The restoration of a more hierarchical approach to management entailed an expansion of the responsibilities, prestige, and privileges of managerial and technical personnel. ‘The ground should shake when the director goes around the factory,’ declared M. M. Kaganovich in a pep talk to managers, adding that ‘workers like a powerful leader’. Successful directors had to do more than shake the ground. Presiding over vast complexes with tens of thousands of workers, they learned how to wheel and deal for scarce resources, establish cosy relations with local party and NKVD officials, read the signals emanating from Moscow, and above all fulfil—or at least appear to fulfil—the quantitative targets of the plan. As a veteran journalist later recalled, ‘it was during those years that the names of metallurgical factory directors became known, not only to a narrow circle of economic officials, but broad sections of the Soviet public. For their work, for their successes, the country celebrated them as in wartime it had followed the successes of military leaders.’
Engineers were also celebrated. Stalin had already signalled the official rehabilitation of the old technical intelligentsia in 1931, but no less important was a parallel and longer-lasting phenomenon—the rehabilitation of engineering as a profession. Symbolic of the engineers’ new stature was the injunction to writers at the founding congress of the Writers’ Union in 1934 that they become ‘engineers of human souls’. It has been pointed out that the engineer-designer, icon of technical mastery and order, began to supplant the production worker as the main protagonist in contemporary novels and films.
These changes in industrialization and labour policies constituted part of a larger process: consolidation of a system that was generally known, though not officially acknowledged, as Stalinism. If the Stalin revolution was more or less coterminal with the First Five-Year Plan, then Stalinism—the repudiation of egalitarianism and collectivist ‘excesses’ of that revolution—was its outcome.
Retaining the ideological prop of a dogmatized Marxism (officially renamed ‘Marxism-Leninism’), Stalinism identified the political legitimacy of the regime not only in the October Revolution, but also in pro-Russian nationalism and glorification of state power. It thus incorporated a conservative and restorative dimension, emphasizing hierarchy, patriotism, and patriarchy.
The Stalinist system depended on an extensive network of officials, the upper echelons of whom were included in the party’s list of key appointments (nomenklatura). Wielding vast and often arbitrary power, these officials ruled over their territories and enterprises as personal fiefs and were not above—or below—developing their own cults of personality. Leon Trotsky, one of the earliest and most trenchant critics of the Stalinist system, regarded it as essentially counter-revolutionary (‘Thermidorist’), a product of the international isolation of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian backwardness, and the political expropriation of the Soviet working class by the bureaucracy. But unlike many others who followed him down the path of communist apostasy, Trotsky did not consider the bureaucracy a ruling class. Bureaucrats, after all, were constrained from accumulating much in the way of personal property and, as the periodic purges of the decade demonstrated, lacked security of tenure. This was why Trotsky wrote that ‘the question of the character of the Soviet Union is not yet decided by history’. It was, rather, a ‘contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism’.
Notwithstanding its exercise of terror and monopolistic control of the means of communication, the bureaucratic apparatus alone could not sustain the Stalinist system. Another dimension of Stalinism, which has only recently received attention from historians, was its assiduous cultivation of mass support and participation—through education and propaganda, leadership cults, election campaigns, broad national discussions (for example, of the constitution, the Comintern’s Popular Front strategy, and the ban on abortions), public celebrations (such as the Pushkin centennial of 1937), show trials, and other political rituals. The system, then, was more than a set of formal political institutions and ‘transmission belts’. In addition to forging a new political culture, it also fostered and was sustained by a particular kind of mass culture.
James van Geldern has characterized this culture in spatial terms as ‘the consolidation of the centre’, a consolidation that ‘did not exclude those outside, [but] aided their integration’. The centre was Moscow, the rebuilding of which constituted one of the major projects of these years. Moscow came to represent ‘the visible face of the Soviet Union … a model for the state, where power radiated out from the centre to the periphery’. Corresponding to a shift in investment priorities, the heightened cultural significance of the capital ‘signalled a new hierarchy of values, by which society’s attention shifted from the many to the one outstanding representative’. The Moscow Metro, a massive engineering project that ‘mocked utility with its stations clad in semi-precious stone’, became an object of not only Muscovite but national pride. The towering Palace of Soviets (the excavation for which involved the razing of the great gold-domed Church of Christ the Saviour) would have been the source of even greater pride had the project not been abandoned and the pit turned into a large outdoor swimming pool.
The periphery was integrated not only through a vicarious identification with the centre but by being recast as an asset. Taming the vast wild spaces of the USSR (for example, through industrial projects such as Magnitogorsk or the settlement of nomads on collective farms) transformed them into both economic and cultural resources. Folklorism, characterized by Richard Stites as ‘politicized folk adaptation’, made a strong comeback via Igor Moiseev’s Theatre of Folk Art, founded in 1936, and a national network of amateur folk choirs and dance ensembles. These ‘prettified and theatricalized Stalinist ensembles … [promoted] images of national solidarity, reverence for the past, and happy peasants’, images that were re-inforced by highly publicized photographs of smiling peasants, decked out in ‘ethnic’ or folk garb, meeting Stalin in the Kremlin.
The imagined harmony of the mid-1930s went beyond folk ensembles and photo opportunities. At the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii—all vanquished political enemies of Stalin—repudiated their previous positions and heaped praise on Stalin’s wise leadership. The congress, in a show of reconciliation, applauded their speeches. The Kolkhoz Congress of 1935, where Stalin announced that ‘socialism’ had been achieved in the countryside, represented another type of reconciliation: shortly afterwards the government issued a kolkhoz statute (conferring certain guarantees and concessions) and dropped legal proscriptions against former kulaks.
‘Life has become more joyous,’ Stalin exulted in November 1935. Endlessly repeated and even set to song, the ‘life is joyous’ theme—the myth of a joyful people achieving great feats and adoring their genial leader (vozhd’)—was woven into the fabric of Soviet life. If previously life’s satisfactions were derived from the knowledge that one’s work was contributing to the building of socialism, now the formula was reversed: the achievement of socialism, officially proclaimed in the 1936 Constitution, was responsible for life’s joyfulness which in turn made work go well. It suddenly became important to demonstrate the prowess of outstanding individuals in a variety of fields: Soviet aviators, dubbed ‘Stalin’s falcons’, took to the skies to set new records; arctic explorers trekked to the North Pole in record time; mountain climbers scaled new peaks; the pianist Emil Gilels and the violinist David Oistrakh won international competitions. All covered the Soviet Union with national glory.