History Summery

Few histories of everyday life start with a chapter on government and bureau- cracy. But it is one of the peculiarities of our subject that the state can never be kept out, try though we may. Soviet citizens attempting to live ordinary lives were continually running up against the state1 in one of its multifarious as- pects. Their lives were tossed around by Communist policies; their tempers were tried on a daily basis by incompetent and arbitrary officials, clerks, and salespeople, all working for the state. This was the omnipresent context of So- viet everyday life; there was no way to live without it. Thus, our story begins with an overview of the Stalinist regime and its institutions and practices, par- ticularly the Communist Party’s style of rule and mentalité.

At the end of the 1920s, the conventional starting point for the Stalin pe- riod, the Soviet regime had been in power for not much more than a decade. Its leaders still thought of themselves as revolutionaries, and they behaved like revolutionaries too. They meant to transform and modernize Russian society, a process they described as “building socialism.” Since they believed that this

1 “The Party Is Always Right”

revolutionary transformation was in the long-term interests of the people, they were willing to force it through, even when, as with collectivization, a majority of the relevant population clearly opposed it. They explained popular resistance as a result of the backwardness, prejudices, and fears of the unen- lightened masses. The Communists’ sense of mission and intellectual superi- ority was far too great to allow them to be swayed by mere majority opinion. In this, they were like all other revolutionaries, for what revolutionary worth his salt has ever conceded that “the people’s will” is something different from the mission he has undertaken to carry out on the people’s behalf?

“Backwardness” was a very important word in the Soviet Communist lexi- con: it stood for everything that belonged to old Russia and needed to be changed in the name of progress and culture. Religion, a form of superstitition, was backward. Peasant farming was backward. Small-scale pri- vate trade was backward, not to mention petty-bourgeois, another favorite term of opprobrium. It was the Communists’ task to turn backward, agrarian, petty-bourgeois Russia into a socialist, urbanized, industrialized giant with modern technology and a literate workforce.

For all the party’s dedication to the idea of modernization, however, Soviet Communist rule in the 1930s was definitely acquiring some neotraditional features that few would have predicted in 1917. One obvious example was the evolution of the party’s “proletarian” dictatorship into something close to personal autocratic rule by Stalin exercised through the Communist Party and the secret police. Unlike the Nazis, Soviet Communists had no Leader princi- ple, but they did increasingly have a Leader practice. Some of what Khrush- chev would later call Stalin’s “cult of personality” reflected the contemporary style of self-presentation of the Fascist dictators, Mussolini and Hitler, but in other respects the cult—or the Russian public’s reception of it—had more in common with the Russian tradition of the “little-father Tsar” than with any- thing in modern Western Europe. The image of Stalin, “father of peoples,” was acquiring a distinctly paternalist cast in the 1930s.

The paternalism was not limited to Stalin. Regional party officials lower in the hierarchy practiced it too, receiving and responding to many humble peti- tions from their obedient subjects who appealed, often in astonishingly tradi- tional terms, to their fatherly benevolence. The official rhetoric increasingly emphasized the state’s protective function with respect to its weaker and less-developed citizens: women, children, peasants, and members of “back- ward” ethnic groups.

Revolutionary Warriors The party was by self-conception a vanguard. In terms of Marxist theory, this meant a vanguard of the proletariat, the class of industrial workers in whose name the party had established its revolutionary dictatorship in October 1917. But the significance of the concept went far beyond class. It was the framework in which Communists thought about and justified their mission of leadership in Russian society. By the 1930s, as the old concept of revolution- ary mission was increasingly acquiring overtones of civilizing mission, the

“The Party Is Always Right” 15

party came to see itself not only as a political vanguard but also as a cultural one. This, of course, was not very convincing to the old Russian intelligentsia, many of whom regarded the Bolsheviks as unschooled barbarians; but the party’s claim to cultural superiority seems to have been accepted as reasonable by much of the rest of the population. The “cultural vanguard” concept re- ceived a further boost in 1936, when Stalin appropriated the term “intelligen- tsia” as a designation for the new Soviet elite, of which Communist administrators formed a major part.2

An important aspect of the party’s claim to cultural vanguard status was its possession of esoteric knowledge, namely Marxist-Leninist ideology. Knowl- edge of the basics of historical and dialectical materialism was a prerequisite for all Communists. What this meant in practice was a grasp of Marx’s theory of historical development, which showed that the driving power of history was class struggle; that capitalism throughout the world must ultimately suc- cumb to proletarian revolution, as it had done in Russia in 1917; and that in the course of time the revolutionary proletarian dictatorship would lead the society to socialism. To outsiders, the boiled-down Marxism of Soviet politi- cal literacy courses might look simplistic, almost catechismic. To insiders, it was a “scientific” worldview that enabled its possessors to rid themselves and others of all kinds of prejudice and superstition—and incidentally master an aggressive debating style characterized by generous use of sarcasm about the motives and putative “class essence” of opponents. Smugness and tautology, along with polemical vigor, were among the most notable characteristics of Soviet Marxism.

Party membership and education, preferably combined, were the main routes to advancement in Soviet Russia. This meant that party membership was a desirable, even necessary qualification for the ambitious; as a result the party spent a great deal of effort trying to differentiate between those who were ambitious in a good sense, meaning that they were prepared to take the responsibilities of leadership, and “careerists,” who only wanted the privi- leges. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, admission to the party was not lightly gained, especially by white-collar office workers and professionals. For most of this period, the party’s enrollment rules strongly favored those with worker or poor peasant background, as did college admissions procedures. In addition, many would-be Communists failed to make it through the compli- cated admissions procedure, involving letters of reference, investigations of social background, examination in political literacy, and so on. The same was true of the Komsomol, and many “true believers” fretted because of their in- ability to join. As the French historian Nicolas Werth notes, “The difficult ad- missions procedure reinforced . . . the deep sentiment of belonging to a world of the elect, of being part of those who walk in the direction of History.”3

Of course there were important changes in the membership of the party in the course of the 1930s. The ideal at the beginning of the Stalin period was a proletarian party: factory workers were encouraged to join, while office work- ers and professionals found the way blocked. The big enrollment of workers from the bench and peasants of the First Five-Year Plan period swelled the

16 Everyday Stalinism

ranks but also introduced a lot of ballast. The party suspended admissions in 1933, and the first in a series of party “cleansings” was held the the same year. The party suffered substantial membership loss during the Great Purges; at the same time, some young Communists found themselves propelled up the ladder at dizzying speeds to fill the jobs of those who had been removed as “enemies of the people.” When admissions were renewed in the last years of the decade, the old proletarian emphasis had largely disappeared and stress was put on getting “the best people” in Soviet society, which in practice meant that it became much easier for white-collar professionals to enter.

We may also note another important change. From the beginning of the 1930s, organized opposition and open debate no longer existed in the Com- munist Party. Leaders of the Left Opposition were expelled from the party at the end of 1927, and this sufficiently intimidated the “Right Opposition” of 1928–29 that it never really organized at all. After that, there were only a few embryonic underground “opposition” groups, dealt with harshly by the OGPU. Although some prominent former Oppositionists recanted and were briefly reinstated in high positions in the early 1930s, it was well understood by all former Oppositionists that even social meetings between them were likely to be interpreted as “anti-Soviet discussions” and provoke fresh punish- ment.

Internal party discussion and debate were correspondingly constricted. In the 1920s, the party had had its own intellectual centers, notably the Commu- nist Academy and the Institutes of Red Professors, institutions where Marx- ism was taken seriously and debated at a relatively high intellectual level.4

Leading politicians like Bukharin and Stalin had personal followings among the young Communist intellectuals, whose militancy and radicalism were well in evidence during the Cultural Revolution. By the middle of the 1930s, how- ever, the Cultural Revolution was over, many of its leaders discredited, and the Communist Academy closed down. This was almost the end of serious intellectual-political debate within a Marxist framework in the Soviet Union. The intense interest and involvement with which many Communists and Komsomol members had followed high politics and policy debates in the 1920s were no more; it had become dangerous to be too interested in politics and political theory.

