Utopia in Power

Instructions from the Commissariat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspection divided all those "purged" from the Soviet apparatus into three categories. Those in the "first category" were deprived of their rights to all benefits, pensions, and jobs and were evicted from their apartments. Those in the "second category" were allowed to find work in government organizations other than the kind presently employing them or in another district. Those in the "third category" were demoted, and the demotion was placed on their record. The grounds for purging someone under one category or another were so broad (including "corrupt elements who have perverted Soviet laws or linked up with the kulaks and Nepmen... embezzlers, bribe takers, saboteurs, wreckers, and parasites")¹ and so ambiguous that the entire population was intimidated, especially considering the hundreds of thou­sands of watchful eyes of the "people's purifiers." Besides, the Shakhty trial was still fresh in people's memories.

One of the results of the new policy was the flight of highly placed officials from the Soviet Union and the refusal of some Soviet diplomatic, commercial, and intelligence personnel abroad, where the purge was also conducted, to return to their country. Early in 1928 Boris Bazhanov, who had worked as one of Stalin's assistants since 1923, fled to Persia. Aga- bekov, head of the Eastern sector of the OGPU's foreign department, im­mediately received the order to kill Bazhanov. While the assassination was being planned, "a telegram arrived from Moscow canceling the 'liquidation' order. ... It turned out that Bazhanov, in his work in Moscow, had not been privy to any important secrets."² Several months later Agabekov himself fled. Soviet diplomats Bessedovsky, Barmin, Dmitrievsky, and many others stayed in the West.

An important part of the "softening up" process was the new offensive against the church. On April 8, 1929, a law was passed that strengthened the state's control over the parishes. On May 22 an amendment was made to article 13 of the Soviet constitution, which until then had provided for freedom of religion and of antireligious propaganda. Propagation of religion now became a crime against the state. Priests and their families were deprived of civil rights. As "disenfranchised persons" they did not have the right to ration cards, medical aid, or communal apartments. The chil­dren of priests were not allowed to attend schools or higher educational institutions. Thus they were forced to renounce their fathers in order to obtain an education or simply to live.

Hundreds of churches were destroyed, including many that were his­torical monuments. The churches that survived had their bells removed, ostensibly so that their ringing "would not disturb the workers." On August 27 a "continuous work week" was introduced; the seven-day week was abolished and replaced by a new system—four days of work followed by one day of rest. "Utopia has become a reality," exclaimed one enraptured writer. 'The continuous-production week has knocked our time out of its calendar saddle. With the elimination of that sleepy interval, the seventh day, Sunday, the country has entered a state of permanent waking."³ In­dustry was not really ready for the continuous work week, but the system did have the advantage of eliminating Sunday. The "continuous week" lasted until 1940, when the Soviet government, of its own good will, granted the workers Sunday as a day of rest.

Among the factors that helped create the particular atmosphere of the five-year-plan era and helped forge the new Soviet consciousness, a special place belongs to the "control figures."

The drafting of a detailed five-year plan to transform the economy "re­quired much more information about interindustry links than could be available in the existing state of information and statistics."⁴ Nevertheless, the plan was drafted in two versions, an initial variant and an optimal variant. Even the initial version was very optimistic. "Miracles seldom occur in economic life," writes one English historian, "and in the absence of divine intervention it is hard to imagine how one would expect simul­taneous increases of investment and consumption, not to speak of the output of industry, agriculture, and labor productivity, by such trememdous per­centages."⁵ But scarcely had the optimal figures been adopted than Stalin raised them to a new, unprecedented level. In 1926 Stalin had ridiculed Trotsky's "fantastic" projects, his desire for "super-industrialization," his idea of building a giant electric power plant on the Dnepr. The Dneprostroi project, observed the general secretary at one time, would require enormous resources, several hundred million rubles. This would be, said Stalin, using his own brand of humor, like "the peasant who after saving a few kopeks, instead of repairing his plow, went out and bought a Gramophone."⁶ By early 1930 Trotsky's figures seemed "shabby" to Stalin. Mensheviks, right- wing Communists, and nonparty members were thrown out of the statistical, economic, and scientific research institutes as "wreckers." Those who replaced them furnished the new figures required of them—and they were astronomical.

The optimal plan provided for coal production to double, from 35 million tons in 1927—28 to 75 million tons in 1932. Stalin's figure was 105 million tons. The corresponding figures for oil were 11.7 million, 21.7 million, and 55 million tons; for iron, 3.2 million, 10 million and 16 million tons. Similar leaps were made in all the control figures for the five-year plan.⁷ But this was still not enough. In December 1929, a gathering of "shockworkers" (udarniki) called for the fulfillment of the five-year plan in four years. "Five in Four" became the slogan of the day. But this, too, was not enough. Stalin announced that "tempos decide everything." On February 4, 1931, he mentioned the possibility—hence the necessity—of fulfilling the plan in the decisive sectors of industry in three years.

The figures intoxicated not only the formulators of the plans but also those who carried them out, the citizens of the country. It seemed that one more effort, one more factory built, one more dam constructed—and hap­piness would be there, right around the corner. With one more step they would "catch up with and surpass" the capitalist countries. Mayakovsky added his urgings: "Forward, time!" Stalin warned: "If in ten years we do not cover the distance that other countries took fifty or a hundred years to traverse, we will be crushed." In a popular play of the early 1930s, Fear by Aleksandr Afinogenov, the old professor Borodin, reactionary but re­educated by the GPU, asserts that "the general motivation for the behavior of 80 percent of all those I have investigated [Soviet citizens—M. H.] is fear." The other 20 percent, explains the professor, are the workers, newly risen to a position of responsibility. 'They have nothing to fear; they are the country's masters." But, adds the learned expert, "their mind is afraid for them... the mind of the manual laborer fears excessive strain and develops a persecution complex. They strive constantly to catch up and surpass. And gasping for breath in this endless race, the mind loses its sanity and slowly becomes degraded."

The figures ceased to mean anything; they became a mere symbol of the desire to race forward. Like a balloon they carried the country away into a nonexistent world.

But the country could not ignore reality. An army of workers and tech­nicians was thrown into fulfilling the senseless plans. It seemed that the ideas of Trotsky and Bukharin on the militarization of labor, rejected in the early 1920s, were being revived. The only quota that was met far ahead of time was the employment index. The expectation was that the state economy would employ 14.7 million, but by 1932 22.9 million were em­ployed. The shortage of qualified workers was compensated for with quan­tity. Just as masses of soldiers are thrown into battle when firepower is lacking, millions of former peasants, undisciplined, ignorant of the tools and machinery, were mobilized to carry out the five-year plan.

The rapid growth of the urban population led to a catastrophic worsening of the housing situation. Food supplies in the cities were severely strained. Strumilin, future academician and one of the authors of Stalin's version of the five-year plan, wrote in Essays on Soviet Economics in 1927 that the rate of accumulation, "given our long experience of consumer asceticism, could exceed all known records." All records for "consumer asceticism" were indeed surpassed during those years in the villages, which literally starved to death. But even in the cities the situation was extremely critical. In April 1929 bread was rationed. By the end of the year, rationing was extended to all foodstuffs, then to manufactured goods. In 1931 additional "coupons" were issued, for it was impossible to obtain one's allotment even with ration cards.

The real situation for workers in this period can be seen from the reports by GPU agents that survived in the Smolensk archives. In 1929 (and the situation only worsened after that) a worker received 600 grams of bread a day, plus 300 grams for each member of his family; between 200 grams and 1 liter of vegetable oil a month; 1 kilogram of sugar a month; and for clothing, 30-36 meters of cotton a year.⁸ A significant number of workers ate in the factory canteens. A novel by Fedor Gladkov described one such canteen at the Dneprostroi dam project: "I go to the factory kitchen and am sickened by the very sight of the vile poison being made there. I go to the work sites, where the food is delivered in thermoses. The bluish swill stinks like a corpse and a cesspool. The workers prefer plain bread and water."⁹ One GPU agent reported the complaints of the workers who ate in Canteen No. 7: "In the so-called soup it is hard to find pieces of anything.

It is not soup, but vegetable water; there is no fat, and the meat is not always washed sufficiently. ... [In some cases] little worms were found in the lunch."¹⁰

In the summer of 1931 Stalin declared war on "egalitarianism." Equality was said to be a petit bourgeois notion. A pejorative term was used for it: uravnilovka, "leveling." Inequality officially became a socialist virtue. A new system of wage scales was introduced, with payment depending on output (piece rate) as well as on one's job category. The workers were to be stimulated from then on by material incentives. Certain nonmaterial incentives, awards and honorific titles, were also introduced, but material benefits always came with them. Their recipients obtained promotions, special rations, and so on. There were at least six different prices for the same merchandise: (1) government prices for goods purchased with ration cards; (2) "commercial" prices, significantly higher, for goods purchased without ration cards; (3) "moderately increased prices" for goods sold ex­clusively in working-class districts (these were lower than "commercial" but higher than government prices); (4) prices in "model stores," general stores where prices were higher than "commercial" prices; (5) prices at the torgsin, a store where goods were sold only in exchange for gold or foreign currency; and (6) market prices.

Prices never stopped climbing, wages rose only nominally, and produc­tion quotas constantly increased. To accelerate the pace of the work, the "shockworkers' movement" and the system of "socialist emulation" were utilized.

This period saw the rise of special stores and special dining halls for the various categories of leaders. And hierarchical precedence was strictly respected. The wife of a member of the Politburo of the German Communist party, who was in Moscow in 1931, recalls how, one fine day, a section of the dining room of the Hotel Luxe, reserved for the Comintern, was marked off. It was thenceforth set aside for the highest-ranking officials only, and the food they were served was better than that given to second- or third- class Comintern officials.¹¹

GPU agents in Smolensk reported the reaction of the workers to these new perquisites for officialdom.¹² Similarly, Ante Ciliga related what an old Leningrad worker told him: "We live worse now than at the time of the capitalists. If we had had to face such starvation, if our salaries had been so low in the days of our old masters, we would have gone on strike a thousand times."¹³ In fact, the workers did go on strike: there are GPU reports to this effect in the Smolensk archives. But it was very difficult to strike, for many reasons: workers were fired, which resulted in the loss of ration cards, eviction from factory housing, even arrest; the trade unions "worked together as one" with management;¹⁴ and the official propaganda never stopped assuring the workers that Soviet power was their power, that if only they went one step further, the happy days of communism would begin. Besides, the wreckers were responsible for all the difficulties.

In April 1929, when work on the first five-year plan was just starting, Stalin was already preparing his scapegoats. Wreckers like those in the Shakhty trial, he declared, "are sitting now in all the branches of our industry."¹⁵ Wrecking and sabotage, he said, had occurred and will continue to occur.¹⁶ Arrests and trials confirmed the general secretary's words. The first five-year plan period was also a time of major show trials. In August 1930 a number of bacteriologists "under the leadership" of Professor Ka- ratygin were arrested and tried in closed session for allegedly bringing on an epidemic among horses. The Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, then traveling around the Soviet Union, chose that moment to comment ap­provingly, in numerous interviews, on everything he had seen in the land of the victorious proletariat.

In September 1930 it was announced that forty-eight figures prominent in the food industry, headed by a Professor Ryazanov, had been shot for creating difficulties in the food supply system.

In November—December 1930 the second full-scale show trial after Shakhty was organized in Moscow, the trial of the so-called Industrial party. The indictment alleged that the clandestine Industrial party had no fewer than 2,000 members. Eight of them were placed on trial. The Shakhty trial had proven that too large a number of defendants detracted from the spec­tacle. That experience was taken into account. The accused were charged with wrecking activities carried out on orders from French President Ray­mond Ротсагё, Lawrence of Arabia, and the Dutch oil magnate Henri Deterding. Except for those arrested, there were no witnesses and no ma­terial evidence at all. They all confessed their guilt, especially Professor Ramzin, the "head" of the party. Ramzin had been a Bolshevik in 1905— 1907, but had left the party and devoted himself to a career in engineering. After the revolution he had loyally cooperated with the Soviet authorities. Suddenly he was the head of an anti-Soviet "clandestine organization." The defendants confessed to everything: to being in league with the capitalist emig^ Ryabushinsky, who gave them their instructions, and to having planned to install a former tsarist minister, Vyshegradsky, as minister of finance after the overthrow of Soviet power. In the course of the trial it came out that both Ryabushinsky and Vyshegradsky were dead, but that did not affect the outcome of the trial. Five of the accused were sentenced to be shot, but were pardoned. Ramzin was released very quickly.¹⁷ The

use of provocateurs was necessary in all the trials staged by the GPU

(4 ??

organs.

Repression continued after the Industrial party trial. Preparations began for a trial of the so-called Toiling Peasants' party. Judging by the massive arrests of agrarian economists, agronomists, other agricultural specialists, and cooperative members, the "organs" intended to fabricate an under­ground organization with tens of thousands of members. This was logical. In a peasant country a "peasant party" had to be proportionately larger than an Industrial party. The "organs" selected Professor Kondratiev as the leader of the Toiling Peasants' party. Professor Chayanov's fantastic novel, My Brother Alekseis Journey to the Land of Peasant Utopia (published in 1920 under the pseudonym Ivan Kremnev), which predicted that in 1984 (Chayanov was the first to choose this date, long before Orwell) Russia would be a free peasant country, was designated as the organization's secret program. Yaroslavsky, writing in Pravda, made a point for the benefit of the investigator in the case: "Now, after the exposure of this clandestine organization of bourgeois restorationists, this kulak manifesto takes on a special significance."¹⁸ The newspapers pointed to a direct link between the "kulak conspirators" and the party's right wing: "All the sympathies of the Kondratievites were on the side of the rights in their struggle against the party leadership. The rights were smashed. And now, thanks to the vigilance of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leaders of the Kondra­tievites have been placed on GPU rations."¹⁹ For reasons unknown, the trial of the Toiling Peasants' party never took place. Those arrested, in­cluding Kondratiev and Chayanov, perished in prisons or in camps.

In March 1931, a trial of Mensheviks was held in Moscow. The majority of the accused worked in the planning agencies; they were accused of wrecking activities "in the planning sphere"—of raising or lowering figures so as to prevent fulfillment of the plans. This trial is of particular interest to historians because one of the defendants, Mikhail Yakubovich, who spent twenty-two years in prisons and camps, survived. In 1967, in a letter addressed to the prosecutor general of the USSR, Yakubovich described how the trial was rigged.

Massive arrests and some trials of "wreckers" continued. The arrests were not limited to the "technical" intelligentsia—engineers, technicians, planners, and managers—but included even rank-and-file workers. 'The class enemy," said one article on the reasons behind the poor functioning of the rail system, "the White Guards and the kulaks, still have the potential to infiltrate the railways by taking 'modest' and inconspicuous jobs as 'oilers.'"²⁰ Oilers, switchmen, and yardmen, not to mention engineers and firemen, went off to prison and the camps, along with milling machine operators, metalworkers, and others blamed for breakdowns in production and failure to fulfill unfulfillable plans. They swelled the ranks of the monstrously enlarged army of prisoners, which occupied a more and more important place in the program for building communism. A significant number of the major objectives of the first five-year plan were brought to completion with the help of prison labor. The Baltic—White Sea canal was built entirely by prisoners. Approximately 500,000 prisoners²¹ over a period of twenty months cut their way through the Karelian granite, by manual labor, without machinery, to build a canal that proved unnecessary.²²

But the race continued, and in Stalin's words: 'The party whipped the country on, rushing it forward at full speed."²³

In 1932 the summing up began. By juggling figures (making calculations with percentages, in rubles whose value was fixed at will by the planning organs, and using 1913 as the base year for comparisons), it was possible to claim that the "main indices" of the plan had been fulfilled. Where it was not fulfilled, wreckers were to blame. Of course, some indices could be checked. The plan had called for an increase of 15—20 percent in the buying power of the ruble. But the reality of inflation was obvious to all Soviet citizens. The plan promised the "elimination of the shortage of manufactured goods by the end of the planning period," an increase of 69 percent in real wages, and "for a number of the most important consumer goods, a doubling of the norms of consumption."²⁴ The waiting lines for goods bought with ration cards, including bread, were hours long and left no doubt that these promises had not been kept. Nevertheless, in an un­usually short time gigantic industrial projects were completed in the Urals, the Kuznetsk basin, the Volga region, and the Ukraine. Factories were built in Moscow and Leningrad, textile mills in Central Asia, and so on. The Turkestan—Siberia Railway, built before the revolution, was extended and a branch added to Karaganda. In all, 5,500 kilometers of rail were laid. (The plan called for 16,000.)

A great deal was accomplished. Stalin had a right to ask at the Seven­teenth Party Congress in 1934: "Is this not a miracle?"²⁵ But it was not. The plan was realized primarily through "domestic accumulation," which was obtained thanks to the "consumer asceticism" Strumilin had written about—that is, the ruthless exploitation of the population. The country was exporting raw materials, including foodstuffs—grain, meat, sugar— for which there was a severe need at home. At the same time, the importing of vitally needed goods, such as wool, cotton, rice, and leather, was stopped. Timber was exported at dumping prices: "We must cut down not only the amount of timber that grows in a year, but much more; in essence, our task is not to utilize the forests, but to obliterate them."²⁶ Production was expanding, in oil and gold, which were also exported, the increased amounts of gold and timber obtained largely through prisoner labor. Even certain treasures from Russian museums were sold, and gold was extorted from the citizenry by every possible means. According to Walter Krivitsky, Stalin decided to revive the customs of the good old days by resorting to the simplest means of acquiring foreign currency: manufacturing dollars in the cellars of the GPU. In 1908 Stalin had directed the "expropriations" from the state treasury at Tiflis; a quarter of a century later he gave the order to begin manufacturing $100 bills in Moscow, in the Lubyanka.²⁷

The five-year plan could not have been implemented without foreign assistance. In 1928 a group of Soviet engineers arrived in Detroit and requested that Albert Kahn and Company, an eminent firm of industrial architects in the United States, design plans for industrial buildings worth $2 billion.²⁸ Close to a dozen designs were to be made in Detroit, the rest in the Soviet Union. According to an agreement with the Supreme Economic Council of the USSR, the American firm agreed to design all aspects of Soviet industry, heavy and light. Foreign designers, technicians, engineers, and skilled workers built the industrial units of the first five-year plan. Primarily they were Americans, who pushed the Germans out of first place after 1928; after them came the Germans, British, Italians, and French. The dam on the Dnepr was built by the firm of Colonel Hugh Cooper, a prominent American hydraulic engineer; the majority of the largest Soviet power plants were equipped by the British firm Metropolitan-Vickers; West­ern companies designed, built, and equipped Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk, the Urals Machinery Works, the Kaganovich Ball Bearing Plant in Moscow, an automobile plant in Nizhny Novgorod, and a truck plant in Yaroslavl, among others. Ordzhonikidze, the commissar of heavy industry, was able to state with full justification: "Our factories, our mines, our mills are now equipped with excellent technology that cannot be found in any one country. ... How did we get it? We bought the most highly perfected machinery, the very latest technology in the world, from the Americans, Germans, French, and English, and with that we equipped our enterprises." And he added caustically, "Meanwhile, many of their factories and mines still have machinery dating from the nineteenth century, or the early part of the twentieth."²⁹

Lest the foreign participants in socialist construction begin to feel too independent, or Soviet citizens forget who the enemy was, a few foreigners were arrested from time to time. In April 1933 one more "wreckers" trial was staged, featuring five British engineers from Metropolitan-Vickers among the eighteen defendants. The fact that the British firm, which had been equipping Soviet power plants since 1923, was virtually in a monopoly position was undoubtedly a factor behind these indictments. In spite of many hours of interrogation, the Britishers refused to plead guilty and got off with light sentences. Thornton, the leader of the group, was sentenced to three years, Cushny to two, two were deported, and the other acquitted. The Soviet citizens in the case received sentences ranging from eighteen months to ten years.

