The First Soviet Writers' Congress completed the process of nationalizing literature, begun after the October revolution. The congress approved the Central Committee's decision to establish a single organization for all writers, the Soviet Writers' Union, under the direction of a representative of the Central Committee, Aleksandr Shcherbakov. One could count on the fingers of one hand the writers who did not take the oath of loyalty to the party: Bulgakov, Platonov, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova. Congresses in other cultural spheres were held on the model of the writers' congress. They too established single unions for everyone in their field and took a loyalty oath. Stalin paid special attention to the cinema, which Lenin had called the most important of the arts. As far back as 1928 a group of directors, including Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Kozintsev, and Trauberg, had asked for a "firm ideological dictatorship in the field of the cinema."160 In January 1935 they greeted this dictatorship. Aleksandr Dovzhenko declared: 'The artists of the Soviet Union have created an art founded on 'yes,' on the conception: I uplift, I inspire, I educate."161
By 1934 collectivization had been completed, industrialization begun, and the superstructure nationalized. The country's spiritual life, with the active help of the "creative intelligentsia," the "masters of thought," was placed entirely at the service of the state, that is, of Stalin.
Gorky held "the traitor Dmitrievsky" up to shame for having written, "We are slaves. We need teachers, leaders, prophets." This was only true under capitalism, Gorky harangued. 'They willingly crawl after any leader, expecting exactly the same thing from each of them: perhaps the Boss will expand the limits of'philistine good fortune' under capitalism."162 He urged people not to follow "just any leader," but only the ones who were building a "new, socialist reality" in the "land illuminated by Lenin's genius, in the land where Joseph Stalin's iron will works tirelessly and miraculously."163
The enormity of Gorky's activity in his final years has not yet been adequately judged. It was primarily with his help that the spiritual enslavement of the Soviet people was made possible. He called on the people to follow "that single guiding idea which does not exist anywhere else in the world, the idea that has been soundly formulated in Stalin's six conditions."164 Abusing his prestige as a great writer and humanist, Gorky never stopped trying to pound into the heads of Soviet citizens the notion that the GPU was the country's most important cultural force. He maintained that "the work of the Chekists in the camps clearly demonstrates the humanism of the proletariat."165 In January 1936 he dreamed: "In fifty years, when things will be a little calmer and the first half of the century will seem like a splendid tragedy, a proletarian epic, it is probable that art as well as history will then be able to do justice to the wonderful cultural work of the rank-and-file Chekists in the camps."166 His dream was realized much sooner: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an artist and historian, did justice to the cultural work of the Chekists in Gulag Archipelago.
Among the most shameful pages of Gorky's prose, his letter 'To the Women Shockworkers at the Building Site of the Moscow—Volga Canal" takes first place. Gorky, the defender of women, who for decades had bemoaned their fate in tsarist Russia, addressed the women prisoners who were being killed off by inhumanly hard labor in a Soviet "corrective labor camp": "Your labor once again demonstrates to the world what a healthy effect work can have on people, work that has been given meaning by the great truth of bolshevism, and it demonstrates how splendidly the Lenin— Stalin cause has done in organizing women."167
Thanks to such spiritual teachers Stalin was able by 1934 to assert unlimited power over the country and the people. He was right when he told Emil Ludwig that he could not hold power by fear alone. He needed lies as well. The "spiritual teachers" created a mirage that they tried to make people believe by claiming that the mirage was more real than reality, that it was reality.
Having completed the base and the superstructure, Stalin moved on to the next task, to the final on the road to socialism. On December 1, 1934, at Smolny in Leningrad, Sergei Kirov was killed.
CHAPTER
SOCIALISM "ACHIEVED AND WON," 1935-1938
THE KIROV ASSASSINATION
Khrushchev in his "secret speech" to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 hinted at what had been known outside the Soviet Union for many years— that Stalin masterminded the Kirov assassination. Walter Krivitsky, who had headed Soviet intelligence in Western Europe, wrote about Stalin's role in 1939, as did Aleksandr Orlov in 1953. (Orlov had also served as a foreign agent for Stalin, particularly in Spain.) Elisabeth Lermolo, perhaps the only firsthand witness to reach the West, wrote about this as well in 1955.1 The wife of a former tsarist officer, Lermolo was serving a ten-year sentence in exile in Siberia when she chanced to meet Leonid Nikolaev, Kirov's future assassin, while he was visiting his aunt, an acquaintance of Lermolo's. After the assassination Lermolo's name was found in Nikolaev's notebook and she was dragged into the affair, being interrogated by Stalin himself. During her six years in prison she had occasion to meet and speak with members of Nikolaev's family, including his wife, Milda.
Today the course of events leading to Kirov's death is more or less well known. Nikolaev, a young member of the Communist party who had some sort of grievance against Kirov, fell into the hands of an agent of Stalin's, Viktor Zaporozhets, deputy chief of the Leningrad NKVD. Zaporozhets
arranged things so that Nikolaev had the opportunity to shoot Kirov. The details of the murder plot, as it has now been reconstructed, were actually given by one of the conspirators himself, Genrikh Yagoda, former head of the NKVD, during the Moscow trial of 1938. Only the "chief organizer" of the plot, Stalin, was of course not named.
Why did Stalin kill Kirov? The controversy over this question still goes on. Boris Nicolaevsky, a sharp-eyed Menshevik historian who knew many of the Bolsheviks quite well, had a chance to talk with Bukharin in Paris in February 1936. He suggested that Kirov represented a new political line, distinct from Stalin's. This point of view, presented in the Menshevik publication Sotsialistichesky vestnik (Socialist herald) in 1956, was picked up by some Soviet historians in 1964, at the height of the struggle against the "cult of personality." They tried to show that the Seventeenth Party Congress had been discontented with Stalin and his policies and that it had even hoped to replace him with Kirov. Hence the assassination and the purge.
It is easy to understand the aims of these historians. How could they explain that the party and its "highest body," the party congress, had marched to Stalin's sacrificial altar without a murmur? The myth of resistance to Stalin by the "best Communists," the authentic Leninists, removes the need for such explanation. But this myth raises other questions. How is it that the dedicated oppositionists were unable to pose a viable alternative to Stalin, and yet the loyal Stalinist Kirov was able to? And when did he do so? After Stalin had succeeded on all battlefronts? Kirov's conduct as Leningrad party boss was no better and no worse than any of Stalin's other governors. His speeches show not the slightest trace of an alternative program.
It is highly plausible that Stalin saw Kirov as a rival. Young, energetic, firm, a relentless enemy of all opposition, and a Russian to boot, Kirov may well have seemed a dangerous competitor. Moreover, Leningrad, the cradle of the revolution, functioned as a second power center, which might under certain circumstances challenge Moscow's primacy. These considerations do not really explain why Stalin decided to kill Kirov, however. A more illuminating approach is to ask what Stalin sought to gain by the assassination.