The Stalinist Dictatorship

Christoper Edward Ward, Christoper Edward Ward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317762256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From the late 1920s onwards, forced collectivisation, state-directed industrialisation, mass purging and the party's control of culture, refashioned Russia and gave birth to a new type of society. The 'second revolution' and its aftermath remodelled the Soviet State and the Bolshevik party, restructured all institutions and reconstituted all social relationships. Millions found their lives changed forever. Nothing was untouched and no one was unaffected. Presiding over these momentous changes was Joseph Stalin, one of the twentieth century's most disturbing figures. "The Stalinst Dictatorship" looks at the regime from three different perspectives. Section one focuses on interpretations of Stalin's character and attempts to explain the everlasting puzzle of the relationship between events and personality. Section two looks at Stalin's role within the Soviet Union, and sees him as only one part (albeit an important one) of a complex culture of politics and administration. The final section examines the ways in which the Soviet people handled socialism, and how Stalinism functioned on the ground. The vicissitudes in Stalin's reputation reflect the vicissitudes of the history of the twentieth century itself. Stalin became a symbol of a new system, a 'socialist' alternative to the capatilist path.

SECTION
III

LIVING STALINISM

Commentary

Social historians of Russia have rarely been disposed to write ‘history with the politics left out, narrations of everyday life which deprecate or ignore the role of state power, legal frameworks or elite ideologies. If anything, they have been mesmerized by the range and sweep of plans emanating from the minds of ‘great men’: tsars, ministers, revolutionaries and commissars. ‘Top-down’ perspectives catalogued turning points, identified conundrums, framed analysis and generally organized the overall shape of events, even in accounts of popular risings such as the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. All this hampered consideration of the activities and inclinations of other parties — subaltern classes, women, the poor and the dispossessed.

This holds true for the social history of the Stalin period. For decades most monographs portrayed the population as the inert receptor of projects designed in the capital and forwarded to the provinces via the regime’s ‘transmission belts,’ the bureaucratic machinery responsible for policy implementation. Only in the past thirty years have new vistas opened up. Stimulated by the general trend towards ‘history from below’ in the 1960s and 1970s and the work of historians such as Moshe Lewin and Sheila Fitzpatrick, researchers began to change direction. While continuing to stress the importance of actions willed by the centre they reconfigured Stalinism’s impact and evolution by exploring how people made sense of their situation, received policy or advanced their own agendas. What has emerged is a more complex, nuanced, and in many ways more puzzling representation: Stalinism as something made ‘from below’ and ‘from above,’ by victims and beneficiaries as well as by elites.

Chapter 5: The second revolution and after

During the late 1920s and early 1930s apparently spontaneous risings of peasant women against collectivization engulfed the Russian and Ukrainian countryside, but participants — dubbed irrational and hysterical by Bolshevik observers — were not usually punished under the notorious Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code. That fate was reserved for male peasants deemed capable of rational action and overt hostility to socialism. Instead, women were to be dealt with by indoctrination and co-option into officially sanctioned village institutions.

In Lynne Viola’s view these remedies were unlikely to meet with much success [Reading 9]. Most women had a lot to lose from collectivization and so their opposition was in fact rationally predicated. Villages buzzed with wild rumours, but even the most extravagant stories reflected real fears: ignorant and overzealous officials did frequently advance madcap schemes of social engineering. In addition, the status of women in rural society depended on the allocation of particular social and economic roles. They raised the children, upheld religion and managed specific agricultural tasks vital to the family’s well-being. All this was threatened, whether by central rescript or local initiative.

In Viola’s opinion if women were not responding irrationally nor were they behaving hysterically. Spontaneity masked intent, and bab’i bunty assumed forms which might well have been consciously designed to perplex outsiders. Some party leaders were probably aware that there was more to bab’i bunty than met the eye, but depicting them as unpremeditated, irrational events served an important political purpose: it allowed Moscow to minimize the seriousness of the resistance to collectivization and deflect the blame for all that had gone awry onto local agitators.

Many historians would see the women involved in bab’i bunty as passive victims, but Viola’s research suggests that they collaborated in making what might be termed ‘really existing Stalinism’ — that which arose from strife and compromise as against that which was willed. Lewis Siegelbaum also looks at Stalinism from below, but instead analyses the interactions between the regime and one of its most favoured groups [Reading 10]. In August 1935 the Donbass coal miner Aleksei Stakhanov exceeded his output norm fourteenfold, hewing 102 tons in one shift. The party immediately hailed this as a breakthrough, contrasting the qualities he supposedly exemplified — careful planning, rational organization and attention to detail — with the haphazard ‘storming’ mentality of the First Five-Year Plan’s ‘shock workers’, and his feat quickly became the locus of an officially sponsored drive — Staklanovism — to raise labour productivity.