“An army of revolutionary warriors,” was how Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich described the party at the XVII Party Congress of 1934. This no- tion was dear to Communists, many of whom still carried a gun, looked back on the Civil War with nostalgia, and, like Stalin, continued to wear a version of military dress, with field jacket and boots. It was a party of urban men with a strong macho ethos: words like “struggle,” “fight,” and “attack” were con- stantly on the lips of its members. Throughout the 1930s, Communists lived with the expectation, justified or not, of foreign attack.5

In Stalin’s view, the danger in which the Soviet Union stood required a spe- cial kind of assertive confidence in dealing with the outside world. Com- menting to Molotov on the draft of a public statement on international affairs in 1933, he wrote: “It came out well. The confident, contemptuous tone with

“The Party Is Always Right” 17

respect to the ‘great’ powers, the belief in our own strength, the delicate but plain spitting in the pot of the swaggering ‘great powers’—very good. Let them eat it.” 6

Stalin, thinking in terms of great power relations, was not greatly interested in the prospect of international revolution in the 1930s. But it was otherwise for a whole generation of the young who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s, for whom world revolution was something inspiring, urgently desired, and, as Lev Kopelev’s memoir suggests, integrally linked with dreams of modernity and access to a wider world:

The world revolution was absolutely necessary so that justice would triumph, all those incarcerated in bourgeois prisons would be set free, those starving in India and China would be fed, the lands taken from the Germans and the Danzig “corridor” would be returned and our Bessarabia would be taken back from Ru- mania. . . . But also so that afterward there would be no borders, no capitalists and no fascists at all. And so that Moscow, Kharkov and Kiev would become just as enormous, just as well built, as Berlin, Hamburg, New York, so that we would have skyscrapers, streets full of automobiles and bicycles, so that all the workers and peasants would go walking in fine clothes, wearing hats and watches. . . . And so that airplanes and dirigibles would go flying everywhere.7

For Communists of Kopelev’s generation, education was extremely impor- tant: to acquire an education was not just a path to personal success but also an obligation that one owed the party. Communists must be “constantly learn- ing, especially from the masses,” the Reichstag-fire hero Georgii Dimitrov told an audience at the Institute of Red Professors.8 In the real world, how- ever, studying in school was more important than learning from the masses. A network of party schools provided Communist administrators with a mixture of general and political education; in addition, many Communists were “mo- bilized” to attend college to study engineering, especially during the First Five-Year Plan. (Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Kosygin all had this experience in the early 1930s.) It was a party member’s duty to “work on himself” and raise his cultural level, even if he was not involved in a formal education program.

At the lower levels of the party, one of the touchstones of a good Commu- nist was having rid oneself of the superstition of religion. Conversely, one of the most common ideological offenses for a party member was to have al- lowed his wife or other female relative to remain a believer, to christen their children, attend church, or keep icons in the house. Party members were fre- quently cross-examined on this score, as in this dialogue reported from a local party cell meeting:

Did you baptise your children?

The last one to be baptised in my family was my daughter in 1926.

At what date did you break with religion.

In 1923.

It seems that there are still icons in your house.

Yes, that’s because my mother-in-law doesn’t want me to take them down! 9

18 Everyday Stalinism

Discipline and unity were high on the list of party values. They were spoken about in almost mystical terms even in the 1920s: as early as 1924, the speech in which Trotsky conceded defeat in the leadership struggle included the words “The party is always right” and “One cannot be right against the party.” One of the defendants in the Great Purge trials noted in his final plea that “the shameful example of my fall shows that the slightest rift with the Party, the slightest insincerity towards the Party, the slightest hesitation with regard to the leadership, with regard to the Central Committee, is enough to land you in the camp of counterrevolution.” 10 The requirements of demo- cratic centralism meant that every Communist was bound to obey unswerv- ingly any decision of the party’s highest organs. The old qualification that unswerving obedience was required once a decision had been reached lost its force as the pre-decision stage of public party discussion disappeared.

There existed a formal scale of punishments for Communists who violated party discipline, starting with a warning and proceeding through various lev- els of rebuke to expulsion, which meant exclusion from public life and depri- vation of privileges like access to special stores and health clinics.11 In practice, however, the scale of punishments went higher. Already in the late 1920s, members of the Left Opposition were sent into administrative exile in distant parts of the Soviet Union, and Trotsky was actually deported from the Soviet Union. During the Great Purges a few years later, execution of disgraced party members as “enemies of the people” became commonplace.

Vigilance—an attitude of watchful suspicion—was an important part of Communist mentalité. According to Dimitrov, a good Communist must “continually manifest the greatest vigilance in relation to the enemies and spies that secretly penetrate into our ranks.” A Communist who was not ceaselessly vigilant, that is, endlessly suspicious of his fellow citizens and even fellow party members, was failing in his duty to the party and falling into “Rightism.” Enemies were everywhere; and, most dangerous of all, these ene- mies were often disguised. A Communist must always stand ready to “un- mask” hidden enemies and show their “true face.” 12

Like freemasons, Communists had many rituals. They were brothers and their brotherhood was in some sense secret. Their status as Communists was related to their mastery of esoteric language. They had symbols they cher- ished, like the Red flag, and a history, including a martyrology, that every Communist had to know. They had a body of sacred texts, comprising the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, and were required to study new ad- ditions to the corpus like Stalin’s latest speeches and important Politburo res- olutions. There was an atmosphere of mystery in the party’s oblique forms of communication, only fully comprehensible to the initiated, and its Aesopian language practices. To be expelled from the party meant to be outcast from this community, cut off from the common purpose: in Bukharin’s words at his trial, “isolated from everybody, an enemy of the people, in an inhuman posi- tion, completely isolated from everything that constitutes the essence of life.” 13 “Don’t push me to despair,” wrote one Communist threatened with expulsion in less extreme circumstances, adding this pathetic postscript:

“The Party Is Always Right” 19

Now spring is coming, the May day holiday. People will be happy to be alive, cheerful, but as for me, I will be weeping in my soul. Can everything be collaps- ing this way? Is it possible that I could have become the enemy of the party which has formed me? No, it is a mistake.14

One of the key rituals through which vigilance was exercised was the “small-p” purge or cleansing,15 a periodic review of party membership to weed out undesirables. In the Cultural Revolution period, similar purges were conducted in all government offices as well, bringing excitement into the workaday bureaucratic routine. The proceedings would begin with an auto- biographical statement by the person under review, followed by interrogation by the purge commission and members of the audience. The questions could deal with any aspect of his political or personal life.

What was he doing before 1917 and during the October Revolution? Was he at the front? Was he ever arrested before the revolution? Did he have any disagree- ments with the party? Does he drink? . . . What does he think about Bukharin and the right deviation, about the kulak, the Five-Year Plan, the events in China? . . . Is it true that he has a private automobile and a pretty wife who was an ac- tress? . . . Did he get married in church? Did he baptize his son? . . . Whom did his sister marry? 16

In her memoirs, Elena Bonner, later wife of the dissident Andrei Sakharov, describes her childhood memories of a purge of the offices of the Communist International, probably in 1933. Her stepfather Gevork Alikhanov worked for the Comintern, and the purge meetings were held in the evenings after work over a period of weeks in the “Red Corner” of the Hotel Luxe, where the Alikhanov/Bonner family and other Comintern officials lived. Elena and other Comintern children hid behind the curtains and eavesdropped.

You could see that they were nervous. . . . They asked about people’s wives and sometimes about their children. It turned out that some people beat their wives and drank a lot of vodka. Batanya [Elena’s formidable grandmother] would have said that decent people don’t ask such questions. Sometimes the one being purged said that he wouldn’t beat his wife anymore or drink anymore. And a lot of them said about their work that they “wouldn’t do it anymore” and that “they understood everything.”

