Perhaps the tragedy in Moscow forced Stalin’s heirs to ponder the police state’s shortcomings, but for now they had no option but to rely on the institutions and methods bequeathed to them. Stalin’s funeral, set for 9 March, was prepared much as the viewing in state had been, but possibly with a bit more care. The top priority was security, ensured by 22,600 secret police agents, policemen, and soldiers. Thirty-five hundred vehicles were commissioned to block streets.
4
The government approved a minute-by-minute schedule of funeral events: the carrying of the coffin from the House of Unions, its placement in front of the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square, a mourning gathering for the public, the carrying of the coffin into the mausoleum. Several hours before the ceremony, six thousand soldiers and fifteen thousand members of a “delegation of workers” were brought to Red Square.
5
This time everything went according to plan.
Although incompetent officials bear much responsibility for the casualties in Moscow, another cause of the tragedy was the sheer number of people wanting to catch one last glimpse of the
vozhd
. What drove them? Was it love, curiosity, mass psychosis, or a rare opportunity for a spontaneous display of emotion? Apparently all these elements were present, along with many others. The few available documents that shed light on the public mood reveal a complex range of responses to the
vozhd
’s illness and death. On 5 March 1953, State Security Minister Ignatiev presented the Soviet leadership with a report on soldiers’ reactions to the news that Stalin was ill. The document described a certain pattern in the reaction of the “faithful.” One common thread was sympathy toward Stalin the man, who, according to Soviet propaganda, was the embodiment of goodness and benevolence: “My family takes this news as a terrible sorrow befalling our country”; “He worked very hard, and that took a toll on his health.” “Positive” responses often involved expressions of concern over the future of the country and the responder’s own future. Two points long emphasized by Soviet propaganda played a part in such positive responses: Stalin was irreplaceable and war was looming: “It’s kind of scary. Who will take his place after his death?”; “Maybe this will speed up the onset of a Third World War.” The chekists also reported on “negative” and “hostile” statements: “Serves him right”; “That’s just fine”; “Stalin won’t hang on for long, and that’s even better. You’ll see that everything will immediately change.”
6
All such letters led to arrests or at least an investigation.
March 1953 saw a surge in arrests and convictions of people charged with “anti-Soviet agitation” for expressing satisfaction with Stalin’s death or otherwise denigrating him. A forty-four-year-old Muscovite named S. M. Telenkov, who worked at a scientific institute, drunkenly proclaimed in a commuter train, “What a fine day it is today; today we buried Stalin. There’ll be one less scoundrel around and now we can get back to living.” R. S. Rybalko, a twenty-eight-year-old working-class woman from Rostov Oblast, was convicted of using profanity in regard to Stalin. Ya. I. Peit, who had been forcibly resettled in Kazakhstan, was sentenced for destroying and stomping on a portrait of Stalin after an official mourning ceremony. Upon hearing of Stalin’s death, P. K. Karpets, a thirty-two-year-old railroad worker from the Ukrainian city of Rovno, swore and exclaimed, “Smell that? The corpse is already stinking.” Ye. G. Gridneva, a forty-eight-year-old female railroad worker from Transcaucasia, was not able to contain herself and commented to a coworker, “A dog dies a dog’s death. It’s good that he died. There won’t be any kolkhozes and life will be a little easier.”
7
The expressions of anti-Stalin sentiment that came to secret police attention were just the tip of the iceberg. Most people had been trained to keep their opinions to themselves. The ubiquity of informants and the habit of fear kept free expression to a minimum, to say nothing of more demonstrative forms of protest. The choice was simple: either accept—or pretend to accept—official values or find yourself in a camp or face to face with an executioner. This circumstance diminishes the value of such normally candid sources as diaries. One must assume that even in the privacy of their own homes, Soviet citizens exercised self-censorship and used their diaries more as potential alibis than vehicles for frankness. Newspaper reports on mass demonstrations, summaries prepared by state security on the public mood, and letters written to the authorities by ordinary citizens provide only part of the picture. Furthermore, many of these documents are still hidden in closed archives. Historians attempting to fathom the public mood during the Stalin era still face major obstacles.
The 190 million people living in Stalin’s Soviet Union on the eve of his death constituted an exceptionally complex community that bore little resemblance to the “New Man” featured on the covers of Soviet magazines.
8
Many factors worked to give cohesion to Soviet society and promote support for the regime, and the motives for this support could vary from sincere enthusiasm to reconciliation with the inevitable to ordinary submission in the face of overwhelming power. The huge scale of violence and terror made fear and compulsion the backbone of the Stalinist system, albeit hidden behind a façade of enthusiasm. At the same time, loyalty and belief in the system and the man were not always feigned. The perpetual fear that was the primary instrument for unifying the people and suppressing independent thought was used alongside “positive” mechanisms of social manipulation. Both the carrot and the stick were applied to keep Soviet society moving in the desired direction.
One by-product of the regime’s policies was the creation of a large privileged class of officials. Those holding all but the most junior government or party posts enjoyed many benefits, including high social status and significant material perquisites. After the mass purges of the second half of the 1930s, the ranks of the Soviet nomenklatura stabilized. Repression against officials during the postwar period was more the exception than the rule. Furthermore, there is evidence that on the eve of Stalin’s death, officials and their relatives were essentially immune from prosecution. The requirement that any arrest or prosecution of a party member be approved by the leadership of party committees led to a bifurcation of the judicial system. In many cases members of the nomenklatura and their relatives avoided prosecution for administrative or criminal offenses that would bring severe punishment to an ordinary citizen.
