The Soviet Century By Moshe Lewin - 10

As yet, we have said nothing about the waves of criticism, expressions of dissent, and often harsh words issuing from the lower classes, which reached just about every government and party letterbox. The policy mix of pampering and badgering pursued with respect to administrators and the intelligentsia sought to make them a rampart for the regime and cadres in the state machinery. Any large-scale expression of popular discontent or sustained, sharp criticism was regarded as dangerous, even when not followed by disorder or demonstrations on the streets that could be dubbed ‘opposition’ or ‘counter-revolution’. Even the reactions of members working outside the apparatus were a matter of concern for party leaders. And such discontent did not begin with the five-year plans.

Reports from the GPU and the party’s information department noted that not all party members were strike-breakers, even if some were perceived as such and indeed were. Between January and September 1926, party members had participated in 45 of the 603 strikes recorded throughout the country. 1 Documents show some party members not only initiating, but also leading, the strikes. Reports also deplore the negative conduct of members in various factories and stress that economic difficulties are engendering what are described as ‘peasant’ attitudes: passivity in social and working life, religious and nationalistic prejudices, hostile reactions to the decisions of the party cell.

Examples are quoted of party members making highly critical statements – for example, ‘We’re now more exploited than we were before. Then we had the bourgeoisie; now we’ve got our managers.’ Another case is cited where the party cell demands that its members halt a strike, prompting this response from a female communist worker: ‘What do you want? Does the party feed me? It’s become impossible to survive.’ Another reaction is quoted: ‘We’re being squeezed to the last drop. Our union representatives have cosied up to the factory management and pay no attention to workers’ demands.’

In a glass factory in the Krasnoyarsk province, some workers go on strike demanding a pay rise from 42 to 52 roubles and a party member is among the leaders. All the strikers were fired, probably because there were so few of them. When strikes were on a larger scale, strikers’ demands were often met.

In the Nevsky shipyards in Leningrad, a strike breaks out that could have been prevented by two party members who are highly regarded by the workforce. But when asked to intervene by management, they refuse.

The reports quote copiously from the criticisms made by some party members of all aspects of party policy. To take an example, two of them come to see their cell secretary, put their membership cards on the desk, pay their dues for the last month, and announce that they are quitting the party: ‘Your cell works for the management; you’re helping it to oppress the workers.’

GPU reports on election campaigns in trade unions and other organizations register considerable passivity among workers, even when they are party members. Some workers want to leave a meeting. When stopped at the exit, they reply: ‘Why do you stop us leaving when party members are the first to be off?’

The reports also cite anti-Semitic statements by working-class party members. They sound familiar: ‘All power is in Jewish hands’; ‘The yids are in power and oppress the workers’; ‘You won’t find one decent person among the yids’; ‘I’ve been itching to have a go at this hateful tribe.’

We must be careful when interpreting these snippets. If such cases were frequent, the reports, which derive from the GPU or the party’s information department, do not permit us to assess the extent of the protests. Other documents maintain that the instructions or interdictions issued by cells were rarely disobeyed by party members. This does not mean that they did not express or share opinions only openly expressed by a minority, or did not tacitly sympathize with workers’ grievances. But they balanced their fear of reprisals at the hands of other workers, which were common when they evinced hostility to them or to strikes – against fear of being reprimanded by the party – which could end up with them losing their jobs. It is also clear now that rank-and-file party members, like everyone else in the workplace, were spied on by stukachi (unpaid informers) or secret agents.

If material from the base attests to demands for a ‘democratization’ of working conditions and party life alike, trends inside the regime were moving in the opposite direction and elicited a variety of reactions, including directly political ones, even among some apparatchiks. The problem was not just the emergence of criticism among these strata. Worse, dedicated old Bolsheviks or idealistic newcomers declared themselves deeply disappointed – even disgusted – with their work and no longer wanted to serve at the heart of the citadel. Some apparatchiks who had not chosen their jobs out of careerism found themselves inside a machine where their sense of vocation, political perspectives and the fate of the country were drowned in bureaucratic vermicelli – a term, picked up in Italy, that was often used by veteran revolutionaries. We have already cited documents to this effect. Even more negative expressions of rejection of the system and accusations of treason also circulated, invariably unsigned.

