Collectivization was necessary from the point of view of Marxism-Leninism, which asserted that only a noncapitalist “mode of production” could undergird a Communist regime.7 Once the fall 1933 harvest proved to be good, and the unbalanced investments of the first Five-Year Plan finally produced results in the second plan, even skeptics gave Stalin his due: his lunatic gamble had panned out. Socialism (anticapitalism) was victorious in the countryside as well as the city. But culture, too, for Marxists, was an integral aspect of any system of class relations, and in culture Stalin was still groping his way. Letters from cultural figures got to his desk quickly—his aides understood his interest—and, as in foreign policy, he made just about every significant decision (unlike in the economy, for want of time or interest).8 But the challenges proved different, not amenable to blunt class warfare. Culture did not offer the equivalent of capitalist private property or “bourgeois” parliaments to eradicate as the path to socialism. Certainly for Stalin, the party had the right to determine the disposition of all writers and artists, but not in a clumsy way.
This chapter examines the period from summer 1933 to early fall 1934, although at times it will track back in time to illuminate the trajectory of Stalin’s engagement with the artistic intelligentsia, while weaving in the workings of the Union and continuing developments in foreign affairs. Trotsky, early on, had argued that the literary sphere had its own relatively autonomous dynamic and therefore should not be administered the same way as the economy or politics (“Art must make its own way and by its own means”).9 He had objected to a drive for an exclusively “proletarian” culture, championed the works of “fellow travelers,” a term he coined for those who did not join the party but sympathized with the cause, and defined the party’s task in culture as ensuring that influential fellow travelers did not go over to the side of “the bourgeoisie.”10 Stalin had taken exactly the same position. A politburo decree had denied a monopoly to the early movement for proletarian culture, and supported a “society for the development of Russian culture,” to be headed by a non-party “Soviet-minded” writer of stature.11 Stalin approved a proposal for a non-party writers’ periodical, Literary Newspaper.12 The militant culture movement endured under the name Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.13 Factions for and against an exclusively proletarian culture, with the former tending to be Russocentric and the latter tending to see themselves as internationalist, dragged Stalin into their political-aesthetic and personal vendettas.14 But in culture, he blocked intransigent enforcement of Communist ideology, groping his way to a socialist aesthetic.
PHARAOH
Solovki, the regime’s original prison labor camp, which provided timber and fish, got displaced in the early 1930s by giant new forced labor complexes, such as one in northern Kazakhstan for ore mining and metals.15 Most ambitiously, in the harsh Chukotka territory, the Far Northern Construction Trust, or Dalstroi, was formed to extract gold.16 Prisoners traveled in cattle cars across the length of the USSR, then, from the railway terminus at Vladivostok, by ship more than 1,700 miles across the Sea of Okhotsk to Nagayevo Bay and the settlement of Magadan. The first slave labor ships had arrived there in June 1932, mostly with thieves, bandits, and murderers, almost half of whom failed to survive the journey.17 To reach the gold-digging areas, Dalstroi used tank crews to clear a path northward up the Okhotsk coast and in along the Kolyma River, then had prisoners lay roadbeds of logs over frozen earth, shortening what had been multiweek trips by reindeer. Thanks partly to a relatively rational treatment of slave laborers, more than 100 million rubles’ worth of gold would be mined each year.18 Beyond Dalstroi, though, the expected savings on cheap prison labor were often undone by low productivity and high administrative costs.19 Still, the Gulag was crucial for developing remote areas. The Union was not only an ethnoterritorial but also an economic structure.
Stalin did not visit the slave labor complexes, with one notable exception: the White Sea–Baltic Canal. Declared finished on June 20, 1933, after just twenty-one months, it extended for 155 miles, longer than the Panama and Suez canals, through difficult terrain.20 Under Yagoda’s chaperoning, from July 18 to 25, Stalin, Voroshilov, Kirov, and Yenukidze sailed the entire canal, also touring the Kola Peninsula, the Northern Fleet, and the polar port of Murmansk. Kirov had driven to Moscow and chauffeured his guests to Leningrad.21 Stalin’s fellow Georgian Orjonikidze was the dictator’s oldest close friend in the regime, but Kirov—a Russian who had spent the underground years in the Caucasus—had become even closer.22 Stalin called him Mironych, an affectionate diminutive of his patronymic, and sometimes Kirych.23 As a new general secretary, Stalin had given him a copy of his On Lenin and Leninism, inscribed TO MY FRIEND AND MY BELOVED BROTHER.24 Stalin had transferred Kirov from Baku to replace Zinoviev as head of the Leningrad party organization, the most important after Moscow, a posting Kirov had resisted, yielding only after Stalin agreed it would be temporary (allowing him to return to the Caucasus). Kirov stayed on to rout the entrenched Zinoviev machine.25 It was partly the chance to spend time with Kirov that drew Stalin to visit the canal.
Kirov’s personal qualities—straightforward, amiable—endeared him to more conniving Bolsheviks. “Stalin loved and respected Kirov above all others,” a longtime bodyguard would recall. “He loved him with a kind of touching, tender love. Kirov’s trips to Moscow and the south were for Stalin a genuine holiday. Sergei Mironovich would come for a week, two. In Moscow he would stay at Stalin’s apartment, and Stalin would literally not separate from him.”26 “Stalin loved him,” Molotov recalled. “He was Stalin’s favorite.”27 Kirov stood a mere five feet five inches (1.64 meters), shorter than the dictator.28 He sent game he hunted to Stalin and, following Nadya’s death, stayed with him when in the capital (Kirov had earlier bunked with Orjonikidze). “Kirov had the ability to dissipate misunderstandings, to convert them into jokes, to break the ice,” recalled Artyom (whose deceased father had also been friendly with Kirov). “He was astonishingly bright-natured, a person like a beam of light, and at home they loved him very much, the members of [Stalin’s] family and the service personnel. They always waited upon his appearances . . . and called him Uncle Kirov.” Kirov jestingly called Stalin “the Great Leader of All Peoples of All Times,” according to Artyom, and Stalin “would retort that Kirov was the ‘Most Loved Leader of the Leningrad Proletariat.’”29
The canal held strategic promise for developing mineral-rich Soviet Karelia and opening a reliable pathway from Leningrad to the north, but it ran a mere sixty feet deep and eighty feet wide, limiting its use. Stalin was said to have been disappointed, finding it “shallow and narrow.”30 Nonetheless, the pharaonic visit was recorded on Soviet newsreels. Kremlinologists noted Yagoda’s prominence in the footage, even though Mężyński remained OGPU chairman. Overseeing such construction was Yagoda’s forte, and he would receive the Order of Lenin for the canal. More than 126,000 forced laborers did the work, almost entirely without machines, and probably at least 12,000 died doing so, while orchestras played in the background. Some of the surviving builders were “amnestied” with fanfare; others were transferred to construction of a Moscow–Volga Canal.31