The Red Flag: A History of Communism (32 page)

It was, however, the state that was to judge people’s achievements, and their rewards, and underlying Stalin’s ideal society was a fundamentally paternalistic outlook: the state was the father, giving rewards to its children depending on how well they behaved. Paternalism was absolutely central to Stalinist propaganda, and its most visible element – Stalin’s leadership cult. The Soviet ‘welfare state’, the schools, hospitals and social protection which were seen by many as amongst the main advantages of the new order, were all commonly presented as gifts from father Stalin to his grateful children, rather than the just entitlements of a hard-working citizenry. As
Komsomol’skaia Pravda
declared,
‘The Soviet people know to whom they owe their great attainments, who led them to a happy, rich, full and joyful life… Today they send their warm greeting to their beloved, dear friend, teacher, and father.’ Meanwhile, school pupils chanted, ‘Thank you comrade Stalin, for a happy childhood!’ Some responded to these signals, and the tsarist-era habit of sending supplicating petitions to the authorities became a common one.

The first signs of Stalin’s leadership cult were evident in 1929 as he sought to marginalize Bukharin and the ‘Right’, but it really began to flourish in 1933 when Stalin, vulnerable after the failures of the ‘Great Break’, used the cult of his image to consolidate central control. The cult was largely directed at ordinary workers and peasants, and not so much at the white-collar workers, who were thought to be too sophisticated for it. Though embarrassed by its incongruity in a socialist society, Stalin realized that it had a real resonance; in a widely publicized interview with the ‘fellow-travelling’ German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger, Stalin conceded that the cult was ‘tacky’, and joked about the proliferation of mustachioed portraits. But, he explained, it had to be tolerated because workers and peasants had not attained the maturity necessary for ‘taste’. The party tried to discourage some of the more extreme manifestations of paternalism, which they saw as redolent of the old regime. Whilst ordinary citizens’ letters often referred to Stalin as ‘
diadia
’ (‘uncle’) and ‘
batiushka
’ (‘little father’ – a term used of the tsars) these epithets never became part of official language. The official cult depicted Stalin as a hybrid Marxist intellectual and charismatic magus – ‘great driver of the locomotive of history’ or ‘genius of Communism’, but these images had far less purchase than the popular notion of Stalin as father of the nation.

There was, though, no necessary contradiction between the paternalistic idea that Father Stalin looked after the nation, and a belief in social mobility. Pasha Angelina, the first woman tractor brigade leader and a famous Stakhanovite, reconciled the two in a verse (
chastushka
) recited at a regional conference in 1936:

In line with the official message, Pasha thanked Father Stalin for helping young, ambitious people who helped themselves – people like herself. Like an idealized form of the tsarist ‘service aristocracy’, the state awarded privileges and rewards in return for service. But it was a short step from a world in which one father presided over a fluid hierarchy of virtue, to a fixed, unchangeable pyramid of superior fathers and subordinate children.

This transformation became increasingly apparent in ethnic politics: Russia emerged more and more as the superior nation, ruling over a graded ethnic hierarchy. And whilst the USSR was not the continuation of the tsarist empire by other means, several features of the
ancien régime
, albeit in diluted form, were recreated. After 1932 all citizens had their class and ethnic status inscribed in their passports, and this affected how the state treated them. Peasants, in theory, could not leave the countryside without permission (an echo of the restrictions binding their serf ancestors); class background continued to affect educational and career chances; and party bosses started to become a privileged, ‘proletarian’ stratum. The
nomenklatura
, as they were known, with special housing, shops and food supplies, was becoming a new privileged status group, with distinct echoes of a tsarist estate.
⁸²

In Stalinist culture, also, the figurative ‘Soviet family’ increasingly looked like one of fathers and sons rather than bands of brothers. Soviet heroes did populate official discourse, but they differed from those of the 1920s: unlike Gladkov’s Gleb, they never attained full maturity as Soviet leaders; they were impulsive and spontaneous figures who always needed the fatherly guidance of mentors in the party. The most famous hero of this type was Pavel Korchagin, the hero of Nikolai Ostrovskii’s semi-autobiographical novel,
How the Steel was Tempered,
of 1934. Set in civil-war Ukraine, the novel tells of Korchagin’s extraordinary will-power: he fights against all the odds, narrowly avoiding death on several occasions, and even continues to struggle for the common cause when paralysed. Although his character, like steel, is ultimately ‘tempered’, he remains immature throughout his life: he is poorly educated and unruly at school; he puts class above love, breaking up with the petty-bourgeois Tonia, but only after a great deal of agonizing; and he remains devoted to the Communist cause, but only following a period of suicidal depression. He is guided by several party mentors in the course of his heroic career, and never himself becomes a party boss, schooled in Marxism-Leninism.
⁸³
Korchagin was only one of the most prominent of the son-heroes who populated 1930s Stalinist culture, both within literature and outside it. Arctic explorer pilots (‘Stalin’s fledgling-children’) and hero-worker ‘Stakhanovites’ were all shown as valued, but junior, members of the Soviet family. Presiding over the new ‘Soviet family’ were several grandfather-heroes. Aleksandr Nevskii, Peter the Great and other historical figures were now revalorized, but they too knew their place as modest forerunners of the
ur
-father, the great Stalin.

