Many suggested that Stalin, frustrated with merely distorting Marxism–Leninism, had effected its abandonment. The émigré Russian fascist leader Konstantin Rodzaevski, becoming convinced that Stalinism and fascism were identical, returned from Harbin to the USSR after the Second World War. (This was not Rodzaevski’s wisest move: he was shot on arrival in Moscow.)12 So was Stalin objectively a Russian nationalist even if he did not subjectively advocate such a posture? Undoubtedly from the mid-1930s he engineered the elevation of the Russians over the other nations of the Soviet Union. Russians were preferred for appointment to high public office. The Russian language was given pride of place in the school curriculum. Russian writers, commanders and even certain emperors were eulogised by the media. The conquest of those other nations by the forces of the Russian Empire was treated as a boon for their general development.
The extolling of Russia and the Russians was accompanied by brutal maltreatment of several other peoples of the USSR. Ukrainians and Kazakhs believed that Stalin was inflicting genocide on them. Both suffered extremes of hardship through the violent collectivisation of agriculture imposed from Moscow. Kazakhs, a nomadic people, were forced to settle in kolkhozes. Ukrainians had always been an agricultural people. Abruptly their villages had been invaded by the OGPU and the 25,000-ers and, after the deportation of kulaks, the remainder of the inhabitants were forced into the collective farming system. The Kazakhs and Ukrainians suffered worse than Russians in most areas of Russia. The reason was similar: the Kazakhs had a culture which had not yet accepted agriculture, much less collective farming; the Ukrainians included many households with a notable commitment to the benefits of private farms. Kazakhs and Ukrainians were bound to be hit deliberately hard by the collectivisation campaign started at the end of the 1920s.
Initially there was an economic and cultural motivation to the Politburo’s treatment of both peoples rather than a national one. But once the campaign got under way, Stalin and his associates were alert to any possibility that ‘bourgeois nationalists’ might put themselves at the head of the rural resistance. Kazakh tribal and religious leaders were constantly persecuted. Repression was also applied in Ukraine not only against kulaks but also against priests, writers and scholars.
Ukraine, however, continued to present Stalin with causes for political concern even though he was willing in 1932–3 to lower the grain-collection quotas across the republic. As collectivisation and deku-lakisation proceeded and material conditions worsened, peasants in their hundreds of thousands sought to flee to regions of the USSR where the food supply was more secure. Among the refugees were Ukrainians who, according to the OGPU, carried the bacillus of nationalism. The Politburo’s reaction, instigated by Stalin, was to instruct the Ukrainian communist authorities to close the Republic’s frontiers to human traffic from 22 January 1933. The same policy of closure was applied to the Kuban area of the north Caucasus where many Ukrainians had settled in earlier years: Stalin wanted to stop them from spreading nationalist ideas outside their villages.13 In the previous month, on 14 December 1932, the Politburo had decreed that the traditional party policy of recruiting mainly Ukrainian cadres to party and government in Ukraine and in Ukrainian-inhabited areas elsewhere had been applied much too mechanically. The alleged result was the penetration of the state by ‘bourgeois-nationalist elements’. The Politburo commanded that a much more rigorous political sieving of promotees should be undertaken.14
Coming after the arrests and trials of Ukrainian cultural figures from the late 1920s,15 these measures were brutal and discriminatory; and although Stalin did not seek the extermination of all Ukrainians and Kazakhs, he certainly aimed to extirpate all opposition real and potential from among them. The ultimate objective, though, was to turn Ukraine and Kazakhstan into economically efficient Soviet republics. He therefore allowed both peoples to retain their culture, albeit in a much more restricted form than in the decade after the October Revolution. If the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic could be made an integral part of the USSR, it would constitute an economic model which would win admirers for communism in eastern Europe.16 Fertile Kazakhstan could also become a republic envied abroad, especially by Moslems. Collectivisation, dekulakisation, declericalisation and neglect of famine were appalling ways to raise Ukraine and Kazakhstan as models of the communist order, but they made a modicum of sense within the world-view of Stalin’s Marxism–Leninism.
