Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

In summer 1940, Eugene Lyons published Stalin: Czar of All the Russians, reusing the interview he had obtained a decade earlier, only now it was not to humanize the despot but to dehumanize him. He alluded inaccurately to Stalin’s “modest apartment of three rooms,” a space the journalist never saw, but he wielded the credibility of his rare face-to-face encounter and long service as the Moscow correspondent of the United Press. Disabused dupes had a lot to make up for. Having previously called Stalin a “thoroughly likable person,” Lyons (prodigiously borrowing from Souvarine’s biography) now cast him as a duplicitous tyrant.¹¹³ According to Lyons, Stalin nursed a youthful humiliation all his life over his lack of any distinction, “the ugly-duckling of Gori, the sulking professional revolutionist of Tiflis and Baku, the shadowy figure among the giants of the overturn of 1917.” The author tore into the despot’s foreign machinations, from the Spanish civil war to the attack on Finland. “It is not beyond possibility that Stalin may double-cross Hitler at some point, particularly if an Allied victory seems inevitable,” Lyons speculated. “There is even more chance that Hitler may double-cross Stalin.”¹¹⁴

A DESPOT MEETS HIS LIMITS

The Red Army was expanding toward 4 million men (as compared with just 1 million in 1934). Some 11,000 of the 33,000 officers discharged during the terror had been reinstated. Industrial production (in constant prices) had tripled since 1928.¹¹⁵ That said, 1940 GDP per capita in the Soviet Union was not very different from projected trends based on economic performance during the tsarist era. The regime had industrialized in no small part by severely repressing consumption. Consumer shortages had been worsening since 1938.¹¹⁶ At the same time, alcohol production reached 250 million gallons, up from 96.5 million gallons in 1932. By 1940, the Soviet Union had more shops selling alcohol than selling meat, vegetables, and fruit combined.¹¹⁷

None of the wildly ambitious industrial targets in the Five-Year Plans (1928–32, 1933–37, 1938–) had been or would be reached. Output continued to be dogged by input shortages, which managerial black marketeering struggled to overcome through hoarding (which exacerbated the shortages) and bartering. Some enterprising factory officials reopened closed mines and sold the coal on the side, which fetched more than four times the state price; others established commercial exchanges for goods that had vanished from factory books and were in high demand throughout the Union, thereby making markets. But extra-plan entrepreneurialism was illegal.¹¹⁸ In 1940, a Leningrad military-industrial research institute fulfilled just 14 percent of its plan, and yet the director and the chief engineer, possessing scarce know-how that factories craved, managed to contract with state companies to obtain not just gramophone records and a piano but also vital engineering tools, pneumatic devices, and plastics. Criminal charges resulted, however.¹¹⁹

More than one third of all industrial workers were classified as “Stakhanovites,” but worker go-slows, also known as Italian strikes, and the constant queuing for food and basic goods continued to depress productivity. So did quitting in search of lower norms and better pay.¹²⁰ Back on June 26, 1940, Stalin had had the criminal penalties for absenteeism and unauthorized job changing augmented; additionally, lateness of just twenty minutes was now criminalized. Violations were punishable with “corrective labor,” mostly in the form of reduced pay at one’s place of employment, but sometimes with several months in a camp.¹²¹ Some 30 million people were now in the Soviet state workforce, and over the next year more than 3 million of them would be investigated for absenteeism and job changing. Of these, nearly half a million would be sentenced to prison for four months; the rest would be sentenced to “forced labor” at their regular place of employment, meaning pay reductions, for six months.¹²² And yet the number of such infractions was likely higher. Some people stole goods from work or otherwise violated discipline deliberately to get fired, so that they could leave undesirable jobs.¹²³ But managers did not investigate many instances of lateness or refrained from sending cases to the procuracy, instead imposing “fines” that were not collected.¹²⁴ Stalin’s orders to mete out punishments for even minor infractions clashed with his directives to meet production targets at all cost.¹²⁵

STUMPED, WRATHFUL, RESTLESS