The Story of Russia

Food shortages brought catastrophe closer. In freezing temperatures the transport system failed to deliver fuel and flour to the capital. Long queues appeared outside bakeries. Prices soared. Workers’ strikes became common. The call for higher pay soon gave way to political demands. The strikes became more violent as factories closed. At the New Lessner machine-building plant in Petrograd strikers fought with the police. The soldiers in the nearby barracks were ordered to suppress the strike, but instead they joined the workers’ side, throwing rocks and bricks at the police.

On 23 February 1917, International Women’s Day, a large crowd of women, mostly shop and office workers, marched through the centre of the capital to demand better rations for the soldiers’ families. Joined by workers, they clashed with the police before dispersing in the evening. More protesters came out the next day. There was a monster rally on Znamenskaya Square. In full view of the police, orators addressed the crowd from the equestrian statue of Alexander III, which they decorated with red banners and daubed with the graffito ‘Hippopotamus’, the people’s nickname for this obese monument to the immovable autocracy. People called for the downfall of the monarchy. The protest movement grew. By 26 February, the centre of Petrograd had been turned into a militarised camp. Soldiers and police were everywhere. Around midday, crowds of workers once again assembled in the factory districts and marched to the centre. On Nevsky Prospekt they were met by the police and soldiers who shot at them with live bullets. The bloodiest incident took place on Znamenskaya Square, where more than fifty people were killed by a training detachment of the Volynsky Regiment.

The regiment’s mainly teenage soldiers were shaken by the incident. One said he had seen his mother in the crowd of people they had fired at. The next morning, when ordered to disperse the crowds again, the soldiers killed their officer and came out on the people’s side. The mutiny was soon joined by other regiments. The soldiers gave a military strength and organisation to the crowds. They fought the police, the last defenders of the monarchy, and led the capture of the arsenal, the telephone exchange, the railway stations, the police headquarters and the prisons, which they burned. Their actions turned the demonstrations into a full-scale revolution.

In the Tauride Palace the Duma leaders formed a Temporary Committee for the Restoration of Order and proclaimed themselves in charge. A Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was meanwhile formed in the same building. It could have taken power, but agreed instead to the formation of a Provisional Government led by Prince Lvov with all its members drawn from the Duma. The Soviet leaders, mostly Mensheviks, believed in line with Marxist doctrine that Russia was too backward to proceed at once to a socialist government. Marx had taught them that what was needed now was a ‘bourgeois democratic’ period of development with freedom for the masses to organise themselves through trade unions, political parties and so on. These were the democratic principles on which they gave their support to the Provisional Government. As socialists, the Soviet leaders were, moreover, fearful of a counter-revolution if they formed a government. Russia would be plunged into a civil war. They thought the Duma leaders would be better able to persuade the generals not to send in troops against the revolutionary capital.

Nicholas had ordered forces to be sent from the Northern Front. But the intervention of the Duma leaders did indeed persuade the generals to revoke his command and urge the tsar to abdicate. It was the only way to restore order, save the army and continue fighting in the war, his senior commanders advised him. Nicholas agreed to abdicate in favour of his son. But he was then warned that Alexei would not live long because of his haemophilia. If Nicholas renounced the throne for him, he would have to go abroad. He would be separated from his family. Determined to remain with them, whatever happened to Russia, he resolved to hand the crown instead to his younger brother, the Grand Duke Mikhail.

A shy and modest man, even less intelligent than Nicholas, Mikhail was reluctant to accept the crown. There had been violent protests when it was announced to the crowds outside the Tauride Palace that the tsar would abdicate in his favour. Mikhail was not inclined to risk his life. Bunkered in the mansion of Princess Putiatina, not far from the Winter Palace, he met with the Duma leaders on 3 March. The Kadet leader Pavel Miliukov, who was still concerned with questions of legality, tried to persuade him to accept the crown on the grounds that a monarchy was needed as a symbol of authority giving legal sanction to the transfer of power to the Duma Committee. Without it, he argued, the Provisional Government would be ‘an unseaworthy vessel liable to sink in the ocean of popular unrest’.4 But nobody could guarantee the grand duke’s personal safety if he became tsar – and that made up Mikhail’s mind. The abdication manifesto, which brought to an end 300 years of Romanov rule, was drawn up by two jurists at a school desk in the study of Putiatina’s daughter and then copied out in one of her school notebooks.

The end of the monarchy was marked by scenes of rejoicing throughout the empire. Rapturous crowds assembled in the streets of Petrograd and Moscow. Red flags were hung from the buildings. In Helsingfors, Kiev, Tiflis and other capitals, national flags were also hung. Symbols of the monarchy – Romanov emblems, coats of arms, double-headed eagles – were torn down from buildings by the crowds.

The monarchy was dead. All its institutions of support had collapsed virtually overnight. No one tried to revive it. None of the counter-revolutionary armies of the Civil War – the fight to remove the Bolsheviks from power after 1917 – embraced monarchism as a cause, although many of their officers were monarchists. Doing so would be a guarantee of their defeat. So much for the myth that Russia needs a tsar. As Trotsky put it in his history of the revolution, ‘the country had so radically vomited up the monarchy that it could never ever crawl down the people’s throat again’.5

But if politically the monarchy was dead, it was still alive in a broader sense, in the psychology that made the people so receptive to later Soviet cults of the Leader. ‘Oh yes, we must have a Republic,’ a soldier said to George Buchanan, the British ambassador, ‘but we must have a good Tsar at the head.’6 Soldiers’ letters expressed a similar misconception: ‘We want a democratic republic and a tsar-batiushka for three years.’7 The idea of the state was too confused with the person of the tsar in the minds of ordinary Russians for them to imagine a new state without a monarch at its head. A member of the Moscow Workers’ Soviet went to agitate at a regimental meeting near Vladimir in March:

A platform stood in the middle of the field. Two or three soldiers were on it, and a crowd of thousands stood around. It was black with people. I talked, of course, about the war and about peace, about the land – ‘land to the people’ – and about the advantages of a republic over a monarchy. But when I finished and the endless ‘hurrahs’ and applause were over, a loud voice cried out: ‘We want to elect you as our Tsar,’ whereupon the other soldiers burst into applause. I refused the Romanov crown and went away with a heavy feeling of how easy it would be for any adventurer or demagogue to become the master of this simple and naive people.8

Kept under house arrest at Tsarskoe Selo, in August 1917 the imperial family was evacuated to Siberia out of fears for their personal safety. It had been intended to send them to England, but George V withdrew his invitation, for fear of sparking an uprising against the British monarchy, so the Romanovs were sent instead to the provincial backwater of Tobolsk, far from the revolutionary crowds. There they lived in comfortable conditions until the spring, when, after rumours of a plot to rescue them, they were sent on Lenin’s orders to Ekaterinburg. The entire family were executed on the night of 16–17 July 1918. Informed of the murder in the press, ‘the population … received the news with astonishing indifference’, according to Robert Bruce Lockhart, the British agent in Moscow.9

The leaders of the Provisional Government saw themselves as a wartime government of national salvation, above class or party interests. No one had elected them. They had come to power through a parliamentary coup backed by the Soviet on condition of their adherence to democratic principles. As they saw it, their purpose was to see the country through to the ending of the war and the election of a Constituent Assembly, which alone could legally resolve the fundamental issues of the revolution, such as who the land should belong to, the constitution of the state and the nationalities question, whether they should keep the empire’s lands together or allow its peoples to leave it. Their position was understandable. But it could hardly satisfy the urgent expectations unleashed by the February Revolution. It was not long before the peasants, factory workers and soldiers took matters into their own hands.

In the countryside the peasants formed their own ad hoc committees (they sometimes called them Soviets) and seized the gentry’s property, first the tools and livestock and then their fields, which the commune divided in line with its customary principles (usually according to the number of ‘eaters’ in each household). These land seizures were ‘legalised’ by district and provincial peasant assemblies, and then endorsed by the First All-Russian Peasant Assembly which sat from 4 to 25 May.

Meanwhile the workers imposed their demands on the factory management. Their organisations spread quickly. The trade unions and Soviets resumed from where they had left off in 1905. But they were joined by two new organs dominated by the Bolsheviks: the factory committees, which supervised the management (they called it ‘workers’ control’) to prevent factory closures and lay-offs; and the Red Guards, formed by workers to defend the factories.

Soldiers’ committees supervised relations with the officers and discussed their military commands. In some units they refused to fight for more than eight hours a day, claiming the same rights as the workers. Throughout the army they demanded to be treated as equals by their officers when they were not engaged in fighting. This assertion of ‘soldier power’ was essential to the spirit of ‘trench Bolshevism’ – a term used by the officers to describe the troops’ refusal to obey their orders – which swept through the forces during 1917.

The war was the most divisive issue for the Provisional Government. The politics of 1917 were a battle between those on the left who saw the revolution as a means of ending the war and those on the right who saw the war as a way to stop the revolution and restore order. When Miliukov, the foreign minister, announced that Russia would honour its imperial commitments to the allies, despite the Soviet’s peace campaign, tens of thousands of armed workers and soldiers came out to demonstrate on the streets of Petrograd, where they clashed with ‘patriotic’ groups calling for the war campaign to continue until final victory.

To reinforce the government’s authority and prevent the country sliding into civil war, six Menshevik and SR leaders joined it during May. The coalition was based on a policy known as Revolutionary Defencism. It meant continuing with the war, not for imperial gains, but solely for the defence of the revolution and Russia. Defeat by Germany would mean, they believed, the restoration of the Romanov (‘German’) dynasty, but fighting to defend the revolution would restore national unity. On this assumption they bowed to allied pressure to launch a summer offensive.

Kerensky, now the minister of war, toured the front to raise the troops’ morale. He dressed in military uniform and wore his right arm in a sling, although no one knew of any injury. Kerensky was an actor-politician, made for the revolutionary stage, where his fiery speeches, filled with theatrical gestures and even fainting fits, genuine but timed to coincide with the dramatic climax of his speech, captured the emotions of the crowd. Standing in his open-top Renault, Kerensky called on the assembled troops to place their ‘civic duty’ above class interests. Like ‘every citizen’, they had to make a sacrifice for the nation. The soldiers had fulfilled this obligation to the old regime, so they should do the same for the defence of Russia’s liberty. ‘Or is it’, he now asked in a phrase charged with meaning and emotion for the peasant soldiers, ‘is it that the first free Russian state is in fact a state of rebellious slaves?’10 It was a question carrying the weight of all the country’s history.

Everywhere he went he was hailed as a hero. The soldiers he encountered – carefully handpicked by their officers – ‘kissed his hand, his uniform, his car, the ground on which he walked’, according to an English nurse, who compared the cult of Kerensky to the former worship of the tsars. ‘Many of the soldiers were on their knees praying; others were weeping.’11 The adulation he received created the impression that the rank and file were eager for battle. In fact, as the date of the offensive approached, the flood of deserters rose sharply. The attack began on 16 June. For two days the Russians advanced, led by the Women’s Battalion of Death, formed by female volunteers in 1917 and chosen now to shame the men into fighting; but when the Germans launched a counter-offensive, the Russians fled to the rear in panic.

The coalition government collapsed. The soldiers of the Petrograd garrison prepared an armed uprising to transfer power to the Soviets – a policy the Bolsheviks had come round to support since Lenin’s return from exile in April. The lead was taken by the First Machine Gun Regiment, the most pro-Bolshevik of all its troops, after they were ordered to the front. They were supported by the Kronstadt sailors, strongly Bolshevik, ‘maximalist’ or anarchist in their outlook, who had declared their own Soviet republic during May. On 3–4 July they occupied the capital. With a clear order from the Bolsheviks they would have staged a coup. But Lenin was unable to make up his mind if the time was ripe ‘to try for power’.12 When the armed sailors and machine-gunners congregated outside the Bolshevik headquarters to receive his instructions, he gave them none. Confused by his vague words of encouragement, they went on to the Tauride Palace, where they called on the Soviet leadership to seize power. Their demand was rejected by the SRs and Mensheviks, who still controlled the Soviet, whereupon the would-be insurrectionists no longer knew what they should do. They were tired and hungry, it was raining heavily, so they dispersed.

The failed uprising sparked a reaction from the right. Leaflets were released by the Ministry of Justice claiming that the Bolsheviks were German agents – an idea based on concrete evidence (the Bolsheviks undoubtedly received German money and logistical support in 1917) but giving rise to the dangerous myth that Soviet power was imposed on Russia by the Germans, Jews and other foreign enemies of the country. In April Lenin had arrived on a ‘sealed’ or uninspected train from Switzerland supplied by Germany to foment opposition to the war, it was now revealed. The Bolshevik headquarters were raided, hundreds of Party members arrested. Lenin fled to Finland disguised in workers’ clothes. He refused to stand trial for treason on the grounds that the government had now become a ‘military dictatorship’ engaged in a ‘civil war’ against the proletariat.13 The only way to fight it was to seize power.

Kerensky formed a new coalition government of SRs, Mensheviks and the Kadets. He introduced restrictions on public gatherings, restored the death penalty at the front, agreed to roll back the influence of the soldiers’ committees to restore military discipline and appointed General Kornilov as the supreme commander. A hero of the right, Kornilov pushed for a military dictatorship to close down the Soviets. He thought he had Kerensky on his side. But when Kornilov despatched a Cossack force to occupy the capital and disarm the garrison, Kerensky condemned him and mobilised the Soviet to resist his coup attempt. There was no need for fighting in the end. On their way to Petrograd the Cossacks were met by a Soviet delegation from the northern Caucasus who talked them into laying down their arms.

The Kornilov Affair destroyed all support for Kerensky and his government. The mass of the soldiers suspected that their officers had backed Kornilov. Discipline collapsed. The rate of desertion rose sharply. The soldiers returned to their villages, where it was harvest time, and assumed control of the peasant revolution, which became more violent as the soldiers took the lead in burning manor houses to force the gentry off the land. Workers too were radicalised. Abandoning the Mensheviks, who refused to break with the Kerensky government, they swung towards the Bolsheviks, the only party to stand firmly for ‘All power to the Soviets’, giving them a clear majority in the Soviets of Moscow, Petrograd and other big industrial cities.

At the Second Soviet Congress in October it was almost certain that the delegates would pass a resolution calling for Soviet power. That would mean a government made up of all the parties in the All-Russian Soviet. The Bolsheviks were likely to be the largest party, but they would have to share the government with the SRs and the Mensheviks. Until 24 October, most of the Bolshevik leaders were prepared for this outcome. But Lenin had different ideas. He did not want to share power. From his hideout in Finland, he had been calling for an armed uprising before the Congress met. The Party ‘can and must’ seize power, he had argued in a series of impatient letters to the Bolshevik Central Committee. He said ‘can’ because the Party had enough support to win a civil war, which was more important than elections at this point. And ‘must’ because by waiting for a vote in the Congress they would give time to Kerensky to organise a counter-revolutionary force and close down the Soviet.14

Under pressure from Lenin, who returned to Petrograd on 10 October, the Central Committee agreed to prepare an uprising, but when it would take place was not yet clear. On 16 October it decided that the time had not arrived. The masses of Petrograd would not come out on the Party’s call alone, it was said by local activists, but ‘would have to be stung by something, such as the break-up of the garrison, to support an uprising’.15 Lenin was irate. A coup needed only a small force. He was prepared to carry out the putsch, if necessary, as a military invasion from Finland, where he could count on the support of the Baltic regiments.

Kerensky played into his hands. Confident that he could crush the Bolsheviks, whose plans for an uprising had been revealed, he ordered the soldiers of the Petrograd garrison to be sent to the Northern Front, where the Germans were advancing fast towards the capital. This was the sting that Lenin had been waiting for. It enabled him to rally armed support for an uprising behind the slogan ‘The Revolution in Danger!’ To prevent their transfer to the front the soldiers formed a Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) which took command of the garrison on 21 October. Over the next days, as delegates arrived for the Soviet Congress, the MRC organised the defence of the capital by seizing control of the railway stations, the post and telegraph, the telephone exchange and the electricity station, and putting soldiers on the streets.

This was the scene on the night of 24 October when Lenin, in disguise, made his way across the capital to the Smolny Institute, the former noblewomen’s school, where the Congress would be held the following day. The building was ablaze with lights and heavily defended by armoured cars and machine guns. In Room 36, the Bolshevik headquarters, Lenin bullied his comrades into ordering the insurrection to begin. He wanted it completed before the Congress voted on the transfer of power. After a day of technical delays, a signal shot was fired by the cruiser Aurora and the Bolshevik attackers stormed the Winter Palace to arrest Kerensky’s ministers – they were bunkered in a small dining room, where they sat amid the plates of their last meal (borscht, steamed fish and artichokes). Kerensky was not there. He had left that morning for the Northern Front in a desperate search for loyal troops. His government by this time was so helpless that it did not even have a car: he had departed in a Renault seized from the American Embassy.

The arrest of the ministers was announced to the Soviet Congress in the smoke-filled hall of the Smolny Institute. The 670 delegates – mostly workers and soldiers in their tunics and greatcoats – had unanimously passed a resolution proposed by the Menshevik Martov to form a socialist government based on all the parties in the Soviet. When the seizure of power was reported, most of the Menshevik and SR delegates denounced this ‘criminal venture’ and walked out in protest. Lenin’s plan had worked. The seizure of power was a provocation against the SRs and the Mensheviks as much as a coup against the Provisional Government. By walking out of the Congress, the Mensheviks and SRs had surrendered the Soviet to the Bolsheviks. Trotsky pounced on the opportunity. Denouncing Martov’s resolution, he gave his verdict on the renegades: ‘You are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out; go where you ought to go – into the dustbin of history!’ Trotsky then proposed a resolution condemning their ‘treacherous’ attempts to kill Soviet power at its birth.16 The Soviet delegates, who did not understand what they were doing, raised their hands to support it. The effect of their action was to give a Soviet stamp of approval for a Bolshevik dictatorship.

Not that anybody gave them long in power at that point. The Bolsheviks had a tenuous hold on the capital – where the civil service, state bank, post and telegraphs all came out on strike in protest against them – but no grip whatsoever on the provinces. They had no means of feeding Petrograd, nor of getting forces to Moscow, where they were engaged in a bitter struggle against troops loyal to Kerensky. They had lost control of the railways because of a strike by the Railway Workers’ Union (Vikzhel), which demanded that the Bolsheviks form a coalition government with the other socialist parties, and forced them to open talks with them. Even if they managed to survive these challenges, there were yet to be elections for the Constituent Assembly, the true organ of democracy in so far as every adult citizen would have a vote, and on this the opposition parties pinned their hopes.

Such hopes were naive. The Bolsheviks refused to play by normal rules in consolidating their dictatorship. From their first day in power, they issued orders through the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), Lenin’s preferred means of government, rather than the Soviet, where the Left SRs, the Anarchists and a small number of left-wing Mensheviks remained as a parliamentary brake on their executive power. They banned the opposition press, and had hundreds of Kadets, Right SRs and Mensheviks arrested by the MRC, which was soon replaced by the Cheka (short for Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage), Lenin’s new political police. The Bolsheviks took over the state bank, arrested striking officials and, once Moscow had been won, walked out of the Vikzhel talks, as they had intended all along. They allowed the elections for the Constituent Assembly to go ahead in November because they thought they would win; but when the SRs emerged as the largest party they declared the result was unfair. Soviet power, Lenin claimed, was a higher democratic principle than ‘the formal rights of a bourgeois parliament’. He ordered the Assembly to be closed down by armed guards only hours after it had opened in the Tauride Palace on 6 January 1918.

