Russia (40 page)

How much freedom nationalistic Ukrainians would be allowed soon became apparent. Ukrainian, recognized as a distinct language by the former imperial government only in 1913, became the official language, though Russian was soon given the status of second official language. Mikhail Hrushevsky, doyen of Ukrainian historians and a notable patriot, became president of the new Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Newspapers were published in Ukrainian; theatres, museums and libraries were Ukrainianized, and Ukrainians were given prominent posts in Ukraine’s government and Party. Agreements with Russia were sometimes dignified by the status of
international treaties, but key decisions were taken by Moscow. There was freedom for cultural nationalism, not for political nationalism. The new Soviet Union could be a federation of independent nations provided a central Communist Party supervised them all from Moscow.
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Though Stalin was a Georgian, as well as being a former trainee for the Orthodox priesthood, he did not at first support the idea of Georgian independence. Instead he lumped Georgia together with Armenia and Azerbaydzhan in an attempt to create a Transcaucasian Federation. Such a federation had been formed in the wake
of
the Revolution, only to split up into three ephemeral independent states, and it was force, as represented by a victorious Red Army, which eventually decided the matter. So it was that in the spring of 1921 the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic came to replace the Georgian Democratic Republic. Azerbaydzhan was brought into the union in September 1920, and Armenia a year later. In 1922 representatives of a ‘Transcaucasian Republic’, which subsumed all these, signed a union treaty with the Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian republics, but Transcaucasia proved too fissile to survive.

Further east, most Kazakhs seem to have favoured autonomy and, like the local Cossacks, sided with Admiral Kolchak’s White army against the Reds. The fighting was heavy, widespread and prolonged, but by the end of 1919 the Reds had prevailed in eastern Siberia, Orenburg and the northern Kazakh territories. By the spring the Seven Rivers territory was also in their hands. Famine followed. Although the Soviet regime had established political dominance, it discovered that it could not administer an economy based largely on semi-nomadic livestock-herding.
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In both the Kazakh areas and the rest of what had become Soviet Central Asia officials had to cope with societies seriously different from those to the west. These societies were largely Muslim and poorly educated. Some regarded the new regime as liberating, but rather more disliked their new rulers much as they had the old. Still further east Bolshevik rule took longer to establish. Eighty thousand Japanese troops had occupied the Amur region in 1918, and, though the Communists had soon set up a ‘Far Eastern Republic’ in Siberia east of Lake Baikal, it was 1922 before the Soviet Union secured that region. The United States had put 7,000 troops into Vladivostok, and the British a further 800.
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Only in 1923 did Chukhotka and Yakutia become Communist.

In 1924 a constitution for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was promulgated. The Union was to be a ‘federal multinational socialist federation’ based on the principle of self-determination. It consisted of three Republics of the Union - Russia, Ukraine and Belarus - and eleven Autonomous Republics - including Kazakhstan, Karelia and the Crimea,
and others for Buriat-Mongols, Volga Germans, Tatars and others. There were also thirteen Autonomous Provinces designed to accommodate,
inter alia,
the Udmurts of western Siberia, the Koni, the Chechens and the Maris. Jews were allotted Birobijan in the Amur region of the Far East as a national home; the Ulch and other small peoples were given ‘national districts’. However, Kazakhstan and Ukraine contained large minorities of ethnic Russians, and not a little ethnic-Russian territory was parcelled off to Estonia and Latvia, which were outside the Soviet Union.
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Political and ethnic frontiers were not congruent in the Soviet Union, but, given the propensity of peoples to reproduce at different rates, to acculturate and to migrate, they never could be. How genuinely the values earnestly proclaimed in the Constitution were reflected in the Union is open to question, but if it really was an empire that had taken shape it was a new kind of empire.

