Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (54 page)

The result was predictable: what has been termed ‘perhaps the only case in history of a purely man-made famine’.
⁵⁰
Rather than surrender their grain, the peasants burnt it. They smashed their implements. They slaughtered 18 million horses, 30 million cattle (45 per cent of the total), 100 million sheep and goats (two-thirds of the total). Even according to the figures in the official Soviet history, livestock production was only 65 per cent of the 1913 level in 1933, draught animals fell by more than 50 per cent, and total draught power, including tractors, did not surpass the 1928 level until 1935.
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Despite the famine of 1932–3, Stalin managed to keep up some grain exports to pay for imported machinery, including the tooling of his new war-factories. The cost in Russian lives was staggering. Iosif Dyadkin’s demographic study, ‘Evaluation of Unnatural Deaths in the Population of the USSR 1927–58’, which circulated in
samizdat
(underground newsletter) form in the late 1970s, calculates that during the collectivization and ‘elimination of the classes’ period, 1929–36, 10 million men, women and children met unnatural deaths.
⁵²

The re-feudalization of the Soviet peasantry, who then formed three-quarters of the population, had a calamitous effect on the morale of the Communist rank-and-file, who carried it through. As Kolakowski puts it: ‘The whole party became an organization of torturers and oppressors. No one was innocent, and all Communists were accomplices in the coercion of society. Thus the party acquired a new species of moral unity, and embarked on a course from which there was no turning back.’
⁵³
Exactly the same thing was to happen to the German National Socialists a few years later: it was Stalin who pointed the way to Hitler. Everyone in the party knew what was going on. Bukharin grumbled privately that the ‘mass annihilation of completely defenceless men, women and children’ was acclimatizing party members to violence and brute obedience, transforming them ‘into cogs in some terrible machine’.
⁵⁴
But only one person protested to Stalin’s face. His second wife, Nadezhda, had left him in 1926 with her two small children, Vasily and Svetlana. Stalin persuaded her to return, but had her watched by the
OGPU
and, when she complained, traced her informants and had them arrested. On
7 November 1932, in front of witnesses, she protested violently to him about his treatment of the peasants, and then went home and shot herself. This was the second family drama – his first son Yakov had attempted suicide in despair in 1928 – and Svetlana later wrote: ‘I believe that my mother’s death, which he had taken as a personal betrayal, deprived his soul of the last vestiges of human warmth.’
⁵⁵

Stalin’s response was to get the
OGPU
to take over the organization of his household; it hired and trained his servants, superintended his food and controlled all access to his person.
⁵⁶
He operated now not through the normal government or party organs but through his personal secretariat, an outgrowth of the old party Secretariat; and through this he created a personal secret police within the official one, called the Special Secret Political Department of State Security.
⁵⁷
Thus cocooned, he felt himself invulnerable; certainly others did. Though the state of Russia was so desperate in 1932 that Stalin’s regime came near to foundering, as had Lenin’s early in 1921, no one came even near to killing him.

As for the planning, held up as a model to the world, it was in all essentials a paper exercise. None of its figures have ever been independently verified, from 1928 to this day. The nongovernmental auditing controls, which are an essential part of every constitutional state under the rule of law, do not exist in the Soviet Union. There was something fishy about the First Five Year Plan from the start. It was approved by the Central Committee in November 1928, formally adopted in May 1929, and then declared retrospectively operative since October 1928! Since from the end of 1929 the entire country was turned upside down by the sudden decision to collectivize agriculture, the 1928 Plan (assuming it ever existed in fact) was rendered totally irrelevant. Yet in January 1933, the month Hitler came to power, Stalin suddenly announced it had been completed in four-and-a-half years, with ‘maximum over-fulfilment’ in many respects.
⁵⁸

The Plan, held up to sophisticated Western society as a model of civilized process, was in fact a barbarous fantasy. Russia is a rich country, with a wealth and variety of raw materials unparalleled anywhere else in the world. The Soviet regime inherited an expanding population and a rapidly growing industrial base. As Wilhelmine Germany had surmised, nothing could stop Russia becoming one of the greatest, soon
the
greatest, industrial power on earth. The policies of Lenin and, still more, Stalin – or rather the series of hasty expedients which passed for policy – had the net effect of slowing down that inevitable expansion, just as Lenin-Stalin policies enormously, and in this case permanently, damaged Russia’s flourishing agriculture.

