The Penguin History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century

9 The First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932)

From 1928 Stalin and his associates undertook a series of actions that drastically rearranged and reinforced the compound of the Soviet order. Lenin’s basic elements were maintained: the single-party state, the single official ideology, the manipulation of legality and the state’s economic dominance. In this basic respect Stalin’s group was justified in claiming to be championing the Leninist cause.

Yet certain other elements were greatly altered and these became the object of dispute. Compromises with national and cultural aspirations had existed since 1917, and there had been relaxations of religious policy from the early 1920s: Stalin brusquely reversed this approach. Moreover, he crudified politics and hyper-centralized administrative institutions. Yet this was still a compound bearing the handiwork of Lenin’s communist party — and in economics, indeed, he strengthened the state’s existing dominance: legal private enterprise above the level of highly-restricted individual production and commerce practically ceased. Stalin’s enemies in the party contended that a rupture with Leninism had occurred and that a new system of Stalinism had been established. Official spokesmen, inveterate liars though they were, were nearer to the truth in this matter when they talked of the development of ‘Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism’. Such a term asserted continuity while affirming that Stalin had changed the balance and composition of the elements of the Soviet compound.

The fracturing of the NEP began not in Moscow but in the provinces — and at the time there were few signs that anything was afoot. Nor did it start with foreign policy or factional struggles or industrializing schemes. The origins can be traced to a journey to the Urals and Siberia taken by Stalin in January 1928.He was travelling there on behalf of the Central Committee in order to identify what could be done about the fall-off in grain shipments to the towns. None of his colleagues had any idea of his true intentions.

Once he was beyond the scrutiny of his central party colleagues, Stalin brashly issued fresh instructions for the collection of cereal crops in the region. In many ways he was re-instituting the methods of War Communism as peasants were called to village gatherings and ordered to deliver their stocks of grain to the state authorities. The policy of grain requisitioning was replicated later in 1928 across the USSR. Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreev, Andrei Zhdanov, Stanislav Kosior and Stalin’s newly-discovered supporter in mid-Siberia, Sergei Syrtsov, were instructed to lead campaigns in the major agricultural regions. Over the next two years the New Economic Policy was piece by piece destroyed. In agriculture it was replaced by a system of collective farms. In industry it gave way to a Five-Year Plan which assigned both credit and production targets to factories, mines and construction sites. Private commercial firms vanished. Force was applied extensively. Kulaks were repressed, managers were persecuted, wages were lowered.

Planning as a concept acquired a great vogue around the world. The instability of capitalism after the Great War had an impact upon the attitudes of many people in the West, especially when the foundations of the global financial system were shaken by the Great Depression in autumn 1929. Mass unemployment afflicted all capitalist countries. There was a slump in trade and production across Europe. Bankrupt financiers leapt out of the windows of New York skyscrapers.

Central state direction of economic development gained in favour as politicians and journalists reported that the Soviet Union was avoiding the financial catastrophe that was engulfing the Western economies. Outside the global communist movement there continued to be abhorrence for the USSR; but the use of authoritarian measures to effect an exit from crisis acquired broader respectability. Dictatorship was not uncommon in inter-war Europe. Benito Mussolini, an ex-socialist, had seized power in Rome in 1922 for his National Fascist Party, and right-wing dictatorships were established in countries such as Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia. In Germany, too, democracy was under threat in the 1920s from a Nazi party which — like the German Communist Party — did not disguise its contempt for due legal process. Confidence in the old — and not so old — ways of conducting politics was widely being eroded.

Yet Stalin, while talking of the virtues of planning, did not have detailed projects in mind when changing policy in 1928–32. If he had a Grand Plan, he kept it strictly to himself. Nevertheless he was not behaving at random: his activities occurred within the framework of his prejudices and ambition; and there was an internal logic to the step-by-step choices that he made.

Stalin attracted much support from fellow communist leaders. The use of force on ‘kulaks’ was welcomed as an end of ideological compromise: Stalin seemed to be fulfilling the commitments of the October Revolution and ending the frustrations of the NEP. In particular, several central politicians warmed to his initiative: Central Committee Secretaries Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich; Supreme Council of the National Economy Chairman Valeryan Kuibyshev; and Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate Chairman Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Their enthusiasm for Stalin was replicated in many local party bodies. Favour was also shown by low-level functionaries in the OGPU, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, the Komsomol and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. Personnel in those institutions with an interest in increasing their control over society were in the forefront of his supporters. In Stalin they found a Politburo leader who gave them the opportunity they had been seeking.

Certain economists, too, backed his case. S. G. Strumilin argued that it did not matter if the setting of economic targets was not based on the normal extrapolation of statistics; his demand was always for the party to aim at achieving the impossible. This ‘teleological’ school of economic planning signified a determination to make the data fit any desired objective. Supporters such as Strumilin treated Stalin’s programme like a priceless photographic film waiting to be exposed to the light by their eager professional chemistry.

Stalin’s actions appalled his ally Nikolai Bukharin. The NEP had entered a critical phase by the winter of 1927–8; but whereas Bukharin wished to assure peasants that the party aimed to foster their immediate interests, Stalin had lost patience. Ostensibly Bukharin was in a strong position. The list of communist party luminaries who supported the NEP was impressive: Aleksei Rykov, Lenin’s successor as Chairman of Sovnarkom; Mikhail Tomski, Chairman of the Central Council of Trade Unions; Nikolai Uglanov, Moscow City Party First Secretary. The fact that Bukharin, Rykov and Tomski also belonged to the Politburo meant that they could press their opinions at the summit of the political system. Moreover, they had privileged access to the media of public communication. Through the pages of Pravda, which Bukharin edited, they affirmed to their readers that the NEP had not been abandoned.

Stalin dared not contradict this. The NEP was closely associated with the name of Lenin, and Stalin always saw the point of identifying his policies as a continuation of Lenin’s intentions. Even in later years, when the NEP had been completely jettisoned, Stalin went on claiming that his new measures were merely an incremental development of the NEP.

His sensitivity had been acute upon his return from the Urals and Siberia; for he knew that he could not yet count on being able to convince the central party leadership that his requisitioning campaign should be extended to the rest of the country. In January 1928 he had already been contemplating the rapid collectivization of Soviet agriculture as the sole means of preventing the recurrent crises in food supplies.¹ But he was still unclear how he might achieve this; and his need at the time was to withstand criticisms by Bukharin and his friends. The Politburo met in April 1928 to discuss the results of the requisitioning campaign. Bukharin was unsettled by the violence; but he, too, was reticent in public. Having just seen off the United Opposition, he did not wish to reveal any divisions in the ascendant party leadership. Thus although the Politburo condemned ‘excesses’ of local grain-seizing authorities, the resolution did not appear in the newspapers and did not mention the main culprit, Stalin, by name.

For some weeks it seemed to many who were not privy to the balance of authority in the Politburo that Bukharin was getting the upper hand. The July 1928 Central Committee plenum debated the party’s attitude to the agrarian crisis, and Bukharin proposed that conciliatory measures were overdue. The plenum decided to raise prices paid by governmental agencies for grain. The hope was to revive the willingness of rural inhabitants to trade their surpluses of wheat and other cereal crops. The restoration of voluntary trade between countryside and town seemed to have become the central party’s goal yet again. But the plenum’s decision had little impact on the availability of food supplies and tensions in the Politburo did not abate. In September a frantic Bukharin published ‘Notes of an Economist’, an article which summarized the arguments for the party to abide by the NEP. The impression was given that official policy had reverted to its earlier position and that the emergency situation would shortly be brought to an end.²

In reality, Stalin and Bukharin were barely on speaking terms and Stalin had in no way become reconciled to rehabilitating the NEP. Bukharin was accustomed to standing up for his opinions. As a young Marxist in 1915, he had argued against Lenin on socialist political strategy. In 1918 he had led the Left Communists against signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In 1920–21 he had criticized not only Trotski but also Lenin in the ‘trade union controversy’; and he had held his ground when Lenin had subsequently continued to attack his views on philosophy and culture.

He was intellectually inquisitive and rejected the conventional Bolshevik assumption that only Marxists could contribute to knowledge about history and politics. He lectured at the Institute of Red Professors, and brought on a group of young Bolshevik philosophers as his protégés. His mind had a cultural sophistication; he loved poetry and novels and was a talented painter in oils: he would always come back from his summertime trips to the mountains with freshly-finished canvases. He also liked a bit of levity in his life: he did cartwheels on a Paris pavement in order to impress a new wife.³ Bukharin identified himself with the country’s youth, often wearing the red necktie sported by teenage adherents of the Komsomol. Born in 1888 to a schoolmaster’s family, he was nearly a decade younger than Stalin. As Lenin once remarked, he was ‘the golden boy’ of the Bolshevik party. Even oppositionists found it hard to dislike him.

Bukharin was no saint. In the 1920s he had shown his nasty side in internal party polemics about the NEP. In the universities, moreover, he imperturbably ruined the career of many non-communist academics. But he also had more than his fair share of naïvety. In particular, he had been taken in by Stalin’s gruff charm. They appeared to get on famously together, and Bukharin did much to make Stalin respectable again after the brouhaha over Lenin’s testament. By 1928 it was too late for Bukharin to admit to Kamenev and Zinoviev that they had been right — however belatedly, even in their case — about Stalin’s personal degeneracy.

This was not a politician who had the insight or skills to defeat Stalin. By the last months of 1928 the spat between them was resumed when the results of Bukharin’s defence of the NEP became apparent. The increase in prices offered by the state for agricultural produce failed to induce the peasantry to return to the market on the desired scale. At the Central Committee plenum in November, Stalin went back on to the offensive and demanded a comprehensive policy of requisitioning. From the Urals and Siberia there also came a proposal that the grain supplies should be seized mainly from the kulaks. This would be done, it was suggested, by local authorities calling a meeting of all peasants within a given locality and invoking them to indicate which of the richer households were hoarding grain. The poorer households were simultaneously to be enabled to have a share of the cereal stocks discovered during the campaign. This process, which became known as ‘the Urals-Siberian method’, was applied across the USSR from the winter of 1928–9.⁴

Every action by Stalin put Bukharin at a disadvantage; for the struggle between them was not confined to the problem of grain supplies. In March 1928, at Stalin’s instigation, it had been announced that a counter-revolutionary plot had been discovered among the technical staff at the Shakhty coal-mine in the Don Basin. The trial was a judicial travesty. Stalin took a close, direct part in decisions about the engineers.⁵ His ulterior purpose was easy to guess. He was grasping the opportunity to use Shakhty as a means of intimidating every economist, manager or even party official who objected to the raising of tempos of industrial growth. This was a feature of his modus operandi. Although his own basic thinking was unoriginal, he could quickly evaluate and utilize the ideas of others: Stalin knew what he liked when he saw it, and his supporters quickly learned the kind of thing that appealed to him.

It ought to be noted that he also added his own little flourishes. The Shakhty engineers were physically abused by the OGPU, forced to memorize false self-incriminations and paraded in a show-trial in May and June 1928. Five of the accused were shot; most of the rest were sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment. The Shakhty trial stirred up industrial policy as crudely as Stalin’s visit to the Urals and Siberia had done to agricultural policy. Experts in Gosplan were harassed into planning for breakneck economic growth; and factory and mining managers were intimidated into trying to put all Gosplan’s projects into effect. Otherwise they faced being sacked and even arrested.

A campaign of industrialization was being undertaken that went beyond the ambitions of the defeated United Opposition. By midsummer 1928, Stalin was telling the central party leadership that industry’s growth required that a ‘tribute’ should be exacted from agriculture. Factories were to be built with the revenues from the countryside. Yet most of the expansion, he declared, would be financed not by rural taxation but by a further massive campaign of rationalization of industrial production. Thus the ‘optimal’ version of the Plan sanctioned by the Fifth USSR Congress of Soviets in May 1929 anticipated a rise by only thirty-two per cent in the number of workers and employees in industry whereas labour productivity was expected to rise by 110 per cent. Stalin was supported robustly by Molotov, Kuibyshev and Ordzhonikidze in the press and at party gatherings. Their prognosis was outlandish (although it may possibly have been intended sincerely); but it allowed them to predict that the average real wages of the working class would rise by seventy per cent.⁶

This placed Bukharin in the unenviable position of arguing against an economic policy purporting to guarantee an improvement in the standard of living of the urban poor. Stalin’s belligerence increased. At the joint meeting of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission in January 1929 he upbraided Bukharin for his objections and accused him of factionalism. The last Politburo leader to be found guilty of this, Trotski, was deported from the country in the same month. Bukharin was placed in serious political danger as the charge was levelled that he and Rykov and Tomski headed a Right Deviation from the principles of Marxism-Leninism.

‘Deviation’ was a significant term, implying that Bukharin’s group was too ill-organized to merit being called an Opposition.⁷ But Bukharin did not give up. At the next Central Committee meeting, in April 1929, he attacked the pace of industrialization being imposed by Stalin; he also castigated the resumption of violent requisitioning of agricultural produce. Stalin counter-attacked immediately: ‘None of your côterie is a Marxist: they’re fraudsters. Not one of you has got an understanding of Lenin.’ Bukharin retorted: ‘What, are you the only one with such an understanding?’⁸ But the mood of the majority of Central Committee members was against the ‘Rightists’, and the industrial quotas and the grain seizures were approved. Across the country the active supporters of Bukharin, few as they were, were dismissed from their posts. In Moscow, Nikolai Uglanov was replaced by Molotov as City Party Committee secretary. The NEP became virtually irretrievable.

Stalin was roused by the response to his reorientation of policy. The Urals Regional Committee, for instance, commissioned the making of a ceremonial sword: on one side of the blade was inscribed ‘Chop the Right Deviation’, on the other ‘Chop the Left Deviation’; and on the butt were the words: ‘Beat Every Conciliator’. This was the language Stalin liked to hear. His career would be ruined unless the Five-Year Plan was successful, and he was determined that there should be no shilly-shallying. Stalin put the matter vividly in 1931: ‘To lower the tempos means to lag behind. And laggards are beaten. But we don’t want to be beaten. No, we don’t want it! The history of old Russia consisted, amongst other things, in her being beaten continually for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish-Lithuanian nobles. She was beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. She was beaten by all of them for her backwardness.’⁹

The economic transformation, in Stalin’s opinion, could not be accomplished unless the USSR stayed clear of military entanglements abroad. His Five-Year Plan was premised on the Kremlin’s need to purchase up-to-date machinery from these powers. It would obviously be difficult to induce foreign governments and business companies to enter into commercial deals if there remained any suspicion that the Red Army might be about to try again to spread revolution on the points of its bayonets.

The ascendant party leaders assumed that Soviet grain exports would pay for the machinery imports; but there was a further slump in global cereal prices in 1929: the result was that although over twice as much grain was shipped abroad in 1930 than in 1926–7, the revenue from such sales rose by only six per cent.¹⁰ Since gold exports were not enough to bridge the gap, short-term credits had to be raised to finance the Five-Year Plan. Banks and businesses in the West were only too eager to sign deals with the USSR after the Great Depression of autumn. Up-to-date machinery was imported, especially from the USA and Germany. Contracts were signed, too, for large foreign firms to supply expertise to assist with the construction of new Soviet enterprises. The American Ford car company, the greatest symbol of world capitalism, signed a deal to help to build a gigantic automotive works in Nizhni Novgorod.¹¹

Stalin hardly needed to be nudged towards allaying Western fears about Soviet international intentions. Under the NEP he had made a name for himself with the slogan of ‘Socialism in One Country’. Repeatedly he had suggested that the USSR should avoid involvement in capitalist countries’ affairs while building a socialist society and economy at home. Foreign policy during the Five-Year Plan was made subordinate to domestic policy more firmly than ever.

Bukharin came to agree with Trotski that Stalin had abandoned the objective of European socialist revolution. The unequivocality of this judgement was incorrect. In 1928, most communists grew to believe in the imminent collapse of capitalism. Stalin went along with them so long as nothing was done to endanger the USSR’s security. The German Communist Party contained many leaders who wanted to break with the policy of a ‘united front’ with other socialist parties in Germany, and in the first year of the Five-Year Plan it was hard to dissuade these leaders from thinking revolutionary thoughts. Under a certain amount of pressure from the German communist leadership, the Comintern at the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928 laid down that an instruction was given that the parties such as the German Social-Democrats and the British Labour Party should be treated as communism’s main political adversaries. Thus the Comintern took ‘a turn to the left’.¹² The European political far right, including Hitler’s Nazis, was largely to be disregarded. The task for the German Communist Party was to build up its strength separately so that it might seize power at some future date.

Among Stalin’s several motives in supporting the international turn to the left was a wish to cause maximum discomfort to Bukharin, who was closely identified as the NEP’s advocate at home and abroad. Throughout 1928–9 Bukharin was humiliated by being forced to condemn ‘rightist’ policies among the various member parties of Comintern. This was of considerable help to Stalin in the imposition of the Five-Year Plan at home. Bukharin was no longer the ascendant star of official world communism.

Constantly the Politburo quickened the projected pace of industrialization. Cheap labour was made available by peasants fleeing the villages. They came for work and for ration-cards, and their arrival permitted a lowering of the wages of labourers; for the commitment to raising wages was soon found unrealistic. In spring 1929 Stalin, seeking still cheaper labour, appointed a Central Committee commission under N. Yanson to explore opportunities for convicts to work on projects in the USSR’s less hospitable regions. The prisons were already crammed with peasants who had resisted being pushed into collective farms: Yanson recommended their transfer to the forced-labour camps subject to the OGPU.¹³ Among the first results was the formation of the ‘Dalstroi’ trust in the Far East which ran the notorious gold mines of Kolyma.

The Politburo also resolved the question as to how to handle those peasants who remained in the countryside. After two successive winters of grain seizures, the peasants would not voluntarily maintain their sown area. Bolsheviks already believed that collective farms, with large production units and electrically-powered machinery, were the solution to agrarian backwardness. Thus the Politburo majority, against Bukharin’s counsel, came to the opinion that compulsory collectivization should be initiated (although the fiction was maintained in public that coercion would not be used). To Molotov was entrusted the job of explaining this to the Central Committee in November 1929. Bukharin was sacked from the Politburo at the same meeting and, in the following month, Stalin’s fiftieth birthday was celebrated with extravagant eulogies in the mass media. By January 1930 the Politburo was insisting that a quarter of the sown area should be held by collective farms within two years. An agricultural revolution was heralded.

And yet both agriculture and industry were altogether too chaotic to be described without reservation as being integrated within ‘a planned economy’. For example, the Five-Year Plan of 1928–33 was drawn up six months after it was said to have been inaugurated (and the Plan was said to be completed a year before it was meant to end). Rough commands were of a more practical importance than carefully-elaborated planning; and the commands were based on guesses, prejudices and whims. At best the officials of Gosplan could rectify the worst mistakes before too much damage was done. But huge human suffering occurred before any particular experiment was halted on the grounds of being dyseconomic.

‘Class struggle’ was intensified through a governmental assault upon the so-called kulaks. It was laid down that the collective farms should be formed exclusively from poor and middling peasant households. Kulaks stood to lose most from collectivization in material terms; they tended also to be more assertive than average. At least, this is how Stalin saw things. He set up a Politburo commission to investigate how to decapitate kulak resistance. Its proposals were accepted by him and incorporated in a Sovnarkom decree of February 1930. Kulaks were to be disbarred from joining collective farms and divided into three categories. Those in category one were to be dispatched to forced-labour settlements or shot. Category two comprised households deemed more hostile to the government; these were to go to distant provinces. Category three consisted of the least ‘dangerous’ households, which were allowed to stay in their native district but on a smaller patch of land. Between five and seven million persons were treated as belonging to kulak families.¹⁴

The decree could not be fulfilled without magnifying violence. The Red Army and the OGPU were insufficient in themselves and anyway the Politburo could not depend on the implicit obedience of their officers of rural origins.¹⁵ And so tough young lads from the factories, militia and the party went out to the villages to enforce the establishment of collective farms. About 25,000 of them rallied to the Politburo’s summons. Before they set out from the towns, these ‘25,000-ers’ were told that the kulaks were responsible for organizing a ‘grain strike’ against the towns. They were not issued with detailed instructions as to how to distinguish the rich, middling and poor peasants from each other. Nor were they given limits on their use of violence. The Politburo set targets for grain collection, for collectivization and for de-kulakization, and did not mind how these targets were hit.

But when they arrived in the villages, the ‘25,000-ers’ saw for themselves that many hostile peasants were far from being rich. The central party apparatus imaginatively introduced a special category of ‘sub-kulaks’ who were poor but yet opposed the government.¹⁶ Sub-kulaks were to be treated as if they were kulaks. Consequently Stalin’s collectivizing mayhem, involving executions and deportations, was never confined to the better-off households. The slightest resistance to the authorities was met with punitive violence. With monumental insincerity he wrote an article for Pravda in March 1930, ‘Dizzy with Success’, in which he called local functionaries to task for abusing their authority. But this was a temporizing posture. For Stalin, the priority remained mass collectivization. By the time of the harvest of 1931, collective farms held practically all the land traditionally given over to cereal crops. Stalin and the Politburo had won the agrarian war.

The price was awful. Probably four to five million people perished in 1932–3 from ‘de-kulakization’ and from grain seizures.¹⁷ The dead and the dying were piled on to carts by the urban detachments and pitched into common graves without further ceremony. Pits were dug on the outskirts of villages for the purpose. Child survivors, their stomachs swollen through hunger, gnawed grass and tree-bark and begged for crusts. Human beings were not the only casualties. While the government’s policies were killing peasants, peasants were killing their livestock: they had decided that they would rather eat their cattle and horses than let them be expropriated by the collective farms. Even some of Stalin’s colleagues blanched when they saw the effects with their own eyes. For instance, Ordzhonikidze was aghast at the behaviour of officials in eastern Ukraine;¹⁸ but he felt no need to criticize mass compulsory collectivization as general policy.

Collectivization was a rural nightmare. It is true that the average harvest in 1928–30 was good.¹⁹ But this was chiefly the product of excellent weather conditions. It certainly did not result from improved agricultural management; for often the collective farm chairmen were rural ne’er-do-wells or inexpert party loyalists from the towns. Nor did the state fulfil its promise to supply the countryside with 100,000 tractors by the end of the Five-Year Plan. Only half of these were built,²⁰ and most of them were used inefficiently through lack of experienced drivers and mechanics.

With the exception of 1930, mass collectivization meant that not until the mid-1950s did agriculture regain the level of output achieved in the last years before the Great War. Conditions in the countryside were so dire that the state had to pump additional resources into the country in order to maintain the new agrarian order. Increased investment in tractors was not the only cost incurred. Revenues had to be diverted not only to agronomists, surveyors and farm chairmen but also to soldiers, policemen and informers. Moreover, ‘machine-tractor stations’ had to be built from 1929 to provide equipment and personnel for the introduction of technology (as well as to provide yet another agency to control the peasantry). Otherwise the rickety structure of authority would have collapsed. No major state has inflicted such grievous economic damage on itself in peacetime.

