Europe: A History (197 page)

Nevertheless, the growing prominence of Modernism should not conceal the fact that the strongest influences on inter-war European culture came from two other directions—from technological change and from America. The impact on popular consciousness of radio, of the Kodak camera, of affordable gramophones, and above all of the cinema was immense. Thanks to Hollywood, Charles Chaplin (1889–1977), an orphaned entertainer from London’s East End, probably became the best-known person in the world. Many of his films, such as
City Lights
(1931),
Modern Times
(1935), or
The Dictator
(1939), contained clear social and political messages. Other Europeans re-exported by the silver screen included the Swede Greta Garbo, the German Marlene Dietrich, and the Pole, Pola Negri. American imports of the era included popular motoring, Walt Disney’s animated cartoons (1928), jazz, and popular dance music. Much of young Europe danced its way from war to war to the strains of ragtime, the Charleston, and the tango.

In the socio-economic sphere the modernization of European society surged ahead, but in highly irregular patterns. The demands of the war had given a strong stimulus to heavy industry and to a wide range of technological innovation. Yet the peace began amidst the widespread disruption of markets, trade, and credit. Despite the great potential for development, especially in new sectors such as oil and motorization, the industrialized countries faced the threat of post-war recession and mass unemployment, and of accompanying social protest.

The struggle for women’s rights was barely started, let alone won. In Great Britain, for example, Constance Gore-Booth (Countess Markiewicz, 1868–1927), who had once been condemned to death for her part in the Easter Rising, had the distinction of being both the first female British MP elected and the first female Irish Cabinet Minister.
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But the movement for women’s suffrage, which had been founded during the childhood of its most devoted activist, Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928), did not achieve success in Britain until the year of her death. The pioneer of birth control, Marie Stopes (1880–1958), who opened the UK’s first birth-control clinic in 1921, was also a professional palaeontologist employed by Manchester University,
[
CONDOM
]

The peasant societies of Eastern Europe were faced by the problems of rural overpopulation, by dwindling opportunities for migration, by a drastic fall in agricultural prices, and by the dearth of capital investment, both local and foreign. In all these matters the economic paralysis of Germany and the unnatural isolation of the Soviet Union caused untold disruption beyond their borders. No sooner had a measure of stability been restored than the whole of Europe was hit by the Great Depression.

The countries of East Central Europe, trapped between Germany and the USSR, faced very special difficulties. Whilst struggling to establish stable political regimes, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Baltic States were forced to carry the economic consequences of the collapse of the empires. Semi-industrialized but still largely agrarian in character, their infant economies started life under the multiple burdens of hyperinflation, post-war industrial recession, and rural
distress. Łódź, for example, the largest textile city in the region, suffered a 75 per cent drop in production between 1918 and 1939, when its traditional Russian market was closed. Peasant societies were increasingly polarized by conflicts between conservative landowning interests and radical peasant parties, by the impositions of new government bureaucracies and foreign-based enterprises, and by class and ethnic protests. In this light, the great advances made in education and the elimination of illiteracy, in parcelling out of the large estates, and in urban development command much respect—not least because later regimes were to deny that any such progress had been made.

The greatest ever experiment in planned modernization took place from 1929 onwards in the Soviet Union. It was so radical and so ruthless that many analysts would maintain that this, and not the events of 1917, constitute the real Russian Revolution.
²⁹
It was made possible by the rise to supreme power of Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the CPSU since 1922.

Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (1879–1953), alias ‘Koba’, alias ‘Stalin’, is the clearest example in history of a pathological criminal who rose to supreme power through the exercise of his criminal talents. In
The Guinness Book of Records
he holds the top place under ‘mass murder’. He was born in the mountain village of Didi-lilo, near Gori in Georgia, the son of a drunken father and of a devout, abandoned mother. Georgians say that he was an Ossetian. At all events, he was not a Russian, though he was sent to be educated in a Russian Orthodox seminary. He was expelled, but not before he had imbibed the paranoiac nationalism of a Russian Church which, in Georgia, was an alien creed. He drifted into revolutionary politics, in the seedy area where the political and the criminal undergrounds overlapped. He made his name in the Bolshevik Party in 1908, when he staged the most spectacular armed robbery in tsarist history, ambushing the Tiflis mail-coach and leaving the scene with a haul of gold. He was repeatedly arrested and exiled to Siberia, whence he repeatedly escaped. This circumstance created the suspicion, first voiced by Trotsky, his most jaundiced biographer, that he was an agent of the Tsarist secret police, the
Okhrana
. He arrived in Petrograd early in 1917 after the latest of his escapes, and, with no qualifications in journalism or Marxism, assumed the editorship of
Pravda
. In the revolutionary years he was Lenin’s choice as Commissar for the Nationalities, and built up a circle of loyal accomplices, notably at Tsaritsyn (later renamed Stalingrad), who followed his fortunes thereafter. His most dangerous moment came in Poland in August 1920 when, as political commander of the South-west Front he had ignored orders to link up with Tukhachevsky and was held responsible by a Party tribunal for the ensuing disaster. As usual, he could not be nailed; but he never forgot it. (Seventeen years later, the death warrant of Tukhachevsky and of four other associates from 1920 was signed by three generals who had all served on Stalin’s Southwest front.)

Stalin became General Secretary of the Party during Lenin’s first illness, and he survived Lenin’s belated advice to have him removed. According to Trotsky, he
poisoned Lenin to prevent further enquiries. Thereafter, with the
Cheka
and the Party Congresses in his practised hands, there was no stopping him. He proceeded with a masterful display of cunning and cynicism. He outmanoeuvred all his senior rivals, setting them up on policy issues which he coolly adopted for himself or used to discredit them. It took him five years to ruin Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Bukharin, and seven to ruin Trotsky. He then set about killing them. He had no family life. He drove his second wife to suicide. He lived like a hermit in one room of the Kremlin, attended by his daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, whose memoirs are a prime source. He slept all day and worked all night with his cronies, endlessly playing the gramophone and watching silent movies, and visiting his dacha for relaxation. He rarely emerged, and made few speeches. On his annual trip to Georgia he travelled in one of five identical trains, each of the others carrying a ‘double’ to lessen the risk of assassination. He need not have bothered. He lived out his natural term. Later, though he spoke no foreign language except Russian, he proved himself as skilful in diplomacy as in home tyranny and in war management. When he was finally struck down, he was the unchallenged master of a superpower.

In looking for superlatives to describe Stalin’s chief rival, an American officer in Petrograd had once called Trotsky ‘A four-kind son-of-a-bitch, but the greatest Jew since Jesus Christ’.
³⁰
Yet Stalin’s record was to make Trotsky’s achievements look like the small change of history. And Trotsky saw it coming: already in 1924 he was correctly predicting that ‘the gravedigger of the Party of the Revolution’ would take over:

The dialectics of history have already hooked him and will raise him up. He is needed by all of them, by the tired radicals, by the bureaucrats, by the nepmen, by the kulaks, by the upstarts, by all the sneaks that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the revolution … He speaks their language, and knows how to lead them. Stalin will become the dictator of the USSR.
³¹

As a manipulator of political power, Stalin has every claim to be judged the greatest man of the twentieth century. He once said, modestly, ‘Leaders come and go, but the People remain.’
³²
In fact, under his guidance the people had to come and go and the Leader remained. The only person whose evil can be compared to his own was another small man with a different moustache, whom he never met, and who was not so successful.

Once Stalin was firmly in the saddle, the tempo of Soviet life began to whir. Lenin’s NEP had done much to restore social and economic equilibrium; but it did nothing to further communist ideals or to equip the Soviet Union for modern warfare. So, confident in his command of unlimited coercion, Stalin plunged into a breakneck programme which was designed to forge a first-class industrial and military power within a decade. Its ambitions were breathtaking; yet in terms of human life its destructiveness outdid any other disaster in European history, even the Second World War. Its apologists, who still thrive in distant universities, are apt to maintain that ‘omelettes can’t be made without breaking eggs’.
³³
But
Stalin was breaking the people whose lives he was supposedly improving; and in the end the omelette proved inedible. There were six main interlocking elements: central planning, accelerated industrialization, rearmament, collectivized agriculture, ideological warfare, and political terror.

