The Red Flag: A History of Communism (33 page)

We cannot say how many Potemkins there were. He was an unusually successful product of the system, and became an explorer and prospector for metals, ending up as Vice-Minister of Geology between 1965 and 1975. But his attitudes may not have been unusual amongst the new white-collar ‘intelligentsia’. This group was given concrete advantages: from the early 1930s, many of lowly origin benefited from the massive expansion of white-collar jobs and from the purges of the late 1930s. They were being given a new status: as the new ‘command staff’ of the regime, they were entrusted with the transformation of the USSR. At the same time, however, they were being offered a messianic ‘mission’, together with a way of transforming themselves into ‘conscious’, ‘advanced’ people who were taking part in the making of history. Some had
doubts, as will be seen, and hid them; others had strong incentives to suppress them, surrounded as they were by a very powerful value system. Some even accepted the Bolshevik view that any critical thoughts were signs of class alien and enemy influence, and had to be removed through internal self-criticism, often practised by keeping diaries.
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Responses to the regime were therefore complex, and are difficult to categorize as simple ‘support’ or ‘opposition’.

A survey of Soviet citizens who had left the USSR during and after the war, interviewed in Harvard in 1950–1, provides some evidence that certainly suggests that Potemkin’s attitudes may not have been that unusual for somebody of his social position.
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Regardless of the many complaints they had about specific policies and low living standards, most people of all classes approved of industrialization, and considerable state involvement in industry and welfare – although they favoured the mixed economy of NEP, not the total state control imposed by Stalin. But the younger and better educated amongst them were more collectivist than workers and peasants. The regime was clearly having some success in integrating this influential group into the system.
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The Harvard interviews suggest that the regime was less successful in absorbing workers as a whole into the new order – perhaps unsurprisingly given that wages, whilst higher than in the crisis years of 1932–3, were still by 1937 only 60 per cent of their 1928 level. The picture, however, was again complex. Despite the end of class discrimination in the mid-1930s, the regime’s rhetoric still gave workers high status, and they could take part in the idealism of the times. Workers were told that this was ‘their’ regime, and John Scott found that despite complaints about food and supplies, Magnitogorsk workers still accepted that they were making sacrifices to build a system superior to a capitalism that was in crisis.
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There were strong reasons to become committed ‘Soviet workers’, playing by the rules and learning how to use official Bolshevik language to better themselves.
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A particularly attractive prize was elevation to Stakhanovite status, at least in the early years of the movement when the wages and benefits were good.

Workers also had new educational opportunities. Scott found that twenty-four men and women in his barracks were attending some course or other, from chauffeuring and midwifery to planning. The more ambitious and politically loyal could enrol in the Communist Higher
Education Institute (Komvuz) to prepare for a career as an official, though the quality of that education was dubious. Scott, who attended the Magnitogorsk Komvuz, found that the students were barely literate and learnt a particularly dogmatic version of Marxism-Leninism:

There were also, though, many reasons for dissatisfaction, and foot-dragging was commonplace. Some workers also resented the new hierarchies, especially as promotions depended on foremen and managers who often behaved arbitrarily. Stakhanovism sharpened the tensions between workers and managers, and amongst workers themselves: the factory administration decided which workers would be Stakhanovites, and their partiality could lead to discontent and envy. That could be directed against managers or individual Stakhanovites, who were sometimes the victims of intimidation.

Many workers had more general objections to the end of egalitarianism in the early 1930s. Already angry at party privileges, many were even more incensed by the new official acceptance of inequalities, which seemed to have little to do with socialist morality. One Leningrad worker declared in 1934:

Much working-class criticism of the regime, therefore, came from the ‘left’, and perhaps most worryingly for the party, the terms used were often strikingly similar to the revolutionary language of 1917. Sharp divisions were perceived between those at the top (the
verkhi
) and those at the bottom (the
nizy
), and objections to them were as much moral and cultural as economic: those at the top were ‘aristocrats’ who ‘insulted’ the workers and treated them like ‘dogs’. As during the Russian revolution, social divisions were sometimes seen less as Marx’s ‘class’ tensions based on economic differences than as cultural conflicts, between
ancien régime
-style estates.

Even so, this was far from a revolutionary situation. Serious strikes did occur in the early 1930s – especially during the famine of 1932–3 – and workers could express their discontent passively, by ‘going slow’, but many accepted the system and tried to do their best within it. Surveillance and repression also effectively headed off any real opposition.

The hierarchies of the mid-1930s had a more mixed effect on women. The state, partly because it wanted to encourage births and population growth, abandoned its earlier denunciations of ‘bourgeois patriarchy’ and embraced the traditional family. Divorce was now frowned on, and families given financial incentives to have children – much as happened in Western Europe in this period. The authority of parents was also strengthened. The cult of Pavlik Morozov – a child who denounced his kulak parents to the authorities – went into abeyance. It seems that this rehabilitation of the family was popular amongst many women, though less well received was the ban on abortion.
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Also, despite its rhetoric about family values, the Stalinist state was still determined that women should work, and they found themselves assuming a ‘double burden’, expected to follow a traditional role in the household, whilst working long hours in factories and on farms.

