Challenging Traditional Views of Russian History

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Challenging Traditional Views of Russian History Edited by Stephen G. Wheatcroft

Studies in Russian and East European History and Society Series Editors: R. W. Davies, E. A. Rees, M. J. Ilic ˇ and J. R. Smith at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham Recent titles include: Lynne Attwood CREATING THE NEW SOVIET WOMAN John Barber and Mark Harrison (editors) THE SOVIET DEFENCE-INDUSTRY COMPLEX FROM STALIN TO KHRUSHCHEV Vincent Barnett KONDRATIEV AND THE DYNAMICS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT R. W. Davies SOVIET HISTORY IN THE YELTSIN ERA Linda Edmondson (editor) GENDER IN RUSSIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE James Hughes STALINISM IN A RUSSIAN PROVINCE Melanie Ilicˇ WOMEN WORKERS IN THE SOVIET INTERWAR ECONOMY WOMEN IN THE STALIN ERA (editor) Peter Kirkow RUSSIA’S PROVINCES Maureen Perrie THE CULT OF IVAN THE TERRIBLE IN STALIN’S RUSSIA E. A. Rees (editor) DECISION-MAKING IN THE STALINIST COMMAND ECONOMY Lennart Samuelson PLANS FOR STALIN’S WAR MACHINE Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925–1941 Vera Tolz RUSSIAN ACADEMICIANS AND THE REVOLUTION J. N. Westwood SOVIET RAILWAYS TO RUSSIAN RAILWAYS Stephen G. Wheatcroft (editor) CHALLENGING TRADITIONAL VIEWS OF RUSSIAN HISTORY Galina M. Yemelianova RUSSIA AND ISLAM A Historical Survey

Studies in Russian and East European History and Society Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71239–0 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Challenging Traditional Views of Russian History Edited by

Stephen G. Wheatcroft Associate Professor in Russian and Soviet History, University of Melbourne

© Selection and editorial matter © Stephen G. Wheatcroft Chapters 1–10 © Palgrave Publishers Ltd 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–75461–1 hardcover This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Challenging traditional views of Russian history / edited by Stephen G. Wheatcroft. p. cm. – (Studies in Russian and East European history and society) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–75461–1 1. Russia – Historiography. 2. Soviet Union – Historiography. 3. Russia (Federation) – Historiography. I. Wheatcroft, S. G. II. Series. DK38 .C38 2002 947¢.007¢2 – dc21 10 11

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Figures

viii

List of Tables

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

Notes on the Contributors

xiii

Acknowledgments

xv

Introduction

xvii

PART I: THE PRE-REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD 1 The Kaghanate of the Rus¢: Non-Slavic Sources of Russian Statehood David Christian 1.1 The background: peasant migrations, Khazar power and expanding trade 1.2 Volga Bulgaria 1.3 The Kaghanate of the Rus¢ 1.4 The turn to the Dnieper 1.5 Conclusions 2 The Crisis of the Late Tsarist Penal System Stephen G. Wheatcroft 2.1 Developments in the Russian prison system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in comparison with the West 2.2 Detailed materials from the annual reports of the Tsarist Prison Administration from the 1880s to 1905: the years of imprisonment 2.3 Changes in prison developments, 1906–14 2.4 Conclusion 3 The Russian Army and American Industry, 1915–17: Globalisation and the Transfer of Technology Frederick R. Zuckerman v

1 3

4 13 14 19 21 27

29

33 39 42

55

vi

Contents

PART II: THE STALIN PERIOD 4 The Soviet Famine of 1932–33 and the Crisis in Agriculture R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

The grain harvest Why was grain production so low in 1931 and 1932? The grain crisis of 1932–33 Changes in the grain balance Conclusion

5 Patronage and the Intelligentsia in Stalin’s Russia Sheila Fitzpatrick 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8

Who were the patrons? What could the patrons do for their clients? How to acquire a patron Brokers How to write to a patron The human factor: affective ties between patrons and clients Hierarchies of patronage Perils and pleasures of patronage

6 Towards Explaining the Changing Levels of Stalinist Repression in the 1930s: Mass Killings S. G. Wheatcroft 6.1 Stalinist mass killings in perspective 6.2 The 1930–31 wave of mass killings, and why the killings were drastically reduced in July 1931 6.3 The reduction in mass killings from the second half of 1931 to 1936 6.4 The Ezhovshchina and the resumption of mass killings, 1937–38 6.5 Conclusions 7 The Great Terror: Leningrad – a Quantitative Analysis Melanie Ilicˇ 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8

The purges: historiographical debates Sources Methodology Sex ratios Age profile Residency Communist Party membership Nationality

67 69 69 71 78 87 88 92 94 97 98 99 100 101 103 104 112 113 114 123 129 138 147 147 149 150 150 151 151 152 154

Contents vii

7.9 7.10 7.11 7.12 7.13 7.14 7.15 7.16

Social composition Dates of arrests, trials and executions Number of days between arrest and trial, trial and execution State organisation responsible for conducting trials Statute Code Women Family ties Conclusions

PART III: THE POST-STALIN PERIOD 8 The Dissident Roots of Glasnost Robert Horvath 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

Leninist sources of Gorbachev’s glasnost The demand for glasnost The weapon of glasnost The practice of glasnost Official glasnost versus dissident glasnost

9 Rethinking Yermolov’s Legacy: New Patriotic Narratives of Russia’s Engagement with Chechnya Julie Elkner 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4

Seeing the Chechen through Yermolov’s eyes Yermolov’s tragedy Punishing civilians Conclusion

10 Stalinism and the Fall of the Soviet Union Graeme Gill

154 157 161 162 163 166 166 167

171 173 175 176 182 185 189 203 207 209 210 212 217

10.1 The emergence of the Stalinist power structure 10.2 Reform of the power structure? 10.3 The collapse of the power structure?

218 225 230

Name index

235

Subject index

240

List of Maps and Figures Maps 1.1 The Khaganate of the Rus’ 1.2 The Khazar empire, 630–965

5 8

Figures 2.1 Russian crude death rates per thousand population: civil adjusted and prisoner, 1885–1906 2.2 Russian crude death rates per thousand population: civil adjusted and prisoner, 1906–15

viii

38 41

List of Tables 2.1 Russian and British execution rates per million population 2.2 The scale of Russian exile in comparison with British exile to America and Australia: average per year and estimates of transportation mortality rates 2.3 Annual migration beyond the Urals in thousands 2.4 Death sentences and executions per year, 1876–1913: various sources 2.5 Russian prisoners according to institution 2.6 Russian prisoners according to category within institution 2.7 Russian prisoners according to time spent within each category in year equivalents each year 2.8 Russian prison mortality for different categories of prisoners: Crude Death Rate per thousand population 4.1 Grain production, 1909–13–1933: alternative series (million tons) 4.2 Grain collections (zagotovki), 1931–32 and 1932–33 (thousand tons) 4.3 State grain collections, agricultural year July 1932–June 1933: peasant sector (kolkhozy plus individual peasants) (thousand tons) 4.4 State grain resources and allocation, 1931–32 and 1932–33 (thousand tons) 6.1 Comparative international data on death sentences and executions 6.2 Main periods of upsurge of repression as indicated by death sentences in Russia and the USSR 6.3 Cases prosecuted by the security agencies, 1926–32: all cases and especially those with death sentences, for USSR, Moscow, Tomsk and Altai 6.4 Death sentences 1930–36 prosecuted by the security agencies: All-USSR, Moscow and other regions 6.5 Death sentences, 1936–39 prosecuted by security agencies: All-USSR, Moscow and other regions 6.6 The growth in numbers of prisoners in Western Siberian prisons (excluding camps) and in the USSR as a whole 6.7 Available figures on initial limits and increases in limits for NKVD operation 00447 7.1 Age profile, in percentage terms, of Leningrad adult population (1939) and victims of the purges (1937) ix

30

31 32 40 45 46 48 50 72 79

80 85 114 115

118 125 130 135 138 152

x

List of Tables

7.2 Residency of purge victims: Leningrad 1937 (selected sample) 7.3 Nationality, in percentage terms, of All-Union, RSFSR and Leningrad populations (1939) and victims of the purges (1937) 7.4 Social composition of Leningrad population (1939) and victims of the purges (1937) 7.5 Dates of arrests, trials and executions: Leningrad 1937 7.6 Number of days between arrest and trials: Leningrad 1937 7.7 Number of days between trial and execution: Leningrad 1937 7.8 Statute Code used in purge trials: Leningrad 1937

153 155 157 158 161 162 164

List of Abbreviations AKhRR APRF ASSR ChK GARF GAU GPU Gosfond HIA Komzag KPK LO LOKAF LVO MTM MTS Narkompros Narkomsnab Narkomzem Nepfond NKRKI/TsKK

NKSnab NKVD NKZem obkom OGPU okruzhkom Orgburo OSO RAPP RGAE RGASPI

Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia Archive of the President of the Russian Federation Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic Cheka (the Soviet security agencies, 1917–22) State Archive of the Russian Federation Main Artillery Administration State Political Administration (the Soviet security agencies, 1922–23) State Reserves Hoover Institution Archives Committee on Grain Collections Committee of Party Control Leningrad oblast¢ Literary Association of the Red Army and Navy Leningrad Military District Machine-Tractor Workshop/s Machine-Tractor Station/s People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment People’s Commissariat for [Food] Supply (also NKSnab) People’s Commissariat for Agriculture (also NKZem) Untouchable Fund People’s Commissariat of Worker-Peasant Inspectorate [of State Agencies]/Central Control Commission [of Party Agencies] People’s Commissariat for [Food] Supply People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (also Soviet security agencies, 1934–46) People’s Commissariat for Agriculture Oblast¢-level [Party] Committee Combined State Political Administration (the Soviet security agencies, 1923–34) Okrug-level [Party] Committee Organisational Bureau of the Central Committee of the Party Special Boards [of the Soviet security agencies] Russian Association of Proletarian Writers Russian State Archives of the Economy Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (former Party archives) xi

xii List of Abbreviations

RSFSR RTsKhIDNI SOU Sovnarkom SSSR TsDAGOU TsGAIPD TsIK TsK TsKK TsSU TsUNKhU UNKVD VChK VSNKh

Russian Soviet Federated Soviet Socialist Republic Russian Centre for the Deposition and Documentation of Recent History (former Party archive, now known as RGASPI) Secret Operations Department (of Soviet security agencies) Council of People’s Commissars USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) Former Party archives in Ukraine Central State Archives of Historical and Political Documentation in St Petersburg Central Executive Committee [of a soviet] Central [Party] Committee Central [Party] Control Commission Central Statistical Administration Central Department of National Economic Accounts (formerly known as Central Statistical Administration) Department of People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs at separate administrative levels All-Union Cheka (see also ‘ChK’) Supreme Council of the National Economy

Notes on the Contributors David Christian, formerly of Macquarie University, Sydney, is now at San Diego State University. He is author of A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, vol. 1: Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire (1998); Imperial and Soviet Russia: Power Privilege and the Challenge of Modernity (1997); Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (1990); Bread and Salt: a Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (with R. E. F. Smith) (1984). He is working on the second volume of his A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia. R. W. Davies is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, Birmingham University, sometime Visiting Professorial Fellow, the University of Melbourne. Author of The Industrialization of Soviet Russia, 1929–1937 (four volumes have so far appeared; another two volumes are planned) (1980–96); The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (editor with M. Harrison and S. G. Wheatcroft) (1994); Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution (1989); Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era (1997); and many more. Currently completing volumes 5 and 6 of The Industrialization of Soviet Russia, of which volume 5 will be jointly written with S. G. Wheatcroft, and volume 6 with Oleg Khlevnyuk and S. G. Wheatcroft. Julie Elkner completed her Master’s degree at the University of Melbourne on the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers, and is currently working on the mythology of the Cheka. Sheila Fitzpatrick of Chicago University is sometime Visiting Professorial Fellow, the University of Melbourne. Author of Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (1999); Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989 (editor with R. Gellately) (1997); Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance & Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (1994); The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia; Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (1979); Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (editor) (1978), and more. Currently working on post-war Stalinism. Graeme Gill, Sydney University. Author of The Dynamics of Democratization: Elites, Civil Society, and the Transition Process (2000), Power in the Party: the Organization of Power and Central Republican Relations in the CPSU (with R. Pitty) (1997); The Collapse of a Single Party System: the Disintegration of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1995); Twentieth Century Russia: the xiii

xiv Notes on the Contributors

Search for Power and Authority (1994); The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (1990); Stalinism (1990); Peasants and Government in the Soviet Revolution (1979) and more. Currently working on post-Soviet politics. Robert Horvath is lecturer and Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where he recently completed his PhD thesis on ‘The Significance of the Dissident Movement in Russia’. Author of ‘The Specter of Russophobia’, in The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 25, no. 2 (1998). Melanie Ilicˇ is senior lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire Higher Education, and Research Fellow at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, Birmingham University. Author of Women Workers in the Soviet Interwar Economy: from ‘Protection’ to Equality (1999), and Women in the Stalin Era (2001). S. G. Wheatcroft, University of Melbourne. Author of Materials to the Balance of the Soviet National Economy, 1928–1930 (editor with R. W. Davies) (1985); and The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (editor with R. W. Davies and M. Harrison) (1994); currently completing with R. W. Davies, vol. 5 of The Industrialization of Soviet Russia: the Years of Hunger, 1931–33. Frederick R. Zuckerman, University of Adelaide. Author of The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880–1917 (1996). Currently working on technological transfers between Russia and the USA.

Acknowledgements This book owes its origins to a series of conferences which we were able to organize at the University of Melbourne under the aegis of the Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies (now part of the Contemporary Europe Research Centre). We are grateful to the Victorian Education Foundation, the Australian Research Council and the University of Melbourne for supporting the Centre in this and other ventures. We are also grateful to the History Department of the University of Melbourne for their ongoing support in this area. Within Australia we have a quite remarkable collection of scholars on Russian and Soviet History who give tremendous support for developments in this area. Professor T. H. Rigby, the Dean of Soviet Studies in Australia, has always attended our conferences and been a wonderfully inspiring figure. Several of the chapters in this volume develop themes that Harry pioneered. Graeme Gill, Steven Fortescue, David Christian, Rick Zuckerman, Adrian Jones, Roger Markwick, David Lockwood and Leslie Holmes have also been constant in their support and advice. We will greatly miss David now that he has moved on to America. But it was the regular visits of the towering figures of Sheila Fitzpatrick and Bob Davies that turned our local gatherings into something that we could argue was of some international significance. Sheila is of course a local and it is only fitting that her home university should wish to develop an ongoing association with the leading social historian of Stalinism in the world. Bob Davies, the leading economic historian of the Stalin period and a great authority on Soviet decisionmaking and Soviet history in general, has also been a regular visitor, and we hope will long continue to be so. We are grateful to the university for supporting his visits. My former students Robert Horvath, Julie Elkner and Emma Gilligan have provided great assistance in the production of this book, including two extremely fine chapters. Julie deserves particular acknowledgement for combining her academic skills with the administrative skills of running the Centre and her wonderful editorial and proof-reading skills. I am grateful to Emma for her assistance in indexing the volume. Yuri Tsygunov provided assistance in data processing. Bob Davies, Melanie Ilicˇ and Jeremy Smith at Birmingham have all been helpful in providing advice about the volume. And I am greatly indebted to Nick Brock, Luciana O¢Flaherty and other members of the Palgrave production team for making the production task so easy. It would be impossible to provide an adequate statement of the great support that western scholars receive from their Russian and other FSU xv

xvi Acknowledgements

colleagues. But I would like to single out Professor Viktor Danilov, who has been a great friend and inspiration for decades, and Professor Oleg Khlevnyuk of a younger generation, but to whom so many of us are greatly indebted. It is also my pleasure to record the assistance that we have all received from Russian and, in my case, Ukrainian archivists. Elena Turina of RGAE, Larissa Rogovaya of RGASPI and Dina Nokhotovich of GARF have all been particularly helpful. We acknowledge the permission granted by Professor Manfred Hildermeir and Georg Kalmer from Historischen Kollegs, for permission to reproduce the article by Sheila Fitzpatrick which is based on her article ‘Intelligentsia and Power: Client–Patron Relations in Stalin’s Russia’ in Manfred Hildermeir, Hg. “Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Neue Wege der Forschung”, R. Oldenbourg Verlag Munchen 1998. Sarah Bennett of Carfax has granted permission for us to reproduce the article by Melanie Ilicˇ, from Europe–Asia Studies, vol. 52, no. 8, December 2000, pp. 1515–1534. See also http://www.tandf.co.uk. Finally Graeme Gill’s paper appeared in a slightly different form in Rosenfeldt, Jensen and Kulavig (eds), Mechanisms of Power in the Soviet Union (Macmillan, 2000) and we are grateful to Palgrave Macmillan for allowing us to use this material here. STEPHEN G. WHEATCROFT

Introduction In times of remarkable change, when empires fall and their secret archives become accessible for the first time, it would be remarkable indeed if there were no radical challenges to the traditional view of history. But the Soviet case is not that simple, for several reasons. Quite apart from the question of the accessibility of hitherto unavailable material, the fall of Soviet Communism has also resulted in a series of swings in popular attitudes regarding Soviet history. In addition, there has also been a separate significant shift in academic opinion, which has coincided with the emergence of another generation of young scholars.1 While the emergence of new schools and cohorts is not, of course, a bad thing in itself, it would be regrettable if this were to lead to a failure to engage with and actively challenge the work of others. It seems ironic that at a time when masses of new and important social scientific materials are becoming available, there are relatively few historians in Russia or the West who are interested in looking at these new materials and using them to challenge the traditional views of the past. In Russia, the ongoing economic crisis is seriously undermining the historical research capability of the distinguished universities and institutes that Russia still possesses. How much longer Russia will be able to support a first-world academic community on a weak economic base is unclear. Work on Russian history will naturally be led by Russian scholars, but it is a tragedy for all of us that the Russian economy is in such a parlous state that it is difficult for many Russian scholars to devote themselves seriously to academic work. Nevertheless, the contribution of such major Russian scholars as Viktor Danilov, Oleg Khlevnyuk, and Nikita Petrov has been enormous, in opening up new areas, and the work of numerous historians working out of local voluntary historical associations across Russia promises to be even more important in the future. It is to be hoped that the archives will be able to maintain and extend the great services that they have continued to provide, despite the extremely difficult circumstances in which they are working. In the West, some major established scholars seem to be suggesting that the archives are not telling us anything new, and that the records they contain are probably distorted in any case.2 This attitude has unfortunately become fairly widely accepted amongst non-specialists, and even amongst some specialists. At the same time, at least one leading figure in the younger generation of cultural historians has effectively dismissed the previous work of social historians as unworthy of serious consideration and as preoccupied with irrelevant issues which are no longer of interest.3 xvii

xviii Introduction

The current collection is made up of articles which do engage with previous scholarship in the area, and which offer challenging new understandings of some of the most important questions in Russian and Soviet history. It is based on a conference on ‘New Work in Russian and Soviet History’ held at the University of Melbourne, supplemented by some additional essays with a view to broadening the scope. Julie Elkner provided assistance in preparing the essays for publication, which is gratefully acknowledged. The volume contains ten chapters which fall into three groups. The first three are devoted to the pre-revolutionary period; the next four to the Stalin period; and the last three to the post-Stalin period. All the chapters challenge traditional views in their area, but in different ways. The challenges offered by all the chapters in Part II and by Zuckerman’s chapter in Part I are all based on significant archival work on materials previously unavailable for study. The challenges from the other chapters are largely based on offering new approaches. The first of the three pre-revolutionary essays is David Christian’s chapter on ‘The Kaghanate of the Rus’’, which traces the non-Slavic, non-western roots of the Russian state. This provides a striking challenge to the conventional view that minimises the influence of non-western factors on early Russian development, before the period of Mongol rule. Stephen Wheatcroft’s contribution on the tsarist prison system draws attention to a remarkable deterioration in the prison system in the last years of the empire following the 1905 Revolution. It argues that the reforms of the earlier period were not sustained in the late years of tsarism, and that there was a major deterioration in the penal system at this time. While Wheatcroft is using materials that were previously known, his challenge is based on a far more comprehensive analysis of the materials of the tsarist prison administration than has previously been carried out. This is an analysis requiring the abstraction and compilation of large amounts of statistical material from the separate annual reports, which would have been impossible before the availability of computers. Rick Zuckerman’s chapter on ‘The Russian Army and American Industry, 1915–1917: The Transfer of Technology’ challenges the established view of Russian technological and administrative inferiority. Readers will be surprised to see that Zuckerman is discussing the transfer of Russian technology to America, and not vice versa. Faced with large Russian armaments orders during the First World War, the Americans had the mass production capacity to satisfy the order – but they failed the surprisingly high Russian quality requirements. Zuckerman uses Russian and American archival materials to argue that it was the transfer of Russian technology and management to America that enabled the American armaments industry to combine mass production with high quality production in the armaments industry. There are four chapters that are devoted exclusively to the Stalinist period. All of these are based on significant archival research on materials that were

Introduction xix

formerly unavailable, and deal with topics that were previously unresearchable in the USSR. These cover the famine of 1931–33; the relations between the cultural and political elites; the nature and chronology of the most extreme aspect of mass repression; and an analysis of the social composition of the victims of this repression. The contribution by R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft covers both the political and the socioeconomic background to the major social crisis of the Stalin period: the 1931–33 famine. It traces the complex causation of agricultural crises over a number of years and challenges the conventional view that presumed that human motivation was the exclusively important factor. The chapter also considers the response of the Soviet government to this tragedy, based on Politburo archival sources, rather than the very restricted published documents. The picture that emerges is very different to the traditional view. The Soviet authorities were indeed ruthless in their responses to the famine, but it is incorrect to suggest that they provoked the famine or failed to take any steps to try to ameliorate its effect. In chapter 5, Sheila Fitzpatrick considers elite cultural relationships in Stalin’s Russia and the way that cultural patronage worked. She reveals a complex and subtle world of interrelationships, which challenges the conventional views of the atomisation of Stalinist society. Stalinist patronage is seen to have many similarities with the traditional patronage of Russian elites in the time of Catherine the Great, but with two distinguishing features: greater insecurity, and the chronic short supply of goods and services in Stalin’s Russia. Stephen Wheatcroft’s chapter on mass killings in the Stalinist period attempts to move closer to an explanation of the nature of mass executions, by examining their intensity, chronology and the mechanism through which they developed in 1930, were reduced in 1931, and then rose to unprecedented levels from July 1937 to mid-1938. This chapter is based on both archival research and an analysis of the large amount of materials being supplied by local historical groups within Russia. Melanie Ilicˇ’s essay (chapter 7) carries the analysis of the victims of the purge further, via a detailed survey of the lists of victims of the first three months of the Ezhovshchina in Leningrad, August–October 1937. The final three essays cover the later post-Stalinist period. Their challenges to traditional views are based more on their new approaches than on their use of newly released archival sources. Robert Horvath offers a reconsideration of the dissident roots of glasnost, in which he challenges the marginalisation of the dissident role in Sovietological accounts of the origins of the collapse of Communism and the creation of democratic institutions in Russia. Julie Elkner returns us to the question of the construction of nationalism that was raised by David Christian in the first chapter, when she looks at new ‘patriotic’ rewrites of the nineteenth-century war in the Caucasus which have emerged in the course of the more recent conflicts in Chechnya. This chapter differs from the others in that it is not itself a

xx

Introduction

challenge to traditional views of history, but rather an account of how the Russian ‘patriotic press’ is challenging previous accounts of the history of the Russian military presence in Chechnya, as part of its construction of a new patriotic historical consciousness in Russia. Finally, Graeme Gill traces the tensions between the personalist principle and organisational norms in the Soviet power structure from the late 1930s to the collapse of Soviet Communism. He sees the great reliance on the personalist principle as an indicator of the weak nature of infrastructural power, which under Stalin was supported by terror (the continuing use of extraordinary measures), popular enthusiasm, and Stalin’s personal dominance. While Khrushchev removed the worst aspects of the terror, and claimed to reject the personality cult, his own style of personalist rule failed to allow organisational norms to become embodied in infrastructural power. Brezhnev was less arbitrary in his personalist policy, but he allowed local power structures to build up their own corrupt personalist ‘family’ relations, rather than strengthen a real infrastructure of power. By the time that Gorbachev attempted to carry out radical reform aimed at providing a firmer basis for infrastructural power, it was too late. The country was facing enormous economic problems which had been ignored since Brezhnev’s day, and the remaining elements of personalist rule eventually moved to stop the reform in a coup, which unwittingly destroyed the system that they were trying to preserve. Graeme Gill’s account challenges the traditional view of the excessive strength of the Stalinist political system. This is a story of a weak political system that over a period of seventy years failed to acquire an infrastructure of power that was independent of personalist features, that is, it is the failure to develop a non-personalised political tradition that is seen as the basis for the collapse of the Soviet state.

Notes 1. Sheila Fitzpatrick diagnoses this development in her recent collection of new writings on Stalinism: In this same period, Russian historians in the United States and Europe, like their counterparts in other fields of history, were experiencing a shift away from social history, dominant in the 1960s and 1970s, towards a new cultural history. This was accompanied by a growing interest in cultural and social theory that in the 1990s pulled the historical profession away from the social sciences and towards the humanities . . . Of course there are disciplinary imperatives at work here: political and economic history are out of fashion, and most of the liveliest minds of the younger generation are drawn to socio-cultural issues. (Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Stalinism: New Directions (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1, 3) 2. In the introduction to the final part of his trilogy on the Russian Revolution Richard Pipes wrote that ‘in the last stages of writing’ he was given access to what

Introduction xxi had been the Central Party Archives in Moscow, and that this enabled him to ‘modify and amplify certain parts of [his] narrative’. However, he was emphatic that ‘not in a single instance did it compel me to revise views which I had formed on the basis of printed sources and archives located in the West’. And he went on to say that: ‘This gives me a certain degree of confidence that no new and startling information from other, still secret, archival repositories . . . is likely to invalidate my account’; R. Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919–1924 (1994), p. xviii. In The Great Terror: a Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), Conquest claims that the new materials from the Soviet archives have ‘clarified and added’ to ‘certain historical points’, but that otherwise they have only ‘confirmed’ ‘the nature of the Terror’ (p. 485). Conquest correctly argues that his ‘calculations and considerations [of casualty figures] in The Great Terror, have been made superfluous by Soviet figures given in 1987–1989’ (p. 485). However, he continues to use them and to claim incorrectly that they have been ‘confirmed’ by later official and unofficial testimonies. When challenged further on this by Getty and Rittersporn in American Historical Review and by myself in Europe–Asia Studies he has continued to adhere to his old figures and to deny that the archival materials can be trusted. See R. Conquest, ‘Letter to the Editor’, American Historical Review (June 1994) 1039, and the response from Getty and Rittersporn in the same issue; and R. Conquest, ‘Victims of Stalinism: a Comment’, Europe–Asia Studies, 49, no. 7 (1997) 1317–19, and his ‘Comment of Wheatcroft’, Europe–Asia Studies, 51, no. 8 (1999) 1479–83; and responses by S. G. Wheatcroft, ‘Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: the Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data – Not the Last Word’, in Europe–Asia Studies, 51, no. 2 (1999) 315–45, and ‘The Scale and Nature of Stalinist Repression and its Demographic Significance: On Comments by Keep and Conquest’, Europe–Asia Studies, 52, no. 6 (2000) 1143–59. 3. Stephen Kotkin recently criticised the earlier generation of social historians for not being interested in the things that interest him, and for being absorbed with controversies over the number of Stalin’s victims: Rather than fostering a discussion of language, popular psychology, modes of political practice, the role of the individual will in history, the dynamics of interagency rivalries, the ambitions of subordinates, and the significance of having or not having explicit instructions, this incognizant intentionalist and functionalist debate on Stalinism became absorbed with controversies over the number of victims and the size of the Gulag population. (S. Kotkin, ‘1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks’, Journal of Modern History, 70 ( June 1998) 414) Earlier Kotkin had described the social historical debates as having degenerated ‘into a campaign for lower-end Gulag statistics’ (ibid., 386, n. 5), and of aiming ‘to diminish the scope and significance of the terror’ (S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995), p. 285). Leaving aside the misleading and reductionist claims in these statements, the strangest aspect of Kotkin’s criticism is his assumption that he can identify with certainty what is an exaggeration or diminution of the scale and the significance of repression and terror, and his apparent disinclination to interrogate the basis for his knowledge of this topic.

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Part I The Pre-Revolutionary Period


1 The Kaghanate of the Rus¢: Non-Slavic Sources of Russian Statehood David Christian

At the beginning of the tenth century, an Arabic geographer, Ibn Rusta, wrote a famous account of the ‘Rus¢’ who traded along the river Volga in the last decades of the ninth century.1 Like many other Viking groups in this period, the Rus¢ combined trading and raiding: they make raids against Saqlaba [a term that may include woodland Slavs, Balts and Finno-Ugrians], sailing in ships in order to go out to them, and they take them prisoner and carry them off to Khazar and Bulkar [Bulgar] and trade with them there. They have no cultivated lands; they eat only what they carry off from the land of the Saqlaba. When a child is born to any man among them, he takes a drawn sword to the new-born child and places it between his hands and says to him: ‘I shall bequeath to thee no wealth and thou wilt have naught except what thou dost gain for thyself by this sword of thine’. They have no landed property nor villages nor cultivated land; their only occupation is trading in sables and grey squirrel and other furs, and in these they trade and they take as the price gold and silver and secure it in their belts [or saddlebags].2 From this passage, it might seem tempting to regard the Rus¢ as little more than loose bands of raiders. However, other parts of Ibn Rusta’s account show that the Rus¢ created durable political structures worthy of the name of a ‘state’. He writes that the Rus¢ ‘have many cities, and they expend much money on themselves’.3 Further, they had ‘a king who is called Khaqan Rus’. The ‘Kaghan’ adjudicated disputes and presided over judicial contests.4 Other sources confirm the existence of a Rus¢ state of some kind in the middle of the ninth century. They also show that the term ‘kaghan’ was not just the terminology natural to an Islamic geographer, but was used by the Rus¢, too. According to the Annals of St Bertin, in about 838, the Byzantine emperor, Theophilus, sent an embassy to the Frankish Emperor, Louis the Pious, which included ‘certain men who said that they were called Rhos, 3

4

The Pre-Revolutionary Period

and that their king, known as chacanus, had dispatched them to him [Theophilus], for the sake of friendship’.5 However, fearing to return by the way they had come because the road was cut by ‘wild and ferocious tribes’, the emperor had sent them back through Germany. The Frankish emperor ‘investigated diligently the cause of their coming and discovered that they were Swedes by origin’.6 There is an interval of at least sixty years between the writing of these two sources, which suggests that the Kaghanate of the Rus¢ was more than an ephemeral condottiere state. On the contrary, it was a powerful and relatively stable state that survived for several generations. What exactly are we to make of the ‘Kaghanate’ of the Rus¢? Did it really exist? If so, how was it organised? How powerful was it? And what is its significance in the later history of Rus¢? This chapter reviews some recent work which has opened up new approaches to the very early history of Rus¢. The appearance of new interpretations of this period of East Slavic history is not the result of major new discoveries. It results from the cumulative impact of archaeological and numismatic research over several decades. In addition, the end of the Cold War has made it easier to break out of old historiographical stereotypes, and consider new interpretations of early Russian history. These shifts of emphasis have brought into sharper relief a very early stage in the history of Rus¢, during which the Rus¢ were oriented not to the Mediterranean, but towards Khazaria, the Caucasus, Baghdad and Central Asia, in their trade, and also in their statecraft and political rituals. It appears increasingly likely that the earliest state of the Rus¢ lay not along the road from the ‘Varangians to the Greeks’, but along trade routes dominated directly by Turkic peoples of pastoralist origin, and indirectly by the Islamic world. In this chapter, I will try to construct as coherent an account as is possible today of this state, the Kaghanate of the Rus¢.7

1.1 The background: peasant migrations, Khazar power and expanding trade The Kaghanate of the Rus¢ appeared in the lands later known as Rus¢, and dominated, today, by Russia west of the Urals, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic States (see Map 1.1). For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to this region as ‘Rus¢’, though the term, is strictly speaking, anachronistic in the ninth century. Four factors dominated Rus¢ in the eighth and ninth centuries CE. These were: (i) the immigration of mainly Slavic-speaking peasants from the sixth century;

KHAGANATE

KHAGANATE OF THE RUS’

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David Christian 5

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6


(ii) the Khazar empire; (iii) the expansion of trade from about 750; and (iv) the intensification of Viking raids from about the same time. Slavic migrations from the sixth century An odd, but often ignored, feature of the history of Rus¢ is the late arrival of agriculture in this region. Between 5500 and 4500 BCE, early forms of agriculture spread from the Balkans to much of Central and Western Europe.8 In Eastern Europe, farming communities also appeared in the wooded steppes of modern Moldova and Ukraine from at least the fifth millennium BCE. But farming did not spread deep into the steppes or into the denser woodlands north of the wooded steppes. As a result, by the fourth millennium BCE, there had emerged a remarkably durable ecological frontier between the farming regions of Western and Central Europe and the lands of Rus¢. Beyond the wooded steppe and small pockets of farming along the shores of the Black Sea, Rus¢ was populated from the fifth millennium by foraging populations in the woodlands, and pastoralists in the steppes. The ecological frontier ran from eastern Poland, along the Western Bug river, bulged eastwards around the forest-steppe lands of central Ukraine and ran west and south towards the Danube.9 The small numbers and limited productivity of most regions of Rus¢ meant that surpluses were too limited to attract or sustain state-building elites, so that Rus¢ remained on the margins of Eurasia’s political and commercial history. In the second half of the first millennium CE, the ecological border was suddenly pushed deep into Inner Eurasia by a huge migration of mainly Slavic-speaking peasants from Eastern Europe. Explaining this migration is not easy, for the woodlands of Rus¢ were difficult to farm. New technologies, including the use of iron implements, and the spread of rye, may have been important, and it may be that the slow climatic warming of much of the first millennium also made farming easier in the woodlands of Rus¢.10 Whatever the causes, the result was the emergence, by 1000 CE, of large populations of peasant farmers in a region previously occupied by sparse populations of woodland foragers and pastoralists. It is not easy to pin down the precise chronology and geography of these migrations, but they seem to have begun in the sixth century, in both the Balkans and Rus¢. In the eighth century, peasants began to migrate into the mixed forest zones north of the old farming regions.11 Some also moved into lands bordering on the steppes protected by the Khazars, while further north, smaller groups of migrants, many speaking Baltic languages, began to settle amongst Finnicspeaking foragers of northern Russia.12 These migrations transformed the linguistic and ecological map of western Inner Eurasia. By 900 CE, most inhabitants of Rus¢ were probably Slavic- or Baltic-speaking farmers. Their settlements reached from the steppes to the northern taiga, though the demographic centre of gravity remained in the

David Christian 7

wooded steppelands near Kiev.13 Their presence meant that more was produced in the region than ever before, and more goods were traded than ever before. These changes made Rus¢ much more attractive to would-be traders and tribute-takers. The Khazar Empire: seventh to tenth centuries The slaves, wax, honey and furs of Rus¢ had attracted outsiders since at least the first millennium BCE, and probably much earlier. Most were willing to take what they wanted by force, but the vast distances they encountered, and the sparseness of local populations, often made trade an easier option. Scythians took tributes in grain and slaves from farming communities of the wooded steppe, and probably traded in furs from the woodlands further north. The eastern Gothic empire of the fourth century also exacted tributes and trade goods from a vast area west of the Urals.14 From the middle of the seventh century, the dominant external power in the region was Khazaria (see Map 1.2). The Khazar empire has still not been given its due in the historical literature on the early history of Rus¢. In part, this reflects the powerful westernising tradition of much Russian historiography. From the time of the Primary Chronicle, most historians of Rus¢ have looked to Scandinavia or Byzantium rather than the Islamic world or the steppes in the search for origins. The Primary Chronicle itself reflects this bias. It has been reconstructed by modern scholars from material embedded in other surviving chronicles. The versions available today were probably compiled in the late eleventh century, some two centuries after the appearance of a Rus¢ state, and they were edited by the Rurikid dynasty in the early twelfth century.15 In other words, the chronicle is as much a genealogical charter as an historical record. Its dates are extremely unreliable before the 940s, the period during which the Rus¢ Kaghanate flourished, and its compilers looked towards Byzantium and the world of Orthodox Christianity rather than towards the steppes or the caliphate. In the Soviet era, the importance of the Khazars was obscured by the anti-Semitism of Stalinist censors, who were reluctant to concede the contribution to Russia’s early history of a state that converted to Judaism. The greatest Soviet scholar of Khazaria, the archaeologist Artamonov, who was himself of Turkic descent, was forced to retract his initial, positive assessment of Khazar influence on Rus¢, and argue, in a revised history of the Khazars, that Russia took nothing of value from them.16 As Arthur Koestler pointed out, Artamonov’s recantation completed a process begun by the flooding of Sarkel, the main archaeological site of the Khazars, which Artamonov himself had excavated, under the Tsimlyanskii reservoir.17 This chapter will argue that Artamonov’s initial assessment was right. It is impossible to understand the early history of Rus¢ while ignoring the Khazars. Originally, the Khazars were probably formed from groups of Turkicspeaking peoples in the northern Caucasus in the late sixth century, though

8

KHAZARIA

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THE KHAZAR EMPIRE 630-965

Novgorod

David Christian 9

they certainly included peoples of Ugrian, Sarmatian or Caucasian origin as well.18 By the early seventh century, the Khazars were the dominant power in the north Caucasus. In the 620s, Khazar armies conquered much of the Caucasus, and in 627, they joined the Byzantine Emperor, Heraclius, in an attack on Tiflis. By the middle of the seventh century (and perhaps even earlier), the Khazars were ruled by a branch of the Arshina royal family that had dominated the Turkic empire, formed a century earlier in Mongolia.19 In 642, they weathered the first of a series of attacks through the Caucasus from the expansionist armies of Islam. Warfare with the Umayyad caliphate continued intermittently for a century. The Khazars were never permanently defeated, though in 737 Arabic armies commanded by Marwan b. Muhammad, who was to be the last Umayyad Caliph, did penetrate deep into Khazar territory. As has often been pointed out, the Khazars blocked Islamic expansion north of the Caucasus as the Franks blocked Islamic expansion north of the Pyrenees.20 In about 670, the Khazars defeated the neighbouring Turkic state of ‘Magna Bulgaria’, which dominated the lucrative trade routes from the Caspian to the Sea of Azov, and on to Byzantium. After driving the Bulgars west into the Balkans, the Khazars established their authority over the Pontic steppes and the wooded steppes further north. By now, they also dominated the lands north of the Caucasus, and many of the steppe tribes between the Caspian and the Aral Seas. By 700, the Khazars were the dominant force north of the Black Sea, and were beginning to play a crucial role in an international system dominated by Byzantium and the caliphate. Though the Khazars and their royal family remained loyal to the pastoralist traditions of their past, many of the peoples they ruled were sedentary farmers. Their capital, Itil, which was probably near modern Astrakhan, was a typical steppe city. It began as a royal encampment, around which gathered a relatively permanent population of traders, craftsmen, and farmers. Its history is apparent from its design: ‘the fortifications of Itil, as in the Hunnic camp of Attila and the Bulgarian Pliska, were concentric (with the khan’s palace at the centre); indeed the plan of Itil, according the khan Joseph, was “in the form of a circle” ’.21 The Khazar rulers mobilised the wealth of the lands they controlled using a range of techniques on the spectrum from plunder to trade. At first, their wealth came mainly from war booty. In addition, mining and metallurgy contributed to Khazar wealth, for the Caucasus was one of the world’s oldest metallurgical centres, and Khazar armies exacted tribute from this region from as early as 628.22 As they expanded, they also took tributes from pastoralists, farmers, woodland foragers, trading cities and trade caravans. In the tenth century, the Khazar king, Joseph, exacted tributes from the Oghuz steppes west of Khorezm, from many cities of the Crimea, from the lands of the Volga, including the Volga Bulgars, and from many Slavic tribes, as well as from the north Caucasus.23 Slavic migration into Rus¢ undoubtedly

10


increased the size of the tributes that could be collected here, while the pax khazarica itself encouraged further immigration. We know from the Russian Primary Chronicle that in the mid-ninth century, the Khazars collected ‘a squirrel-skin and a beaver-skin from each hearth’, from the Slavic tribes of the Polianians (who occupied the lands around Kiev), the Severians and the Viatichians. Other goods entered Khazaria as tribute or trade goods from the northern woodlands. In the early tenth century, al-Istakhri reported that beaver skins, honey and wax came to Itil from Volga Bulgaria and Rus¢.24 They also received slaves as a form of tribute.25 Most slaves traded south were ‘idolators’ according to al-Istakhri (that is, not people ‘of the book’).26 They came from pagan Rus¢, from the Finnic-speaking peoples of the woodlands, and from the steppes. The Khazars maintained their rights to tribute with periodic military tours and the taking of hostages, and also by planting garrisons in subordinate lands. In the tenth century, Ibn Fadlan reported that 25 separate peoples had to offer royal princesses as the kaghan’s brides.27 In the late eighth and early ninth centuries, the Khazars built a network of forts along the Don and Donets to exploit the growing sedentary populations of the region, and the flourishing trades that passed northwards towards the Volga and the Baltic.28 Most were built from blocks of white limestone to a standard pattern, and sited on promontories overlooking river valleys. There may also have been Khazar forts as far afield as Kiev. Indeed, it is possible that Kiev was originally founded as a Khazar garrison.29 It was a natural site for a Khazar garrison, as it controlled the lucrative trade routes to Eastern Europe dominated by the Radanite Jews.30 Tribute-collecting shaded imperceptibly into trade. Itil lay at the crossroads of two major trade routes. The first was a northern branch of the Silk Road, that led from China to the Syr-Darya and Khorezm, around the north of the Caspian Sea, through the Volga Delta to the sea of Azov and the trading cities of the Black Sea, then into the Mediterranean. The second linked the wealthy cities of Central Asia, Persia and Mesopotamia with the forest communities of the far north. It passed either through the Caucasus or through the steppes between Khorezm and the Caspian Sea. As early as 730, merchants from Khazaria appeared in Derbent, while Derbent merchants traded in Khazaria, paying a tithe for the privilege.31 In the tenth century, Al-Istakhrii reported that the Khazar king’s revenues came from customs-dues on trade by land and sea, as well as from tithes levied on trade goods and produce.32 According to the Hudud al¢Alam, ‘the wellbeing and wealth of the king of the Khazars are mostly from the maritime customs’.33 Khazar forts such as Kiev or Sarkel collected customs-dues as well as tributes. Khazaria sent the goods it received as tributes or trade from the north on to the markets of the Caucasus, Khorezm, Khorasan and Constantinople, in return for textiles, luxury goods, and large amounts of Sassanid or Islamic coinage, some of which it sent back to the north.