Siegelbaum interrogates the surface banality of Stakhanovism and postulates the existence of a complex phenomenon riddled with ambiguities. On the one hand Stakhanovism manifested itself as cultural myth, something articulated by the regime for its own purposes. On the other hand reality invaded myth because some workers internalized the movement’s prescriptions, thus breathing life into propaganda and ascribing new meanings to the Soviet experience. Feted by the powerful and glorified in the press, a few Stakhanovites acquired the kind of renown enjoyed nowadays by soap opera stars or successful game show contestants. Newsreels displayed images of respectful workers accompanied by dutiful wives receiving cars, refrigerators or the keys to a new apartment, invariably with a party boss in attendance. Siegelbaum believes that these staged events served a number of purposes: showering gifts on individuals celebrated acquisitiveness and reaffirmed the regime’s abrogation of egalitarianism, while beneficiaries acted as a goad to others, emblems of what could transpire under socialism and harbingers of a ‘higher reality’ — the communist utopia of superabundance.

Most, of course, never won glittering prizes or met Stalin, and exhibited relatively high levels of consumption simply by using wages to furnish a room or buy new clothes, but whatever the source of their well-being Siegelbaum represents them as a new, indeterminate sub-group within Soviet society. Frequently young and obviously successful, they could probably count on a wider than normal range of potential marriage partners and a better life for their children. But if some couples inhabited the myth with alacrity and made it their own it remains the case that they were still working class; the movement was never intended to disrupt society or disturb shop-floor hierarchies, although social mobility did occur when Stakhanovites moved into managerial and technical posts during and after the Ezhovshchina.

Chapter 6: The purges

Properly speaking, there is no Russian equivalent of the English word purge. In Russian the pre-war purges comprise discreet events: show trials of technical specialists between 1928 and 1933; chistki in the periods 1928–30 and 1933–35; a proverka in 1935; the obmen in 1936; and finally the Ezhovshchina, which lasted from about 1936–37 to 1938. A ceaseless rumble of persecution accompanied these frightening detonations. Throughout the decade anyone could suddenly be arraigned on charges of wrecking, sabotage, espionage, aiding kulaks, counterrevolutionary activity or plotting to kill a member of the Politburo, and, after torture and summary conviction, be sacked, exiled, hurled into the Gulag or shot. No one knows exactly how many died or languished in prison, but the total runs into many millions.

Whatever the figure the purges cannot be understood simply by reference to actions willed by the centre. Like the witch crazes of medieval and seventeenth-century Europe these were social events. In some way they spoke to the condition of 1930s Russia: for millions to suffer millions had to cooperate, either as active participants or approving onlookers. Why people did so remains an enigma, but we can begin to approach the aetiology of purging by recalling a remark of Isaac Deutscher’s:

Russia had been belated in her historical development. In England serfdom had disappeared by the end of the fourteenth century. Stalin’s parents were still serfs. By the standards of British history, the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries have, in a sense, met in contemporary Russia. They have met in Stalin.²

The point here is that it was not just Stalin who straddled the centuries. Throughout the Great Breakthrough and well into the 1930s not only had most people been raised in a medieval political economy (the village community), they also exhibited a medieval world-view. The Slav lands and the Caucasus teemed with evils we have forgotten. Hobgoblins, demons and infernal spirits permeated physical reality: in secluded glades, by silent trackways, in pools, streams and wells, in unlit barn-lofts or the shadowy corners of rooms lurked everwatchful presences intent on harm. Sometimes they could be avoided or propitiated, and if necessary exposed and thwarted, at least temporarily, for in opposition to darkness stood the forces of light, the saints in heaven whose help could be invoked in times of trouble.

In a bipolar universe, be it fourteenth-century England or early twentieth-century Russia, there are no shades of grey. Coincidence does not exist, nor is anything equivocal, and since nothing happens by accident the price of survival is eternal vigilance. Cows refuse to give milk, crops wither, children die, mine-shafts explode and buildings are struck by lightning because malevolent agents will it so. The second revolution spread this magical culture across the country. Ruralized cities, bustling construction sites and Soviet institutions bulging with people only recently uprooted from the peasantry proved fertile breeding grounds for rumour and speculation. Everywhere the backward half-glance towards the hidden terror jostled secular readings of cause and effect. When projects ran into difficulties, therefore, it was quite natural that fantastic stories of plots, spies, concealed enemies and secret cabals should resonate in society and bewitch the imagination of Stalinist leaders (themselves not too far from the village), and that confession, ‘unmasking’ and the inquisitorial style should figure so prominently in show trials.

It is with this heritage in mind that we should approach interpretations of the articulation and reception of purging offered by Gábor Rittersporn from Hungary and the Australian Sheila Fitzpatrick, now based in the USA. According to Rittersporn, long before 1941 cons...