Russia. A History полностью

Engineers were also celebrated. Stalin had already signalled the official rehabilitation of the old technical intelligentsia in 1931, but no less important was a parallel and longer-lasting phenomenon—the rehabilitation of engineering as a profession. Symbolic of the engineers’ new stature was the injunction to writers at the founding congress of the Writers’ Union in 1934 that they become ‘engineers of human souls’. It has been pointed out that the engineer-designer, icon of technical mastery and order, began to supplant the production worker as the main protagonist in contemporary novels and films.

These changes in industrialization and labour policies constituted part of a larger process: consolidation of a system that was generally known, though not officially acknowledged, as Stalinism. If the Stalin revolution was more or less coterminal with the First Five-Year Plan, then Stalinism—the repudiation of egalitarianism and collectivist ‘excesses’ of that revolution—was its outcome.

Retaining the ideological prop of a dogmatized Marxism (officially renamed ‘Marxism-Leninism’), Stalinism identified the political legitimacy of the regime not only in the October Revolution, but also in pro-Russian nationalism and glorification of state power. It thus incorporated a conservative and restorative dimension, emphasizing hierarchy, patriotism, and patriarchy.

The Stalinist system depended on an extensive network of officials, the upper echelons of whom were included in the party’s list of key appointments (nomenklatura). Wielding vast and often arbitrary power, these officials ruled over their territories and enterprises as personal fiefs and were not above—or below—developing their own cults of personality. Leon Trotsky, one of the earliest and most trenchant critics of the Stalinist system, regarded it as essentially counter-revolutionary (‘Thermidorist’), a product of the international isolation of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian backwardness, and the political expropriation of the Soviet working class by the bureaucracy. But unlike many others who followed him down the path of communist apostasy, Trotsky did not consider the bureaucracy a ruling class. Bureaucrats, after all, were constrained from accumulating much in the way of personal property and, as the periodic purges of the decade demonstrated, lacked security of tenure. This was why Trotsky wrote that ‘the question of the character of the Soviet Union is not yet decided by history’. It was, rather, a ‘contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism’.

Notwithstanding its exercise of terror and monopolistic control of the means of communication, the bureaucratic apparatus alone could not sustain the Stalinist system. Another dimension of Stalinism, which has only recently received attention from historians, was its assiduous cultivation of mass support and participation—through education and propaganda, leadership cults, election campaigns, broad national discussions (for example, of the constitution, the Comintern’s Popular Front strategy, and the ban on abortions), public celebrations (such as the Pushkin centennial of 1937), show trials, and other political rituals. The system, then, was more than a set of formal political institutions and ‘transmission belts’. In addition to forging a new political culture, it also fostered and was sustained by a particular kind of mass culture.

James van Geldern has characterized this culture in spatial terms as ‘the consolidation of the centre’, a consolidation that ‘did not exclude those outside, [but] aided their integration’. The centre was Moscow, the rebuilding of which constituted one of the major projects of these years. Moscow came to represent ‘the visible face of the Soviet Union … a model for the state, where power radiated out from the centre to the periphery’. Corresponding to a shift in investment priorities, the heightened cultural significance of the capital ‘signalled a new hierarchy of values, by which society’s attention shifted from the many to the one outstanding representative’. The Moscow Metro, a massive engineering project that ‘mocked utility with its stations clad in semi-precious stone’, became an object of not only Muscovite but national pride. The towering Palace of Soviets (the excavation for which involved the razing of the great gold-domed Church of Christ the Saviour) would have been the source of even greater pride had the project not been abandoned and the pit turned into a large outdoor swimming pool.