The Soviet state was born in war. If any nation should have known the face of violence, it was this one. First there had been the Tsar’s war against Germany, in which more Russian soldiers died than those from any other European state.5 The prospect of defeat in this, the First World War, along with the hardship that came with the war effort, sparked the riots of February 1917, the outburst of popular rage that toppled the Tsar and swept a new government into power. But it took yet another upheaval, the Bolshevik coup under Lenin, to get the Tsar’s exhausted troops back home. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which the new state dropped its former allies, Britain and France, in favour of a truce with Germany, brought peace for a few weeks at the beginning of 1918. Those servicemen who had not managed to desert rejoiced at the news that they no longer had to fight. But civil war followed, a conflict that blazed across the future Soviet world like a consuming fire, recalling soldiers to the colours and conscripting bystanders of every age. Its violence, more bitter even than conventional fighting, was only one face of this new war’s cruelty. Wrecked towns and villages were also ravaged by epidemics – typhus in particular – while harvests failed and entire regions starved. By 1921, when the fighting ended in all but the last corners of the emergent state, most Soviet people knew exactly what war really meant.
The greatest promise of the new regime was peace. The word itself had been the most potent element in Bolshevik propaganda back in 1917, and there would be few things, in years to come, that Soviet people wanted more. But though the leaders talked conciliation, declaring that their long-term goal was nothing less than harmony and brotherhood, their policies set them on a collision course with the rest of the world. Marxism–Leninism assumed a prolonged war with capitalism, and while the struggle was certain to end with communism’s triumph, no one believed it would be bloodless. As the ultimate victory of communism drew closer, the ideologists explained, its opponents would fight with ever more determination, clinging for dear life to the power and wealth they had amassed. Some kind of armed conflict was bound to erupt before the world reached its final state of brotherhood and plenty. More locally, there were still remnants of those same elements – bourgeois capitalism, imperialist oppression – to be overcome at home. The state, the self-appointed instrument of the people’s will, set about extirpating them. Class war – a brand-new kind of violence – raged for the next decade. By 1938, its casualties approached 15 million dead and many times that number homeless, broken, orphaned or bereaved.
The prospect of a golden future and the fear that enemies were gathering to subvert it formed the carrot and stick of the Stalinist dictatorship. Opposition to aspects of policy endured, and so did cynical evasion and crime. But this was a state that aimed to transform human lives, not just a humdrum tyranny. To some extent, a person’s response depended on his age. The revolution was a watershed, and anyone who had a stake in the old world was likely to feel threatened by upheavals in the new. For older people, fear and hardship threw a chilling shadow over communism’s dawn, while memories of war and terror fostered cautious vigilance. But the young – the generation that would constitute the majority of soldiers after 1941 – grew up learning the bright language of hope. The schisms were largely concealed. For years before the war, the Soviet people had been trained to work as one. Each November and May, when it was time to celebrate the gains of revolution, the crowds turned out in their millions to march and sing. Stalin’s image, reproduced on countless posters and banners, gazed down upon the spectacle of unity. In reality, the people who would form the core of the Red Army and fight the coming war were divided by everything from generation to class, ethnicity, and even politics. The thing that kept them together, moulding them into a nation that remained distinct from any other, was their almost complete isolation from the outside world.
Within this sealed universe, the most contentious issue for most people was the transformation of the countryside. The Soviet Union was still a country where four fifths of the population came from villages. For generations, the sons of peasants had shouldered packs and tramped off to the cities in pursuit of work. But they often left wives and children behind, and almost all dreamed of returning one day, if only to die. The Russian countryside, or that of Ukraine, the Caucasus, the steppe, was a vision of motherland that anyone born there was bound to cherish. Its traditions, folklorists imagined, stretched back into the dawn of time. This was not true – Russia had changed dramatically even in the nineteenth century – but it was a comforting fantasy, especially for people who now worked at building sites and steel mills. For the peasants themselves, what mattered was their land, their stock, and the next harvest. In 1929, this whole economy and way of life would be turned upside down.
The Soviet government had decided that its agricultural sector was inefficient. Peasant farming, a culture ingrained even more deeply than religion, had to be streamlined, managed more efficiently, controlled. In the winter of 1929–30, police and volunteers spread out across the countryside to impose a second revolution, this time from above. Their aim was to create collectives, abolishing individual farms and setting up a system based on mechanized wage labour. To give it a more revolutionary bite, the campaign was cast as a new class war and its enemies – the scapegoats of the coming agony – were identified as the wealthier peasants, the kulaks, a social category largely invented for the purpose. Kulaks were destined to lose everything: their stock and equipment, their homes, their civil rights, and frequently, their lives. In the spring of 1930, the countryside came close to open war. In the years that followed, millions of those who worked the farms would be driven to the cities, unable to support themselves on the irregular rations of grain that took the place of wages. Millions more would starve. By 1939, the rural population had declined from 26 to 19 million households.6 Of the men and women who had disappeared from the countryside, an estimated 10 million were dead.
No policy would cause more anguish during Stalin’s rule, and none provoked such opposition. It was a constant irritant despite the fact that its prime victims remained invisible. Famine victims were silent even as they died, while exiled kulaks were forced to vanish, largely, from the public gaze, or rather, from all European eyes. Their lives and deaths in sparsely populated settlements to the far north and east were an irrelevance as far as Moscow was concerned. They were not even considered suitable candidates for army service. Their children, too, were treated as suspect at first. Members of the second generation tended to begin their military service working like slaves in labour battalions, building factories and digging rock, not fighting at the front.7 But even supposedly loyal peasants, the surly, taciturn majority, included millions who resented the collectives and all the hardships they had brought. Many were hungry, overworked, disorientated. As the state took more and more grain from the countryside for sale abroad, their families scattered like chaff. People were forced to live like vagabonds, moving around in search of food and work. When these sons of the village were called up, they made uncertain soldiers. At best, they resented and feared their arbitrary government. At worst, they waited for a chance to put things right.