Yet Stalin could draw up a balance sheet that, from his standpoint, was favourable. From collectivization he acquired a reservoir of terrified peasants who would supply him with cheap industrial labour. To some extent, too, he secured his ability to export Soviet raw materials in order to pay for imports of industrial machinery (although problems arose with foreign trade in 1931–2). Above all, he put an end to the recurrent crises faced by the state in relation to urban food supplies as the state’s grain collections rose from 10.8 million tons in 1928–9 to 22.8 million tons in 1931–2.²¹ After collectivization it was the countryside, not the towns, which went hungry if the harvest was bad.

Stalin was still more delighted with the record of industry. The large factories and mines had been governmentally-owned since 1917–19, but the number of such enterprises rose steeply after 1928. Thirty-eight per cent of industrial capital stock by the end of 1934 was located in factories built in the previous half-dozen years.²² Simultaneously the smaller manufacturing firms — most of which had been in private hands during the NEP — were closed down. The First Five-Year Plan was meant to end in September 1933; in fact its completion was announced in December 1932. Mines and factories were claimed to have doubled their production since 1928. This was exaggeration. Yet even sceptical estimates put the annual expansion in industrial output at ten per cent between 1928 and 1941; and the production of capital goods probably grew at twice the rate of consumer goods during the Five-Year Plan.²³ The USSR had at last been pointed decisively towards the goal of a fully industrialized society.

Stalin the Man of Steel boasted that he had introduced ‘socialism’ to the villages. The nature of a collective farm was ill-defined; no Bolshevik before 1917 — not even Lenin — had explained exactly what such farms should be like. There was much practical experimentation with them after 1917: at one end of the range there were farms that required their employees to take decisions collectively and share land, housing, equipment and income equally, regardless of personal input of labour; at the other end it was possible to find arrangements allowing peasant households to form a co-operative and yet keep their land, housing and equipment separately from each other and to make their own separate profits.

The idea of peasants taking most of their own decisions was anathema to Stalin. The government, he insisted, should own the land, appoint the farm chairmen and set the grain-delivery quotas. His ideal organization was the sovkhoz. This was a collective farm run on the same principles as a state-owned factory. Local authorities marked out the land for each sovkhoz and hired peasants for fixed wages. Such a type of farming was thought eminently suitable for the grain-growing expanses in Ukraine and southern Russia. Yet Stalin recognized that most peasants were ill-disposed to becoming wage labourers, and he yielded to the extent of permitting most farms to be of the kolkhoz type. In a kolkhoz the members were rewarded by results. If the quotas were not met, the farm was not paid. Furthermore, each peasant was paid a fraction of the farm wage-fund strictly in accordance with the number of ‘labour days’ he or she had contributed to the farming year.

And so the kolkhoz was defined as occupying a lower level of socialist attainment than the sovkhoz. In the long run the official expectation was that all kolkhozes would be turned into sovkhozes in Soviet agriculture; but still the kolkhoz, despite its traces of private self-interest, was treated as a socialist organizational form.

In reality, most kolkhozniki, as the kolkhoz members were known, could no more make a profit in the early 1930s than fly to Mars. Rural society did not submit without a struggle and 700,000 peasants were involved in disturbances at the beginning of 1930.²⁴ But the resistance was confined to a particular village or group of villages. Fewer large revolts broke out in Russia than in areas where non-Russians were in the majority: Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus, Ukraine and parts of Siberia. Yet the official authorities had advantages in their struggle against the peasants which had been lacking in 1920–22.²⁵ In the collectivization campaign from the late 1920s it was the authorities who went on the offensive, and they had greatly superior organization and fire-power. Peasants were taken by surprise and counted themselves lucky if they were still alive by the mid-1930s. Battered into submission, they could only try to make the best of things under the new order imposed by the Soviet state.

An entire way of life, too, was being pummelled out of existence. The peasant household was no longer the basic social unit recognized by the authorities. Grain quotas were imposed on the collective farm as a whole, and peasants were given their instructions as individuals rather than as members of households.

Industrial workers were fortunate by comparison. Except during the famine of 1932–3, their consumption of calories was as great as it had been under the NEP. But although conditions were better in the towns than in the countryside, they were still very hard. The quality of the diet worsened and food rationing had to be introduced in all towns and cities: average calory levels were maintained only because more bread and potatoes were eaten while consumption of meat fell by two thirds. Meanwhile wages for blue-collar jobs fell in real terms by a half in the course of the Five-Year Plan.²⁶ Of course, this is not the whole story. The men and women who had served their factory apprenticeship in the 1920s were encouraged to take evening classes and secure professional posts. Consequently many existing workers obtained material betterment through promotion. About one and a half million managers and administrators in 1930–33 had recently been elevated from manual occupations.²⁷

This was also one of the reasons why the working class endured the Five-Year Plan’s rigours without the violent resistance offered by peasant communities. Another was that most of the newcomers to industry, being mainly rural young men who filled the unskilled occupations, had neither the time nor the inclination to strike for higher wages; and the OGPU was efficient at detecting and suppressing such dissent as it arose. Go-slows, walk-outs and even occasional demonstrations took place, but these were easily contained.

Of course, Stalin and OGPU chief Yagoda left nothing to chance. The OGPU scoured its files for potential political opponents still at large. Former Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were hunted out even though their parties had barely existed since the 1922 show-trial of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. But whereas Lenin had trumped up charges against genuinely existing parties, Stalin invented parties out of the air. A show-trial of the imaginary ‘Industrial Party’ was staged in November 1930. The defendants were prepared for their judicial roles by an OGPU torturer; they were mainly persons who had worked for the Soviet regime but had previously been industrialists, high-ranking civil servants or prominent Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. In 1931 a trial of the fictitious ‘Union Bureau’ of the Menshevik party was organized. Trials were held in the major cities of Russia and the other Soviet republics. Newspapers were stuffed with stories of professional malefactors caught, arraigned and sentenced.

Stalin glorified the changes in the political environment by declaring that the party had ‘re-formed its own ranks in battle order’. Administrators with ‘suspect’ class origins or political opinions were sacked from their jobs. Workers were hallooed into denouncing any superiors who obstructed the implementation of the Five-Year Plan. A witch-hunt atmosphere was concocted. For Stalin used the party as a weapon to terrify all opposition to his economic policies. He needed to operate through an institution that could be trusted to maintain political fidelity, organizational solidity and ideological rectitude while the Soviet state in general was being transformed and reinforced. In the late 1920s only the party could fulfil this function.

But the party, too, needed to be made dependable. Expulsions started in May 1929, resulting in a loss of eleven per cent of the membership. A recruitment campaign began at the same time, and the party expanded its number of members from 1.3 million in 1928 to 2.2 million in 1931.²⁸ Party secretaries at the various local levels were the Politburo’s local chief executives. Republican party leaders were handpicked by the Politburo for this role; and in the RSFSR Stalin constructed a regional tier in the party’s organizational hierarchy which brought together groups of provinces under the reinforced control of a single regional committee.²⁹ Thus the Mid-Volga Regional Committee oversaw collectivization across an agricultural region the size of the entire United Kingdom. Party secretaries had been virtually the unchallengeable economic bosses in the localities since the middle of the Civil War. But there was also a large difference. In the 1920s private agriculture, commerce and industry had been widespread; under the Five-Year Plan only a few corners of non-state economic activity survived.

Yet still the central leadership could not regard the party with equanimity. The picture of over-fulfilled economic plans painted by the newspapers involved much distortion. And where there was indeed over-fulfilment, as in steel production, its quality was often too poor for use in manufacturing. Wastage occurred on a huge scale and the problem of uncoordinated production was ubiquitous. The statistics themselves were fiddled not only by a central party machine wishing to fool the world but also by local functionaries wanting to trick the central party machine. Deceit was deeply embedded in the mode of industrial and agricultural management.

It has been asserted that shoddy, unusable goods were so high a proportion of output that official claims for increases in output were typically double the reality. If the increase in output has been exaggerated, then perhaps Stalin’s forced-rate industrialization and forcible mass collectivization were not indispensable to the transformation of Russia into a military power capable of defeating Hitler in the Second World War. An extrapolation of the NEP’s economic growth rate into the 1930s even suggests that a Bukharinist leadership would have attained an equal industrial capacity. This is not the end of the debate; for as the First Five-Year Plan continued, Stalin diverted investment increasingly towards the defence sub-sector. Nearly six per cent of such capital was dedicated to the Red Army’s requirements: this was higher than the combined total for agricultural machines, tractors, cars, buses and lorries.³⁰ It was easier for Stalin to bring this about than it would have been for Bukharin who wanted peasant aspirations to be taken into account.

Yet Bukharin would have ruled a less traumatized society, and been more able to count on popular goodwill. Bukharin’s perceptiveness in foreign policy might also have helped him. Stalin’s guesses about Europe were very faulty. In the German elections of 1932 the communists were instructed to campaign mostly against the social-democrats: Hitler’s Nazis were to be ignored. There were comrades from Berlin such as Franz Neumann who questioned Stalin’s judgement. But Stalin calmly replied: ‘Don’t you think, Neumann, that if the nationalists come to power in Germany, they’ll be so completely preoccupied with the West that we’ll be able to build up socialism in peace?’³¹ Stalin’s judgement did not lack perceptiveness: he correctly anticipated that Hitler would stir up a deal of trouble for the Allies who had imposed the Treaty of Versailles — and since the end of the Great War it had been Britain and France, not Germany, which had caused greatest trouble to Soviet political leaders.

Yet when due allowance is made, his comment underestimated the profound danger of Nazism to the USSR and to Europe as a whole. It also displayed the influence of Leninist thinking. Lenin, too, had asserted that the German extreme right might serve the purpose of smashing up the post-Versailles order;³² he had also stressed that Soviet diplomacy should be based on the principle of evading entanglement in inter-capitalist wars. The playing of one capitalist power against another was an enduring feature of Soviet foreign policy.³³ This does not mean that Lenin would have been as casual as Stalin about Adolf Hitler. Yet as socialism was misbuilt in the USSR, silence was enforced by the Politburo about the risks being taken with the country’s security.

Stalin had tried to root out every possible challenge to both domestic and foreign policies. His suspicions were not without foundation. Many party and state functionaries had supported his rupture with the NEP without anticipating the exact policies and their consequences. Most of them had not bargained for famine, terror and Stalin’s growing personal dictatorship. Small groupings therefore came together to discuss alternative policies. Beso Lominadze and Sergei Syrtsov, one-time supporters of Stalin, expressed their disgruntlement to each other in autumn 1929.An informer denounced them and they were expelled from the Central Committee.³⁴ In 1932 another group was formed by Mikhail Ryutin, who sought Stalin’s removal from power; and yet another group coalesced under A. P. Smirnov, Nikolai Eismont and V. N. Tolmachev. Both groups were detected by the OGPU and arrested; but their existence at a time when the punishments for ‘factionalism’ were increasing in severity showed how restive the party had become.

Then there were the oppositionist leaders waiting for a chance to return to the Politburo: Kamenev and Zinoviev had publicly recanted and been allowed to return to the party in 1928; Bukharin had avoided expulsion from the party by publicly accepting official party policy in November 1929. Their professions of loyalty convinced no one, and Trotski wasted no time in publishing his Bulletin of the Opposition from abroad and in initiating a secret correspondence with several disaffected communist officials.³⁵ All these disgraced former leaders knew that they could count on many existing party functionaries, activists and rank-and-file members to support them if ever an opportunity arose.

They might also be able to appeal to the persons who had walked out on the party or had been expelled: there were about 1,500,000 such individuals by 1937.³⁶ In addition, the Socialist-Revolutionaries had possessed a million members in 1917, the Mensheviks a quarter of a million. Dozens of other parties in Russia and the borderlands had also existed. Huge sections of the population had always hated the entire Bolshevik party. Whole social strata were embittered: priests, shopkeepers, gentry, mullahs, industrialists, traders and ‘bourgeois specialists’. Among these ‘former people’ (byvshie lyudi), as the Bolsheviks brusquely described persons of influence before the October Revolution, hatred of Bolshevism was strong. Many peasants and workers had felt the same. And Stalin had made countless new enemies for the party. Collectivization, de-kulakization, urban show-trials and the forced-labour penal system had wrought suffering as great as had occurred in the Civil War.

Stalin had engineered a second revolution; he had completed the groundwork of an economic transformation. But his victory was not yet totally secure. For Stalin, the realization of the First Five-Year Plan could only be the first victory in the long campaign for his personal dictatorship and his construction of a mighty industrial state.

10 Fortresses under Storm: Culture, Religion, Nation

Stalin’s ambition was not confined to economics and politics. Like other Bolsheviks, he had always seen that the creation of a communist society necessitated further changes. Communist leaders also aspired to raise the level of education and technical skills in the population. They wished to expand the social base of their support; they had to dissolve Soviet citizens’ attachment to their national identity and religion. Bolshevism stood for literacy, numeracy, internationalism and atheism, and this commitment was among the reasons for the replacement of the NEP with the First Five-Year Plan.

Of all the regime’s achievements, it was its triumph over illiteracy that earned the widest esteem — and even anti-Bolsheviks were among the admirers. Education was treated as a battlefront. Only forty per cent of males between nine and forty-nine years of age had been able to read and write in 1897; this proportion had risen to ninety-four per cent by 1939.¹ The number of schools rose to 199,000 by the beginning of the 1940–41 academic year.² They were built not only in major areas of habitation like Russia and Ukraine but also in the most far-flung parts of the country such as Uzbekistan. Pedagogical institutes were created to train a generation of young teachers to take up their duties not only in schools for children and adolescents but also in polytechnics, night-schools and factory clubs for adults. Compulsory universal schooling was implemented with revolutionary gusto. The USSR was fast becoming a literate society.

As workers and ex-peasants thronged into the new educational institutions, they could buy reading materials at minimal cost. Pravda and Izvestiya in the 1930s were sold daily for ten kopeks, and the print-run of newspapers rose from 9.4 million copies in 1927 to 38 million in 1940.³ Other literature, too, was avidly purchased. The poet Boris Slutski recalled: ‘It may have been stupid economically, but books were sold for next to nothing, more cheaply than tobacco and bread.’⁴

Revenues were also channelled into the provision of inexpensive facilities for relaxation. By the end of the 1930s the USSR had 28,000 cinemas.⁵ Football, ice-hockey, athletics and gymnastics were turned into major sports for both participants and spectators. All-Union, republican, regional and local competitions proliferated across the country. For those who wanted quieter forms of recreation, ‘houses of culture’ were available with their own reading-rooms, notice-boards, stages and seating. Each medium-sized town had its theatre. Drama and ballet became popular with a public which looked forward to visits by companies on tour from Moscow. The authorities also laid aside space for parks. Families took Sunday strolls over public lawns — and the largest of all was the Park of Culture, which was named after the novelist Maksim Gorki, in the capital.

As in other industrial countries, the radio was becoming a medium of mass communication. Performers and commentators based in Moscow became celebrities throughout the USSR. News reports vied for attention with symphony concerts and variety entertainments. The telephone network was widened. Communications between district and district, town and town, republic and republic were impressively strengthened.

The foundation of new cities such as Magnitogorsk was celebrated (although Pravda was not allowed to report that a segment of the labour-force used for the construction consisted of Gulag prisoners).⁶ Housing was not built as fast as factories. But Russian towns whose houses had been chiefly of wooden construction were becoming characterized by edifices of brick and stone; and most new dwellings were apartments in immense blocks whose heating was supplied by communal boilers. The steam escaping through air-vents was a feature of the broad thoroughfares. The internal combustion engine took the place of horse-drawn vehicles for people going about their working lives. Goods were transported in lorries. In Moscow, the first section of the underground railway came into operation in 1935. A fresh style of life was introduced in remarkably short time so that Stalin’s slogan that ‘there are no fortresses the Bolsheviks cannot storm!’ seemed justified.

Thus a triumph for ‘modernity’ was claimed as the USSR advanced decisively towards becoming an urban, literate society with access to twentieth-century industrial technology; and Stalin’s adherents declared their modernity superior to all others by virtue of its being collectivist. The typical apartment block contained flats called kommunalki. Each such flat was occupied by several families sharing the same kitchen and toilet. Cafeterias were provided at workplaces so that meals need not be taken at home. The passenger vehicles produced by automotive factories were mainly buses and trams rather than cars — and such cars as were manufactured were bought mainly by institutions and not by individuals. State enterprises, which had a monopoly of industrial output from the end of the NEP, were steered away from catering for the individual choices of consumers. Whereas capitalism manufactured each product in a competitive variety, communism’s rationale was that this competition involved a waste of resources. Why waste money by developing and advertising similar products?

And so a pair of boots, a table, a light-bulb or a tin of sardines bought in Vladivostok or Archangel or Stavropol would have the same size and packaging. Clothing, too, became drab; local styles of attire disappeared as kolkhozniki were issued with working clothes from the factories and as village artisans ceased production. Standardization of design, too, was a basic governmental objective. Uniformity had been installed as a key positive value. Stalin was proud of his policies. Brazenly he announced to a mass meeting: ‘Life has become better, life has become gayer!’⁷

The changes in life were not better or gayer for everyone. Wage differentials had been sharply widened; material egalitarianism, which had anyway not been practised even in the October Revolution, was denounced. The administrative élites were amply rewarded in a society which had undergone huge structural change since the NEP. Spivs, grain-traders, shopkeepers and workshop owners had gone the way of the aristocracy, the gentry and the ‘big bourgeoisie’. The administrators had the cash to pay for goods in the sole retail outlets where high-quality consumer goods were on legal sale. These were state shops belonging to the Torgsin organization. In a Torgsin shop a previously well-off citizen could deposit some family heirloom which the shop would sell at a commission on the citizen’s behalf.⁸ Stalin’s economy was not all tractors, tanks and canals; it was also luxury goods, albeit luxury goods that were not being made in Soviet factories but were being sold on by individuals who had fallen on hard times since 1917.

By means of these blandishments the Politburo aimed to ensure that the stratum of newly promoted administrators would remain keen supporters of the NEP’s abandonment; and such persons were a large proportion of the fourfold increase in the number of state employees in institutions of education, health, housing, and public administration between 1926 and the end of the 1930s. But life was tough even for the middle-ranking administrators. The new schools, apartment blocks, hotels and kindergartens took years to build. Most working-class people, moreover, had yet to benefit at all from the general improvements promised by the Politburo. A generation was being asked to sacrifice its comfort for the benefit of its children and grandchildren. Hunger, violence and chaos were widespread, and the rupture of social linkages drastically increased the sense of loneliness in both the towns and the countryside. This was not a society capable of being at ease with itself.

Stalin, too, felt uneasy lest political opposition might arise inside or outside the party to exploit the situation. His attitude to Martemyan Ryutin, who was arrested in 1932 for leading a secret little group of communists who denounced his despotic rule and called for his removal from power, supplied a terrifying signal of his intentions. The fact that Ryutin had once belonged to the Central Committee apparently did not stop Stalin from calling for his execution. The Politburo instead ordered him to be sentenced to ten years’ detention in the Gulag. This treatment of an oppositionist was horrific by most standards, but was much too light for Stalin’s taste.

Yet he felt compelled to yield somewhat to the warnings being given, inside and outside the party, that failure to reduce the tempos of economic development would result in disaster. Even many of his central and local supporters stressed that conditions in industry were altogether too chaotic for the Second Five-Year Plan, introduced at the beginning of 1933, to be fulfilled in most of its objectives. A hurried re-drafting took place and a lower rate of growth was accepted. The new expectation was for a doubling of the output of industrial producers’ goods in the half-decade before the end of 1937. This was still a very rapid growth, but not at the breakneck speed of the First Five-Year Plan. The Politburo began to lay its emphasis upon completing the construction of the half-built factories and mines and getting them into full production. Consolidation of existing projects became the priority in the industrial sector.⁹

As policy was being modified in 1932, Bukharin was appointed chief editor of Izvestiya. Meanwhile Sergo Ordzhonikidze, as Chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy in 1930–32 and as People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry from 1932, protected managers and engineers from persecution.¹⁰

These modulations in official stance were extended to agriculture, which was in a frightful condition. In 1932 the fantastic scheme to increase state grain procurements by nearly thirty per cent over the previous year was quietly abandoned. The total of cereal crops actually obtained by the state did not rise at all, but dropped by nearly a fifth.¹¹ A decree was passed in the same year permitting the establishment of ‘kolkhoz markets’, where peasants could trade their surplus produce so long as they worked on those few kolkhozes which had fulfilled their quota of deliveries to the state. Another decree in 1933 allowed each household in a kolkhoz to cultivate a garden allotment for personal consumption or sale. Private profit was reintroduced even though it was banned from official terminology. In any case, these concessions were restricted to the margins of economic activity. Most industry, agriculture and commerce remained under strict state control; and the mass deportation of kulaks was intensified in the Kuban region and the North Caucasus. Yet the lesson had been learned that not even the economy of Stalin’s USSR could function without some residual components of the market.

And so the hope was inspired in some observers that Stalin’s demeanour during the First Five-Year Plan had been an aberration and that he would revert to less severe methods. Perhaps the party was about to return to the NEP. When he told the Central Committee plenum in January 1933 that he would not ‘go on whipping the country’, he was heard with relief by most of his listeners.¹²

Yet at the same plenum he bared his tigrine fangs as he advanced the following proposition: ‘The abolition of classes is not obtained through the elimination of class struggle but through its reinforcement.’¹³ For Stalin, his victory in the First Five-Year Plan was an occasion for the intensification rather than the relaxation of state violence. He pounced on his friend Ordzhonikidze for objecting to trials being held of officials from the People’s Commissariats for Heavy Industry and Agriculture. According to Stalin, Ordzhonikidze was guilty of hooliganism while Kaganovich, who was not unsympathetic to Ordzhonikidze, was accused of joining ‘the camp of the party’s reactionary elements’.¹⁴ The Boss, as his associates referred to him, was prowling with menace. The gravest snub he suffered face to face came not from an associate but from his wife Nadezhda, who seems to have agreed with Bukharin that the countryside had been ravaged by mass collectivization. Nor was she willing to tolerate his alleged flirtations with other women. After an altercation with him in November 1932, she had gone outside and shot herself.¹⁵

He had always been a solitary fellow, but the suicide of Nadezhda, whom he had loved despite their stormy relationship, shoved him further into himself. Stalin’s early life had been hard. Born to a Georgian couple in the little town of Gori near Tiflis, his real name was Iosif Dzhugashvili. His birthday was given out officially as 21 December 1879; but the parish records indicate that he entered this world a year earlier.¹⁶ Why he wished to alter the date remains a mystery; but, whatever his reasons, such a desire was in keeping with a man who liked to manipulate the image that others held of him.