The system aimed to accommodate the aspirations of the ‘nationalities’, and to a large extent it succeeded. It ensured that a larger proportion of each group would get official jobs and that most of the subject population would be administered by people of their own kind. It also provided a stimulus to national self-expression in most forms of art. Furthermore, the loyalty of the provincial nationality elites was fostered by a series of institutional links which strengthened personal connections with Moscow. Not only the Party itself but professional, academic and artistic associations networked across the Union, promoting links between the great metropolis, Moscow, and the peripheries. Recognition by the centre became a point of pride, and access to the Union’s capital, where privilege shops gave access to goods unobtainable elsewhere, was much sought after.

Aspects of the nationalities policy showed that, though the Soviet regime, shaped in the crucible of pitiless warfare, had inflicted great cruelties and that dogmatism, dragooning and repression were fast becoming entrenched in its culture, the infant Union also possessed a kindlier and more constructive face. This was largely because the Bolsheviks had been constrained to co-opt proponents of the progressive agenda. Hence the government’s enlightened attitudes to women and minorities, its enthusiasm for literacy and education, and, in part, its campaigns against the obscurantism of the Church and all religions. It also encouraged talent — and never more so than when it found someone who conformed to a Soviet ideal and had been neglected by the old regime.

Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, for example, had good proletarian credentials. He came from mixed Russian, Polish and Tatar stock, was a modest schoolteacher in Kaluga, and was handicapped by deafness. He was also a genius in the field of aerodynamics and a visionary who helped make space travel
possible. Ignored by the scientific establishment, he had built Russia’s first wind tunnel at his own expense, and in 1899 he had published a key paper on atmospheric pressure on surfaces, also at his own expense. Once the Soviet regime was in power, however, his research was funded, he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences, and allotted a life pension. The physicist Kapitsa, the economist Kondratev, the writer Maxim Gorky and the composer Sergei Prokofiev were among other luminaries who shone in this early Soviet period.

The New Economic Policy stabilized a country careening out of control, and the basic indicators of demographic strength and economic growth flickered and began to rise. Indeed, the population in the period 1922—7 grew at the phenomenal rate of 2 per cent a year. This was chiefly due to a decline in the death rate. Winnowed by the hardships of the tragic years, the population had been growing hardier.
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National income was also creeping up. In 1925—6 it reached 75.7 rubles per head of population — 75 per cent of what it had been in 1913. Yet, of a total population of 150 millions, almost 82 per cent lived and worked in the countryside. A brilliant future, Communist or not, could not be built on such a basis. In proportion to population, Russia’s national income was less than a fifth of Britain’s and less than an eighth of that of the United States.
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And by 1928 a serious economic and social crisis was looming. It led the Party to resort to military methods again, and worse.

The crisis was linked to the onset of the world depression but stemmed from serious inadequacies in Soviet economic arrangements. Industry was failing to produce goods the peasants were interested in buying. The peasants therefore saved themselves the labour of sowing so much land for the next harvest. The result was a dearth of grain not only for export, but also for the cities and hence industry. The state reacted with what since the war had become a traditional remedy: requisitioning grain from the peasants. The recurring problem arose from a failure to match supply and demand, but there were more fundamental inadequacies in the management
of
the economy, the approach to which was often too simplistic for so complex an undertaking. As Kondratev himself explained in a paper requested by one of the new leader’s, Stalin’s, closest associates, Viacheslav Molotov:

The planned management of our national economy is one of the main aims. But planned management … requires good plans. In practice, when we draw up the plans we very often misunderstand the problems and
opportunities involved. This is why our planning is so full of enthusiasm, why it wastes too much energy, why it is so isolated from economic policy in practice, and why it produces [unpleasant] surprises.
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Idealism and enthusiasm by themselves could not direct the economy efficiently. Indeed, they sometimes combined to undermine it. Meanwhile the urban labour force needed for industry, though increasing, was still less than it had been in 1916.
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In 1926 agricultural production showed a welcome increase, but in 1927 it declined quite sharply.
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The recurring problem of peasant production undermined Stalin’s faith in the free-market prescription of the New Economic Policy and, together with problems experienced in getting industry launched, built up momentum for a root-and-branch solution. This took shape in 1928—9. It involved the forced collectivization of peasant farming. Huge collective farms were the closest the Communists would go to replicating the highly productive great estates of the pre-revolutionary era without compromising their ideology. Peasants, including the richer ones, known as kulaks, whom Stolypin had encouraged, would no doubt object, but they would have to be suppressed. Collectives, with their economies of scale, would release a mass of surplus rural labour for industry, especially if industry could equip them with tractors and other farming machinery. The workless peasants would be directed to urban centres to serve as grist to the wheels of industry. Capital was essential, of course, and this was scarcer in Russia than it had ever been. What little surplus the budget could scrape up would have go to foreign companies willing to provide essential technical expertise in turbine construction and the like. The bulk of the capital would have to be found by squeezing resources out of the population at large, by forcing them to produce significantly more value than they consumed. They would be paid largely in promises.

