Finally, the law of June 8, 1934, rehabilitated the family: its members became collectively responsible for any flagrantly criminal deed committed by one of them. Members of the family who knew of the intentions of a "traitor to the homeland" could be sentenced to prison camp for a period of two to five years, while those who did not know could be exiled for five years. (The last measure was not repealed until 1960.) This notion of collective responsibility demonstrated that the state was interested in reviving a strong family. A new family and marriage code would be adopted in 1936, but as early as 1934 the change in attitude was evident. The restoration of the destroyed family had begun, but on a new basis. Each Soviet family had to accept a new member, the Soviet state.
At the end of the First Five-Year Plan, a sword of Damocles hung over every Soviet citizen: they were all equal, for they were all on the brink of a precipice and they were all afraid. Stalin had explained to Emil Ludwig very well how the system of terror works: if a group of the population is destined to be liquidated, it is completely natural for a hierarchy of fear to arise. Everyone is afraid, but to different degrees, and the fear involves different punishments. Moreover, everyone recalls the existence of those destined for liquidation and is even more afraid of falling into this category. At the same conference of Marxist students of the agrarian question in December 1929 at which Stalin gave the signal for the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," Yuri Larin explained that this liquidation did not mean that all kulaks would be shot immediately. It sufficed to execute some of the condemned and let the others wait.
During the First Five-Year Plan, the specific features of Stalin's policy were definitively developed. He would draw the string taut, and at the last moment, when it was at the breaking point, he would relax the tension, only to tighten it again with still greater force. He often drew it tight and relaxed it almost simultaneously. Some American historians call the last year or two of the First Five-Year Plan "the great retreat." That was precisely the impression Stalin wished to give: after the insane figures of the first Stalin five-year plan, even a step backward to figures that were just as unrealizable but more modest seemed like a victory for common sense.
In 1932 collective farmers were allowed to cultivate private plots once again, but that was the same year that the law of August 7 was passed. The Soviet press sounded the alarm: in the giant factories, the shops, the sovkhozes (state, as opposed to collective, farms), the lunchrooms, "the individual had been forgotten." Pravda was indignant: "It is time to put an end to the bureaucratic, manor lord disdain for questions of public catering and to understand finally that there is no task more noble for a Communist than improving the condition of the workers."123 Such an appeal in the fifteenth year of the proletarian revolution might seem strange had it not been launched at the very moment when conditions for the working class were worse than at any time since the civil war.
In 1928 the Central Committee had passed a special resolution that branded the technical intelligentsia a class enemy. In 1931 a secret directive called for improving the attitude toward the technical intelligentsia as well as their material situation; but in 1933 a new resolution demanded a redoubled effort against "wreckers."
In the course of the First Five-Year Plan, an intricate hierarchical system of privileges took shape. During war communism, only a norrow segment of leaders enjoyed privileges; during the NEP, some privileges of a material kind slipped out of the party's control. Money opened the way to the good life, independent of the party and the state (if you did not, of course, take into account the permanent fear that nagged at the Nepmen). During the five-year plan, the stratum of leaders was broadened considerably, and the party, that is to say, Stalin, became the exclusive dispenser of all privileges. But he granted privileges not only to the leaders but to all the citizens. His article, "Dizzy with Success," was an authorization for peasants to leave the collective farms (if only for a few months). His declaration, "Life has become more joyous, comrades; life has become gayer" (at the most acute period of the famine) was a directive for everyone to "be merry." After receiving this directive, Komsomol leader Kosarev tried to persuade young people: "It is wrong to think that we are against personal well-being, against comfortably furnished rooms, tidiness, fashionable clothes and shoes, that we crush any aspiration for individual desires. ... We are not against music, we are not against love, we are not against flowers."124
Everyone who was forbidden to do anything was forbidden at the request of the workers; everyone who was authorized to do something was authorized to do so by the party, that is, Stalin. The struggle against asceticism, declared in 1932, became the next weapon for strengthening the state. Ascetics had nothing to lose but their ideas. If Stalin granted material benefits to those who appreciated them, he could also take them away. Those who lost favor with Stalin could lose their apartments, positions, and the "special rations" that went with a favored position. In 1932, Isaac Babel, who was in Paris, had a conversation with Boris Souvarine. The author oiRed Cavalry portrayed Stalin in colorful terms in the early 1930s, just the way his contemporaries, people close to the "court," saw him. Babel described how Stalin summoned an executive of the Commissariat of Nationalities whom the Politburo had decided to punish for some infraction. Stalin announced his punishment, seized his identification cards one by one for every establishment the man had worked for, confiscated his party card, and when the demoted man was about to leave called him back: "Hand over your pass to the Kremlin dining hall."125
During the First Five-Year Plan a state was built up on the basis of a very complicated system of privileges and fear of their loss. This system was sound, for famine and poverty reigned; therefore, everything became a privilege. Everyone depended on a higher benefactor, just as in the feudal system vassals depended on their suzerain. One need only give a nudge to one "benefactor" to nudge an endless series of favor seekers and favor granters.
The Stalinist state needed a Stalinist society. The revolution had destroyed the old order, and a kind of hybrid society, the not quite dead remnants of the old order and the beginnings of the new postrevolutionary society, had survived under the NEP; during the First Five-Year Plan the society of the NEP era was destroyed. Out of the debris of the prerevolu- tionary and NEP societies, a new society was formed according to the specifications of the Great Builder, as Radek called Stalin. This society had no need at all for ascetics or for the followers of any ideas, including Marxists: it needed doers.