We are thus dealing with a significant number of victims of the terror – a mass that there is no need to inflate, manipulate or falsify. It remains to add to the toll a further sad category: demographic losses in the broad sense. In order to sort out the complicated picture for the period 1914–45, we must turn to a specialist in historical demography: Robert Davies.[13] The figures here concern the history of the Russian population for the whole period. But the Stalinist phase within it is clearly distinguished.
In Russia–USSR, two world wars and a civil war occasioned greater demographic losses (or population deficits) than elsewhere. These are measured both by ‘excess deaths’ – from violence, famine and epidemics – and by ‘birth deficit’, due to a temporary drop in birth rates. For the First World War and the Civil War, excess deaths are estimated at 16 million and the birth deficit at some 10 million. For the Second World War, the corresponding figures are 26–27 million and 12 million.
Stalinist industrialization also led to excess deaths in peacetime of the order of 10 million or more, many of them during the 1933 famine. Thus, total population loss for 1914 to 1945 from premature deaths and birth deficits amounted to 74 million: 26 million in 1914–22, 38 million for 1941–5, and 10 million in the peacetime years. Davies furnishes no figures for the birth deficit for this last period, but his work does aid us to have done with the fictitious body-counts in which anything goes as long as the record of ‘communism’ is drenched in ever more blood. When, for example, 80 million corpses are laid at its door, we might wonder: why not twice as many?
12
ENDGAME
At the war’s close, the country was exhausted and the vast territories occupied by the Germans, or which had formed military theatres, were literally devastated. In the reconquered territories there was no economy to speak of and no government. The Soviet system had to be completely reconstructed, initially without an economic base and among populations that contained many former collaborators.
I shall restrict myself to one point about the reconstitution of the Soviet system in these regions. Finding cadres for the reconquered territories was an immense task, conducted in conditions of utter chaos. Newly appointed personnel often had to be replaced several times over, because they were incompetent, unreliable, or criminal elements who had penetrated the administration. Cadres assigned from areas that had escaped German conquest were often of poor quality and inclined to abandon a difficult job and return home. In the Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia, strong detachments of nationalist insurgents fought Soviet troops and security forces, sometimes in pitched battles, with heavy losses on both sides. It took the regime time and effort to subdue these partisans. But work resumed, factories were rebuilt, and life slowly returned to normal.
Recovery and the restoration of social and economic indicators to their prewar levels – especially for agricultural output – had been achieved by the time of Stalin’s death. But his disappearance from the scene was insufficient wholly to rid the USSR of his legacy – especially since postwar reconstruction involved restoring a decaying Stalinist model with its aberrations and irrationalities.
The return of peace confronted the state and party, hitherto wholly absorbed in the war effort, with unanticipated realities. The state bureaucracy – the main organizer of the war – now had to face the problems of reconversion. For the party and its apparatus, things were even more complicated. Whatever the propaganda, between 1941 and 1945 the party apparatus had been demoted to an auxiliary role. Certainly, Politburo members ran the war machine via the State Defence Committee, but they did so under Stalin’s rod of iron as leaders of the state, not the party. The Central Committee was in abeyance and no party congress had been convened.
To put the party’s house in order, Stalin brought in the well-known Leningrad party leader Alexis Kuznetsov, who had distinguished himself during the siege of the city as Zhdanov’s second in command. He became party secretary for cadres, a member of the Politburo, and was thought to be being groomed by Stalin to succeed him. This was not an enviable lot for a beginner caught up in the complex power apparatus around Stalin. His prerogatives were considerable, but the task ahead was daunting. He was responsible for supplying high-quality, politically reliable leaders for all important state agencies. To do this, he was to supervise the work of the party’s cadres directorate, which had been reorganized to tackle the job. The priority was to find qualified personnel for positions of responsibility in the most important branches of the economy throughout the country.
Reorganizing the party was another order of the day. If the personnel of the party apparatus were in a permanent state of flux, its structures remained more or less the same hereafter. This is why the new structure that emerged is sufficiently instructive to warrant us going into some detail.
It was now decided that the head of the cadres directorate would have five deputies and that it would contain twenty-eight departments (instead of the previous fifty), each of them responsible for overseeing a group of ministries or other government agencies. A single personnel department and a few sectional services were envisaged for the whole directorate.
Of the twenty-eight departments, one would deal with cadres for party organizations, another with the training and retraining of cadres, and a third with the cadres of Soviet institutions (armed forces, internal affairs and foreign trade). State security services, the Prosecutor’s Office and justice came under the same department. Similarly, a department was projected for transport and for each branch of industry, as well as for agriculture, finance, trade, higher education and research, publishing, the arts, and so on. In short, the new directorate was a bulky piece of machinery, employing some 650 senior officials. Probably the largest of the Central Committee’s apparatuses, it was organized on functional lines – until, two years later, it reverted to the older ‘economic branch’ structure. Meanwhile, the new secretary’s position gave him sight of everything, including the most secret institutions, for they all needed the cadres his directorate supplied and controlled – or at least was beginning to supply and control.
Kuznetsov’s (unpublished) speeches and conversations with his subordinates allow us to conclude that he was a man of considerable intelligence. His organizational abilities, and the ease with which he earned the esteem of the apparatus, attest to his calibre. The attempt to reconstruct and revitalize the party and its apparatus was, of course, coordinated with Stalin. When it came to organizational matters, Kuznetsov was clearly his own man. On ideology, however, he had to toe the line. Accordingly, before continuing our discussion of reforms in the party apparatus we must introduce these ‘ideological questions’, and especially a novelty that stemmed from Stalin’s growing identification with Tsarist symbols during the war. The new ideological line directly concerned the party’s central cadres, who were now subject to rein-doctrination in common with various social groups and administrative bodies.
ZHDANOVISM AND THE ‘COURTS OF HONOUR’ (1946–50)
Zhdanovism – named after its chief proponent, Andrei Zhdanov, at the time party secretary – refers to an especially obscurantist chapter in the history of Stalinism.[1] Since this policy, which ravaged the country’s cultural life, is studied in all histories of Soviet literature, we have opted to deal with it exclusively through unpublished documents from the party apparatus.
1
Good accounts of Zhdanovism can be found in histories of Soviet literature. A useful concise account is M. Slonim,