In the 1930s, however, the regime possessed more instruments than it had in the 1920s for imposing its authority on everyone, including party members – the criminal code and the secret police foremost among them. But another phenomenon proved still more potent: with the expansion of its apparatus, the party ended up becoming its mere appendix – though this was not Stalin’s ultimate objective (in the 1940s he developed even more radical projects). Whether he adopted this policy in 1933 or somewhat earlier is a secondary issue. What matters is a combination of different factors. Domination of a country thrust into full-scale industrialization and ‘collectivization’ demanded the final emasculation of the old revolutionary party and its transformation into an obedient tool. ‘Adequate’ repressive agencies, as well as an ideological lexicon to justify the repression, were constructed to this end or simply updated for new purposes. Thus, the category of ‘counter revolutionary crime’ contained in the criminal code, and which sounded obvious in a revolutionary situation, was refined to meet new requirements. A military prosecutor, V. A. Viktorov, who was very active under Khrushchev, described the terroristic trends and practices of the Stalinist era in highly critical terms, referring to the ‘amendments with far-reaching consequences’ introduced into the criminal code in 1926, despite strenuous opposition in various circles. 2

The article on ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ originally required a clearly proven ‘intention followed by action’ before prosecution was warranted. But the newly created GPU skilfully manoeuvred so that arrests and interrogation eluded supervision by prosecutors, who were supposed to monitor their legality. It also succeeded in circumventing ‘awkward’ legal provisions in the criminal code. Amendments to the code, and the new powers granted to the GPU by the government, enabled the latter to prosecute and punish without real proof – i.e., without the ‘culprit’ having actually committed a crime. Investigations no longer had to prove the existence of an ‘intention followed by action’. Viktorov’s analysis indicates that the way was now open for a type of ‘legal’ repression where the only requisite proof was the accusation itself. However strange it might seem, guilt was firmly established even before the indictment was decided.

In the last analysis, the combination of this pseudo-legal manipulation of the code and use and abuse of the ‘heresy syndrome’ led to a surreal situation where guilt was genetically inscribed in all citizens, who were liable to be prosecuted at will. Paradoxically, this juridical absurdity, cloaked in the vaguest of terminologies, would soon be used to combat not only what were regarded as anti-regime currents, but also – and primarily – the ruling organization itself, in whose name the operation was supposedly being conducted. Party members, as well as the large pool of ex-members, became the target of a witch-hunt, at a time when no serious opposition to Stalin remained – unless we regard as opposition the attitude of those who resigned their party duties or let them lapse, or the numerous complaints and criticisms emanating from the party’s rank and file, and even some of its higher strata, as reported by whoever did the reporting.

Thus, as Stalin increasingly entrenched himself at the top and the category of ‘counter-revolutionary crime’ became ever more vague in the criminal code and in practice, the security agencies extricated themselves from control by the law and legal authorities and expanded the scope of their arbitrary punitive powers. A veritable machinery of terror was now available, ready to be deployed against anyone. Party membership, old or new, became irrelevant – or even dangerous. Stalin had scores to settle with many members of what was supposed to be his own party, including with some of those who had helped him acquire the tools to do just that. With the party tamed and the police completely unconstrained and directly subordinate to the ‘top man’, the way was free for Stalin’s solo stewardship, without ‘sentimentality’ or checks, of a powerful centralized state. In fact, this state was a war machine ready to do battle and provided with all necessary means for that purpose. As the title of Part One puts it, this state was combined with a ‘psyche’. It is remarkable how long members of the ‘old guard’ – with the exception of Lenin – were unaware of what Stalin was capable of. By the time they discovered it, it was too late. Were they too ‘Westernized’ to decipher such a dark psyche? Or just short-sighted? Or, more charitably, were they still too dominated by a socialist ideology to realize that they had embarked on a journey that was leading them back into the depths of Mother Russia, and that different means would have been required to prevent the worst?

