“Anti-crisis manager” Stalin and his political ploys

The more you study the history of the first half of the 20th century, the more convinced you become that Joseph Stalin was really a unique political figure. More specifically, he was a unique manipulator who was able, like nobody else among his contemporaries, to turn his failures into what seemed to be high-profile victories, build perfect and brilliant ideological structures on the bones of millions of victims, and cover the most heinous crimes of the Bolshevik system with somebody else’s true heroism.

Boundless cynicism and self-assurance distinguished Stalin even from among such fanatical communist figures as Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Dzerzhinsky, and Kirov. While the others were mobilizing the proletariat or establishing governmental and military entities with the assistance of “bourgeois specialists,” Stalin was artfully conducting a behind-the-scenes game so he could play the leading role, in the fullness of time, in a show that he had orchestrated.

Lenin, who was gravely ill and temporarily out of active politics, noted with surprise in 1922 that the undersized and pockmarked apparatchik Joseph, who held a purely nominal office of party secretary general in the Politburo, very soon put on a show called “unification of the Soviet republics by way of their autonomization and making them part of the Russian Federation.” Lenin made a last-ditch effort to cut short this show, which could have turned a Red Russia into a slightly refurbished Black Hundred [referring to an ultra-conservative, counter-revolutionary movement of the early 20th century in Russia – Ed.] Russia in the mid-1920s. He partly succeeded in this. But Lenin considered it only possible to build the USSR as a confederation, not a federation, by uniting military and foreign-policy agencies alone, and pursuing the policy of combating Great Russian chauvinism and of resolute Korenizatsiya (“indigenization”) in the union and autonomous republics, and building an economy based on farming, industrial and consumer cooperatives (this was to have resulted 10 to 15 years later in something that resembles what Josip Broz Tito built in Yugoslavia in the second half of the 20th century). What course Stalin embarked on when he became an omnipotent dictator in the late 1920s is common knowledge. Yet he also managed to position himself in the eyes of the entire world (including both followers and adversaries of communism) as the most consistent and, later, the only disciple of Lenin. Then he loudly accused “the dog Tito’s clique” of revisionism and betrayal of Leninism and, before that, spent 20 years condemning to firing squads the old Bolsheviks who were unwise enough to keep at home a Pravda with Lenin’s notes on the “radical revision of our entire viewpoint on socialism.” The show turned out to be so effective that it eclipsed reality, as it happens now, when TV shows are eclipsing real politics, albeit to a lesser degree.

Being “a loyal disciple of great Lenin” was Stalin’s first, largest, longest, in fact lifelong, show. An organic element of the latter was the physical and moral destruction of Bukharin and Trotsky, who were really much closer to Lenin, and, moreover, the harassment of the Bolshevik party creator’s widow and sisters.

But, before being thrown into the execution cell, Bukharin would speak thousands of times, orally and in writing (almost every day), about the genius of Comrade Stalin as Lenin’s foremost disciple and on his own mistakes. Krupskaya, too, had to abide by party discipline (the holy of holies!) and take part in glorifying “the best friend of sportsmen” until her death. What was central here is the scale and regularity of public spectacles devoted to a certain topic in combination, naturally, with the activity of “competent bodies,” which were “purged” in the late 1930s of almost all the not-so-numerous career intelligence and counterintelligence officers — the main thing was to hunt down “enemies of the people” and “wreckers,” on which one could pompously report from the podium.

Then all hell broke loose. In January 1933 Stalin announced at the CC VKP(b) plenum that the first five-year plan had been fulfilled ahead of schedule in four years and three months. He claimed that the plan was fulfilled 93.7 and 108 percent in terms of the gross industrial and heavy industry output, respectively. And as the main task was to boost the heavy industry, it meant they attained their goal. Since then (suffice it to open, say, Wikipedia or Russian textbooks in history and political science), Stalin’s notorious catch phrase “we have failed in some points, but in general…” with some alterations, has been distorting the real results of the first five-year plan, which were very far from the targets.

Let us look more in detail at what the 1933 fanfare was hiding, as it is a classical method of history falsification, which was used in the USSR until its demise and seems to be of use in independent Ukraine. Firstly, Stalin signed a secret telegram before his appearance at the plenum, which forbade departments of all levels to make public any statistical information before the publication of official State Planning Committee documents. But even after this publication, any local statistics could only be printed with Moscow’s permission. This resulted in the abrupt reduction of statistical publications, and the published information was to be approved at the highest level. Secondly, the abovementioned 93.7 and 108 percent were assessed on a price-related basis without due account of the growth of wholesale prices for industrial products. In other words, if the plan said that a Moscow-made truck would cost 50,000 rubles but it really cost 85,000 in early 1933, the plan was considered fulfilled and over-fulfilled and fanfares blared, whereas the real number of automobiles was smaller than intended.

