Utopia in Power

In the fall of 1921 the Soviet authorities sent Enver to Central Asia. Their aim was to exploit his popularity among the Muslims to help suppress the Basmachi movement. After arriving in Bukhara, Enver decided to turn against the Communists, join the native rebels, and attempt to unite them under his leadership. After some initial successes in combat against Red Army units he sent an ultimatum to Moscow in May 1922 demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops from Turkestan and promising in return to support Communist activities in the Middle East. Enver's death in battle in August 1922, the rivalries among the various Basmachi groups, and the reforms carried out in 1922 by the Turkestan Bureau of the Central Com­mittee (the return of waqf lands, lands held in usufruct, to the Muslim clergy, permission to reopen Muslim religious schools, and recognition of Islamic religious law, the sharia) were all instrumental in suppressing the Basmachi movement.

Once the civil war was over, nationalist movements in the Soviet republics took on the new form of Communist nationalism.

The organizational structure and centralist principles of the Communist party required a centralized state. When Skrypnik complained at the Elev­enth Party Congress about the changing landmarks elements in the party who dreamed of restoring "Russia one and indivisible," one of the delegates shouted from the floor: 'The party, one and indivisible." Indeed, it could be said that the primary goal of the party's founder was exactly that: a party, one and indivisible. The party mission was, in Lenin's view, to express class interests, not national interests. But after the party came to power it unavoidably began to express the interests of the Russian state above all. Lenin assumed that Russia would be a torch to light the fire of world revolution. The larger and more powerful the torch, the hotter it would burn and the quicker the flames would spread.

The Russian Communist party was itself multinational, but its compo­sition did not reflect exactly the country's ethnic diversity. In 1922 it had 375,901 members, of which 270,409 were Russian, that is, 72 percent. In addition there were 22,078 Ukrainians, 19,564 Jews, 9,512 Latvians, 7,378 Georgians, 6,534 Tatars, 5,649 Poles, 5,534 Byelorussians, 4,964 Kirghiz, 3,828 Armenians, 2,217 Germans, 2,043 Uzbeks, 1,964 Eston­ians, 1,699 Ossetians, and 12,528 of other nationalities.¹³⁰ What is most striking about these figures is the overwhelming predominance of Russians in the party. Besides that, the substantial number of Jews is noteworthy. In February 1917 Jews were granted equal rights, and during the revolution and civil war they were active in large numbers on both the Red side and the White. All this resulted in a new explosion of anti-Semitism. Pogroms against Jews were a common feature of the civil war. No less than 100,000 Jews were killed in these pogroms.

On the nationality question the Jewish, Latvian, Polish, and Estonian Communists were usually the most extreme advocates of centralism and the most ardent defenders of a "Russia one and indivisible." Lenin re­marked that "people of other nationalities who have become Russified" (a reference to the Georgians Stalin and Ordzhonikidze and the Pole Dzer- zhinsky) always "overdo it with respect to the 'truly Russian' frame of mind."¹³¹ The Communists of the smaller republics became the chief op­ponents of renascent "Great Russian chauvinism." The stronger the national Communist party, the greater its resistance to this reviving trend. Moreover, the Ukrainian and Georgian Communist parties were acting as Communist parties normally do, that is, demanding total power for themselves.

National Communist views were expressed most strongly by Nikolai Skrypnik. A Ukrainian, he had joined the Marxist movement in 1897 and after 1903 sided with Lenin. From 1900 on he had lived in St. Petersburg and Siberia. It was not until 1918 that he returned to the Ukraine, on Lenin's insistence: "We don't need just any Ukrainian; what we need is Skrypnik."¹³² Lenin was convinced that this veteran Bolshevik would defend Moscow's views against both the local nationalists and the "nihilists" who denied the importance of nationality. Skrypnik justified Lenin's confidence, working first with the Cheka and then, in 1920, assuming the post of Ukrainian commissar of internal affairs.

During 1922 and 1923 Skrypnik became one of the sharpest critics of the Russian party's nationalities policy. Particularly noteworthy was his criticism of Stalin's views on the national question in June 1923 at the Fourth Conference of the Central Committee with Responsible Officials of the National Republics and Regions. He spoke of the party's failure to carry out its nationalities program, citing in particular its inability or re­luctance to combat the rise of Great Russian chauvinism within its own party apparatus as well as among government officials.

The June 1923 conference on nationality issues was held specifically to deal with the question of "Sultan-Galievism," the first "national deviation" to be suppressed by the party. A Tatar from the Volga region, Sultan-Galiev had joined the Bolsheviks before the revolution. In 1918 he became a member of the leading body (collegium) of the People's Commissariat of Nationalities, headed by Stalin. Sultan-Galiev dealt with matters concerning the Muslim peoples and was in charge of the Central Muslim Military Collegium. He played a major role in Bolshevik efforts to win over the Muslims of the former Russian empire, in particular helping to organize a "Muslim Socialist Army," to whose Red banners Lenin and Trotsky urged all Muslims rally.

Sultan-Galiev viewed the October revolution as an opportunity for the Tatars to realize their national aspirations. He dreamed of a Tatar-Bashkir Republic and the unification of all the Muslim peoples of the former tsarist empire into a new, powerful state of their own. In the fall of 1919 he published a series of articles in the magazine Zhizn natsionalnostei (The life of the nationalities), organ of the Commissariat of Nationalities, pre­senting his concept of world revolution. The weak link in the capitalist chain was not the West but the East, and the Communists should direct their efforts accordingly. But the Eastern peoples did not have an industrial proletariat; therefore different methods would have to be employed to arouse their revolutionary enthusiasm. Above all, Muslim activists should be uti­lized to spread communism in the East.

For Sultan-Galiev the transition to the NEP and the rise of the changing landmarks ideology were signs that his hopes had been misplaced. He came to the conclusion that the "German model" of Marxism could not meet the needs of the colonial peoples. He wrote a series of articles prefiguring the ideology of Islamic socialism. He advocated the formation of a "Colonial International" independent of the Comintern and based on an alliance of the workers and peasants in each colonial country with the native petit bourgeoisie and even progressive elements of the grand bourgeoisie.

Sultan-Galiev foresaw five stages in the realization of his ideas: (1) the formation of a Muslim Communist state in the central Volga region; (2) the incorporation into this state of all the Turkish peoples, followed by (3) all the other Muslim peoples of the former Russian empire; (4) the creation at first of an Asian International and then of an international embracing all the colonial peoples; and finally (5) the establishment of the political hegemony of the colonial and semicolonial countries over the industrialized metropolitan centers.

Sultan-Galiev was arrested in the spring of 1923. For the first time the political police were brought into a dispute among Communists, and for the first time a prominent party figure was arrested for his views. At the June 1923 conference on nationality questions Stalin explained the reasons for the arrest of his former associate in the Commissariat of Nationalities. The GPU had allegedly intercepted secret, seditious correspondence by Sultan-Galiev.¹³³ The Tatar dissident was freed not long after his first arrest but was rearrested in 1929. He died in the 1930s at a time and place unknown. The term Sultan-Galievism continued to be used as a weapon against all nationalist deviations and was among the charges brought against the defendants in the Moscow trials of 1936—1938. The arrest of Sultan- Galiev and the condemnation of Sultan-Galievism in the summer of 1923 was for Stalin a way of avenging a defeat he had suffered earlier on the question of the draft constitution for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

In August 1922 the commission assigned by the Central Committee to draft a constitution for a union of the Soviet republics and headed by Stalin came up with a draft proposing the "autonomization" of the other Soviet republics; that is, they should all become part of the RSFSR but retain their "autonomy" within it. The first clause in this "Draft Resolution on Relations Between the RSFSR and the Independent Republics" proposed: 'That a treaty be concluded between the Soviet republics of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, and the RSFSR concerning the formal incorporation of the former into the RSFSR, leaving open the question of Bukhara, Khorezm, and the Far Eastern Republic."¹³⁴

Lenin categorically opposed Stalin's "autonomization" plan. He regarded it as a crude and undisguised violation of the party's nationalities policy and of its central principle, the right of nationals to self-determination. In his view it would provoke major conflicts that could only weaken the Soviet cause. On October 6, 1922, the Central Committee approved a new draft rewritten along lines favored by Lenin, entitled, "On the Relations Between the Sovereign United Republics." Its first clause stated: "It is deemed necessary that a treaty be concluded between the Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Federation of Transcaucasian Republics, and the RSFSR unifying them into a single Union of Socialist Soviet Republics while reserving to each the right to secede freely from this Union."¹³⁵

Lenin's "federalization" plan won out over Stalin's "autonomization." But in the meantime Stalin had succeeded in partially neutralizing the Cau­casian republics, especially Georgia, by pushing through the formation of the Transcaucasian Federation, which was placed under the authority of the Transcaucasian Bureau (Zakburo) of the party, headed by Ordzhoni­kidze, the conqueror of Georgia and one of Stalin's cronies. The discussion that followed the Central Committee's approval of Lenin's plan showed that even "federalization" did not receive support everywhere, because it did not guarantee genuine sovereignty. While the constitution of the USSR was being worked out, the Central Committee's position was frequently criti­cized.¹³⁶

The nationality question was discussed freely for the last time at the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923. Lenin had been impaired by illness through much of 1922. Nevertheless, at the end of 1922 and the beginning of 1923 he made preparations for an open attack on Stalin and his henchmen at the upcoming party congress, intending to call for a sharp condemnation of their actions. To Lenin, Ordzhonikidze's behavior in Georgia was evi­dence of a severe crisis in the party over the nationality question. In the heat of an argument Ordzhonikidze, the representative of the Russian party's Central Committee, had slapped a member of the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist party. Lenin did not wish to look at the real reason for the failure of the party's nationalities policy, it being the inevitable result of a state where autocratic power was in the hands of a dictatorially centralized party.

For Lenin the "intrigues of the class enemy" were behind the conflict, the "bourgeois elements" that were filling up and defiling the state appa­ratus. The countermeasures that Lenin wished to present to the Twelfth Party Congress amounted to nothing more than the strengthening of the party's control over the machinery of state and government officialdom. However, Ordzhonikidze himself was a leading member of the party's in­stitutions of control. Lenin intended to propose other measures as well, including a "code of conduct" for Communists assigned to work in areas populated by minority nationalities. All of these measures were aimed directly against Stalin, but Lenin's illness prevented him from speaking at the congress. He entrusted all his materials on the nationality question to

Trotsky, asking him to speak against Stalin in defense of the Georgian Communists and to present Lenin's view.

Trotsky could not make up his mind to speak at the congress. It was Rakovsky, one of Trotsky's closest collaborators, who spoke against Stalin's policy. He warned that unless the necessary corrections were made, the mishandling of the nationality question could lead to a civil war. Stalin refuted the arguments of all his critics with little effort. As ever, he stood firmly on Marxist principles. He defended a strong, centralized state and the leading role of the party in all spheres of life. He pointed out that the political base of the proletarian dictatorship was necessarily located in the central industrial regions, not in the outlying areas, with their predomi­nantly peasant population. In other words, the Russian Republic had to have primacy over the national republics. Stalin supported his arguments with numerous quotations from Lenin. He questioned Lenin's argument that it was better to be overly indulgent toward the national minorities than to overdo things in the opposite direction. Stalin argued that it was never good to overdo.

On July 6, 1923, the Central Executive Committee formally approved the Constitution of the USSR. On January 31, 1924, ten days after Lenin's death, the constitution was ratified by the Eleventh Congress of Soviets.

In September 1924 the people's republics of Khorezm and Bukhara "dissolved themselves" and were absorbed by the Uzbek, Turkmen, and Tadzhik republics. Earlier, in November 1922, the Far Eastern Republic had "dissolved itself" to join the RSFSR.

The Constitution of the USSR did not go into effect until 1924, but the fundamental principles of Soviet nationalities policy, the principles of the centralized Soviet state, had been laid down long before. Zinoviev expressed them clearly and concisely as early as 1919, when he proclaimed the natural resources of the non-Russian republics—Azerbaijani cotton and Turkestani cotton, for example—indispensable to the new state. Unlike their prede­cessors, however, the Soviets would be imparting civilization when they came.

LENIN'S MANTLE

On May 25—26, 1922, Lenin suffered a stroke. His right side was paralyzed and he lost the power of speech. Not until October 2 did he gradually begin to resume work. On December 13 a second stroke put him almost entirely out of commission. From then until March 9, 1923, when a third stroke turned him into a living corpse (that survived for another eleven months), Lenin could do nothing more than think, dictate his thoughts for a few minutes each day, and hope that his advice would be taken by his cohorts and disciples.

Lenin used those last weeks of conscious life for a desperate effort to work out some formulas that he hoped would cure the serious disorders he had discovered in the party and the state after he had fallen ill. When he saw that his own death was imminent and inevitable, he offered his last advice on how he should be replaced as head of the party and the state. The struggle for Lenin's mantle, to use the expression common at the time, began with the first signs of his illness. The structure of the party's governing bodies limited the number of candidates. Formally speaking, the highest body of the party was its congress, which was held once a year every year from 1917 through 1925. Between congresses the party was led by the Central Committee. In 1919 a Political Bureau (better known by its short form, Politburo) was elected for the first time. Power within the party was concentrated in the Politburo. At the same time there existed a Secretariat, in charge of day-to-day affairs, and an Organization Bureau, the Orgburo, which handled organizational matters.

On April 3, 1922, in the aftermath of the Eleventh Party Congress, a new Politburo was elected, consisting of Lenin, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Rykov, and Tomsky. Bukharin, Molotov, and Kalinin were elected as alternate members of this top leadership body. The youngest of them all, Bukharin, was thirty-four. Stalin was forty-three and Trotsky forty-two. The dying Lenin had just turned fifty-two.

A Soviet poet, Nikolai Aseev celebrated October with the words: "Long live the revolution that has thrown down the power of the old." The old rulers who had been "thrown down" were really not that old; the century was still young. The leaders of the Bolshevik party, on the other hand, were middle-aged men who expected to live for a long time.

Lenin himself limited the number of those who aspired to his mantle or to a share of it. In his "Letter to the Congress," which he dictated from December 23 to December 25, 1922, and which is commonly called Lenin's Testament, he wrote: "I would strongly urge that at this congress [the Twelfth Congress—M. H.] a number of changes be made in our political struc­ture."¹³⁷ For Lenin "an increase in the number of Central Committee mem­bers to a few dozen or even a hundred represented a significant change in the political structure. He placed such an increase "at the head of the list." The Central Committee elected at the Eleventh Congress had twenty- seven full members and nineteen alternates. If we add to that the Control

Commission, with five full members and two alternates, we get a total of fifty-three. That is, the central leadership already consisted of "several dozen." To increase it to a hundred would have meant doubling its size. The new members were to come, as Lenin advised, from among the rank- and-file workers in the party. However, he himself had written a little earlier, "Is it really true that every worker knows how to run the state? People working in the practical sphere know that this is a fairy tale."¹³⁸

Enlarging the Central Committee was intended to heighten its authority and improve the machinery of party and state in general. If we keep in mind the fact that Lenin was recommending the election of workers from the factory floor to the Central Committee, that is, people completely un­familiar with the administrative work of the party, the absurdity of the advice becomes clear, despite its author's conviction that this measure could work a miraculous cure.

The miracle cure was supposed to transform the "political structure" of the party. Lenin knew perfectly well that he was the real leader of the party. He tried to lead like the conductor of an orchestra and avoid brutal re­pressive measures against his comrades. If necessary, when controversies became too sharp, he used the weapon of his personal authority as the party's founder and leader, the man who had made the revolution against the advice of many of his lieutenants and whose far-sightedness had been confirmed by the Brest-Litovsk treaty. At the Ninth Party Congress in March—April 1920 a group of Old Bolsheviks called for a broadening of party democracy. These democratic centralists reproached Lenin for the fact that "a tiny handful of party oligarchs decide everything" and that the Central Committee had imposed a system of "bureaucratic centralism." Lenin replied with a theoretical explanation of the necessity for one-man dictatorship: "Soviet socialist democracy and individual management and dictatorship are in no way contradictory. ... The will of a class may some­times be carried out by a dictator, who sometimes does more alone and is frequently more necessary."¹³⁹

In 1920 Lenin had spoken in favor of a dictator, but in the last weeks of his conscious life in 1922—23 he was in despair because he saw several candidates for dictator. A conflict among them meant the danger of a split in the party. This was something Lenin feared greatly. He who had never hesitated to split if he was not obeyed unquestioningly now feared the deadly consequences of a split after his death.

In his Testament, Lenin gave his assessment of the six leading figures in the Central Committee. In Gogol's Dead Souls Sobakevich gave Chichikov the following brief description of the inhabitants of their provincial capital: "The only decent man in town is the prosecutor, and he too is a swine." This was the immortal model Lenin followed in characterizing his associates on the Central Committee.

First Lenin took up the "two outstanding leaders of the present Central Committee," Stalin and Trotsky. He regarded the possibility of a clash between these two potential dictators as "the greater part of the danger of a split." Lenin continued: "Comrade Stalin, having become general sec­retary, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution." On the other hand, Trotsky "is distinguished not only by out­standing ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present Central Committee. But he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work." Then came Zinoviev and Kamenev, Lenin's closest comrades in the prerevolutionary days of exile. He commented meaningfully that "the October episode with Zinoviev and Kamenev [that is, their opposition to the October revolution] was, of course, no accident, but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them personally, any more than nonbolshevism can upon Trotsky." The Testament then devoted a "few words" to Bukharin and Pyatakov, "the most outstanding figures among the younger party mem­bers." Of Bukharin, Lenin said, "[He] is not only a major and most valuable party theorist; he is also rightly considered the favorite of the whole party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve." As for Pyatakov, "he is unquestionably a man of outstanding will and outstanding ability, but he shows too much zeal for administration and the administrative side of the work to be relied upon in a serious political matter."

Ten days later Lenin dictated an "Addition to the Letter," stating in part:

Stalin is too rude, and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a general sec­retary. That is why I suggest the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.

The direction of Lenin's thinking is obvious. Not one of the "outstanding members of the Central Committee" was worthy of succeeding him; none of them had the necessary abilities to act as dictator, to exercise one-man rule over the party. Lenin disqualified the two most outstanding leaders,

Stalin and Trotsky, because one had concentrated unlimited authority in his hands and might not always be capable of using it with sufficient caution while the other displayed excessive self-assurance and was excessively preoccupied with the purely administrative side of things. (The recollection that Trotsky had had a Communist commissar, Panteleev, shot was also very much alive among the Old Bolsheviks.) Besides, the author of the Testament did not fail to mention Trotsky's non-Bolshevik past. To be sure, he urged that Trotsky not be blamed for that any more than Zinoviev and Kamenev for their opposition to the October revolution, but it is unclear what Lenin meant when he suggested they should not be blamed personally for those errors. What is clear is that Lenin never forgot anything about anyone. In regard to Bukharin, although Lenin called him a major theo­retician of the party, he also reproached him for theoretical views that were not fully Marxist, rather a serious defect for a major theoretician of a Marxist party. Pyatakov, too, had outstanding abilities but could not be relied on in serious political questions, another contradiction that Lenin did not explain.