Less integrated into the Soviet order, and much less contented, were the peasants. Although life had improved since the virtual civil war of the early 1930s, and the consolidation of farms into collectives did allow some facilities like schools and hospitals to be built, many peasants were disgruntled and bitter. They might have accepted that collective farms were here to stay, but many felt like second-class citizens. Living standards were much lower than in the towns and peasants did not receive the benefits enjoyed by workers. Arvo Tuominen, a Finnish Communist who was a member of a grain procurement brigade in 1934,
found that peasants were extremely hostile to the regime: ‘My first impression, which remained lasting, was that everyone was a counter-revolutionary, and that the whole countryside was in full revolt against Moscow and Stalin.’
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Andrei Arzhilovskii, formerly a ‘middle’ peasant (and old enough to remember pre-revolutionary Russia), was one of the disillusioned – understandably, as he had spent seven years in a labour camp for allegedly campaigning against collectivization. When he was released he kept a diary in which he recorded his alienation from the system and the people around him:

A particular complaint amongst peasants was the abuse of power by collective farm officials. A secret police investigation of 1936, for instance, gave a long account of the ‘filthy, brazen, criminal, hooligan-like actions’ of a collective farm chairman in Southern Russia, Veshchunov, who regularly harassed the women farm-workers. When one of them married a certain Mrykhin, they needed the Chairman’s permission for him to join the collective farm – a tricky proposition as he had a criminal record. Veshchunov agreed to admit him if his wife slept with him first. She asked her husband, ‘What on earth should I do, go to bed with Veshchunov and buy you off, or you will be sent back to the Urals?’ Mrykhin agreed that this was the only thing to do. There had been complaints to the local prosecutors, and Veshchunov had been brought to trial, but he had been acquitted; the decision was then overturned, and the charges upheld, but he was still in post. Officials had influence and were remarkably difficult to remove.
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However, amongst those most alienated from the regime were undoubtedly the prisoners of the Gulag, the huge complex of labour camps, supposedly designed to ‘re-educate’ recalcitrants through work. In 1929 the leadership replaced institutions for long-term prisoners
with work camps, designed to extract minerals in Siberia and other remote areas of the USSR where it was difficult to attract free labour. The Gulag soon expanded rapidly with the collectivization campaigns, as hundreds of thousands of kulaks, priests and other ‘enemies’ were imprisoned. By World War II, they had become subjects of an enormous slave state, and a central part of the Soviet economy, with a shocking 4 million people in the whole Gulag system.
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Prisoners were forced to do heavy labour in the harsh climate, and they only received full rations if they fulfilled their work plan. Those who did not often became ill, and were even less capable of meeting their targets. Many were therefore, in effect, worked to death. One prisoner, writing in the earliest, and worst, period of the Gulag, sent a complaint to the Red Cross (naturally intercepted by the police) about the appallingly cruel treatment:

Given the different treatment received by various groups within the Soviet population, it was inevitable that attitudes towards the regime varied enormously. But one message emerges from the evidence we have, much of it collected by the party and the secret police: a resentment of high-handed and privileged officials.
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And Stalin himself was well aware of this, for he regularly received secret police and party digests of popular opinion. He, of course, had no objections to strict, harsh discipline and he was prepared to mete out a great deal of violence himself, but he accused his officials of alienating, rather than mobilizing, the citizenry.
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It was not only the pretensions of the ‘little Stalins’ that angered a vengeful Stalin. He also believed that they were frustrating his efforts to prepare the economy for war. Just as Count Potemkin built fake ‘Potemkin villages’ along the River Dnepr to convince Catherine the Great of the value of his Crimean conquests, so local party bosses exaggerated their economic achievements and lied about Plan fulfilment in their reports to Stalin and Moscow. Officials protected one another, and whistleblowers or anybody who broke ranks paid a heavy price. The leadership’s demand that party officials support managers had led to
‘collusion’ to hide mistakes.
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And at the same time, these officials had their protectors within the top leadership in the Kremlin, among Stalin’s inner circle.

Stalin, determined to increase his power over the party, now insisted that there were drawbacks to the ‘retreat’ of the early 1930s and the accompanying ‘demobilization of the ranks’ of the party, as he put it in 1934.
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The party, it’s leader now aggressively warned, was in danger of becoming impure, much as it had during the NEP, and was losing its transformative power. This time, though, the dangers came from enemies and spies within the party. The party needed to purify itself, regain its messianic role, and rearm itself ideologically to prepare for the coming war.