Thirdly, these figures were upwardly falsified by means of double accounting, when the performance of an enterprise was assessed on the basis of both workpieces and end products — in our example, truck bodies and trucks themselves (together with bodies). In reality (the State Planning Committee did have the right information, which was a closely guarded secret), industrial output increased twofold and that of Group A products by 2.7 times in the first five-year plan period, while the planned target was 2.8 and 3.3 times, respectively. There was an especially wide gap in the production of consumer goods: there growth was 1.56 instead of 2.4. The flop of the five-year plan was still more obvious in fundamental resources: the year 1932 saw the production of 13.5 billion kWh of electricity instead of 22 billion, 64.4 million tons of coal instead of 75 million, 6.2 million tons of pig iron instead of 10 million, 0.3 million tons of mineral fertilizers instead of 8 million, 5.9 million tons of steel instead of 10.4 million, and 4.4 million tons of rolled metal instead of 8 million. There was a still greater lag in mechanical engineering: in 1932, 23,900 automobiles were manufactured compared to the target of 100,000; 48,900 tractors against 53,000; and 10,000 harvesters against 40,000. Oil was the only item that more or less met the target: 21.4 million tons against the planned 22 million.

There is no use speaking about the production of consumer goods (Group B). Not to burden the readers with figures, I will only say that the first five-year plans for the manufacture of cotton and woolen textiles were fulfilled as late as 1954 and 1957, respectively.

Interestingly, the transition from the New Economic Policy (NEP) to a directive-mobilization-type economy essentially slowed down growth in key sectors. For example, the average annual growth rate in coal production was 39.9 percent in 1926-27 and about 15 percent during the first five-year plan years, in steel production it was 37.6 and 8.2 percent, and in cement production — 34.4 and 17.1 percent. In other words, the Stalinist economy immediately proved ineffective. Little wonder, for in the NEP era the “old cadres” could work calmly, workers could buy something for the money they earned, living standards were gradually rising, and political thunders roared somewhere “high above” – in sharp contrast to what began in the USSR in 1929, the year of “the great turning point,” and reached the peak in 1930-33. As a result of the liquidation of cultured agricultural producers and the replacement of farming cooperatives with collective and state-run farms, the production of meat, milk, eggs, and sugar in the USSR dropped by two, one and a half, three times, and 39 pecent in 1929-33, respectively. Instead of rising by 1.5 times in 1929-33, agricultural output dropped in 1933 to less than two-thirds of the 1929 and 1913 levels. Small wonder, for the USSR tractor fleet had a total capacity of 1.1 million horse power, while the number of horses (i.e., the same horse power) fell by 13.6 million in 1930-33. Add to this millions of lost oxen (the total quantity of cattle fell from 60.1 million head in 1928 to 33.5 million in 1933), and you will see the complete picture of a total energy-related degradation of “socialist agriculture.” As is known, the NEP-time Soviet ruble had a gold content and was a hard currency. But, as soon as industrialization and collectivization began, the printing press was brought into action and the gold content was, naturally, abolished. The circulating money mass rose fivefold in 1928-32, which resulted (in spite of all ration cards) in a 60-percent drop of the ruble’s purchasing power (in the system of state-run wholesale and retail trade alone).

However, dozens of millions of people, including well-educated ones, still consider the first five-year plan a strategic breakthrough on the path to industrialization and do not know that there were milder and, hence, incomparably more economically effective, options for the USSR’s industrial and agricultural development.

How did it come about that such an incorrect interpretation of events, and even the complete falsification of not that remote events proved to be so successful? The punitive and repressive machine? Yes. A total brainwashing by means of powerful propaganda institutions? Yes. The USSR’s isolation from the rest of the world? Yes. But there is another important factor that promoted the success of Stalin’s policies: he would always involve — at various levels — a large number of interested and even uninterested people into his shows.