It is impossible to sum up the results of the first five-year plan strictly in terms of industrial successes (or failures). From 1928 to 1932 significant strides were made in the industrialization of the country. But the main arena of the "Great Rupture," or the "great backbreaking," as Solzhenitsyn called it, was agriculture. The main object of this all-out offensive—and its main victim—was the peasantry, that is, the overwhelming majority of the population.

FULL STEAM AHEAD—INTO THE SWAMP

Stalin's article "A Year of Great Change" appeared in Pravda on November 7, 1928. It spoke of "the radical change that has taken place in the development of our agriculture from small, backward individual farming to large-scale advanced collective agriculture."³⁰ The article ended: "We are advancing full steam ahead along the path of industrialization." This might have seemed just a metaphor, but within seven weeks it became reality.

Stalin announced the start of a new revolution on December 27, 1929, at a conference of "Marxist students of the agrarian question." The Soviet Union had just celebrated Stalin's fiftieth birthday, December 21. The country discovered for the first time that Stalin had been its Great Leader (Veliky Vozhd) all along, organizer of the October revolution, creator of the Red Army, victorious commander against the Whites and foreign invaders, guardian of Lenin's "general line" and vanquisher of all its opponents, leader of the world proletariat, and great strategist of the five-year plan. Portraits of the Leader were printed in unbelievable numbers, his bust appeared in all prominent places, and a pamphlet containing "birthday materials" about him was circulated everywhere. The most enthusiastic article, which set forth the main lines for the future cult of Stalin, was written by Karl Radek. Since 1921 the National Socialists in Germany had been on a campaign to build up a cult around Hitler. By 1929 they had accumulated considerable experience. This was the model Radek drew on for his trend-setting article. Stalin responded to all the homage paid him on his birthday by pledging to shed "all of his blood, to the last drop if necessary," for the cause, and he gave the credit for all his accomplishments to "the great party of the working class, which nurtured me and reared me in its image."³¹ Using a figure of speech from the as yet unforgotten Bible, Stalin described his origins with astonishing accuracy. The party had made Stalin what he was, but as sometimes happens, the child turned against its parent, killed it, and in turn sired a new offspring, a party fashioned in Stalin's image.

On December 27 the Leader announced the end of NEP and the start of a new era. The problem was as follows, he declared: "Either we go backward to capitalism or forward to socialism."³² In exact conformity with Bolshevik tradition, the problem was presented so as to allow only one response. It was necessary to go on the offensive. "What does this mean?" Stalin asked, and answered himself: "It means that after a policy that consisted in limiting the exploitative tendencies of the kulaks, we have switched to a policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class."³³ The path forward was the path of "complete collectivization." To those who questioned whether dekulakization was necessary for complete collectivization, Stalin replied: "The question is absurd!" A great lover of Russian proverbs, he added, "When the head is cut off, why cry over a few hairs?"³⁴

The next sixty-five days shook the country more than the ten days in October 1917 that "shook the world." Those nine weeks convulsed the lives of the Soviet Union's more than 130 million peasants, transformed the country's economy, and changed the very nature of the state.

Two processes went on simultaneously: the creation of collective farms (kolkhozes), and the liquidation of the kulaks. Above all, dekulakization was necessary to provide the "material base" for the collective farms. From the end of 1929 to the middle of 1930,

more than 320,000 kulak faramers were dekulakized. Their property (worth more than 175 million rubles) was transferred to the indivisible funds of the kolkhozes and used for the entrance fees of poor peasants and unpropertied farmhands. Former kulak property amounted to more than 34 percent of the total value of the indivisible funds of all the kolkhozes taken together.³⁵

The liquidation of the kulaks deprived the countryside of the most en­terprising and independent-minded peasants and broke the spirit of resis­tance. Moreover, the fate of "dekulakized persons," deportation to Siberia or the north of Russia, served as an example for anyone who thought of not joining the kolkhoz. It was necessary to join immediately. A commission of the Politburo formed on December 8, 1929, under the direction of Yakov Yakovlev, commissar of agriculture, proposed that "complete collectiviza­tion" be carried out in the lower Volga region by autumn 1930, the central Black Earth region and the Ukrainian steppes by autumn 1931, the left bank of the Ukraine by spring 1932, and the north and Siberia by 1933.

Stalin and his "close comrade-in-arms" Molotov insisted that the pace be even faster. On December 10 the Kolkhoztsentr, the central office es­tablished to administer all kolkhozes, sent a directive by telegraph to local organizations in the regions slated for complete collectivization: "Implement 100 percent collectivization of draft animals and cattle, 80 percent of hogs, and 60 percent of sheep and poultry.ⁿ³⁶ Joining the kolkhoz meant surren­dering your property, all of it, to the collective.

Party members (25,000 of them) were sent to the villages to force the peasants to join kolkhozes. It was announced that whoever did not join would be considered an enemy of the Soviet state. On July 1, 1928, only 1.7 percent of the peasantry belonged to kolkhozes; by November 1929 the figure had risen to 7.6 percent; in March 1930 it was 58 percent.

There had not been a final decision on the exact form the kolkhoz should take, whether all land, implements, and animals should be collectivized or some left in individual hands. There was still a lack of personnel capable of administering collective farms. The necessary tractors and other ma­chinery were not available. Lenin, who never stopped hoping for miracles, once said: "If tomorrow we could supply 100,000 first-class tractors—you know very well that at present this is sheer fantasy—the middle peasant would say, ⁴I am for the kommuniycC (i.e., for communism)."³⁷ Stalin fully shared Lenin's steadfast faith in the direct and inseparable connection between the material base and the spiritual superstructure (100,000 tractors equals "I am for communism"), but he acknowledged that he did not have the tractors. He promised 60,000 by the spring of 1930 and the magical 100,000 for the following year. In 1928, according to official Soviet figures, there were only 26,700 tractors.

Unfazed by such problems, Stalin simply cracked the whip harder at the local party officials, who in turn drove the rank-and-file activists (the "twenty-five-thousanders") harder. The number of collective farmers stead­ily increased, and the number of kulaks dwindled. The term kulak had never been defined. Anyone who employed hired labor was considered a kulak, but so was anyone who owned two horses or two cows or a nice house. Since there was no clear notion of what a kulak was, overall quotas for dekulakization and collectivization were assigned for each region. The quota for collectivization was the same everywhere, 100 percent. The de­kulakization quota varied, averaging 5—7 percent.

Many of the peasants who had previously been regarded as middle or pros­perous peasants were now listed as kulaks and made subject to dekulaki- zation. In addition, many less prosperous middle peasants and even some poor peasants were deported, after being labeled—to make repression against them easier—with the absurd term kulak henchmen (podkulachniki). ... In some regions 15—20 percent of the peasants were deported; for every kulak deported three or four middle or poor peasants were arrested.³⁸

That is how a History of the USSR published in Moscow thirty years after the events described the situation in the countryside in 1930. In a fit of inexplicable frankness it admitted that the concept "kulak henchman" was absurd. Yet the leadership had used that term to justify the harshest mea­sures against the peasantry.

On the basis of resolutions passed by the Central Committee of the party, the government's Central Executive Committee, and the Council of People's Commissars on January 3 and February 1, 1930, as well as special in­structions dated February 4, all kulaks and podkulachniki were divided into three categories.

Organizers and perpetrators of terrorist acts, and those engaged in active anti-Soviet work, were isolated and sent to concentration camps. Kulaks who demonstrated the slightest active resistance were deported to remote regions of the country, where they were put to work cutting down the forests, doing farm labor, etc. The other kulaks remained where they were, but they could not have any land allotments from within the bounds of the kolkhozes.³⁹

Moreover, "during the autumn and winter of 1930-31 additional depor­tations were carried out affecting the expropriated kulak households."⁴⁰

Kulaks and their "henchmen" were deported with all of their families, including infants and old people. Hundreds of thousands were shipped in unheated boxcars thousands of kilometers away to remote parts of the Urals, Siberia, and Kazakhstan. Many died en route; many others died after their arrival, for as a rule they were deported to uninhabitable locations in the forests, mountains, or steppes. In 1937 Walter Krivitsky recalled what he had seen by chance at a railroad station in Kursk in the winter of 1934: "I will never forget what I saw. In the waiting area there were nearly six hundred peasants—men, women, and children—being driven from one camp to another like cattle. ... Many were lying down, almost naked, on the cold floor. Others were obviously dying of typhoid fever. Hunger, tor­ment, and despair were written on every face."⁴¹ A quarter of a century later, during the brief period of the Thaw, a number of Soviet writers confirmed what the "defector" Krivitsky had written.

The full story of this first socialist genocide has yet to be written. Chron­ologically, the first genocide of the twentieth century was that of the Ar­menians by the Turks. The massacre of Don Cossacks by the Bolsheviks during the civil war likewise approached genocidal proportions. The Turks destroyed a population of a different faith and nationality; the Cossacks suffered during a fratricidal civil war. The genocide against the peasants in the Soviet Union was unique not only for its monstrous scale; it was directed against an indigenous population by a government of the same nationality, and in time of peace.

In 1945, after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the public disclosure of all its crimes, jurists, sociologists, psychologists, historians, and journalists began the inevitable controversy over whether the German people had known about the Nazi crimes or not. There is no question that the Soviet city people knew about the massacre in the countryside. In fact, no one tried to conceal it. Stalin spoke openly about the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," and all his lieutenants echoed him. At the railroad stations, city dwellers could see the thousands of women and children who had fled from the villages and were dying of hunger. Kulaks, "dekulakized persons," and "kulak henchmen" died alike. They were not considered human. So­ciety spat them out, just as the "disenfranchised persons" and "has-beens" were after October 1917, just as the Jews were in Nazi Germany.

The great proletarian humanist Maxim Gorky invented a formula to justify this genocide: "If the enemy does not surrender, he must be destroyed." Gorky's article containing this formula was printed simultaneously in Pravda and Izvestia on November 15, 1930, then publicized in speeches and lectures, in newspapers and magazines, and over the radio. "We are opposed by everything that has outlived the time set for it by history, and this gives us the right to consider ourselves again in a state of civil war. The conclusion naturally follows that if the enemy does not surrender, he must be de­stroyed."⁴²

Official sources note forty-five instances of hostile action against col­lectivization in Central Asia in early March 1930, involving 17,400 persons, and "rebellions and disturbances in other regions."⁴³ This is a ridiculous understatement of the peasantry's resistance to the kolkhoz: collectivization provoked hostility among the peasants in the Ukraine, Siberia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Kuban, and the Don region. The detailed docu­mentary evidence presumably resides in the KGB archives. Scattered bits of testimony allow us nevertheless to deduce the breadth of the resistance. In the Northern Caucasus and in a number of regions in the Ukraine regular units of the Red Army, backed by air power, were thrown against the peasantry. Frinovsky, commander of the frontier forces of the NKVD, who directed the suppression of the peasant rebellions, reported to a meeting of the Politburo that the rivers of the Northern Caucasus were carrying thousands of corpses to the sea. In some areas Red Army men refused to fire on the peasants and were shot immediately; in other cases small units went over to the rebels.

Once war was declared on the peasantry, the Soviet propaganda machine indignandy denounced cases of resistance, especially the murder of "twenty- five thousanders," the activists assigned to driving the peasants into the kolkhozes.

Passive resistance became the universal form of resistance. The peasants refused to join kolkhozes as long as they had sufficient strength not to yield to threats and force, and they destroyed their livestock as a sign of protest. Livestock transferred to the kolkhoz died from lack of shelter, fodder, and care.

The statistics demonstrate the disaster that struck the Soviet livestock herd. In 1928 there were 33.5 million horses in the country; in 1932, 19.6 million. For cattle the figures were, respectively, 70.5 million and 40.7 million; for pigs, 26 million and 11.6 million; for sheep and goats, 146 million and 52.1 million.⁴⁴ In Kazakhstan the number of sheep and goats fell from 19.2 million in 1930 to only 2.6 million in 1935.⁴⁵ From 1929 to 1934 a total of 149.4 million head of livestock were destroyed. The value of these animals and their products (milk, butter, wool, etc.) far exceeded the value of the giant factories built during the same period. The destruction of horses meant a loss of 8.8 million horsepower. In 1935, when there were already 379,500 tractors, the available horsepower was still 2.2 million less than in 1928, when there were only 26,700 tractors.

Passive resistance was suppressed just as fiercely as the active variety. In Voronezh in the summer of 1930 a show trial was held featuring sixteen leaders of the "Fedorovite" religious sect. This movement, headed by a peasant named Fedorov, had arisen in the early years of the NEP in what had been Voronezh Province. The main tenet of their faith was "nonre- sistance to evil," and they sought by every means possible to "avoid evil temptation" or "participation in evil deeds." During the NEP the Fedo- rovites, and other sects such as the Dukhobors, Molokane, and Baptists, were spared persecution by the Soviet authorities, who hoped to use them against the Orthodox church. When the Fedorovites refused to join the kolkhozes, however, they were immediately branded enemies, conspirators, and kulaks. Fifteen of their leaders were sentenced to death (and imme­diately shot). The sixteenth was condemned to lifelong confinement in a psychiatric hospital. Nearly 2,000 Fedorovites were deported to the taiga and tundra, to meet a slow but certain death. For three months the regions infected with the idea of nonresistance to evil were "combed out." The peasants, praying and appealing to their tormentors, offered no resistance to arrest.

The peasants' passive resistance, the destruction of livestock, the com­plete disorganization of work in the kolkhozes, and the general ruin caused by continued dekulakization and deportations all led in 1932—33 to a famine that surpassed even the famine of 1921—22 in its geographical extent and the number of its victims. On this occasion, however, the government took no measures against the famine and in fact contributed to tis spread, using it as a weapon in the civil war against the peasantry.

The difference between the two famines was not limited just to the larger scale of that brought on by collectivization. Another difference was that the government denied the existence of the later one. Even to mention it was a crime against the state. In 1921 the Soviet government, however reluctantly, had allowed independent figures to seek help from abroad. In the 1930s nothing was said about the famine, and grain continued to be exported throughout this period. In 1928 grain exports amounted to only 1 million centners; in 1929, 13 million; in 1930, 48.3 million; in 1931, 51.8 million; and in 1932, 18.1 million.

When Terekhov, a secretary of the Ukrainian party's Central Committee, asked at a Moscow conference that grain be sent to save the starving collective farmers of the Kharkov region, Stalin cut him off: "I see that you are a good storyteller. You have invented this tale about a famine, hoping to frighten us, but it won't work!"⁴⁶ It was impossible to frighten Stalin with "tales" of a famine. If he did not want to save the people dying of hunger, it was not because grain was lacking (the export of grain was evidence to the contrary) but because the famine and the havoc it wreaked vitiated the peasantry as a political force and broke the last vestiges of its resistance.

"For Stalin the peasants were scum," Khrushchev recalled much later in his memoirs. "He had no respect for the peasants or their work. He thought the only way to get farmers to produce was to put pressure on them. Under Stalin, state procurements were forcibly requisitioned for the coun­tryside to feed the cities."⁴⁷

In the cities the workers were not starving; they merely lived from hand to mouth. The leaders, however, denied themselves nothing. Dmitrievsky, the former Soviet diplomat, described how he had been fed at a sanatorium for "higher-ups" in the Crimea: 'The usual menu abounded in tasty dishes, with everything in which Russia is rich. Breakfast at eight, with eggs, ham, cheese, cocoa, tea, and milk. At eleven, yogurt. Then a four-course midday meal: soup, fish, meat, dessert, and fruit. During the afternoon, tea and pastries. In the evening, a two-course supper."⁴⁸ Walter Krivitsky, who vacationed in similar conditions during the famine, at the former estate of the Baryatinsky princes near Kursk, recounted the self-justifications of the luxuriating Soviet elite: "We are traveling a difficult road to socialism. Many have fallen along the way. We must eat well and relax after our labors, enjoying for a few weeks of the year the comforts that are still not accessible to others, for it is we who are building the happy life of the future."⁴⁹

The completion of the first five-year plan gave Stalin the opportunity to play benefactor, announcing the great achievements and benefits to the people. Since the very first days of the revolution the party had deceived the workers and poor peasants, in whose name it ruled, by promising them that paradise on earth was imminent. In the late 1920s the deception, both conscious and unconscious, became a lie. During the first five-year plan it became the Great Lie. The Great Terror was preceded by—and is in­variably accompanied by—the Great Lie. As a British humorist once said, there are three kinds of lies: a lie, a barefaced lie, and statistics. He was unaware of a fourth kind, Stalinist statistics, and a fifth, the Stalinist lie.

In summing up the achievements of the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin was not ashamed to announce that workers' wages had risen by 67 percent and that the material conditions of the workers and peasants had improved from year to year. In a popular Moscow anecdote of the period a tourist guide at a zoo points to a crocodile recently brought to the capital and explains that from tail to head it is five meters long but from head to tail it is six. "How could that be?" asks a tourist. "You don't believe it? Measure it yourself," the guide answers. "You'll see." Stalin had roughly the same answer for anyone who wanted to check his figures. Only "sworn enemies of the Soviet system" could have any doubts about the improvement of the workers' and peasants' conditions in the Soviet Union, he declared.⁵⁰

Fifteen years after the revolution Pravda proclaimed, "For a Communist there is no task more noble than the improvement of the workers' condi­tions."⁵¹ In the fall of 1932, when those words were written, famine and collectivization were at their height. Seventeen years after the revolution Stalin declared: 'There would have been no use in overthrowing capitalism in November 1917 and building socialism all these years if we were not going to secure a life of plenty for our people. Socialism does not mean destitution and privation."⁵²

For all of Stalin's lies, however, collectivization never went smoothly. In late February 1930 it became obvious even to Stalin that the mad dash to collectivize everything, which he himself had ordered at the end of 1929, threatened to end in disaster. Discontent began to penetrate the army, which was composed of the sons of peasants. So Stalin took a step backward, as though intending to retreat. On March 2, 1930, Pravda published his

article, "Dizzy with Success," in which he placed all the blame on those who were following orders, the local party activists. The peasants who had been driven into the kolkhozes read this as the abandonment of collectiv­ization. After all, had he not written, "Who benefits by these distortions, this bureaucratic decreeing of a collective farm movement, these unseemly threats against the peasants? Nobody but our enemies!" After the publi­cation of this article the kolkhozes collapsed like a house of cards. In the central Black Earth region, where 82 percent of the individual farms had been collectivized by March, only 18 percent remained collectivized in May. To the peasants Stalin had become the good and just ruler supreme. All the trouble had been caused by local misrulers.

A step backward had been taken, however, only to prepare the way for ten new steps forward. By September 1931 nearly 60 percent of the farms had been collectivized again; in 1934, 75 percent. Repression against the peasants did not end with the establishment of the kolkhoz system. The aim of collectivization was to "solve the grain problem." The kolkhozes were formed for the convenience of the state, but the appropriate methods for controlling the kolkhozes were not found immediately.

