Despite people’s evasions and self-misrepresentations, the NKVD—full of half-educated people—amassed a stunning amount of operational information, seizing local archives and personnel files, and using censuses and tax registers, to enumerate the entire population politically. The NKVD locked factory gates with the workers inside until registrations were complete, and put the onus on urban landlords, who would answer with their heads, to march whole apartment buildings to prearranged sites for “registration.” In villages, volunteer or conscripted facilitators were promised rewards for meeting “quotas” of farmers delivered to in-person registrations.62
Then, across nearly 80,000 square miles of territory littered with impassable marshes, served by sparse rail or paved roads fit for vehicles, with a mass influx of refugees and other wartime dislocation, functionaries managed to ensure that every adult in former eastern Poland took part in single-candidate “elections” to a “People’s Assembly.” Posters went up, film screenings were organized, marches staged. The elections provided a legal façade for the transfer of sovereignty, but, more profoundly, they entailed political conditioning in the new regime. The coerced voting took place in full view of others, some of whom were eager or reluctant stool pigeons. Many people nonetheless crossed off the name of the candidate, and some slipped manure into the ballot envelopes. But many of those who spoiled ballots or failed to show were arrested. After the vote, the public displays and slogans remained, and political speeches with mandatory attendance continued. State-sponsored associations were established. State schools replaced private ones, and a new political vocabulary reflecting Communist ideology took over the public sphere and people’s identities.63 In less than two years, western Ukraine and western Belorussia recapitulated much of what had been carried through in the Soviet Union over two decades.
In summer 1940, a similar “revolution from abroad” was enacted in the Baltics. Stalin ordered forced Sovietization of Estonia, to be overseen by Zhdanov; of Latvia, overseen by show-trial prosecutor Vyshinsky; and of Lithuania, overseen by Dekanozov, the Beria protégé and Molotov deputy at foreign affairs. Each commanded gangs of functionaries newly promoted as a result of the terror. But here, too, local inhabitants were incited to orgies of denunciation, such that, in avenging wrongs, assuaging hunger, and satisfying greed, they helped level their societies and pave the way for Communist monopoly. Once again, the local archives were seized for operational purposes.64 Scores of thousands of local inhabitants would be deported to Siberia, and those not removed were compelled to take part in single-candidate “elections” to People’s Assemblies; the installed deputies, in turn, “voted” to form Soviet socialist republics and join the USSR. The economies were confiscated (“nationalized”), including land, although collectivization was held off. Even as underground resistance units formed, substantial numbers of people on the political left in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—including the ethnic Russian and Jewish workers—supported this Sovietization.65
All told, between March and June 1940, five new Soviet socialist republics were established (including Karelia, elevated to Union republic status), increasing their total to sixteen and the Soviet population to 200 million. On June 5, 1940, a “Ten-Day” culture festival celebrating the expanded Belorussian SSR, involving 1,200 participants, opened in Moscow.66 The regime had long since shifted from award ceremonies for milkmaids and cotton pickers, with Stalin and entourage donning national costume, to showcases of the Union’s national cultures. The first Ten-Day, in 1936, had celebrated Soviet Ukraine, with some 500 participants, numerous awards bestowed on artistic organizations, and additional funds allocated for the arts in the republic.67 Similarly extravagant Ten-Days had followed for Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, whose troupes and ensembles performed in the top theaters and conservatories of the capital.68 The USSR committee on artistic affairs took no chances, dispatching composers to republics and lavishing robust sums on them to compose a “national” opera or ballet.69 Moscow-worthy performances required the addition of singers or musicians from the capital and a large crew comprising everything from choreographers to hairdressers.70 Each “national” folk dance or “national” opera became recognizably Soviet.71
CLASH