In Europe (65 page)

The party now being held here signifies the end of social change from the top down. It is the great dismantling of the idea that ruled Soviet life from the 1920s to the 1980s. For let there be no mistake about this: even Stalin, with all his cruelty, was well loved in the Soviet Union during his lifetime. And his views were adhered to by a broad cross section of the population.

Stalin and Hitler were both ultra-radical, they both went to extremes in pursuit of their utopias. But Stalin was a revolutionary; in the end, Hitler, who always protected the established order, was not. And, after a certain fashion, Stalin's vision was more rational and even more optimistic. The ideal human and the ideal society were determined, in his eyes, not by birth and racial selection; no, the ideal could be
achieved
. The criminal could be rehabilitated and become a good citizen, the backward Russian masses could be remoulded into the building blocks of a new society. That was the core of Stalin's Soviet project.

For him, therefore, mass murder was not an end in itself, but a revolutionary means to build his ideal Soviet state. A ‘state’ indeed, for Stalin held no truck with the old revolutionary idea that the state is a ‘lie’. In his view, the nation state was to assume a fully central role once more, and that was one of the most crucial points of difference with his rival Trotsky, who continued to advocate the old Marxist idea of a ‘worldwide’ and ‘permanent’ revolution.

Hitler had his Wagnerian heroes; Stalin, too, had his role models. But those models were ‘heroes of the new humanity’, men and women who posited human force against the forces of nature in a ‘great and tragic struggle’. Their task was no longer to analyse and understand the world, as Marx and his followers did. No, in this new phase the world was to be conquered, overwhelmed and created anew. Even the concentration camps played a role in this: it was no coincidence that the camp newspaper of the slave labourers on the White Sea-Baltic Sea canal was called
Perekovka
, the ‘Reforging’.

At the same time, deep in his heart, Stalin was an anti-idealist. He was referred to as the Benevolent Friend of All Children, the Wise Helmsman, the Eagle of the Mountains, the Greatest Genius of All Time, the Titan of the World Revolution and the Most Profound Theoretician of the Modern
Age, but in fact he was simply Josef Dzhugashvili, the son of a penniless Georgian cobbler. He had been raised with a deep mistrust of people in general, and he rid himself of his last illusions after the death of his wife in 1907. After the suicide – betrayal! – of his second wife in 1932, his cynicism soured into pure misanthropy.

Everything he did or did not do was ruled by an iron logic: once you had said A, then B and C had to follow, regardless of the human cost. When his eldest son, Yakov, was captured by the Germans, he did nothing to save him. In the end, Yakov committed suicide in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. Stalin could not imagine others living outside these norms. According to his world view, every deviation was a source of suspicion, every ally a potential rival, every comrade a potential traitor. That, after all, was how he himself operated. He had an unusually acute feeling for the weak spots of his co-workers and opponents; he could, as people say, ‘open the windows to the soul’, but this ability gradually became more and more clouded by his own paranoia. He saw ‘spies’, ‘enemies’ and ‘counterspies’ everywhere. At the end of his life, in 1951, Khrushchev even heard him say: ‘I am finished. I don't trust anyone any more, not even myself.’

Stalin was also a chameleon who could fade into his surroundings, which was how he seized power after Lenin's death. The chronicler of the revolution, Nikolai Suchanov, described him in 1917 as a ‘grey spot that became visible now and then, but never left a single trace’. The brilliant and arrogant Trotsky called Stalin an ‘excellent bit of mediocrity’ and barely took him into account. That proved to be a fatal mistake.

Trotsky was an extraordinary speaker and organiser, a popular army leader and a successful revolutionary. He was one of the five members of the original Politburo, and was widely seen in 1920 as Lenin's natural successor. But he rarely or never attended a party meeting. During the same period, Stalin worked his way up through the nebulous party apparatus until he achieved a central position of power. Internally, he was anything but a marginal figure. Soon after the 1905 revolution he became one of Lenin's most important advisers, particularly on issues concerning national minorities. In 1917, during the events at Petrograd, Stalin played a central, behind-the-scenes role in almost all major discussions and
decisions. And it was he who soon supervised the course of daily affairs within the Politburo; he was able to appoint allies to top positions and dismiss opponents, thereby further broadening his power base within the bureaucracy.

