Europe: A History (198 page)
In religious matters, Stalinism followed the established atheist line. State education was militantly anti-religious. In the 1920s and 30s the Orthodox Church was mercilessly attacked, churches destroyed, and priests killed. Later, the emphasis shifted more towards manipulation: during the Second World War, Stalin would call for the defence of Holy Russia and reopen the churches. Mature Stalinism contained a strange symbiosis of state atheism and Orthodox patriotism.
The main instruments of coercion and terror—the
Cheka
(OGPU/NKVD/ KGB), the
Gulag
, or network of state concentration camps, and the dependent judiciary—had been refined during the early Bolshevik period. In the 1930s they were expanded to the point where the manpower of the security agencies rivalled that of the Red Army, and the camps contained up to 10 per cent of the population. By 1939 the Gulag was the largest employer in Europe. Its prisoner-employees, the
zeks
, who were systematically starved and overworked in arctic conditions, had an average life expectancy of one winter. Innocent victims were rounded up in their homes and villages; others were charged with imaginary offences of ‘sabotage’, ‘treason’, or ‘espionage’, and tortured into confession. The usual sentences consisted either of summary execution or of fixed periods of imprisonment or exile, such as 8, 12, or 25 years, from which very few could emerge alive. Show trials of the most prominent victims were staged for the benefit of publicity. They also served to mask the nature and scale of the main operations. Such was the paralysing fear that gripped the largest state in the world for three decades that most of the concrete information about the Terror was successfully suppressed. [
VORKUTA
]
VORKUTA
I
F
space in history books were allotted in proportion to human suffering, then Vorkuta would warrant one of the longest chapters. From 1932 until 1957, this mining town on the Pechora River, in Russia’s Arctic, stood at the centre of Europe’s most extensive complex of concentration camps. In Stalin’s ‘Gulag Archipelago’, the
Vorkutlag
ranked second only to Kolyma in north-eastern Siberia, whose entrance gates were surmounted by the slogan: ‘LABOUR IS A MATTER OF HONOUR, COURAGE, AND HEROISM.’ At the time of the
zek
rebellion in 1953, Vorkuta held some 300,000 souls. Over the years, more human beings perished there than at [
AUSCHWITZ
]; and they died slowly, in despair. But few history books remember them.
1
There are many eye-witness reports from Vorkuta, several of them published in English;
2
but few people have read them. There is even a detailed guidebook to over 2,000 ‘facilities’ of the Soviet Gulag written by a Jewish survivor in the 1970s. His account was barely noticed.
3
In addition to the familiar categories of camps, prisons, and
psikbol’nitsa
or ‘psychiatric prisons’ [
DEVIATIO
], it contains a section on ‘death-camps’. These were installations like those at Paldiski Bay (Estonia), Otmutninsk (Russia), and Cholovka (Ukraine), where prisoners were forced to work without protection on tasks such as the manual cleaning of atomic-powered submarines or the underground mining of uranium. Death from radiation was only a matter of time.
4
(See Appendix III, p. 1330.)
At the height of the Glasnost era, local people started digging in the Kuropaty Forest near Minsk in Belarus’. They knew that it sheltered the remains of men, women, and children killed during the Great Terror fifty years before. They uncovered several circular pits, each containing a mass grave for c.3,000 bodies. They could see that scores, if not hundreds more such pits lay under the pines. But in 1991 they were ordered to stop. They planted a cross by the roadside, and left the secrets of the forest intact.
5
In 1989 the Russian ‘Memorial’ organization, which devotes itself to discovering the truth about Stalinist times, unearthed a pit at Chelyabinsk in the Urals dating from the 1930s. It contained 80,000 skeletons. Bullet holes in skulls told an unambiguous story. These were not victims who had been worked to death in the Gulag. ‘People were taken out of their flats’, said the local photographer, ‘and shot with their children at this place.’
6
One was entitled to ask; how many more such sites did the immensity of Russia conceal?