Iosif’s father was a child-beating drunkard who died leaving the family penniless; but Katerina Dzhugashvili, the mother of Iosif, managed to have him enrolled in the Tiflis Ecclesiastical Seminary. He quickly picked up the Russian language and the rhythms of the catechism; but he was also rebellious: like thousands of adolescents of his generation, he preferred revolutionary literature to the Bible. After being expelled from the seminary, he wandered over the Transcaucasus picking up odd jobs and getting involved with clandestine political circles. When news of the split of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party reached him, he sided with the Bolsheviks whereas most Georgian Marxists became Mensheviks. Young Dzhugashvili, whose pseudonym was first Koba and then Stalin (or ‘Man of Steel’), reacted positively to themes of dictatorship, terror, modernity, progress and leadership in Lenin’s writings.

Stalin became an organizer for the Bolsheviks and so underwent arrest several times. His articles on the ‘national question’ commended him to Lenin as ‘the wonderful Georgian’, and he was co-opted to the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912. He was sent to St Petersburg to edit the legal Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, but was quickly captured and exiled to Siberia. There he stayed until 1917. A street accident he had suffered as a lad left him with a slightly shortened arm, and because of this he escaped conscription into the Imperial Army.

Returning to the Russian capital after the February Revolution, he was not fêted to the extent of Lenin and the émigré veterans. He seemed unimpressive alongside them. Unlike them, he had made only brief trips abroad. He could not speak German or French or English. He was a poor orator, a plodding theorist and a prickly character. Yet his organizational expeditiousness was highly valued, and he joined the inner core of the Central Committee before the October Revolution. Thereafter he became People’s Commissar for Nationalities in the first Sovnarkom and served uninterruptedly in the Party Politburo from 1919. In the Civil War he was appointed as leading political commissar on several fronts and was regarded by Lenin as one of his most dependable troubleshooters, acquiring a reputation for a fierce decisiveness. In 1920 he added the chairmanship of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate to his list of posts, and in 1922 became General Secretary of the Party Central Committee.

Stalin’s rivals in his own party would soon pay dearly for their condescension. He was crude and brutal even by Bolshevik standards, and was proud of the fact. On the Southern front in 1918 he had put villages to the torch to terrorize the peasantry of an entire region, and but for Lenin’s intervention would have drowned scores of innocent former Imperial Army officers on a prison barge moored on the river Volga.

But Stalin’s rivals had no excuse for underestimating Stalin’s intelligence. His lack of intellectual sophistication did not mean that he was unmotivated by ideas; and he was conscious enough of the gaps in his education to take on Jan Sten as a private tutor in philosophy in the 1920s.¹⁷ He was also a voracious reader, supposedly getting through a daily quota of 500 pages.¹⁸ Although his objects of study changed, his orientation was constant. He despised middle-class experts, believing that the regime could train up its own ‘specialists’ in short order. The ‘filth’ from the old days ought to be cleansed (or ‘purged’); social, economic and political problems should not be allowed to await solution. Those persons deemed responsible for the survival of such problems had to be physically exterminated. Let saboteurs and renegades perish! Let there be steel, iron and coal! Long live comrade Stalin!

That this maladjusted character, whose mistrustfulness was close to paranoia, should have won the struggle to succeed Lenin boded ill for his opponents past and present and for his potential opponents as well. It has been speculated that his vengefulness was influenced by the beatings he supposedly had received from his father or by the traditions of honour and feud in the Caucasian region. Yet his fascination with punitive violence went far beyond any conditioning by family or national customs. Stalin supposedly remarked: ‘To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed… there is nothing sweeter in the world.’¹⁹

He also had a craving for adulation. As his doings were celebrated in the public media, only his ageing mother, to whom he dutifully sent packets of roubles, was oblivious of his status. Official history textbooks by Nikolai Popov and Emelyan Yaroslavski exaggerated his importance. Articles were published on the Civil War which treated the battles around Tsaritsyn in 1918, when Stalin was serving on the Southern front, as the turning point in the Red Army’s fortunes. Already in 1925, Tsaritsyn had been renamed Stalingrad. The phrase was put into circulation: ‘Stalin is the Lenin of today.’ Ostensibly he shrugged off claims to greatness, complaining to a film scriptwriter: ‘Reference to Stalin should be excised. The Central Committee of the party ought to be put in place of Stalin.’²⁰ He also repudiated the proposal in 1938 that Moscow should be renamed as Stalinodar (which means ‘Stalin’s gift’)!²¹ His modesty on this and other occasions was insincere, but Stalin knew that it would enhance his popularity among rank-and-file communists: in reality he was extremely vainglorious.

Egomania was not the sole factor. The cult of Stalin was also a response to the underlying requirements of the regime. Russians and many other nations of the USSR were accustomed to their statehood being expressed through the persona of a supreme leader. Any revolutionary state has to promote continuity as well as disruption. The First Five-Year Plan had brought about huge disruption, and the tsar-like image of Stalin was useful in affirming that the state possessed a strong, determined leader.

Full regal pomp was nevertheless eschewed by him; Stalin, while inviting comparison with the tsars of old, also wished to appear as a mundane contemporary communist. Audiences at public conferences or at the Bolshoi Ballet or on top of the Kremlin Wall saw him in his dull-coloured, soldierly tunic — as he mingled with delegates from the provinces to official political gatherings — and he always made sure to have his photograph taken with groups of delegates. The display of ordinariness was a basic aspect of his mystique. The incantations of public congresses and conferences included not only Stalin but also ‘the Leninist Central Committee, the Communist Party, the Working Class, the Masses’. It was crucial for him to demonstrate the preserved heritage of Marxism-Leninism. The heroism, justice and inevitability of the October Revolution had to be proclaimed repeatedly, and the achievements of the First Five-Year Plan had to be glorified.

There is no doubt that many young members of the party and the Komsomol responded positively to the propaganda. The construction of towns, mines and dams was an enormously attractive project for them. Several such enthusiasts altruistically devoted their lives to the communist cause. They idolized Stalin, and all of them — whether they were building the city of Magnitogorsk or tunnelling under Moscow to lay the lines for the metro or were simply teaching kolkhozniki how to read and write — thought themselves to be agents of progress for Soviet society and for humanity as a whole. Stalin had his active supporters in their hundreds of thousands, perhaps even their millions. This had been true of Lenin; it would also be true of Khrushchëv. Not until the late 1960s did Kremlin leaders find it difficult to convince a large number of their fellow citizens that, despite all the difficulties, official policies would sooner or later bring about the huge improvements claimed by official spokesmen.²²

Stalin’s rule in the early 1930s depended crucially upon the presence of enthusiastic supporters in society. Even many people who disliked him admired his success in mobilizing the country for industrialization and in restoring Russia’s position as a great power. There was a widespread feeling that, for all his faults, Stalin was a determined leader in the Russian tradition; and the naïvety of workers, peasants and others about high politics allowed him to play to the gallery of public opinion more easily than would be possible for Soviet leaders in later generations.

But enthusiasts remained a minority. Most people, despite the increase in cultural and educational provision, paid little mind to communist doctrines. They were too busy to give politics more than a glancing interest. It was a hard existence. The average urban inhabitant spent only an hour every week reading a book or listening to the radio and twenty minutes watching films or plays.²³ Adulatory newsreels were of limited help to Stalin while there remained a paucity of spectators. Furthermore, in 1937 there were still only 3.5 million radios in the country.²⁴ The authorities placed loudspeakers on main streets so that public statements might be broadcast to people as they travelled to work or went shopping. But this was rarely possible in the countryside since only one in twenty-five collective farms had access to electrical power.²⁵ Several weeks passed in some villages between visits from officials from the nearby town, and Pravda arrived only fitfully. The infrastructure of intensive mass indoctrination had not been completed before the Second World War.

The underlying cause for the ineffectiveness of official propaganda, however, was the hardship caused by official measures. The non-Russian nationalities were especially embittered. The assertiveness of national and ethnic groups in the 1920s had been among the reasons for the NEP’s abolition. Several imaginary anti-Soviet organizations were ‘discovered’, starting with the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine in July 1929.²⁶ Artists, scholars and novelists were arraigned in Kiev and sentenced to lengthy years of imprisonment. Analogous judicial proceedings took place in Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Communist officials thought to have shown excessive indulgence to the sentiments of nations in their republics suffered demotion. The prime victim was Mykola Skrypnik in Ukraine. In 1933 he was dropped as Ukraine’s People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, and committed suicide. Simultaneously those writers and artists who had developed their national cultures under the NEP were subject to ever stricter surveillance.

Nor was the menace of Russian nationalism ignored. In 1930 the historians S. F. Platonov and E. V. Tarle, famous Russian patriots, were put on trial and imprisoned for leading the non-existent All-People’s Union of Struggle for Russia’s Regeneration.²⁷ Three thousand Red Army commanders who had been officers in the Imperial Army were also arrested.²⁸ Russian-language literary figures, too, were persecuted. Novels dealing sensitively with the peasants, rural customs, spirituality and individual emotions had appeared in the 1920s and had offered consolation to readers who disliked Marxism-Leninism. With the occasional exception such as Mikhail Sholokhov’s stories of Cossack life in Quiet Flows the Don, this artistic trend was eradicated. The field was dominated during the First Five-Year Plan by writer-activists belonging to the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. Works depicting working-class selflessness and internationalism flooded from Soviet publishing houses.

Each nationality felt itself to be suffering worse than all the others: such is the norm for national and ethnic groups in times of stress and privation. In 1934 some daredevils in the Russian city of Saratov produced an illicit poster of a broad river with two bands of men lining up on opposite banks to give battle to each other. On one bank stood Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev, all of them being Jewish; the other was held by the Georgians: Stalin, Yenukidze and Ordzhonikidze. Underneath was the caption: ‘And the Slavs fell into dispute over who was to rule in Old Russia.’²⁹ The message was that Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians were being humiliated in their own lands. Even under Stalin, in the early 1930s, the composition of the central party leadership failed to mirror the country’s demography even though it was not so much out of focus as previously. To a popular tradition of anti-Semitism was added a resentment against the nations of the Transcaucasus.

In reality the Georgians were tormented along with the other peoples. The local OGPU chief in Tbilisi, the Georgian Lavrenti Beria, was winning plaudits from Stalin for his ruthlessness towards Georgian nationalist dissent and peasant resistance. And those Jewish institutions of the USSR which had flourished in the 1920s were either emasculated or crushed. Winter followed the springtime of the nations.

This did not mean that nations suffered equally. Most deaths caused by the Soviet state during the First Five-Year Plan were brought about by the collectivization of agriculture. Consequently the less urbanized nationalities were victimized disproportionately. For example, it is reckoned that between 1.3 million and 1.8 million Kazakh nomads died for this reason;³⁰ and the imposition of agricultural quotas upon such a people led to the destruction of an entire way of life. Kazakhs, who knew nothing of cereal cropping, were ordered to cultivate wheat on pain of execution. The Soviet economy’s patchwork quilt was being replaced by a blanket cut from a single bloodied cloth. Several victim-nations concluded that Stalin was bent on genocide. Not only Kazakhs but also Ukrainians suspected that he aimed at their extermination under cover of his economic policies. Collectivization, according to surviving nationalists, was Stalin’s equivalent of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’. Purportedly, the difference was that Stalin had it in for the Ukrainians whereas Hitler wished to annihilate all Jews.

Certainly Ukraine was subject to perniciously peculiar dispensations. Passenger traffic between the Russian and Ukrainian republics was suspended in 1932 and the borders were sealed by Red Army units.³¹ From village to village the armed urban squads moved without mercy. ‘Kulaks’ were suppressed and the starving majority of the Ukrainian peasantry had to fulfil the state’s requirements or else face deportation. Famine was the predictable outcome. It is true that the central authorities cut the grain-collection quotas three times in response to reports of starvation. Yet the cuts were a long, long way short of the extent sufficient to put a quick stop to famine. Horrendous suffering prevailed over Ukraine in 1932–3.

Were not these official measures therefore genocidal? If genocide means the killing of an entire national or ethnic group, the answer has to be no. The centrally-imposed quotas for grain deliveries from Ukraine were in fact somewhat reduced from the second half of 1932. The evidence of millions of starving people gave even the Politburo some pause for thought. It must be stressed that the reductions were nothing like enough to end the famine; but the occurrence of any reductions at all casts doubt on the notion that Stalin had from the start intended to exterminate the Ukrainian nation. Furthermore, Ukrainians were only seventy-four per cent of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic’s population before the First Five-Year Plan, and to this extent the infliction of famine was not nationally specific.³² In any case Stalin needed Ukrainians as well as Russians to take up jobs in the factories, mines and railheads being opened in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Indeed Stalin did not go as far as banning their language from the local schools. To be sure, Russian-language schooling assumed much greater prominence than in the 1920s; and the ability of Ukrainian educationists and writers to praise specifically Ukrainian cultural achievements was severely limited. Nevertheless Stalin — albeit with great reservations — accepted Ukrainian linguistic and cultural distinctness as a fact of life (and in 1939 he sanctioned sumptuous celebrations of the 125th anniversary of the birth of the great Ukrainian national poet and anti-tsarist writer Taras Shevchenko). But Stalin also wanted to teach Ukraine a political lesson; for Ukraine had always appeared to Bolsheviks as the black heart of kulakdom and national separatism. The bludgeoning of its inhabitants, going as far as the killing of a large number of them, would serve the purpose of durable intimidation.

A logical corollary was the resumed persecution of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church. Indeed the authorities were zealous in smashing the foundations of organized religion of all kinds and in all places. The God of the Christians, Muslims and Jews was derided as that ‘nice little god’. The limited tolerance afforded to religion since the middle of the NEP was thrown aside.

Unlike de-kulakization, de-clericalization was not explicitly announced as a policy, and there were no quotas for elimination. Yet a licence was given for physical attacks on religious leaders. Stalin thought godlessness the beginning of righteousness and had no compunction about the mass slaughter of clerics. The number of killings during the First Five-Year Plan outdid even the record of the Civil War. In the Russian Orthodox Church alone the number of active priests tumbled from around 60,000 in the 1920s to only 5,665 by 1941. No doubt many of them fled in disguise to the towns in order to escape the attentions of the armed squads that were searching for them. But many priests were caught unawares and either imprisoned or executed.³³ Thousands of other Christian leaders, mullahs, both Shi’ite and Sunni, and rabbis were also butchered. The one-ideology state was imposed with a vengeance.

Political pragmatism as well as a philosophy of militant atheism spurred on the campaign. Stalin and his associates remembered that in 1905 a demonstration headed by Father Gapon had touched off an avalanche that nearly buried the monarchy. Churches, mosques and synagogues were the last large meeting-places not entirely controlled by the state authorities after the October Revolution of 1917.

The feasts of the religious calendar also stood as marking points for the farming year. Particularly in Russia the tasks of ploughing, sowing, reaping and threshing were deemed incomplete unless a priest was present to pray for success. Agriculture and religious faith were intimately entwined. From its own fanatical standpoint, the League of the Militant Godless had logic on its side in pressing for the demolition of the houses of ‘god’. Priest and mullah and rabbi were vilified as parasites. In reality most parish clergy were as poor as church mice and, after the separation of Church from state in 1918, depended entirely on the voluntary offertories from their congregations. The same was usually true of other faiths. Clerics of all religions were integral parts of social order in their small communities. They welcomed children into the world, blessed marriages and buried the dead. They alternately rejoiced and commiserated with ordinary peasants. A village without a church, mosque or synagogue had lost its principal visible connection with the old peasant world. A countryside deprived of its priests, shrines, prayers and festivities was more amenable to being collectivized.

The destruction continued through the 1930s. Only one in forty churches was functioning as such by the decade’s end; the others had been reduced to rubble or recommissioned for secular purposes.³⁴ Equally significantly, no place of worship was built in the new cities and towns arising in the Soviet Union. Stalin and Kaganovich, as the capital’s party first secretary from 1930 to 1935, implemented schemes for the re-creation of the vista of central Moscow. They knocked down the little streets around the Kremlin so that great parades might be held along broad new avenues. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was blown up; the plan was to use the site for the construction of the world’s tallest building, which would house a Palace of Soviets with a massive statue of Lenin on its roof.³⁵ Kaganovich, a Jewish atheist, had no compunction in assailing a Russian Orthodox Church notorious for its anti-Semitism before 1917. But even he was wary, and instructed that the demolition of the Cathedral should take place secretly at dead of night.

The leaders of the various faiths had been traumatized. The Acting Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Sergei lived in perpetual fear of arrest. The violence threw the communist party’s campaign for cultural and national reconstruction into grotesque relief. Indisputable gains were made in literacy, numeracy, industrial skills and urban infrastructure. The account-sheet, however, was in debit: both culturally and nationally there had been more destruction than construction. A society had gone into semi-dissolution. Nations, religions and popular traditions had been ground into the dust.

Among the reasons for this was Stalin’s desire to produce ‘Soviet’ men and women and create a ‘Soviet’ people. As a follower of Marx and Engels, he held that the ultimate antidote to conflicts among national groups was the ‘fusion’ of all nations. The post-national compound would supposedly include ingredients from each nationality. Among Stalin’s acolytes during the First Five-Year Plan there had been several who assumed the moment of fusion to be imminent in the USSR. But Stalin recognized that this might damage the last elements of cohesion in society. Some binding factor had to be introduced. By 1934 he had come to the opinion that the Soviet state, for reasons of security, needed to foster Russian national pride. Russians were fifty-two per cent of the USSR’s population in the late 1930s.³⁶ A large number of them lived in each republic, especially after the migration of people during the First Five-Year Plan; and they were disproportionately well-represented in administrative posts. Russians were anyhow used to inhabiting a state larger than mere Russia as defined by Soviet communists and had no wish to see this state dismembered.

Already in 1930 the communist versifier Demyan Bedny had been reprimanded for insulting the Russian people in one of his doggerel verses. Marxism-Leninism was not to be used as a cover for humiliating a nation whose workers had been the vanguard of the October Revolution; limits existed on the deprecation of Russianness.

It was in 1934 that the privileging of Russian nationhood began in earnest. Concerns about the USSR’s security had been growing in the early 1930s; and Stalin and the leadership felt edgy about Ukraine, about Polish infiltration into the western borderlands and about the threat posed by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Russian national feelings were nurtured more warmly, and nowhere was this more obvious than in the writing of history. The doyen of the academic profession until his death in 1932 had been M. N. Pokrovski, who had waged a vendetta in his books and in university administration against writers who failed to put class struggle at the centre of their interpretations. He had insisted, too, that Russian imperial expansion over the centuries had brought harm to the non-Russian peoples. This approach now fell into official disrepute; and Professor E. V. Tarle, the non-Marxist historian and Russian patriot, was released from prison to reoccupy his university chair in Moscow.

It remained obligatory to analyse the Soviet period predominantly in terms of class struggle, but the distant Russian past could now be handled more flexibly. Stalin himself was an admiring reader of the best works that appeared. As Russian emperors and commanders came in for gentler treatment, scholars still had to criticize their faults but were also required to accentuate the benefits brought to Russians by the tsarist unification of Muscovy and to the non-Russians by the growth of the Russian Empire. The Russian language was given heightened status. In the academic year 1938–9 it became one of the compulsory subjects of instruction in all schools; and from the late 1930s a campaign was begun to alter the various non-Russian languages to a Cyrillic-style alphabet on the Russian model. Thus in 1940 the Uzbek tongue was no longer allowed to be written in Arabic characters.³⁷

Yet there were restrictions on the expression of Russian patriotism. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great could be praised, but not Nicholas II; and the aristocracy, gentry, merchantry and other so-called ‘former people’ had to be denounced. The expression of contemporary Russian nationhood, moreover, excluded the Orthodox Church. It rejected most village traditions. In literature it incorporated Alexander Pushkin and Maksim Gorki, but rejected the Christian nationalist Fëdor Dostoevski.³⁸ For the central political leaders in the 1930s remained wary lest Russian national pride might get out of hand. They were willing to modify Marxism-Leninism and even to distort it by adding Russian national ingredients to it; but they insisted that Marxism-Leninism should remain at the core of the state ideology.

Russians anyway did not always do better than other peoples in the USSR. The famine that devastated society in Ukraine in 1932–3 was also grievous in southern Russia. The Russian nation, despite the accolades it received, could reasonably perceive itself as a victim people. Territorially the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR) abruptly lost much of its status. In 1936 the internal borders of the USSR were redrawn. The Transcaucasian Federation was dissolved and Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan became republics on a par with the RSFSR. At the same time a huge chunk of the RSFSR was hacked away when the territory previously known as the Turkestan Region became the Kazakh Socialist Soviet Republic, thereby supplanting Ukraine as the USSR’s second largest republic. Most significantly, the new republic of Kazakhstan acquired its own communist party whereas the RSFSR remained without one.

For Stalin feared a New Russia as much as the Old. He wielded the knout to discourage certain aspects of Russianness while waving a flag to foster others. But he could not do this without increasing the self-awareness of Russians as Russians. The process was driven also by other forces. Chief among these were urbanization and mass literacy; for as Russian-speaking peasants poured into the towns and as Russian-speaking workers moved from one town to another in search of jobs, so millions of Russians discovered how much they had in common.

A certain administrative measure gave unintended impetus to the process. From December 1932 urban inhabitants had to acquire identity booklets (or ‘internal passports’) specifying personal particulars. Item No. 5 referred to nationality. Labour books and other documents had long contained such information; but, unlike them, the new passports were mandatory for all town-dwellers. Many individuals might previously have described themselves as peasants or workers, as natives of Samara or Nakhichevan, as Christians or Muslims. They now had to make a definitive choice of their nationality. Should they be of mixed parentage, they had to opt for either the paternal or the maternal line of descent. Aleksei Kulichenko, whose father was Ukrainian and mother was half-Russian and half-Tatar, decided to put ‘Ukrainian’ in his passport; and Avraam Epshtein, a Jew from the Belorussian capital Minsk who had lost his faith and was at ease linguistically in Russian, registered himself as a Russian.

The passports had been introduced to control the surge of villagers into the towns in search of industrial work. The kolkhozniks were denied the automatic right to obtain them. More generally, passports were a signal of the party leaders’ concern that society remained outside their full control. The First Five-Year Plan had intensified state authority beyond precedent. The Politburo under Stalin decided every great aspect of policy in foreign affairs, security, politics, administration, economy, science and the arts. No organized hostile group, except for a few bands of Basmachi in central Asia, endured. Yet somehow the peoples of the USSR had resisted being pummelled into the shape prescribed by the Kremlin.