Whatever our answer to that question, once in opposition to Stalin the different currents in the old guard – supporters of Trotsky, Zinoviev or Bukharin, each of them ‘waking up’ after the previous one had already been vanquished – fought as best they could for some four years. Most ended up yielding to Stalin. Trotsky, forced into exile, was the main exception. Following the defeat of the more sizeable oppositions, small groups of disillusioned top officials attempted some criticism between 1929 and 1932, but they were soon neutralized. Mention should be made of a particularly brave illegal organization headed by a former secretary of the Moscow party, Ivan Riutin. He had circulated a thousand-page document entitled ‘Platform of the Marxist-Leninists’, which accused Stalin of betraying the party and the revolution. According to some information, the Central Committee would not permit Stalin to eliminate him physically in 1932. We know that Riutin was sufficiently courageous and intransigent to declare to one of his interrogators: ‘I will not go down on my knees.’ He went to prison and subsequently disappeared. Another opposition figure whom we have already encountered – Trotsky’s former associate, Christian Rakovsky – carried on writing remarkable critical analyses of Stalin’s policies and regime until 1934, when he finally ‘repented’. It only served to prolong his life for a few more years.

Small, sometimes tiny, currents, as well as numerous individuals, continued to express criticism. The authorities were informed of it either when the police seized material during raids on people’s homes, or when such criticisms were sent by mail to the press, the party, leaders, or Stalin himself – invariably unsigned, so as to escape retribution. Researchers today are still unearthing them in large numbers in the archives.

Thus, any organized opposition, whether open or clandestine, was now impossible. But individual demonstrations, as well as politically charged collective reactions – disorder, strikes, withdrawal from the party (however discreet) – allow us to suggest that the population and many party members were not exactly mute. This is a topic that requires more research, but we already have a pioneering book, The Year 1937 , by Oleg Khlevniuk, which offers the first evidence of the widespread existence of different forms of opposition and protest – in this case, against the purges. One of the forms of protest mentioned is a wave of suicides. Official propaganda insinuated that a suspect’s suicide was proof of guilt or cowardice, but the measures adopted to reduce the number of such suicides were unavailing. Helpless in the face of state terror, some people had no other way of defending themselves. According to one source, suicides numbered in the thousands. In 1937, there were 782 in the ranks of the Red Army alone. The following year, the figure rose to 832 (not counting the navy). Such suicides were not always desperate acts by the powerless; they were also courageous gestures of protest.

The social turbulence generated by the ‘great leap forward’ – the massive population movements, particularly those covered by the term tekuchka – and the need to control those sectors where the ensuing crisis was at its most acute, impelled the regime to adopt two strategies that had contradictory dynamics:

(1) recourse to various forms of repression, referred to by the term shturmovshchina (storming) – i.e. the launch of huge campaigns to achieve whatever the current objectives were at any price;

(2) construction of a hypertrophied bureaucracy to control population flows by systematizing and channelling them.

Seemingly unavoidable, these strategies contradicted one another. The mobilizing campaigns alternated, or ran in parallel, with attempts to ‘regularize’ things: in sum, the Mr Hyde of terror versus the Dr Jekyll of bureaucracy, keen on planning, stability and ‘tenure’. Both belonged to the regime’s internal clock.

This alternation between stick and carrot persisted even at the height of the terror. The bloody purges of 1937–9 contained their own swings of the pendulum. The inability to pursue a steady course, the innate preference for violent acceleration, always ended up causing a trail of damage that had to be cleared away before the next mobilization. 3 This innate preference was the hallmark of a concentration of power, regarded as the only way of pursuing the chosen course to the end. Whatever the current line, whether hard or softer, the regime never relaxed its compulsive attachment to a strict centralism as the only fixed point in a chaotic situation. This approach was not altogether lacking in logic: the gigantic endeavour that had been embarked upon could never have derived from below, and could not be managed at local level either. But centralism on this scale was the source of endless imbalances. Stalinist centralism grew out of a specific situation: a powerful centre had existed since the end of the 1920s, but it had a narrow summit. The configuration of power was such that the assessment of the situation, the diagnosis, the very definition of reality and the policies to adopt depended on the opinions and views of a very small number of leaders. As the great leap unfolded, the way they had governed the country before 1929 must in retrospect have seemed like simplicity itself. The object of government was now literally in perpetual motion.

