Stalin’s rivals in his own party would soon pay dearly for their condescension. He was crude and brutal even by Bolshevik standards, and was proud of the fact. On the Southern front in 1918 he had put villages to the torch to terrorize the peasantry of an entire region, and but for Lenin’s intervention would have drowned scores of innocent former Imperial Army officers on a prison barge moored on the river Volga.
But Stalin’s rivals had no excuse for underestimating Stalin’s intelligence. His lack of intellectual sophistication did not mean that he was unmotivated by ideas; and he was conscious enough of the gaps in his education to take on Jan Sten as a private tutor in philosophy in the 1920s.17 He was also a voracious reader, supposedly getting through a daily quota of 500 pages.18 Although his objects of study changed, his orientation was constant. He despised middle-class experts, believing that the regime could train up its own ‘specialists’ in short order. The ‘filth’ from the old days ought to be cleansed (or ‘purged’); social, economic and political problems should not be allowed to await solution. Those persons deemed responsible for the survival of such problems had to be physically exterminated. Let saboteurs and renegades perish! Let there be steel, iron and coal! Long live comrade Stalin!
That this maladjusted character, whose mistrustfulness was close to paranoia, should have won the struggle to succeed Lenin boded ill for his opponents past and present and for his potential opponents as well. It has been speculated that his vengefulness was influenced by the beatings he supposedly had received from his father or by the traditions of honour and feud in the Caucasian region. Yet his fascination with punitive violence went far beyond any conditioning by family or national customs. Stalin supposedly remarked: ‘To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed… there is nothing sweeter in the world.’19
He also had a craving for adulation. As his doings were celebrated in the public media, only his ageing mother, to whom he dutifully sent packets of roubles, was oblivious of his status. Official history textbooks by Nikolai Popov and Emelyan Yaroslavski exaggerated his importance. Articles were published on the Civil War which treated the battles around Tsaritsyn in 1918, when Stalin was serving on the Southern front, as the turning point in the Red Army’s fortunes. Already in 1925, Tsaritsyn had been renamed Stalingrad. The phrase was put into circulation: ‘Stalin is the Lenin of today.’ Ostensibly he shrugged off claims to greatness, complaining to a film scriptwriter: ‘Reference to Stalin should be excised. The Central Committee of the party ought to be put in place of Stalin.’20 He also repudiated the proposal in 1938 that Moscow should be renamed as Stalinodar (which means ‘Stalin’s gift’)!21 His modesty on this and other occasions was insincere, but Stalin knew that it would enhance his popularity among rank-and-file communists: in reality he was extremely vainglorious.
Egomania was not the sole factor. The cult of Stalin was also a response to the underlying requirements of the regime. Russians and many other nations of the USSR were accustomed to their statehood being expressed through the persona of a supreme leader. Any revolutionary state has to promote continuity as well as disruption. The First Five-Year Plan had brought about huge disruption, and the tsar-like image of Stalin was useful in affirming that the state possessed a strong, determined leader.
Full regal pomp was nevertheless eschewed by him; Stalin, while inviting comparison with the tsars of old, also wished to appear as a mundane contemporary communist. Audiences at public conferences or at the Bolshoi Ballet or on top of the Kremlin Wall saw him in his dull-coloured, soldierly tunic — as he mingled with delegates from the provinces to official political gatherings — and he always made sure to have his photograph taken with groups of delegates. The display of ordinariness was a basic aspect of his mystique. The incantations of public congresses and conferences included not only Stalin but also ‘the Leninist Central Committee, the Communist Party, the Working Class, the Masses’. It was crucial for him to demonstrate the preserved heritage of Marxism-Leninism. The heroism, justice and inevitability of the October Revolution had to be proclaimed repeatedly, and the achievements of the First Five-Year Plan had to be glorified.
There is no doubt that many young members of the party and the Komsomol responded positively to the propaganda. The construction of towns, mines and dams was an enormously attractive project for them. Several such enthusiasts altruistically devoted their lives to the communist cause. They idolized Stalin, and all of them — whether they were building the city of Magnitogorsk or tunnelling under Moscow to lay the lines for the metro or were simply teaching kolkhozniki how to read and write — thought themselves to be agents of progress for Soviet society and for humanity as a whole. Stalin had his active supporters in their hundreds of thousands, perhaps even their millions. This had been true of Lenin; it would also be true of Khrushchëv. Not until the late 1960s did Kremlin leaders find it difficult to convince a large number of their fellow citizens that, despite all the difficulties, official policies would sooner or later bring about the huge improvements claimed by official spokesmen.22
Stalin’s rule in the early 1930s depended crucially upon the presence of enthusiastic supporters in society. Even many people who disliked him admired his success in mobilizing the country for industrialization and in restoring Russia’s position as a great power. There was a widespread feeling that, for all his faults, Stalin was a determined leader in the Russian tradition; and the naïvety of workers, peasants and others about high politics allowed him to play to the gallery of public opinion more easily than would be possible for Soviet leaders in later generations.
But enthusiasts remained a minority. Most people, despite the increase in cultural and educational provision, paid little mind to communist doctrines. They were too busy to give politics more than a glancing interest. It was a hard existence. The average urban inhabitant spent only an hour every week reading a book or listening to the radio and twenty minutes watching films or plays.23 Adulatory newsreels were of limited help to Stalin while there remained a paucity of spectators. Furthermore, in 1937 there were still only 3.5 million radios in the country.24 The authorities placed loudspeakers on main streets so that public statements might be broadcast to people as they travelled to work or went shopping. But this was rarely possible in the countryside since only one in twenty-five collective farms had access to electrical power.25 Several weeks passed in some villages between visits from officials from the nearby town, and Pravda arrived only fitfully. The infrastructure of intensive mass indoctrination had not been completed before the Second World War.
The underlying cause for the ineffectiveness of official propaganda, however, was the hardship caused by official measures. The non-Russian nationalities were especially embittered. The assertiveness of national and ethnic groups in the 1920s had been among the reasons for the NEP’s abolition. Several imaginary anti-Soviet organizations were ‘discovered’, starting with the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine in July 1929.26 Artists, scholars and novelists were arraigned in Kiev and sentenced to lengthy years of imprisonment. Analogous judicial proceedings took place in Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Communist officials thought to have shown excessive indulgence to the sentiments of nations in their republics suffered demotion. The prime victim was Mykola Skrypnik in Ukraine. In 1933 he was dropped as Ukraine’s People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, and committed suicide. Simultaneously those writers and artists who had developed their national cultures under the NEP were subject to ever stricter surveillance.