First, a system of obligatory deliveries to the state was introduced (and meeting these obligations became "the first commandment of the collective farmer"). The kolkhozes were obliged to surrender between 25 and 33 percent of their products at fixed prices established by the state. Second, the kolkhozes were stripped of all agricultural machinery, that is, of the very tractors that were supposed to make the peasants say, "I am for communism." The kolkhozes had the land and the labor force, but the machinery was held by state-run machine and tractor stations (MTSs) es­tablished by a decree of June 5, 1929. In return for its services the MTS took another 20 percent of the harvest, and it was impossible to conceal the harvest from the MTS personnel, since they actually worked the kolkhoz fields. Thus, control was established over kolkhoz production. In addition, "political departments" attached to the MTSs were introduced in January 1933, with the task of monitoring the collective farmers from the political point of view. The head of each political department was flanked by a GPU representative, who could instantly turn word into deed by arresting errant peasants. In January 1933 Stalin spoke ironically about those who believed that after the liquidation of the kulaks there would be no more enemies. He pointed out that storehouse personnel, accountants, and managers could be enemies, too. Immediately 34.4 percent of all employees at storage facilities were arrested and charged with sabotage; the same with 25 percent of all bookkeepers, and so forth.⁵³

Among the more eloquent documents of the period is a secret letter of

May 8, 1933, to all party and government workers and all organs of the GPU, the courts, and the procuracy. This letter, marked "secret, not for publication," was found in the Smolensk archives. It provides a good summary of what happened during collectivization, especially the forms and methods used to carry it out. The letter, signed by Molotov as president of the Sovnarkom and Stalin as general secretary of the party's Central Committee, consisted of two parts: "Regularization of Arrest Procedures"; and "Reduction of Overloading [i.e., an excessive number of prisoners] at Places of Confinement." The instructions under the first part were "to prevent arrests by persons not authorized by law—chairmen of district soviet executive committees, district and regional plenipotentiaries, chair­men of village soviets, chairmen of kolkhozes and associations of kolkhozes, secretaries of party cells, etc." The "etc." was particularly significant. It meant that until then virtually anyone had been able to arrest peasants. The letter put an end to this situation, except for "the Far Eastern Territory, Central Asia, and Kazakhstan," where the continuation of these practices was authorized for another six months.

The second part of the letter showed the results of such mass arrests and indiscriminate power to arrest. The letter stipulated that no more than 400,000 people should be held in places of confinement—other than labor camps and penal colonies. As of May 8, twice that number were being held, because the letter instructed the GPU, the commissariats of justice of the Soviet republics, and the procuracy of the USSR to "undertake immediately to relieve the overloading at places of detention and within a two-month period reduce the number of prisoners from 800,000 to 400,000.

If the overloading of the prisons was relieved, that did not mean that the prisoners were freed, but only that they were dispatched to the camps more quickly. Room was made in the prisons, and the work force in the camps was swelled. The Western journalist William Henry Chamberlin, who was a correspondent in Moscow in the 1930s, had the following to report about the camps: "I was informed by a reliable source that in the concentration camps in Siberia alone there were close to 300,000 prisoners. The number of Soviet citizens who were deprived of their liberty without the slightest hint of a trial during the years of the five-year plan must be estimated at no less than 2 million."⁵⁵ The official figure of 800,000 in the prisons alone as of May 8, 1933, suggests that the total number must have been far more than 2 million.

The economic results of collectivization were deplorable. During the first four years of the five-year plan the total harvest of grain diminished, ac­cording to official calculations, from 733.3 million centners in 1928 to 696.7 million in 1931—1932. The yield per hectare in 1932 was 5.7 cent­ners. In 1913 it had been 8.2 centners.⁵⁶ In 1928 the total output for agriculture was 124 percent of the amount in 1913. In 1929 this dropped to 121 percent; in 1930, 117 percent; in 1932, 107 percent; and in 1933, 101 percent. Livestock production in 1933 was only 65 percent of pro­duction in 1913.⁵⁷ Yet in summing up the results of collectivization on January 7, 1933, Stalin was satisfied: 'The party has succeeded in creating conditions which enable it to obtain 1,200—1,400 million poods [394—460 million centners] of marketable grain annually, instead of 500—600 million poods [164—197 million centners], as was the case when individual peasant farming predominated."⁵⁸

This success was paid for primarily with millions of human lives. The demographic results of collectivization were tragic. The number of victims has never been, and will never be, determined exactly. (The losses of livestock were calculated, on the other hand, down to the last sheep.) Population figures and the data on the birth rate and mortality rate were no longer published after 1932. Stalin took personal charge of statistics. In January 1934, at the Seventeenth Party Congress, the "Congress of Victors," he reported "an increase in the population of the Soviet Union from 160,500,000 at the end of 1930 to 168,000,000 at the end of 1933." Ten years later he would tell Churchill that "the poor peasants" had taken reprisals against "10 million kulaks," of whom the "vast majority" were annihilated, the rest being sent to Siberia.⁵⁹ In 1935 Molotov reported that in 1928 the kulaks and well-to-do peasants had numbered 5,618,000, but as of January 1, 1935, only 149,000 were left.⁶⁰ Aleksandr Orlov reports that foreign journalists, including those who praised Stalin's policies, es­timated the number of victims of the famine at 5—7 million. The GPU gave Stalin an estimate of 3.3—3.5 million.⁶¹ The Soviet demographer Boris Urlanis notes a population loss of 7.5 million between the end of 1932 and the end of 1933.⁶²

After considering all the estimates and accounts, Robert Conquest arrived at the cautious figure of "over 5 million deaths from hunger and the diseases of hunger."⁶³ In a samizdat essay written in the period 1976—1978, I. G. Dyadkin estimated the population loss from 1929 to 1936 at 15.2 million.⁶⁴ The authorities expressed their opinion of Dyadkin's figures by arresting him.

The monstrous dimensions of this bloodletting become more apparent if we recall the angry indictment Bakunin hurled at the tsarist autocracy: "In the course of some 200 years the tsarist system had destroyed more than a million victims as a result of its brutish contempt for human rights and human life."⁶⁵ Bakunin included in his total for the "tsarist system" victims of war, epidemics, and other natural disasters that occurred in the course of those 200 years. A comparison of the number of victims in these two periods, 200 years of tsarist rule and a few years of Stalinist collectivization, shows the difference between autocracy and totalitarianism, between an unhurried historical existence and an insane rush toward "progress."

With amazing insight, as early as 1919, Ivan Bunin uncovered "the Bolsheviks' diabolical secret." They wanted to kill human sensibility. "Peo­ple live by a certain measure," Bunin wrote in his diary,

Even imagination and sensibility are measured. And so you go beyond this limit. As with the price of bread or beef. "What? Three rubles a pound!" (That is still within your frame of reference.) But if the price is raised to a thousand rubles, there will be no more shouts or amazement, only numbed insensibility. "What's that, seven?" "No, my dear, seven hundred." Then you really feel stunned, paralyzed. Because if seven people are hanged, you can still imagine it, but try to imagine seven hundred, or even seventy.⁶⁶

Bunin still measured sensibility by nineteenth-century standards. It never occurred to him, of course, that the number of people hanged, shot, tortured to death, and so on would be measured, not in the hundreds, but in the millions.

One of the most important aspects of collectivization was its sociological shock effect. The post-October tremor did not touch the deeper strata of society, but the shock of collectivization reached the very foundations of rural society. It destroyed the old peasantry and in its place produced a new social type—the collective farmer, a being who very quickly lost all interest in working the land. In the latter half of the 1920s such writers as Konstantin Fedin, Vsevolod Ivanov, and Leonid Leonov had written about postrevolutionary rural Russia. The revolution had not affected it at all, they said; it continued to live in the sixteenth century or at best the seventeenth. They portrayed Russia as a kind of antediluvian beast, a brontosaurus with a huge, inert body (the countryside) and a tiny brain (the city). Collectivization killed the brontosaurus.

The best works about collectivization were left to us by Andrei Platonov: The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan), which was never printed in the Soviet Union; and the short novel Vprok (meaning "pointless, for no good reason"), whose very title aroused immediate and angry criticism from Stalin. In these works Platonov in effect was asking, Does the country really need this insane attempt to reach socialism on paper? The entire subsequent history of the Soviet Union demonstrates that collectivization left the economy with a gaping wound that has never healed.

In Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak very accurately described the con­sequences of collectivization. Through terror people were broken of the habit of thinking; an illusory world was created for them, which they were required to accept as real. Pasternak was wrong, though, when he said the authorities could not admit that collectivization had been a mistake. For Stalin collectivization was not a mistake but a great victory.

Politically, collectivization was a brilliant success. From Stalin's point of view it was absolutely necessary. S. Dmitrievsky, the Soviet diplomat who defected while in Stockholm in 1930, published a biography of Stalin in 1931 that may be considered the first apologia for the Leader to appear in the West and the first statement of certain ideas that the Leader could not express openly at home.

The edifice of Stalin's dictatorship can be maintained and his plans carried out only if political and economic power is fully monopolized by Stalin. Political power has been in his hands for a long time. But up until now he had not had full economic power. That is possible only on the basis of a monopolistic state capitalism encompassing the country's entire economic life without exception.⁶⁷

Dmitrievsky noted a threat to Stalin's dictatorship from the peasant quarter. 'The victory of the peasantry within the country would be a victory for the West, for its fundamental conception of individualism and liberalism in political life."⁶⁸

Dmitrievsky wrote his biography of Stalin just when collectivization was in full swing. When that campaign was over, the entire economic life of the country was indeed in Stalin's hands. The entire citizenry became completely dependent on the state, both politically and economically. Si­multaneously, monopoly control was exerted over another part of people's lives, the spiritual aspect.

THE INEXORABLE RISE OF JOSEPH STALIN

This is how Dmitrievsky described a Politburo meeting in 1930: "Rudzutak, steady and impassive, usually chairs the meeting. But the central, the decisive presence, despite his customary silence, even because of it, is Stalin. All eyes are on him. Many at the meeting dislike him, some even hate him, but for the moment he is nothing less than the autocrat of the Russian state."⁶⁹

The American journalist Louis Fischer concluded his account of the Sixteenth Party Congress, held in June—July 1930, with these words:

A good comrade should advise Stalin to stop the orgy of glorification of his person. ... Every day hundreds and thousands of telegrams full of compli­ments in exalted, exaggerated Oriental style—"You are the very greatest Leader," "the most faithful disciple of Lenin," etc.—are addressed to him. Three cities are named after him, along with countless villages, collective farms, schools, factories, and institutions. ... Though Stalin may not be responsible for this state of affairs, he tolerates it. He could put an end to it just by pressing a button.⁷⁰

Fischer later learned that when this passage was translated for Stalin, the Leader's response was brief and to the point: "Scum!"

Robert C. Tucker, the American biographer of Stalin, argues that the real cult, the deification, of Stalin began at the end of 1931 with an article in which the general secretary presented himself as the only legitimate interpreter of Marx. It is true that in 1929—1930 Stalin had not yet assumed all the attributes of the Supreme Leader and Teacher, whose every word became law for all of progressive mankind. Nevertheless, by then he not only possessed vast power but had already become the object of a cult, as Louis Fischer described. In those first years of the five-year plan he was not universally worshiped, as he soon would be. Evidence of reluctance to make a god of him could be seen in two attempts to challenge his authority in the early 1930s. They were made, not by veteran oppositionists, but by Bolsheviks of the younger generation.

In November 1930 a plot was uncovered, the "Syrtsov plot" as Dmitriev- sky called it, or the "right-ultraleft bloc" in the official terminology, which considered the combination of such mutually exclusive concepts perfectly acceptable. A few months earlier Sergei Syrtsov had begun a meteoric rise, becoming chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR in 1929 and an alternate member of the Politburo after the Sixteenth Party Congress, in July 1930. His fall was every bit as sudden as his rise. Dmitrievsky, who gives the fullest account of the "plot," says that Syrtsov, a favorite of Stalin's, along with a number of other "high party and gov­ernment officials, came to the conclusion that the most decisive measures had to be taken to change the policies of the government to which they themselves belonged. "⁷¹ Dmitrievsky stresses that Syrtsov, in all his articles and speeches, "remained what he was, a devoted adherent to the Stalinist system of ideas." What he was dissatisfied with was the administrative mess, the incredible bureaucracy of the machine of state. His "purely practical, nonideological platform"⁷² was endorsed by Besso Lominadze, who at one time had been sent by Stalin to attempt a revolution in Canton, and by Lazar Shatskin, a leader of the Komsomol. What is more, Dmi- trievsky states, "there were rumors that Stalin himself was somehow mixed up in this plot, hoping to use it to carry through a number of radical changes."⁷³ Knowing Stalin, we cannot reject even such fantastic rumors. Would he really have refrained from playing the provocateur if that suited his ends? The "conspirators" were arrested and removed from their posts, but only mild sanctions were taken against them. It was the last time that criticism of the party line was viewed simply as a political matter, rather than "treason" or "terrorism."

The summer of 1932 saw the second challenge to Stalin's authority in this period. Mikhail Ryutin, a former Bukharin supporter and one-time secretary of the party's Moscow committee, circulated a 160-page program containing three main demands: (1) economic retreat (a slower pace of industrialization and an end to forced collectivization); (2) democracy within the party; and (3) removal of Stalin. An entire chapter of the program dealt with Stalin, whom Ryutin called "the evil genius of the party and the revolution," "the gravedigger of the revolution," and a "provocateur."⁷⁴

Charges were brought not only against Ryutin but also against Uglanov, formerly first secretary of the Moscow committee, and against Tolmachev and Eismont, formerly people's commissars and Central Committee mem­bers. All were accused of trying to form a "counterrevolutionary bourgeois- kulak organization" whose purpose was to "restore capitalism in the USSR." Ryutin had once been an editor of the military newspaper Red Star. Now he was charged with attempting to organize a terrorist group among student officers at the Military School of the Ail-Union Central Executive Com­mittee, with the aim of assassinating Stalin. For the first time party members were accused of plotting terrorist acts when all they had done was express oppositional views. For the first time Stalin demanded the death penalty for the "plotters." However, the Politburo refused to authorize the execution of Ryutin. According to Krivitsky, Kirov opposed the death penalty in this case and rallied the majority of the Politburo behind him.⁷⁵ Stalin would recall the Ryutin platform with a vengeance four years later, and within a year and a half he made Kirov pay for his conduct.

Ryutin circulated his program at the height of the famine, in the midst of collectivization and the mad rush to complete "five in four." Meanwhile the Left Opposition, i.e., Trotsky, supported Stalin.

The Trotskyists welcomed the decision to collectivize agriculture, al­though Trotsky did reproach Stalin for his theoretical illiteracy, for not even considering the second volume of Capital in his policy of collectivization.⁷⁶ (Trotsky wrote this in his Bulletin of the Opposition, which he began to publish after being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929.) Sometimes it is possible to find in Trotsky's Bulletin letters from the Soviet Union crit­icizing collectivization for not being radical enough. "In place of the dis­possessed and deported kulaks," a certain A. T. complains in a letter dated June 12, 1930, "in the soil fertilized by centrist illusions, we see the sprouting of new capitalist shoots."⁷⁷ In a 1931 pamphlet, Problems of the Development of the USSR, Trotsky called collectivization "a new epoch in the development of humanity, the beginning of the liquidation of the 'idiocy of rural life.'" Ante Ciliga, who in 1930 was in Stalin's prisons and camps, told of the unenviable position of the imprisoned Trotskyists when they received instructions from their leader to defend the view that the Soviet Union was a "workers' state." It is true that Trotsky wrote, 'The Soviet Union has not entered into socialism, as the ruling Stalinist faction teaches." Instead, Trotsky argued, it had entered "only into the first stage of devel­opment in the direction of socialism." In a letter to his son in October 1932 he wrote that it would be wrong to raise the slogan "Down with Stalin" as a war cry at that moment because "at present Milyukov, the Mensheviks, and Thermidorians of all sorts... will willingly echo the cry. ... It may happen within a few months," this great strategist of the revolution con­tinued, "that Stalin may have to defend himself against Thermidorian pres­sure, and that we temporarily may have to support him."⁷⁸ With enemies like these, Stalin didn't need friends.

The years of the First Five-Year Plan were the years of Stalin's inexorable rise. He concentrated all power, material and spiritual, in his hands. He was praised and glorified without restraint. A single word from him could stop or start the entire country. He would utter brief slogans and entire policies would change: 'Technology decides everything," 'Tempos decide everything," "Cadres decide everything." He devastated the countryside and killed millions of peasants, then blamed his subordinates. He imposed a regime of virtual slavery on the workers, then declared: "Of all the greatest treasures in the world, human beings, cadres, are the most precious and the most decisive." He announced that "life has become more joyous," and the country, bathed in blood and tears, was compelled to rejoice.

Hundreds of books have been written about Stalin in an attempt to penetrate the mystery of his success, the cult that surrounded him, his seemingly inexorable rise to greater and greater heights and unlimited power. He himself revealed the secret of his success in a simple formula: "If you are backward, if you are weak, that means you are wrong and can be beaten and enslaved. If you are mighty, that means you are right, and people have to beware of you. "⁷⁹ Stalin was referring to the might and power of the state, to the idea that might makes right in both foreign and domestic policy, but his formula also applied to the individual in a political power struggle.

For decades Trotsky's views decisively influenced most biographers of Stalin, "the irreplaceable general secretary," as Souvarine called him. Stalin was portrayed as a mediocrity, "a gray blur," borrowing the expression first used by Sukhanov. He was a liar, a scoundrel, and a good-for-nothing who had accidentally usurped the position that rightfully belonged to Trotsky, the brilliant organizer, writer, theoretician, and practical leader. After Sta­lin's death many biographers seemed inclined to depict him as a devil who had been plotting virtually since childhood to seize total power. The per­sonality traits of the mature Stalin, whose monstrous power unbalanced his mind, were projected back to an earlier period onto the Stalin who was fighting for power and who won because he understood the true nature of the Bolshevik party better than his opponents and who best understood the weaknesses of his rivals.

We can safely assume that his plans for the kind of state and society he wanted did not crystalize in his mind until the late 1920s, when his victory over his rivals, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin, was no longer in doubt. We can obtain a fairly clear picture of Stalin's plans, ideas, and aspirations from Dmitrievsky's books, although most biographers of Stalin disregard him completely.

Dmitrievsky was unquestionably a follower of Ustryalov, and he carried the changing landmarks ideology a step further, portraying Stalin as the embodiment of Russian national communism. Dmitrievsky's book on Stalin (1931) and his Soviet Portraits (1932) were aimed at winning the emigr6 community over to Stalin's side. What he wrote then seemed strange and unbelievable, but today it deserves special attention, because Stalin soon embarked on the road Dmitrievsky predicted.

A certain process had been underway in Russia, Dmitrievsky argued: "People who with full sincerity considered themselves at first to be nothing but Communists have now become National Communists, and many of them are already standing on the threshold of pure Russian nationalism."⁸⁰ The future of Russia was to be a national, or people's, empire, and the general secretary was the man leading the country to that state. "Could it be that only a thick-headed battering ram like Stalin can break through the door to Russia's future?" Dmitrievsky asked rhetorically.⁸¹ To him, Stalin's dic­tatorship was in many respects already a national, people's dictatorship. At any rate, it was "far more closely linked with the masses than any so- called democracy."⁸² The strength of the Stalinist system lay "not only in its bayonets" but in these links with the nation.⁸³

Stalin's program consisted of several points, according to Dmitrievsky. First, to follow a "policy of applying maximum pressure, both in the party and the state apparatus, until everything and everyone is about to burst." Then would come the time when the idea of a "Red, proletarian, Russo- Asiatic imperialism" could be put into effect. The world had been divided into two camps—imperialism and its opponents. At the head of those fed up with imperialism and willing to fight to the death against it would stand the Soviet Union, That was how Stalin summed up his views, according to Dmitrievsky.⁸⁴ But the struggle against imperialism meant a struggle against the West. "It is necessary to catch up with and surpass the hated West, to bring it down, to break its arrogant power. For the sake of this objective, he is ready to sacrifice not only the small nation to which he was born but every generation now alive."⁸⁵

This enemy of democracy and of the West, this implacable despot "who has no doubts about anything, who feels no pity for anyone," was building a national, people's empire. Russia was "gradually and ever more thor­oughly ridding itself of the buzzing fly of Marxism, and advancing farther and farther along the road to a national system. Stalin's victory was the first step on this road, because it broke the back of the main force fighting Marxism in this country."⁸⁶

In 1932, when Dmitrievsky wrote those lines, Trotsky still believed that Stalin was a Marxist, insufficiently grounded in theory and inclined to violate the letter and the spirit of the doctrine, but a Marxist nevertheless. To Dmitrievsky Stalin was already a fighter against Marxism. Both observers were right, each in a certain sense. Stalin was a Marxist as long as he found it helpful and an anti-Marxist whenever its dogmas became a con­straint upon him. This was also true of nationalism, which also contained too much dogma for Stalin. He would regard Russia as the motherland only so long as the power in Russia was "ours, the workers' power, Stalinist power," as Dmitrievsky rightly observed.⁸⁷

Nationalism, Marxism, whatever—anything was used as building ma­terial to consolidate the power Stalin had inherited from Lenin. Dmitrievsky saw Stalin as the predecessor of a future Russian Caesar, the builder of a future nationalist-led Russia. In fact, Stalin was a Caesar serving his own ends and building his own, purely Stalinist state.

