The Russian Revolution (24 page)

In the period 1928-32, urban population in the Soviet Union increased by almost twelve million, and at least ten million persons left peasant agriculture and became wage-earners.23 These were enormous figures, a demographic upheaval unprecedented in Russia's experience and, it has been claimed, in that of any other country over so short a period. Young and able-bodied peasants were disproportionately represented in the migration, and this surely contributed to the subsequent weakness of collectivized agriculture and demoralization of the peasantry. But, by the same token, the migration was part of the dynamics of Russia's industrialization. For every three peasants joining collective farms during the First Five-Year Plan, one peasant left the village to become a blue- or white-collar wage-earner elsewhere. The departures were as much a part of Stalin's revolution in the countryside as collectivization itself.

Cultural Revolution

The struggle against class enemies was a major preoccupation of Communists during the First Five-Year Plan, as it had been during the Civil War. In the collectivization campaign, `liquidation of the kulaks as a class' was a focal point of Communist activity. In the reorganization of the urban economy, private entrepreneurs (Nepmen) were the class enemies that had to be eliminated. At the same period, the international communist movement adopted a new belligerent policy of `class against class'. These policiesall involving repudiation of a more conciliatory approach that had prevailed during NEP-had their counterpart in the cultural and intellectual sphere, where the class enemy was the bourgeois intelligentsia. Struggle against the old intelligentsia, bourgeois cultural values, elitism, privilege, and bureaucratic routine constituted the phenomenon which contemporaries labelled `Cultural Revolution'.24 The purpose of Cultural Revolution was to establish Communist and proletarian `hegemony', which in practical terms meant both asserting party control over cultural life and opening up the administrative and professional elite to a new cohort of young Communists and workers.

The Cultural Revolution was initiated by the party leadershipor, more precisely, Stalin's faction of the leadership-in the spring of 1928, when the announcement of the forthcoming Shakhty trial (see above, p. 122) was coupled with a call for Communist vigilance in the cultural sphere, re-examination of the role of bourgeois experts, and rejection of the old intelligentsia's pretensions to cultural superiority and leadership. This campaign was closely linked with Stalin's struggle against the Right. The Rightists were depicted as protectors of the bourgeois intelligentsia, over-reliant on the advice of non-party experts, complacent about the influence of experts and former Tsarist officials within the government bureaucracy, and prone to infection by `rotten liberalism' and bourgeois values. They were likely to choose bureaucratic methods rather than revolutionary ones, and favour the government apparat over that of the party. Moreover, they were probably Europeanized intellectuals who had lost touch with the party's proletarian rank-and-file.

But there was more to the Cultural Revolution than a factional struggle within the leadership. The fight against bourgeois cultural dominance appealed very much to Communist youth, as well as to a number of militant Communist organizations whose drive had been thwarted by the party leadership during NEP, and even to groups of non-Communist intellectuals in various fields who were at odds with the established leadership of their professions. Groups like the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) and the League of Militant Atheists had been agitating throughout the 1920S for more aggressive policies of cultural confrontation. Young scholars in the Communist Academy and the Institute of Red Professors had been itching for a fight with the entrenched senior scholars, mainly non-Communist, who still dominated many academic fields. The Komsomol Central Committee and its secretariat, always tending towards revolutionary `avantgardism' and aspiring to a larger policy-making role, had long suspected that the numerous institutions with which the Komsomol had policy disagreements had succumbed to bureaucratic degeneration. For the young radicals, Cultural Revolution was a vindication and, as one observer put it, an unleashing.

Seen from this perspective, Cultural Revolution was an iconoclastic and belligerent youth movement, whose activists, like the Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 196os, were by no means a docile tool of the party leadership. They were intensely party-minded, asserting their own right as Communists to lead and dictate to others, but at the same time they were instinctively hostile to most existing authorities and institutions, which they suspected of bureaucratic and `objectively counter-revolutionary' tendencies. They were self-consciously proletarian (although most of the activists were white collar by social origin as well as by occupation), scornful of the bourgeoisie and, in particular, of middleaged, respectable `bourgeois Philistines'. The Civil War was their revolutionary touchstone and the source of much of their rhetorical imagery. Sworn enemies of capitalism, they nevertheless tended to admire America because its capitalism was modern and on the grand scale. Radical innovation in any field had an enormous appeal to them.

