Abstract
We know more about Stalinism now than ever before. But there are also ways in which the debate about its origins and character is only just beginning. For it is only now, as the archives of the Communist Party and central organs of state become available, that we can begin to ask the kinds of question which historians of other societies — such as Nazi Germany — have been asking for decades. As the Cold War recedes into history, the crude bi-polar debate about the Soviet system emerges for what it was — an often overheated controversy about current politics played out in academic literature and seminars, circling, for the most part, around an extremely limited range of censored or partisan historical sources. Too often, serious historical work fell victim to the wider ideological environment in which it was conducted. The dust stirred by Communism’s dramatic collapse is taking time to dispel.1 But ultimately the removal of its ideological constraints must lead to a renewed assessment of all aspects of the history of Stalin’s Soviet Union.
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References
A fuller discussion of some of these problems appears in Catherine Merridale, ‘Glasnost and Stalin: New Material, Old Questions’, The Historical Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, 1993, pp. 233–43.
For a discussion of some implications of the 1937 census, for example, see Iu.A Poliakov, V.B. Zhiromskaia and I.N. Kiselev, Tolveka molchaniia’, Sotsiologicheskaia issledovaniia, 1990, nos. 6, 7 and 8.
The original version of this paper was presented in 1990 at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, and was in turn largely based on research conducted for my monograph, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin, London, 1990.
For an airing of the controversy, see Russian Review, vol. 45, no. 4, October 1986.
For the earlier 1920s, see Richard Sakwa, Soviet Communists in Power, London, 1988, and William J. Chase, Workers, Society and the Soviet State, Urbana and Chicago, 1987.
The accusation brought against communists at this stage was not generally that they were active right-wingers, but that they ‘compromised’ or ‘appeased’ the right. Stalin’s speech to the Moscow party plenum in October 1928 made this very plain, VI Ob ′′edinennyi plenum MK i MKK VKP(b), Moscow, 1928.
See R. V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1960, and Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, London, 1980.
Trotsky Archive, T 1897. For more details of this conversation, see Stephen Cohen, ‘Predchuvstvie Stalinizma’, Ogonek, no. 28, 1990, and Iu.G. Fel′shtinskii, ‘Dva epizoda iz istorii vnutripartiinoi bor′by: konfidentsial′nye besedy Bukharina’, Voprosy istorii, 1991, nos. 2–3, pp. 182–203.
See Catherine Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin, London, 1990, pp. 47–50.
As Bukharin remarked, ‘You cannot build with future bricks.’ In ‘Notes of An Economist’, Pravda, 30 September 1928. See also E.H. Carr and R.W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, London, 1969, vol. 1, pp. 89–90 and 318–19.
The Moscow Party First Secretary, N.A. Uglanov, insisted that the extraordinary measures could only be temporary in his speech to the second Moscow party plenum of January-February 1928. Moskovskii partiinyi arkhiv, (MPA) fond 3, opis’ 9, delo 2, list 37.
Nebogin, A.G. Samorodov, ‘Diskussii v moskovskoi partiinoi organizatsii v 1928–1929 gg.’, Voprosy istorii KPSS, 1990, no. 6, p. 65.
Semenov, Litso fabrichnykh rabochikh prozhivaiushchikh v derevniakh i politprosvetrabota sredi nikh, Moscow/Leningrad, 1929.
T 1835.
Piatii ob “edinennyi plenum MK i MKK VKP(b), Moscow, 1928.
Nebogin and Samorodov, ‘Diskussii…’, p. 69.
Pravda, 21 September 1928
Nebogin and Samorodov, ‘Diskussii…’, p. 69. They give the example of Molotov’s speech attacking the right at the September plenum, comparing the published version with that available in the archives.
VI Ob′′edinennyi plenum.
Although they wanted to know, and asked their comrades for more information. See Merridale, Moscow Politics, p. 61.
Voprosy istorii, 1991, nos. 2–3, pp. 194–201 (reprints of materials from the Trotsky archive).
Piatii ob′′edinennyi plenum, especially the speech by Al′ferov.
This is a point argued by Stephen Cohen, Bukharin, p. 235. However, it must be added that the group most likely to support Bukharin in 1928–9, the peasants, was also the least informed of political change, the least enthusiastic about any of the Bolshevik’s policies, and the most remote from political decision-making.
The ‘right’ was not a new bogey in 1928. The word had negative connotations dating from 1917, and had been used against Bukharin in 1924.
