The Whisperers Read online

  Maiakovsky Station, 1940

  Avtozavod Station, 1940s

  The Vesnin brothers were also involved in building private homes. They were commissioned to design two- and three-room apartments, like the one Mikhail Voshchinsky and Fania Laskina occupied after their marriage. ‘We were very happy there,’ recalls Fania. ‘It was the first time that either of us had ever lived in an apartment with a bathroom and kitchen. Misha [Mikhail] had his own study. And there was always room for visitors to stay.’7

  This new emphasis on the construction of private apartments represented a fundamental change in Soviet housing policy. During the 1920s, when the utopian dream of building new collective forms dictated policy, the Bolsheviks had given priority to ‘commune houses’ (doma kommuny) – huge communal blocks with rows of rooms for several thousand workers and their families, shared kitchens and washing and laundry facilities, which would liberate women from domestic drudgery and teach the inhabitants to organize their lives collectively. The Constructivists in the Union of Contemporary Architects had been in the vanguard of this Soviet campaign to obliterate the private sphere by making people live in a communal way. But Moscow’s housing priorities were turned around in 1931: despite the chronic shortages of accommodation in the Soviet capital – a situation exacerbated by more than a million new arrivals – it was decreed that the main type of housing to be built in Moscow was the luxury house with individual family flats.

  The change in policy was obviously connected to the rise of a new political and industrial elite, whose loyalty to the Stalinist regime was secured by the handing down of material rewards. The Five Year Plan had produced a huge demand for new technicians, functionaries and managers in all branches of the economy. According to the chairman of Gosplan, the state planning agency, 435,000 engineers and specialists were needed for the new demands of industry in 1930. The old (‘bourgeois’) industrial elites were mistrusted by the Stalinist leadership (only 2 per cent of Soviet engineers were Party members in 1928). Many of these specialists had been opposed to the fantastically optimistic targets of the Five Year Plan in industry. They were massively purged (as ‘saboteurs’ and ‘wreckers’) in the industrial terror of 1928–32, when the chaos introduced by the Five Year Plan and the constant breakdown in the supply of fuel and raw materials led many workers to denounce their bosses when the factory shut down work and they lost pay. The hounding out of the ‘bourgeois specialists’ from senior positions of industrial management, the economic commissariats, the planning agencies, the academies and the teaching institutes created opportunities for the ‘proletarian intelligentsia’ to be promoted in their place. The first Five Year Plan was the heyday of the Factory Apprentice Schools (FZUs), which trained workers, many of them peasants who had recently arrived from the countryside, for the expanding ranks of the industrial professions and administrative posts in the economy. From 1928 to 1932, the number of students in the FZUs increased from 1.8 to 3.3 million (nearly half of them of peasant origin); 140,000 workers were promoted from the factory floor to management (many of them trained while on the job); and 1.5 million workers left the factory for administrative jobs or higher schools. Meanwhile, a million workers were enrolled in the Party. Controls were dropped to encourage recruitment (in many factories the entire workforce was enrolled en masse), as the Party leadership attempted to create a proletarian social base to support and implement its policies.8

  Stalin needed reliable support. The Great Break had created social chaos and widespread discontent, which destabilized his leadership. The archives of the Party and the Soviets are filled with letters and petitions of complaint from angry workers and peasants about the hardships of the Five Year Plan. They wrote to the Soviet government, to Mikhail Kalinin, the Soviet President, or directly to Stalin, to complain about the injustices of collectivization and the over-requisitioning of peasant grain, about the problems they encountered in their factories, about the corruption of Soviet managers and officials, the lack of housing and foodstuffs in the shops.9 This was not a people resigned to its fate. There were uprisings and strikes throughout the land.10 Anti-Soviet graffiti was almost just as visible as Soviet propaganda in many city streets.11 In rural areas there was widespread opposition to the Soviet regime which was voiced in rhyming songs (chastushki):

  The Five Year Plan, the Five Year Plan

  The Five Year Plan in Ten.

