The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

Violence and fear were the great handmaidens of the Stalinist era. True totalitarianism manifested itself. Though party functionaries could write off the human devastation of collectivization, it was another story with the Great Purges of 1936-1938. Here Stalin endeavored to cleanse society and the Communist Party itself of every conceivable blemish, enemy, or opponent. Most of these perceptions were a result of his paranoia. But they were manifested as mass executions of the innocent and true believer. Even the armed forces, which lost some three-quarters of its senior officers, could not avoid the purging.

Through the 1930’s and right up to Stalin’s death in March 1953, Soviet society is best understood in terms of unprecedented regimentation. The discussion above points clearly to order and terror. Because this was so pervasive and complete, regimentation could be attempted and effected. Socialist realism forced literature and the arts into a straitjacket. The League of Militant Atheists served as the state arm to help repress religion. Science, whether mathematics or biology, had to serve the ideological strictures of the State. History was periodically rewritten so that the “fact” fit party requirements. Informing on family or neighbors who might not be reliable citizens was strongly encouraged. And the Gulag expanded with an unparalleled rapidity since it had to absorb millions of the arrested. As the writers Ilf and Petrov pointed out, loving Soviet power was not enough. It had to love you.1

With the opening of numerous Soviet archives in recent years, the knowledge of the death toll under Stalin has become more precise. In referring to the Soviet State and its leaders from Lenin through Stalin, Woodford Mc-Clellan asks: “How many did they kill one way or another? The Holocaust in Russia antedated the one in the Third Reich and took as many as 40 million and perhaps as many as 60 million lives.”2 An exceedingly difficult question to answer is how a nation survives this.

Survival is, of course, the greatest theme of World War II. Bearing the brunt of Hitler’s attack in June 1941, (the most powerful military operation ever), the Soviet Union was ultimately a heroic victor. The great battles of Stalingrad and Kursk proved Germany would not win. Leningrad, surviving a 900-day siege wherein over one and a half million people starved to death, proved, if one ever had doubt, a Russian tenacity and resiliency that is barely imaginable. These were also among the intangibles that allowed the Soviet Union to claim ultimate victory, even though three fourths of the German army was engaged against it, not the West. Small wonder that Stalin insisted on territorial “concessions” after the war.

The post-war years did not grant the nation any political gifts. Repression and regimentation again became the norm. The thought of any comfort social, cultural, political, religious, or economic—was only a dream foundered on a

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harsh reality. But death began to shift that reality, Stalin’s death. The mid 1950’s were to witness a collective sigh of relief, and the surge of a long dormant positive hope.

Nickolas Lupinin

NOTES

As pointed out by Woodford McClellan, Russia: The Soviet Period and After, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1998), p. 97.

McClellan, 97.

Chapter Twenty

B. Brovtsyn, Dearly Beloved

The persecution of religion was a notorious feature of the Soviet State, one that began shortly after the Bolshevik seizure of power. By the late 1920’s and through the 1930’s, this had developed into a total attack encompassing mass destruction of churches, arrests of believers, frequently leading to dismissal from work, imprisonment and execution. In this noxious atmosphere public profession of religion was simply dangerous. Brovtsyn describes an intimate situation. He and his fiancee, both scientists, had to go to great lengths to have a secret church wedding. Taken from B. Brovtsyn, “Pervogo iunia na Lakhte” [The First of June on the Lakhta River]. New York: The New Review, No. 158, March, 1985.

The place, where I was born, spent the first nine years of my life, and to which I returned from the place of my parents’ exile almost an adult, at age fifteen, has been best described by Pushkin:

Along the mossy, swampy shores Blackened huts here and there, Shelter of a wretched Finn. And the forest, unpenetrated by light In the haze of the hidden sun, Rustled all around.

Both the mossy shore and the swampy marsh have remained. The northern shore of the Gulf of Finland from Petrograd to the west is covered with forests. In the lowlands there were marshes where in autumn bright red cranberries ripened on their thin stems. On the pine tree-covered knolls nestled stunted, dark red foxberries, with glittering, rigid little leaves. And

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