Meanwhile, at the grass-roots level of society, the Bolsheviks gave free rein to the ‘looting of the looters’ – mob trials, lynchings, violent robberies and requisitionings of anyone who bore the slightest trace of wealth or privilege. Socialists like the writer Maxim Gorky who had hoped the revolution would fulfil their humanist ideals and bring Russia closer to the West saw these acts of vengeance as a terrible explosion of the Russian people’s ‘Asiatic savagery’. ‘I am’, he wrote in his newspaper Novaya Zhizn (New Life) on 19 November, ‘especially distrustful of a Russian when he gets power into his own hands. Not long ago a slave, he becomes the most unbridled despot as soon as he has the chance to become his neighbour’s master.’17

But Lenin saw the ‘looting of the looters’ as a deepening of the ‘class struggle’, a necessary form of civil war. In ‘How to Organize Competition?’, written in December 1917, he suggested that each town should develop its own means of:

cleansing the Russian land of all vermin, of scoundrel fleas, the bedbug rich and so on. In one place they will put into prison a dozen rich men … In another they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third they will be given yellow badges after a term in prison … In a fourth one out of every ten will be shot. The more variety the better.18

Soviet officials, bearing flimsy warrants, went round the houses of the ‘bourgeoisie’ – the hated burzhooi as they were called – confiscating anything of value ‘for the revolution’. They levied taxes on the burzhooi and imprisoned hostages, threatening to shoot them if they failed to pay the tax. Their terror took a leaf out of the old playbook of krugovaya poruka, collective responsibility, applied now to a whole social class. They called this terror the ‘internal front’ of the Civil War.

Much of this violence was instigated by the soldiers, returning in their millions from the fronts following the Bolshevik Decree on Peace, passed on 26 October 1917. The soldiers took the decree as a licence to demobilise themselves and headed for the nearest railway station. They formed themselves into militias, or Red Guards, to carry out the revolution in their towns and villages.

Without an army to go on with the war, the Bolsheviks were forced to open peace talks with the German high command at Brest-Litovsk. But they were divided over strategy. To those on the left wing of the Party, like Bukharin, a separate peace with ‘imperialist’ Germany would represent a betrayal of the internationalist cause. It would end all hopes of the revolution spreading to the West, which they saw as crucial to the cause. The Russian Revolution on its own, they thought, could not survive without the support of the more advanced industrial societies. On this reasoning, they favoured spinning out the peace talks with the Germans for as long as possible and, if need be, fighting against them with Red Guards and militias (what they called a ‘revolutionary war’) in the hope of inspiring the European proletariat. Lenin, by contrast, wanted to conclude a separate peace, and as soon as possible, in order to secure a ‘breathing spell’ for the revolution in Russia. ‘It is now only a question of how to defend the motherland,’ he argued as the spokesman for a small minority in the Central Committee on 11 January 1918. There was no point risking the defeat of Russia on the chance that a German revolution might break out, which Lenin doubted would happen. ‘Germany is only just pregnant with revolution, but we have already given birth to a completely healthy child.’ The Civil War demanded an immediate peace, or as Lenin put it with his usual bluntness, ‘The bourgeoisie has to be throttled and for that we need both hands free.’19

Because of these divisions, the Bolshevik negotiators, led by Trotsky, played for time at Brest-Litovsk. Trotsky ran rings around the German diplomats and generals, subjecting every sentence in the draft treaty to lengthy abstract discussions. Finally the Germans lost patience and signed a separate treaty with Ukraine, whose nationalist leaders in the parliament in Kiev declared Ukraine’s independence on 22 January and sought at once the Germans’ help in their war against the Red Guards based in east Ukraine where the ethnic Russians were in the majority. Signed on 9 February, the treaty turned Ukraine into a German protectorate, opening the way for its occupation by the Germans and the Austrians. Having detached the Ukrainians from the Russians, the Germans were in a position to increase their demands at Brest-Litovsk. Yet still Lenin could not get the votes he needed in the Central Committee. It was not until 23 February, with the Germans dropping bombs on Petrograd, that he got his way and the German terms – now much worse than they would have been in January – were accepted by the Bolsheviks. Under the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Russia was forced to give up most of its former imperial territories on the European continent. Poland, Finland, Estonia and Lithuania gained nominal independence under German protection. Soviet troops were evacuated from Ukraine, which was quickly occupied by half a million Austrian and German troops, mainly bent on plundering as much foodstuffs as they could from the Ukrainian peasantry as they pushed the Red Guards back to east Ukraine. All in all, the Soviet Republic lost 34 per cent of its population (55 million people), 32 per cent of its agricultural land, 54 per cent of its industrial capacity and 89 per cent of its coalmines (peat and wood now became its biggest source of fuel).20 As a European power, Russia was reduced to a status on a par with seventeenth-century Muscovy. The transfer of the Soviet capital to Moscow on 12 March symbolised this retreat from Europe. St Petersburg had always been a European city, ‘Russia’s window on the West’; Moscow, by contrast, was a physical reminder of its Asiatic traditions. As an international movement the revolution had been dealt a heavy blow. But the Russian Revolution, in the meantime, had been saved.

The armies of the Civil War were being formed. The anti-Bolshevik forces, known as the ‘Whites’ (a name derived from the white cockades worn in the hats of the anti-Jacobins during the French revolutionary wars), were a motley bunch without a clear or unifying ideology except to remove the ‘Reds’ from power and restore the ‘old Russia’. But what that Russia should be like – a monarchy or a republic, an empire or a federation, a system based on private property or a socialist society – was a question that divided them.

In south Russia, there was a Volunteer Army. Formed by Kornilov on the Don following the Bolshevik coup, it comprised mainly officers, whose right-wing politics created tensions with the Don Cossacks, on whom they relied to do the fighting, because many of the younger Cossacks wanted their own socialist republic rather than the restoration of the Russian Empire, which the leaders of the Volunteer Army clearly favoured. General Anton Denikin, who assumed command on Kornilov’s death in April 1918, failed to specify his policies. The experience of 1917 had taught him to keep the army out of politics and rely on simple slogans, such as ‘Russia One and Indivisible’, which did nothing to endear the Cossacks or other national minorities to him.

Meanwhile, on the Volga, a Czech Legion was the major force supporting the Komuch, an SR government based in Samara fighting for the restoration of the Constituent Assembly and the resumption of the war. Stranded behind German lines, the Czechs were keen to rejoin the fighting on the Western Front to win their national independence from the Austrian–Hungarian Empire. Politically weak, without much support from the peasants, the Komuch soon became dependent on the Siberian Army based in Omsk, where a group of rightist officers installed Admiral Kolchak, the tsar’s commander of the Black Sea Fleet, as supreme ruler in a military dictatorship that set about conscripting peasants for its war against the Bolsheviks. The Western powers supported all these counter-revolutionary armies in the hope of getting Russia to rejoin the war – that at least was how they presented their involvement in the Civil War – and on that basis they provided them with most of their equipment, including tanks and aircraft, and sent troops to help them fight the Reds.

The Red Army was formed on the Volga front. To begin with it consisted of Red Guards, the workers’ militias, whose revolutionary zeal was not enough to compensate for their lack of military discipline against the more experienced Czech soldiers. The ease of the first Czech victories made it clear to Trotsky, the commissar of war, that the Red Army had to be reformed on the model of the imperial army, with conscript units instead of the Red Guards, experienced (tsarist-era) officers and a centralised command. Many of the rank and file resented these reforms as a restoration of the old military order. They saw the ex-tsarist officers as an obstacle to their own promotion through the ranks. A Military Opposition crystallised around this lower-class resentment of the professional officers and other ‘bourgeois specialists’. Its stronghold was on the Tsaritsyn Front where Stalin, known for his ruthless methods, had been sent to requisition grain, though he soon took over the military command, wreaking havoc with his wholesale arrests of Trotsky’s tsarist officers.

Mass conscription was introduced in June. The Red Army mobilised a million men by the spring of 1919, three times that number by 1920 and 5 million by 1921. It was a pattern we have seen before in which quantity was made to substitute for quality because of the country’s backwardness. The armed forces grew much faster than the war-torn economy was able to supply them with munitions, transport, food and clothes. The soldiers’ morale collapsed and they deserted in their thousands, especially during harvest time when they were needed in their villages. New recruits were thrown into battle without training, making them more likely to desert. A vicious circle thus developed where mass conscription led to supply shortages and mass desertion. It locked the Soviet economy into a system – War Communism, as it became known – whose purpose was to channel all production towards the demands of the army.

War Communism was the first attempt by the Bolsheviks at a command economy. Some believed it would lead directly to a Communist society. The system began with a grain monopoly in May 1918, but broadened to include a comprehensive range of state controls over the economy: the stamping out of private trade; the nationalisation of industries; the militarisation of labour; and at its height, in 1920, universal rationing, which was meant to lead to the abolition of money.

The grain monopoly was a response to the exodus of workers from the cities in the first six months of the regime when there was neither food nor fuel. A million workers moved into the countryside to feed themselves more easily. Factories closed for lack of fuel. The revolution was in danger of being starved out of existence – the fate suffered by the Paris Commune in 1871, whose defeat had long served as a warning to the Bolsheviks. Its failure had taught them that if they were to survive in their urban strongholds they had to fight a war for foodstuffs in the countryside.

The root of the crisis was the peasantry’s reluctance to sell their surpluses for worthless paper money – a problem going back to the war years, when manufacturing had declined and there was a steep rise in prices. A barter economy rapidly developed with ‘bagmen’ from the towns travelling by rail to exchange clothes and household goods for bags of grain. Leather-jacketed Cheka agents went round trying to eradicate this trade, which they called ‘speculation’, but they could not cope with the enormous numbers of bagmen. So more coercive measures were employed. Under the grain monopoly all the peasants’ surplus became the state’s property. Armed brigades were organised by the Bolsheviks in factories and sent into the countryside to requisition grain by force. Where they found none, they assumed that it was being hidden by the ‘kulaks’ – the phantom class of ‘capitalist’ peasants invented by the Bolsheviks – and an unequal ‘battle for grain’ began. The brigades beat and tortured villagers; villages were burned, until they handed over what they had, which was often their last stocks of food and seed for the next year. There were hundreds of peasant uprisings – a ‘kulak counter-revolution’ according to the Bolsheviks – behind the Red fronts in the Civil War.21

The Civil War was a formative experience for the Bolshevik regime, whose methods of coercion, of ruling by the gun, became established in these years. The military emergency strengthened its dictatorship. It was used by the Bolsheviks to justify the Red Terror, with its mass arrests and shooting of ‘class enemies’, and to enlarge the centralising powers of the Party-state, which under War Communism imposed its control on every aspect of the economy and social life. By 1920, some 3 million people were employed in the Soviet bureaucracy. This was not a Dictatorship of the Proletariat but a Dictatorship of the Bureaucracy.

Enrolment in the Party was the surest way to climb the ranks of this bureaucracy. Over a million people joined it during the Civil War. Many were recruited through the Red Army, which taught its conscripts how to read and how to speak and act like Bolsheviks. The leadership was worried that this mass influx would reduce the Party’s quality. How could they stop it being swamped by careerists, motivated only by the perks of membership (better jobs, higher food and fuel rations, access to special shops, and so on)? How could they know who they really were if they hid behind a Party mask? They called them ‘radishes’ (Red on the outside, White inside). Annual purges of the membership were carried out. But this fear remained a source of insecurity until at least the 1930s, when it fuelled the Stalinist purges.

As the Party grew, its members came to dominate the Soviets, transforming them from local revolutionary bodies controlled by an assembly into bureaucratic organs of the Party-state. In the provincial cities and some district towns, the Soviet executives were appointed by Moscow from a central pool of Bolsheviks, who had no connection necessarily with the region under their command. But in the rural areas there were too many volost Soviets to fill with appointees. Here the Bolsheviks who took control were young peasant men, many of them soldiers who had returned from the wars, newly skilled in military techniques and organisation, literate and versed in socialist ideas.22 Like the village children polled in 1903, they did not want to return to a farming life, but saw in Party work a way to obtain office jobs. Throughout the peasant world Communist regimes have been built on the ambition of peasant sons to join the bureaucratic class.

By the spring of 1920, the Bolsheviks had all but won the Civil War. Kolchak’s army had been defeated in Siberia. Denikin’s had retreated to the Crimea, where under the command of General Wrangel the remnants of the Whites made one last stand. By November they too had been overcome. Thousands of defeated troops scrambled on to allied ships taking them into exile where another ‘Russia’ would be built in Berlin, Paris and New York.

What was the key to the Bolsheviks’ success? They had the Party’s discipline and organisation. They also had a unifying goal (the defence of ‘the revolution’) with clear symbols (the Red Flag and the Red Army’s emblem, the Red Star) capable of winning mass support. The Bolsheviks were masters of propaganda, which they deployed in every form – posters, pamphlets, free newspapers, films and agitational dramas – all sent to the fronts on special agit-trains, equipped with printing presses, libraries, theatre troupes (who used open goods wagons as their stage) and even cinemas inside the carriages.

Their propaganda was cleverly adapted to the old religious myths of social justice and freedom which had long inspired popular rebellions. It was communicated in a simple visual and iconic form easily accessible and understood by a population with low rates of literacy and little understanding of political discourse. Pamphlets for the rural poor compared socialism to the work of Christ. The cult of Lenin, which took off from August 1918 after he was wounded in an assassination attempt, carried clear religious overtones. Lenin was depicted as a Christlike figure, ready to die for the people’s cause, and, because he had survived, blessed with miraculous powers.

Even the Red Star had religious connotations deeply rooted in folklore. A Red Army leaflet explained to the soldiers why the Red Star appeared on their caps and uniforms. It was a symbol of the goddess Pravda, who had a burning red star on her forehead which lit up the whole world and brought it truth and justice, the dual meaning of her name. One day the red star was stolen by Krivda (meaning falsehood) whose rule brought darkness and evil to the world. At last the people, called upon by Pravda, rose up against Krivda to retrieve the star. The ‘brave lads’ of the Red Army, the leaflet concluded, were ‘fighting against Krivda and her evil supporters so that truth should rule the world’.23

The mobilising power of folk myths was not the only reason for the Bolsheviks’ success. Geography was also important. They had control of central Russia, where the bulk of the population lived, and held the core of the country’s railway network, which converged on Moscow like a spider’s web, enabling them to shift their forces and resources from one front to another, wherever the Whites attacked. The Whites, by contrast, had to fight on several fronts. Without a network of communications, they found it hard to coordinate their operations against the Reds. They also had to rely on the allied powers for much of their supplies.

But at the heart of the Whites’ defeat was a failure of politics. They were unwilling to put forward policies capable of winning mass support. They failed completely to adapt to the new revolutionary realities. It was not until the last year of the Civil War, and then only on the allies’ insistence, that they devoted any real resources to propaganda work, and even then it was directed to the allied powers rather than to the people. The Whites’ refusal to recognise the national independence movements was disastrous. It lost them the support of the Poles, Ukrainians, Estonians and Finns – any one of which could have tipped the military balance in their favour – and complicated their relations with the Cossacks, who wanted more autonomy from Russia than the White leaders were prepared to give.

The main cause of the Whites’ defeat, however, was their failure to accept the peasant revolution on the land. It alienated them from the rural population in the central agricultural zone, the Civil War’s decisive battlefield, where the land gains of the peasants had been greatest during 1917. This fatal shortcoming is illustrated well by the Denikin offensive against Moscow in 1919. The Whites pushed north from their bases in Ukraine and the lower Volga in July. They moved fast in an all-or-nothing gamble to break through to Moscow. In mid-October they took Orel, not far from Tula, the Red Army’s main arsenal, then in the midst of workers’ strikes, which, if taken, would give the Whites a crucial advantage in the battle for Moscow. For once the Whites had managed to coincide their attack on the Southern Front with another against Petrograd led by General Yudenich coming through Estonia. The Bolsheviks were thrown into panic. They thought that Moscow was about to fall. Many packed their bags to flee abroad. Secret plans were made to evacuate the Soviet capital. But at this vital moment, when the fight for Tula was finely balanced, a quarter of a million peasant soldiers from that area, all deserters from the Red Army, willingly returned to fight the Whites.24 However much the peasants might have detested the Bolshevik regime, with its food brigades and commissars, they would side with it against the Whites to defend their revolution on the land.

Once the Whites had been defeated the peasants turned against the Bolsheviks, whose requisitionings had brought them to the brink of starvation. By the autumn of 1920, the whole of the country was engulfed in peasant wars. Most were small revolts but there were also larger armies, sometimes called the Greens, such as Makhno’s in Ukraine or Antonov’s in Tambov, which set up peasant governments. Everywhere their aims were basically the same: to restore the peasant self-rule of 1917. Some expressed this in the slogan ‘Soviets without Communists!’

Bolshevik power ceased to exist in much of the countryside. The consignment of grain to the cities was seriously affected. Workers went on strike. It was not just the shortages that angered them. They were protesting against the loss of rights hard won in 1917. They objected to the quasi-military subordination of the trade unions to the Party’s industrial bureaucracy, a policy pursued by Trotsky as commissar for transport from 1920, and opposed what they saw as the decline of democracy in the Party, as policies increasingly were pre-decided by the leadership and then imposed on the rank and file. They found a voice in the Workers’ Opposition, as it was named by Lenin, a group of Bolsheviks, led by Alexander Shliapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai, who called for more trade union powers and a return to Soviet democracy. The strikes began in Moscow and soon spread to Petrograd where this proclamation appeared on the streets on 27 February, the fourth anniversary of the revolution. It was a new call to arms:

The workers and peasants need freedom. They do not want to live by the decrees of the Bolsheviks. They want to control their own destinies. We demand the liberation of all arrested socialists and non-party working men; abolition of martial law; freedom of speech, press and assembly for all who labour; free elections of factory committees, trade unions and soviets.25

That day the rebellion spread to the Kronstadt naval base. In 1917, Trotsky had called the Kronstadt sailors the ‘pride and glory of the Russian Revolution’. They had played a crucial role in the October seizure of power. But now the sailors were calling for an end to the Bolshevik dictatorship. Electing a new Soviet, they demanded freedom of speech and assembly, ‘equal rations for all working people’ and no more requisitioning.26 Trotsky took command of the suppression of the mutiny. The assault began with a bombardment of the naval base on 7 March, just as the Tenth Party Congress was assembling in Moscow.

There Lenin introduced a tax in kind to replace requisitioning. Once the tax was paid, the peasants were allowed to sell their surplus foodstuffs on the free market. This was necessary, he argued, to quell the peasant uprisings, which were ‘far more dangerous’ than all the Whites together, and to build a new alliance (smychka) with the peasantry. It meant abandoning the central plank of War Communism and laying the foundations of a New Economic Policy (NEP) in which private trade and small-scale manufacturing would be allowed within the socialist system. There were many Bolsheviks who feared that this would lead to the return of the capitalist system. But Lenin insisted that as long as the state controlled the ‘commanding heights of the economy’ (heavy industry, the utilities and natural resources), there was no danger in allowing private farming, retail trade and handicrafts to satisfy consumer needs.

To enforce party unity and suppress the Workers’ Opposition, Lenin also introduced a ban on factions inside the Party. It was a fateful decision. Henceforth the Central Committee was to rule the Party on the same tightly dictatorial lines as the Party controlled the country; no group could question its decisions without exposing itself to the charge of ‘factionalism’, which could mean expulsion from the Party.