David Christian 11

Coins first begin to be used within Khazaria in the eighth century. Most were Arabic dirhams or Khazar imitations.34 These trading connections brought new influences from the lands with which the Khazars traded, including literacy, new commodities, and new religious ideas. And these influences help explain why, eventually, the Khazar state converted, officially, to Judaism, as the Uighur state, based in Mongolia, had converted to Manichaeism a century earlier.35 The causes and timing of this momentous event have led to immense controversy. There are hints in the Khazar records of a two-stage conversion, which has led some commentators to suggest that Judaism began to spread amongst the Khazar elites as early as the eighth century. Artamonov argued that Judaism began to spread in the 730s, after the invasion of Marwan, and became the official religion of the state after a period of internal conflict late in the eighth or early in the ninth centuries.36 However, the most persuasive recent account, which is based mainly on Khazar documents, suggests that the conversion was a simpler, and more rapid process, occurring in 861.37 Jews had been settled in Khazar lands since at least the sixth century, when many were expelled from Sassanid Persia for supporting Mazdakism, while the persecutions of the Byzantine Emperor, Heraclius, created an influx of Byzantine Jews in the early seventh century. According to a Khazar source, the so-called ‘Genizah’ letter, which was written in about 949, Jewish settlers in Khazaria merged with the local population and lost most of their Jewish traditions. However, eventually a powerful Khazar military commander of Jewish origin, called Bulan, was persuaded by his wife, Sarah, to return to the Jewish religion. After this, he took the Jewish name of ‘Sabriel’. His conversion, and, perhaps, his active support of Judaism, provoked opposition within the Khazar elite, as a result of which Bulan persuaded the Khazar kaghan to hold a formal disputation between representatives of different religions. Zuckerman argues that the story of a disputation can be taken quite literally, as it is confirmed by a Byzantine source, the Life of Constantine, which allows us to date the event precisely to 861.38 Constantine (St Cyril), the later creator of the first Cyrillic alphabet, learnt Khazar in Kherson before travelling to Itil in that year.39 After the conversion, Judaism spread within the Khazar elites and within the merchant community, but it did not spread widely amongst the Khazar population. Islam, Christianity, and traditional Turkic beliefs and practices continued to thrive even in the tenth century. According to Al-Istakhri: ‘The smallest group is the Jews, most of them being Muslims and Christians, though the king and his court are Jews’.40 Ibn Rusta, who wrote in c. 900, claimed that, though the rulers and elites adopted Judaism, most of the ordinary Khazars ‘are of a faith similar to that of the Turks’.41 According to the Arab traveller, al-Mas’udi, in tenth-century Itil there were separate judges for the different religious groups, two for the Christian population, two for the Muslims, two for the Khazars (judging in accordance with the Torah), and

12


one for the pagan population, the Rus¢ and Saqaliba.42 Itil also had a mosque.43 The conversion clearly reflected the rising power of military leaders such as Bulan, so it is not altogether surprising that it was accompanied by significant constitutional changes. These reduced the power of the Khazar kaghans, and elevated the power of the Jewish ‘kings’ or ‘beks’, who were, apparently, descendants of Bulan/Sabrial. By the late ninth century, military and political power was held by the ‘kaghan-bek’ or ‘isha’, who handled dayto-day business and led the army.44 Ibn Rusta reported that: ‘The power to command belongs to the Isha [Bek], since in regard to control and the armies he is so placed that he does not have to care for anyone above him’.45 Meanwhile, the ‘Great Kaghan’ became a purely sacral figure, isolated from the people, rarely appearing in public, and treated as a near-god, though liable to be murdered if the fortunes of the polity declined.46 Those who approached him had to be purified by fire, and those who buried him were executed, in traditional steppe fashion, so that the site of his grave would remain secret.47 Ibn Fadlan learned in 922 that the ‘Great Kaghan’ had 25 wives, each the daughter of a subordinate ruler, as well as sixty concubines, and each had a separate dwelling and was guarded by a eunuch.48 Expanding trade from 750 Gradually, the power of the Khazars came to rest more and more on the region’s commercial wealth. This shift reflected the third major factor in this period: the great expansion in the volume of trade through the Khazar empire in the eighth and ninth centuries. Recent numismatic work has provided a more nuanced account of shifts in the geography and the volume of trade through the Khazar empire, by charting finds of Abbasid and Central Asian silver dirhams from the Caucasus to the Baltic.49 Both the north/south and the east/west routes flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries.50 The old trade routes between Persia and the forest lands of the middle Volga were active in the sixth century, but declined during the seventh and early eighth centuries, partly because of the wars between Khazaria and the caliphate, and partly because of declining Byzantine and Sassanid demand for furs during the depression of the seventh and early eighth centuries.51 From the middle of the eighth century, trade revived along these routes. The expansion was made possible in part by the pax khazarica, and by the more peaceful relations with the caliphate that emerged after the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate in 750. In addition, the demand for forest goods such as slaves, boats, timber, furs, wax and honey expanded, because of reviving demand from Europe, Byzantium and the Islamic lands of Mesopotamia, Iran and Central Asia.52 Finally, peasant migrations into Rus¢ increased both production and demand along the major trading routes, and provided new bases for supplies and repairs for trading caravans. In turn, the flow of dirhams through the Don/Donets

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systems northwards towards the Oka and Volga began to attract settlers willing to act as guides, guards or suppliers of furs.53 Mapping of early finds suggests that silver dirhams travelled through the Caucasus, and then moved north and west along a number of routes, mainly through the Don and Donets river systems.54 The variety of routes suggests the existence of many local systems of exchange which swapped goods and coins in a relay of trade and tribute.55 Even ordinary Slavic settlements may have engaged in trade to some extent for, though most were self-sufficient even in the tenth century, they also produced saleable goods, such as honey, wax, and furs, while in winter, they made and dyed linen or woollen cloths or made pottery or burnt charcoal or dug in local marshlands for pig-iron for their blacksmiths.56

1.2 Volga Bulgaria The pax khazarica and the expansion of trade stimulated the emergence of two subordinate states on the northern fringes of the Khazar empire. These were Volga Bulgaria and the Kaghanate of the Rus¢. Some Bulgars may have fled north after the Khazar defeat of ‘Magna Bulgaria’ in the late seventh century. There is clear evidence of a Bulgar diaspora in the mid-Volga region from the late eighth century, but migrations continued, particularly in the middle of the ninth century, perhaps as a result of Magyar incursions into Khazar lands or internal conflicts associated with the conversion to Judaism.57 At some point, probably in the ninth century, pastoralist Bulgar elites began taking tributes from the Slavic- and Ugric-speaking farmers and foragers of the region. This was an old pattern of relations in the region, for there is clear archaeological evidence that Sarmatian pastoralists had played a similar role in the third and second centuries BCE.58 Early in the tenth century, the Volga Bulgars emerged as a significant commercial and military power, which accepted Khazar suzerainty, but with some reluctance. Control of the trade routes along and parallel to the Volga was the basis of Volga Bulgar power. In the early tenth century, silver dirhams were so common that they were scattered over honoured guests at ceremonies.59 From the middle of the tenth century, Volga Bulgaria began to mint its own dirhams, modelled on those of the Samanids.60 Much of the state’s revenue came from trade, mainly in furs, for the rulers took a tithe on all trade passing through their lands.61 Merchants from Volga Bulgaria obtained furs from forest peoples to their north, in exchange for metal blades and harpoons which Islamic manufacturers prepared especially for the forest peoples.62 The capital, Bulgar, was near modern Kazan.63 According to Maqdisi, Bulgar could provide 20 000 horsemen, which suggests that it was a very substantial city.64 It had a small artisan quarter, occupied by Slavic immi-

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grants.65 Archaeologists have discovered evidence of at least twenty other towns in Volga Bulgaria, and many smaller settlements.66 Most of the lands controlled by the Bulgar were wooded, with sedentary communities. According to Ibn Rusta, who wrote early in the tenth century, but may have used earlier sources: ‘They are a people who possess fields and agriculture and cultivate all (types of) grain: wheat, barley, millet and the like’.67 The main foodstuffs Ibn Fadlan observed were millet and horse meat, as well as wheat and barley.68 Despite the agrarian basis of the lands they ruled, the Bulgar elites preserved the traditions of the steppes, for they regularly raided their southern neighbours, the ‘Burdas’ (Bashkirs?), often taking captives as slaves. Ibn Rusta reported that they fought on horseback and demanded horses as tributes. According to Ibn Fadlan, the Volga Bulgars lived in tents, though many of their subjects lived in wooden houses in the towns, in winter, and in tents in summer.69 The kaghan’s tent was vast, capable of holding up to a thousand people, and was decorated with Armenian carpets and Byzantine brocades.70 In the early tenth century, the rulers of Volga Bulgaria still accepted Khazar suzerainty, and sent hostages to Itil. However, they were already trading directly with Samanid Central Asia, sending caravans to Khorezm along difficult routes that bypassed Itil.71 There is powerful evidence of the scale of this trade in the large numbers of Samanid dirhams that begin to appear in the Baltic in the tenth century.72 This route presumably deprived the Khazars of much of the wealth they had once levied on the trade along the Volga. Archaeological evidence shows that Islam began to spread amongst the Volga Bulgars from late in the ninth century, and when Ibn Rusta wrote, early in the tenth century, he reported that most Volga Bulgars were Muslim, ‘and in their settlements are mosques and Koranic schools; they have muezzins and imams’.73 In about 920, a Bulgar kaghan sought the help of the caliphate in spreading Islam in his lands, and in defending them against the Khazars. The mission sent by the caliph was described in extraordinary detail by one of its members, Ibn Fadlan, whose account is the main literary source on the Volga Bulgars in this era. Ibn Fadlan’s account makes it clear that the Bulgar kaghan was a powerful ruler, who ruled in his own right, unlike the Khazar ruler. For example, he personally checked on the payment of tithes by ships travelling through his realms.74 The uncomfortable proximity of Itil may explain why the Khazar rulers were so determined to shake off the commercial, ideological and political influence of Khazaria as soon as this became possible.

1.3 The Kaghanate of the Rus¢ The second tribute-taking state to emerge at the margins of the Khazar empire was the Kaghanate of the Rus¢. Like Volga Bulgaria, this was created

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by predatory migrants in a land of woodland foragers and small peasant villages. Scandinavian traders had probably taken furs and other goods from the woodlands of northern Rus¢ for many millennia. Finds of Sassanid and Byzantine silverware and Byzantine coins along the river Kama, dating from the sixth and early seventh centuries, and references in Jordanes to Swedish fur traders, prove the existence of long-distance networks of exchange in the middle of the millennium.75 As early as the sixth century, some may have travelled as far as Lake Ladoga in search of furs.76 However, the revival of trade from the late eighth century stimulated renewed Scandinavian interest in the region. A thirteenth-century Icelandic saga, Yngvar’s Saga, may give some insight into the sort of world that Vikings entered in northern Rus¢. In one episode, the hero’s son, Svein, encounters a group of natives along a river deep in Rus¢ territory. One of the natives had a feather in his hand, and first he pointed up the stem of the feather, then the blade, which seemed to be a token of peace, so Svein responded with a hand-sign of peace too. The natives gathered under the lee-side of a cliff, offering various kinds of merchandise. Svein told his men they could go ashore, and they traded with the natives though neither side could understand what the other was saying.77 The sequel suggests how easily trade could turn into plunder: Next day, Svein’s men went ashore yet again to trade with the natives and for a while they exchanged goods, until one of the Russians [Vikings] tried to break an agreement he had just made to buy some furs. When the heathen lost his temper and punched him on the nose so that the blood poured onto the ground, the Russian drew his sword and sliced the heathen in two. At that the heathen people ran off shouting and screaming but in no time they gathered in what seemed an invincible army. But Svein told his men to arm themselves for war and march against the heathen, and in the fierce battle that followed the heathen, having no protective armour, fell in huge numbers. When they saw that they had lost the battle, the heathen ran, and Svein and his men won a great deal of plunder left behind by the others, which they carried down to the ships.78 As early as the seventh century, Scandinavian traders settled among the Finnic-speaking peoples of the eastern shores of the Baltic. But not until the late eighth century did they settle away from the Baltic coast. In the 750s, Vikings settled in Staraya Ladoga (Norse Aldeigjuborg) on the river Volkhov, just as the trading cities of Hedeby in Denmark, and Birka in Sweden began

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to blossom.79 Staraya Ladoga controlled access by river to Lake Ladoga and the Baltic. It was probably part of a larger trade network which included Birka and Hedeby. It functioned as a remote outpost, a sort of eighth-century Hudson’s Bay settlement, joining the Baltic trading system to that of the Silk Roads and the caliphate. It attracted native fur traders and even slavers, as well as traders from the south who paid for goods in Abbasid dirhams. In return it sold manufactured goods from the Baltic, such as amber or glass beads.80 Staraya Ladoga had boatyards to repair ships, workshops to modify or even make simple trade goods such as beads, and also permanent dwellings, most of which are typically Scandinavian. The absence of fortifications before the mid-ninth century, and the small number of weapons in its cemeteries show that for a time the settlement was protected by its remoteness.81 In the early ninth century, Viking traders probed south, founding new settlements on Lake Ilmen, at the southern end of the river Volkhov. The most important was a fortified settlement near modern Novgorod, known to archaeologists as ‘Rurikovo Gorodishche’ or ‘Rurik’s town’.82 Later in the ninth century, Gorodishche became an important trading emporium, and many Vikings settled here, as well as local Baltic-, Slavic- or Finnic-speaking people. Vikings also settled further south, perhaps amongst Slavic- or Finnicspeaking communities, at strategic centres near future towns such as Yaroslavl, Rostov and Smolensk.83 Taken together, the fragmentary archaeological evidence suggests that by 850 Vikings had settled in a number of strategic settlements along the trade routes through the thinly populated mixed forest zone, sometimes in Viking colonies, sometimes amongst Baltic, Slavic or Finnic communities. The Viking Rus¢ were mainly interested in tribute-taking and trade, for there are very few signs of Rus¢ settling as farmers in the north. Settlements such as Staraya Ladoga or Gorodishche almost certainly had permanent colonies of Rus¢, but they were mainly there to service trade. More important politically were the transient populations of Scandinavian mercenaries and traders looking for business and employment. A thirteenth-century Icelandic saga, Eymund’s Saga, which refers to events of the eleventh century, hints at the role that new Viking arrivals may have played in the Scandinavian settlements of Rus¢. It tells how a Norwegian called Eymund sought fame and fortune by offering his services as a mercenary to ‘King Jarisleif’ of Novgorod.84 He negotiated terms for himself and his followers with great care. ‘Now, we’re offering to take charge of the defences of the kingdom and become your hired soldiers, taking payment from you in gold, silver and fine clothes. Should you decide to give us a quick refusal and turn down our offer, we’ll accept the same terms from another king’.85

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Jarisleif asked for more precise terms, and was told: ‘First of all . . . you’re to provide us and all our troops with a great hall, and see to it that we’ll never be without the very best of your provisions if we should want them . . . These men . . . will be at your disposal, to go ahead of your troops in battle, in defence of the kingdom. You’ll also pay every one of our soldiers an ounce in weight of silver, and to each Captain an additional half-ounce . . . We’ll take payment in kind, beaver pelts and sable furs and other things readily available in your kingdom. . . . And as long as there’s plenty in the way of spoils you should be able to pay us out of that, but if we sit around doing nothing there’ll be less pay’.86 It was this diaspora of Swedish traders and condottiere that laid the foundations for the ‘Kaghanate of the Rus¢’. The most recent analysis of the Kaghanate suggests that its capital was probably at Gorodishche, near Novgorod.87 This may explain why Ibn Rusta described the capital of the ‘Rus’ as ‘an island around which is a lake’, for the Scandinavian name for Gorodishche, ‘Holmgarthr’, literally means ‘island compound’.88 The fact that the Russian Primary Chronicle also locates the first Rus¢ capital at Novgorod offers some support for this hypothesis. Reconstructing the history of the Kaghanate is not easy, for the evidence is thin and often obscured by later sources, including the chronicle. We know that the Kaghanate of the Rus¢ existed by 838, the year of the Rus¢ embassy to Constantinople. But it was probably new then, and reasonably weak, for the Frankish emperor had little or no knowledge of it. Perhaps, as Shepard has suggested, the embassy to Byzantium was the Kaghanate’s first diplomatic démarche, a public announcement of the Kaghanate’s existence.89 By the middle of the ninth century, the Rus¢ were engaged in trade on a large scale, mainly along the silver road down to the Black Sea, where they had to pay tolls to Byzantine governors. From there they travelled into Khazaria, where they paid tolls to the Khazars, and to the Caspian Sea. Some went as far as Baghdad. According to the Arabic geographer, Ibn Khurdadhbih, even in the 840s: [t]hey bring furs of beavers and black foxes, as well as swords, from the most distant parts of the land of the Slavs to the Black Sea where the ruler of the Greeks collects the tithe [from their goods]. If they like, they go via the Slavic River [the Don] to Hamlih [on the Volga], a city of the Khazars, where the latter’s ruler collects the tithe from them. Then they reach the Sea of Jurjan [the Caspian Sea] and land at the shore they like . . . Sometimes they bring their wares on camels from Jurjan to Baghdad, where Slavic eunuchs serve as interpreters for them. They profess to be Christians, and they pay [only] the head tax.90

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In 860, a seaborne army of Rus¢ launched a fierce attack on Byzantium. Though successfully repelled, the raid was dangerous and highly destructive, and alerted Byzantium to the military power of the new power emerging in the far north.91 In the next decade or two, there were equally large Rus¢ raids on the rich cities along the southern shores of the Caspian, probably launched with the permission of the Khazar rulers.92 Such raids suggest that trade alone was not generating enough wealth to support the Viking migrants who sought their fortune in the region, and it may be, as Franklin and Shepard have suggested, that the Kaghanate of Rus¢ dealt with surplus migrants by sending them south to try their hand at founding new conquest states.93 There is also evidence, both archaeological and literary, that the Rus¢ Kaghanate underwent periods of internal conflict. The chronicle accounts refer to the creation of independent Rus¢ polities further south, and the Arabic writer, Masudi, writes of Dir, the conqueror of Kiev, that, though not a kaghan, he was the greatest of the Slav princes, and ruled huge and populous cities, that were visited by Muslim traders.94 There is archaeological evidence that Staraya Ladoga and Gorodishche were sacked in the 860s, while Ladoga acquired substantial fortifications for the first time in the midninth century.95 Taken together, these signs suggest the existence of a relatively unstable military elite, which was both strengthened and destabilised by the periodic arrival of new groups of fortune seekers from Scandinavia. The early tenth-century descriptions of Ibn Rusta and Ibn Fadlan suggest that the Kaghanate became more stable later in the ninth century. There is good reason to suppose that the trade treaties negotiated with Byzantium in 907 and 911 were negotiated with the Rus¢ Kaghanate. The chronology of the Primary Chronicle, which attributes these negotiations to a ruler based in Kiev, is notoriously unreliable for the early period, and its account of a Rus¢ raid on Constantinople from Kiev is not supported by Byzantine records. Nor is it supported by the available archaeological evidence, which suggests that Kiev began to expand rapidly only in the tenth century. Besides, the treaties with Byzantium refer not to a newly established power, but to a long-standing ‘love’ between Byzantium and Rus¢, which seems to imply a well-established relationship.96 The only significant evidence on the internal structures of the Kaghanate comes from Ibn Fadlan’s famous account of his embassy to the Volga Bulgars in 922. Ibn Fadlan’s account of the Rus¢ he met in Volga Bulgaria in 922, shows a world of warrior/traders, interested in booty and trade goods.97 They had their own houses and warehouses, and traded in a wide range of goods including furs of many kinds (sable, squirrel, ermine, fox, marten and beaver), Frankish swords, wax, honey, amber, livestock produce such as hides, and slaves.98 Ibn Fadlan describes how, on arrival in Bulgar, the Rus¢ set up wooden totem poles with carved faces to which they sacrificed food, and prayed for success in finding rich buyers.99

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In its rituals and its political structures, the Rus¢ Kaghanate was more deeply influenced by Khazaria than the Bulgar state, perhaps because it was further away, and less directly threatened by Khazar power. Turkic traditions are particularly evident in funeral rituals. Ibn Fadlan described a Viking funeral in which the dead chief was cremated in a tomb in his boat, which was drawn up on land. Before cremation, he was provided with food, wine, money, clothing and jewellery, and a slave girl, who volunteered to accompany him, was ritually murdered, and then cremated with him.100 The excavation of burial mounds from the towns of Rus¢ confirms the accuracy of this account. Many contain horses as well as slaughtered concubines and retainers.101 Ibn Fadlan’s account of the Rus¢ ruler suggests that he, like the Khazar by this time, was a purely ceremonial leader, while real power was held by a deputy. While the deputy ‘commands the troops, attacks his enemies, and acts as his representative before his subjects’, the kaghan himself ‘has no other duties but to make love to his slave girls, drink, and give himself up to pleasure’.102 Virtually a prisoner, the kaghan lived his life of sybaritic luxury surrounded by 400 retainers in a huge fortress, in a room decorated with precious cloths. All in all, the fragmentary evidence on the Kaghanate of the Rus¢ suggests that Viking traders and mercenaries had managed to create a moderately durable state, with a semi-sacred ruling dynasty like the Khazar kaghan, and a separate military leader like the Khazar ‘bek’. Like the Türk empire created by the Ashina dynasty, this state based its power on a federation of elite warriors, funded by controlling trade routes between two large areas of agrarian civilisation. Though they travelled by boat, the Vikings showed as great a flair for trade and booty as any pastoralist community, and the relative poverty of their homelands gave them as great an incentive to raid richer lands. Pritsak has called the Vikings ‘nomads of the sea’, and the analogy is a good one, particularly in the era of the ‘Rus¢ Kaghanate’.103

1.4 The turn to the Dnieper At some point early in the tenth century, the Rus¢ relocated to Kiev on the river Dnieper. The chronology of this transition remains unclear. However, while Ibn Fadlan’s account implies that the Kaghanate still existed in 922, there are good archaeological and literary reasons to think that the Rus¢ had relocated to Kiev by 940.104 The Dnieper routes, with their many rapids, were extremely difficult to use, particularly after the Khazars lost control of the Pontic steppes during the ninth century. However, several factors encouraged the Rus¢ to explore the Dnieper routes. First, the Rus¢, like the Volga Bulgars, undoubtedly resented paying tolls to the Khazars, and sought ways of evading such payments. The Dnieper routes ran along the margins of the Khazar empire, and were therefore difficult to police, so they provided the best chance of

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evading Khazar control. Second, the Rus¢ had been in contact with Byzantium from at least 838. Indeed, though Khazaria influenced the political structures of the Rus¢ Kaghanate, Byzantium seems to have had an enduring influence over its religious traditions. Though most Rus¢ were pagan, some were clearly Christian, including some of the Rus¢ who traded in Baghdad. Soon after the 860 raid, a delegation of Rus¢ appeared in Byzantium, accepted Christianity, and apparently returned to their homeland with a Christian bishop and pastor.105 Third, the Dnieper routes controlled the lucrative trades from Central Europe to Khazaria, which had been dominated by the Rhadanite Jews. Finally, Kiev was at the centre of one of the richest agricultural regions of Eastern Europe, and had dense Slavic populations from which tributes could be exacted. The emerging systems of tribute exaction of the mid-tenth century were described in a famous account by the Byzantine Emperor, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, written in c. 950.106 Because of the Dnieper rapids, and the threat from steppe pastoralists, serious trade down the Dnieper required substantial organisation and considerable military backing. According to the chronicle accounts, at some point a Rus¢ leader called ‘Oleg/Helgi’ from the far north conquered an already existing polity based at Kiev, and perhaps ruled by other groups of Vikings. Though the chronicle dates the conquest of Kiev to 882, there are good reasons for placing this date in the early tenth century. Recent archaeological work makes it unlikely that Kiev was the capital this early; and Khazar sources suggest that Oleg was still alive as late as 944.107 The first clearly attested Rus¢ ruler of Kiev is Igor’, who ruled in the 940s, perhaps with the support of Oleg. The fact that Oleg was not, apparently, a Rurikid suggests that he may have held a position similar to that of the Khazar bek, perhaps also acting as a regent during Igor’s minority. The fact that Oleg began taking tributes from tribes such as the Severians and Radimichians, who had previously paid tributes to the Khazars, shows that his aim was to chip away at the margins of Khazar power.108 Under Igor’, the Rus¢ became engaged in a long, three-way conflict with Khazaria and Byzantium for control of the lucrative trade routes through the Black Sea. Oleg’s power seems to have declined after he led an unsuccessful attack on Tmutorakan (modern Taman) the key to this trade route. The Khazars then turned him around and he launched a second, unsuccessful attack on Byzantium, after which he returned to Khazaria, dying in a raid on the Caspian coast.109 After this, Igor’ emerged as prince of the Rus¢. If indeed the political structures of Rus¢ were closely modelled on those of Khazaria, this obscure episode may reflect a sort of princely restoration, and the decline of the power of the prince/kaghan’s regent, general and prime minister, Oleg. After the death of Igor’, in 945, his wife, Ol’ga, maintained the authority of the princely office by punishing his murderers with great brutality.

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From the middle of the tenth century, Rus¢ was firmly based on the Dnieper, and its commerce and political connections were directed, increasingly, towards Byzantium. In 965, Igor’s son, Svyatoslav, led a massive expedition which first defeated the Volga Bulgars, and then destroyed Khazar power for ever. After this, the Kievan state emerged as the major power in Rus¢. However, its future destiny was now linked firmly with that of Byzantium, rather than Khazaria or the Islamic world, a fact that was to prove of immense significance for the future history of Rus¢, Muscovy and Russia.

1.5 Conclusions This tentative history of the Kaghanate of the Rus¢ shows the extent to which the Byzantine bias of the Primary Chronicle, and of much Russian historiography since the eighth century, has obscured the Eurasian roots of statehood in Rus¢. The first state of the Rus¢ emerged in the shadow of a great Turkic empire, that of the Khazars. It derived its wealth from trans-Eurasian trade routes that reached from China to Baghdad and the Baltic, and that flourished under Khazar protection. In modern terminology, it was a satellite of the Khazars, not of Byzantium. The Rus¢ certainly paid tolls to the Khazars; they probably paid tributes to them on occasion, and sometimes they acted as subordinate allies, perhaps even as mercenaries of the Khazars. Khazar influence on the Rus¢ was so great that they named their own rulers ‘kaghans’, and granted them a purely sacral power similar to that of the Khazar ‘kaghans’ of the late ninth century. In short, the Viking Rus¢ learnt their statecraft as apprentices and eventually rivals of the Turkic Khazars. Indirectly, the major trade links of the Rus¢ Kaghanate were with the Islamic rather than the Christian world. Its most important commercial and political connections were with Itil and Baghdad, not Constantinople. If this orientation had survived, modern historians would have no difficulty in seeing Rus¢ as a Eurasian state, rather than as the product of western expansion into Eurasia. Most traces of this first phase of statehood in Rus¢ were obliterated by the commercial, political and eventually ideological reorientation that took place in the second quarter of the tenth century, when Rus¢ turned its face towards Byzantium, and shifted its centre of gravity to Kiev. Eventually, the Khazarian phase of the history of Rus¢ was to be written out of the historical record by the Christian chroniclers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and by modern historians who followed the chronicle account. However, a few traces survived. The title ‘Kaghan’ appears in an eleventhcentury graffito in St Sophia, as the title of prince Yaroslav.110 Indeed, it may have been used more widely as a royal title in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, particularly in the south.111 It also crops up in two wellknown passages in medieval Russian literature. The ‘Sermon on Law and

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Grace’ of Metropolitan Hilarion, which was composed in c. 1051, refers at one point to ‘our teacher and mentor, the great Kagan of our land, Vladimir’.112 More than two centuries later, when the lands of Rus¢ lay once again in the shadow of a great steppe empire, the author of the ‘Lay of Igor’s Campaign’ described the semi-legendary ruler, Oleg, as ‘Kogan Oleg’.113 Memories of the Khazars were also preserved in Slavic folk tales, or byliny, whose heroes include Mikhailo Kozarin (‘the Khazar’?) and the giant, Zhidovin (‘the Jew’, which in this period certainly meant ‘the Khazar’), the enemy of the great hero, Il’ya of Murom.114 And, as Golden has pointed out, the Rus¢ may have become acquainted with the Hebrew scriptures not just through Byzantium, but also, more directly, through the influence of Khazar ‘Jews’ and refugees in Kiev.115 However, since the eighteenth century, the westernising bias of most historians of modern Russia has obliterated even these faint traces of Khazar influence. In principle, the multicultural nature of the Soviet Union might have encouraged a reassessment of such attitudes, and in some areas it did. Artamonov’s own work, though its conclusions were bent by Stalinist censors, was an attempt to reassess the importance of the Khazars. And the work of his students, such as S. A. Pletneva and L. N. Gumilev, has done something to revive the study of steppeland polities, and show their close links with statehood in Rus¢. (Unfortunately, Gumilev’s later work is warped by an idiosyncratic notion of ‘ethnicity’, and tinged with anti-Semitism.)116 Now, with the end of the Cold War, and more complex views of world politics, it should be easier to see once again the non-European, non-Christian, and Inner Eurasian roots of statehood in Rus¢.

Notes 1. Ibn Rusta wrote between 903 and 913, but probably used sources referring to the middle and late ninth century; see Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus¢, 750–1200 (London and New York: Longman, 1996), p. 40. 2. G. V. Vernadsky et al., eds, A Sourcebook for Russian History from Early Times to 1917, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 9. 3. Ibid., p. 10. 4. Ibid., pp. 9–10. 5. G. Waitz, ed., Annales Bertiniani (Hannover, 1883), pp. 19–20, cited in Vernadsky, Sourcebook for Russian History, vol. 1, p. 11. 6. Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings (1968; reprint, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 249–50; Vernadsky, Sourcebook for Russian History, vol. 1, p. 11. 7. The main authors referred to are the Soviet archaeologist, Artamonov, and a number of modern western historians of early Rus¢, including J. Shepard, T. Noonan and C. Zuckerman.

David Christian 23 8. There is a map of this process in M. Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess: the World of Old Europe (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), p. 6. 9. Pavel Markovich Dolukhanov, The Early Slavs: Eastern Europe from the Initial Settlement to the Kievan Rus¢ (London and New York: Longman, 1996), p. 199. 10. Carsten Goehrke, Frühzeit des Ostslaventums (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992), pp. 111–17; Dolukhanov, Early Slavs, pp. 48, 146. 11. Goehrke, Frühzeit des Ostslaventums, p. 112. 12. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, p. 82; Goehrke, Frühzeit des Ostslaventums, p. 112. 13. Ibid., p. 173. 14. See Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths, trans. Thomas J. Dunlap (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 86–7; and Jordanes, The Gothic History of Jordanes, trans. Charles Christopher Mierow (Princeton, 1915; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 84–5. 15. There is a good summary in C. Zuckerman, ‘ “On the Date of the Khazars”: Conversion to Judaism and the Chronology of the Kings of the Rus Oleg and Igor’, Revue des Études Byzantines, 53 (1995) 259–62. 16. See M. I. Artamonov, Istoriya khazar (Leningrad: Izd-vo gos. Ermitazha, 1962), and Ocherki drevneishei istorii khazar (Leningrad: Gos. sots.-ekon. izd-vo, 1936). See also Anna Frenkel, ‘The Jewish Empire in the Land of Future Russia’, Australian Journal of Jewish Studies, 9, nos 1 and 2 (1995) 143. 17. Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: the Khazar Empire and Its Heritage (London: Hutchinson, 1976), p. 94. Recently, Artamonov’s student, L. N. Gumilev, has done something to revive interest in the Khazars, but Gumilev’s latest work itself has an anti-Semitic tinge to it, and interprets the Khazar empire after the conversion to Judaism not as a ‘true state’, but as a ‘chimera’. See L. N. Gumilev, Drevnyaya Rus¢ i velikaya step’ (Moscow: T-vo Klyshnikov, Komarov i Ko., 1992), chs 6–9. 18. Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples: Ethnogenesis and State-formation in Medieval and Early Modern Eurasia and the Middle East (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992), pp. 233–6. 19. Artamonov, Istoriya khazar, pp. 170–1, 180. 20. D. M. Dunlop writes in The History of the Jewish Khazars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 46: ‘Though the great mountain range would doubtless have caused the invaders from the south much difficulty in any case, sooner or later they would have overrun any but a strong and well-organized resistance. Such they appear to have met in the Khazars’. Artamonov makes a similar point in Istoriya khazar, p. 224. 21. S. A. Pletneva, Kochevniki srednevekov’ya: poiski istoricheskikh zakonomernostei (Moscow: Nauka, 1982), p. 51. 22. Quoted from an Armenian chronicle, in Dunlop, Jewish Khazars, p. 30. See also Pletneva, Kochevniki srednevekov’ya, p. 227. 23. Artamonov, Istoriya khazar, pp. 385–6. 24. Dunlop, Jewish Khazars, p. 93. 25. See ibid., pp. 93, 96; A. P. Kovalevskii, trans., Kniga Akhmeda ibn Fadlana o ego puteshestvii na Volgu v 921–922 gg. (Kharkov: n.p., 1956), pp. 140–1. 26. Dunlop, Jewish Khazars, p. 96. 27. Kovalevskii, Kniga Akhmeda ibn Fadlana, p. 147. For Ibn Fadlan’s sources, see Dunlop, Jewish Khazars, p. 109. In this customary way, a political relationship was represented symbolically as a relationship of kinship.

24


28. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, pp. 79–83. 29. See ibid., pp. 95–6; and Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 44. 30. See P. D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 106; and Louis I. Rabinowitz, Jewish Merchant Adventurers: a Study of the Radanites (London: E. Goldston, 1948). The main Arabic source is ibn Khurdadbeh. 31. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, p. 10. 32. Dunlop, Jewish Khazars, p. 93. 33. Peter B. Golden, Khazar Studies: an Historico-philological Inquiry into the Origins of the Khazars, vol. 1 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1980), p. 67. Chapter 3 of the Hudud is all about the Khazars; see Hudud al’Alam, ‘The Regions of the World’, trans. and ed. V. Minorsky, with a preface by V. V. Bartol’d (London: Luzac and Co., 1937). 34. S. A. Pletneva, Khazary (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), pp. 56–7. 35. The basic source on Manichaeism is S. N. C. Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China (1985; reprint, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1992). On the Uighurs, see Colin Patrick Mackerras, The Uighur Empire (744–840) According to the T’ang Dynastic Histories (Canberra: Australian National University, 1972). 36. Artamonov, Istoriya khazar, pp. 275–6. For the second date, he relies on Masudi’s claim that the conversion occurred during the reign of the Caliph Haroun alRashid (reigned 786–809). 37. Zuckerman, ‘On the Date of the Khazars’; Artamonov, Istoriya khazar, p. 327, argues for a prolonged period of civil conflict, though he dates it to the early ninth century. 38. Zuckerman, ‘On the Date of the Khazars’, 243–4. 39. Artamonov, Istoriya khazar, p. 331ff. 40. Cited in Dunlop, Jewish Khazars, p. 92. 41. Cited in ibid., p. 104. 42. Omeljan Pritsak, ‘The Khazar Kingdom’s Conversion to Judaism’, in his Studies in Medieval Eurasian History (London: Variorum Reprints, 1981), p. 266. 43. Ibn Fadlan, in Kovalevskii, Kniga Akhmeda ibn Fadlana, pp. 147–8. The minaret was destroyed by the Khazar king, on hearing of the destruction of a synagogue in the Islamic world. 44. The first such evidence is in Masudi; see Artamonov, Istoriya khazar, p. 275; and P. Golden, ‘The Peoples of the South Russian Steppes’, in D. Sinor, ed., The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 270. See also Zuckerman, ‘On the Date of the Khazars’, 253. 45. Cited in Dunlop, Jewish Khazars, p. 104. 46. Golden, ‘The Peoples of the South Russian Steppes’, p. 264. Artamonov, Istoriya khazar, p. 410, notes the similarity with the sacral kingships described in Frazer’s Golden Bough; Kovalevskii, Kniga Akhmeda ibn Fadlana, p. 146. 47. Ibn Fadlan in ibid., p. 147. 48. Ibid. 49. The fullest English-language accounts are in the numerous articles by T. S. Noonan, whose results are summarised in Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢. 50. Ibid., p. 8. 51. Ibid., pp. 7–9. 52. Goehrke, Frühzeit des Ostslaventums, p. 171.

