The little episode shows that many citizens, especially those who felt grateful to the authorities, had a compulsive urge to revere him. (It also indicates that Stalin, even if he liked such flattery, reacted pretty brusquely: his main concern was to coax the old woman to go on toiling years beyond the age of retirement!) Moreover, people were much more likely to engage in his worship when they were in a crowd affected by the officially created atmosphere. Not only unsophisticated citizens but also many politicians and intellectuals experienced an inner need to extol him. They counted themselves blessed even if they only briefly met him or caught a glimpse of him. The writer Kornei Chukovski was hardly a natural Stalinist. Disconcerted by the kind of literature demanded of authors by Stalin, he retreated into writing tales for children. Even so, his diary from 1936 records the following impression at a congress:31
Suddenly there appeared Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Andreev, Zhdanov and Stalin. What on earth happened to the hall! And HE stood still, somewhat tired, pensive and magnificent. One could sense the immense habituation to power, the force and at the same time something feminine and soft…
That Chukovski was charmed by Stalin’s ‘graceful smile’ says much for the impact of the cult.
Yet the success was not as large as Stalin had hoped. Among the peasantry in particular there was pervasive dislike of him and many villagers regarded him — a Georgian, an atheist, an internationalist — as the very Antichrist. So desperate was rural opinion by the late 1930s that many peasants seriously hoped for war with Germany on the assumption that only military invasion would dislodge Soviet communism from power and bring about opportunities for decollectivisation.32 Such hostility was not confined to rural inhabitants. A misspelled and ungrammatical letter of protest dispatched to him and Kalinin by fifty Leningrad workers in March 1930 had stated:33
No one has sympathy for Soviet power and you are considered hangmen of the Russian people. Why should we undertake the Five-Year Plan so abruptly when we have become poor after such richness as we had in Russia — let’s just take the example of sugar, which used to be fed to pigs and which now can’t be found even for money, and meanwhile our children are starving and there’s absolutely nothing to give them to eat.
The period of the First Five-Year Plan was directly associated with Stalin in the popular mind. He had claimed credit for the industrial and cultural revolution of those years. The result was that everyone knew who was to blame for the hardships.
Exactly how widespread and deep was such hatred is a question which will never be satisfactorily answered. The NKVD supplied regular reports on popular opinion, but their language and orientation left much to be desired. Security agencies had an interest in alarming Stalin. Their power and prestige rested on their capacity to persuade him that it was only their vigilance which protected the state against its millions of internal enemies. (Not that he usually took much persuading.)