It reminded young Elena of being called into the teachers’ room at school for a dressing-down and having to say you were sorry. “But these people were more nervous than you were with the teacher. Some of them were practically crying. It was unpleasant watching them.” 17

There was a confessional as well as an intimidatory quality to these purge rituals, and when simple people went through them they often got side- tracked out of the political and social realm into personal confessions and rev- elations. But it was a special kind of confessional ritual: one in which there was no absolution. “Going through the purge” meant confessing your sins end- lessly, especially membership of oppositions and bad social origin, but there was no provision in the ritual for being relieved of the burden. You “recog- nized your errors,” you apologized, and, if lucky, you were sent away with a warning. But the errors were still there next time, for by the 1930s the party

20 Everyday Stalinism

was no longer interested in your “subjective” attitude to your sins, but only in the existence of a record of past sins in your file.18

Show trials, which also often featured public confessions, were organized for a broader audience. The show trial may be defined as a public theatrical performance in the form of a trial, didactic in purpose, intended not to estab- lish the guilt of the accused but rather to demonstrate the heinousness of the person’s crimes. As an entertainment-cum-agitational genre, it went back to the Civil War period, when extemporized theater of all kinds was very popular, and arose as a result of local initiative. In its early years, it often took the form of a theatricalized trial of a symbolic figure (“the kulak,” “the wife-beater”), though real-life offenders, persons accused of hooliganism or absenteeism from work, were also sometimes “prosecuted” in show trials as a local disci- plinary measure. These early trials did not result in real sentences.

A pioneering centrally organized show trial of former political opponents of the Bolsheviks (Right Socialist Revolutionaries) was held in 1923. But it was not until the Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s that show trials, fea- turing elaborately planned “scenarios” and intensive media coverage aimed at a national audience, became an important agitational tool of the Central Committee. In the Shakhty trial (1928) and the “Industrial Party” trial (1930), engineers and other “bourgeois specialists” were accused of sabotage and counterrevolutionary conspiracy in association with foreign powers.19 All confessed their guilt, providing circumstantial detail of their extraordinary (and in general totally fictitious) crimes, and all received sentences of death or substantial periods of imprisonment. Much the same pattern was followed in the better-known “Moscow trials” of the Great Purges period—the Zinoviev– Kamenev trial of 1936, the Piatakov trial of 1937, and the Bukharin trial of 1938—except that in the Moscow trials the defendants were not bourgeois specialists but top-ranking Communist leaders.

Whether Stalin and other Communist leaders believed in a literal sense in the conspiracies described in the show trials is a hard question to answer. In his secret correspondence with officials about the trials of the early 1930s, Stalin wrote as if he did believe—yet at the same time these letters could be read as coded instructions about what kind of scenario should be written. For the party leadership, as Terry Martin writes, the accusations made at the trials probably represented psychological rather than literal truth. But the leaders hoped ordinary people would take them literally; indeed, workers’ responses to the Shakhty trial, which included calls for still harsher punishment of the defendants, suggest that this was often the case.20

Conspiracy In 1926, a former Cheka man confided in Victor Serge, an old revolutionary, his secret knowledge of a monstrous plot. As Serge related their conversation,

The secret is that everything has been betrayed. From the years when Lenin was alive, treason has wormed its way into the Central Committee. He knows the names, he has the proofs. . . . At the peril of his life, he is submitting his analysis of the gigantic crime, studied over years, to the Central Committee. He

“The Party Is Always Right” 21

whispers the names of foreigners, of the most powerful capitalists, and of yet others which have an occult significance for him. . . . I follow his chain of reason- ing with the secret uneasiness that one feels in the presence of some lunatic logi- cian. . . . But in all that he says, he is driven by one basic idea which is not the idea of a madman: “We did not create the Revolution to come to this.” 21

This man may have been crazy, but the way of thinking was characteristic of Communists. Their work was being undermined by a conspiracy of people in- side and outside the Soviet Union whose hatred of the revolution was abso- lute. The Cheka man thought the center of the plot was the current party leadership, a position only marginally different from the one Stalin and Ezhov were to take in the Great Purges. For the rest, he was totally typical in his super-suspiciousness. Foreign capitalists were in league with hostile forces within the country. The conspirators were hidden; only the most diligent ef- forts could unmask them. Finally, and perhaps most important, these conspir- ators, with their ingrained hatred of the Soviet Union, were making everything go wrong. There must be a conspiracy, because otherwise the fact that the revolution was not turning out as planned was inexplicable. Someone must be to blame.22

The Soviet regime was adept at creating its own enemies, whom it then sus- pected of conspiracy against the state. It did so first by declaring that all mem- bers of certain social classes and estates—primarily former nobles, members of the bourgeoisie, priests, and kulaks—were by definition “class enemies,” re- sentful of their loss of privilege and likely to engage in counterrevolutionary conspiracy to recover them. The next step, taken at the end of the 1920s, was the “liquidation as a class” of certain categories of class enemies, notably ku- laks and, to a lesser extent, Nepmen and priests. This meant that the victims were expropriated, deprived of the possibility of continuing their previous way of earning a living, and often arrested and exiled. Unfortunately this did not reduce the danger of conspiracy against the state but probably only increased it. For, as Stalin (wise after the fact?) realized, a member of an enemy class did not become any better disposed to Soviet power after his class was liquidated. On the contrary, he was likely to be full of anger and resentment. The person who had been dekulakized was a more desperate, intransigent enemy than the kulak. Moreover, he had very likely fled to the cities and disguised himself, as- suming a more acceptable identity as a worker. He had become a hidden en- emy, hence more dangerous as a potential conspirator.23

Enemies were not the only conspirators in the Soviet world. Remarkably, the old prerevolutionary self-designation of the party as “conspiratorial” re- mained in use (albeit secret use) into the 1930s, and Communists were regu- larly urged in internal party documents to observe “conspiracy” and “conspiratorialness,” that is, to maintain secrecy about party affairs.24 In the old days, conspiracy had been a necessity of the fight against the Tsarist regime; under postrevolutionary conditions, the awkward question “conspir- acy against whom?” hung in the air. “The Soviet people” was one possible an- swer, though it is implausible that Communists or any other rulers should perceive themselves as engaged in a malevolent conspiracy against the nation;

22 Everyday Stalinism

“the encircling capitalist world” was another. But perhaps the best way of un- derstanding the Communists’ attachment to conspiracy is to see the party, in their eyes, as a kind of freemasonry, whose ability to act for good in the world depended on protecting its inner life from the hostile scrutiny of outsiders.

An increasing number of party affairs were being handled in secrecy from the beginning of the 1930s. In the late 1920s, a procedure was introduced whereby Politburo and Central Committee documents were sent out to local party branches with strict limitations on the persons allowed to read them and the requirement to return them within a few days (at the end of 1938, even this stopped). Minutes of the Central Control Commission were similarly re- stricted: it was “absolutely forbidden” for them to be shown to persons not on the approved list to read them, or to be copied or cited in public; and the min- utes had to be returned. A Communist who violated the secrecy rules, even in a speech to a factory meeting full of presumed class allies, could be accused of “betraying the party to the working class.” 25

Secrecy was invading government as well as party practice. Among the top- ics classified as “top secret” or “secret” in internal government and party com- munications were military and mobilization plans, including defense industry construction; export of precious metals; important inventions; OGPU reports on the mood of the population and other matters; prosecutions under article 58 of the Criminal Code, which dealt with crimes against the state; and ad- ministrative exile, deportation, and special settlements. Strikes and workers’ protests were also classified topics, though at the lower level of “not for publi- cation.” Reports on cases of plague, cholera, typhus, and other infectious dis- eases were classified as well.26

One reason secrecy had become so important, we may assume, is that the Communist rulers were doing things they were ashamed of, or at least thought that outsiders would have difficulty understanding. In the early years of the revolution, the Bolsheviks had made a point of not being ashamed of their practice of terror, which they claimed to be a necessary and even con- structive part of revolution: in his radical days, circa 1920, the later Rightist Nikolai Bukharin described it as “a method of creating communist mankind out of the human materials of the capitalist epoch,” and another enthusiast called it “a source of great moral encouragement.” 27 Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks’ handling of public relations after the suppression of the Kronstadt sailors’ revolt in 1921 suggests that they were ashamed and deeply embar- rassed by this event; and the collectivization struggle and its aftermath of fam- ine produced similar reactions from the regime. The old defiant, unapologetic stance about violence by the revolutionary state was replaced by evasion, eu- phemism, and denial. By 1933, a secret Politburo order was in force forbid- ding newspapers to report executions without special clearance.28

It is true that in the mid 1930s the secret police was greatly publicized in certain connections and its leaders acclaimed as heroes. The NKVD’s big pro- jects, like the building of White Sea Canal, were acclaimed for “reforging” the convicts who worked on them, its officers were honored and decorated, and its border guards were held up as exemplars for Soviet youth. At the end of

“The Party Is Always Right” 23

1937, the NKVD’s twentieth anniversary was celebrated with fanfare, and the Kazakh bard Dzhambul hailed its leader, Nikolai Ezhov, as “a flame, burning the serpents’ nests,” and a “bullet for all scorpions and serpents.” 29 But the presumably massive growth in the security agency and its network of inform- ers in the course of the 1930s was (and remains) a state secret; and the NKVD’s more mundane activities like surveillance, arrest, and interrogation were usu- ally treated as a dirty secret and kept under wraps. It was standard practice for a person released after arrest or interrogation to be required to sign an agree- ment not to speak of what had happened to him.