Lenin's Testament was not read at the Twelfth Congress, although heads of delegations were allowed to see it. Later there arose a legend that Stalin had concealed the letter from the party by not allowing it to be read to the Congress. It is true that within a few years the Testament became an illegal document, possession of which was punished by prison or a labor camp. But there is no question that in 1923 the "outstanding members of the Central Committee" had no desire to see it published. For several years even Trotsky denied the existence of Lenin's Testament—until Max Eastman published it in the United States in October 1926. Boris Souvarine likewise published it in France.

The message of the Testament leaves no room for doubt. Lenin was urging insistently that he be replaced by a collective leadership. Only then would the deficiencies of each member of the leadership be compensated for by the merits of the others. It is true that none of them had very great merits, but the leader of the party had no one but himself to blame for that. He had raised and trained those who were to replace him and in the process had gotten rid of any who showed the least bit of independence.

In 1920 at the Ninth Congress one of the democratic centralists, Valerian Osinsky, spoke of the dictatorship that was threatening the party and named three potential candidates for supreme dictator: Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. During the revolution and civil war the Soviet government was identified with two names by its supporters and enemies alike, Lenin and Trotsky.

Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, leader of the October insurrection, first people's commissar of foreign affairs, who issued inflammatory man­ifestos ('To All, to All, to All") calling for world revolution, the first representative of the "new world" to engage in talks with the imperialists (at Brest-Litovsk), organizer of the Red Army, and brilliant orator, Leon Trotsky was considered by many the natural successor to Lenin. He too considered himself such. This conviction was one of the main reasons for his defeat as the battle for Lenin's mantle began.

General secretary of the Central Committee, member of the Politburo and the Orgburo, people's commissar of nationalities, and people's com­missar of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, Joseph Stalin was known only to the narrow circles of the party and military leadership. He rarely spoke at meetings. His articles did not sparkle with professional crafts­manship. John Reed did not even mention him in Ten Days That Shook the World, Reed's chronicle of the October revolution. But at the beginning of 1918, when Lenin became fed up with the endless discussions in the Central Committee and sought to have a special bureau created "for solving urgent questions," it consisted of four men: Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin. Stalin was also a member of the editorial board of Pravda, along with Trotsky, Bukharin, and Sokolnikov.

Lenin had complete confidence in Stalin and indulged all his caprices, while Stalin, aware of his importance, behaved like a prima donna. When at the Eleventh Party Congress Preobrazhensky listed all of Stalin's duties and questioned whether it was possible for one man to handle this vast amount of work on the Politburo, the Orgburo, two commissariats, and a dozen subcommittees of the Central Committee, Lenin immediately spoke up in Stalin's defense, calling him irreplaceable as commissar of nation­alities and adding: 'The same thing applies to the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate. This is a vast business; but to be able to handle investigations we must have at the head of it a man who enjoys high prestige."¹⁴⁰ After the Eleventh Congress (March—April 1922), Lenin proposed Stalin for the post of general secretary, only to complain eight months later, as though he had forgotten what he had done, that Stalin had concentrated too much authority in his hands. Lenin also made the sudden discovery that there were major defects in the functioning of the Workers' and Peasants' In­spectorate and that Stalin was the main source of the monstrous growth of bureaucracy.

Stalin did not make himself general secretary. Lenin did. Lenin had been his mentor, protector, and constant model. According to Boris Sou- varine, Victor Adler once chided Plekhanov jokingly, "Lenin's your son." Plekhanov retorted, "If he's my son, he's an illegitimate one." Souvarine adds: "Lenin might have said the same about Stalin."¹⁴¹ The question of whether Lenin was the legitimate or illegitimate son of Plekhanov and Marx continues to stir debate among philosophers, historians, and specialists in family law, but the question of whether Stalin was Lenin's son is disputed less and less. Stalin was not only his legitimate heir but his only one. The fact that the father, at the end of his life, got angry at his son and tried to disinherit him is nothing unusual.

Many reasons are given to explain Stalin's rise to power. The main reason was that he was Lenin's legitimate heir. The majority of the party perceived the situation that way. This was a necessary condition for his success, but as the logicians say, it was not by itself sufficient reason.

Stalin displayed brilliant strategy in the struggle for power. First of all, he pretended not to want the power and formed an alliance with two other hopefuls, Zinoviev and Kamenev, letting them act as senior partners in a triumvirate. Trotsky, on the other hand, tended to alienate all who were not his loyal allies.

The Bolsheviks, who looked at themselves in the mirror of the French revolution, saw in Trotsky, the commissar of war and chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, a potential Bonaparte. Trotsky knew this and yet in a pamphlet entitled Lessons of October, which he published after Lenin's death, he wrote: "Robespierre never had the chance to acquaint himself with the Plekhanovian philosophical idea. He violated all the laws of sociology and instead of exchanging handshakes with the Girondists he cut off their heads."¹⁴² Trotsky committed an irreparable error in threatening to use the guillotine when he was unable to make good his threat. By bringing up the question of Zinoviev's and Kamenev's conduct in October 1917, Trotsky seemes to have forced the triumvirs to drag up his own non- Bolshevik past.

On October 8, 1923, Trotsky sent a letter to the Central Committee. Lest he be accused of factionalism, he signed it alone. A week later the Central Committee received the so-called Platform of the Forty-Six, which discussed the same issues Trotsky had brought up. Among the signers were Preobrazhensky, Pyatakov, Antonov-Ovseenko, Vladimir Kosior, and Osinsky. Both letters sharply criticized "the policies of the majority of the Politburo."

The first part of the Platform of the Forty-Six spoke of a grave economic crisis: strikes, growing unemployment, production breakdowns, and the inefficiency of most of heavy industry. The blame for the catastrophic situation was laid on the majority faction in the Politburo. The second part of the platform spoke of a crisis within the party: "We observe the ever increasing, and scarcely concealed, division of the party between a sec­retarial hierarchy and 'the quiet folk,' between professional party officials recruited from above and the general mass of the party, which does not participate in party life."¹⁴³ The Platform of the Forty-Six made the same arguments as Trotsky's letter. Both asserted that the source of the party crisis lay in the system by which all secretaries of local party organizations were appointed from above rather than elected by the organization.

Trotsky and his associates were absolutely correct. The appointment system was Stalin's most effective instrument in conquering power. Although he did not invent it, he perfected it. Boris Souvarine, in his analysis of the structure of the state, singled out the two chief concentrations of central power—the Secretariat, which worked in close association with the Org- buro; and the Central Control Commission, with its local control commis­sions, introduced in 1920 to register all complaints against officialdom but very quickly transformed into a weapon for combatting all criticism and maintaining the strictest discipline.

The importance of the Secretariat was that it handled all questions re­lating to personnel assignments and leadership posts in local organizations. In 1920 a Department of Records and Assignments, the Uchraspred, was established within the Secretariat, with the initial task of organizing emer­gency mobilizations of party members. It set the mobilization quotas for each local organization. After the civil war, when major mobilizations of party members ended, the Uchraspred took over the job of assigning per­sonnel to party posts. Under the party's rules, members were always totally at the disposal of the Central Committee. After the civil war this meant at the disposal of the Uchraspred. By the beginning of 1923 all party posts down to the district level came under its jurisdiction. At the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923 the report on the work of the Uchraspred stated that during 1922 it had assigned "more than 10,000 party members, about half of whom were 'responsible officials.'"¹⁴⁴

The party congress elected the Central Committee, which in turn elected the Politburo, Orgburo, and Secretariat. The Secretariat, through the Uchraspred, chose all the regional and district secretaries of party com­mittees. They in turn selected the delegates to the congress, which elected the Secretariat. By 1923 this system, in which the Secretariat in effect elected itself, had been perfected. Stalin had the party machinery in his hands.

Trotsky and his associates justly criticized the system of appointments from above, but they were criticizing a system that Lenin had created and were thereby violating Lenin's precepts. More importantly, they were crit­icizing a system created with their consent and participation. They voiced their opposition to the system after the Twelfth Congress, when it began to turn against them. Despite the sharp polemics between the supporters of Trotsky and Stalin, they agreed on one decisive point: the party should run the entire life of the country, not only its political life, but social, economic, and cultural matters as well. Their agreement on this point showed that the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky was in the last analysis only a struggle for power.

Lenin had often stressed the all-encompassing role of the party. In 1918 the non-Communist specialist S. Liberman discovered intolerable practices among those in charge of the lumber industry. Lenin listened to Liberman's complaints, agreed with him, then warned: "The rectification of our errors must always come from above, not from specialists. That is why if you have any proposals, you should call me on the phone, and I myself will make the necessary changes."¹⁴⁵ At the end of his life Lenin was to say: "We must know and remember that the entire constitution of the Soviet Republic, both in legal terms and practical matters, is based on the fact that the party does everything, planning, building, and straightening out errors, according to one single principle."¹⁴⁶ That principle was the autocratic rule of the party.

In the early 1920s Gabriel Myasnikov and the Workers' Group, which he organized among industrial workers in Petrograd and the Urals, put forward some slogans that were quite unusual for Communists. After the Tenth Party Congress, Myasnikov sent a letter to the Central Committee with the following proposal: "Now that we have smashed the resistance of the exploiters and constituted ourselves the sole power in the land, we must proclaim freedom of speech and the press of a kind that no one in the world has had before—for everyone, from the monarchists to the anarchists." Myasnikov was expelled from the party and arrested. After escaping from the Soviet Union in 1928, he acknowledged that he had remained alive thanks only to his "heroic past"—the murder of Grand Duke Mikhail Romanov.

On January 16, 1924, five days before Lenin died, the Thirteenth Party Conference decided to make public the entire resolution on party unity passed on Lenin's urging by the Tenth Party Congress in 1921. The con­ference reminded all who criticized the "Politburo majority" that they were fighting against Leninist ideas. In May 1924 at the Thirteenth Party Con­gress, the first after Lenin's death, Trotsky made clear once again that his entire past and future opposition to Stalin was nothing more than a struggle for power: "I have never recognized freedom for groupings inside the party, nor do I now recognize it, because under the present historical conditions groupings are merely another name for factions." Then Trotsky uttered words that in effect constituted a death sentence for all who criticized Stalin from the point of view of "true Leninism":

In the last analysis, the party is always right, because the party is the sole historical instrument the working class possesses for the solution of its fundamental tasks. ... I know that no one can be right against the party. It is only possible to be right with the party and through it since history has not created any other way to determine the correct position.¹⁴⁷

If the party is always right, if one cannot oppose it, if there can be no doubt that it alone will carry out the mission assigned to it by history, the only alternative is to try to seize power within the party.

On January 21, 1924, Lenin died. Stalin organized the funeral in his own manner. Despite the protests of many Old Bolsheviks and of Lenin's widow, Lenin's corpse was embalmed and placed in a glass coffin inside a mausoleum built of wood upon Red Square. On January 30, Krupskaya asked in Pravda that Lenin not be mourned with "public worship of him." She asked that statues of him not be erected nor cities named after him. "If you wish to honor Vladimir Ilyich's name, build child care centers, kindergartens, houses, schools, and so on." The opposite was done. Gi­gantic funeral ceremonies were organized, as were pilgrimages to the mau­soleum. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. Cities like Lenino, Leninsk, and Ulyanovsk appeared on the map.

The deification of Lenin was particularly necessary for his heirs, each of whom tried to tear off a piece of his halo. They felt themselves to be lesser deities. Along with Leningrad other new names for towns and cities appeared: Zinovievsk, Trotsk, and Stalingrad. And all the while Stalin was operating for the most part in the background, pushing Zinoviev to the fore. On January 26, Stalin spoke very modestly in the Hall of Columns at the Central Trade Union Building in Moscow. His modest speech, which Soviet schoolchildren would later be required to learn by heart for decades there­after, was entitled "A Pledge." Pravda published only short excerpts.

The spectacular funeral for Lenin showed convincingly that Stalin was Lenin's most outstanding disciple. The Politburo, after placing Lenin's body in the mausoleum, thus encasing the relics of the new saint, at the same time submitted their teacher's brain to scientific examination. A German professor by the name of Vogt undertook the task and soon discovered "important peculiarities in the structure of the so-called pyramidal cells of the third layer." The journalists of the time reported that these special characteristics of Lenin's brain were "the reason for his ingenious ideas and the ingenious tactics that Lenin devised at the most difficult stages of the revolution when many others felt the ground slip from under their feet and lost all perspective."¹⁴⁸ The deification of the leader proceeded, fully in accordance with the doctrine of Marx: the mausoleum represented the cultural-ideological superstructure; the pyramidal cells, the material base.

THE YEARS OF WAITING

Saltykov-Shchedrin, the Russian satirist, told the story of the people of Glupov (Dumbville), who under one of their governors had a holiday in the spring to commemorate the ills of the past and one in the fall to prepare for the evils to come. The people of the Soviet Union celebrated the years 1923—1926 as a time of hope and expectation. It was one of the calmest periods in Soviet history, despite continued rumblings of discontent. The country was slowly convalescing, gradually getting back on its feet, re­membering with horror the ills of the past, mourning its millions of dead, and hoping for better things to come.

One of the rare personal diaries that has come down to us from the 1920s has the following entry for December 17, 1923:

Policies have changed. Free trade is permitted now, and theaters, streetcars, newspapers, etc., cost money. But Lenin has preserved an oasis of socialism in Russia—the government agencies and their staffs—while he allows the rest of the country to live the capitalist way. So far as anyone can foresee, the second stage of our revolution will come down to a struggle between these two principles, the socialist and the capitalist.¹⁴⁹

Mostly it was the rural areas that began to "live the capitalist way." Nowhere was the return to normalcy painless, however. Industry was seized with a sudden passion for profit making and raised its prices drastically. A widening gap, or "scissors," to use Trotsky's term, appeared between prices for manufactured goods and those for agricultural products. In 1924 the "scissors" began to close again as the party took up a new slogan, "Face the Countryside." The "link" (smychka), the bond between the work­ers and the peasants, was declared to be fundamental to all government policy. Land area under cultivation quickly increased, reaching 80 percent of the prewar total. In 1925 Bukharin issued his famous call to the peas­antry: "Enrich yourselves. Develop your plots of land. Don't be afraid of restrictions."¹⁵⁰ On the eighth anniversary of the revolution Stalin declared, "At present our task is to forge a solid alliance with the middle peasantry."

Industry also revived, although the process was slower than in agricul­ture. The introduction of material incentives in industry and the formation of conglomerates that were given the capitalist name trusts and that operated on the basis of profitability helped to hasten the recovery of industry. This was especially true of small industry, which produced for the peasant market. It did not require large outlays of capital and provided a quick return on investment. The expansion of the domestic market made possible a fairly rapid revival of plants producing consumer goods. Heavy industry recovered at a slower pace.

Industrial recovery based on the profit principle had one adverse effect, unemployment. In October 1921 there were 150,000 unemployed; at the beginning of 1924, 240,000. This increase was in part the result of layoffs by factories seeking to increase profits by reducing payrolls but also the result of an influx from the countryside. Together with unemployment there was a severe shortage of skilled labor.

Demands for higher productivity, which was obtained "through the in­tensification of labor and only to a small degree through improved orga­nization of production and modernization of equipment,"¹⁵¹ caused much unrest among the workers, especially since increased productivity was not accompanied by wage increases. In the spring of 1925 a wave of strikes swept the main industrial areas, particularly Moscow and Ivanovo. Sokol- nikov, the commissar of finance, admitted in 1925 that "in the eighth year of Soviet power" the wages of metalworkers, miners, and rail workers had barely reached the prewar level. The average wage in 1925 was 40 cher- vonets. M. Larsons wrote that in 1923 a people's commissar received 210 chervonets as well as an apartment.¹⁵²

A new class of capitalists, the Nepmen, came into existence with the introduction of the NEP, a social group that seemed to exist beyond the pale of Soviet society. They did not have the right to vote, they could not form professional associations or be members of trade unions, and their children could not study at the university level. They owed their existence to a policy reversal by the Soviet government, and they understood that at any time a change of policy could sign their death warrant. The Nepmen were necessary for NEP, but they were treated with repugnance. Private businessmen never lost the feeling of precariousness, that their existence was only temporary. That was why private enterprise attracted mainly ad­venturers and speculators, whose hope it was to make some fast money and spend it as quickly as possible while keeping out of sight of the ever watchful GPU. Due to the hostility of the Soviet system toward private enterprise and the reluctance of private businessmen to invest in any long- term industrial projects, throughout the NEP period the share of private business in overall industrial production remained quite small: 3.8 percent in 1925.¹⁵³

The fact that the social organism contained an alien presence in the form of capitalists contributed to the special atmosphere of this era in Soviet history. The Nepmen were accused, for example, of corrupting the Com­munists and were blamed for the massive spread of alcoholism.

The question of whether to legalize the production of alcohol in the land of the radiant future provided lengthy debate among the Bolsheviks. Before the revolution they had fiercely criticized the tsarist government for profiting from drunkenness. Now they had to choose whether to continue or revoke prohibition, which had been introduced by Nicholas II at the beginning of World War I.

Those who favored legalizing alcohol production, with a state monopoly on vodka, argued that illegal production was very widespread and that large revenues for the state could be obtained by legalization. In 1922 Pravda published a ringing declaration by an Old Bolshevik, A. Yakovlev, with the headline, "It Shall Not Pass." Yakovlev sharply denounced a certain Professor Ozerov, who favored government sale of vodka, promising that it would bring 250 million gold rubles per year into the state coffers. Ozerov proposed charging twice the price before the revolution. Yakovlev replied:

Soviet power, which exists for the people and for the national economy,... cannot take this suicidal road for the sole reason that in the pursuit of these imaginary 250 million, or even a real sum of that size, the national economy would suffer such losses and such destruction that even billions of rubles would not make up for it.¹⁵⁴

The ranks of the party and the Central Committee were against a revival of the state monopoly on the sale of alcohol. Nevertheless, the Politburo insisted on the measure. The debate continued until 1924. Stalin ended the discussion when he introduced a statement at a Central Committee plenum, signed by six other Central Committee members, solemnly stating that Lenin had told him and the other six in the summer and fall of 1922 that the vodka monopoly had to be introduced. In so doing Stalin annulled "all of Lenin's earlier statements on this question" found in his collected works. In 1927 Stalin recalled their discussions:

What's better, the bondage of foreign capital or the introduction of liquor? That was the issue before us. Clearly, we settled on vodka because we felt— and still feel—that if we, for the sake of the victory of the workers and peasants, have to soil ourselves a little bit, then we will agree to even those extreme means in the interest of our cause.¹⁵⁵

The vodka monopoly introduced in January 1923 was a compromise. The production of vodka was legalized at only half its normal strength—that is, 40 proof. This was immediately called Rykov vodka, or rykovka, in honor of the party leader who signed the decree and who himself was no enemy of the bottle. The power and attraction of alcohol was explained this way by Aron Solts, the Old Bolshevik known as the "conscience of the party":

When life is hard, when you don't have the strength or hope to change it, you wish you could picture it or imagine it to be different. To do this you have to put reason to sleep and dull the power of critical thought, which you can do with alcohol. When you drink you forget all your sorrows, all your troubles disappear, and all your problems fade away.¹⁵⁶

This comment, which ends up sounding rather favorable toward alcohol, may provide a clue to some of the thinking behind the steady increase in vodka production, aside from the desire for larger state revenues. The initial plan for vodka production for the year 1929—30 provided for 41 million vedra (406 million liters), but this was increased to 46 million (456 million liters).¹⁵⁷ In those days sorrows, troubles, and problems were mul­tiplying by the thousands.

