Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (44 page)

Within ten years nearly every one of them would be dead.

PART V

Stalin’s Russia

In our days tears and blood flow like two big rivers and apparently, for some unknown reason, this is as it must be. They must keep running until the end, and should the springs of tears and blood run dry, then a knee will be placed down hard into the living—much more can be squeezed out.

—Mikhail Prishvin,

diary entry, July 1930

18

THE GREAT BREAK

The struggle among the Communist leadership to replace Lenin began well before his death in 1924. Confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak, Lenin by late 1923 was little more than an empty shell, feeble, powerless, obsolete. A year earlier, he had begun dictating to a secretary his opinions on the state of the party and its chief personalities in what became known as his Testament. Here he addressed the rivalry between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. Lenin never came out unequivocally in favor of either man, although in his final pronouncements he gave an increasingly negative assessment of Stalin. To many in the party, Trotsky, the man of supreme rhetorical skill, the brilliant, ruthless leader of the victorious Red Army in the civil war, seemed Lenin’s logical successor.

Stalin, however, skillfully managed to defeat his rivals for control of the party over the next several years—first Trotsky, who was eventually expelled from the country in 1929, then Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and finally Nikolai Bukharin. Throughout these clashes, Stalin was masterful at changing his position on the most pressing political questions when it suited him in the pursuit of power. Like Lenin, Stalin knew how to be fluid, open, to adjust one’s policies, or steal an opponent’s, to achieve one’s goals. Following Bukharin, he rejected the idea of world revolution in favor of “building socialism in one country”; following Trotsky, he embraced the need for a renewed, radical assault on Russian backwardness and an end to the gradualism of
NEP. Socialism, Stalin declared, would be built in Soviet Russia with or without the rest of the world, and it would be built now.

Stalin’s beliefs were shared by many in the party who had been uncomfortable with NEP from the beginning. Even as early as 1922, the Eleventh Party Congress had affirmed that there would be no further “retreat” from the revolution than the concessions already made. Two years later laws restricting the activities of the Nepmen were adopted, and in 1927, measures against the kulaks were enacted as well. Parts of Soviet society, including workers and the young, together with much of the party membership had long been frustrated with NEP’s slow approach to achieving socialism and the persistence of the old order, signs of which they saw all around them. Had the sacrifices of the revolution and civil war been made, many Russians asked, so that a new generation of traders and petty bourgeoisie could get rich at their expense and dance to the sounds of American jazz in the night spots of Moscow while they remained mired in poverty?

The pervasive disquiet was captured in
Cement
, Fyodor Gladkov’s popular novel of 1925. In a section titled “The Nightmare,” the young Communist Polia Mekhova feels as if she has strayed into a “strange land” as she walks the city streets. All the women in the shops are now wearing smart clothes—“flower-trimmed hats, transparent muslin, fashionable French heels. The men had also changed: cuffs and ties and patent leather boots.” Cigarette smoke, tinged with ladies’ perfume, wafted from the cafés where men gambled, music played, and women laughed.

Later, at a meeting of party members, Polia breaks down under the strain of the contradiction between the new world they thought they had been fighting for and the one they ended up with. In a shaky voice she cries:

I can’t endure it, because I can neither understand nor justify it . . . We fought and we suffered . . . A sea of blood and hunger . . . And suddenly—the past arises again with joyful sound . . . And I don’t know which is the nightmare: those years of struggle, blood, misery, and sacrifice or this bacchanalia of rich shop windows and drunken cafés! What were the mountains of corpses for then? Were they to make the workers’ dens, their poverty and their death, more dreadful? So that scoundrels and vampires should again enjoy all the good things in life, and get fat by robbery? I cannot accept this, and I cannot live with it!

Leaving the meeting, Polia is approached by some of the rank-and-file: “Just so Comrade. [. . .] We always get the same, nothing . . . the bastards must be smashed . . . smashed . . .”
¹

The party was supposed to lead society, not just govern it, but as the twenties progressed, it increasingly seemed as though society were heading in its own direction with little regard for the party. The party leadership feared it was losing control; secret internal reports depicted a growing number of problems: worker anger, peasant resistance, alienated youth, drunkenness, and rampant corruption. By the end of the decade, the party was poised to strike back.
²

Stalin’s “revolution from above,” begun in 1928, has come to be known as the Great Break. In October of that year the First Five-Year Plan was launched. Its chief goal was to turn what was still a largely rural, peasant society into a major industrial power virtually overnight. The audacity of the plan reflected Stalin’s gargantuan vision and the party’s belief in its own infinite powers: “There are no fortresses the Bolsheviks cannot storm,” a popular slogan of the day put it. Such was the frenzied tempo of the First Five-Year Plan that it was completed in just four years and three months. Entire industries, from chemicals to automobiles, from aviation to machine building, were created out of nothing, and new cities, home to sprawling industrial complexes, sprang up in Siberia and the Urals.

The capital to pay for industrialization came from the peasants. Tens of thousands of enthusiastic Communists and workers went out into the countryside during the First Five-Year Plan to force the collectivization of agriculture. Through a campaign of encouragement, propaganda, intimidation, and deadly violence, Russia’s peasants were forced to give up their land and move onto large, state-administered agricultural collectives. Their labor, and profits, would henceforth be under the direct control of the state, which would use them for its own ends. Everything was diverted to the plan, and every aspect of economic life was to be under the control of the state. All private trade, even, for a time, the sale of personal property between individuals, was banned; farmers’ markets were shut down. Food and other basics disappeared from the stores; rationing had to be reintroduced, first on bread and
then on nearly all staple goods. Hunger became a widespread and permanent feature of Soviet life.

