The feasts of the religious calendar also stood as marking points for the farming year. Particularly in Russia the tasks of ploughing, sowing, reaping and threshing were deemed incomplete unless a priest was present to pray for success. Agriculture and religious faith were intimately entwined. From its own fanatical standpoint, the League of the Militant Godless had logic on its side in pressing for the demolition of the houses of ‘god’. Priest and mullah and rabbi were vilified as parasites. In reality most parish clergy were as poor as church mice and, after the separation of Church from state in 1918, depended entirely on the voluntary offertories from their congregations. The same was usually true of other faiths. Clerics of all religions were integral parts of social order in their small communities. They welcomed children into the world, blessed marriages and buried the dead. They alternately rejoiced and commiserated with ordinary peasants. A village without a church, mosque or synagogue had lost its principal visible connection with the old peasant world. A countryside deprived of its priests, shrines, prayers and festivities was more amenable to being collectivized.
The destruction continued through the 1930s. Only one in forty churches was functioning as such by the decade’s end; the others had been reduced to rubble or recommissioned for secular purposes.34 Equally significantly, no place of worship was built in the new cities and towns arising in the Soviet Union. Stalin and Kaganovich, as the capital’s party first secretary from 1930 to 1935, implemented schemes for the re-creation of the vista of central Moscow. They knocked down the little streets around the Kremlin so that great parades might be held along broad new avenues. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was blown up; the plan was to use the site for the construction of the world’s tallest building, which would house a Palace of Soviets with a massive statue of Lenin on its roof.35 Kaganovich, a Jewish atheist, had no compunction in assailing a Russian Orthodox Church notorious for its anti-Semitism before 1917. But even he was wary, and instructed that the demolition of the Cathedral should take place secretly at dead of night.
The leaders of the various faiths had been traumatized. The Acting Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Sergei lived in perpetual fear of arrest. The violence threw the communist party’s campaign for cultural and national reconstruction into grotesque relief. Indisputable gains were made in literacy, numeracy, industrial skills and urban infrastructure. The account-sheet, however, was in debit: both culturally and nationally there had been more destruction than construction. A society had gone into semi-dissolution. Nations, religions and popular traditions had been ground into the dust.
Among the reasons for this was Stalin’s desire to produce ‘Soviet’ men and women and create a ‘Soviet’ people. As a follower of Marx and Engels, he held that the ultimate antidote to conflicts among national groups was the ‘fusion’ of all nations. The post-national compound would supposedly include ingredients from each nationality. Among Stalin’s acolytes during the First Five-Year Plan there had been several who assumed the moment of fusion to be imminent in the USSR. But Stalin recognized that this might damage the last elements of cohesion in society. Some binding factor had to be introduced. By 1934 he had come to the opinion that the Soviet state, for reasons of security, needed to foster Russian national pride. Russians were fifty-two per cent of the USSR’s population in the late 1930s.36 A large number of them lived in each republic, especially after the migration of people during the First Five-Year Plan; and they were disproportionately well-represented in administrative posts. Russians were anyhow used to inhabiting a state larger than mere Russia as defined by Soviet communists and had no wish to see this state dismembered.
Already in 1930 the communist versifier Demyan Bedny had been reprimanded for insulting the Russian people in one of his doggerel verses. Marxism-Leninism was not to be used as a cover for humiliating a nation whose workers had been the vanguard of the October Revolution; limits existed on the deprecation of Russianness.
It was in 1934 that the privileging of Russian nationhood began in earnest. Concerns about the USSR’s security had been growing in the early 1930s; and Stalin and the leadership felt edgy about Ukraine, about Polish infiltration into the western borderlands and about the threat posed by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Russian national feelings were nurtured more warmly, and nowhere was this more obvious than in the writing of history. The doyen of the academic profession until his death in 1932 had been M. N. Pokrovski, who had waged a vendetta in his books and in university administration against writers who failed to put class struggle at the centre of their interpretations. He had insisted, too, that Russian imperial expansion over the centuries had brought harm to the non-Russian peoples. This approach now fell into official disrepute; and Professor E. V. Tarle, the non-Marxist historian and Russian patriot, was released from prison to reoccupy his university chair in Moscow.
It remained obligatory to analyse the Soviet period predominantly in terms of class struggle, but the distant Russian past could now be handled more flexibly. Stalin himself was an admiring reader of the best works that appeared. As Russian emperors and commanders came in for gentler treatment, scholars still had to criticize their faults but were also required to accentuate the benefits brought to Russians by the tsarist unification of Muscovy and to the non-Russians by the growth of the Russian Empire. The Russian language was given heightened status. In the academic year 1938–9 it became one of the compulsory subjects of instruction in all schools; and from the late 1930s a campaign was begun to alter the various non-Russian languages to a Cyrillic-style alphabet on the Russian model. Thus in 1940 the Uzbek tongue was no longer allowed to be written in Arabic characters.37
Yet there were restrictions on the expression of Russian patriotism. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great could be praised, but not Nicholas II; and the aristocracy, gentry, merchantry and other so-called ‘former people’ had to be denounced. The expression of contemporary Russian nationhood, moreover, excluded the Orthodox Church. It rejected most village traditions. In literature it incorporated Alexander Pushkin and Maksim Gorki, but rejected the Christian nationalist Fëdor Dostoevski.38 For the central political leaders in the 1930s remained wary lest Russian national pride might get out of hand. They were willing to modify Marxism-Leninism and even to distort it by adding Russian national ingredients to it; but they insisted that Marxism-Leninism should remain at the core of the state ideology.
Russians anyway did not always do better than other peoples in the USSR. The famine that devastated society in Ukraine in 1932–3 was also grievous in southern Russia. The Russian nation, despite the accolades it received, could reasonably perceive itself as a victim people. Territorially the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR) abruptly lost much of its status. In 1936 the internal borders of the USSR were redrawn. The Transcaucasian Federation was dissolved and Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan became republics on a par with the RSFSR. At the same time a huge chunk of the RSFSR was hacked away when the territory previously known as the Turkestan Region became the Kazakh Socialist Soviet Republic, thereby supplanting Ukraine as the USSR’s second largest republic. Most significantly, the new republic of Kazakhstan acquired its own communist party whereas the RSFSR remained without one.
For Stalin feared a New Russia as much as the Old. He wielded the knout to discourage certain aspects of Russianness while waving a flag to foster others. But he could not do this without increasing the self-awareness of Russians as Russians. The process was driven also by other forces. Chief among these were urbanization and mass literacy; for as Russian-speaking peasants poured into the towns and as Russian-speaking workers moved from one town to another in search of jobs, so millions of Russians discovered how much they had in common.