Stalin's triumph was celebrated at the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934. This was his apotheosis. The achievements of industriali­zation were visible, collectivization had been completed, the spiritual life of Soviet society had been firmly taken in hand, and new laws had been passed that chained the citizenry down in all possible ways. In five years the country had changed beyond recognition. No one would dare any longer to challenge Stalin's autocratic rule.

Kirov, who had less than a year to live, called it the Congress of Victors. In September 1934, Hitler told his National Socialists, gathered at Nurem- burg, that they were the real congress of victors.

In his speech to the Seventeenth Party Congress Stalin promised peace and tranquility:

At the Fifteenth Congress it was still necessary to prove that the party line was correct and to wage a struggle against certain anti-Leninist groups; and at the Sixteenth Party Congress we had to deal the final blow to the last adherents of these groups. At this congress, however, there is nothing more to prove and, it seems, no one to fight. Everyone now sees that the line of the party has triumphed.⁸⁸

The stenographic record at this point records "thunderous applause." Of the applauding delegates, who numbered 1,966, only 59 were to take part in the next congress, the Eighteenth, in 1939. Nearly two-thirds of the delegates to the Congress of Victors were arrested in the intervening five years. Of those, only a very few survived.

The first official biography of Stalin was published in 1935 in a great many languages. Stalin had always hoped Gorky would write it, but the father of proletarian literature never got around to it, and "the social de­mand" had to be met by Henri Barbusse. It was rumored that the biography was actually written by Alfred Kurella, a German Communist writer, and that Barbusse merely put his name to it. Be that as it may, Barbusse's book, Stalin: A New World Seen Through One Man, was soon banned in the Soviet Union, for nearly all the Leader's friends and comrades-in-arms mentioned in the book had become enemies of the people. Nevertheless this "biography" provided the promoters of Stalin's cult with a splendid model to follow. Consider this paean to Stalin, for example: "Although you do not know him, he knows you and is thinking of you. Whoever you may be, you have need of this benefactor. Whoever you may be, the finest part of your destiny is in the hands of that other man, who also watches you, and who works for you."⁸⁹

Of course there was also Dmitrievsky's portrait:

Calm, immovable, Stalin sits there, with the stony face of an antediluvian lizard, in which only the eyes are alive. All thoughts, desires, plans converge upon him. He listens, reads, considers, thinking intently. Confidently, with­out any haste, he issues his orders. He weaves his web of intrigue. Elevates his own people and crushes the others. Buys and sells bodies and souls.⁹⁰

Barbusse is more flattering about the Benefactor's outer appearance. He is a "man with a scholar's mind, a workman's face, and the dress of a simple soldier."⁹¹

The ultimate assessment was given by Kirov at the Seventeenth Congress. He called Stalin "the greatest man of all ages and nations." Stalin had reached the heights of power. The next stage would begin with Kirov's murder.

ALL QUIET ON EVERY FRONT

Tranquility on the Soviet Union's borders was an essential condition for the success of Stalin's "revolution from above." Soviet diplomacy—the "ground floor" of Soviet foreign policy—sought to ensure such tranquility during the First Five-Year Plan.

Only one incident seriously disrupted the calm, but it gave the Red Army the opportunity to show itself in battle for the first time since the civil war. There had been no diplomatic relations between China and Moscow since 1928. In the summer of 1929, Chiang Kai-shek's government provoked the Soviet Union: the consulate staffs in Manchuria and northern China were arrested. (The consulates in Harbin and Mukden had continued to function despite the break in diplomatic relations.) The civilian em­ployees of the Soviet-owned Chinese Eastern Railway were also arrested. Then the railroad was seized. When China refused to release the Soviet citizens and return the railroad, Soviet forces intervened and defeated the Chinese army after several battles. The Special Red Army of the Far East was commanded by Vasily Blyukher, who in 1924—1927 had been a military adviser to the Kuomintang. In December 1929 the status quo was restored on the Soviet—Chinese border. Chiang Kai-shek had miscalculated, under­estimating the strength and determination of the Soviet government. Al­though the Stalin regime feared serious international complications, it would try to use to its own advantage any situation that arose.

At the end of the 1920s, Moscow intervened in a civil war in Afghanistan in support of King Amanullah, who was threatened by a major rebellion. Agabekov, in his account of this episode, stated that the decision was made to support Amanullah because he based himself on the southern Afghan tribes, the "natural enemies" of the British, rather than Bacho Sakao, who based himself on the population of northern Afghanistan and therefore might try to "extend his influence into Soviet Turkestan." A "strike force" under the command of Primakov, former Soviet military аПасЬё in Kabul and a hero of the civil war, was sent to Afghanistan to support Amanullah. After a series of successful engagements with Bacho Sakao's troops, the Soviet military unit was recalled, for Amanullah had given up the struggle against the insurgents.⁹²

Relations with Germany were at the center of Soviet foreign policy in­terests during the First Five-Year Plan. Only at the end of this period was a longstanding aim of Soviet diplomacy achieved, that is, the signing of nonaggression pacts with France (in 1931) and, over Germany's objections, with Poland (in 1932). In 1926 and 1931, Germany and the Soviet Union renewed and amplified the terms of the Treaty of Rapallo. The privileged relations between the two countries, as opponents of the Versailles system, included not only diplomatic and economic but especially military coop­eration. The German foreign policy line had developed out of the struggle between German "Westernizers" and "Easternizers," between supporters of close ties with the Soviet Union and advocates of a Western orientation. Among those favoring the Eastern orientation were the Reichswehr, con­servative politicians, and some industrialists; the Westernizers were pri­marily Social Democrats.

It is easy to understand why Stalin's dislike for the Social Democrats— for socialists in general—was particularly keen with regard to the German Social Democrats. Stalin's leaning toward the conservative elements in Germany can be explained not only by their support for a pro-Soviet ori­entation but also by the general secretary's partiality for anyone who favored firm, authoritarian rule. The Soviet Union's relations with Fascist Italy, for example, were excellent from the moment Mussolini came to power. Alek- sandr Barmin writes that in 1924 the Soviet ambassador to Italy, Yurenev, invited Mussolini to dinner. The day before the dinner, Giacomo Matteotti, a socialist and leader of the opposition, was kidnapped (and subsequently killed) by the Fascists. Italian Communists and liberals demanded that Yurenev withdraw his invitation. The Soviet ambassador refused to do this and ceremoniously received И Duce.⁹³ During the First Five-Year Plan, Italy received huge orders from the Soviet Union for industrial equipment, and Italian industrialists in turn offered the Soviet Union long-term credits guaranteed by their government.⁹⁴

The "second-floor" aspect of Soviet foreign policy—involving the Com­intern—centered on one main task, the implementation of the decisions of the Sixth Comintern Congress, held in the summer of 1928, especially the decision that the main enemy was "the social fascists." This phrase, first put into circulation by Zinoviev in 1922, referred to the Social Dem­ocrats and implied not only that they were the main enemies of the working class but also that the real fascists were not a great danger. Moscow viewed the growing power of the Nazis (who won 6.5 million votes in Germany in 1930) as a rather positive phenomenon. It showed, according to the Com­intern leaders, that the masses were losing their illusions about parliament and democracy. Besides, the Nazis were enemies of the Western democra­cies and, as Stalin saw it, would not be able to maintain a pro-Western orientation. In 1931 Stalin asked Heinz Neumann, a leader of the German Communist party (KPD), "Don't you think that if the nationalists came to power in Germany they would occupy themselves solely with the West, so that we would be able to build socialism freely here?"⁹⁵ The KPD was given orders from Moscow to wage a relentless struggle against the Social Dem­ocrats, particularly against the left wing. In submitting to these orders, the Communists not infrequently joined forces with the Nazis to fight the so­cialists. This meant an abrupt change of tactics for the German Communists. Just the day before, the party had still followed Neumann's slogan: "Hit the fascists wherever you meet them." Stalin, who had decided on this change of policy, summoned three members of the German leadership to Moscow, Thaelmann, Neumann, and Remmele. After their return, they announced the new orders: the Social Democrats are the enemy.

Many historians have accepted the view that in paving the way for Hitler's victory Stalin was following the formula: a victory for Hitler today means victory for the Communists tomorrow. This notion was widely accepted in Communist circles in Germany in the early 1930s. Actually Stalin's policy with regard to Germany was shaped by three factors. The first was hatred for the Social Democrats. But this feeling was not a personal phobia. All the Bolsheviks shared it, including Trotsky. True, he opposed the term social fascist, but at the same time he opposed any alliance with parties and organizations that refused to break with reformism or wanted to revive social democracy.

The attitude of Stalin and Trotsky toward social democracy and nazism in the 1930s clearly shows the difference between the two heirs of Lenin and no less clearly shows that Stalin was the genuine Leninist. From 1931 to 1941, without any shame or hesitation, Stalin carried out at least four 180-degree turns in foreign policy, guided solely by his own interests. In June 1933, after Hitler had come to power, the magazine Communist In­ternational ridiculed a suggestion by the "Austro-Marxists" (as the Social Democrats of Austria were called):

The Austro-Marxists suggest that the USSR make an alliance with the "great democracies" on an international scale in order to fight fascism.... The

social fascists advise the Soviet proletariat to enter into an alliance with "democratic" France and its vassals against German and Italian fascism. The social fascists seem to have forgotten the existence of French, British, and American imperialism.⁹⁶

Within less than a year the "Soviet proletariat" did precisely what the Austro-Marxists had advised. But Trotsky stuck to the old position. Even in 1938 he argued:

What in fact would a bloc of the imperialist democracies against Hitler mean? The shackles and leg irons of Versailles in a new form, but even heavier, bloodier, more difficult to bear. ... To be allied with imperialism in a struggle against fascism is the same as being allied with the devil against his horns and claws.⁹⁷

By 1938 Stalin was an ally of the democracies and Trotsky criticized him unmercifully for betraying the cause of the proletariat and the world revolution. In June 1940 Trotsky still insisted on his position: "A socialist who advocates defense of the capitalist 'homeland' plays a role just as reactionary as the peasants of the Vend6e who fought to defend the feudal order, that is, their very own chains."⁹⁸ This time Trotsky found himself in the same camp with Stalin, who had managed to change camps again by concluding an alliance with Hitler in 1939. Trotsky gave the impression of a clock that had stopped working in 1917 and Stalin one of a clock that runs in whatever direction its owner wishes. Each claimed, of course, that his was the only correct time, since it corresponded to the laws of history.

Hostility toward the Social Democrats was the first element of Stalin's policy vis-^-vis Germany. The second element was the conviction that the Nazis were nationalists whose main concern was to oppose the Versailles system. In 1923 Karl Radek had tried to use the rising Nazi party as a force to help destroy the Weimar Republic and thereby contribute to a Communist revolution. Radek gave the Nazis their first hero, Schlageter, who was shot by the French in the occupied Ruhr, by making a famous funeral speech in his honor, a speech approved by Stalin and Zinoviev. Radek expressed the conviction of the leaders of the Comintern that the "vast majority of the nationally minded masses will belong not to the capitalist camp but to the workers' camp," that "hundreds of Schlageters" would come over to the camp of the revolution.⁹⁹ Hitler, in turn, expressed the belief to his comrades that a Communist could always make a good Nazi, but a Social Democrat never could.

Finally, the third element was fear of seeing the Communists come to power in Germany. At the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, Zinoviev said: "We know very well that in only a few years, many of the industrial countries will outdistance us and occupy first place in the Comintern and then, as Comrade Lenin said, we will become a backward Soviet country among developed Soviet countries." Zinoviev apparently had nothing against this prospect. Stalin was categorically opposed. He had no intention of yielding first place in the Comintern.

In the 1930s a new and important factor appeared on the world political scene: pro-Soviet public opinion. The cultivation of Western public opinion began right after the October revolution. Its effects were described by the American journalist George Popov in his book The Cheka, which tells of his arrest in 1922: "One of the greatest political successes of the Moscow despots is to have conditioned world opinion in such a way that anyone who dares to discuss the shortcomings of the Soviet state, even though they are undeniable, is declared 'anti-Bolshevik' and accused of lacking objec­tivity."¹⁰⁰

In the eyes of the Western intelligentsia, the world economic crisis transformed the Soviet Union, the land of the five-year plan, into a paradise on earth. Arthur Koestler, who visited the Soviet Union in 1932—33 and wrote about it with the same enthusiasm as all the other Western writers, journalists, and businessmen, made the following remark much later, when he was settling his scores with the past in his autobiography: "If history itself had been a supporter of communism, it would not have been able to synchronize so perfectly the gravest crisis of the Western world and the first phase of the Russian industrial revolution. The contrast was so strong that it inevitably led to this conclusion: they are the future, we are the past."¹⁰¹ Soviet planning was contrasted to the chaos of the Western econ­omy, and the absence of unemployment in the Soviet Union to the millions of unemployed in the West.

The term iron curtain came into general use after Churchill's speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. Goebbels had used it before Churchill, but the first to do so "was the Russian writer Vasily Rozanov in 1917: "With a clank, a squeal, and a groan, an iron curtain has descended over Russian history. The show is over. The audience has risen from its seats. It is time for people to put on their coats and go home. They look around. There are no more coats and no more homes."¹⁰² To Rozanov, the iron curtain was the revolution, which interrupted the course of Russian history. The term was used in the same sense in 1921 by an emigr6 writer named Polyakov.

Soviet propagandists also used the term, but in a different sense. In 1930, an article entitled "The Iron Curtain" appeared in Literaturnaya gazeta. Its author, Lev Nikulin, began with these words:

When there is a fire on the stage, the stage is separated from the auditorium by an iron curtain. From the point of view of the bourgeoisie, there is a conflagration in Soviet Russia that has lasted for twelve years in a row. Pulling on the ropes with all their might, they have tried to lower the curtain little by little, so that the fire does not spread to the orchestra pit.¹⁰³

A fire had indeed been raging in the Soviet Union. By 1930 it had devoured millions of people, but the West knew nothing about it—the West did not want to know. The end of the NEP and the coming of the "Great Change" meant, in particular, the end of all connections with the outside world that were not totally monitored by the authorities. Unsupervised contacts had still been possible in the latter half of the 1920s.

The Soviet Union's isolation from the rest of the world was possible only through the complicity of the West. It was not difficult to isolate the Soviet people: the strictest censorship, no more individual trips abroad, no cor­respondence with foreigners or conversations with them, and incessant propaganda. Koestler was rather surprised by the questions he, a German Communist, was asked by the Soviet people concerning the situation in the West:

"When you left the bourgeois Press was your ration card withdrawn and were you kicked out at once from your room?" "What is the average number per day of French working class families starving to death (a) in rural areas, (b) in the towns?" "By what means have our comrades in the West succeeded in temporarily staving off the war of intervention which the finance-capitalists are preparing with the aid of the Social Fascist traitors?"¹⁰⁴

Koestler added that these questions were always asked, the same ones in every town he visited, and that they were asked in neo-Russian, "Dzhu- gashvilian" language (Stalin's original name was Dzhugashvili).

The ignorance of the Soviet people was the result of the combined efforts of the "organs" and the propaganda machine. But the scores of books, the hundreds and hundreds of articles written about the Soviet Union by French, German, English, and American democrats, liberals, and conservatives who had been authorized to travel in the land that was building socialism reinforced the iron curtain from the Western side by not allowing people in the West to learn the truth about the Soviet Union.

Journalists who had lived for a long time in the Soviet Union, such as Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent in Moscow, participated in the deception. Their reasons varied widely: a desire not to offend the Soviet authorities, fear of being considered "unobjective," a desire to pro­mote their own government's policies. Western correspondents concealed, distorted, and interpreted the facts falsely. It was with their help that the monstrous extent of the famine of 1931—1933 was concealed from the world.

Many Western intellectuals saw the October revolution as the dawn of a new era. To them the Great Depression of the 1930s signaled the end of Western civilization. They believed that the Soviet Union represented a joyous tomorrow for all mankind. "I have seen the future and it works," declared Lincoln Steffens, an influential American journalist and true friend of the Soviet Union. The eminent British Fabians Sydney and Beatrice Webb published a book entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? They answered the question in no uncertain terms. It was a new civiliza­tion.¹⁰⁵ "I have never eaten so well as during my trip to the Soviet Union," announced the famous master of paradox Bernard Shaw, who visited the country of the future at the height of the famine. On the eve of his departure he entered the following in the visitor's book at Moscow's Metropol Hotel: 'Tomorrow I leave this land of hope and return to our Western countries of despair."¹⁰⁶ Ella Winter, an American who was in the Soviet Union in 1932, spoke of certain momentary "difficulties" in terms of labor pains: "Is a woman happy bearing the long-awaited child? They are giving birth to a new world, a new world outlook, and in this process questions of personal gratification become secondary."¹⁰⁷ After traveling in the Soviet Union in 1934, the Labourite Harold Laski announced: "Never in history has man attained the same level of perfection as in the Soviet regime."¹⁰⁸

Arthur Koestler explained the thought process he went through on his visit to the Soviet Union to gather materials for an enthusiastic book about the land of socialism. He reasoned dialectically. The standard of living was low, but it had been lower under the tsars. The workers lived better in the capitalist countries, but their situation was growing worse, while in the Soviet Union workers' conditions were improving.

The main argument in the minds of all Western devotees of the new society was that things would be different when the revolution came in their own country. This was the reasoning of French, English, and Americans alike. Edmund Wilson, the influential American literary critic, even pro­posed in an "Appeal to Progressives" that they "take communism out of the hands of the Communists" in order to build it themselves.¹⁰⁹ In the Soviet Union, he wrote, "I felt as though I was in a moral sanctuary, where the light never stops shining."¹¹⁰

The enthusiastic international campaign by intellectual "friends of the Soviet Union" rendered enormous practical service to Stalin's country. Pub­lic opinion was won over. A New York travel bureau recruited workers for the Soviet Union with publicity like this: "Come to Soviet Russia. Intel­lectuals and workers of every profession, both men and women, are cordially invited to Soviet Russia... where the greatest social experiment in the world is taking place, amidst a myriad of colorful nationalities, marvelous scenery, splendid architecture, and exotic civilizations."¹¹¹ Largely influ­enced by public opinion, the United States recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, after establishing close economic and cultural ties with it.