But progress was made nonetheless. Great projects were completed. There was the Dnieper Dam of 1932; the Stalingrad tractor factory; the Magnitogorsk steel plant in the Urals; the Kuznetsk Basin mines of Siberia; the Baltic—White Sea Canal; and many others. Some of them, such as the canal, were built wholly or in part by slave labour. As we have seen, the use of political slaves had been part of the Lenin regime – though initially a small part – from its first months. Under Stalin the system expanded, first slowly, then with terrifying speed. Once forced collectivization got under way, in 1930–3, the concentration camp population rose to 10 million, and after the beginning of 1933 it never fell below this figure until well after Stalin’s death. Among industries which regularly employed slave-labour on a large scale were gold-mining, forestry, coal, industrial agriculture and transport – especially the building of canals, railways, airports and roads. The
OGPU
negotiated slave-labour deals with various government agencies in exactly the same manner that the Nazi
SS
were later to hire such labour to Krupps, I.G.Farben and other German firms. For the big Baltic-White Sea Canal, one of Stalin’s showpieces, 300,000 slaves were used.
⁵⁹
Slave-labour ceased to be marginal, as in Lenin’s time, and became an important and integral part of the Stalinist economy, with the
OGPU
administering large areas of Siberia and Central Asia.
⁶⁰

The death-rate in totalitarian slave-labour camps appears to have been about 10 per cent a year, to judge from German figures.
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It may have been higher in Russia because so many of the camps were located within the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. At all events the need to keep the slave-labour force supplied was undoubtedly one of the main reasons for the countless arrests of non-party workers during the years 1929–33. Periodically there were carefully staged show-trials, such as the Menshevik trial in March 1931, or the Metro-Vickers engineers trial in April 1933. These highly publicized events, which revealed in elaborate detail the existence of a series of diabolical conspiracies, each a small part of one gigantic conspiracy against the regime and the Russian people, were needed to create the xenophobia and hysteria without which the Stalinist state could not hang together at all. But of course they were only a tiny fraction of the process, the public rationale for arrests and disappearances taking place all over the country on an unprecedented scale.

Most ‘trials’ were not reported, although they often involved large groups of people, classified together according to occupation. Many were never tried at all. The arbitrary nature of the arrests was essential to create the climate of fear which, next to the need for labour, was the chief motive for the non-party terror. An
OGPU
man admitted to the
Manchester Guardian
Moscow correspondent that
innocent people were arrested: naturally – otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.
⁶²
But this apart, there seems to have been no pattern of logic or sense in many instances. An old Bolshevik recounts the case of an energy expert who, over eighteen months, was arrested, sentenced to death, pardoned, sent to a camp, released, rehabilitated and finally given a medal, all for no apparent reason.
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But the overwhelming majority of those arrested spent the rest of their lives in the camps.

