The Red Flag: A History of Communism (28 page)

Stalin had a particular interest in geopolitics and Russia’s borderlands, but his view of the world had much in common with the culture of the party that emerged from the civil war. His belief in the centrality of ideas and ideological commitment made sense to the Red Army Bolsheviks, who understood the vital importance of morale in war. Any chink in ideological unity could lead to defeat.

It is therefore not surprising that Stalin relished war when it came; even though his role was merely to collect food supplies in Southern Russia, he quickly transformed himself into a military commissar, substituting suit and tie for the martial attire of collarless tunic, breeches and tall boots – an ensemble he favoured thereafter.
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His behaviour was brutal and cruel, and in some ways his militaristic, mobilizing political
style was closest to Trotsky’s.
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This may have been one reason for their mutual loathing, but there were others: he was deeply hostile to Trotsky’s (and indeed Lenin’s) use of upper-class tsarist officers.

Stalin accepted the NEP retreat. But contemporaries should not have been entirely surprised when he eventually emerged as the destroyer of NEP. As disillusionment with NEP spread throughout the party, Stalin was ideally poised to devise an alternative course with appeal within the party. And that new path amounted to nothing less than a second Bolshevik revolution.

In the classic Soviet novel
Cement
, written between 1922 and 1924, the proletarian writer Fedor Gladkov tells the story of Gleb Chumalov, a civil-war hero, who returns home from the fighting to find that his beloved cement factory is idle and decaying. The locals have turned to goat-herding and selling cigarette-lighters (typical petty-bourgeois activities in the Bolshevik imagination). Gleb sets about trying to restore the factory, applying the radical heroism imbibed during the war to economic reconstruction. One of his fellow Communists, an anti-NEP utopian, is prone to reminisce about the war: ‘If you only knew how I love the army. Those were the most unforgettable of my life, like the October days in Moscow. Heroism? It’s the fire of revolution.’ To which Gleb replies:

But Gleb has to struggle with resistance in all quarters. Cossack bandits rebel and Whites attack, only to be repulsed. Kleist, the old German engineer, has collaborated with the Whites and is initially sceptical of Gleb’s plans. But Gleb, in a scene deliberately reminiscent of Bely’s
Petersburg
, plays the role of a revivified Bronze Horseman, placing his hands on Kleist’s shoulders and infusing him with the will to help the industrial effort. However, it soon transpires that the most dangerous enemies are not foreign experts, but home-grown bureaucrats. Shramm, the head of the Council of the People’s economy, though nominally a
Communist, has the ‘soft face of a eunuch’, with a ‘gold pince-nez perched on an effeminate nose’, and is full of bourgeois affectation. He loves luxury and consumes corruptly acquired delicacies with his decadent cronies. He accuses Gleb of being a dreamer who is guilty of ‘disorganizing enthusiasms’ but is himself a passionless technocrat, signalled by his monotonous mechanical voice.
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Nevertheless Gleb is not to be deterred, and sets about mobilizing the workers to rebuild the factory. He is at once a human dynamo and descendant of the medieval Russian knight (
bogatyr
), the hero of the old Russian epics. Shramm, meanwhile, is exposed as a saboteur and arrested, and in the final scene the factory is opened in front of a blood-red banner declaring:

Few today would read Gladkov’s
Cement
for pleasure; nevertheless unlike some other ‘proletarian’ literature, it was not merely a
Pravda
editorial in novelistic garb. Despite its unpromising title, it had literary pretensions, was written in a highly emotional, even purple style, and became enormously popular. Party leaders praised it – Stalin himself was its main promoter. And though Gladkov has Gleb formally endorsing NEP, the novel is chiefly notable for capturing the disappointments common amongst many party members. And as the novel’s parting slogan illustrates, it both describes the new problems facing the regime, and suggests a way of solving them. The Soviet regime, having defeated internal ‘bourgeois enemies’, now faced (or thought it faced) external ones; and having achieved some measure of economic stability after the chaos of civil war, now had to think about economic growth and international competition. Gleb’s solution was to return to the methods of the civil war, when bands of committed party members had supposedly mobilized the ‘masses’ in a ‘class struggle’. And by the end of the 1920s, many Communists agreed.

Cement
also revealed the profound contradictions embodied in NEP. Although Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin, NEP’s great supporter, told Communists that they must ‘learn from’ in order to compete with the bourgeoisie, the regime still defined itself as the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, and was based on class favouritism. ‘Class aliens’ – the aristocracy and bourgeoisie – and ‘former people’ – priests and supporters of the old regime – were deprived of the vote (7.7 per cent of the
urban population by 1927–8), and found it difficult to enter university. And whilst everybody agreed that NEP was temporary, there were deep disagreements over how long it was to last. Radicals, like Gleb (and Gladkov), may have formally acquiesced in NEP, but they were profoundly out of sympathy with its principles. Meanwhile, more technocratic Communists – like Shramm – were convinced of the need for rational management and class reconciliation.

Both views coexisted within the collective party leadership that emerged during Lenin’s final months. The majority supported NEP’s survival, but of these only the intellectually gifted but politically weak Nikolai Bukharin was deeply committed. Other leaders, one by one, began to defect to the radical left oppositions. The first was Trotsky in 1923 – an unlikely convert to the left given his defence of harsh discipline and tsarist officers during the civil war. Lev Kamenev and Zinoviev formed their own opposition in 1925, and in 1926 all three joined together in a ‘United Opposition’, which berated the pro-NEP leadership of Stalin and Bukharin for its neglect of ‘class struggle’, egalitarian ‘democracy’ and international revolution.

