In 1931 the Central Committee passed a resolution on schools. The schools returned to the old methods, courses, lessons, and themes condemned by the revolution. Commissar of Education Lunacharsky, the former symbol of the revolutionary school, was replaced by Andrei Bubnov, who had served for many years as the head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army. Three hundred fifty "experienced party functionaries" and one hundred Komsomol members were sent into the schools, which had been overwhelmed by an "alien element," as the Central Committee resolution put it. In 1932 all experiments in the realm of education were branded "leftist deviations" and "latent Trotskyism." "Firm schedules," "firm discipline," and a whole gamut of punishments, right up to expulsion, were introduced in the schools.
The role of the school as an "educational," "civilizing" factor was assigned to the prison system and the concentration camps, which developed very rapidly during the First Five-Year Plan, which included prisoner labor. In 1928 criminal legislation was reviewed and adapted to the expanding system of camps, which became necessary as a result of the sharp increase in the number of prisoners. In 1930 the task of protecting society against "particularly dangerous social offenders by means of isolation combined with socially useful labor, and by adapting them to the conditions of a working community" was entrusted to the "corrective labor" camps.126 As early as 1929 all the camps had been placed under the direction of the OGPU, which for years had directed the archetypal camp at Solovki. The OGPU became the country's largest construction company. With a virtually limitless supply of unskilled labor at its disposal, the OGPU conducted massive arrests of engineers and technicians to manage the unskilled laborers. A new, purely Soviet institution arose, the sharashka: a prison in which engineers, scholars, and researchers worked in their fields of specialization for the interests of the state. At the large-scale building sites, in the "super-factories," the specialists were monitored by armed guards. The largest construction site of the First Five-Year Plan, the Baltic—White Sea Canal, was built by prisoners under the leadership of "engineer- wreckers." Trotsky's dream of "militarized labor" became a reality under Stalin in the form of the "penalization of labor." The gates of the camps were adorned with Stalin's words: "In the Soviet Union labor is4a matter of honor, prowess, and heroism."
The prisoners constituted the bottom of Soviet society; at the summit was the Leader, the Boss. In 1933, Afinogenov, after the success of The Fear, wrote a new play, The Lie. Aware of the explosiveness of his subject, he sent the text to Comrade Stalin in person. Stalin worked on the play for a long time, making corrections, cutting out parts, adding to it. Then, for lack of time, he returned the manuscript without adding the finishing touches, with the following note: "Comrade Afinogenov! The point of your play is rich in its conception, but its execution was poor."127 It cannot be ruled out that, for Stalin, the point of the play was expressed by one of its characters: "One had to be a boss to think."128 Several years later, at an all-union conference for the wives of Red Army commanders, one of the wives recounted her conversation in the Far East with a Gold, a representative of the indigenous population. The man was seated in a boat and his wife was rowing. "Why aren't you rowing?" the lady asked him. "I am thinking," he answered. When she saw them a second time, the man was rowing while his wife sat behind him. "Now," he explained, "Stalin is doing the thinking about how I should live, so I am free to work."129
The restructuring of society's material base was accompanied by a complete alteration of its superstructure. Society's spiritual life was harnessed to the state's chariot to an extent that would have seemed impossible not long before. Krylenko, the commissar of justice, renowned prosecutor, and amateur chessmaster, declared in 1932: "We must once and for all put an end to neutrality in chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula 'chess for chess's sake,' just as we do 'art for art's sake.' We must organize shock units of chess players and immediately begin to fulfill a five-year plan for chess."
The chess five-year plan was an innocent game in comparison to the "antireligion five year plan" announced on May 15, 1932. Under this plan, "by the first of May 1937 not a single house of prayer will be needed any longer in any territory of the Soviet Union, and the very notion of God will be expunged as a survival of the Middle Ages and an instrument for holding down the working masses."
All of science came under attack as well. 'The philosophical, natural, and mathematical sciences," declared the journal Marxism and the Natural Sciences, "have the same political character as the historical sciences." In 1929 the number of academicians doubled. In the elections for three Marxists—the philosopher Deborin, the historian Lukin, and the literary critic Friche—nine academicians, including Ivan Pavlov, voted against them in a last stand in defense of scientific freedom. After a second ballot, the Marxists were elected to the Academy. Aleksei Krylov, a mathematician and naval architect, quoting Pushkin, exhorted the resisters: "What does it matter, sir? Go ahead and kiss the villain's hand."130
The housebreaking of the Academy of Sciences went beyond the election of Marxists. In 1930 the Academy was assigned a new task, formulated as follows: "to assist in developing a unitary scientific method based on the materialist world view, consistently orienting the entire system of scientific knowledge toward the satisfaction of the needs of the socialist reconstruction of the country and the further development of socialist society."131
In December 1930 Stalin gave an interview to a group of philosophers at the Institute of Red Professors. He called for a struggle against the "Menshevizing idealism" of Deborin and the Menshevik views of Plekhanov and urged them to pay no attention to the modesty of Lenin, who did not consider himself a professional philosopher; on the contrary, they should give the leader of the October revolution the place he deserved—that of the head of Russian Marxism, the greatest Russian Marxist philosopher, one of Marxism's leading lights together with Marx and Engels. The hint was well taken. In September 1931 Bolshevik, the organ of the Central Committee, published an article that unmasked the "Menshevizing idealism" of Deborin and his school (whatever that meant) and indicated that "it was necessary to develop materialist dialectics... on the basis of the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin." Thus Stalin was elevated to the rank of a classic writer of Marxist philosophy, on a par with the other three. On the fiftieth anniversary of Marx's death Pravda explained that Marx should be studied "in accordance with" Stalin's works. The publication figures for the Marxist "classics" presented in January 1934 at the Seventeenth Party Congress eloquently demonstrated that all the classics were equal, but one was more equal than the others. Marx and Engels had a circulation of 7 million, Lenin 14 million, Stalin 60.5 million. American correspondent Eugene Lyons, who was walking around Moscow on November 7, 1933, counted all the portraits of Lenin and Stalin in the windows of the houses along Gorky Street. The count was 103 to 52 in favor of Stalin. The "four-headed portrait" soon gained great popularity: the four profiles of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin looking to the future. Goebbels saw in this portrait an excellent propaganda device and immediately prepared a similar one for Germany; true, it had only three profiles: Frederick the Great, Bismarck, and Hitler. This trinity also looked resolutely to the future.
Philosophical expertise was, and is, an indispensable attribute of the Leader of the Communist party, Supreme Guardian of the Doctrine, but of perhaps even greater significance is history. The conquest of history was somewhat more difficult for Stalin than it was to proclaim himself "coryphaeus of Marxism," for history consists, in addition to theory, of facts. In October 1931 the magazines Proletarskaya revolyutsiya and Bolshevik published Stalin's article (in the form of a letter to the editor), "Some Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism." Stalin used as a pretext an article by A. Slutsky on Lenin's views on the internal party struggle among German Social Democrats on the eve of World War I. This was certainly not a burning issue at the end of 1931, but the historical importance of this article cannot be denied. It marked the establishment of Stalin's ideological autocracy.