Russia. A History полностью

The periphery was integrated not only through a vicarious identification with the centre but by being recast as an asset. Taming the vast wild spaces of the USSR (for example, through industrial projects such as Magnitogorsk or the settlement of nomads on collective farms) transformed them into both economic and cultural resources. Folklorism, characterized by Richard Stites as ‘politicized folk adaptation’, made a strong comeback via Igor Moiseev’s Theatre of Folk Art, founded in 1936, and a national network of amateur folk choirs and dance ensembles. These ‘prettified and theatricalized Stalinist ensembles … [promoted] images of national solidarity, reverence for the past, and happy peasants’, images that were re-inforced by highly publicized photographs of smiling peasants, decked out in ‘ethnic’ or folk garb, meeting Stalin in the Kremlin.

The imagined harmony of the mid-1930s went beyond folk ensembles and photo opportunities. At the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii—all vanquished political enemies of Stalin—repudiated their previous positions and heaped praise on Stalin’s wise leadership. The congress, in a show of reconciliation, applauded their speeches. The Kolkhoz Congress of 1935, where Stalin announced that ‘socialism’ had been achieved in the countryside, represented another type of reconciliation: shortly afterwards the government issued a kolkhoz statute (conferring certain guarantees and concessions) and dropped legal proscriptions against former kulaks.

‘Life has become more joyous,’ Stalin exulted in November 1935. Endlessly repeated and even set to song, the ‘life is joyous’ theme—the myth of a joyful people achieving great feats and adoring their genial leader (vozhd’)—was woven into the fabric of Soviet life. If previously life’s satisfactions were derived from the knowledge that one’s work was contributing to the building of socialism, now the formula was reversed: the achievement of socialism, officially proclaimed in the 1936 Constitution, was responsible for life’s joyfulness which in turn made work go well. It suddenly became important to demonstrate the prowess of outstanding individuals in a variety of fields: Soviet aviators, dubbed ‘Stalin’s falcons’, took to the skies to set new records; arctic explorers trekked to the North Pole in record time; mountain climbers scaled new peaks; the pianist Emil Gilels and the violinist David Oistrakh won international competitions. All covered the Soviet Union with national glory.

But the most celebrated individual feat of the decade was fittingly in the field of material production. On the night of 30 August 1935, Aleksei Stakhanov, a 30-year-old Donbas coalminer, hewed 102 tons of coal—more than fourteen times the norm for a six-hour shift. Stakhanov achieved his record thanks to a new division of labour that enabled him to concentrate on coal-cutting while others cleared debris, installed props, and performed other auxiliary tasks. Within days of the record, which Pravda had rather perfunctorily reported, other miners were surpassing it. But only after some prompting from the People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry, ‘Sergo’ Ordzhonikidze, did the Stakhanovite movement take off, spreading rapidly to other industries and to agriculture.

Stakhanovism was a complex phenomenon, both something more and something less than what higher political authorities intended. Idiomatically, it encompassed such a broad range of themes—mastery of technology, the creation of the New Soviet Man, the cultured working-class family, role reversal (the Stakhanovite was the expert; the expert became student of the Stakhanovite), upward social mobility—that internal contradictions were bound to occur. It tapped into popular desires for public recognition, adequate conditions of work, and consumer goods that at least some Stakhanovites enjoyed. At the same time, it raised these same expectations among workers who either could not become Stakhanovites or, having achieved that status, did not receive commensurate rewards. Resentment also increased as Stakhanovite records inexorably led to higher output norms for rank-and-file workers.