  I won’t go to the kolkhoz:

  The kolkhoz has no bread!12

  Within the Party there was no formal opposition to the Stalin line, but there was a good deal of concealed dissent and discontent about the enormous human costs of 1928–32. In 1932, this began to coalesce around two informal groups. One was made up of Trotsky’s former followers from the Left Opposition of the 1920s (I. N. Smirnov, V. N. Tolmachyov, N. B. Eismont), who held various meetings at which there was talk of removing Stalin from the leadership. The other consisted of remnants of the more moderate Right Opposition, led by supporters of the NEP such as Rykov and Bukharin, and in particular by N. N. Riutin, a former district secretary in the Moscow Party organization. Riutin held a small and secret meeting of old comrades in March 1932, the outcome of which was a 194-page typewritten document entitled ‘Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship’. It was a detailed critique of Stalin’s policies, methods of rule and personality, which was circulated in the Party’s ranks, until OGPU intercepted it. All the leading members of the so-called Riutin Platform were arrested, expelled from the Party and imprisoned in the autumn of 1932. Most of them were later to be shot in the Great Purge of 1937, when many more Old Bolsheviks, veterans of 1917, were charged with some connection to the group.13

  The exposure of the Riutin group increased Stalin’s paranoia about opposition in his own Party. It coincided with the suicide of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, in November 1932, which seriously unhinged the leader, making him mistrustful of everybody in his entourage. In January 1933, the Politburo announced a thoroughgoing purge of the Party’s ranks. The purge instructions did not mention members suspected of belonging to opposition groups, but their call for the expulsion of ‘duplicitous elements who live by deceiving the Party, who conceal from it their real aspirations, and who, under the cover of a false oath of “loyalty” to the Party, seek in fact to undermine the Party’s policy’ made it clear that weeding out dissenters was an urgent task for the Party, which needed to close ranks behind the leadership.14

  Through the purging of the old and the recruitment of the new, the nature of the Party was gradually evolving in the 1930s. While the Old Bolsheviks were losing ground, a new class of Party bureaucrats was emerging from the industrial rank and file, largely made up of workers promoted to administrative posts (vydvizhentsy). The vydvizhentsy were the sons (and very rarely, the daughters) of the peasantry and the proletariat, trained in the FZUs and other technical institutes during the First Five Year Plan. This cohort of functionaries became the mainstay of the Stalinist regime. By the end of Stalin’s reign, they composed a large proportion of the senior Party leadership (57 of the top 115 ministers in the Soviet government of 1952, including Leonid Brezhnev, Andrei Gromyko and Aleksei Kosygin, were vydvizhentsy of the First Five Year Plan).15 The emerging elite of the early 1930s was generally conformist and obedient to the leadership that had created it. With only seven years of education, on average, few of the new functionaries had much capacity for independent political thought. They took their ideas from the statements of the Party leaders in the press, and parroted their propaganda slogans and political jargon.* Their actual knowledge of Marxist-Leninist ideology was meagre and easily contained in the The Short Course (1938), Stalin’s history of the Party, which they all knew by heart. They identified completely with the Stalinist regime; they linked their personal values to its interests, and all of them were eager to advance their own careers by implementing orders from above.

  The character of this new elite was caustically portrayed by Arkadii Mankov, an accountant
in the Red Triangle Factory in Leningrad. The son of a lawyer, Mankov was working at the factory so that he could qualify as a ‘proletarian’ and gain entry to the Institute of Librarians. In a 1933 diary entry, he described his boss – a young man of twenty-five, who started his career in the same way as tens of thousands of young men:

  He appeared in Leningrad from nobody knows where, and through the labour exchange got a job at the factory. When he had worked there for a couple of months, he joined the Komsomol, became an activist – that is, did everything that he was asked to do – and spoke up at the meetings, showing off his knowledge of Stalin’s and Molotov’s articles, whereupon he was suddenly promoted to work in the administration as a labour economist… His entire achievement consists in having an important title, and in getting nicely paid (300 roubles a month). He gives the impression of a highly successful person who is pleased with himself and his position. He smiles sweetly, wears a spotlessly white English shirt and tie and a dark new jacket and has a confident and even arrogant manner. Although he holds a high post, he has no specific job. He does all the petty tasks: keeps tabs on people, checks the accounts, sets the work norms. He considers it his business to stick his nose into everything – to express ‘the factory view’ – to insist, shout, threaten. He collects information carefully and fills out pointless forms and cards which are never seen by anyone. He takes a particular interest in investigating the legality of all innovation in the workshop and is always checking the rulebook.16

