Stalin полностью

In the USSR, an entire generation was coming of age in what seemed like the most heroic epoch in history, acquiring skills, education, apartments—building and living socialism. New or wholly reconstructed factories abounded, their production celebrated daily. The famine had been left behind, and rationing was abolished. In the economy, the years 1934–36 turned out to be relatively good, as the country consolidated its investments.²¹ Waste was colossal, of course, but most of the rest of the world was still mired in the effects of the Great Depression. The regime had also eased up on the state of emergency, the extrajudicial and judicial executions. And yet, the land of Soviets remained deeply insecure. When the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov fed a dog, it salivated, and the scientist rang a bell. After many repetitions, Pavlov stopped the feeding but continued the ringing—and the animal salivated anyway. Pavlov had conditioned the dog to respond to the bell as if the sound were the smell and taste of food. The Soviet populace, too, had been conditioned: the “bell” sounded by the regime was “capitalist encirclement,” and the people’s reflexive response was fear of foreign invasion and war.²²

Nonetheless, the Soviet population was unprepared for what struck the country during its hour of triumph beginning in 1936. Even by Stalinist standards, the carnage would be breathtaking.²³ The peak year for Soviet executions—20,201 of them—had been 1930, during dekulakization. In the three years from 1934 to 1936, a time that included mass reprisals for the Kirov murder, the NKVD reported arresting 529,434 people, including 290,479 for counterrevolutionary crimes, and executing 4,402 of them. But for the two years 1937 and 1938, the NKVD would report 1,575,259 arrests, 87 percent of them for political offenses, and 681,692 executions. (The country’s working-age population was around 100 million.) Because an untold number of people sentenced to incarceration were actually executed, and many others died during interrogation or transit and fell outside of execution tabulations, the total who perished directly at the hands of the Soviet secret police in 1937–38 was likely closer to 830,000.²⁴

No such numbers were publicly divulged, and as a result almost no one could fathom the full scale of what was transpiring. Nor could people comprehend the reasons. In many industrial sectors, output plans were not being met, and queues for bread would appear as a result of a poor harvest in 1936, but a sense of the world-beating success of industrialization and stabilization of the collective farm system remained pervasive. (Even privately, the regime evinced no special anxiety about the economic situation.)²⁵ Substantial popular discontent persisted, as under all authoritarian regimes, but it was not increasing, and it certainly did not threaten the regime.²⁶ Soviet society had astonishingly little overt political opposition of any kind. No possibility existed of establishing any genuine organization independent of the regime, let alone of overthrowing it—that would be possible only via military defeat and occupation. The threat of such a war, and on two fronts—west (Germany) and east (Japan)—did continue to loom large in 1937–38, but it already had for several years without provoking any remotely comparable domestic bloodshed. Indeed, the years 1937 and 1938 would bring the long-feared bloodbath—but it did not come on account of war. No foreign power attacked.²⁷ There was no immediate threat—social, economic, political—to the country or to the regime’s legitimacy or stability, no crisis. But then, suddenly, there was total crisis.

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