After the civil war ended in 1921, Trotsky's popularity began to wane and two thirds of ‘his’ Red Army was sent home. On 3 April, 1922, at Lenin's recommendation, the plenary meeting of the central committee elected Stalin general secretary of the party. Now he was holding all the cards.

One month later Lenin had the first of a series of strokes. He was forced to withdraw almost entirely from active politics, but at the same time grew ever more concerned about the behaviour of the new general secretary. During Lenin's absence, Stalin formed a troika with Grigori Zinoviev in Petrograd and Lev Kamenev in Moscow. Increasingly, decisions were made without the sick leader being consulted.

In late 1922, Lenin dictated his political will and testament. It was a bitter piece by a man badly disappointed by the course ‘his’ revolution had taken. He came back again and again to the problem of Russia's backwardness, and seemed in hindsight even to be in agreement with the Mensheviks: the country was, indeed, not ready for socialism. Lenin did not spare any of his old comrades, but his verdict concerning his intended successor was nothing less than damning. ‘Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings between communists, becomes intolerable in a general secretary. For this reason I suggest that the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from that post and replace him with someone who has only one advantage over Comrade Stalin, namely greater tolerance, greater loyalty, greater courtesy and consideration to comrades, less capriciousness, etc.’

But it was too late. Three months later Lenin lost the ability to speak. He died on 21 January, 1924. During the last ten months of his life, he was able to utter only a few syllables:
vot-vot
(here-here) and
syezd-syezd
(congress-congress).

Stalin went immediately for his former rival Trotsky. Apart from all their political differences, the two men also held each other in immense personal contempt. During the civil war, Trotsky had reprimanded his subordinate Stalin on a number of occasions, and Stalin had never forgiven
him for that. In January 1925, Trotsky was discharged as commander of the Red Army. A campaign of slander against the ‘Trotskyite schismatics’ followed. In July 1926 he was dismissed from the Politburo; Kamenev and Zinoviev followed in October.

Eighteen months later, on 7 November, 1927, Trotsky and Zinoviev made a final attempt to stop Stalin: they issued a public call for mass demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad. The secret police beat the demonstrators back, both organisers were thrown out of the party, and only their great fame kept Stalin from liquidating them on the spot. Trotsky was dragged kicking and screaming from his apartment and put on a train for Almaty. From there he was deported to Turkey in 1929, and by way of France and Norway finally ended up in Mexico in 1936. There, at Coyoacán, he spent his last years, a prisoner in his own house, watched over by Mexican policemen and a handful of followers, waiting for Stalin's death-sentence-by-default to be carried out. On 20 August, 1940, an NKVD agent fatally wounded him with a blow of an ice-axe to the head. He died the next day.

What effects did all these events have on daily life in an average Russian village?

In 1997, the former editor of the
New York Times’
desk in Moscow, Serge Schmemann, published a detailed history of daily life in Sergiyevskyo, also known as Koltsovo. The village lay about 130 kilometres south of Moscow, not far from the city of Kaluga, and Schmemann came there because his mother's family had once owned an estate nearby. The Great Revolution had reached the village in autumn 1918, when an ad hoc committee of farmers seized the estate. Schmemann's family got up from the breakfast table, left everything where it was, packed a few clothes and left.

The name of the village was considered too feudal, so a few months later it was given a new one: Koltsovo, after the writer Koltsov – who, incidentally, had never set foot in the area. A group of Bolshevik officials came to Koltsovo. They set up a commune on the abandoned estate, consisting of two widows with their children and a number of outsiders. The chairman was a veteran of the revolution from Moscow, a former printer. The farmers saw the group primarily as a gang of thieves: they
confiscated cows, horses, pigs and machinery everywhere, in the name of the revolution.

Schmemann found the minutes of a meeting held in a neighbouring village in 1919. ‘Kulaks shouted “Godless coercion!”, “Down with the Communists!”, “You were given 1,500 hectares, give us bread!” Some threw stones.’ Ten years later the farmers were still refusing to take part in the kolkhoz, but now the chief troublemakers among them were labelled enemies of the people. Seven ‘kulak families’ from Koltsovo were sent into exile, their possessions went to the kolkhoz. On the heels of revolutionary enthusiasm, Stalin's revolutionary coercion crept into the village.

