Yet most of his visitors were party and government functionaries of the region. No one, not even Molotov or Kaganovich, was a chum as Kirov had been; and Lakoba was more like a seasonal landlord than a genuine intimate. Having put up barricades against psychological intrusion, Stalin restricted himself to playful recreation. He took nieces and nephews on his knee. He sang Orthodox liturgical chants by the piano. He went hunting, challenged visitors to games of billiards and welcomed the presence of female relatives. But he had got harder as a personality. Ice had entered his soul. Molotov and Kaganovich, who immensely admired him, could not work out what made him tick. They later said that he changed a lot after Nadya’s death. But the same works emphasise what made him exceptionaclass="underline" will power, clarity of vision, endurance and courage. Always Molotov and Kaganovich were observing him from the outside. They were in awe of Stalin. While they too were wilful and determined, they appreciated someone who had these qualities to a unique level of intensity. When he acted oddly, they gave him the benefit of the doubt. They thought he had earned the right to any psychological peculiarity by the services he had rendered to the USSR.
Most of them until the late 1930s felt no reason to query the mental condition of their Leader. Doubtless Stalin had previously driven them to distraction with orders to intensify political and economic campaigns. Yet the policies had been those of the ascendant party leadership and the negative side of Stalin’s personality was largely overlooked. Earlier acquaintances had been more perceptive. Fellow pupils in Gori and Tbilisi as well as many party comrades before 1917 had remarked on his hypertrophied sense of importance and his excessive tendency to take offence. And when Lenin used him as Political Commissar in the Civil War or as Party General Secretary, he knew that Stalin would need careful handling if his volatility and crudity were not to damage the interests of the Revolution. Then in the early 1930s Stalin started to demand capital punishment for his adversaries in the communist party. If Nadya’s suicide changed him, it was only to push him down a road he had been travelling his whole life long.
27. MODERNITY’S SORCERER
Stalin and his associates aimed to turn the USSR into an industrial and military megalith. They were militants. They wrestled to change society from top to bottom. They fought for ‘cultural revolution’. Their campaign, as they saw it, required the entire syndrome of attitudes and behaviour in the country to be transformed in the spirit of the Enlightenment in general and Marxism in particular. War was waged upon customary ideas. Religion was to be eradicated and nationalist affiliations dissolved. The intelligentsia in the arts and sciences was to be battered into submission or else discarded. The objective was for communism to become the generally accepted ideology and for Stalin’s variant of Marxism–Leninism to be installed as its core. He had not suddenly discovered this inclination. In the 1920s he had urged that young communists be trained to take up positions of authority and spread the party’s ideas.1 The entire generation of Bolshevik veterans shared his standpoint. They believed that the achievement of socialism required a fundamental rupture with the old society and the elites who had formed opinions in it.
Stalin, like every communist, insisted that culture was not confined to the poems of Pushkin but covered literacy, numeracy, hygiene, shelter, food, conscientiousness and efficiency. There was an almost religious ecstasy in the political sermons he and his fellow leaders delivered on the ‘cultural front’. Writers were designated as ‘engineers of human souls’. His Marxist faith was fused with a warlike spirit. No one underestimated the difficulties of the campaign as Stalin urged the cultural combatants to rise to the task in hand. At the Seventeenth Party Congress in January–February 1934 he declared that fierce battles still lay ahead:2
The enemies of the party, opportunists of all colours, national-deviationists of every kind have been crushed. But the remains of their ideology live on in the heads of individual party members and often give evidence of their existence… And the soil for such inclinations undoubtedly exists in our country if only because we still have intermediate strata of the population in town and countryside who represent a nutritive environment for such inclinations.
Fervour and pugnacity were demanded: Stalin had begun a war he was determined to win.
Most observers have assumed that his ultimate aim was merely to ‘catch up’ with the West. This is to underestimate his purposes. He had a much more comprehensive project, and the atmosphere of his rule, which engendered much popular enthusiasm, is incomprehensible without that project. When Stalin spoke about the need for the introduction of ‘modernity’ (sovremennost’) to the USSR, what he had in mind was something more than blind imitation of the advanced capitalist countries. Soviet-style modernity in his estimation would be of an altogether superior kind.
He and the rest of the Politburo were Marxist believers. The utopian strain in their thought was to the fore in the early 1930s; they thought that Soviet modernity would raise humanity to a higher plane of existence not just by eliminating the bad old traditions in Russia but also by doing things unparalleled in the West. Unemployment had already been eradicated and soon the gap in material conditions between town and countryside would be closed.3 Universal provision of food, shelter, education and healthcare would be guaranteed. Bolsheviks had always claimed that capitalism was an inherently wasteful economic system in comparison with socialism. Marx and Lenin had written that industrialists and bankers inevitably developed an interest in doing down competitors and in blocking technological advance at the expense of popular aspirations and requirements. Resources were not going to be unproductively expended in Stalin’s USSR. A virtue was claimed for the standardisation of products and services. The higher good was the principle of common availability. Stalin was hostile, at least in public, to the maintenance of manufacturing sub-sectors dedicated to luxury goods. Individualisation of choice was consciously downplayed. The priority was for the ‘new Soviet person’ to accept the obligations of membership of ‘the collective’.
Stalin advocated ideas of this kind in speeches and articles. He embodied them in his public appearance and comportment. His soldierly tunic, his avoidance of the word ‘I’, his issuance of orders in the name of the respective party organs rather than in his own, even his lack of oratorical tricks: all these features helped to convey the message that Soviet modernity would ultimately triumph and bring unprecedented benefit to toiling humanity.
The ascendant party leadership had cleared a lot of the ground for cultural transformation. The First Five-Year Plan was accompanied by vicious campaigns against religion, and the Red Army and the 25,000-ers arrested clerics and kulaks with equal eagerness. Religion was to be stamped out. Many churches, mosques and synagogues were shut down. Out of 73,963 religious buildings open before 1917, only 30,543 were allowed to function by April 1936.4 Nationalism of every stripe was also trampled underfoot. The elites of the various national and ethnic groups were objects of intense suspicion, including even many people who had aligned themselves with the communists in previous years. Show trials of leading ‘bourgeois nationalists’ were held from 1929. The League of the Militant Godless was given sumptuous funding. When Mykola Skrypnik, a Bolshevik Ukrainian leader who had strongly promoted the interests of his nation, committed suicide, no official regret was expressed. The times had changed, and the USSR was being pointed towards transformations which according to veteran Bolsheviks were overdue. Private printing presses were closed down. Travel between the USSR and foreign countries became impossible unless political and police organs gave their sanction. The ascendant leaders tried to insulate the country from all ideological influences but their own. Basic cultural assumptions of Bolshevism were at last going to be realised.