Thus the first half-decade of the 1930s was a time of sharp contrasts. Cultural work was strengthened, but in an atmosphere that induced fear among school-teachers, writers and even party propagandists; and the peoples of the USSR had succeeded in preserving their traditions and beliefs against the pressure of official Soviet doctrines. Economic relaxations were announced, but generally the methods of obtaining food supplies by intimidation and violence was kept in place. National and religious leaderships and organizations were attacked; and yet there was also an increasing indulgence to Russian nationhood. Internationalism and Russian semi-nationalism were engaged in uneasy cohabitation. The First and Second Five-Year Plans were meant to secure the voluntary allegiance of workers, peasants, administrators and intellectuals to the regime. But although some enthusiasm for Stalin’s policies undoubtedly existed, hostility was much more widely disseminated. The integration of the aspirations of party, state and society was a very distant goal. The USSR was a country in travail and the compound of the Soviet order had yet to be stabilized sufficiently for the central party leadership’s comfort of mind.

11 Terror upon Terror (1934–1938)

It was in this volatile situation that the engine of a Great Terror was cranked up and set in motion. The exact calculations of Stalin and his associates have not been recorded for posterity, but undoubtedly several leaders had been made edgy by the situation confronting them after the First Five-Year Plan. They knew that resentment of their rule in the rest of society was deep and wide, and they feared lest former Bolshevik oppositionists might exploit this circumstance. Stalin’s allies felt deeply insecure, and shared a rising sense of frustration. They were annoyed by the chaos that prevailed in the network of public institutions — and they had doubts about the loyalty of party, governmental, military and managerial officials, even including those who had implemented the First Five-Year Plan. They had few scruples about applying their repressive power. The thought, practices and institutions of the Civil War had set precedents for the horrors of the late 1930s.

Indeed state violence was already being applied widely under the First and Second Five-Year Plans. ‘Kulaks’, railwaymen-‘wreckers’, ‘nationalists’ and managerial ‘saboteurs’ were being arrested in large numbers. Nearly a million Soviet citizens languished in the forced-labour camps and colonies of the OGPU by 1933, and further millions were in prisons, deportation camps and compulsory resettlement areas.¹ Consequently the Great Terror of 1937–8 was not a thunderclap in a cloudless sky but the worsening of a storm that was already raging.

None the less the Great Terror would not have taken place but for Stalin’s personality and ideas. He it was who directed the state’s punitive machinery against all those whom he identified as ‘anti-Soviet elements’ and ‘enemies of the people’. Among his purposes was a desire to use his victims as scapegoats for the country’s pain; and in order to sustain his mode of industrialization he also needed to keep his mines, timber forests and construction sites constantly supplied with slave labour.² It was probably also his intention to take pre-emptive measures against any ‘fifth column’ operating against him in the event of war.³ These considerations, furthermore, fitted into a larger scheme to build an efficient Soviet state subservient to his personal dictatorship — and to secure the state’s total control over society. Such was the guiding rationale of the Great Terrorist.

Back in 1933, not even Stalin had been urging repression on that scale: he was still selecting specific ‘anti-Soviet elements’ as targets for the OGPU. Yet official violence was never absent from the Politburo’s agenda for long, and Stalin reprimanded his Politburo colleagues whenever they failed to support him. The tensions in public life were maintained. Stalin and his most trusted associates saw a tightening of discipline as the main means to attain economic success and political stability. Repeatedly they affirmed the need to root out class enemies, saboteurs and spies.

This did not happen without dissension in the Politburo. Three great power-bases had been consolidated during the First Five-Year Plan: the All-Union Communist Party, the People’s Commissariats and the OGPU. Relations between the party and the commissariats caused heated controversy. To Stalin’s fury, Ordzhonikidze as People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry prevented local party bodies from interfering in the activity of factory directors.⁴ But at the same time Stalin was angered by the power of the party at its lower levels, power that was frequently used to thwart the central party apparatus’s instructions. So that Stalin was unhappy with both the party and the government. Debate about this in the Politburo ensued in the winter of 1933–4 and the balance of opinion was in favour of letting the commissariats get on with fulfilling the Second Five-Year Plan without interference by local party bodies.⁵

But how could this be achieved without losing control of the commissariats? Kaganovich suggested that the party should be given a crucial supervisory role at the local level. Thus the party committees would establish an internal department for each major branch of the economy. The task of the departments would be to check on the implementation of central economic objectives at the local level without taking over the functions of detailed management.

Kaganovich’s proposal had the virtue, from Stalin’s standpoint, of strengthening compliance with the Second Five-Year Plan. Each local party secretary would be reduced in authority when his committee was turned into ‘a small apparatus subordinate to the People’s Commissar’,⁶ and the party as a whole was subjected to greater control from the centre. In 1933 yet another purge of the membership was undertaken, resulting in the withdrawal of party cards from 854,300 persons identified as careerists, drunkards, idlers and unrepentant oppositionists.⁷ While all this was sweet music to Stalin’s ears, there remained much to annoy him. Firstly, the trimming of the party’s sprawling powers served to increase hostility to Stalin’s policies and mode of leadership among many party secretaries in the provinces. Stalin was less and less their hero. Secondly, the enhanced autonomy of the governmental organs made them still less amenable to Stalin’s control. Stalin was not the sort of leader who found this a tolerable situation.

Basic questions about how to consolidate the regime were therefore yet to be resolved. The Politburo reserved the right to take any definitive decision. No one was allowed to refer directly to these questions at the Seventeenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party, which opened in Moscow on 26 February 1934. The press had indicated that it would be a Congress of Victors. The internal communist oppositions had been defeated; industrialization and agricultural collectivization had been imposed; military security had been reinforced. The party’s unity under its great leader was to be celebrated.

Stalin in his speech to the Congress, however, indicated that he was not going to be gracious in victory: ‘Consequently it is necessary not to sing lullabies to the party but to develop its vigilance, not to send it to sleep but to keep it in a condition of militant readiness, not to disarm but to arm it.’⁸ He warned against complacency about the party’s economic achievements and against indulgence towards the former oppositionists. His associates were equally intransigent. Molotov asserted that ‘vestiges of capitalism’ continued to affect thinking in the party; Kaganovich added that anti-Leninist deviations still threatened the party.⁹ Lesser figures added to the belligerent chorus. M. F. Shkiryatov suggested that the central leadership needed to intervene more vigorously to make improvements in local party life; and R. I. Eikhe declared that Bukharin had not done enough to prevent the emergence of ‘Ryutin and other counter-revolutionary swine’.¹⁰

They did not have everything their own way. Politburo members Kuibyshev and Mikoyan refrained from calling for a sharpening of political struggle.¹¹ Similar reluctance was shown by influential regional party first secretaries including Pëtr Postyshev of Ukraine, I. M. Vareikis of the Central Black-Earth Region and B. P. Sheboldaev of the Azov-Black Sea Region.¹² Molotov bridled at any such signs of diminishing militancy, and in his report on the economy he proposed — presumably with Stalin’s approval — to raise the projected annual industrial growth rate by another five per cent.¹³ Ordzhonikidze’s intervention led to a limitation of the increase to three per cent.¹⁴ The intensity of the dissension between Molotov and Ordzhonikidze ought not to be exaggerated. Nevertheless the Congress’s other decisions were generally in favour of slackening the political tensions, and it would seem that Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov, too, was popular among Congress delegates for favouring such a relaxation. Pointedly Kirov had stated in his main speech: ‘The fundamental difficulties are already behind us.’¹⁵

There is also fragmentary evidence that Stalin did so poorly in the elections to the new Central Committee that the number of votes cast for each candidate was withheld from publication. Another story is that several Congress delegations asked Kirov to stand against Stalin for the General Secretaryship — and that Kirov declined the request.¹⁶ The full truth remains beclouded. What is clear is that Stalin lost his title of General Secretary and was redesignated simply as Secretary, and that Kirov was given the same rank.¹⁷ On the other hand, it remains far from clear that Kirov’s policies were really very different from those of Stalin and Molotov. Certainly he eulogized Stalin in his same speech to the Congress;¹⁸ and probably, too, he actually tried to resist his own promotion to Central Committee Secretary.¹⁹ Nevertheless Stalin had not had the enjoyable time during and after the Congress which he had thought his due: this much appears clear. His usual reaction in such a situation was to search for ways to settle accounts finally with those whom he regarded as his enemies.

From spring to autumn 1934 some impression was given that Stalin was making compromises just as Lenin had done in introducing the NEP. Kirov went on speaking in support of increased rations for workers, greater respect for legal procedures and an end to the violent extortion of grain from peasants.²⁰ Restrictions were placed on the arbitrary arrest of economic experts.²¹ The OGPU lost its separate institutional status, and its activities and personnel were transferred under the control of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). Thus the state’s mechanisms of arbitrary repression appeared to have been weakened. Yet the changes for the better were nugatory. Massive instrumentalities of violence remained intact, and the NKVD’s engorgement of the OGPU had the result of constructing an even mightier centralized organ for policing and security. Political passions therefore remained high: the Congress had ultimately resolved little.

On 1 December 1934 an astonishing event triggered an upward ratcheting of the level of repression. A young ex-Zinovievite, Leonid Nikolaev, walked into Kirov’s office in Leningrad, pulled out a revolver and shot him. Stalin exploited the assassination as a pretext to rush through a set of decrees granting full authority to the NKVD to arrest, try and execute at will. This gave rise to the belief that Stalin connived in the killing. Nikolaev had previously been caught in possession of a firearm in suspicious circumstances. He was executed before any exhaustive interrogation could take place and an improbably large proportion of those who handled Nikolaev after Kirov’s death, including the van-drivers, quickly perished in mysterious circumstances. Yet Stalin’s complicity in the Kirov murder remains unproven. What is beyond dispute is that the assassination enabled him and his associates to begin to move against the somewhat less militant among the Stalinists and their tacit supporters.

Stalin first took revenge upon Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were accused of conniving in Kirov’s death. They agreed to accept moral and political responsibility for their former minor adherent in return for an assurance that they would receive a light sentence. Their trial was held in camera in January 1935. On Stalin’s orders Zinoviev and Kamenev were consigned to ten and five years of imprisonment respectively. Stalin’s prisons were not rest-homes. Furthermore, 663 past supporters of Zinoviev in Leningrad were seized and sent into exile in Yakutia and other bleak Siberian locations. Over 30,000 deportations of members of social groups regarded as hostile to the communism in Leningrad and other cities as the security agencies intensified its years-old campaign against undesirables.²²

Stalin was cranking up the motor of prophylactic repression. Neither the exiled communist ex-oppositionists nor the deported former middle-class city dwellers had been conspiring against Stalin. But Stalin did not want to give them the chance to do so. His desire for complete control was even extended to ordinary communists who had never belonged to an oppositional faction. Yet another clear-out of undesirable rank-and-file members was ordered in 1934 and a block was placed on recruitment for the second half of the year. Coming after the purge of 1933, this measure was a sign of the Secretariat’s undispelled concern about the revolutionary ‘vanguard’. In January 1935, as Kamenev and Zinoviev received their prison sentences, a general exchange of party cards was announced. This would be a purge under a different name: the aim was to identify and remove those many members who did nothing for the party while deriving advantage from having a card. In consequence, by May 1935, 281,872 persons had ceased being Bolsheviks.²³

This fitted the schemes of Andrei Zhdanov, who had become a Central Committee Secretary in 1934 and Leningrad party chief after Kirov’s murder. Zhdanov wanted to restore the authority of the party at the expense of the people’s commissariats; he saw the internal party purge as a prerequisite of this task. Once it had been ‘cleansed’, the party would be in a condition to resume its role as the supreme institution of the Soviet state. At a practical level, Zhdanov aimed to reverse the Seventeenth Party Congress’s decision to reorganize the departments of party committees on parallel lines to the economic branches of government. The local party committees, according to Zhdanov, should reclaim their role in propagating Marxism-Leninism, mobilizing society and in selecting personnel for public office. His implicit argument was that the Soviet order could not safely be entrusted to the people’s commissariats.

Zhdanov’s success was an episode in the struggle among institutions. The Soviet economy was run on the basis of central command, and it was important that the people’s commissariats maximized their power to impose their will. Yet there was a danger that this power might be used against the wishes of the central political leadership. And so the party had to be retained to control the commissariats. But the party might lack the necessary expertise. As central politicians tried to resolve this dilemma, they alternated in their preferences between the people’s commissariats and the party. Indeed this had become the perennial institutional dilemma of the one-party, one-ideology state and the state-owned economy of the USSR.

Yet Stalin had his own motives in supporting Zhdanov. Apparently Zhdanov wished to box off the party purge from the concurrent arrests of ex-oppositionists. But Stalin rejected any such demarcation, and on 13 May 1935 the Secretariat sent out a secret letter to local party committees asserting that party cards had got into the hands of many adventurers, political enemies and spies.²⁴ Thus persons expelled from the party could now find themselves accused of espionage, for which the punishment was either execution or years of forced labour. On 20 May, the Politburo issued a directive for every former Trotskyist to be sent to a labour camp for a minimum of three years. On 20 November, Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev were accused of spying for foreign powers.²⁵ Stalin, designedly or not, was moving towards a violent general resolution of the political tensions. Apparently not even Kaganovich or Zhdanov or even Molotov, his closest associates, were demanding the extension of terror. But by then none of them dared deny Stalin something upon which his mind was fixed.²⁶

Not only political administration but also economic management became more hazardous. For it was also in 1935 that an extraordinary campaign was introduced to raise industrial productivity. In the Don Basin, in eastern Ukraine, the miner Aleksei Stakhanov hewed 102 tons of coal in a six-hour stint in August. This feat was fourteen times the norm set by his enterprise. When the news reached Moscow, Stalin and Molotov perceived that a summons to all industrial labourers to emulate Stakhanov would help to break the spine of the objections by managers, technical experts and workers to the Politburo’s policies.

Stakhanov was hailed as a worker-hero; a Stakhanovite movement was founded. Suddenly it was found that practically every industrial machine could be made to function much, much faster. Even the boilers of steam-trains started to perform wonders. Managers and administrative personnel were intimidated into altering patterns of work to accommodate attempts on records; and the workers were put under pressure to change their working procedures.²⁷ Critics of Stakhanovism in any enterprise were not merely reprimanded but arrested as ‘wreckers’. Ordzhonikidze as a Politburo member had immunity from such a sanction, and he pointed out that Stakhanov and his emulators could perform miracles only by means of the deployment of other workers to service their needs. Yet he was ignored. The Stakhanovite movement suited Stalin, who wanted to foster utopian industrial schemes by terrorizing doubters and encouraging enthusiasts.

His hostility to factory directors, local party chiefs and former oppositionists was coalescing into a single repressive campaign. It would take little to impel Stalin into action. Politics had been dangerously volatile for years as institutional interests clashed and rivalries among the leaders intensified. In 1935–6 there was again a dispute in the Politburo about tempos of economic growth.²⁸ As usual, Stalin was strongly in favour of increasing the tempos. At the same time there was administrative chaos and popular resentment in the country. And then suddenly, in summer 1936, Stalin was driven frantic by evidence obtained by the NKVD that Trotski had been keeping contact from abroad with clandestine groups of supporters and that these groups had been negotiating with supporters of Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev.²⁹ For an extremely suspicious and vengeful person such as Stalin, this threat called for massive retaliation. In the rest of the year he sought to settle accounts bloodily with all those whom he identified as his enemies.

First he moved against Kamenev and Zinoviev. On 29 June 1936, a secret letter was sent by the Central Committee Secretariat to the local party bodies alleging the discovery of ‘the terrorist activities of the Trotskyist-Zinovievite counter-revolutionary bloc’.³⁰ In August 1936, Kamenev and Zinoviev were dragged from their cells and re-tried. This time the proceedings were held in public. The defendants were privately threatened with the death sentence unless they ‘confessed’ to having set up an Anti-Soviet Trotskyist-Zinovievite Centre that organized assassinations. Supposedly Stalin was next on their list after Kirov. They duly confessed, and Stalin duly broke his promise. The court condemned them to death and sentence was carried out early next morning.

This was the first execution of anyone who had belonged to the Party Central Committee. Stalin’s campaign was relentless. He sacked Yagoda in September on the grounds that he was four years behind in catching enemies of the people. His replacement was Nikolai Yezhov a rising figure in the central party apparatus. The atmosphere in the Soviet leadership was not relaxed by the economic news. The 1936 grain harvest turned out to be twenty-six per cent smaller than the harvest of the previous year;³¹ and in November a massive explosion occurred at the Kemerovo coal-mine. Many such troubles in agriculture and industry were the product of the technical disruptions brought about by Stalin’s management of the economy. But he blamed the troubles on wreckers and anti-Soviet elements and strengthened his resolve to stick to his methods.

Ordzhonikidze and Kuibyshev, who themselves had supported the brutal industrialization during 1928–32, were disconcerted by Stalin’s continued brutality.³² But Kuibyshev, a heavy drinker, died of a heart attack (or was he poisoned on Stalin’s orders?) in January 1935. Ordzhonikidze was becoming isolated in the Politburo. Others who had their doubts — Mikoyan, Voroshilov and Kalinin — were threatened back into submission. And so Stalin had the preponderant influence in the central party organs. The Politburo, which had convened weekly during the First Five-Year Plan, met only nine times in 1936.³³ Despite losing his title of General Secretary in 1934, Stalin still dominated the Secretariat. He also had his own office, headed by A. N. Poskrëbyshev, which kept hold of its own long-established links with the NKVD.

Even Stalin, however, needed a sanction stronger than his signature as Party Secretary in order to start a systematic extermination of communist oppositionists. He was not yet a dictator. The party was the regime’s most influential institution, and Stalin still had to get his strategy, ill-defined as it was, approved by the rest of the Politburo. Ordzhonikidze was a source of difficulty. Stalin attacked him in a particularly nasty fashion by putting Pyatakov, former oppositionist and presently Ordzhonikidze’s deputy in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, on show-trial alongside fellow ex-oppositionist Karl Radek. Under intense psychological pressure Pyatakov and Radek confessed to leading an imaginary Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre aiming to restore capitalism in Russia. Pyatakov was shot and Radek sent to a labour camp. In February, unhinged by Pyatakov’s execution, Ordzhonikidze shot himself — or possibly he was murdered on Stalin’s orders.

Ordzhonikidze’s death freed Stalin to present his ideas to the lengthy Party Central Committee plenum that stretched from the end of February into mid-March 1937. He wasted no words of sympathy on Ordzhonikidze. Stalin also declared that the local party leadership was a tap-root of the Soviet state’s problems. He castigated the cliental system of appointments: ‘What does it mean if you drag a whole group of pals along yourself ? It means you’ve acquired a certain independence from local organizations and, if you like, a certain independence from the Central Committee.’³⁴

This was no longer a prim administrative point because Stalin at the same time asserted that wreckers, spies and assassins had insinuated themselves into influential party posts, forming Trotskyist groups and aiming at a capitalist restoration. Allegedly, enemies of the people existed in every locality and party organization. The First Party Secretary in Ukraine, Pëtr Postyshev, had for weeks been rejecting this extraordinary claim. Postyshev had previously been a close supporter of Stalin; and Stalin, being determined to have implicit obedience from his supporters, made a public example of Postyshev by declaring that he had allowed enemies of the people to infiltrate the Kiev party apparatus.³⁵ This was a hair’s breadth from denouncing Postyshev as an enemy of the people, and the plenum was cowed. Having achieved the desired effect, Stalin appeared to show magnanimity by only calling for Postyshev to be removed from the Politburo.³⁶

The shooting of Pyatakov and the humiliation of Postyshev terrified every Central Committee member, and it was almost with relief that the plenum listened to Zhdanov’s parallel proposal to inaugurate a campaign for ‘democratization’ in local party organizations. The fact that the projected ‘re-elections’ might end the political careers of most of the audience was overlooked.³⁷ For the number of arrested oppositionists and economic officials increased sharply in spring 1937, and Stalin deftly obviated any last obstacle to his wishes in the Politburo by getting sanction for the creation of a commission which could take decisions on the Politburo’s behalf. The commission consisted exclusively of leaders who by then accepted the case for intensified terror: Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Yezhov (who was not even a Politburo member at the time) and Stalin himself.³⁸

Thus empowered, Stalin expanded the scope of terror: no institution in the Soviet state failed to incur his suspicion. The next group picked by him for repression were the Red Army leaders. Stalin’s aim was to ensure that the armed forces were incapable of promoting policies in any way different from his own, and Marshal Tukhachevski laid himself open to trouble by arguing for a more adventurous military strategy for the USSR.³⁹ He and several high-ranking commanders were arrested in May and beaten into confessing to plotting a coup d’état. Stalin called them all spies at a meeting of the Military Soviet of the People’s Commissariat of Defence, and they were shot in mid-June. On the same occasion he announced that Bukharin, Tomski and Rykov were guilty of espionage.⁴⁰ Stalin repeated these charges against these former leaders of the Right Deviation at a Central Committee plenum starting on 23 June, where he stated that the NKVD had collected information sufficient to merit judicial proceedings.

At this Osip Pyatnitski, who had first been elected a Central Committee member in 1912 before Stalin himself became one, protested. An intermission was called so that Molotov and Kaganovich, Stalin’s intermediaries at the plenum, might bring Pyatnitski to his senses.⁴¹ Pyatnitski opted for death before dishonour. Thereupon Yezhov took not only Bukharin and Pyatnitski but also his own NKVD predecessor Yagoda into his care.

Yezhov enjoyed the technical chores of administering repression, devising instructions that anticipated most practical snags. Since 1927 he had risen to ever more senior posts in the Central Committee Secretariat. At the age of forty-three years he was a living caricature of gleeful fanaticism. He was ‘short of stature, almost a dwarf, with a piercing voice and bandy legs’.⁴² His associates played on the verbal associations of his name in the Russian language by dubbing him the Iron Hedgehog. On 2 July, at Stalin’s instigation, the Politburo passed a resolution ‘On Anti-Soviet Elements’, and Yezhov scuttled back to the Politburo on 31 July with the scheme for the NKVD to arrest 259,450 persons over the following four months.⁴³ In mid-August 1937 torture was sanctioned as a normal procedure of interrogation in Soviet prisons. The Great Terror was raging. It did not cease until the end of 1938.

