Bunin still measured sensibility by nineteenth-century standards. It never occurred to him, of course, that the number of people hanged, shot, tortured to death, and so on would be measured, not in the hundreds, but in the millions.
One of the most important aspects of collectivization was its sociological shock effect. The post-October tremor did not touch the deeper strata of society, but the shock of collectivization reached the very foundations of rural society. It destroyed the old peasantry and in its place produced a new social type—the collective farmer, a being who very quickly lost all interest in working the land. In the latter half of the 1920s such writers as Konstantin Fedin, Vsevolod Ivanov, and Leonid Leonov had written about postrevolutionary rural Russia. The revolution had not affected it at all, they said; it continued to live in the sixteenth century or at best the seventeenth. They portrayed Russia as a kind of antediluvian beast, a brontosaurus with a huge, inert body (the countryside) and a tiny brain (the city). Collectivization killed the brontosaurus.
The best works about collectivization were left to us by Andrei Platonov: The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan), which was never printed in the Soviet Union; and the short novel Vprok (meaning "pointless, for no good reason"), whose very title aroused immediate and angry criticism from Stalin. In these works Platonov in effect was asking, Does the country really need this insane attempt to reach socialism on paper? The entire subsequent history of the Soviet Union demonstrates that collectivization left the economy with a gaping wound that has never healed.
In Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak very accurately described the consequences of collectivization. Through terror people were broken of the habit of thinking; an illusory world was created for them, which they were required to accept as real. Pasternak was wrong, though, when he said the authorities could not admit that collectivization had been a mistake. For Stalin collectivization was not a mistake but a great victory.
Politically, collectivization was a brilliant success. From Stalin's point of view it was absolutely necessary. S. Dmitrievsky, the Soviet diplomat who defected while in Stockholm in 1930, published a biography of Stalin in 1931 that may be considered the first apologia for the Leader to appear in the West and the first statement of certain ideas that the Leader could not express openly at home.
The edifice of Stalin's dictatorship can be maintained and his plans carried out only if political and economic power is fully monopolized by Stalin. Political power has been in his hands for a long time. But up until now he had not had full economic power. That is possible only on the basis of a monopolistic state capitalism encompassing the country's entire economic life without exception.67
Dmitrievsky noted a threat to Stalin's dictatorship from the peasant quarter. 'The victory of the peasantry within the country would be a victory for the West, for its fundamental conception of individualism and liberalism in political life."68
Dmitrievsky wrote his biography of Stalin just when collectivization was in full swing. When that campaign was over, the entire economic life of the country was indeed in Stalin's hands. The entire citizenry became completely dependent on the state, both politically and economically. Simultaneously, monopoly control was exerted over another part of people's lives, the spiritual aspect.
THE INEXORABLE RISE OF JOSEPH STALIN
This is how Dmitrievsky described a Politburo meeting in 1930: "Rudzutak, steady and impassive, usually chairs the meeting. But the central, the decisive presence, despite his customary silence, even because of it, is Stalin. All eyes are on him. Many at the meeting dislike him, some even hate him, but for the moment he is nothing less than the autocrat of the Russian state."69
The American journalist Louis Fischer concluded his account of the Sixteenth Party Congress, held in June—July 1930, with these words:
A good comrade should advise Stalin to stop the orgy of glorification of his person. ... Every day hundreds and thousands of telegrams full of compliments in exalted, exaggerated Oriental style—"You are the very greatest Leader," "the most faithful disciple of Lenin," etc.—are addressed to him. Three cities are named after him, along with countless villages, collective farms, schools, factories, and institutions. ... Though Stalin may not be responsible for this state of affairs, he tolerates it. He could put an end to it just by pressing a button.70
Fischer later learned that when this passage was translated for Stalin, the Leader's response was brief and to the point: "Scum!"
Robert C. Tucker, the American biographer of Stalin, argues that the real cult, the deification, of Stalin began at the end of 1931 with an article in which the general secretary presented himself as the only legitimate interpreter of Marx. It is true that in 1929—1930 Stalin had not yet assumed all the attributes of the Supreme Leader and Teacher, whose every word became law for all of progressive mankind. Nevertheless, by then he not only possessed vast power but had already become the object of a cult, as Louis Fischer described. In those first years of the five-year plan he was not universally worshiped, as he soon would be. Evidence of reluctance to make a god of him could be seen in two attempts to challenge his authority in the early 1930s. They were made, not by veteran oppositionists, but by Bolsheviks of the younger generation.
In November 1930 a plot was uncovered, the "Syrtsov plot" as Dmitriev- sky called it, or the "right-ultraleft bloc" in the official terminology, which considered the combination of such mutually exclusive concepts perfectly acceptable. A few months earlier Sergei Syrtsov had begun a meteoric rise, becoming chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR in 1929 and an alternate member of the Politburo after the Sixteenth Party Congress, in July 1930. His fall was every bit as sudden as his rise. Dmitrievsky, who gives the fullest account of the "plot," says that Syrtsov, a favorite of Stalin's, along with a number of other "high party and government officials, came to the conclusion that the most decisive measures had to be taken to change the policies of the government to which they themselves belonged. "71 Dmitrievsky stresses that Syrtsov, in all his articles and speeches, "remained what he was, a devoted adherent to the Stalinist system of ideas." What he was dissatisfied with was the administrative mess, the incredible bureaucracy of the machine of state. His "purely practical, nonideological platform"72 was endorsed by Besso Lominadze, who at one time had been sent by Stalin to attempt a revolution in Canton, and by Lazar Shatskin, a leader of the Komsomol. What is more, Dmi- trievsky states, "there were rumors that Stalin himself was somehow mixed up in this plot, hoping to use it to carry through a number of radical changes."73 Knowing Stalin, we cannot reject even such fantastic rumors. Would he really have refrained from playing the provocateur if that suited his ends? The "conspirators" were arrested and removed from their posts, but only mild sanctions were taken against them. It was the last time that criticism of the party line was viewed simply as a political matter, rather than "treason" or "terrorism."
The summer of 1932 saw the second challenge to Stalin's authority in this period. Mikhail Ryutin, a former Bukharin supporter and one-time secretary of the party's Moscow committee, circulated a 160-page program containing three main demands: (1) economic retreat (a slower pace of industrialization and an end to forced collectivization); (2) democracy within the party; and (3) removal of Stalin. An entire chapter of the program dealt with Stalin, whom Ryutin called "the evil genius of the party and the revolution," "the gravedigger of the revolution," and a "provocateur."74