Public Prosecutor Ivan Kondurushkin gave this summary of NEP's re­sults:

As of 1927 we have accomplished the following: (1) restored industry to the prewar level of production; (2) restored the transportation system, which is now working smoothly; (3) stabilized the currency; (4) revived and organized the working class, which numbers 300,000 more than in 1922; and (5) revived agriculture, fully restoring the area previously under cultivation.¹⁵⁸

The economic success of the policy begun in March 1921 was undeniable. It enabled the economy to return more or less to its prewar condition. But that was not the goal of the Bolshevik party, which had made a revolution in order to create a new society and a new kind of human being.

During the "years of waiting" between the end of the civil war and the beginning of the Stalin revolution the old society was under attack on every front. The first Soviet legal code on the family and marriage was adopted on September 18, 1918. Its aim was to "revolutionize" the family and the four main provisions of this code did indeed make it a revolutionary doc­ument for its time: only civil (not religious) marriage was recognized; there was no requirement for consent by any third party to a marriage; divorce was permitted without restrictions—if only one member of the couple wanted it, the divorce went through a court, but in cases of mutual consent, divorces were granted by the marital registry office; and the legal concept of ille­gitimacy pertaining to children was abolished.

The chief expression of this revolution in the family was the destruction of the "old bourgeois morality." The ideas of Alexandra Kollontai, com­missar of social welfare and a prominent party member, were very widely accepted. Clara Zetkin in her Recollections of Lenin described his attitude toward Kollontai's ideas: "No doubt you have heard the famous theory that in communist society satisfying sexual desire and the craving for love will be as simple and trivial as 'drinking a glass of water.⁹ A section of our youth has gone mad, absolutely mad, over this 'glass of water.'"¹⁵⁹

It was true that the "glass of water" theory became very popular in a society where the family had suffered heavy losses continuously for seven years of war and revolution. According to the 1897 census, women con­stituted 50.3 percent of the population, and men 49.7 percent, roughly equal proportions. According to the census of 1926, there were 5 million fewer men than women in the Soviet Republic. It was under these conditions that the party waged its fight against the "bourgeois family." Lenin expressed his indignation over "free love" theories in private to Zetkin and others, but he never spoke about it publicly. Instead he preached the "new rev­olutionary morality." The hero of a novel about free love that was popular in the 1920s quoted Lenin almost word for word: "Komsomol morality does exist. ... Our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the pro­letarian class struggle! Komsomol morality is a system that serves the working people in its struggle against exploitation of every kind. Whatever is useful to the revolution is moral; whatever is harmful to it is immoral and intolerable."¹⁶⁰ Morality as a weapon in the class struggle was a theme constantly reiterated by party theoreticians. Preobrazhensky dedicated his book, The Moral and Class Norms of Bolshevism, to that paragon of Bol­shevik morality, GPU leader Felix Dzerzhinsky.

The party's policy toward children also contributed to the breakup of the family. In the ABCs of Communism, Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, the authors of this most popular 1920s guidebook for the "new Soviet man," wrote: "Children belong to the society into which they are born, not to their parents."¹⁶¹ A prominent Soviet legal authority, one of the drafters of the new code on marriage and the family, expressed the same idea even more succinctly: "The family must be replaced by the Communist party."¹⁶²

On September 30, 1918, at virtually the same time that the new family code was adopted, the All-Russia Central Executive Committee approved a resolution establishing schools that would combine learning with labor. The school was revolutionized. Everything outdated was thrown away: desks, daily lessons, homework, textbooks, grades, tests. All education was made free of charge and coeducational. In working out a model for the new Soviet school, the Bolsheviks drew upon the most advanced pedagogical ideas of Russian educators, in particular, Konstantin Ventsel, as well as those of progressive Western educators, such as John Dewey.

The new Soviet school was "self-administered" by a collective consisting of all pupils and all employees, from the teachers to the janitors. The very word teacher was abolished and replaced by the term shkrab, short for shkolny rabotnik, school employee.

During the civil war the Soviet government was unable to carry out its Utopian dreams for this new type of school. Only at the end of 1923 was a plan adopted for reorganizing the school system, which was to be oriented toward the training of skilled specialists who would have a Marxist, working- class view of the world. One thing had been accomplished during the initial, Utopian phase: teachers' resistance to the politicization of the school had been broken. Lenin insisted that the bourgeoisie be fought in the schools as well, that education cannot proceed apart from politics. The chief slogan in the second phase of the Soviet school system was, "We do not need literacy without communism." As a result, communism was included every­where, even in arithmetic. For example, students were asked to solve the following problem: 'The insurrection in which the Parisian proletariat took power occurred on March 18 in 1871. The Paris commune fell on May 22 the same year. How long did it last?" The politicization of education was facilitated by the use of new methods comprehensively conceived with long- term aims. Or, as the Small Soviet Encyclopedia said, "in the Soviet Union for the first time in history, schools took up the task of combatting religion; the school became an antireligious institution."¹⁶³

Education was unabashedly made a class privilege. When children started school, they were immediately and bluntly made aware of their class origins. Among the first lessons they learned was that people were divided into two categories, the higher category of working people and the lower category of nonworkers.

One of the main aims of the class-oriented school was to train interna­tionalists, as V. N. Shulgin, an influential Marxist educator explained: "Our goal is not to turn out a Russian child, a child of the Russian state, but a citizen of the world, an internationalist, a child who will fully understand the interests of the working class and who is capable of fighting for the world revolution. ... We educate our children, not for the defense of the motherland but for worldwide ideals."¹⁶⁴

This education of children in the spirit of universal ideals meant first of all the extirpation of their national roots. "We realized a little too late," Mikhail Pokrovsky admitted in a self-criticism at the First Conference of Marxist Historians, "that the term Russian history is a counterrevolutionary term." Schools taught the history of the revolutionary movement. Civic history was eliminated. The manipulation of social memory began. Simul­taneously war was declared on classical Russian literature. In 1930 a proletarian literary critic objected that "the terms 'Russian literature' and 'the history of Russian literature' have not yet been denied their civil rights as part of the school curriculum, of textbooks, and of teaching aids."¹⁶⁵ Many classical writers were removed from the curriculum and others were studied only from a special angle. For example, the works of Pushkin, Griboedov, and Lermontov were analyzed as models of "the literary style of the Russian nobility during the rise of commercial-industrial capitalism."

One of the most tragic consequences of war and revolution were the homeless children, the besprizorniki. Hundreds of thousands of children lost their parents in the war zones, and millions lost them during the 1921 famine. Government statistics spoke of 7 million homeless children in 1922.¹⁶⁶ The officially encouraged breakup of the family only increased the problem. Krupskaya admitted in 1925: "I myself have written in the past that the problem of homeless children was a legacy of the war and economic dislocation, but after observing these children, I can see that we must stop speaking in those terms. We must say that the roots of the problem lie not only in the past but also in the present."¹⁶⁷

In 1921, at the height of the famine, a civic organization, the Save the Children League, was suppressed. It had functioned since 1918 and in­cluded former members of the Cadet party, SRs, and Mensheviks, as well as unaffiliated activists. The Commissariat of Education had insisted that the League be abolished on the grounds that representatives of the bourgeoi­sie could not be allowed to rescue proletarian children and then miseducate them. A Commission to Improve the Lives of Children was organized and placed under the direction of Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka. Thus, con­cern for children became the task of the organs of repression.

Two months after the revolution a new law was passed under which all cases involving children or adolescents under eighteen were transferred from the common courts to "special commissions for cases involving minors, these commissions having purely pedagogical and medical aims." It was forbidden to refer to minors as criminals; they were delinquents. In 1920 a new decree allowed the special commissions to refer cases involving minors above fourteen back to the regular courts.

A policy of harsh punishment became one way of dealing with the problem of homeless children. They were imprisoned or sent to concentration camps. Another solution was to place them in what were called children's homes or in a special category of such institutions—vocational-agricultural labor colonies. Among Communist educators one theory gained a special cur­rency: namely, that these children without parents or families could serve as splendid material for breeding the "new Soviet man." Many of the children's homes and labor colonies were placed under GPU jurisdiction. Finally, there was a third way of dealing with the problem—leaving the homeless children to their fate. Delinquents for whom vacancies could be found were sent for reeducation to the children's homes; the rest were left on the streets.

Toward the end of the 1920s, the economic revival and improved material conditions brought about a reduction in the number of homeless children. The Stalin revolution in the 1930s would throw new millions of children without parents into the streets.

One of the chief tasks undertaken by the Soviet government was the elimination of illiteracy. In 1855, 93 percent of all Russians were illiterate; in 1897 the figure was approximately 77 percent. The American scholar Daniel Lerner, basing himself on information drawn from twenty-two coun­tries, has demonstrated a very close link between urbanization and literacy. In the mid-nineteenth century only two Russian cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants. In the early twentieth century, when Russia's industrial growth rate became one of the fastest in Europe, the literacy rate rose rapidly. The tsarist government, however, is not usually given credit for this rise in the literacy rate.

Immediately after the October revolution the "anti-illiteracy front" was opened, alongside the military front and the economic front. The goal was not so much to teach illiterates how to read and write as to teach them to think correctly. 'The illiterate," Lenin explained, "remains outside of pol­itics, and that is why he must be taught the alphabet. Without this there can be no politics."¹⁶⁸ Bogdanov, the ideologist of proletarian culture, held the view that illiteracy would be eliminated and education provided to the people spontaneously through a kind of natural process. Lenin's view was the exact opposite. A decree of the Council of People's Commissars on the elimination of illiteracy, which Lenin signed on December 26, 1919, said in the preamble:

With the aim of providing the entire population of the republic the opportunity of conscious participation in the political life of the country the Council of People's Commissars hereby decrees: All inhabitants of the republic between the ages of eight and fifty who do not know how to read or write must take part in the literacy campaign.

The workday for illiterates was reduced by two hours with no cut in pay. However, article 8 specified that "those who seek to avoid the obligations put into effect by this decree ... will be subject to prosecution."¹⁶⁹ Learning to read and write became a duty, a kind of tax required by the government, and refusal to fulfill this obligation was made a crime.

In 1926, when the first census was taken under Soviet rule, it was determined that 5 million people had overcome illiteracy. This indicates that after the revolution the population acquired literacy at approximately the same rate as before, despite all the noisy propaganda and intimidating decrees. In the early 1930s the literacy rate would rise much more quickly, with intensified industrialization and urbanization.

A new family and marriage code adopted in 1928 completed the stage of revolutionary upheavals in the realm of family law. Under the new code registered and unregistered marriages were recognized as equally valid. Either husband or wife could dissolve the marriage without even informing the other. All he or she had to do was make a written statement. A postcard to the registry office was sufficient. "A divorce now costs three rubles," wrote Mikhail Koltsov in Pravda. "No more formalities, no papers, no summons, not even the need to inform in advance the person you are divorcing. Subscribing to a magazine is harder. ... For three rubles why not indulge yourself?"¹⁷⁰

The new legal code was meant to strike a mortal blow at the family and to tear apart the social ties which had begun to reassert themselves under NEP. The struggle against the intelligentsia and the destruction of the family and the old morality were meant to clear the ground for the new society. Since the state felt itself to be insufficiently powerful as yet, it sought to disrupt all ties between individuals, leaving each isolated in relation to the state.

Despite all this, the countryside—where the majority of the people lived—remained a bulwark of the old forms of authority and old morality. It was through the cells of the Young Communist League (the Komsomol), and especially in the form of "free love," that the new morality reached the countryside, although its influence remained marginal during this pe­riod.

Religion did not wither away despite the bitter fight against it. Churches were torn down, members of the clergy arrested, and antireligious propa­ganda constantly intensified. The publishing house Atheist began opera­tions in 1922. A newspaper by the same name began to come out once every five days in 1923, along with a monthly magazine Bezbozhnik и stanka (The godless at the workplace), which published caricatures prefiguring the crude anti-Semitic cartoons of the Nazi era. On February 17, 1923, Emelyan Yaroslavsky, director of antireligious propaganda, announced the formation of the League of Militant Atheists, which published the mass distribution magazine Bezbozhnik (The godless).

The struggle against the Orthodox church was made easier by the schism that persisted within it and by certain improprieties disclosed at the higher levels of the patriarchate. In December 1926, Metropolitan Sergii, exe­cuting the duties of the patriarch, was arrested. He was released in March 1927 and in July published a declaration which, to quote a historian, "transformed the church into an active ally of the Soviet government."¹⁷¹ The majority of the clergy and the faithful, this historian continues, under­stood that "this sin was necessary to save the church from destruction." A number of bishops were sent to penal exile on the Solovetsky Islands, and although they did not endorse Metropolitan Sergii's declaration per se, they urged that the unity of the church be maintained. In spite of this "spiritual and moral catastrophe for the Russian church,"¹⁷² religion continued to serve as a barrier to the degradation of society and the creation of the "new human being" the Soviet authorities wanted. Religion remained a traditional model, whose existence alongside the model of the new Soviet man allowed comparisons and a choice. But the party did not lay down its arms. "Have we suppressed the reactionary clergy?" asked Comrade Stalin in 1927. He answered: "Yes, we have suppressed them. The only trouble is that we have not yet eliminated them completely. Antireligious propaganda is the means that must bring to completion the job of eliminating the reactionary clergy."¹⁷³ Stalin was explaining the situation to a delegation of American workers, but he failed to add that besides propaganda the job of elimination was being speeded along with the help of the GPU.

THE EMIGRES

During the "years of waiting" there was the other possibility for comparison. The window to the West remained open. Beginning at the end of 1922 trips abroad for a limited period of time became quite common. Soviet engineers, foreign trade officials, and Nepmen went abroad on business, and writers and artists went for professional reasons. It also became a common form of punishment to send party leaders who were out of favor on foreign assignments, commercial or diplomatic. For Russians the West had always been both attractive and repulsive. In the 1920s it seemed much more like home because of the large Russian emigr6 community.

The Soviet authorities even tried to influence the emigr6s, encouraging the changing landmarks tendency among them. This policy was symbolized by the founding of the newspaper Nakanune (On the eve), with editorial offices in both Moscow and Berlin. Soviet writers were allowed to publish their books in Berlin, Prague, and Riga as well as Moscow. It was not expressly forbidden to meet with emigr6s, and Soviet citizens who did so were not punished after returning home. Film rental agencies in the Soviet Union, seeking profits, went so far as to print pinup shots of Asta Nielsen and Mary Pickford in Pravda. Scenes of bourgeois decadence in the West, especially of sleazy Russian emigr6 taverns, were regularly featured in Soviet films. Theater audiences viewed with delight the scenes of corruption and splendor from the outside world.

Soviet party leaders engaged in lively polemics with emigi-ё politicians, and Soviet literary critics reviewed the books of emig^ writers. The tone was nasty, sarcastic, malicious; the victors were mocking the vanquished. Still, in a certain sense the emigr6 community remained a part of Soviet life. It was insulted and ridiculed but also feared to some extent. In turn the emigr6 community eagerly followed all developments inside Russia. The emigr6s were influenced by Soviet ideas, but they too influenced Soviet ideology.

The emigr6 community was a faithful reflection of prerevolutionary Rus­sian life, with its countless political parties and groupings and schools of religion, philosophy, and literature. Revolution and civil war, defeat and forced exile strengthened dogmatic and intolerant attitudes. One of the principal lessons of the civil war was never absorbed—that the defeat of the anti-Bolshevik camp was largely the result of lack of unity. In exile the politicians continued the struggle, but mostly among themselves, one party against another.

The church set the example. In the fall of 1921 a council of the church in exile convened in Karlovci, Yugoslavia. The monarchists sought to have the council proclaim a legitimate tsar from the house of Romanov. Others at the council protested that this would be "interfering in politics, which was inadmissable at a church gathering."¹⁷⁴ In 1922 Patriarch Tikhon condemned the Karlovci council for its political activities and named Met­ropolitan Eulogius the head of the church abroad. The majority of emig^s felt that the church in exile should be linked with the Patriarchate in Moscow. In 1926 and 1927 a split took place. Most of the bishoprics (eparchies) in Western Europe recognized the authority of Metropolitan Eulogius, but the bishoprics in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Far East accepted the authority of Metropolitan Antonius, a supporter of the Karlovci council. The monarchist movement was torn by inner dissension, especially between absolutist and constitutionalist tendencies and two rival pretenders: Nikolai Nikolaevich, the uncle of Tsar Nicholas II; and Kirill Vladimirovich, a grandson of Tsar Alexander II and a cousin of the last tsar.

In August 1922 Kirill Vladimirovich proclaimed himself the true heir to the throne, but the majority of the monarchists chose Nikolai Nikolaevich as their leader, although it was left open who would actually ascend the throne. That was to be decided after the monarchy's return to power in

Russia. The monarchist program essentially called for the formation of a new Volunteer Army to invade Russia. The key to success was financial aid, and possibly military aid, from abroad.

Pavel Milyukov, chief organizer and ideologist of what was called the Republican-Democratic Alliance, categorically rejected foreign aid. "I do not know how we will return to Russia," he said in 1925, "but I do know how we will not return." That is, it would be impossible to return in the wake of a foreign army.¹⁷⁵ During the NEP Milyukov came to the conclusion that a certain evolution was underway in Russia as a result of the long- term policies of the Soviet government, which was being forced to shift from destruction to reconstruction of Russia's productive forces. Milyukov proposed no plan of action but placed his hopes on a historical process that would lead the Russian people themselves to overthrow the regime that oppressed them.

Petr Struve, the spokesman for conservative liberalism, was attacked by both left and right. For the left he was a monarchist who wanted to reha­bilitate the tsarist regime. For the right he was a liberal who, horror of horrors, had been a Marxist in the past. He called for a strong state that would restore order in Russia and defend property rights while respecting the legitimate freedoms of the people.

The numerous parties of the left, People's Socialists, Left and Right Socialist Revolutionaries, Social Democrats, Mensheviks, and anarchists, debated the pros and cons of dictatorship by a party or by a class and argued over whether the Bolsheviks were socialists or not. In 1921 the Mensheviks began to publish Sotsialistichesky vestnik (Socialist herald) in Berlin. It provided a wealth of information about events in the Soviet Union.

Alongside the traditional parties new movements and organizations arose in exile. For example, an anthology was published in Sofia in 1921 entitled Exodus to the East, with the subtitle "Forebodings and Accomplishments: A Profession of Faith by the Eurasians." It set forth the main tenets of "Eurasianism." "We honor the past and present of Western European cul­ture, but we do not see it as the future," said the foreword to the anthology.¹⁷⁶ The authors felt, as Herzen had, that "history is now knocking at our door." In the article "A Turn Toward the East," Professor Savitsky asked rhetor­ically, "Are there many people in Russia in whose veins the blood of Khazars, Polovtsians, Tatars, or Bashkirs does not flow?"¹⁷⁷ Russia was not only the West but the East, not only Europe but Asia as well. In fact it was not Europe at all but Eurasia.¹⁷⁸ The anthology advocated Russian nationalism as its main secular idea. Its authors warned, however, that they did not want to restrict nationalism to the framework of national chauvin­ism.¹⁷⁹ The Eurasians went further than the Slavophiles, who had spoken not only of the Russian people but of all the Slavic peoples; the Eurasians appealed to "the entire range of peoples of the Eurasian world, among whom the Russian people occupy a special position."¹⁸⁰

A split occurred in the ranks of the Eurasians in 1929, marking the beginning of the end for this movement. Its ideas nevertheless inspired a broad range of political currents among Russian emigr6s. The idea that because of its geopolitical situation and national character Russia could never become a democracy drew a section of emigr6s with Eurasian views into collaboration with the Soviet government in the 1930s.

