The Red Flag: A History of Communism (52 page)
Read The Red Flag: A History of Communism Online
Authors: David Priestland
The USSR faced all of these tasks at a time when the ‘ideological preparedness’ of the population, as the official jargon put it, was seriously dilapidated. The wartime experiences of many Soviet soldiers presented a major challenge to the values of the regime. Some had fought in partisan units, where they had become used to a degree of equality and autonomy. More importantly, millions of soldiers had visited the West, and were in a position to question official propaganda. One political officer, charged with repatriating Soviet citizens who had sought sanctuary in neutral Sweden, reported that, ‘After they have seen the untroubled life [in Sweden], certain individuals among our repatriated [citizens] draw the incorrect conclusion that Sweden is a rich country and that people live well.’
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But some even claimed that they were better fed and treated as German prisoners of war than they had been in the Red Army. Unsurprisingly Stalin suspected all ex-prisoners of war of
anti-Soviet thinking, and on their homecoming many were despatched to the Gulag.
Faced with deteriorating relations with the West and disunity at home, the Stalinists imposed a regime that reinforced the nakedly coercive elements of the pre-war order and depended on patriotic, rather than class mobilization. The speech which George Kennan saw as an attack on the West signalled the end of wartime liberalization in the spring of 1946. The entire country was now to be mobilized to reconstruct the economy. Problems of labour shortage were addressed by increasing the levels of unfree labour beyond those already seen before the War. About 4 million students aged between fourteen and seventeen, mainly from the countryside, were conscripted into factory jobs, where they worked for nothing but their board and lodging.
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One of the greatest contributions was made by the Gulag – the vast archipelago of labour camps, most of them in remote Siberia. Prison labour had also played a major part in the economy in the 1930s, but the system now became much more extensive under their post-Terror boss, the secret police chief Lavrentii Beria. The whole prison system, which is estimated to have included some 5 million in 1947, provided some 20 per cent of the industrial labour force and over 10 per cent of the USSR’s industrial output.
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But Stalin’s firm belief in the economic importance of the camps was wrong: they were extremely wasteful and unproductive – inevitably given that conditions were so poor and the prisoners treated so callously. Certainly, in comparison with the mid-1930s, the Gulag was more technocratically organized, but this was hardly a rational way to run an economy. In her brilliant pen-portrait of one Gulag director, Kaldymov, Evgenia Ginzburg, a worker on his Siberian state farm during the War, vividly illustrated how technocracy and a belief in the Stalinist hierarchy combined to produce extraordinary cruelty. Kaldymov, a child of peasants, had benefited from the inter-war social mobility and had become a teacher of Dialectical Materialism before an embarrassing family scandal led him to move to Siberia. Nevertheless, in the eyes of his bosses he was a good director:
judging from fulfilment of the plan – he made quite a respectable job of running a state farm in the taiga with its convict labour force… [He] used to run his enterprise on a work-intensive basis, relying on slave labour and a rapid turnover of ‘worked out contingents’.
He was totally oblivious to his own cruelty… Take, for example, his dialogue with Orlov, our zootechnician, which one of our female workers who was forking manure near the dairy farm happened to overhear:
‘What about this building? Why has it been left empty?’ inquired Kaldymov.
‘It had bulls in it,’ Orlov replied, ‘but we have had to put them elsewhere. The roof leaks, the eaves are iced up, so it isn’t safe to put cattle in it. We will be doing a proper repair job on it in due course.’
‘It’s not worth wasting money on such a pile of old lumber. The best thing would be to use it as a hut for women.’
‘What are you saying, Comrade Director? Why, even the bulls couldn’t stand it and began to fall ill here!’
‘Yes, but they were bulls! No question, of course, of risking the bulls!’
This was not a joke, nor a witticism, nor even a sadistic jibe. It was simply the profound conviction of a good husbandman that bulls were the foundation of the state farm’s life and that only extreme thoughtlessness on the part of Orlov had prompted him to put them on an equal footing with female prisoners.
