But the most celebrated individual feat of the decade was fittingly in the field of material production. On the night of 30 August 1935, Aleksei Stakhanov, a 30-year-old Donbas coalminer, hewed 102 tons of coal—more than fourteen times the norm for a six-hour shift. Stakhanov achieved his record thanks to a new division of labour that enabled him to concentrate on coal-cutting while others cleared debris, installed props, and performed other auxiliary tasks. Within days of the record, which Pravda had rather perfunctorily reported, other miners were surpassing it. But only after some prompting from the People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry, ‘Sergo’ Ordzhonikidze, did the Stakhanovite movement take off, spreading rapidly to other industries and to agriculture.
Stakhanovism was a complex phenomenon, both something more and something less than what higher political authorities intended. Idiomatically, it encompassed such a broad range of themes—mastery of technology, the creation of the New Soviet Man, the cultured working-class family, role reversal (the Stakhanovite was the expert; the expert became student of the Stakhanovite), upward social mobility—that internal contradictions were bound to occur. It tapped into popular desires for public recognition, adequate conditions of work, and consumer goods that at least some Stakhanovites enjoyed. At the same time, it raised these same expectations among workers who either could not become Stakhanovites or, having achieved that status, did not receive commensurate rewards. Resentment also increased as Stakhanovite records inexorably led to higher output norms for rank-and-file workers.
Moreover, expectations of political leaders that Stakhanovites’ innovations and production records would raise labour productivity all around were largely unfulfilled. Indeed, in some measure Stakhanovism was dysfunctional, as managers concentrated on supplying workers in the ‘leading’ professions, machinery became overstrained, and inter-shop deliveries broke down. Just three months into the ‘Stakhanovite year’ of 1936, speeches of political leaders and the press began to use words like ‘saboteur’ and ‘wrecker’ to describe managers and engineers who had ostensibly blocked the application of Stakhanovites’ methods or whose enterprises had failed to meet their targets. It was all Ordzhonikidze could do to deflect these charges and prevent the demoralization of industrial cadres in the face of what looked like a revival of cultural revolution specialist-baiting. In fact, something far more lethal was in store not only for enterprise directors, but also for Soviet officials, political functionaries, and military officers.
The Great Purges
The subject of harrowing memoirs and painstakingly researched academic studies, of folk legend and official investigations, the Great Purges continue to fascinate and appall. Emblematic of Stalinism, the ‘repressions’—to employ the term more common in Russian parlance—of 1936—8 seem to have been so arbitrary in victimization, so elusive in motivation as to defy explanation. Access to long-closed archives of the NKVD, while clarifying some issues, has not yet yielded a satisfactory explanation. Indeed, even what hitherto were assumed to be incontrovertible, basic facts are now in question.
According to the once standard version, Stalin initiated the Great Purges by arranging the assassination of the Leningrad Party boss, Sergei Kirov, in December 1934. Stalin’s purpose here was twofold. First, he sought to eliminate a potential rival. Reputedly the leader of a ‘moderate’ faction within the Politburo, Kirov had also received more votes than Stalin himself in the elections to the Politburo at the Seventeenth Party Congress. Second, by claiming that the assassination was the work of ‘Zinovievists’ and ultimately inspired by Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin could legitimize the physical annihilation of former leaders of the opposition, their retinues, and eventually anyone else on whom he chose to pin the label ‘enemy of the people’. This grand scheme for mounting a campaign of terror included the verification of party documents in 1935, the three public show trials of former oppositionists (Zinoviev and Kamenev in August 1936; Piatakov and Radek in January 1937; and Bukharin and Rykov in March 1938), the execution of Marshal Tukhachevskii and most of the Red Army general staff in June 1937, the elimination of nearly the entire regional leadership of the party later that year, and the arrest and disappearance of prominent persons from a wide variety of fields. The NKVD and its commissar, N. I. Ezhov, were the ruthless executors of Stalin’s designs, and indeed the entire period is sometimes referred to as the ‘Ezhovshchina’ (the evil epoch of Ezhov).
Treating these events as instances of a single phenomenon, most scholars assumed that Stalin was intent on eliminating any potential source of opposition, beginning with past opponents but eventually including any who might appear to be unreliable in the future. Some have suggested that the Nazis’ assumption of power in Germany and the increasing prospect of international war provided the impetus—or at least pretext—for Stalin’s actions. Other accounts have emphasized the pathological nature of Stalin’s suspiciousness and his psycho-dramatic replay of Ivan the Terrible’s elimination of the boyars. Still others stress an inherent imperative of the totalitarian system: not only to atomize and terrorize society, but to achieve a turnover of cadres. Another interpretation derives the Great Terror from the bureaucratic imperatives associated with the NKVD’s aggrandizement of power and its supervision of the GULAG. Whatever the dynamics, the traditional historiography shared a consensus that the Great Terror and purges represented a unitary process and that they served some rational function.
J. Arch Getty was the first to challenge the prevailing consensus. He noted the heavy reliance on rumour and gossip in memoirs, questioned the existence of a Stalin–Kirov rivalry or a moderate faction in the Politburo, and denied the existence of a master plot concocted by Stalin. Basing his analysis primarily on materials in the Smolensk Party Archive (seized first by the German army in the Second World War, then taken by American forces from the Germans) he argued that the party apparatus was hardly an efficient machine implementing the dictates of its leader, but a ‘petrified bureaucracy’ incapable even of keeping track of its members. According to Getty, the Great Purges actually derived from the failure of two campaigns to renovate the party: a series of operations to purge passive and degenerate members, and the initiatives spearheaded by Andrei Zhdanov to give party cadres a political education and to introduce ‘party democracy’ through contested secret ballot elections. The anti-bureaucratic impulse here struck a responsive chord with lower-ranking party members, but aroused resistance from regional party secretaries. As Ezhov undertook a search for enemies, which had extended from former oppositionists to regional military commanders, such resistance took on a sinister colouring. ‘Anti-bureaucratic populism and police terror’ created a vicious cycle of accusation, denunciations, and arrests that decimated the ranks of the party and certain high profile professions.
When Getty recently revisited the ‘politics of repression’, he concluded that ‘glasnost’ and the collapse of the Communist Party have put the secretive history of Stalinism on a more evidentially sound footing’. He notes that the investigation of a Politburo commission found no evidence of Stalin’s participation in Kirov’s assassination or the prior or subsequent existence of a moderate bloc; he therefore reiterates his scepticism about the planned nature of the terror. ‘Indecision and chaos’, he argues, were more evident in the evolution of repression before mid1937. Thereafter, it is at least as plausible that Ezhov was pursuing his own agenda, which may—or may nothave coincided with Stalin’s. Not that, in Getty’s view, this exonerates Stalin from responsibility; on the contrary, Stalin was an active participant, personally edited lists of defendants and their statements for the 1936 and 1937 show trials, signed tens of thousands of death sentences, and established target figures for executions in each province. But some scholars remain dissatisfied with Getty’s interpretation and even assert that Getty glossed over ‘one of the darkest and most tragic episodes in Soviet history’.