Details of Uglanov’s biography appear in the Granat encyclopedia, Deiateli sovetskikh sotsialisticheskikh respublik i oktyabr’skoi revoliutsii, vol. 43, part iii, Moscow, 1927, p. 166.
Moskovskaia pravda, 12 February 1989.
Merridale, Moscow Politics, pp. 29–30.
MPA, fond 3, opis’ 6, ed. khr. 34.
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv russkoi federatsii (GARF, formerly TsGAOR), 7952/3/258, 3.
Merridale, Moscow Politics, pp. 190–8
Nobuo Shimotomai, ‘The Defeat of the Right Opposition in the Moscow Party Organization: 1928’, Japanese Slavic and East European Studies, 1983, vol. 4, p. 20.
Merridale, Moscow Politics, pp. 63–4.
On Stalin’s political consistency, see the chapter by Robert Service in this volume.
Bauman may be credited for foreshadowing the slogan ‘elimination of the kulaks as a class’ in a speech of 1928, in which he declared ‘there cannot be two socialisms, one for the countryside, and one for the towns.’ Cited in Merridale, Moscow Politics, p. 44.
Nebogin and Samorodov, ‘Diskussii…’, p. 65.
The Trotsky Archive reports, for example, a number of deliberate provocations at the factory level intended to gauge the levels of support for the two wings of the party. T 2534.
T 2850.
His deposition to the 1937 plenum appears in ‘Materialy fevral′sko-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP(b) 1937 goda’, part I, Voprosy istorii, 1992, nos. 2–3, pp. 3–44.
The most notable example was the report he gave to Moscow party activists after the July plenum, in which he described the ‘crisis’ in the villages and declared the smychka to be on the verge of dissolution. Pravda published only an edited version of this speech. The full text appeared in Rabochaia Moskva, 17–18 July 1928.
Voprosy istorii, 1992, nos. 2–3, pp. 3–44.
Pen′kov, himself a former ‘rightist’, made a statement to the 16th Party Congress in 1930 ‘to correct the view that no factional work was carried on’. Naturally, circumstances would have impelled him to overstate the case in 1930, but much of his evidence can be corroborated with reports from the time.
Bordiugov and V.A. Kozlov, ‘1929 povorot i al′ternativa Bukharina’, Voprosy istorii KPSS, 1988, no. 8, pp. 15–33.
During the summer of 1928, largely as a result of in-migration from the countryside, unemployment was reputed to stand at one in four of the adult population in Moscow.
T2021.
Sememov, cited in G.A. Bordiugov and V.A. Kozlov, Literaturnaia gazeta, 12 October 1988, p. 11.
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, Trotsky, 1921–1929, London, 1959, p. 135.
Merridale, Moscow Politics, pp. 152–3.
As one rank-and-filer remarked of the inner-party struggle of 1928, ‘someone should explain what it’s about.... In my view, it is … only a struggle for a portfolio.’ GARF 7952/3/82, 213.
For details, see Merridale, Moscow Politics, p. 64.
The composition of the Moscow elite is discussed in Merridale, Moscow Politics, pp. 206–8.
Taking the Moscow Party Committee as the elite, the only exceptions were Khrushchev and Kosarev.
As one overworked official remarked in 1929, ‘If you will take ten people from us every month, we cannot really be expected to develop an aktiv.’ GARF 7952/3/82, 153.
The membership figures for the Moscow party were as follows: 1925 70 479 1928 104 021 1930 135 488 1932 225 554 Source: Moskovskaia gorodskaia i Moskovskaia oblast’naia organizatsiia KPSS v tsifrakh, Moscow, 1972.
These examples were cited by party officials anxious to eradicate slipshod recruitment practices. More coercive examples would almost certainly have gone unrecorded. For a discussion of the reported cases, see Merridale, Moscow Politics, pp. 131–3.
Memoirs of lower-level officials abound with evidence of this involvement in economic life. Examples from different sections of the ‘Krasnyi Proletarii’ factory party organization are preserved in GARF, 7952/3/82 and 7953/3/267.
Starodubtsev, ‘Deiatel′nost′ moskovskoi partiinoi organizatsii po razvitiiu obshchestvenno-politicheskoi aktivnosti rabochego klassa v gody pervoi piatiletki 1928–1932 gg.’, unpublished dissertation, Moscow, 1972, p. 54.
Merridale, Moscow Politics, pp. 114–16.
Partden’ na predpriiatii, Moscow, 1932, describes this and other propaganda campaigns, in its turn setting them in the warmest possible light.