In his sanguine swinishness, his fixed belief in the solidity and infallibility of the dogmas and quotations he had learned by heart, Kaldymov would, I think, have been fearfully surprised if anyone had called him to his face a slave owner or slave driver. The Jacob’s ladder that supported on its lowest rungs the prisoners and near the top the Wise and Great One, with the official cadre members like the state farm director somewhere in between, seemed to him utterly irreversible and sempiternal. His firm conviction of the unchangeability of this world, with its hierarchy and its accepted rituals, could be sensed in every word and gesture of the director.
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Given these attitudes to prisoners, it is no surprise that millions died of starvation and over-work. Figures remain uncertain and one based on official archives – of 2.75 million for the whole Stalin era – is certainly too low.
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Conditions, though not quite so harsh in ordinary factories, were certainly grim, with workers much poorer than before the war; prices were raised and rations cut in September 1946. In many ways, the regime was returning to the strategies of the late 1920s and early 1930s, forcing workers to finance industrialization through low living
standards, but the methods were different: the leadership eschewed populist appeals for fear of undermining managers. And whilst Stakhanovism survived, the leadership largely relied on coercion. Managers were given more powers over workers than in the 1930s and labour discipline was harsh. Workers were no longer free to change jobs, and anyone who tried to was liable to be punished for ‘labour desertion’. However, the system was less draconian in practice than the legislation suggested. Managers did not always enforce their powers because they needed the cooperation of the workforce. Moreover, there was remarkably little sign of labour unrest. Workers undoubtedly resented the post-war hierarchical order, but protests were muted, and demoralized workers and peasants tried to evade controls by going slow or running away from their jobs.
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A letter of complaint sent to Moscow gives a sense of the dire conditions and the inequalities in the city of Vodsk:
In the city from early morning all the people are on the search for water, the pumps don’t work, we take water from the open man-holes wherever they are… For a population of 50 thousand we have only one functioning bathhouse… there are huge queues to get into the bath and they are only made up of the damned directors of the city…
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As this complaint suggests, the early 1950s were a much better time for bosses. Efforts by the police to control them were discouraged, and corruption flourished.
From 1946 Stalin did launch ideological campaigns of purification against ‘deviations’ amongst the ‘socialist intelligentsia’, but rather than anti-elite, they were nationalistic and xenophobic in content. The first victims of the post-war ideological campaigns were two literary journals –
Leningrad
and
Zvedza
(
Star
) – and two writers: the poet Anna Akhmatova and the humorous short-story writer Mikhail Zoshchenko. In a major decree on patriotism in literature in August 1946, the ideological chief Andrei Zhdanov described Akhmatova as a ‘mixture of nun and harlot… a crazy gentlewoman dashing backwards and forwards between her boudoir and her chapel’; Zoshchenko was denounced as a ‘vulgar and trivial petty-bourgeois’, who ‘oozed anti-Soviet poison’. But the centre of the charges was that they, and other literary figures, had ‘slipped into a tone of servility and cringing before philistine foreign literature’.
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However, it was the beginning of the Cold War proper in early 1947 that led to full-scale patriotic campaigns. Purge commissions,
now given the distinctly retro name of ‘honour courts’ (named after tsarist military courts), were set up in offices and bureaus to ‘eliminate servility to the West’.
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This new cultural xenophobia blighted several areas of intellectual life, and most famously affected genetics, in the person of the notorious bogus ‘biologist’ Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko came from a peasant family and had no scientific training, but he claimed that his practical knowledge as a peasant more than made up for the absence of formal education. During the late 1920s and 1930s he had been a beneficiary of the Radical Marxist idea that ideologically inspired scientists ‘from the people’ were superior to academically trained specialists. His main invention was ‘vernalization’ – soaking and chilling winter wheat so that it would grow in the spring. The results were unimpressive, but Lysenko skilfully exploited the political atmosphere of the time. He also developed an ideological justification for his new approach. Changes in the environment, not just genes, could improve plants – a doctrine that accorded with Marxist ideas on the importance of the environment over heredity (genetics was damned by association with eugenics and Nazism). Lysenko fought a long-running battle with geneticists in the Academy of Sciences throughout the later 1930s, but failed to secure political support; Stalin was not then prepared to endanger economic development by subordinating scientific research to Marxist speculation. However, by the summer of 1948, at the height of the Berlin crisis, he was more willing to sacrifice science to patriotism. At that point Stalin was determined to establish a clear difference between a ‘progressive’ Soviet science and a ‘reactionary’ bourgeois science.