Stalin’s Signals In principle, the Soviet Communist Party had no leader. It had only a Central Committee, elected by its periodic national congresses of delegates from local party organizations, and three standing bureaus of the Central Committee elected in the same way: the Politburo, a group of seven to twelve members in charge of political and policy matters, and the Orgburo and Secretariat, both of which dealt with organizational and personnel questions. In the mid 1920s, however, in the course of the undeclared succession struggle that raged after Lenin’s death, Stalin had used his position as party secretary to stack local or- ganizations and congresses with his supporters.30 In the 1930s, Stalin was still general secretary of the party, as he had been from 1922 and would be until 1952, but he no longer spent the time with personnel files and appointments that had characterized his rise to power. He was now acknowledged as the party’s supreme leader, its vozhd’. Although he retained his previous de- meanor as a simple and accessible man (not flashy and arrogant like his main rival for power, Trotsky), his humility had a special character: when he modestly and unobtrusively entered the hall at a party congress now, the whole audience rose to its feet to give him a standing ovation. Although Stalin at times deprecated his cult, he also tolerated and perhaps covertly encour- aged it.31

For Communists of the old guard, the Stalin cult was probably something of an embarrassment. Yet in their eyes too, he was becoming a charismatic leader, though of a somewhat different kind than for the broad public. Stalin’s public image in the 1930s, like the Tsars’ before him, was that of a quasi-sacred leader, font of justice and mercy, and benevolent protector of the weak; he was often photographed smiling paternally on shy peasant women and children. To the party elite, in contrast, Stalin was known as “the boss,” whose main characteristics were sharpness and shrewdness of mind, decisive- ness, the capacity for hard work, and dislike for fancy rhetoric and other kinds of personal flamboyance. His associates also knew him to have an excellent memory for slights and a penchant and formidable talent for political intrigue.32

In the Politburo, the convention of an assembly of equals was maintained. Stalin usually chaired, but he tended to sit quietly smoking his pipe and let others have their say first. (This underlined his lack of pretension, but it also gave Stalin the advantage of having others show their hands before he did.)

24 Everyday Stalinism

Arguments occurred in the Politburo, even heated ones in which the volatile Georgian Sergo Ordzhonikidze would lose his temper. There were also sharp factional disputes between Politburo members based on their institutional af- filiations: Ordzhonikidze, for example, would speak for the cause of heavy in- dustry, Klim Voroshilov for the armed forces, Sergei Kirov for Leningrad. But very rarely were there arguments in which a Politburo member knowingly set himself at odds with Stalin.33

“The Politburo is a fiction,” one insider said in the early 1930s. What he meant was that the formal Politburo meetings—large-scale affairs attended not only by Politburo members but also by Central Committee members, representatives of many government agencies, and selected journalists—were not where the real business got done. Serious business was handled by a smaller group selected by Stalin who met privately in an apartment or in Sta- lin’s office in the Kremlin. At any given moment, the group might include in- dividuals who were not formally Politburo members. It also routinely excluded some Politburo members who were in disfavor or regarded as light- weights, like Mikhail Kalinin.34

There was an inner circle in the Politburo, but even its members had to be wary of Stalin’s disapproval. Viacheslav Molotov, the leadership’s no. 2 man for most of the 1930s and Stalin’s close associate, put up with the arrest of sev- eral of his trusted assistants during the Great Purges; in 1939, his wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, was dismissed from her position as Minister of Fisheries on the grounds that she had “involuntarily facilitated” the activity of “spies” in her milieu. Threats to family members became a favored technique of Stalin’s for keeping his associates under control. Ordzhonikidze’s brother was ar- rested in 1936 on suspicion of anti-Soviet activities. Kalinin’s wife was ar- rested as an enemy of the people while he continued to serve as President of the Soviet Union; the same was to happen after the war to Molotov’s wife. Mikhail Kaganovich, former head of the Soviet defence industry and brother of Lazar, a Politburo member who remained one of Stalin’s closest associates, was arrested and shot at the end of the 1930s. It is indicative of the distance that separated Stalin from even his closest Politburo colleagues and the inten- sity of fear in the purge years that of these four political heavyweights (Molotov, Kalinin, Ordzhonikidze, and Kaganovich), only Ordzhonikidze seems to have protested vigorously to Stalin and unqualifiedly asserted his brother’s innocence.35

This is only one example of Stalin’s characteristic way of keeping his associ- ates off-balance. Insight into this aspect of the man is provided by a letter he wrote his wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, when he was on vacation in 1930. She had asked him with some irritation why he had given her one date for his return from the South and his colleagues another. He replied that he had given her the correct date—but “I put about that rumor that I could return only at the end of October via Poskrebyshev [Stalin’s secretary], as a conspiratorial measure.36

No Politburo member could be sure that he would not fall out of favor with Stalin, as Bukharin had done at the end of the 1920s and then, even more

“The Party Is Always Right” 25

disastrously, in 1936. When this happened, the news did not come directly from Stalin but through various signs of slipping influence and clout: exclu- sion from inner-circle meetings, derogatory comments appearing in Pravda or Izvestiia, or rejection of routine patronage interventions on behalf of cli- ents and subordinates. The result was that the fallen leader found himself stig- matized and outcast by his erstwhile colleagues, almost all of whom followed the unwritten rule that a disgraced person should not be acknowledged or greeted in public.37

The obliqueness of Stalin’s communications of favor and disfavor in high politics was matched by a similar lack of explicitness in policy formulation. This may seem strange, since Stalin’s regime was notoriously insistent on obe- dience to central directives, and how can one obey when one has not clearly been told what to do? The fact is, however, that important policy changes were often “signalled” rather than communicated in the form of a clear and detailed directive. A signal might be given in a speech or article by Stalin or an editorial or review in Pravda or via a show trial or the disgrace of a prominent official associated with particular policies. What all these signals had in com- mon was that they indicated a shift of policy in a particular area without spell- ing out exactly what the new policy entailed or how it should be implemented.

The collectivization drive in the winter of 1929–30 is a case in point. In contrast to previous major Russian agrarian reforms, such as the 1861 emanci- pation of the serfs or the Stolypin reforms of the early twentieth century, no detailed instructions about how to collectivize were ever issued, and local offi- cials who asked for such instructions were rebuked. The signal for a radical shift in policy toward the countryside was given in Stalin’s speech to the Com- munist Academy in December 1929, although it offered no specific guidance on collectivization other than the instruction that kulaks were to be “liqui- dated as a class.” The closest thing to an explicit public policy statement on collectivization was Stalin’s letter “Dizzy with success” published in Pravda on March 1, 1930—but this appeared only after two disastrous months of all-out collectivization and constituted a repudiation of much of what had been done without precise instructions by local officials.