In 1923 a General Congress of Nationally Minded Russian Youth was held in Munich. It founded the League of Young Russians, electing A. L. Kazem-Bek as its president. This later became the Young Russia party, which advocated restoration of the monarchy in Russia with a legitimate heir from the house of the Romanovs to be placed on the throne. The congress passed a declaration that stated in part, 'The development of antinationalist, liberal, and democratic schools of thought undermined the state and cleared the way for aggressive socialism and its logical culmi­nation, modern communism." The declaration singled out as the "most negative factors in modern life" what it called "freemasonry and interna­tional capital, which is concentrated mostly in the hands of the Jews."¹⁸¹

The Young Russia movement sought to combine monarchism with "young nationalist ideas," which were said to be on the rise in all countries. This meant, above all the ideas of Italian fascism. Their infatuation with nazism was to come later. (The Young Russians wore blue shirts and greeted their leader Kazem-Bek with shouts that were the equivalent of "Heil Hitler.") Varshavsky, the historian of this second generation of emigr6 youth, the "unnoticed generation," observed that the social orientation of the Young Russians and other Russian nationalist youth groups—expressed in the slogan "a monarchy above classes, a monarchy of the working people"— was related not only to the influence of fascism and national socialism but also to their personal experience. The harsh conditions of emigre life deep­ened their suspicion and hostility toward democracy. Fascism seemed to provide a program combining the ideas of national and social rebirth.

One of the paradoxes of emigre life was that the right-wing parties and movements which had been conservative in Russia engaged in revolutionary activity abroad, while parties with revolutionary pasts became passive. The activism of the right-wing parties, their training of cadres for a future army and infiltration of agitators and terrorists into the Soviet Union, made them easy prey for the GPU. Soviet agents and provocateurs penetrated all the emigr6 organizations, but those favoring close ties with their homeland were especially vulnerable to GPU tricks and subterfuge.

All the parties and movements whose programs called for the restoration of a strong Russian state, nationalism, and opposition to democracy evolved in the same direction. The changing landmarks group, the Eurasians, and the Young Russians found more and more attractive features in the Soviet system and concluded that "there was no need to exaggerate the differences between the 'ideological' measures of the Communists and the real needs of the people."¹⁸² Ultimately they agreed to collaborate with the Communist authorities. The "cunning dialectic of revolution"¹⁸³ allowed them to close their eyes to all unpleasant features.

Only a small number of Russian emigres belonged to political parties, but the vast majority belonged to military, social, professional, and literary associations of one kind or another. Until the mid-1920s Germany was the center of Russian emigre life, especially Berlin, where there were at least forty Russian publishing houses, each of which brought out more than a thousand titles, and where three daily Russian papers were published, as well as numerous magazines, with views ranging from monarchist to an­archist. There too a Russian-language theater was able to survive. In the mid-1920s Paris became the center of Russian emigration, with as many as 300 emigre organizations. In Paris alone there were seven Russian newspapers and many magazines.

The tragedy of separation from the homeland, the difficulties and mis­fortunes of life in exile, the petty problems of everyday life, the perennial dissatisfaction with everything Western prevented the Russian emigres from seeing the enormous amount that they actually accomplished, their tre­mendous contribution to Russian culture. The creative work of major Rus­sian writers in exile such as Ivan Bunin and Marina Tsvetaeva, and of historians, philosophers, theologians, naturalists, engineers, artists, and painters are an inseparable part of the Russian heritage. But to this day no history of the Russian emigres has been written. Very few understood that there was another side to the tragedy of emigre life. This was best expressed by Vladimir Nabokov, who became a great writer in exile. On the tenth anniversary of the October revolution he wrote:

Above all we must celebrate ten years of freedom. The freedom that we enjoy, I believe, is not known in any country in the world. In the unique and special Russia that invisibly surrounds us, enlivens and supports us, feeds our souls, and colors our dreams, there is no law but the law of love of Russia and no power other than our own consciences. ... Some day we will thank the blind Clio for allowing us to taste this freedom and enabling us to understand and cultivate in exile our profound feeling for our native land. ... Let us not curse our exile. Let us repeat in our day the words of

Plutarch's ancient warrior: "Late at night in a savage land far from Rome I pitched my tent and my tent became Rome for me."¹⁸⁴

Nabokov composed this paean to inner freedom just at the time when the years of waiting were coming to an end in the Soviet Union.

WHO WILL PREVAIL?

The Thirteenth Party Congress marked the victory of a triumvirate, three leaders who had agreed to assume Lenin's mantle collectively. Kamenev chaired the congress, Zinoviev gave the report for the Central Committee, and Stalin organized the congress. Trotsky admitted defeat. But no sooner had the congress ended than Stalin began to undermine the position of his fellow triumvirs. Thus began the inexorable rise to power of Joseph Stalin.

A debate has gone on among historians for the past half century: Did Stalin create the apparatus or did the apparatus create Stalin? The desire to portray Stalin as the creator of the apparatus, the bureaucratic machine and system, is understandable. This conception allows one to divide Soviet history into the pre-Stalin, Stalin, and post-Stalin periods. But there is no doubt that the apparatus existed before Stalin, just as there is no doubt that he perfected it and used it to consolidate his power—just as his rivals tried unsuccessfully to do. 'To be a leader and organizer," Stalin wrote in 1924, "means first of all to know your party cadres, to be able to grasp their strengths and weaknesses... and second to know how to assign them."¹⁸⁵ Stalin's technique was quite simple, but effective. He especially knew the weaknesses of the party members he assigned to one or another post, and in making assignments his aim was above all to punish some and reward others. One of the delegates to the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925 made this revealing observation: 'The comrades are living and eating well right now, and so not everyone will raise his hand to vote against something, only to be sent to Murmansk or Turkestan for that."¹⁸⁶

The party apparatus, Stalin's instrument for taking power, was an out­growth of the party, but the character of the party had been shaped by Lenin more than anyone else. In 1926 Stalin's opponents—Trotsky, Zi­noviev, Kamenev, Krupskaya, Pyatakov, and others—formed the United Opposition. In July they addressed a letter to the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission. They denounced the sit­uation in which "all discussion is from the top down and the ranks below merely listen, thinking for themselves only in isolated cases and on the sly. Those who are dissatisfied, have doubts, or disagree are afraid to raise their voices at party meetings. ... Party members are afraid."¹⁸⁷

The United Opposition sought to portray all this as the result of Stalin's policies. However, during the discussion held on the pages of Pravda in 1923, when the Oppositionists were still in power, the situation was the same. "Party members have forgotten how to think for themselves. They are afraid to 'y^aP' about anything until orders come from above. They wait for ready-made decisions to be handed down and even for the ready-made explanations for those decisions."¹⁸⁸ 'There is self-seeking, sycophancy, and fear of expressing one's own opinion. ... Everyone is pretty much preoccupied with the question of assignments and transfers."¹⁸⁹ "Under the system of command from above there is no party life for the ranks. The bureaucratic atmosphere, with official circulars setting the tone, pushes the ranks out of the picture. ... Tale bearing, informing, and bootlicking are increasing, and careerism thrives on this soil."¹⁹⁰ "Some party officials use 'comrade' only in addressing someone of lower rank. They invariably address their superiors (ingratiatingly) by their first and middle names."¹⁹¹ All of this was printed in the pages of Pravda during a brief moment of freedom for party members when a discussion was allowed by the top brass. They were talking about Lenin's party.

At the Fourteenth Congress in 1925 a member of the oppositional Len­ingrad delegation complained about the widespread practice of informing, which had taken "such forms and such characteristics that a comrade cannot tell his friend his most intimate thoughts."¹⁹² The complaining comrade was justly reprimanded by Sergei Gusev: "You're faking, Bakaich, you're faking, believe me. In the past Lenin taught us that every member of the party has to be an agent of the Cheka; in other words, keep his eyes open and act as an informer. ... I think that every party member must report on others. If we have a problem, it is not informing but the lack of informing."¹⁹³ Ten years later both of these men were able to return to the question of informing because both the complainer and the reprimander were in Lu- byanka prison. But Gusev was absolutely right to accuse Ivan Bakaev (familiarly called Bakaich) of faking. It was hardly appropriate for Bakaev, one-time head of the Petrograd Cheka, to complain about informing. And Gusev was a hundred times right to recall that informing became a party norm under Lenin.

Stalin did not invent the party; he inherited it from Lenin. But he perfected it and embellished upon it in his own way, discarding everything extraneous or incidental. He enlarged the Central Committee to sixty-three full members and forty-two alternate members in 1925, thereby carrying out Lenin's recommendation that a struggle between Stalin and Trotsky could be prevented in this way. He carried out what was called the Lenin enrollment, bringing 203,000 new members into the party from February to August 1924, increasing the membership by 50 percent. Earlier, at the end of 1923, the question of holding a "party week" for the recruitment of 100,000 new members was discussed. The prevailing opinion at that time was that "our cadres are not equipped to integrate such a large number of new recruits. Our Martin ovens, the party cells, don't have the capacity to refine and temper this quantity of youthful raw material."¹⁹⁴ Yet within a few months 200,000 members were admitted. The party underwent a drastic change. Its new members were ignorant of the extraneous or incidental traditions which Stalin was energetically uprooting. The aim of the Lenin enrollment was to bring workers from the factory floor into the party. But the flood of new recruits mainly consisted of privilege seekers. "Many of them," a party member complained in Pravda, December 8, 1924, "view the party as some sort of pancake covered with sour cream." The new recruits were looking for jobs and got them. Workers from the factory floor became workers with briefcases, and party members from the countryside were promoted just as readily. But they had to pay for these privileges. The members of the party became vassals. They forfeited even those min­imal liberties which Soviet citizens still enjoyed at the time.

The party, despite this rejuvenation, was led by the so-called Old Guard, the veteran party members. In January 1924 the Old Guard of those who had joined before 1917, those with experience in the tsarist underground, numbered only 8,249. The total party membership was 401,481, 56.6 percent of whom had joined between 1920 and 1924.¹⁹⁵

The struggle for power was waged among the numerically insignificant number of former underground activists. It was in those circles that the political combinations, coalitions, and blocs were formed. It was there that Stalin showed his remarkable abilities at political maneuvering, employing others to do his dirty work. The main burden of the assault on Trotsky in 1923—1924 was eagerly assumed by Zinoviev and Kamenev. Later, in fight­ing those two, Stalin used Bukharin and enjoyed the benevolent neutrality of Trotsky. Unlike Trotsky, who referred darkly to the guillotine, or Zinoviev, who demanded Trotsky's arrest for publishing his article "Lessons of Oc­tober," Stalin wore the mask of moderation. Recalling that his fellow trium­virs had demanded the arrest and expulsion of Trotsky, he uttered these remarkable words:

We did not agree with Zinoviev and Kamenev because we knew that a policy of amputation is fraught with grave dangers for the party, that the method of amputation and of bloodletting—for they demanded blood—is dangerous and contagious. Today you cut off one member of the party, tomorrow another, the next day a third, and soon what will be left of our party?¹⁹⁶

Stalin fought his opponents with deeds, not words. Many years later the phrase "salami tactics" became famous. Stalin deprived his opponents of power little by little, cutting off tiny slices, one at a time. In January 1925 Trotsky was removed as commissar of war, after which he lost the support of the army apparatus, especially with the removal of his close ally Antonov- Ovseenko as head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army. Similarly, Kamenev was removed as head of the Moscow party organization at the end of 1925.

But Stalin also used words to fight his enemies. He had no trouble showing that they were unprincipled politicians, that at one time they had supported and defended Stalin only to turn against him later and say, as Kamenev did at the Fourteenth Congress: "We are against the creation of a 'Leader.'... I suggest that our general secretary is not a figure who can unite the Old Bolshevik general staff around himself." In reply to demands for party democracy, Mikoyan defended Stalin with the acid comment that when the Oppositionists were in power they were against democracy, but when they went into opposition they suddenly became its champions. Stalin himself did not hesitate to remind those who called for democracy of their own past.

In the ranks of the Opposition there are people like Beloborodov whose "democratism" is still remembered by the workers of Rostov; Rozengolts, whose "democratism" was visited upon our water and rail transport workers; Pyatakov, whose "democratism" made the Donbass region not only yell but scream;... and Byk, whose "democratism" still makes Khorezm scream.¹⁹⁷

During the power struggle of the 1920s a method of debating developed in which Stalin showed himself a past master. This system, essentially a semantic one, was an extremely important factor in enabling Stalin to defeat his opponents. Lenin deserves credit for developing this semantic system in 1903, when he called his group the Bolsheviks (majority supporters) when in fact they were in the minority on all but one question at the Second Party Congress. In the polemics that constantly shook the party from 1903 to 1917 (and after), Lenin always sought to pin a discrediting label on his opponents rather than defeat them by argument.

In the debates of 1923—1928 the adversaries constantly juggled labels and special terms such as "leftist," "rightist," "centrist," and "general line." Stalin demonstrated great virtuosity in this semantic game. The opponents of the "general line," which was constantly changing, could be accused of leftist views with rightist deviations or of a right deviation with leftist tendencies. Two new concepts were also created: "Leninism," a system of views that were always correct; and 'Trotskyism," a system of views that was always hostile to Leninism. Any inappropriate phrase spoken by chance or out of carelessness became a crime. Stalin's first shot fired against his fellow triumvirs, a month after the Thirteenth Congress, was an attack on Kamenev, who had spoken of Nepmans Russia rather than NEP Russia. "Does Kamenev understand the principled difference here?" Stalin asked in his comradely way. "Of course he understands it. Why then did he put forward this strange slogan? Because of his characteristic dis­regard for theory and precise theoretical definitions."¹⁹®

Every line was put through a strainer. Every word uttered by an opponent was reinterpreted, distorted, and falsified.

The best exammple of the semantic game Stalin played was his reduction of the dispute with Trotsky to a question of two slogans: "socialism in one country" and "permanent revolution." Lenin and all the other leaders had believed that the sparks of the Russian revolution would touch off a world­wide conflagration. After that would come the building of the radiant future. On March 12, 1919, Lenin said exactly that: 'The tasks of construction depend entirely on how swiftly the revolution wins out in the main European countries. Only after that victory will we be able to undertake the tasks of construction in a serious way."¹⁹⁹ On November 6, 1920, he was even more categorical: "In one country it is impossible to achieve such a task as the socialist revolution."²⁰⁰

After the failure of the revolution in Europe, especially the fumbled attempts to start a revolutionary fire in Germany in 1923, all of the Bol­sheviks understood that they had to build something in Russia. In late 1924, on the basis of a single sentence found in a 1915 article by Lenin, Stalin declared that it was possible and necessary to "build socialism in a single country," the Soviet Union. It was not enough, however, to formulate this positive program; he contrasted it to a negative program, which he called "the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution." Long before the 1917 revolution Trotsky had put forward the theory that the Russian rev­olution would inevitably "pass over" from a bourgeois democratic to a socialist revolution and that its ultimate fate would depend on the world revolution, which was also inevitable. In full agreement with Lenin, Trotsky believed that only assistance from the victorious world proletariat would make it possible to consolidate the victory of the Russian proletariat.

In 1924 the question of the transition from bourgeois democratic to socialist revolution was purely of historical interest. But Stalin used the

old formula of "permanent revolution" to construct the demon theory of Trotskyism, which allegedly denied the possibility of building socialism in the Soviet Union.

The debate between Stalin and Trotsky took place on two different levels. Trotsky argued theoretically in the traditional style of Marxist scholasticism. He agreed that the process of building socialism could begin in the Soviet Union, but he thought it impossible for the process to be completed within a single country. Stalin, for his part, avoided the fine points of theory, arguing in practical terms. He defended "Leninism" against 'Trotskyism." He defended the honor of the Russian proletariat against Trotsky, who supposedly had no faith in its capacities. He made it clear that the policy of "building socialism in one country" meant a peaceful, constructive life, while "permanent revolution" would mean new wars and revolutions. Trot­sky's defeat was inevitable. Bled white by its suffering, the country longed for peace.

This debate was typical of all the internal disputes in the party from 1923 to 1928. There were no clear differences of principle, as can be seen from the content of the discussions and the ease with which the adversaries changed their minds and shifted from one camp to another. The real dif­ference between Stalin and all of his opponents was the way they debated and their attitude toward dogma. Many factors contributed to Stalin's victory, but the most important was the inner weakness of his opponents, unable as they were to free themselves of the dogmas by which they were bound. This was especially true of Trotsky, the most outstanding of Stalin's rivals, but none of them were able to overcome the prejudices of old fashioned Marxism. Stalin, Lenin's best disciple, was a Marxist of a new type, a Marxist of the twentieth century, possibly even the twenty-first.

In many respects Trotsky and Stalin were twins. Their attitude toward party democracy was the same. Trotsky wrote in November 1930: "What we mean by the restoration of party democracy is that the real, revolutionary, proletarian core of the party must win the right to curb the bureaucracy and to carry out a genuine purge of the party."²⁰¹ He went on to specify all the elements that had to be purged, quite a long list. Trotsky's and Lenin's attitudes toward democracy in society were also the same. Trotsky wrote in November 1932:

The regime of the proletarian dictatorship cannot and does not wish to hold back from infringing the principles and formal rules of democracy. It has to be judged from the standpoint of its capacity to ensure the transition to a new society. A bourgeois democratic regime, on the other hand, must be judged from the standpoint of the extent to which it allows the class struggle to develop within the framework of democracy.²⁰²

The dictatorship of the proletariat was not bound by any "formal rules of democracy," but the democratic regime must allow its enemies to fight against it.

In principle Trotsky's attitude toward culture was also the same as Sta­lin's. Writing in exile in June 1933, Trotsky granted that "the party is obliged to permit a very extensive liberty in the field of art," but he added, "eliminating pitilessly only that which is directed against the revolutionary tasks of the proletariat."²⁰³ Lastly, their attitude toward morality was the same. 'The means can only be justified by the end," Trotsky wrote. "But the end must also be justified. From the point of view of Marxism, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it increases humanity's power over nature and contributes to eliminating the power of man over man."²⁰⁴ From the standpoint of this morality (if it can be called that), Trotsky justified the murder of the tsar's children but condemned the murder of his own children by Stalin, because Stalin was not a true representative of the proletariat.²⁰⁵

Trotsky was hopelessly outpaced by Stalin because Trotsky continued to believe in certain unshakable truths, for example, that the proletariat was a class with a historical mission to perform and that there were certain invariable historical laws that would specifically ensure the victory of Trot­sky, who represented the true interests of the proletariat. He also believed in the party as the only instrument history had provided for the proletariat. His faith in these eternal truths bound Trotsky and the entire Opposition hand and foot and prevented them from using all the means at their disposal for fighting Stalin. To them, Stalin in the last analysis represented the party, and thus the proletariat and the laws of history. Stalin did not have any such complexes. He knew that he was right because he had the power, and that meant that anything was permitted.