This growing repression had everything to do with the first five-year plan launched in October 1928. The plan was intended to make of the Soviet Union a ‘second America’, and before long the whole country was suffering under ‘five-year hysteria’. It was decreed that the production of iron was first to increase threefold, then fivefold, and finally sevenfold. The farms were to be merged into huge, modern collectives – Stalin spoke of ‘grain factories’ of tens of thousands of hectares – villages were to be converted into ‘socialist agro-cities’, the wooden houses replaced with prim flats, the stuffy churches with airy schools and model libraries, the heavy manual labour would be taken over by hundreds of thousands of farming machines.

Joseph Roth, who toured Russia in August 1926, wrote that the young Soviet cities reminded him of the little towns of America's Wild West, ‘the same atmosphere of noise and constant childbearing, the quest for happiness and the lack of roots, the courage and self-sacrifice, the suspicion and fear, the most primitive forestry beside the most complicated technology, the romantic horsemen and down-to-earth engineers’.

Between the utopia and the reality lay an obstacle: the farmers did not want it. The situation in Koltsovo was typical of that which pertained throughout the Soviet Union. In summer 1929, only three per cent of the farmers were actively taking part in collective and/or state farms. The big estates, most of the revenues from which had previously gone to the cities, had been disbanded. The small farmers produced largely to meet their own needs, and stockpiled the rest of their grain; they could earn
nothing on it anyway. Grain stocks were commandeered and fixed quotas imposed, but it didn't help much. The farmers skirted the rules, hid their supplies or sold them on the black market.

For the first time since the civil war, winter 1929–30 saw lines at the greengrocers and bakeries in the cities. ‘It is normal for a worker's wife to spend the whole day standing in line, her husband then comes home from work, dinner is not ready, and everyone curses the Soviet authority,’ said a (secret) summary of readers’ letters to
Pravda
. On 27 December, 1929, therefore, Stalin decided to collectivise at one fell swoop all agriculture in the nation's grain-producing areas. In addition, he singled out a general culprit for all the earlier failures, a new and well defined class enemy: ‘We must destroy the kulaks, eliminate them as a class!’

The Politburo's resolution of 30 January, 1930 – ‘On measures to eliminate kulak households in areas of mandatory collectivisation’ – is not as well known as the protocol drawn up twelve years later beside the Wannsee, but for millions of farmers the results were much the same: mass deportation, followed by death. Stalin needed no gas chambers: the starvation and cold in the distant reaches of his empire turned his camps into natural death factories.

Sixty years later, Schmemann sat beside an old woman on the bench in front of her wooden hut in Koltsovo; together, they ran down a list of the nearby houses: ‘The Ionovs, they were kulaks, were thrown out of that first one, over there; Uncle Borya, a simple farmhand was arrested in that red one, his only crime was cursing at the wrong moment; the next one, there, where the Lagutins live, belonged to the Chochlovs …’ Eight of the fifteen households on her street were evicted in the early 1930s, and the families disappeared without a trace.‘The Zabotnys,’ another woman said, ‘there, where the telephone booth is now. They took away everything they had and sent them into exile. They'd had some stupid conflict with the leaders of the collective.’ A third villager said; ‘They took our neighbour too. He had flour and bread. He had a horse.’

According to the latest and most accurate estimates, Stalin's breakneck collectivisation cost the lives of seven million people: five million in the Ukraine, two million in the rest of the Soviet Union. The famine grew worse, because the enormous cost of the five-year plan was being deducted
largely from the nation's food supply. Foreign material and equipment and specialised manpower were paid for mostly with the revenues from grain exports. In 1932, the Soviet Union exported two million tons of grain. In the catastrophic year 1933 that was 1.7 million tons, while the country's population starved. In 1935, domestic grain consumption in the Soviet Union was less than that of Russia in 1890.

After a tour of the Soviet Union in 1932, a gullible George Bernard Shaw wrote in
The Times
: ‘I did not see a single undernourished person in Russia, young or old. Were they padded? Were their hollow cheeks distended by pieces of India rubber inside?’