Because many of the initiatives taken in the name of Cultural Revolution were spontaneous, they produced some unexpected results. Militants carried their anti-religious campaign to the villages at the height of collectivization, confirming peasant suspicions that the kolkhoz was the work of Antichrist. Raids by the Komsomol `Light Cavalry' disrupted work in government offices; and the Komsomol's `Cultural Army' (created primarily to fight illiteracy) almost succeeded in abolishing local education departments-which was certainly not an objective of the party leadership-on the grounds that they were bureaucratic.

Young enthusiasts broke up performances of `bourgeois' plays in state theatres by whistling and booing. In literature, the militants of RAPP launched a campaign against the respected (though not strictly proletarian) writer Maxim Gorky just at the time when Stalin and other party leaders were trying to persuade him to return from his exile in Italy. Even in the realm of political theory, the radicals followed their own path. They believed, as many Communist enthusiasts had done during the Civil War, that apocalyptic change was imminent: the state would wither away, taking with it familiar institutions like law and the school. In mid-1930, Stalin stated quite clearly that this belief was mistaken. But his pronouncement was almost ignored until, more than a year later, the party leadership began a serious attempt to discipline the activists of Cultural Revolution and put an end to their `hare-brained scheming'.

In fields like social science and philosophy, young Cultural Revolutionaries were sometimes used by Stalin and the party leadership to discredit theories associated with Trotsky or Bukharin, attack former Mensheviks, or facilitate the subordination of respected `bourgeois' cultural institutions to party control. But this aspect of Cultural Revolution coexisted with a brief flowering of visionary utopianism which was far from the world of practical politics and factional intrigue. The visionaries-often outsiders in their own professions, whose ideas had previously seemed eccentric and unrealizable-were busy with plans for new `socialist cities', projects for communal living, speculations on the transformation of nature, and the image of the `new Soviet man'. They took seriously the First Five-Year Plan slogan `We are building a new world'; and for a few years at the end of the 192os and the beginning of the 1930s, their ideas were also taken seriously, receiving wide publicity and also, in many cases, substantial funding from various government agencies and other official bodies.

Although the Cultural Revolution was described as proletarian, this should not be taken literally in the realm of high culture and scholarship. In literature, for example, the young activists of RAPP used `proletarian' as a synonym for `Communist': when they spoke of establishing `proletarian hegemony', they were expressing their own desire to dominate the literary field and to be acknowledged as the Communist Party's only accredited representative among literary organizations. To be sure, the RAPPists were not totally cynical in invoking the name of the proletariat, for they did their best to encourage cultural activities in the factories and open channels of communication between professional writers and the working class. But this was all very much in the spirit of the Populists' `going to the people' in the t87os (see above, p. 25). RAPP's intelligentsia leaders were for the proletariat rather than of it.

Where the proletarian aspect of Cultural Revolution had substance was in the policy of proletarian `promotion'-a Soviet `affirmative action' programme on behalf of workers and peasantsvigorously pursued by the regime at this period. The treachery of the bourgeois intelligentsia, Stalin said apropos of the Shakhty trial, made it imperative to train proletarian replacements with all possible speed. The old dichotomy of Reds and experts must be abolished. It was time that the Soviet regime acquired its own intelligentsia (a term which in Stalin's usage covered both the administrative and specialist elite), and this new intelligentsia must be recruited from the lower classes, especially the urban working class.25

The policy of `promoting' workers into administrative jobs and sending young workers to higher education was not new, but it had never been implemented with such urgency or on such a massive scale as during the Cultural Revolution. Enormous numbers of workers were promoted directly into industrial management, became soviet or party officials, or were appointed as replacements for the `class enemies' purged from the central government and trade-union bureaucracy. Of the 86t,ooo persons classified as 'leading cadres and specialists' in the Soviet Union at the end of 1933, over 140,ooo-more than one in six-had been blue-collar workers only five years earlier. But this was only the tip of the iceberg. The total number of workers moving into white-collar jobs during the First Five-Year Plan was probably at least one and a half million.