This enormous fluidity in society and institutions was, of course, the result of the speed and scale of the transformation that had been embarked on. By definition, it was inevitable, and corrigible only in the long run. However, especially in the early 1930s, the regime had to undertake its enormous economic tasks in the here and now, while confronting intense social ferment. The inexorable growth of the whole administrative apparatus – a novelty in itself on this scale – had inevitable social consequences. Even before they had learnt to do their jobs properly, administrative personnel displayed an amazing ability to express their needs, desires and interests, and hit upon means of satisfying them. Thus the problem-solver generated new problems, in conformity with much else in these tumultuous years. A sketch of the bureaucratic structures of the state is now in order.

A document from early 1929, and two others from 1940, cast light on some key aspects of bureaucratic state-building between these dates, or at least on the rulers’ perception of it. The first derives from Kujbyshev, Politburo member and head of the State Inspectorate, composed of members of the party’s Central Control Commission and the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate, which had commissariat status. The speech he made to his department heads in early 1929 was, to say the least, rather alarming: ‘Nothing in our new state resembles the old Tsarist regime as much as our administration.’ He listed the well-known defects of the latter and then concluded, like Lenin before him, that they were very difficult to rectify. The abuses and scandals were on such a massive scale that urgent measures were being canvassed. However, they would at best make it possible to get shot of some swindlers, who would quickly be replaced by others, sowing despair in the ranks of militants in the Worker–Peasant Inspectorate. Their commissariat was supposed to be exemplary and enjoy great authority among other government agencies. But this was dangerous: no agency could live up to it. Everyone knows, he continued, about the intra-agency disputes that are typical here and no department is prepared to accept the solutions suggested by another body, especially if they occasion the slightest inconvenience. The higher government agencies, which are supposed to coordinate the activity of lower bodies, are torn apart by the same quarrels and their decisions are often the product of nothing more than fortuitous majorities. Supra-ministerial bodies like the Council for Labour and Defence, or the economic councils at regional level, are insufficiently powerful, because the offended party appeals to the Council of Commissars and often succeeds in getting decisions overturned. ‘In a word,’ Kuibyshev said, ‘you will not find one uncontested authority in this system.’ And he added: people still hope that the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate will find a way of becoming such an authority.

Incredible as it might seem, in his diagnosis of an absence of uncontested authority, Kuibyshev did not mention the Politburo as an exception – though this might have been unintentional.

The Politburo was itself looking for ways of remedying the situation, notably by ousting old cadres from the apparatus and training new ones. We know enough about Stalin by now to guess that in his eyes such a defective organization could only be tantamount to sabotage on a grand scale.

By 1940, with the great purges already in the past, the communism ‘without deformations’ – particularly ‘without bureaucratization’ – imminently anticipated by some was still very far off It suffices to read these lamentations from Izvestiia , which echo Kuibyshev’s twelve years earlier: ‘A great many superfluous departments and agencies have grown up in our state administration, innumerable superstructures where employees do nothing but write, “conduct inquiries”, answer correspondence. And all too often, this paper trail leads to absolutely nothing.’ This was a leading article. It went on to deplore the plethora of supply agencies and gave the example of Gorky, where they were pointlessly proliferating – there were sixty in this town alone. Every commissariat had several supply agencies, each agency had a large workforce, and running expenses kept on increasing. The agencies were duplicating one another, since they virtually all performed the same tasks. In Gorky, running expenses had doubled in 1940 and the editor of Izvestiia could not understand why. Most worrying was the fact that this was a widespread phenomenon.

