The Russian Revolution (27 page)

In education, the wildly experimental developments of the Cultural Revolution, as well as the more moderate progressive tendencies of the 1920s, were abruptly reversed in the 193os. Homework, textbooks and formal classroom teaching and discipline made a comeback. Later in the 1930s, school uniforms reappeared, making boys and girls in Soviet high schools look very like their predecessors in Tsarist gymnasia. In the universities and technical schools, entrance requirements were once again based on academic rather than social and political criteria; professors recovered their authority; and examinations, degrees, and academic titles were reinstated. 16

History, a subject banished soon after the Revolution on the grounds that it was irrelevant to contemporary life and had traditionally been used to inculcate patriotism and the ideology of the ruling class, reappeared in the curricula of schools and universities. The brand of Marxist history associated with the Old Bolshevik historian Mikhail Pokrovsky, dominant in the 1920s, was discredited for reducing history to an abstract record of class conflict without names, dates, heroes, or stirring emotions. Stalin ordered new history textbooks, many of which were written by Pokrovsky's old enemies, the conventional `bourgeois' historians who paid only lip-service to Marxism. Heroes-including great Russian leaders of the Tsarist past like Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great-returned to history. 17

Despite their reservations about sexual liberation, the Bolsheviks had legalized abortion and divorce shortly after the Revolution and strongly supported women's right to work; they were popularly regarded as enemies of the family and traditional moral values. Motherhood and the virtues of family life made a comeback in the 1930s, which may be read as a reactionary move, a concession to public opinion, or both at once. Gold wedding rings reappeared in the shops, free marriage lost its legal status, divorce became more difficult to obtain, and persons taking their family responsibilities lightly were harshly criticized ('A poor husband and father cannot be a good citizen'). Abortion was outlawed after a public discussion that showed support for both the pro- and anti-abortion viewpoints,18 and male homosexuality was criminalized without publicity. To Communists who had assimilated the more emancipated attitudes of an earlier period, this all came very close to the dreaded philistinism of the petty bourgeoisie, especially given the sentimental and sanctimonious tones in which motherhood and the family were now discussed.

Between 1929 and 1935 almost four million women became wageearners for the first time,19 meaning that one basic plank of the original women's emancipation was definitely hammered into place. At the same time, the new emphasis on family values sometimes seemed to contradict the old emancipation message. In a campaign inconceivable in the 1920s, wives of members of the Soviet elite were encouraged to engage in voluntary community activities that bore a strong resemblance to the upper-class charitable work that Russian socialist and even liberal feminists had always despited. In 1936, wives of senior industrial managers and engineers had their own national meeting in the Kremlin, attended by Stalin and other Politburo members, celebrating their achievements as volunteer cultural and social organizers at their husbands' plants.20

These wives and their husbands belonged to a de facto elite whose privileged position vis-a-vis the rest of the population provoked grumbling among Soviet workers21 and a certain amount of embarrassment within the party. In the 1930s, privileges and a high standard of living became a normal and almost obligatory concomitant of elite status, in contrast to the situation in the 1920s, where Communists' incomes were constrained, at least in theory, by a `party maximum' that kept their salaries from rising above the average wages of a skilled worker. The elite-which included professionals (Communist and non-party) as well as Communist officials-was set apart from the masses of the population not only by high salaries but also by privileged access to services and goods and a variety of material and honorific rewards. Elite members could use shops not open to the general public, buy goods not available to other consumers, and take their holidays at special resorts and well-appointed dachas. They often lived in special apartment blocks and went to work in chauffeur-driven cars. Many of these provisions arose out of the closed distribution systems that developed during the First Five-Year Plan in response to acute shortages, but remained to become a permanent feature of the landscape.22