David Christian 25 53. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, pp. 75–6, 83. 54. Goehrke, Frühzeit des Ostslaventums, p. 122; Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, p. 25. 55. Ibid., p. 27. 56. Goehrke, Frühzeit des Ostslaventums, pp. 114–15. 57. S. A. Pletneva, ed., Stepi Evrazii v epokhu srednevekov¢ya (Moscow: Izd-vo ‘Nauka’, 1981), p. 77. 58. A. P. Smirnov, Volzhskie bulgary (Moscow: n.p., 1951), p. 11. 59. For example, Ibn Fadlan, in Kovalevskii, Kniga Akhmeda ibn Fadlana, pp. 131–2. 60. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, p. 63. 61. Cited in ibid.; and Kovalevskii, Kniga Akhmeda ibn Fadlana, pp. 140–1. 62. J. Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness: the Fur Trade and its Significance for Medieval Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 22. 63. G. A. Fedorov-Davydov, ed., Gorod Bolgar: ocherki istorii i kul’tury (Moscow: ‘Nauka’, 1988), p. 3. 64. Ibid., p. 10. 65. A. P. Smirnov, ‘Volzhskaya Bolgariya’, in Pletneva, Stepi Evrazii, p. 209. 66. Ibid., p. 210. 67. Golden, Introduction, p. 254. For the dates of Ibn Rusta’s sources, see Dunlop, Jewish Khazars, pp. 107–8. 68. Kovalevskii, Kniga Akhmeda ibn Fadlana, p. 136. 69. Golden, Introduction, p. 256; Kovalevskii, Kniga Akhmeda ibn Fadlana, p. 137. 70. Ibid. 71. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, p. 64. 72. Ibid., p. 63. 73. Cited in ibid., p. 62. 74. Cited in ibid., p. 63; Kovalevskii, Kniga Akhmeda ibn Fadlana, pp. 140–1. 75. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, p. 7. 76. Ibid., pp. 8–9. 77. H. Palsson and P. Edwards, trans., Vikings in Russia: Yngvar’s Saga and Eymund’s Saga (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), p. 62. 78. Ibid. Though written by an author with no direct knowledge of Rus¢, Yngvar’s Saga seems to refer to conditions in Rus¢ in the tenth and early eleventh centuries; ibid., p. 2. 79. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, pp. 12, 17. Note that Dolukhanov suggests that the settlement was polyethnic from the very beginning; Dolukhanov, Early Slavs, pp. 182–5. 80. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, pp. 19–21. 81. Ibid., p. 19. 82. Ibid., p. 33; Dolukhanov, Early Slavs, p. 187. 83. The main sites here were Timerevo near modern Yaroslavl, and Gnezdovo, near modern Smolensk. Both were clearly settled by Vikings towards the end of the century, but there are hints of settlement even earlier; Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, pp. 36, 101. 84. Palsson and Edwards, Vikings in Russia, p. 71. ‘Yarisleif’ is modelled on the eleventh-century Grand Prince, Yaroslav. 85. Ibid., p. 73. 86. Ibid. 87. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, pp. 31–41. Shepard discusses four possible sites: Sweden, Gorodishche, Rostov, and the Upper Volga, while G. V.

26

88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106.

107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

The Pre-Revolutionary Period Vernadsky, Kievan Russia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1948), p. 174, proposes Tmutorakan (modern Taman) on the straits of Kerch. Gumilev, Drevnyaya Rus¢, p. 107, assumes that Kiev was their capital, but that their original base was in the Crimea. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, p. 40. Ibid., p. 32. Cited in Vernadsky, Sourcebook, vol. 1, p. 9. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, pp. 51–3. The chronicle gives 866 as the date and claims, anachronistically, that it was launched from Kiev; it is described by Patriarch Photius of Constantinople, Vernadsky, Sourcebook, vol. 1, p. 11. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, p. 56. Ibid., p. 55. Artamonov, Istoriya khazar, p. 368. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, pp. 56, 59. Ibid., p. 108. Kovalevskii, Kniga Akhmeda ibn Fadlana, p. 141. See Jones, History of the Vikings, p. 164, for summary of evidence from Masudi and Muqqadasi; and Kovalevskii, Kniga Akhmeda ibn Fadlana, p. 142. Ibid., p. 142. Ibn Fadlan’s account is translated in Jones, History of the Vikings, pp. 425–30. See also Vernadsky, Sourcebook, vol. 1, p. 10, for a similar report from Ibn Rusta. Masudi reports of the Rus¢ that: ‘their women desire to be burned with their husbands so as to follow them to paradise’. Jones, History of the Vikings, p. 256. Kovalevskii, Kniga Akhmeda ibn Fadlana, p. 146. Omeljan Pritsak, The Origin of Rus¢, vol. 1, Old Scandinavian Sources other than the Sagas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1981), p. 16 passim. Zuckerman, ‘On the Date of the Khazars’. Vernadsky, Sourcebook, vol. 1, p. 12; Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, p. 54. G. Moravcsik, ed., Constantine Porphyrogenitus: De Administrando Imperio, trans. R. J. H. Jenkins (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, 1967), pp. 18–20, 28. Zuckerman, ‘On the Date of the Khazars’, 259–68. According to the chronicle account. This reconstruction is based on Zuckerman, ‘On the Date of the Khazars’. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus¢, p. 215. See Golden, Khazar Studies, vol. 1, p. 17; and Vernadsky, Kievan Russia, p. 174. Serge A. Zenkovsky, ed., Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales (New York: Dutton, 1974), p. 88. Ibid., p. 189. Golden, Khazar Studies, vol. 1, p. 16. Ibid., pp. 17–18. See, for example, Gumilev, Ot Rusi k Rossii: ocherki etnicheskoi istorii (Moscow: Ekopros, 1992).

2 The Crisis of the Late Tsarist Penal System* Stephen G. Wheatcroft

Many eighteenth-century writers appear to have been shocked by the cultural differences that they observed between Eastern and Western Europe. The perception of these differences has been represented as the prototype of Western European attitudes towards the Orient, and towards the ‘other’.1 But John Howard, in his eighteenth-century guide to the prisons of Europe, found himself in familiar territory in the prisons of the East.2 The Russian prisons that he described in the 1780s were in many regards similar to those of the West. Russian sanitary conditions were probably worse, and ultimately that may have been the most important difference. This was certainly the case for John Howard, because this was what eventually killed him.3 By the late nineteenth century, the differences between Russian and western prisons seemed much greater than they had been earlier, although some political activists and scholars claim that the differences were not as large as is often claimed.4 In the West, prison reform had greatly transformed the situation since John Howard’s day. There had been a significant decline in corporal and capital punishment, which would have placed an enormous strain on the prison system had it not been accompanied by a growth in the transportation and exile system. Transportation to distant colonies had also led to a decline in domestic forced labour. Then, from the middle of the nineteenth century, there was also a decline in transportation, and its replacement by the penitentiary system.5 Beyond these changes in penal policy, there were other changes brought about by a revolution in health care, which transformed the western prison system at a much greater rate than the system in the East. There were a number of significant differences in the nature and timing of Russian and western penal developments. Most importantly, the Russian penal system placed far less emphasis on capital punishment than did western systems throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was only in the twentieth century that Russia began to reverse the pattern by starting to execute more people than in the West, and this was something that happened quite suddenly after the 1905 Revolution. In Russia, 27

28


corporal punishment, exile and forced penal labour had always played the prominent role. These main differences can be partly attributed to two possibly interrelated causes: (i) the lower labour/land ratios in Russia which placed a greater priority on forced labour and which enabled forced labour to remain a viable option, well after it had disappeared in more advanced societies;6 and (ii) the relatively slow and weak development of civil society in opposition to the autocratic nature of the tsarist state. This chapter examines the development of the Russian penal system in the twentieth century in the context of these historical differences, but it is more interested in the changes that were taking place within the Russian system in this period, than in static global comparisons. There are many eyewitness reports from travellers and former inmates that have given us very graphic pictures of the conditions in the tsarist prison and exile system in the earlier period.7 But there have been comparatively few attempts to seriously consider the detailed available accounting data on the tsarist penal system that would permit a more objective assessment. The five-volume history of Russian prisons produced by the veteran criminologist M. N. Gernet suffers from the kind of problems that we might expect of any Stalin-Prize-winning book on Russian history. It is nevertheless very informative for most periods other than the late tsarist period.8 Don Rawson’s 1984 study of the related topic of the legislative basis for the application of the death penalty in the late tsarist period is based on a detailed investigation of the records of the military courts.9 However, as will be explained below, it is unclear why his data differ from those provided by the leading Russian experts Gernet and, more recently, Zheltov. The recent monograph by another American historian, Bruce Adams, is based more on the writings of legal reformers than on the prison records, and it offers a rather simplified account of the politics of the Russian prison reform movement in the last decades of tsardom.10 I agree with Rawson that identifying the direction of penal developments in the last decades of tsarist Russia is very problematic. I also agree with Adams that until the beginning of the twentieth century Russian penal practices were undergoing a reform that would have brought Russian prisons closer to their western counterparts, and that the Russian prison reformers had some notable achievements to their credit. I wish to complement Adams’ study of the legal documents on the struggle for prison reform in this period with a consideration of prison records and the public health aspects of the problem. These questions are amenable to measurement and, as will be shown below, they indicate quite remarkable achievements in the period before 1906, but an even more remarkable deterioration in the following years. On the basis of this evidence, this chapter takes issue with Adams’

Stephen G. Wheatcroft 29

overall evaluation of the post-1906 period by drawing attention to this massive deterioration in Russian prison conditions. In a sense the deterioration in conditions in the Russian prisons can be seen as comparable with the changes brought about by the escalation in the use of capital punishment. This chapter is in three parts. Part 1 considers the developments in the Russian penal system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in comparison with developments in the west. Part 2 considers the detailed materials from the annual reports of the tsarist prison administration from the 1870s to 1905, which can shed light on the changing material conditions in the different parts of the tsarist prison system. Part 3 reports on what the available data, including these prison administration records, tell us about the very different patterns of penality and the different levels of prison mortality that occurred after 1906 and up to 1917. The conclusions compare my findings on the developments over this period with other scholarship on the topic.

2.1 Developments in the Russian prison system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in comparison with the West The Russian government introduced domestic forced labour in the beginning of the eighteenth century, when much of Europe was abolishing it and replacing it with transportation.11 The idea of using the forced labour of criminals instead of executing them is normally attributed to Peter the Great’s Dutch friend Andrei Vinius, who proposed such a policy in 1688 in direct imitation of western practice. But the tsarist order introducing this measure was delayed until 24 November 1699.12 The word used to describe this new penal system was katorga, which is the Greek word for galley slavery, but was soon applied to other forced labour situations, especially construction work in the building of St Petersburg, the building of canals, and work in the mines. The introduction of katorga was associated with a decline in capital punishment. In January 1704, Peter the Great ordered that in future only those found guilty of murder, or the political offences of treachery or rebellion, were to be executed. All others, ‘who were deserving of death, were to be beaten, branded and were to be sent to serve forever in katorga’.13 This order was followed by a series of other decrees between 1744 and 1754 issued by Peter’s daughter Elizaveta Petrovna, who abolished the death penalty for all offences.14 The death penalty would subsequently reappear for serious political offences and for murder, but would remain at a relatively low level in comparison with most of Europe and especially Britain (see Table 2.1). From the mid-eighteenth century, under Catherine II, the centre of the forced labour system moved out of the more refined areas – the capitals and European Russia – to the less developed areas, where land to labour ratios led to a greater need for labour. The mines of Ekaterinburg and Nerchinsk

30

The Pre-Revolutionary Period Table 2.1 Russian and British execution rates per million population

About 1600 About 1770 1800s 1840s 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s

Death sentences

Executions

England

Russia

England

Russia

0.17 0.17 0.17 0.22 0.15 0.1

147 23 6 0.7 0.6 0.6 0.5 0.3

0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1

49 38 1.1 1.1 1.1 1.0 0.8

Sources: Calculated from data in A. G. L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies: a Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and Other Parts of the British Empire (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1966), p. 28; J. Ritchie, Punishment and Profit (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1970), pp. 261–2; R. J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishent in Germany, 1600–1987 (Harmondsworth: Perguin Books, 1997), pp. 934–5; and D. Rawson, ‘The Death Penalty in Late Tsarist Russia: An Investigation of Judicial Procedures’, Russian History, 11, no. 1 (spring 1984) 33, 36–7.

in Siberia were established in 1760 and became the main centres of katorga.15 This coincided with the peak of pre-colonial transportation to America and preceded by only a few years the beginning of transportation to Australia (see Table 2.2). There were several unique features in the Russian penal system which deserve attention. The early abolition of capital punishment was accompanied by a continued use of corporal punishment into the late nineteenth century. The slitting of nostrils was abolished in 1817, but beatings and facial branding continued to be widely used into the mid-century. And, as Adams points out, attempts to abolish most aspects of corporal punishment in the Legal Code of 1845 had to be delayed until 1863 because no alternative punishments were available.16 Another important and distinctive feature of the Russian prison system was the widespread use of exile as an administrative and non-judicial punishment. This was in addition to its role as part of a judicial criminal punishment associated with katorga and other judicial sentences. There was a whole series of administrative punishments that were meted out not just by the central government, but by local government agents, and even by the peasant community. In general the state had an interest in promoting the settlement of the unpopulated exile areas, as well as in removing troublemakers. Throughout the nineteenth century the centre of gravity of the exile system gradually shifted ever further eastwards from Western Siberia to

Stephen G. Wheatcroft 31 Table 2.2 The scale of Russian exile in comparison with British exile to America and Australia: average per year and estimates of transportation mortality rates

a British to America Transported per year Number 1600 1670–99 1700 1726–36 1770

4 180 500 1000

Per million population 0.6 21.2 54.1 95.2

b British to Australia Transported per year per million pop. 1788–1800 1801–10 1811–20 1821–30 1831–40 1841–50 1851–60 1860–68 1871–80 1881–85 1886–90 1891–95 1896–1900

43 30 94 156 217 127 39 13

Crude death rate per thousand population

1040 743

c Russian transportation to Siberia Crude death rate per thousand population transported 191 97 34 27 53/39 47 32 23

Transported Per million population

2 036 3 976 9 171 7 882 6 250 7 057 12 354 17 304 17 381 16 716 16 716 16 716

68 105 199 146 101 101 158 201 183 161 148 137

Crude death rate in transportation system

in all penal system

165 164 94

35 44 27

Sources: Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies; McDonald and R. Shlomowitz, ‘Mortality on Convict Voyages to Australia, 1788–1868’, Social Science History, 13 (1989) 299; Russian exiles transported, 1807–81, Ssylka i katorga v Sibiri (XVIII–nachalo XX v.) (Novosibirsk, 1975), appendix 1, p. 2, cited here from A. D. Margolis, Tyur¢ma i ssylka v imperatorskoi Rossii (Lanterna Vita, 1995), p. 30. For average 1882–98, ibid., p. 32; for crude death rate in transportation system and in all penal system see appendix Table 2.8.

Eastern Siberia, and to the Russian Far East, with Sakhalin Island being developed as a specially severe location of secondary exile from the 1870s to 1905.17 The geographical spread and size of the tsarist prison system can be gauged to some extent by the data in the 1897 census, which recorded 92 802

32

The Pre-Revolutionary Period Table 2.3 Annual migration beyond the Urals in thousands

1801–50 1851–60 1861–70 1871–80 1881–90 1891–1900 1901–10

Prisoners & exiles

Peasants

Total

Prisoners & exiles as % of total

5 10 14 18 14 13 2.5

2.5 9.1 11.4 6.8 27.9 107.8 225.7

7.5 19.1 25.4 24.8 41.9 120.8 228.2

66.7 52.4 55.1 72.6 33.4 10.8 1.1

Source: V. V. Obolenskii (Osinskii), Mezhdunarodnye i mezhkontinental’nye migratsii v dovoennoi Rossii i SSSR (Moscow, 1928), p. 84.

prisoners in designated prisons in March 1897 and 3645 exiles who were receiving central supplies. These were equivalent to 739 prisoners per million population and an additional 29 centrally supplied exiles per million population.18 Overall, these rates appear to be fairly low in comparison with, for instance, Australian penal rates at this time.19 But the rates were as high as 2868 per million in Siberia and 229 680 per million (about one in four) on Sakhalin Island. Although the exile system had been of major importance for the settlement of Siberia in the first half of the nineteenth century, its importance had been progressively declining from the 1880s, when peasant migration into Siberia began to increase. The Soviet politician Osinskii provided an indication of these movements in his 1928 study of migration (see Table 2.3). The objective of abolishing katorga and the exile system had been widely discussed from the 1860s. The judicial reform of 1864 was aimed at strengthening the rule of law, by which the exercise of administrative power would be subject to legal principles. But the achievements of other reforms, such as the abolition of most forms of corporal punishment in 1863, placed a greater strain on the prison system and made the task of reforming katorga and the exile system more difficult. Eventually, when the tsarist state faced a wave of terrorist attacks in the 1870s, it introduced a series of emergency (extraordinary) measures by which administrative procedures could (temporarily) overrule legal principles. Civil cases could be transferred to the military courts which could act on the basis of special emergency procedures that were normally only applicable to wartime situations. Although this extrajudicial procedure was not often used at the time, it did create a dangerous precedent which was readily invoked in subsequent emergency situations following the Revolution of 1905. At the same time that this precedent was being set, attempts were being


made to reduce the use of low-level administrative exile and to replace the exile category of katorga with the penitentiary category of forced labour. The old criminal exile system was eventually formally abolished by the law of 12 June 1900 when it was announced that it had been replaced by a correctional system.20 The new system still involved forced labour in prisons, or other correctional establishments, which were often located within the old katorga buildings. Although the tsarist prison officials tended to emphasise the significance of the formal abolition of the katorga and exile system, many critics have doubted its real importance.21 As will be noted below, the nature of the changes was not so great as to require any major change in accounting procedures, and the official prison reports continued to refer to katorga as a major division in the prison system.

2.2 Detailed materials from the annual reports of the Tsarist Prison Administration from the 1880s to 1905: the years of improvement The establishment of the Chief Prison Administration in 1879 eventually led to a more complete and systematic publication of prison data in the Administration’s annual reports. A remarkably detailed picture of the nature of the prison system and the conditions within the different parts of the prison system can be calculated from 1882.22 The Ministry of Justice also published detailed annual accounts of the workings of the courts including sentencing to the prison system.23 Although a wealth of detailed data is available in the prison annual reports, these reports are complex and difficult to use. They require a selection and reworking of the data to compile workable series of data. Summaries of these data were regularly produced by the criminologist and statistician E. Tarnovskii,24 and the Chief Prison Administration also regularly produced surveys of developments for international prison congresses.25 Most historians working in this area have used these summaries, rather than the bulky primary data from the annual reports. However, it is clear that these summaries, especially the ones produced for the international congresses, were required to serve a propaganda purpose and cast as good a light as possible on the situation. The annual reports provide detailed information on the prisoners who are listed according to their numbers on 1 January each year, and according to the number of days that they spent in the different sections of the prison in the given year. There is an elaborate balance of the number of prisoners in the different kinds of prison sections. The balances cover the number of prisoners at the beginning of the year, arrivals, departures, transfers and numbers at the end of the year. The prisoners were also listed according to institution, category within the institution, and sentence. The institutions that are covered in these early reports initially excluded military prisons, the

34


special political prisons, special clerical prisons and the special prisons of Sakhalin, although separate data were provided on the political camps and on Sakhalin. Tables 2.5 and 2.6 in the appendix contain a summary of the listing of the prisoners that were recorded in the different parts of the prison system on 1 January. Table 2.5 presents these data divided by institution, while Table 2.6 divides the data according to category of prisoner to provide a snapshot. Table 2.7 in the appendix is a more complex table based on the flows of population through the different parts of the system throughout the year. These were presented in the reports as the total number of days spent in each part of the system and have been converted into year equivalents. Table 2.8 in the appendix presents mortality indicators based on the given number of deaths in each part of the system and the reported number of days spent in each part of the system as calculated in Table 2.7. On 1 January 1884 there were 87 696 prisoners in the 884 prisons under the Chief Prison Administration.26 The number of prisoners rose significantly for the remaining years of Alexander III’s reign and peaked at 116 376 in 1893. The future significant changes in the size of the prison population appear to owe more to misguided autocratic celebratory gestures than to any serious consideration of prison policy.27 Nicholas II’s accession in October 1894 was marked by a significant amnesty which reduced the total number of prisoners by 27 000 to 80 133. From Tables 2.5 and 2.6 it is clear that most of this reduction was in the number of prisoners who would normally have been sentenced to a fixed term of imprisonment, and that there was no reduction in those sentenced to katorga. In the following years, up to 1904, there was a recovery in numbers by 14 000 bringing the total up to 93 537. But then in 1904 there was another major reduction in the number of prisoners which again was caused by non-penal factors. This was the amnesty to mark the birth of the tsarevich. By January 1905 the number of prisoners was at a record low of 75 009. The revolutionary year of 1905 saw only a very slight increase in the number of prisoners, which had risen to 88 520 by 1 January 1906. As we shall see in the next section, there was a remarkable reversal of these minimalist trends after this date. Whilst it is interesting to speculate on what role these released criminals played in the social unrest of 1905–06, the important thing was that the government was persuaded by events that future stability required a much larger proportion of the population to be incarcerated. The detailed prison records enable us to chart developments within the different parts of the prison system. The largest number of prisoners was located in places of primary and short-term detention where initially no labour was required. These were known as tyur¢ma (prison), tyuremnie zamki (prison fortresses), or arestantskie pomeshcheniya (arrest houses of police) and were located at the guberniya, oblast¢, urban, uezd or okrug level.28 These establishments will be called primary prisons in this chapter.


On 1 January 1884 there were 68 991 prisoners in 824 of these establishments. Numbers in these prisons grew to 94 541 in 1893 and fell to 61 212 after the amnesty of 1894. Numbers rose again to 75 246 on 1 January 1903 and then fell to 59 750 on 1 January 1905 after the amnesty of 1904. By 1906 numbers had risen to 72 411. The correctional system of prisons initially comprised two types of institutions. The largest of these institutions was the correctional arrest department (ispravitel¢noe arestantskoe otdelenie), a relatively new type of labour service prison which was considered to be the most severe form of correctional punishment. These prisons only included men aged 17 to sixty who were not exempt from corporal punishment. All prisoners in the correctional arrest unit were sentenced from one to four years and were condemned to hard labour. There were 33 prisons in this system in 1884. There were also two modern correctional prisons (ispravitel¢nye tyur¢my) in Moscow and St Petersburg. In later statistics these groups of prisoners were often merged. Throughout this period prison reformers were anxious to transfer more prisoners from the traditional penal servitude system of katorga in exile to these newer correctional arrest units, but they seem to have met with mixed success due to the difficulties of organising labour in these establishments. There were 7262 prisoners in these correctional arrest prisons in 1884 (6246 in the correctional arrest divisions and 1016 in the St Petersburg and Moscow correctional prisons). Their numbers rose to 11 597 in 1894, before falling to 5423 in 1897, growing again to 13 268 in January 1904 and falling to 9567 in January 1905. The penal servitude system of katorga changed its nature significantly over this period. By the 1860s, katorga had come to mean exile to hard labour in one of the major construction or mining establishments in the east. There were 17 katorga prisons in 1884, with 8068 prisoners. These were long-term punishment areas with no pretence at correction. But by the late 1880s a new type of katorga prison was being developed which no longer involved transportation and exile. Exile for forced labour was formally abolished in 1900, but because of a lack of alternative accommodation the old katorga prisons continued to be used. Forced labour, sometimes also referred to as katorga, began to be increasingly used in other prison establishments. The annual reports list a continuous decline of prisoners in katorga throughout Alexander III’s reign, falling from 8068 in 1884 to 5559 in 1894. There appears to have been no amnesty for the katorzhniki in 1894, but numbers continued to fall gradually, reaching a level of 3569 in 1899. The abolition of exile in 1900 does not appear to have had any effect on reducing the number of katorga prisoners. By this time the nature of katorga had formally changed to make it simply a more severe form of correctional labour. The number of katorga prisoners rose from 3569 in 1899 to 4364 on 1 January 1904, before the 1904 amnesty reduced it to 3186 on 1 January 1905. The 1905 Revolution reduced the number further, to 1722 on 1 January 1906.

36


The prison transportation system (peresil¢nye) contained the network of marching transit lock-ups (etap and poluetap), the concentration points at rail, road and river barge terminals. There were two important factors that greatly changed the requirements of the transportation system. The switch to travelling to Siberia by rail or prison barge instead of marching would have greatly reduced the number and size of transport prisons, and the amount of time spent by the prisoners in the transportation system. The formal abolition of exile in 1900 might be expected to have also reduced the demand for the transportation prisons, but in reality this is probably not the case, since prisoners were still condemned to hard labour in Siberian prisons, although this was no longer formally part of an exile system. Since the transportation business was highly seasonal, the January figures are likely to represent a low point, and are less informative than annual figures. They show a growth in the years of Alexander III from 3375 in 1884 to 4185 on 1 January 1894. There appears to have been no reduction as a result of Nicholas II’s amnesty of 1894, but figures did fall to a low of 2506 by 1 January 1905, then rising slightly by January 1906 to 3453. These transportation figures give only a very incomplete indication of the size of the exile category. They only include the katorga exiles (for the period when katorga included exile) and that part of the other exile population that was in transit on its way to places of exile or was temporarily located in the primary prisons and the transportation system. The data on the total number of exiles in Siberia are very unsatisfactory. We know the numbers sent out, but their subsequent fate is very unclear. A large number of exiles undoubtedly tried to flee from exile. Many were apprehended and returned. Many of those who were apprehended refused to give their names and were given such new names as ‘Nepomnyashchii’ (‘Cannotremember’). These were the vagabonds (brodyagi) who often terrorised the countryside and would be arrested and automatically sent back into exile every year. Theoretically these categories should have disappeared after the abolition of exile in 1900, but as can be seen from appendix Table 2.6 ‘sentenced to exile’, and Table 2.7(d) ‘exile’, only a few categories disappeared. There was a reduction from 13 540 prisoners being sentenced to exile in January 1886 to 6000–7000 in January 1898–January 1906 (see Table 2.6, appendix). Table 2.7 in the appendix shows the reduction in numbers exiled by courts for life, those not accepted by the peasant community after serving a sentence, and those sentenced to exile as vagrants. Of much greater interest than the simple classification of the type of prisoner is the available data on the condition of the population in these different categories and, in particular, mortality within the different sections of the prison system. But before presenting and analysing these mortality data it is necessary to make a couple of points about their reliability and meaning. There is a slight ambiguity in the term used to describe mortality. Until 1910 mortality was listed as ‘deaths in prison hospitals’. Since it is clear that


many deaths occurred outside the prison hospitals, it might be thought that these mortality figures would be very incomplete. But an investigation of their magnitude and of the overall balance of prisoner movements indicates that these figures referred to virtually all prisoner mortality. Presumably the prisoners’ corpses would be taken to the prison hospital for the medical staff to complete a report on the cause of death, and the hospital would be recorded as the place of death irrespective of where the death had actually occurred. The prison administrators were apparently reluctant to record that there had been many deaths at place of hard labour or during transportation. This applies particularly to the records of deaths in the transportation system, which were so high that it seems very unlikely that many prisoner deaths could have been excluded. Second, we need to note a technical point concerning crude death rates for non-standard populations. The crude death rate is the aggregate of the deaths in a population of different ages and sexes. Mortality rates are highly age-specific, and to some extent sex-specific. Mortality rates are always very high for very young age groups, very high for the elderly and lower in-between. This produces the well-known ‘U’ age-specific mortality curve. Women generally have a higher life expectancy than men at all ages, although deaths in childbirth can affect this. The age and sex profile of the Russian prison population included very few children, relatively few elderly people, and less than 10 per cent women. In a society with extremely high infant and juvenile mortality rates, the normal mortality rate, when measured in crude terms, is drastically reduced. Normal mortality rates for this predominantly adult male prison population before the Revolution would probably have been only about one-third of the normal civilian rate for a normally structured high-birth-rate society. Consequently, when considering these computed crude prison mortality rates we need to compare them with adjusted civil mortality figures. In the comparisons given below I have adjusted the civil mortality data by two-thirds. Figure 2.1, based on data given in Table 2.8, provides a comparison of total prisoner mortality in the period 1885–1906 in comparison with adjusted civil mortality. These indicators suggest that prison mortality rates were overall between 2.5 and 3 times as high as the equivalent adjusted civil mortality rates in the 1880s. The prison rate rose to almost four times the adjusted civil mortality rate in the famine and cholera year of 1892, but then fell significantly in 1906 to a level of only 30 per cent above the adjusted civil rate. This is an extremely impressive and dramatic improvement in material conditions, which accompanied the prison reform process. In 1885 the mortality rate in the primary prisons was 30.2 per thousand, about 10 per cent lower than the average for the entire prison system. There was a significant overall decline in mortality in this period, apart from a massive upsurge in 1891–93 that was associated with famine and cholera. By 1906 primary prison mortality is reported to have fallen to an extremely

38


civil adj. prison 70 60

CDR

50 40 30 20 10

1905

1903

1901

1899

1897

1895

1893

1891

1889

1887

1885

0

Year Figure 2.1 Russian crude death rates per thousand population: civil adjusted and prisoner, 1885–1906

low rate of 13.9 per thousand. There is an interesting, observable difference between the mortality rates in the Polish and Russian prisons during this period. Polish prison mortality rates were normally a little lower than those in Russian prisons. Like the Russian rates, they rose during the famine, but they peaked in 1891 at a higher rate than Russia, and then fell significantly in 1892. The normal pattern of lower Polish mortality was also disturbed by much higher rates in 1903 and 1904, the last years for which separate Polish data are readily available. The mortality rate for the 10 000–11 000 prisoners held in the correctional arrest prisons was significantly lower than both the primary prison rate and the rate for the entire prison system. This is presumably explained by the less transitory nature of the population in the correctional system and therefore its lower susceptibility to infectious diseases. The hard labour katorga mortality rates present a rather surprising result. In the 1880s and early 1890s the katorga mortality rates were slightly lower than the primary prison mortality rates. But following these years the katorga mortality rates fell far less sharply, as a result of which by 1905 katorga mortality rates were about double the normal prison rates. This presumably indicates the predominant influence of the unhealthy transitory population in the primary prisons in the earlier years and the predominant influence of the harsher regime in the katorga prisons in the later years. Even more remarkable are the mortality rates within the transportation system. These rates were extremely high in the 1880s, when they were more


than five times the normal prison mortality rate, at 165 per thousand per year in 1885 and 272 per thousand per year in 1886. The latter mortality rate clearly indicates an epidemic within the transportation system. These rates fell very dramatically from 128 per thousand per year in 1896 to a level of 50 to 70 per thousand per year in 1904–06. These figures show just how wretched the tsarist transportation system must have been. The descriptions of George Kennan rival those of the Soviet GULag, but the statistical evidence indicates that mortality levels were much higher. The decline in mortality in the tsarist transportation system is undoubtedly related to the discontinuation of forced marches to the place of exile, of the incarceration of prisoners in the unsanitary conditions of the transportation forts (etap and poluetap) and the concentration and holding points, and on the infamous prison barges. Although transportation by rail in what came to be known as ‘Stolypin wagons’ had a very bad reputation, it replaced something that was very much worse. The main factor in reducing mortality here is probably the reduction of time spent in the gruelling and unsanitary conditions of this transportation system. The material indications of reduced mortality indicate the great improvement in health and welfare that was taking place at this time. This provides dramatic confirmation the picture given by Adams and others of the success of the prison reform movement at this time. But unfortunately this was not the end of the story.

2.3 Changes in prison developments, 1906–14 Following the 1905 Revolution and the government’s harsh reaction to it, great changes were introduced throughout the penal system. The dramatic switch in policy regarding death sentences under martial law following the peasant disturbances of 1906 is well known (see Table 2.4). From virtually no death sentences in the first half of the nineteenth century, to one or two dozen death sentences in the 1880s to 1906, there was a rapid tenfold growth by 1906 and growth by probably another factor of six by the peak year of 1908. While there remains some uncertainty over the exact number of sentences and executions in these years, the general pattern of sharp growth is clear. What is less well known is the deterioration in the prison system that occurred in these years. There were several reasons for this deterioration: firstly, Russia’s defeat by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War and the need to accept a quick peace treaty led Russia to cede half of Sakhalin Island to Japan and to promise the Japanese that all convicts would be removed from the island. This required a massive transfer of many of the most hardened offenders to other prison sites on the mainland. Secondly, the upsurge of revolutionary and peasant disturbances resulted in a great increase of arrests and other punitive actions (apart from the executions described in Table 2.4). This added to overcrowding and a deterioration in health and welfare

40


Table 2.4 Death sentences and executions per year, 1876–1913: various sources

1876–80 1881–85 1886–90 1891–95 1896–1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913

Rawson Figures Sentences

Gernet/Zheltov

Gernet

District Military Courts

Fields Court Martial

District Military

All

Military

Civilians

Sentenced

Sentenced

25 15.2 16.2 9.6 15.6 9 28 11 19 25 247 627 1342 629 166 113 143

5.6 2.8 1.8 0.6 0.6 1 6 1 0 13 65 84 50 25 11 12 28

19.4 12.4 14.4 9 14.4 8 22 10 19 12 182 543 1292 604 155 101 115

Executed 7.2 0.6 0 0 4.8

}1102 }

}683 }

All Executed

Executed 13.6 12.8 15.8 9.6 10.8

72 450 1056 1741 1435 434 237 229 115

10 144 456 825 543 129 58 108 25

574 1139 1340 717 129 73 126

Sources: Death sentences from district military courts: Rawson, ‘The Death Penalty in Late Tsarist Russia’, Russian History, 33, 36–7; Fields court martial death sentences and executions: 1876–1900; M. N. Gernet, Smertnaya Kazn¢ (Moscow, 1913), p. 97, citing Prof. Tagantsev; 1906–07: V. P. Zheltov, ‘Statistika prestupnosti’, in A. Mironov, Rossiya 1913g., Statistiko-dokumental¢nii spravochnik (St Petersburg, 1993), p. 400; District military courts death sentences and executions: 1876–1905: Gernet, Smertnaya Kazn¢, p. 97. Note: It is unclear why Gernet’s figures for executions by district military courts in 1881–95 exceed Rawson’s figures for death sentences by district military courts in these years. It is conceivable that the Rawson figures for the nineteenth century include fields court martial. Zheltov’s figures on field court martials refer to the six-month period from the end of 1906 to the beginning of 1907.

conditions in the prison system. A significant part of the increase in numbers of prisoners was the consequence of the growth of ‘hooliganism’ in these years.29 Weissman argues that, by 1910, police were describing the growth of hooliganism ‘as a more serious threat to rural order than a renewal of peasant rebellion’.30 Stephen Frank has also recently described ‘the veritable explosion’ in rural criminal cases and convictions during the years 1903–13.31 Although the police were rather ineffective in their attempts to arrest the perpetrators of this hooliganism and rural crime, they did arrest a large number of restless rural youths and exposed them to a very severe prison regime. The prison system was in crisis. Throughout the entire system penal mortality was increasing dramatically. From a level of just 30 per cent above civil


civil adj. Prison 60 50

CDR

40 30 20 10

1915

1914

1913

1912

1911

1910

1909

1908

1907

1906

0

Year Figure 2.2 Russian crude death rates per thousand population: civil adjusted and prisoner, 1906–15

adjusted mortality rates in 1906, it rose rapidly in 1907, 1908 and 1909 until it was again three to four times greater than the equivalent adjusted civil mortality rate. Prison mortality fell slightly in 1913–14, but remained at about four times the normal adjusted civil mortality rates. It rose significantly in 1915, and presumably even more in 1916, although data for this last year are currently unavailable (see Figure 2.2). The separate sections of the prison system reacted differently. As the number of prisoners in primary prisons rose sharply from 72 411 on 1 January 1906 to 139 415 on 1 January 1913, mortality rates rose sharply by over 400 per cent from the record low of 13.9 per thousand in 1906 to 16.2 per thousand in 1907; 30.5 per thousand in 1908; 37.4 per thousand in 1909; and 47.5 per thousand in 1910. It remained at over 40 per thousand until 1913, fell slightly in 1914, and rose again to 54.8 per thousand in 1915, the last year for which figures are available. Correctional arrest prison mortality rates rose sharply to 40.5 per thousand in 1909, which was a record high for the entire period from the 1880s. Figures for subsequent years were considerably lower, but began rising again, reaching 33.5 per thousand in 1915. Katorga mortality rates also rose to unprecedented levels of 46.4 per thousand in 1909, 59.6 per thousand in 1910, and a peak of 67.4 per thousand in 1911. There was a slight reduction in later years, but 1915 still registered a level of 54 per thousand.

42


The only area which did not experience a record upswing in mortality was the transportation system. Even there mortality rates rose sharply from 40.2 per thousand in 1907 to 67.7 per thousand in 1909, but then fell to levels comparable with the rest of the prison system (26.4 per thousand in 1914 and 38.8 per thousand in 1915). The position of the prisons during the war is a little unclear. Naturally the government was eager to reduce prison numbers and send more men to the front. There seems to be no doubt that numbers of prisoners in most civilian categories fell. But there were two additional developments, which produced two new categories of camp-dwellers that greatly supplemented the prison population in Russia. First, there was a very large influx of refugees who had been forcibly evacuated from Poland by the tsarist army and who in many regards could be considered part of the old exile system. Many of these were Jewish and had been forced to leave their properties as a result of claims that they were German sympathisers.32 A second new, mass group comprised German and Austrian prisoners of war, who were often moved into the former labour camps. The tsarist government insisted that POWs work on forced labour projects and some of these projects, like the construction of the Murmansk railway, appear to have caused very high mortality rates. Thirty thousand POW workers out of a total labour force of 70 000 are reported to have been working on the construction of this railway in 1916.33 According to another report there were 25 000 fatalities among the 70 000 German POWs working on the railway.34 The situation in the Central Asian parts of the empire was even more complex, with massive rebellion in 1916 and the use of extensive violence by the state. These are clearly topics that need more detailed investigation.