A central topic of debate was the NEP. The question under discussion was this: What economic levers could the state use to obtain the resources necessary for industrial development when agriculture remained almost entirely in private hands? Until 1925 all the party leaders had agreed with the policy of smychka, the alliance with the peasantry. As a British historian noted, "If anyone in January 1925 had been acute enough to predict an imminent break between Stalin and Zinoviev on this issue, he would almost certainly have seen in Zinoviev the prospective champion of a peasant policy and Stalin and its opponent."²⁰⁶ Even Trotsky in the fall of 1925 acknowledged that there was nothing threatening about the economic pro­cesses underway in the countryside, and he denounced any policy of "de- kulakization" at that time.²⁰⁷

Bukharin was the chief ideologist of the NEP and he defended it against

the attacks, first Trotsky's, then Zinoviev's and Kamenev's. But he was not opposed in principle to violence and exploitation. In 1920 Bukharin had advocated nationalization of all economic activities, militarization of labor, and rationing for everyone—in short, the universal use of force in regulating the economy.

Just as Stalin had "construed" Trotsky's political program in his own way, by reducing it to the slogan of permanent revolution and investing his own, Stalinist, meaning in that slogan, so too an economic program was devised for the United Opposition. A report by Preobrazhensky, 'The Fun­damental Law of Socialist Accumulation," was said to be the essence of the Opposition's economic point of view. Preobrazhensky argued that the October revolution was premature in the sense that Russia had not yet reached the necessary level of capitalist development, that what Marx called the stage of "primitive accumulation of capital" had not been completed. In other words, Russia did not yet have the industrial base necessary for material goods to be distributed "to each according to his needs." The capitalists had accomplished their primitive accumulation through the ex­ploitation of colonies. According to Preobrazhensky, primitive socialist accumulation, which was necessary for the building of a socialist industry, would have to take place at the expense of the lower forms of economic life, in particular that "internal colony," the peasantry.²⁰⁸

Preobrazhensky's ties with Trotsky provided a splendid opportunity for Stalin to attribute the primitive accumulation theory to the Opposition as a whole. Growing numbers of Oppositionists leaned toward such extreme views, especially those like Kamanev and Zinoviev who based themselves in Leningrad and Moscow, where the workers were discontented with the social inequities produced by the NEP. They were inclined in this direction also because of the moderate position of Stalin and his associates, who argued for a program of "civil peace," as Bukharin did at the Fourteenth Party Congress.²⁰⁹ Even Stalin asked whether there was any need for class warfare "now that we have the dictatorship of the proletariat and now that the party and trade union organizations function with full freedom." The general secretary answered his own question. "Of course not."²¹⁰

Bukharin's program, supported by Stalin, stated that war against the peasantry would be fraught with fatal consequences, both political and economic, for the Soviet state. That was why economic development had to be based on an alliance with the peasants, providing them the opportunity to increase their productivity, organize cooperatives, and develop forms of exchange through the market. On April 17, 1925, Bukharin uttered the famous words: "We must tell the peasants, all the peasants, enrich your­selves. Develop your plots of land and don't be concerned about being pressured."²¹¹ Later when Stalin began manufacturing a "right deviation," he chose these words of Bukharin's as the essence of the deviationists' program.

Bukharin's words provoked indignation among Oppositionists. Among the peasants they aroused hope. One man, a keen observer who considered himself the unofficial "loyal opposition," greeted them enthusiastically. This was Nikolai Ustryalov, whom Stalin called the "spokesman for the bourgeois specialists in our country."²¹²

Ustryalov had no doubt that a new period in Soviet history had begun, one more step toward the emancipation of Russia from alien internationalist ideas. He also had no doubt that this period was crucially linked with the name of Stalin, whom Ustryalov regarded as Lenin's true disciple, he who had grasped Lenin's doctrine "dynamically," as befits the teachings of a master dialectician. Ustryalov proclaimed the "twilight of the Leninist Old Guard," noting that the former "masters and favorites of the revolution, the October guard, the stalwarts of the iron cohort, the pride and glory of the proletarian vanguard," had been dethroned.²¹³ In October 1926 Us­tryalov declared, "Not only are we now 'Against Zinoviev'; we are definitely Tor Stalin.'"²¹⁴ Ustryalov did not delude himself about his new hero; he quoted the "wise words" of Konstantin Leontiev: "Good people are not infrequently worse than bad people. It is known to happen. Personal honesty may be pleasing on the personal level and may inspire respect, but there is nothing political or organizational about these fragile qualities. Very good people sometimes do terrible damage to the state."²¹⁵ From his peaceful nineteenth-century vantage point, Leontiev could not of course have imag­ined what terrible damage the bad people would do.

Ustryalov hailed Stalin's victory because he saw him as Lenin's true disciple. As early as 1923 Ustryalov had described Lenin and Mussolini as two equally important figures who "for all their political polarity... mark a new stage in the evolution of modern Europe."²¹⁶ In 1926 Stalin too was marking a new stage in European history as he marched inexorably toward full personal power within the party—and consequently within the state.

The Fourteenth Party Congress, in December 1925, brought an end to the interregnum, the period of "collective leadership." Three years earlier, Lenin's appearance before the Fourteenth Comintern Congress was de­scribed this way: 'The applause is joyful and stormy because it has seemed a very long wait. ... The entire auditorium sings the Internationale—be­cause the applause, the ovation, seemed insufficient to express the bound­less love for the leader and the limitless faith in him."²¹⁷ In December 1925 Stalin's speech to the party congress was greeted by "applause swelling to an ovation; all the delegates rose and sang the Internationale."

Stalin began consolidating his power at once. Kamenev and Zinoviev were removed from their posts in the Moscow and Leningrad party orga­nizations, and Kamenev was demoted from full to alternate member of the Politburo. After the congress Kirov was sent to Leningrad to "restore order" there. In 1926 Zinoviev, Trotsky, and Kamenev were removed from the Politburo.

Stalin made use of every means to consolidate his power, including the art of medicine. In October 1925, by order of the Politburo, Commissar of War Frunze underwent an operation. (An ally of Zinoviev's, Frunze had replaced Trotsky as commissar of war a few months earlier.) The surgeons discovered that the ulcer they were ordered to remove had scarred over. The surgery was unnecessary, but the patient never rose from the operating table. He was replaced as commissar of war by Stalin's crony Voroshilov. At Frunze's funeral Stalin pronounced these mysterious words: "Perhaps this is the way, just this easily and simply, that all the old comrades should be lowered into their graves."²¹⁸

Zinoviev and Kamenev, forced out of all their posts, proposed an alliance to their old enemy Trotsky. The United Opposition of 1926—1927 criticized Stalin for making concessions to the kulaks, refusing to industrialize the country, and bureaucratizing the state apparatus. This criticism of Stalin's policies, however, could not save the Opposition because it suffered from an inherent weakness.

The Fifteenth Party Congress, entirely dominated by the Stalinists, was held in December 1927 after a two-year interval, the first time that a congress had not been held once a year since the party had come to power. At the congress Kamenev gave a speech of repentance in which he said there were only two possible roads. One was the creation of a second party. "This road, under the conditions of proletarian dictatorship, would be disastrous for the revolution. ... This road is closed to us, forbidden, ruled out by our entire system of ideas, by all of Lenin's teachings on the dic­tatorship of the proletariat." The other road was "to submit wholly and entirely to the party." "We have chosen this road," said Kamenev, "because we are deeply convinced that a correct Leninist policy can triumph only within our party and through it, not outside it or against it."²¹⁹ Trotsky himself, even after being deported from the Soviet Union in February 1929, held the same position, that the Soviet state was still the historical instru­ment of the working class.

Capitulation did not save the Oppositionists. Kamenev and 121 other

Opposition leaders were expelled from the party by the Fifteenth Congress. Some had already been arrested. Rykov concluded a speech at the congress with these words: "I don't think we can guarantee that the prison population will not have to be increased somewhat in the near future."²²⁰ Ten years later, while sitting in prison, he may have regretted those words.

To the Opposition s objections that Stalin was using terror against party members, the general secretary replied: "Yes, we are arresting them and we will continue to. ... Some say that in the history of our party such incidents have never been seen before. Untrue. What about the Myasnikov group? And the Workers' Truth group? Who does not know that the members of those groups were arrested with the full agreement of Zinoviev, Trotsky, and Kamenev?"²²¹

The Fifteenth Congress ended the dispute over the succession to Lenin and definitively answered the question, Who will prevail? Over a period of five years Stalin had carried out what Boris Souvarine called his "mo­lecular coup (ГёЬаЬ."²²² He assumed the mantle of Lenin.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT CULTURE?

In April 1918 some representatives of the newly organized Union of Activists in the Arts gathered at the home of Maxim Gorky for a meeting with the commissar of education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, an occasional dramatist and literary critic in his own right. They proposed that the executive committee of their union be placed in charge of the arts instead of the existing col­legium, or board, of the Commissariat of Education. In other words, they wanted artists to administer the arts. Lunacharsky responded: "We were against the Constituent Assembly in the political arena. We are all the more opposed to a Constituent Assembly in the arts."²²³

The party announced its intention to administer art and culture directly. This involved two elements: (1) what artists should not write, paint, sculpt, etc.; and (2) what they should. The first part of this program was easy to carry out. Press censorship was introduced immediately after the revolution, in November 1917. Then after the civil war, on June 8, 1922, the Council of People s Commissars announced the formation of a Main Press Com­mittee, whose purpose was to "unify all existing forms of censorship in Russia." Two months later a government decree established the Main Lit­erature and Art Administration (Glavnoe Upravlenie po Delam Literatury i Iskusstva), which became famous under the acronym Glavlit as the main Soviet censorship agency over the years and which exists to this day. The duties of Glavlit, according to its founding decree, included "prior ex­amination of all literary works, periodical and nonperiodical publications, maps, etc., intended for publication and distribution." In addition, Clavlit was to "issue all official authorizations for printed works of any kind, prepare lists of banned books, and work out provisions governing printing estab­lishments, libraries, and the book trade."²²⁴

The second part of the program was harder to implement. Practical experience with ways of pressuring artists into doing what the party required had not yet accumulated.

First of all, the party had to assert its inalienable right to act as the sole authority in cultural matters. A challenger to this right was a group that called itself Proletkult, short for Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organization. Its leader, the ex-Bolshevik Aleksandr Bogdanov, had worked out the theory of an autonomous proletarian culture even before the revo­lution. He held that the "organizational principle of the bourgeoisie" was individualism and that therefore bourgeois culture was individualistic. The organizational principle of the proletariat was collectivism. The proletariat had to reexamine all previously existing culture from this point of view, reevaluate it, and take control of it. The proletariat would then transform all old science and scholarship and create a new "universal organizational science," which would enable it to "organize all human existence in a harmonious and complete fashion." After the February revolution, the sup­porters of Proletkult announced themselves as an independent worker's organization—independent, that is, of the Provisional Government's Min­istry of Education. After the October revolution numerous Proletkult circles, studios, and laboratories were organized for industrial workers who wanted to paint, write poetry, or take to the stage. Proletkult published books and pamphlets, held conferences, and opened what it called the Proletarian University in Moscow. The work of "creating a proletarian culture" had begun.

Lenin declared war on Proletkult. Bad enough that it was led by his former friend Bogdanov, who had become a dangerous enemy, a man whose philosophical writings Lenin never ceased to denounce; in addition, Pro­letkult was seeking "to wall itself off from the party's leadership."²²⁵ Bog­danov held that "Proletkult was the class organization of the proletariat for culture and the creative arts just as the workers' party was its political organization and the trade union was its economic organization." Lenin answered that the proletariat has only one organization, the party, which "guides and directs not only in politics but also in economics and cul­ture."²²⁶ In 1919 the Proletarian University in Moscow was closed down, particularly because a course in Bogdanov's "organizational science" had been given there. In its place a so-called Communist University was founded. In October 1920 the Politburo took up the question of Proletkult three times. At the session on October 9, Lenin spoke nine times on the question; so did another expert on culture, Stalin.²²⁷

On December 1, 1920, Pravda published a letter by the Central Com­mittee on the subject of Proletkult. This was the first in an endless series of Central Committee pronouncements on cultural questions. Proletkult was stripped of its autonomy, and Communist party members were removed from the central committee of Proletkult and obliged to acknowledge the guiding role of their party and its leadership in this sphere. The letter expressed the Central Committee's views on other cultural questions as well: for example, that futurism reflected "perverse and absurd tastes." Soon after the publication of this letter Proletkult renounced its former ties with the futurists and passed a resolution stating that "futurism and comm- futurism are ideological currents characteristic of the final phase of bour­geois culture in the age of imperialism" and therefore must be recognized as "hostile to the proletariat as a class."²²⁸

The death of Alexander Blok marked the end of an era, the collapse of faith in the revolution on the part of the intelligentsia, the demise of hope. "Life has changed," Blok wrote in his diary on April 17, 1921. Earlier he had written 'The Twelve," a poem in which Christ led the revolutionaries into the future. Now he wrote, "Throughout the world, the louse has con­quered and everything will go a different way now, not the way we used to live, the way we loved."²²⁹ At his last public appearance, a meeting in honor of the eighty-fourth anniversary of Pushkin's death, Blok spoke of the poet's mission: 'They also take away peace and liberty... not outward peace, but the inner calm of creativity. Not juvenile libertinism... but creative freedom, a secret inner liberty. And the poet dies because he can no longer breathe; life has lost its meaning."²³⁰ Within a few months Blok himself died, and his death was quite symbolic. On May 29, 1921, Gorky addressed a letter to Lunacharsky: "Would you please ask the Politburo as quickly as possible to give permission for Blok to leave for Finland." Twelve days later Lunacharsky passed on the request in behalf of Blok, who was seriously ill. The next day the Politburo discussed the question and passed a resolution to "improve the food situation for Alexander Blok." Blok's condition worsened. On July 23 the Politburo agreed to allow the poet to leave the country but would not give permission for his wife to accompany him. The poet was in no condition to travel by himself. On July 29 Gorky sent a telegram to the Kremlin addressed to Lunacharsky: "Urgent. Con­dition extremely serious. Immediate departure for Finland indispensable."

On August 1 Lunacharsky again raised the question with the Central Com­mittee. This time the authorization was granted.²³¹

On August 7 Blok died at the age of forty. Weeks had passed since Gorky's initial letter. It is common knowledge that it was Lenin who decided questions involving departure from the Soviet Republic by people prominent in science and culture.

Neither the fact that most intellectuals protested against the October revolution nor that numerous cultural figures went into exile stopped the progress in the arts that had been going on in Russia since the turn of the century. Not even the lack of essential materials, such as paints and canvas for artists, marble for sculptors and architects, and paper for writers, stopped this powerful creative impulse. Andrei Bely wrote: "In its most difficult days Russia became like a garden of nightingales. Poets sprang up as never before. People barely had the strength to live but they were all singing."²³² However, as Lenin explained to Clara Zetkin, the task of the party was to direct this spontaneous artistic and cultural outpouring into a constructive channel serving the state and to bring it under the control of party insti­tutions.²³³ Viktor Shklovsky jotted down this note at the time: "Art must move organically, like the heart in the human breast, but they want to regulate it like a train."²³⁴

The task of regulating art fell to party members who were connected with one or another artistic endeavor. Proletarian writers and proletarian artists became cultural leaders. The magazine of the proletarian writers, appro­priately enough, was named On Guard (Na postu).

In 1923 Trotsky coined a phrase for designating nonproletarian writers and artists who wanted to live and work in the Soviet Republic but were not fully qualified to do so (in the eyes of the party); he called them fellow travelers (poputchiki). Those writers and artists who were not classed as outright enemies could be granted the designation poputchik, but there was a thin line between "enemy" and "fellow traveler." Maxim Gorky, who had left the country and who was regarded with hostility by the proletarian writers, was classed as a fellow traveler. So was Mayakovsky, although one of Pravdas leading journalists, Lev Sosnovsky, denounced Mayakovsky in 1921 for having dared to take "our very old comrade Svortsov-Stepanov" to court because he had "refused in his capacity as director of the State Publishing House, Gosizdat, to pay royalties on some futurist nonsense published in a theatrical journal." The article concluded unequivocally, "So you want to fool around, Messieurs Futurists? We will see that your inappropriate and costly fooling comes to an end."²³⁵

This was not the first warning to the fellow travelers. They had been warned by the shooting of Gumilev, the death of Blok, and the deportation of many leading intellectuals from the country; and they had been threatened repeatedly with the "stern whip of the dictatorship" in newspaper and magazine articles. On February 27, 1922, the Orgburo passed a resolution "on the struggle against petit bourgeois ideology in the field of literature and publishing."²³⁶ This was the second Central Committee pronouncement on cultural questions. It indicated what should and should not be published. In particular it authorized the printing of works by a group of young writers who had formed the first literary association after the revolution, the Se- rapion Brothers, but only on the condition that "the latter do not contribute to any reactionary publications." Which publications were reactionary, of course, was decided solely by the party.

The danger to culture and free creative activity was first pointed out by Evgeny Zamyatin, who was also the first to disclose the real nature of the October revolution as the beginning of a new era. "We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses," he wrote in 1920. "We are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses."²³⁷ With the foresight of genius he wrote the novel We, in which he described the Only State, the state of the future, in which there is only one individual, the Benefactor, and in which the citizens are mere numbers. In this state, where the citizens' capacity to fantasize has been surgically removed so that they can become just like machines, the fate of literature, art, and culture is foreordained. "How is it possible," asks the hero of the novel, "that the ancients did not see as plain as day the total absurdity of their literature and poetry? The grand and majestic power of the written word was spent for nothing. It was simply ridiculous. Everyone wrote whatever came to mind."²³⁸ In Zamyatin's negative Utopia, literature is a branch of the civil service. Ten or fifteen years later Zamyatin's terrible prophecy became a reality. Today it seems like a commonplace, but in 1920 the idea of a "state literature" was an entirely new concept.

Zamyatin was the most consistent and fearless defender of creative free­dom. He issued his warning about the threat to culture not in We, whose publication was banned, but in an article entitled "I Am Afraid," in which he said,

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trust­worthy officials, but by madmen, misfits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics. But when a writer must be sensible and rigidly orthodox,... there can be no literature cast in bronze, there can be only a paper literature, a newspaper literature, which is read today and used for wrapping soap to­morrow. ²³⁹

Zamyatin was not alone. The painter Kazimir Malevich, one of the world's first abstract artists, insisted on the independence of the arts.

All social and economic relations do violence to art. ... Whether a portrait is being painted of some socialist or some emperor, whether a mansion is being built for a businessman or a humble dwelling for a worker—these differences cannot be taken as the starting point for art. ... It is about time we understood at last that the problems of art and the problems of the belly are extremely remote from one another.²⁴⁰

The old Russian writer Vikenty Veresaev also complained: "Our creative work is being done more and more on two levels—one that we write for ourselves, the other for publication."²⁴¹ Even Aleksandr Zharov, the bard of the Young Communist League, who was more devoted to the party than anyone, expressed regret: "I'm not allowed to sing sad songs. A mark would go against me on my party card."

By the the mid-1920s voices of protest became less frequent and more discreet. It was harder for them to break into print, but the voices praising the policies of the party and the shackling of literature grew louder and more triumphant. At his last public appearance, Alexander Blok, still very hesitantly, pointed to a phenomenon he found astonishing. He contrasted the youthful volubility of the radical critic Belinsky, who continued Push­kin's rebellious tradition in Russian literature, to the polite restraint of Chief of Gendarmes Count Benckendorff, who on behalf of Tsar Nicholas I helped harass Pushkin and drive him to his grave. Blok said that he always believed the Belinskys were totally opposed and totally hostile to the Benckendorffs and it would be terribly painful if that turned out not to be so.²⁴² But Blok was not mistaken. The Soviet Belinskys were turning into Soviet Benckendorffs, and although they did not have the polite voice of the chief of gendarmes, they outstripped him by far in the techniques of repression.