The three phases of the Stalinist Terror succeeded each other in a rising tide of brutality and irrationality. The preliminary terror was directed against carefully selected targets. Its victims were mainly second-rank figures—the ex-Menshevik managers of the pre-1929 Gosplan, internationalist Marxist historians, the Byelorussian intelligentsia, and the minor associates of major figures. Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, was warned that she wasn’t ‘irreplaceable’. The Peasant Terror or ‘anti-kulak drive’ mushroomed after 1932, as peasants resisted collectivization or slaughtered their livestock in protest. No clear definition of a kulak was available, though poorer peasants were urged to denounce their more prosperous neighbours. The Terror-Famine 1932–3 was a dual-purpose by-product of collectivization, designed to suppress Ukrainian nationalism and the most important concentration of prosperous peasants at one throw, [
HARVEST
]
The Political Terror or ‘Purges’ began in earnest in December 1934 with the murder of S. M. Kirov, the Party leader in Leningrad. From that starting-point, it spread out in ever-widening circles until it engulfed the leadership of the CPSU, including officers of the Red Army and of OGPU itself, and eventually the entire population. Since every victim was required to denounce ten or twenty ‘accomplices’ and their families, it was only a matter of time before the numbers involved were being counted in thousands and, in the end, in millions. The initial purpose was to destroy all the surviving Bolsheviks and everything they stood for. But that was only a beginning. Participants in the XVIIth Party Congress of 1934, the ‘Congress of Victors’, meekly hailed Stalin’s triumph over the ‘opposition’, only to find themselves accused and decimated in turn. After the three main show trials of Zinoviev (1936), Pyatykov (1937), and Bukharin (1938), the sole Bolshevik leader left alive was Trotsky, who survived in his fortified Mexican refuge until 1940. But the full fury of the indiscriminate
Yezovshchina
, the Terror of N. I. Yezhov, Stalin’s chief hangman, was still to be unleashed. Such was the dynamic of the infernal machine that early in 1939 Stalin and Molotov were signing lists of several thousand named victims each morning, whilst every regional branch of the security police was scooping up far greater quotas of random civilian innocents. The Terror did not take a pause until at the XVIIIth Congress of March 1939 Stalin coolly denounced Yezhov as a degenerate; and it did not stop completely until the
Vozhd’
himself expired.
For many decades, opinion in the outside world was unable to comprehend the facts. Prior to the documentary writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the 1960s, and the publication of painstaking research by a few courageous scholars, most people in the West thought that stories of the Terror were much exaggerated. Most sovietologists sought to minimize it. The Soviet authorities did not admit to it until the late 1980s. Stalin, unlike Hitler, did not pay the price of public exposure. The total tally of his victims can never be exactly calculated; but it is unlikely to be much below 50 millions.
35
Without doubt, Stalinism was the child of Leninism; on the other hand, it acquired many specific characteristics which were not important in Lenin’s lifetime. Trotsky classified the change as the ‘Thermidorian Reaction’, and it greatly
complicates all debates on Soviet and Communist history. The central fact to remember is that Stalinism was the mode within which Soviet Communism stabilized, and which provided the foundations of Soviet life in the USSR until 1991. For this reason it is Stalin’s version of Communism, not Lenin’s, that must be addressed whenever any general assessment of the system is to be made. (See Appendix III, p. 1321.)
HARVEST
A
QUARTER
of the rural population, men, women and children, lay dead or dying’ in ‘a great stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants’, ‘like one vast Belsen’. ‘The rest, in various stages of debilitation’, ‘had no strength to bury their families or neighbours’. ‘(As at Belsen), well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.’
1
In 1932–3, as part of the Soviet collectivization campaign, the Stalinist regime had unleashed a man-made terror-famine in Ukraine and the neighbouring Cossack lands. All food stocks were forcibly requisitioned; a military cordon prevented all supplies from entering; and the people were left to die. The aim was to kill Ukrainian nationhood, and with it the ‘class enemy’. The death toll reached some 7 million.
2
The world has seen many terrible famines, many aggravated by civil war. But a famine organized as a genocidal act of state policy must be considered unique.