4.4 Conclusion The conventional view in the West, as expressed by Pipes, Conquest and Solzhenitsyn, is that there can be no comparison between the tsarist and Soviet prison systems. The number of tsarist executions is clearly minute in comparison with the later Soviet figures, and the scale of katorga and exile is also extremely low. While this is undeniable, it is important to stress the remarkable changes and deterioration in the tsarist prison systems that came about in the last decade of tsarist rule. Furthermore the main western work, which concentrates on the discourse over prison reform, seems to have completely overlooked this disastrous change in the late tsarist period and consequently tends to give a highly misleading picture of these developments. For the period up to 1905, I agree with Adams that there was remarkable progress in Russian prison reform and prison conditions. I differ from him, however, in my assessment of the subsequent period. My account of these developments emphasises the importance of the discontinuity in the earlier trends that began following the 1905 Revolution. Of course, Adams is


aware of the severe repression that occurred in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution, and that this ‘kept the prisons overcrowded until 1912’.35 But he nevertheless tends to ignore the unfavourable developments of the last peacetime decade of the empire: Russia’s penal system has an extremely negative reputation . . . For most of the tsarist period there were good reasons for this . . . But long after Russia had abolished these ‘anachronisms’, the reputation for backwardness and brutality remained . . . For the last forty or fifty years of the tsarist regime, however, [this reputation] is undeserved.36 Although it had accomplished little in the way of prison reform before 1879 and had not ended in 1917, the discussion slowly led to substantive changes in criminal punishment and in the physical condition, population, regimes, and administration of Russia’s prisons . . . I am prepared to believe, although I think that it would be difficult to prove one way or another, that, like many other things Russian, prisons were not as clean or as orderly as were their European counterparts. What I am quite sure of, however, is that Russia, which had a smaller percentage of its population in prison than did any other European nation, gradually made its prisons cleaner, roomier, healthy places. By the end of the nineteenth century, certainly by 1917, Russia was running its prison system for the same purposes and according to the same standards in use in European nations and the United States.37 Adams presents no evidence in his book to support his claims concerning the cleanliness or healthiness of the prisons either in the earlier period or in this later post-1906 period. My review of the prison mortality data shows a remarkable decline in prison mortality between the 1880s and 1906, but then a sharp rise. There was a massive departure from previous trends towards reduced mortality and presumed improved healthiness which occurred in the Russian prisons in the years following the 1905 Revolution, or more precisely following the counter-revolution and reaction of 1906. This distinction is important, when we come to look at the relationship between the tsarist prison system and the subsequent Soviet prison system. The tsarist prison system was not one in which liberalism was gradually bringing about improved conditions from an initially bad situation. It was one in which the liberal achievements and health improvements of the earlier years were being destroyed. Instead of seeing the final decade of the tsarist regime as the end of a golden period of improvement, it could be seen as the first wave of increased repression as the modern police state made its first incursions into a semi-modern and rapidly modernising society. Of course, as Richard Pipes and many others have pointed out, the scale of tsarist repression at its height in the post-1905 period was still insignificant in comparison with what came later. While I certainly do not deny this assertion, I think that this static perception has tended to conceal the real mag-

44


nitude of the changes and deterioration in the tsarist prison system that took place in the final peacetime decade of the tsarist system. And it therefore tends to cloud our understanding of the origins of the modern repressive system. I argue that it is here, in the reversal of this liberal trend in the post-1905 period, that we can see the roots of the monstrous developments that were to come during the First World War, Civil War, collectivisation and the Ezhovshchina. Of course, the later upsurges (or waves, to use Solzhenitsyn’s terminology) of repression were all progressively much larger. But that should not conceal the fact that the first of these four great waves of repression (mass extrajudicial killings, exile, forced labour, and a serious deterioration in the conditions within the entire prison system) occurred in the last years of the tsarist period.38 While my view ultimately differs from that of Bruce Adams, who tends to ignore the significance of this late tsarist reversal in liberalisation, it also differs from the well-known views of Richard Pipes, which tend to overlook the significance of the earlier tsarist liberalisation. Pipes argues that the nature of the tsarist patrimonial state and its violent conflict with the revolutionaries in the 1870s and early 1880s set the scene for the development of a police state.39 While there is some truth in this, I find Pipes’ argument to be overstated.40 And I agree with Adams that the achievements of the period prior to the 1906 reaction were far more substantial than Pipes claims. Despite his differences with Pipes, Adams makes a similar static comparison of the relationship between Soviet and tsarist repression, asserting that ‘in 1918 the Cheka managed to execute more people than the tsarist government had in the previous 300 years’. He fails to note that similar claims could have been made for 1906. And when he does come to comment directly on the relationship between the tsarist and the Stalinist repressive systems, Adams is more interested in what he describes as the ‘mistaken conception’ that this comparison produces, than with any causal link: Our minds, colored by the knowledge of very real horrors, move from Kennan to Solzhenitsyn, and it seems as though things only went from bad to worse. The brief period in which, for better or worse, reformers did modernize Russia’s prisons is buried in the much greater mass of information about the ills of the system over a much longer period.41 While I agree with this statement to some extent, I also think that the even briefer period of the last 12 years of the tsarist regime which exhibited a sharp reversal in these trends and the first mass wave of repression has been buried under two layers:42 it has been buried by Adams in his writings about the improvements in the system over his forty-fifty-year period. But it has also been buried, and much of its records destroyed, as a result of the magnitude of the destruction that came after it.43 We consequently face a task of exhuming it from these accretions, and if Adams describes his work as ‘revisionist’,44 then presumably mine is doubly so.


Appendix Table 2.5 Russian prisoners according to institution

1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915* 1916*

All types of prisoner

Russian & Polish prisons

Correctional Arrest Dept

Katorga

Transportation

95 509 97 337 87 696 94 488 100 003 105 817 108 845 107 401 109 485 108 169 113 729 116 376 107 753 80 133 85 656 75 654 83 209 89 670 89 141 88 171 87 791 95 234 93 537 75 009 88 520 122 008 156 155 177 240 171 413 177 017 187 855 192 387 178 951 169 085 142 997

71 914 74 449 68 991 76 694 79 097 83 834 85 420 83 917 85 205 84 426 91 261 94 541 86 412 61 212 70 009 63 391 69 313 72 974 71 615 70 119 69 548 75 246 73 347 59 750 72 411 99 982 126 355 141 251 135 731 135 678 138 306 139 415 132 204 124 528 101 762

11 006 10 580 7 262 7 823 9 816 11 221 11 279 11 157 11 248 10 953 10 575 10 426 11 597 8 086 7 088 5 423 7 518 9 011 8 741 9 519 10 179 11 346 13 268 9 567 10 934 13 825 18 891 20 986 19 778 18 235 19 300 19 779 16 206 16 523 14 777

9 183 8 414 8 068 6 531 7 324 7 370 7 900 7 208 7 994 7 779 6 033 5 876 5 559 5 432 4 376 3 600 3 610 3 569 4 195 4 191 4 767 4 680 4 364 3 186 1 722 4 845 6 279 9 618 10 757 19 538 20 701 23 218 21 453 20 409 19 606

3406 3894 3375 3440 3766 3392 4246 5119 5038 5011 5860 5533 4185 5403 4183 3240 2768 4116 4590 4342 3297 3962 2558 2506 3453 3356 4630 5385 5147 3566 4719 5097 4890 4107 4120

Amur Railway

1775 4829 4878 3518 2732

Source: Assembled from Otchet po Glav. Tyuremnomu Uprav. za 1882 (St Petersburg, 1884) and for other years up to 1915g., ch. 2, prilozh, Petrograd 1916. Note: * excludes areas evacuated during the war. Data refer to numbers of prisoners on 1 January each year.

46

1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898

Under investigation

Sentenced to term

Sentenced to exile

In transportation

Voluntarily following prisoners

Others

All

39 844

40 986

8 647

4 063

676

714

94 930

27 519 26 936 26 272 24 383 23 547 23 756 25 572 24 502 24 215 22 243 22 260 22 096 21 522

49 940 56 355 58 021 58 348 59 705 59 668 62 588 65 971 61 836 34 892 45 127 38 067 47 002

13 540 13 186 15 034 14 689 16 053 15 318 13 699 14 625 12 557 13 282 10 168 8 197 7 267

5 432 5 250 5 561 6 745 6 755 6 293 7 711 7 097 6 085 6 924 5 651 5 331 5 360

2850 3470 3137 2458 2583 2371 3112 3242 2329 1917 1615 1297 1263

692 681 824 778 842 763 878 939 731 875 835 666 795

99 973 105 878 108 845 107 401 109 485 108 169 113 560 116 376 107 753 80 133 85 656 75 654 83 209

Children

2447

All incl. children

97 377

99 973 105 878 108 845 107 401 109 485 108 169 113 560 116 376 107 753 80 133 85 656 75 654 83 209


Table 2.6 Russian prisoners according to category within institution

23 342 23 738 24 074 24 535 25 831 29 663 28 937 38 787 49 107 58 531 62 878 60 317 59 269 62 060 62 670 64 984 52 080 38 969

50 237 50 223 48 647 50 318 54 158 56 462 38 402 40 116 53 717 70 251 78 923 75 433 75 732 81 169

7 140 7 395 7 373 6 396 6 784 6 294 6 472 6 289 9 603 14 395 22 904 26 906 30 964 31 124

68 315 60 014

29 746 28 784

6 214 6 138 5 683 5 573 5 979 5 281 5 466 5 201 7 600 9 880 8 933 7 373 6 665 9 733 7 330 7 596 12 571 8 242

1734 1834 1718 1410 1814 1728 1061 1190 1500 1561 1986 1996 3 8 4 14 7 0

1003 813 712 619 568 708 547 3869 3771 5407 4582 2467 1800 1365 1541 3809 6047

89 670 90 141 88 207 88 851 95 134 100 134 80 885 95 452 125 298 160 025 180 206 174 492 174 433 185 459 190 067 173 553 166 528 142 056

2284 2396 2320 1720 2557 1803

89 670 90 141 88 207 88 851 95 134 100 134 80 885 95 452 125 298 160 025 180 206 174 492 176 717 187 855 192 387 175 273 169 085 143 859

Note: Data refer to numbers of prisoners on 1 January each year. Source: Assembled from Otchet po Glav. Tyuremnomu Uprav. za 1882 (St Petersburg, 1884) and for other years up to 1915g., ch. 2, prilozh, Petrograd 1916.


1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916

48


Table 2.7 Russian prisoners according to time spent within each category in year equivalents each year a Primary prison

b Correctional-arrest division

c Arrest

d Exile

Under invest.

Sentenced to arrest division

Sent. to arrest

Ssylnokatorzhn

8

9

Sentenced to prison All

1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915

1 yr+

3

Less 1 yr

All

1 yr+

01–12 m

4

5

6

7

1

2

23 193

21 424

26 669

25 884 26 219 25 184 23 712 22 422 22 823 22 943 24 294 23 357 22 362 21 340 21 380 20 956 21 887 22 892 23 129 22 709 24 604 27 071 28 924 30 443 46 133 51 293 62 443 60 195 55 695 57 901 59 182 60 665 58 505 41 933

32 881 35 057 37 329 37 127 37 862 38 458 38 721 42 725 41 277 36 373 26 272 25 276 28 439 32 755 32 550 31 140 30 724 32 027 32 861 28 878 24 517 27 228 37 663 44 356 45 632 40 623 39 627 41 433 32 813 37 239 30 011

12 337 14 786 17 258 18 585 19 226 19 249 19 670 19 640 20 943 19 102 12 616 11 174 12 201 13 715 15 455 15 832 16 312 18 085 20 635 18 635 15 273 16 400 22 289 27 429 29 600 30 541 34 713 38 794 33 845 34 750 33 034

2612 2692 3686 4094 4093 3918 4206 4603 4132 2675 3632 5032 6652 7621

22 664 25 747 29 069 28 456 27 047 26 806 27 821 28 258 24 746 21 842 23 596 32 631 37 705 38 010

8 980

8 885 9 481 11 405 13 066 13 373 13 664 15 374 17 909 16 174 12 268 13 750 18 813 23 354 25 462 26 939 30 963 34 843 29 805 30 252 29 782

2289 2720 2311 2390 2459 2648 2711 2726 2461 3005 2650 3476 4074 4138 3602 3750 3952 4040 4498 3252

884 1051 1079 936 955 738 450 506 481 428 259 283 422 499 500 521 535 532 582 435 431 908 944 591 290 218 207 212 131 372 989

8 265 8 127 9 183 9 725 9 940 11 312 10 079 8 434 8 563 7 838 6 657 5 802 5 143 4 904 5 246 5 789 6 211 6 260 5 833 6 400 6 123 6 633 9 798 16 451 23 095 28 529 29 424 31 836 30 379 29 352 28 987

Source: Assembled from Otchet po Glav Tyuremnomu Uprav za 1882, and other years up to 1915g., ch. 2, prilozh, StPb 1884–Pg 1916.


d Exile Exile – settlers

Exile as tramp

Exile for life

Rural community Ex.con

10

11

12

13

e Transportation

f Others

g Voluntary

h All

17

18

19

20

Centre All

Admin Exile Admin ord. ord. 14 15 16

1530

853

339

1142

800

70

13 712

4 569

582

949

91 098

1849 2016 1842 1945 2190 1690 1341 1555 1414 1618 1686 1127 936 799 493 413 159 38 26 79 202 128 168 170 141 229 307 376 420 456 358

948 1057 1068 1130 888 998 867 917 558 664 674 345 137 109 114 114 114 18 2 2 13 11 5 3 3 0 0 0 0 0 0

356 317 311 344 385 383 370 351 427 359 284 257 194 206 134 145 40 9 10 8 7 7 23 37 36 0 0 0 0 0 0

859 760 750 722 696 793 901 1035 1224 1056 1347 952 622 646 341 164 7 2 2 1 3 1 0 8 5 0 0 0 0 0 0

778 641 535 485 428 472 603 886 1078 1005 966 727 543 601 533 366 168 239 276 316 338 1198 1275 1246 819 468 337 264 270 209 122

99 61 85 78 76 52 44 52 55 104 142 105 77 51 31 38 13 27 76 55 13 203 254 698 331 173 145 73 76 264 331

13 154 12 978 13 774 14 428 14 602 15 699 14 206 13 230 13 318 12 643 11 756 9 315 7 651 7 317 6 891 7 030 6 712 6 593 6 224 6 862 6 699 8 181 11 524 18 611 24 431 29 399 30 214 32 549 31 145 30 281 29 798

5 690 5 450 5 710 6 018 6 368 5 892 6 546 7 708 6 977 6 351 5 906 5 570 5 199 5 697 5 772 5 656 5 377 5 735 6 131 5 948 5 228 6 562 8 469 9 701 9 100 6 770 8 009 8 017 7 172 9 481 10 161

682 745 744 745 835 744 782 964 773 860 844 733 720 906 999 789 659 746 798 711 1338 4696 4884 6298 3833 2237 1598 1498 1395 2815 5771

3443 3456 3560 2574 2786 2874 3014 3287 3253 2794 2253 1854 1666 1900 1802 1761 1606 1566 1703 1397 1216 1291 1436 1791 1926 2027 2138 2174 1755 2031 2096

94 955 99 742 104 637 104 124 105 057 106 478 106 331 112 354 110 378 100 913 81 246 75 586 77 254 84 676 86 862 85 857 84 632 89 889 96 005 91 790 85 144 111 400 138 501 171 219 175 008 167 511 209 120 222 652 202 766 210 224 186 827

50


Table 2.8 Russian prison mortality for different categories of prisoners: Crude Death Rate per thousand population Civil CDR

1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915

Civil basic

Civil adjusted

35.8 33.2 33.8 33.4 35.5 36.7 35.8 41.0 34.4 34.3 35.5 33.3 31.7 33.2 31.2 31.1 32.1 31.5 30.0 29.9 31.7 29.9 28.4 28.3 29.5 31.5 27.4 26.5 27.4

14 13 13 13 14 14 14 16 13 13 14 13 12 13 12 12 12 12 11 11 12 11 11 11 11 12 10 10 10

All prisoners

34.8 38.8 32.2 29.8 35.8 38.3 43.0 59.0 45.0 39.1 32.3 29.5 26.2 28.2 26.2 27.1 22.7 22.0 20.4 19.6 19.5 14.4 16.5 30.0 38.6 48.1 49.4 44.0 38.8 35.9 52.1

Primary prisons All

Russian

Polish

30.2 30.4 28.6 29.9 31.4 31.4 36.9 54.9 38.8 32.5 25.9 25.3 23.2 24.2 22.8 23.2 20.7 20.7 19.7 18.0 15.7 13.9 16.2 30.5 37.4 47.5 49.9 45.6 40.1 37.5 54.8

30.6 31.0 29.0 30.3 31.7 31.4 36.6 57.8 40.4 33.7 26.6 25.4 23.6 24.5 22.7 23.8 20.8 21.1 19.5 17.4

27.6 25.5 25.6 26.8 28.7 31.4 39.3 32.0 24.5 20.5 19.4 24.9 19.8 20.7 23.5 18.2 20.2 17.3 22.1 24.4

CorrectArrest Dept

Katorga System

Transportation System

13.6 17.4 14.6 17.8 20.5 21.5 28.9 36.7 29.5 27.1 15.3 16.1 13.1 25.9 25.3 16.6 15.8 14.4 13.0 15.4 12.7 9.9 14.9 25.0 40.5 38.4 31.2 28.5 23.0 21.5 33.5

28.1 27.3 30.1 24.0 37.2 39.8 44.2 48.8 35.4 25.7 27.3 28.1 25.5 31.4 32.3 39.1 39.8 31.9 31.6 24.0 29.0 20.4 19.1 21.5 46.4 59.6 67.4 51.3 43.7 39.7 54.0

165.1 271.9 150.9 69.2 148.6 182.1 163.6 173.3 174.9 165.4 143.8 127.8 111.8 102.2 83.8 97.4 60.5 52.4 61.3 71.9 66.0 48.1 40.2 64.0 67.7 64.2 34.2 35.7 34.8 26.4 38.8

Source: Calculated from data in Otchet po Glav Tyuremnomu Uprav za 1882, and other years up to 1915g., ch. 2, prilozh, StPb 1884–Pg1916.


Notes * This chapter is based on a paper that was presented to the International Conference on ‘Colonial Places, Convict Spaces: Penal Transportation in Global Context, c. 1600–1940’, University of Leicester (UK), 9–10 December 1999. I am grateful to the participants of that conference for their comments. I am also grateful to Dr Peter Holquist for his detailed comments on this chapter and for sharing with me some of his unpublished research. 1. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), chapters 1 and 2. 2. John Howard, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (Warrington, 1777), and The Lazarettos of Europe (London, 1791). 3. John Howard died of typhus in Taganrog in 1790 on his second tour of the Russian prisons. 4. B. F. Adams points out that Petr Kropotkin, Vladimir Burtsev, Feliks Volkhovskii and others who were familiar with English and European prisons, as well as with Russian prisons, claimed that Russian prisons were no worse than the western prisons of the time. What shocked George Kennan and other western commentators was that gentlemen and ladies were forced to endure these conditions for political crimes: ‘ignorant about living and traveling conditions for the average free Russian and about the inside of prisons in their own countries, they were appalled by the conditions of imprisonment and exile’. See B. F. Adams, The Politics of Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia, 1863–1917 (DeKalb, IL: North Illinois University Press, 1996), pp. 5–6. 5. Classic account of these changes are provided by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939); Thorsten Sellin, Slavery and the Penal System (New York: Elsevier, 1976); David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: a Study in Social Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); and Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1977). 6. This also relates to the main argument of Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labour: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987). 7. The best known of the travellers’ accounts are George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, 2 vols (New York: Century Company, 1891), and Anton Chekhov, The Island: a Journey to Sakhalin (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967) (first published in 1893). For reports of former inmates the best known are F. Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead (first published in the 1860s) and Peter Kropotkin, In Russian and French Prisons (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). See also the journal Katorga i ssyilka that was published by the Soviet association of former tsarist prisoners. 8. M. N. Gernet, Istoriya tsarskoi tyur¢mi, vols 1–5 (Moscow, 1961) (first published in 1951). For the late tsarist period the work concentrates on the larger central forts (Petro-Pavlovsk and Shlussenberg) rather than on the prison system as a whole. 9. D. Rawson, ‘The Death Penalty in Late Tsarist Russia: an investigation of judicial procedures’, Russian History/Histoire Russe, 11, no. 1 (1984) 36–7, Table 1. Rawson has characterised the government’s attitude to the penal system at this time as being one in which it adopted ‘the rather ambiguous position of undermining the legal principles it had itself created, while still endeavoring to uphold them as the basis for its judicial system’; ibid., p. 29. Whether this was the conscious

52

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

The Pre-Revolutionary Period ambiguity of a united government or the contradictions of different parts of a complex and poorly integrated governmental system was not pursued. Adams, The Politics of Punishment. French and Spanish use of galley slaves ceased in 1715; see Thorsten Sellin, Slavery and the Penal System (New York: Elsevier, 1976). See A. D. Margolis, Tyur¢ma i ssylka v imperatorskoi Rossii: issledovaniya i arkhivnye nakhodki (Moscow, 1995), pp. 7–8. Andrei Vinius was half-Dutch and half-Russian. He was entrusted by Peter with diplomatic tasks in the early part of Peter’s reign, before becoming Director of the Post Office, Inspector of Artillery and Founder of the Urals Iron Works. See O. P. Podosenov, Zakonodatel¢stvo o katorge i ssylke v Rossii v xviii veke (Irkutsk, 1982), p. 4. Cyril Bryner, ‘The Issue of Capital Punishment in the Reign of Elizabeth Petrovna’, The Russian Review, 49 (1990) 389–416. Margolis, Tyur¢ma i ssylka, p. 10. Adams, The Politics of Punishment, pp. 26–33. Chekhov’s account of his visit and attempted survey of the penal establishments on Sakhalin in the 1890s is of considerable interest in describing the conditions in this otherwise obscure location. Unfortunately, having a world-renowned novelist carrying out a census has certain drawbacks when he presents the results in a literary work rather than in a less creative formal manner; see Chekhov, The Island. Calculated from data in Obshchii svod po imperii rezul¢tatov razrabotki dannykh pervoi perepisi naseleniya 1897g., vol. 2 (St Petersburg, 1905), pp. 240–50. Australian imprisonment rates in 1897 were 1045 per million for Victoria, 1817 per million for New South Wales, and 772 per million for Tasmania; calculated from data in S. K. Mukherjee et al., eds, Sourcebook of Australian Criminal and Social Statistics, 1804–1988 (Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminiology, 1989). After petitioning from the Ministry of the Interior a few minor categories of exile were retained; see A. D. Margolis, ‘Systema sibirskoi ssylki i zakon ot 12 iyunya 1900 goda’, in Tyur¢ma i ssylka, pp. 13–28. In later years these minor exceptions were to grow significantly. Gernet pays little attention to it. A recent Russian historian, A. D. Margolis, does give far more emphasis to this law; see ibid. Adams appears to have been influenced by the publicity about this event, although he too does not spend much time describing it. See Otchet po Glavn. Tyuremn. Uprav. (St Petersburg, 1886–1916). The statistical reports generally came in part 2. There were a few changes in the way in which the data were presented in the 1870s–1884 which make comparisons with the later data complicated. There were also changes in the presentation of these data in 1910, which further complicates these comparisons. Svod statisticheskikh svedenii po delam ugolovnym, published annually by the Russian Ministry of Justice from 1872 to 1913, and their annual Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii Ministerstva Yustitsii, from 1884 to 1913. These materials were recently reviewed by B. N. Mironov, in ‘Prestupnost’ v Rossii v XIX-nachale XX veka’, Otechestvennaya istoriya, no. 1 (1998) 24–42. Although Mironov provides a useful indication of decadal changes, his analysis fails to identify the important reversal of the post-1906 period, which requires an analysis on an annual basis. Unfortunately Tarnovskii’s summaries do not cover the last decade, and this is another reason for the burying of the story of the dramatic changes of the last


25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

period. For Tarnovskii’s last summary see E. N. Tarnovskii, ‘Dvizhenie prestupnosti v Rossiiskoi Imperii za 1899–1908gg.’ in Vestnik Ministerstva Yustitsii, no. 9 (1909) 52–99. See Kratkii ocherk tyuremnogo ustroistva i meropriyatii v oblasti tyuremnogo dela v Rossii za 1905–1910gg. (St Petersburg, 1910) (which was reproduced from the Ministry of Justice Journal, Zhurnal Ministerstva Yustitsii, 7 (1910) 175–242), for the VIIIth International Prison Congress in Washington in 1910. A similar review had been produced by A. M. Stremoukhov in 1905 for the Budapest Congress. Otchet po Glav. Tyuremn.Uprav. za 1884 (St Petersburg, 1886), pp. 1–4. Elsewhere I have argued that similar misguided gestures concerning rural taxation amnesties in 1904 had disastrous consequencies in aggravating the rural question. See S. G. Wheatcroft, ‘Crises and the Condition of the Peasantry in Late Imperial Russia’, in E. Kingston-Mann and T. Mixter, eds, Peasant Economy, Culture and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 128–74. That is, they excluded the lowest-level village lock-ups. See Neil B. Weissman, ‘Rural Crime in Tsarist Russia: the Question of Hooliganism, 1905–1914’, Slavic Review, 37 (1978) 228–40. Ibid., 234. See Stephen Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914 (University of California Press, 1999), p. 80. See P. Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), and P. Holquist, ‘To Count, to Extract, to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia’, in R. Suny and T. Martin, eds, Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (forthcoming). A Soviet historian Griner reported in 1949 that German POWs accounted for 33 000 out of a total forced labour force of 70 000 who built the railway, but he does not give the number of deaths involved; Griner, ‘Iz istorii Murmana i Murmanskoi (Kirovskoi) zheleznoi dorogi’, Letopis’ Severa, 1 (1949) 175–88. Elsa Brandstrom, Among Prisoners of War in Russia and Siberia (London: Hutchinson, 1929), pp. 137–42. Elsa Brandstrom was the daughter of the Swedish Ambassador who had diplomatic responsibility for the interests of Germany during the First World War. She was also a nurse, who personally investigated the conditions of German POWs. Adams, The Politics of Punishment, p. 6. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., pp. 4, 9. While the chronology of the third and fourth waves is quite clear and distinct, the chronology and nature of the first and second is less clear. Peter Holquist has suggested that my first wave of 1906–12 should be treated as a first breaker, which was to be followed in close succession by either a wave covering the 1914–22 period, or two waves of 1914–17 and 1918–22. Certainly the disturbed period of 1914–17 requires greater attention and I am delighted that Dr Holquist, Professor Gatrell and others are working in more detail on this important and previously relatively ignored period. But from my point of view, that of analysing available data on penal systems and state-organised killing operations, the period of the war and Civil War are periods where no comparable data are available. Although the years 1916–20 have been assigned question marks rather than quantitative estimates, I would agree that the figures would be higher than the

54

39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

The Pre-Revolutionary Period recorded levels for 1921. This is especially the case when we realise that we will be supplementing the civil penal system with prisoners of war and refugees held in places of confinement and dealt with under martial law. Dr Holquist has also argued that there was a much greater continuity in the use of violence by the military authorities in a colonial setting from the tsarist to the Soviet period; see P. Holquist, ‘To Count, to Extract, to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial Russia and Soviet Russia’, in R. Suny and T. Martin, eds, Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. I am grateful to Dr Holquist for allowing me to cite this work. R. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977). The argument is probably better put by Richard Wortman when he argues that under the last two tsars the autocracy ‘took leave of its legal sytem and relied increasingly on force. Elevating itself beyond legality, it subverted the claims to obedience upon which its power ultimately rested’; R. S. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976), p. 289. Stephen Frank has recently added to this the statement: ‘State reliance on supralegal means to contain the turmoil only legitimized extralegal activity in society itself while further delegitimizing government authority’; Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice, p. 308. Adams, The Politics of Punishment, p. 7. Although Pipes is correct that the legislation to increase the application of extrajudicial sentences was introduced at the time of the assassination of Alexander II, it was only used on a mass basis following the 1905 Revolution. Adams himself has admitted that his story ‘ends rather abruptly’ because the archival materials for the last years of the Chief Prison Administration were destroyed in March 1917 when revolutionary mobs attacked the Administration’s headquarters and destroyed many of its records; Adams, The Politics of Punishment, p. 8. The last set of published records that we have for the Chief Prison Administration is the detailed annual report for 1915, Otchet po Glavn. Tyuremn. Uprav. za 1915g. (Petrograd, 1916). The records for 1916 would undoubtedly have been of very great interest, but they appear to have been destroyed. Adams, The Politics of Punishment, p. 9.

3 The Russian Army and American Industry, 1915–17: Globalisation and the Transfer of Technology Frederick R. Zuckerman

Most economic historians characterise the period between 1860 and the First World War as a period of economic globalisation and convergence in which the culture of modern industrialism evolved, spread throughout the manufacturing world and came to have a fateful impact upon the dynamics of social, political and economic relations within every polity it touched.1 By the first years of the twentieth century, throughout industrialising Europe this new culture came to be expressed in a single word: ‘Americanism’2 – a label for a new and complex factory culture generated by innovative interactions between technology, labour and management on the factory floor on the one hand and by the displacement of the traditional work ethos by a new industrial ideology on the other. These processes arose from the principles of the ‘American System of Manufacturing’ with its standardised, mechanised, labour-reducing and organisational methods which – it was claimed – led to the exact replication of a product time after time with, of course, the concomitant interchangeability of parts. These industrial operations were modified, elaborated upon and honed by the advocates of ‘scientific management’. The prophets of ‘scientific management’, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford (surrounded by lesser lights), were supported and idolised by the members of the new engineering and technical professions. As the high priests of ‘Americanism’ – engineers and technicians – the new managerial class spread their ideology far beyond the confines of the factory, influencing social mores, behaviour and politics throughout the industrialising world.3 Historians of Russian labour and of the Russian technical intelligentsia have, to one degree or another, dealt with the impact of ‘scientific management’ and the rise of the engineering profession upon late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union, but, except for the brilliant work of Kendall Bailes, some of Heather Hogan’s articles and, to a lesser degree, the scholarship of Nicholas Lampert and Peter Gatrell, there has been little work done on understanding the evolution of the new Russian industrial culture 55

56


in a global context prior to the October Revolution.4 Equally, outside the theses written by Harley Balzer, Stephen Ellis and D. W. Green and the work of V. R. Leikina-Svirskaya, the world of tsardom’s engineers, technicians, production floor managers and factory inspectors has been little investigated and its international aspects, except for Green’s work, have been all but ignored.5 Even to authors such as Fred Carstensen and V. S. Dyakin, who studied the operations of foreign firms in late imperial Russia, globalisation simply meant the transfer of western technology and production methods to the benighted Russians.6 But no historians dealing with late imperial Russia have gone much further than that. Certainly none have dealt with the possibility that this process was, for the Russians at least, a two-way street – that, in fact, Russian industrial culture made a major impact on the complexion of Americanism itself. The popular view of the impact of Americanism on Russia is that in the years immediately prior to the First World War, the achievements of Americanism attained mythical proportions among the most advanced elements of the Russian manufacturing community. However, while the French and British governments sent commissions to the United States to study American manufacturing in action, the Russians chose not to do so. Instead they read scientific management treatises and observed the Russian operations of such companies as Singer Sewing Machine, Otis Elevator and International Harvester (amongst the most innovative American manufacturers).7 At the same time, Russian ordnance officers retained the cherished memory of their forefathers’ strongly positive relationship with American arms-makers in the post-American Civil War era.8 According to this line of argument, the Russians were the beneficiaries of received wisdom. The blame for this lacuna lies with the failure of historians to consider Russian industrial development as part of the global process with which it was intimately involved.

My research project, in part, deals with this very issue by studying the industrial relationship between Russia and the United States during the First World War. The exchange of technology between allies during wartime is a major, if irregular source of technology transfer. By technology I mean knowledge, techniques of production, and industrial and labour organisation designed to increase efficiency, improve quality and reduce overall costs. With the outbreak of war in August 1914, Russia turned to the United States almost immediately for the purchase of a vast amount of industrial goods necessary for what Richard Overy calls indirect rearmament,9 for example: travelling cranes, steam compressors, steel-cutting lathes, machine tools, spare parts for submarine signalling devices, forging machines, telegraphic sets, American universal grinding and milling machines and highspeed screw-cutting lathes, no doubt to the delight of American engineering

Frederick R. Zuckerman 57

firms.10 American industry was good at producing these things (although not in the quantity demanded by Russia). By the late autumn of 1914 the Main Artillery Administration (Glavnoe artilleriiskoe upravlenie (GAU)) realised that not even France and Great Britain together could supply the Russian Army with the rifles and ordnance it required. Russia turned to Canada and the United States. It began to order that ordnance as early as the autumn of 1914. In the spring of 1915, GAU established the Russian Artillery Commission in New York and then, in November 1915, the Ministry of War instructed General Sapozhnikov, the chief of the Russian Artillery Commission, to establish the Russian Supply Committee, to be located at the Russian Embassy in Washington, to oversee the purchase of all supplies for the Russian war effort in North America.11 The Ministry of War dispatched about one thousand men – ordnance experts, engineers, inspectors and technicians – to the United States to oversee production.12 Many of these people were recent graduates and higher school technical students whom the tsarist government assigned abroad for experience. After all, what better place to send them than to the United States, where they could absorb the latest technical and supervisory skills that they would require for the future. They travelled on a cloud of expectation, filled with the imagery of an American industrial culture exuding ingenuity. After all, General Germonius, one of tsardom’s most talented ordnance officers, believed that American industry could accomplish any task set before it and manufacture any weapons no matter how complex the construction.13 In fact, or so it seemed, no industrial system was more suited to the requirements of military production than this system and nothing served it so well as war. ‘Quantity production’, wrote Lewis Mumford, ‘must rely for its success upon quantity consumption and nothing ensures replacement like organised destruction.’14 By the end of 1915, however, the pristine image of ‘Amerikanizm’ held by the Russians had become deeply tarnished. American incompetence combined with serious labour problems had too late disabused the Russian Supply Committee in the United States of its belief in the unlimited capacity of American manufacturing. In the organisation of production, speed of manufacture, standardisation of the product (permitting the interchangeability of parts), quality control, testing and the disciplining of labour, American industry failed miserably.15 The failure of Americanism to cope with the demands of producing products to new specifications in huge quantities under the imposition of stringent standards – the Russians had the narrowest inspection tolerances of any ordnance manufacturing nation – within a short period of time is, of course, understandable. It is true that the ‘American System’ initially arose from the requirements of ordnance production, to be sure, but by the last years of the nineteenth century Americanism had become the victim of a consumerbased philosophy. Products such as Singer sewing machines took years to

58


perfect and developing new models and reorganising factory routines to suit their production was a painfully slow business. But in the world of everyday production, time was often not of the essence. In any case few American companies possessed the expertise, talent and resources of Singer.16 Labour proved to be another problem. Mass production (derived from the ‘American System’) was based upon a de-skilling of the labour force. This de-skilling process altered the culture on the factory floor and eroded the craft mentality of thousands of skilled workers, particularly in the metal trades. Traditional culture came under further pressure when management embarked upon a campaign of instilling the theories of scientific management into everyday factory practice. Even seemingly benign practices, such as installing a time clock in the shop, created a furore on the factory floor. David Montgomery, along with several other American labour historians, has discussed the massive wave of strikes sparked by these considerable disruptions to factory life.17 As a result, the Russians discovered that although Americanism had given birth to a new industrial world, that world was still in its infancy.18 This was especially true of the armaments industries. It is in this area that the Russian Ministry of War’s ordnance experts, engineers, factory floor supervisors and senior inspectors (many of whom were civilians) made a major contribution to American production methods and in so doing contributed to the evolution of the culture of industrialism which dominated much of the manufacturing world for most of this century. The Americans, at least in the area of armaments production, learned much from their Russian guests.

The wealth of information I have collected on this subject includes correspondence, contracts and minutes of meetings between American manufacturers and their Russian clients, and the personal and official correspondence of Russian technical staff in the United States to family, colleagues and superiors. While this is only a preliminary study of this material, I wish to discuss a small but important example of the tortuous two-way path of technology transfer between the Russians and American business between 1915 and 1917. This example involves the production of service rifles by the Remington Arms Company and the New England Westinghouse Company, a subsidiary of the Westinghouse Electric Company, the only companies the Russians believed suitable to undertake the manufacture of their rifles. Remington constructed a new factory especially for the production of Russian rifles in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Westinghouse began by employing subcontractors to manufacture rifle parts, and subsequently used four of its own New England factories located in Springfield Massachusetts and Meridian Connecticut for the venture. For its part, the Russian Army assigned military specialists to work with American technical and


managerial personnel in order to develop the production techniques for manufacturing its weapons.19 From the outset the project was plagued by problems. Remington requested twenty line rifles so that it could strip them down and develop the patterns, jigs and measuring instruments needed for production. This seemingly straightforward request fell foul of Russian red tape. The request passed through GAU only to be sent up to the General Staff for approval. There the request lingered for several weeks as the Russians debated whether the army could afford to part with twenty rifles.20 This was only the first of Remington’s encounters with Russian administrative culture. Westinghouse and Remington soon ran into a second cultural problem. The still-vibrant Russian artisan mentality demanded that specifications for the rifles meet the most fine tolerances laid down in the rifle inspectors’ instructions. Some manufacturing processes involved tolerance to a degree of one-hundredth of a millimetre!21 Young and inexperienced Russian inspectors trained in an environment where the advanced skills of master arms-makers were taken for granted – after all, at the Tula works, where only 24 rifles were manufactured between January and June 1914, individual artisans could take their time manufacturing about a rifle per week22 – stuck mercilessly to the specifications in the documentation, rejecting rifle after rifle, thereby driving the management of both Westinghouse and Remington to distraction. To make matters worse, the Americans did not manufacture instruments that could even measure such fine tolerances and, even if they could, it was soon discovered that they did not possess skilled craftsmen who could meet the Russian specifications.23 Not only that, the Russian rifle is a complex machine, constructed from one hundred component parts and demanding over 1500 manufacturing operations.24 American pattern-makers and machinists could not produce patterns and jigs which duplicated the Russian originals or in fact duplicated each other! It came as quite a shock to the Russians that neither Westinghouse nor Remington employed sufficient or sufficiently skilled tradesmen to undertake the construction of the machine tools and equipment required for production. Remington and Westinghouse even lacked sufficient semi-skilled and unskilled workers for the job. Perhaps most surprising of all to the Russian officers was the lack of managerial talent at both the administrative and factory floor level where inefficient manufacturing processes themselves created tremendous wastage. As if these problems were not enough, the raw materials (the steel and wood) necessary for manufacturing the rifles were, for the most part, of unacceptably poor quality.25 By the summer of 1916, the Russian Army was desperate for rifles. First, General Manikovskii cabled General Sapozhnikov in New York, emphasising the ‘catastrophic’ shortage of rifles and cartridges and demanding to know why his orders to keep him informed on the status of rifle production

60


had not been obeyed.26 What could Sapozhnikov tell him? Labour unrest plagued Westinghouse, its subcontractors and Remington Arms; the contractors were losing money and the British government was becoming restive about how its loans were being spent. Clearly, General Germonius, the chairman of the Russian Supply Commission in London, felt this pressure. At the end of July 1916, he urged General Khrabrov (Sapozhnikov’s successor) to take all possible measures at Remington to fill the Russian order for rifles on the British account. He ordered factory inspectors to relax their standards by approving rifles that met the more generous standards tolerated by mass production.27 Germonius had learned that the principal criterion of production should not be elegance, but, as the British told the Russians, whether or not the weapons would kill Germans.28 In early July 1916, General Manikovskii dispatched Chief Inspector Lieutenant-General N. N. Fedorov, a specialist in the manufacture of small arms, to the United States. At the end of July 1916, Manikovskii went a step further, replacing the chairman of the Russian Supply Committee with General Zaliubovskii, a specialist in rifle manufacture. Zaliubovskii arrived carrying instructions from Manikovskii to resolve the bottleneck in rifle production forthwith.29 In early October 1916, Zaliubovskii visited the Westinghouse plants supposedly dedicated to the manufacture of Russian rifles. He was horrified. The new arrival discovered that Westinghouse’s engineers and managers did not know how to structure the manufacturing operations for rifle production and were unwilling to alter their production system to meet the demands imposed by the Russian techniques of production.30 Zaliubovskii immediately assigned General Fedorov to Westinghouse. Although hindered by his lack of adequate English, General Fedorov, under the supervision of General Khrabrov, threw himself into improving Westinghouse’s virtually nonexistent production of Russian rifles.31 Fedorov’s task became easier when, fearing not only the loss of these vast orders, but bankruptcy itself, Remington and Westinghouse relented, not only by allowing Russian engineers and technicians onto the factory floor, but by permitting them to restructure production and deal with the labour force directly. Fedorov decided all technical problems on the spot and issued technical instructions to factory floor supervisors on the best and quickest method of manufacturing the rifles.32 In reporting to GAU at the end of his tenure at Westinghouse in July 1917, General Fedorov recounted the difficulties he had confronted when he arrived at Westinghouse (including problems with inexperienced and poorly trained Russian inspection staff, many of whom were little more than university students). In summary, Fedorov reported on his restructuring of the factory layout in order to create a smoother manufacturing process, his ordering proper machinery and materials and dealing with the Americans’


insufficient technical skill which had contributed so much to the delay in production.33 It was a slow and painful task and no amount of pressure from either Manikovskii or Germonius could speed up the transferral of Russian knowledge and technical expertise to the Americans. Colonel S. Gruev arrived from Russia in May 1917 to help Fedorov. According to Gruev, when he arrived at Westinghouse shortly afterwards the company was still only producing fifty rifles per month. By August, however, ten months after Fedorov’s arrival at Springfield, the crisis was over: Westinghouse was manufacturing 5000 rifles per day, close to the projected maximum production for the company.34 Remington’s problems, although similar to those at Westinghouse, were handled quite differently, a difference undoubtedly determined by the February Revolution and America’s subsequent entry into the war. General Manikovskii ordered General Khrabrov to take responsibility for speeding up Remington’s production. In addition, the Ministry of War dispatched two less senior but nevertheless experienced supervisors to the United States. One of these officers went to work at Remington. Still, the restructuring of the Remington rifle factory proved to be a slow and expensive operation which was bankrupting the Remington parent company. Finally, in December 1916 Remington threatened to terminate the contract unless the tsarist government renegotiated its principal clauses. In March 1917, after lengthy negotiations which, significantly, traversed the February Revolution, Remington Arms, with American government approval, agreed to sell its Russian rifle manufacturing operation to what was now the Provisional Government. On 10 September 1917, the New Remington Co., managed and supervised by Russian ordnance officers, Russian engineers and technicians and Russian-trained Americans, began operations. New Remington Co. came under the guidance of a new board of directors composed of three Russians and three of Remington Arms Company’s most experienced American managers.35 It is interesting to compare the number of rifles manufactured for the four months in which this contract was in force with the period between May and August 1917. During those three months Remington (a more competent manufacture than Westinghouse to begin with) manufactured a total of 29 300 rifles. In September, New Remington manufactured 52 200 rifles; in October 70 000; November 108 400; and December 107 100.36 Why did New Remington and New England Westinghouse now work so well? Several factors contributed to this success: the Russians were experienced in managing large factories in which human resources were limited; they had shown the reluctant consumer-oriented Americans how to be more efficient; they had taught American semi-skilled workers and their foremen to be more concerned with precision; and the American entry into the war

62


gave them a militarised workforce, if not stripped of the right to strike, at least intimidated by the penalties its government was prepared to impose upon strikers.