The party leaders were still somewhat sensitive on the question of elite privilege; conspicuous flaunting or greed could earn reprimands, or even cost lives during the Great Purges. Up to a point, at any rate, the privileges of the elite were hidden. There were many Old Bolsheviks around who still favoured the ascetic life and criticized those who succumbed to luxury: Trotsky's thrusts on this question in The Revolution Betrayed were not so different from those made privately by the orthodox Stalinist, Molotov;23 and conspicuous consumption and acquisitiveness were among the abuses for which disgraced Communist elite members were routinely criticized during the Great Purges. Needless to say, there were conceptual problems for Marxists about the emergence of a privileged bureaucratic class, the `new class' (to use the term popularized by the Yugoslav Marxist Milovan Djilas), or `new service nobility' (in Robert Tucker's term).24 Stalin's way of dealing with these problems was to call the new privileged class an `intelligentsia', thus switching the focus from socio-economic to cultural superiority. In Stalinist representation, this intelligentsia (new elite) was given a vanguard role comparable to that of the Communist Party in politics; as a cultural vanguard, it necessarily had access to a wider range of cultural values (including consumer goods) than was available, for the time being, to the rest of the population.25

Cultural life was very much affected by the regime's new orientation. In the first place, cultural interests and cultured behaviour (kul'turnost') were among the visible marks of elite status that Communist officials were expected to display. In the second place, non-Communist professionals-that is, the old `bourgeois intelligentsia'-belonged to the new elite, mixed socially with Communist officials, and shared the same privileges. This constituted a real repudiation of the party's old anti-expert bias that had made the Cultural Revolution possible (in his `Six Conditions' speech in 1931, Stalin had reversed course on the question of `wrecking' by the bourgeois intelligentsia, saying baldly that the old technical intelligentsia had abandoned its attempt to sabotage the Soviet economy, realizing that the penalties were too great and that the success of the industrialization drive was already assured"). With the old intelligentsia's return to favour, many of the Communist intellectuals who had been activists of Cultural Revolution fell out of favour with the party leadership. One of the basic assumptions of Cultural Revolution had been that the revolutionary age demanded a different culture from that of Pushkin and Swan Lake. But in the Stalin era, with the old bourgeois intelligentsia staunchly defending the cultural heritage and a newly middle-class audience looking for an accessible culture to master, Pushkin and Swan Lake came out the winners.

It was early days, however, to talk of a true return to normalcy. There were external tensions, which increased steadily throughout the 193os. At the `Congress of Victors' in 1934, one of the topics of discussion was Hitler's recent accession to power in Germany-an event that gave concrete meaning to the previously inchoate fears of military intervention by the Western capitalist powers. There were internal strains of many kinds. Talk of family values was all very well, but the cities and railway stations were once again, as in the Civil War, flooded by abandoned and orphaned children. Embourgeoisement was available only for a tiny minority of urban-dwellers; the rest were crammed into `communal apartments', with several families each occupying a room, sharing a kitchen and bathroom in what had formerly been a one-family residence, and rationing of all basic goods was still in force. Stalin might tell kolkhozniks that `Life is becoming better, comrades', but at the timeearly 1935-only two harvests separated them from the 1932-3 famine.

The precariousness of postrevolutionary `normalcy' was demonstrated in the winter of 1934-5. Bread rationing was to be lifted on 1 January 1935, and the regime planned a propaganda blitz on the `Life is becoming better' theme. The newspapers celebrated the abundance of goods that would shortly be available (admittedly, only in few high-priced commercial stores) and enthusiastically described the merriment and elegance of the masked balls with which Muscovites greeted the New Year. In February, a congress of kolkhozniks was to be held to endorse the new Kolkhoz Charter, which guaranteed the private plot and made other concessions to the peasants. All this duly took place in the first months of 1935but in an atmosphere of tension and foreboding, overshadowed by the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party leader, in December. The party and its leadership were thrown into spasm by this event; mass arrests followed in Leningrad. For all the signs and symbols of a postrevolutionary `return to normalcy', normalcy was still far away.

The Terror

Imagine, we say, 0 Reader, that the Millennium were struggling on the threshold, and yet not so much as groceries could be had,-owing to traitors. With what impetus would a man strike traitors, in that case! ... As to the temper there was in men and women, does not this one fact say enough: the height SUSPICION had risen to? Preternatural we often called it; seemingly in the language of exaggeration: but listen to the cold deposition of witnesses. Not a music patriot can blow himself a snatch of melody from the French Horn, sitting mildly pensive on the housetop, but Mercier will recognize it to be a signal which one Plotting Committee is making to another... Louvet, who can see as deep into a millstone as the most, discerns that we shall be invited back to our old Hall of the Manege, by a Deputation; and then the Anarchists will massacre Twenty-two of us, as we walk over. It is Pitt and Cobourg; the gold of Pitt.... Behind, around, before, it is one huge Preternatural Puppet-play of Plots; Pitt pulling the wires.27