Central direction was constantly involved. On 27 August, when the Krasnoyarsk Regional Committee wrote to him about a grain-store fire, Stalin telegrammed back within hours: ‘Try the guilty [sic] persons in accelerated order. Sentence them to death.’⁴⁴ His method was systematically arbitrary; for the Politburo decision of 31 July 1937 assigned arrest-quotas to each major territorial unit of the USSR. No serious effort was made to catch and punish people for offences they had really committed; and it was laid down that 72,950 of victims — twenty-eight per cent — should be shot and the rest given ‘eight to ten’ years in prison or labour camp.⁴⁵ A Central Committee plenum in January 1938 momentarily seemed to terminate the madness by passing a resolution calling for greater scrupulousness to be shown in decisions to expel individuals from the party, decisions which by then were normally a preamble to arrest by the NKVD.⁴⁶ But the relief was illusory, and on 15 March 1938 an additional target of 57,200 ‘anti-Soviet elements’ was introduced. Fully 48,000 of them were marked for execution this time.⁴⁷

The victims were tried by trios (troiki), typically consisting of the local NKVD chief, party secretary and procurator. Trials were derisorily brief and sentences were carried out without right of appeal. In searching out ‘anti-Soviet elements’, troiki were enjoined to capture escaped kulaks, ex-Mensheviks, ex-Socialist-Revolutionaries, priests, pre-revolutionary policemen and former members of non-Russian parties.⁴⁸ As the Great Terror was intensified, the resolution ‘On Anti-Soviet Elements’ was applied to virtually anyone who had been active in or sympathetic to a communist oppositionist faction; and soon pretty well everybody who held a political, administrative or managerial post lived in fear. Not a single institution was unscathed by the NKVD’s interrogators. The quota system was applied not merely to geographical areas but also to specific public bodies. The objective was to effect a ‘cleansing’ throughout the state. The NKVD was not to restrain itself by notions about an individual’s possible innocence: the point was to eliminate all the categories of people believed by Stalin and Yezhov to contain the regime’s enemies.

According to official central records, 681,692 persons were executed in 1937–8.⁴⁹ This may well be an underestimate, but the total number of deaths caused by repression in general was anyway much higher as people also perished from the inhuman conditions of their captivity. Between one million and one and a half million persons, it is tentatively reckoned, were killed by firing squad, physical maltreatment or massive over-work in the care of the NKVD in those two years alone.⁵⁰ The Jews and Gypsies exterminated by Hitler knew that they were dying because they were Jews and Gypsies. Stalin’s terror was more chaotic and confusing: thousands went to their deaths shouting out their fervent loyalty to Stalin.

Even Hitler’s Gestapo had to trick Jews to travel peacefully to the gas-chambers, and Stalin had to be still more deceitful: the risible fiction had to be disseminated throughout the country that a conspiracy of millions of hirelings of foreign states existed. Victims usually had to sign a confession mentioning participation in a terrorist conspiracy headed by Trotski and Bukharin and directed by the British, American, Japanese or German intelligence agencies. An immense punitive industry was developed with guaranteed employment for torturers, jailors, stenographers, van-drivers, executioners, grave-diggers and camp-guards. Meticulous records were kept, even though the blood of the signatories occasionally smudged the documents.⁵¹

Bukharin, who was put on show-trial in March 1938, was one of the luckier ones inasmuch as he was not physically abused. But he was nevertheless put under acute psychological duress to ‘confess’. Bukharin surrendered as part of a deal to save the lives of his wife and son. The protracted rigmarole of denunciations, confessions, trials and sentencings in any event made the immense stratum of surviving officials complicit in the Terror. Even Nikita Khrushchëv, a rising party official in the 1930s who lived to denounce Stalin posthumously in 1956, was heavily involved; and Georgi Zhukov was exceptional among Red Army generals in refusing to make allegations of criminal activity against fellow generals.⁵² At the central level Stalin’s civilian associates competed with each other in the stylistic flourish with which they confirmed death sentences. Among Molotov’s favourite addenda was: ‘Give the dog a dog’s death!’

Vans and lorries marked ‘Meat’ or ‘Vegetables’ could carry the victims out to a quiet wood, such as the one near Butovo twenty-five kilometres north of Moscow, where shooting-grounds and long, deep pits had been secretly prepared. Plenty of work could be found for prisoners spared capital punishment. Cattle-trucks were commandeered for journeys to the labour camps of the Gulag in Siberia, Kazakhstan and arctic Russia. The trains rumbled through towns at night-time to avoid public curiosity. Food and drink on the journey were grievously inadequate. The convicts were treated as badly as the Negro slaves who had been shipped to the West Indies. On arrival at their camp they sawed timber, dug for gold, mined coal and built towns. Their meals left them constantly famished: Yezhov’s dieticians had estimated a provision of calories barely enough to sustain men and women who were not doing strenuous physical labour with wholly inadequate clothing and medical care in some of the USSR’s most inhospitable regions.⁵³

The exact death-rate of inmates is not known, but was indubitably high. Contingent after contingent of fresh (or rather newly-battered) prisoners were needed to replenish a labour-force that afforded a crucial portion of the state’s industrial output. Not even Stalin, an enterprising proponent of the virtues of penal servitude, turned over his camps to agriculture. The kolkhozes and sovkhozes were already so close to being labour camps that the transfer of wheat cultivation to the Gulag would have brought no advantage. In times of famine, indeed, peasants in Vologda province were reduced to begging for crusts of bread from the convoys of prisoners in the locality.

And so it would seem that by 1939 the total number of prisoners in the forced-labour system — including prisons, labour camps, labour colonies and ‘special settlements’ — was 2.9 million.⁵⁴ In each camp there were gangs of convicted thieves who were allowed by the authorities to bully the ‘politicals’. The trading of sexual favours was rife. Many inmates would kill or maim a weaker fellow victim just to rob him of his shoes. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was arrested after the Second World War, later wrote that experience of the camps could ennoble the character of prisoners. But Solzhenitsyn served most of his sentence in a camp in the Moscow suburbs where the inmates were given unusually light conditions in order to carry out scientific research. More typical for the Gulag inmates were the camps outside central Russia where it was every person for himself and moral self-control was rarely practised.

This convulsion of Soviet state and society had the severest consequences. Only one in thirty delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 returned to the Eighteenth Congress in 1939. The loss from the Central Committee was also drastic: just sixteen out of seventy-one members survived.⁵⁵ Another devastated institution was the Red Army. Tens of thousands of officers fell into the grip of Yezhov’s ‘hedgehog gloves’, including fifteen out of the sixteen army commanders.

These figures are most easily compiled for high and medium-ranking functionaries. But other folk could also get caught by the mass repression. In his pursuit of political security Stalin resumed and expanded the policy of national deportations. Especially vulnerable were national and ethnic groups which had a large number of people living beyond the USSR’s frontiers: Stalin was concerned lest they might prove disloyal in the event of war. Thus the Poles were removed from Soviet Ukraine by a secret decree of April 1936, roughly deposited in Kazakhstan and left to build their settlements. In the following year the Kurds were driven out from the North Caucasus, and the Koreans from eastern Siberia. Uninhabited tracts of Kazakhstan became a dumping ground for all peoples which incurred Stalin’s suspicion.⁵⁶ As Yezhov carried out his master’s command, countless deportees died before reaching their destination.

The impact of the Great Terror was deep and wide and was not limited to specific political, administrative, military, cultural, religious and national groups. Even a harmless old Russian peasant woman muttering dissatisfaction with conditions in the kolkhoz or her young worker-son blurting out complaints about housing standards would be dispatched to the horrors of the Gulag. No trace of ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ was meant to survive. Casual jokes against Stalin, the communist party or the Soviet state were treated as the most heinous form of treason. In this fashion practically all Soviet citizens were extirpated who had displayed an independent mind about public affairs.

Yet Stalin’s very success brought about a crisis of its own. The original purpose of his clique in the central leadership had been to reconstruct the state so as to secure their authority and impose their policies. In carrying through this design, the clique came close to demolishing the state itself. The blood-purge of the armed forces disrupted the USSR’s defences in a period of intense international tension. The arrest of the economic administrators in the people’s commissariats impeded industrial output. The destruction of cadres in party, trade unions and local government undermined administrative co-ordination. This extreme destabilization endangered Stalin himself. For if the Soviet state fell apart, Stalin’s career would be at an end. He had started the carnage of 1937–8 because of real hostility to his policies, real threats to his authority, a real underlying menace to the compound of the Soviet order. Yet his reaction was hysterically out of proportion to the menace he faced.

Stalin had a scarily odd personality. He was in his element amidst chaos and violence, and had learned how to create an environment of uncertainty wherein only he could remain a fixed, dominant point of influence. His belief in the rapid trainability of functionaries and experts, furthermore, gave him his equanimity when butchering an entire administrative stratum. The Stalin of the Civil War and the First Five-Year Plan lived again in the Great Terror. His hyper-suspicious, imperious temperament came to the fore. No one coming into frequent contact with him in the late 1930s had a chance to become disloyal: he had them killed before such thoughts could enter their heads. He was unflustered about murder. When his old comrade Vlas Chubar telephoned him out of concern lest he be arrested, Stalin warmly reassured him; but Chubar was arrested the same day and, after disgusting physical torment, executed.

By then Stalin was privately identifying himself with the great despots of history. He was fascinated by Genghis Khan, and underlined the following adage attributed to him: ‘The deaths of the vanquished are necessary for the tranquillity of the victors.’ He also took a shine to Augustus, the first Roman emperor, who had disguised the autocratic character of his rule by refusing the title of king just as Stalin was permitting himself at most the unofficial title of Leader.⁵⁷

Other rulers who tugged at his imagination were the Russian tsars Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. He admired them with the critical eye of a twentieth-century dictator: ‘One of Ivan the Terrible’s mistakes was to overlook the five great feudal families. If he had annihilated those five families, there would definitely have been no Time of Troubles. But Ivan the Terrible would execute someone and then spend a long time repenting and praying. God got in his way in this matter. He ought to have been still more decisive!’⁵⁸ And, when proposing a toast at a celebratory banquet in honour of the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov in 1937, Stalin declared that any party member trying to weaken the military might and territorial integrity of the USSR would perish: ‘We shall physically annihilate him together with his clan!’ He summarized his standpoint with the war-cry: ‘For the destruction of traitors and their foul line!’⁵⁹

This was a leader who took what he wanted from historical models and discarded the rest — and what he wanted apparently included techniques for the maintenance of personal despotism. No candidate for the Lenin succession in the mid-1920s would have done what Stalin did with his victory a decade later in the Great Terror. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, quipped that if he had not died in 1924, he would be serving time in one of Stalin’s prisons.

Lenin would surely have been appalled at the NKVD’s bacchanalia of repression. But it must not be overlooked how much Stalin had learned and inherited from Lenin. Stalin continued to admire Lenin even though Lenin on his death-bed wished to sack him from the General Secretaryship. Lenin’s ideas on violence, dictatorship, terror, centralism, hierarchy and leadership were integral to Stalin’s thinking. Furthermore, Lenin had bequeathed the terroristic instrumentalities to his successor. The Cheka, the forced-labour camps, the one-party state, the mono-ideological mass media, the legalized administrative arbitrariness, the prohibition of free and popular elections, the ban on internal party dissent: not one of these had to be invented by Stalin. Lenin had practised mass terror in the Civil War and continued to demand its application, albeit on a much more restricted basis, under the NEP. Not for nothing did Stalin call himself Lenin’s disciple.

It is hard to imagine Lenin, however, carrying out a terror upon his own party. Nor was he likely to have insisted on the physical and psychological degradation of those arrested by the political police. In short, Lenin would have been horrified by the scale and methods of the Great Terror.

He would also have been astounded by its autocratic insouciance. Stalin over the years reviewed 383 lists of the most important arrested persons in bound booklets he endearingly called albums, and his self-assigned chore was to append a number to each name. A number ‘1’ was a recommendation for execution, a ‘2’ indicated ten years in the camps, a ‘3’ left it to Yezhov’s discretion. A single album might contain 200 names, and the technique of reviewing cases ‘in the album fashion’ was copied at lower rungs of the ladder of state repression.⁶⁰ Also attributable to Stalin personally was the insistence that leading victims should not be shot until they had been thoroughly humiliated. In one of his last pleas to Stalin, Bukharin wrote asking what purpose would be served by his death. This question must have given profound satisfaction to Stalin, who kept the letter in his desk until his own death in 1953. Countless unfortunates across the USSR were similarly robbed of every shred of dignity by interrogators who extracted a grovelling confession before releasing them to the firing squad.

Stalin had an extraordinary memory, but not even he could know the biographies of every real or potential antagonist. His method of rule had always been to manufacture a situation which induced local officials to compete with each other in pursuit of his principal aim. It gladdened him that troiki in the provinces sometimes appealed against centrally-assigned arrest quotas, conventionally known as ‘the limits’, that they regarded as too low.⁶¹ Nor did he punish local officials who went beyond their quotas. Between August and September 1938, for instance, the security police in Turkmenia carried out double the originally-assigned number of executions.⁶²

Thus the Great Terror followed the pattern of state economic planning since 1928: central direction was accompanied by opportunities for much local initiative. While aiming to reach their ‘limits’, NKVD officials were left to decide for themselves who were the ‘anti-Soviet elements’ in their locality. Neither Stalin nor even Yezhov could ensure that these ‘elements’ fell precisely into the categories defined in their various instructions. Nor were even the local NKVD officials entirely free to choose their own victims. As well as personal jealousies there were political rivalries in play. Conflicts at the local level among leaders, among enterprises and among institutions could suddenly be settled by a nicely-timed letter of ‘exposure’. There was little incentive to delay in denouncing an enemy; for who could be sure that one’s enemy was not already penning a similar letter? Old scores were murderously paid off. And it greatly simplified the task of repression, once a fellow had been arrested, to compile a list of his friends and associates and arrest them too.

But if vile behaviour was widespread, it was at its worst among the employees of the NKVD. Neither Stalin nor Yezhov in person directly inflicted pain on those under arrest. But the duties of the NKVD attracted some enthusiastic physical tormentors. One such was Lavrenti Beria who became Yezhov’s deputy in July 1938.He had a collection of canes in his office, and Red Army commanders ruefully talked of such interrogations as occasions when they went ‘to have a coffee with Beria’.⁶³ This newcomer to Moscow was notorious in Georgia, where he beat prisoners, sentenced them to death and gratuitously had them beaten again before they were shot.⁶⁴ And Beria was by no means the worst of the gruesome sadists attracted to the NKVD’s employment.

Furthermore, the morbid suspiciousness of the Kremlin dictator was internationalized as Stalin turned his attention to the world’s communist parties. The irony was that he did this during a period of improvement of the USSR’s relations with several major foreign states. Formal diplomatic ties had been agreed with the United Kingdom, France and the USA in 1933. Entrance had been effected to the League of Nations in 1934 and treaties signed with France and Czechoslovakia. In the same year the Politburo also overturned its injunction to foreign communist parties to concentrate their hostility upon rival socialists; instead they were to form ‘popular fronts’ with such socialists in a political campaign against fascism. The containment of the European far right had become a goal in Soviet foreign policy. The reorientation was affirmed at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in August 1935.

While making this adjustment in foreign policy, Stalin demanded vigilance from Europe’s communists, and the Comintern was ordered to rid its ranks of Trotskyist and Bukharinist ‘traitors’. Until 1937 this was a strictly political process because only the All-Union Communist Party in Moscow was a governing communist party with a secret police which could arrest those party members who had been expelled. This meant that while communists were being tortured in the USSR for long-past associations with members of left-of-centre political parties, communists abroad were expelled from their own parties as Trotskyists if they refused to collaborate with other parties on the left.

There was certainly reason for Stalin to worry about the world situation. Germany and Japan signed an Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1936, increasing the menace of a war against the USSR on two fronts. In the same year Hitler had wrecked the Treaty of Versailles in Europe by occupying the Rhineland and offering military support to the fascist forces of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The USSR’s call for intervention by the parliamentary democracies of Europe in concert with the Soviet state was ignored. Stalin sent equipment and advisers to Spain all the same. Official Soviet propagandists praised the principled stand being taken by the Kremlin. The USSR was the only state willing to translate its anti-fascist rhetoric into action and Stalin enhanced his prestige among those sections of Western political opinion which bridled at the passivity of the British and French governments.

As Soviet assistance reached Spain in 1937, however, so too did Soviet political practices. The Spanish and foreign volunteers fighting for the Madrid republican government did not consist exclusively of members of parties belonging to the Comintern: there were also liberals, social-democrats, socialists, Trotskyists and anarchists. Stalin, while wanting to preserve the policy of ‘popular fronts’ against fascism, rejected co-operation with rival far-left groupings; and he instructed his emissaries to conduct the same bloody terror against the Trotskyists, anarchists and others that he was applying to them in the USSR. Thousands of anti-fascist fighters were arrested and executed at the behest of the Soviet functionaries.

Stalin wanted to increase the influence of the world-wide communist movement, but only insofar as it in no way damaged the USSR’s interests as he perceived them. In 1938 he took the otherwise incomprehensible decision to wipe out the leading cadre of the Polish Communist Party. The victims were by then resident in Moscow, and the few surviving figures were those lucky enough to be in prison in Warsaw (and one of these, Władisław Gomułka, was destined to become the Polish communist leader in 1945). Stalin, knowing that many comrades from Poland had sympathized with leftist communist factions in Moscow in the 1920s, aimed to crush insubordination before it recurred. Moreover, the NKVD infiltrated their agents into groups of political émigrés from the Soviet Union. Assassinations were frequent. Trotski, immured in his own armed compound in Coyoacán in Mexico, survived for a while; but even his defences were penetrated on 20 August 1940, when his killer, Ramon Mercader, plunged an ice-pick into the back of his head.

All this time the situation around the USSR’s border became more threatening. While fighting a war against China, the Japanese military command was not averse to provoking trouble with the USSR. Violent clashes occurred in July 1937. Another series of incidents took place between July and August 1938, culminating in the battle of Lake Khasan on the Manchurian border. A truce was arranged, but there was no guarantee that Japan would desist from further aggression. In the same year, Hitler made Germany the most powerful state in Europe by occupying all of Austria and the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.

Yet it was also in 1937–8 that Stalin chose to liquidate practically the entire high command of his armed forces. Nothing more vividly demonstrates that his was the statesmanship of the madhouse. By late 1938 even Stalin was coming to the conclusion that the scale of state terror had to be reduced. The most obvious sign of this was given on 19 November 1938, when Yezhov unexpectedly resigned from the NKVD after a brief interview with Stalin. He retained a job as People’s Commissar for Water Transport, but began to while away the meetings of Sovnarkom by folding paper aeroplanes and flying them around the room. Acquaintances were puzzled as to whether he had finally gone off his head or was an accomplished actor; but Stalin was not one to leave such things to guesswork: Yezhov was arrested in April 1939 and executed in the following February.⁶⁵

The Iron Hedgehog’s disappearance signalled the closing of the floodgates of the Great Terror. It was not the end of extensive terror; on the contrary, Stalin used it liberally for the rest of his career. But at the end of 1938 he had decided that the arrests should be fewer. He did not explain his changed position; and yet surely even he must have been shaken by the many practical effects of the blood-purge. There is still much uncertainty about the physical volume of industrial output in 1937–8; but certainly the rate of growth was severely curtailed. There may even have been an absolute decrease in production.⁶⁶ The disorganization was extraordinary. Even the purgers of the purgers of the purgers had been arrested in some places. There are hints that Stalin recognized his own proneness to being too suspicious for his own good; he was to mutter in Khrushchëv’s presence several years later: ‘I trust nobody, not even myself.’⁶⁷

Yet such comments were rare. On the whole Stalin gave the impression that abuses of power were not large in number and that anyway they were Yezhov’s fault. Consequently no action was taken against people who referred to the Great Terror as the Yezhovshchina.⁶⁸ For this term distracted unpleasant attention from Stalin. And Stalin, having used Yezhov to do his dirty business, emerged as Soviet dictator in all but name.

He had broken the party as an independent, supreme political agency. Five years passed after the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 before he would permit another Congress to convene, and he restricted the Central Committee to one plenum in 1939. The Politburo was ceasing to meet on a regular, formal basis: Stalin preferred to hold discussions with whatever group of Politburo members suited his purposes at the time.⁶⁹ The NKVD’s star had risen while the party’s had fallen; and Beria, when replacing Yezhov, entered the small circle of Stalin’s close advisers. The ‘organs’, as the security police were known, were at Stalin’s elbow whenever he needed them. Fearsome as it was, moreover, the NKVD itself operated in dread of Stalin. In consequence of the Great Terror of 1937–8, therefore, Stalin had succeeded in elevating himself above party, people’s commissariats, army, trade unions and police.

He fostered tension among these powerful institutions so as to maintain his towering position. Communists had typically given little mind to the demarcation of functions among state bodies since the October Revolution; they despised such pernicketiness as an obstacle to communist progress. Stalin exploited this attitude to his personal advantage. The NKVD conflicted with the Red Army, the Red Army with various People’s Commissariats, the Commissariats with the Central Council of Trade Unions and the Central Council with the Party Central Committee.

After 1938 these clashes were mainly bureaucratic squabbles; they often involved differing orientations of policy, but they were less frequently accompanied by mass arrests. All public institutions, while abjectly professing loyalty to Stalin, were confirmed in their power over the rest of society. The Soviet state was authoritative as never before. Satisfied that he had brought the party to heel, Stalin restored its prestige and authority somewhat. The salaries of its functionaries were raised. In December 1938 the NKVD was ordered to seek permission from the party apparatus before taking any official of the party into custody; and, at the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, Beria stressed that not all the economic problems of the USSR were attributable to sabotage. It was even admitted that a great many expulsions from the party — which in 1937–8 had typically led to arrests — had been unjustified. Stalin confirmed the fresh attitude by asserting the necessity to ‘value cadres like the gold reserves of the party and state, esteem them, have respect for them’.⁷⁰

The applause which greeted this statement of monumental hypocrisy stemmed from a feeling of relief that the party might again enjoy durable favour. Other institutions were similarly reassured; but the party remained rather special. It incarnated continuity with the October Revolution, with Lenin, with Marxism-Leninism, with the Communist International. It provided the ideological cement to help to maintain the Soviet state. Its cohesive capacity was equally important organizationally: holders of governmental, administrative and military office were virtually obliged to be party members and to operate under the party’s discipline; and the party apparatus, at the centre and elsewhere, helped to co-ordinate state institutions.

Furthermore, citizens of the USSR were acutely aware of their state’s immense and pervasive powers. The Great Terror, following quickly after the violent campaigns of collectivization and industrialization, left no one in doubt about the consequences of overt disobedience. The kind of conversation held by the visiting American engineer John Scott with Soviet managers in the early 1930s about the inefficiency of a particular coal-mine no longer took place. Similarly, the complaining talk among workers recorded at the beginning of the decade by the ex-Menshevik Viktor Kravchenko became more discreet by its end. Oppositional leaflets of discontented party activists, which still appeared as late as 1933, had become antiquarian artefacts. Officials in every institution and at every level were wary of saying the slightest thing that might conceivably be interpreted as disloyal. The traumatization had been profound, and the carnage of 1937–8 left a mark on popular consciousness that endures.