The NEP was to be a temporary retreat from the utopian dream of building socialism by decree – the essence of the War Communist model. It meant confronting Russia as it was – a country of small peasant farms – and forging policies to engage them through the market in the socialist sector. ‘Only in countries of developed capitalism’ was it possible to make ‘an immediate transition to socialism’, Lenin told the Congress. This was what the Mensheviks had said in 1917. Now he was adopting their approach, calling on the Bolsheviks to set about the task of ‘building Communism with bourgeois hands’. There would have to be a new modus vivendi with the Church, with private enterprise, with the intelligentsia and its ‘bourgeois’ culture, all of which had been attacked, condemned as ‘class enemies’, under War Communism. The Bolsheviks would have to change their ways, if Lenin’s vision was to be achieved. They could no longer rule by threatening people with rifles. Now, Lenin warned, they had to ‘proceed more slowly’. They needed Western education and culture, to ‘learn how to govern’ properly.27 But were they ready to do so?

9

The War on Old Russia

The restoration of the market brought back life to the Soviet economy. Private trade responded instantly to the chronic shortages that had built up over seven years of war, revolution and the Civil War. Flea markets boomed. Peasants brought their produce to markets. Private cafés, shops and restaurants sprang up everywhere. Long-forgotten luxuries (butter, cheese and meat, pastries, sweets) were displayed in shop windows, but at prices well beyond the means of ordinary citizens. A new-rich class of private traders, the ‘Nepmen’, soon appeared. They dressed their wives and mistresses in diamonds and furs, drove around in huge imported cars and boasted loudly in expensive hotel bars of the fortunes they had wasted at the newly opened race tracks and casinos. Was this what the revolution had been for? That was the question many asked. Workers in their thousands threw away their Party cards in disgust at the NEP, which they called the New Exploitation of the Proletariat.

Urban opposition to the NEP was sharpened by shortages of food in the state shops. The root of the problem, as before, was the absence of consumer goods to trade with the peasants. Industry had been badly damaged by the Civil War. It took longer to recover than the peasant farms, which had good harvests in 1922 and 1923. The result was a widening gap (the ‘scissors crisis’) between deflated agricultural prices and steeply rising prices for consumer goods. As the cost of manufactures rose, the peasantry reduced its grain sales to the state depots. The state’s procurement rates were too low for the peasants to earn enough from sales to afford the household items they needed. The Bolsheviks were split about how to deal with the issue. Those on the left wing of the Party, like Trotsky, thought the top priority was to increase the supply of factory goods. They favoured keeping agricultural prices low and taking grain by force if necessary to boost large-scale industrial production with the benefit of planning by the state. Those on the right, like Bukharin, advocated raising the procurement prices, even if this entailed slowing down the rate of capital accumulation for industrialisation. Higher prices would stimulate the peasants’ marketing of grain and preserve the smychka, the state’s alliance with the peasantry, on which the survival of the revolution depended.

There were disagreements too on the international consequences of the NEP. When the Bolsheviks took power they had all assumed that the revolution would soon spread to the more advanced industrial societies. In their view socialism was unsustainable in Russia on its own because it lacked the industries it needed, machine-building and munitions, to defend itself against the hostile capitalist powers. They dreamed of the revolution spreading through the world as a liberating force. That was why they had set up the Comintern, the Communist International, to organise the Communists of other countries under Moscow’s leadership. The Comintern’s foundation was a fundamental break from the position of the socialist parties in the Second International, which had dissolved in 1916 amid conflicts over whether socialists should support their country’s war campaign. To mark their ideological opposition to the Social Democrats, some of whom had backed their national wartime governments, the Bolsheviks in 1918 changed their name from the SDs to the Communist Party. The distinction was reinforced by the Comintern, known as the Third International, whose ‘Twenty-One Conditions’ (passed in 1920) obliged its member parties to rename themselves as Communist, to fight against the ‘social patriots’ of the parliamentary socialist parties and give loyal support to the Soviet Republic, which, as the sole existing seat of Communism in the world, was their only true homeland. Through the Comintern, Russia gained a new position on the international stage. Communism gave it a new messianic role. In the medieval myth of the Third Rome, Moscow had been cast as the one true holy saviour of the world. Now, at the head of the Third International, it assumed the mission of its liberation from capitalist oppression. Western Communists who joined the Comintern bowed to Russia’s leadership.

By 1924 it had become apparent, however, that a revolution in the West was unlikely. The immediate postwar instability had passed. In Italy the Fascists had come to power. In Germany strikes organised by Communists had failed to develop into larger uprisings. Abandoning the goal of exporting revolution in the immediate future, Stalin and Bukharin advanced the policy of ‘socialism in one country’. It was a dramatic turnaround in the Party’s revolutionary strategy. Instead of waiting for support to come from the industrialised states, the Soviet Union, formed by the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian and Belarusian Soviet Republics in 1922, would now have to become self-sufficient and defend itself by building industries with capital extracted from its own economy. It would export grain and raw materials to pay for tools and machines imported from the West.

The debates about the NEP came down to a question about time. How long would it take for the Soviet Union to industrialise through the market mechanisms of the NEP? Would these means be fast enough to build the defence industries the Soviet Union needed before a war with the capitalist states which all agreed was unavoidable? This was the fear that fuelled Stalin’s rise to power with the launching of the FiveYear Plan.

In his brilliant chronicle of 1917 the Menshevik memoirist Nikolai Sukhanov famously described Stalin as a ‘grey blur, which flickered obscurely and left no trace’.1 Stalin had appeared in Petrograd that March after many years of underground activity in his native Georgia and the Caucasus, ending in arrest and exile in Siberia. During the Civil War he took on many jobs that others had considered too mundane. He was the commissar for nationalities, the commissar of Rabkrin (Workers’ and Peasant Inspectorate), a member of the Politburo and the Orgburo (Organisational Bureau) and the chairman of the Secretariat in charge of the Party’s management. As a consequence he had gained a reputation for modest and industrious mediocrity.

Short in size with a deformed arm and pockmarked face, speaking Russian with a Georgian accent, Stalin felt the condescension of the Party’s metropolitan leaders. Quick to take offence, but holding on to grudges for ever, he plotted his revenge by building up his power-base in the Party’s lower ranks. All the Bolshevik leaders underestimated him. Lenin was as guilty as the rest. For too long he indulged his rudeness, violence and criminality – methods which he saw as useful for the cause. In April 1922, he made him the general secretary of the Party. He thought that Stalin’s ruthless discipline would help him to enforce the ban on factions and rid the Party of the Workers’ Opposition, which was still attracting the support of workers opposed to the NEP. It was, as Lenin came to realise, a terrible mistake.

The key to Stalin’s growing power was his control of the Party apparatus and his secret use of the OGPU police, as the Cheka was renamed, to remove his enemies from it. As the chairman of the Secretariat, and the only Politburo member in the Orgburo, he could promote his supporters to the key regional Party posts, thus securing a majority in the Party Congress and the Central Committee. During 1922 alone, more than a thousand senior Party officials, including forty-two provincial Party bosses, were appointed by the Orgburo.2 This was the core of the nomenklatura, a listing of positions filled by the Central Committee and ranked in a hierarchy of status, privilege and patronage, not unlike the system of mestnichestvo by which the princes and the boyar clans were ordered in the closed and minutely graded service class of medieval Muscovy. These appointees became Stalin’s loyal supporters in his struggles for the leadership. Like him, they came from humble origins. Most of them had no more than a few years’ schooling. They had a feeble grasp of Marxist ideology, which they had learned through primers, and mistrusted intellectuals like Trotsky and Bukharin, whose theorising went over their heads. They preferred to place their trust in Stalin’s down-to-earth wisdom which he expressed in simple terms.

Not that Stalin ever felt secure. Naturally suspicious, he was obsessed with the idea that local Party cells were hiding ‘oppositionists’ (remnants of the Menshevik and SR parties, Workers’ Oppositionists and supporters of Trotsky). Through his control of the Secretariat and its Orgburo he put pressure on the regional Party secretaries to expose oppositionist activities (which could mean nothing more than voicing criticisms of the Party leadership). He measured the success of these regional leaders by the quality of information they passed on to the Central Control Commission, responsible for Party discipline, which he headed until 1923, when it was taken over by his ally Valerian Kuibyshev.

Beyond the Party’s mechanisms of control and punishment, Stalin also relied on OGPU, which answered to him as the general secretary. He formed a tight alliance with Felix Dzerzhinsky, the OGPU chief, who pushed for more resources and power by providing evidence of ‘anti-Soviet’ groups in the Party and society. Stalin employed the political police to spy on Party officials and collect or fabricate incriminating evidence (kompromat) that could be used against them when needed. Thousands of potential oppositionists were purged from the Party in this way – and once they had been expelled they could be arrested, even killed, without awkward questions being asked. Stalin himself liked to spy on his comrades. He had a ‘secret department’ in the Secretariat, whose staff compiled an office-full of dossiers on Party leaders detailing their weaknesses and fears learned from intercepted mail and conversations bugged by the police. Hidden in a drawer inside his desk, Stalin had a secret telephone on which he was able to listen to the private conversations of senior government officials in the Kremlin. He knew all his comrades’ weaknesses – their mistresses, their cocaine use, their homosexuality – and knew how to exploit them.3

As general secretary, Stalin was in charge of Lenin’s medical care when the latter suffered from the first of several strokes in May 1922. With Lenin out of action, Stalin formed a triumvirate (with Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev) to oppose Trotsky, whom they all feared as their main rival for the succession. Lenin became increasingly suspicious of Stalin. Between 23 December 1922 and 4 January 1923, he dictated a series of fragmentary notes for the forthcoming Twelfth Party Congress (later known as Lenin’s Testament) in which he was highly critical of Stalin and recommended his removal from the post of general secretary.

Lenin had been shocked by his handling of the Georgian Bolsheviks, who had opposed Stalin’s plan, as commissar of nationalities, to form a federation as the basis of the Soviet Union. In this plan the non-Russian nations would join Russia as ‘autonomous’ republics, denying them a formal right of secession from the union as Lenin had proposed in his own plans for a federation of equal Soviet republics before he was incapacitated by illness. Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the head of Moscow’s Caucasian Bureau and Stalin’s closest ally in the Caucasus, had been imposing his centralised control on the Georgian republic, purging ‘nationalists’ and ‘deviationists’ from the Party’s membership. On one occasion in a private argument he had slapped the face of a Georgian Bolshevik opposed to Stalin’s plan. Lenin was outraged when he found out. Stalin was a ‘Great Russian chauvinist’, he now realised, who could only bully and subjugate small nations, whereas what was needed was ‘profound caution, sensitivity and a readiness to compromise’. His poor opinion of Stalin was confirmed in March when he learned of another ugly incident in which Stalin had subjected Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, ‘to a storm of coarse abuse’ and even threatened her.4 Devastated by the incident, Lenin at once became ill. Three days later he had another stroke which robbed him of speech.

The Twelfth Party Congress finally convened in April 1923. The Testament was not read out to the delegates, as Lenin had intended, but was kept in store by Krupskaya, who hoped for his recovery. It was only after Lenin’s death, in January 1924, that she presented his dictated notes to the Secretariat, asking for them to be published for the delegates of the Thirteenth Party Congress in May 1924. The Testament was not made known to the whole Congress, but was read out to the delegation heads in a small and orchestrated gathering where the triumvirate was able to persuade the delegates to accept Stalin’s promises to mend his ways.

Trotsky was too weak to challenge this decision on the Testament (at the Thirteenth Congress he had come a lowly thirty-fifth in the voting for the Central Committee). Instead he vacillated between trying to conciliate his enemies in the name of Party unity and posing as the champion of the rank and file against the ‘police regime’ of the triumvirate. Support for Trotsky had come from a ‘Group of Forty-Six’, senior Bolsheviks who agreed with his pro-industrial stance on the NEP. But this merely exposed him to the charge of factionalism (a crime against the Party since Lenin’s ban on factions). Branded as an oppositionist, and accused of ‘Bonapartist’ ambitions, Trotsky was condemned by a Party Plenum in October 1923. Kamenev and Zinoviev wanted him expelled from the Party, but Stalin, always eager to appear more moderate than he was, opposed this. Trotsky anyway was finished as a force. Removed from office in 1925, he was expelled from the Party two years later, exiled to Kazakhstan and finally deported from the Soviet Union in 1929.

Lenin had asked to be buried next to his mother’s grave in Petrograd. But Stalin wanted to embalm the corpse and put it on display. In the Russian Orthodox tradition the uncorrupted body was a sign of holiness. Trotsky was horrified by the idea, which he compared to the religious cults of medieval Rus: ‘Earlier there were the relics of Sergius of Radonezh and Serafim of Sarov: now they want to replace these with the relics of Vladimir Ilich.’ Stalin forced the Politburo to accept his plan. Lenin’s body was displayed in a temporary wooden mausoleum opened only one week after his death. On seeing it, many of the mourners bowed before it, fell to their knees, crossed themselves and said prayers to this new god.5

Stalin benefited from this cult more than any other Bolshevik leader. On 26 January 1924 he made a speech at the Soviet Congress of the Soviet Union in which, in the tone of an evangelist, he vowed repeatedly to continue Lenin’s work, ending each successive incantation of the dead leader’s principles and achievements with the same sacred oath: ‘We vow to you, comrade Lenin, we shall fulfil your behest with honour!’ The ‘Great Oath’ speech, as it became known, established Stalin as the leading apostle of the Leninist doctrine. His actions would be justified as a fulfilment of his oath. He used the defence of ‘Leninism’ to destroy his rivals, one by one.

With the defeat of Trotsky and his supporters (known as the Left Opposition), the pro-peasant approach to the NEP appeared set for many years. Although Zinoviev and Kamenev belatedly came round to Trotsky’s side, their criticisms of the NEP (that it was strengthening the private sector at the expense of the state economy) carried little influence. Bukharin was supported by Stalin in his efforts to encourage peasant farms to sell more foodstuffs to the state. Some real progress was achieved. By 1926 agricultural production had regained the levels last attained in 1913, when Russia had been one of the biggest food exporters in the world. Through cooperatives, which offered better access to consumer goods, the peasant farms were marketing more grain in the socialised economy; they were improving their productivity, thanks to the agronomic aid they could receive from the cooperatives (land reorganisation, irrigation, better tools and fertilisers, and so on). Encouraged by the government’s taxation policies, many villages were even forming simple collectives, known as TOZ, where the land was farmed in common but the livestock and the tools remained private household property. With more time, the TOZ might have formed a significant collective-farming sector within the market structures of the NEP.

But time for the NEP was running out. A poor harvest in 1927 led to a sharp fall in state grain procurements at a time when the Soviet press was filled with false reports (exploited if not engineered by Stalin) that the Polish nationalist government of Józef Piłsudski was planning an invasion of Soviet Ukraine and Belarus with the backing of the British government, whose relations with the Soviet Union had been tense for several years.* Stalin called for a return to requisitioning. Only the methods of the Civil War could save the country from the capitalist powers and their allies, the kulaks, who were, he claimed, withholding grain to block the country’s progress towards socialist industrialisation. Whereas the NEP was based on the idea that the ‘kulak threat’ was weakening, as all the ‘anti-Soviet’ forces were, in line with the country’s socialist advance, Stalin introduced the novel theory, probably derived from his paranoid mentality and his calculation that he needed constant crisis to build his police state, that the struggle with the kulaks would intensify as the revolution neared its final victory. The idea was that, as they faced defeat, the ‘counter-revolutionary’ elements, like the kulaks, would fight with growing desperation through acts of terror and conspiracy. For the Party to disarm in its struggle with the kulaks, as Bukharin argued, was, Stalin warned in a clear threat to his erstwhile ally, to play into the hands of the revolution’s ‘enemies’. Against the protests of Bukharin, who tried to keep the market mechanisms of the NEP alive, requisitioning was brought back for the 1928 harvest. This time it was toughened by the application of Article 107 of the Criminal Code which allowed the food brigades to arrest peasants and confiscate their property if they failed to pay their grain quota. Known as the Urals–Siberian method, the relative success of this campaign persuaded Stalin to press ahead with more radical measures to break the ‘kulak strike’ by controlling food at the point of its production in collective farms.

Although small collectives, like the TOZ, had been steadily developing, Stalin now insisted that the peasants should be forced to join larger collective farms (kolkhozes) where not just the land but all the tools and livestock were collectivised. Beginning in the summer of 1929, armed brigades were sent into the countryside to set up the collective farms. Reinforced by army and police units, they went into the villages with strict instructions not to come back without organising a kolkhoz.

Most of the peasants were afraid of giving up a way of life their families had lived for centuries – a life based on the family farm, the peasant commune, the village and its church, all of which were to be swept away as legacies of ‘backwardness’. In many villages there were demonstrations and riots, assaults on Communists, attacks on kolkhoz property and protests against church closures in which peasant women often took the lead. It was almost a return to the situation at the end of the Civil War, when peasant wars had forced the Bolsheviks to abandon requisitioning, only this time the regime was strong enough to crush the resistance. Realising their own weakness, the peasants ran away or slaughtered their livestock to prevent them being requisitioned for the collective farms. The number of cattle in the Soviet Union fell by 30 per cent in 1929–30, and by half from 1928 to 1933.

Any peasant who resisted was branded a kulak and sent to remote ‘special settlements’ controlled by OGPU where they were made to work in logging camps and mines. The Politburo set a target for OGPU to send a million kulak families to these penal settlements. OGPU in turn raised the figure to between 3 and 5 per cent of all peasant households and handed quotas down to provincial organisations, which frequently exceeded the target to demonstrate their vigilance.

The war against the kulaks was an economic disaster, on top of its immense human costs. It deprived the new collective farms of the best and hardest-working peasants (because these are what the kulaks in fact were) and ultimately led to the terminal decline of the Soviet economy. The kolkhoz system was a dismal failure. In the early years, few collective farms had tractors to replace the horses slaughtered by the peasantry. They were badly run by managers appointed for their loyalty. Under pressure to minimise their costs, they paid their workers a few roubles only once or twice a year, expecting them to live on a small food ration supplemented by their private garden plots, strictly limited in size, where they were allowed to keep a cow and a few chickens and to grow fruits and vegetables. Tied to the collective farm by an internal passport system, the peasants saw this enforced labour as the restoration of serfdom.

Roughly half the Soviet peasantry – around 60 million people in 100,000 villages – found themselves in the collective farms by the end of 1931. Almost everything the new farms produced was taken by the state, which now had no obstacle, like the peasant commune, to its rapacious requisitioning. The outcome was a widespread rural famine during 1932–3. The number of deaths is hard to calculate, but demographers suggest that up to 8.5 million people died of starvation or disease. The worst-affected areas were in Ukraine, where the levies on collective farms were particularly high. This has prompted some historians to argue that the ‘terror-famine’ was a calculated policy of genocide against Ukrainians, although that is hard to prove.6 Certainly the famine, or Holodomor (‘killing by starvation’ in Ukrainian), has left a bitter legacy of hatred towards Russia among the descendants of Ukrainians who died from Soviet policies.

Although the gross harvest was dramatically reduced, the new collective farms delivered to the state a greater quantity of food compared to the peasant family farms which they replaced. On this basis collectivisation was hailed as a triumph by Stalin. Even if the kolkhoz peasants starved, the government would earn the capital it needed from its export sales of grain to import new machinery. This was why he had battled with Bukharin in 1928–9 – to end the state’s dependence on the market mechanism with the peasantry so that it could maximise investment in the FiveYear Plan.

In its original version the Plan had envisaged optimistic but not completely unrealistic targets of industrial growth which could be met within the structures of the NEP. But Stalin pushed for higher rates. By the autumn of 1929, the FiveYear Plan was set to triple investment, double coal output and quadruple iron production. These were utopian rates of growth unattainable within the NEP.