Let us take the first five-year plan again: even under a one-party regime, the failure of this plan could bring the Stalin group down and bring in some other group, all the more so that there was a group of influential party leaders who could propose their own variant of industrialization. These were Nikolai Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky, and Nikolai Uglanov — three Politburo members (Rykov also headed the USSR government) and the first secretary of the Moscow city VKP(b) committee. They were dismissed from office in 1930 and accused of a “rightist tilt,” but the subsequent events brilliantly showed that they were right. However, the “collective Stalin,” which had grown under the Bolshevik rule around the new leader and his inner circle, was not interested in altering the course. This would have meant loss of power and all the possibilities that the latter could furnish and withdrawal of the ruling class to or even beyond the margins of power. For this reason, the “collective Stalin,” who numbered thousands, if not dozens of thousands, in the early 1930s, took an active part in the nationwide show put on by the Leader himself. The point is that almost all of them — the nomenklatura of various levels — had in fact flopped in their offices and were waiting with fear for punishment at the hands of the inexorable Central Committee, and the Leader suddenly threw a life line to each of them: the five-year plan was fulfilled in four years and three months. It was in the headlines of all newspapers, magazines, radio, and newsreel reports — and one would eventually believe that things are not so bad, and the fact that the tractors break down every 100 km is a trifle in comparison with overall colossal successes. After all, even such tractors are better than nothing. Ration cards and shopping coupons? It’s a result of poor crops and wreckers’ schemes, you know.

In his memoirs, tape-recorded in the late 1960s, Nikita Khrushchev, as recent omnipotent leader of the USSR turned old-age pensioner, notes with a sincere surprise (he has begun to lose the ideological shroud) that in 1930 he, a young and successful apparatchik, lived considerably worse in material terms than before the revolution, when he was a metalworker in the Donbas. He even provides a calculation that confirms this conclusion. Yet Khrushchev later says that this was an inevitable price for industrial progress and the construction of communism, though this sounds somewhat unconvincing. The impression is that if he had lived for another few years, he would have come to more radical conclusions, but this did not happen.

I gave this example to show that only two decades after Stalin’s death high-ranking participants in his show (who in principle had access to many secret materials) began to get rid of that warped vision of reality, while some of them (Molotov and Kaganovich) were convinced even in the 1980s that everything had been done the right way.

The merry-go-round had spun with all its might by the mid-1930s. Unlike his German counterpart, the “Kremlin highlander” failed to please his people with a real and noticeable increase in living standards. So he invented a few ersatzes of an “improving life already today.” Firstly, it was cinema that showed the happy and affluent life of Soviet people. Secondly, Moscow enjoyed a special supply status, which made the Soviet capital seem like a paradise on Earth to provincial visitors. Thirdly, there were a few dozen elite health centers and summer holiday camps, not only for the nomenklatura and their children but also, to some extent, for representatives of “ordinary Soviet people.” Fourthly, there were grandiose extravaganzas – not the naive Young Communist League improvisations of the 1920s with the customary “our response to Chamberlain” in the shape of “the bird” strapped instead of a propeller to an aircraft but carefully worked-out pageants, when the ground was shaken by hundreds of tanks and the air was full of hundreds of roaring aircraft, when athletes with wooden rifles in hand conducted spectacular exercises on the squares of the largest cities, when balloons soared over Moscow, Leningrad, and Kyiv, carrying huge portraits of the “greatest leader of all the working people of the world.” And all this was carefully filmed so that not only the tens of thousand of spectators and participants, but also the entire Soviet Union, could see.

But this is not the end of it. What became the best elements in Stalin’s show and the most effective cover for his bloodiest hecatombs and most obvious fiascos, were the manifestations of true courage and heroism that occur in all times and under all regimes. The first attempts to whip up a nationwide frenzy, when everybody would sing praise to heroes and (above all) the VKP(b) Politburo, were connected with the achievements of Soviet pilots and stratosphere explorers in the first half of the 1930s. But what became the first really grandiose campaign, turning defeat into victory in mass consciousness, was the rescue and homecoming of the Cheluskin crew. It will be recalled that the icebreaker Cheluskin set sail down the Northern Sea Route in the summer of 1933, only to break down and be crushed by ice floes on February 13, 1934, killing one crew member. The crew and passengers came out onto the ice. As a result of a two-month operation, all the seamen and passengers (most of them were scientists) were rescued by Soviet pilots, some of them being assisted by US flight engineers. This really heroic action was caused, however, by the mess that reigned supreme in Stalin’s empire: a steamship totally unfit for sailing in heavy ice put to sea a month later than necessary, as far as the ice situation was concerned. But this was forgotten. Instead, governmental decorations were showered on the rescue pilots: they were awarded the just instituted title of Hero of the Soviet Union. (Due to a total mess-up, one of the first Heroes was Sigizmund Levanevsky who failed to evacuate even one Cheluskin crew member because he had broken his airplane, while Mikhail Babushkin, whose reconnaissance seaplane was aboard the vessel and who managed to fly to the mainland and evacuate his mechanic, only received an Order of the Red Star.) And then there was a special train from Vladivostok to Moscow, rallies, dances, songs and joy all around… and arrests of all those who dared utter even one critical word, not about the Cheluskin crew — their exploit really deserved respect — but about the bosses who had sent them to almost a sure death.

