A highly characteristic trait of the pro-Soviet campaign was its language. All the books written in this period about the Soviet Union, whether in German, French, or English, by professional hack writers like Anna Louise Strong or refined aesthetes like Edmund Wilson, seem to have been written in the same "Dzhugashvilian" Soviet language. The lies that were being purveyed, whether consciously or unconsciously, lent a similar tone and color to all such works. The virus of the lie and the instrument of its contagion (the Russian language) spread through the entire world. And it seemed normal, after the Reichstag fire, when the Gestapo began hunting down all political opponents, that the leadership of the German Communist party should declare: 'The proletariat has not lost the battle. It has not been defeated. ... This is only a temporary retreat."112
The few Western intellectuals who tried to poke a hole in the iron curtain, to expose the conspiracy of lies about the Soviet Union and write the truth about it, were pitilessly ostracized from the camp of progressive humanity. This is what happened to the Romanian writer Panait Istrati in the early 1930s, for example, as it had to the American Max Eastman in the late 1920s.
Apologists for the Soviet Union submissively accepted all the twists and turns of Stalinist foreign policy, explaining them in the first half of the 1930s as a necessity for undermining imperialist and social fascist plots; in the second half of the 1930s and thereafter—as Stalin's wisdom. They glorified his genius even more shamelessly, if it is possible, than did those in the Soviet Union. A noted English biologist warmly recited a story about how Stalin personally had gone at night to a railroad freight station in Moscow with the sole purpose of helping the stevedores.113 Heinrich Mann maintained that for Stalin, Geist (spirit) is more important than Macht (physical might), and on and on.
"LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYOUS"
When Panait Istrati, a Romanian novelist, vagabond, and revolutionary, during his 1927—28 stay in the Soviet Union, expressed his disillusion with things in the land of socialism, he was told, "One can't make an omelette without breaking eggs." He retorted: "I can see the broken eggs. [But] where's this omelette of yours?"114
The eggs were broken relentlessly, and after the building-and-wrecking machine of collectivization and industrialization had been at work for a while one could begin to see the outline of the "omelette." On December 13, 1931, Stalin gave an interview to the German writer Emil Ludwig, the biographer of great men. "The task to which I have devoted my life... is the strengthening of the socialist state, and that means the international state."115 The word was spoken: the strengthening of the state, which was a revision of all the theories of that time that were considered orthodox Marxist. At the root of these theories was an army of quotations from Marx asserting that the state would soon wither away. Stalin still used the adjective international, but the main part was the noun state and the verb to strengthen. The cement for this state was to be fear. Emil Ludwig asked Stalin: "It seems to me that a large part of the Soviet population is experiencing terror, fear in the face of Soviet power, and that to a certain extent the stability of Soviet power is based on this fear."116 Stalin answered: "You are mistaken ... Do you really think that it would be possible to retain power for fourteen years and to have the backing of the masses, millions of people, owing to methods of intimidation and fear? No, that is impossible." But, he added: 'There is a small portion of the population who really fear Soviet authority and fight it. ... But here it is a question not only of a policy intended to intimidate these groups, which really do exist. Everyone knows that we Bolsheviks do not limit ourselves to intimidation; we go much farther, to the point of liquidating this bourgeois segment."117 Stalin corrected the German writer: not intimidation but liquidation of part of the population— the "bourgeois segment." It is doubtful however, that this correction could calm the part of the population that was considered beyond the pale and destined for liquidation.
During the First Five-Year Plan, a series of laws aimed at strengthening the government was passed. Some tightened up labor discipline: hundreds of thousands of peasants who had arrived in the cities and factories were to be "reeducated," turned into proletarians through forcible administrative measures.
A September 1929 resolution of the Central Committee made the director of an enterprise its master, its individual boss. Up to this time, an enterprise was headed by a "triangle": the director, the party secretary, and the president of the trade union committee. Now the director had the right to make all decisions autonomously: he could fire workers without notifying the trade unions, which in 1933 were formally dissolved and merged with the Commissariat of Labor. (The resolution said that the trade unions were being dissolved at their own request.) For an unauthorized absence from work (even for a single day) a worker could be prosecuted. But the director, who had broad rights, also lived under a threat. If the enterprise did not fulfill the plan or if the quality of production was poor, the director could be prosecuted. 'The labor code not only did not advance the norms and decrees of the first years of the dictatorship of the proletariat, on a number of points it actually retreated."118
In August 1932 the cruelest of a series of laws aimed at "strengthening state discipline" was adopted. It was a resolution "guarding the property of state enterprises, kolkhozes, and cooperatives and reinforcing public socialist ownership." Since everything in the Soviet Union was public property, the law applied to all government employees, including collective farmers (who in fact were the main targets of this law). A peculiar feature of this law was its "application of legal repression" by means of only one punishment: "the supreme measure of social defense: execution by shooting, with confiscation of all property." In the case of extenuating circumstances, execution was replaced by "deprivation of freedom for a period of not less than ten years, with confiscation of all property."119 This law was soon extended "by analogy" to "a broad range of crimes... including speculation, sabotage by state farm workers, theft of seed, etc."120 Today Soviet historians admit, "The law of August 7 was excessively severe and insufficiently worked out from the legal point of view. Malicious embezzlers and those who committed utterly insignificant misdemeanors alike came under its provisions."121 But it was precisely its maximum cruelty, its universality, that made this law one of the most essential instruments in "strengthening the state."
No less important was the law adopted at the end of 1932 that introduced the system of internal passports. Just two years earlier such passports had been called "the most effective instrument of police pressure and of extortionist policies in so-called police states."122 Now they became the latest achievement on the road to socialism. The passports limited citizens' freedom of movement and facilitated control over them. Above all, since the passports were issued only to city dwellers, the system tied collective farmers to the land. The prohibition against unauthorized resignation from an enterprise and the right of the Commissariat of Labor to transfer skilled workers and specialists to other locations or branches of industry in a sense also tied city inhabitants "to the land." All citizens became servants of the state, which assigned them their place of work and prohibited them from quitting, on pain of severe punishment.
Another law, enacted on June 8, 1934, crowned the system by which the population was now enslaved: "betrayal of the homeland" became punishable by death. This law definitively rehabilitated the notion of "homeland." That term now referred to the Soviet state—which by party and state decree was projected retroactively into Russian history. The law also revived the term punishment, which had not been used since 1924. Similarly, the state abandoned the earlier concept of "reeducating" transgressors and instead announced its strict intention to punish them. In the decade following the revolution, the prevailing view was the Marxist notion that being determines consciousness. Consequently, by altering being, that is, the economic conditions of one's environment, the state could alter consciousness. With the exception of those who should be exterminated as incurable, it was possible to correct, to reeducate, the rest. But in 1934 it was decreed that the individual, not society, was responsible. It was his fault if he could not overcome the "birthmarks of capitalism," the "remnants of the past," and he ought to be punished, for although his being had changed, his consciousness remained unaltered.