A highly characteristic trait of the pro-Soviet campaign was its language. All the books written in this period about the Soviet Union, whether in German, French, or English, by professional hack writers like Anna Louise Strong or refined aesthetes like Edmund Wilson, seem to have been written in the same "Dzhugashvilian" Soviet language. The lies that were being purveyed, whether consciously or unconsciously, lent a similar tone and color to all such works. The virus of the lie and the instrument of its contagion (the Russian language) spread through the entire world. And it seemed normal, after the Reichstag fire, when the Gestapo began hunting down all political opponents, that the leadership of the German Communist party should declare: 'The proletariat has not lost the battle. It has not been defeated. ... This is only a temporary retreat."¹¹²

The few Western intellectuals who tried to poke a hole in the iron curtain, to expose the conspiracy of lies about the Soviet Union and write the truth about it, were pitilessly ostracized from the camp of progressive humanity. This is what happened to the Romanian writer Panait Istrati in the early 1930s, for example, as it had to the American Max Eastman in the late 1920s.

Apologists for the Soviet Union submissively accepted all the twists and turns of Stalinist foreign policy, explaining them in the first half of the 1930s as a necessity for undermining imperialist and social fascist plots; in the second half of the 1930s and thereafter—as Stalin's wisdom. They glorified his genius even more shamelessly, if it is possible, than did those in the Soviet Union. A noted English biologist warmly recited a story about how Stalin personally had gone at night to a railroad freight station in Moscow with the sole purpose of helping the stevedores.¹¹³ Heinrich Mann maintained that for Stalin, Geist (spirit) is more important than Macht (physical might), and on and on.

"LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYOUS"

When Panait Istrati, a Romanian novelist, vagabond, and revolutionary, during his 1927—28 stay in the Soviet Union, expressed his disillusion with things in the land of socialism, he was told, "One can't make an omelette without breaking eggs." He retorted: "I can see the broken eggs. [But] where's this omelette of yours?"¹¹⁴

The eggs were broken relentlessly, and after the building-and-wrecking machine of collectivization and industrialization had been at work for a while one could begin to see the outline of the "omelette." On December 13, 1931, Stalin gave an interview to the German writer Emil Ludwig, the biographer of great men. "The task to which I have devoted my life... is the strengthening of the socialist state, and that means the international state."¹¹⁵ The word was spoken: the strengthening of the state, which was a revision of all the theories of that time that were considered orthodox Marxist. At the root of these theories was an army of quotations from Marx asserting that the state would soon wither away. Stalin still used the adjective international, but the main part was the noun state and the verb to strengthen. The cement for this state was to be fear. Emil Ludwig asked Stalin: "It seems to me that a large part of the Soviet population is experiencing terror, fear in the face of Soviet power, and that to a certain extent the stability of Soviet power is based on this fear."¹¹⁶ Stalin answered: "You are mistaken ... Do you really think that it would be possible to retain power for fourteen years and to have the backing of the masses, millions of people, owing to methods of intimidation and fear? No, that is impossible." But, he added: 'There is a small portion of the population who really fear Soviet authority and fight it. ... But here it is a question not only of a policy intended to intimidate these groups, which really do exist. Everyone knows that we Bolsheviks do not limit ourselves to intimidation; we go much farther, to the point of liquidating this bourgeois segment."¹¹⁷ Stalin corrected the German writer: not intimidation but liquidation of part of the population— the "bourgeois segment." It is doubtful however, that this correction could calm the part of the population that was considered beyond the pale and destined for liquidation.

During the First Five-Year Plan, a series of laws aimed at strengthening the government was passed. Some tightened up labor discipline: hundreds of thousands of peasants who had arrived in the cities and factories were to be "reeducated," turned into proletarians through forcible administrative measures.

A September 1929 resolution of the Central Committee made the director of an enterprise its master, its individual boss. Up to this time, an enterprise was headed by a "triangle": the director, the party secretary, and the president of the trade union committee. Now the director had the right to make all decisions autonomously: he could fire workers without notifying the trade unions, which in 1933 were formally dissolved and merged with the Commissariat of Labor. (The resolution said that the trade unions were being dissolved at their own request.) For an unauthorized absence from work (even for a single day) a worker could be prosecuted. But the director, who had broad rights, also lived under a threat. If the enterprise did not fulfill the plan or if the quality of production was poor, the director could be prosecuted. 'The labor code not only did not advance the norms and decrees of the first years of the dictatorship of the proletariat, on a number of points it actually retreated."¹¹⁸

In August 1932 the cruelest of a series of laws aimed at "strengthening state discipline" was adopted. It was a resolution "guarding the property of state enterprises, kolkhozes, and cooperatives and reinforcing public socialist ownership." Since everything in the Soviet Union was public property, the law applied to all government employees, including collective farmers (who in fact were the main targets of this law). A peculiar feature of this law was its "application of legal repression" by means of only one punishment: "the supreme measure of social defense: execution by shooting, with confiscation of all property." In the case of extenuating circumstances, execution was replaced by "deprivation of freedom for a period of not less than ten years, with confiscation of all property."¹¹⁹ This law was soon extended "by analogy" to "a broad range of crimes... including specula­tion, sabotage by state farm workers, theft of seed, etc."¹²⁰ Today Soviet historians admit, "The law of August 7 was excessively severe and insuf­ficiently worked out from the legal point of view. Malicious embezzlers and those who committed utterly insignificant misdemeanors alike came under its provisions."¹²¹ But it was precisely its maximum cruelty, its universality, that made this law one of the most essential instruments in "strengthening the state."

No less important was the law adopted at the end of 1932 that introduced the system of internal passports. Just two years earlier such passports had been called "the most effective instrument of police pressure and of ex­tortionist policies in so-called police states."¹²² Now they became the latest achievement on the road to socialism. The passports limited citizens' free­dom of movement and facilitated control over them. Above all, since the passports were issued only to city dwellers, the system tied collective farmers to the land. The prohibition against unauthorized resignation from an enterprise and the right of the Commissariat of Labor to transfer skilled workers and specialists to other locations or branches of industry in a sense also tied city inhabitants "to the land." All citizens became servants of the state, which assigned them their place of work and prohibited them from quitting, on pain of severe punishment.

Another law, enacted on June 8, 1934, crowned the system by which the population was now enslaved: "betrayal of the homeland" became pun­ishable by death. This law definitively rehabilitated the notion of "home­land." That term now referred to the Soviet state—which by party and state decree was projected retroactively into Russian history. The law also revived the term punishment, which had not been used since 1924. Similarly, the state abandoned the earlier concept of "reeducating" transgressors and instead announced its strict intention to punish them. In the decade fol­lowing the revolution, the prevailing view was the Marxist notion that being determines consciousness. Consequently, by altering being, that is, the economic conditions of one's environment, the state could alter conscious­ness. With the exception of those who should be exterminated as incurable, it was possible to correct, to reeducate, the rest. But in 1934 it was decreed that the individual, not society, was responsible. It was his fault if he could not overcome the "birthmarks of capitalism," the "remnants of the past," and he ought to be punished, for although his being had changed, his consciousness remained unaltered.

Finally, the law of June 8, 1934, rehabilitated the family: its members became collectively responsible for any flagrantly criminal deed committed by one of them. Members of the family who knew of the intentions of a "traitor to the homeland" could be sentenced to prison camp for a period of two to five years, while those who did not know could be exiled for five years. (The last measure was not repealed until 1960.) This notion of collective responsibility demonstrated that the state was interested in re­viving a strong family. A new family and marriage code would be adopted in 1936, but as early as 1934 the change in attitude was evident. The restoration of the destroyed family had begun, but on a new basis. Each Soviet family had to accept a new member, the Soviet state.

At the end of the First Five-Year Plan, a sword of Damocles hung over every Soviet citizen: they were all equal, for they were all on the brink of a precipice and they were all afraid. Stalin had explained to Emil Ludwig very well how the system of terror works: if a group of the population is destined to be liquidated, it is completely natural for a hierarchy of fear to arise. Everyone is afraid, but to different degrees, and the fear involves different punishments. Moreover, everyone recalls the existence of those destined for liquidation and is even more afraid of falling into this category. At the same conference of Marxist students of the agrarian question in December 1929 at which Stalin gave the signal for the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," Yuri Larin explained that this liquidation did not mean that all kulaks would be shot immediately. It sufficed to execute some of the condemned and let the others wait.

During the First Five-Year Plan, the specific features of Stalin's policy were definitively developed. He would draw the string taut, and at the last moment, when it was at the breaking point, he would relax the tension, only to tighten it again with still greater force. He often drew it tight and relaxed it almost simultaneously. Some American historians call the last year or two of the First Five-Year Plan "the great retreat." That was precisely the impression Stalin wished to give: after the insane figures of the first Stalin five-year plan, even a step backward to figures that were just as unrealizable but more modest seemed like a victory for common sense.

In 1932 collective farmers were allowed to cultivate private plots once again, but that was the same year that the law of August 7 was passed. The Soviet press sounded the alarm: in the giant factories, the shops, the sovkhozes (state, as opposed to collective, farms), the lunchrooms, "the individual had been forgotten." Pravda was indignant: "It is time to put an end to the bureaucratic, manor lord disdain for questions of public catering and to understand finally that there is no task more noble for a Communist than improving the condition of the workers."¹²³ Such an appeal in the fifteenth year of the proletarian revolution might seem strange had it not been launched at the very moment when conditions for the working class were worse than at any time since the civil war.

In 1928 the Central Committee had passed a special resolution that branded the technical intelligentsia a class enemy. In 1931 a secret directive called for improving the attitude toward the technical intelligentsia as well as their material situation; but in 1933 a new resolution demanded a redoubled effort against "wreckers."

In the course of the First Five-Year Plan, an intricate hierarchical system of privileges took shape. During war communism, only a norrow segment of leaders enjoyed privileges; during the NEP, some privileges of a material kind slipped out of the party's control. Money opened the way to the good life, independent of the party and the state (if you did not, of course, take into account the permanent fear that nagged at the Nepmen). During the five-year plan, the stratum of leaders was broadened considerably, and the party, that is to say, Stalin, became the exclusive dispenser of all privileges. But he granted privileges not only to the leaders but to all the citizens. His article, "Dizzy with Success," was an authorization for peasants to leave the collective farms (if only for a few months). His declaration, "Life has become more joyous, comrades; life has become gayer" (at the most acute period of the famine) was a directive for everyone to "be merry." After receiving this directive, Komsomol leader Kosarev tried to persuade young people: "It is wrong to think that we are against personal well-being, against comfortably furnished rooms, tidiness, fashionable clothes and shoes, that we crush any aspiration for individual desires. ... We are not against music, we are not against love, we are not against flowers."¹²⁴

Everyone who was forbidden to do anything was forbidden at the request of the workers; everyone who was authorized to do something was authorized to do so by the party, that is, Stalin. The struggle against asceticism, declared in 1932, became the next weapon for strengthening the state. Ascetics had nothing to lose but their ideas. If Stalin granted material benefits to those who appreciated them, he could also take them away. Those who lost favor with Stalin could lose their apartments, positions, and the "special rations" that went with a favored position. In 1932, Isaac Babel, who was in Paris, had a conversation with Boris Souvarine. The author oiRed Cavalry portrayed Stalin in colorful terms in the early 1930s, just the way his contemporaries, people close to the "court," saw him. Babel described how Stalin summoned an executive of the Commissariat of Nationalities whom the Politburo had decided to punish for some in­fraction. Stalin announced his punishment, seized his identification cards one by one for every establishment the man had worked for, confiscated his party card, and when the demoted man was about to leave called him back: "Hand over your pass to the Kremlin dining hall."¹²⁵

During the First Five-Year Plan a state was built up on the basis of a very complicated system of privileges and fear of their loss. This system was sound, for famine and poverty reigned; therefore, everything became a privilege. Everyone depended on a higher benefactor, just as in the feudal system vassals depended on their suzerain. One need only give a nudge to one "benefactor" to nudge an endless series of favor seekers and favor granters.

The Stalinist state needed a Stalinist society. The revolution had de­stroyed the old order, and a kind of hybrid society, the not quite dead remnants of the old order and the beginnings of the new postrevolutionary society, had survived under the NEP; during the First Five-Year Plan the society of the NEP era was destroyed. Out of the debris of the prerevolu- tionary and NEP societies, a new society was formed according to the specifications of the Great Builder, as Radek called Stalin. This society had no need at all for ascetics or for the followers of any ideas, including Marxists: it needed doers.

In 1931 the Central Committee passed a resolution on schools. The schools returned to the old methods, courses, lessons, and themes con­demned by the revolution. Commissar of Education Lunacharsky, the former symbol of the revolutionary school, was replaced by Andrei Bubnov, who had served for many years as the head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army. Three hundred fifty "experienced party functionaries" and one hundred Komsomol members were sent into the schools, which had been overwhelmed by an "alien element," as the Central Committee resolution put it. In 1932 all experiments in the realm of education were branded "leftist deviations" and "latent Trotskyism." "Firm schedules," "firm dis­cipline," and a whole gamut of punishments, right up to expulsion, were introduced in the schools.

The role of the school as an "educational," "civilizing" factor was as­signed to the prison system and the concentration camps, which developed very rapidly during the First Five-Year Plan, which included prisoner labor. In 1928 criminal legislation was reviewed and adapted to the expanding system of camps, which became necessary as a result of the sharp increase in the number of prisoners. In 1930 the task of protecting society against "particularly dangerous social offenders by means of isolation combined with socially useful labor, and by adapting them to the conditions of a working community" was entrusted to the "corrective labor" camps.¹²⁶ As early as 1929 all the camps had been placed under the direction of the OGPU, which for years had directed the archetypal camp at Solovki. The OGPU became the country's largest construction company. With a virtually limitless supply of unskilled labor at its disposal, the OGPU conducted massive arrests of engineers and technicians to manage the unskilled la­borers. A new, purely Soviet institution arose, the sharashka: a prison in which engineers, scholars, and researchers worked in their fields of spe­cialization for the interests of the state. At the large-scale building sites, in the "super-factories," the specialists were monitored by armed guards. The largest construction site of the First Five-Year Plan, the Baltic—White Sea Canal, was built by prisoners under the leadership of "engineer- wreckers." Trotsky's dream of "militarized labor" became a reality under Stalin in the form of the "penalization of labor." The gates of the camps were adorned with Stalin's words: "In the Soviet Union labor is⁴a matter of honor, prowess, and heroism."

The prisoners constituted the bottom of Soviet society; at the summit was the Leader, the Boss. In 1933, Afinogenov, after the success of The Fear, wrote a new play, The Lie. Aware of the explosiveness of his subject, he sent the text to Comrade Stalin in person. Stalin worked on the play for a long time, making corrections, cutting out parts, adding to it. Then, for lack of time, he returned the manuscript without adding the finishing touches, with the following note: "Comrade Afinogenov! The point of your play is rich in its conception, but its execution was poor."¹²⁷ It cannot be ruled out that, for Stalin, the point of the play was expressed by one of its characters: "One had to be a boss to think."¹²⁸ Several years later, at an all-union conference for the wives of Red Army commanders, one of the wives recounted her conversation in the Far East with a Gold, a represen­tative of the indigenous population. The man was seated in a boat and his wife was rowing. "Why aren't you rowing?" the lady asked him. "I am thinking," he answered. When she saw them a second time, the man was rowing while his wife sat behind him. "Now," he explained, "Stalin is doing the thinking about how I should live, so I am free to work."¹²⁹

The restructuring of society's material base was accompanied by a com­plete alteration of its superstructure. Society's spiritual life was harnessed to the state's chariot to an extent that would have seemed impossible not long before. Krylenko, the commissar of justice, renowned prosecutor, and amateur chessmaster, declared in 1932: "We must once and for all put an end to neutrality in chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula 'chess for chess's sake,' just as we do 'art for art's sake.' We must organize shock units of chess players and immediately begin to fulfill a five-year plan for chess."

The chess five-year plan was an innocent game in comparison to the "antireligion five year plan" announced on May 15, 1932. Under this plan, "by the first of May 1937 not a single house of prayer will be needed any longer in any territory of the Soviet Union, and the very notion of God will be expunged as a survival of the Middle Ages and an instrument for holding down the working masses."

All of science came under attack as well. 'The philosophical, natural, and mathematical sciences," declared the journal Marxism and the Natural Sciences, "have the same political character as the historical sciences." In 1929 the number of academicians doubled. In the elections for three Marx­ists—the philosopher Deborin, the historian Lukin, and the literary critic Friche—nine academicians, including Ivan Pavlov, voted against them in a last stand in defense of scientific freedom. After a second ballot, the Marxists were elected to the Academy. Aleksei Krylov, a mathematician and naval architect, quoting Pushkin, exhorted the resisters: "What does it matter, sir? Go ahead and kiss the villain's hand."¹³⁰

The housebreaking of the Academy of Sciences went beyond the election of Marxists. In 1930 the Academy was assigned a new task, formulated as follows: "to assist in developing a unitary scientific method based on the materialist world view, consistently orienting the entire system of scientific knowledge toward the satisfaction of the needs of the socialist reconstruction of the country and the further development of socialist society."¹³¹

In December 1930 Stalin gave an interview to a group of philosophers at the Institute of Red Professors. He called for a struggle against the "Menshevizing idealism" of Deborin and the Menshevik views of Plekhanov and urged them to pay no attention to the modesty of Lenin, who did not consider himself a professional philosopher; on the contrary, they should give the leader of the October revolution the place he deserved—that of the head of Russian Marxism, the greatest Russian Marxist philosopher, one of Marxism's leading lights together with Marx and Engels. The hint was well taken. In September 1931 Bolshevik, the organ of the Central Committee, published an article that unmasked the "Menshevizing ideal­ism" of Deborin and his school (whatever that meant) and indicated that "it was necessary to develop materialist dialectics... on the basis of the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin." Thus Stalin was elevated to the rank of a classic writer of Marxist philosophy, on a par with the other three. On the fiftieth anniversary of Marx's death Pravda explained that Marx should be studied "in accordance with" Stalin's works. The publi­cation figures for the Marxist "classics" presented in January 1934 at the Seventeenth Party Congress eloquently demonstrated that all the classics were equal, but one was more equal than the others. Marx and Engels had a circulation of 7 million, Lenin 14 million, Stalin 60.5 million. American correspondent Eugene Lyons, who was walking around Moscow on Novem­ber 7, 1933, counted all the portraits of Lenin and Stalin in the windows of the houses along Gorky Street. The count was 103 to 52 in favor of Stalin. The "four-headed portrait" soon gained great popularity: the four profiles of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin looking to the future. Goebbels saw in this portrait an excellent propaganda device and immediately pre­pared a similar one for Germany; true, it had only three profiles: Frederick the Great, Bismarck, and Hitler. This trinity also looked resolutely to the future.

Philosophical expertise was, and is, an indispensable attribute of the Leader of the Communist party, Supreme Guardian of the Doctrine, but of perhaps even greater significance is history. The conquest of history was somewhat more difficult for Stalin than it was to proclaim himself "cory­phaeus of Marxism," for history consists, in addition to theory, of facts. In October 1931 the magazines Proletarskaya revolyutsiya and Bolshevik pub­lished Stalin's article (in the form of a letter to the editor), "Some Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism." Stalin used as a pretext an article by A. Slutsky on Lenin's views on the internal party struggle among German Social Democrats on the eve of World War I. This was certainly not a burning issue at the end of 1931, but the historical importance of this article cannot be denied. It marked the establishment of Stalin's ideological autocracy.

Stalin dictated to historians what they must do and how they must work. Their first mission was to alter the history of the party, then the history of Russia. The core of the new history of the party was the absolute infallibility of Lenin and the existence of two party leaders. Robert Tucker has observed that, in a certain sense, Lenin evolved after his death. He continued to be infallible, but "attached to his successor like a Siamese twin, he became inevitably smaller in many areas. Only the facets of his life and activities that were connected with Stalin were idealized on a grand scale."¹³² As for methodology, Stalin announced that only "archive rats" and "hopeless bu­reaucrats" could research documents and facts. The main point was a correct purpose. Interpreting Stalin's speeches in an address to the Institute of Red Professors, Kaganovich emphasized that in creating the history of the party the key task was to employ "flexible Leninist tactics." It is not important what an "authentic Bolshevik" has or has not done in his time: facts and documents must be interpreted from the point of view of the present moment.¹³³ Stalin "interpreted" Trotsky from the point of view of the present. 'Trotskyism," he wrote, "is the vanguard of the counter­revolutionary bourgeoisie"; consequently, Trotsky always was an agent of the counterrevolution.

