Already in 1927 the Politburo had sanctioned the use of forced labour to expand the mining of gold. This initiative was translated in the following year to timber hewing.9 Stalin gave rulings on the use of concentration camps not just for the social rehabilitation of prisoners but also for what they could contribute to the gross domestic product in regions where free labour could not easily be found. He had never been reluctant to contemplate such camps as a central component of communist party rule; and he did not flinch from ordering arrests and ordering OGPU chief Vladimir Menzhinski to create the permanent organisational framework. Among the victims were categories of persons whom he feared and resented. Members of outlawed political parties were high on the list. Stalin also had ‘bourgeois nationalists’, priests and private traders in his sights as well as recalcitrant economic experts. His method was a continuation of the techniques developed at Shakhty. Leading individuals and groups in ‘anti-Soviet’ categories were put on show trial. The objective was to intimidate all their followers and sympathisers into giving up thoughts of opposition in case they too might be arrested.
A succession of such trials occurred in 1929–30. These involved much political inventiveness with Stalin supplying the main momentum. Historians Sergei Platonov and Yevgeni Tarle were arrested and included in the so-called Academy of Sciences Affair which led to the condemnation of the non-existent All-People’s Union for the Struggle for Russia’s Regeneration in July 1929.10 The fictitious Industrial Party, including the engineer Leonid Ramzin, was brought to court in November 1930. The Labouring Peasant Party, also non-existent, was arraigned in December 1930; the main defendants were the economists Alexander Chayanov and Nikolai Kondratev.11 The so-called Union Bureau of the Mensheviks was tried in February and March 1931 with Nikolai Sukhanov as the leading defendant.12 Outside the RSFSR there were trials of nationalists. Many of them had until recently been figures of the political establishment. But wherever Stalin and his associates caught a whiff of nationalism they resorted to judicial procedures. Ukraine, Belorussia and the Caucasus, north and south, were subjected to similar proceedings. Torture, outlandish charges and learned-by-rote confessions became the norm. Hundreds of defendants were either shot or sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment.13
Stalin’s strategy was to bring about a massive increase in political control as his general revolutionary assault was reinforced. His zeal to subjugate all strata of ‘specialists’ was heightened. Industrial managers, lawyers, teachers and military officers fell foul of him. The Red Army narrowly escaped a trial of its commanders but the interrogations alone, which involved Stalin in person, were enough to scare the living daylights out of the officer corps. Individual generals, though, were persecuted. Like the Red Army, the Russian Orthodox Church — as well as the other Christian denominations and indeed Islam, Judaism and Buddhism — escaped a show trial. But this did not mean that repression was withheld. Attacks on religious leaders became so frequent and systematic that the League of the Militant Godless expected belief in deities to be eradicable within a few years. Persecution was extreme, and only a twelfth of the Russian Orthodox Church’s priests were left functioning in their parishes by 1941.14
Meanwhile promotions of newly trained workers and peasants took place as the administrative stratum was widened. Volunteer collectivisers were found among young workers. Armed and indoctrinated, these so-called ‘25,000-ers’ set out for the villages to deal with the ‘class enemy’.15 Recruitment to the party expanded. By 1931 it had 1,369,406 full members.16 Literacy and numeracy spread. There was a reprise of revolutionary spirit as the regime gave out the message that socialism was being created in the USSR while abroad capitalism was entering its final crisis. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 made this a plausible message at the time. Unconditional enthusiasts for the Politburo’s policies existed everywhere. Even many who detested the violence and vilification were willing to believe that a new and better world was being created. In the party there was relief that action at last was being taken. Bukharin’s group had so little organised support that it did not merit the name of the Right Opposition. The end of the NEP was welcomed. Local party secretaries became mini-Stalins making all the fundamental decisions across the range of public policy — and the fact that nearly all the economy was somehow or other taken into the hands of the state meant that their powers had never been greater.17
While promoting industrialisation and collectivisation, Stalin did not overlook the fact that he ruled a former empire. In a speech to a conference of industrial functionaries on 4 February 1931 he declared: ‘In the past we didn’t have and couldn’t have a fatherland. But now that we have overthrown capitalism and power is in our hands, the people — and we — have a fatherland and we will protect its independence.’18 Patriotism was making its way back on to the list of official priorities. While society was being split asunder by policy initiatives from the late 1920s, Stalin recognised that some cement was needed to keep the people of the USSR together.
The range of changed policies was large, and in every case Stalin’s intervening hand was felt. Even on the ‘philosophical front’ he was active. On 9 December he visited the Institute of Red Professors. Several of the academics, including Abram Deborin, were known as supporters of Bukharin. Stalin demanded greater militancy from his own followers in the party cell at the institute: ‘Everything written here by you is correct; the problem is that not everything has yet been said. In the critical part it’s possible to say much more. You’ve given the correct evaluation here but it’s too soft and unsatisfactory.’ Then he added: ‘Do you have the forces? Will you be able to cope? If you have the forces, you need to do some beating.’19 Stalin was determined to crack the nut of intellectual resistance to his policies. He spoke of Deborin’s group:20
They occupy the dominant positions in philosophy, in natural science and in several fine questions of politics. You’ve got to be able to grasp this. On questions of natural science the Devil knows what they’re doing; they are writing about Weismannism, etc., etc. — and this is all presented as Marxism.
It’s necessary to scatter them and dig over all this dung which has accumulated in philosophy and natural science.
Stalin treated the philosophers in the party cell as troops to be deployed in a campaign against the enemy.
The motif was manifest: ‘What sort of Marxism is this which separates philosophy from politics, theory from practice?’21 Stalin was somewhat incoherent. Elsewhere in his commentary he accused Bukharin and Deborin of cloaking their politics in philosophical argumentation. But he was not worried by his contradictions. He wanted cultural life cleared of every trace of opposition to his policies. Narrowness, rigidity and ritualism were to be introduced. Lenin was to be raised as the unchallengeable totemic figure in the campaign. His Materialism and Empiriocriticism, that crude work on epistemology which Stalin had dismissed when it appeared in 1909, would be elevated to the status of a philosophical classic and all philosophers would have to take its postulates as axiomatic.22
Yet even Stalin could not totally ignore the huge disruptions to agriculture caused by his policies. Forewarned of the fate awaiting them, peasant communities in Ukraine, the north Caucasus, south Russia and central Asia took up arms. The urban squads of collectivisers were met with violent opposition. The Red Army, despite early official concerns about the loyalty of its conscripts, successfully suppressed such risings; and nowhere did the rebels manage to organise themselves across a broad territory as they had at the end of the Civil War. But the imposition of collective farms led to deep resentment. Antagonism to the authorities was ineradicable and the millions of peasants who were forced to give up their property and customs withdrew co-operation. Productivity fell away. A system proposed as the permanent solution to the problems of the rural economic sector might have yielded more grain for the towns but this was happening at the point of a rifle, and the perils of continuing mass collectivisation at the current rate became obvious.23