The achievements of Stalin’s revolution cannot be denied. In a few years the Soviet Union did indeed transform itself into one of the world’s industrial powers. But the costs, in human suffering and environmental devastation, render these achievements hollow. The figures on collectivization and its fallout alone beggar comprehension. Before the program of mass collectivization ended in 1933, likely more than two million people had been deported as class enemies to Siberia, the Urals, and Central Asia. Hundreds of thousand had been killed or died from starvation and exposure. The peasants not deported did not necessarily have it any better. Collectivization brought a massive famine across Ukraine, central Russia, and the northern Caucasus that left more than five million dead by 1934. Most of the deportees were placed in special settlements and put to work clearing forests and digging mines. Beginning in 1929, the existing system of prisons was replaced with a vast new network of self-supporting corrective labor camps—the gulag. Eighteen million inmates passed through the camps between 1929 and 1953, the year of Stalin’s death. These inmates formed a nation of slave laborers without whose work Stalin’s plans never could have been realized.
³

Stalin’s revolution was conceived as a war. Industrialization and collectivization were two of its main fronts. Culture was the third. This front was to figure as the battle line against the Soviet Union’s class enemies, and it was fought to the death. Class warfare was not only renewed but whipped into a frenzy against the usual suspects: former people, outcasts, intellectuals, Nepmen, bourgeois specialists, and kulaks.
⁴
In late 1926, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee had toyed with the idea of reinstating the rights of the country’s outcasts if they had engaged in socially useful work and been loyal to Soviet power over the past few years. The change, however, was never made. Now new laws were being passed against socially alien groups. In 1929, for example, a new crime was added to Article 31 of the criminal code of the USSR making it illegal to attempt to reestablish the power of the bourgeoisie. Widespread purges at offices, factories, and schools left many of these people without any clear means of survival.
⁵

The threat posed by former people seemed to be mounting. Internal
secret OGPU documents from the early 1930s claimed that “the anti-Soviet activity of former people at the present time has grown in strength.” There was concern that former people were coming together and plotting to mix counterrevolutionary actions with terrorism.
Komsomolskaia Pravda
talked of saboteurs with “grenades in their pockets” and the remnants of the old elite harboring “dreams of avenging the revolution.”
⁶

Around this time, former people became linked with a broader notion of “socially harmful elements,” which included the unemployed, orphans, beggars, and petty criminals (both real and imagined). The Soviet leadership saw these elements as one of the most serious threats to the state, and it tried to address the threat through the introduction of internal, domestic passports in 1932. The chaos of collectivization and industrialization unleashed a modern-day
Völkerwanderung
, during which more than twenty million people flooded into Soviet cities and towns in the first years of the 1930s. By making passports obligatory for all citizens, the OGPU hoped to flush out all former people and other undesirables trying to hide and then either arrest or exile them from the major urban centers. Although there were no formal restrictions on denying former people passports, verbal instructions were given to deny passports to all “class enemies” and “former people.”
⁷

Eugene Lyons was a radical American journalist and political activist who went to the Soviet Union in 1928 as the chief correspondent for the United Press just as the Great Break was getting under way. He arrived a radical, but what he saw over the next six years destroyed his illusions about the Workers’ Paradise. Among the many things that shook his beliefs was the treatment of former people. He was stunned at the intensity with which they were being “pried out into the open and stepped on without pity.” He could not conceive of how these people being thrown out of work and denied any means to make a living were to survive; what made it even worse was that to show any concern for these unfortunate souls was denounced as “bourgeois sentimentality.” When he asked officials about the plight of the former people and what was to become of them, no one could give him an answer, except to comment on the “amazing tenacity of the human animal in clinging somehow to life.”
Lyons, however, was convinced many did not survive; the rest “hung on to existence somehow with bleeding fingers.”
⁸

“The living dead,” Walter Duranty called former people in 1931, “phantoms of the past in the Soviet present.”
⁹

With the beginning of the Great Break, former people found there was almost nowhere now left to hide. Not only were they being hounded in the cities, but the few who had managed to survive in the countryside were being driven off the land for good. By the mid-1920s, about 11 percent of prerevolutionary landowners (some 10,756 landlords, not including their families) were still living in the countryside. Most of these had never been great landlords like the Sheremetevs, but much smaller landowners. Some had managed to hold out by setting up communes or model farms and working alongside their former peasants. Regardless, all had seen their landholdings whittled away over time and by now had only meager plots. Nonetheless, their very presence represented a problem for the Soviet state, and throughout the decade efforts had been made to remove them, not without success. In March 1925, the Soviet government issued a decree evicting all former landlords from their properties by the beginning of 1926. (The order was later amended from January 1 to August 1, 1926.) In early 1927, Tula Province, to cite one region, was still home to 371 former landlords; by the end of the year, only 138 remained. With the arrival of collectivization, they all were pushed off the land, along with every other landlord all across Russia prior to 1930. Most of these people made their way to the cities and joined the ranks of outcasts in desperate search for lodging, work, and food.
¹⁰