The Plan created more chaos than organisation in the industrial sector. Statistics were falsified at every level of production, from the factory to the economic ministries, to cover up the failings of officials or secure more central investment. The official figures of the planned economy thus bore no relation to reality. Under intense pressure to meet their output targets, managers were forced to ‘storm’ production. This meant working round the clock in shifts, paying workers by results, and organising them in shock brigades. Factories competed with each other to fulfil their norms, which encouraged managers to hoard supplies, creating bottlenecks and dislocations in the planned economy. The shockwork system found its hero in the Donbass miner Alexei Stakhanov, who broke all records in 1935 by mining 102 metric tons of coal (fourteen times his quota) in six hours. He gave his name to a mass movement created by the state. The Stakhanovites were rewarded with consumer goods, better housing, higher rates of pay and often with promotion into management and the bureaucracy. They became loyal Stalinists. But the storming of production led to friction with the managers when shortages of fuel or raw materials slowed down the work rate of the shock brigades and reduced their pay. Workers accused their managers of ‘sabotage’ or ‘wrecking’. They did not realise that the shortages were caused by the fantastic targets that had led to the hoarding of supplies and bottlenecks in the system. They were told that ‘bourgeois wreckers and saboteurs’ were the cause instead. It was the only way the regime could explain the chaos brought about by its planning.

The rates of growth that Stalin had demanded in the FiveYear Plan could not have been achieved without the use of forced labour, particularly in the cold and remote regions of the Far North and Siberia, where so many of the Soviet Union’s precious economic resources (diamonds, gold, platinum and nickel, oil, coal and timber) were located but where nobody would freely go. The Gulag was the key to the colonisation of these areas. A vast slave economy organised by the police, the Gulag (an acronym for the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies) oversaw the process of arresting ‘enemies’ and sending them to prison camps where they were worked to death on construction sites, building railways and canals, mining coal and gold by hand, and chopping down whole forests in the Arctic zone. Their labour made an incalculable contribution to the country’s economic growth – far more valuable than any figures can communicate because of its added benefit of colonising these inhospitable regions with their precious resources.

The prototype of the Gulag system was the White Sea Canal (Belomorkanal), 227 kilometres of waterway between the Baltic and White seas, which employed 100,000 prisoners by 1932. It was a utopian project on a scale unseen since the building of St Petersburg. Prisoners were given primitive hand tools – crudely fashioned axes, saws and hammers – and were worked to exhaustion in the freezing cold. An estimated 25,000 prisoners died during the first winter. Their frozen corpses were thrown into the waterway’s foundations where their bones remain today.

In August 1933, the canal was opened by Stalin. A few weeks later it was explored by a ‘brigade’ of leading Soviet writers, who sang its praises in a volume commissioned by OGPU to celebrate its completion. Edited by Gorky, who had recently returned from voluntary exile in the West to lend his support to Stalin’s policies, the book’s chief theme was how corrective labour could ‘reforge’ human beings, turning criminals into loyal Soviet citizens. It was a big lie – and a propaganda victory. The Belomorkanal was hailed as a symbol of the progress achieved by the FiveYear Plans. New factories, dams, canals, electric power stations, entire cities like Magnitogorsk, were being built at a fantastic rate. With the capitalist world in depression, these signs of progress led huge numbers of people to invest unbounded faith in the Soviet system. But would they have thought the same if they had known that the canal was built on bones?

The speed of change in the early 1930s was intoxicating. There were so many signs of the country’s progress – or so it seemed from the Soviet press and other propaganda media – that people believed in the myth that a new world was being made.

Moscow was the symbol of this achievement. It was transformed in a few years from a rundown almost provincial city of churches into an imperial capital in the monumental architectural style with new apartment blocks, department stores, palaces of culture, parks and sporting arenas. Streets were cleared to build broad avenues for cars that rolled off the production lines. The Moscow metro was a marker of the better life to come. Its stations were like cathedrals, with spacious halls, marble floors and walls, lofty arches, chandeliers, mosaics and bas-reliefs depicting the achievements of the FiveYear Plans. The splendour of these public spaces – which stood in such stark contrast to the people’s squalid ‘living space’ in communal apartments, where several families shared a few divided rooms and a kitchen – helped to foster popular belief in the public goals and values of the Soviet order. Millions of people were persuaded to believe – some with a religious fervour – that the hardships of their everyday existence were a sacrifice worth making for the building of a workers’ paradise. Hard work today would be rewarded tomorrow.

The FiveYear Plans played a crucial role in this utopian projection. They aimed to accelerate the tempo of the whole economy. ‘The FiveYear Plan in Four!’ was their slogan. The Plans reconfigured time itself along a series of strategic targets on the path towards a Communist utopia. In this sense they built upon the age-old striving of the Russian people for a higher form of existence that lay at the heart of their religious consciousness, particularly their belief in the possibility of building a utopia on Russian soil. The creation of belief in the Soviet system required the replacement of religious ends with secular objectives tangible enough to motivate the people but meaningful in ways to satisfy the eschatological endeavour of the Russian collective psyche. By hailing the achievements of the FiveYear Plans, propaganda aimed to foster the belief that the utopia was imminent, that it could be reached by one last collective effort. The promise was renewed by every FiveYear Plan, of which there were twelve, but the utopia was never reached.

Belief was strongest in the young. For those indoctrinated in the Soviet school system, the Communist utopia was not a distant dream but a reality, which they would live to see. Nina Kaminskaya, a young law student in the 1930s, recalls a song which she and her friends would sing:

Believing in our country is so easy,

Breathing in our country is so free:

Our glorious, beloved Soviet land …

Our Soviet life is so good and bright

That children in ages to come

Will probably cry in their beds at night

Because they were not born in our lifetime.7

This sense of the approaching paradise was conveyed in the propaganda images of happy factory and kolkhoz workers that passed for Socialist Realist art. The paintings were not meant to represent some far-off future. They pictured present-day realities, recognisable to the masses, but in a mythical and ideal form to symbolise the signs of the coming Communist utopia. They were pictures of the present in the process of becoming the future. Like the icons of the Russian Church, which had let believers sense the sacred in the material world, they were meant to let their viewers sense the presence of the paradise towards which they were progressing under Stalin’s leadership. The acceptance of this vision was the starting-point of Communist belief. But that belief had deep roots in the Orthodox religious consciousness, where the divine was not confined to the heavens but immanent in worldly existence.

The cult of Stalin was crucial to this belief in the Communist future. In the portraits of the ‘Great Leader’, the ‘Teacher’, ‘Father’ of the nation, which began to appear everywhere, Stalin’s gaze is fixed ahead, beyond the frame, to a future only he can see. He looks calm and confident, certain of success in the heroic feats the Soviet people were accomplishing under his wise leadership. Whereas Lenin, in his cult, appeared as a human god or saint, a sacred guide for the Party orphaned by his death, the cult of Stalin portrayed him as a tsar, the ‘littlefather tsar’ or tsar-batiushka of folklore, who would protect the people, like his children, and guide them to a better life. ‘The Russians need a tsar’, Stalin said on many occasions.8

In the 1930s, when the people suffered so much violence at the hands of the state, so much misery and uncertainty, they clung to their belief in Stalin. At no other time in the country’s history has Cherniavsky’s observation about Russian myths been so true or apposite: the harder life becomes, the more the Russians seek hope and salvation in myths transcending everyday realities. This explains why even Stalin’s victims continued to believe in his goodness.

Born in 1917, Dmitry Streletsky was the oldest of four children in a peasant family in the Kurgan region of the Urals. In 1930 the family was stripped of all its meagre possessions and deported to a labour camp. The village Soviet, ordered by the district Party committee to find seventeen kulak families for deportation, had chosen his to make up the quota. For years they languished in terrible conditions in camps and penal settlements. Dmitry studied hard but could not go to university or hold down a proper job because of his kulak origins. Yet he never ceased believing in Stalin, and was himself, in his own words, an ‘ardent Stalinist’. Looking back on his life decades later, he said in interviews: ‘it was easier for us [the repressed] to survive our punishments if we continued to believe in Stalin, to think that Stalin was deceived by enemies of the people, rather than to give up hope in him … Perhaps it was a form of self-deception, but psychologically it made life much easier to bear, believing in the justice of Stalin. It took away our fear.’9

Stalin faced a crisis in 1932. The year had begun with widespread strikes. The workers were protesting against cuts in their food rations, longer working hours and a fall in their real wages, which had been halved since 1928. Sacrifice today for a better life tomorrow – that had been the mantra of the FiveYear Plan. But the sacrifice was being made by them. ‘There’s no bread, no meat, no fats – nothing in the shops,’ an OGPU official admitted to the British ambassador in an unguarded moment.10

There were rumblings of discontent in the Party. Anti-Stalin factions were forming. The most dangerous was organised by Martemyan Riutin, an Old Bolshevik, supporter of Bukharin, whose 200-page thesis ‘Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship’ circulated among the Party’s rank and file. Better known as the Riutin Platform, the typescript was a blistering critique of Stalin’s politics and personality, denouncing him as a mediocre thinker, ‘unscrupulous intriguer’ and ‘gravedigger of the revolution’ through his catastrophic policies, which, in forcing through collectivisation, had betrayed Lenin’s voluntarist principles.11 Riutin and his circle were arrested and exiled. Others were expelled from the Party for simply knowing of the group’s existence and failing to report them to OGPU. The episode left Stalin with a paranoid belief that his ‘enemies’ were everywhere.

That conviction was intensified by the suicide of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, on 8 November. Stalin had been rude to her at a dinner in the Kremlin the previous evening to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. He knew that she sympathised with Bukharin (whose wife was her best friend) and that she was horrified by what she had learned about collectivisation from her fellow students at the Industrial Academy. Stalin had proposed a toast to the destruction of the ‘enemies of the state’. Nadezhda did not raise her glass. Stalin goaded her, demanding to be told why she was not drinking. He threw orange peel and flicked cigarette butts at her across the table. Then she shouted at him to ‘Shut up!’ and stormed out. She went to her room and shot herself with a pistol. Among her things they found a note to Stalin in which she had written that she was opposed to everything he was doing. They also found a copy of the Riutin Platform.

Stalin was unhinged by his wife’s suicide. It reinforced his fear of enemies. In April 1933 he announced a general Party purge. Almost one in five of the Party’s 3.2 million members were expelled – not just ‘socially alien elements’, as in previous purges, but those considered ‘unreliable’. It is striking that the leadership remained so insecure more than fifteen years after coming to power. Stalin could not trust the Party rank and file. Like Ivan the Terrible with his boyars, he needed constantly to test their loyalty. He wanted to create his own elite, workers promoted from the factory floor (vydvizhentsy) who would repay him in obedience. Trained as engineers and managers in evening colleges, the vydvizhentsy of the 1930s became the mainstay of the Stalinist regime. Their ascent was enabled by the purges of these years, when bosses were removed, allowing them to move into their jobs. In 1952, these vydvizhentsy made up half the Soviet leadership (57 of the top 115 ministers in the Soviet government), among them Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gromyko and Kosygin.

By 1934, Stalin thought he had defeated his opponents. His personal dictatorship appeared secure. To his loyal supporters he was now known as the khoziain, ‘the Master’, a patrimonial term used for the tsars. On 26 January, Stalin told the opening session of the Seventeenth Party Congress that the ‘anti-Leninist’ opposition groups had been defeated. Bukharin and the others who had questioned Stalin’s policies all recanted their ‘errors’. Pravda dubbed it the ‘Congress of Victors’.

In fact the Congress marked the last revolt against Stalin from within the Party’s ranks. During the secret ballot to elect the Central Committee it was rumoured that Stalin had received at least 150 negative votes (the custom in Party elections was to vote for or against each candidate). The ballot papers were destroyed, and only three votes officially recorded against him. But opposition to his policies was obviously growing among the Party’s regional secretaries, some of whom were looking to replace the general secretary with Sergei Kirov, the popular boss of Leningrad (as Petrograd had been renamed), who had polled better than Stalin. Whether Kirov knew of this alleged conspiracy is unclear. It is unlikely that he seriously considered joining it. Since the death of Stalin’s wife, Kirov had become extremely close to the leader – practically a member of the family. But Stalin suspected treachery in everyone – a paranoia amplified by the anonymous ballot – and he was afraid of Kirov as a challenger.

On 1 December, Kirov was murdered in the Smolny Institute in Leningrad by a disgruntled Party member known to be a threat but allowed by the police to enter with a gun and find Kirov in his offices. Stalin’s role in the assassination cannot be established. But there is no doubt that he used it to eliminate his political enemies.

Within hours of the murder, Stalin took control of the investigation and issued an emergency decree for summary trials and executions of suspected ‘terrorists’. The city’s ‘former people’ (as the elites of tsarist days were called) were rounded up in their thousands. None of them had been an actual threat, but they were convenient scapegoats. In the Party purge of 1935, a quarter of a million members were expelled, most of them investigated by the NKVD (as OGPU was renamed from 1934) and accused of being ‘anti-Leninists’. The close involvement of the NKVD in a Party purge was something new. It set the pattern for the Great Terror.

Stalin was the driving force of this campaign. When Genrikh Yagoda, the NKVD chief, complained that his officials were uneasy about arresting so many Party comrades, Stalin told him to be more vigilant, or else ‘we will slap you down’. In 1936 Yagoda was replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, an unscrupulous henchman, who fed Stalin’s paranoid fears. He promoted the outlandish theory that, on Trotsky’s orders from abroad, Zinoviev and Kamenev had organised a terrorist conspiracy to murder Stalin and other members of the Party leadership. The two Bolsheviks had already been tried in secret in 1935. But Stalin wanted a show trial to ‘prove’ the existence of this conspiracy. He charged Yezhov with ‘building up the case’. Arrested suspects were tortured until they made the necessary confessions and agreed to speak the lines prepared for them in the courtroom. In August 1936, Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen other Party leaders were put on trial. All of them were shot.

A second show trial, in January 1937, witnessed the conviction of Piatakov, Radek and fifteen other former supporters of Trotsky. Then, in May, eight of the country’s highest army leaders, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (deputy commissar of defence), General Uborevich (commander of the Belarusian Military District) and General Yakir (commander of the Kiev Military District), were arrested, tortured brutally and tried in secret in a military tribunal of the Soviet Supreme Court, where they were convicted of belonging to a ‘Trotskyist-Rightist anti-Soviet conspiracy’ as well as carrying out espionage on behalf of Nazi Germany. Within hours of their conviction all eight of them were shot. The army had been the one institution capable of standing up to Stalin in his quest for complete power (which is why the Trial of the Generals had been in secret). Now its leadership was virtually destroyed: of the 767 members of the high command, 512 were shot, 29 died in prison, 3 committed suicide and 59 were still in jail when the war with Germany began in 1941.

In the last and biggest of the show trials, in March 1938, Bukharin, Yagoda and Rykov, along with thirteen other Bolsheviks, were sentenced to be shot for conspiring with the ‘Trotsky–Zinoviev terrorist organisation’ to assassinate the Soviet leaders and spy at the behest of the Fascist states.

The show trials sent a signal through the Party ranks. It told them to report suspected oppositionists, anyone connected, however long ago or remotely, to ‘enemies of the people’. When a leader was arrested, the NKVD investigated all his connections. The typical provincial town was ruled by a clique of senior officials – the district Party boss, the police chief, the heads of local factories, collective farms and prisons – who each had their own client networks in the institutions they controlled. These officials protected one another as long as their power-circle was maintained. But the arrest of one official would inevitably lead to the arrest of all the other members of the ruling clique, as well as their hangers-on, once the NKVD got to work revealing the connections between them.

The terror spread down through the Party ranks, Soviet institutions and society. Millions of people informed on their colleagues, neighbours, friends, sometimes even relatives. Some were motivated by malice, vendettas, jealousies, or by the prospect of material gain or promotion. Others acted from a sense of patriotic duty. They believed the propaganda about ‘spies’ and ‘enemies’. But most informers were afraid of getting into trouble if someone they suspected was arrested and it was revealed that they had failed to report them. It was a crime to conceal one’s contacts with ‘enemies of the people’.

The duty to inform was a long-established principle in Russian governance, dating back to the sixteenth century, as we have seen. It was connected to the obligations of krugovaya poruka, the medieval principle of collective responsibility, which we have observed as a recurrent feature in the country’s history. During the Great Terror, as the mass arrests of 1937–8 have become known, this tradition was reflected in the almost universal compliance of public institutions with the NKVD’s instructions to rid themselves of ‘enemies’ within their midst. Whether they were factory collectives, research institutes or local Soviet committees, they eagerly displayed their vigilance in rooting out these suspect individuals to prevent the whole group being punished for their sins. Proof of guilt was not needed. Suspicion was enough. The concept of ‘objective guilt’ applied to crimes against the state – meaning that a person might act with sincere and innocent intentions and yet serve the counter-revolution through their behaviour. It was the objective consequence (the ‘meaning’) of a person’s actions that determined guilt or innocence.

Most of the arrests were carried out, not as a result of individual denunciations, but with lists prepared by the police for the mass repression of entire social groups. The ‘kulak operation’ (Order 00447) accounts for almost half of the arrests (670,000) and more than half the executions (376,000) in 1937–8. Most of the victims were former kulaks and their families who had returned from three-or five-year sentences in the special settlements and Gulag labour camps.

If there was a rationale for this Great Purge it was Stalin’s fear of a fifth column in the coming war, which he thought was unavoidable. He was acutely conscious of the dangers faced by wartime governments (the Bolsheviks themselves had come to power by exploiting Russia’s war campaign). Stalin was particularly afraid that ‘malicious kulaks’ who had returned embittered from the labour camps might pose a threat in time of war. He also deemed certain ethnic groups ‘unreliable’ in the event of war – and the ‘national operations’ or wholesale deportations he instituted account for another 350,000 arrests and 200,000 deaths.12

‘To win a battle,’ Stalin warned in 1937, ‘several corps of soldiers are needed. But to subvert this victory on the front, all that is needed are a few spies somewhere in army headquarters.’ On this reasoning, if only 5 per cent of those arrested turned out to be truly enemies, ‘that’, Stalin said, ‘would be a good result’.13

What did people make of this madness? How did they reconcile their belief in the Soviet system with the arrest of relatives and friends whose guilt had seemed impossible to them? People dared not question the arrests. They suppressed their doubts, or found ways of rationalising them to preserve the basic structures of their Soviet identity. They told themselves that their own relatives had been arrested ‘by mistake’. The police, they reasoned, were bound to make some errors because there were so many hidden enemies. It was not Stalin’s fault. He would surely put things right if they wrote to him, as many people did, continuing the old tradition of petitioning the tsar to correct the abuses of his officials. How far people were prepared to extend this logic to other families is hard to tell. Maybe they believed in the innocence of their closest friends, the people they knew well. But did they think the same of casual acquaintances? Perhaps they were guilty of some crime they could not know of? There was no smoke without fire. In this way society was atomised. People were afraid of making contact with the families of ‘enemies of the people’. They crossed the street to avoid them. The solidarities of the workplace and the neighbourhood – which might have served to slow down the arrests or mitigate their damage – dissolved in this toxic atmosphere of universal mistrust, anxiety and fear.