The doctrine became firmly established, distinguishing itself in both versatility and cruelty. It could change instantaneously, switching to its antithesis, but in the interval between the changes it remained immobile. The doctrine could be expressed only in the exact words of the Leader, without even a comma changed. Stalin's letter to Proletarskaya revolyutsiya (and this was the first of many such occasions) was immediately echoed in all areas of Soviet life. The journal Proletarian Music (January 1932) ded­icated an editorial to it with the headline: "Our Tasks on the Music Front," while a lead article in the journal For Soviet Accounting (February 1932) bore the title "For Bolshevik Vigilance on the Bookkeeping Front," and the Journal of Neuropathology and Psychiatry (February 1932) published an article "For a Bolshevik Offensive on the Neuropathology Front." Stalin's letter was studied by economists, naturalists, and technicians. Maxim Gorky added his voice to the chorus: "It is vital that we know everything that has happened in the past, not as it has already been recounted, but in the light of the doctrine of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin."¹³⁴

From Gorky to workers on the bookkeeping front, everyone responded the same way (in public, at least), not only in the territories of the Soviet Union, where Stalin's power had become absolute, but also wherever Com­munist parties, sections of the Comintern, existed. Arthur Koestler relates that in January 1935, when the Saar was preparing to vote on a referendum that would decide whether it would remain under French administration or become part of the German Reich, the Communist party ordered people to vote for "a Red Saar in a Soviet Germany."

"But there is no Soviet Germany as yet, so what do we stand for?" a miner asked the leader of a Communist cell in despair. "We stand, comrade," the

latter answered, "for a Red Saar in a Soviet Germany." "But there is no Soviet Germany, so do you mean we should vote for Hitler?" "The Central Committee," objected the secretary of the cell, "did not say you should vote for Hitler. It said you should vote for a Red Saar in a Soviet Germany." "But, comrade, until there is a Soviet Germany, would it not be best to vote for the status quo?" "By voting for the status quo," explained the secretary, "you would align yourself with the social fascist agents of French imperi­alism." 'Then who the bleeding hell are we to vote for?" cried the miner. "You are putting the question in a mechanistic manner," the secretary re­proached him. 'The only correct revolutionary policy is to fight for a Red Saar in a Soviet Germany."¹³⁵

After the elections, in which Hitler received more than 90 percent of the vote, the organ of the Saarland Communists bore this front-page head­line: "Defeat of Hitler in the Saar." According to the laws of Marxist- Stalinist dialectics, the Hitlerities, who had expected 98 percent, had suffered a defeat.

The letter to Proletarskaya revolyutsiya marked a turning point in the official attitude toward Russian history. Stalin pointed out that a history of European Marxism should be written from the point of view of the Russian Bolsheviks. They were, as Lenin had predicted in 1902, the vanguard of the international proletarian movement. The Russian revolution was the beginning of the world revolution, and it was not for the Western Marxists to give lessons to their Russian comrades, but vice versa.

On February 4, 1931, Stalin presented his view of Russian history: "The history of old Russia," said Stalin, consisted, among other things, in her constantly being beaten for her backwardness. "She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish-Lithuanian pans. She was beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. She was beaten by everyone because of her backward­ness."¹³⁶ This interpretation of Russian history was still partly in accordance with the (until then) orthodox Marxist views of Pokrovsky. On May 15, 1934, a resolution "On the Teaching of the Nation's History in Soviet Schools" marked a break with the old policy regarding Russian history and the beginning of a new policy. In 1936 the Soviet press published a letter by Stalin, Zhdanov, and Kirov which was a critique of projected textbooks on the history of the Soviet Union and gave new instructions for teaching Russian history.

In 1934 Stalin, the victor, the creator of collectivization and industrial­ization, state builder, and Supreme Ideologue, took up the weapon of

Russian nationalism. In a certain sense this confirmed the predictions of Ustryalov and Dmitrievsky, but only in a certain sense. Stalin used Russian nationalism as he had used a great number of other bricks for building his empire. He needed Russian nationalism to legitimize his authority. He could not, and probably did not want to, stress continuity with the revolution and the destructive elements of the past while he was in the process of building a new state and social system. That is why he chose a new line of ancestors, the Russian princes and tsars, the builders of a mighty state. After 1934 Stalin—and all Soviet historians after him—stopped saying that "everyone had beaten" Russia. They began to say that Russia had beaten everyone. The signal was given to crush Pokrovsky's historical school. The history of Russia, which after 1917 had been revised from the point of view of the class struggle, was being revised in light of the struggle for the creation of a strong state. The people remained at the center, but for the Pokrovsky school the people wanted liberty, whereas for the Stalin school they wanted strong authority.

One of the key aspects on the "ideological front" was literature. In the first year of the First Five-Year Plan, its situation reflected, with a certain belatedness, the complex twists and turns of the intraparty struggle. Rep­resentatives of leftist views, supporters of Trotsky, were still present on the staffs of literary journals and in literary associations, and adherents of the "right" still held important posts. Bukharin, who was a specialist on the intelligentsia, was subjected to increasingly violent attacks, and Stalin began to express his own literary views more and more frequently. RAPP, the Association of Russian Proletarian Writers, assumed greater and greater control over literary life. In the summer of 1928 the Central Committee issued a new resolution on cultural questions. In its opening sentences, its most soothing passage, it cited the resolution of 1925, but further on it declared war on any "backsliding from a class position, eclecticism, or benign attitude toward an alien ideology." The resolution declared that literature, theater, the cinema, painting, music, and radio had to take part "in the struggle... against bourgeois and petit bourgeois ideology, against vodka and philistinism," as well as against "the revival of bourgeois ideology under new labels and the servile imitation of bourgeois culture."¹³⁷

The cultural revolution had begun. "Industrial and financial plans" for literature were announced, and the call went out for "shock troops" in literature, which became a very important matter—one that could not be entrusted to mere writers. "We must reexamine our list of coryphaei," wrote Literaturnaya gazeta. "It is essential to conduct a thorough purge. Along with the slogan of a cultural revolution, the task of creating a literature of the masses has taken on urgent meaning." But, explained Literaturnaya gazeta, "the good writers, the coryphaei, are incomprehensible to the masses; their style is too complicated. (The mediocrities have a much simpler style.)" Hence, "more attention to mediocre writers!"¹³⁸

Writers began to search for ways to liquidate literature. RAPP announced that art was "the most powerful weapon in the class struggle." Mayakovsky urged that writers meet society's demands. S. Tretyakov, a member of LEF (Left Front of Art) declared: "We cannot wait forever while the professional writer tosses and turns in his bed, giving birth at last to something useful and comprehensible only to himself." Tretyakov called for the creation of workshops to which literary workers would bring materials (travel diaries, biographies, etc.). Others would arrange them, and still others would cast them in a language easily understood by the masses. Marxist literary critic V. Pereverzev considered even this measure insufficient:

The creator [the working class—M. H.] does his work himself; he does not contract it out to others. ... He commands others. ... We do not contract work out to the men of LEF, nor to the men of RAPP; as the ruling power, we simply give the order to sing to anyone who knows how to sing the songs we need, and the order not to to those who do not know.¹³⁹

In January 1929 Voronsky, the principal advocate of the policy of utilizing fellow travelers in Soviet literature, was arrested for 'Trotskyism." In the fall of 1929 a campaign of denunciation against Boris Pilnyak and Evgeny Zamyatin began. They were condemned for having published their books abroad (Pilnyak's Mahogany and Zamyatin's We). This was only a pretext, for until then Soviet writers had regularly published their books abroad. Pilnyak explained that the Soviet magazine Krasnaya nov was about to publish Mahogany, and Zamyatin explained that We had appeared in the West years earlier, in 1926. Actually, the two men were chosen in order to intimidate other nonparty writers in the unaffiliated professional orga­nization, the Writers' Union. Pilnyak was the head of the Moscow branch of that organization, and Zamyatin headed the Leningrad branch.

The authorities had other grievances against both men. Pilnyak had committed a grave sin by publishing his 'Tale of the Unextinguished Moon," which told about the strange death of Red Army Commander Gavrilov on the operating table, where he had been placed by order of "Number One." It was easy to identify Commissar of War Frunze as the model for Gavrilov and Stalin as the model for "Number One." Zamyatin's sins included We and the article "I Am Afraid." Besides that, his uncompromising honesty, which he considered a necessary condition for true literature, was partic­ularly unforgivable.

Literaturnaya gazeta devoted its whole front page to the disgraced writers:

The conception of a Soviet writer is not geographical; it is social. Only the person who links himself and his work with the socialist system in the present period of reconstruction, a period in which the proletariat is attacking the remnants of capitalism, a period of fierce resistance by the class enemy, only this person can call himself a Soviet writer.¹⁴⁰

The newspapers devoted much space to indignant telegrams and reso­lutions condemning Zamyatin's and Pilnyak's "shameless conduct." This was the first time such a campaign had been conducted. Many organizations and individuals in the world of Soviet culture (people who had never read the condemned books) wrote statements with headlines like 'Traitors to the Revolution," "Fraternization with the White Guards," "Literary Sabotage," and 'Treason at the Front." Pilnyak surrendered, asked for permission to revise his book, and wrote a new novel, The Volga Flows to the Caspian, under the literary tutelage of Nikolai Ezhov, then a secretary of the Central Committee, who was to become famous later in areas other than literature. Zamyatin, for his part, wrote to Stalin saying it was impossible for him to be a writer in the Soviet Union. He requested (and with Gorky's help obtained) permission to leave the country.

At the end of 1929 a Central Committee resolution announced that the literary policies of RAPP were closest to those of the party and called for all literary forces to unite around RAPP. Mayakovsky joined RAPP and within the year committed suicide. In his work The Bathhouse (1929) he put the new credo of Soviet literature in the mouth of Pobedonosikov: "I beg you, in the name of all the workers and peasants, don't get me worked up. ... You should soothe my ears and rest my eyes, not get me worked up. ... We want to relax after all our state and civic responsibilities. Back to the classics! Learn from the great geniuses of our accursed past." Even in "stepping on the throat of his own song," Mayakovsky still got people worked up, and that was useless and harmful. If Demyan Bedny could say, "I'm not an organ grinder whom you can just order to play another tune," how much more difficult it was to tell Mayakovsky to change his tune. Yet the officially required theme songs changed daily. Trotsky, in commenting on Demyan Bedny's fall from grace (in 1932), remarked that Bedny had been able to sell himself wholesale but found it hard to do so retail, that is, to follow every minute change of orders, every political zigzag. How much harder for Mayakovsky to "sell himself retail." His suicide allowed him to enter the pantheon nonetheless. Stalin killed him a second time by naming him (in a resolution to Comrade Ezhov) "the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch."¹⁴¹

In 1932 a new Central Committee resolution abolished all literary schools, trends, and associations, including RAPP. This decision was like a bolt from the blue. Averbakh and his henchmen, the leaders of RAPP, had terrorized all of Soviet literature for years; now at a stroke of the pen they had been thrown from their pedestal. When Boris Souvarine asked who had influenced Stalin in this decision, Babel answered that no one had. "Stalin decides everything for himself, on his own. For two weeks he invited in and listened to Averbakh, Bezymensky, and tutti quanti. Then he de­cided: we'll get nowhere with these fellows. In the Politburo he suddenly proposed his resolution. No one batted an eye."¹⁴²

Perhaps Babel oversimplified things. Stalin's decision might have been prompted in part by his desire to win over Gorky, who detested the men of RAPP. In 1932 Stalin was a frequent guest at Gorky's house, where he met other writers as well. It was during one of these meetings that Stalin bestowed the noble title "engineers of human souls" on Soviet writers. Undoubtedly, it was at that time, after his letter to Proletarskaya revolutsiya, that Stalin decided to take personal charge of literature, as he had of philosophy and history. He needed efficient and dependable types to serve as "transmission belts," not Marxist ideologues like Averbakh. They "worked people up" too much. Instead of proletarian writers, Stalin decided to rely on fellow travelers, but only those who were ready, as Pereverzev put it, "to sing the songs we need" on command. Stalin counted heavily on Gorky's help to carry out his plan for the final subjugation of literature, and culture in general, to the party.

In 1928 Gorky, who was living on Capri, began receiving numerous letters and telegrams from Soviet institutions and individuals—writers, workers, members of the Pioneer youth organization, and so on—urging him to return to his homeland. The flood of requests, regulated by GPU head Genrikh Yagoda, reached such proportions that Gorky was unable to refuse. Other factors undoubtedly played a part: nostalgia for his homeland, the tempting prospect of assuming first place in Russian culture, and the persuasive arguments of his secretary Kryuchkov, a GPU agent.

At the end of 1928 Gorky returned to Moscow. There is no doubt that many in the Soviet Union looked forward to his return, for his authority as a great writer, a great humanist, and a defender of the oppressed was undeniable. Moreover, he was not a party member. Until 1933 Gorky made occasional visits to the Soviet Union, where he had at his disposal a sumptuous house in Moscow and two luxurious villas (one outside Moscow, the other in the Crimea) and where many factories, schools, even corrective labor camps, and an entire city had been named after him. In 1933 he was refused a visa to leave for Italy and remained in the Soviet Union until his death in July 1936. In 1932 Souvarine asked Babel about Gorky. Babel told him that whenever Stalin left Moscow for one of his country places, his responsibilities were assumed by Kaganovich, but on a more general plane, Gorky was "the number two man."

Civic responsibilities changed Gorky. He continued as before to stig­matize injustice, hunger, and poverty, but only when they occurred in the West. For his homeland he had only praise and approval. In 1930, on the first day of the "Industrial party" trial, he wrote an article that began: "In Moscow the Supreme Court of the workers and peasants of the Union of Socialist Soviets is trying a group of people who organized a counterrevo­lutionary plot against workers' and peasants' power."¹⁴³ The great writer could have waited for the end of the trial to make his pronouncement, but no, he already knew that "a counterrevolutionary plot" had been organized. Just two weeks later, Pravda and Izvestia published a new article by Gorky, 'To the Humanists." The proletarian humanist fell upon the bourgeois humanists, particularly "Professor Albert Einstein and Mr. Thomas Mann," for having signed a protest statement by the German League for Human Rights against what Gorky called "the execution of forty-eight criminals, organizers of the famine in the Soviet Union."¹⁴⁴ The Gorky who had pro­tested the death penalty in the Bolshevik-organized trial of SR leaders in 1922 and who had railed unceasingly against the monstrous cruelty of bourgeois justice had disappeared. Forty-eight directors of the Soviet food industry were shot after a secret trial—or without a trail, but Gorky said, "I know very well the indescribable vileness of the actions of those forty- eight."¹⁴⁵

Aleksandr Orlov, once a highly placed Chekist, wrote that after hearing about the execution of the forty-eight Gorky became hysterical and accused Yagoda of killing innocent people in order to dump the blame for the famine on them.¹⁴⁶ If this is true it puts Gorky in a worse light still, for in 1931 he returned to Capri for a vacation from "building socialism" and could have publicly condemned the executions then. Instead, he spoke out against a new group of defendants in another one of Stalin's show trials. This time it was the trial of a group of Mensheviks, which took place March 1-8, 1931. Gorky not only agreed with the verdict ("all of these criminals" had been involved in "wrecking activity over the course of several years"); he also believed that not all of them had been caught and that the hunt should continue.¹⁴⁷ One peculiarity of the Menshevik trial and Gorky's article about it was that among the accused were people he knew well, including a close friend, Nikolai Sukhanov, author of a seven-volume history of the Russian revolution. Gorky did not forgo the opportunity to mock Sukhanov, calling him a "conceited scholar."¹⁴⁸

In his assertion of the need for "the consoling lie," the lovely mirage, as the best means of educating the people, Gorky displayed such zeal that he earned a gentle rebuke from Stalin himself. In one of the most tragicomic episodes in the history of Soviet culture, Gorky called for the prohibition of self-criticism in the Soviet Union. Stalin admonished him: "We cannot do without self-criticism. We really cannot, Aleksei Maksimovich."¹⁴⁹

In his speeches, articles, and letters to foreign friends, Gorky denounced the "legends" about forced labor and terror, collectivization and famine in the Soviet Union. He denied the "very vulgar fable that there is an individual dictator in the Soviet Union."¹⁵⁰

After abolishing all literary trends and associations, Stalin wanted to see the establishment of a single writers' organization under the firm control of the party and state. It was partly to accomplish this task that he placed Gorky in charge of all Soviet culture. At the First Congress of Soviet Writers in the summer of 1934, Gorky coped marvelously with his task. He intro­duced a new obligatory literary style, an "artistic method" that soon became obligatory in all cultural fields: "socialist realism." This was the method of the consoling lie, which Gorky said was necessary to create a "new reality."¹⁵¹ The writers' congress enthusiastically adopted this new ethic for all "engineers of human souls" and builders of the "new reality." From the platform of the congress Viktor Shklovsky denounced Dostoevsky: "If Fedor Mikhailovich were here, we would have to judge him as the heirs of hu­manity, as people who are judging a traitor. Dostoevsky cannot be under­stood outside of the revolution, nor can he be understood as anything but a traitor. "¹⁵² Dostoevsky had done his time and did not need to fear for the future, but the delegates to the writers' congress engaged in more contem­porary denunciations: they denounced each other.¹⁵³ They also reported with satisfaction that "in our kolkhoz fields ... Pioneer children catch their fathers, accomplices of the class enemy, in the act of stealing socialist property and bring them before the revolutionary tribunals."¹⁵⁴ The writers reported with equal pride their trip to the Baltic—White Sea Canal, a trip that produced the most disgraceful book in the history of literature, a glorification of the concentration camp.¹⁵⁵

Last but not least, the congress sang the praises of Stalin. Everyone said as much as their literary talents would permit. "Comrade Stalin is a mighty genius of the working class," said one delegate.¹⁵⁶ Another called him "the most beloved of all leaders of any epoch and any people."¹⁵⁷ Here too Gorky set the tone. "Leaderism," he said, "is a sickness of our century. Internally, it was the result of decadence, impotence, and the poverty of individualism;

externally, it was manifested in the form of such purulent abscesses as, for example, Ebert, Noske, Hitler, and similar heroes of capitalist reality. Here, where we have created a socialist reality, such abscesses are of course impossible."¹⁵⁸ He concluded with, "Long live the party of Lenin, the leader of the proletariat. Long live the leader of the party, Joseph Stalin."¹⁵⁹

The First Soviet Writers' Congress completed the process of nationalizing literature, begun after the October revolution. The congress approved the Central Committee's decision to establish a single organization for all writ­ers, the Soviet Writers' Union, under the direction of a representative of the Central Committee, Aleksandr Shcherbakov. One could count on the fingers of one hand the writers who did not take the oath of loyalty to the party: Bulgakov, Platonov, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova. Congresses in other cultural spheres were held on the model of the writers' congress. They too established single unions for everyone in their field and took a loyalty oath. Stalin paid special attention to the cinema, which Lenin had called the most important of the arts. As far back as 1928 a group of directors, including Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Kozintsev, and Trauberg, had asked for a "firm ideological dictatorship in the field of the cinema."¹⁶⁰ In January 1935 they greeted this dictatorship. Aleksandr Dovzhenko de­clared: 'The artists of the Soviet Union have created an art founded on 'yes,' on the conception: I uplift, I inspire, I educate."¹⁶¹

By 1934 collectivization had been completed, industrialization begun, and the superstructure nationalized. The country's spiritual life, with the active help of the "creative intelligentsia," the "masters of thought," was placed entirely at the service of the state, that is, of Stalin.