In the outside world, the magnitude of the Stalin tyranny – or indeed its very existence – was scarcely grasped at all. Most of those who travelled to Russia were either businessmen, anxious to trade and with no desire to probe or criticize what did not concern them, or intellectuals who came to admire and, still more, to believe. If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot – and his crimes – so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped.
⁶⁴
Thus, Amabel Williams-Ellis wrote an introduction to a book about the building of the White Sea Canal, later so harrowingly described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which contains the sentence: ‘This tale of accomplishment of a ticklish engineering job, in the middle of primaeval forests, by tens of thousands of enemies of the state, helped – or should it be guarded? – by only thirty-seven
OGPU
officers, is one of the most exciting stories that has ever appeared in print.’ Sidney and Beatrice Webb said of the same project: it is pleasant to think that the warmest appreciation was officially expressed of the success of the
OGPU
, not merely in performing a great engineering feat, but in achieving a triumph in human regeneration.’ Harold Laski praised Soviet prisons for enabling convicts to lead ‘a full and self-respecting life’; Anna Louise Strong recorded: ‘The labour camps have won a high reputation throughout the Soviet Union as places where tens of thousands of men have been reclaimed.’ ‘So well-known and effective is the Soviet method of remaking human beings’, she added, ‘that criminals occasionally now apply to be admitted.’ Whereas in Britain, wrote George Bernard Shaw, a man enters prison a human being and emerges a criminal type, in Russia he entered ‘as a criminal type and would come out an ordinary man but for the difficulty of inducing him to
come out at all. As far as I could make out they could stay as long as they liked.’
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The famine of 1932, the worst in Russian history, was virtually unreported. At the height of it, the visiting biologist Julian Huxley found ‘a level of physique and general health rather above that to be seen in England’. Shaw threw his food supplies out of the train window just before crossing the Russian frontier ‘convinced that there were no shortages in Russia’. ‘Where do you see any food shortage?’ he asked, glancing round the foreigners-only restaurant of the Moscow Metro-pole.
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He wrote: ‘Stalin has delivered the goods to an extent that seemed impossible ten years ago, and
I
take off my hat to him accordingly.’ But Shaw and his travelling companion, Lady Astor, knew of the political prisoners, since the latter asked Stalin for clemency on behalf of a woman who wished to join her husband in America (Stalin promptly handed her over to the
OGPU
) and she asked him, ‘How long are you going to go on killing people?’ When he replied ‘As long as necessary’, she changed the subject and asked him to find her a Russian nurserymaid for her children.
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Estimates of Stalin written in the years 1929–34 make curious reading. H.G.Wells said he had ‘never met a man more candid, fair and honest… no one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him’. The Webbs argued that he had less power than an American president and was merely acting on the orders of the Central Committee and the Presidium. Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury, described him as leading ‘his people down new and unfamiliar avenues of democracy’. The American Ambassador, Joseph E. Davies, reported him as having ‘insisted on the liberalization of the constitution’ and ‘projecting actual secret and universal suffrage’. ‘His brown eye is exceedingly wise and gentle,’ he wrote. ‘A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.’ Emil Ludwig, the famous popular biographer, found him a man ‘to whose care
I
would readily confide the education of my children’. The physicist J.D.Bernal paid tribute both to his ‘deeply scientific approach to all problems’ and to his ‘capacity for feeling’. He was, said the Chilean writer Pablo Neruda, ‘a good-natured man of principle’; ‘a man of kindly geniality’, echoed the Dean.
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Some of these tributes can be variously explained by corruption, vanity or sheer folly. Davies, who consistently misrepresented the nature of Stalin’s Russia to his government, was being in effect bribed by the Soviet regime, who allowed him to buy icons and chalices for his collection at below-market prices.
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Anna Louise Strong was well described by Malcolm Muggeridge as ‘an enormous woman with a very red face, a lot of white hair, and an expression of stupidity so overwhelming that it amounted to a kind of strange beauty’.
⁷⁰
Self-delusion was obviously the biggest single factor in the presentation
of an unsuccessful despotism as a Utopia in the making. But there was also conscious deception by men and women who thought of themselves as idealists and who, at the time, honestly believed they were serving a higher human purpose by systematic misrepresentation and lying. If the Great War with its unprecedented violence brutalized the world, the Great Depression corrupted it by appearing to limit the options before humanity and presenting them in garishly contrasting terms. Political activists felt they had to make terrible choices and, having made them, stick to them with desperate resolution. The Thirties was the age of the heroic lie. Saintly mendacity became its most prized virtue. Stalin’s tortured Russia was the prime beneficiary of this sanctified falsification. The competition to deceive became more fierce when Stalinism acquired a mortal rival in Hitler’s Germany.