But how long could the arrests go on for without undermining people’s trust in Soviet justice? At the rate set in 1937, when 1,500 Soviet citizens were shot on average each day, it would not be long before doubts began to spread. In January 1938, Stalin warned the NKVD not to carry on arresting people solely on the basis of denunciations without checking their veracity. Yezhov’s power was gradually reduced. In November he was replaced by his deputy, Lavrenty Beria, who announced a full review of the arrests in Yezhov’s reign. Over the next year, 327,000 prisoners were let out of the Gulag’s labour camps and colonies. Yezhov himself was exposed as an ‘enemy of the people’. It was said that he had tried to undermine the government by spreading discontent through false arrests. He was later shot in a basement near the Lubianka, the NKVD headquarters. The effect of Beria’s review was to stabilise belief in the justice of the purge. People reasoned that the mass arrests had all been Yezhov’s fault, that Stalin had corrected his mistakes, and so those left in the camps, as well as those arrested from this point, must be guilty of some crime against the state.

* The British Conservative Party had won the 1924 election thanks in large part to the publication in the Daily Mail of the fake ‘Zinoviev Letter’ suggesting that the Comintern, which was headed by Zinoviev, had infiltrated the defeated Labour government and was using it to stir a Leninist revolution in Britain and its colonies.

10

Motherland

Alexander Nevsky had its premiere on 1 December 1938. Eight hundred copies of the film were made. On the first day, in Moscow alone it was shown in seven cinemas to 45,000 people.1 Its release was accompanied by a massive state publicity campaign explaining how the obscure prince of Novgorod had saved Russia from the Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth century. Stalin was delighted with the film. Its patriotic message of national unity against foreign invasion was carried with tremendous emotional power by the cinematic arts of Eisenstein and the programmatic music of Prokofiev. At a time when the Soviet Union was readying for war with Nazi Germany, the contemporary parallel was obvious. ‘We want our film to mobilise the people in the struggle against Fascism,’ declared Eisenstein.2 He had planned to begin the film with a quotation from Mein Kampf in which Hitler had invoked the memory of the Teutonic Knights to call for Germany’s expansion (Drang nach Osten) into Slavic lands. That idea was dropped. But the film retained some visual reminders of the German threat. The Teutonic infantry are seen in helmets like the Stahlhelm worn by German soldiers in the First World War. The mitres of their bishops are marked with swastikas.

Nevsky was not the only ruler from the tsarist past to be celebrated on the Soviet screen. A two-part biopic of Peter the Great was released in 1937, and Eisenstein would follow up his Nevsky triumph with Ivan the Terrible. Stalin led this rehabilitation of the tsars. They had done ‘much that was bad’, he said in a speech to mark the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution. ‘But they did do one good thing – they put together an enormous state.’3 He saw himself as a national leader in the combined mould of Nevsky, Peter and Ivan – a view of him reflected in these films.

On Stalin’s orders, history was restored to a prominent position in the school curriculum from 1934. The new textbooks gave more attention to the positive achievements of the tsars, above all in ‘uniting all the Russian [sic] lands’ of the Soviet Union, as Stalin instructed. This was a far cry from the way the subject had been taught in the 1920s when the main book used in schools, Mikhail Pokrovsky’s Russian History, had given primacy to the international class struggle. Pokrovsky had pioneered the Marxist school of history. But following his death in 1932, he was attacked for over-emphasising social forces at the expense of patriotic heroes like Nevsky. History was to teach devotion to the motherland.

Stalin realised that patriotic pride was a more solid base of popular belief than Marxist ideology. After the mass upheavals of the FiveYear Plan, he recognised the need to reunite the country around familiar national symbols and ideas. This was connected to a general retreat from the utopian policies of the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks had launched a cultural revolution to break free from the tsarist past and foster a more international proletarian culture. They had attacked the Russian Church, along with the ‘bourgeois–patriarchal family’, the most familiar institution of them all, whose oppressive influence they had sought to undermine by opening kindergartens, laundries and canteens to free women from domestic slavery and help them enter the workplace. Under Stalin’s leadership the Bolsheviks continued with their atheist campaigns against the Church, but they adopted new ‘pro-family policies’ (for example, the outlawing of abortion, more state child support, the prosecution of homosexuals) to boost the birth rate, which had fallen sharply since the launching of the FiveYear Plan. Like Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia needed more young people for its military.

The new nationalist emphasis also meant a turnaround in Moscow’s policies towards the non-Russian nationalities. During the 1920s the Party had encouraged the development of national cultures in the Soviet republics (‘national in form, socialist in content’ was the slogan). The aim was to liberate the non-Russians from the ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ of the Tsarist Empire (the ‘prison of peoples’, as Pokrovsky had called it). Under the policy of korenizatsiia (indigenisation), essentially a form of affirmative action for the non-Russians, every nationality was to have its own territorial autonomy with rights to use its native language in books, newspapers, schools, universities and public offices. The result was the growing domination of the state administration in these territories by the indigenous elites.4

Stalin had reversed these policies. As he tightened his control of the Party structures, he grew more suspicious of the non-Russian territorial leaders, purging them as ‘bourgeois nationalists’ if they deviated from the Moscow line and appointing Russians in their place. In the Soviet ‘family of peoples’ the Russians were now firmly at the head. ‘The Great Russian people lead the struggle of the Soviet people for the happiness of mankind. They are the first among equals,’ proclaimed the journal Bolshevik in 1938.5 From that year, learning Russian was made compulsory in Soviet schools. It became the only language of command in the Red Army, where ethnic units were abolished at this time. Stalin was afraid of the non-Russian borderlands in the event of war. The ‘national operations’ of the Great Terror wiped out whole communities of Soviet Poles, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Chinese and Koreans (all redefined as ‘nationalities of foreign governments’) whom he feared could become spies.

By 1939 Stalin knew that war was imminent. He doubted that the Western powers were prepared to fight against the Axis powers (Germany, Japan and Italy). They had failed to act against the German occupation of the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia. They appeared set on a policy of appeasement, hoping that the Nazis’ military aggression would be directed east, against the Soviet Union. Such considerations were invoked to justify the Soviet Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany, signed in Moscow on 23 August by Molotov and Ribbentrop, the two foreign ministers. The country needed more time to build up its armed forces. Soviet troops were involved already in a border conflict with the Japanese in Mongolia and Manchuria. They were unable to fight on two distant fronts.

These same reasons have been given by successive Russian governments to justify the shocking pact – an obvious betrayal of Soviet principles. The ‘leading role’ of the USSR in ‘the struggle against Fascism’ – the basis on which socialists around the world aligned themselves with Moscow – had turned out after all to be a lie. The Soviet entry in the war, from 1941, revived this myth, justifying the pact as a necessary measure for the country’s survival in the minds of most Russians. But there was more to Stalin’s thinking than national defence. He also had a hidden long-term plan. On 7 September, he told his inner circle that they would wait for the Western powers and Nazi Germany to exhaust themselves in a long war before they joined the fighting to ‘tip the scales’ and emerge as the victors. The capitalist system (in which he included the Fascist states) would be weakened, enabling the Red Army to export the Soviet revolution as it marched into Europe.

The Nazi–Soviet Pact contained a secret protocol, revealed only after 1945, which partitioned Poland between the two states and gave the Soviet Union control of the Baltic states, Finland and parts of Romania – territories the Russian Empire lost in 1917. None of them was needed for the Soviet Union’s survival – the reason given for the pact. They were territorial gains, the price Stalin demanded for his collaboration with Hitler, and he hoped to add to them control of the Turkish Straits through the conquest of Bulgaria.

Once the Germans began their invasion of Poland from the west, on 1 September, the Red Army entered Poland from the east. Over the next eighteen months the Soviet invaders arrested and deported around 400,000 Poles deemed hostile to the Soviet regime. They executed 15,000 Polish prisoners of war and 7,000 other ‘bourgeois’ prisoners in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. The Soviet invasion of the Baltic states was accompanied by similar repressions – a ‘cleansing operation’ of ‘anti-Soviet elements’ in which 140,000 Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians were killed or deported by the Red Army. But in Finland the Russians were resisted by the Finns in a three-month Winter War for which the Red Army had not been prepared. A quarter of a million Soviet troops were killed or wounded before the Finns were overwhelmed.

After the signing of the pact with Germany, Alexander Nevsky was withdrawn from Soviet cinemas. It had been seen by 50 million people in the Soviet Union, and by many more abroad. But its anti-German message was now out of line with Stalin’s policy of keeping in with Germany. Under the pact, the USSR agreed to send to Germany millions of tons of war materiel – foodstuffs, fuel, cotton, minerals – more than half of all its exports between the signing of the pact and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Stalin had been fooled. Convinced that Hitler would not attack the Soviet Union until he had beaten the British, he ignored intelligence reports of German preparations in the east, discounting them as a British ploy to lure the Soviet Union into war. ‘You can send your “source” from German aviation headquarters back to his fucking mother. This is disinformation, not a “source”,’ he wrote to his state security commissar, who on 17 June had warned of an imminent attack.6 When, four days later, the Germans launched their invasion, known as Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet defences were completely unprepared. They fell back in disarray. By 28 June, six days after the invasion had begun, German forces had advanced in a huge pincer movement to capture Minsk, 300 kilometres into Soviet territory, and were on the road to Moscow, while further north they cut through the Baltic states to threaten Leningrad.

Hitler had three basic aims in this ‘race war’: to destroy the ‘Jewish Bolshevik regime’; to turn the Soviet Union into a free supplier of raw materials for the Third Reich; and, once all the Jews and 30 million other Soviet people had been killed or starved to death, to turn the surviving population into slaves. Hitler wanted the destruction of Russia. He viewed the Russians, like the Slavs, as ‘sub-humans’, incapable of building their own civilisation. He once said, in terms reminding us of the early German historians of Russia we met in the first chapter, that ‘unless other peoples, beginning with the Vikings, had imported some rudiments of organisation into Russian humanity, the Russians would still be living like rabbits’.7

Stalin was shaken by the collapse of the Soviet front. It was not until 3 July that he made his first war speech to the country on the radio. Pausing frequently, he addressed the people, not as ‘comrades’, but as ‘brothers, sisters, friends’, and called on them to unite in this ‘war of the entire Soviet nation’.8 It was an entirely different tone from the divisive, class-embattled language of the pre-war years, a tone suggesting that he shared the people’s suffering. A million people from Leningrad and Moscow – many of them no more than students – volunteered at once to go off to the front. They had little training, no medical support, and only half of them were armed. People’s Militias were quickly formed to defend towns and factories. It was thanks to the patriotic spirit of the Soviet people, not to the Party, that the country managed to escape defeat in 1941.

By the beginning of September, the German forces had surrounded Leningrad. Wanting to preserve his northern troops for the crucial battle of Moscow, Hitler ordered them to starve the city rather than to conquer it. In military terms the fate of Leningrad was not decisive for the outcome of the war. But as the birthplace of the revolution it had a symbolic importance, making it impossible to abandon. Stalin sent his top commander, General Zhukov, to defend it. The evacuation of the city’s population was badly organised. A mere 400,000 left before the Germans closed the exit routes. But many people chose to stay and fight. A million Leningraders – one-third of the city’s population – died from cold, starvation and disease before the siege was lifted in January 1944.

Meanwhile, the Germans moved into Ukraine, whose agriculture, coal and industry were essential for their war machine, while their main force advanced on Moscow. By 10 October, when Zhukov arrived from Leningrad to take control of the capital’s defence, they had reached the outskirts of Moscow. Stalin ordered the evacuation of the government to Kuibyshev. Panic spread as the bombing of the city became more intense. At railway stations there were ugly scenes as crowds struggled to board trains heading east. Stalin made a radio broadcast pledging to defend the city to the end – and its people responded. A quarter of a million Muscovites dug defences on the city’s edge, carted supplies to the front and cared for injured soldiers in their homes. Many fought alongside army units, scratched together from the shattered forces of the Western Front and reinforcements from Siberia.

This new spirit of determination was symbolised by Stalin’s bold decision to go ahead as usual with the military parade for Revolution Day (7 November) on Red Square. He went against the advice of his air force commanders, who feared that the Germans would try to bomb the parade from the air (a few days earlier German planes had scored a direct hit on the Kremlin, killing 41 and injuring 146 people).9 In his speech from the Lenin Mausoleum, Stalin called upon the soldiers to take inspiration from the military heroes of ‘our great ancestors’ – naming Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoi, Minin and Pozharsky, Suvorov and Kutuzov, the generals who had fought against Napoleon – in the defence of ‘our glorious motherland’.10 From Red Square the soldiers marched directly to the front.

The speech had a critical effect. Emboldened by its patriotic spirit, the Russians fought with grim determination for their capital. Gradually they overcame the German troops, who were unprepared for the Russian winter and exhausted after fighting for five months without a break. The defence of Moscow was vitally important. Hitler’s capture of the capital would not have meant the end of the fighting (the Red Army could retreat to the Urals and beyond) but it could have toppled the Soviet regime, and would have led to millions of extra deaths in a more protracted war for the defence of Russia.

No one can deny the extraordinary courage of the Soviet people in the war. But who can explain it? Why did so many Soviet soldiers fight with such determination and self-sacrifice? Foreigners were astounded. ‘The front abounded in examples of the personal heroism and unyielding tenacity and initiative of the common soldiers,’ noted Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslavian Communist, on a visit to the Ukrainian Front in 1943. ‘Russia was all last-ditch resistance and deprivation and will for ultimate victory.’11 Was there something in the Russian character that explains this sacrifice, as some naive commentators have maintained? Or was it the result of a discipline imposed by the totalitarian state?

Terror and coercion provide only part of the answer. At the height of the Soviet collapse, on 28 July 1942, as the Germans threatened Stalingrad, Stalin issued Order 227 (‘Not One Step Backwards!’) calling on the troops to fight to the death without retreat. To enforce the command special units swept behind the front lines and shot any troops who lagged behind. The impact of this terror system was limited, however. Order 227 was used at desperate moments, like the battle for Stalingrad, but otherwise it was ignored by commanders, who learned from experience that military effectiveness was not best served by drastic punishments.

The cult of sacrifice was a more important factor than terror. It was the Soviet system’s main advantage over Western liberal societies where the loss of human life was given greater weight in the reckonings of the command. Since the launching of the FiveYear Plan, the Soviet people had been told that sacrifice today was needed for the building of the Communist utopia. By 1941, they were more prepared than other peoples for the hardships of the war – the sharp decline in living standards, the breaking-up of families, the death and disappearance of their relatives – because they had been through these during the 1930s. The most selfless sacrifice was made by teenagers. Brought up on tales of Soviet heroes (record-breaking pilots and Stakhanovites, courageous soldiers of the Civil War, Communists who went to fight in Spain), they volunteered in huge numbers. Among them was Rita Kogan, one of a million Soviet women who fought in the Red Army and its partisan units. Born into a Jewish family in Belarus, she was in her final year at school when the war broke out:

I was just 18 in 1941 … I saw the world in terms of the ideals of my Soviet heroes, the selfless pioneers who did great things for the motherland … I had no idea what war was really like, but I wanted to take part in it, because that was what a hero did … I did not think of it as ‘patriotism’ – I saw it as my duty … I could have simply worked in the munitions factory and sat out the war there, but I was an activist … I did not think of death and was not afraid of it, because, like my Soviet heroes, I was fighting for my motherland.12

Her generation fought with reckless bravery. Only 3 per cent of the eighteen-year-olds mobilised in 1941 would still be alive in 1945.

The Soviet command economy was made for war. Its ability to organise production for the military campaign – to move and build new factories overnight, to subject workers to martial law and to work to death a million Gulag slaves mining fuel and minerals – gave it an advantage over the Nazis, who were unable to demand so much from the Germans. There was almost no limit to the number of lives that the Stalinist regime was willing to expend to achieve its military goals. It went far beyond the traditional reliance of the Russian army on large quantities of troops to defeat the enemy. Only by considering this ruthless disregard for human life can we explain the shocking losses of the Red Army – around 12 million soldiers killed between 1941 and 1945 – three times the number of German military losses between 1939 and 1945.13

The defeat of Nazism was a victory of the Soviet people, above all. They were fighting not for Communism – ‘for us’, as Stalin put it to the US envoy Averell Harriman – but ‘for their motherland’.14 Stalin and the Party were conspicuously absent from Soviet wartime propaganda. Revolutionary symbols were replaced by older images of Mother Russia (Rodina-Mat, literally ‘Homeland Mother’) that carried greater weight among the troops. The Communist ‘Internationale’ was replaced by a new Soviet national anthem, whose lyrics hailed the union of the peoples bound together by Great Rus. New Soviet medals were embossed with the names of military heroes of the tsarist past: Nevsky, Suvorov, Kutuzov, Nakhimov, the martyr–hero of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Alexander Nevsky, the film by Eisenstein, was brought back to cinemas and shown endlessly throughout the war. Perhaps most importantly, the persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church was brought to a temporary halt and an agreement reached with its new patriarch, elected after eighteen years of prohibition by the Bolsheviks in September 1943. In exchange for the patriarch’s support and loyalty, Stalin ordered the release of thousands of imprisoned priests, allowed churches to reopen and restored church property, including the Trinity Lavra of St Sergius, the centre of the Russian Church, closed by the Bolsheviks in 1920, since when its buildings had been used for a wide variety of purposes, among them the training of radio engineers.

What did the soldiers understand by ‘motherland’? The word rodina, usually translated as the ‘motherland’, can be used in Russian for a family household, kinship group, a village, town or city, or more generally for the nation. The Red Army soldiers were mostly peasant sons. When they wrote home from the front they made no distinction between fighting for Russia, as their rodina, and fighting for their homes and families. Wartime propaganda played to these emotions. The best-known poster of the war – ‘Mother Russia Calls’ – shows a middle-aged woman holding out a draft form, calling on her sons to defend her from the enemy. She symbolised the mother every soldier believed he was fighting for.

Many soldiers found an expression of their patriotic feelings in Vasily Terkin, Alexander Tvardovsky’s narrative poem, printed in the front-line newspapers throughout the war. Terkin is a peasant lad. He never mentions the Party or Stalin. His attachment to the motherland is focused on his village in Smolensk. But he also has a sense of fighting both for Russia and for the liberation of the world:

Today we answer for Russia,

For the people,

For everything in the world.

From Ivan to Foma,

Dead and alive,

We together are we,

The people, Russia.15

Hatred of the enemy was equally a part of these patriotic emotions. The Germans had committed so many atrocities on Soviet soil that it was not difficult to fan the popular desire for revenge. According to a study of the Red Army’s rank and file, it was hatred of the Germans, more than anything, that made the soldiers want to fight. The poem ‘Kill Him!’ by Konstantin Simonov was read to soldiers by their officers before they went into battle:

If you cherish your mother, Who fed you at her breast

From which the milk has long since gone,

And on which your cheek may only rest;

If you cannot bear the thought,

That the Fascist standing near her,

May beat her wrinkled cheeks,

Winding her braids in his hand;

…

Then kill a German – make sure to kill one!

Kill him as soon as you can!

Every time you see him,

Make sure that you kill him every time!16

Stalingrad became the symbol of this patriotic spirit. Even as the city was reduced to ruins under the bombardment of the German tanks, artillery and planes, the Soviet soldiers fought for every street, as if defending their own homes. They went on fighting for three months, from August to November 1942, when the Red Army under Zhukov launched its counter-offensive and forced the Germans to retreat towards the Don. These weeks of fighting were the turning-point of the whole war. From the Don, the Soviet army pushed on towards Kursk, where it concentrated 40 per cent of its infantry and three-quarters of its armoured forces to defeat the bulk of the German army in July 1943. Kursk definitively ended German hopes of a victory on Soviet soil.