To be sure, companies such as Colt, Russian Singer and Dupont, abounding in engineering and managerial talent and the most skilled workers in America, had created the myth of Americanism. These companies were prepared for the call to arms. But the majority of the two hundred companies which did business with the imperial and Provisional Governments needed to be taught.37 Russian ordnance experts, engineers and technicians were partly responsible for this instruction. After great effort these men brought Tula and Petersburg to Connecticut and Massachusetts. Indeed, the American companies which worked with the Russian experts were so impressed with their performance that they invited them to stay on in the United States after the Bolshevik Revolution, offering them responsible jobs in their factories as inducements.38 Most importantly, both the Russians and Americans learned that American manufacturing could be improved upon by Russian experience. American machines and Russian expertise worked well together. It was a lesson to be propagated by those Russian experts who returned home to serve the Bolshevik regime. Certainly, General Manikovskii learned some vital lessons from his American experience. When Manikovskii submitted his plans for the construction of several state munitions works to the Ministry of War in 1916, he argued that ‘munitions, especially, the most complex, may only be manufactured at specialist factories with the necessary plant, equipment and work force’.39 One observation stands out above all the others: both the United States and Russia learned much from each other about how to structure their munitions and ordnance industries before the next war.

Notes 1. Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘Globalization, Convergence, and History’, The Journal of Economic History, 56 (June 1996) 277. 2. For the Russian image of Americanism, see Hans Rogger, ‘Americanizm and the Economic Development of Russia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23 (July 1981) 382–420; Kendall Bailes, ‘The American Connection: Ideology and the Transfer of American Technology to the Soviet Union, 1917–1941’, Comparative Studies in History and Society, 23 (3 July 1981) 421–48. 3. For the impact of Taylor and Ford, see David A. Hounsell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: the Development of Manufacturing Technology in the


4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Karel Williams, Colin Haslam and John Williams, ‘Ford-v-Fordism: the Beginnings of Mass Production?’, Work, Employment and Society, 4 (December 1992) 517–52; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: the Workplace, the State and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Kendall Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Heather Hogan, ‘Scientific Management and the St. Petersburg Metalworking Industry, 1900–1914’, in Leopold H. Haimson and Charles Tilly, eds, Strikes, Wars, and Revolutions in an International Perspective: Strike Waves in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 356–79; Heather Hogan, ‘The Origins of Scientific Management in Russia’, in Melvyn Dubovsky, ed., Technological Change and Workers’ Movements (Beverly Hills: Sage Publishing, 1985), pp. 77–94; Heather Hogan, Forging Revolution: Metalworkers, Managers and the State in St. Petersburg, 1890–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Nicholas Lampert, The Technical Intelligentsia and the Soviet State (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979); Peter Gatrell, Government, Industry and Rearmament in Russia, 1900–1914: the Last Argument of Tsarism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Harley D. Balzer, ‘Educating Engineers: Economic Politics and Technical Training in Tsarist Russia’ (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1980); Stephen Charles Ellis, ‘Management in the Industrialization of Russia, 1861–1917’ (PhD diss., Duke University, 1980); Donald Webb Green, ‘Industrialization and the Engineering Ascendancy: a Comparative Study of Russian and American Engineering Elites, 1870–1920’ (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1972); V. R. LeikinaSvirskaya, Intelligentsiya v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow: Mysl’, 1971); V. R. Leikina-Svirskaya, Russkaya intelligentsiya v 1900–1917 godakh (Moscow: Mysl¢, 1981). Fred V. Carstensen, American Enterprise in Foreign Markets: Studies of Singer and International Harvester in Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); V. S. Dyakin, Germanskie kapitaly v Rossii: elektroindustriya i elektricheskii transport (Leningrad: Nauka, 1971). ‘Finansovoe Agentstvo v S.Sh.A.’, ‘Sbornik Zapisok, Otnosiashchikhsia k Russkomu Snabzheniiu v Velikuiu voinu’, MS (hereafter ‘Sbornik’), Hoover Institution Archives (hereafter HIA), p. 162; Kendall Bailes, ‘The American Connection’, p. 423; Peter Gatrell, ‘Russian Heavy Industry and State Defence, 1908–1918: Pre-War Expansion and Wartime Mobilization’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1979), p. 149; Rogger, ‘Americanizm’, 413. Joseph Bradley, Guns for the Tsar: American Technology and the Small Arms Industry in Nineteenth-century Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990), pp. 99–129. R. J. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 8. Russian Provisional Government Embassies, box 18, folder British–Russian Supply Committee Relations, HIA. For a brief description of the establishment of the Russian Supply Committee see: ‘Otchet o deiatel’nosti Russkago Zagotovitel’nago Komiteta v Amerike i ego Likvidatsionnoi Komissii’ (hereafter ‘Otchet’), Chast’ Pervaia, glava 3, MS, HIA.

64


12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Nicholas Khrabroff, ‘Providence or Chance? Reminiscences’, 3, MS, HIA. ‘Sbornik’, p. 162. Quoted in Hounsell, From the American System, p. 330. ‘Otchet’, pp. 4–5; ‘Sbornik’, pp. 251–2. For a discussion of Singer’s manufacturing culture see: Hounsell, From the American System, pp. 99, 117–22; Carstensen, American Enterprise, pp. 71–3, 99–100, 228; Gatrell, ‘Russian Heavy Industry and State Defence’, p. 133. Cecelia F. Bucki, ‘Dilution and Craft Tradition: Bridgeport, Connecticut, Munitions Workers, 1915–1919’, Social Science History, 4 (February 1980) 105–24; David Montgomery, ‘Strikes of Machinists in the United States, 1870–1922’, in Haimson and Tilly, Strikes, Wars and Revolutions, pp. 271–2, 277–8; Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, pp. 169–70, 193, 282–6, 327–9. For the teething problems experienced by Ford in 1913, see, for example, Carl H. A. Dassbach, ‘The Origins of Fordism: the Introduction of Mass Production and the Five-Dollar Wage’, Critical Sociology, 18 (spring 1991) 77–90. ‘Vypolnenie ruzheinykh kontraktov s firmoi Vestingauz Elektrik Ko.’, in ‘Otchet o Deiatel’nosti Russkago Zagotovitel¢nago Komiteta v Amerike’, Chast¢ Vtoraia, Tom 2-oi (hereafter ‘Otchet o deiatel¢nosti’), pp. 133–6, HIA. Glavnoe upravlenie General shtaba, Otdel General-Kvartimeistra. Deloproizvodstvo Zakazy, 28 Maia 1915, No. 177, Petrograd, Russian Supply Committee, Provisional Government Embassies, box 227, HIA. Gatrell, ‘Russian Heavy Industry and State Defence’, p. 130. Peter Gatrell, ‘The Armaments Industry, 1914–1918’, unpublished discussion paper, p. 5. The comments of General N. M. Khrabrov in ‘Sbornik’, p. 251. Gatrell, ‘Russian Heavy Industry and State Defence’, p. 5. ‘Vypolnenie ruzheinykh kontraktov s Remington Arms Ko.’, in ‘Otchet o deiatel¢nosti’, pp. 187–223; ‘Vestingauz Elektrik Ko.’, pp. 117–86; ‘Sbornik’, pp. 251–2. Cablegram no. 386 from General Manikovskii to General Sapozhnikov, Provisional Government Embassies, box 39, folder: Rifles (2), HIA. Cablegram from General Germonius to General Khrabrov, 29 July 1916, Provisional Government Embassies, box 39, folder: Rifles (2), HIA. ‘Sbornik’, p. 254. ‘Otchet o deiatel¢nosti’, pp. 133–6. Ibid., pp. 143–4. The Westinghouse story is a complex and fascinating case study of the transfer of Russian technical know-how and factory management and structure systems to the American manufacturing environment. The relationship ultimately crumbles under the pressure of financial constraints just as Fedorov and his team succeeded in transforming New England Westinghouse into a successful producer of Russian rifles. The Russians established an investigation commission to look into the affair under the direction of Lieutenant B. L. Brazol¢, the political police official attached to the Supply Commission. I have only begun to analyse the documents collected by Brazol¢. The three documents employed hereafter are: Report of Lt General Fedorov to the Chairman of the Artillery Commission no. 41, August 1917 (on the occasion of his resignation from Westinghouse); Report of Colonel Gruev to General Zaliubovskii no. 4, 27 July 1917; Interrogation of Lt General Fedorov by the Investigation Commission, Russia. Posol¢stvo (U. S.), Box 347, Folder 347–5, HIA.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Frederick R. Zuckerman 65 32. ‘Otchet o deiatel’nosti’, pp. 133–4. 33. Report of Lt General Fedorov to the Chairman of the Russian Artillery Commission, no. 41, August 1917. 34. Ibid., Report of Colonel Gruev to General Zaliubovskii, no. 27, July 1917. 35. For a summary of the Remington Arms–Russian relationship see: ‘Vypolnenie ruzheinykh kontraktov s firmoi Remington Arms Ko.’, in ‘Otchet o deiatel’nosti’, pp. 187–223. Remington Arms of itself destroyed most of its business records for this period prior to and immediately after the Second World War and the remainder when it closed down its Bridgeport, Connecticut operation. See letter to the author from J. D. Heath, Manager Marketing Information, Remington Arms Company Inc., 12 February 1990. 36. ‘Otchet o deiatel¢nosti’, p. 212. 37. Ibid., p. 255; Gatrell, ‘Russian Heavy Industry and State Defence’, p. 133; ‘Obiasnitel¢naia’ no. 64, Colonel Nekrasov to General Khrabrov, 7 July 1917, Nekrasov papers (The Russian Artillery Commission), box 2, (L.L. 2), Tamiment Library, New York University. 38. ‘Sbornik’, p. 253. 39. Quoted in Gatrell, ‘Russian Heavy Industry and State Defence’, p. 152.


Part II The Stalin Period


4 The Soviet Famine of 1932–33 and the Crisis in Agriculture* R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft

Many historians have concluded that the central reason for the Soviet famine of 1932–33 was not the amount of grain available in these years but the distribution of grain. On this basis it is argued that this was an ‘organised famine’ in which Stalin deliberately withheld available grain from the population of Ukraine and elsewhere. An extreme position is taken by Robert Conquest, who argues that ‘the famine of 1933 was deliberately carried out by terror’ and that this was demonstrated by ‘the figures on the millions of tons of available grain reserves’.1 We do not at all absolve Stalin – or the Bolshevik leadership as a whole – from responsibility for the famine. But we believe that there was a much more deep-seated crisis than Conquest assumes. In our opinion, the harvests of 1931 and 1932 were extremely poor, and the absolute shortage of grain was the immediate factor in the crisis which led to the famine. In this chapter, we consider three issues: (i) the size of the grain harvest, particularly in 1931 and 1932; (ii) the reasons for the poor harvests. We devote particular attention to agricultural and agro-technical problems which are neglected in most studies of the period; and (iii) the grain crisis of 1932–33.

4.1 The grain harvest The usual figures cited for the gross harvest of grain are those approved by TsSU (the Central Statistical Administration) after Khrushchev had exposed the falsification brought about by the use of the ‘biological harvest’ (the harvest on the root) from 1933 onwards (million tons).2 1909–13 (average) 1913 1928 69

65.2 76.5 73.3

70

The Stalin Period

1930 1931 1932 1933

83.5 69.5 69.9 68.4

In our opinion these figures are most misleading. It should be noted in particular that the figure for 1932 was cited unchanged in all Soviet statistics because it was officially approved by the Politburo and Sovnarkom (the Council for People’s Commissars). On 8 October 1932, the Politburo ruled that all discussion of the areas sown in the spring of 1931 and 1932 should cease; only figures based on the Narkomzem (People’s Commissariat for Agriculture) summary reports (svodki) should be published.3 Then a year later, Sovnarkom, following a decision of the Politburo, ruled that the gross harvest of grain crops in 1932 was to be taken as 698.7 million tsentners (69.9 million tons).4 Many Russian, Ukrainian and western historians assume that the official figures are correct and that the harvest of 1932 was a reasonable one, at least as large as in 1931. Thus I. Zelenin wrote that ‘the total gross harvest of grain in the country in 1932 was even somewhat larger than in 1931 (698.7 mln. tsentners against 694.8 mln)’.5 N. Ivnitskii stated in the same volume that ‘documents testify that in 1932, in spite of a partial drought in a number of areas no less grain was harvested than in the previous year’.6 But more recently he has accepted the view that the current published estimates of the 1932 harvest may be exaggerated.7 The official rulings were part of a very long series of disputes about the size of the harvest. Twenty years ago Stephen Wheatcroft undertook a detailed investigation of the basis of Soviet grain statistics.8 This showed that the famous ‘Ivantsov correction’, which increased the pre-1914 grain production figures, was invalid. Moreover, comparison of pre-1914 and postrevolution figures, and of one post-revolution year with another, is very difficult. From the late 1920s onwards, the amount of data collected from the peasants and the kolkhozy was increased by statisticians under pressure from politicians. Historians, like Khrushchev’s statisticians, have assumed that the only substantial increase was made from 1933 onwards, when the ‘biological yield’ replaced the ‘barn harvest’. In fact there had already been increases in the 1920s and, in the early 1930s, statisticians were persuaded to increase the raw data to a yet greater extent. If the losses between field and barn are removed from the 1933 harvest, an appropriate amount must also be removed from the harvests of the previous postrevolution years. We can reach more accurate figures for the harvests in various ways. Let us take 1932 as an example. Numerous reports and statements made at the time showed very low yield figures in the main grain areas. At a conference

R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft 71

on the harvest held in the summer of 1932 the report from the North Caucasus claimed that the yield was 6–7 tsentners per hectare, far less than in 1931; an investigation of two districts in the region found that the yield was one-third to one-half of that in 1931.9 The report from the Central Volga region claimed that the yield of rye in kolkhozy was 6–7 tsentners, the yield of wheat no more than 4 tsentners.10 The much more systematic kolkhoz reports submitted to the centre also show yields which were significantly lower than the centrally corrected figures that were reported by Osinskii (the head of TsSU) and others throughout 1932. Some of the data from these reports have been available for many years through Soviet scholars, particularly Zelenin and Vyltsan, and the reports are now openly available in the archives. The uncorrected data, and various other ways of aggregating the available harvest data, all lead us to the conclusion that the harvest was broadly in the range 53 to 58 million tons (the outside upper limit, in our opinion, is 62 million tons). The centrally compiled grain–fodder balances in the archives confirm that the harvest was this order of magnitude. They were put together so as not to challenge the official harvest figure for 1932. But they achieved this only by including a large figure for losses and/or an item frankly entitled ‘nevyazka’ (‘discrepancy’). If these are excluded, the grain–fodder balances give a harvest figure for 1932 of 58.1 million tons, compared with 69 in 1931 and 77 in 1930 – figures which may themselves be too high. Table 4.1 shows the various alternative series for the harvest; our preferred series is the penultimate column, the low SIPS estimate.11 In our opinion the 1932 harvest was 16–20 per cent smaller than the 1928 harvests, while the generally accepted figures show that it was only 4.8 per cent lower than in 1928 (69.8 against 73.3 million tons). The 1932 harvest was thus lower than that in the drought year 1931; and the 1933 harvest was considerably higher than both the 1931 and the 1932 harvests. The occurrence of two bad harvests in succession greatly added to the difficulties of the authorities in distributing grain.

4.2 Why was grain production so low in 1931 and 1932? The optimum variant of the Five-Year Plan approved in the spring of 1929 anticipated that the 1932 harvest would be 45 per cent larger than in 1928, 106 against 73 million tons (see Table 4.1). In discussing the failure of this important element in the Five-Year Plan, most historians have emphasised two factors: the harmful effect of chaos caused by rapid collectivisation; and the lack of incentives for collective farmers to work well, which was in turn the result of the high state grain collections (zagotovki) which removed nearly all the off-farm grain (tovarnyi khleb). Some historians have also

72

TsSU (1925)

1909–13 1913 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933

65 45.7 66.6

Expert Soviet (1920s)

81.6/73.3 [93.2] 51.6 72.4 76.6 71.7 73.3

First five-year plan

Soviet 1930s

TsUNKhU Grain balances

67.6 80.1

73.1 73.5 81.4 87/88.3 92.9/96.1 99.7/105.9 107.7/116.4

71.7 83.5 69.5 69.8 89.8

77.1 69.4 62.6/58.2 75.2

Soviet 1950s

65.2 76.5 51.6 72.4 76.6 71.7 73.3 71.7 83.5 69.5 69.8 68.4

Wheatcroft & Davies (1998) Low estimate

High estimate

68 79 44 62 66 62 63 62 67 60 53 65

80 93 51 73 77 73 73 72 78 69 58/63 71+/-5%

Sources: This table is based on S. G. Wheatcroft’s article ‘The Reliability of Russian Prewar Grain Output Statistics’, Soviet Studies, XXXVI (1974), and on R. W. Davies, M. Harrison and S. G. Wheatcroft, eds, The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). The estimates in the last two columns will be further discussed in R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (forthcoming).

The Stalin Period

Table 4.1 Grain production, 1909–13 – 1933: alternative series (million tons)


pointed out that dekulakisation removed the most capable peasants from the villages. We agree that these factors were important. But we believe that this account underestimates the negative role of various agro-technological factors. Here we will deal with: (i) cropping systems; (ii) traction power; and (iii) the weather. The first two factors, although agro-technological in the short term, were ultimately an unintended consequence of the errors of the political leadership. a Cropping systems The first Five-Year Plan proposed to achieve the expansion of crop production both by extending the sown area by 22.2 per cent and by a more intensive use of the sown area which would increase yields by 25.4 per cent. The plans for technical improvements which would raise yield aimed to introduce in the course of five years changes which had been introduced in Western Europe over five centuries. Some significant changes did take place. More artificial fertiliser was supplied by industry, but this modest increase was more than outweighed by the concomitant decline in the supply of manure due to the reduction in livestock. The one technological improvement that was to some extent achieved was the mass application of improved sorted seed. Within five years the proportion of the area sown with grain in the form of sorted seed had increased from 3 per cent to over 25 per cent, roughly as envisaged in the plans.12 This was a remarkable achievement, the result of considerable efforts to build special seed farms and to establish procedures to exchange seed on a mass scale. The basis for such operations had been laid by the pre-revolutionary zemstva, and was extended in the 1920s before the onset of mass collectivisation. The subsequent developments and achievements therefore had a firm base. But remarkable as this achievement was, it utterly failed to compensate for the agro-technological shortcomings. The sustained attempt to extend the sown area was a major factor in the deterioration of agricultural technology. The Five-Year Plan intended to achieve part of this expansion through the development of sovkhozy on virgin lands; and in terms of sown area a substantial increase was achieved.13 But more than half the expansion in sown area depended upon reducing the amount of fallow by 23 per cent. For such a radical transformation not to result in over-cropping, soil exhaustion and reduced yields, it would be essential either to implement improved crop rotation systems or to use large amounts of manure or fertiliser. Neither happened.

74

The Stalin Period

Moving to an improved cropping system proved especially difficult in Ukraine. Ukraine already had a much lower level of uncropped arable than any other region of the USSR, with the exception of the highly commercial Leningrad region. According to the planning documents, the Ukrainian level of fallow was equal to 27.7 per cent of the sown area in 1927–28 and was projected to fall to 18.1 per cent in 1932–33.14 The USSR average was 59.1 per cent, projected to fall to 41.7 per cent. An external factor considerably complicated the situation in Ukraine in the winter of 1927–28 when half the 10.4 million (mln) hectares of winter sowings were struck by winter killings, reducing the winter sown crop to 5.2 mln ha. instead of 10.4 mln ha. The party responded by doing what the peasants would have done instinctively in such circumstances and expanded the spring sowings. Some of the winter-sown land was resown in spring and other winter-sown land was simply left as wasteland. To compensate for the loss, other land that had originally been scheduled for fallow was brought into use. In 1929 Ukraine was again struck by massive winter killings, and again the level of spring sowings was raised to compensate for the losses. By this time rational crop rotation was seriously undermined. Then in 1930 and 1931, in the hope of increasing grain production, the sown area was drastically increased. The 1931 sowings in Ukraine were a record 28.9 million hectares. Narkomzem estimated that the total stock of arable land was only 29.5 million hectares.15 If this estimate is correct, it suggests that fallow land had been totally eliminated. An analogous situation was reported from other regions. The intense pressure to increase sown area added to the disruption of existing land arrangements brought about by the two collectivisation drives of 1930 and 1931 (and by the retreat from collectivisation in the spring of 1930). Rational crop rotation disappeared in many villages and districts. In the North Caucasus in 1932 it was reported that ‘there is no crop rotation in the kolkhozy’, and in some districts in the Central Volga region, collective farmers complained that ‘if we do not introduce crop rotation we shall starve’: ‘there is no fallow. All the land in these districts has been ploughed up, no pasture remains; the cows have nowhere to go to feed.’16 It was not until September 1932, after the harvest, that Stalin indicated, in an unpublished message to the Crimean regional party committee, that an extension of the grain sowings would be unwise.17 A subsequent published decree of Sovnarkom resolved that sown areas had been expanded sufficiently, stressed that the central task was to increase yields, and called for the introduction of crop rotation in all kolkhozy and sovkhozy in 1933.18 However, much damage had been done in the meantime. Such a dramatic expansion of sown area and reduction of fallow without the careful introduction of alternative means for enriching the soil with nutrients was bound to lead to the reduction of yields and an increased likelihood of crop dis-


eases. By 1932, in many regions, and particularly in Ukraine, soil exhaustion and crop diseases were widespread. b Traction power It is well known that the failure to increase the production of grain did not lead the authorities to moderate their pressure for the state collections in the course of 1929–31. The Five-Year Plan envisaged that extra-rural marketing (vnederevenskii oborot) of grain in 1932–33 would amount to 19.6 million tons out of a harvest of 106 million tons, and the amount of grain retained in the village would increase during the five years.19 In fact the state collections in 1931 amounted to nearly 23 million tons out of an official figure for the harvest of 69 million tons (which, as we have seen, was probably an overestimate). Increased collections from a smaller harvest meant that less grain was available in the villages. The supply of grain for animal fodder was also considerably reduced. According to the grain–fodder balances, it declined from 23.3 million tons in 1927–28 to 13.8 million in 1932 (preliminary estimate).20 The decline in the availability of grain as fodder was the major factor resulting in the reduction of the number of workhorses and oxen from 27.4 million in 1928 to 17.9 million in 1932. This was partly compensated for by the rapid increase in tractor horsepower from 0.27 to 2.1 million between 1928 and 1932. One tractor horsepower provides more drawing power than one horse. But even allowing for this, in 1932 total traction power amounted to only some 21–22 million, compared with 28 million in 1928.21 Key agricultural operations are greatly affected by the availability of traction power: (i) The ploughing of fallow in preparation for winter sowing. Pryanishnikov estimates that delaying the ploughing to May or June reduced the yields by up to 30 per cent;22 (ii) The delay in the time of spring sowing enormously reduces the yield. According to the experiments of Gaberland, cited by Pryanishnikov, a delay of 17 days between 18 March and 3 April could reduce the yield as follows in the areas where his experiments were carried out: wheat by over 50 per cent; rye by nearly 60 per cent; oats by 28 per cent; barley by 19 per cent;23 (iii) Harvesting losses, which could be up to 20 or 30 per cent or more, are very sensitive to the speed at which harvesting is carried out. In addition there was a qualitative aspect to this work. Ploughing, sowing and harvesting could always be speeded up by carrying out the work in a slipshod manner, and this is undoubtedly what happened. Shallow ploughing was quicker than deep ploughing, and was normally less effective.

76

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Sowing was quicker if you did not waste time regulating the density of the spread of the seed and ensuring that corners of fields and inaccessible areas were covered. Harvesting could also be speeded up if you were less concerned about minimising harvesting losses. Additional traction power would have allowed all these operations to have been carried out more quickly and better, at the most optimal period. This would undoubtedly have resulted in larger biological yields (that is, larger yields before harvesting losses were deducted) and lower levels of harvesting losses. But the decline in traction power in association with an increase in sown area resulted in a deterioration in the quality of ploughing, sowing and harvesting, with the inevitable consequences of reduced yields and greater losses. The problem was compounded by the low morale of the peasants. The available operational control data on the timing of the ploughing, sowing and harvesting campaigns indicate the great delay in 1931 and 1932 in the commencement of spring sowings, and the even greater delay in the completion of the reaping and threshing operations in the 1932 harvest.24 For example, in Ukraine only 8 million hectares had been sown by 15 May 1932, compared with 15.9 million in 1930 and 12.3 in 1931. The lack of horses carried with it other troubles. Both collective farmers and individual peasants had great difficulty in conveying the grain to the collection points. And fewer horses, as we have seen, meant less manure and therefore poorer soil. c The weather Fluctuations in annual temperature and rainfall in the territory of the USSR are greater than in major grain-producing areas elsewhere in the world. The weather pattern is highly continental, and is complicated by the frequent but irregular dry winds (sukhovei) which blow from Central Asia across the Volga region, North Caucasus and Ukraine in the critical growing months of late spring and early summer. Moreover, critically low rainfall makes this territory particularly susceptible to drought. In normal times changes in the weather are the main cause of the large annual fluctuations in yield per hectare. Was the weather a significant factor in the low grain yields which predominated in the 1930s, or were these entirely due to the technical and political factors which we have already discussed? In a preliminary attempt to answer this question, Wheatcroft has constructed a ‘drought index’ using weather data for 1883–1940. This assesses how far the annual fluctuation in the degree of drought in late spring and early summer might be expected to affect the grain yield. This estimate of annual fluctuation in yield due to the weather was then compared with the extent to which the actual yield in each year differed from the long-term expected trend. It is often assumed that good weather years tend to cancel out bad years, so that over a five-year period fluctuations can be ignored. This is demon-


strably not the case. As we have already noted, the weather was largely responsible for the above-average yield over the whole five years, 1909–13, not only for the bumper harvest year in 1913. In 1925–29, however, the weather was only slightly worse than average, though as we have seen the unusual weather conditions in Ukraine after the autumn sowings of 1927 and 1928 resulted in extensive winter losses. In the 1930s, bad weather also played a significant role, particularly in the crucial years of the collectivisation drive of the early 1930s. Wheatcroft’s index of the predicted agrometeorological deviation from grain yield shows below average weather in both 1930–34 and 1935–39, and particularly in the crucial years 1931 and 1932 (measured in tsentners per hectare).25

1904–08 (average)

-0.13

1909–13 (average)

+0.31

1920–24 (average)

-0.82

1925–29 (average)

-0.10

1930

+0.84

1931

-1.75

1932

-0.55

1933

+0.29

1934

-0.67

1930–34 (average)

-0.37

1935–39 (average)

-0.22

The year-on-year changes are very relevant to our understanding of agricultural processes in the 1930s. In 1930, the year in which collectivisation was launched, the weather – and the harvest – were particularly favourable. The good harvest in a year of turmoil undoubtedly strengthened the illusion among the political leaders that agricultural difficulties could be overcome easily. But the drought of 1931 was particularly severe, and drought conditions continued in 1932. This certainly helped to worsen the conditions for obtaining the harvest in 1932. The attitude of political leaders and principal planning officials to the weather compounded what was already a serious problem. Although the

78

The Stalin Period

inevitability of fluctuations in the weather from year to year was well known, in every year the Soviet government gambled on good weather – and was often unlucky.

4.3 The grain crisis of 1932–33 a The switch to ‘neo-Nep’ (Spring 1932) In spite of the drought and the poor harvest of 1931, which were publicly acknowledged, at the beginning of 1932 the plans of the authorities assumed that the harvest of 1932 would be successful. Apparently no specific target for the 1932 grain harvest was adopted. But the grain collection plans were predicated upon a massive increase in production. In December 1931 Narkomsnab (the People’s Commissariat for Supply) approved an immense grain collection plan of 29.5 million tons, an increase of over four million tons on the planned grain collections from the 1931 harvest.26 In conformity with this, the Politburo agreed in January 1932 that as much as 6.235 million tons of grain should be exported in 1932, including nearly 3 million tons of wheat.27 Nearly all of this would have to come from the 1932 harvest. But the severity of the grain crisis in the spring of 1932 evidently persuaded the Politburo that this optimistic plan for the state collections must be modified. It launched the reform measures widely known as ‘neo-NEP’.28 At the heart of this new policy was the reduction of the planned collections from the 1932 harvest and the legalisation of the collective-farm market. The reduction was not as great as the published decree indicated. It compared the new plan with the planned collections from the 1931 harvest, which were not achieved. Compared with the actual collections in 1931–32, including the milling levy, the reduction was only from 22.7 to 22.2 million tons (see Table 4.2); and in addition the agricultural sector was required to return a seed loan of 1.27 million tons, compared with 0.16 millions in 1931–32. But the grain collection plan did mark an important change. It proposed to increase the grain taken from the sovkhozy, and somewhat reduce the grain from the peasant sector (that is, kolkhozy plus individual peasants – edinolichniki). Moreover, the 1932 collection plan represented a huge reduction compared with the plans for 1932–33 drafted at the beginning of 1932; by the spring of 1932 agricultural policy was more realistic (or rather less unrealistic). In planning the distribution of grain in the agricultural year 1932–33 the authorities had anticipated that they would have approximately the same amount of grain at their disposal as in 1931–32. But they envisaged important changes in the allocation of grain (see Table 4.4). The grain balance, prepared on 2 June 1932, proposed that general supply (obshchee snabzhenie) would increase by 0.95 million tons compared with the actual issue in

R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft 79 Table 4.2 Grain collections (zagotovki), 1931–32 and 1932–33 (thousand tons) 1931–32 (actual)

1932–33 (initial plan)

1932–33 (actual)

Peasant sector Sovkhozy Milling levy Other

19 363 1 774 1 521 17

18 067 2 490 1 638 –

14 878 1 623 1 230 100

Total

22 675

22 195

17 831

Return of seeds Purchases (zakupki)

164 –

1 268 557

686 229

Total

22 839

24 020

18 746

Sources: 1931–32 and 1932–33 (actual): Ezhegodnik khlebooborota, [vi], 1934, except zakupki (from Chernov – see below). The zakupki figure is preliminary. 1932–33 (plan) from Sobranie zakonov, 1932, art. 190 (6 May), except for milling levy, return of seeds, and zakupki, from RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 36, ll. 161–2 (report by Chernov to conference of 19–21 May 1933).

1931–32. In addition, as much as 2.877 million tons would be allocated to the state reserves in the so-called ‘Untouchable Fund’ (Nepfond) and in Gosfond (the state fund to be assembled in case of mobilisation).29 In the previous year total grain stocks, including the Nepfond and Gosfond as well as transitional stocks, had actually fallen from 2.332 million tons at 1 July 1931, to a mere 1.360 million tons at 1 July 1932 – about one month’s supply of the grain required for internal use from centralised funds. As the amount of grain available to the centre was expected to be about the same in 1932–33 as in 1931–32, the grain balance of 2 June 1932 was intended to compensate for these increases by reducing exports in 1932–33 by 2.826 million tons (or nearly 60 per cent) compared with the previous year. It was also proposed that in 1932–33 there should be no seed or food loans – following the drought in 1931–32 these amounted to 1.37 million tons. Cuts were also made in the planned allocation of centrally supplied fodder for livestock and in the allocation of grain to the timber industry and to urban horse transport (guzhevoi transport).

Nearly all accounts of the harvest of 1932 and the grain collections of 1932–33 argue that once the ‘reduced’ collections plan had been approved in May 1932 Stalin and the Politburo pursued a ruthless policy of attempting to secure the planned grain at all costs. No compromise of any kind was permitted.30 Stalin’s policy was certainly extremely ruthless, but in subsections (b) and (c) below we seek to show that it also involved further important compromises and retreats.

80

The Stalin Period

b The desperate battle for grain, July 1932–February 1933 We do not need to recite here the extensive information now available about the ruthless struggle to obtain grain, which, by the beginning of 1933, involved the arrest and exile of hundreds of thousands of peasants.31 But what has not generally been noted is that during the months of the collections the Politburo, and Stalin personally, reluctantly conceded that the plans of May 1932 could not be achieved, and in response to numerous appeals from districts, regions and republics substantially reduced the grain collection plans for the peasant sector in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga region. The main Politburo decisions are listed in Table 4.3. Between August 1932 and January 1933, the plan was reduced from 18.07 to 15.30 million tons. The largest cuts were made in Ukraine, where the original plan, already more modest than if it had expected the amount collected in 1931–32, was further reduced on three occasions by a total of 35 per cent. The Politburo referred to the Ukrainian plan as the ‘thrice reduced already reduced plan’ (‘trizhdy umen’shennyi uzhe umen’shennyi plan’),32 and this phrase was frequently repeated in criticism of the alleged inadequacies of the organisation of the Ukrainian collections. The first reduction in the Ukrainian plan was made as early as August. On

Table 4.3 State grain collections, agricultural year July 1932–June 1933: peasant sector (kolkhozy plus individual peasants) (thousand tons)

1931–32 Final Plan 1931–2 Actual 1932–33 Plan (6 May 1932) Main revisions to 17 August 2 October 30 October 3 November 29 November 12 January 1933 1932–33 Actual

Ukraine

North Caucasus

Central Volga

Lower Volga

Central BlackEarth

West Siberia

Other

Total

7109

2522

1736

1638

2097

1212

6077

22 391

6471 5831

2506 2228

1045 1179

1138 1261

2091 1900

898 1016

5227 4652

19 376 18 067

1797

1054

4506

14 878

plan by Politburo: 5171 1786 4223 1589 1195 3766 3584

1593

1159

1185

Sources: For final plan, 1931–32, see Sobranie zakonov (1932), art. 190 (6 May). For actual, 1931–32 and plan and actual, 1932–33, see sources to Table 4.2. For revisions to plan, see text of this chapter.