A less momentous example was Stalin’s letter to the editors of a journal of party history, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, in 1931, endlessly cited as a major policy pronouncement for the cultural field. Written in a passionate polemical style, its general message seemed to be that Communist intellectuals, inclined to hair-splitting and faction-fighting, needed to clean up their act, but what that meant concretely, except in the specific and apparently trivial case with which the letter dealt, was obscure. Its practical policy meanings were con- structed only after the fact, as each cultural institution held long, painful meetings “drawing organizational conclusions from comrade Stalin’s letter,” that is, deciding whom to discipline and punish.38

There are various ways of explaining this surprising reticence. In the first place, Stalin’s regime was a great generator of mystification, consciously or unconsciously treating mystery as an enhancer and sanctifier of power. It was the aura of mystery and secrecy settling over the Kremlin in the 1930s that

26 Everyday Stalinism

perhaps more than anything else set Stalin’s style of rule apart from Lenin’s. In the second place, the regime operated with a primitive administrative ma- chinery that responded to only a few simple commands, such as “stop,” “go,” “faster,” “slow down,” which could adequately be conveyed by signals. More- over, the regime itself had a low degree of legislative competence: on the occa- sions when the government did try to issue detailed policy instructions, its decrees and orders usually had to be repeatedly clarified and expanded before the message was satisfactorily communicated.39

There were also political advantages, at least from Stalin’s Byzantine per- spective. In the event that a new policy went wrong, as in the case of collectiv- ization, signals could be more easily repudiated and reinterpreted than explicit policy statements Signals were ambiguous, which was useful if there was a lack of leadership consensus behind a policy, if a new policy violated existing Soviet law, or if its nature was such that the regime did not want foreigners to under- stand it. All three of these last factors were at play, for example, in the case of policy toward the church in 1929–30. Soviet law and administrative practice through most of the 1920s extended tolerance, at least of a limited sort, to re- ligion and forbade the arbitrary closing or destruction of functioning churches. A substantial group of “soft-line” Communist leaders, mainly working in government rather than party agencies, strongly supported these policies, as of course did international opinion. But in 1929, with the onset of the Cultural Revolution and an upsurge of radical militancy in the party and Komsomol, a powerful “hard line” in favor of mass closing of churches and ar- rests of priests became dominant and evidently won Stalin’s approval. Secret “hard-line” instructions were issued to local party organizations but not pub- lished.40 When the anti-religious drive inflamed the anger of the rural popula- tion, not to mention that of the Pope and other Western church spokesmen, the regime was able to back off from a policy that it had never publicly en- dorsed anyway.

In cases like these, ambiguity and secrecy may have had political advan- tages, but they also had enormous practical disadvantages. In the church case, for example, Soviet officials in charge of religious affairs asked plaintively how they were to explain the actions of local authorities to church representatives when the formal law was actually on the churches’ side. They pointed out in vain that an instruction allowing former priests to register at labor exchanges (giving them the right to employment) was unlikely to have a beneficial effect as long as it remained secret and hence unknown to labor-exchange officers.41

The combination of ambiguous policy signals and the cult of secrecy could produce absurd results, as when certain categories of officials could not be in- formed of relevant instructions because the instructions were secret. In one blatant example, the theater censorship and the Ministry of Enlightenment, headed by A. V. Lunacharsky, spent weeks arguing at cross purposes about Mikhail Bulgakov’s controversial play Days of the Turbins, despite the fact that the Politburo had instructed the Ministry that the play could be staged, be- cause “this decree was secret, known to only key officials in the administration of art, and Lunacharsky was not at liberty to divulge it.” 42 A few years later,

“The Party Is Always Right” 27

after Stalin had expressed strong views on cultural policy in a private letter that had circulated widely, if unofficially, on the grapevine, Lunacharsky begged him to allow publication of the letter so that people would know what the party line on art actually was.43

Some of Stalin’s cultural signals were even more minimalist, involving tele- phone calls to writers or other cultural figures whose content was then in- stantly broadcast on the Moscow and Leningrad intelligentsia grapevine. A case in point was his unexpected telephone call to Bulgakov in 1930 in re- sponse to Bulgakov’s letter complaining of mistreatment by theater and cen- sorship officials. The overt message of the call was one of encouragement to Bulgakov. By extension, the “signal” to the non-Communist intelligentsia was that it was not Stalin who harrassed them but only lower-level officials and militants who did not understand Stalin’s policy.

This case is particularly interesting because the security police (GPU, at this date) monitored the effectiveness of the signal. In his report on the impact of Stalin’s call, a GPU agent noted that the literary and artistic intelligentsia had been enormously impressed. “It’s as if a dam had burst and everyone around saw the true face of comrade Stalin.” People speak of Stalin’s simplicity and accessibility. They “talk of him warmly and with love, retelling in various ver- sions the legendary history with Bulgakov’s letter.” They say that Stalin is not to blame for the bad things that happen:

He follows the right line, but around him are scoundrels. These scoundrels per- secuted Bulgakov, one of the most talented Soviet writers. Various literary ras- cals were making a career out of persecution of Bulgakov, and now Stalin has given them a slap in the face.44

The signals with Stalin’s personal signature usually pointed in the direction of greater relaxation and tolerance, not increased repression. This was surely not because Stalin inclined to the “soft line,” but rather because he preferred to avoid too close an association with hard-line policies that were likely to be unpopular with domestic and foreign opinion. His signals often involved a “good Tsar” message: “the Tsar is benevolent; it is the wicked boyars who are responsible for all the injustice.” Sometimes this ploy seems to have worked, but in other cases the message evoked popular skepticism. When Stalin de- plored the excesses of local officials during collectivization in a letter, “Dizzy with success,” published in Pravda in 1930, the initial response in the villages was often favorable. After the famine, however, Stalin’s “good Tsar” ploy no longer worked in the countryside, and was even mocked by its intended audi- ence.45

Bureaucrats and Bosses Nobody was more critical of Soviet bureaucracy than the Soviet leaders. Sta- lin’s attack on collectivization officials was part of a whole genre of high-level criticisms of bureaucracy, and “bureaucracy” was always a deeply pejorative word in the Soviet lexicon. It was the revolutionary dream to communicate directly with the population without intermediaries, to follow the spirit of the revolution, not the dead letter of the law. In the early years, this meant that

28 Everyday Stalinism

Communist leaders were highly suspicious of the influence of Tsarist hold- overs in the state administration and felt more comfortable using the suppos- edly less bureaucratic party apparatus to carry out their will. By the mid 1930s, the concern about Tsarist holdovers had waned, but bureaucrats were still routinely pilloried at “self-criticism” meetings at enterprises and in the Soviet press. Members of the public were encouraged to send letters to higher authorities detailing cases of abuse of power by officials in their districts. The fact that these guilty officials were now usually Communists was irrelevant: the party leaders had little confidence in their own bureaucratic cadres, and constantly bemoaned their lack of education, common sense, and a work ethic.

The stupidity, rudeness, inefficiency, and venality of Soviet bureaucrats constituted the main satirical targets of the Soviet humorous journal, Krokodil. Its stories and cartoons illustrated the various methods by which of- ficials secured scarce goods and luxuries for themselves and their acquain- tances and denied them to the rest of the population.46 They showed officials absent from their workplaces, slacking off when present, refusing desperate citizens’ pleas for the precious “papers” that were necessary for even the sim- plest operations in Soviet life, like buying a railroad ticket. An eloquent Krokodil cartoon, headed “Bureaucrat on the trapeze,” shows two circus art- ists in performance. One of them, representing the hapless citizen, has just launched himself into the air from his trapeze. The other, representing the bu- reaucrat, is supposed to catch him, but in fact sits smugly on his own trapeze holding a sign saying “Come back tomorrow.” 47

The problems were compounded by the fact that “Stalin’s revolution” at the beginning of the 1930s had greatly expanded the functions and responsi- bilities of Soviet bureaucracy. Private trade had been abolished; hence a new state trade bureaucracy had to be created almost from scratch, not to mention new bureaucracies to administer the rationing system and set up public dining rooms to feed people in compensation for the deficiencies of state trade. Col- lectivized agriculture required an expanded bureaucracy for agricultural pro- curements and kolkhoz supervision. Services ranging from tailoring to shoe-repair were now in state or cooperative hands, a distinction without a real difference. The First Five-Year Plan industrialization drive expanded the state’s industrial bureaucracy, while the repression that accompanied it ex- panded its secret police. Internal passports and urban registration permits, in- troduced in 1932, added more layers of bureaucracy to everyday life, as did the requirement that personnel departments of all state agencies maintain ex- tensive personal dossiers on their employees.

These new bureaucrats carrying out new tasks were inexperienced by defi- nition; they were also usually poorly educated and inefficient. They could not count on the support of the regime, whose record of repudiating and punish- ing its servitors was formidable even before the Great Purges.48 They were feared, resented, envied, and despised by ordinary citizens, who frequently denounced them to higher authorities. Yet for all this disapproval, bureau- cracy flourished. In his own little world, the bureaucrat was king.