As the Red Army drove the Germans back towards the western borderlands, it carried out a second war against Ukrainian nationalists, many of them followers of Stepan Bandera, whose guerrilla bands had been employed by the Nazis to fight behind the Soviet lines. NKVD units rounded up civilians in areas where Bandera’s partisans had been active, and in a policy of ethnic cleansing sent them east to Gulag camps. Similar campaigns were carried out in Poland and the Baltic states. There were also wholesale deportations of Soviet ethnic groups (Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush and Crimean Tatars) deemed collectively responsible for those few among them who had worked for the Germans.

The Red Army moved into the western borderlands as imperial conquerors. It was guided from the top by a strong sense of Russia’s rightful domination of the non-Russian population in these territories. Once it entered German soil, the Soviet troops were driven forward by hatred of the Germans and by their desire for revenge – an impulse culminating in the rapes of German women on their final march towards Berlin. Around 2 million German women are believed to have been raped by Soviet soldiers, whose actions went unpunished by their commanders. When Djilas, at a dinner, expressed his concerns about hundreds of reported rapes by Red Army soldiers in Yugoslavia, Stalin interrupted him:

‘Yes, you have, of course, read Dostoevsky? Do you see what a complicated thing is man’s soul, man’s psyche? Well then, imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade – over thousands of kilometres of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones! How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors?’17

On 24 May 1945, at a reception for the Red Army’s commanders in the Kremlin, Stalin proposed a toast ‘to the health of our Soviet people, and in the first place, the Great Russians. (Loud and prolonged applause and shouts of “Hurrah.”) … I propose a toast to the health of the Russian people because it has won in this war universal recognition as the leading force of the Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country.’18

The victory of 1945 gave rise to a new brand of Russian nationalism – more imperial than before. Russia emerged from the war in Stalin’s view as the undisputed leader of the Soviet peoples. Djilas noticed that he spoke of Russia (Rossiia) instead of the Soviet Union.19 The primacy he gave to the ‘Great Russians’ (a term Stalin favoured) justified his postwar policies of Russification in the non-Russian republics and the newly annexed territories of west Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltic, as it would in the east European Soviet satellites. In all these lands the Russian language became compulsory in schools and universities, fluency in it a requirement for almost any job where higher education was called for. Russian books and films, music, street names, history – they were imposed everywhere.

This triumphalism was expressed in the architectural forms which dominated plans for the reconstruction of Soviet cities after 1945. The ‘Soviet Empire’ style copied the neo-classical and Gothic motifs of its Russian Empire model, which had flourished in the wake of 1812. It can be seen most clearly in the ‘Stalin Cathedrals’, the seven monumental wedding-cake-like structures (such as the Foreign Ministry and the Moscow University ensemble) which shot up around Moscow after 1945. But it was also visible in palaces of culture, cinemas and circuses, even metro stations, such as Komsomolskaya on the circle line. Komsomolskaya’s huge subterranean Hall of Victory, conceived as a monument to Russia’s military heroes of the past, is a curious mixture of the baroque and the Byzantine.

Although the Comintern had been disbanded in the war, a new messianic role for Russia had emerged. As the first and only socialist society, its survival had been seen by Communists around the world as the main objective of the war. With the defeat of Nazi Germany its prestige was at its height, strengthening the case for exporting revolution to those countries occupied by the Red Army, as Stalin had envisaged when he made the pact with Hitler in 1939. No one better understood the dynamic between war and revolution than the Bolsheviks. They had used the revolutionary forces unleashed by the last war to seize power in 1917. Now they saw a chance to do the same in the war-torn territories they had liberated from Hitler.

Stalin saw the victory over Hitler as a prelude to Russian foreign expansion. ‘This war is not as in the past,’ he explained at dinner with Djilas in early 1945. ‘Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.’ Stalin believed that the Soviet Union had proved its invincibility, and that under Russian leadership it was strong enough to liberate the capitalist world. Until his break with Tito and the Yugoslavs in 1948, he embraced a Pan-Slav policy, as Russia’s later nineteenth-century tsars had done, convinced as he was that Slavic unity would keep the Germans down and extend Russian power to the centre of Europe. ‘If the Slavs keep united and maintain solidarity,’ he explained to Djilas, ‘no one in the future will be able to move a finger. Not even a finger!’ He emphasised the last point, recalled Djilas, by ‘cleaving the air with his forefinger’.20

Hubris yielded to a new imperial myth of Russia as the liberator of mankind. Born in the victory of 1945, the myth was linked by its propagandists to earlier historical episodes when Europe had been ‘saved’ by Russia’s selfless sacrifice – at Kulikovo, when the Muscovites had beaten the Mongols, or in the war against Napoleon. The war dead were mobilised for the construction of this messianic myth – their deaths invoked as proof, not of Soviet inefficiency and callous disregard for human life, but of Russia’s sacrifice, the price it paid to save humanity. At first Stalin allowed a published figure of only 7 million dead, around one-quarter of the estimated deaths accepted by historians today.21 It was only in the 1960s, when a fuller picture of the losses could be given, that the endlessly repeated statistic of ‘20 million dead’ entered Soviet propaganda as a symbol of the country’s unique sacrifice for the liberation of the world.22

Indeed, no other country had sacrificed so much for the defeat of Nazism. Apart from the millions of its war dead, Russia’s towns and cities were destroyed. The economy was in a mess. The collective farms had lost almost half their pre-war livestock and 38 per cent of their male workers.23 In the central agricultural zone there was widespread famine in 1946. To get the country on its feet again a new FiveYear Plan was soon imposed.

In February 1946, in a speech that marked this return to the planned economy, Stalin argued that the war had put the Soviet system to the test. Its victory had proved the superiority of the Soviet multinational state, the Red Army and the planned economy, without which the ‘bravery of our troops’ would not have been enough to defeat the enemy.24 The victory was, in other words, the Party’s achievement, and without the Party’s leadership the people would be defenceless. Over the next forty years, this myth would be used to legitimise the Soviet system, justifying everything it had accomplished after 1917.

Stalin still had doubts that the Soviet people would fight for the system if there was a new war with the West. He retained the view that they would first be fighting for the motherland. Russian nationalism, for this reason, was heavily promoted by the postwar Soviet regime. Its main aim was to seal the country off from Western influence during the Cold War. Absurd claims for Russia’s greatness began to appear in the Soviet press. ‘Throughout its history,’ declared Pravda, ‘the Great Russian people have enriched world technology with outstanding discoveries and inventions.’25 The aeroplane, the steam engine, the radio, the incandescent bulb – there was scarcely an invention for which the Russians were not responsible. Timofei Lysenko, the director of the Soviet Institute of Genetics, even claimed to have developed a new strain of wheat that would grow in the Arctic – a bogus claim that was responsible for millions of deaths in Maoist China where the pseudoscience was adopted during the 1950s. Pride in Russian culture knew no bounds. Its literature and music were ‘far superior’ to their Western counterparts, Stalin’s chief of culture Andrei Zhdanov argued, ‘because they reflect a culture many times higher.’26

Stalin used this nationalist programme to tighten the regime’s ideological grip on the intelligentsia, whose reverence for the West he mistrusted. He soon clamped down on the ideas of reform that had surfaced in the war, when the country was exposed to foreign books and films imported by the LendLease agreement with America. Zhdanov oversaw the purge of Western (‘anti-Soviet’) tendencies in all the arts and sciences (hence the clampdown became known as the Zhdanovshchina). It began in August 1946, when the Central Committee published a decree censoring the journals Zvezda and Leningrad for publishing the work of two great Leningrad writers, Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova. Zoshchenko was the last of the Soviet satirists, a literary tradition dictators cannot tolerate. As for Akhmatova, she had acquired an immense moral stature in the war, when her poetry, rarely published in the Soviet Union, was widely circulated in handwritten copies, even by the troops. Stalin envied her authority.

These attacks were followed by a series of repressive measures against ‘anti-Soviet elements’ in all the arts and sciences. The State Museum of Modern Western Art was closed down. A campaign against ‘formalism’ and other ‘decadent Western influences’ in Soviet music led to the blacklisting of Shostakovich, Khachaturian and Prokofiev, among other composers. In July 1947, the Central Committee published an attack on two Soviet scientists, Nina Kliueva and her husband, Grigory Roskin, for sharing information about their cancer research on a US tour. Accused of ‘servility’ towards the West, they were dragged before an ‘honour court’, a new institution to examine ‘anti-patriotic’ acts, where they were made to answer hostile questions before 800 spectators.

There were also attacks on the Soviet Jews, whose fortunes were connected to the Cold War alignment of Israel. Stalin had supported the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. He hoped it might become a Soviet satellite. When Israel sided with America, he grew fearful of pro-Israeli feeling among the 2 million Soviet Jews. In 1948, Solomon Mikhoels, the popular director of the Jewish Theatre in Moscow, was killed by the MVD (as the NKVD had been renamed), his body later dumped on a roadside and run over by truck to disguise the killing as an accident. The next year saw the start of a campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’ (that is, Jews) in the other cultural spheres, with expulsions from the Party, the Writers’ Union, universities and research institutes. The anti-Semitic campaign climaxed with the Doctors’ Plot in 1952.

The idea of a plot had its origins in 1948, when Lidiia Timashuk, a doctor in the Kremlin Hospital, wrote to Stalin two days before Zhdanov’s death, claiming that his medical staff had failed to recognise the gravity of his condition. The letter was ignored and filed away, but four years later it was used by Stalin, by now completely paranoid, to accuse the Kremlin doctors of belonging to a ‘Zionist conspiracy’ to murder Zhdanov and the rest of the leadership. Hundreds of doctors and officials were arrested and tortured into making false confessions of belonging to a huge international conspiracy linking Soviet Jews to Israel and the USA. The country was returning to the atmosphere of 1937 with the Jews in the role of ‘enemies of the people’.

In December 1952, Stalin told a meeting of the Central Committee that ‘every Jew is a potential spy for the United States’. Thousands were arrested, expelled from jobs and homes and deported as ‘rootless parasites’ from the major cities to remote regions of the Soviet Union. Stalin ordered the construction of a vast network of labour camps in the Far East where the Jews would be sent. Had it not been for his death, at the height of this hysteria, there might well have been a holocaust on Soviet soil.

Stalin had suffered a stroke and lay unconscious for five days before he died on 5 March 1953. He might have been saved if medical assistance had been called in time. But in the panic of the Doctors’ Plot none of Stalin’s inner circle dared take the initiative. He became the final victim of his system of terror.

Huge crowds came to the Hall of Columns near Red Square where his body lay in state. Hundreds were killed in the crush. There were scenes of mass grief and hysteria. For thirty years the people had regarded Stalin as their moral reference point, their teacher, national leader, guarantor of justice and order. He had been their tsar, a god on earth, the embodiment of their hopes and ideals, and they had needed to believe in him during the hard times they had lived through. The grief they showed was a natural response to the fear and confusion they were bound to feel on his passing.

A collective leadership assumed control. Beria was the dominant figure. But senior Party and military leaders were opposed to his programme, which involved the dismantling of the Gulag and a relaxation of Soviet policies in western Ukraine, the Baltic region and East Germany. On 26 June, Beria was arrested in a Kremlin coup organised by Khrushchev with senior army personnel. Tried in secret, he was later shot.

Nikita Khrushchev emerged from the coup at the head of the collective leadership. A flamboyant and tempestuous character of humble peasant origins, he had risen through the ranks as a loyal executioner of Stalin’s policies. He was deeply implicated in the repressions of the 1930s, first as the Moscow Party boss and then in Ukraine, where he had been responsible for the arrest of a quarter of a million citizens. Perhaps it was guilt that would lead him to expose the crimes of Stalin’s reign in his ‘Secret Speech’ of 1956.

The Gulag population reached its peak in 1952, when there were around 2 million prisoners in its labour camps and colonies. After Stalin’s death, prisoners began to be released – first those, mainly criminals, on shorter sentences, and then the ‘politicals’, whose cases were reviewed by the Soviet Procuracy, a long and complex process obstructed by authorities reluctant to acknowledge their mistakes. With so many prisoners returning, the regime needed to explain what had gone on. But how much of the truth could be revealed? All the leaders were afraid of what might happen if the full extent of the terror was exposed. Would they be held accountable? Wouldn’t people ask why they had failed to stop the mass arrests?

A commission was appointed to report on the repression of Party members between 1935 and 1940. The Politburo was so shocked by its findings that it decided to report them (though not the full extent of the terror in the country as a whole) to the Twentieth Party Congress, the first since Stalin’s death, in February 1956. The text was prepared collectively and delivered by Khrushchev. The speech gave details of the Party purges and of Stalin’s blunders in the war, attributing them both to the dictator’s deviation from Leninist principles and to the ‘cult of the personality’, which had made resistance to his policies impossible. By emphasising that the current leadership had only just found out these details from the commission, Khrushchev tried to absolve it and shift the guilt on to Stalin. There was no question of blaming the Party leadership. The whole purpose of the speech was to restore belief in the Party by presenting Stalinism as an aberration from the October Revolution’s socialist ideals.

Khrushchev ended with a plea for his revelations not to be communicated outside the Party. But the text of his speech was read to millions of Party members in meetings right across the Soviet Union and was sent to the Communist governments of eastern Europe. Published by the Poles, it was printed in the New York Times. And from the West, it filtered back to the Soviet Union. In the climate of the Khrushchev ‘Thaw’, when censorship was gradually relaxed, it encouraged a more general evaluation of the Party’s record by the Soviet intelligentsia. ‘The congress put an end to our lonely questioning of the Soviet system,’ recalled Liudmilla Alexeeva, later to become a well-known dissident but at that time a Moscow University student. ‘Young men and women began to lose their fear of sharing views, information, beliefs, questions. Every night we gathered in cramped apartments to recite poetry, read “unofficial” prose and swap stories that, taken together, yielded a realistic picture of what was going on in our country.’27 The Party faced a moral crisis of authority. For the first time in its history it was admitting that it had been wrong – not wrong in a minor way but catastrophically wrong – and had lied about it all along. How could it rebuild its credibility?

The Thaw had begun in literature, a surrogate of politics throughout modern Russian history. Once the hand of Stalinist conformity had been removed, writers strived to portray Soviet life with more sincerity. Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw (1954) – which gave its name to this period – tells the story of a woman oppressed by her husband, a despotic factory boss, who at last finds the courage to leave him during the spring thaw. The high point of this literary renaissance came in 1962 with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the first novel on the subject of Stalin’s labour camps, in the journal Novy Mir (New World). It was read by millions. But if condemnation of the Gulag was allowed, the October Revolution remained beyond questioning. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak’s epic novel set against the backdrop of the revolution and the Civil War, was rejected in 1956 by several journals, including the progressive Novy Mir, on the grounds that it was ‘anti-Soviet’. Smuggled to Milan, where it was published in Italian, the novel soon became an international bestseller. Pasternak was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1958. But under pressure from the Soviet government he was forced to turn it down.

The Thaw entailed the partial opening of Soviet society to the West. For the first time, foreign tourist groups arrived. The Khrushchev government saw tourism as a way of earning dollars while demonstrating Soviet achievements to the world (the Sputnik programme of space exploration had just been launched). In 1957, Moscow hosted the World Festival of Youth. The Kremlin’s aim was to win over the young people of the capitalist countries to the Soviet way of life. But the outcome was the opposite. With their jeans and easy-going manner the visitors converted Soviet youth to the Western way of life. Rock and roll and its attendant fashions captured the imagination of a generation of Soviet students too sophisticated for the dull, conformist culture of the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League. On their short-wave radios, they listened to the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, where rock and jazz were the draw for news and information about the freedoms of the West. This generation formed its picture of the West through Hollywood, whose films, shown in Soviet cinemas as part of the thaw, had a massive influence. According to the poet Joseph Brodsky, the Tarzan films ‘did more for de-Stalinization than all of Khrushchev’s speeches at the Twentieth Party Congress and after’.28

By 1960, more than half the population was under thirty years of age. The October Revolution was not something they could relate to – for them it was ancient history – while the Great Patriotic War was something that their parents had lived through. It was a challenge to engage this generation in the system’s values and beliefs.

Khrushchev tried to do so through the Komsomol. He attached importance to mass participation in policy campaigns designed to reawaken the enthusiasm of the Revolution’s early years. In the Virgin Lands campaign of 1954–63, young men and women from the Komsomol volunteered in their tens of thousands to work in new collective farms on the unfarmed steppelands of Kazakhstan. Forty million hectares of arid land were brought into production by 1963. Grain output rose. But harvest yields were variable and steadily declined after 1958, because the soil was too poor to grow wheat.

Khrushchev was removed in 1964. Apart from the failure of his Virgin Lands campaign, he was blamed for the food shortages that had resulted, in 1962, in a workers’ uprising in Novocherkassk in southern Russia, which had been suppressed by the army with dozens of protesters killed. Khrushchev’s political reforms had alienated the regional Party bosses by weakening their economic powers and subjecting them to regular elections to the Central Committee, a body under Stalin they had occupied as a sort of natural right, enabling them to build up their own patron–client networks in the provinces. Khrushchev’s erratic leadership, his tendency to act on intuition and then attack his critics, his meddling in affairs where he lacked expertise, and his dangerous confrontation with the USA in the Cuban Missile Crisis – all this lost him the support of Party colleagues who wanted a more stable and collective style of government.

Leonid Brezhnev emerged as primer inter pares of the colourless regime that replaced him. It gave the appearance of ‘collective leadership’ – a myth used by all the Soviet leaders to symbolise their accountability, to enforce Party discipline and, in Brezhnev’s case, to regain the cadres’ trust by promising stability. The Politburo’s decisions were henceforth reached collectively, and their names listed alphabetically. Slowly Brezhnev became dominant. He was a creature of the system, a grey and mediocre functionary. Even his passions were conventional (fast cars, hunting, women and football). Like so many Party apparatchiks promoted during Stalin’s purges and the war, he had more practical than intellectual capacities (according to his brightest minister, Alexander Yakovlev, his main talent was an uncanny ability to ‘recognise precisely who was his friend and who was his enemy’).29 He was good at building political alliances and networks of support among the regional Party leaders, many of them comrades from the 1930s, when he had risen from the factory floor to become the propaganda chief of the Dnepropetrovsk Party organisation in Ukraine. What united them was the preservation of the status quo. They wanted to prevent the shake-up of the Party that Khrushchev had begun, to restore a stable system that would keep them at the top. As long as Brezhnev was in power, the leaders were allowed to grow old in their posts. The average age of the Politburo rose from sixty in 1964 to over seventy in 1982.

In contrast to the Khrushchev government, which had appealed to Leninist ideas in its efforts to restore authority, the Brezhnev government turned to Russian nationalism to shore up its base of political support. This was the moment when the regime built up the official cult of the Great Patriotic War, whose memory previously had been downplayed. Until 1965, Victory Day had not even been a Soviet holiday. It had been left to veterans’ groups to organise their celebrations and parades. But from the victory’s twentieth anniversary, 9 May was commemorated with a huge display of military might and with all the Party leaders, lined up on the top of the Lenin Mausoleum, saluting as the massed ranks of the Red Army marched past on Red Square. Two years later, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was erected near the Kremlin Wall – a sacred site for foreign dignitaries (and Soviet bridal couples) to pay homage to the ‘20 million dead’. In Volgograd (previously Stalingrad) a monumental complex of mourning was completed the same year. At its centre was a colossal statue, Mother Russia Calls, her sword held aloft summoning the people to action.

