The political philosopher V. P. Mezhuev, of the Russian Academy’s Institute of Philosophy, addressed precisely these problems during a conference in Moscow in 1999:
Ask yourself what in the past is dear to you, what must be continued, preserved, and that will help you to face the future… If the past contains nothing positive, then there is no future and it only remains to ‘forget it all and sink into slumber’ [zabytsia i zasnut’]. A future without a past is not the historical destiny of Russia. Those who want to erase the twentieth century, a century of major catastrophes, must also bid a permanent farewell to a great Russia.[3]
This is well put, and we shall return to these considerations in our conclusion. But we wish to insist on one point: we are perfectly aware that historical research is a difficult undertaking and it seems to us crucial that it be conducted in a dispassionate and unbiased fashion. When an author professes to offer a work of scholarship, a short disclaimer is in order: intentions, however sincere, are no guarantee of success. The pitfalls en route are many and varied: sources and evidence, degree of professional mastery, personal biases, but also the infinite complexity of historical realities, which are fluid, ambiguous and manifold – and resist being reordered in any explanatory schema. And yet, if they do not attempt precisely that, historians would not even produce a convincing story. There would simply be false stories, or rather the same one endlessly trotted out.
PART ONE
A REGIME AND ITS PSYCHE
INTRODUCTION
The 1930s occupy a very special place in the relatively short history of the Soviet system. First, because they took the form of a high-intensity drama in a country that had not yet fully recovered from the aftermath of the First World War and the Civil War of 1918–21. Second, because the short-lived New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s, although quite successful in restoring the country to minimal levels of physical (biological) and political viability, still left it short of what was required to confront the internal, and especially external, challenges that were looming on the horizon. The sudden launch of the five-year plans (piatiletki) triggered a chain of utterly unexpected, startling events. The first surprise was the Stalinist ‘big drive’, which occurred against the backdrop of the deep economic recession that engulfed the US and Europe but stopped short at the borders of the USSR. The second was a series of internal upheavals consequent upon this new policy. The unprecedented national effort dictated and executed by a determined elite and a ruthless supreme leader, heavily reliant on the state’s coercive machinery, generated a spate of radical changes in all directions, which had a significant rebound effect on the regime itself. They shaped it in a way that amounted to the formation of a new, sui generis, state system, which, at least in its early stages, seemed to some actors, but also to outside observers, to embody the aspiration to a higher form of social justice. Others – especially some years later – regarded it as a new form of state slavery.
It might legitimately be asked how one and the same system could elicit such incompatible judgements in these years. But one fact is undeniable: the country was undergoing extremely rapid changes. A (hypothetical) party or government official, who for some purpose or other had been on a foreign mission during the first years of the plan, would certainly have been struck on his return by the astonishing changes that had occurred in the interim. Much more so, at any rate, than a White Russian returning to the country in the 1920s (there were such cases) and comparing Russia under the NEP with Tsarist Russia. However irritated by the novelties introduced by the regime, the latter would still have seen all around him the ‘Mother Russia’ he knew. He might even have felt quite reassured. By contrast, the Soviet official returning to Moscow in the 1930s would have found virtually none of the institutions he was familiar with in the 1920s. The press, the nepmen, the stores, the supply system, the political debates, most cultural life – all this had gone. The workplace, the pace of life, the slogans, and also (on closer inspection) the party itself – all were transformed. Political life and the policies adopted were different and impetuous. Stalin’s image and slogans extolling him now covered the walls of towns and village squares alike. Initially portrayed alongside Lenin, he soon invariably came to be represented alone. The meaning of these iconographic switches would not as yet have been readily apparent.
This state system early on received the name of ‘Stalinism’, and the man at the helm was manifestly and unambiguously in control. This does not mean that the system’s characteristics are to be ascribed exclusively to its head. In many ways, they transcended the leader’s way of running things. The considerable changes that occurred in the way the regime was managed after Stalin’s death indicate this. But the converse is also true: many basic characteristics remained in place. Determining what actually did change, and what endured, is a key problem in understanding the country’s history. But it also presents the historian with a recurrent obstacle, which pertains to the philosophy of history: how much can be attributed to an individual leader? Is he an independent agent, i.e. an autonomous factor? If so, all we need is a biography. Or is he a product of historical circumstances and conditions, of the country’s traditions, of its potential and limitations? In that case, we need a work of history.
The 1930s do not present historians with an easy task, regardless of whether they are dealing with personal or objective factors. As has been suggested, these years contain enough contradictory elements for some people to depict them in glowing colours, while for others they were nothing but a Calvary. And many autobiographies reveal their authors oscillating between these extremes. The fact that so many people, at the time or subsequently, refused to believe in the image of Stalin as the criminal organizer of a regime of terror may have had much to do with those aspects of his policies that unquestionably served the country’s interests. As many Russian and non-Russian observers agree, the USSR’s victory in the Second World War was an epic that saved the country and had great international impact. But it could not have been achieved by Tsarism or a similar regime. On the other hand, ignorance – fruit of the secretive character of the Stalinist state – also certainly contributed to the successful propagation of the image of the ‘great Stalin’ as imposed by its subject.
A scholarly approach cannot ignore these ‘extremes’. But its purpose does not consist in wavering between such determinist notions as ‘There was no alternative’ and ‘Stalin was inevitable’, or contrary views stressing the fortuitous, usurpatory and arbitrary dimensions of the Stalinist phenomenon. It is preferable to concentrate on the actual course of history, analysing the context – i.e. the full interplay of relevant factors – that contributed to the making of a regime which abandoned the requisite rules of the political game – rules it still unquestionably possessed in the early years of the NEP. Stalinism was precisely the flip side of a party system that had lost control over its political existence. That many vital state functions continued to be taken in charge does not alter this fact. However, it is also an incentive to carry on exploring the way in which the various factors remained active. Stalin’s arbitrary power was never immune from the rebound of developments – from what was advancing or slowly decaying in the country, around him and, ultimately, inside him.
3
V. P. Mezhuev, ‘Otnoshenie k proshlomu-kliuch k budushchemu’, in