“The Party Is Always Right” 29

“Little Stalins” Stalin was not the only Soviet leader with a cult. As a young British scholar has recently pointed out, he was not even the only leader to whom the exalted word “vozhd’,” a term often seen as comparable to the Nazi “Führer,” was ap- plied.49 It was not just that Stalin was acquiring the aura of a charismatic leader, but that leadership itself was acquiring that aura. Newspapers wrote of “our leaders” (nashi vozhdi) in the plural, referring to the Politburo. Some Politburo members like Ordzhonikidze, the popular industrial leader, Molotov, head of the Soviet government, and, for a few years, Nikolai Ezhov, head of the NKVD, were celebrated in terms almost as extravagant as Stalin. In 1936, a diarist noted that on revolutionary holidays “the portraits of party leaders are now displayed the same way icons used to be: a round portrait framed and attached to a pole . . . just like what people used to do before on church holidays.” 50

Tsaritsyn on the Volga became Stalingrad in Stalin’s honor, Iuzovka in the Donbass became Stalino. But other leaders, living and dead, were similarly honored by having cities or regions named after them. The city of Vladikavkaz became Ordzhonikidze; Samara became Kuibyshev, Perm became Molotov, and Lugansk became Voroshilovgrad, not to mention some ill-fated name changes that later had to be reversed (e.g., Trotsk, Zinovevsk, and Rykovo). In addition, it was the custom to name enterprises and collective farms in honor of party leaders, like the Kaganovich Metro in Moscow. Ordzhonikidze, Kaganovich, and even the future “wrecker” Iurii Piatakov (Ordzhonikidze’s deputy) all surpassed Stalin in the number of industrial enterprises renamed in their honor in 1935. Streets were also renamed after political leaders and prominent cultural figures, with Moscow’s main street, Tverskaia, becoming Gorky Street (for the writer Maxim Gorky), Miasnitskaia becoming Kirov Street, and Bolshaia Lubianka becoming Dzerzhinsky Street. In the provinces, the same kind of naming and name-changing went on in honor of regional party leaders.51

On occasion, Stalin or someone else would point out that this was all becoming a bit excessive. Stalin, for example, rejected the suggestion that Moscow be renamed Stalinodar in his honor. When the practice of glorifica- tion of leaders was criticized, however, it was most often in connection with the disgrace of the political leader in question or with a general critique of “little Stalins” out in the provinces. When large numbers of provincial party leaders were disgraced during the Great Purges, their local “cults of personality” were prime objects of criticism. A typical comment from that era, directed at the head of a regional railroad, noted that “toadyism and servility flourish on the railroad. Comrade Bazeev encourages flatterers. It’s already standard on the railroad that whenever comrade Bazeev shows up anywhere, he is met with stormy applause and even shouts of ‘Hurrah.’” 52

Sometimes local personality cults were attributed to the backwardness of the population and “leaderism” was treated as an ethnic disease. This was the

30 Everyday Stalinism

approach that the head of a regional party organization took in his mild criti- cism of a subordinate who was top party official in the national region of Chuvashia:

Not long ago comrade Petrov—secretary of the Chuvash party committee— thanked our regional committee . . . from the heart for saving him from the dis- ease of leaderism. You know that comrade Petrov is a modest man, a good Bolshevik, a good worker, popular in his organization. But in Chuvashiia they began to look on comrade Petrov as they do on Kalmykov in Kabardino- Balkariia, as they do on other national leaders who[se status is] also exaggerated. In Chuvashiia some comrades thought: why shouldn’t comrade Petrov be Kalmykov? And when such an atmosphere is created, you don’t have to wait long for executants. They began to write poems and addresses, and invented the “six conditions of comrade Petrov” (laughter). Petrov at first frowned and said “What is this for?,” but then more or less got used to it.53

Eugenia Ginzburg gives a vivid description of the metamorphosis of the Kazan party leader, Mikhail Razumov, an Old Bolshevik of impeccable prole- tarian origins, with whom her husband worked closely in the pre-purge years. In 1930, Razumov “still lived in one room in my father-in-law’s flat, and sliced a sausage for his dinner with a penknife on a piece of newspaper.” By 1933, he was being hailed locally as “the foremost worker in Tartary,” and when the region received the Order of Lenin for success in collectivization, “[Razumov’s] portrait was carried triumphantly through the town and enter- prising artists copied it in any medium from oats to lentils for exhibition at ag- ricultural shows.” 54

Of course, there was more to being a Communist leader than having your portrait carried through town. Communist leaders projected themselves as tough guys, an image that generally corresponded with reality. They culti- vated a peremptory style of command, barking orders, demanding instant obedience and no backchat, and insisting on the Soviet version of the bottom line, which was to meet plan targets at all costs. Consultation or lengthy delib- eration was a sign of weakness; a leader must be decisive.

At its worst, this kind of managerial style involved a great deal of bullying, bluster, and cursing. “He is very crude in dealing with rank-and-file Commu- nists. Shouting is his only form of communication with people,” wrote a critic of one party official in Iaroslavl. He “likes to show off his talents to bystand- ers,” shouting and throwing people out of his office for no good reason, ran another complaint, directed against a department head in the Leningrad city party committee. “A cloud of cursing hangs in the air of the department. Not for nothing does the head of the department not want to hire women for cleri- cal work.” 55

The idealized leader of the 1930s, modeled on the real-life industrial man- agers, heroes of the Five-Year Plans, who built and ran Soviet metallurgical and machine-building plants, was anything but an office type. He was out in the mud at the construction site, hard on himself and everyone else, ruthless if need be, tireless, and practical. A manager’s task was to get more out of people than they thought they had to give, using exhortation, intimidation, threats,

“The Party Is Always Right” 31

arrests, or whatever it took. A lot of work was carried out in “campaign” style, that is, in short, hectic bursts of concentrated attention to particular tasks, not through routine, incremental activity. This made life at the factory resemble life at the front, justifying another military metaphor—“storming.” Storming was what took place in the frantic days at the end of each month as each enter- prise tried to fulfil its monthly plan. The best Soviet managers were risk-takers; indeed, they had to break rules and take risks to do their jobs, for regular channels and legal methods would not provide them with the parts and raw materials they needed to achieve plan targets.56

Among the top party leaders, Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Lazar Kaganovich best exemplified the hard-driving, can-do style as heads of heavy industry and the railroads, respectively. Ordzhonikidze was “a typical administrator of the Stalinist type, energetic, coarse, and tough,” a Russian historian writes. “He had completely mastered only one method of leadership—pressure on subor- dinates, keeping a constant eye on his ‘property,’ and promoting managers who were capable of guaranteeing success locally by the same means.” From those who worked for him, Ordzhonikidze expected dedication, results, and loyalty. But he also offered protection, intervening energetically on behalf of “his people” when they got into trouble with the party, the secret police, or other control agencies. (After Ordzhonikidze died, probably by his own hand, at the start of the Great Purges, Stalin noted that this unquestioning loyalty to subordinates and strong commitment to his role as a patron was one of his defects.)57

The practice of patronage, however, was characteristic not only of Ordzhonikidze but of all Soviet leaders, starting with Stalin and going down to local level. They all tried to have “their own” people working for them— people who were personally loyal, associated their interests with their boss’s, relied on him as a patron, and so on. As the political scientist Ken Jowitt sug- gests, the Soviet system of rule was personalistic and “patrimonial,” meaning that an institution was like a fiefdom, its status and power inseparable from that of the man in charge. Bosses of this type acted as patrons for a stable of political clients, subordinates, and associates from whom they expected loy- alty and offered protection in exchange. With his “family” around him, the lo- cal boss could hope to keep local challenges or criticism of his rule to a minimum. He could also hope that, with the “family” controlling informa- tion flow, local problems and shortfalls would be successfully concealed from the probing eyes of the center.58

These functions of local mutual-protection circles were well understood in the center. As Stalin complained at a Central Committee plenary meeting early in 1937, regional party leaders were choosing their subordinates on personalistic, not objective, grounds—because they were “acquaintances, friends, from the same part of the country, personally devoted, masters at flat- tering their bosses.” Local elites form self-protective “families,” whose mem- bers “try to live in peace, not to offend each other, and not to wash their dirty linen in public, praise each other and from time to time send the center empty and nauseating reports about their successes.” When a local boss was trans-

32 Everyday Stalinism

ferred, he would seek to take a retinue or “tail” of his most trusted subordi- nates and specialists along with him. In his speech to the Central Committee, Stalin described this practice as pointless, a “petty-bourgeois philistine” ap- proach to personnel matters, but in a draft of the speech he noted its political rationale: “What does it mean to drag after you a whole group of pals?. . . It means that you received a certain independence from local organizations [presumably meaning secret police and control agencies] and, if you like, a certain independence from the Central Committee.” 59

Stalin’s characterization is borne out by this picture, drawn from local NKVD archives, of how one regional “family” in the Urals secured the loyalty of its members and defended its interests.