9
Another category—“the country’s best people”—approached the status of officials within the huge party-state apparat. These “best people” could be found in every social segment and professional group, including workers, peasants, writers, artists, and scientists. The best known examples were the so-called Stakhanovites, real or imagined shock workers at the forefront of production who were held up for admiration as “beacons” of the Soviet spirit. Enjoying a stature somewhere between ordinary citizens and officials, the Stakhanovites quickly assimilated the latter’s value system, although in theory they kept working away as before. They served as spokespeople, lobbying for the interests of enterprises and regions and enjoying significant material privileges. A typical representative of this category of beneficiary of the Stalinist system was the eponymous miner Aleksei Stakhanov, who earned celebrity and Stalin’s favor through his record-breaking productivity. He quickly developed a taste for the nomenklatura lifestyle and bombarded Stalin with requests:
Joseph Vissarionovich! Give me a nice car and I will justify your trust. Soon the Stakhanovite movement will be ten years old, and I’m going to Donbas and will again show people how to work. I keep asking and they keep giving me some broken down war trophy clunker, but if just once I got something nice, I’d stop asking.… Also, about the apartment.… I can’t get anywhere with my requests to fix it up. The walls are dirty, the furniture is frayed and broken …, while other people get their walls papered with silk twice a month and get all sorts of furniture. This isn’t correct, so I’m asking for a renovation and new furniture so I won’t be ashamed to invite people to my apartment.
10
Another consequence of the channeling of benefits to the upper crust of Soviet society was the policy of disproportionately allotting resources to cities, especially major ones. Forced industrialization and militarization widened the gulf in living standards and social status between the rural majority and urban minority.
11
Many urbanites, especially in the capitals and major industrial centers, belonged to a relatively privileged and well-remunerated class. During years of famine they may have been hungry, but since they received a government ration, they were not dying of starvation like the peasantry. They had internal passports, unlike the peasants, and relative freedom of movement. Urban populations also enjoyed better health care and a well-developed cultural and educational infrastructure. In the stores of Moscow and Leningrad, where most food and consumer goods were sent, shoppers could find what they needed and even had a degree of choice.
12
The relative accessibility of educational institutions and high-paying jobs gave urbanites much better economic prospects. The monetary reform, which reduced prices in state stores while increasing taxes on peasant production, disproportionately favored the residents of capitals and industrial centers. These measures forced peasants to sell the products of their private plots at lower prices in urban markets. The consequences of these policies apparently escaped Stalin’s awareness. Mikoyan, whose duties placed him in charge of certain commercial matters, offers the following account:
I told him [Stalin] that we could not lower the prices on meat and butter, on white bread, first of all because they were in short supply and second because it would affect the procurement prices, which would have a negative effect on the production of these products, and when these goods are in short supply and with this reduction in prices there would be huge lines, which would lead to profiteering; after all, workers cannot go to the store during the day, so the profiteers would buy up all the goods.… But Stalin insisted, saying that this was necessary in the interests of the intelligentsia.
13
Mikoyan here nicely sums up the predictable effect of the politically motivated price reduction: shortages, lines, and a shadow market. But these were of little concern to Stalin. His focus was on the regime’s bulwark, the privileged segment of society in major cities. The government’s preferential distribution of resources made even the average urbanite many times better off than the rural population. One symptom of this inequality was the number of young rural women streaming into cities to work as housekeepers for urban families for no more than bread and shelter. Clearly, the urban minority and the rural majority had starkly divergent perceptions of reality. It was the urbanite viewpoint that found voice in memoirs and diaries and has disproportionately influenced contemporary understandings of day-to-day life under Stalin.
Another factor that led Soviet society to tolerate and even support the dictatorship was war. Memories of the horrors of the world and civil wars, the victory over the Nazis (paid for with 27 million lives), and the fear of a third world war all had a huge impact on perceptions—and not only in the Soviet Union. Stalin enjoyed the image of a savior who had delivered the world from a terrible evil. For decades afterward, the 1945 victory lent legitimacy to the Stalinist regime and those of his successors.
14
The list of historical circumstances that enabled the Stalinist system to endure could be continued, but even in conjunction with an ever-vigilant apparatus of repression they could not completely hide the contradictions inherent in Soviet society or suppress widespread dissatisfaction. From the moment they came to power as a radical revolutionary party, the Bolsheviks relied on a strategy of dividing society and suppressing the fraction that, for reasons of class origin or societal role, was considered hostile to socialism. This strategy included killing off the members of the hostile groups.
15
The Stalinist revolution devoted tremendous resources to purging society of these “elements.” Furthermore, along with the nobility, bourgeoisie, tsarist officers and officials, and anyone else proclaimed persona non grata after 1917, the largest segment of the population was stigmatized: the peasantry. During collectivization, many peasants were branded kulaks and shot, exiled, or driven out of their native villages. Millions of people from every sector were persecuted on a variety of pretexts and put into the camp system or simply killed. Aware that these measures had earned the dictatorship true enemies, Stalin intensified his preemptive purges, most notably during the Great Terror of 1937–1938. Repression begat repression. By the end of his rule a significant proportion, if not the majority, of Soviet citizens had at one time or another been arrested, imprisoned in a camp, forcibly relocated, or subjected to some softer form of mistreatment.
The regime’s victims did not necessarily turn into conscious opponents. Terror often had the opposite effect. Intimidation made people more governable and submissive and forced them to demonstrate their loyalty. But it would be wrong to assume that submission was the only possible reaction. The historical record attests to the existence of widespread anti-government feelings or even active forms of resistance. For understandable reasons resistance was most common when the dictatorship was first being consolidated—most notably peasant revolts during collectivization in 1930 and its aftermath.
16
The Terror and the stabilization of the system sharply curtailed opportunities for overt action, especially on a large scale. But it is important to note that access to secret police archives, which would reflect the true state of affairs in the late Stalin era, is extremely limited. We may learn that our image of the 1940s generation as silent and submissive is misinformed.