The new collectives survived. They weathered the storm because enough people believed in them, and believed with sufficient passion to face the violence that their zealotry unleashed. During the campaign of collectivization, words seem to have blinded Stalin’s activists to the reality before their eyes. A leaden language muffled other people’s pain. ‘I did not trouble myself with why “humanity” should be abstract,’ wrote one activist, the future Red Army officer Lev Kopelev, ‘but “historical necessity” and “class consciousness” should be concrete.’8 ‘Historical necessity’ called for armed gangs and mass arrests. The task of enforcement was assigned to secret-police troops. These men included simple thugs, as well as affectless professional bullies whose careers stretched back to tsarist times, but their vanguard was made up of real enthusiasts. ‘In the terrible spring of 1933 I saw people dying from hunger,’ Kopelev recalled. ‘I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing, but with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses, corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots, corpses in peasant huts… I saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide… Nor did I lose my faith.’9 The new Russia had staked its claim against the old.
Like the Red troops in Dzigan’s film, the forces of the Stalinist regime were set to win. For one thing, the peasants, numerous as they were, remained remote, a group fragmented by distance, dialect and their own misery. Decisions were taken in Moscow, not in some mud-locked village miles from the nearest road. In a democracy, dispossessed peasants might have formed a powerful faction, their protests stirring others to take up the cause. But a democracy would not have driven the peasants into collectives in the first place. Soviet power offered no outlet for protest: unless a person was religious, his choices were to nurture his resentment in obscurity or to embrace the new regime and hope for a better future. Religious faith offered an alternative set of beliefs for a large minority, but even the churches were powerless against the saturating propaganda of this state, and the more so because collectivization was accompanied by an assault on organized worship. Churches were closed, turned into barns and pigsties, priests arrested, believers exiled. And with religion shattered, no creed could stand up to the communist world view, no group sustain itself for long without collapsing under state pressure. The very depth of people’s suffering increased their sense of isolation. As one survivor remarked, ‘Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friends.’10
But repression alone could not have achieved the state’s triumph, nor even the idealism of an élite of young activists. This Soviet state also commanded real support among large numbers of ordinary citizens. Such people’s fundamental motive was more positive than fear, more tangible than hope. ‘Life is getting better,’ the huge posters told them, ‘better and more joyful.’ Inch by inch, and almost shamefully, for millions, it was. With Europe and America in economic depression, the Soviets could boast full employment and rapid growth. A village boy who sought work in the towns would not be looking long. The older generation might not manage to adapt, but for the young the prospects started to look bright. As a worker in the Soviet state, too, a young man might bask in a patriotic pride. By 1938, the Soviet Union had the largest engineering industry in Europe. The proof was there to be seen in the airships, dams, and polar ice-breakers. Millions of tons of coal were dug from Soviet earth each year – 166 million tons in 1940. ‘In all fields,’ Pravda wrote on the last New Year’s Eve of peace, ‘our successes have been stupendous.’11 Readers would all have known about the tanks and planes. Indeed, the Soviet state had more tanks at its disposal in 1941 than the rest of the world combined.12 But more immediately, people could also point to improvements at home. Things had been so bad for so long, after all, that almost anything looked like progress.
Here was a paradox. This was a state that proclaimed its altruism, commanding its citizens to forsake private property. One of its most potent selling points, however, was the material prosperity it promised, an abundance that was measured, even in the censored newspapers, in terms of wristwatches and bicycles, not merely public goods. In consequence, although the papers did not usually mention it, a population already hardened by suffering and violence learned to look for opportunities at every turn. Even before the war, Soviet citizens could be resourceful when it came to trade, stockpiling, and the networking that makes black markets hum.13 In the land of brotherhood, most people’s first thoughts centred on themselves. Publicly, meanwhile, the rhetoric was all about collective happiness, and this was also pictured in material terms. Wristwatches, the symbol of modernity that people seemed to covet most, were still a dream for almost everyone, but one day, ran the tale, the factories that kept on springing up were bound to produce them. Lev Kopelev put his own view in similarly concrete terms. ‘The world revolution,’ he wrote, ‘was absolutely necessary so that justice would triumph.’ When it was over, there would be ‘no borders, no capitalists and no fascists at all… Moscow, Kharkov and Kiev would become just as enormous, just as well-built, as Berlin, Hamburg and New York… we would have skyscrapers, streets full of automobiles and bicycles’ and ‘all the workers and peasants would go walking in fine clothes, wearing hats and watches’.14
For the time being, the state provided citizens with the small compensations that appeared to presage more. The planners’ choices could seem callously ironic. This was a land where children had been left to starve as famine raged in 1933, and many Soviet villages would remain sunk in poverty through the decades to come. Even the cities faced shortages of meat and butter, while bread rationing continued until 1935. The quality of mass-produced staples was always suspect, and there were constant rumours of dust or sand in the flour, gristle in place of meat. But Anastas Mikoyan, the minister responsible for food supplies, had plans to cheer life up for everyone who had a spare rouble to spend. His aim was to provide the people with irresistible snacks, so he focused the might of the planned economy on the task of processing frankfurters and ice cream. The Soviets had imported new mass-production methods from America and Germany, allowing fast food of a basic kind to be manufactured in prodigious amounts. There might not be fresh vegetables, there might not be much milk, but there would be ice cream for everyone. The new industry was portrayed as a harbinger of the good life that was soon to be. The more processed the food, moreover, the greater its supposed appeal for a generation hoping to transform the world. How could the Soviet people not be glad when they could eat not only plain but even cherry, chocolate, and raspberry ice cream?15
The town-bred children of the pre-war years remember only happiness. ‘We never went hungry. And there was no crime, either.’ It is a rosy view, more revealing about the censored press and the romance of long hindsight than about real life. Pilfering and theft were rife in the 1930s, while the exploitation of personal connections was often the only way to secure valuable goods.16 One writer recalls queuing all night outside a Moscow shop when his mother wanted to buy him a new suit. ‘Even so,’ he adds, ‘we had to wait for five hours in the shop, emerging at 1 p. m.’ The suit itself had cost a month’s wages.17 But what people remember now is that they could in fact buy suits. It had not been so long since there had been no goods of any kind for purchase, and soon there would be none again. Moreover, back in 1938, few people in the Soviet Union had the means to compare their quality of life with that of foreigners. Their leaders constantly told them that they lived in a better and more equal society, a place where the right kind of effort would soon deliver abundance for everyone. For all they knew – and most believed it – the queues in capitalist countries were even longer, the workers not permitted to wear suits at all.