The clique employed a range of tactics to ensure its control, mostly in the nature of unsubtle positive and negative reinforcements. The positive reinforcements were largely financial. The members of the clique and “especially important members of the [regional] Party aktiv” were ensured an excellent standard of living in exchange for their loyalty. They received large apartments, dachas, spe- cial access to consumer goods and food supplies and large supplements to their salaries . . . Negative reinforcements were the flip side of the graft coin. Those who made trouble for the members of the clique were removed from their posts, thereby losing all the attendant privileges. The Party [purges] of the mid-1930s … were favoured means of removing untrusted colleagues. It was generally not difficult to find some element from an enemy’s past and use it to get him purged. Once the offending parties had been removed, those who replaced them were carefully chosen, known friends of the clique. They were coopted, rather than elected by an obkom plenum as had been the practice in the 1920s and early 1930s.60

“Petty tutelage” was the contemporary Soviet term for administrative micromanagement, in particular the bureaucratic desire to control even the minutiae of everyday life. This had a long history in Russia, going back at least as far as Peter the Great, with his famous instructions to the nobility on how to dress and comport themselves in public. Eighteenth-century serf-owners sometimes dressed their serfs in uniforms, drilled them, and prescribed de- tailed rules for their conduct. In the reign of Alexander I, General Arakcheev’s military colonies, where peasant soldiers had to conform to set standards of hygiene and propriety, were models of the same kind of administrative prac- tice.61

Nineteenth-century Russian literature provides many similar examples, no- tably in the works of Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, whose History of a Town (1869–70) presents a series of satirical portraits of officials who arrive in the provinces with detailed and totally unrealistic blueprints for universal betterment. Critics of Soviet “petty tutelage” often cited Chekhov’s character Prishibeev, a retired NCO, “who had grown accustomed to giving orders in the barracks and still conducted himself in the same bossy way in re- tirement,” going round the village “ordering people not to sing songs and not to light candles” on the grounds that there was no law that specifically allowed these activities.62

One of Krokodil’s examples of petty tutelage was the order—apparently

“The Party Is Always Right” 33

genuine—issued by the director of a starch factory about shaving and haircutting.

In view of the opening of a hairdresser’s at the plant it is categorically forbidden to perform haircutting and shaving privately. I instruct the Commendant of the plant, Botarev, and the medical assistant Chikin to keep an eye on this and if he discovers anyone shaving at home to make out a charge and turn the matter over to the court for criminal prosecution and the exaction of a fine. (Signed) Direc- tor Kaplan.63

Nadezhda Mandelstam provides another example of this bureaucratic style in her description of a kolkhoz chairman she encountered in the mid 1930s.

Three days before we met him Dorokhov had issued an order that every house in the village must display two pots of flowers on the windowsill. He issued or- ders like this in a constant stream, and they were all counched in the language of the first years of the Revolution. He went around to a dozen houses with us to check whether his instructions had been complied with. He set enormous store by this measure, since he believed that flowers imbibe the moisture and thus help “against the rheumatism.” The village women explained to him that they had nothing against flowers, but that one couldn’t get pots for love or money, and that in any case three days was not enough time to grow burdock or nettles, never mind flowers. Dorokhov was furious, and only our presence restrained him from meting out punishment on the spot.64

Dorokhov’s aims were cultural and utopian, and he punished people by beating them with his fists. But other micromanagers had a different aim and mode of punishment: their objective was to create misdemeanors that pro- vided the pretext for levying fines, and these fines often went directly into their pockets. Peasants complained frequently about such practices on the part of district officials and kolkhoz chairmen. It was alleged that in a district in the Voronezh region, one rural soviet chairman imposed fines on kolkhoz members totalling 60,000 rubles in 1935 and 1936: “He imposed the fines on any pretext and at his own discretion—for not showing up for work, for not attending literacy classes, for ‘impolite language,’ for not having dogs tied up . . . Kolkhoznik M. A. Gorshkov was fined 25 roubles for the fact that ‘in his hut the floors were not washed.’” 65

A Stalingrad city ordinance of 1938 forbade people to travel on the street- car in dirty clothes on pain of a 100-ruble fine. The investigator who reported this noted that “when I asked why that point was included, I received the an- swer that in this way we are pushing man into a cultured attitude to himself.” In Astrakhan, a man received a 100-ruble fine for wearing a hat. By order of the central Ministry for Communal Economy, only singing birds could be kept in cages in apartments and it was forbidden to store food in the urban Russian’s basic “refrigerator” of the period—the space between the outer and inner window.66

The passion of local authorities for micro-management of the everyday life of the population received particular critical attention at the end of the 1930s, although whether this was because it got worse during the Great Purges is hard to determine. In May 1938, a national meeting of regional public prose-

34 Everyday Stalinism

cutors deplored the tendency of district and city soviets to issue compulsory ordinances on trivial matters. As the Belorussian prosecutor told the meeting, to hilarity from the floor:

Turov district soviet published a compulsory resolution in which it forbade old people and young children from lighting matches under pain of administrative penalty (100 ruble fine) as an anti-fire measure. Vyshinsky: Even in the kitchen. Voices from the floor: It’s out of Gogol’s Inspector General. The Rechitsa city soviet published a compulsory resolution which said that all houseowners and heads of institutions were obligated to build new asphalt pave- ments and to paint their houses. Moreover it even established the color of the paint, for example, bright green on Soviet Street, bright yellow on Lenin Street, blue on Cooperative Street, and dark green for all the rest. For violation of that resolution there was a fine of 100 rubles.67

A Girl with Character The aktiv, the collective noun from which the term “activist” is derived, was a kind of ginger group in all kinds of Soviet settings. Party and Komsomol members were activists almost by definition. In trade unions, factories, offices, universities, and other workplaces and associations, the membership was di- vided into an activist minority, whose function was “to call to action, rouse to greater efforts,” and the rest, who were the objects of activization. It was to be expected that party and Komsomol members would be activists in any institu- tion or association to which they belonged. But there was room for “non-party activists” as well—people with energy or ambition who were will- ing to work with the party people.68

The main categories of activists, apart from Communists, were Komsomol members (from the Communist youth movement), Stakhanovites (workers and peasants honored for outstanding production), worker and peasant corre- spondents who served as stringers for newspapers, and members of the wives’ volunteer movement. To be an activist was, in the first place, to be a volunteer who helped party and soviet bureaucracies to carry out tasks such as enrolling pupils in school, collecting state procurements quotas from the collective farms, or improving labor discipline in factories. This aspect of activism was naturally highly unpopular with the non-activist population, which often re- garded the activists with the same disfavor as schoolchildren regard teachers’ pets.

But activists also had other functions. Komsomol activists from the towns, proud of their militancy, were prominent in the collectivization and anti-religious drives of the early 1930s, armed and outfitted in a quasi-military uniform of “knickers, botinki [boots], stockings, semi-military tunic, belt, and a sam-brown belt (worn diagonally across the chest from shoulder to hip).” 69 Throughout the decade, they considered it their special task to keep watch on bureaucracy and expose official abuses, “regardless of who commit- ted them.” These were the aspects of activism that were exciting and appeal- ing to many young people. The watchdog-on-bureaucracy function also had

“The Party Is Always Right” 35

some legitimacy with a broader population, insofar as the activists were repre- senting a public interest in attacking unpopular bureaucrats. The paradox of activism in the 1930s was that it involved supporting the regime yet simulta- neously criticizing its executants.

The critical aspect was personified by Katia, a humble state farm activist in the Soviet Far East whose problems with her boss are the starting point for the story of a popular musical of the late 1930s, A Girl with Character.