  Competing for material and political rewards, this type of functionary easily turned against his rivals in the Soviet hierarchy. In 1932, a manager at Transmashtekh, a vast industrial conglomerate, wrote to the Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin:

  The problem with Soviet power is the fact that it gives rise to the vilest type of official – one that scrupulously carries out the general designs of the supreme authority… This official never tells the truth, because he doesn’t want to distress the leadership. He gloats about famine and pestilence in the district or ward controlled by his rival. He won’t lift a finger to help his neighbour… All I see around me is loathsome politicizing, dirty tricks and people being destroyed for slips of the tongue. There’s no end to the denunciations. You can’t spit without hitting some revolting denouncer or liar. What have we come to? It’s impossible to breathe. The less gifted a bastard, the meaner his slander. Of course the purge of your Party is none of my business, but I think that as a result of it, decent elements still remaining will be cleaned out.17

  In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), where he outlined his theory of the ‘Soviet Thermidor’, Trotsky pointed to the vast ‘administrative pyramid’ of bureaucrats, which he numbered at 5 or 6 million, on which Stalin’s power depended.18 This new ruling caste did not share the democratic instincts or the Spartan cult of the Old Bolsheviks, who had been so worried that the Party rank and file would be corrupted by the bourgeois influences of the NEP. On the contrary, they hoped to become a Soviet bourgeoisie. Their interests centred on the comforts of the home, on the acquisition of material possessions, on ‘cultivated’ pursuits and manners. They were socially reactionary, clinging to the customs of the patriarchal family, conservative in their cultural tastes, even if politically they believed in the Communist ideal. Their main aim was to defend the Soviet system, from which they derived their material well-being and position in society.

  The system, in turn, made sure they were content. During the Second Five Year Plan (1933–7) the government increased its investment in consumer industries, which had been starved of capital in the rush to build new factories and towns. By the middle of the 1930s, the supply of foodstuffs, clothes and household goods had markedly improved (millions of children who grew up in these years would recall the mid-1930s as a time when they were given their first pair of shoes). From the autumn of 1935, rationing was gradually lifted, giving rise, in Soviet propaganda, to an optimistic mood among consumers as shop windows filled with goods. Cameras, gramophones and radios were mass-produced for the aspiring urban middle class. There was a steady rise in the production of luxury goods (perfumes, chocolate, cognac and champagne), which catered mainly to the new elite, although prices were reduced for Soviet holidays. It was important to the Soviet myth of the ‘good life’ to give the impression that luxury goods previously affordable only by the rich were now being made accessible to the masses, who could afford them too if they worked hard. New consumer magazines informed the Soviet shopper about the growing diversity of clothing fashions and furnishing designs. Huge publicity was given to the opening of department stores and luxury food shops, like the former Yeliseyev store, renamed Grocery No. 1, which reopened on Moscow’s Gorky Street in October 1934. ‘The new store will sell more than 1,200 foodstuffs,’ announced the newspaper Evening Moscow:

  In the grocery department there are 38 kinds of sausage, including 20 new kinds that have not been sold anywhere before. This department will also sell three kinds of cheese – Camembert, Brie and Limburger – made for the store by special order. In the confectionary department there are 200 kinds of sweets and pastries… The bread department has up to 50 kinds of bread…

  The next day, the store was visited by 75,000 people (most, one suspects, just to look).19

  The promotion of a Soviet consumer culture was a dramatic ideological retreat from the revolutionary asceticism of the Bolsheviks in the first decade of the Revolution, and even in the period of the First Five Year Plan, when Communists were called upon to sacrifice their happiness for the Party’s cause. The Soviet leadership was now communicating the contrary message: that consumerism and Communism were compatible. Socialism, Stalin argued in 1934, ‘means, not poverty and deprivation, but the elimination of poverty and deprivation, and the organization of a rich and cultured life for all members of society’. Stalin developed this idea at a conference of kolkhoz labourers in 1935. Reprimanding the collective farms for trying to eliminate all private household property, Stalin called for the kolkhoz workers to be allowed to keep their poultry and their cows, and to be given larger garden allotments, to stimulate their interest in the collective farms. ‘A person is a person. He wants to own something for himself,’ Stalin told the delegates. There was ‘nothing criminal in this’ – it was a natural human instinct to want private property, and it would ‘take a long time yet to rework the psychology of the human being, to re-educate people to live collectively’.20