Propaganda would stoke up enthusiasm, especially among the young, and raise peoples’ eyes above the bleak immediate prospects to a rosy future in which all needs would be met and grand projects realized. Force would also be needed, not only to coerce the peasants, but also to find labour for essential projects in unpleasant places — but opponents of the governments’ schemes and social misfits could be put to useful work for nothing.

As the programme was climbing into top gear, in February 1931, Stalin made a powerful speech invoking Russian patriotism. The old Russia, he said, had been beaten by the Mongols, defeated by the Turks and Swedes, occupied by the gentlemen of Poland-Lithuania, worsted by French and
British capitalists and by the Japanese. They had done down Russia because Russia had been afflicted by backwardness —

military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political, industrial and agricultural backwardness. They beat… [us] because it was profitable and could be done with impunity. Such is the law of the exploiter — to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle law of capitalism …

We are fifty or a hundred years behind the developed countries. We must catch up that distance in ten years … Or we shall be crushed.
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Retrospect credits Stalin with prescience. The Soviet Union was indeed to face a life-and-death crisis ten years later, but he had in mind the hostility of the world in general. He could hardly have foreseen the triumph of Hitler so early in 1931. Other, gentler, means to the desired end might well have worked, but force was quicker. Stalin was in a hurry.

Both the achievements and the costs of Stalin’s revolution are reflected in the census data. Painstaking research into the demographic history of Russia in the 1930s concludes that by 1937 the urban population had increased by 70 per cent, and by substantially more than that in the industrializing areas of Siberia. This reflected a strategic plan to shift the centre of economic gravity towards the east. On the other hand the rural population had shrunk by 3.4 million souls.
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The number of ethnic Russians rose, although even their numbers fell in 1933, as did the Tatar, Azerbaydzhani and Circassian populations. The Ukrainian and Kazakh populations fell more sharply. By 1937 there were 29 per cent fewer Kazakhs than there had been in 1926, and 15 per cent fewer Ukrainians. The Kazakh losses are attributed to collectivization and cross-frontier migration; the loss of 5 million Ukrainians is also blamed on collectivization, and to a dreadful famine of 1931-2 which was associated with it.
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The massive mortality has been ascribed to genocide, but the charge is unfounded.
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True, the regime disliked political nationalists, and in 1931 it shot a former premier of the puppet regime set up by the Germans in 1917 and then some Ukrainian Communists suspected of nationalist leanings.
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But Ukrainians were by no means the only nationality to suffer, and it was not Ukrainians but kulaks and anyone who stood in its way whom the regime targeted. Nor was the famine as such man-made, as has been alleged. The regime had no interest in dead peasants and starving subjects. It wanted live and active workers. Rather than being deliberately induced, the famine was the consequence of mistaken policy, ruthlessly implemented.

Kulak opposition to collectivization had been anticipated, and was confronted by force. Peasants — by no means all of them kulaks — slaughtered their livestock rather than let the collectives have them, precipitating a meat shortage that was to last for decades. They and anyone else who impeded the imposition of the programme were carted off in droves to detention camps. Worse still were the grain-procurement quotas and the punitive ways in which they were enforced. Peasants had long been used to hiding grain from requisitioning squads, but things had reached such a point where there was virtually nothing left to hide; and the quotas demanded were set unrealistically high. The impetus to what turned out to be a major human disaster was the regime’s attitude.