On the screen appears a bright-haired girl. She is delivering an angry speech un- masking her boss, the director of a state grain farm, before a noisy, jeering audi- ence of his sycophantic followers. Such is the viewer’s first acquaintance with the heroine of the film. . . Katia Ivanova. With Katia, we are indignant with the bu- reaucrat Meshkov and wait impatiently for [his crimes] to be exposed.70

Since district officials are hand in glove with Meshkov, Katia’s complaints are brushed aside. But this “girl with character” will not accept defeat. Full of high spirits and youthful daring, she makes the long journey to Moscow to find justice. For her, activism means challenging authority—but she challenges it with the confidence that in the Kremlin, at the highest level, such behavior is applauded and expected of young Soviet patriots.

Stories like Katia’s figure prominently in memoirs of former activists, espe- cially Komsomol members, of this generation. For a number of the young ref- ugees and defectors interviewed in Munich shortly after the war, the most memorable aspect of their lives in the Komsomol was the struggle against the corruption and obscurantism of local officials. One respondent, who had been a teacher and Komsomol activist in a village in Kazakhstan, remembered fighting the cliques who “dominated kolkhoz leadership and squandered kol- khoz property”; he found allies in the political department of the local Machine-Tractor Station, a control agency reporting to the center, whose “implacable attitude” toward local wrongdoing won his admiration.71

Another respondent was a Kirgiz who had been posted to a distant region of the republic, was horrified by the backwardness and corruption he encoun- tered there, and became an activist. “The only people who tried to fight igno- rance were teachers who had come from the North and the local Komsomol leaders.” Later, this man became a muckraking journalist, Soviet-style, and ex- posed a local boss’s mistreatment of his wives and children. This prompted his conservative Kirgiz father to accuse him of having chosen the “low trade” of informer, but he saw himself in a more heroic guise: “My Komsomol, journal- istic conscience would not allow me to condone evil.” 72

One of the younger Munich respondents, born in 1921 in the central Rus- sian province of Tver, grew up venerating the Komsomol members from the city who “literally took over the village” during collectivization, wearing smart military-style uniforms and carrying guns. “They were fighters who had declared war on rural backwardness and ignorance.” He told the story of how these activists attacked and ousted the secretary of the rural soviet, a petty bu- reaucrat who was “the living incarnation of an official of Gogol’s day [and] forced people to come three or four times to the soviet for the simplest mat- ter.” This respondent saw the Komsomol in a very different light from later

36 Everyday Stalinism

postwar generations, for whom its iconoclastic and militant spirit was scarcely even a memory. The Komsomol’s function, he told the Munich interviewers, was “combatting every shortcoming in the life of the country without regard for the higher-ups, proclaiming boldly the demands and claims of youth.” 73

The “demands and claims of youth” were very important in forming the activist spirit of the prewar years. Another Munich respondent tried to explain why, as a young person growing up in this period (born in 1914), he had sup- ported Soviet power and wanted to be an activist.

In spite of material difficulties, such as the constant food shortage which was particularly acute at the time, neither I nor the young people around me had any anti-Soviet feelings. We simply found in the heroic tension involved in the build- ing of a new world an excuse for all the difficulties . . . The atmosphere of un- daunted struggle in a common cause—the completion of the factory—engaged our imagination, roused our enthusiasm, and drew us into a sort of front-line world where difficulties were overlooked or forgotten.

Activism, as this respondent perceived it, was strongly correlated with youth.

Of course, it was only we, the younger generation, who accepted reality in this way. Our parents were full of muted but deep discontent. The arguments of our elders, however, had little effect upon us, being, as they were, wholly concerned with material things, while we found in the official justification of all these diffi- culties a superficial idealism which had considerable appeal to the young.74

For some, youth activism seemed the only thing that could save the revolu- tion. A slightly older Munich respondent (born in 1904) described the con- victions that had drawn him into activism, starting in the 1920s.

It . . . was not a desire for honors or rewards that caused me to do without sleep and to devote all my energy to the Party and the Komsomol. . . . I saw that the older generation, worn out after the years of the war and the postwar chaos, were no longer in a position to withstand the difficulties involved in the con- struction of socialism. I thus came to the conclusion that success in transforming the country depended entirely on the physical exertions and the will of people like myself.75

Activists expected to encounter difficulties and dangers. One source of danger was local bosses, incensed by activists’ criticisms and interference. Peasant correspondents who criticized kolkhoz and village soviet chairmen were particularly vulnerable because of their physical isolation. One activist schoolteacher in a Siberian village described her struggle against corrupt local bosses:

I write about various things to the district prosecutor, I write to the district com- mittee of the Communist Party, to the district newspaper, but if you knew how passively those district organizations react, and the wreckers take advantage of that. And how they hate me, some of those big-mouths who have power locally as members of the rural soviet and the board, they take revenge on me in any way they can, they starve me out. . . . But I will not yield my “position.” They won’t get me by starving me out.76

People who disliked the regime and considered activists its surrogates were

“The Party Is Always Right” 37

another source of danger. Even members of the Young Pioneers, the Komsomol’s junior branch for ten to fourteen-year olds, might be targetted for attack. In the Rossosh district of central Russia, a stronghold of religious sectarianism and monarchism, Pioneers were subject to regular harassment by religious believers who “call the Pioneer tie ‘the devil’s noose’ and consider that it is a sin to wear it.” In 1935, a group of adult believers ambushed some Young Pioneers as they were coming back from the Pioneer club at midnight.

The sectarians dressed all in white, fell on the Pioneers, drove them into the ra- vine and didn’t let them out for more than half an hour. Arepev [the sectarians’ leader] seized Pioneer K. I. Loboda and tore off his clothes and threw stones at the others and broke the head of one of them. As they threw stones, the sectari- ans shouted: “Little idolatrous devils, I’ll show you how to wear a tie.” 77

In the Urals, the worker activist Grigorii Bykov, an aspiring writer, was murdered by local youths with kulak connections after he contributed to a his- tory of the local factory that unmasked class enemies there. Such incidents, frequently reported in the press, made all activists feel that they were living lives of bravery and danger, even when their actual circumstances were quite humdrum, and the story of Pavlik Morozov, the martyred Young Pioneer, had a similar impact.78

Activists were supporters of the regime. Some undoubtedly became activ- ists out of ambition, for their support could well be rewarded by honors and promotion. That was why activists were often seen as the regime’s protégés, favored and privileged. But in their own self-image they were fighters, people who put their lives on the line in the real-life struggle for socialism. They were militant opponents of “backwardness,” which primarily meant religion, sub- ordination of women, and other traditional practices. They were opponents of “bureaucracy,” meaning that they were often locked in conflict with local offi- cials. Moscow in principle approved of such struggles. In practice, however, the activists could not rely on Moscow’s protection if local officials retaliated, so their perception of their activism as risky and brave was not without foun- dation.

� � �

The Communists saw themselves as a vanguard, leading the masses to social- ism. This mobilizing, exhortatory, educative role was the one they under- stood best and found most congenial. It gave them a sense of cultural as well as political superiority that outsiders often found difficult to understand. Like the notion of benign conspiracy, the vanguard concept was rooted in the party’s prerevolutionary past. When applied to a different situation, that of a regime in power, it was inadequate in several ways. In the first place, the ruling vanguard found that the masses did not always want to follow where it led. Leadership lost some of its glamor in real life: it was less like an officer hero- ically leading his men in the charge than a tugboat pulling a dead weight into harbor. Sometimes, to make the troops move at all, the officers had to get be- hind them with guns drawn and drive them forward.

In the second place, this vanguard, mobilizing concept of leadership was

38 Everyday Stalinism

little help when it come to the everyday running of the country. That required administration; but since Communists despised bureaucracy and were impa- tient with law and routine procedures, their relationship with their own ad- ministrative apparatus was ambivalent. Bureaucracy, to them, was at best a necessary evil. But it was an evil that kept growing as the state’s powers and control aspirations expanded. Once the state had become a virtual monopolist of urban production and distribution, allocation of consumer goods became one of its most important functions, and certainly the one that was of most di- rect concern to the urban population. Up to the end of the 1920s, the Com- munists’ main interest in this sphere had been redistribution, taking goods and benefits from those who had been privileged under the old regime and giving them to those who had been exploited. Now, as Stalin’s revolution ush- ered in an era of scarcity, distribution itself became a central bureaucratic task and the dominant preoccupation of the party leaders.

“The Party Is Always Right” 39