The Brezhnev government encouraged two main strands of Russian nationalism, both reflected in the literary sphere. One was represented by a group of ‘village prose writers’, among them Fedor Abramov, Valentin Rasputin and Solzhenitsyn (until his falling out with the regime and exile to the West after the foreign publication of his Gulag Archipelago in 1973). The group had first emerged in the Khrushchev era, mainly at the journal Novy Mir. Their stories served as a condemnation of the legacies of collectivisation – the destruction of the village and its church, the depopulation of the countryside, deforestation, pollution, the decline of rural living standards – and as a lament for the old Russian values and traditions of the peasantry. A second more assertive strand of nationalism was found at the journal Molodaya Gvardiia (Young Guard), the official organ of the Komsomol, which enjoyed the support of the neo-Stalinist wing of the Party leadership, including Mikhail Suslov, Brezhnev’s chief of ideology. The journal shared the same concerns as the village prose writers, but it also used its Politburo protection to push for more aggressive policies. Its writers were united by their nationalist view of history, in which Russia was defined by its strong authoritarian state and anti-Western traditions. Encouraged by Suslov, they argued that the Party should adopt Russian nationalism as its basic ideology alongside Marxism-Leninism. When Alexander Yakovlev, the head of the Party’s Propaganda Department, criticised the journal’s nationalist views as anti-Leninist, he was sacked from his position and sent in punishment to Canada as the Soviet ambassador (he returned ten years later, after Suslov’s death in 1982, and went on to become the main ideologist of Gorbachev’s reforms).

These and other nationalist groups received protection from the Party leadership. Nationalism was regarded as an antidote to the growing influence of Western ideas and culture. It lent support to military spending, which by 1982 accounted for around one-sixth of the country’s GNP, largely due to the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, intended to prop up its unstable Communist regime, and the nuclear arms race with America. Nationalist support was important too for Brezhnev’s policies, which he made his top priority, to reverse the decline of living standards in the countryside. Between 1965 and 1970 there was a four-fold increase in state subsidies to the collective farms.

No amount of investment could turn around the fortunes of collectivised farming, however. Machines were badly made and always breaking down, sometimes going years without repair (concerned to find out what was going on, in 1980 Brezhnev at last ordered an investigation, which found that less than 1 per cent of new agricultural machines had been made according to the technical requirements).30 The kolkhoz workers were given no incentives in those sectors where the state took all the crops (cereals, sugar beet, cotton, flax and cattle production). Despite the rise in state procurement prices, they remained very poorly paid. Many lived in squalid poverty, without running water or electricity, in settlements neglected by the kolkhoz management. They focused all their energies on their tiny garden plots – the last refuge of the peasant economy – where they grew fruits and vegetables, or kept pigs and poultry, which they sold on roadsides or in peasant markets in the towns. The Brezhnev government lifted the restrictions on the size of these private allotments to get more food to consumers. By the end of the 1970s, they took up 4 per cent of the country’s agricultural land, but produced 40 per cent of its pork and poultry, 42 per cent of its fruit and over half its potatoes.31 The prices in the peasant markets were too high for most people to afford, except on special occasions.

There were shortages of everything in the state shops. Long queues formed if some hard-to-come-by product (and it could be anything) by chance appeared. People became disenchanted, cynical about the propaganda claims of the regime. No longer fearful of repression, they let off steam by telling jokes:

A man goes into a shop and asks: ‘You don’t have any meat?’ ‘No,’ replies the sales assistant, ‘we don’t have any fish. It’s the shop across the street that has no meat.’

The one product not in short supply was alcohol. Consumption more than doubled in the Brezhnev years. By the early 1980s, the average kolkhoz family was spending one-third of its household income on vodka. Alcoholism was the national disease. It had a major impact on crime rates (10 million people every year were detained by the police for drunkenness) and male life expectancy, which declined from sixty-six in 1964 to just sixty-two in 1980. Brezhnev’s children were both alcoholics. But his government was unconcerned by the problem. It increased vodka sales to extract money from the population, which had little else to buy. Better to have people drunk than demonstrating against shortages.

Oil revenues rescued the regime from probable food riots and possible collapse in the 1970s. They gave a lease on life to the Soviet economy, which would have been in serious trouble without a five-fold increase in crude oil prices as a result of the crisis caused by the Arab producers’ embargo on oil sales to pro-Israeli states during the Yom Kippur (Arab–Israeli) War of October 1973. The Soviet Union doubled oil production in the 1970s, mainly by developing new fields in Siberia. With its dollar earnings from the sale of oil and gas, the government was able to buy consumer goods and foodstuffs from the West. Before the revolution, Russia had been a major agricultural exporter. But within sixty years of 1917 it had become the biggest food importer in the world. One-third of all baked goods were made from foreign cereals. Cattle farming was entirely dependent on imported grain.

There comes a moment in every old regime when people start to say, ‘We cannot go on living like this any more.’ That feeling started in the 1970s. But there was no social force to bring about a change. The people were too cowed, too passive and too conformist, to do anything about their woes. Very few were involved with the dissidents – human rights campaigners, Jewish refuseniks (denied permission to emigrate abroad), dissenting priests and liberal intellectuals like Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel physicist, who formed an active underground through samizdat (self-publishing) and tamizdat (publishing abroad). Harassment and surveillance by the KGB (as the MVD had been renamed) deterred those who sympathised with them – perhaps a majority of the intelligentsia – from having any contact with the dissidents.

*

The push for change came from the only place where it was possible: the Party leadership. Mikhail Gorbachev was one of many Bolsheviks – all of them the children of the Twentieth Party Congress – who believed in Khrushchev’s vision of a Leninist renewal to revitalise the Soviet project. They had spent the Brezhnev years working in the research institutes connected to the Central Committee, and had been talking about perestroika (structural reform), the catchword of the Gorbachev era, since the Khrushchev period. Glasnost (openness) too was a concept that went back in Party circles to the 1960s, when it had been used to argue that the work of government should be open to the media.

Gorbachev was born in 1931 to a peasant family in Stavropol in south Russia. His paternal grandfather was sent into exile in Siberia for failing to fulfil the sowing plan for 1933 – a year of famine when three of his six sons and half the population of his village died of starvation. His other grandfather, a kolkhoz chairman, was arrested as a ‘Trotskyist’ in 1937. Gorbachev concealed this ‘spoilt biography’ until 1990. But the stigma of repression was no doubt at the root of his commitment to overcome the legacies of Stalinism.

With a good school record and Komsomol report, Gorbachev was awarded a place to study law at Moscow University. He was the first Soviet leader with a university degree. Joining the Party in 1952, he was fairly orthodox in his Stalinist opinions at this time. He did not yet connect his family’s suffering to Stalin’s policies. But his worldview was transformed by Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. One of his closest friends at university, Zdeněk Mlynář, another major influence on Gorbachev, would go on to become a central figure in the socialist reformist government of Alexander Dubček suppressed by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

In 1970, at the age of thirty-nine, Gorbachev became the Party secretary of the Stavropol region, the youngest regional Party leader in the Soviet Union. It was a useful position on the ladder to the top. Known for its spas, Stavropol was a place where Kremlin bosses came for holidays. Gorbachev took full advantage of the opportunity to impress them with his efficiency, intelligence and charm. Yuri Andropov, the chief of the KGB, was a frequent visitor. He brought Gorbachev to the attention of Brezhnev, who called him to Moscow, putting him in charge of coordinating agricultural policies.

On Brezhnev’s death, in 1982, Andropov became the Party’s new leader. He signalled his intention to tighten discipline in the workplace, to fight corruption in the administration and to decentralise the Soviet economy in order to increase productivity. Andropov was a moderniser who believed the system could be made to work if only it was run more rationally, like a police state. He rewarded young reformers, promoting Gorbachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov to counteract the influence of Konstantin Chernenko, leader of the Brezhnevite old guard. After only fifteen months in office, Andropov died from a long illness. He had nominated Gorbachev to succeed him, but Chernenko took his place. Within weeks he too became terminally ill. The Bolsheviks were dying of old age.

The selection of Gorbachev as Chernenko’s successor, in March 1985, did not at first appear so radical. Without a pro-reform majority, Gorbachev was conscious of the need to proceed carefully if he was to avoid Khrushchev’s fate. In his first year in power he talked only of a ‘quickening’ of the economy (uskorenie), an echo of the Andropov approach. It was not until the January 1987 Plenum of the Central Committee that Gorbachev announced the launching of his perestroika programme, describing it as a ‘revolution’ in its radical restructuring of the command economy and political system, but invoking Lenin to legitimise his bold initiative. He was a sincere Leninist. Where other Party leaders paid lip-service to Lenin, Gorbachev believed that his ideas, particularly those he had developed in the NEP, were still helpful for the challenges the country faced.

Economically, perestroika had a lot in common with the NEP. It rested on the assumption that market mechanisms could be added to the structures of the socialist economy to stimulate production and satisfy consumer needs. State controls on wages and prices were loosened in 1987. Cooperatives were legalised the following year, resulting in an NEP-like sprouting up of cafés, restaurants and small shops or kiosks, selling mostly vodka, cigarettes and pornographic videos imported from abroad. But these measures failed to ease the shortages of food and household goods. Only the dismantling of the planned economy could have solved the crisis – a reform too far in 1987 and yet too late in August 1990 when a 500-Day transition to a market-based economy was introduced.

Glasnost was the really revolutionary element of the Gorbachev reforms, the means by which the system unravelled ideologically. The Soviet leader intended it to bring transparency to government and break the power-hold of the Brezhnevite conservatives opposed to his reforms. The need for glasnost had been reinforced by the shameful cover-up of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986. But its consequences quickly spiralled beyond Gorbachev’s control. By relaxing censorship, glasnost meant that the Party lost its grip on the mass media, which exposed social problems previously concealed by the government – poor housing, criminality, ecological catastrophes – undermining public confidence in the system. Revelations about Soviet history had a similar effect. One by one the legitimising myths of the regime – the achievements of Soviet industrialisation, the creation of a socialist society, the Party’s leading role in the defeat of Nazism, even the idea of mass support for the October Revolution – were questioned as the facts emerged from the newly opened archives and books published in translation from abroad.

Glasnost politicised society. Public bodies formed. By March 1989, there were 60,000 ‘informal’ groups and clubs in the Soviet Union. Here were the stirrings of a civil society, something that the country had previously lacked to sustain democracy. Groups held demonstrations in the streets, many of them calling for political reforms, independence for Soviet republics and an end to the Communist monopoly of power (enshrined in Article 6 of the Soviet constitution). The cities were returning to the revolutionary atmosphere of 1917.

The one-party state began to crumble as reformers in the system lost the will to defend it or made their support for the opposition known. Yakovlev, the intellectual architect of Gorbachev’s reforms, began to talk like a European social democrat. Boris Yeltsin, the Moscow Party boss, called on the Party to renounce its Leninist inheritance. Gorbachev was moving in the same direction too. His views developed as he came to understand the unreformability of the system. He was beginning to talk about the need for checks and balances within the state, supporting contested Soviet elections and slowly coming round to the demands of the radicals to abolish Article 6.

Communist hardliners were alarmed by the speed with which the system seemed to be unravelling. Political reform was threatening to become a revolution undermining everything the Party had achieved since 1917. Their opposition to Gorbachev’s reforms was articulated by Nina Andreeva, a chemistry lecturer in Leningrad, in an article entitled ‘I Cannot Give up Principles’. Approved by several Politburo members, the article was published in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiia in March 1988. It attacked the ‘blackening’ of Soviet history, defended Stalin’s achievements ‘in building and defending socialism’ and called on the country’s Communists to defend their Leninist principles, ‘as we have fought for them at crucial turning points in the history of our motherland’.32

Gorbachev decided to fight back, pushing ahead with a series of more radical reforms. At an All-Union Party Conference, in June 1988, he forced the introduction of contested elections for two-thirds of the seats in a new legislative body, the Congress of People’s Deputies, which would meet twice a year and elect a reformed Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the country’s highest parliament. This was not yet a multi-party democracy (87 per cent of the elected deputies were Communists), but voters could remove incumbent leaders if they were united against them (the entire Party leadership of Latvia and Lithuania suffered a humiliating defeat in the Congress elections in early 1989).

The Congress of People’s Deputies became a democratic platform against the one-Party state. The opening sessions at the end of May were watched by 100 million people on TV. An Inter-Regional Group was formed within the Congress by reformists in the Party and non-Party democrats whose main demand was the scrapping of Article 6. Gorbachev agreed with the proposal and steered it through the Politburo in February 1990. He had started his reforms to save the one-party state, but was now dismantling it.

Nationalist movements were unleashed. The Baltic nations were the first to call for independence, followed by the Georgians and Armenians and substantial segments of the population in western Ukraine and Moldova (regions which like the Baltic states had been annexed in the war). Slower to react were the Central Asian republics where the elites depended on the Soviet system and the popular alternative was likely to be Islamic.

Gorbachev’s reforms helped the nationalist leaders in two ways. First his creation of the post of Soviet president, which he occupied from 1990, encouraged them to form a presidential office of their own in the republics. Yeltsin was the major beneficiary. His election as Russia’s president, in June 1991, gave him more authority in Russia than the unelected Soviet president. He became a symbol of Russian independence from the Soviet Union. Secondly, the introduction of contested elections for the Supreme Soviet of each republic allowed nationalists to win control of these new parliaments and use them to declare their independence from Moscow. In the Baltic states nationalists swept to victory in the 1990 Supreme Soviet elections.

Police repressions also fuelled the independence movements in Georgia and the Baltic states. In Tbilisi nineteen demonstrators were killed and hundreds wounded by the Soviet police in April 1989. In Lithuania and Latvia seventeen were killed in the crackdown of January 1991. These last repressions had been instigated by Communist hardliners in the KGB and military. They were trying to provoke a violent response by the nationalists which they could use to impose a state of emergency and prevent the break-up of the Soviet Union. Rather than resist the hardliners and run the risk of splitting the Party, Gorbachev made concessions, promoting two of them, Boris Pugo as minister of the interior and Gennady Yanaev as his Soviet vice-president.

Gorbachev needed the support of the hardliners for his plans to reconstitute the Soviet Union. The Soviet president proposed to negotiate a new union treaty with the republics, whose participation was dependent on a plebiscite. He wanted to agree a federal structure that would keep the Soviet Union together as a voluntary union, as Lenin had originally planned. Six republics were determined to break free and refused to vote on the matter (Georgia, Armenia, Moldavia and the three Baltic states). In the nine other republics, where a plebiscite was held, three-quarters of the people voted for maintaining the federal system of the Soviet Union. A draft treaty was negotiated between the Soviet government and the nine republican leaders (the ‘9+1’ agreement). It was signed on 23 April 1991 at Novo-Ogarevo near Moscow. In these negotiations Yeltsin (in a strong position after his election as the Russian president) and Leonid Kravchuk (angling to become the Ukrainian president by reinventing himself as a nationalist) extracted many powers for the republics from the Soviet president.

By August, eight of the nine republics had approved the draft treaty (the one exception was Ukraine, which had voted for the union but was holding out for guarantees of Ukrainian sovereignty). The draft treaty promised to convert the USSR into a federation of independent states, not unlike the European Union, with a single president, foreign policy and military force. It would be called the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics (with ‘Sovereign’ replacing the original USSR’s ‘Socialist’). On 4 August, Gorbachev left Moscow for a holiday in Foros in the Crimea, intending to return to the capital to sign the new union treaty on the 20th.

Although the treaty was meant to save the union, the hardliners feared it would encourage its break-up. They decided it was time to act. On 18 August, a delegation of conspirators flew to Foros to demand the declaration of a state of emergency, and when Gorbachev refused their ultimatum, placed him under house arrest. In Moscow a self-appointed State Committee of the State of Emergency (including Yanaev and Pugo) declared itself in power. A tired-looking Yanaev, his hands seized by alcoholic tremors, announced uncertainly to the world’s press that he was taking over as the Soviet president.

The putschists were too hesitant to have any real chance of success. Perhaps even they had lost the will to take the necessary measures to defend the system at its very end. They failed to arrest Yeltsin, who made his way to the White House, the seat of the Russian Supreme Soviet, where he organised the parliament’s defence. They failed to give decisive orders to the tank divisions they had brought in to Moscow to put down resistance to the coup. The senior army commanders were in any case divided in their loyalties. The Tamanskaya Division, stationed outside the White House, declared its allegiance to Yeltsin, who climbed on top of one of the tanks to address the crowd. Without a bloody struggle there was no way from this point that the putschists could succeed in an attack on the White House. They did not have the stomach for a fight.

The coup soon collapsed. Its leaders were arrested on 22 August (Pugo shot his wife and then himself just before they came for him). Gorbachev returned to the capital. But his position had been undermined. Many thought he had been on the putschists’ side or had been complicit in some way (he fell victim in this way to the same fate as Kerensky after the Kornilov coup attempt in August 1917). The putsch had discredited the Communist Party and handed the initiative to Yeltsin as the president of Russia and ‘defender of democracy’. On 23 August, he issued a decree suspending the Party in Russia pending an investigation into its role in the putsch (it was banned by him in November). Late that night, crowds in Moscow toppled the statue of Dzerzhinsky outside the KGB headquarters at the Lubianka. The next day, Gorbachev resigned as the Party’s general secretary.

He still wanted to revive the union treaty talks. But Yeltsin turned against them, seeing the disbanding of the Soviet Union as a victory for his Russian government. The other republics, especially Ukraine, were now wary of any sort of union with Moscow, the power-centre of the KGB and the armed forces. When the Novo-Ogarevo talks resumed in mid-November, Yeltsin and Kravchuk demanded more concessions from the Soviet president. It looked as if the USSR would be converted into a Union of Sovereign States. But in a referendum on 1 December the Ukrainians voted by a huge majority for independence. Their departure blew a massive hole in the Soviet ship of state, an act that would not be forgotten by those who saw its sinking as a tragedy. A week later, Yeltsin, Kravchuk and the Belarusian leader Stanislav Shushkevich met in Belarus to announce the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Effectively, it was a coup by the leaders of the three republics.

In a farewell address broadcast from the Kremlin on Christmas Day, Gorbachev declared that he could not support the abolition of the Soviet Union. It had not been ratified by constitutional procedures or even by a democratic vote. Popular opinion had been in favour of a union, but the nationalist leaders had gone against the people’s will.

11

Ends

How does the story of Russia end? How far will the country’s future be shaped by its past? In many ways the country appears to be trapped in a repeating cycle of its history. Twice in the twentieth century, in 1917 and 1991, the autocratic state has broken down, only to be reborn in a different form. The public forces unleashed in the state’s collapse have turned out to be too weak and divided to sustain a democratic government. This has been a recurring pattern throughout Russian history. The autocratic state has been challenged many times by popular revolts but has always re-established its power.

Why did this occur again in 1991? How can we explain the failure of democracy in Russia under Yeltsin, and the re-emergence of dictatorship under Putin’s leadership? Many views have been expressed by pundits of all sorts. The literature is large and grows by many volumes every year. But its perspective is narrow. Most of it reflects the viewpoint of the liberal intelligentsia in Moscow and the other big cities, a small and isolated caste whose influence was never as significant as it and its allies in the West believed. Western analysts have also focused too much on Putin as the embodiment of the ‘kleptocracy’ or ‘mafia state’ – descriptions of a system that is too complex to be explained by the corrupt pursuit of personal wealth or the machinations of one man and his oligarchic entourage. Much of what is called the ‘Putin system’ was already in existence in the Yeltsin years in any case. A deeper problem of this literature is its ahistoricism. Contemporary Russian politics are too often analysed without sufficient knowledge of Russian history. Yet an understanding of the country’s past is essential to make sense of the developments in Russia during the last thirty years. History and myth – and the Putin regime’s use of both – should be reconsidered if we want to understand where Russia’s story is heading.