Gorky held "the traitor Dmitrievsky" up to shame for having written, "We are slaves. We need teachers, leaders, prophets." This was only true under capitalism, Gorky harangued. 'They willingly crawl after any leader, expecting exactly the same thing from each of them: perhaps the Boss will expand the limits of'philistine good fortune' under capitalism."¹⁶² He urged people not to follow "just any leader," but only the ones who were building a "new, socialist reality" in the "land illuminated by Lenin's genius, in the land where Joseph Stalin's iron will works tirelessly and miraculously."¹⁶³

The enormity of Gorky's activity in his final years has not yet been adequately judged. It was primarily with his help that the spiritual en­slavement of the Soviet people was made possible. He called on the people to follow "that single guiding idea which does not exist anywhere else in the world, the idea that has been soundly formulated in Stalin's six con­ditions."¹⁶⁴ Abusing his prestige as a great writer and humanist, Gorky never stopped trying to pound into the heads of Soviet citizens the notion that the GPU was the country's most important cultural force. He maintained that "the work of the Chekists in the camps clearly demonstrates the hu­manism of the proletariat."¹⁶⁵ In January 1936 he dreamed: "In fifty years, when things will be a little calmer and the first half of the century will seem like a splendid tragedy, a proletarian epic, it is probable that art as well as history will then be able to do justice to the wonderful cultural work of the rank-and-file Chekists in the camps."¹⁶⁶ His dream was realized much sooner: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an artist and historian, did justice to the cultural work of the Chekists in Gulag Archipelago.

Among the most shameful pages of Gorky's prose, his letter 'To the Women Shockworkers at the Building Site of the Moscow—Volga Canal" takes first place. Gorky, the defender of women, who for decades had bemoaned their fate in tsarist Russia, addressed the women prisoners who were being killed off by inhumanly hard labor in a Soviet "corrective labor camp": "Your labor once again demonstrates to the world what a healthy effect work can have on people, work that has been given meaning by the great truth of bolshevism, and it demonstrates how splendidly the Lenin— Stalin cause has done in organizing women."¹⁶⁷

Thanks to such spiritual teachers Stalin was able by 1934 to assert unlimited power over the country and the people. He was right when he told Emil Ludwig that he could not hold power by fear alone. He needed lies as well. The "spiritual teachers" created a mirage that they tried to make people believe by claiming that the mirage was more real than reality, that it was reality.

Having completed the base and the superstructure, Stalin moved on to the next task, to the final on the road to socialism. On December 1, 1934, at Smolny in Leningrad, Sergei Kirov was killed.

CHAPTER

SOCIALISM "ACHIEVED AND WON," 1935-1938

THE KIROV ASSASSINATION

Khrushchev in his "secret speech" to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 hinted at what had been known outside the Soviet Union for many years— that Stalin masterminded the Kirov assassination. Walter Krivitsky, who had headed Soviet intelligence in Western Europe, wrote about Stalin's role in 1939, as did Aleksandr Orlov in 1953. (Orlov had also served as a foreign agent for Stalin, particularly in Spain.) Elisabeth Lermolo, perhaps the only firsthand witness to reach the West, wrote about this as well in 1955.¹ The wife of a former tsarist officer, Lermolo was serving a ten-year sentence in exile in Siberia when she chanced to meet Leonid Nikolaev, Kirov's future assassin, while he was visiting his aunt, an acquaintance of Lermolo's. After the assassination Lermolo's name was found in Nikolaev's notebook and she was dragged into the affair, being interrogated by Stalin himself. During her six years in prison she had occasion to meet and speak with members of Nikolaev's family, including his wife, Milda.

Today the course of events leading to Kirov's death is more or less well known. Nikolaev, a young member of the Communist party who had some sort of grievance against Kirov, fell into the hands of an agent of Stalin's, Viktor Zaporozhets, deputy chief of the Leningrad NKVD. Zaporozhets

arranged things so that Nikolaev had the opportunity to shoot Kirov. The details of the murder plot, as it has now been reconstructed, were actually given by one of the conspirators himself, Genrikh Yagoda, former head of the NKVD, during the Moscow trial of 1938. Only the "chief organizer" of the plot, Stalin, was of course not named.

Why did Stalin kill Kirov? The controversy over this question still goes on. Boris Nicolaevsky, a sharp-eyed Menshevik historian who knew many of the Bolsheviks quite well, had a chance to talk with Bukharin in Paris in February 1936. He suggested that Kirov represented a new political line, distinct from Stalin's. This point of view, presented in the Menshevik publication Sotsialistichesky vestnik (Socialist herald) in 1956, was picked up by some Soviet historians in 1964, at the height of the struggle against the "cult of personality." They tried to show that the Seventeenth Party Congress had been discontented with Stalin and his policies and that it had even hoped to replace him with Kirov. Hence the assassination and the purge.

It is easy to understand the aims of these historians. How could they explain that the party and its "highest body," the party congress, had marched to Stalin's sacrificial altar without a murmur? The myth of resis­tance to Stalin by the "best Communists," the authentic Leninists, removes the need for such explanation. But this myth raises other questions. How is it that the dedicated oppositionists were unable to pose a viable alternative to Stalin, and yet the loyal Stalinist Kirov was able to? And when did he do so? After Stalin had succeeded on all battlefronts? Kirov's conduct as Leningrad party boss was no better and no worse than any of Stalin's other governors. His speeches show not the slightest trace of an alternative program.

It is highly plausible that Stalin saw Kirov as a rival. Young, energetic, firm, a relentless enemy of all opposition, and a Russian to boot, Kirov may well have seemed a dangerous competitor. Moreover, Leningrad, the cradle of the revolution, functioned as a second power center, which might under certain circumstances challenge Moscow's primacy. These consid­erations do not really explain why Stalin decided to kill Kirov, however. A more illuminating approach is to ask what Stalin sought to gain by the assassination.

Walter Krivitsky was in Moscow in the summer of 1934. On the night of June 30 he prepared reports on the situation in Germany for a special session of the Politburo, which was to discuss the "night of the long knives," when Hitler murdered Ernst Roehm and his other former comrades of the SA. Among those included in the Politburo discussion was an intelligence official named Berzin. Krivitsky passes along Berzin's account of the Po­litburo discussion. After listening to those who considered the murder of Roehm and the others a sign that Hitler's power was weakening, Stalin rejected their view and presented his own summary conclusions: 'The events in Germany do not in any way mean that nazism is about to collapse. On the contrary, they will surely lead to a consolidation of the regime and the strengthening of Hitler's personal power."²

The "consolidation" of Stalin's power began the day Kirov was assas­sinated. On December 1 a law calling for speedy trials in political cases was ratified. It also provided that sentences involving capital punishment should be carried out immediately. Robert Conquest has written that the Kirov assassination could easily be called the "crime of the century."³ In the years that followed, millions of Soviet citizens, accused of the most diverse, and imaginary, crimes, were put to death. The "Kirov affair" started the earthquake known as the Great Terror. Immediately after the murder, thirty-seven "White Guards" were put to death in Leningrad, followed by thirty-three in Moscow and twenty-eight in Kiev.⁴ Elisabeth Lermolo reports that executions took place at NKVD headquarters in Leningrad for nights on end; each morning there would be a pile of some 200 corpses in the basement.⁵

A confidential letter from the Central Committee to all party organizations drew "the lessons of the events linked to the cowardly murder of Comrade Kirov." Trotskyists were sought and found all over the country. In Leningrad 30,000 or 40,000 people were arrested. Ante Ciliga met some of them in exile in Siberia. On December 22 Pravda announced that the real culprits in the murder of Kirov had been found, the members of the Zinovievist "Leningrad center." Ciliga in his memoirs recalls the Verkhne-Uralsk prison, where he witnessed the arrival of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and other Zinovievists not long after their trial in the Kirov affair. Others arrived as well, Shlyap­nikov and Medvedev, former leaders of the Workers' Opposition, Timofei Sapronov, leader of the Democratic Centralists, and so on. Half the oc­cupants of the Kremlin from the years 1917—1927, Ciliga remarks ironically, had moved to Verkhne-Uralsk.⁶

A purge of the party, underway since 1933, was scheduled to end in 1935, but the Central Committee decided to review the status of all full and candidate members immediately. On February 1, 1935, a new exchange of party cards began. (Members had to hand in their old cards and received new ones only if they had been checked and approved.) The membership, already under pressure since 1933, felt more intimidated than ever; those in charge of the review seemed to be examining them under a microscope, trying to peer into their very souls.

Between 1924 and 1933 the party had grown to colossal size, from 470,000 to 3,555,000, but from January 1931 to January 1933 more than a million members had been purged. Now more were to go. In these conditions new members learned how to behave so as not to be expelled— flatter their superiors, speak only in the most guarded way, keep an eye on their fellow members, and choose friends with the greatest caution. A party card admitted the bearer to the privileged stratum of society, but its loss cast him into the pit. He became a pariah, worse off than someone who had never been in the party. Every expelled member immediately came under the scrutiny of the "organs" of state security.

In July 1934 the official name of the "organs" had been changed again. The GPU became the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, or NKVD, and the "chief of security" became a "people's commissar." As in 1922, when the Cheka became the GPU, this transformation gave rise to high hopes, which were encouraged by promises that the jurisdiction of the "organs" would be circumscribed.

Stalin used the Kirov assassination to reverse this trend, to create an atmosphere of tension and conflict in which the "organs" would be called upon to use force to resolve problems. The main blow was aimed at the party itself, which was said to be in great danger. The opposition, which willingly approved the harshest use of terror against other strata of the population, considered the party sacrosanct and could never imagine the use of terror against it. Stalin had no such qualms. He acted according to Machiavelli's dictum: No one can strengthen his own power by relying on those who helped him win it. In 1935 Stalin dissolved two organizations that reminded him of those who had helped him win power, the Society of Old Bolsheviks and the Society of Former Hard Labor Convicts, that is, political prisoners under the tsars. The second organization included some former terrorists of the People's Will, but terrorism had become the most horrendous crime against the state. The displays at the Museum of the Revolution were also changed. The terrorists who had assassinated Tsar Alexander II were no longer there to remind people that bombs can be used to change the government. Their pictures were stored in the cellars. These two societies were also dissolved simply because they were orga­nizations. Soon all organizations would be dissolved, whether they had to do with philately, Esperanto, or anything else.

In August 1929 Pravda had published an article entitled "What Will the USSR Be Like in Fifteen Years?" The author, Yuri Larin, concluded on the following note: "Our generation will be able to see socialism with its own eyes."⁷ The prophecy came true much sooner than expected. In August 1935 Dmitry Manuilsky, Stalin's representative at the Seventh Con­gress of the Comintern, declared: "Between the sixth and seventh con­gresses of the Communist International a major event in the lives of the people has taken place: the definite, irreversible victory of socialism in the USSR."⁸ That was how the Soviet people learned that they had finally reached their longed-for destination.

True, one year later, in reporting to the Congress of Soviets on the proposed new constitution, Stalin warned that although "our Soviet society has already, in the main, succeeded in achieving socialism," that was only "what Marxists call the first, or lower, phase of communism." This meant that the march was not yet over; in fact, conditions were becoming in­creasingly difficult—the closer they came to the ultimate goal, the greater would be the resistance of the class enemy. In other words, the better things get, the worse they get.

Nevertheless, Stalin asserted, "for the USSR socialism is something already achieved and won."⁹ Most important of all, though, socialism has already been built. American press magnate Roy Howard, who interviewed Stalin in March 1936, asked him whether it wouldn't be correct to call what exists in the Soviet Union "state socialism." Stalin categorically re­jected such a definition: Our society is socialist, a genuinely socialist society "because private ownership of factories, plants, the land, banks, means of transportation has been abolished and replaced by public ownership."¹⁰

The year of the decisive attack upon the party—1935—was also the year of the "turn toward man." The main slogans of the day were "Man is the most valuable capital" and "Cadres decide everything." This was so­cialism with a human face, but the face was Stalin's. Along with the new orientation came an attempt to "humanize" him, too. To the standard ep­ithets ("wise," "ingenious," "made of steel") new ones were added: "be­loved," "dear," "kind," "good," "great humanist." During the May Day parade in 1935, Pravda reported, the demonstrators carried "thousands of portraits of him. There were also carvings and statues of the leader, and his name, repeated a million times that morning, was cast in metal, em­broidered on transparent gauze, and spelled out in chrysanthemums, roses, and asters."¹¹

Flowers were back in favor, along with the fox trot and tango, and parks for culture and recreation were opened. A carnival was held for the people of socialism's capital in 1935, at Moscow's new Central Park of Culture, and on Red Square in July of that year a parade of gymnasts was organized. It was strikingly similar to the mammoth spectacles in Nazi Germany, with the difference that instead of storm troopers marching to military strains, the marchers in Moscow were athletes and smiling children. The parade was led by children, 5,000 Pioneers carrying slogans fashioned of fresh flowers: "Greetings to Comrade Stalin, the Pioneers' best friend." 'Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy life" fluttered above a column of Pi­oneers from the Dzerzhinsky District.¹² A devoted Maxim Gorky responded to the athletes' parade: "Long live Joseph Stalin," he wrote, "a man of enormous heart and mind, a man whom yesterday our young people thanked so touchingly for their 'joyful youth'!"¹³ Since 1935 Stalin had been chil­dren's best friend. Newspapers published a photograph of the most humane of men with his daughter Svetlana, then with other little girls giving him flowers. Especially popular (the poster circulated in the millions) was a photograph of Stalin with a dark-eyed, high-cheekboned little girl named Gelya Markizova, taken in January 27, 1936, in the Kremlin at a "reception for the workers of the Buryat-Mongolian ASSR." The poster continued to give pleasure to Soviet citizens for a long time, even though Gelya's father was shot as an "enemy of the people" and her mother was arrested and later committed suicide.

Since January 1, 1935, food ration cards had been rescinded, and the statistics on the fulfillment of the Second Five-Year Plan, which began in 1933, had stirred hopes for a better life. On August 30, 1935, an ordinary, nonparty Soviet miner, Aleksei Stakhanov, mined 102 tons of coal, instead of the usual 7, in a single shift. Stakhanov's "spontaneous initiative" was taken up by other miners and spread to other industries. In December the Central Committee approved the workers' initiative, and production quotas were increased by anywhere from 15 to 50 percent throughout industry. The Soviet press launched a furious campaign against "pseudo-specialists," who were trying to hold back the Stakhanovite movement with arguments about "scientifically based" production quotas. Cartoons showed giant workers sweeping the specialists aside.

In real life, the workers understood that the record-breaking achieve­ments were falsified, that entire work teams had prepared the site for Stakhanov's feat of labor, that the whole purpose was to increase production quotas. They responded by beating up Stakhanovites and killing some. These actions were denounced as terrorism and punished accordingly. Ber­nard Shaw reported his conversation with a "shock worker" (through an interpreter, of course) and commented on the man's popularity among his fellow workers. In backward England, Shaw explained, a worker who pro­duced so much would soon be discouraged by his fellow workers, with a brick to the head, but in the Soviet Union things were different.¹⁴

In 1935, the eighteenth year of the revolution, the overwhelming majority of the population lived in worse conditions than before the revolution. Strumilin calculated that in 1935 the average monthly consumption of basic agricultural products was 21.8 kilograms of bread, 15.9 kilograms of po­tatoes, and 4.07 kilograms of milk and dairy products. Strumilin was pleased with these figures and boasted that workers in the Soviet Union were consuming bread in quantities that would "undoubtedly be envied by many workers in fascist countries."¹⁵ Of course, the workers in the land of socialism had no way of comparing. How could they find out the actual bread consumption in fascist countries? But they could compare their sit­uation to that of agricultural laborers in the Saratov region of tsarist Russia in 1892, because Lenin had calculated the average annual consumption of cereal products of such workers—419.3 kilograms. Lenin also mentioned that the agricultural laborer ate 13.3 kilograms of bacon yearly. Strumilin said nothing about bacon.¹⁶

A 1934 survey of 83,200 kolkhozes in the Russian Republic, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia showed that the collective farmers were paid in kind, on an average yearly basis, 1.30 centners of grain in 1932, 2.33 in 1933, and 2.59 in 1934.¹⁷ In old Russia the minimum adequate food intake was considered to be 2.5 centners per person per year. It should be kept in mind that Soviet peasants had to save part of their grain for their animals. After February 1935, when they were given permission to tend their own plots of land around their houses, their situation began to improve. The kolkhoz charter was also modified to allow each household to keep one cow, two calves, one sow with piglets, and ten sheep. At the same time, individual households began to deliver goods to the market.

The end of food rationing did not improve the situation for the workers, however. So-called commercial prices were abolished and new, standardized prices were introduced, but these were considerably higher than the prices workers had paid with ration cards. For example, the price for rationed bread in 1933 had been sixty kopeks per kilogram, the commercial price had been three rubles, but the new, standardized price was one ruble.¹⁸ The Russian emigre economist Bazilli estimated that in 1913 the average monthly wage enabled a worker to buy 333 kilograms of rye bread, but only 241 kilograms in 1936. The corresponding figures for butter were 21 and 18; for meat, 53 and 19; for sugar, 83 and 56.¹⁹ During the NEP a worker spent about 50 percent of his earnings on food; in 1935, 67.3 percent.²⁰

In late 1936 a French miner, ЮёЬег Legay, went to the Soviet Union as part of a workers' delegation. Determined not to let himself be fooled, he decided to make careful notes, writing down all facts and figures and checking on them directly. These were the prices he recorded for various items: white bread, 1.2 rubles per kilogram; meat, 5—9 rubles; potatoes, 40 kopeks; lard, 18 rubles; men's shoes, 290 rubles; men's boots, 315 rubles; women's shoes, 280 rubles; a man's overcoat, 350 rubles; a child's suit, 288 rubles; a man's shirt, 39—60 rubles. The average worker's wage was 150-200 rubles a month, and pension payments were 25—50 rubles.²¹ There were twelve paid holidays. Workers had to contribute to a government loan fund the equivalent of from two to four weeks' wages a year. They paid very low rents, but the housing situation was abominable. From 1929 to 1932 the urban population had increased from 28 million to 40 million, whereas living space had increased only 22 million square meters, less than 2 square meters per person. As a rule, workers lived in communal apartments with no or very few amenities.

The Stakhanovites enjoyed substantial privileges. A special decree of the Ail-Union Central Trade Union Council gave Stakhanovites priority in the allocation of union-operated vacation homes and resort areas. In 1935 their earnings varied from 700 to 2,000 rubles a month, and in 1936 they rose to as high as 4,000 ²² They were also awarded various decorations, which in effect made them part of the social elite. The Stakhanovites were said to be a new "nobility," a new set of "notables" or "celebrities" (znatnye lyudi). The Soviet vocabulary was soon enriched by other despised words from the prerevolutionary past. In September 1935 new military titles were introduced: lieutenant, captain, major, colonel, marshal. The purpose, Pravda said, was "to heighten further the role, importance, and authority of the command staffs of the Red Army. Even among artists a hierarchy was established, with the invention of the title "people's artist of the USSR." Trotsky wrote in his Bulletin of the Opposition:

Never has the Soviet Union known such inequality as now, almost two decades after the October revolution. Wages of 100 rubles a month for some, and of 800 to 1,000 for others. Some live in barracks and their shoes are worn out; others ride in luxurious cars and live in magnificent apartments. Some struggle to feed themselves and their families; others, besides their cars, have servants, a dacha near Moscow, a villa in the Caucasus, and so on.²⁴

This accurate assessment did not provent Trotsky from continuing to say that since factories and land were nationalized in the Soviet Union, the working class was still exercising its dictatorship, although it had no rights and lived a miserable existence.