This division between more inclusive technocrats and partisan radicals was hardened by the peculiar structure of the new Soviet system, which became the foundation of all Communist regimes thereafter. Although the small circle of leaders in the party’s Political Bureau (Politburo) decided all major issues, below them the power structure was divided into two parallel hierarchies – the party and the state. The state’s duty was to administer the country, and it tended to adopt a practical, managerial approach. It was generally run by party members with a Modernist bent – Communists like Shramm – and employed non-party bourgeois specialists. The party, by contrast, was to act as the ideological kernel of the state, to oversee policy and make sure that the regime retained its ideological spirit.
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In practice, of course, their roles often overlapped, and both sides, each with a different value system and culture, struggled for influence, sometimes viciously.

NEP, therefore, was an unstable order. Whilst some officials happily spent their time trying to make ‘state capitalism’ work, others were deeply unhappy with the class compromises they had to make. They hated the regime’s relative inclusiveness, its toleration of merchants, street markets and conspicuous consumption. As one commentator, an academic, explained:

The ‘evil’ he referred to was not just political, but moral and cultural, and even psychological. As
Cement
demonstrated, amongst many in the party virtue was intimately linked with class origin. The bourgeoisie was regarded as effeminate, selfish and luxury-loving; the proletariat as masculine, collectivist and self-sacrificing. For many Bolsheviks, Communist society could only be built by the virtuous ‘new man’, willing to sacrifice himself or herself to the common good. The real danger was that the market, and with it bourgeois influence, would corrupt workers, contaminating them with selfishness, smug philistinism and a shallow hedonism. So despite Marx’s, and some Bolsheviks’, claims that morality was an entirely bourgeois phenomenon, and would wither away under socialism, most Bolsheviks (like many other Marxists) were highly moralistic. Women’s behaviour was especially targeted as an index of virtue. One supposed expert, writing in the newspaper
Komsomolskaia Pravda
(
Komsomol Truth
), opined: ‘Contemporary female fashions are conditioned reflexes for the arousal of enflamed emotion. That is why it is essential to battle for the expulsion of “Parisian fashions” from our lives and for the creation of hygienic, simple and comfortable clothing.’
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So, whilst the party leadership and economic managers preached collaboration with the bourgeoisie, the party as an organization was obsessed with maintaining its ideological purity at a time of ‘retreat’, much as it was in Western Europe. As has been seen, Social Democratic parties had long shared some of the features of exclusive religious sects. The notion of ‘conversion’ to Marxism was a common one, as was the conception of the party member’s life as a journey from disorganized revolutionary ‘spontaneity’ to a disciplined ‘consciousness’.
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And once the party was in power, it was determined to make sure that all of its members had had the same experience. Those entering the party had to give an account of their lives, often in written autobiographies. They were expected to admit to earlier political ‘sins’ and show that they had truly converted. One student, Shumilov, described how he had read
illegal Marxist literature when in a German prisoner-of-war camp. As a result he had ‘experienced a spiritual rebirth’; he ‘experienced the revelation of the essence of Being’, rejecting his old Christianity and embracing Marxism.
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Once members of the party, Communists were subjected to a whole range of tools and methods designed to keep them pure and exclude ‘alien’ ideological influences. The most important of these was the ‘purge’. Until the second half of the 1930s, the purge was not automatically connected with arrest and repression; those who fell foul of the purge were either expelled from the party or demoted to a lower status (for instance, from full member to ‘sympathizer’). First applied in the party in 1921, and extended to other institutions afterwards, the purge was a regular process, intended to check that party members were committed and morally pure, though of course it could be used to remove leaders’ opponents. Party members were questioned about their attitudes, their past and their knowledge of Marxism before a commission of three. Questionnaires were filled out, and members questioned on their past thoughts and behaviour. In 1922 and 1923 the Sverdlov Communist University in Moscow replaced termly exams with purges, in which academic achievement was judged alongside ‘party-mindedness’ and political or moral ‘deviations’.
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In 1924, purges were extended to all universities, and poor academic standards or political mistakes could lead to expulsion from the party.

Another way of discovering revolutionary commitment can be seen in the academic seminars of Communist universities. Academics were ‘worked over’, or subjected to aggressive questioning in public meetings; if they were discovered to be in error, they had to confess their sins. This was the root of the ‘criticism and self-criticism’ campaigns of the Stalinist period, and influenced the ‘struggle sessions’ used later by the Chinese Communist Party, experienced by the Chinese students of Moscow’s Communist University of the Toilers of the East.
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Such confrontational methods of interrogation also had much in common with the ‘agit-trial’ – a form of theatrical propaganda developed in the Red Army. These mass spectacles in which, for instance, soldiers participated in ‘trials’ of actors playing capitalists and Whites, were to become the basis of the Stalinist show trial.
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However, alongside detailed inquiries into individuals and their views, purges relied on the cruder criterion of class background, for it
was assumed that proletarians were more collectivist and virtuous than the bourgeois. But defining class was not as easy as it sounded. Were workers from large factories to be favoured because they were ‘purer’ than those from small workshops? Was the class of one’s parents to be decisive, or could one overcome a bad class background by working in a factory or joining the Red Army? Members of ‘exploiting’ classes had to repudiate their parents if they were to gain admission to university by publishing an announcement in a newspaper: ‘I, so-and-so, hereby announce that I reject my parents, so-and-so, as alien elements, and declare that I have nothing in common with them.’ But this was not guaranteed to work. Inevitably, applicants for the party or university invented proletarian backgrounds for themselves, whilst denunciations for concealing class background proliferated.
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