The writer Vasily Grossman would later describe the children:
Have you ever seen the newspaper photos of the children in German camps? They were just like that; their heads like heavy balls on thin little necks, like storks … and the whole skeleton was stretched over with skin like yellow gauze … And by spring, they no longer had faces at all. Instead they had birdlike heads with beaks—or frog heads—thin white lips—and some of them resembled fish, mouths open … These were Soviet children and those who were putting them to death were Soviet people.
3
The outside world was not informed. In the USA a Pulitzer Prize was given to the
New York Times
correspondent, who spoke freely in private of millions of deaths but published nothing.
4
In England, George Orwell complained that [the terror-famine] had ‘escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles’.
5
The historian who eventually brought convincing proof to the event struggled to convey its enormity. He wrote a book of 412 pages, with about 500 words per page, then stated in the Preface: ‘about twenty human lives were lost, not for every word, but for every letter in this book.’
6
As it happened, 1929, the year of Stalin’s revolution in the USSR, was also the year of crisis in the capitalist world. Historians have wondered whether the two events were not somehow linked, perhaps through the rhythms of post-war economic
adjustment. At all events, on 24 October 1929, ‘Black Thursday’, the prices of shares on the New York Stock Exchange suddenly collapsed. Panic set in; banks recalled their loans; and, before anyone could control it, the Great Depression was rolling round all the countries with whom the USA did business. It was a backhanded compliment to the extent of American influence in the world economy. In the USA itself, the sudden end to the easy credit of the ‘roaring twenties’ caused a massive wave of bankruptcies, which in turn caused an accompanying wave of unemployment. At the height of the ‘Slump’, in 1933, one-third of the American labour force was out of work; the steel industry was working at 10 per cent of its capacity; food stocks were destroyed because hungry workers could not afford to buy them; and ‘poverty raged amidst plenty’.
In Europe, which was struggling to pay its war debts, often from dwindling reserves of gold, the effects of the Slump were felt with little more than a year’s delay. In May 1931 Austria’s leading bank, the
Kreditanstalt
of Vienna declared itself insolvent; in June the USA had to accept a moratorium on all debts owed by European governments; and in September the Bank of England was forced to take sterling off the gold standard. Confidence, the corner-stone of capitalism, was breaking down. Within a couple of years business had lost its way, and 30 million workers had lost their jobs. By 1934 the USA had a new, dynamic President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal programme of government-funded works was to haul America back to prosperity. ‘The only thing we have to fear,’ he said, ‘is fear itself’. But Europe had no Roosevelt, and no New Deal. Recovery was as slow as the Slump was sudden.
The effects of the Depression were psychological and political as well as purely economic. Everyone from banker to bellboy was perplexed. The Great War had brought death and destruction; but it had also brought a purpose to life and full employment. Peace appeared to bring neither. There were men who said that life amidst the danger and comradeship of the trenches was preferable to life on the dole. Others said that Spengler’s gloomy broodings about Europe returning to a Dark Age were correct. The anxieties brimmed over into violence on the streets: left-wing battle squads pitched into right-wing gangs in many European cities. It was the season for charlatans, adventurers, and extremists, [
MOARTE
]
In Germany, the rise of Hitler and his Nazi Party was unquestionably connected to the Great Depression. But the connection was not a simple one. The Nazis did not march on Berlin at the head of an army of unemployed; there was no ‘seizure of power’. Hitler did not have to topple a weakened government as the Bolsheviks did, nor threaten the head of state, like Mussolini. He came to power through participation in Germany’s democratic process, and at the invitation of the lawful authorities. It is beside the point that he and his ruffians were anything but democrats or constitutionalists at heart.
German politics were specially vulnerable to the Depression, whose effects were poured into a cup of insecurity already full to the brim. The rancour of defeat still lingered. The street battles of extreme left and extreme right were ever-present.
Democratie leaders were mercilessly squeezed both by the Allied Powers and by voters’ fears. The German economy had been tortured for a decade, first by reparations, then by hyperinflation. By the end of the 1920s it was exceptionally dependent on American loans. When Stresemann died in October 1929, several days before the Crash, it took no genius to forecast turbulence ahead. None the less, the turbulence which ensued in 1930–3 was accompanied by several unusual and unforeseen circumstances.