The Marxist Bukharin totally disagreed with the Marxist Trotsky. Bu- kharin claimed that the Soviet government, the dictatorship of the prole­tariat, was

entering a stage of very fast growth for proletarian democracy. Countless forms of mass initiative are developing, with the most varied systems for the selection of the best, the leaders, the shock workers, the Stakhanovites, the heroes of Soviet labor; the barriers that derived from a different array of

social forces are now falling. This is the consistent and logical development

of Soviet democracy itself.²⁵

Bukharin spoke of two tremendous conquests of "genuine democracy, not the falsified bourgeois version," the All-Union Conference of Stakha- novites and the Congress of Kolkhoz Shock Workers.²⁶ It was in the same vein that kolkhoz shock worker Evdokiya Fedotova, after chairing one of the sessions of the congress and having the honor of being noticed by Stalin, wrote in Pravda, "I ran down the stairs like a young girl, full of joy and pride that he had seen how I worked and had liked it."

Some barriers had indeed fallen, as Bukharin mentioned. In 1935 the children of lishentsy were admitted to schools without further restrictions. In May 1936 it was forbidden any longer to deny jobs to people on the grounds of bourgeois origin. Other new restrictions appeared, however. On April 8, 1935, a special law extended all penalties under the criminal code, including capital punishment, to children of twelve and older. It was at this point that Stalin began to have his picture taken with children in his arms.

The "law on children" pursued several aims at once. It was one of a series of measures geared to strengthening the family and parental authority. The head of the family became the representative of the state within the household. In a sense this law was also a supplement to the law on treason to the fatherland passed in 1934, in that twelve year olds would be held responsible from then on for failure to denounce treason on the part of parents. Thus, the children were included in the system of collective re­sponsibility. The law on children seemed so typically Soviet that when the Nazis adopted a similar law in 1944, Himmler felt obliged to justify it in the following terms: "We are instituting absolute responsibility on the part of all members of the clan. ... And let no one say that this is bolshevism. ... It is a return to the most ancient traditions of our ancestors."²⁷ There were other practical objectives behind the new law. It made a final solution possible to the problem of the homeless children, and it handed investigators a splendid tool for putting pressure on defendants.

The process of transforming the Soviet family into a fully "socialist" one seemed to move in two contradictory directions. On the one hand, all earlier theories of the family were pronounced bourgeois prejudices or undertakings of the enemy. On the other hand, Pravda insisted: 'The family is the most serious thing in life."²⁸ In 1936 a new marriage and family code was adopted. It made divorce much more difficult, which was logical, since in a country stripped of rights, free divorce seemed sacrilegious. Abortion, which had been legalized for the benefit of women since November 18, 1920, was banned again on June 27, 1936, with the justification that "only under socialism, where the exploitation of some by others no longer exists and where women are full members of society,... can the struggle against abortion be seriously posed." Many years later, on November 23, 1955, the right to abortion would be restored "owing to the uninterrupted growth of women's level of consciousness and culture."

Stepping forward as the new apostle of the socialist family was Maka- renko, an educator who had worked in the correction colonies of the GPU and NKVD for many years. He proposed that his experience in training young criminals and delinquents be made the universal pedagogical method in the Soviet Union. He also recommended two institutions as the model context for training children: the corrective labor colony and the army.

Makarenko's theory became the official theory of Soviet education. The child should be educated as a member of a collective organized along semimilitary lines and should be instilled with respect for the authority of the collective and of the person chosen to lead it. Postrevolutionary ped­agogy had stated that punishment taught people to be slaves. Makarenko objected: "Punishment may produce slaves but it may also produce those who are good and free and proud."²⁹ Makarenko's theory could not have been more appropriate for this time, when all of society was being punished for "indiscipline." In 1937 he wrote The Parents⁹ Book, in which he applied his general ideas to the family. The family, he said, is also a collective, and the interests of the collective are primary. They are expressed, of course, by the person in authority, who represents the family. Thus a nicely finished system of education was worked out: the child is raised in an authoritarian family, a microcosm of the state, then in an authoritarian school, the same kind of microcosm, and at last enters adult life—in the authoritarian state itself.

The subordination of the family to the interests of the state was a constant theme in literature, the cinema, and every form of art. The family is an important form of the collective, so the argument ran, but the state is an incomparably more important one. That is why, in the 1936 movie Party Card, the wife denounces the husband to the security organs. That is why the hero of Soviet children was twelve-year-old Pavlik Morozov, who had turned in his father, a "kulak." Gorky called on Soviet writers to glorify this adolescent who, "by overcoming blood kinship, discovered spiritual kinship."³⁰ In the novel Skutarevsky, Leonid Leonov portrayed a great scientist, one of the old intelligentsia, nobly betraying his own son. This call for the betrayal of one's kin was directed to all family members without distinction; in that respect full equality reigned.

"STALINIST AND DEMOCRATIC"

The year 1936 was marked by two events, the adoption of the constitution and the publication of official "comments" by Stalin, Kirov, and Zhdanov on a proposed textbook of Soviet history. The two events might not seem of equal importance, but to the historian they were factors of equal weight in the formation of the socialist state. The constitution institutionalized the new society; the "comments" announced the "nationalization" of history, the social memory.

The decision to modify the Soviet constitution was taken "on the initiative of Comrade Stalin" at the Seventh Congress of Soviets on February 6, 1935, only a few weeks after the Kirov assassination. Bukharin, during his trip to Paris in early 1936, told Boris Nicolaevsky that he had written virtually the entire constitution. He was very proud of it, because it introduced not only universal and equal suffrage but also the equality of all citizens before the law. He thought it would lay the basis for a transition from the dicta­torship of a single party to a genuine people's democracy.³¹

The 1936 constitution, the Stalin constitution, as it was immediately baptized, did assure democratic rights to all citizens: freedom of speech, association, and the press, freedom to demonstrate, freedom to propagate both religious and antireligious ideas, and inviolability of privacy in the home and in one's correspondence. Freedom of movement was not men­tioned, but all citizens were given the right to vote (none were disenfran­chised any longer), and elections were to be secret and direct. The Stalin constitution was proclaimed "the most democratic in the world."

As Solzhenitsyn was to say, the constitution never went into effect, not for a single day. Stalin gave his report on its draft form in August 1936, as the force of the Great Terror was mounting daily. In 1937, when the first elections under the new constitution were held, the terror reached its peak. Not that nonimplementation of the document was any great surprise. Previous constitutions had also assured freedom of association, assembly, and the press, but only "in the interests of the workers." The 1936 con­stitution had the qualifying phrase "in accordance with the interests of the workers and for the purpose of strengthening the socialist system." One thing was made absolutely clear: "Whoever seeks to weaken the socialist system is an enemy of the people."³²

The new constitution granted equality to all in the sense that all were equally unequal. Stalin explained that the dictatorship of the working class remained in force, as did "the present leading role of the Communist party."³³ This constitution added a step. In previous ones the Communist party's leading role was only implied. The 1936 constitution spelled it out plainly and unmistakably.

The official proclamation of the party's right to represent everyone, to lead everyone and decide everything, at the same time that equality was granted to all, marked the consecration of the totalitarian state, which had received its finishing touches during the first half of the 1930s. At the time another totalitarian state existed, Nazi Germany. According to Nicolaevsky, Bukharin had given a lot of thought to nazism, in which he saw the ac­celerated decomposition of the capitalist system. He was concerned to prevent a similar decomposition in the Soviet Union and favored building an international movement to fight fascism. Above all, the ideas of nazism had to be fought with better ideas. Nazism's central concept, as Bukharin saw it, was violence. We have to fight violence, he said, under the banner of our new humanism, proletarian humanism.³⁴

Bukharin's remarks to Nicolaevsky in Paris in February 1936 had a pathetic ring. Here was one of the leaders of the October revolution, one who had contributed the most to Stalin's rise, dreaming in a confused and vacillating way about a possible "second party" of intellectuals who could advise "the first party." He had been searching in Marx's papers for some profound observations that other researchers might have missed, some guide to what should be done. "Ah, Karlusha Karlusha," he sighed about an unfinished article of Marx's, "why didn't you finish?... [How] you would have helped us!"³⁵ Notwithstanding his Marxist education—perhaps be­cause of it—Bukharin never understood that he had drafted the constitution of a totalitarian state. It was true there was a difference between this state and Nazi Germany. It could be boiled down to two slogans. Whereas Hitler said, "If necessary we will be inhuman," Stalin said, "Man is the most valuable capital."

The Soviet state relied on total terror, as did the Nazi state, and both relied on the Big Lie. The finishing touch was placed on Soviet totalitar­ianism with Stalin's proclamation of a "democratic" constitution. Under Lenin, terror was still called terror, and bureaucracy was called by that name, as was any uprising against Bolshevik rule. Under Stalin, as Ko- lakowski has written in his thoroughgoing analysis of the Soviet state, "the party was still being attacked by its enemies, but it no longer made mistakes, never. The Soviet state was irreproachable and the people's love for it was boundless." Having eliminated all means of public control over the gov­ernment, the state justified its power with the argument that "in principle" it embodied the interests, needs, and desires of the workers. The state claimed legitimacy on an ideological basis. Kolakowski adds that the om­nipotence of the Big Lie was not the result of Stalin's evil nature. It was the only possible way to legitimize power based on Leninist principles.³⁶ The universality of the Big Lie helped Stalin in his claim that the 1936 constitution was a "document proving that the past and present dreams of millions of honest people in the capitalist countries have been realized in the USSR." As paradoxical as it may sound, in this case Stalin was telling the truth, for millions of people in capitalist countries belived that the "dreams of humanity" had come true in the Soviet Union.

Many were unable to see the truth, but many were willingly deceived. Yuri Pyatakov, who was expelled from the party at its Fifteenth Congress, then "exiled" to the Soviet Foreign Trade Office in Paris after capitulating to Stalin, and finally executed by Stalin in 1938, gave Valentinov-Volsky the following explanation in 1928, at the time of his capitulation:

Since you do not believe that people's convictions cannot change in a short period of time, you conclude that our statements [of capitulation].. . are insincere, that they are lies. ... I agree that people who are not Bolsheviks, the category of ordinary people in general, cannot make an instant change, a turn, amputating their own convictions. . .. We are not like other people. We are a party of people who make the impossible possible. . . . And if the party demands it, if it is necessary or important for the party, we will be able by an act of will to expel from our brains in twenty-four hours ideas that we have held for years. .. . Yes, I will see black where I thought I saw white, or may still see it, because for me there is no life outside the party or apart from agreement with it.

A real Bolshevik, Pyatakov was ready for anything. The specter of rev­olution was haunting the world, he said, "and do you really think I am not going to be part of it? Do you really think that in this great worldwide transformation, in which our party will play a decisive role, I will remain on the sidelines?"³⁷

Eight years later, and once again in Paris (a city that seemed to inspire such reflections), Bukharin told Nicolaevsky: "It is difficult for us to live. ... But one is saved by a faith that development is always going forward. It is like a stream that is running to the shore. If one steps out of the stream, one is ejected completely."³⁸

Party members closed their eyes to Stalin's machinations and willingly accepted black as white in order to stay in "the stream of history." Their thinking might have been voiced by the Negro spiritual: "0 Lord, I want to be in that number/When the saints go marching in."

Some Western intellectuals also wanted "to be in that number." Others saw nothing special about Soviet totalitarianism because they considered that kind of thing natural to Russia. They portrayed Stalin as the direct heir of Nicholas I and Ivan the Terrible. Western Marxists consoled them­selves with the thought that Stalin's socialism had nothing in common with authentic socialism, and non-Marxists assumed that nothing like that could happen in countries that had been spared "Russia's accursed past."

The year of the Stalin constitution, 1936, was notable for another crushing blow to the "superstructure," that is, to the intellectual and spiritual forces of Soviet society. Pravda indicated the connection: "The draft of the Stalin constitution reflects a fact of exceptional importance, the full equality of rights enjoyed by the intelligentsia." In the same breath Pravda recalled Ivan Pavlov's warning to young scientists: "Don't ever think that you know everything. "³⁹ The implication was that only the party and its Leader know everything. Viktor Shklovsky, with the native talent for aphorisms he had as a young man, once observed: There is no truth about flowers; there is only the science of botany. In the late 1920s the Soviet government began to insist that there was a truth about flowers, about animals, about humans, about the universe. That truth was Marxism, and only the party and its Leader knew it for certain. The purpose of this campaign was to make the educated public more manageable, to make science manageable, as Mark Popovsky put it in his book on Soviet science.⁴⁰

An effort to intimidate scientists began. They were arrested one by one at first, then in groups. In 1929 a group of historians, including Sergei Platonov and Evgeny Tarle, were arrested; in 1930 it was a group of microbiologists; then it was agronomists, physiologists, aircraft designers, and so forth. Some were killed, others broken in spirit. In 1934 Professor S. Pisarev was forced to sign a denunciation of his friend Academician Vavilov; otherwise, he was threatened, his children would be killed, his wife tortured, and he himself killed as well.⁴¹ Academician Ukhtomsky was forced to renounce his brother, a bishop already under arrest, and some of his students, also under arrest.⁴² Vavilov, the great botanist, who died of starvation in Saratov prison, said that a process of selection was taking place in the scientific field, to produce a strain of people "lacking the gene of honesty." This was the same Vavilov who in the name of science and "for the good of the cause" went to Afghanistan in 1924 and, in return for Soviet permission to go there for his research on strains of wheat, agreed to take photos of a fortress on the India—Afghanistan border; the same Vavilov who during the worst years of the famine, in 1931—1933, went abroad "to praise the achievements of Soviet agriculture and the Soviet government."⁴³ Later he agreed to lead Trofim Lysenko by the hand into the domain of science, only to be sent to his own painful death by Lysenko.

In a 1924 polemic with the famous psychologist and physiologist Ivan

Pavlov, Bukharin declared that he himself followed "neither Kant's cate­gorical imperative nor the commandments of Christian morality, but rev­olutionary expediency."⁴⁴ In 1936, in his conversations with Nicolaevsky, Bukharin spoke at length about "humanizing" Communist theory. Nico­laevsky pointed out, "What you are now saying is nothing other than a return to the Ten Commandments." Bukharin replied: "Do you think the Commandments of Moses are obsolete?"⁴⁵ It may be that Bukharin was reminded of the Ten Commandments because he had encountered the Devil. He told the Menshevik leader Fedor Dan, "He is a petty, malicious man. Not even a man. A devil." He was talking about Stalin.⁴⁶

By 1936 the devil and his numerous assistants, including those who quietly regretted it, had accomplished their task: science was under control. The Academy of Sciences passed a resolution stating, "We will resolve all problems that arise before us with the only scientific method, the method of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin."⁴⁷

On July 4, 1936, the Central Committee conducted an utterly astounding experiment in the liquidation of an entire science by the mere stroke of the pen, by a single decree. Liquidated was "so-called pedology," for it was based on "pseudo-scientific, anti-Marxist assumptions."⁴⁸ Only a few years before pedology had been the "science of development for the new socialist individual," "a unified, independent science built on the foun­dation of dialectical materialism."⁴⁹ The abolition of pedology was followed by the closing down of other sciences: genetics, sociology, psychoanalysis, cybernetics, and so forth. Pedology was the first in a long line.

The problem with pedology was that it tried to be an exact science, studying the child with the aid of what the decree called "senseless and harmful questionnaires, texts, and so on." As long as official ideology proceeded from the assumption that existence determines consciousness, pedology was useful because it showed that poor conditions, a poor envi­ronment, has a negative influence on the child. In 1936 it was proclaimed that socialism had been built, but the "senseless and harmful question­naires, texts, and so on" were demonstrating that children still lived in poor conditions. When a pedologist studying Chuvash children came to the conclusion that they studied poorly due to poor conditions, the journal Pedology (which was liquidated along with the science and the pedologists) immediately responded: What kind of poor conditions did the researcher uncover? Conditions created by the Soviet government and the Communist party? At the first—and last—pedological conference, in 1928, A. Zal- kind, in the main presentation, defined pedology's tasks as follows: "Pe­dology had to respond, clearly and unambiguously, as to whether from the pedological standpoint the new socialist environment was a proper one for the creation of the new mass individual." Two years later that question sounded suspicious, and in 1936 downright counterrevolutionary.

In the cultural field, 1936 began with an article in Pravda on January 28, "Some Chaos Instead of Music," a devastating blast at Shostakovich's opera Katerina Izmailova. The fact that Pravda took an interest in musical questions was a sign that the process of "taming the arts" was nearing completion. Up until then party directives passed through professional channels. For example, the magazine Worker and Theater (Rabochii i teatr) complained in 1932, "Instead of calling on composers to master the method of dialectical materialism, the magazine Proletarian Musician urges them to this day to master the creative method of Beethoven."⁵⁰ Now the Central Committee was intervening directly in cultural matters, without delegating its authority to anyone. The article in Pravda was unsigned, meaning it voiced the official opinion, and it referred to Soviet culture as a whole: 'This ultraleft deformity in opera derives from the same source as ultraleft deformity in painting, poetry, pedology, and science." The article warned, 'This playing around with unintelligible things could end badly."⁵¹

On February 6 Pravda published another article against Shostakovich, this time taking up his ballet The Clear Stream. On February 20 it was the architects' turn, with an article headlined, 'The Cacophony in Archi­tecture"; on March 1 painters were taken to task in "Daubers, Not Painters"; on March 20 the theater and theatrical writing were attacked in "Outward Glitter, Inner Falsity" (specifically against Bulgakov's play МоНёге, put on by the Moscow Art Theater).

Writers, artists, musicians, actors organized meetings at which they approved the articles in Pravda and went on to denounce one another and recant. Arkady Belinkov, whose books on Tynyanov and Olesha are the first true histories of Soviet culture, once wrote: "Art is the dynamometer of the vileness of a tyrannical regime. The degree of vileness can be measured by the speed with which art is turned to dust."⁵²

The second great event of 1936 was the publication in Pravda on January 27 of the "comments" by Stalin, Kirov, and Zhdanov on a "proposed text­book of Soviet history" as well as on a "proposed textbook on modern world history." Written in June 1934, the "comments" were published a year and a half later (after the assassination of one of the authors) to complete the process of nationalization of spiritual life. Memory became state property.

In Soviet ideology history occupies a central place. The teleological nature of this ideology makes history a legitimizing factor. History validates the firm hand that leads men toward the great goal. "With every major historical zigzag of policy, [the bureaucratic policy makers] are compelled to revamp history all over again. Thus far we have had three large-scale alterations."⁵³ Trotsky wrote those words in reference to the period 1923— 1931. The alterations of the history of the party and the revolution took place only a few years after the events themselves, before the eyes of living witnesses. Facts were deleted, reworked, falsified, but party members went along with it all because history gave legitimacy to the leaders and the party as a whole.

In publishing his "comments," Stalin proclaimed himself historian-in- chief, displacing Mikhail Pokrovsky as the head of the school of Soviet Marxist history. An editorial in Pravda was blunt about it: Pokrovsky's scheme was oversimplified; he did not see "shifts and transitions within the framework of a single formula." Pokrovsky himself admitted that his approach was not scientific, from which Pravda concluded, "That which is not scientific can only be anti-Leninist. An official document with the title, "On the Battlefront of Historical Science," and the subtitle, "At the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the Party," stated that the "erroneous historical views typical of the so-called Pokrovsky school of history" had led to a situation in which there had taken root among historians, "especially Soviet historians," certain "anti-Marxist, anti- Leninist, essentially liquidationist, antiscientific views in regard to histor­ical science."