25 July 1932, Stalin, in a letter to Kaganovich, mistakenly claimed that in the USSR as a whole ‘the prospects for the harvest . . . are without any doubt good’, but also acknowledged that ‘a closer acquaintance with Ukrainian affairs for this period has already revealed the necessity of helping the Ukrainian kolkhozy in the form of a partial reduction of the plan’, and proposed that the same assistance should be provided for individual noncollectivised peasants (individually). Then on 17 August the Politburo resolved to accept Stalin’s proposal and reduce the plan by 40 million puds in the districts which had been particularly badly affected.33 On 28 August, a further Politburo resolution setting out more detailed provisions for the cut specifically resolved that the decision to reduce the plan should not be published. This was evidently because it feared that such an announcement would encourage other lagging districts and regions to press for a reduction in their plan. This principle was maintained with later decisions, all of which appeared only in the special files – with the paradoxical result that in public the Politburo appeared more uncompromising than behind the scenes. A savage struggle to achieve the reduced Ukrainian collection plan culminated in Molotov’s protracted stay there as an emissary of the USSR Politburo at the end of October and during November. While Molotov reproved Ukrainian leaders at all levels for their lack of zeal, soon after he arrived he also recommended to the USSR Politburo that the Ukrainian plan should be reduced by a further 1.15 million tons and this recommendation was approved.34 The total collection plan for Ukraine now amounted to 4.561 million tons compared with the original 6.306 million, a reduction of 28 per cent. A further reduction of 0.457 million tons was made on 12 January 1933.35 The North Caucasus was the other area for which substantial cuts were made in the collection plan. At the end of September the Politburo, noting extremely unfavourable conditions, reduced the plan by 0.605 million tons, 21 per cent of the original plan.36 But even this reduced plan was quite unrealistic, and a further reduction of 0.360 million tons was agreed upon on 3 November.37 These two decisions meant that the new plan was based on two-thirds of the collection levels of the original plan. The performance of the sovkhozy had been particularly poor (as in the case of Ukraine), and their new plan aimed at less than half the original collection. In the autumn of 1932 the reductions in the collection plans for the Volga regions were much less significant than in the case of Ukraine and the North Caucasus, though in 1933 the famine in these regions was also severe. No reductions were made in the Central Volga plan. In the Lower Volga region, Ptukha, the party secretary, made persistent efforts to secure a less stringent plan, but until the end of November the region had been refused any reduction. On 29 November the Politburo firmly rejected Ptukha’s new proposal to reduce the Lower Volga plan by 0.262 million tons (18 per cent) as completely unacceptable. But it agreed to a reduction by 0.066 million tons, and

82

The Stalin Period

to postpone 0.033 million tons of the seed loan due to be returned – a net reduction of only 7 per cent.38 In his valuable dissertation Kondrashin suggests that if Ptukha’s request had been accepted this would have provided enough grain to feed 1.2 million people until the new harvest, and ‘then not a single collective farmer would have died from hunger’.39 Together with the cuts made in the plans for other regions, these changes meant that by January 1933 the original collections plan for the whole USSR of 20.557 million tons in 1932–33 (excluding the milling levy) had been reduced by 17 per cent, to 17.045 million tons. This required major changes in the plans for the issue of grain, to which we return in the final section of this chapter. c Grain in the time of famine, February–July 1933 The drive to collect the remaining grain due to the state continued unabated in January 1933 and in the first week of February. But at this time major changes in policy took place in Moscow. Like the reductions in the collection plans which we have described, these changes were almost entirely made in secrecy, and have not received much attention from historians until recently. By the end of January the spring sowing for the 1933 harvest was only two months away – nearer in the southern districts – and the collection of an adequate amount of seed was an urgent necessity. On 7 February, a resolution of the plenum of the Ukrainian central committee showed no sign of any change in policy. It even claimed that the original plan for the collections had been realistic.40 But two days previously the USSR Politburo had resolved that collections of grain in Ukraine should cease from 6 February, and all regions should devote their efforts to the collection of seed.41 But a far more alarming spectre than seed shortage haunted Ukraine, the North Caucasus and the Volga regions – the spectre of famine. Until this time rural and district authorities had been very reluctant to report cases of famine even in ‘top secret’ communications. They feared to be accused of being misled by kulaks and other counter-revolutionaries. But by the end of January both OGPU and party reports were far more frankly describing cases of famine both in small towns and in the countryside. Now that historians have some access to OGPU reports, it is obvious that on many matters OGPU reports were unreliable. They were frequently preoccupied with the search for imaginary enemies, when the real enemy was the mistaken policy of the authorities. But in 1933 these reports evidently played a major role in convincing sceptical political leaders, including Stalin himself, that they were confronted with genuine famine. We do not yet have access to the OGPU reports received by Stalin, which are presumably in the Presidential Archive. But crucial reports such as those in the Ukrainian archives were certainly forwarded to Stalin. Thus on 6 February a comprehensive report from the Kiev GPU reached


the Ukrainian central committee. The report concluded that, since January, there had been twenty cases of sharply increased food difficulties and attested cases of famine. Like other documents prepared at this time, the report described famine both in small towns and in the countryside. According to the report, in one village parents had sent their children begging; in another starvation had affected widows, old people, and in some cases poor individual peasants and collective farmers.42 This report, and many others in the Ukrainian central committee papers, evidently strongly influenced the Ukrainian Politburo. On 8 February, two days after it received the report of the Kiev GPU, and only a day after the Ukrainian central committee plenum adopted its bland resolution on the grain collections, the Ukrainian Politburo admitted the existence of famine for the first time (albeit in a secret resolution).43 As the extent and depth of famine became clearer, the USSR Politburo was faced with urgent and competing demands for additional grain. First and most acute were the needs of tens of millions of peasants, hungry, starving or on the point of dying from hunger in vast areas of the countryside. Secondly, the grain supplied centrally for the rations of the urban population, the army and others had been quite inadequate even before the famine hit the countryside, and had been supplemented by local supplies. But in the areas affected by famine local supplies of all kinds of food were attenuated to vanishing point and industries, local authorities and others responsible for the population on Ration Lists 2 and 3 (the lists which had lower priority than the Special List and List 1), vociferously demanded increased grain allocations. Thirdly, in the famine areas grain was required for the spring sowing – without it the 1933 harvest would fail in the key grainproducing regions. Fourthly, fodder grains were needed by millions of emaciated horses, essential in many kolkhozy for sowing, harvesting and transport. Confronted by the numerous reports and appeals about the desperate situation in the countryside in the famine areas, the Politburo relinquished its earlier firm decision not to issue grain from centralised funds for seed, or for food- or fodder-aid to the countryside. Between 11 February and 3 March, the Politburo authorised the issue of over 800 000 tons of grain as seed to the North Caucasus, Ukraine, the Lower Volga Region, the Urals and Kazakhstan; and a further 400 000 tons were issued before the end of the spring sowing. The first Politburo decision to release grain for seed was adopted on 11 February. It stated that seed assistance was to be supplied to ‘kolkhozy and sovkhozy which are in need’ in the North Caucasus as a loan; this was to be returned in kind in the autumn of 1933, plus 10 per cent (also in kind) to cover the cost of administration and transport.44 The arrangements for the return of grain set the pattern for all later decisions about seed. A parallel decision on seed assistance for Ukraine followed on 18 February.45 The two decisions were promulgated as an open decree of

84

The Stalin Period

Sovnarkom and the central committee which was published in Pravda. The amounts of seed lent, and the conditions of the loan, were stated in the published decree, which explained that steppe Ukraine and the Kuban’ districts of the North Caucasus were short of seed because the unfavourable climatic conditions in a number of districts of Ukraine and the North Caucasus had led to a loss of part of the harvest.46 However, the published decree did not mention that grain was also being lent for food; moreover, this was the only occasion during the famine months on which the provision of grain to the countryside from central funds, even for seed, was announced openly in the press. The total amount of grain issued for seed, including the secret allocations, was 1.274 million tons. Grain for food was issued in much smaller quantities. Between February and July no fewer than 35 Politburo decisions and Sovnarkom decrees – all secret or top secret – authorised in all the issue of a total of 320 000 tons of grain for food (see Table 4.4). Some of the decisions to issue grain as food were evidently made in direct response to the requests of regional or republican party secretaries. Thus in May 1933 Kosior and Chubar¢ sent a telegram to Stalin urgently requesting grain: The particularly difficult food situation which is developing for June undoubtedly requires the provision of food assistance not only for Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk and Donetsk regions but also for Khar¢kov, Vinnitsa and Kiev regions. Khar¢kov region contains about 20 particularly difficult districts which unconditionally require assistance, and there are already no resources. The telegram specified that Khar’kov region needed 200 000 puds, Kiev and Vinnitsa 150 000 each, and Chernigov 30 000 – a total of 530 000. The Politburo decision which followed on 31 May rounded the total to 500 000 puds, and granted the regions 200 000, 135 000, 135 000 and 30 000 puds respectively.47 The most famous case of a positive response by the Politburo – or rather by Stalin – to a request for grain concerned two districts in the North Caucasus, Veshenskii and Upper Don. In 1963 Khrushchev cited one of Sholokhov’s letters and Stalin’s critical reply, but he was so anxious to blacken Stalin’s reputation that he did not reveal either that Stalin had allocated extra grain in response to Sholokhov or that a Politburo commission had investigated the charges and, in principle, supported them.48 The full Sholokhov-Stalin correspondence was not released until 1994.49 In fact the Politburo advanced grain to these districts on two occasions to the amount of Sholokhov’s requests.50 This was the only occasion on which the Politburo provided a specific amount of grain for a particular district. Although the grain loans for food were substantial, most of the grain

Table 4.4 State grain resources and allocation, 1931–32 and 1932–33 (thousand tons) 1931–32 actual (preliminary) (dated 3 March 1932) Availability Stocks on 1 July (beginning of year) Central receipts2 TOTAL AVAILABLE Allocations: General supply3 Torgsin4 Commercial sales Horse transport5 Timber6 Peat and fisheries Far North Gold and non-ferrous Vodka, beer industries Other industries Army and OGPU troops Gulag, special settlers Livestock Special agriculture7 Seed loans Food loans Export Losses TOTAL ALLOCATED Stocks remaining, 30 June (end of year) Of which, addition to reserve funds

1931–32 actual (final)1

1932–33 plan (2 June 1932)

1932–33 actual (final)

2 143

2 332

996

1 286

22 699 24 842

22 839 25 171

22 180 23 176

18 837 20 123

8 870

8 956

9 903

0 820 1 039 236 349 224 1 058 698 818 254 816 1 684 660

0

1 362

160 640 935 255 330 265 925 724 928 192 471 1 397 0 0 1 960 395 19 479 3 697

1 441 331 18 162 1 949

-970

2 877

663

4 546 654 22 725 2 117 -26

1 149 264 200 1 032 569

715 1 707 1 267 107 4 786

8 314 193 105 464 622 192 252 285 1 199 532 814 226 378 943 1 8718

Notes: 1 These figures are taken from the published grain handbook, which does not include army, Gulag, and so on; no comparable total is therefore available. 2 These figures differ slightly from those in Table 4.2; they include some miscellaneous receipts and sometimes include only the 90 per cent of the milling levy which was transferred to the centre. 3 1931/32 (preliminary), 1932/33 (plan) and 1932/33 (final) include fodder grains used for flour and groats, and semolina (mannaya krupa). 1931/32 (final) is not explicit: we assume it includes these items, and have deducted from it the allocation to urban horse transport (obtained from the preliminary column) in order to make it consistent with the other columns. 4 Foreign-currency shops. 5 Guzhevoi transport: fodder for urban and industrial horses. 6 Cutting and floating. 7 Includes grain allocated for food to cotton and other specialised areas, and food allocations to sovkhozy. 8 This figure is not given divided into seed and food. The published total in Ezhegodnik is seed loans 1274; food loans 330, a total of 1604. The reason for the discrepancy is not known. Sources: 1931–32: (preliminary) and 1932–33 (plan): RGAE, f. 8040, op. 1, d. 12, ll. 74–82. 1931–32 (final): Ezhegodnik khlebooborota, [vi] (1934). 1932–33 (final): RGAE, f. 8040, op. 8, d. 8, ll. 572–6 (memorandum from Chernov to Stalin, Kaganovich, Molotov and Kuibyshev, dated 29 December 1933).

86

The Stalin Period

provided comprised grains which were in normal times mainly used for fodder or for special purposes, rather than the two main food grains (rye and wheat). Only 35.4 per cent of the food loans consisted of rye, wheat and flour, compared with 83 per cent for the ‘general supply’ of grain and flour for rations to the non-agricultural population. Starving peasants had to make do with the secondary grains.51 Which of the starving peasants received the grain? Central recommendations, and local practice, were by no means clear-cut. At first the Politburo decisions sought to allocate grain aid only to the rural proletariat and the politically conscious. The decisions of 7 February all stated that the grain was for the food needs of workers in sovkhozy, MTS (Machine-Tractor Stations) and MTM (Machine-Tractor Workshops), and also for the ‘party and non-party aktiv of kolkhozy in need’.52 This distinction was not maintained. Later decisions simply stated that the grain was ‘for kolkhozy and sovkhozy which are in need’ (11 February, North Caucasus),53 and even included individual peasants (for example, the decision about Veshenskii district on 19 April). But attempts were made to ensure that ‘conscientious’ collective farmers were afforded some priority. Thus a directive of Dnepropetrovsk regional committee stated that grain should be provided to MTS and sovkhoz workers, and also to collective farmers who had earned a considerable number of labour days in those kolkhozy in which there had been cases of ‘swelling-up and death from hunger’.54 Both central and local authorities used the grain in order to ensure that agricultural work was carried out. Thus the Sovnarkom/central committee top secret section of the decrees of 18 February specifically stated that grain for food was advanced for the period of spring field work.55 In practice, during the spring sowing bread and other foods were frequently provided on a daily basis for collective farmers out in the fields. See, for example, the instructions of the Vinnitsa regional party committee issued to the district committees on 29 April.56 A chilling decision of the Ukrainian central committee explained what was to be done with peasants in the Kiev region who had been sent to hospital suffering from hunger: ‘Divide all those hospitalised into the sick and those who are getting better, and significantly increase the food for the latter so that they can be released for work as quickly as possible.’57 In practice food was often received only on the basis of ability to work in the fields, and other peasants were left to die. An OGPU report about a district in the Khar¢kov region complained that ‘food assistance was provided only for those working, and very insignificant help was given to those who were in decline or had swelled up’.58 But this was not the whole story. Considerable efforts were made to supply grain to hungry children, irrespective of their parents’ role in society. The Vinnitsa decision of 29 April insisting that most grain should be distributed to those who were active in agriculture also allocated grain specifically to crèches and children’s institutions in the badly hit districts.59 The report of


3 June, which recommended that food should be withdrawn from those who did not work, also argued that ‘the People’s Commissariat of Education should be obliged to decisively undertake and secure food assistance to the school and pre-school child population, and immediately establish a sufficient quantity of children’s homes for the homeless [besprizornye]’.60 The USSR Politburo issued a grain loan to the Crimea on 20 May which was specifically for children in need and aged invalids.61 Considerable research is required to establish exactly how the food loans of the famine months were distributed.

4.4 Changes in the grain balance In the outcome, the central authorities collected a total of 17.8 million tons of grain (including milling levy), 4.4 million tons less than the plan of 6 May 1932 (see Table 4.2).62 This failure meant that very considerable changes had to be made in the planned issue of grain. These are set out in Table 4.4. The original planned issue in the grain balance of 2 June 1932 envisaged that as much grain would be available to the centre for distribution as in 1931–32, but proposed major changes in the way in which it was distributed (see section 3a) above). By December 1932, it was absolutely clear that the 2 June 1932 plan could not be achieved, owing to the reduction in the collections compared with the May 1932 plan. On 9 December the Politburo approved a revised grain balance. The new balance reduced general supply by 1.120 million tons, so that the allocation in 1932–33 would now be lower than in 1931–32.63 Several other cuts were also made, particularly in allocations to the stimulation of the production of industrial crops, to timber and to export; but at this stage the allocation to the reserve funds was reduced only slightly. But the failure to reach even the reduced collection plans, and the emergence of seed shortage and famine conditions, meant that this plan could not last. The amount of grain available was about 1.3 million tons less than the amount expected in December 1932, and some 1.5 million more tons were allocated to seed and food assistance. To accommodate these changes, in the course of January–July 1933 the Committee on Grain Collections (Komzag) persuaded the Politburo to make a large number of changes to the grain balance. These were often individually small. But the outcome was that further cuts were made in general supply, in the allocation for industrial crops and in the allocation for export. Compared with the June 1932 plan for 1932–33, general supply was cut by over 1.5 million tons and exports by 0.5 million (see Table 4.4). But the most significant change was that the proposed allocation to the reserve funds – Nepfond and Gosfond – was gradually whittled away. According to the preliminary grain balance prepared in July 1933, these special fondy had vanished altogether. When the head of Komzag submitted

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the grain balance to Stalin, Kaganovich and Molotov on 4 July 1933, he stated that the total remaining stock of grain on 1 July, including fondy, was only 1.392 million tons, no more than on 1 July 1932.64 But the grain balance for 1933–34 approved by the Politburo a month later recorded that the stock (nalichie) of grain on 1 July 1933, was 1.825 million tons.65 The final official figure was 1.949 million tons (see Table 4.4). We have not found a satisfactory explanation of the discrepancy between these figures. The additional grain would have enabled substantial increases to be made in the grain supplied to the starving peasantry during the famine. But we have found no evidence that the availability of these additional grain stocks was known either to the officials of Komzag or to Stalin and the Politburo before July or August 1933. In any case the total amount available in stocks was only some six weeks’ supply for internal use.

4.5 Conclusion 1. The grain harvests (barn harvest) From the mid-1920s onwards grain harvests were considerably smaller than the amount recorded in the official handbooks of TsSU published from the 1960s onwards. The 1931 and 1932 harvests were particularly bad. The 1932 harvest was certainly smaller than the harvest of the previous year, some 53–58 million tons, and even in terms of the official TsSU figures it probably amounted to no more than 58 million tons (62 million tons is the upper limit). 2. The reasons for the poor harvests of 1931 and 1932 The crisis was complex and cumulative, resulting from a series of disastrous state agricultural policies from 1927–28 onwards. Serious over-cropping resulted in soil exhaustion and contributed to the upsurge of plant diseases, which were particularly severe in Ukraine. Excessive grain zagotovki undoubtedly affected peasant incentives to work, though the extent is difficult to assess. The shortage of grain in the countryside due to the excessive collections certainly made it impossible for the kolkhozy and the individual peasants to maintain livestock levels. The decline in traction power resulted in serious delays in all basic field operations. Delays in ploughing and sowing reduced biological yields, and delays in harvesting, especially in circumstances of widespread plant diseases, greatly increased harvesting losses. All these problems were compounded by the confusion in agricultural organisation to which many commentators refer. The unfavourable weather added to the difficulties. 3. Grain collection and distribution Our work has confirmed – if confirmation were needed – that the grain campaign in 1932–33 was harsh and repressive to an unprecedented degree.


While this harshness was the dominant factor, we also find that state policy was more ambiguous and confused than is generally believed. In response to pressure from the local authorities and the peasants, the Politburo made large though insufficient reductions in planned collections between August 1932 and January 1933. In the famine months, it made substantial issues of grain for seed and for food to the peasants in the worst-affected areas, entirely contrary to its original policy. All these changes involved major modifications in the grain balance, the most important of which were: (i) the reduction in general supply to the population receiving rations, particularly those on Ration Lists 2 and 3, and the removal of many people from rationing altogether; and (ii) the failure to accumulate the reserve funds – Nepfond and Gosfond – for which Stalin had been insistently clamouring ever since 1929.

Notes * An earlier Russian-language version of this chapter was presented to the Agrarian Seminar organised by V. P. Danilov in Moscow, and was published together with comments of Russian historians in Otechestvennaya istoriya, no. 6 (1998) 94–131. An English-language version was also presented to the Annual Conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies in April 1999. 1. New York Review of Books, 23 September 1993. 2. Metric tons are used throughout this chapter. 3. RGASPI, f.17, op. 3, d. 902, l. 6 (item 16). 4. RGASPI, f.17, op. 3, d. 931 (decision by opros no. 107/71 dated 23 September); GARF, f. 5446, op. 57, d. 26, l. 119 (article 2121/487s). 5. Golodomor 1932–1933 rr. v Ukraini: prichini i naslidki (Kiev, 1995), p. 46. 6. Ibid., p. 36. 7. Rossiya XX vek: sud¢by rossiiskogo krest¢yanstva (Moscow, 1996), pp. 333–4. 8. S. G. Wheatcroft, ‘The Reliability of Russian Pre-war Grain Output Statistics’, Soviet Studies, XXVI (1974); ‘Grain Production and Utilisation in Russia and the USSR before Collectivisation’ (PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 1980); and ‘A Re-evaluation of Soviet Agricultural Production in the 1920s and 1930s’, in R. C. Stuart, ed., The Soviet Rural Economy (New Jersey: Rowman & Allanfeld, 1984). See also the revised grain output figures in R. W. Davies, S. G. Wheatcroft and J. M. Cooper, ‘Soviet Industrialization Reconsidered: Some Preliminary Considerations about Soviet Economic Development Between 1926 and 1941’, Economic History Review, second series, XXIX (1986) 280–4. More recently the American historian M. B. Tauger has drawn similar conclusions to our own in relation to the 1931 and 1932 harvests (see his article in N. A. Ivnitskii, ed., Golod 1932–1933 godov (Moskva: Rossiiskii gos. gumanitarnyi universitet, 1995), pp. 13–42; in our opinion, however, his estimate that the 1932 harvest might be even less than 50 million tons cannot be safely obtained from the kolkhoz annual reports. 9. RGAE, f. 260, op. 1, d. 217, ll. 2, 16 (reports by Tarakanov and Pliuks). 10. Ibid., l. 6 (Nikulikhin).

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11. ‘SIPS’ is an acronym for the Soviet Industrialisation Project, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham. 12. Pyatiletnii plan . . . , vol. 2, part 1 (Moscow, 1929), 337; Sel’skoe khozyaistvo SSSR: ezhegodnik 1935 (Moscow, 1936), p. 367. 13. See data in Sel¢skoe khozyaistvo 1935, p. 715; this early virgin lands campaign is discussed by I. E. Zelenin in Otechestvennaya istoriya, no. 2 (1996) 55–70. 14. Pyatiletnii plan, vol. 3 (1929), pp. 556–7. 15. Ezhegodnik po sel¢skomu khozyaistvu Sovetskogo Soyuza za 1931 god (Moscow, 1933), p. 234. This estimate (29.5 million hectares) was much lower than the estimate previously accepted. 16. RGAE, f. 260, op. 1, d. 217, ll. 4, 6ob. (report of conference on the harvest, summer 1932). 17. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 899 (no. 2/9). 18. Sobranie zakonov, 1932, art. 436, dated 29 September (‘O meropriyatiyakh po povysheniyu urozhaya’). 19. Pyatiletnii plan, vol. 2, part 1, pp. 328–9. 20. Ibid., p. 333; RGAE, f. 4372, op. 30, d. 881, l. 19 (the 1932 figure was originally published from the archives by Moshkov). 21. See S. G. Wheatcroft, ‘The Soviet Economic Crisis of 1932: the Crisis in Agriculture’, working paper presented to NASEES conference, March 1985. 22. D. N. Pryanishnikov, Izbrannye sochineniya, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1931; reprint, 1965), pp. 249–50. 23. Ibid., p. 272. 24. This is shown in detail in diagrams in Wheatcroft, ‘Soviet Economic Crisis’, appendices 4a and 4b. 25. S. G. Wheatcroft, ‘The Significance of Climate and Weather Change on Soviet Agriculture (with Particular Reference to the 1920s and 1930s)’, Discussion Papers, SIPS no. 11 (Birmingham: Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, 1977). 26. Narkomsnab decree of 6 December 1931; RGAE, f. 1446, op. 6, d. 143, l. 41. See also Yu. Moshkov, Zernovaya problema v gody sploshnoi kollektivizatsii sel¢skogo khozyaistva SSSR (1929–1932gg.) (Moscow, 1966), p. 210. 27. RGASPI, f.17, op. 162, d.11, ll. 131–54 (16 January). 28. See R. U. Devis (R. W. Davies), ‘Sovetskaya ekonomika v period krizisa. 1930–1933 gody’, Istoriya SSSR, no. 4 (1991) 198–210; and I. E. Zelenin, ‘Byl li “kolkhoznyi neonep”?’, Otechestvennaya istoriya, no. 2 (1994) 105–21. 29. ‘Transition stocks’ would be reduced by 0.176 million tons, so the net addition to stocks would be 2.701 million tons (see Table 4.4, 1932–33 plan). 30. See, for example, the arguments advanced by Robert Conquest, Slavic Review, 53, no. 1 (spring 1994) 318. 31. See, for example, the valuable account in N. A. Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiya i raskulachivanie: nachalo 30-kh godov (Moscow: Magistre, 1996), pp. 186–207. Part of this material comes from the Politburo working papers currently held in the Presidential Archives and is not generally accessible. 32. RGASPI, f. 17, op.3, d. 914 (art. 50/32 dated 24 January 1933). 33. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 13, 76 (decision 47/4 reported to full Politburo on 25 August). 34. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162 d.13, l. 140 (decision by correspondence – oprosom – dated 30 October). 35. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 913, l. 15 (oprosom).

R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft 91 36. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 13, l. 118 (decision oprosom dated 29 September). 37. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 14, l. 2; on the same day the West Siberian plan was reduced. 38. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 16, d. 14, l. 22. 39. V. Kondrashin, ‘Golod 1932–1933 godov v derevne Povolzh’ya’ (kandidatskaya dissertatsiya, Institut istorii SSSR, Moscow, 1991), p. 266. 40. Pravda, 10 February 1933; the text from the archives is published in Golod 1932–1933 godov na Ukraine (Kiev, 1990), pp. 371–3. 41. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 915, l. 16 (oprosom). 42. TsDAGOU, f. 1, op. 20, d. 6274, ll. 46–56 (the report is not dated). 43. TsDAGOU, f. 1, op. 16, d. 9, ll. 151–6, published in Golod 1932–1933, p. 375. 44. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162,d. 14, ll. 62–3 – art. 52/17. 45. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 14, ll. 64, 74. 46. Pravda, 26 February 1933. The decree, dated 25 February, was also published in Sobranie zakonov (1933), art. 80. 47. Draft telegram, TsDAGOU, f. 1, op. 20. d. 6378, l. 36. 48. Pravda, 10 March 1963. 49. Voprosy istorii, no. 3 (1994) 3–25. Even now the original correspondence, preserved in APRF, is not normally accessible to historians. 50. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 14, ll. 124, 126 (decisions of 19 and 22 April). 51. Ezhegodnik khlebooborota za 1931–32, 1932–33 i predvaritel’nye itogi zagotovok 1933 g. (tablitsy), [vi], (Moscow, 1934). The other grains received as food assistance included maize (24.2 per cent), oats (14.5 per cent), millet (13.0 per cent) and vetch (6.1 per cent). 52. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 14, l. 60. 53. See, for example, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 14, ll. 62–3 (food loan to North Caucasus, decision dated 11 February). 54. Directive to districts, 10 February; TsDAGOU, 1/20/6277, 6. 55. GARF, f. 5446, op. 57, d. 23, ll. 73–4 (stat¢ya 243/43s). 56. Decision of bureau of Vinnitsa regional committee. TsDAGOU, f. 1, op. 20, d. 6275, ll. 211–15. 57. TsDAGOU, f. 1, op. 6, d. 282, ll. 107–10, published in Golod 1932–1933, pp. 471–4. 58. Report on situation as at 10 June; TsDAGOU, f. 1, op. 20, d. 6276, l. 31. A further food loan was given to the region on 13 June. 59. TsDAGOU, f. 1, op. 20 d. 6275, l. 211. 60. TsDAGOU, f. 1, op. 20, d.6276, ll. 9–10. 61. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 14, l. 142. 62. These figures include the milling levy (garntsevoi sbor), but exclude the return of seed originally envisaged, and the zakupki collected by local authorities under central direction in addition to the zagotovki. Including these items, the shortfall was as much as 5.470 million tons. 63. For the 9 December 1932 revision, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 14, ll. 34–5. 64. RGAE, f. 8040, op. 8s, d. 7, ll. 306–17. 65. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 15 ll. 24, 38–40 (decision of 7 August, art. 53/39).

5 Patronage and the Intelligentsia in Stalin’s Russia* Sheila Fitzpatrick

In 1930 in the little Sukhumi rest-house for bigwigs where we ended up through an oversight of Lakoba’s, Ezhov’s wife was talking to me: ‘Pil¢nyak goes (khodit) to us,’ she said. ‘And whom do you go to?’ I indignantly reported that conversation to O. M., but he quietened me down: ‘Everyone “goes”. Obviously it can’t be otherwise. We “go”, too. To Nikolai Ivanovich [Bukharin]’.1 Patronage relations were ubiquitous in the Soviet elite. The phenomenon is perhaps most familiar in the political sphere, where local and central leaders cultivated and promoted their own client networks (the often-criticised ‘family circles’ [semeistva]).2 But it was not only rising politicians who needed patrons. Lacking an adequate legal system, Russians relied on patronage alliances to protect ‘personal security, goods, career and status, freedom of expression and other material interests’.3 These words, written by David Ransel about Russian elites in the time of Catherine the Great, apply equally well to Stalinist society. Like blat connections, patronage relations were part of the well-placed Soviet citizen’s survival kit. And no sector of the elite was more intensive in its pursuit of patrons, or more successful in finding them in the heights of the party leadership, than the Soviet ‘creative intelligentsia’, whose clientelist practices are the subject of this chapter. To say that patronage relations were ubiquitous in the elites of Stalin’s Russia is not to say that everybody had them. Not everyone is equally adept at the human skills involved in patronage and blat relations. Some members of the intelligentsia were virtual non-participants for lack of opportunity or aptitude; others avoided clientelist relations with highly-placed Communists on principle. But nobody within the elites – and perhaps outside them, but that question remains to be investigated by scholars – could live in a patronage-free environment, any more than he or she could live in a social environment that was free of blat. These two phenomena are intimately connected. Both involve the doing of favours based on some degree of personal relationship, for which there is no direct payment; the difference is that 92

Sheila Fitzpatrick 93

patronage connections exist between persons of unequal social status, whereas blat relations are non-hierarchical.4 Like blat, patronage was and remains a semi-taboo subject with slightly shady overtones of corruption for Russians (at least when they are talking about themselves). Among intelligentsia memoirists, only the most sociologically-inclined (like Nadezhda Mandelstam) or the most flagrant practitioners of clientelism (like Natal¢ya Sats, former director of the Moscow Children’s Theatre) openly discuss their own relations with patrons from the political elites.5 Most memoirists remain reticent, though they may note occasions where some important personage showed his nobility of character or devotion to the arts by intervening on their behalf. The same reticence is to be found in the language which Russians use to talk about patronage. While terms describing a patron’s protection exist (pokrovitel¢stvo, protektsiya, ruka), they tend to be pejorative and would rarely be used about one’s own patronage relations. Most non-pejorative ways of referring to a patron are euphemistic and tend to present the patron–client relationship in terms of friendship. Verbs like ‘help’ (pomogat¢), ‘support’ (podderzhivat¢), and ‘come to the aid of’ (vyruchat¢) are often used to describe patronage transactions. Written appeals to patrons request their ‘advice’ (sovet) and ‘help’ (pomoshch¢).6 There is an extensive comparative literature on clientelist/patronage relations in which these are defined as reciprocal, personal (conventionally involving affective ties), continuing (not one-off events), and taking place between unequal partners.7 The advantage to the client is that he or she obtains goods, jobs, promotion, protection, and so forth from the more powerful and worldly-connected patron. The advantage to the patron, as it is described in the literature, is that the patron has the loyalty and services of the client for a range of purposes ranging from work, protection of reputation, and provision of intelligence to support in elections. The client is the patron’s ‘man’. Many writers on clientelism see it as closely connected with insecurity and vulnerability: One may posit that resort to patronage mechanisms will be the more pronounced where the weak are disproportionately weak, the strong disproportionately strong, and formal, alternative mechanisms for protecting citizens – laws, court systems, police, procedural rules of the game, etc. – remain embryonic, manipulable or perhaps imbued with little or no legitimacy.8 It has also been suggested that, in situations of scarcity of goods and services, patronage may provide the necessary discriminatory selection basis.9 Much of this general theory of patronage fits the Soviet case very well, in particular the insecurity/vulnerability and preferential distribution arguments. Undoubtedly patronage and blat were Soviet mechanisms for

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distributing scarce goods in the absence of a market. There was not enough social provision such as housing, health care, and so on to go round; there was no market to set priorities via pricing; bureaucratic rules of allocation were clumsy and unsatisfactory; law functioned poorly, especially as a protection for the individual against arbitrary state action. In the real world, personalistic processes like patronage and blat were what often determined who got what. Less clearly applicable to the Soviet case is the notion of reciprocity in patron–client relations. In the sphere of political clientelism, one can see possible forms of reciprocity in the form of loyalty, discretion and mutual protection within the family circle: since semeistva got local political leaders into big trouble during the Purges, their ubiquity presumably tells us that a local mutual-protection ring was an almost essential modus operandi in Stalinist politics, despite the dangers.10 But in the multifarious patron–client relationships that linked the creative intelligentsia and the regime, it is hard to see what reciprocal benefits the clients could offer their patrons. Of what use would the loyalty of (say) Mandelstam have been to Bukharin, or of Vavilov to Molotov? And what ‘services’ could these intelligentsia clients provide for their patrons? On closer examination, this may not constitute a deviation of Soviet patronage from the general rule so much as point up a weakness in the articulation of the theory. There must, in fact, be many contexts in which patrons are unlikely to obtain tangible material benefits from their clients. As one writer notes, ‘a patron controlling bureaucratic favours may be victimised by his own power, unable to extract from his clients anything commensurate with the services he has rendered’.11 (I will consider the intangible benefits to the patron later in this chapter.) Patronage is still an underdeveloped topic in modern Russian/Soviet historiography. Daniel Orlovsky has provided a valuable introductory overview of pre-Soviet patronage focussed on the late imperial period,12 and Daniel Aleksandrov and other young Russian historians of science have begun to investigate patronage in the sciences as part of their study of the everyday practices (byt) of Russian and Soviet science.13 The present essay is, as far as I know, the first attempt at an overview of client–patron relationships between members of the Soviet intelligentsia and members of the Soviet political elite. For reasons of space, the equally important topic of clientalist relations within the intelligentsia is not discussed in this chapter.

5.1 Who were the patrons? Officials were the people with access to resources in Soviet society; consequently, officials were the major source of patronage. Any office-holder could function as a patron who did favours for clients, and it is hard to believe that there was any official who never did this. As for patronage of


the intelligentsia, some political leaders were more involved, some less, but it is probably safe to assume that all members of the Politburo and obkom secretaries acted at least occasionally as patrons of members of the intelligentsia. This was not necessarily because of love of the arts and scholarship but a matter of noblesse oblige – the position and status required it. From the existing memoir literature, it would be easy to get the impression that patronage of the intelligentsia – indeed, patronage in general – was the prerogative of a few particularly generous or culturally-inclined party leaders: for example, Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad obkom leader; ‘Sergo’ Ordzhonikidze, People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry; Mikhail Kalinin, longtime President of TsIK; and Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, who was Deputy Commissar of Enlightenment.14 This is not the case, however. It must be remembered that in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods, when most of these memoirs of ‘unforgettable meetings’ with ‘friends of science’ and ‘friends of the arts’ in the party leadership appeared, large numbers of former leaders – from Oppositionists of the 1920s like Trotsky and Kamenev to the ‘anti-party group’ of the 1950s, including Molotov and Malenkov – were non-persons whose names could not be mentioned in print. It may be that ‘good’ Communists like Kirov and Ordzhonikidze – along with Bukharin, whose patronage is attested by dissident and samizdat sources – really were particularly generous as patrons of the intelligentsia. But ‘bad’ Communists like State Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinskii or Nikolai Ezhov, Genrikh Yagoda and Yakov Agranov of the NKVD were also active patrons.15 With the opening of the Soviet archives, we find that even Vyacheslav Molotov, head of the Soviet government throughout the 1930s, who gets few if any mentions as a patron in the memoir literature (or, for that matter, in his own quasi-memoir volume),16 was much sought after and responsive as a cultural patron. (The next section of this essay is largely based on Molotov’s Sovnarkom archive.) Stalin, of course, was in a category of his own. While his eminence tended to disqualify him from engaging in ordinary patron–client relations in the 1930s and 1940s, he may be regarded as the universal and archetypal patron, as in this extract from a fantasy about the writer Mikhail Bulgakov (whom Stalin did in fact help): Motorcycle . . . brrm!!! In the Kremlin already! Misha goes into the hall, and there sit Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan and Yagoda. Misha stands in the door, making a low bow. STALIN: What’s the matter? Why are you barefoot? BULGAKOV (with a sad shrug): Well . . . I don’t have any boots. STALIN: What is this? My writer going without boots? What an outrage! Yagoda, take off your boots, give them to him.17

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High officials in the cultural bureaucracies played a special role as patrons of the intelligentsia. Anatolii Lunacharskii, as head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros), was notoriously generous in this regard, though the generosity of his response reduced the value of his interventions on behalf of clients.18 As the writer Kornei Chukovskii recalled, as early as 1918 dozens of clients gathered every day outside Lunacharskii’s apartment in Petrograd, ‘thirsting for his advice and help’: Pedagogues, workers, inventors, librarians, circus clowns, futurists, artists of all schools and genres (from peredvizhniki to Cubists), philosophers, ballerinas, hypnotists, singers, Proletkul¢t poets and simply poets, artists of the former Imperial stage – all of them went to Anatolii Vasil¢evich in a very long queue up the dilapidated staircase to the crowded room which finally came to be called the ‘reception room’ ( priemnaya).19 In the realm of cultural patronage, nobody was more important than Maxim Gorky. His position was anomalous, since he was neither a cultural bureaucrat nor a party leader. He established the role first during the Civil War by virtue of his longtime close acquaintanceship with Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders. Then, after his return to the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s, Gorky was essentially given the job of patron extraordinaire by Stalin; indeed, this was probably one of the main incentives for him to return. Chukovskii’s tribute to Gorky’s ‘unforgettable role’ as a patron of children’s literature (‘How stubbornly he helped up children’s writers struggle with Leftist apologists, how many times he saved our books from the then Narkompros, RAPP [the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers], and so forth’) is one of hundreds.20 There are more than 13 000 letters to Gorky from Soviet writers in the Gorky archive,21 a sizeable proportion of which approach him as an actual or potential patron,22 and his activities in this sphere in the first half of the 1930s were legendary. Finally, institutional sources of patronage outside the cultural bureaucracy should not be forgotten. Katerina Clark notes that in the early years of NEP, when Narkompros’s budget was drastically reduced, the Komsomol assumed new importance as a source of patronage for Petrograd intellectuals.23 The GPU/NKVD and its leaders also provided important patronage for some cultural and educational activities (Matvei Pogrebinskii’s and Anton Makarenko’s communes for delinquents; the writers’ expedition to the White-Sea Canal that resulted in the Belomor volume,24 and so on). For the artists of AKhRR (the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, established in the mid-1920s), trade unions and the Red Army were the main sources of patronage.25 It should be noted that artists had access to private patronage in a fully traditional sense: the commissioning of portraits of patrons in the political world. The army leader Klim Voroshilov was one of those whose portraits were painted by a client.26 Opponents of the AKhRR


group claimed that AKhRR owed its success to a ‘policy of worming a privileged position by doing portraits of the establishment figures, who in turn passed on lucrative commissions to the Association on behalf of the organizations they headed’.27

5.2 What could patrons do for their clients? There were three main categories of request from clients: (i) goods and services; (ii) protection, and; (iii) intervention in professional disputes. The first category is the one where we see patronage acting as a non-market mechanism for the distribution of scarce goods, above all housing. Molotov’s Sovnarkom archive of the 1930s is full of requests from members of the intelligentsia, writing to him as a patron (addressed by name and patronymic) and putting their requests on a personal basis, for help in obtaining a larger apartment.28 The letter of Nikolai Sidorenko, a member of the Writers’ Union, was a typical if florid example. Sidorenko described pathetically how he lived with wife and stepson of 15 in one attic room, damp, low and dark, 13 square metres, off Arbat. As a result of ‘every-day life and moral torments of my family’, his wife was suffering from severe nervous breakdown; the boy was growing up ‘abnormal, without his own corner’; his wife’s father, a 72-year-old invalid, had to beg corners in strange apartments.29 Writers, musicians, scientists, and artists were among those who approached Molotov, often successfully, for help in obtaining housing.30 The second category – even more common, at least in the Great Purge years – consists of requests for protection. In the Soviet case this could mean intervention to stop the writer being harassed by colleagues or particular state institutions; help in re-establishing a reputation after falling into political disgrace; help in getting an arrested relative released or their case reviewed, and so on. Take a characteristic selection of items from Molotov’s mailbag in the second half of the 1930s: Professor A. L. Chizhevskii appealed for protection from harassment by the Communist biologist B. M. Zavadovskii;31 Academician Derzhavin asked for help in resisting ‘persecution’ at the hands of Academician Deborin;32 I. I. Mints asked Molotov to squash a libellous rumour that Mints was a friend of the disgraced ‘Trotskyite’, Leopol¢d Averbakh (former leader of RAPP);33 the poet A. Zharov complained about the ‘death sentence’ pronounced on his recent book in a Pravda review.34 There is no reason to think Molotov was unusual in the scope of his patronage activities (after all, as noted above, he is not celebrated as a patron in the annals of the literary intelligentsia). Similar ‘client’ cases can be found

98

The Stalin Period

in Ordzhonikidze’s archives. In 1931, for example, the former Menshevik economist, O. A. Ermanskii, wrote to Ordzhonikidze asking for his help in dissipating the ‘social isolation into which I have fallen’.35 There are many letters to party leaders in the archives from aggrieved actors, singers and other performers complaining about being denied good roles.36 Agranov of the NKVD, a patron of the Vakhtangov Theatre, was the person to whom the actress Tsetsiliya Mansurova regularly applied when her husband, a member of the aristocratic Sheremet¢ev family, was disenfranchised or arrested because of his social origins.37 When the composer Dmitrii Shostakovich fell into disgrace over his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936, he turned naturally to his friend and patron, Marshall Tukhachevskii.38 The third type of help for which clients appealed to patrons was intervention in professional disputes. Lysenko’s feud with the geneticists, for example, was the subject of many appeals from both sides.39 Physics, too, was a subject of appeals and counter-appeals. For example, the militants at Pod znamenem marksizma, M. B. Mitin, A. A. Maksimov and P. F. Yudin, sought Molotov’s support for their controversial attack on ‘idealism’ in physics,40 while Petr Kapitsa wrote in defence of the militants’ targets to Stalin, Molotov and Mezhlauk, characterising Pod znamenem marksizma’s intervention in physics as ‘scientifically illiterate’ and deploring the assumption that ‘if you are not a materialist in physics . . . you are an enemy of the people’.41 Artists were perhaps even more prone than scientists to appeal to patrons to resolve professional disputes. At the beginning of 1937, Konstantin Iuon, Aleksandr Gerasimov (head of the Moscow Union of Artists), Sergei Gerasimov and Igor¢ Grabar¢ asked Molotov to receive a delegation to adjudicate their quarrels with Kerzhentsev’s Arts Committee, claiming that ‘extra and decisive interference of authoritative instances is necessary so as not to allow that union [of artists] to collapse completely’.42

5.3 How to acquire a patron The patron–client relationship requires the existence of some sort of personal connection. That connection may be social or familial, or have occurred through a chance meeting in a work context, in a train, at a resort, for example, or through an introduction. Boris Pil¢nyak was taken along to meet an early patron, Trotsky, by A. K. Voronskii (editor of Krasnaya nov¢) in the early 1920s.43 How he met a later patron, Ezhov, is unknown, but most likely it was through Babel, who was a friend and former lover of Ezhov’s wife. Leopol¢d Averbakh knew Yagoda because his sister married him; one of the sources of his (and Yagoda’s) contact with Maxim Gorky was that his uncle, Zinovii Peshkov, was Gorky’s adopted son. Meyerhold expanded his network of party and security-police patrons through the salon


run by his second wife, Zinaida Raikh.44 Painters could acquire patrons by painting them: q.v. requests to pose from painters Mark Shafran (to Andrei Zhdanov) and B. V. Ioganson (to Ivan Gronskii).45 But these are only the beginnings of chains by which a potential client could establish contact with a patron. There were political leaders who were known to specialise in certain types of clients on the basis of ethnicity, profession, avocation etc.: Mikoyan for Armenians,46 Ordzhonikidze for Georgians,47 Vyshinskii for lawyers and diplomats,48 Voroshilov (an amateur singer) for opera singers . . . And there were also introductions from lowerlevel patrons: for example, when Pil¢nyak was in trouble in the mid-1920s after the publication of his scandalous novella, Povest¢ nepogashennoi luny, he approached a middle-level patron, Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov, then editor of Izvestiya, who arranged a meeting with Rykov (who ‘advised me to write letters of contrition, which I did’).49 And people with contacts might pass on a letter ‘kuda sleduet’, as Babel did when he handed Ezhov’s wife a letter from Eduard Bagritskii’s widow asking for the release from prison of her sister’s husband.50 Finally, major cultural institutions like the Bol¢shoi or Vakhtangov theatres would have their own sets of patronage connections that could be activated on behalf of a member in need.51

5.4 Brokers There were certain leading members of the cultural and scholarly professions – P. L. Kapitsa and S. I. Vavilov were examples in the natural sciences – who acted as representatives of a whole group of clients in dealing with highly-placed patrons. They assumed this broker function because of their professional statures and their established connections with various government leaders: chairmen of the Academy of Sciences, secretaries of professional unions, directors of scientific institutes, and so on, had it ex officio. Sometimes brokering was a matter of representing the professional interests of a group, as when Aleksandr Fadeev, secretary of the Writers’ Union, wrote to Molotov in January 1940 to express the distress of the literary community that none of the newly established 100 000 ruble Stalin Prizes had been earmarked for literature.52 Sometimes it meant interceding on behalf of subordinates – for example when Graftio, head of Svir¢stroi, wrote to Leningrad leader M. S. Chudov in 1935 on behalf of Svir¢stroi engineers threatened with deportation.53 Many ‘broker’ interventions had to do with arrests within the professional community that the broker represented. Kapitsa, for example, appealed to Valerii Mezhlauk (deputy chairman of Sovnarkom) and Stalin about the arrest of V. A. Fock in 1937 and to Molotov and Stalin about Landau’s arrest (in 1938) and continuing imprisonment (in 1939).54 S. I. Vavilov wrote to Beria in 1944 attempting to gain the release of N. A. Kozyrev, a young astronomer from Pulkovo.55 Gorky, of course, was famous for such inter-

100 The Stalin Period

ventions on behalf of Petrograd intellectuals during the Civil War, and continued the practice – though increasingly sparingly – in the 1930s. Meyerhold frequently appealed to his patrons Avel¢ Enukidze and Genrikh Yagoda on behalf of arrested friends and acquaintances in the theatre world – it was said of him that ‘he practically never refused anyone’.56 If this is not hyperbole, however, it suggests that Meyerhold lacked the quality of sober calculation of the odds that characterised the best brokers (there was no point in a broker using up credit with a patron on a hopeless case).

