Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

Among other things, it spawned a monopoly appointments system (nomenklatura). The party’s rules stipulated that its members should strive to carry out party policy wherever they worked, and ‘to exercise party supervision over the work of all organizations and institutions’. Responsible appointments in all walks of life required a resolution of the appropriate party committee. This meant that all factory directors, senior local government officials, headteachers, newspaper editors, and so on were vetted by their local party organization before appointment. For this purpose, party committees at all levels maintained a card index system listing all potential appointees to important posts and containing information on their qualifications, experience, and political reliability. When Joseph Stalin became General Secretary of the party in 1922, he perfected this system and used it to keep tabs on all his comrades and subordinates. Mao Zedong later said that power grew out of the barrel of a gun; but Stalin had already shown that it grew out of a well-kept filing cabinet. During the late 1920s and 1930s, he used it to defeat all his rivals and to rig show trials against many of them.

However, local party secretaries could and did manipulate this system too. Stalin could not keep a constant eye on the tens of thousands of party committees up and down the country. Their leaders used their own files to promote their own favourites. Thus, the party’s power monopoly generated a hierarchy of patron–client networks, whose grip on whole regions or branches of the economy could be restrained only by extreme vigilance and determined intervention from above.

11. Portrait of Stalin by Isaak Brodskii, 1928

Why, though, did organizational rivalries generate the grotesque excesses of the 1930s terror? The Communist leaders were profoundly marked by the experiences that had brought them to power. They had endured privation together in the Tsarist underground, sustained by their shared belief in their own mission. They had suffered arrest and exile, and fought a desperate civil war, which it often seemed they would lose. Their consciousness was formed by their awareness that they were surrounded by enemies and by popular indifference or hostility even while, as they saw it, they were trying to bring harmony and happiness to humanity. Through these abrupt changes of fortune, they forged intense interdependence and mutual trust, without which they could scarcely have persisted in their endeavour. Absolute trust in the party became a hallmark of Communists.

A warrior mentality coloured the Communists’ responses to all social problems, including those of economic development. In their eyes, everyone but workers and the poorest peasants were potential enemies. In 1928, the state planning institution, Gosplan, launched the first of a series of Five Year Plans, intended to industrialize the country, replacing foreign capital with state allocation of resources. The plans were successful in increasing industrial output, but they required a net transfer of resources from the countryside to the towns. Offered lower prices for their crops, peasants responded by cutting their grain deliveries. The Communist leaders interpreted this market malfunction as deliberate sabotage by ‘kulaks’ – wealthier peasants who were ‘class enemies’. They responded with two aggressive campaigns, implemented with military speed and thoroughness: ‘dekulakization’, and the creation of collective farms (kolkhozy), run by appointed officials, from which deliveries of produce could be enforced.

Plenipotentiaries were sent into the villages, with instructions to find out who the ‘kulaks’ were and to banish them from the communities. The most ‘malicious elements’ were deported to remote underpopulated regions of the north and Siberia, where they were dumped, often without suitable shelter, nutrition, or clothing. The peasants were then pressured into surrendering their land and livestock to kolkhozy, which were intended to bring industrial organization and discipline to agriculture. Some poorer villagers welcomed this, but the whole notion repelled most peasants, who were strongly attached to their household plots of land.

These measures brought about the destruction of the whole traditional rural way of life. Some peasants dubbed the results a ‘second serfdom’. As more archive materials become available, historians have uncovered more and more cases of peasant resistance, often violent. Since the village church was usually closed as well and the priest arrested, some peasants actually believed that the reign of Antichrist had come, and that anyone who entered a kolkhoz would be ‘branded with the stamp of the beast’.