Stalin: A Biography полностью

The USSR had in many ways dragged its society out of the ruts of traditionalism. But the process was not unidirectional. Marxism–Leninism, despite its pretensions to ‘scientific analysis’, rested on assumptions inherited from earlier centuries. This was particularly true of Stalin’s way of thinking. He had never eradicated the superstitious worldview he had encountered as a small boy; and his attitudes were transferred to cultural life as a whole once he had supreme power. Official Soviet thought, consolidated in the Civil War, postulated the existence of alien, maleficent forces acting against the common weal. Conspiracies were supposedly being formed everywhere. The appearance of sincerity had always to be queried. Foreign agencies were alleged to be ubiquitous in the USSR. Such thinking did not begin with Stalin. Lenin during the Kronstadt Revolt and on other occasions had ascribed outbreaks of dissent and resistance to the activity of capitalist powers abroad. Under Stalin, though, this mode of perception became an ever more cardinal feature. The testing of political and economic assertions against empirical evidence fell into desuetude; open discussion on the scientific model ceased. Pronouncements from the Kremlin served as the regime’s kabbalah. Anyone refusing to accept the existence of fiends using diabolical methods to overturn the regime was liable to be treated as an infidel or heretic deserving summary punishment.

A corpus of magical writ was purveyed. Its texts were not the works of Marx, Engels or even Lenin. Soviet culture from the late 1930s was dominated by The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): A Short Course and the official biography of Stalin. Excerpts from both were accorded quasi-Biblical authority. Marxism–Leninism in general, and Stalin’s version of it in particular, was reproducing a mentality characteristic of peasant traditionalism. Customs in the countryside were associated with belief in spirits, demons and sorcerers. Witchcraft was a normal phenomenon and spells were regularly employed to ward off evil (or to inflict it on enemies). This syndrome suffused Stalinism and its culture. Without using the term, Stalin suggested that black magic had to be confronted if the forces of good — Marxism–Leninism, the communist party and the October Revolution — were to survive and flourish. Not every novelist, scholar or scientist went along with such idiocy. Quite the contrary: the best cultural achievements under Stalin were devoid of it. But in key sectors, especially the schools and the print and broadcast media, he could impose the pattern very effectively. Despite its achievements in twentieth-century culture, the USSR was being dragged back to older modalities of thought. Stalin, far from being the clean-limbed titan of modernity, was a village sorcerer who held his subjects in his dark thrall.

Even as the First Five-Year Plan had neared completion in 1932, the strains in the economy and in society were becoming intolerable. The famine deepened in Ukraine, south Russia, the north Caucasus and Kazakhstan. Rural rebellions had not been completely suppressed. Attacks on collectivisation squads, OGPU officials and local soviets continued. Having been bludgeoned into joining kolkhozes, hundreds of thousands of peasant families left the countryside rather than endure further hardship.¹ Trouble started to spread to the towns. Strikes and demonstrations against the regime were organised in the textile city of Ivanovo.²

Like Lenin in 1921, Stalin saw the need for a temporary economic retreat. The difference was that, whereas Lenin had introduced the New Economic Policy mainly for fear of a universal revolt by the peasantry, it was the workers who brought Stalin to his senses. If industrialisation were to be disrupted, the foundations of his power would be undermined. There was recognition that the problems in the towns and villages were linked. From May 1932 the peasants were permitted to trade their agricultural surplus at so-called kolkhoz markets. Between August 1932 and February 1933 the state’s planned collection quotas for grain were reduced from 18.1 to 14.9 million tons.³ The industrial component of the retreat took shape in a slackening of the tempo of capital investment during the Second Five-Year Plan. The rampant dash for expanded output in factories and mines was to be slowed.⁴ The living conditions of citizens were at last given prominence. Industrial consumer products were planned to increase by 134 per cent and agricultural output by 177 per cent in 1933–7. Housing space was to expand by two fifths.⁵ Apparently he was beginning to see sense. The objective was to avoid a second headlong dash for growth in capital projects and to consolidate the gains already won.