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Soon after this Lysenkoism became the new orthodoxy, blighting Soviet biology for two decades.
Stalin was, however, more circumspect about subjecting physics to such ideological tampering because he was unwilling to risk the atomic project. Even so, science became increasingly bound up with national pride. The
Great Soviet Encyclopaedia
informed its readers that Aleksandr Mozhaiskii, not the Wright brothers, built the first aeroplane; Grigorii Ignatiev invented the telephone; A. S. Popov the radio; V. A. Manassein and A. G. Polotebnov penicillin; P. N. Iablochkov and A. N. Lodygin the light-bulb.
Stalin and his propagandists were of course tending the seed of a nationalism they had planted some time before, in the mid-1930s. This
was not Russian nationalism pure and simple, but a Soviet–Russian amalgam, intended to integrate all official Soviet nationalities into a single harmonious whole. But the Russian element in the mixture became far greater after the War, and in one respect particularly it came strikingly close to the state nationalism of Tsar Nicholas II – its anti-Semitism.
Jews, as an ethnic group, had not been victimized by the Soviet regime before World War II, and were not specifically targeted by the 1936–8 Terror. Indeed, as has been seen, Jews were one of the most pro-Communist peoples in the USSR, and throughout the world. As a highly educated and urban group, they were also overrepresented in the upper echelons of professional and cultural life. Nevertheless Stalin frequently manifested crude prejudices about many ethnic groups, including Jews. Khrushchev, hardly a model of political correctness himself, described him as having a ‘hostile attitude towards the Jewish people’, recalling Stalin’s mimicking of a Jewish accent ‘in the same way that thick-headed backward people who despise Jews talk when they mock the negative Jewish traits’.
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But this was no ideological racism, Nazi-style. Jews were numbered amongst Stalin’s closest associates (and he would tolerate no anti-Jewish prejudice when the Jewish Kaganovich was within earshot). Anti-Semitism was, he said in 1931, ‘an extreme form of racial chauvinism’, ‘the most dangerous rudiment of cannibalism’.
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And during the War, the Soviet leadership set up the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee – a typical Popular Front-style organization designed to attract worldwide Jewish support for the Soviet war effort, chaired by Solomon Mikhoels. Even so, the War strained relations between Jews and Slavic nationalities: the sufferings of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis – and their collaborators – intensified the sense of their ethnicity, whilst the revived Russian nationalist messages of the period encouraged a popular anti-Semitism.
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Initially the Soviet leadership was happy merely to indulge this traditional anti-Semitism. But Stalin took more extreme measures when international politics intervened. The USSR had supported the foundation of Israel in 1948. The Zionists, after all, were socialists, and many had been born in the Russian empire; Stalin hoped that Israel would become a bridgehead for Soviet influence in the Middle East. But he also worried that Israel might act as a magnet for the loyalties of Soviet Jews. The arrival of Golda Meyerson (later Meir) in Moscow – born in Kiev but brought up a three-hour drive from Mosinee in Wisconsin – as
the first Israeli ambassador to the USSR caused particular anxiety when it provoked spontaneous Jewish demonstrations of support. And when it became clear in 1949 that Israel was firmly in the American sphere of influence, Soviet Jews were transformed, overnight, into potential fifth columnists, and became victims of discrimination and even repression. Like the Germans, Poles and Koreans in the 1930s, they were seen as conduits for foreign influence, in this case Israeli, and therefore American. According to Stalin, ‘Jewish nationalists believe that their nation has been saved by the United States (there they can become rich, bourgeois and so on)’.
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