Stalin, however, was not the only father within the party. The USSR became a
matrioshka
-doll society and ‘lesser’ fathers appeared in a seemingly endless hierarchy. Many local bosses, their high status earned by their service during the civil war, behaved like ‘little Stalins’, with their own patronage networks – or so-called ‘tails’ – which they dragged behind them when moved from one post to another. They encouraged their own cults, copied from the great
vozhd
(leader);
⁸⁴
like him, they claimed credit for every achievement that had taken place in their region. Sometimes these cults loomed much larger in the popular consciousness than Stalin’s own. In 1937 one collective farm-worker, when asked ‘Who is the boss now in Russia?’, answered ‘Ilyin’ – the chairman of the local village soviet; it seems that he had never heard of the supreme
vozhd
.
⁸⁵

Stalin’s attempts to spread the appeal of an aristocratic military heroism effectively authorized an increasingly paternalistic political culture. The noble warriors of
Aleksandr Nevskii
were powerful role models. Nevertheless it would be an exaggeration to suggest that Stalinist Russia had simply reverted to the
ancien régime
. Party members were expected to absorb not only military heroic values, but Lenin’s almost Protestant ideal of sober asceticism. Party members were expected to follow a strict moral code. They were also, unlike Peter’s nobles, expected to master science – of the conventional ‘bourgeois’, rather than utopian Marxist variety – and the leadership placed enormous emphasis on the creation of a new cadre of ‘red experts’, indoctrinated with an ideological message strictly controlled by the party.

The new union of quasi-aristocratic father figures and quasi-bourgeois scientists was abundantly clear in the regional and local elites of the USSR. After the chaos of the early 1930s, Stalin now stressed strict obedience in the economy. Engineers and managers acquired high status, and party officials, once encouraged to adopt a suspicious, ‘vigilant’ attitude to them, were now expected to help and support them. The party had been partially ‘demobilized’, whilst its officials and managers now became a more coherent and unified administrative elite. Viktor Kravchenko, who had become an engineer at the new metallurgical plant in Nikopol in the Ukraine in 1934, describes well his entry into the new elite, and his tense relations with the workers:

Kravchenko’s observation that a ‘new class’ was emerging in the USSR – the
apparatchiki
, with new, bourgeois tastes – was a common one amongst critics of Stalinism, and became central to the Trotskyist analysis (although Trotsky himself never went so far as to allege that the Communists had become a new bourgeoisie). Undoubtedly, during the 1930s a new, powerful social group had emerged. Stalin’s own policies were, in part, responsible: he had deliberately reasserted control after the chaos of the early 1930s by strengthening a new hierarchy, with party bosses and Communist experts, often of Russian, proletarian or poor peasant background, at the summit. Unconscious paternalistic attitudes from the tsarist era may also have played a part. But more important was the absence of any authority genuinely independent of an increasingly unified party-state apparatus, whether an autonomous
judiciary or a propertied class. In abolishing the market, the regime gave enormous powers to party bosses and state officials, at all levels of the system; they exerted huge influence in economic as well as political life. Moscow attempted to control this burgeoning bureaucratic power with a panoply of ‘control commissions’ to investigate corruption. Moreover, everybody was supposed to check up on everybody else – party leaders on state officials, the secret police (in 1934 renamed the NKVD) on the party, and the party on itself, through purges, ‘self-criticism’ campaigns and elections. But in reality officialdom was very difficult to control. Local cliques could protect themselves, persecuting critics.

The ‘retreat’ from the militant fraternity of the early 1930s had therefore created a highly contradictory system: the rhetoric of equality was still present, but it coincided with a new value system of reward according to achievement, and in practice fixed, almost
ancien-régime
hierarchies were emerging. This system was probably more stable than either the tense standoff of the NEP period, or the violent radical enthusiasms of the late 1920s, for it established a group of white-collar, educated officials committed to the objectives of the regime. But it also created tensions, as, for different reasons, both the supreme leader above and ordinary people below became increasingly hostile to the new bureaucracy.

In the summer of 1935, an ambitious 22-year-old student at the Sverdlovsk Mining Engineers’ Institute, Leonid Potemkin, tried to show his effectiveness as a student leader by arranging a group holiday on the Black Sea coast. However, after consultation with the Institute’s All-Union Voluntary Society of Proletarian Tourism and Excursions, he discovered it was too expensive for most students. He therefore put a proposal to the Director of the Institute: the Institute should organize a ‘socialist competition’, and give a holiday subsidy to the students who did best in their annual military training classes. The idea was a good one because it gave the Institute ideological cover to help its students. The Director readily agreed, and, as Potemkin recorded in his (private) diary, he threw himself into the tasks with enthusiasm:

Potemkin was Stalin’s ideal ‘middle-rank’ citizen. He had embraced the new morality of competitive virtue, and had absorbed Stalinist ideas about leadership – a mixture of strictness and mobilizing enthusiasm. He also had a ‘mission’ to contribute to society. He was determined to become a New Soviet Person, partly because he could see there were advantages for him – as his skilful manoeuvring over his student holiday showed – but also because he wanted to remake himself and society. He came from a poor background (though not formally ‘proletarian’; his father was a postal employee), and he had to leave school to earn a living. He remembered how he had been ‘weak-willed, sickly, physically ugly, and dirty… I felt that I was the lowest, most insignificant of all people.’
⁸⁸
But the new system allowed him to enter higher education despite his poor qualifications, and he was determined to better himself, whilst improving society. His diary was an essential tool in this self-transformation – a place where he could reflect on his mistakes and successes and vow to do better next time.