For some of the livelier campaigns, see Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, Oxford and New York, 1989.
See Merridale, Moscow Politics, pp. 147–8.
As Bukharin put it, ‘we were moving towards a common goal, on a still unblazed trail. Pravda carried a discussion page, everyone argued, searched for ways and means, quarrelled and made up and moved on together.’ His remarks charmingly overlook the fact that this freedom of debate was carefully bounded and problematic even by 1917, but the spirit of collective endeavour was undoubtedly the ideal of the 1920s.
Merridale, Moscow Politics, pp. 148–9.
This was attested by an old Communist Party member interviewed by the author in Moscow in 1986.
The career cycle is discussed in more detail in my contribution to David Lane (ed.), Elites and Political Power in the USSR, Aldershot, 1988.
Anna Larina’s memoir of this period (’Nezabyvaemoe’, Znamia, 1988, nos. 10, 11, 12) gives an account of such gatherings. Fascinating evidence for the interlocking social life of elite Bolsheviks is also furnished by Grigorii Zinoviev’s diary for 1925, whose entries demonstrate that, on virtually every day the Leningrad party secretary was in Moscow (which was more of the time than he spent in Leningrad at this point), he attended one or more (usually several) meetings with colleagues from the party and goverment elite. Rossiisskii Tsentr Khraneniia Dokumenty Sovremennoi Istorii (formerly Central Party Archive), 324/1/581.
Perhaps as a result of the purges of the 1920s, however, turnover at the higher levels in the Moscow party (as opposed to the state apparatuses) was lower than the national average after 1929.
The treatment of Bogdanov and Lunacharskii in 1909 provides an example of this intolerance at work even before 1917.
The most sensitive issues, moreover, seem to have been discussed on the telephone, rather than being committed to paper.
Davies, The Socialist Offensive, The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, London, 1980, pp. 189–90.
For the background to the anti-Nepmen campaign, see Alan M. Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists, Berkeley, California, 1987. See also Merridale, Moscow Politics, pp. 71–3.
See Davies, Socialist offensive, pp. 442–3.
Merridale, Moscow Politics, p. 76.
A good deal of new material has been published since 1989 attesting to the virtual anarchy in some rural areas, although I have seen no new work specifically on the Moscow oblast. For an example from elsewhere, see V. Vasil′ev, ‘Krest′ianskie vosstaniia na Ukraine, 1929–1930 gody’, Svobodnaia my si′, 1992, no. 9, pp. 70–8.
Pravda, 2 March 1930.
Vasil′ev, ‘Krest′ianskie vosstaniia…’.
Davies, Socialist Offensive, p. 280.
Reflected in his writings of 1930–2. See Izvestiia Tsentral’nogo Komiteta, 1989, no. 6.
For an outline of political events in the capital after 1931, see Nobuo Shimotomai, Moscow Under Stalinist Rule, London, 1992.
The responses to the 1937 census question about religion suggest a range of attitudes, from the hope that the USSR might lose a coming war, leaving believers free to practice, to the remark that ‘when there is bread, I am a believer, when there is not, I am not.’ Poliakov et al, ‘Polveka molchaniia’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 1990, no. 7, pp. 50–70 (p. 68).
See Khrushchev Remembers, vol. 1, Harmondsworth, 1977. More seriously, Stalin involved himself intimately with the plans for Moscow’s ‘reconstruction’; many of the architectural features of the new city reflect his personal choice.
One example of this was the rebuilding of the ‘Serp i Molot’ factory, an obsolete building which was ‘modernized’ (against the advice of experts) as a public-relations exercise. In the course of this reconstruction, the site was visited by Voroshilov, who ‘swore violently about the mud’. GARF 7952/3/82, 130–3.
See Shimotomai, Moscow, pp. 64–71.
Among those arrested in this period were the leaders of the alleged ‘Industrial Party’ and a number of individuals identified with it for tactical purposes, including SateL, the technical director of the trust responsible for ‘Krasnyi Proletarii’.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the USSR, Cambridge, 1979.
Merridale, Moscow Politics, pp. 149–50.
Merridale, Moscow Politics, pp. 115.
Merridale, Moscow Politics, pp. 186.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Stalin and the Making of a New Elite 1928–1939’, Slavic Review, September 1979, pp. 377–402.
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Merridale, C. (1998). The Origins of the Stalinist State: Power and Politics in Moscow, 1928–32. In: Channon, J. (eds) Politics, Society and Stalinism in the USSR. Studies in Russia and East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26529-9_4
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