Six months later there came the mysterious death of Kirov and a pompous funeral, which began the first, so far short-lived, wave of the Great Terror and the “cleaning” of cities of “alien class elements.”

But the most striking thing was the combination of mass-scale terror, a high-profile campaign of the first “election without choice” to the USSR Supreme Soviet under a new Constitution (written by a small group of party intellectuals with Bukharin at the head and publicly named “Stalin’s”), and long-distance air flights. So let us recall the way it went. On July 1, 1937, after being approved by the VKP(b) CC plenum, the draft Provision on the USSR Supreme Soviet Elections was confirmed on behalf of the All-Union Central Executive Committee (VTsIK, nominally, the highest body of power with “president” Kalinin at the head) presidium, which passed a resolution to this effect at its 4th session of the 7th convocation. Unlike the secret Politburo resolution “On Anti-Soviet Elements,” passed at the same time, the provision on elections was widely publicized. The agendas of Politburo meetings show that decisions on anti-Soviet elements (in concrete regions) and on the readiness of constituencies for elections were made simultaneously from July 2 until the voting day on December 12, 1937. Moreover, it was planned to finish the “mopping-up” before The Day of elections. The NKVD instruction “On the Operation to Repress Former Kulaks, Criminals, and Other Anti-Soviet Elements,” approved by the Politburo on July 31, prescribed that the operation be launched, depending on the region, on August 5 to 15, and finished within four months. As the election date drew closer, the summer and fall of 1937 saw a number of mass-scale campaigns and festivities, such as the flights of Chkalov and Gromov to the United States of America over the North Pole, the welcoming of polar expedition participants, and so on. All these festivities went hand in hand with mass-scale arrests, killings of people in NKVD dungeons, and dispatches of new contingents to the Gulag according to the repression targets approved by the topmost leadership.

That is the show Joseph Stalin put on.

Moreover, when the Americans were giving a hearty welcome to Chkalov’s and Gromov’s crews, they could not even imagine that it was in reality a test flight of the new super-long-range bomber designated as ANT-25 and DB-1 for civilian and military purposes, respectively. These aircraft, which were to equip two regiments, were supposed to be able to reach any city in North America, Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa from the Soviet territory and land, after accomplishing the combat mission, on secret airfields prepared by local Comintern agents. The idea was never fully implemented, perhaps due to the arrest and imprisonment of a number of aircraft designers, including Andrei Tupolev, the author of the ANT-25. The next modification of this plane was the DB-2 manufactured without his participation. Women pilots Gryzodubova, Raskova, and Osipenko made a flight on a specially-equipped plane of this type (called Rodina) to the Far East in September 1938. This raised a new wave of enthusiasm and glorification of the pilots as well as... a new wave of the Great Terror.

Incidentally, at that very time Stalin lost interest in records and high-profile propaganda: he takes a dim view of the suggestion of a flight over the South Pole and a non-stop flight around the globe. He was getting ready for new shows that would soon shake the world — the signing of a pact with Germany and “liberation missions” in the West. Still, he had to resort to polar explorers once more during the unsuccessful “winter war” against Finland. The SS Georgy Sedov had been drifting in the Arctic Ocean ice for 812 days. In January 1940 the icebreaker Iosif Stalin broke through to help it. All the Georgy Sedov crew members were awarded the title of Heroes, the rescuers were also generously rewarded, and a grandiose fuss was raised, fuzzing out the not-so-optimistic news from the front.

This article can be continued to show many other examples of Stalin the showman (in fact, the “collective Stalin”: is the top-level Soviet nomenklatura), staging magnificent mass-scale extravaganzas aimed at disguising the true state of affairs and throwing dust into the faces of millions of people. But the problem is different: there are a lot of Stalin’s followers today. They are not friendly with history, they are ready to tell the most grandiose lies in order to retain their power, and they prefer showing pageants to the people to keep them under control. People know who the culprits are.