At the same time, Stalin launched an intensive campaign to send young workers and Communists to higher education, producing a major upheaval in the universities and technical schools, outraging the `bourgeois' professors and, for the duration of the First FiveYear Plan, making it extremely difficult for high-school graduates from white-collar families to obtain a higher education. About 150,000 workers and Communists entered higher education during the First Five-Year Plan, most of them studying engineering, since technical expertise rather than Marxist social science was now regarded as the best qualification for leadership in an industrializing society. The group, which included Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Aleksei Kosygin, and a host of future party and government leaders, was to become the core of the Stalinist political elite after the Great Purges of 1937-8.

For members of this favoured group-'sons of the working class', as they liked to call themselves in later years-the Revolution had indeed fulfilled its promises to give power to the proletariat and turn workers into masters of the state. For other members of the working class, however, the balance sheet on Stalin's Revolution was much less favourable. Living standards and real wages dropped sharply for most workers during the First Five-Year Plan. Trade unions were reined-in after Tomsky's removal, losing any real ability to press for workers' interests in negotiations with management. As new peasant recruits (including former kulaks) flooded into industrial jobs, the party leaders' sense of a special relationship and special obligations towards the working class weakened.26

The demographic and social upheaval during the period of the First Five-Year Plan had been enormous. Millions of peasants had left the villages, driven out by collectivization, dekulakization, or famine, or drawn to the towns by the new availability of jobs. But this was only one of many kinds of uprooting that had shattered the settled pattern of life for individuals and families. Urban wives had gone to work because one pay cheque was no longer enough; rural wives had been deserted by husbands who disappeared to the towns; children who had been lost or abandoned by their parents had drifted into gangs of homeless youth (besprizornye). `Bourgeois' high-school students who had expected to go to college found their path blocked, while young workers who had only seven years' general education were drafted to study engineering. Expropriated Nepmen and kulaks fled to towns where they were not known to start a new life. Priests' children left home to avoid being stigmatized along with their parents. Trains carried loads of deportees and convicts to unknown and unwanted destinations. Skilled workers were `promoted' into management, or `mobilized' to distant construction sites like Magnitogorsk; Communists were sent to the countryside to run collective farms; office-workers were fired in the `cleansing' of government agencies. A society that had scarcely had time to settle down after the upheavals of war, revolution, and civil war a decade earlier was mercilessly shaken up once again in Stalin's Revolution.

The decline in living standards and quality of life affected almost all classes of the population, urban and rural. Peasants suffered most, as a result of collectivization. But life in the towns was made miserable by food rationing, queues, constant shortages of consumer goods including shoes and clothing, acute overcrowding of housing, the endless inconveniences associated with the elimination of private trade, and deterioration of urban services of all kinds. The urban population of the Soviet Union soared, rising from 29 million at the beginning of 1929 to almost 40 million at the beginning of 1933-an increase of 38 per cent in four years. The population of Moscow jumped from just over 2 million at the end of 1926 to 3.7 million at the beginning of 1933; over the same period, the population of Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg), an industrial city in the Urals, rose by 346 per cent.27

In the political sphere, too, there had been changes, though of a more subtle and incremental kind. The cult of Stalin began in earnest at the end of 1929 with the celebration of his fiftieth birthday. At party conferences and other large gatherings, it became customary for Communists to greet Stalin's entrance with wild applause. But Stalin, mindful of Lenin's example, appeared to deprecate such enthusiasm; and his position as General Secretary of the party remained formally unchanged.