Thus, the regime responsible for this situation, be it the ‘social mobility’ or the proliferation of bureaucracy, was in turn put to the test and forced to react to one emergency after another, each of which was perceived as a threat. This perception of things was to become the main motor of Stalinism. Not only did the threats exist, but they were necessary to the regime to mobilize the faithful and justify the terror. Yet the factors that had destabilized the social structure were not contained by the terror. The camps and the terror only compounded the instability and sense of insecurity in society, which then rebounded on the state. The leadership was haunted by the spectre of an ungovernable system and losing control of the social ‘magma’. Their counter-measures consisted in strengthening state control over most, if not all, aspects of life, more centralization, and transforming the system into a fortified camp, by increasing the layers of bosses at every administrative level – precisely what Izvestiia denounced.

We know that bureaucracies, whether efficient or sloppy, are not that pliable a tool. Stalinism hoped to solve its problems by ‘mastering the masters’ – i.e. the summits of the bureaucracy. Yet this endeavour was to be complicated by an unanticipated trap, which the top leadership fell into. They had concentrated enormous power in their hands, which they justified on the basis of their tasks. Strong pressure from above was their strategy and it had its logic. The fact that so many crucial decisions depended on the capacities and psychological make-up of a small ruling group, and each of its members personally, might on the face of it have served to unify and consolidate the group. But amid the turmoil of the 1930s, the more the leadership reinforced its control and grip on power, the deeper was its sense that things were escaping its control. As they read reports or visited factories, villages and towns, they realized how many people were not carrying out their orders, were concealing the reality as best they could, or were quite simply unable to maintain the stipulated pace. They noted that thousands of their directives and decrees were not even properly filed. All this helped to spread a perception among the top ranks that their power was actually more fragile than it seemed. They shared a sense of insecurity and disorientation, leading some to doubt the validity of the whole line.

This phenomenon might be called ‘systemic paranoia’ – a term that encapsulates the condition of the precariousness of power. It constitutes one of the core elements of Stalinist autocracy and its ‘self-beatification’.

Overwhelmed by problems and undermined by doubts, the top echelon became more vulnerable to the influence of the one of its members who seemed sufficiently strong and determined to face this historical flood tide. His toughness – even ruthlessness – seemed like the requisite qualities for the tasks of the day. It was a classically auspicious moment for a master of intrigue and backstage manipulation to gather all power in his hands, including the power to decide the fate of every other leader. It was at this point that autocratic power reached its peak. The country’s destiny largely found itself at the mercy of one psyche, a personality prone to paranoia, a figure on whose shoulders the whole weight of the 1930s now came to rest. This is the conjuncture that explains the title of Part One, ‘A Regime and Its Psyche’. Had a collective leadership existed, it might have attenuated the effects of such tensions. But once power was allowed to become so deeply personalized, outbursts of irrationality – including murderous outbursts – were bound to occur. ‘Systemic paranoia’ (at the political level) was going to crystallize in the paranoid tendencies (at the psychic level) of an individual. Spite, malice, deviousness, fury – all became components of the system’s modus operandi .

But this is also the moment to point out that the system Stalin created was inherently recalcitrant to being ‘mastered’, even though the image of ‘master’ was the one he projected at home and abroad. Certainly, the objective of an extreme centralization of power was attained. Henceforth, however, there was nowhere else to go but to cling compulsively to the summit of power. This situation generated its own tensions and side-effects: the less power you delegate, the more it imperceptibly flows into the hands of local ‘little Stalins’; the more you monopolize information, the more it is kept from you; the more you control institutions, the less you master them. As we have indicated, such a configuration was intrinsically unstable and perceived as menacing. No wonder, then, that a central dimension of Stalinism consisted in fighting hordes of enemies. It was obviously not in a position to overcome the effects of this patent over-concentration of power, for that was its very essence. And yet these ‘enemies’ were not individuals and the dictator’s personal safety was never threatened. The real enemies were objective limitations (which Stalin had declared non-existent ‘for us’ in 1924): social trends and changes, institutional attrition, psychological and cultural structures. Later, we shall have the chance to see such limitations at work.

Meanwhile, if it is accepted that the essence of Stalinism consisted in accumulating all power in Stalin’s own hands, we can turn to the issue of how he ruled Russia. Had he not been obsessively preoccupied by this solitary exercise of power, we might have borrowed the title of our next chapter from Merle Fainsod’s How Is Russia Ruled? But our own research leads us to formulate the question rather differently.