That was Carlyle on the French Revolution, but it can scarcely be bettered as an evocation of the spirit of 1936-7 in the Soviet Union. On 29 July 1936, the Central Committee sent a secret letter to all local party organizations `Concerning the terrorist activity of the Trotskyist-Zinovievist counterrevolutionary bloc' stating that former Oppositionist groups, which had become magnets for `spies, provocateurs, saboteurs, White Guards, [and] kulaks' who hated Soviet power, had been responsible for the murder of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party leader. Vigilance-the ability to recognize an enemy of the party, no matter how well he might be disguisedwas an essential attribute of every Communist.28 This letter was a prelude to the first show trial of the Great Purges, held in August, in which Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev, two former Opposition leaders, were convicted of complicity in Kirov's murder, and sentenced to death.

In a second show trial, held early in 1937, the emphasis was on wrecking and sabotage in industry. The chief defendant was Yurii Pyatakov, a former Trotskyite who had been Ordzhonikidze's righthand man at the Commissariat of Heavy Industry since the beginning of the 1930s. In June of the same year, Marshal Tukhachevsky and other military leaders were accused of being German spies and immediately executed after a secret court martial. In the last of the show trials, held in March 1938, the defendants included Bukharin and Rykov, the former Rightist leaders, and Genrikh Yagoda, former head of the secret police. In all these trials, Old Bolshevik defendants publicly confessed to a variety of extraordinary crimes, which they described in court in great circumstantial detail. Almost all of them were sentenced to death.29

Apart from their more flamboyant crimes, such as the murder of Kirov and the writer Maxim Gorky, the conspirators confessed to many acts of economic sabotage designed to provoke popular discontent against the regime and facilitate its overthrow. These included organizing accidents in mines and factories in which many workers were killed, causing delays in the payment of wages, and holding up distribution of goods so that rural stores were deprived of sugar and tobacco and urban bread shops ran out of bread. The conspirators also confessed that they had habitually practised deception, pretending to have renounced their Oppositionist views and proclaiming their devotion to the party line, but all the while privately dissenting, doubting and criticizing.

Foreign intelligence agencies-German, Japanese, British, French, Polish-were said to be behind all the conspiracies, whose ultimate objective was to launch a military attack on the Soviet Union, overthrow the Communist regime, and restore capitalism. But the linchpin of conspiracy was Trotsky, allegedly an agent not only of the Gestapo but also (since 1926!) of the British Intelligence Service, who acted as intermediary between foreign powers and his conspiratorial network in the Soviet Union.

The Great Purges were not the first episode of terror in the Russian Revolution. Terror against `class enemies' had been part of the Civil War, and it was also part of collectivization and Cultural Revolution. Indeed, Molotov stated in 1937 that a direct line of continuity ran from the Shakhty and `Industrial Party' trials of the Cultural Revolution to the present-with the important difference that this time the conspirators against Soviet power wreckers were not `bourgeois specialists' but Communists, or at least people who `masked themselves' as such and managed to worm their way into top positions in the party and government.30

Mass arrests in the upper echelons began in the latter part of 1936, particularly in industry. But it was at the February-March plenum of the Central Committee in 1937 that Stalin, Molotov, and Nikolai Ezhov (new head of the NKVD, as the secret police was renamed in 1934) gave the signal that really started the witch- hunts.31 For two full years in 1937 and 1938, top Communist officials in every branch of the bureaucracy-government, party, industrial, military, and finally even police-were denounced and arrested as `enemies of the people'. Some were shot; others disappeared into Gulag. Khrushchev disclosed in his Secret Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress that out of 139 full and candidate members of the Central Committee elected at the party's `Congress of Victors' in 1934, all but 41 fell victim to the Great Purges. Continuity of leadership was almost completely broken: the Purges destroyed not only most surviving members of the Old Bolshevik cohort, but also a large part of the party cohorts formed in the Civil War and the period of collectivization. Only twenty-four members of the Central Committee elected at the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 had been members of the previous Central Committee, elected five years earlier.32