Stalinist planning methods exceeded anything previously attempted anywhere. The State Planning Commission, Gosplan, was empowered to draw up Five-Year Plans that determined every detail of every branch of economic activity—production, trade, services, prices, wages, costs. Every enterprise, and every worker, was given ‘norms’ that were to be fulfilled without discussion. Since the Soviet state was a monopoly employer, all workers became ‘slaves of the Plan’. Indeed, since the Party insisted on the ethos of ‘socialist emulation’, that is, forcing workers to outdo their norms in the manner of the legendary coalminer Alexei Stakhanov, over-fulfilment of the Plan was regularly demanded. The Five-Year Plans of 1928–32, 1933–7, and 1938–42 set unprecedented targets for economic growth and productivity of labour. Industrialization was to be achieved in exchange for a marked reduction in consumption. In practice, this meant ‘work harder, eat less’. Industrial growth rates were set at over 20 per cent per annum. Total crude industrial output rose astronomically: in 1928 the index stood at 111 per cent of the 1913 level, in 1933 at 281 per cent, in 1938 at 658 per cent. Absolute priority was given to heavy industry—steel, coal, power, and chemicals. Quantity reigned supreme over quality. Falsified statistics became the object of an official cult whose central temple stood in the Permanent Exhibition of Economic Achievement in Moscow.

Rearmament was not announced, though the military-industrial complex was evidently the chief beneficiary of the changes. A separate and secret military-industrial sector was supplied with its own favoured factories, personnel, and budget. (The very existence of that separate budget was denied until 1989.) From 1932 onwards the Red Army was able to invite its German partners to participate in training and manoeuvres using the most modern equipment, including tanks, war-planes, and parachute troops.

The collectivization of agriculture, postponed in 1917, was now put into effect with utter disregard for the human cost. The aim was to ensure that the state took full control of the food supply at a period when a large part of the rural labour force was being drafted into the new industrial towns. In the ten years 1929–38,94 per cent of the Soviet Union’s 26 million peasant holdings were amalgamated into a quarter of a million
kolkhozy
or state-owned ‘collective farms’. After 70 years of emancipation, the Russian peasant was returned to serfdom at the point of a gun. All who resisted were shot or deported. A fictional social enemy, the
kulak
or tight-fisted peasant, was invented in order to justify the murders. An estimated 15 million men, women, and children died. Agricultural production dropped by 30 per cent. Famine, both natural and artificial, stalked the land.

Stalinist ideology, as instituted in the 1930s, involved the adoption of numerous official fictions which were then enforced as the absolute and incontrovertible truth. These fictions had little to do with serious political philosophy, and took a
radical turn away from Lenin’s internationalist Marxism. They included: the role of Stalin as ‘the best disciple’ of Lenin; the role of communists as the chosen leaders of the people; the role of the Great Russians as ‘elder brothers’ of the Soviet nationalities; the status of the Soviet Union as the crowning achievement of ‘all patriotic and progressive forces’; the function of the Constitution as a source of democratic power; the unity of the Soviet people and their love for the communist system; the ‘capitalist encirclement’ of the USSR; the equitable distribution of wealth; the joyous freedom of learning and art; the emancipation of women; the solidarity of workers and peasants; the justness of ‘the people’s wrath’ against their enemies. Many of these fictions were enshrined in Stalin’s
Short Course
(1939) on the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the bible of the faithful. Soviet scholars, educators, and legislators were obliged to propagate them for fear of their lives; Western scholars were not.

The cult of Stalin’s personality knew no bounds. All the country’s foremost poets and artists were conscripted to the chorus:

Thou, bright sun of the nations,
The unsinking sun of our times,
And more than the Sun,
For the Sun has no wisdom …
³⁴