and French capitalists, and ‘Japanese barons’. ‘All beat her—because of her backwardness … military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness’. But, he added, correlating gender with political transformation, ‘Mother Russia’ has since become the socialist fatherland. ‘Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? … We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under’.

Stalin’s forced-pace industrialization undoubtedly contributed mightily to he Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War. The tempo of industrialization was literally killing and extremely wasteful, but by 1941 the USSR had closed he gap, militarily and industrially. The greatest spurt occurred during the ‘three good years’ of industrialization (1934–6). By 1937 steel output was nearly three times greater than in 1932, coal production had doubled, and electricity generation had risen by 250 per cent. Thereafter, the Great Purges and the channelling of investments into armaments—defence expenditure quadrupled between 1936 and 1940—caused growth rates in these and other branches of industry to subside. But on the eve of the war, Soviet industry was producing 230 tanks, 700 military aircraft, and more than 100,000 rifles every month. However, agriculture still lagged. A major crop failure in 1936—a yield even smaller than the official harvest for 1932—strained the state’s reserves and distribution network; it has even been argued that this crisis contributed to the political events of 1937. Because of increased military expenditure, investments in the collective and state farm system remained woefully minuscule.

But ‘backwardness’ is qualitative, not merely quantitative. In cultural and political terms, the USSR’s backwardness was perpetuated, even intensified, not because party and state officials tried to do too little, but because they tried to do too much. Browbeating the nation into modernity and socialism—the two were deemed to be synonymous—Stalin and his lieutenants provoked much resistance, but also conjured up demons of their own Manichean imaginings. These they combated with cults, reliance on miracles, and a great deal of force. They thus conformed to what Moshe Lewin has called ‘the contamination effect’, whereby radical and rapid transformation in fact ensures the survival of fundamental continuities, especially in social behaviour and political culture. Hence, the methods employed in ‘building socialism’, derived from previous centuries and combined with twentieth-century technology, actually built something called Stalinism.