5.5 How to write to a patron While other forms of initial approach to a patron existed (for example, a word to the patron about the client’s needs from a family member or assistant), writing a letter was the standard way of communicating a clientelist request. The composition of such letters was a serious matter: Kapitsa ‘worked on letters to “up there” no less seriously and responsibly than on an article or a paper’ and often wrote four or five drafts before he was satisfied. Kapitsa, who was often writing as a broker for the physics community rather than for himself, wrote dignified, substantive letters with a minimum of flattery and little intrusion of the personal; some of his letters were so like articles that they contained separate headed sections and even on one occasion an epigraph.57 Like most clients, Kapitsa used a formal salutation with name and patronymic (‘Much respected [mnogouvazhaemyi] Valerii Ivanovich’) for lower-level patrons like Valerii Mezhlauk, Karl Bauman, or Nikolai Gorbunov, ending his letters ‘Yours, P. Kapitsa’. In writing to top leaders in the 1930s, however, he used the less common style of addressing his letters to ‘Comrade Stalin’ and ‘Comrade Molotov’ without further salutation, ending his letters simply with a signature.58 Natal¢ya Sats approached the task of writing equally seriously. In 1941, visiting Moscow seeking intervention on her behalf in troubles in her theatre work in Kazakhstan, she sat up all night in the bathroom of a friend’s apartment in Moscow, writing on the window-ledge, composing a letter to Aleksandr Shcherbakov, secretary of the Central Committee and a major force in cultural affairs. The letter went through 15 or 20 versions. It was important to be brief, in Sats’ view; on the other hand, it was also necessary to strike a personal note. In the letter to Shcherbakov, whom Sats did not know well, this meant slipping in a reminder of past contacts, however tenuous (‘He probably knows me from past work. Once Aleksei Maksimovich Gor¢kii mentioned me in a letter to him’). Once the letter was finished, both Kapitsa and Sats agreed, it must be hand-delivered. Kapitsa would send his wife, personal assistant or secretary to deliver his letter to the Central Committee and obtain a receipt.59 Sats delivered her own letter by hand to Shcherbakov’s assistant, asking him to give Shcherbakov the letter personally at once.60


Although the approach to a patron was normally by letter, the reply, if there was one, usually came by telephone.61 Two days after the delivery of her letter, Natal¢ya Sats received a telephone call from Shcherbakov’s assistant giving her the good news that Shcherbakov supported her in the quarrels in the Kazakhstan theatre world about which she had complained.62 For a client to make his pitch to a patron over the telephone was apparently very rare, probably because this approach seemed insufficiently deferential. (There were exceptions, however. In 1937, the much-rewarded writer Aleksei Tolstoi had the nerve to telephone Molotov’s secretary and request – though it came across almost as a demand – an 11-room dacha in a particular location that he preferred to that of the dacha he had been offered.63)

5.6 The human factor: affective ties between patrons and clients In 1930, Mikhail Bulgakov received a telephone call from Stalin responding to his complaints about persecution and censorship and promising to remedy the situation. News of this call spread rapidly on the grapevine through the intelligentsia. As an anonymous police agent reported, the story had had an enormous impact on intellectuals’ views of Stalin: ‘It’s as if a dam had broken, and everyone around saw the true face of comrade Stalin.’ They speak of his simplicity and accessibility. They say that Stalin is not to blame for the bad things that happen; ‘he lays down the right line, but around him are scoundrels. These scoundrels persecuted Bulgakov, one of the most talented Soviet writers. Various literary rascals were making a career out of persecution of Bulgakov, and now Stalin has given them a slap in the face’. Intellectuals were talking of Stalin ‘warmly and with love’.64 The conventions of Soviet client–patron relations demanded that they be represented as based on friendship or at least mutual regard, or sometimes even in familial terms (the patron as father who ‘pitieth his children’). These conventions are most evident in the hagiographic memoir literature on great men – from political leaders like Ordzhonikidze to cultural figures like Maxim Gorky – in which the client-memoirist dwells affectionately on the deeply human traits (generosity, compassion, understanding, paternal solicitude) of the patron as well as emphasising his high culture. Kalinin ‘looked up at me with sparkling eyes and smil[ed] his kind old-man’s smile, as if his entire face had lit up in an instant’.65 Valerian Vladimirovich [Kuibyshev] was a many-sided man, a great connoisseur of art and literature, enchanting, uncommonly simple and modest in approach . . . He liked nature and flowers very much. When we went out on the sea, he, with youthful animation, called us up on deck to enjoy the spectacle of the beautiful sunset. ‘How sad that all this is so fleeting,’ he said, when the multihued sky dulled and grey twilight descended.66


Although these memoirs were written for public consumption and, to a large extent, according to formula, we can find similar statements of affection for patrons in diaries.67 This does not fully answer the question of how ‘sincere’ such protestations were. But our interest is less in whether the emotions expressed were genuine than in the fact that their expression was conventionally required in a patronage situation. Even the irreverent Nadezhda Mandelstam writes of her husband’s patron, Bukharin, with affection; while the cynical Shostakovich called Tukhachevsky his ‘friend’ and ‘one of the most interesting people I knew’, while acknowledging that, unlike other admirers of the Marshall, ‘I behaved very independently. I was cocky, [but] Tukhachevsky liked that.’68 Many client-memoirists describe their patrons as people whose happiness in life came from helping others (or specific categories of others, like young people or artists). As applied to Soviet party leaders, this may seem a bizarre characterisation. Yet it must have had resonance, for it is common also in the thousands of letters of appeal that humble Soviet citizens – non-elite members without direct, personal access to a patron – wrote to political leaders in the 1930s.69 One can imagine that subjectively the belief of a Stalinist obkom secretary or Politburo member that he was basically a good man doing something useful for humanity must have rested to a significant extent on his patronage activities, demonstrating his capacity for loyalty (to members of his official ‘family’), generosity and civilised values (with respect to elite clients), and compassion (towards clients in distress and popular supplicants). If this is correct, we would expect the affective ties to go two ways. Evidence on patrons’ attitudes to their clients is harder to come by than its obverse, but is not totally lacking: Molotov noted a ‘mutual liking’ (vzaimnaya byla takaya svyaz¢) between Voroshilov and his client, the painter Aleksandr Gerasimov.70 Khrushchev, whose connections with the intelligentsia in the 1930s seem to have been less abundant than those of many other leaders, emphasises his personal regard in the few instances he recalls in his memoirs, for example, with regard to the engineer-inventor Paton.71 If a particular patron–client relationship was too distant for the notion of friendship to be appropriate, it was at least necessary to impart some touch of the personal. This is evident, albeit in stylised form, in the possibly anecdotal description that Vyshinskii’s biographer provides of Vyshinskii’s relationship with his client Aleksandr Vertinskii, a famous popular singer. After Vyshinskii had made possible Vertinskii’s return from emigration in China, he supposedly attended one of Vertinskii’s concerts, sitting modestly in a side box hidden from inquisitive eyes behind velvet drapes. However, his presence was no secret to the artist on the stage. He knew perfectly well whom Destiny had appointed as his patron. When he started singing, as a token of respect he turned very slightly towards the


box. Only very slightly but it was still noticeable. And he also bowed separately and with particular dignity towards the box.72 For Natal¢ya Sats, exiled to the provinces in the 1940s, it was a matter of the highest importance to establish new clientelist ties in the towns to which she had been exiled. As her description makes clear, this meant trying by every means possible to arrange a meeting with a potential patron, and then – most important – somehow establishing personal rapport, however tenuous, in the course of the meeting. In Alma-Ata, for example, when Sats finally got to see Zhumbai Shaiakhmetov, second secretary of the Kazakhstan party, for example, the success of the meeting – that is, the establishment of a personal connection – was demonstrated when Shaiakhmetov (who also knew how to play this game) playfully dispatched a messenger to Sats bearing the box of matches from his desk which, at their meeting, had momentarily distracted her attention. Later, when enemies in the Saratov Theatre were threatening to have her transferred further into the boondocks, she appealed ‘personally, tears running down my face’, to the patron who had got her the job, G. A. Borkov, first secretary of the regional party organisation.73

5.7 Hierarchies of patronage In his memoirs, Yurii Elagin tells the story of the epic ‘battle of patrons’ between two well-connected theatrical figures, L. P. Ruslanov, administrator of the Vakhtangov Theatre, and A. D. Popov, director of the Moscow Red Army. Ruslanov and Popov lived in the same apartment house, and the trouble arose when Popov hung flowerpots from his balcony which Ruslanov regarded as a potential danger to passers-by. Using his contacts, Ruslanov got an order from the head of the raion militia to remove the flowerpots; Popov trumped this by getting permission from the head of the militia of the city of Moscow to keep his flowerpots. Ruslanov then went to the chief director of militia of the whole Soviet Union for a removal order, to which Popov responded with a letter from Voroshilov instructing that he should not be further harassed about his flowerpots. But Ruslanov was the winner when he went to Kalinin, president of the USSR, and obtained an order that the flowerpots should be removed.74 Apocryphal or not, this story is a nice illustration of the hierarchies of patronage that could be invoked by persistent and well-connected clients. The Vakhtangov Theatre, according to Elagin, had its set of middle-level patrons in the pre-1937 period – Maxim Gorky, Avel¢ Enukidze, Daniil Sulimov (chairman of Sovnarkom RSFSR) and Yakov Agranov (deputy head of OGPU) – who were ‘always ready to do everything possible for our theater’. But there were also even more highly placed persons, notably Voroshilov and Molotov (both Politburo members, Molotov chair of


Sovnarkom), who could also be called on in extreme cases.75 These middlelevel patrons were themselves clients whose efficacy as patrons often depended on access to patrons at the very top. Thus Gorky, for example, was effective as a patron only so long as Stalin, Molotov, Yagoda and so on were prepared to honour his requests for his clients. Naturally in the politically perilous circumstances of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, a patron’s status was not necessarily stable:76 he might rise and fall in the hierarchy of patronage; indeed he might even fall from the status of patron completely and become a client-supplicant. Bukharin provides a good illustration of this process. As the sharp-eyed Nadezhda Mandelstam noted, ‘Up until 1928 he would cry “Idiots!” and seize the telephone, but from 1930 he would frown and say: “I have to think whom to ask [komu obratit¢sia] [sic].” ’77 Molotov was one patron whom Bukharin successfully approached on Mandelstam’s behalf in the early 1930s;78 and, although Bukharin did not know Gorky particularly well,79 he recognised his power as a patron in the early 1930s and ‘kept wanting to go to “Maksimych” in his search for “transmission channels” ’.80 Ordzhonikidze and Voroshilov were figures to whom he turned on his own behalf in the last years.81

5.8 Perils and pleasures of patronage As already noted, there were no obvious tangible benefits to the Soviet patron in having clients. Soviet officials’ tenure was not dependent on popularity or winning elections. Clients might praise their patrons’ generosity – but too fulsome expressions of enthusiasm for a local leader could provoke the accusation that he was developing a local ‘cult of personality’. Indeed, in the suspicion-laden world of Stalinist politics, there were definite risks associated with being too active or committed a patron. The pejorative words khvosty and semeistva were frequently invoked when local leaders were unmasked as ‘enemies of the people’ during the Great Purges. An example of the possible pitfalls of patronage comes from the memoirs of Ivan Gronskii, Izvestiya editor, who was a patron of old-school realist artists in the 1930s. The day after a group of his ‘clients’ escorted him home as a gesture of appreciation after his pro-realism intervention at an artists’ meeting, Gronskii received a telephone call from Stalin with the abrupt and threatening query: ‘What kind of demonstration was that yesterday? (Chto vchera byla za demonstratsiya?)’82 That patronage of the intelligentsia could be a negative in Stalin’s eyes is confirmed by Molotov’s reported comments on Voroshilov, who ‘loved to play a bit at being, so to speak, a patron of the arts (metsenat), a protector ( pokrovitel¢) of artists and so on’. Stalin saw this as a weakness, ‘because artists, they’re irresponsible people (rotozei). They are harmless in themselves, but around them swarm all kinds of dubious riffraff (shantrapa polosataya). They exploit that connection – with Voroshilov’s subordinates, with his family’.83


The archetypal example of a good Bolshevik ruined by his taste for patronage was Avel¢ Enukidze, secretary of TsIK, whose dramatic fall from grace in 1935 was one of the harbingers of the Great Purges. Enukidze was well known both as a patron of the arts with a taste for ballerinas and as one of the party leaders who was most likely to be sympathetic to the plight of ‘former people’, members of the old nobility and privileged classes who were liable to disenfranchisement and other forms of discrimination in the Soviet period.84 The accusations made at the June 1935 plenum focussed particularly on the latter: in Ezhov’s words, ‘Enukidze created a situation in which any Whiteguard could and did get in to work in the Kremlin, often using the direct support and high protection (pokrovitel¢stvom) of Enukidze’. People got a job in the TsIK apparatus through friends and family connections, and Enukidze himself was ‘linked through personal, friendly relations’ with many TsIK employees. Even when their alien social backgrounds and ‘antiSoviet attitudes’ were reported to Enukidze by the NKVD, he continued to shield them and refused to fire them. He used government money from TsIK’s ‘secret fund’ to support various unfortunates, including six hundred rubles to ‘Stepanova, one of the wives of the writer [Nikolai] Erdman, exiled for a lampoon against Soviet power’. All this made Enukidze ‘the most typical example of the degenerating and complacent Communist who not only fails to see the class enemy, but actually forms an alliance (smykat¢sya) with him’, in Ezhov’s words.85 It also led inexorably to corruption, sexual as well as financial.86 Defending himself at the closed session of the Central Committee, Enukidze regretted having involuntarily aided the class enemy in some instances, but still managed to convey that his patronage was needed and justifiable in human terms: There were really a lot of people to whom I gave that help that is now characterised as my high protection in regard to certain persons. Unfortunately, circumstances were such that people appealed to me for everything: if they needed an apartment, material help, things (veshchi), or to be sent somewhere to a rest home. Through me both our people (nashi) and people alien to us (chuzhie) received aid, I distributed that aid to everyone.87 What Enukidze personally got out of his patronage activities (before he lost his life for them) is not known. In general, however, what patrons got out of patronage were intangibles: prestige and status associated with the ability to act as a patron; a sense of noblesse oblige or a desire to play the great man as it was traditionally played; a desire to see themselves as good, generous people; a desire to receive flattery and gratitude from clients. ‘Tukhachevsky liked being a patron of the arts’, wrote his client and friend Shostakovich. ‘He liked finding “young talents” and helping them. Perhaps


because the marshal himself had been a military Wunderkind, or perhaps because he liked demonstrating his enormous power.’88 Patronage is a traditional prerogative of power and also a visible mark of it. Writing of her refusal on principle to establish patronage connections, an informant in Ledeneva’s blat study notes that ‘the nomenclatura people I met did not pay me any respect for that [refusal]. They respected those who made them feel powerful and helpful.’89 They would have thought better of her, she felt, if she had approached them as a humble client asking for favours. There were added benefits in the case of patronage of the arts, such as access to the world of celebrity and glamour – famous singers and film actors, writers and scientists of international renown – to which members of Stalin’s Politburo were drawn just as contemporary American politicians are often drawn to Hollywood and sports stars. Like rulers in many societies, Stalinist politicians obviously felt that contact with the arts and scientists adorned them. To some degree, patronage was an indicator of kul¢turnost¢ for some Soviet leaders. In the Gronskii story cited above, Gronskii portrayed himself as embarrassed but also flattered by the fulsomely-expressed admiration of the artists, ‘famous old masters of painting’ as he puts it.90 There was even some allure in the risk inherent in acting as patron to someone of high reputation in the cultural world who was under a cloud. This is most often seen in the case of middle-level patrons like journal editors, who would take the risk of publishing a controversial poem or story because of the kudos to be gained within the intelligentsia through such boldness. But the same dynamic may have operated at a higher level, for example in Vyshinskii’s patronage of the former émigré singer Vertinskii, whose semi-disgrace was underlined by the ban on publicising the concerts which he was occasionally allowed to give after his return.91 Patronage networks are important to the functioning of many societies; patronage of the arts exists in some form in virtually all. But how much patronage matters in the day-to-day life of clients and patrons depends on the seriousness and frequency of the clients’ need for protection. Stalin’s Russia was a dangerous place to live. Insecurity and the ever-present danger of a major personal calamity were facts of life for the elites as much as (perhaps more than) for lower social strata. It was not uncommon, even among the privileged intelligentsia, for a person suddenly to find himself in truly desperate straits as a result of the loss of an apartment or ration privileges or an accident at work that was construed as ‘wrecking’. Arrest or the public besmirching of reputation that might lead to loss of employment and arrest were also common occurrences. Having a patron to ‘go to’ could make the difference between surviving or failing to survive. This was one of the features of Soviet patronage that distinguished it from patronage in late imperial Russia or most other modern societies. Another distinguishing feature was that goods and services were in chronically short supply in the Stalin period, and the party-state had monopoly control over


their distribution. If one had the misfortune to be without a decent apartment in Moscow, how else could one obtain it without recourse to a patron? If one’s child suddenly fell critically ill, how else could one get access to the right doctor and the right hospital to treat her? If one lost one’s job or was arbitrarily denied access to the ‘closed’ foodstore, how to remedy the situation except by appeal to a patron? The malfunctioning of the Soviet legal system was another of the features of Stalinist society that made patronage practices – as well as their humbler counterpart, petitioning – essential. One of the fascinating aspects of patronage in Stalinist society is its strange relationship to official ideology. On the one hand, the patron–client relationship exemplified the personalistic interests of officialdom that were routinely deplored and sometimes harshly punished as corruption. On the other hand, this same relationship exemplified the human and familial motif that was at the heart of Stalinist discourse about rulers and people.92 In the familial metaphor, the whole Soviet Union was a family (sem¢ya) with Stalin as the father; and it is only a short semantic step from sem¢ya to semeistvo (the pejorative applied to political patronage relations). If Stalin was ‘father’ and ‘benefactor’ of his people, was he not by the same token the universal ‘patron’ of Soviet citizens, bound by ties of mutual affection to his ‘clients’? Were not all the vozhdi, local and regional, construed as benevolent patrons of the citizenry, ready to respond to need and rescue from distress? It may be argued that patron–client relations in the everyday world were exactly what gave that rhetoric a grounding in reality for Soviet citizens, making patronage practices a kind of intuitive proof of the ideological premise that the Soviet regime was the people’s benefactor.

Notes *Thanks to Alena Ledeneva, T. H. Rigby, Yuri Slezkine, and Lewis Siegelbaum, as well as participants in discussion at the Munich conference, for helping to clarify my thoughts on this topic. I am also indebted to Jonathan Bone for his services as my research assistant. Note: this chapter is largely based on an article entitled ‘Intelligentsia and Power: Client–Patron Relations in Stalin’s Russia’, in Manfred Hildermeier, ed., Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Neue Wege der Forschung/ Stalinism before the Second World War: New Avenues of Research (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1998). 1. Nadezhda Mandel¢shtam, Vospominaniya (New York: Izdat. Im. Chekhova, 1970), pp. 119–20. 2. T. H. Rigby was a pioneer in studies of political patronage in the Soviet Union: much of his work on the subject is collected in his Political Elites in the USSR: Central Leaders and Local Cadres from Lenin to Gorbachev (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990). On political patronage in the Stalin period, see Graeme Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 129–30, 315–16, 324–5.

108 The Stalin Period 3. David L. Ransel, The Politics of Catherinian Russia: the Panin Party (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 1. 4. On blat, see Alena V. Ledeneva, ‘Formal Institutions and Informal Networks in Russia: a Study of Blat’ (DPhil, Cambridge University, 1996). 5. See Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope (London: Atheneum, 1970) and Hope Abandoned (London: Atheneum, 1974), both trans. Max Hayward (Russian titles Vospominaniya and Vtoraya kniga); and Natal¢ya Sats, Zhizn¢ – yavlenie polosatoe (Moscow: Novosti, 1991), esp. pp. 377–92, 443–4, 467, 479–80. 6. Thanks to Yuri Slezkine and Alena Ledeneva for their advice on the language of patronage. 7. Anthony Hall, ‘Patron–Client Relations: Concepts and Terms’, in Steffen W. Schmidt, Laura Guasti, Carl H. Landé and James C. Scott, eds, Friends, Followers and Factions: a Reader in Political Clientelism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 510; Ernest Gellner, ‘Patrons and Clients’, in Ernest Gellner and John Waterbury, eds, Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies (London: Duckworth, 1977), p. 4. On asymmetry, durability, and reciprocity, see John Waterbury, ‘An Attempt to Put Patrons and Clients in their Place’, in Gellner and Waterbury, Patrons and Clients, pp. 329–32. On the personal aspect, see James Scott, ‘Patronage or Exploitation?’, in ibid., p. 22. 8. Waterbury, ‘Patrons and Clients in their Place’, p. 336. 9. Ibid., p. 339. 10. See Gill, Origins, pp. 129–30, on the ways in which ‘local control by a personalized network’ could protect subnational leaders from both grassroots criticism and interference and investigation from above. The best concrete description of such a ring, based on regional party and NKVD archive material from Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk), is in James Harris, ‘The Great Urals: Regional Interests and the Evolution of the Soviet System, 1917–1937’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago 1996), ch. 6. 11. Waterbury, ‘Patrons and Clients in their Place’, p. 331. 12. Daniel T. Orlovsky, ‘Political Clientelism in Russia: the Historical Perspective’, in T. H. Rigby and Bohdan Harasymiw, eds, Leadership Selection and Patron–Client Relations in the USSR and Yugoslavia (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), pp. 175–99. 13. D. A. Aleksandrov, ‘Istoricheskaya antropologiya nauki v Rossii’, Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniya i tekhniki, no. 4 (1994). This article appeared in English translation in Russian Studies in History, (Fall 1995) 62–91. 14. For a bibliographical survey of this literature, which incidentally provides a useful guide to the range of ‘acceptable’ subjects of memoirs, see the section on ‘Deyateli Kommunisticheskoi partii i sovetskogo gosudarstva . . .’, in V. Z. Drobizhev, ed., Sovetskoe obshchestvo v vospominaniyakh i dnevnikakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Kniga, 1987), pp. 26–101. 15. See Arkady Vaksberg, The Prosecutor and the Prey: Vyshinsky and the 1930s Moscow Show Trials, trans. Jan Butler (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), pp. 3–7, 275–7; Yurii Elagin, Ukroshchenie iskusstv (New York: Izd. im. Chekhova, 1952), pp. 48, 52; Yurii Elagin, Temnyi genii (Vsevolod Meierkhol¢d) (New York: Izd. im. Chekhova, 1955), p. 291. 16. Sto sorok besed s Molotovym. Iz dnevnika F. Chueva (Moscow: Terra, 1991). 17. Vitalii Shentalinskii, Raby svobody. V literaturnykh arkhivakh KGB ([Moscow]: Parus, 1995), p. 120. 18. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 131–2. Examples of Lunacharskii’s activity as a patron


19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

may be found in RGASPI, f. 142, d. 647 (Pis¢ma akademikov, deyatelei nauki i kul¢tury o pomoshchi . . . 1928–33). Kornei Chukovskii, Sovremenniki. Portrety i etyudy (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1963), pp. 401–2. Ibid., p. 360. Novyi mir, no. 3 (1968) 6. For Gorky’s position after his return to the USSR and his patronage activities, see Shentalinskii, Raby svobody, pp. 302–77 passim; and Valentina Khodasevich, ‘Takim ya znala Gor¢kogo’, Novyi mir, no. 3 (1968) 11–66. Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 145. Belomorsko-Bal¢tiiskii kanal imeni Stalina (Moscow, 1934). Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art. The State and Society: the Peredvizhniki and their Tradition (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1977), p. 151. For another example of military patronage, see the discussion of LOKAF in Evgenii Dobrenko, Metafora vlasti: Literatura stalinskoi epokhi v istoricheskom osveshchenii (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1993), pp. 138–51. Sto sorok besed, p. 315. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, p. 156. See Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 5446, op. 82, d. 72, l. 114 for a letter of early 1938 from the housing officer noting that as soon as the NKVD released the apartments and rooms it had sealed up after arresting their occupants, he would get back to Molotov with a response to the clients’ cases Molotov had raised. Molotov sends this on to Bulganin with a request for action. GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 72, l. 115. See, for example, GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 77, ll. 9–10; d. 72, l. 34; d. 51 [n.p.] (case of Academician V. I. Vernadskii); d. 51, l. 286 (thanks from the Kukryniksy, cartoonists). GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 51, l. 144. Tsentral¢nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv istoriko-politicheskoi dokumentatsii SanktPeterburga (TsGAIPD), f. 24, op. 2v, d. 2220, ll. 103–5. GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 53, l. 130. GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 70, l. 165. Rossiskii archiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), f. 85, op. 28, d. 77. Ermanskii’s work on the scientific organisation of labour was savagely attacked in 1930, and he was expelled from the Communist Academy along with other Mensheviks. See, for example, the letter to Zhdanov in TsGAIPD f. 24, op. 2v, d. 2679, ll. 28–30. Elagin, Ukroshchenie, pp. 52–3. Testimony: the Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, ed. Solomon Volkov, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Harper, 1980), pp. 98–9. See, for example, the letter to Zhdanov in TsGAIPD f. 24, op. 2v, d. 2679, ll. 28–30. GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 65, l. 207. The attack was launched in PZM nos 7 and 11–12 (1937). P. L. Kapitsa, Pis¢ma o nauke 1930–1980 (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1989), p. 151. GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 53, l. 82. The meeting was duly held on 11 February 1937, Kerzhentsev also being present; GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 53, l. 102.

110 The Stalin Period 43. From Pil¢nyak’s statement under interrogation by the NKVD, 11 December 1937, cited in Shentalinskii, Raby svobody, p. 196. 44. Elagin, Temnyi genii, p. 291. 45. TsGAIPD, f. 24, op. 2v, d. 2219, l. 1; Ivan Gronskii, Iz proshlogo . . . Vospominaniya (Moscow, 1991), p. 142. 46. After the arrest of her stepfather, the Armenian Gevork Alikhanov, Elena Bonner’s mother appealed to Mikoyan for help, even though they had not been particularly close friends judging by Bonner’s recollections; moreover, Mikoyan responded with an offer to adopt Elena and her younger brother. Elena Bonner, Mothers and Daughters, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), pp. 123–4. 47. RGASPI, f. 85 (Ordzhonikidze fond) contains many such letters. 48. Vaksberg, Prosecutor and Prey, pp. 3–4, 275. 49. Shentalinskii, Raby svobody, p. 197. 50. From Babel’s confession, in ibid., p. 50. 51. See Yurii Elagin’s examples in his Ukroshchenie iskusstv, including his own case. 52. GARF, f. 5446, op. 81a, d. 338, ll. 76–8. 53. TSGAIPD, f. 24, op. 2v, d. 1515, ll. 64–5. 54. Ibid., ll. 184–5. 55. Paul Josephson, Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), p. 316. From Academy of Sciences archive. 56. Elagin, Temnyi genii, pp. 294–5. 57. Kapitsa, Pis¢ma o nauke, with an introduction by former secretary P. E. Rubinin, pp. 11–12. 58. Ibid., passim. In 1943, Kapitsa switched to ‘Much respected Vyacheslav Mikhailovich’ for Molotov and retained this style thereafter, using it also in his letters to Khrushchev, Mikoyan and Malenkov in the 1950s. Stalin remained ‘comrade Stalin’ to the end, though from 1945 Kapitsa ended his letters to him with ‘Yours’, or ‘Respectfully yours’. 59. Ibid., pp. 11–12. 60. Sats, Zhizn¢, p. 446. 61. K. Rossiyanov, ‘Stalin as Lysenko’s Editor: Reshaping Political Discourse in Soviet Science’, Russian History, 21, no. 1 (1994) 49–63. 62. Sats, Zhizn¢, p. 446. 63. GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 56, l. 154. (Molotov approved this request, though he cut the dacha size down to ten rooms.) 64. Shentalinskii, Raby svobody, pp. 124–5. 65. Mikhail Sholokhov, ‘Velikii drug literatury’, in M. I. Kalinin ob iskusstve i literature: Stat¢i, rechi, besedy (Moscow: Gos. izdat. khudozh. lit., 1957), pp. 234–7. 66. Galina Serebryakova, ‘V. V. Kuibyshev’, in O Valeriane Kuibysheve: Vospominaniya, ocherki, stat¢i (Moscow: Politizdat, 1983), pp. 219–21. 67. For example, Galina Shtange on Lazar Kaganovich (patron of her women’s group) in Véronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya and Thomas Lahusen, eds, Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York: The New Press, 1995), p. 184. 68. Shostakovich, Testimony, p. 96. 69. On this, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s’, Slavic Review 55, no. 1 (1996) 78–105. 70. Sto sorok besed, p. 315. 71. Khrushchev Remembers, trans. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 116–19.

Sheila Fitzpatrick 111 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84.

85.

86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

Vaksberg, Prosecutor and Prey, p. 237. Sats, Zhizn¢, pp. 443–4, 479. Elagin, Ukroshchenie, pp. 66–9. Ibid., p. 48. Note that patronage relations were not without risk to the client: the patron might be disgraced. In 1939, the young writer A. O. Avdeenko was blamed for his connections with unmasked ‘enemies of the people’, the industrialist Gvkhariya and Urals party leader Kabakov. See D. L. Babichenko, Pisateli i tsenzory. Sovetskaya literatura 1940-kh godov pod politicheskim kontrolem TsK (Moscow: Rossiiya molodaya, 1994), pp. 26–7. Pil¢nyak was another whose connections with opposition figures was held against him. It has been suggested that the fall of theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold at the end of the 1930s was associated with his clientalist ties to Trotsky and Zinoviev in the early 1920s (Testimony, p. 80), or to Rykov and other ‘Rightists’ at the end of the decade (Elagin, Temnyi geniii, p. 319), but Meyerhold had so many political patrons at various times that this is hard to judge (it is equally plausible to link his fate with that of his NKVD patrons of the 1930s). Mandel¢shtam, Vospominaniya, p. 124. Ibid. Gronskii, Iz proshlogo, p. 125. Mandel¢shtam, Vospominaniya, p. 124. See Anna Larina, This I Cannot Forget, trans. Garry Kern (New York: Norton, 1993), pp. 310, 328. Gronskii, Iz proshlogo, p. 143. Note, however, that despite this threatening preamble, Stalin was sympathetic to the artists when Gronskii described their situation and actively took up their cause, according to Gronskii’s account. Sto sorok besed, p. 315. The TsIK archive contains many instances: see, for example, GARF, f. 3316, op. 2, d. 918, ll. 1–13 (1930 memo from Enukidze to Stalin on abuses of disenfranchisement) and ibid., d. 1227, l. 101 (conflict between Enukidze and the Moscow OGPU in 1933 over denial of passports to ‘former people’). RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 542, ll. 79–84 (stenogram with speakers’ corrections of proceedings at the plenum). Thanks to Arch Getty for generously making this material available to me. Bribes and presents of a thousand rubles or more (evidently accepted by Enukidze’s subordinates, not Enukidze himself) were mentioned in Ezhov’s indictment. Sex is not explicitly mentioned in the surviving text of Ezhov’s indictment, but it must have been there originally since Enukidze in response denied that he had ‘had affairs (sozhitel¢stvoval) with any of those who were arrested’ (ibid., pp. l. 128). For gossip about the sexual aspect of the Enukidze scandal, see ‘Dnevnik M. A. Svanidze’, in Iosif Stalin v ob≤yatiyakh sem¢i. Iz lichnogo arkhiva (Moscow: Rodina, 1993), p. 182. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 542, 139. Testimony, p. 98. Ledeneva, ‘Formal Institutions and Informal Networks’, pp. 105–6. Gronskii, Iz proshlogo, pp. 142–3. Vaksberg, Prosecutor and Prey, p. 237. My thinking here is indebted to discussion with Yuri Slezkine. See also Katerina Clark’s treatment of the ‘Great Family’ myth in The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 114–17.

6 Towards Explaining the Changing Levels of Stalinist Repression in the 1930s: Mass Killings S. G. Wheatcroft

There is nothing exceptional in the fact that the Soviet government used repression. All governments use repression against those they consider to be criminals or enemies, and the use of repression tends to increase during times of war, revolution and counter-revolution. The Soviet government was born in a time of war, and had to face the onslaught of counter-revolution, political terrorism and civil war in its early years. Twenty years later it had to face the even greater onslaught of the Second World War. Throughout the intervening period the Soviet regime considered itself threatened by internal and external enemies. What requires explanation is not so much the existence of repression, but the scale, nature and timing of the specific forms of repression that took place under Stalin in the 1930s. This was a repression that led to the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of people, the imprisonment of millions more, and the destruction of many members of the regime’s own elite – and this, at a time when there appeared to be no particular danger facing the regime. This was a highly specific kind of repression that became known as ‘the Great Terror’. What were these specifics? When we divide repression into its component parts, we can see that the different aspects of repression were characterised by different patterns of development that were important at different times. There was a more or less continuous growth in the numbers of prisoners in the labour camps and in places of exile from 1929, with some decline during the war. By contrast there were sharp oscillations in the numbers of prisoners executed, and significant, if slightly less sharp oscillations in the number of those imprisoned. The attitude of the government to ‘oppositionists’, who would eventually feature in the ‘show trials’, also underwent dramatic change during this period. The object of this chapter is to consider not so much the long-term shift towards placing a higher proportion of the population into the labour camps and places of exile, or the growing attack on former party oppositionists, but rather the short-term shifts and oscillations that led to sharp increases and declines in mass killing at certain times.1 112

S. G. Wheatcroft 113

The 1937–38 period was the peak period for mass executions. But it can also be seen as the fourth of a series of great upsurges in mass executions that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century. All of these previous upsurges had been associated with the use of extraordinary, extrajudicial executions, and each had been followed by a great decline. However, all the previous peaks in mass execution can be related to quite specific political crises that explain why recourse to extraordinary measures was taken. The martial law executions of 1906–08 were a response to massive peasant rebellion following the 1905 Revolution. The executions of 1918–22 were a response to the desperate situation of the Civil War and peasant rebellions, when the Whites and other opponents to the Bolsheviks were also using terror. The mass executions of 1930–31 were associated with the dekulakisation campaign, the mass disturbances associated with collectivisation, and the threat of famine. But here the relationship becomes somewhat strained. If it was simply the political crisis that was the cause of mass executions, then we would expect the levels of execution to have risen again in 1932 and the first half of 1933, as the country faced the desperate threat of famine. But this did not occur. Moreover, we also need to explain the fourth and greatest wave of mass killings in 1937–38, when the country was at peace, when there were no major food problems,2 and when the new constitution, written with the close involvement of former oppositionists, had just declared the end of class opposition and the absence of alien classes in the Soviet Union. There is no adequate explanation for the timing or the severity of the repression of 1937–38.3 This chapter will attempt to cast some light on this complex problem by considering the history of mass killings in the 1926–38 period in some detail, by placing them in the context of earlier mass killings, and by seeking to explain the mechanisms through which these operations were carried out.

