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9.3 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS, AND STALIN'S SOLUTIONS (a) The problems were to some extent of Stalin's own making; he obviously felt that under his totalitarian regime, political and social activities must be controlled just as much as economic life: he aimed at complete and unchallenged power for himself and became increasingly suspicious and intolerant of criticism. (i) Starting in 1930, there was growing opposition within the party which aimed to slow down industrialisation. allow peasants to leave collective farms, and remove Stalin from the leadership if necessary. However. Stalin was equally determined that political opponents and critics must be eliminated once and for all. (ii) A new constitution was needed to consolidate the hold of Stalin and the communist party over the whole country. (iii) Social and cultural aspects of life needed to he brought into line and harnessed to the service of the state.
(b) Stalin's methods were typically dramatic. (i) Using the murder of Sergei Kirov, one of his supporters on the Politburo (December 1934), as an excuse, Stalin launched what became known as the purges. It seems fairly certain that Stalin himself organised Kirov's murder, 'the crime of the century', as Robert Conquest calls it, 'the keystone of the entire edifice of terror and suffering by which Stalin secured his grip on the Soviet peoples'. but it was blamed on Stalin's critics. Over the next four years hundreds of important officials were arrested, tortured, made to confess to all sorts of crimes of which they were largely innocent (such as plotting with the exiled Trotsky or with capital-ist governments to overthrow the soviet state) and forced to appear in a series of 'show trials' at which they were invariably found guilty and sentenced to death or labour camp. Those executed included all the 'Old Bolsheviks' - Zinoviev, Kamcnev, Bukharin and Radek - who had helped to make the 1917 revolution, the Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, Tukhachevsky, thirteen other generals and about two-thirds of the top officers; millions of innocent people ended up in labour camps (Conquest puts the figure at about eight million by 1938). Even Trotsky was sought out and murdered in exile in Mexico City, though he managed to survive until 1940. The purges were successful in eliminating possible alternative leaders and in terrorising the masses into obedience, but the consequences were serious: many of the best brains in the government, the army and in industry had disappeared, and in a country where the highly educated class was still small, this was bound to hinder progress. (ii) In 1936, after much discussion, a new and apparently more democratic constitution was introduced in which everyone was allowed to vote by secret ballot for members of a national assembly known as the Supreme Soviet. However, this met for only about two weeks in the year, when it elected a smaller body, the Praesidium, to act on its behalf, and when it also chose the Union Soviet of Commissars. a small group of ministers of which Stalin was the Secretary, and which wielded the real power. In fact the democracy was an illusion: the constitution merely underlined the fact that Stalin and the party ran things. and though there was mention of freedom of speech, anybody who ventured to criticise Stalin was quickly 'purged'. (iii) Writers, artists and musicians were expected to produce works of realism glorifying soviet achievements; anybody who did not conform was persecuted, and even those who tried often still fell foul of Stalin. The young composer Shostakovich was condemned when his new opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, failed to please Stalin, even though the music critics had at first praised it. Further performances were banned with the result, according to the American ambassador, that 'half the artists and musicians in Moscow are having nervous prostration and the others are trying to imagine how to write and compose in a manner to please Stalin'. Education like everything else was closely watched by the secret police, and although it was compulsory and free it tended to deteriorate into indoctrination; but at least literacy was increased, which along with the improvement in social services, was an unprecedented achievement. Finally an attempt was made to clamp down on the Orthodox Church: churches were closed and clergy persecuted; but this was one of Stalin's failures: in 1940 probably half the population were still convinced believers, and during the war the persecution was relaxed to help maintain morale.
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9.4 WAS THE STALIN APPROACH NECESSARY? Historians have failed to agree about the extent of Stalin's achievement, or indeed whether he achieved any more with his brutality than could have been managed by less drastic methods. Stalin's defenders, who include many soviet historians, argue that the situation was so desperate that only the pressures of brute force could have produced such a rapid industrialisation together with the necessary food; for them, the supreme justification is that thanks to Stalin Russia was strong enough to defeat the Germans. The opposing view is that Stalin's policies, though superficially successful, actually weakened Russia: ridiculously high targets for industrial production placed unnecessary pressure on the workers and caused slipshod work and poor quality products; the brutal enforcement of collectivisation vastly reduced the amount of meat available and made peasants so bitter that in the Ukraine the German invaders were welcomed; the purges slowed economic progress by removing many of the most experienced men, and almost caused military defeat during the first months of the war by depriving the army of all its experienced generals; in fact Russia won the war in spite of Stalin, not because of him. Whichever view one accepts, a final point to bear in mind is that many Marxists outside Russia feel that Stalin betrayed the idealism of Marx and Lenin: instead of a new classless society in which everybody was free and equal, ordinary workers and peasants were just as exploited as under the tsars, whereas skilled workers were an Elite; the party had taken the place of the capitalists, and enjoyed all the privileges - the best houses, country retreats and cars. Instead of Marx's 'dictatorship of the proletariat' there was merely the dictatorship of Stalin.
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