12 Coping with Big Brothers

By the late 1930s the term totalitarianism was being widely used to describe the kind of state and society engineered by Iosif Stalin. Benito Mussolini had used it in reference to his own fascist Italy nearly two decades before. Commentators on Soviet politics, while recognizing contrasts of ideology, saw the similarities among fascism, nazism and communism in their methods of rule. In Moscow as in Berlin there was a dominant leader and a one-party state. Both countries had witnessed a merciless crushing of internal opposition. The state not only monopolized the instrumentalities of coercion but also dominated the means of mass communication. It allowed no challenge to the single official ideology. There was persecution of any independent individual, organization or institution standing between the central state bodies and ordinary citizens. Total, unmediated pervasion of society by his power was each leader’s aspiration.

That something close to this had been Stalin’s underlying objective in carrying through the Great Terror there can be little doubt. Yet his power was not absolute. Those who had carried out the bloody purges knew that, in order to survive, they had to use the practices of patronage and mutual protection which Stalin had hoped to eradicate. And Stalin himself had had to scale down his totalist aims in the course of the Terror. Concessions to Russian national pride had been strengthened. Moreover, not all public entertainments were heavily political: frivolity existed even in Stalin’s USSR. Stalin felt the need to identify himself with the aspirations of the people he governed. This fearsome dictator had fears of his own.

Yet he could take comfort from the knowledge that he had promoted a vast number of newly-trained young activists. The central nomenklatura of personnel involved in state economic management had risen to 32,899 posts. Of these, 14,585 at the beginning of 1939 had been appointed in the past two years — forty-seven per cent of the total. In the Red Army the proportion was also remarkable: Stalin had purged the officer corps at its highest levels with particular thoroughness. The apparatus of the party, too, had been overhauled. Four out of five provincial committee first secretaries had joined the party after Lenin’s death; ninety-one per cent of them had yet to reach the age of forty (and sixty-two per cent were less than thirty-five years old).¹ A cohort of young men gained advancement who were later to govern the country through to the early 1980s: Mikhail Suslov, Dmitri Ustinov, Leonid Brezhnev, Aleksei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny. It was a new élite and it was Stalin’s élite.

Most of its members were workers or peasants who had taken the opportunities offered by the Soviet authorities to get themselves educated. Over half of the voting delegates to the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 had completed their secondary schooling.² Their adult life and their politics marked them off from the generation of Old Bolsheviks: they had not operated in the clandestine Bolshevik groups before 1917; they had not made the October Revolution or fought in the Civil War; and their Marxism was not their intellectual passion but a crude creed purveyed to them by the party’s agitation-and-propaganda departments.

They were taught to obey and be vigilant; their obligation was not only to ‘unmask’ traitors but also to engage in ‘self-criticism’ whenever they could not fulfil orders. Simultaneously they were cajoled to clamber up the ladder of promotion. The administrative hierarchy in the USSR was much simpler than in advanced capitalist societies: the duties, perks and authority accompanying each post were evident to every ambitious man and woman. The Soviet Union was distinguished by a uniformity of work-style and by great symbolism and ceremony. Not only military but also civilian medals were worn in normal public life: even Molotov sported a Hero of the Soviet Union badge on his suit’s lapel. Outstanding actors, opera singers and clowns were awarded the title of ‘People’s Artist of the USSR’; and when national gatherings were held in the capital, ritual obeisance to Stalin was compulsory: the major decisions had been taken in advance by the party leadership.

The promotees could hardly believe their luck. Most of them were persons who had not dreamed of staying in a hotel or even having a healthy diet earlier in their lives. As the Great Terror came to an end, they became able to enjoy their privileged conditions. The gap between the rulers and the ruled widened. In 1940, Stalin approved the introduction of fees to be paid by parents for students in the last three years of secondary school and at university. High-ranking administrators were in a better position to find the necessary finance than any other group in society. A new social class was in the process of formation.³

Its members acclaimed Stalin as the world’s outstanding philanthropist, leader and theorist. In the 1930s he attempted no lengthy contribution to the canon of Bolshevism: he was too busy killing Bolsheviks. Many among the party’s writers who might have written textbooks for him fell victim to his butchery. A new explication of the principles of Marxism-Leninism was essential for the regime. As regional party secretary M. M. Khataevich had put it in 1935, there was a need for ‘a book of our own, in place of the Bible, that could give a rigorous answer — correct and comprehensible — to the many important questions of the structure of the world’.⁴ Khataevich perished in the Great Terror; and the project for a grand treatise on Marxism was not realized until after Stalin’s death. In the meantime the gap was filled by a book with a narrower title, The History of the All-Union Communist Party: A Short Course.

The main authors were veteran party loyalists V. G. Knorin, E. M. Yaroslavski and P. N. Pospelov. But Stalin closely supervised the contents and personally wrote the sub-chapter on ‘dialectical and historical materialism’. To most intents and purposes he was the textbook’s general editor and hid behind the pseudonym of ‘a commission of the Central Committee’.

The Short Course traced the rise of the Bolsheviks from the political struggles against the Romanov monarchy through to Stalin’s ascendancy. The last section of the final chapter dealt with ‘the Liquidation of the Remnants of the Bukharinite-Trotskyist Gang of Spies, Wreckers and Traitors to the Country’. Hysterical self-righteousness imbued the book. Stalin wanted to stress that Marxism provided the sole key to understanding both the social life of humanity and even the material universe, and that only Stalin’s variant of Marxism was acceptable. Just as prophet followed prophet in the Old Testament, the Short Course traced a lineage of authentic scientific communism from Marx and Engels through Lenin down to Stalin. According to Stalin, Bolshevism had triumphed predominantly through struggle, often bloody, merciless struggle, and unceasing vigilance.⁵

Purportedly its victories had also resulted from the virtues of its leadership. Lenin and Stalin, and subsequently Stalin by himself, had led the Central Committee. The Central Committee had led the communist party and the party had led the masses. In each period of the party’s history there had been maleficent communists such as Trotski and Bukharin who had linked up with kulaks, priests, landlords and tsarist officers at home and capitalist espionage agencies abroad. But in vain! For Comrade Stalin had rooted out the traitors and pointed the party in the direction of the attainment of a perfect society!

The book divided everything between black and white (or, as Stalin preferred, White and Red). There was no palette of colours in this Stalinist catechism. Violence, intolerance, pitilessness, command, discipline, correctness and science were the central themes. In the USSR of the 1930s this was a conservative set of recommendations. Current holders of office could act without qualms. Stalin’s infallibility meant that they need not question their consciences, even when taking up the posts of innocent dead men and buying up their possessions in the special shops runs by the NKVD. By obeying the Leader, they were acting in complete accord with the requirements of patriotism, class struggle and History. Their power and their privileged life-style were in the natural order of things, and the existence of an impregnable, terrifying Soviet state was the guarantee of the October Revolution’s preservation. The Short Course was a manifesto for Stalin’s style of communist conservatism.

According to Lenin, however, the communist dictatorship would wither away and be succeeded by a society without any state bodies whatsoever. Stalin brazenly declared that much progress had already been made towards that ultimate goal. The bourgeoisie no longer existed, and a new social and economic order had been built.

Now it was stated that only three social classes existed: the working class, the peasantry and the ‘working intelligentsia’ (which included everyone with an administrative, managerial or educational post). Therefore the Soviet Union was still a society of classes. But supposedly it was different from all such previous societies inasmuch as the three classes had no reason to conflict with each other. Thus the working class, the peasantry and the intelligentsia had ‘non-antagonistic’ interests and drew common benefit from the state’s provision of employment, education, health care, nutrition and shelter.⁶ In November 1936, when introducing a new Constitution for the USSR, Stalin proclaimed: ‘Socialism, which is the first phase of communism, has basically been realized in our country.’⁷ He therefore proposed that the electoral franchise should be made universal. The ‘deprived ones’ (lishentsy) — including former kulaks, White Army officers and priests — should be allowed to vote.⁸

Universal civil rights were introduced on paper, and the freedoms of thought, the press, religion, organization and assembly were guaranteed. Furthermore, Stalin insisted that economic rights were as important as political ones. In particular, he drew attention to the guarantees of employment given in the Soviet Union. This led him to claim that the new Constitution proved that the USSR was the most democratic country in the world.

Stalin was being monumentally insincere. The lishentsy were picked out for repression when the Great Terror began in full earnest in mid-1937. Moreover, the new Constitution itself was laden with stipulations that restricted the exercise of civil freedoms. In the first place, the USSR was defined as ‘a socialist state of the workers and peasants’. Thus the rights of citizens were made entirely subsidiary to the determination to preserve the existing structure and orientation of the Soviet state. No clause in the Constitution expressly sanctioned the All-Union Communist Party’s political monopoly; but only the existing public institutions, including the communist party, were allowed to put up candidates in elections. Formal approval was given in this indirect fashion to the one-party state. Stalin carefully supervised the wording of the final draft and, when introducing the Constitution, specified that the communist dictatorship was not going to be weakened.⁹

Not surprisingly the Constitution was not taken seriously by citizens of the USSR.¹⁰ Its main admirers were gullible foreigners. The most notorious of them were Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? sought to defend Stalin against the charge that dictatorship of any kind existed in the USSR!¹¹ In the meantime Molotov bluntly affirmed that years would pass before full implementation of all the civil freedoms granted by the Constitution;¹² and already in 1933 Stalin himself had contended that, as the party advanced to victory after victory, so the state required strengthening against the bitter onslaughts of its foes at home and abroad. In 1939 he expatiated on this point at the Eighteenth Party Congress: ‘Will our state be retained also in the period of communism? Yes, it will be retained unless capitalist encirclement is liquidated and unless the danger of a military attack from abroad is liquidated.’¹³

This contradicted Marxist doctrine inasmuch as communism was supposed to involve the ‘withering away of the state’. But Stalin ignored such a nicety; his overriding aim was to reinforce the regimentative aspects of Bolshevism. The Congress delegates were anyway not the sort to worry about interpretations of Marxism. They were also well accustomed to the fact that the USSR was a terror-state. At the same Eighteenth Congress Stalin alluded to this in his po-faced comment that, whereas the elections to the USSR Supreme Soviet yielded a 98.6 per cent vote in favour of the regime after the sentencing of Tukhachevski in 1937, the proportion rose to 99.4 per cent after Bukharin’s trial in 1938.¹⁴

Stalin, needless to say, knew that the more favourable vote derived not from the cogency of the evidence against the alleged traitors but from the intimidating example of their execution. Not even he, however, ruled exclusively through the violence of his security and judicial machinery. He had his equivalent of an old boys’ network, consisting of cronies who had supported him in his past battles and who served him through to his death. The first in political seniority was Molotov. Then came Kaganovich and Mikoyan, who had joined him in the early 1920s. Others included pre-revolutionary party veterans such as Andrei Zhdanov, Andrei Andreev, Nikolai Bulganin and Kliment Voroshilov. Nor did Stalin neglect the young: Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchëv and Georgi Malenkov were hauled up by him from the lower political echelons and promoted to supreme party and government posts.

The central leadership was like a gang, and Stalin as its leader relied upon his fellow members to organize the state’s institutions. Competence and obedience remained prerequisites of gang membership. The penalty for disagreement with Stalin was constant: ‘seven grams of lead’ in the head.

Stalin continued to make occasional arrests of cronies. Like Al Capone, he knew how to ‘keep the boys in line’.¹⁵ For instance, he asked Khrushchëv whether it was true that he was really a Pole.¹⁶ This was quite enough to terrify Khrushchëv, who knew that in 1938 Stalin had executed the Polish communist émigrés in Moscow. The nearer someone was to the apex of power, the more directly he was intimidated by Stalin. People’s commissars trembled at meetings of Sovnarkom. Stalin’s ploy was to get up from the long green-baize table and pad up and down in his soft leather boots behind the seats of his colleagues. It was an unnerving experience. In reply to Stalin’s enquiry about the number of recent plane crashes, air force commander Rychagov, being the worse for drink, blurted out: ‘There will continue to be a high level of accidents because we’re compelled by you to go up in flying coffins.’ The room fell silent as a graveyard, and after a long pause Stalin murmured: ‘You shouldn’t have spoken like that.’ Rychagov was shot a few days later.¹⁷

Yet the uppermost élite lived in greater safety than in 1937–8. Stalin could not afford to reduce his associates to the condition of robots: he needed them to accompany their self-abasement before him with a dynamic ruthlessness in the discharge of their tasks — and to give orders on their own initiative. Laws, decrees, regulations and commands were produced in profusion in this period of frightful legal abusiveness.¹⁸ But, as under Lenin, office-holders were given to understand that they would not be assessed on the basis of their adherence to procedural norms. What would ultimately count for or against them was their record of practical results.

At the supreme and middling levels they had to combine the talents of cardinals, condottieri and landed magnates: they had to be propagators of Marxism-Leninism; they had to fight for the policies of the party; and each of them had to assemble a band of followers who would carry out orders throughout the area of their patron’s responsibility. The unavoidable result was that Stalin had to settle for a less amenable administration than he had aimed to establish by means of the Great Terror. Just as he needed his cronies, so they needed cronies of their own. The cliental groupings therefore stayed in place. For example, Postyshev’s team in the Ukrainian party leadership gave way to Khrushchëv’s team when Stalin sent Khrushchëv to Kiev in 1938; and Beria likewise cleared out Yezhov’s team from the NKVD and installed his own: it was the only available way to ensure the substitution of reliable anti-Yezhovites.

Not only vertically but also horizontally the old administrative practices stayed in place. In June 1937 Stalin had complained: ‘It’s thought that the centre must know everything and see everything. No, the centre doesn’t see everything: it’s not like that at all. The centre sees only a part and the remainder is seen in the localities. It sends people without knowing these people one hundred per cent. You must check them out.’¹⁹ But new local ‘nests’ or ‘family circles’ were formed almost as soon as Stalin destroyed the existing ones. Wheeling and dealing occurred among the heads of party, soviet, police, army and enterprise management; local officials protected each other against the demands made by central authorities. More than ever, lying to Moscow was a skill crucial for physical survival. Institutions had to fiddle the accounts so as to exaggerate achievements enough to win acclaim, but not to the point that the following year’s quotas would be raised intolerably high.

Such evasiveness was not confined to officialdom. A black market existed in those many types of product which were in severe deficit in the USSR. Moisei Kaganovich, brother of Stalin’s close associate, loudly objected to the general evidence of disobedience: ‘The earth ought to tremble when the director walks around the plant!’ In theory the managerial stratum was obliged to give its work-forces a harder time than since the October Revolution. But the potential for harshness was limited outside the forced-labour camps by the chronic shortage of skilled free labour. Strict time-keeping and conscientious work could not be enforced if hired labourers could simply wander off and find employment elsewhere. A kind of social concordat was established whereby managers overlooked labour indiscipline so long as they could hang on to their workers. Records were written to over-state a worker’s technical qualifications or his hours of attendance or his output. Managers had to break the law in order to fulfil their own quotas.²⁰

In every branch of the economy it was the same story. Even in the kolkhozes and the sovkhozes the local authorities found it convenient to make compromises with the work-forces. A blind eye was turned to the expansion of the size of peasants’ private plots.²¹ Regular contribution of ‘labour days’ was not always insisted upon. Illicit borrowing of the farm’s equipment was overlooked by the chairman who needed to keep the peasants on his side in order to fulfil the governmental quotas.

The central political leadership had been encouraging the workers and kolkhozniki to denounce factory directors and farm chairmen for their involvement in sabotage; but the end of the Great Terror led to a renewed emphasis on labour discipline. Increasingly draconian punishments were introduced. Managers in town and countryside were threatened with imprisonment if they failed to report absenteeism, lack of punctuality, sloppy workmanship as well as theft and fraud. According to a decree of December 1938, labourers who were late for work three times in a month should be sacked. Another decree in June 1940 stated that such behaviour should incur a penalty of six months’ corrective labour at their place of work.²² Stalin also tightened his grip on the collective farms. A decree of May 1939 ordered local authorities to seize back land under illegal private cultivation by kolkhozniki.²³ But the fact that such measures were thought necessary showed that, at the lower levels of administration, non-compliance with the demands of the central authorities was widespread. Sullen, passive resistance had become a way of life.

The Soviet order therefore continued to need a constant dosage of excitation in order to keep functioning. Otherwise the institutions of party and government would tend to relapse into quietude as officials pursued personal privilege and bureaucratic compromise. Ideological apathy would also increase. The provision of dachas, nannies, special shops and special hospitals was already well developed in the 1920s; and, with the termination of the Great Terror, these benefits were confirmed as the patrimony of Stalin’s ruling subordinates. How to ensure a lively discomfort among the central and local nomenklaturas?

Or indeed among all sections of the USSR’s society? Denunciation by ordinary workers became a routine method of controlling politicians and administrators. Stalin knew that anonymous letter-writing was open to abuse; and yet he fostered the practice in order to keep all leaders in a state of trepidation. Likewise he reinforced Pravda’s custom of carrying out muck-raking investigations in a specific locality. The idea was that an exposé of malpractice would stimulate the eradication of similar phenomena elsewhere. Stalin and his colleagues were attracted to a campaigning style of work. Time after time the central political authorities imposed a fresh organizational technique or a new industrial product, and used the press to demand enthusiastic local obedience. Reluctantly they had accepted that Stakhanovism caused more disruption than increase in output; but the pressurizing of managers and workers to over-fulfil plans was an unchanging feature.²⁴

These traditions had existed since 1917; but Stalin relied upon them to a greater extent than Lenin. Organizational pressure and ideological invocation, in the absence of the predominant stimulus of the market, were the principal instruments available to him apart from resort to the security police. A structural imperative was at work. Stalin’s preferences gave strength to the practices, but the practices were also necessary for the maintenance of the regime.

The central authorities aimed at the total penetration of society. The Great Terror had smashed down nearly all associations that competed with the regime for popularity. The only surviving potential challenge of an organized nature came from the religious bodies, and all of these were in a deeply traumatized condition. It was the aim of the authorities that no unit of social life — not only the tribe and the clan but also even the family — might be left free from their control. Within the walls of each family home there could be talk about the old days before the October Revolution and about values and traditions other than the Marxist-Leninist heritage. Discussions between parents and their children therefore became a matter for governmental concern. In 1932 a fourteen-year-old village boy called Pavlik Morozov had denounced his father for fraud. The peasants on the same kolkhoz were enraged by such filial perfidy, and lynched the lad. Young Pavlik became a symbol of the official duty of each citizen to support the state’s interest even to the point of informing upon his parents.

Other groups, too, attracted Stalin’s persecution. No recreational or cultural club was permitted to exist unless it was run by the state; and harmless groups of philatelists, Esperantists and ornithologists were broken up by the arrest of their members. Labourers had to watch their tongues when gathering together over a glass of vodka in taverns; intellectuals were wary of sharing their thoughts with each other in the kommunalki in case their neighbours might overhear them. NKVD informers were everywhere and everyone learned to exercise extreme caution.

Lower than this level, however, the Soviet state found it difficult to achieve its goals. The plan was to maximize the influence over people as individuals. Citizens were permitted to act collectively only when mobilized by party and government. But the groups based on family, wider kinship, friendship, leisure and a common culture were molecules resistant to disintegration into separate atoms.²⁵ The difficulties for the authorities were compounded by the abrupt, massive process of urbanization: a third of the population of the USSR lived in towns and cities by 1940: this was double the proportion three decades earlier. The newcomers from the villages brought with them their folk beliefs, their religion and even their forms of organizations; for some of them, when leaving their villages, stayed together in zemlyachestva, which were the traditional groups based upon geographical origin. In the short term the influx had a ‘ruralizing’ effect as former villagers introduced their habits and expectations to the towns.²⁶

If customary patterns of behaviour caused problems for the political leadership, so too did newer ones. Under the First Five-Year Plan there had been a drastic loosening of moral restraints and social ties. Juvenile delinquency reportedly increased by 100 per cent between 1931 and 1934. Hooliganism was rife not only in the new shanty-cities under construction but also in the old metropolitan centres. In 1935 there were three times as many abortions as births. The incidence of divorce rose sharply. Promiscuity was rampant. Vital social linkages were at the point of dissolution.²⁷

Even before the Great Terror the authorities had seen the risks of this situation. Measures were taken to restore a degree of stability. Respect for parents and teachers was officially stressed from 1935. There were curtailments of the rights to get a divorce and to have an abortion in 1936. Awards were to be made to ‘mother-heroines’ who had ten or more children. School uniforms were reintroduced for the first time since 1917. Discipline at school, at work and at home was officially demanded and most of the new inhabitants of the towns went along with this. But their behaviour displeased the authorities in other respects. Peasants were thought unhygienic, ignorant and stupid. They needed, in the contemporary phrase, to become kul’turnye (‘cultured’). Campaigns were organized to rectify the situation. People were instructed to wash their hands and faces, brush their teeth and dress smartly in the dourly Soviet manner. Men were told that beards were unmodern. Even Kaganovich, at Stalin’s behest, had to shave off his beard.²⁸

It was therefore for pragmatic reasons that political leaders began in the mid-1930s to give encouragement to the family and to rather traditional proprieties. But this shift in policy occurred within carefully-maintained parameters. Stalin was determined that it should not culminate in the disintegration of the October Revolution.

He similarly aimed to hold expressions of Russian nationhood under control. His particular stratagem was to attempt to amalgamate ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet’ identities. Thus Russians were to be induced to take much pride in Russia but even greater pride in the USSR. There were indeed many achievements about which the Soviet state could boast in the 1930s. Daring expeditions were made to the frozen Russian north, where gold, oil and other precious deposits were discovered. Records were broken by Valeri Chkalov and other aviators who flew over the North Pole. Gymnastic displays were frequent and football became a major sport across the USSR. The Moscow Metro was renowned for its sumptuous frescos, candelabra and immaculate punctuality. Almost every edition of Pravda carried a large photograph of some young hero who had accomplished some great feat — and in 1937–8 there were more pictures of such persons than of Stalin himself on the first page of the newspaper.²⁹ The popularity of such successes was among the reasons why he got away with his bloody mass purges.

Science, mathematics and technology were also celebrated. Bolsheviks had always dreamed of engineering an entirely new physical environment, and Lenin had minted the slogan: ‘Communism equals electrification plus soviet power.’ Under the NEP, few advances were made either in academic research or in the diffusion of up-to-date technology. But things changed under Stalin, who put the resources of the Soviet state firmly behind such efforts.

