Stalin полностью

Soviet life proceeded on its course. Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov published their entertaining One-Story America, about their travels to that far-off land, and the Bolshoi premiered Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila (April 14, 1937). A week later the Moscow Art Theater premiered Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, in a staging by Nemirovich-Danchenko. Stalin attended, along with Molotov, Voroshilov, and Zhdanov. It depicted how the passionate love of Anna (played by Alla Tarasova) for Vronsky led to her suicide. The show concluded with a life-size train bearing down on the audience as Anna lay on the tracks.¹⁵⁵ Earlier that same day, Stalin had Yezhov invent the “discovery,” via intelligence sources, of a foreign plot against Tukhachevsky’s life, which prevented the marshal from accepting an invitation to the upcoming coronation in London of George VI. The Soviets announced that Tukhachevsky had a cold.¹⁵⁶

On April 22, Stalin paid his third visit to a part of the eighty-mile canal linking the Moscow and Volga rivers; newsreels and newspapers showered the visit with publicity (several of the people captured on film would soon be arrested and erased).¹⁵⁷ For the canal’s official opening, in summer, a flotilla of forty-four ships would deliver the supposed builder-Stakhanovites to the embankment at Moscow’s Gorky Park, where a celebration took place.¹⁵⁸ The canal was built by Gulag laborers, more than 20,000 of whom likely perished. Agitators celebrated the achievement that Moscow was now linked to five seas: White, Black, Baltic, Caspian, and Azov.

Food hardships returned. Around 100 million rural folk, 97 percent of all rural households, were confined to 237,000 collective farms and compelled to supply the fruits of their labor—grain, meat, milk, eggs—to the state at prices that were more than ten times below those at “peasant” markets. At the same time, more than 38 percent of the country’s vegetables and potatoes and 68 percent of its meat and dairy products in 1937 were produced on their small household plots for sale at those markets.¹⁵⁹ The state store network had grown considerably, but it still had fewer outlets and was more poorly managed than NEP-era retail.¹⁶⁰ Urban per capita consumption in 1937 was higher than it had been in 1928.¹⁶¹ But the priority on heavy industry and the military depressed living standards.¹⁶² Decent housing was especially scarce.¹⁶³ The effects of the poor 1936 harvest were being felt. Local newspapers referred to the queues for bread, indirectly acknowledging the shortages. Secret NKVD reports in 1937 noted “food difficulties”—collective farmers fleeing the most affected areas for the cities to try to get the food they had grown that had been confiscated from them, and spreading typhus.¹⁶⁴ Vyshinsky, the USSR procurator general, reported to Stalin in spring 1937 about peasants stealing the corpses of collapsed livestock, eating offal, potato roots, and fellow humans.¹⁶⁵

The first Soviet rockets using liquid fuel were launched, traveling eight miles.¹⁶⁶ At the same time, in heavy industry and the defense industry, 585 people had been arrested. There were also arrests in the enlightenment commissariat (288), light industry (141), transport (137), agricultural commissariat (102), food commissariat (100), and the Academy of Sciences (77).¹⁶⁷ The forestry commissariat had, instead of the budgeted 2,480 personnel, just 1,024.¹⁶⁸ Meanwhile, provincial and republic NKVD “party actives” were being forced to follow the suicidal ritual of mutual denunciation. Stalin read an anonymous letter sent to him that claimed that many operatives in the NKVD feared arrest and could not comprehend how the entire NKVD leadership had consisted of thieves and traitors, imploring Stalin to check into the situation and stop the extermination of people.¹⁶⁹

HINTS