A leading Soviet literary critic of the early 1920s, Petr Kogan, declared:

For a long time to come the revolution must forget about the end for the sake of the means, must get rid of the dream of freedom so that discipline will not be weakened. A splendid yoke, not of gold but of steel, solid and organized—that is the new element the revolution has brought in for now. Instead of a yoke of gold a yoke of steel. Whoever does not understand that this is the only road to emancipation does not understand anything about current events.²⁴³

Kogan sang the glories of the yoke of steel in full seriousness, not knowing that Zamyatin had already predicted such things in his novel We. The Only State had launched a spaceship with the following assignment: "Your mis­sion is to subject to the beneficial yoke of reason all unknown beings in inhabiting other planets, beings perhaps still living in the wild state of freedom. If they fail to understand that we bring them mathematically infallible happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy."²⁴⁴ Petr Kogan is the same literary critic who noted with approval the "exceptional interest the imaginative literature of today is showing in the Cheka and the Chekists," that is, the security police agencies and their agents.²⁴⁵ 'The Chekist," Kogan said, "is a symbol of an almost inhuman decisiveness, a being who does not have the right to normal human feelings, such as pity, love, and doubt. He is an instrument of steel in the hands of history."²⁴⁶ With this instrument of steel a party could carry out its historical task— forcing people to be happy.

The year 1925, which was marked by the death of another writer, the suicide of Sergei Esenin, was the high point of the NEP in culture as well as politics and economics. Through the force of inertia the powerful wave of innovation in the arts begun at the turn of the century continued. Besides that, social cataclysms have always been fertile ground for literature, and it would be difficult to imagine greater cataclysms than the combination of war and revolution from 1914 to 1922. Another factor favorable to the arts was the internal dispute in the party, which occupied the attention of the leaders and diverted them from working out a single clear line for bringing culture to heel.

The conjunction of all these factors created opportunities for development in the figurative arts, theater, the cinema, and literature that were never to occur again. The experiments in form, language, and subject matter of the writers Andrei Bely and Velemir Khlebnikov and the renovation of the literary language carried out by Remizov and Zamyatin, in combination with numerous topics not dealt with before in literature, produced such remarkable prose writers as Boris Pilnyak, Isaac Babel, and Vsevolod Ivanov, and such poets as Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pas­ternak, and Marina Tsvetaeva. In the theater this was the age of Meyerhold, the herald of an October-style revolution in the theater; Tairov, the pro­ponent of what he called chamber theater; and Forreger, the film experi­mentalist, and his prot6ge, Sergei Eisenstein. Likewise, Lev Kuleshov and Dziga Vertov created a new kind of poetics for a new medium, the cinema.

After 1925 Stalin's position as top leader of the party was no longer in doubt. More attention was now paid to literature, and a general line was proclaimed in cultural matters. In February 1925 the Moscow Committee of the party called a conference to take up the question of the intelligentsia. This was the last occasion on which members of the intelligentsia were able to express their views publicly and have an exchange of opinion with the party leadership. Lunacharsky and Bukharin represented the party, and the intelligentsia was represented by Academician Pavel Sakulin, a re­nowned literary historian, and Yuri Klyuchnikov, a writer and supporter of the changing landmarks point of view. The fate of the intelligentsia and freedom of thought were the topic for discussion. Lunacharsky presented the main report and indicated that the party had "no fixed and final, indisputable, ready-made opinion on the fate of the intelligentsia."²⁴⁷ The party had a goal, "to persuade or to force" the intelligentsia to work with the proletariat. Lunacharsky quoted Lenin, "If persuasion does not work, force must be used."²⁴⁸

Academician Sakulin responded first of all that the better part of the Russian intelligentsia could never regard the revolution as alien because the intelligentsia itself had "nurtured the dream of political freedom and social equality."²⁴⁹ Secondly, he hoped that "during the time when war communism was dominant, before it was terminated by the course of events, the position of the intelligentsia was very difficult."²⁵⁰ By this he did not mean their material situation but the ideological and methodological dic­tatorship which the Central Committee had proclaimed over education and scientific research.²⁵¹ Addressing the party and the government, Sakulin then presented the main demand of those intellectuals who wanted to work with the revolutionary authorities: 'There should be no claim to a monopoly on the truth. ... The essence of the truth is that it requires freedom in education and research, and competing schools of scientific thought."²⁵²

Klyuchnikov presented a different position, the changing landmarks view: "Since the Soviet government is fighting for its ideals under conditions of tremendously hostile encirclement and since it can transform ruined Russia into a mighty power only if its ideals are victorious," the intellectual outside the party has "no alternative but to recognize that his fate must be to submit."²⁵³ Klyuchnikov contended that for the intellectual to do creative work he must be placed in an appropriate environment enabling him to be creative. But political freedom was not necessary. 'To give that to us intellectuals outside the party, even those who are marching firmly in step with the Soviet authorities, would be dangerous. We would just shoot off our mouths."²⁵⁴ The stenographic record at this point records applause. The intellectuals present in the great hall of the Moscow Conservatory apparently agreed that they would all just shoot off their mouths if they were given political freedom.

Bukharin's speech at this conference showed that the Soviet government had no intention of granting any freedom. The man whom Lenin had called the "favorite of the party" and who at that time was acting as chief theorist for the Stalinist majority, was frank and open. "Freedom in education is a

sophism," he said.²⁵⁵ Such categories as the people, good, and freedom were mere verbal badges, empty shells.²⁵⁶ The party had come to power "by marching over corpses. For this it had to have not only nerves of steel but also a knowledge of the road history had marked out for us, based on Marxist analysis."²⁵⁷ The party's victory had confirmed the accuracy and correctness of Marxist ideology. The party would not renounce the hegemony of Marxism because "it is the most powerful weapon in our hands, allowing us to build what we want."²⁵⁸ "In particular," Bukharin declared, "it is essential to us that intellectual cadres be trained in an ideologically precise way. Yes, we will produce standardized intellectuals, produce them as though in a factory."²⁵⁹

A few months after this conference the Central Committee's press de­partment held a conference on party policies in regard to literature. Thus the Central Committee was proceeding from a definition of the general line to a specific application of its policy toward the most important section of the intelligentsia, the writers.

There was no single, unified point of view. The proletarian writers, who had formed the so-called October Group and had published the magazine On Guard since 1923, called for a big stick policy in relation to the fellow travelers. The fellow travelers were mainly published in a magazine called Red Virgin Soil (Krasnaya nov), run by the Old Bolshevik Aleksandr Vo- ronsky. It was revealed by Vardin, a leader of the On Guard group, that "in 1921 Comrade Voronsky was given certain directives and certain re­sources in order to keep a certain group of writers in Soviet Russia. ... At the time we had to be careful that the Pilnyaks would not defect to the Whites."²⁶⁰ Voronsky's view was that since proletarian literature did not exist, the party had to give the fellow travelers "a moral working-over," to paraphrase Lenin. This line had Trotsky's support as well. He did not think proletarian literature would have time to come into existence because the period of proletarian dictatorship would be too short. Bukharin on the other hand upheld the theory of socialism in one country and favored the de­velopment of proletarian literature. He believed it was necessary to reed­ucate some of the fellow travelers and get rid of the others.

At the Central Committee conference of July 1925 two different policies were advanced. Voronsky proposed that the party abstain from adopting the viewpoint of any one literary current and instead aid all the revolutionary groupings while prudently seeking to orient them. Vardin proposed that the party install the dictatorship of the party in literature and that the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) be the instrument of that dic­tatorship. As to the fellow travelers, he favored the establishment of a "literary Cheka." A letter signed by thirty-seven prominent Soviet writers

was read to the conference. Among the signers were Aleksei Tolstoy, Isaac Babel, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Sergei Esenin. The writers spoke of their close ties with post-October Soviet Russia, confessed their own errors, but at the same time complained about the attacks upon them by the On Guard group, which was presenting its views as though they were the views of the party as a whole. This letter was a totally new phenomenon. Writers were asking the party for protection, addressing it as a supreme arbiter.

The resolution of the Central Committee combined both points of view on how to control literature. Everyone agreed on the main thing, that it was up to the party to identify without fail the "social and class essence of all literary currents" and to exercise its authority over them.²⁶¹ The only disagreement was over what kind of sauce to cook the fellow travelers in.

The majority of Soviet writers who felt that they were suffering under the tutelage of the On Guard group accepted the Central Committee res­olution as a charter of liberties for the writer. Only a few understood its real meaning. Pasternak commented that the country was not going through a cultural revolution but a "cultural reaction."²⁶² Osip Mandelstam, as his widow Nadezhda tells us in her memoir Hope Against Hope, understood that the noose would be tightened more and more around the neck of literature. There were even some who found the idea of a "literary Cheka" entrancing. Mayakovsky spoke on October 2, 1926, during a discussion on the Soviet government's theatrical policy. He called for legal reprisals against Mikhail Bulgakov for his play The Days of the Turbins, which depicted the Whites rather favorably. It had been staged by the Moscow Art Theater. "Accidentally, and to the great joy of the bourgeois, we gave Bulgakov a chance to whine and squeal—and whine he did, but we won't let him again."²⁶³ Mayakovsky totally identified himself with those who would decide whether or not to allow writers to whine and squeal. The former rebel poet had become a hunter of heretics.

After the Central Committee resolution, power in the fields of literature, art, and theater gradually passed into the hands of the On Guard group, to those who were commonly called "the frenzied zealots."

CHAPTER

—4

IN PURSUIT OF CONFLICT, 1926-1928

THE DEATH OF NEP

Historians disagree on exactly when the NEP ended, but it began to die out in late 1926. The "grain procurement crises" of 1927 and 1928—sharp reductions in peasant deliveries of grain to the state—were the visible symptoms of NEP's mortal illness. But sooner or later, one way or another, the NEP was doomed. The Soviet system was not suited to, indeed had not been created for, the resolution of problems through normal, traditional methods under peaceful conditions.

The system had been created by a revolution to carry out a "great leap forward" into Utopia. Under Lenin, during the civil war, primitive but effective forms of government had been worked out: intimidation, open terror, and rule by decree. But they were effective only under crisis con­ditions. Crisis alone permitted the authorities to demand—and obtain— total submission and all necessary sacrifices from its citizens. The system needed sacrifices and sacrificial victims for the good of the cause and the happiness of future generations. Crises enabled the system in this way to build a bridge from the fictional world of Utopian programs to the world of reality.

In the second half of 1926, the NEP began gasping for breath. The 201

restoration of the economy had, for the most part, been accomplished. It became necessary at that point to decide what direction further economic development should take, especially in regard to heavy industry. Bukharin's program, embodied in the slogan, "Enrich yourselves," represented a peaceful, traditional model of development.

During the NEP years N. Valentinov (whose real name was Nikolai Volsky) edited the Commercial-Industrial Gazette, organ of the Supreme Economic Council, the VSNKH. A Bolshevik until 1905, then a Men- shevik, Valentinov-Volsky knew Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders well. In his opinion the "right-wing Communists were following a program parallel to Stolypin's."¹ In other words, Bukharin's program, supported by Stalin in 1925, was similar to the Stolypin land reform, with the difference that Nicholas II's prime minister believed in the permanence of his reform, whereas the 1925 program only temporarily sanctioned private farming on nationalized land.

Bukharin's program had a positive impact on agriculture. As Valentinov- Volsky put it, 'The year 1925 and the first half of 1926 were indeed happy times for the peasantry."² But this period can be called happy only in relative terms: it was better than the preceding one and immeasurably better than the one that followed. Even in this "happy" period the peasants were squeezed by taxes and uncertain what the future would bring. On an income of 250 rubles, a peasant paid as much in taxes as a small busi­nessman or merchant paid on 1,200 rubles or a worker on 3,800.³ For 16.4 kilos of rye in 1913 a peasant could buy 5.48 meters of cloth; for the same amount of rye in June—July 1927 he could buy only 2.55 meters of cloth. The corresponding figures for malt were 103 and 61.9; for sugar, 8.24 and 3.93 pounds.⁴

Still, the peasants were much better off than the workers. Unemployment was increasing, but wages were not. "Nine years after the October revolution the workers in the main branches of our industry do not even dare to dream of their prewar wages."⁵ Discontent over a policy that allowed the peasants to live better than the workers was quite natural. Among rank-and-file party members and lower-level party officials nostalgia for the lost paradise of war communism was felt more and more strongly. "Once there were some brothers named Wright," recalls the hero (one of a group of "the last real Communists," who have gathered in a cave) of "Mahogany," a story by Boris Pilnyak. 'These brothers decided to fly into the sky, and they per­ished, smashed to the ground, after falling from the sky. ... Comrade Lenin has perished, like the Wright brothers. ... What kind of ideas he had no one remembers any more, comrades, except us." Such was the lament of a "Communist called up under war communism, demobilized in 1921. "⁶

In 1928 Artem Vesely published a "demi-short story" called 'The Bare­foot Truth." Some Communists from the Kuban, heroes of the civil war, were writing a letter of complaint to their former commander, Mikhail Vasilievich: "The truth must be spoken plainly—there's more bad in our life than good." They complained of their poverty and the scornful attitude of the Soviet authorities, the bureacratic apparatus, toward them. "The old saying isn't wrong," the veterans complained, bitterly recalled their wartime exploits against the Whites. "As long as the watchdog barked, he was needed. When he got old, he was chased away." They asked a key question: "What did we fight for, Mikhail Vasilievich? For government bureaus or workers' committees?"⁷ The heroes of Vesely's story were not the only ones asking this question or voicing these complaints, as is shown by the fact that the party's Central Committee passed a special resolution on May 8, 1929—the first of its kind—"sharply reprimanding" the editors of the magazine Molodaya gvardiya (Young guard) for publishing "The Barefoot Truth," "a one-sided, tendentious depiction of Soviet reality, essentially a caricature that is objectively beneficial only to our enemies."⁸ For the heroes of 'The Barefoot Truth" the main source of misfortune, the death of the revolution, lay in the fact that "committees were replaced by bu­reaus"—that is, by the bureaucratic apparatus.

The Soviet apparatus—in the government, the state economy, and the party—never stopped growing. By 1928 functionaries numbered 4 million. But this gigantic apparatus, controlled from the center, was incapable of administering the country under normal conditions. "A big fuss is made about the apparatus," wrote Demyan Bedny, the leading "proletarian" poet, in its defense. "But it has to make a devilish effort to get the proletarian steamshhip moving." What's more, this steamship was "towing behind it a huge barge, the peasantry, which is reluctant, sluggish, and intractable."⁹ In fact, the apparatus itself was sluggish and incapable of independent action, consisting as it did of two incompatible elements: unskilled, often illiterate Communist leaders; and the civil servants under them, who trem­bled with fear—a fear the leaders cultivated perennially and systematically.

The only efficient organ of Soviet power was the Cheka-GPU. Whenever something had to be done quickly an "extraordinary commission" was created. This combination of words—it was assumed—could produce re­sults just by itself. For example, Mikoyan relates that in December 1922, when it was necessary to obtain boots and warm clothing, the Council of Labor and Defense established an extraordinary commission for the pro­curement of felt boots (valenki), bast shoes (lapti), and sheepskin coats (polushubki), abbreviated Chekvalap.¹⁰ When an extra effort had to be exerted and a special committee was set up for that purpose, Feliks Dzer- zhinsky, head of the Cheka-GPU, was invariably placed in charge. He directed the rail system, the aid program for homeless children, the Main Labor Committee, and the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Snowdrifts. When a mass society of Friends of the Soviet Cinema was organized, Dzerzhinsky was chosen its chairman.¹¹ Again, in 1924, when the Society for the Study of Interplanetary Communications was founded, the head of the GPU was not forgotten.¹² This was how they carried out the will of Lenin, who proclaimed that "the Cheka must become an in­strument of discipline such as we succeeded in creating in the Red Army."¹³ On January 31, 1924, Dzerzhinsky was nominated chairman of the Supreme Economic Council, the VSNKH, the body that directed the Soviet economy. "Dzerzhinsky brought the GPU apparatus closer than ever to the tasks of economic construction," his biographer tells us.¹⁴ Valentinov- Volsky, in his memoirs about work at the Vesenkha, portrays Dzerzhinsky as a calm, sober-minded director. The quality that Valentinov valued most in the head of the GPU at the Vesenkha was Dzerzinsky's awareness that he should not frighten those who worked under him. After his death in July 1926 the functionaries at Vesenkha sincerely mourned him. "What a shame that Dzerzhinsky's gone. It was easy to work with him. He appreciated and defended us specialists. Under him we could sleep in peace without fear that the Black Maria would come for us."¹⁵ These lamentations effec­tively convey the atmosphere in the "peaceful years" of the NEP. Dzer­zhinsky's reasonableness was akin to that of the intelligent slavemaster, who knows that slaves represent material value. Nevertheless, the head of the GPU made clear where he stood: "I was named to the Supreme Economic Council. ... I introduced the principle of planning with an iron hand. Some people know very well that I have a very heavy hand which can strike strong blows. I will not permit work to be done as it has been up to now, that is, anarchically."¹⁶

The most important characteristic of the system of rule created by the Communist party was that all problems were considered solely from the point of view of political utility. This applied to the economy as much as to other problems. In the latter part of the NEP the handling of economic problems, as with all questions of "the general line," ran into difficulties that had not existed during war communism, when Lenin's authority swept all disagreements or objections aside, difficulties that would not exist after 1929 either, when Stalin's power would likewise sweep all objections aside.

The difficulties in 1926—1927 consisted mainly in the fact that the United Opposition existed. Trotsky was easily beaten, but his slogans and his criticism of Stalin and Bukharin as "defenders of the kulaks" found an echo in the party, among those who were asking, "Is this what we fought

for?"—among those who remembered the ideals of communism, among workers discontented with their conditions, and among the almost 2 million unemployed.¹⁷ Trotsky's criticisms were reinforced when his former op­ponents Zinoviev and Kamenev joined him. The oppositionists, although excluded from the party apparatus, were still able to air their views in the "Discussion Bulletin" supplement to Pravda, published from time to time during precongress discussions, and to circulate them privately in manu­script form by the method later called samizdat. Within the party it was known not only that Ustryalov praised the policies of Stalin and Bukharin but also that the Mensheviks criticized them sharply from a Marxist view­point, on the grounds that they were leading the country not to communism but "from the old landlord-capitalist economy to a new peasant-capitalist economy."¹⁸

During the entire period of internal struggle in the party only once was a totally new idea proposed. A worker named Yakov Ossovsky, a Communist since 1918, proposed the formation of a second party in the Soviet Union, the creation of a two-party system. As an orthodox Marxist, he believed that the presence of two economic sectors (one private, the other state) made two parties necessary: "As long as we hold to the principle that ours is the only party and that it requires absolute unity," Ossovsky wrote, "a free exchange of opinions in our organizations and party press is not per­mitted, despite the fact that within the party a difference of opinion does exist, owing to the diversity in the economy."¹⁹ Ossovsky was censured by the Central Control Commission and expelled from the party.²⁰ Bukharin declared that open discussion, such as Ossovsky proposed, was imper­missible "because it would shake the very foundations of the proletarian dictatorship, the unity of our party and its dominant position in our country, because it would bring grist to the mill of the groups and splinter groups that are yearning for political democracy."²¹ Even the oppositionists con­demned Ossovsky's proposal. There had never been two parties in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, in the years 1923—1928, the views of the opposition did have an effect on the "general line."