The authorities demanded that scientists should produce work that would benefit the economy. The goals included not only electrification but also ‘radiofication’ and ‘tractorization’. Close control was imposed upon research, often with baleful results: many researchers languished in Siberian labour camps. At the same time the fraudulent geneticist Timofei Lysenko, exploiting his access to Stalin, built up a sparkling career; and one particular foreign adventurer is alleged to have been given funds for the rearing of herds of giant rabbits.³⁰ (This was surely the most hare-brained of all Stalinist schemes!) Nevertheless science in general made immense progress in the USSR and acquired world renown. Pëtr Kapitsa did brilliant work on low-temperature physics and became director of the Institute of Physical Problems in Moscow. Aleksei Bakh was a founding father of biochemistry. The veteran physiologist Ivan Pavlov remained at work through to his death in 1935, and other giants of the period were the physicists Lev Landau and Yevgeni Lifshits. Promising youths such as Andrei Sakharov were being trained by them to serve the country’s interests.

Literature, too, was accorded prestige; but, as with science, Stalin supported activity only insofar as it assisted his ulterior purposes and this naturally affected its quality. Notoriously, he dragooned Maksim Gorki and others to write a eulogistic account entitled ‘Stalin’s White Sea–Baltic Canal’.³¹ Other participating writers included Mikhail Zoshchenko, Valentin Kataev, Aleksei Tolstoy and Viktor Shklovski. All artistic figures went in fear of their lives. Many of the country’s most glorious poets, novelists, painters, film directors and composers came to an untimely end. Isaak Babel was shot; Osip Mandelshtam perished in the Gulag; Marina Tsvetaeva, whose husband and son were slaughtered by the NKVD, committed suicide. The despairing Mikhail Bulgakov died of nephritis outside prison. Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak lived a living death, not knowing why they had been spared the fate of others.

Just a few works of merit, such as Andrei Platonov’s stories, were published in the late 1930s. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, with its phantasmagoric portrayal of the clowns and bureaucrats of contemporary Moscow, lay in his desk drawer. None of the wonderful elegies by Mandelshtam, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva on the fate of their country appeared in print. Pasternak wanted to survive and, if this involved keeping his decent poems to himself, he understandably thought it a price worth paying. In 1934 the founding Congress of the Union of Writers was held and the principle of ‘socialist realism’ became officially mandatory. This meant that ‘the truthfulness and historical concreteness of artistic portrayal must be in harmony with the objective of the ideological transformation and education of the workers in the spirit of socialism’. Above all, the arts had to be optimistic. The typical novel would involve a working-class hero who undertakes a task such as the construction of a dam or a housing block and fulfils it against near-miraculous odds.

Reconditeness in theme or style was forbidden not only in literature but also in music. Stalin wanted melodies that were whistlable, and wonderful composers and Marxist-Leninist sympathizers such as Dmitri Shostakovich fell into disgrace for their atonalities and discords. Stalin’s taste leant in the direction of the less demanding pre-revolutionary Russian classics: he adored Glinka and Chaikovski. Indeed the ballet and the symphony concert were becoming the favourite evening entertainment for the central party élite. Patriotic (nay, chauvinistic!) films such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible and novels about the tsars by Aleksei Tolstoy were also admired. Lighter mental fare, too, was provided. Spy novels, patriotic doggerel and folk-songs were popular, and many theatres specialized in ‘light entertainment’. Love ditties were particular favourites with the audiences. Jazz and Western ballroom dancing were also increasingly common.³²

The opportunities for cultural self-edification and recreation were widely welcomed; but what most people wanted above all else was an improvement in their material situation. Food shortages had troubled most Soviet citizens since the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan. And things were gradually getting a little better. Bread, meat, sugar were among several staple products no longer rationed from 1934–5. All rationing was abolished in 1936, and material provision improved for most non-arrested people in the late 1930s. Cheap food in work-place cafeterias also made a difference to the average diet. Admittedly consumption per head of the population was still three per cent lower in 1940 than in 1928.³³ But the general trend was towards betterment in the late 1930s. The network of free educational and medical establishments was also expanded and people in employment received their work-clothes free of charge. Such changes proved a surer means of ensuring acquiescence than compulsory study of the Short Course.

Many workers and kolkhozniki were anyway pleased by the repression of peremptory, privileged administrators. Sometimes there was a xenophobic aspect to popular attitudes — and Pravda played cunningly upon worries about spies and about the military threats from abroad. Furthermore, the Bolsheviks who had made the October Revolution included a disproportionate number of non-Russians, especially Jews.³⁴ Indeed many relished the discomfiture of such people. At last the biters were being bitten. Nor were the mass media always disbelieved when they claimed that ‘wreckers’ and ‘spies’ existed in a countless quantity.³⁵ Practically everyone had experienced a breakdown in factory machinery, in public transport or in the supply of food. The years of industrialization and collectivization had been exceptionally turbulent, and it was not hard to persuade people that sabotage was widespread. Moreover, Russian peasants had a tradition of dealing severely with the wrong-doers in their midst. There was a certain amount of popular approval for the harsh punishment of those whom Stalin purged.

The survival of old social attitudes was important in enabling Stalin to carry out the Great Terror and to deflect blame from himself. Among Russians there was a centuries-old assumption that, if the policies of the tsar were unfair, the fault lay with his malevolent advisers. Stalin persistently induced people to think that he had their interests at heart. It was necessary, he had declared, ‘to listen carefully to the voice of the masses, to the voice of rank-and-file party members, to the voice of the so-called “little people”, to the voice of simple folk.’³⁶

Nevertheless it is unclear whether his pose won him friends even among the most simple-minded of citizens. Of course, Stalin’s message appealed to the newly-promoted members of the various élites. Of course, too, it was attractive to youngsters who had been schooled to revere him and whose parents were too terrified to say anything even privately against him. But rural hatred of Stalin was visceral.³⁷ He had identified himself so closely with agricultural collectivization that he could not easily disassociate himself from its horrors. And in the towns there were millions of inhabitants who had no reason whatsoever to regard the period of his rule with affection. Religious belief remained a solace for most people. In the USSR census of 1937, fifty-seven per cent of the population disclosed that they were believers — and the real percentage was probably a lot greater in view of the state’s aggressive promotion of atheism.³⁸ All in all, little political acquiescence would have been obtained if people had not been afraid of the NKVD: silent disgruntlement was the norm.

Most adults in the Soviet Union knew all too well how far official rhetoric was at variance with their direct experience. Real wages per person in 1937 were about three fifths of what they had been in 1928.³⁹ The material improvement for the average family since the mid-1930s was mainly the result of more members of each family taking up paid employment.⁴⁰ People knew they were working much harder for their living. They also retained a keen memory of the military-style collectivization, the famine, the persecution of religion and the bludgeoning of all dissent, near-dissent and imaginary dissent. It is difficult to quantify the degree of hostility to Stalin’s regime. Who but a fool or a saint talked openly about these matters? But the NKVD did not delude itself that the voluntary communion of Stalin, the party and the masses was a reality. Police informers in Voronezh province, for example, indicated that the contents of the 1936 Constitution were widely regarded as not being worth the paper they were printed upon.⁴¹

The conclusion must be that the Soviet state was far from its goal of reshaping popular opinion to its liking. But a caveat must be entered here. Interviews with Soviet citizens who fled the USSR in the Second World War showed that support for welfare-state policies, for strong government and for patriotic pride was robust — and this was a sample of persons who had shown their detestation of Stalin by leaving the country.⁴² Some elements in the regime’s ideology struck a congenial chord while others produced only disharmony. This was not a settled society, far less a ‘civilization’. People knew they lacked the power to get rid of the Societ order. While hoping for change, they made the best of a bad job. Probably most of them ceased to dream of a specific alternative to Stalinism. They tried to be practical in an efford to survive. All the more reason for Stalin to reward the men and women who staffed the institutions that administered society on his behalf. Insofar as it was a durable system, this was to a large extent because a hierarchically graduated system of power and emoluments held their loyalty. Even many doubters thought that the regime’s nastiness was not unreformable. Hope, too, endured in the USSR.

A wilder misjudgement of Stalin is hard to imagine. Stalin was unembarrassed about the need to use force in order to maintain his rule. In August 1938, as the penal terms of a generation of convicts drew to a close, he playfully asked the USSR Supreme Soviet whether such convicts should be released on time. He declared that ‘from the viewpoint of the state economy it would be a bad idea’ to set them free since the camps would lose their best workers. In addition, convicts on release might re-associate with criminals in their home towns and villages. Better for them to complete their rehabilitation inside the Gulag: ‘In a camp the atmosphere is different; it is difficult to go to the bad there. As you know, we have a system of voluntary-compulsory financial loans. Let’s also introduce a system of voluntary-compulsory retention.’⁴³ And so just as free wage-earners had to agree to ‘lend’ part of their wages to the Soviet government, so camp inmates would have to agree to the lengthening of their sentences.

And so control over people came nearest to perfection in relation to two groups: those at the very bottom and those at the very top. Camp inmates had no rights: their daily routine ensured compliance with the instruction of their guards on pain of death. Politburo members, too, lacked rights, and their physical proximity to Stalin necessitated an unswerving obedience to the whim of the Leader. Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, Beria and their colleagues could never safely object to a line of policy which Stalin had already approved.

But in between there were gradations of non-compliance which were possible and common. Policies could be obfuscated, modified and even emasculated. Choices could be made between one official priority and another; for there was practically no message from the Kremlin that was not said to be a priority of the Politburo. Furthermore, the entire structure of public information, surveillance and enforcement was patchy. Such a state and such a society were clearly not totalitarian if the epithet involves totality in practice as well as in intent. Compliance with the supreme communist leadership was greater in politics than in administration, greater in administration than in the economy, greater in the economy than in social relations. The totalitarian order was therefore full of contradictions. Perfect central control eluded Stalin. The Soviet compound was a unity of extremely orderly features and extremely chaotic ones.

It is plain that Stalin in the 1930s was driven by the will to destroy the old relationships and to build new ones within a framework entirely dominated by the central state authorities. He did not entirely succeed. Nor did his mirror-image adversary Adolf Hitler in Germany. But the goal was so ambitious that even its half-completion was a dreadful achievement.

13 The Second World War (1939–1945)

Stalin had always expected war to break out again in Europe. In every major speech on the Central Committee’s behalf he stressed the dangers in contemporary international relations. Lenin had taught his fellow communists that economic rivalry would pitch imperialist capitalist powers against each other until such time as capitalism was overthrown. World wars were inevitable in the meantime and Soviet foreign policy had to start from this first premiss of Leninist theory on international relations.

The second premiss was the need to avoid unnecessary entanglement in an inter-imperialist war.¹ Stalin had always aimed to avoid risks with the USSR’s security, and this preference became even stronger at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in mid-1936.² The dream of Maksim Litvinov, People’s Commissar for External Affairs, of the creation of a system of ‘collective security’ in Europe was dissipated when Britain and France refused to prevent Germany and Italy from aiding the spread of fascism to Spain. But what could Stalin do? Complete diplomatic freedom was unfeasible. But if he dealt mainly with the victor powers of the Great War, what trust could he place in their promises of political and military cooperation? If he attempted an approach to Hitler, would he not be rebuffed? And, whatever he chose to do, how could he maintain that degree of independence from either side in Europe’s disputes he thought necessary for the good of himself, his clique and the USSR?

Stalin’s reluctance to take sides, moreover, increased the instabilities in Europe and lessened the chances of preventing continental war.³ In the winter of 1938–9 he concentrated efforts to ready the USSR for such an outbreak. Broadened regulations on conscription raised the size of the Soviet armed forces from two million men under arms in 1939 to five million by 1941. In the same period there was a leap in factory production of armaments to the level of 700 military aircraft, 4,000 guns and mortars and 100,000 rifles.⁴

The probability of war with either Germany or Japan or both at once was an integral factor in Soviet security planning. It was in the Far East, against the Japanese, that the first clashes occurred. The battle near Lake Khasan in mid-1938 had involved 15,000 Red Army personnel. An extremely tense stand-off ensued; and in May 1939 there was further trouble when the Japanese forces occupied Mongolian land on the USSR–Mongolian border near Khalkhin-Gol. Clashes occurred that lasted several months. In August 1939 the Red Army went on to the offensive and a furious conflict took place. The Soviet commander Zhukov used tanks for the first occasion in the USSR’s history of warfare. The battle was protracted and the outcome messy; but, by and large, the Red Army and its 112,500 troops had the better of the Japanese before a truce was agreed on 15 September 1939.⁵

Hitler was active in the same months. Having overrun the Sudeten-land in September 1938, he occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, thereby coming closer still to the USSR’s western frontier. Great Britain gave guarantees of military assistance to Poland in the event of a German invasion. All Europe already expected Warsaw to be Hitler’s next target, and the USSR engaged in negotiations with France and Britain. The Kremlin aimed at the construction of a military alliance which might discourage Hitler from attempting further conquests. But the British in particular dithered over Stalin’s overtures. The nadir was plumbed in summer when London sent not its Foreign Secretary but a military attaché to conduct negotiations in Moscow. The attaché had not been empowered to bargain in his own right, and the lack of urgency was emphasized by the fact that he travelled by sea rather than by air.⁶

Whether Stalin had been serious about these talks remains unclear: it cannot be ruled out that he already wished for a treaty of some kind with Germany. Yet the British government had erred; for even if Stalin had genuinely wanted a coalition with the Western democracies, he now knew that they were not to be depended upon. At the same time Stalin was being courted by Berlin. Molotov, who had taken Litvinov’s place as People’s Commissar of External Affairs in May, explored the significance of the German overtures.⁷ An exchange of messages between Hitler and Stalin took place on 21 August, resulting in an agreement for German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to come to Moscow. Two lengthy conversations occurred between Stalin, Molotov and Ribbentrop on 23 August. Other Politburo members were left unconsulted. By the end of the working day a Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty had been prepared for signature.

This document had two main sections, one made public and the other kept secret. Openly the two powers asserted their determination to prevent war with each other and to increase bilateral trade. The USSR would buy German machinery, Germany would make purchases of Soviet coal and oil. In this fashion Hitler was being given carte blanche to continue his depredatory policies elsewhere in Europe while being guaranteed commercial access to the USSR’s natural resources. Worse still were the contents of the secret protocols of the Non-Aggression Treaty. The USSR and Germany divided the territory lying between them into two spheres of influence: to the USSR was awarded Finland, Estonia and Latvia, while Lithuania and most of Poland went to Germany. Hitler was being enabled to invade Poland at the moment of his choosing, and he did this on 1 September. When he refused to withdraw, Britain and France declared war upon Germany. The Second World War had begun.

Hitler was taken aback by the firmness displayed by the Western parliamentary democracies even though they could have no hope of rapidly rescuing Poland from his grasp. It also disconcerted Hitler that Stalin did not instantly interpret the protocol on the ‘spheres of influence’ as permitting the USSR to grab territory. Stalin had other things on his mind. He was waiting to see whether the Wehrmacht would halt within the area agreed through the treaty. Even more important was his need to secure the frontier in the Far East. Only on 15 September did Moscow and Tokyo at last agree to end military hostilities on the Soviet-Manchurian frontier. Two days later, Red Army forces invaded eastern Poland.

This was to Germany’s satisfaction because it deprived the Polish army of any chance of prolonging its challenge to the Third Reich and the USSR had been made complicit in the carving up of north-eastern Europe. While Germany, Britain and France moved into war, the swastika was raised above the German embassy in Moscow. Talks were resumed between Germany and the USSR to settle territorial questions consequent upon Poland’s dismemberment. Wishing to win Hitler’s confidence, Stalin gave an assurance to Ribbentrop ‘on his word of honour that the Soviet Union would not betray its partner’.⁸ On 27 September 1939, a second document was signed, the Boundary and Friendship Treaty, which transferred Lithuania into the Soviet Union’s sphere of interest. In exchange Stalin agreed to give up territory in eastern Poland. The frontier between the Soviet Union and German-occupied Europe was stabilized on the river Bug.

Stalin boasted to Politburo members: ‘Hitler is thinking of tricking us, but I think we’ve got the better of him.’⁹ At the time it seemed unlikely that the Germans would soon be capable of turning upon the USSR. Hitler would surely have his hands full on the Western front. Stalin aimed to exert tight control in the meantime over the sphere of interest delineated in the Boundary and Friendship Treaty. The governments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were scared by Stalin and Molotov into signing mutual assistance treaties which permitted the Red Army to build bases on their soil.

On 30 November 1939, after the Finns had held out against such threats, Stalin ordered an invasion with the intention of establishing a Finnish Soviet government and relocating the Soviet-Finnish border northwards at Finland’s expense. Yet the Finns organized unexpectedly effective resistance. The Red Army was poorly co-ordinated; and this ‘Winter War’ cost the lives of 200,000 Soviet soldiers before March 1940, when both sides agreed to a settlement that shifted the USSR’s border further north from Leningrad but left the Finns with their independence. Thereafter Stalin sought to strengthen his grip on the other Baltic states. Flaunting his military hegemony in the region, he issued an ultimatum for the formation of pro-Soviet governments in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in June. Next month these governments were commanded, on pain of invasion, to request the incorporation of their states as new Soviet republics of the USSR. Also in July 1940, Stalin annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania.

The Sovietization of these lands was conducted with practised brutality. Leading figures in their political, economic and cultural life were arrested by the NKVD. Condemned as ‘anti-Soviet elements’, they were either killed or consigned to the Gulag. The persecution also affected less exalted social categories: small traders, school-teachers and independent farmers were deported to ‘special settlements’ in the RSFSR and Kazakhstan;¹⁰ 4,400 captured Polish officers were shot and buried in Katyn forest. Thus the newly-conquered territory, from Estonia down to Moldavia, lost those figures who might have organized opposition to their countries’ annexation. A Soviet order was imposed. A communist one-party dictatorship was established, and factories, banks, mines and land were nationalized.

Stalin and his associates felt safe in concentrating on this activity because they expected the war in western Europe to be lengthy. Their assumption had been that France would defend herself doughtily against the Wehrmacht and that Hitler would be in no position to organize a rapid attack upon the Soviet Union. But Holland, Belgium, Denmark and Norway had already been occupied and, in June 1940, French military resistance collapsed and the British expeditionary forces were evacuated at Dunkirk. Even so, the USSR’s leadership remained confident. Molotov opined to Admiral Kuznetsov: ‘Only a fool would attack us.’¹¹ Stalin and Molotov were determined to ward off any such possibility by increasing Soviet influence in eastern and south-eastern Europe. They insisted, in their dealings with Berlin, that the USSR had legitimate interests in Persia, Turkey and Bulgaria which Hitler should respect; and on Stalin’s orders, direct diplomatic overtures were also made to Yugoslavia.

But when these same moves gave rise to tensions between Moscow and Berlin, Stalin rushed to reassure Hitler by showing an ostentatious willingness to send Germany the natural materials, especially oil, promised under the two treaties of 1941. The movement of German troops from the Western front to the Soviet frontier was tactfully overlooked, and only perfunctory complaint was made about overflights made by German reconnaissance aircraft over Soviet cities. But Richard Sorge, a Soviet spy in the German embassy in Tokyo, told the NKVD that Hitler had ordered an invasion. Winston Churchill informed the Kremlin about what was afoot. Khrushchëv, many years later, recalled: ‘The sparrows were chirping about it at every crossroad.’¹² Stalin was not acting with total senselessness. Hitler, if he planned to invade had to seize the moment before his opportunity disappeared. Both Soviet and German military planners considered that the Wehrmacht would be in grave difficulties unless it could complete its conquest of the USSR before the Russian snows could take their toll.

Convinced that the danger had now passed, Stalin was confident in the USSR’s rising strength. Presumably he also calculated that Hitler, who had yet to finish off the British, would not want to fight a war on two fronts by taking on the Red Army. In any case, the cardinal tenet of Soviet military doctrine since the late 1930s had been that if German forces attacked, the Red Army would immediately repel them and ‘crush the enemy on his territory’.¹³ An easy victory was expected in any such war; Soviet public commentators were forbidden to hint at the real scale of Germany’s armed might and prowess.¹⁴ So confident was Stalin that he declined to hasten the reconstruction of defences in the newly annexed borderlands or to move industrial plant into the country’s interior.

Throughout the first half of 1941, however Stalin and his generals could not overlook the possibility that Germany might nevertheless attempt an invasion. Movements of troops and equipment in German-occupied Poland kept them in a condition of constant nervousness. But Stalin remained optimistic about the result of such a war; indeed he and his political subordinates toyed with the project for the Red Army to wage an offensive war.¹⁵ At a reception for recently-trained officers in May 1941, Stalin spoke about the need for strategical planning to be transferred ‘from defence to attack’.¹⁶ But he did not wish to go to war as yet, and hoped against hope that an invasion by the Wehrmacht was not imminent. Soviet leaders noted that whereas the blitzkrieg against Poland had been preceded by a succession of ultimatums, no such communication had been received in Moscow. On 21 June Beria purred to Stalin that he continued to ‘remember your wise prophecy: Hitler will not attack us in 1941’.¹⁷ The brave German soldiers who swam the river Bug to warn the Red Army about the invasion projected for the next day were shot as enemy agents.

At 3.15 a.m. on 22 June, the Wehrmacht crossed the Bug at the start of Operation Barbarossa, attacking Soviet armed forces which were under strict orders not to reply to ‘provocation’. This compounded the several grave mistakes made by Stalin in the previous months. Among them was the decision to shift the Soviet frontier westward after mid-1940 without simultaneously relocating the fortresses and earthworks. Stalin had also failed to transfer armaments plants from Ukraine deeper into the USSR. Stalin’s years-old assumption prevailed that if and when war came to the Soviet Union, the attack would be quickly repulsed and that an irresistible counterattack would be organized. Defence in depth was not contemplated. Consequently no precautionary orders were given to land forces: fighter planes were left higgledy-piggledy on Soviet runways; 900 of them were destroyed in that position in the first hours of the German-Soviet war.¹⁸

Zhukov alerted Stalin about Operation Barbarossa at 3.25 a.m. The shock to Stalin was tremendous. Still trying to convince himself that the Germans were engaged only in ‘provocational actions’, Stalin rejected the request of D. G. Pavlov, the commander of the main forces in the path of the German advance, for permission to fight back. Only at 6.30 a.m. did he sanction retaliation.¹⁹ Throughout the rest of the day Stalin conferred frenetically with fellow Soviet political and military leaders as the scale of the disaster began to be understood in the Kremlin.