The events of 1991 were not a revolution but an abdication of power by the Communist Party. There was no mass uprising or opposition movement to bring down the Soviet regime in Russia. There were no parties, no trade unions or civic forum groups ready to take power, as they did in the east European revolutions of 1989. The crowds defending the White House against the putsch were not as large as later claimed, when there were accounts of 40,000 people standing in the rain on the night of 20–21 August to defend the Yeltsin government against the tanks.1 In fact on that night there was just a ‘tiny rag-tag army’ on the barricades and only ‘several thousand’ in the general vicinity of the White House, according to the most reliable accounts by foreign TV journalists. Meanwhile life went on as normal in the rest of the city (one reporter thought there were more people in the queue at Moscow’s new McDonald’s than at the White House).2 Three young men were killed by tanks, which, ironically, were on their way out of the capital, having received orders to withdraw. These needless deaths were enough to break the resolve of the putschists, even in the KGB.3 Larger crowds turned out the next day, 21 August, after all the tanks had been withdrawn; and many tens of thousands appeared at the victory rallies held in Moscow, Leningrad and other cities later on.

If this was a victory for democracy, it was not perceived as such for long. By 1994, only 7 per cent of the Russian people thought that the downfall of the Soviet regime was a democratic victory, according to the trusted polling group of Yuri Levada. The rest saw it as a ‘power struggle’ between leaders, or a ‘tragedy with terrible effects’ for the country.4

Without a democratic revolution, the old elites soon re-emerged at the top of the post-Soviet system. The KGB renamed itself the Federal Counter-Intelligence Service (later changed to the Federal Security Service, or FSB) without changes in its personnel. Yeltsin filled his government with former Communists and set about reclaiming the old Soviet bodies (the army, the state bank, the Soviet seat in the United Nations) for Russia. There were none of the lustration laws like those in eastern Europe and the Baltic states to bar from public office those involved in the old repressive organs of the Soviet regime. Even the leaders of the August putsch were amnestied in February 1994. Some went straight from jail to leading positions in Russia’s largest banks and companies.

In business, too, the Communist elites were quick to take advantage of the legal loopholes created by the Gorbachev reforms to emerge as millionaires from the wreckage of the Soviet economy. The mass privatisation programme was a social disaster. Hurried through in 1992 by Yeltsin’s wide-eyed young free marketeers, Yegor Gaidar, the prime minister, and Anatoly Chubais, his deputy, the programme involved giving vouchers to the population which could be used to buy shares in the privatised state companies. Most people had no clue what they should do with these vouchers. They had never heard of shares before. They were struggling to make ends meet as a result of the government’s decision, in January 1992, to lift price controls on basic goods (‘shock therapy’) which had sent prices rocketing. Many people sold their vouchers straightaway, often for no more than the price of a few tins of food or a bottle of vodka. Because the voucher value was not linked to inflation, enterprises could be picked up for a song by businessmen with access to loans from the state bank, which was happy to lend large sums to its friends in business. Gazprom, Russia’s gas monopoly, had a voucher value of $228 million – just 0.1 per cent of the valuation made by Western banks.5

The worst scandal was the scheme of ‘loans for shares’ introduced in 1995. Yeltsin’s government was strapped for cash to pay its public workers, many of whom had not received their salaries for months. Facing re-election in 1996, it was in danger of losing power to a resurgent Communist Party, which had emerged as the largest party in the Duma elections of December 1995. Yeltsin’s ratings were at an all-time low, a long way behind Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist leader. People were fed up with the collapse of the economy, the loss of basic services, rising criminality and corruption. They called democracy (demokratiia) ‘shitocracy’ (dermokratiia). Chubais brought together the leading oligarchs and offered them a deal allowing them to pay – in the form of ‘loans’ to Yeltsin’s government – for ‘temporary ownership’ of the controlling shares in state oil and mining companies. The shares were sold through rigged auctions to ensure that these national assets ended up in the hands of tycoons – a new boyar class of oligarchs – handpicked by the Yeltsin government. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had made his fortune as a Komsomol official, acquired 45 per cent of the shares in Yukos, one of Russia’s biggest oil giants, at the bargain price of $159 million. Vladimir Potanin, a former Communist official at the Ministry of Foreign Trade, purchased 38 per cent of Norilsk Nickel, the world’s second largest nickel producer, for $100,000 more than the auction’s opening price of $170 million. These acquisitions became permanent when, as everyone had expected, the government defaulted on the loans.6

Through this scheme Yeltsin raised $500 million for his campaign. With the help of US advisers and Yeltsin’s favourite media moguls Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, owners of the country’s two main TV stations, his team overwhelmed the media with scare stories about the Communists. It brought a sweeping victory. But real power now lay with the oligarchs. They started to behave as if they were the government, demanding posts from Yeltsin, who had suffered several heart attacks during the campaign and was barely able to carry out the functions of a president (heavy drinking did not help). The state was in danger of breaking into fiefdoms controlled by the oligarchs.

This was the context in which Putin was manoeuvred into power by the FSB, whose mission, as it saw it, was to ‘save the state’ by replacing Yeltsin with a stronger leader, more in line with its own statist principles. Putin was not its first choice. The FSB had pinned its hopes on the prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, who had been the KGB’s director of foreign intelligence before 1991. But Yeltsin fired Primakov in May 1999, after it had become evident that Primakov would not grant immunity to Yeltsin or his family, should he be elected president in the 2000 elections. There had been mounting allegations of corruption against Yeltsin and his daughter involving money-laundering through a Swiss-based company called Mabetex. Yeltsin wanted a successor who would protect him. His choice fell on Putin, Berezovsky’s favoured candidate, whom he made prime minister in August 1999, announcing at the same time that he wanted Putin to succeed him as the president. One of Putin’s first acts in that office was to grant immunity to Yeltsin and his family.

Putin was born in Leningrad in 1952. His family had suffered, like so many from that city, in the war. His father had been badly wounded at the front, while his elder brother had died in childhood during the siege. Putin joined the KGB at the age of twenty-three and ended up in Dresden as a spy. When the Berlin Wall came down, he was in the basement of the Soviet compound burning secret documents. None of the democratic spirit of these years affected him. He experienced the collapse of the Soviet system as a humiliation for his motherland, and took from it the lesson that uncontrolled democracy could only end in chaos and the weakening of the state. It was a lesson that would guide him as the Russian president.

Putin returned to Leningrad in 1990, and began to work for his former law professor, Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St Petersburg, as the city was renamed in 1991. Putin was in charge of granting licences to businesses and headed up a programme to export Russian goods in exchange for foodstuffs imported from abroad. The food never came, and he was accused of taking bribes worth millions of dollars from the racketeers.7 Thanks to Sobchak’s protection the charges against him were dropped. Many of the people who defended him went on to perform important roles in his regime, including Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister and president, Sergei Stepashin, the justice minister, and Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB during Putin’s first two presidential terms.

It was Putin’s loyalty that recommended him to Yeltsin and his bosses in the FSB. Appointed to his first job in the Kremlin in 1996, within two years he had risen to become director of the FSB. The grey official was unknown by the public that elected him as president. But that was the key to his success. His victory depended, not on an assessment of his policies (no one knew what he stood for) but on how he came across on television screens: sober, clean-cut, competent, someone who would not bring shame to Russia on the international stage – in sum, Yeltsin’s opposite.

People were confused by the loss of Communism as a system of beliefs and practices. They fell into a moral vacuum. For some, religion filled the gap. For others monarchism was a substitute. There was even talk of the Romanovs returning to the throne. Cults of every kind, hypnotists with magic healing powers, found a ready following. The need to believe in something, anything, that offers hope, is a constant thread of Russian social history, as we have seen. The harder life in Russia is, the more its people hold on to beliefs that give them faith in salvation.

The Russians were affected more than other nationalities by the ideological collapse. The Ukrainians, the Baltic nations, Georgia, Armenia and even Kazakhstan were able to rebuild themselves as nation states by imagining the Soviet collapse as a national liberation from foreign (‘Russian’) rule. But the Russians did not have this possibility. They had never been a nation state. Their identity had been subsumed in the Russian Empire, and then in the Soviet Union, where they were regarded as the leading nationality. Russia had existed as an empire for so long that it could not simply reinvent itself as a nation after 1991.

There were no symbols or ideas around which the Russians could unite. They were too divided by their history. The imperial tricolour (white–blue–red) introduced by Peter the Great was readopted as the national flag in 1993, but nationalists preferred the black–yellow–white flag of Alexander II, said to be the colours of Byzantium, while Communists adhered to the Red Flag. The Soviet national anthem was replaced by Glinka’s ‘Patriotic Song’. But it proved unpopular. It failed to inspire Russian athletes or footballers, whose lacklustre performances on the international stage became a source of national shame. So the Soviet anthem was brought back with newly written words (‘Russia – our sacred state’). New national holidays were established. Those of the Russian Church were all restored. But the Soviet holidays were still observed. Ideologically it was a mess. The vacuum created by the Soviet collapse was being filled with debris from every period of Russian history.

A good illustration of this eclectic attitude to Russia’s past was one of Putin’s first political billboards. It was posted throughout Moscow by his United Russia Party in the wake of the December 2003 parliamentary elections. Against the national tricolour and the slogan ‘A Strong Russia Is a United Russia’, it showed the map of Russia filled with portraits of 145 national figures (one for each million of the population) from the country’s history: Alexander Nevsky, Peter the Great, Nicholas II, Stolypin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Lenin, even Stalin, all of them were there. This was more than an all-inclusive mix designed to appeal to everyone.8 It was a statement of Putin’s ideology, based on his reading of Russian history, a subject in which he considers himself to be an authority.

Putin’s view of the country’s history is statist and conservative. His reading of it tells him that Russia has been strong when its people were united behind a strong state; weak when the people were divided and lost sight of the ‘Russian principles’ that united and distinguished them. This was the view he first mapped out in his ‘Millennium manifesto’, published in December 1999. The liberal freedoms the Russians had obtained since 1991 were universal values, he declared, but Russia’s strength lay in its ‘traditional values’ – patriotism, collectivism and submission to the state. ‘For Russians,’ he explained, ‘a strong state is not an anomaly to fight against. On the contrary, it is the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and main driving force of any change.’9 While this concept of the state was obviously nationalist (his stated aim was to restore Russia as a major power in the world), it was not aligned to any ideology or period of Russian history. At times he invoked the evolutionary principles of Stolypin, at other times he borrowed from the tsars, the Slavophiles, White emigré and Eurasianist philosophers, the Russian Church or the KGB handbook.

Putin’s reassertion of the state began by taking back control of the television stations owned by Gusinsky and Berezovsky, who were forced to sell their interests and flee abroad. Both stations had been critical of Putin’s war in Chechnya and his manipulation of the Chechen terror threat to boost his polling for the 2000 presidential election (six months before the election there had been a series of bombings of apartment buildings in Riazan and Moscow, among other cities, which the Kremlin blamed on Chechen terrorists, though many people claimed that the FSB had been responsible for the attacks). Through his domination of the media Putin was now able to portray his critics as the ‘enemies of Russia’ or ‘enemies of the people’ – terrifying phrases from the Stalin era – to justify his strengthening of state power. Outside the main cities, few people had the internet in their homes. Eight out of ten received their news from the TV.

Other oligarchs were divested of their companies. In 2003, Khodorkovsky was arrested, charged with fraud and tax evasion, and later sentenced to nine years in a Siberian labour camp. The Kremlin had been shocked by Khodorkovsky’s plan to sell his shares in Yukos to the US oil giant Exxon. Although the government had been in favour of Russia’s reintegration into the global capitalist system, it would not allow a foreign company to control strategic economic sectors, such as energy, crucial for security and foreign policy. Yukos was taken over by the state. Khodorkovsky’s main crime was his financing of opposition groups, a contravention of the informal pact that Putin had made with the oligarchs on becoming president: summoning the businessmen to Stalin’s house in Kuntsevo, he told them he would let them keep their money if they stayed clear of politics.

This was a revival of the patrimonial principle that had defined the tsar’s relations with his oligarchs since at least the sixteenth century. The boyars were permitted to enrich themselves at the expense of the people only for as long as the tsar allowed them to. Putin’s inner ministerial circle was aware of the tradition. Among themselves they called the companies they were meant to protect their ‘grazing grounds’ (polianie) – a modern version of the ‘feeding’ (kormlenie) system, going back to Kievan Rus, in which officials were allowed to ‘feed themselves’ by extracting money from the regions under their control.

Putin’s next important move was to abolish elections for the regional governors, who would henceforth be appointed by Moscow. Passed in the wake of a terrorist attack on a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, in September 2004, the reform was officially justified by the need to tighten state controls against further terrorist attacks by the Chechens, whose aim, it was claimed, was ‘the break-up of Russia’.10 Meanwhile Putin imposed what he called the ‘power vertical’ – a concept rich with autocratic parallels from Russia’s past – to centralise and strengthen his executive powers. The effect was to undermine the two potential brakes on his authority: the autonomy of the regions and the Duma parliament. Yeltsin had begun this centralising process by sending tanks to shell the Duma in 1993, when it had opposed his constitutional reforms. But Putin completed the Duma’s subjugation to the president. He streamlined the party system so that in addition to his own United Russia, the loyalist parliamentary majority, there were just three other parties to manage: the Communists; the Liberal Democrats (a misnamed ultra-nationalist party); and A Just Russia, a fake party set up by the Kremlin to take votes off the Communists. The Duma had become a rubber stamp for his decrees.

The name given to this authoritarianism was ‘sovereign democracy’ – a term coined in 2006 by Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s deputy chief of staff and principal adviser, whose approach to words was the same as Humpty Dumpty’s in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (‘When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean’). The meaning of ‘sovereign democracy’, as Surkov defined it, was that Russia should be free to choose its own political system and call it a ‘democracy’ (Putin, after all, had been elected). Any attempt by the West to verify that claim or dictate the meaning of democracy (in terms of liberal freedoms, human rights, rule of law, respect for the sovereignty of neighbouring states, and so on) was now dismissed as meddling in Russia’s internal affairs. Russia was to have a form of ‘managed’ or ‘staged’ democracy in which elections would be held but their result would be decided beforehand. The Kremlin’s control of the media, the legal banning or intimidation of the opposition and systematic ballot-rigging would make sure of that.

To underpin this ‘Russian’ version of ‘democracy’ Surkov argued that it was important for the Russians to reclaim the Soviet past as a positive experience. Their sovereignty depended on their own belief that the system they now had was the outcome of their history, of every stage of it, and that it was of their own making. They could not be truly sovereign if they thought they had been conquered or defeated in 1991, if they were made to feel that everything they had achieved as Soviet citizens had been for naught.

The Kremlin’s campaign to restore pride in Soviet history began in schools. At a national conference of high-school teachers in 2007, Putin complained about the ‘mess and confusion’ that he perceived in the teaching of Soviet history and called for ‘common standards’ to be introduced in Russian schools. The following discussion then took place:

A conference participant: In 1990–1991 we disarmed ideologically. [We adopted] a very uncertain, abstract ideology of human values … It is as if we were back in school, or even kindergarten. We were told [by the West]: you have rejected communism and are building democracy, and we will judge when and how you have done …

Putin: Your remark about someone who assumes the posture of teacher and begins to lecture us is of course absolutely correct. But I would like to add that this, undoubtedly, is also an instrument of influencing our country. This is a tried and true trick. If someone from the outside is getting ready to grade us, this means that he arrogates the right to manage [us] and is keen to continue to do so.

In his concluding speech to the history teachers, Putin said

As to some problematic pages in our history – yes, we’ve had them. But what state hasn’t? And we’ve had fewer of such pages than some other [states]. And ours were not as horrible as those of some others. Yes, we have had some terrible pages: let us remember the events beginning in 1937, let us not forget about them. But other countries have had no less, and even more. In any case, we did not pour chemicals over thousands of kilometers or drop on a small country seven times more bombs than during the entire World War II, as the U.S. did in Vietnam, for instance. Nor did we have other black pages, such as Nazism. All sorts of things happen in the history of every state. And we cannot allow ourselves to be saddled with guilt.11

Four days after the conference, the Duma passed a law empowering the Ministry of Education to decide which history textbooks should be used in schools. The textbook favoured by the Ministry (The Modern History of Russia, 1945–2006) had been commissioned by the presidential administration, which had issued the following guidelines to the textbook’s authors about how they should evaluate the leaders of the period:

Stalin – good (strengthened vertical power but no private property); Khrushchev – bad (weakened vertical power); Brezhnev – good (for the same reasons as Stalin); Gorbachev and Yeltsin – bad (destroyed the country but under Yeltsin there was private property); Putin – the best ruler (strengthened vertical power and private property).12

Meanwhile the Kremlin’s ideologists launched a series of attacks on what they called the ‘anti-patriotic elements’ (a term coined by Stalin) that had tried to ‘weaken Russia’ by burdening the country with a sense of guilt over its own history. The implication was that anyone who dared to highlight Stalin’s crimes, or other ‘black spots’ in the country’s history, was an agent of the West. ‘Russia has ceased to be the sovereign of its own historical memory, which is now in danger of being taken over by foreign inventions,’ wrote Gleb Pavlovsky, an adviser to Putin, in December 2008.13 That same month there was a raid on the St Petersburg archive of the Memorial Society, which for twenty years had pioneered research on the Stalinist repressions, collecting information on the perpetrators and victims.14 The archive was returned by a court order, but a warning had been served.

Four years later, a law was passed requiring NGOs that received funding from abroad to register themselves as a ‘Foreign Agent’ – a term fraught with meanings from the Stalin era when it was used to uncover foreign spies. The Foreign Agents Law has been enforced against bodies like Memorial, whose Moscow branch was closed in 2021 on the pretext that it failed to signal its status as a ‘foreign agent’ on some social media sites. Other laws have been applied to silence and discredit individual historians – in one case using trumped-up charges of paedophilia to imprison a Memorial researcher in Karelia, Yuri Dmitriev, who had uncovered a mass grave at an execution site from 1937 and was working to identify the 9,000 victims, along with their executioners. Arrested in 2016, four years later, at the age of sixty-five, Dmitriev was sentenced to thirteen years in jail (later extended to fifteen years). His persecution had been instigated by a former chief of the Karelian FSB, whose relatives had worked in the KGB and MVD going back to Stalin’s time.15

There is no law against the publication of historical research relating to the Stalinist repressions. Putin has never denied these. But he has argued for the need to balance them against the Soviet Union’s achievements under Stalin’s leadership – above all the victory of 1945 which assumed a sacred status in his version of Russian history.

In 2009, the United Russia Party proposed a Duma law to protect the official history of the Great Patriotic War. Passed five years later, the law introduced a new Article 354.1 (Rehabilitation of Nazism) to Russia’s Criminal Code, making it a crime, with a penalty of up to five years in prison, to ‘spread intentionally false information about the Soviet Union’s contribution to the victory of the Second World War’, including any information that was ‘disrespectful of society’. The ‘memory law’, as it is known, was subsequently used against a number of historians, journalists and bloggers whose only crime was to draw attention to the Soviet Union’s collaboration with Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1941, or to challenge the official view of the country’s glorious and heroic role in the Second World War. Of the twenty-six criminal prosecutions brought to trial between 2015 and 2019, all but one resulted in convictions – the one acquittal being of a nationalist activist and writer who denied the ‘so-called Holocaust’ as a ‘shameless swindle’ perpetrated by the Jews.16