In the fall of 1926 the peasants sharply reduced the sale of grain and other products to the state. Ante Ciliga, a Yugoslav Communist who had arrived in Moscow in 1926 to represent his party, wrote in his memoirs: 'The autumn of 1927 was marked by an occurrence new to me: in the stores there was no meat, no cheese, no milk. Then there began to be interruptions in the sale of bread."²² The crisis in grain deliveries and the attendant difficulties in food supply were taken by Stalin as an occasion to strike a new blow at the opposition. In October 1927, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Central Committee. After their attempt to

organize a counterdemonstration on November 7, the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, they and dozens of others were expelled from the party.

Having driven the Opposition leaders out of the party, Stalin began to take over their program and follow their suggestions. To overcome the crisis he resorted to "extraordinary measures." Thirty thousand party members were sent into the countryside to wring grain out of the peasantry. Party leaders, too, traveled into the field. On January 15, 1928, Stalin left Moscow for the Urals and western Siberia. It was the last time he was to travel through the country in that way. Stalin issued some drastic orders to local party officials: in the case of peasants who refused to sell their grain, he told them, article 107 should be applied. This article (added to the Criminal Code in 1927) stipulated imprisonment for one year, with possible confis­cation of property, for anyone who "concealed goods." Poor peasants were invited to join in the search for hidden grain, with 25 percent of the confiscated grain to be distributed to them at a discount or on credit. Stalin's method of collecting grain, the so-called Urals-Siberia method, was extended to the entire country.

The peasants said, "1919 has returned." The roofs of peasant huts were torn off for insufficient deliveries. Military units were sent into the villages to search for hidden grain. It was officially declared that the kulak was to blame for everything. But not long before, Kalinin had written, 'The kulak is a bugbear, a ghost of the old world. This is not a social layer or a group, not even a handful. It's a matter of a few individuals, and they are dying out."²³ Rykov complained: "God only knows what we're doing. To please Trotsky, Pyatakov, and Zinoviev we use the term kulak for the genuine middle peasant who, entirely in accordance with the law, wants to be prosperous."²⁴ In July 1928 Stalin proudly told the Central Committee plenum: "We will press down and gradually squeeze the capitalist elements in the countryside, even if in some cases it brings them to ruin."²⁵

The situation in the Russian countryside at the end of the NEP was neatly summed up by Boris Pilnyak:

The peasants at that time were perplexed by the following problematical dilemma, completely incomprehensible to them. .. . Fifty percent of the peas­ants got up at three in the morning and went to bed at eleven at night, and everyone in the household worked without letup, from the smallest to the largest.... Their huts were in good shape, and so were their wagons. Their cattle were well fed and well cared for. They themselves were well fed and up to their ears in work. They conscientiously paid their tax in kind and other obligations to the state. But the authorities were afraid of them and con­sidered them enemies of the revolution, no more, no less. The other 50

percent of the peasants each had a hut open to the wind, one skinny cow, one mangy sheep, and that was all. ... The state exempted them from the tax in kind, reimbursed them for the cost of sowing, and regarded them as friends of the revolution. The "enemy" peasants maintained that 35 percent of the "friendlies" were drunks,... 5 percent were unlucky,... and 60 per­cent were good-for-nothings, windbags, philosophizers, goof-ofTs, stum- blebums, and clods. The village "enemies" were pressured in every way to become "friendlies," and thus lose the capacity to pay their taxes and let their homes get torn open by the wind.²⁶

Neither Pilnyak nor the peasants he described imagined what would be done to the peasants and their villages when the NEP was over.

On July 11, 1928, a secret meeting took place between Kamenev, rep­resenting the no longer united opposition, and Bukharin, leader of the "right wing." After collaborating with Stalin closely for several years, Bu­kharin suddenly informed Kamenev: "We consider Stalin's line disastrous for the revolution as a whole. ... Our differences with Stalin are many times more serious than all the differences we had with you." Suddenly Bukharin discovered that Stalin was "an unprincipled intriguer who subordinates everything to the preservation of his own power. He changes his theories depending on whom he wants to get rid of at any particular moment." Kamenev's notes of this conversation with Bukharin fell into the hands of the Trotskyists, who took perverse pleasure in publishing them in early 1929. For Stalin this was one more piece of ammunition in the battle he was undertaking against the right wing. He readily accepted support from the "left" in his struggle against the "right." Many former Left Opposi­tionists, who had been sent into internal exile or confined in special prisons for political opponents ("polit-isolators"), took this occasion to announce their capitulation, their agreement with Stalin's new policy, which they were convinced was actually their policy. According to Ciliga, Preobrazhensky's book on primitive socialist accumulation was reprinted, and Stalin even tried to win Preobrazhensky over. In response to doubts Preobrazhensky expressed, his suspicions that the Central Committee still favored right- wing policies, Stalin assured him: "If necessary, I shall have the entire Central Committee arrested, but I shall carry out the five-year plan."²⁷ The arrest of almost the entire Central Committee did not come about until 1935—1938. For the time being, Stalin merely deported Trotsky to Turkey in February 1929, after having him forcibly removed from Moscow on January 17, 1928, and confining him to Alma-Ata in Central Asia for a year.

Stalin officially announced the end of the NEP in December 1929, but as early as April 1928 he terminated "civil peace" as the prevailing con­dition. "We have internal enemies. We have external enemies. This, com­rades, must not be forgetten for one moment."²⁸ The Shakhty trial was the signal for the war against society to begin. In March 1928 the authorities announced the discovery of a "counterrevolutionary plot." Fifty-three en­gineers, technicians, and directors of the coal industry at the Shakhty mines in the Donbass (Donets basin) were arrested and accused of wrecking and espionage. A sensational six-week trial followed, from May to July, with still more revelations later in the year. This was the first in a series of "wreckers' trials" that went on into 1931. The word wrecker (vreditel) in fact became one of the most widely used terms in Soviet officialese.

The Shakhty trial was the first public show trial since that of the SRs in 1922. The respite of the NEP had intervened. Robert Conquest, author of the most complete history of the Great Terror (aside from Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago), suggests that the Shakhty affair was initiated by Evgeny Evdokimov, the GPU official in charge of the region where Shakhty was located.²⁹ Without discounting the individual initiative of Evdokimov, a former criminal who made a brilliant career in the "organs" during the civil war and who became one of Stalin's boon companions,³⁰ we may conclude that the Shakhty defendants were deliberately selected at a higher level.

Among the accused were three German engineers. In this way the Shakhty trial was designed to accomplish foreign policy aims as well as domestic ones. Moreover, it was a test model for the show trials to come. The defendants were accused of sabotage and spying for the benefit of a foreign power with whom relations at the moment were bad. Some of the defendants signed confessions, which constituted the main evidence against all of them. (Two of the Shakhty defendants never appeared in court, undoubtedly because they refused to sign or died under interrogation. Several disputed the charges presented by the prosecutor, Nikolai Krylenko.) The indignation of the Soviet people was aroused throughout the affair. Twenty years later George Orwell's 1984 described a state in which "two minutes of hatred" were held every day. Citizens would gather in front of television sets; the image of Goldstein, the enemy of the people, would appear on the screen, and everyone would hate him. In the Soviet Union in the 1920s there were no television sets. There were newspapers instead. The first experiment in organized hatred was carried out at Lenin's instigation in the SR trial. During the Shakhty trial, hatred was organized on a significantly broader scale.

An investigation took place in Ekaterinburg in the summer of 1920 into the murder of a group of "specialists," technicians working at the Egor- shinsky mines. The specialists had been killed by "local party comrades," who considered them counterrevolutionaries. Witnesses questioned by the court testified that they knew of no counterrevolutionary actions by the murdered technicians. The murderers were defended by N. V. Kommodov, who argued: "Healthy blood flows in their veins. They have experienced all the burdens of social inequality and have learned to hate their class enemies. It was this feeling that guided their actions."³¹

Eight years later an editorial in Pravda entitled, "A Class Trial," said: 'Today in the Hall of Columns at the House of Trade Unions before the Supreme Court of the USSR there appeared the constellation of 'heroes' of Shakhty. ... They were firmly guaranteed the deadly class hatred of the workers and toiling people of the whole world."³² Kommodov, who acted as attorney for one of the defendants, could find no convincing arguments for his client, in whose veins flowed the "diseased blood" of a specialist. The hate campaign whipped up by the press included a statement by the twelve-year-old son of one defendant, asking that his father be shot.

A new era had begun.

FOREIGN POLICY

The Treaty of Rapallo opened up a period of normal diplomatic relations with the capitalist world; 1924 became the year of the Soviet Republic's "recognition"—by Great Britain in February, followed by Italy, Norway, Austria, Greece, Sweden, China, Denmark, and in October, France. But Soviet foreign policy had two levels: traditional diplomatic relations on one level and, on the other, the activity of the Comintern. After hopes for a revolution in Germany were dashed, the principal task of the Communist parties was to support the foreign policy aims of the Soviet Republic. At the end of 1924, S. Medvedev and A. Shlyapnikov, representatives of the "workers' opposition," wrote in an open letter to the Baku Worker that the entire activity of the Comintern amounted to

artificially creating materially sick Comintern sections and supporting them at the expense of the masses of Russian workers, who had paid for their property with blood and sacrifices but who were unable to use it for them­selves under the present circumstances; in reality, hordes of petit bourgeois servants supported by Russian gold have been created."³³

While it may be true that the Comintern sections lived off of "Russian gold," it is difficult to agree that their only activity was to collect their pay. The Comintern sections actively, though blindly, carried out orders from Moscow. In cases where there was discontent with disobedient leaders, they were immediately replaced by obedient ones. The foreign Communist parties surrounded themselves with a cloud of pro-Communist mass orga­nizations, societies, and clubs that sympathized either secretly or openly with the party and mobilized world public opinion for the defense of the Soviet Union. The German Communist Willy Munzenberg became a master of the new methods of propaganda: he organized and directed the Inter­national Organization for Aid to Revolutionaries, the League of Struggle Against Imperialism, and a pro-Communist (that is to say, pro-Soviet) press group in Germany and conducted worldwide campaigns for the defense of the victims of capitalism (the German anarchist Max Hoelz, the Hungarian Communist Maty as Rakosi, and the American anarchists Sacco and Van- zetti).

Quite often the two levels of foreign policy functioned together and it was difficult to determine where one ended and the other began. Walter Krivitsky, who was head of the Soviet military intelligence network in Western Europe and who in 1937 refused to return to Moscow (where he knew he would be shot), recounts in his memoirs that in 1923, when the French occupied the Ruhr, the Soviet government expected a revolution at any moment. Krivitsky and five other officers were sent to Germany to create within the heart of the Communist party the core of the future German Red Army and the future German Cheka, as well as special detachments of propagandists whose mission it was to undermine morale in the bourgeois army and reserves.³⁴ By autumn 1924, the situation in Germany had sta­bilized itself, but Zinoviev, the chairman of the Comintern, declared that a revolutionary situation had arisen in Estonia. Berzin, head of military intelligence, received an order from Zinoviev to back up the revolution: sixty officers were sent immediately to Estonia. On December 1, 1924, a "revolution" broke out in Revel. The Soviet agents and local Communists received no support at all from the population, and the putsch ended in a bloodbath.³⁵

In the fall of 1927 Stalin (who by this time was directing the Comintern) was offended by the reproaches of the Trotskyists, who accused him of betraying the world revolution; he decided that a revolutionary situation had arisen in China. Stalin sent the German Communist Heinz Neumann and the Soviet Communist Besso Lominadze to Canton. In December 1927 Stalin's agents stirred up a rebellion in Canton that was immediately crushed. In Revel, more than 150 people were shot. In Canton, more than 5,000 were executed.

The lack of separation between traditional diplomatic activity and the innovative moves of the Comintern was indicated by the fact that quite often Soviet diplomatic representatives abroad were at the same time of­ficials of the Comintern. G. S. Agabekov, a top GPU official and a dip­lomatic resident in the Near East, related that "in 1926, the Soviet consul in Meshed (Persia) was also a representative of the Third International, just as in 1924^25 the Soviet plenipotentiary in Afghanistan (Stark) was also the Comintern's secret representative in Afghanistan and the northern provinces of India."³⁶

In the 1920s the Soviet Union concentrated its attention on three coun­tries: Germany, England, and China.

Excellent relations with Germany had developed in the realm of tradi­tional diplomacy; at the same time, the German Communist party gained support, while relations on a third level (economic) continued to develop and strengthen. Economic relations were not limited to trade; they also included the all-around technical aid that Germany accorded to the Soviet Union. More than 2,000 German engineers and technicians arrived in the Soviet Union after the signing of the Rapallo treaty.³⁷ They actively assisted in renewing Soviet industry. German—Soviet military cooperation was pro­vided for in a secret clause of the Rapallo treaty. The Treaty of Versailles prohibited the German army, 100,000 strong, from having modern arma­ments, particularly aircraft and tanks. By the middle of 1923, Junkers was able to build airplanes in Fili, near Moscow. In 1924 a center for training German pilots was opened in Lipetsk. Russian and German chemists ex­perimented together to produce poison gases. Krupp built artillery factories in Soviet Central Asia.³⁸ Reports of German—Soviet military collaboration were published in due course and denied by both Soviets and Germans, but they were fully confirmed by documents found in the German archives after World War II. Again the question arises, which of the two sides won in the process of this cooperation? General von Seeckt was able to rebuild the German army, getting around the Versailles treaty, and he was able to arm it with the latest weaponry, built and tested on Soviet territory. The Red Army certainly profited: military men received training in Germany, industry obtained modern technology. However, since Stalin eventually exterminated all the officers and generals who had been in Germany or had had dealings with German officers, it could be said that only the German side profited.

Robert Conquest suggests, not without reason, that at the time of the Shakhty trial, the inclusion of German engineers among the accused was explained by the fact that in 1927 German technical aid had become predominant and the number of German engineers and technicians had grown too great. It was decided to teach them a lesson. The Shakhty trial implicated three German engineers, but thirty-two others were arrested at the same time. The very number of those arrested indicates the numerical significance of German personnel in the Soviet Union. After the trial, the Soviet government turned to the Americans for technical aid. In mid-1929 the Soviet Union had technical agreements with twenty-seven German firms and fifteen American firms. By the end of 1929, forty American firms were cooperating with the Soviet Union.³⁹

After Great Britain's recognition of the Soviet Union, Anglo—Soviet re­lations were normalized, but Moscow regarded England as its principal adversary, particularly in Asia (Afghanistan and China). In 1924 the Soviet Union tried to take advantage of the fact that for the first time in British history the Labour party won at the polls. It was the newly formed Labour government that recognized the Soviet Union. An attempt was made to turn the British Communist party into a mass organization and to penetrate the trade unions. But in October 1924 the Labour party was defeated. One of the principal causes of this defeat was a document which the English press published as "Zinoviev's Secret Letter." The controversy surrounding the authenticity of this letter, which gave directives to English Communists, is still going on. Even if the letter was a fake, it contains nothing that Zinoviev could not have written. The directive that particularly roused the indignation of English public opinion (to conduct an operation to undermine the army) was one of the twenty-one conditions necessary for all Communist parties for admission to the Comintern. During the general strike in 1926, a collection was taken up in the Soviet Union for use by English strikers. An Anglo—Russian trade union committee was created.

The treaty with China, signed in 1924, provided for the preservation of the Soviet Union's rights to the Chinese Eastern Railway (the part of the main Trans-Siberian rail line, built by the tsarist government in 1903, that passed through Manchuria for a distance of 1,481 kilometers, with a 240- kilometer spur to Harbin) and for the Soviet Union to maintain a protectorate over Outer Mongolia, which had declared itself a people's republic. At the same time, the Soviet Union supplied aid to the Chinese nationalist party, the Kuomintang, led by Sun Yat-sen. Soviet military advisers, directed by Galen-Blyukher, were operating in China. The tiny Chinese Communist party, acting under orders from Moscow, joined the Kuomintang. Soviet policy in China became one of the major themes of the controversy between Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky insisted on the necessity of stirring up the revolutionary struggle in China, under the leadership of the Communist party; Stalin defended the policy of supporting the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek, who led the party after Sun Yat-sen's death. Stalin and Bukharin believed that the Kuomintang played an "objectively progressive role." Chiang cooperated with Moscow but did not want the Communists in his party. In 1926 the Communists were expelled from the Kuomintang and arrested. In April 1927 Chiang Kai-shek organized a massacre of Com­munists in Shanghai. Soon after, Stalin, hoping to exonerate himself, sent Neumann and Lominadze to Canton. He termed the failure of the Cantonese insurrection a "victorious rear-guard battle."

The Soviet Union's foreign policy for this period was guided by three central precepts: (1) the Soviet Union was the most important factor of world revolution and thus its strengthening, combined with an equivalent strengthening of the world revolutionary movement for the sake of Soviet interests, was the revolutionary task of Communist parties in other coun­tries; (2) conflict between the Soviet Union and the capitalist countries was inevitable, and the revolutionary movement in the capitalist countries was a reserve force that could help Moscow; (3) the nature of capitalist countries was such that subversive revolutionary activity conducted against them did not exclude the possibility of carrying on normal diplomatic and trade relations with them.