Stalin knew he had blundered, and supposedly he cursed in despair that his leadership had messed up the great state left behind by Lenin.²⁰ The story grew that he suffered a nervous breakdown. Certainly he left it to Molotov on 22 June to deliver the speech summoning the people of the USSR to arms; and for a couple of days at the end of the month he shut himself off from his associates. It is said that when Molotov and Mikoyan visited his dacha, Stalin was terrified lest they intended to arrest him.²¹ The truth of the episode is not known; but his work-schedule was so intensely busy that it is hard to believe that he can have undergone more than a fleeting diminution of his will of steel to fight on and win the German-Soviet war. From the start of hostilities he was laying down that the Red Army should not merely defend territory but should counter-attack and conquer land to the west of the USSR. This was utterly unrealistic at a time when the Wehrmacht was crashing its way deep into Belorussia and Ukraine. But Stalin’s confirmation of his pre-war strategy was a sign of his uncompromising determination to lead his country in a victorious campaign.

The task was awesome: the Wehrmacht had assembled 2,800 tanks, 5,000 aircraft, 47,000 artillery pieces and 5.5 million troops to crush the Red Army. German confidence, organization and technology were employed to maximum effect. The advance along the entire front was so quick that Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were under German occupation within weeks. The Russian city of Smolensk was overrun with a rapidity that left the party authorities no time to incinerate their files. By the beginning of September, the Wehrmacht had cut off Leningrad by land: transport to and from the Soviet Union’s second city had to be undertaken over Lake Ladoga. To the south, huge tracts of Ukraine were overrun: Kiev was captured in mid-August. After such success Hitler amassed his forces in the centre. In September, Operation Typhoon was aimed at the seizure of Moscow.

In the first six months of the ‘Great Fatherland War’, as Soviet leaders began to refer to the conflict, three million prisoners-of-war fell into German hands.²² There had been a massive loss to the USSR in its human, industrial and agricultural resources. Roughly two fifths of the state’s population and up to half its material assets were held under German dominion.

A political and military reorganization was rushed into place. For such a war, new forms of co-ordination had to be found. On 30 June it was decided to form a State Committee of Defence, bringing together leading Politburo members Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov and Voroshilov. The State Committee was to resolve all major political, economic and strategical questions and Stalin was appointed as its chairman. On 10 July he was also appointed Supreme Commander (although no immediate announcement was made since Stalin wanted to avoid being held popularly culpable for the continuing military débâcle). In addition, he became chairman of the High Command (Stavka) on 8 August.²³ Stalin was attempting to be the Lenin and Trotski of the German-Soviet conflict. In the Civil War Lenin had operated the civilian political machinery, Trotski the military. Stalin wished to oversee everything, and dispatched several of his central civilian colleagues to secure his authority over the frontal commands.

It was a gruelling summer for the Red Army. The speed of the German invasion induced Stalin to contemplate moving the capital to the Volga city of Kuibyshev (once and now called Samara), 800 kilometres to the south-east of Moscow. Foreign embassies and several Soviet institutions began to be transferred. But suddenly in late October, the Wehrmacht met with difficulties. German forces on the outskirts of Moscow confronted insurmountable defence, and Stalin asked Zhukov whether the Red Army’s success would prove durable. On receiving the desired assurances from Zhukov, Stalin cancelled his emergency scheme to transfer the seat of government and intensified his demand for counter-offensives against the Wehrmacht.²⁴

Hitler had already fallen crucially short of his pre-invasion expectations. His strategy had been based on the premiss that Moscow, Leningrad and the line of the river Volga had to be seized before the winter’s hard weather allowed the Red Army to be reorganized and re-equipped. The mud had turned to frost by November, and snow was not far behind. The supply lines of the Wehrmacht were overstretched and German soldiers started to feel the rigours of the Russian climate. Soviet resolve had already been demonstrated in abundance. On 3 July, Stalin made a radio-broadcast speech, addressing the people with the words: ‘Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and Sisters!’ He threatened the ‘Hitlerite forces’ with the fate that had overwhelmed Napoleon in Russia in 1812. ‘History shows,’ he contended, ‘that invincible armies do not exist and never have existed.’²⁵ In the winter of 1941–2 his words were beginning to acquire a degree of plausibility.

Yet Stalin knew that defeat by Germany remained a strong possibility. Nor could he rid himself of worry about his own dreadful miscalculations in connection with Operation Barbarossa. On 3 October 1941 he blurted out to General Konev: ‘Comrade Stalin is not a traitor. Comrade Stalin is an honest person. Comrade Stalin will do everything to correct the situation that has been created.’²⁶ He worked at the highest pitch of intensity, usually spending fifteen hours a day at his tasks. His attentiveness to detail was legendary. At any hint of problems in a tank factory or on a military front, he would talk directly with those who were in charge. Functionaries were summoned to Moscow, not knowing whether or not they would be arrested after their interview with Stalin. Sometimes he simply phoned them; and since he preferred to work at night and take a nap in the daytime, they grew accustomed to being dragged from their beds to confer with him.

As a war leader, unlike Churchill or Roosevelt, he left it to his subordinates to communicate with Soviet citizens. He delivered only nine substantial speeches in the entire course of the German-Soviet war,²⁷ and his public appearances were few. The great exception was his greeting from the Kremlin Wall on 7 November 1941 to a parade of Red Army divisions which were on the way to the front-line on the capital’s outskirts. He spent the war in the Kremlin or at his dacha. His sole trip outside Moscow, apart from trips to confer with Allied leaders in Tehran in 1943 and Yalta in 1945, occurred in August 1943, when he made a very brief visit to a Red Army command post which was very distant from the range of gunfire.

The point of the trip was to give his propagandists a pretext to claim that he had risked his life along with his soldiers. Khrushchëv was later to scoff at such vaingloriousness; he also asserted — when Stalin was safely dead and lying in state in the Mausoleum on Red Square — that the office-based mode of leadership meant that Stalin never acquired a comprehension of military operations. The claim was even made by Khrushchëv that Stalin typically plotted his campaigns not on small-scale maps of each theatre of conflict but on a globe of the world. At best this was an exaggeration based upon a single incident. If anything, Stalin’s commanders found him excessively keen to study the minutiae of their strategic and tactical planning — and most of them were to stress in their memoirs that he gained an impressive technical understanding of military questions in the course of the war.

Not that his performance was unblemished. Far from it: not only the catastrophe of 22 June 1941 but several ensuing heavy defeats were caused by his errors in the first few months. First Kiev was encircled and hundreds of thousands of troops were captured. Then Red Army forces were entrapped near Vyazma. Then the Wehrmacht burst along the Baltic littoral and laid siege to Leningrad. All three of these terrible set-backs occurred to a large extent because of Stalin’s meddling. The same was true in the following year. In the early summer of 1942, his demand for a counter-offensive on German-occupied Ukraine resulted in the Wehrmacht conquering still more territory and seizing Kharkov and Rostov; and at almost the same time a similar débâcle occurred to the south of Leningrad as a consequence of Stalin’s rejection of Lieutenant-General A. N. Vlasov’s plea for permission to effect a timely withdrawal of his forces before their encirclement by the enemy.

Moreover, there were limits to Stalin’s military adaptiveness. At his insistence the State Committee of Defence issued Order No. 270 on 16 August 1941 which forbade any Red Army soldier to allow himself to be taken captive. Even if their ammunition was expended, they had to go down fighting or else be branded state traitors. There could be no surrender. Punitive sanctions would be applied to Soviet prisoners-of-war if ever they should be liberated by the Red Army from German prison-camps; and in the meantime their families would have their ration cards taken from them. Order No. 227 on 28 July 1942 indicated to the commanders in the field that retreats, even of a temporary nature, were prohibited: ‘Not one step backwards!’ By then Stalin had decided that Hitler had reached the bounds of his territorial depredation. In order to instil unequivocal determination in his forces the Soviet dictator foreclosed operational suggestions involving the yielding of the smallest patch of land.

Nor had he lost a taste for blood sacrifice. General Pavlov, despite having tried to persuade Stalin to let him retaliate against the German invasion on 22 June, was executed.²⁸ This killing was designed to intimidate others. In fact no Red Army officer of Pavlov’s eminence was shot by Stalin in the rest of the German-Soviet war. Nor were any leading politicians executed. Yet the USSR’s leaders still lived in constant fear that Stalin might order a fresh list of executions. His humiliation of them was relentless. On a visit to Russia, the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas witnessed Stalin’s practice of getting Politburo members hopelessly drunk. At one supper party, the dumpy and inebriated Khrushchëv was compelled to perform the energetic Ukrainian dance called the gopak. Everyone knew that Stalin was a dangerous man to annoy.

But Stalin also perceived that he needed to balance his fearsomeness with a degree of encouragement if he was to get the best out of his subordinates. The outspoken Zhukov was even allowed to engage in disputes with him in Stavka. Alexander Vasilevski, Ivan Konev, Vasili Chuikov and Konstantin Rokossovski (who had been imprisoned by Stalin) were more circumspect in their comments; but they also emerged as commanders whose competence he learned to respect. Steadily, too, Stalin’s entourage was cleared of the less effective civilian leaders. Kliment Voroshilov, People’s Commissar for Defence, had been shown to have woefully outdated military ideas and was replaced. Lev Mekhlis and several other prominent purgers in the Great Terror were also demoted. Mekhlis was so keen on attack as the sole mode of defence in Crimea that he forbade the digging of trenches. Eventually even Stalin concluded: ‘But Mekhlis is a complete fanatic; he must not be allowed to get near the Army!’²⁹

The premature Soviet counter-offensive of summer 1942 had opened the Volga region to the Wehrmacht, and it appeared likely that the siege of Stalingrad would result in a further disaster for the Red forces. Leningrad in the north and Stalingrad in the south of Russia became battle arenas of prestige out of proportion to their strategical significance. Leningrad was the symbol of the October Revolution and Soviet communism; Stalingrad carried the name of Lenin’s successor. Stalin was ready to turn either city into a Martian landscape rather than allow Hitler to have the pleasure of a victory parade in them.

Increasingly, however, the strength of the Soviet Union behind the war fronts made itself felt. Factories were packed up and transferred by rail east of the Urals together with their work-forces. In addition, 3,500 large manufacturing enterprises were constructed during the hostilities. Tanks, aircraft, guns and bullets were desperately needed. So, too, were conscripts and their clothing, food and transport. The results were impressive. Soviet industry, which had been on a war footing for the three years before mid-1941, still managed to quadruple its output of munitions between 1940 and 1944. By the end of the war, 3,400 military planes were being produced monthly. Industry in the four years of fighting supplied the Red forces with 100,000 tanks, 130,000 aircraft and 800,000 field guns. At the peak of mobilization there were twelve million men under arms. The USSR produced double the amount of soldiers and fighting equipment that Germany produced.

In November 1942 the Wehrmacht armies fighting in the outer suburbs of Stalingrad were themselves encircled. After bitter fighting in wintry conditions, the city was reclaimed by the Red Army in January 1943. Hitler had been as unbending in his military dispositions as Stalin would have been in the same circumstances. Field-Marshal von Paulus, the German commander, had been prohibited from pulling back from Stalingrad when it was logistically possible. As a consequence, 91,000 German soldiers were taken into captivity. Pictures of prisoners-of-war marching with their hands clasped over their heads were shown on the newsreels and in the press. At last Stalin had a triumph that the Soviet press and radio could trumpet to the rest of the USSR. The Red Army then quickly also took Kharkov and seemed on the point of expelling the Wehrmacht from eastern Ukraine.

Yet the military balance had not tipped irretrievably against Hitler; for German forces re-entered Kharkov on 18 March 1943. Undeterred, Stalin set about cajoling Stavka into attacking the Germans again. There were the usual technical reasons for delay: the Wehrmacht had strong defensive positions and the training and supply of the Soviet mobile units left much to be desired. But Stalin would not be denied, and 6,000 tanks were readied to take on the enemy north of Kursk on 4 July 1943. It was the largest tank battle in history until the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Zhukov, who had used tanks against the Japanese at Khalkhin-Gol, was in his element. His professional expertise was accompanied by merciless techniques. Penal battalions were marched towards the German lines in order to clear the ground of land-mines. Then column after column of T-34 tanks moved forward. Red Army and Wehrmacht fought it out day after day.

The result of the battle was not clear in itself. Zhukov had been gaining an edge, but had not defeated the Wehrmacht before Hitler pulled his forces away rather than gamble on complete victory. Yet Kursk was a turning point since it proved that the victory at Stalingrad was repeatable elsewhere. The Red Army seized back Kharkov on 23 August, Kiev on 6 November. Then came the campaigns of the following year which were known as the ‘Ten Stalinist Blows’. Soviet forces attacked and pushed back the Wehrmacht on a front extending from the Baltic down to the Black Sea. Leningrad’s 900-day siege was relieved in January and Red forces crossed from Ukraine into Romania in March. On 22 June 1944, on the third anniversary of the German invasion, Operation Bagration was initiated to reoccupy Belorussia and Lithuania. Minsk became a Soviet city again on 4 July, Vilnius on 13 July.

As the Red Army began to occupy Polish territory, questions about the post-war settlement of international relations imprinted themselves upon Soviet actions. On 1 August the outskirts of Warsaw were reached; but further advance was not attempted for several weeks, and by that time the German SS had wiped out an uprising and exacted revenge upon the city. About 300,000 Poles perished. Stalin claimed that his forces had to be rested before freeing Warsaw from the Nazis. His real motive was that it suited him if the Germans destroyed those armed units of Poles which might cause political and military trouble for him.

The USSR was determined to shackle Poland to its wishes. In secret, Stalin and Beria had ordered the murder of nearly 15,000 Polish officers who had been taken captive after the Red Army’s invasion of eastern Poland in 1939. Subsequently Soviet negotiators had been suspiciously evasive on the question of Poland’s future when, in July 1941, an Anglo-Soviet agreement was signed; and the British government, which faced a dire threat from Hitler, had been in no position to make uncompromising demands in its talks with Stalin. Nor was Stalin any more easily controllable when the USA entered the Second World War in December 1941 after Japan’s air force attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbor and Hitler aligned himself with his Japanese partners against the USA. The USSR’s military contribution remained of crucial importance when the Anglo-Soviet-German war in Europe and the Japanese war of conquest were conjoined in a single global war.

There was an exception to Stalin’s chutzpah. At the end of 1941 he had ordered Beria to ask the Bulgarian ambassador Ivan Stamenov to act as an intermediary in overtures for a separate peace between the USSR and Germany.³⁰ Stalin was willing to forgo his claims to the territory under German occupation in exchange for peace. Stamenov refused the invitation. Stalin would anyway not have regarded such a peace as permanent. Like Hitler, he must have calculated that the Wehrmacht’s cause was ultimately lost if Leningrad, Moscow and the Volga remained under Soviet control. A ‘breathing space’ on the model of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk would have been more advantageous to Stalin in 1941–2 than to Lenin in 1918.

Naturally Stalin kept this gambit secret from the Western Allies; and through 1942 and 1943, he expressed anger about the slowness of preparations for a second front in the West. Churchill flew to Moscow in August 1942 to explain that the next Allied campaign in the West would be organized not in France or southern Italy but in north Africa. Stalin was not amused. Thereafter a meeting involving Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin was held in Tehran in November 1943 — the greatest distance Stalin had travelled from Moscow in three decades. Churchill flew again to Moscow in October 1944, and in February 1945 Stalin played host to Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta in Crimea. At each of these meetings, he drew attention to the sacrifices being borne by the peoples of the USSR. Not even the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944 put an end to his habit of berating the other Allies; for he knew that his complaints about them served the purpose of distracting attention from his designs upon eastern Europe.

All this notwithstanding, Stalin had been receiving considerable military and foodstuffs assistance from the USA and the United Kingdom to plug the gaps in Soviet production. The German occupation of Ukraine deprived the USSR of its sugar-beet. Furthermore, Stalin’s pre-war agricultural mismanagement had already robbed the country of adequate supplies of meat; and his industrial priorities had not included the development of native equivalents to American jeeps and small trucks. In purely military output, too, misprojections had been made: the shortage of various kinds of explosive was especially damaging.

From 1942, the Americans shipped sugar and the compressed meat product, Spam, to Russia — and the British naval convoys braved German submarines in the Arctic Ocean to supplement supplies. Jeeps, as well as munitions and machinery, also arrived. The American Lend-Lease Programme supplied goods to the value of about one fifth of the USSR’s gross domestic product during the fighting — truly a substantial contribution.³¹ Yet Allied governments were not motivated by altruism in dispatching help to Russia: they still counted upon the Red Army to break the backbone of German armed forces on the Eastern front. While the USSR needed its Western allies economically, the military dependence of the USA and the United Kingdom upon Soviet successes at Stalingrad and Kursk was still greater. But foreign aid undoubtedly rectified several defects in Soviet military production and even raised somewhat the level of food consumption.

There was a predictable reticence about this in the Soviet press. But Stalin and his associates recognized the reality of the situation; and, as a pledge to the Western Allies of his co-operativeness, Stalin dissolved the Comintern in May 1943. Lenin had founded it in 1919 as an instrument of world revolution under tight Russian control. Its liquidation indicated to Roosevelt and Churchill that the USSR would cease to subvert the states of her Allies and their associated countries while the struggle against Hitler continued.

While announcing this to Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin played upon their divergent interests. Since Lenin’s time it had been a nostrum of Soviet political analysis that it was contrary to the USA’s interest to prop up the British Empire. Roosevelt helped Stalin by poking a little fun at Churchill and by turning his charm upon Stalin in the belief that the USSR and USA would better be able to reach a permanent mutual accommodation if the two leaders could become friendlier. But Stalin remained touchy about the fact that he was widely known in the West as Uncle Joe. He was also given to nasty outbursts. Churchill walked out of a session at the Tehran meeting when the Soviet leader proposed the execution of 50,000 German army officers at the end of hostilities. Stalin had to feign that he had not meant the suggestion seriously so that the proceedings might be resumed.

At any rate, he usually tried to cut a genial figure, and business of lasting significance was conducted at Tehran. Churchill suggested that the Polish post-war frontiers should be shifted sideways. The proposal was that the USSR would retain its territorial gains of 1939–40 and that Poland would be compensated to her west at Germany’s expense. There remained a lack of clarity inasmuch as the Allies refused to give de jure sanction to the forcible incorporation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the USSR. But a nod and a wink had been given that the Soviet Union had special interests in parts of eastern Europe that neither Britain nor the USA cared to challenge.

This conciliatory approach was maintained in negotiations between Churchill and Stalin in Moscow in October 1944. Japan had not yet been defeated in the East, and the A-bomb stayed at an early experimental stage. Germany was still capable of serious counter-offensives against the Allied armies which were converging on the Third Reich. It made sense to divide German-occupied Europe into zones of influence for the immediate future. But Churchill and Stalin could not decide how to do this; each was reluctant to let the other have a completely free hand in the zone accorded to him. On his Moscow trip, therefore, Churchill put forward an arithmetical solution which appealed to Stalin. It was agreed that the USSR would gain a ninety per cent interest in Romania. She was also awarded seventy-five per cent in respect of Bulgaria; but both Hungary and Yugoslavia were to be divided fifty-fifty between the two sides and Greece was to be ninety per cent within the Western zone.

Very gratifying to Stalin was the absence of Poland from their agreement, an absence that indicated Churchill’s unwillingness to interfere directly in her fate. Similarly Italy, France and the Low Countries were by implication untouchable by Stalin. Yet the understanding between the two Allied leaders was patchy; in particular, nothing was agreed about Germany. To say the least, the common understanding was very rough and ready.

But it gave Stalin the reassurance he sought, and he scrawled a large blue tick on Churchill’s scheme. The interests of the USSR would be protected in most countries to Germany’s east while to the west the other Allies would have the greater influence. Churchill and Stalin did not specify how they might apply their mathematical politics to a real situation. Nor did they consider how long their agreement should last. In any case, an Anglo-Soviet agreement was insufficient to carry all before it. The Americans were horrified by what had taken place between Churchill and Stalin. Zones of influence infringed the principle of national self-determination, and at Yalta in February 1945 Roosevelt made plain that he would not accede to any permanent partition of Europe among the Allies.

But on most other matters the three leaders could agree. The USSR contracted to enter the war against Japan in the East three months after the defeat of Germany. Furthermore, the Allies delineated Poland’s future borders more closely and decided that Germany, once conquered, should be administered jointly by the USSR, USA, Britain and France.

Stalin saw that his influence in post-war Europe would depend upon the Red Army being the first force to overrun Germany. Soviet forces occupied both Warsaw and Budapest in January 1945 and Prague in May. Apart from Yugoslavia and Albania, every country in eastern Europe was liberated from German occupation wholly or mainly by them. Pleased as he was by these successes, his preoccupation remained with Germany. The race was on for Berlin. To Stalin’s delight, it was not contested by the Western Allies, whose Supreme Commander General Eisenhower preferred to avoid unnecessary deaths among his troops and held to a cautious strategy of advance. The contenders for the prize of seizing the German capital were the Red commanders Zhukov and Konev. Stalin called them to Moscow on 3 April after learning that the British contingent under General Montgomery might ignore Eisenhower and reach Berlin before the Red Army. The Red Army was instructed to beat Montgomery to it.

Stalin drew a line along an east-west axis between the forces of Zhukov and Konev. This plan stopped fifty kilometres short of Berlin. The tacit instruction from Stalin was that beyond this point whichever group of forces was in the lead could choose its own route.³² The race was joined on 16 April, and Zhukov finished it just ahead of Konev. Hitler died by his own hand on 30 April, thwarting Zhukov’s ambition to parade him in a cage on Red Square. The Wehrmacht surrendered to the Anglo-American command on 7 May and to the Red Army a day later. The war in Europe was over.

According to the agreements made at Yalta, the Red Army was scheduled to enter the war against Japan three months later. American and British forces had fought long and hard in 1942–4 to reclaim the countries of the western coastline of the Pacific Ocean from Japanese rule; but a fierce last-ditch defence of Japan itself was anticipated. Harry Truman, who became American president on Roosevelt’s death on 11 April, continued to count on assistance from the Red Army. But in midsummer he abruptly changed his stance. The USA’s nuclear research scientists had at last tested an A-bomb and were capable of providing others for use against Japan. With such a devastating weapon, Truman no longer needed Stalin in the Far East, and Allied discussions became distinctly frosty when Truman, Stalin and Churchill met at Potsdam in July. On 6 August the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, on 9 August a second fell on Nagasaki.

Yet Stalin refused to be excluded from the war in the Far East. Alarmed by the prospect of a Japan exclusively under American control, he insisted on declaring war on Japan even after the Nagasaki bomb. The Red Army invaded Manchuria. After the Japanese government communicated its intention to offer unconditional surrender, the USA abided by its Potsdam commitment by awarding southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands to the Soviet Union. Thus the conflict in the East, too, came to an end. The USSR had become one of the Big Three in the world alongside the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Her military, industrial and political might had been reinforced. Her Red Army bestrode half of Europe and had expanded its power in the Far East. Her government and her All-Union Communist Party were unshaken. And Stalin still ruled in the Kremlin.