  A further sign of this retreat from the ascetic culture of the Revolution was the new importance the Party now assigned to personal appearance and etiquette. The early Bolsheviks considered it anti-socialist to care about such petty things. But from the 1930s the Party declared that cultivated manners and good grooming were compulsory for the young Communist. ‘We endorse beauty, smart clothes, chic coiffures, manicures,’ announced Pravda in 1934. ‘Girls should be attractive. Perfume and make-up belong to the “must” of a good Komsomol girl. Clean shaving is mandatory for a Komsomol boy.’ Perfumes and cosmetics were sold in growing quantities and varieties during the 1930s. Conferences were held to debate fashion and personal hygiene.21

  There was also a new emphasis on having fun. ‘Life has become better, comrades. Life has become more joyous,’ announced Stalin in 1935. ‘And when life is joyous, work goes well.’ Dancing, which had been condemned by the early Bolsheviks as a frivolous pursuit, was officially encouraged by the Stalinist regime. It soon became the rage, with dance schools opening everywhere. There were carnivals in Moscow’s parks, and huge parades to celebrate the Soviet holidays. The Soviet cinema churned out happy musicals and romantic comedies. The people did not have much bread, but there were lots of circuses.

  The consolidation of the Stalinist regime was closely connected to the creation of a social hierarchy structured by the granting of material rewards. For those at the top of the pyramid these rewards were immediately available for industry and loyalty; for those at the bottom they were promised in the future, when Communism had been reached
. The regime was thus connected to the establishment of an aspirational society, at the heart of which was a new middle class made up of the Party and industrial elites, the technical intelligentsia and professionals, military and police officers, and loyal industrial workers who proved their worth by working hard (the Stakhanovites).* The defining principle of this new social hierarchy was service to the state. In every institution, the slogan of the Second Five Year Plan (‘Cadres Decide Everything!’) served to uphold the state’s loyal servitors; and their loyalty was handsomely rewarded with higher rates of pay, special access to consumer goods, Soviet titles and honours.

  The emergence of a Soviet middle class was further supported by the regime’s cultivation of traditional (‘bourgeois’) family values from the mid-1930s. This represented a dramatic reversal of the anti-family policies pursued by the Party since 1917. It was partly a reaction to the demographic impact of the Great Break: the birthrate had declined disastrously, posing a serious threat to the country’s labour supply and military strength; the divorce rate had increased; and child abandonment had become a mass phenomenon, as families fragmented, leaving the regime to cope with the consequences. But the return to traditional family values was also a reflection of the conservatism of the new industrial and political elites, most of whom had risen only recently from the peasantry and the working class. As Trotsky wrote in 1936, the change in policy was a frank admission by the Soviet regime that its utopian attempt to ‘take the old family by storm’ – to root out the habits and customs of private life and implant collective instincts – had failed.22

  From the middle of the 1930s, the Party adopted a more liberal approach towards the family and the private home. The notion of ‘private life’ (chastnaia zhizn’) – a closed and separate sphere beyond the state’s control and scrutiny – was still rejected ideologically. But the idea of ‘personal life’ (lichnaia zhizn’) – an individual or family realm that remained open to public scrutiny – was actively promoted by the state. In this configuration of the private–public division, the private and the personal were defined in terms of individuality; but the domination of the public sphere demanded visibility of every aspect of the individual’s life. The practical effect was to liberate a space within the four walls of the home for the free expression of domesticity (consumer taste, ways of living, domestic habits, and so on), while retaining political controls on the private conduct of the individual, especially the Communist. ‘The Party does not interfere or create standards for the trifles of the everyday life of the Communist,’ announced Rabotnitsa, the Party’s main newspaper for women, in 1936; ‘it does not insist on rules of behaviour for every Party member in every aspect of a member’s life. But the Party does require that every member behave in their private life in a way that serves the interests of the Party and the working class.’23