The full extent of Western economic and technological aid to the Soviet Union will not be known until the Soviet archives are opened up. The Western firms that collaborated with Moscow have concealed the information almost as carefully as their Soviet partners. Nevertheless, the American historian Anthony Sutton has come to the conclusion, on the basis of German and English archives, that 95 percent of Soviet industrial enterprises re­ceived Western aid in the form of machines, technology, and direct technical aid.⁴⁰

The Soviet Union made skillful use of the competition among capitalist firms. "In the realm of technical assistance," wrote Economicheskaya zhizn (Economic life), "we have neither an English, nor a German, nor an Amer­ican orientation. We maintain a Soviet orientation. ... When we need to modernize our oil, automobile or tractor industries, we turn to the United States because it is the leading country in these industries. When we speak about chemistry, we approach Germany."⁴¹ It was also able to turn for help to Germany, England, and the United States, even though Germany and England recognized the Soviet Union in 1924, while U.S. recognition did not come until 1933. The capitalist firms, who were competing bitterly with each other, rushed to offer their services: they gained concessions, supplied the latest equipment and technology, sent engineers and technicians, and took on Soviet trainees. The myth about a "blockade," "economic isolation," and the hostile attitude of the capitalist "sharks" toward "the socialist homeland" falls apart in the face of the facts. In the 1920s only aid from the West permitted the Soviet authorities to restore the economy rapidly, including transportation, all branches of industry, and the extraction of useful minerals. This aid was given in spite of the Soviet government's policy, which put all sorts of obstacles in the way of the capitalist firms and ended the concessions as soon as Soviet specialists had assimilated Western technology. The capitalist firms were always in a weak position; they had never before encountered a partner as powerful as a government, and they were thirsty for profits. Along with the Comintern and pro-Com­munist organizations, these firms played the role of organizers of public opinion in favor of the Soviet Union. When Standard Oil decided to build an oil refinery in Batum, a top public relations expert was sent to persuade public opinion that a socialist country was a state like any other. Without knowing a word of Russian, this representative of Rockefeller's knew every­thing after several days: The Russians (he always talked about the Russians, not the Soviets) are okay! That's why the United States ought to recognize the Soviet Union and extend credit to it.⁴²

One of the important factors in the development of Soviet—capitalist relations was the activity of certain individual foreigners. First in line is Armand Hammer, son of Dr. Julius Hammer, one of the founders of the American Communist party. Young Armand Hammer arrived in Moscow in 1921 with a recommendation from Martens, the unofficial Soviet trade representative in the United States. He had brought with him a freightcar full of drugs and medicines as a gift to the Soviet government. He met with Lenin, who was drawn to the enterprising young American. Lenin advised him to assume management of the Alapaevsky asbestos mines on a con­cessionary basis, and he personally organized the immediate formation of this concession, which ordinarily would have taken months. Hammer did not limit himself to the first million he earned from the asbestos concession. Until 1930 he lived with several members of his family (his wife, mother, brothers, and uncle) in Moscow. Hundreds of pages, the best of which are by Mikhail Bulgakov, have been written about the housing crisis in Moscow. Hammer rented a twenty-four-room house in Moscow and converted it into the unofficial embassy of the United States. He took out a concession on the production of pencils and pens. In 1926 his factory produced 100 million pencils and made enormous profits, which he used to buy Russian works of art. Unlike all the other concessionaires, Hammer was able to convert his revenues to dollars. His example was infectious. He served as an intermediary in the conclusion of an agreement between the Soviet government and Henry Ford, an ardent enemy of the Communists. The American Consolidated Company (50 percent of the capital was Hammer's; the other 50 percent was the Soviet government's) conducted the affairs of "three dozen American firms" trading with the Soviet Union.⁴³ The phe­nomenal successes of Armand Hammer, who made millions in the Soviet Union, could not fail to entice other capitalists.

The most convincing proof of the nonexistence of "aggressive capitalist plans" was the fact that the Red Army, which in 1929 numbered 1.2 million men, was equipped with prewar Russian and foreign armaments. Soviet industry was still in no condition to produce the necessary weaponry, so it was supplied by the Germans, English, Americans, and French: for ex­ample, heavy machine guns, like the Maxim and Colt; light machine guns, like the Browning and Lewis; artillery on a par with the American 76-inch howitzer; and Renault tanks, built in Fili with the help of the Germans.

The first five-year plan was not implemented until after the contracts on plant construction and technical aid were signed with the Western firms.

Soviet foreign policy successes on the third, economic level, however much they were concealed and disclaimed, did not impede the "pursuit of conflict" on the first two levels. The crisis in Anglo—Soviet relations, brought on by the meddling of Soviet trade unions ("independent from the state") in English affairs during the general strike of 1926, led, after a raid by London police on Soviet trade offices, to a break in diplomatic relations which lasted from 1927 to 1929. Also in 1927, France demanded the recall of Soviet Ambassador Rakovsky, a Trotskyist who had declared in a letter to the Central Committee that in the event of war with the imperialists he would urge the soldiers of the imperialist armies to desert. The French considered such promises incompatible with diplomatic status. Meanwhile, a Russian emigre assassinated the Soviet ambassador to Warsaw, Voikov, who had taken part in the murder of the tsar's family in 1918, and in December the putsch in Canton, conceived by Stalin, ended in defeat.

The Soviet government presented all these separate events as elements in a single plot that was sure to end in an inevitable—and imminent— war: an attack by imperialist forces. This episode in history comes under the heading, "The 1927 War Scare." Historians still debate whether or not the Soviet leaders, primarily Stalin, actually believed in the inevitability of an attack on the Soviet Union. After all, 1927 was the calmest year in the world since the end of World War I. Economic relations with the West were developing. But the "war scare" gave Stalin an additional argument to use in favor of the rapid liquidation of the Opposition, which was un­dermining unity in the face of imperialist intervention. In 1929, Chicherin, who was nominally still deputy commissar of foreign affairs but who in fact had been removed from things for a long time, made a frank disclosure to the American journalist Louis Fischer, whom he met in Wiesbaden while receiving treatment: "In June 1927 I returned from Western Europe. Every­one in Moscow was talking about war. I did my best to dissuade them: 'No one is planning to attack us,' I insisted. Then I was enlightened by a colleague. He told me: 'Hush, we know that. But we need this for the struggle against Trotsky.'"⁴⁴

The Sixth Congress of the Comintern, which gathered in Moscow in July 1928, decided on a new policy line for the second level of Soviet foreign policy. (This turned out to be the Comintern's next-to-last congress. The last would meet in 1934, and in 1943 Stalin would dissolve the Third International by a stroke of the pen.) The sessions of the Sixth Congress were not held in the Kremlin, as before, but in the House of Trade Unions. The Congress stressed the need to strengthen discipline within the Com­munist parties, to subordinate local interests to the interests of the inter­national Communist movement—that is, to Moscow—and to comply unconditionally with all Comintern decisions. According to the old Bol­shevik tradition, the new line provided an opponent: the "rightist" Bu­kharin, who was opposing the extremely left-wing Trotskyist line, then being supported by Stalin. The Communist parties received a directive to regard the socialist parties, labeled "social fascists," as the principal en­emy. Marxist scientific analysis enabled Stalin to conclude that the West had entered a period of world stabilization; therefore the task of the Com­munists was to tear the working class away from the influence of the "social fascists." Then, when the epoch of crises and wars arrived, which was inevitable in view of the growing contradictions among the principal cap­italist countries, particularly between England and the United States, the Communists would be able to try to seize power.

In January 1928 Trotsky and his comrades addressed a letter to the Comintern complaining of the repression they were under. They admitted that repression can play an extremely positive role if it supports a just line and contributes to the liquidation of reactionary groups. The Trotskyists stressed that, as Bolsheviks, they were quite familiar with the use of repres­sion and had repeatedly used repressive measures themselves against the bourgeoisie, the Mensheviks, and so on. They declared that even in the future they had no intention at all of renouncing repression against the enemies of the proletariat. They believed only that the use of repression against them was unjust and that repression against Bolsheviks had always been ineffective. For he who supports a political line that is just will be victorious.

This Trotskyist logic was brilliantly confirmed by Stalin's victory in all his endeavors and Trotsky's defeat. Trotsky must have taken some conso­lation, however, in the fact that Stalin had adopted his line.

THE DAWN OF A NEW CIVILIZATION

In 1928 the "rusty times" came to an end. After the Shakhty trial, which culminated in five executions, things got redder and redder.

During the years of the NEP the worst of the war-inflicted wounds were healed, the economy was restored despite the many difficulties, and life assumed a semblance of normality. But these accomplishments were paid for dearly. The population lived in uncertainty, fearful of breaking the law, afraid of what was to come. Paradoxically, those who were considered the victors (the workers) lived in poverty, although without fear, while those who knew they were the vanquished (the middle peasants, Nepmen, in­tellectuals) enjoyed material comfort, but lived in fear.

Existence under the NEP was measured by various yardsticks. On the one hand, the party knew what the ultimate goal was, but its leaders were locked in bitter internecine warfare over the right to lead the country to that goal by each leader's "only correct path." Meanwhile, on another level, the United States became a universal model and object of adoration. Stalin spoke of combining "American efficiency with Russian revolutionary scope." Aleksei Gastev, a proletarian poet and founder of the League of Time, issued this call: "Let us take the hurricane of revolution, the USSR; add the pulse of America; and we will do the job as steadily as a chronometer." Lev Sosnovsky, a writer for Pravda and a Left Oppositionist, announced a search for "Russian Americans," people who would know "how to work with a rhythm, an ardor, and a doggedness, the likes of which old Russia never knew." The peasant poet Petr Oreshin exclaimed: "And every rural cottage dreams a wondrous dream—a New York of steel." The writer N. Smirnov turned out a popular novel, Jack Vosmerkin the American, about a Russian-American who returned to his homeland to transplant American know-how onto Soviet Russian soil. The peasants of the village where Jack Vosmerkin settled regarded him with hostility, not only because the peasant is a backward type but also because as soon as the peasant begins to apply progressive methods—however admirably American they are—he begins to grow rich. And immediately becomes an enemy of the Soviet government.

Although life seemed to be returning to normal, a mounting antireligious campaign was cause for concern. For example, a peculiar hybrid—the "Red" church service, along with "Red" baptisms and "Red" Easters— was introduced. Non-Christian names were recommended. The civil registry offices hung up lists with such suggestions for girls' names as Atlantide, Brunhilda, Industriya, Octobrina, Februarida, Idea, Kommuna, and May- ina, and for boys, Chervonets, Spartak (Spartacus), Textile, Styag (Banner), and Plamenny Vladilen ("Fiery Vladimir Lenin"). On the back page of Izvestia a certain Demyan Kasyanovich Mironov announced he was changing his name to Dekamiron. In the rural areas, however, most marriages were still held in churches and children's names were chosen from the Christian calendar of saints.

Schools were expected to wither away, along with the family, but a German historian visiting the Soviet Union made this observation: "The Bolsheviks have organized public education in such a way that no one can exceed the limits of the officially authorized level of knowledge and education, so that the proletarian state will not be threatened by a superfluous exchange of information which would transform the citizens into 'subversive ele­ments.'"⁴⁵ The American writer Theodore Dreiser, who spent seventy-seven days in the Soviet Union in 1927, said much the same thing to Bukharin: "You take a child and you drum limited concepts into his head. He does not know anything more than what you teach him, and he will never know anything—you just watch. The success of your revolution, then, depends on the education of the children, does it not? 'In part, yes,' agreed Bu­kharin."⁴⁶

From 1921 to 1928 Soviet literature flourished, but a peculiar kind of writer, unknown before then, appeared on the scene. It seemed that Bu­kharin's idea of standardizing the intellectuals, turning them out "as though from a factory," was being taken literally. Writers became increasingly aware that the traditional calling of Russian literature, the defense of the humble and the abandoned, did not correspond to the new reality. The writers themselves began to plead with the authorities, as Ilya Selvinsky did: "Comrade! ... Do our thinking for us, switch on our nerves, and get us going, just like a factory." Mayakovsky declared a fait accompli: "I feel I'm a Soviet factory." To the population, Stalin was still a chief like any other, much less famous than Trotsky. But having taken the party apparatus in hand long before and having involved himself more and more in the economy and foreign affairs, he began to express his views on literature as well. This took the form at first of personal letters, but these were circulated in all literary, editorial, and censorship circles and were looked upon as directives. For example, Sholokhov, whom a number of "proletar­ian" writers accused of being a plagiarist and a champion of the White Cossacks, was declared by Stalin to be an "illustrious writer of our time."⁴⁷

Revolutionary slogans were still alive, as were hopes for a world revo­lution, the advent of a classless society, and the withering away of the state once all class enemies had been defeated. But the newspapers dealt with more mundane topics as well. They made much of the search for the mysterious Tungus meteorite by the courageous Soviet geologist Leonid

Kulik. Universal attention was paid to the daring Arctic explorations of the Norwegian Amundsen and the Italian Nobile, but of course the Soviet Arctic explorers on the icebreaker Krasin and the Soviet Arctic fliers who saved them from certain death on the polar ice received the most attention of all. These were the first Soviet heroes not connected with war or revolution.

Soviet justice came into being as a form of revolutionary class justice. It was not ashamed of terror, for it was clearing the way for a better future. In a separate room of the Moscow Museum of the Revolution, relics of tsarist "hard labor" were assembled, including instruments of torture and models of the torture chambers. "Prisons have existed and still exist," Bukharin explained, "and a system of coercion exists, but these are directed at new and different goals." "We have merely turned the concept of 'freedom' inside out," he added.⁴⁸ He meant that freedom had been for landowners and capitalists, but now it was for workers and peasants. But according to official data, no less than 40 percent of the Soviet prison population was made up of workers and peasants, and their numbers continued to increase. A simple comparison of the figures shows that ten years after the revolution the number of those in Soviet prisons exceeded the largest number of prisoners at any time in the tsarist era. In 1925, 144,000 persons were serving sentences in Soviet prisons; in 1926, the figure was 149,000; and in 1927, 185,000.⁴⁹ In 1912 the population of the tsarist prisons was 183,864. Then the number dropped steadily, reaching 142,399 in 1916.⁵⁰ The population of Soviet prisons and camps would later grow at rates no one could have imagined.

Lenin's indignant words were to come true:

Scarcely at any time in the past has there been such a degree of overcrowding of prisoners: they have been placed in fortresses and in castles as well as prisons and given special accommodations at police stations. Even private homes and apartments have been temporarily converted into prisons. There is no place to accommodate all those who have been seized, no way of sending the exiles to Siberia in the usual "transports" without organizing special convoy forces.⁵¹

Lenin's indignation over the inhumanity of the tsarist regime was ex­pressed in 1902, when there were 89,889 people in prisons.

After the October revolution prisons were abolished. They became known as houses of detention. Convict labor (katorga) was eliminated until 1943: it was replaced by the "corrective labor camp." Even the word punishment was struck from the law dictionary and replaced by the expression "mea­sures of social defense." And there was no punishment: people who broke revolutionary law were to be annihilated, isolated, or, in the case of "socially friendly" workers and peasants influenced by "survivals of the accursed past," reeducated. Advanced Western methods were used for "reeduca­tion." Political prisoners (members of other socialist parties or Communist oppositionists) enjoyed almost the same rights they had had under the tsars. Marxist legal experts spoke of the impending "withering away" of the law, which would lead to the "liquidation" of the system of coercion, prisons, and so forth.

After 1926 the GPU's prerogatives began to expand. Quite a few hopes were aroused by the disappearance of the Cheka. The GPU, reported one German traveler, "is more refined and elegant than the Cheka. Its agents are extremely courteous, charming, and obliging; they wish to erase the memory of the Cheka."⁵² Foreigners who came to know the "work of the GPU" directly, as clients of that institution, had a different opinion. One of the first foreign accounts of the Solovetsky concentration camps was entitled, as we have noted before, In the Land of the NEP and the Cheka, by the Finnish writer Boris Cederholm.⁵³ Technically, the title was wrong; it should have said GPU not Cheka, but Cederholm saw no difference between them. Neither did the American journalist George Popov, who entitled his memoirs about his time in Lubyanka prison in 1924 simply The Cheka.⁵* The GPU inherited its main residence, the Lubyanka, whose very name inspired horror, from the Cheka: "Shake someone awake at night and say the word 'Lubyanka' and he will stare at his bare feet, say goodbye to everybody, and even if he's young, and healthy as an ox, he'll break down and cry like a baby. '^,55 And of course the GPU inherited Dzerzhinsky, its chairman, from the Cheka.

During the early years of NEP some indecisive attempts were made "to reinforce a very important democratic principle, according to which only judicial bodies should have the right to mete out punishment."⁵⁶ But these attempts ended quickly. In October 1922 the GPU acquired the right to apply "extrajudicial" measures of repression, including execution, to "ban­dits." Its pool of clients quickly widened. On May 6, 1926, for example, the central newspapers reported the GPU's execution of three officials of the Commissariat of Finance "for speculation in gold, foreign currency, and government bonds."

From the Cheka the GPU inherited its own places of detention, including Solovki, the prison camp on the Solovetsky Islands. Until the appearance of Hitler's camps, the Solovki served as a symbol of arbitrariness, cruelty, and tyrannical power. "Here, we don't have Soviet power; we have Solo­vetsky power." That was how the head of the camp greeted the prisoners. "Solovetsky power" was the power of the GPU, but after all, that was the quintessence of Soviet power.

From 1927 on, the GPU took a more and more active part in the struggle unfolding within the party, although it had been involved since 1923. To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the "organs" in December 1927, Pravda saluted their successes and declared that the GPU was vital in the struggle against the class enemy and in maintaining law and order.⁵⁷ Throughout 1927, the GPU's prerogatives continued to expand. After the assassination of Voikov in July, the GPU was "obliged" to take decisive measures in order to defend the country against foreign spies, provocateurs, and assassins, as well as from their monarchist allies and the White Guard.⁵⁸ After an explosion at a party club in Leningrad (perhaps a provocation), the GPU announced the execution of ten former monarchists, who were charged with espionage. The repression broadened and intensified. The humanitarian penitentiary system was denounced as a manifestation of bourgeois humanism, an anti-Marxist deviation.

In 1928 Bukharin, who already knew what Stalin was, declared: "We are creating and will create a civilization in comparison with which capitalist civilization will seem like a vulgar street dance compared with the heroic symphonies of Beethoven."⁵⁹ In fact, a new civilization was being born. Its unusual nature was understood by one of the rare foreigners who visited the Soviet Union in 1927, Alfred Fabre-Luce, who declared that it existed only "in the future, that is, in the realm of the impossible." "I feel like some hero of Einstein's relativity concept," he wrote in his conclusion, "who returns to his native planet, gray-haired after a ten-minute voyage."⁶⁰

Osip Mandelstam defined the dawning civilization less poetically and more precisely: "They think," he said to his wife regarding the people of Moscow, busily going about their affairs, "they think that everything is normal just because the streetcars are running."

CHAPTER

THE

GREAT RUPTURE, 1929-1934

FIVE IN FOUR

The dream of a planned economy along the lines of Germany's war economy had preoccupied Lenin as early as 1918. In 1920 the first long-term plan was drawn up by GOELRO, the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia. This plan initially provided for the construction of one hundred power plants. Lenin proclaimed electrification as the key to communism. But in January 1921, Zinoviev spoke of no more than twenty-seven power plants. In the end, the GOELRO plan remained on paper.

In 1927 Soviet economists began drafting the first five-year plan—a comprehensive plan providing for the development of every region, using every resource for the industrialization of the country. It was supposed to go into effect in October 1928, but was not even submitted for approval until the Sixteenth Party Conference in April 1929.

Just as an experienced boxer prepares his opponent for a knockout by "softening him up" with blows to the liver, stomach, kidneys, and heart, Stalin softened up the country before hitting it with the Great Change. The softening up of the party was brought to completion with the elimination of the "right wing." In February 1929, at a joint session of the Politburo and the Central Control Commission, Bukharin was censured for his "un­principled behavior" in conducting talks with Kamenev. Rykov, chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and Tomsky, leader of the trade unions, were also censured. In April 1929 the Central Committee removed Bukharin from his posts as editor of Pravda and president of the Comintern and Tomsky from his post as chairman of the Ail-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. Bukharin's supporter Uglanov lost his positions as sec­retary of the Moscow Committee, secretary of the Central Committee, and candidate member of the Politburo. In November 1929, Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo. "Right deviation" had become a crime.

In April 1929 the Sixteenth Party Conference passed a resolution calling for a second general purge (the first was in 1921): anyone who at any time (from 1921 to 1929) had voted against Stalin or supported an opposition platform—no matter which one—was purged. The conference decided to extend the purge to include nonparty officials working in Soviet institutions. All Soviet functionaries were subject to the purge—or, one might say, passed through purgatory. Broad strata of "worker activists" were enlisted to help in checking over the biographies, service records, conduct, and loyalty of these functionaries. Special "light cavalry" units were set up, consisting of Komsomol members, while trade union officials and shock- workers acted as judges. Thus the party involved broad sections of the population in repressive activity.