6.1 Stalinist mass killings in perspective The widespread use of capital punishment and threats to resort to capital punishment are fairly sensitive indicators of the repressive nature of a regime. They are also ones that are conducive to measurement and comparison. In comparative terms the Russian example has always been extreme. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia had the lowest level of death sentence per head of population in Europe, at 0.2 per million. But that situation changed dramatically in 1906–08 when Russia suddenly became the country with the highest level of death sentences in Europe, at 9 per million (see Table 6.1). Whether we consider death sentences or executions, the extreme nature of the Russian case is apparent. Although the general pattern had been for many, and in some cases most death sentences to be commuted, the switch

114 The Stalin Period Table 6.1 Comparative international data on death sentences and executions

1600 1800 1812–18 1830s 1860s 1900 1906–08

Death sentences per million population

Executions per million population

England

England

Australia

Germany

Russia

400+ 46 77 1.1 0.8

1.6 1.5 1.5

0.2 0.2 9

400 8 4 3 0.6 0.5

Australia

404 9 0.5

Germany

Russia

0.13 2 0.2

0.11 0.11 9

Sources: Calculated from data in A. G. L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies: a Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and Other Parts of the British Empire (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1966), p. 28; J. Ritchie, Punishment and Profit (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1970), pp. 261–2; R. J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Harmondsworth: Pernuin, 1997), pp. 934–5; and D. Rawson, Russian History, 11, no. 1 (spring 1984) 33, 36–7.

to higher levels of death sentence in Russia was accompanied by much higher levels of execution. In subsequent years the level of death sentences in Russia and the USSR rose dramatically in three major periods, alternating with sharp drops. The level of mass killing of civilians in the revolutionary and Civil War upheavals is difficult to assess accurately, but probably reached a level twenty times as high as in 1906–08, at 200 per million. The rates probably fell back to about 3 per million in the 1920s, but rose again during the period of the grain problems to reach a peak in early 1931 of 130 per million. Rates fell to about 7 per million in 1935–36, before rising precipitously to over 2100 per million (ten times higher than the estimated Civil War rates) in 1937–38. The overall dynamic divided into these periods is presented in Table 6.2. In comparison with these enormous figures, most European and western countries were reducing their use of capital punishment. The major exception was, of course, Nazi Germany where the level of death sentences also rose but much less sharply (namely, from 1.5 per million in 1935 to 3.6 per million in 1940 and 76.7 per million in 1943).4 This chapter will concentrate on the extraordinary phenomena of the third and fourth of these waves of Soviet mass killings.

6.2 The 1930–31 wave of mass killings, and why the killings were drastically reduced in July 1931 a Death sentences 1926–32 The official security agency series of data provide indicators of the total number of sentences prosecuted by the security agencies, as well as the

S. G. Wheatcroft 115 Table 6.2 Main periods of upsurge of repression as indicated by death sentences in Russia and the USSR Periods

Dates

Numbers per year Security

Rate per million population Civil

All

Security

Civil

All

1st Wave: Post-1905 Revolution Trough 1900–05 Peak 1906–08 Trough 1911–12

15 1 300 80

2nd Wave: Early Revolutionary Peak 1918–21 Trough 1923

51 000 400

600

1 000

200 3

4

200 7

3rd Wave: Grain problems Peak 1930–31 Trough 1935–36

20 000 1 200

1000 800

21 000 2 000

130 7

6 5

136 12

4th Wave: Ezhovshchina Peak 1937–38 Trough 1939–40

350 000 1 600

3000 1400

353 000 3 000

2100 20

20 18

2120 38

5th Wave: World War II Peak 1942 Trough 1948–09

25 600 0

7650

33 000 0

220 0

80 0

300 0

1 760

0

1 760

10

0

10

6th Wave: Post-war Peak

1952

0.1 9 1

0.1 9 1

Sources: Pre-war death sentences: see chapter 2 above. 1918–20 death sentences: an estimate based on recorded levels in Penza guberniya from A. Berelovich and V. Danilov, eds, Sovetskaya derevnya glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD 1918–1939, vol. 1, 1918–1922 (Moscow, 1998), pp. 313–14. 1921–38 death sentences prosecuted by security agencies: see GARF, F. 9401, op. 1, d. 4157, ll. 202–5. 1939–53 death sentences for counter-revolutionary offences: see GARF, F. 9401, op. 1, d. 4157, l. 201, inflated by 10 per cent to account for ‘other’ offences. Civil death sentences (that is, those prosecuted by the legal agencies and not the security agencies or the military): 1923–36 estimated from Ger P. Van Den Berg, The Soviet System of Justice: Figures and Policy (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), pp. 304–5. See Appendix 3 note. Civil death sentences 1937–52: GARF, F. 9492, op. 6, d. 14, l. 29. Demographic data from Andreev, Darskii, Kharkova, Istoriya naseleniya SSSR, 1920–1959gg (Moscow, 1990), pp. 141–2.


number resulting in death sentences.5 These official figures are only available at the national level on a calendar year basis. They indicate a steady growth in the number of all political prosecutions until 1929, then a quadrupling of prosecutions in 1930 and a slight reduction in 1931 and 1932. Regarding the prosecution of death sentences the period 1926–29 is more mixed, with an early peak in 1927 and a reduction in 1928. The growth in death sentences in 1930 was far more substantial (almost tenfold), with a sharp reduction in 1931 (almost a halving of the 1930 numbers) and a further sharp reduction in 1932. The growth in death sentences in 1930 and 1931 was overwhelmingly (over 90 per cent) produced by local extrajudicial troiki. A more detailed picture regarding monthly changes in execution rates, some regional breakdown, and the changing intervals between arrest and sentence and between sentence and execution can be gained from some of the regional data series that are now becoming available (see Table 6.3). The detailed datasets for Moscow and Altai guberniya in Siberia show that the reduction in arrests came fairly sharply in Moscow after February 1931, and in the Altai after June 1931. The reduction in capital sentencing came about very sharply in Moscow in July 1931 and in Altai guberniya in August 1931. The reduction in the number of arrests in Moscow in March–June 1931 appears to have been associated with a reduction in the time taken to investigate and prosecute these cases, which resulted in a record number of sentences in April 1931. Thereafter the backlog of cases would have been removed. The security agencies in Moscow would have needed a new series of arrests to maintain their activities. As we shall see below, a proposal was laid before the Politburo in June 1931 which appears to have been aimed at increasing repression against socially alien elements within industrial enterprises, but this proposal appears to have been severely rebuffed. In the next section I will attempt to describe the changes in penal policy in the 1927–31 period that led up to what appears from the data to have been a major reversal in policy in June–July 1931. b Policy changes affecting the penal system, 1927–31 i The onset of extraordinary measures and the re-emergence of local troiki in 1927–29 Roberta Manning has recently pointed out that the ‘extraordinary measures’ which played such an important role in the split between Stalin and the Right Deviation at the beginning of the grain crisis in early 1928, were not simply ad hoc procedures hastily adopted to solve a temporary grain problem, but were part of an organised OGPU campaign against private traders and ‘kulaks’.6 These emergency measures, which granted additional rights to OGPU to deal with speculators and kulaks, appear to have been proposed by Bukharin in October 1927, when Stalin was relatively reluctant


to use them. However, on 4 January 1928, after the economic and political situations had deteriorated, and after Trotsky had been exiled to Alma Ata, the OGPU began a major operation against kulaks and traders. Stalin travelled to Siberia a fortnight later to take personal charge of the campaign in one of the key grain supply areas. Although almost 15 000 private traders and ‘kulak’ speculators were arrested, none of these were given death sentences at this time. But they are part of our story because they mark the re-emergence of mass operations being carried out through a network of local troiki, which would play a major role in the future. ii Extending the powers of special troiki at the local level, January 1930 The continuing grain shortages, caused by the poor harvests of 1927–29, led to mounting pressure on the peasants and increasing signs of resistance. These were inevitably given a class explanation at the time and were blamed on ‘kulaks’. This led to an organised campaign to ‘liquidate’ the kulaks. The conventional narrative of the growth in repression associated with dekulakisation begins with the policy discussions in the Politburo from November 1929 to January 1930 before the establishment of a network of special party/state/OGPU troiki.7 An OGPU order of 2 February 1930 authorised the establishment of local troiki which were to include not only the local OGPU special plenipotentiary, but also representatives of the local party committees and of the local Soviet executive committees and the procuracy.8 The members of these troiki were to be affirmed by the collegium of OGPU, but presumably N. I. Ezhov, who was deputy chair of NKZem in charge of cadres at the time, would have taken an active interest in this process.9 The scale of executions carried out by these local OGPU troiki was very high, reaching 18 966 in 1930 and 9170 in the first half of 1931.10 These constituted the great majority of death sentences passed by the security agencies in these years. Lynne Viola has also pointed out that a detailed investigation of the chronology of the operations indicates that OGPU was already carrying out dekulakisation, before the Politburo had ordered it to do so.11 A recent collection of memoirs of Siberian ‘kulaks’ indicates that most of the ‘kulaks’ included in the volume were dekulakised in 1929.12 The Altai ASSR data cited above also support Professor Viola’s arguments, since they show the increase in arrests associated with special troiki prosecutions in November 1929. In this case the troiki with party and state members can be seen as either an attempt to use local party and state leaders to restrain and check on the work of the local OGPU, or, which is more likely, an attempt to involve local groups in this work and to win them over to it. The dramatic reversal in policy on collectivisation announced in ‘Dizzyness with Success’ in March 1930 and the subsequent TsK resolution, served to incite a greater level of peasant disturbances, rather than to reduce them. Ultimately it was to be the increased application of repression which would

Year

1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1930 Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul.

a All sentences

b Death sentences

USSR

USSR

17 804 26 036 33 757 56 220 208 069 180 696 141 919

Moscow

All

Collegium of OGPU

Troiki

Other

All calc.

Collegium of OGPU

990 2 363 869 2 109 20 201 10 651 2 728

517 779 440 1383 1229

0 0 0 0 18 966 9 170

473 1584 429 726 6 1481 2728

8 68 18 45 255 196 49

8 68 18 45 224 168 48

8 8 18 43 6 11 4

8 8 14 36 5 10 2

Tomsk

Altai

0 0 3 270 30 3

80 920 450 0

Troiki

31 27 1

4 7 1 1 2

0 80 340 160 150 0 0


Table 6.3 Cases prosecuted by the security agencies, 1926–32: all cases and especially those with death sentences, for USSR, Moscow, Tomsk and Altai

26 76 21 31 3

23 71 17 27 3

3 5 4 4 0

0 30 30 50 80

1931 Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec.

18 32 12 86 17 23 3 0 2 1 1 0

6 26 8 83 16 22 3 0 2 1 1 0

12 6 4 3 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

190 20 40 50 80 20 50 0 0 0 0 0


Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec.

c Arrests of those subsequently executed Moscow All

Tomsk Collegium of OGPU

1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932

39 45 32 119 307 63 162

39 45 32 117 263 48 162


23 15 21 14 6 24 25 77 29 28 22 21

23 11 17 11 5 16 24 72 27 21 20 16

Altai

d Days from arrest to sentence, listed according to arrest date of sentence

e Days from sentence to execution, listed according to date

Moscow

Altai

Moscow

97 83 62 118

4 9 34 16 11 12 74

Troiki

2 42 15

4 4 3 1 8 1 5 2 7 2 5

19 27 55 612 519 368

150 1080 220 40

255 106 406 242 154 153 154

50 560 80 0 30 0 140 100 90 0 10 20

240 206 118 118 143 172 93 122 110 124 109 133

57 73 76 0 133 0 140 139 86 44

19 3 16 22 8 36 9 6 5 6 8 3

Altai

7 15 15

0 18 12 15 29

6 13 13 20


Table 6.3 Continued


11 24 7 7 2 2 1 2 2 1 1 3

9 15 4 7 2 2 1 2 2 1 1 2

2 9 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1

50 60 10 60 30 10 0 0 0 2 0 0

103 133 111 94 32 348 248 373 288 398 414 237

90 86 81 64 93 42 82

9 25 14 9 8 5 6

249

21 51 6

12 24 27 18 9 23 21


Sources: All sentences in cases prosecuted by OGPU, GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, 11. 203–4. All USSR death sentences by OGPU Collegium and by troiki: Rasstrel¢nye spiski, vyp. 2, Vagan¢kovskoe kladbishche, 1926–1936 (Moscow, 1995), pp. 281–2. All Moscow Sakharov Foundation: http://memory.sakharov-center.ru/. Calculated from full listing in Moscow Memorial: Rasstrel¢nye spiski, vyp. 2. Altai data calculated from 10 per cent of listing in Altai ASSR: Zhertvy politcheskikh repressii v Altaiskom Krae, vol. 1, 1919–1930gg. (Barnaul, 1998), and vol. 2, 1931–1936gg. (Barnaul, 1999). Tomsk oblast¢: Yu. K. Kuperta, ed., Repressii kak eto bylo ... (Zap. Sib v kontse 20-kh nach. 50-kh godov) (Tomsk, 1995), pp. 99, 126–7. Note: Data for Samara city have also been analysed for these years, but curiously they present no figures on executions in these years. Samarskaya Oblast¢ Belaya kniga o zhertvakh politicheskikh repressii, vols 1–6 (Samara, 1997–98).


bring about a temporary stabilisation of the situation in the countryside. The data from Altai and Moscow all indicate that the level of arrests, executions and exiling increased at this time and through to the middle of 1931, when a dramatic reversal of policy on repression occurred. iii Changing the line on repression June–July 1931, and the first attempts by Akulov The monthly figures on death sentences given in Table 6.3 indicate that repression in the separate regions was progressing in waves at this time, with each successive wave of arrests followed by a wave of sentences several months later. June 1931 was a low point in terms of arrests in Moscow and Altai. The previous peaks in arrests had been in July and August 1930, although the latest peaks in sentences had been much more recent. The July and August 1930 repression was aimed mainly at the peasantry, but in June 1931 there were attempts to expand the campaigns into the military and industrial areas. On 16 June 1931 a proposal was brought before the Politburo aimed at removing socially alien elements from industrial enterprises.13 This would have been directed against the spetsy (who had become a target after the Shakhty Affair in 1928), and possibly against former oppositionists currently employed in industry. While we currently know little about the origins of this proposal, it appears to have been associated with Evdokimov,14 the head of the Secret Operations Department (SOU), who had earlier gained Stalin’s support to prosecute the Shakhty case, against the wishes of Menzhinskii and his deputy Yagoda. This proposal is unlikely to have been forwarded to the Politburo without having first received Stalin’s support. However, at the Politburo this proposal appears to have met with considerable opposition from those leaders engaged in work in the industrial and military sectors: Ordzhonikidze, Kuibyshev, Voroshilov, and Rudzutak. All of these men had found it useful to employ ‘bourgeois spetsy’ and ex-oppositionists with technical experience.15 The Politburo protocols record that decision of this controversial issue was deferred. Four days later, at the Politburo session of 20 June, Stalin raised the problem of OGPU procedures for arrest and sentencing,16 which were clearly causing some concern. The Politburo ordered Menzhinskii to report on this to the next but one Politburo session. But before Menzhinskii could report Stalin made a public speech indicating that he was now in favour of changing the policy towards the employment of specialists.17 In the following weeks, the Politburo took several steps along a reconciliationist line. Stalin and Andreev raised the question of the restitution of civil rights to certain kulak groups on 30 June.18 Voroshilov was successful in securing the OGPU release of ten sailors on 10 July.19 On 20 July Kuibyshev convinced the Politburo to agree to his proposals on cadres in Gosplan,20 and Ordzhonikidze finally succeeded in obtaining Politburo approval for Pyatakov’s appointment as his first deputy.21


The Politburo commission on OGPU finally reported to the Politburo on 10 July and the Politburo accepted a series of measures which severely restricted the independence of OGPU with regard to arrests, investigations and execution of sentences.22 These restrictions included: forbidding the arrest of Communists and spetsy without the permission of the TsK; restricting the time that prisoners could be held prior to charges being laid to two weeks; limiting the time that prisoners could be held prior to trial to three months; and requiring all death sentences passed by the collegium of OGPU to be affirmed by TsK. As these changes were being decided there was another striking sign of increased party reconciliation when Bukharin began attending Politburo meetings on 25 July.23 Bukharin was thus able to hear Stalin announce the measures that the Politburo was taking with regard to the OGPU leadership. Since the deterioration in Menzhinskii’s health in 1930 increased power had passed to his first deputy, Yagoda. This had been resented by many individuals, including senior Chekists Evdokimov, Bel¢skii, and Messing. The immediate results of the July 1931 shake-up were mixed. The ailing Menzhinskii remained formally in charge of OGPU. Yagoda’s enemies were dismissed or demoted, but Yagoda was also himself demoted to second deputy, with a new independent outsider, Ivan Akulov, appointed over him as first deputy.24 Akulov had previously been Ordzhonikidze’s deputy in NKRKI/TsKK and had direct links to the party leadership where he remained a member of the Orgburo. Other senior Chekists were to be rotated in their positions. Three very senior Chekists, Messing,25 Bel¢skii,26 and Ol¢skii, were to be transferred to other work outside OGPU. Evdokimov, a member of the collegium of OGPU, who in 1929 had taken over charge of the Secret Operational Department (SOU) from Yagoda was first transferred to Leningrad and then quickly to Central Asia. Meanwhile, Artuzov,27 Agranov,28 and Bulatov29 were appointed to the collegium. The reasons for these changes in staff appear to have been related to the change in line on repression that was carried out at this time. But there are signs of an attempt to conceal this, to deny that they were related to any change in policy, and to maintain some balance within the OGPU leadership. The reasons that were publicly given at the time for the dismissal of these previous hardliners was that they had allegedly suddenly undergone a change of heart and had begun belittling the threat of wrecking activities within the military and industrial complex.30 Naturally OGPU would not announce that it was going to reduce its activities in these areas.

6.3 The reduction in mass killings from the second half of 1931 to 1936 Whatever was claimed about these changes, the result was a significant reduction in the levels of mass killing from the second half of 1931 to 1936 in comparison with 1930 and the first half of 1931. Akulov and his


colleagues had been successful in forcing OGPU and then NKVD to conduct a much higher proportion of their activities through the normal legal mechanisms.31 Extrajudicial agencies were to increase in importance somewhat during the worst period of the famine, and would be licensed to operate in particularly lawless areas, but generally, in the central European Russian part of the country, repression in the form of execution was contained. The much-publicised decree of 7 August 1932 calling for the death penalty for the theft of socialist property is often presented as unleashing a wave of terror. This decree should in fact be seen as a key step in the attempts to move repression away from extrajudicial agencies and towards legal agencies. In terms of mass consciousness it was undoubtedly important, but in terms of the level of killings, it was somewhat less important than is often assumed.32 Kirov’s assassination in December 1934 is also treated as a landmark indicating the beginning of a creeping terror. But again, such an interpretation is not supported by the mass data on killings, which remained relatively low in the 1934–36 period and right up to July 1937. This being said, it is true that the prison camp population would steadily grow from this point onwards, and that the accusations made against oppositionists and others blamed for Kirov’s assassination were becoming increasingly threatening. a Sentences, death sentences and executions, 1930–36 The official data on political prosecutions indicate that the reduction in prosecutions from 1930 to 1932 was sharply reversed by a major upturn in 1933; reversed once more by an extremely sharp reduction in 1934; and reversed yet again in 1935 by another sharp growth to a level that was maintained in 1936. The growth in 1933 and its reversal in 1934 could be explained in terms of the difficulties associated with the famine, which reached a peak in the first half of 1933. The renewed growth in political prosecutions in 1935 was undoubtedly associated with a renewal in security activities following the Kirov assassination in December 1934. But this pattern of total sentences by the security agencies differs greatly from the pattern of security agency prosecutions resulting in death sentences. The pattern here was a distinct and continuing downward trend, from 20 201 death sentences in 1930 to only 1118 in 1936. From the detailed data we reviewed above, it is probable that the decline should be dated from the first half of 1931 rather than from 1930. Clearly the decline is a consequence of the reduction in extrajudicial prosecutions carried out by the troiki. From the regional data available in Table 6.4, it would appear that the decline in death sentences was sharper in the localities (certainly in Tomsk and Altai) than in Moscow. There are also some signs of an increase in the numbers of executions and arrests (of prisoners who will eventually be executed) in Moscow in 1936 (see Table 6.4). Data for Moscow and Altai also reveal an increasing interval between

Table 6.4 Death sentences 1930–36 prosecuted by the security agencies: All-USSR, Moscow and other regions Year

a All sentences

b Death sentences All-USSR

1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936

298 069 180 696 141 919 239 664 78 999 267 076 274 670

Moscow

All

Collegium OGPU

Troiki

Other

All

Collegium OGPU

Troiki

20 201 10 651 2 728 2 154 2 056 1 229* 1 118

1229

18 966 9 170

6 1481 2728

255 196 49 172 162 11 225

224 168 48 171 108 0 0

31 27 1 1 1

c Arrests of those subsequently executed Moscow

Altai

270 30 3 17 26 2 1

920 450 0 640 50 20 0

Other

53 11 225

d Days from arrest to execution

e Days from sentence to execution

Moscow

Altai

Moscow

Altai

154 153 154 138 119 406 216

83 62 118 46 70 656 278

11 12 74 32 40 62 1

15 15 0 8 3

Altai

All

Collegium OGPU

Troiki

307 63 162 117 93 11 367

263 48 162 115 35 0 0

42 15 2 0 0 0

Other

1 0 58 11 367

1080 220 40 610 60 10 60

Sources: see Table 6.3 above. Moscow: Rasstrel¢nye spiski, vyp. 1, Donskoe kladbishche, 1934–1940 (Moscow: 1993). * Note: as explained below there are some accounts that suggest that the 1935 figure should be over 4400.


1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936

Tomsk


arrests and sentence and between sentence and execution during this period, although with some reversal in 1934 and again some signs of a slight reversal in 1936. These may be signs that the procuracy officials were trying to carry out the legal requirements on death sentences and were delaying the process. In some localities, like Turkestan and West Siberia, the local security agencies and party chiefs were repeatedly applying for extraordinary powers to carry out arrests, make sentences and execute them, without these legal delays. There was undoubtedly an attempt during these years to shift more of the sentencing and execution of repression to the legal structures. This became particularly noticeable during the campaigns concerning the law of 7 August 1932, which, according to the publicity surrounding it, was supposed to require the death sentence, which could be mitigated to ten years’ imprisonment in the presence of mitigating circumstances. The number of convictions under this law was at its height in the worst period of the famine, the second half of 1932 and the first half of 1933, before falling sharply.33 But the level of executions that were associated with this law is significantly lower than we might expect.34 b Central policy continues to restrain the local urge to mass killings During the difficult years of famine, OGPU continued to arrest many peasants and illegal traders, but the controls over executions and sentences remained in place in most areas. Ukraine and Belorussia were exceptional in this regard. On 22 November 1932 the Politburo established a special troika under the Ukrainian party leadership to speed up the secret issuing of death penalties in Ukraine.35 In early February, at the request of Gikalo, the Belorussian party secretary, a similar troika was set up in Belorussia.36 On 3 March 1933 Balitskii, the full plenipotentiary of OGPU SSSR in Ukraine, requested and received permission from Stalin and Ezhov to set up an exclusively OGPU troika in Ukraine with power to apply the death sentence in order to combat rebellion and counter-revolution in Ukraine.37 Later in March Eikhe and Gryadinskii from Novosibirsk in Western Siberia requested and received permission to establish a West Siberian troika capable of imposing the death sentence on 28 March 1933. It was alleged that this was necessary in order to combat a White Guard rebellion of over three thousand men.38 And in mid-April the alleged ‘liberal’ Kirov requested and received permission to set up a party/OGPU troika in Leningrad.39 These troiki were presumably responsible for many of the 2200 executions of 1933, and for a large share of OGPU sentences.40 For many areas without troiki the effect of the restrictions on OGPU death sentences at a time of full labour camps and continuing high levels of arrest simply resulted in more prisoners being held in prison. The number of prisoners in the system (excluding the camps and colonies) rose from under 200 000 in 1929 to 800 000 in May 1933. According to Volkogonov, Stalin


became concerned about this situation on 3 May 1933 when he attended a meeting of what Volkogonov describes as the OGPU Orgburo.41 Less than a week later, Stalin issued two instructions related to this matter. A Politburo decree on 7 May forbade republican, krai and oblast¢ OGPU troiki from imposing the death penalty, with the exception of the Russian Far East.42 And the next day Stalin and Molotov issued their famous secret instruction of 8 May 1933 to all party-state workers and to all organs of OGPU, the courts and the procuracy. This instruction warned against disorderly mass arrests; required a new procuracy agency to become more involved in checking the implementation of repression; and ordered that the number of prisoners be reduced from 800 000 to under 400 000 within a two-month period, and that the number of prisoners remain limited at such a level.43 While the main blame for disorderly arrests was placed on those local officials who technically did not have the authority to carry out arrests, the instruction pointed out that ‘in such a saturnalia of arrests, organs which do have the right to arrest, including the organs of the OGPU and especially the militia, are losing all sense of moderation and often perpetrate arrests without any basis, acting according to the rule: “First arrest, and then investigate”.’44 The instruction ordered that the procuracy be given more control over arrests and that OGPU seek preliminary approval for such arrests from the procurator, for all cases apart from those involving ‘terrorist acts, explosions, arson, espionage, border crossings, political banditry and counterrevolutionary anti-party groupings’. This legislation appeared to be plugging a gap that had been left after the July 1931 attempts to control OGPU. The exceptions, of course, were very important: they gave OGPU an incentive to interpret acts as terrorist and counter-revolutionary, because this would mean that OGPU would then retain control over these cases. The reference to the USSR procurator is especially interesting because that position did not in fact exist at the time. It would only be created a month and a half later, on 20 June 1933, and the way in which it was created would indicate beyond all doubts the lines of continuity between this attempt to rein in the forces of repression and those of June 1931. On 20 June 1933, Akulov was brought back to Moscow, where he was appointed the first all-union procurator general. Just as Akulov had been appointed over Yagoda in 1931, he was now appointed over Vyshinskii, who became his deputy. One of Akulov’s main tasks was to establish procuratorial oversight over OGPU. Effectively, then, Akulov was given a second chance at bringing OGPU in line.45 The high figures for OGPU arrests and sentences for 1933 in the official (Pavlov) figures probably conceal the beginning of the fall in the second half of the year. But the decline in 1934 is apparent, and it appears to continue through to 193546 and 1936 for the renamed security organ, the NKVD. Part of the decline may in fact have been related to the liquidation of OGPU and


establishment of the NKVD SSSR on 10 July 1934. The liquidation of OGPU resulted in the liquidation of the local troiki that had been established under it. When OGPU was transferred to NKVD as GUGB-NKVD, several of its previous rights to independent action were restricted.47 At the central level the OGPU Special Conference now became the NKVD Special Conference, and its rights to impose sentences were at first limited to sentencing socially dangerous people to up to five years’ exile or five years in a corrective labour camp.48 Its staff was required to work with the procurator of the USSR or his deputy. It was not long before local officials began petitioning for a revival of extrajudicial rights to death sentences. In September 1934, Eikhe and the West Siberians again requested and received Politburo permission to establish a West Siberian troika with plenipotentiary power over death sentences for two months in September and October.49 About three weeks later Kaganovich, on tour in Western Siberia, proposed extending this right for a month to Chelyabinsk.50 Stalin disagreed, and suggested that it would be better to avoid a troika and to carry out sentences through the normal channels.51 In November 1934 the Turkmen, Tadzhik and Kirgiz TsK were also granted similar rights.52 This, then, was the situation in December 1934 when Kirov was assassinated, the act which saw Stalin immediately pressing for the rapid and more frequent use of the death penalty. Whether Akulov and others attempted to resist this is unclear, but Akulov was soon to leave the procuracy for TsIK,53 and in March 1935 he handed charge of the procuracy over to his Stalinist deputy Vyshinskii. There is some uncertainty regarding the level of executions in 1935. The official series of executions carried out following charges for all political crimes laid by OGPU/NKVD only lists 1229 executions in 1935, significantly fewer than the 2056 recorded for 1934.54 But a recent biography of Zakovskii and other OGPU/NKVD leaders, whose compilers had access to the security archives, states that special troiki were set up in Leningrad between 28 February and 27 March 1935, and that they exiled 11 000 ‘byvshie’ from Leningrad and sentenced 4393 to be shot and 299 to be imprisoned.55 Local troiki were re-established at all other republican, krai and oblast¢ levels by an NKVD order of 27 May 1935, and received the powers of the special boards (OSO) of NKVD SSSR. But unlike the previous troiki their rights of sentence were limited to sending prisoners to the camps or into exile for periods of up to five years. These troiki were to be presided over by the local head of UNKVD or his deputy and were to include the head of the Department of Militia and the heads of other UNKVD Departments. Participation of procuracy officials was obligatory.56 According to the Zakovskii biography, in August 1935 Zakovskii proposed setting up an ‘inter-oblast¢ ’ NKVD school to prepare operational workers on the basis of the Leningrad experience in this area, and such a school was set up in October 1935.57


In 1936 and the first half of 1937 there was a great publicity campaign surrounding the application of the death sentence to former oppositionists in the show trials. These trials were carried out by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Soviet, with a prominent position played by Procurator of the USSR Vyshinskii. But while great publicity was being given to the application of death sentences to former oppositionists, there appears to have been relatively little change at the local level regarding rights to issue death sentences. And despite all the publicity, 1936 is credited with having the lowest number of death sentences for counter-revolutionary offences since 1928. The situation did not change immediately in 1937. As late as 8 April 1937 changes to the competency of local troiki and the central OSO only slightly increased their powers, giving them the right to increase the term of imprisonment from five to eight years for persons ‘suspected’ (podozrevaemye) of espionage, wrecking, and diversionary and terrorist activities.58 As we shall see below, the main change would come in July 1937.

6.4 The Ezhovshchina and the resumption of mass killings, 1937–38 The political situation within the NKVD clearly changed when Ezhov replaced Yagoda as head of the NKVD in September 1936. Ezhov was apparently required by Stalin to keep Agranov as one of his deputies, but there was a return of several of the hardliners who had been demoted in 1931. In particular Bel¢skii and Evdokimov’s protégé Frinovskii would quickly emerge as one of Ezhov’s deputies.59 There was no immediate sign of a change in line regarding rights over extrajudicial killings, but this was to come in the following year, when other preparations had been made. a The leap in death sentences Both the official security agency data and the available regional data indicate a massive leap in the level of both all security agency sentences, and especially death sentences in 1937 and 1938. There was an astonishing leap in the number of death sentences from 1118 in 1936 to 353 074 in 1937. These additional 350 000 death sentences accounted for well over half of the additional 516 000 sentences in column (a) of Table 6.5. More detailed aspects of the regional datasets enable us to analyse the chronology in more detail in terms of arrests, sentences and executions, in terms of the nature of the security institution prosecuting the cases and in terms of changes in the length of time that the victims spent in prison. It is clear that the upward leap in mass killings came about in the second half of 1937. A slight growth in arrests (that would lead to killings) occurred after January 1937, with slightly different regional characteristics. There appears to have been a particularly sharp growth in Tomsk oblast¢ (Western

Table 6.5 Death sentences, 1936–39 prosecuted by security agencies: All-USSR, Moscow and other regions Year

1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1936 Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec.

a All sentences

b Death sentences

All USSR

All USSR

All USSR

All

KR crimes

267 076 274 670 790 665 554 258 63 889 71 806

1 229 1 118 353 074 328 618 2552 1649

Moscow

Leningrad

Yaroslavl¢

Tomsk

Omsk

Samara Oblast Samara city

11 223 11 168 13 503 185 3

2 113 50 57

736 829 2 2

2 1 6667 3474 0 0

0 0 1159 60 30 10

Bezenchuk

All

Syrzin

60 240

85

0 0 1295 300 30 10


12 20 42 6 44 27 42 1 312 3 210 2 211 1 829 2 413


882 2 712 2 659 1 445 1 497 1 510 629 1 191 703 274 0 1

800 2920 3010

10

9 163 153 64 151 196 214 74 152 8 16 134 2 2 34 194 21 2

1 4 5 33 0 6 17 955 1191 1287 768 2280 592 456 796 928 10 62 0 24 7 500 59 6

1241 2873 3627 2638 630 196 0 2995 0 0 1000 10 119 52 529

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 50 50 20 60 200

10 0 0 0 0 30 0 20 0

190 250 180 30 90 30

30 200 0 0 0 10

10

56 0 0 0 28

106 80 20 80 228

0 0

220 450 180 30 90 40 71

10 0 0 10 10 20

10 10 20

Table 6.5 Continued d Days from arrest to sentence

c Arrests of those subsequently executed Moscow Year

All

1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940

16 384 7153 1700 127 171

1936 Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec.

47 51 49 31 43 22

1937 Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul.

97 57 47 118 82 163 272

Leningrad Troiki

Other

2937 1403

16 384 4756 297 127 171

4756

47 51 49 31 43 22

10 10 30 0 40 80

97 47 37 78 82 123 192

Yaroslavl¢

2 7 1078 345 0 1

N. Tagil

Tomsk

55 15 2708 561 4 4

366 376 9843 3858 81 168

Omsk Samara Moscow

1160 60 0 20

1 3 3 9 14 10 60 10 230 100 170 320

14 19 24 70 119 397 142

28 28 29 110 64 276 1557

e Days from sentence to execution

20 20 0 60 10 20 70

Leningrad

406 216 109 78 648

123 171 160 217 252 235

235

296 211 234 202 216 185 170

213 198 145 136 107 86 55

Samara

Moscow

63 144

1 3 11 3

Leningrad

0 1 1 0 2 11 335 172 217 205 246 115

8 1 26 5 0 0 2

2 12 3 5 9 3 5

Samara

Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec.

1298 1210 1133 1497 1151

750 350 430 550 410

548 860 703 947 741


1456 2439 2653 440 116 146 71 37 26 16 24 16

390 460 510 40

1066 1979 2143 400

3430 2040 330

181 89 95 116 154

1227 1089 1926 1395 1754

1664 4428 5812 3923 1226

141 100 230 280 491

70 78 84 67 94

32 19 11 2 7 1 1 2 0 0

508 1672 412 109 80 370 99 16 551 18 19 4

211 0 5000 0 0 1000 0 199 171 1609

10 30 10 0 0 0 0 0 20

69 62 90 126 132 136 199 210 250 294 198 394

4

112 115 80 44 16

4 5 6 11 9

17 170

11 11 8 16 12 19 9 3 5 0 46

Sources: All Civil: GARF, f. 9492, op. 6, d. 14, l. 29. Cases considered by the general courts of the USSR. All Moscow: Sakharov, Rasst-1, Altai, Samara and Tomsk: see Tables 6.2 and 6.4 above. Butovo 1–3: Calculated from a sample 10 per cent listing of names in Butovskii poligon, 1937–1938, vols 1–3 (Moscow, 1997, 1998 and 1999). Butovo given: Calculated from monthly lists given in Butovskii poligon, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1997), pp. 346–7. Kommunarka: Calculated from data from http://www.memo.ru/memory/communarka. Kalinin: Vozvrashchenie k pravde (Iz istorii politicheskikh repressii v Tverskom Krae v 20–40-e i nach. 50-kh godov). Dokumenty i materialy (Tver’, 1995). Yaroslavl’: Calculated from a sample 10 per cent listing of names in Ne predat’ zabveniyu, Kniga pamyati repressirovannykh v 30–40-e i nachale 50-kh godov, svyazannykh sud’bami s Yaroslavskoi Oblastyu (Yaroslavl’, 1993). Omsk: V. M. Samosudov, Bol’shoi Terror v Omskom Prirtysh’e, 1937–1938 (Omsk, 1998). Note: All USSR death sentences in 1939–40 refers to counter-revolutionary crime only and not to all political crime.


Siberia) in June and especially July 1937, with similar sharp leaps in most other regions about a month later. This sharp growth in arrests that would lead to killings was associated with a return to the mass use of troiki after July 1937, and this had the effect of significantly reducing the time between arrest and sentence. In Moscow this interval fell from over 200 days before May 1937 to a mere 70 days in August 1937, as the numbers arrested per month rose from 82 to 1298. The length of imprisonment before capital sentencing would remain below 100 days until March 1938, but would then rise to 199 days in July 1938 and back to 294 days in October 1938 as the scale of arrests and use of troiki declined. The length of imprisonment after capital sentencing and before execution had been drastically reduced from 62 days in Moscow in 1935 to one to three in 1936–37. Below I will briefly trace out what we now know about the policy changes that produced these astonishing results of an unprecedented high level of mass killings. b Policy changes: The re-establishment of a network of local troiki Local data in Table 6.5 from Tomsk oblast¢ in Western Siberia indicate a remarkable growth in arrests that would result in executions in this area.60 This was a growth in advance of that in most other regions. The data show few signs of an increase in arrests for the first three months of 1937, although there was a slight increase in the number of death sentences and executions. Then, in April, the number of arrests tripled, the number of sentences more than doubled, and executions rose by more than sixfold. These were levels already in excess of the 1930 levels. In May there was a decline in sentences and executions, which fell below the low 1936 level. The level of arrests also fell slightly, but remained at double the 1936 level. In June there was a further surge in arrests which quadrupled the May levels and more than doubled the level of April, which had been the previous record level. However, the number of sentences and executions remained very low. In these circumstances the authorities in Western Siberia would have been faced with severe overcrowding in the prisons. The prison data, which are available on a monthly basis for this period, confirm that in Western Siberia there was a sharp rise in the number of prisoners in the first half of 1937 (by 89.1 per cent), and that the West Siberian growth was about four times greater than for the country as a whole. (The All-USSR level grew by only 20.3 per cent in the same period.) (See Table 6.6.) The West Siberian party secretary Eikhe responded to this situation in a similar way as he had in July 1933, by requesting permission to reactivate a troika in order to bypass the normal judicial agencies and to provide extrajudicial death sentences at an express rate. This request was sent to Stalin and the Central Committee on 28 June 1937 with an explanation that it was needed to speed up the processing of the large number of arrested criminals, who were largely ex-kulaks and former zeks.61 Eikhe may have

S. G. Wheatcroft 135 Table 6.6 The growth in numbers of prisoners in Western Siberian prisons (excluding camps) and in the USSR as a whole

1937 Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec. 1938 Jan.

Western Siberia

All-USSR

8 212 9 080 9 886 9 676 11 865 12 374 15 525 20 004 24 545 27 691 31 098 26 407

375 376 370 261 381 711 393 329 404 051 414 718 451 456 533 878 628 816 685 240 734 406 766 713

100 98.6 101.7 104.8 107.6 110.5 120.3 142.2 167.5 182.5 195.6 204.3

888 842

236.8

100 110.6 120.4 117.8 144.5 150.7 189.1 243.6 298.9 337.2 378.7 321.6

Source: Calculated from data in GARF, F. 9414, op. 1, d. 2740, ll. 41, 44.

intimated to Stalin that the incidence of lawlessness was reaching the level of a rebellion. Eikhe’s request arrived in Moscow at a time when Stalin and his colleagues must have been anxious to find ways to stem a wave of central and regional concern that the NKVD had gained too much power in connection with the arrest and execution of Tukhachevskii and other military leaders.62 Stalin appears to have been delighted with this request.63 He immediately responded with a Politburo decree announcing that it was necessary to apply the death penalty to all the participants of the insurgent (povstancheskaya) organisation amongst the exiled kulaks in Western Siberia.64 The decree ordered a troika to be established comprising Mironov (head of the West Siberian NKVD), who was to chair the troika, with Barkov (the West Siberian procurator), and Eikhe (the West Siberian party kraikom secretary), ‘in order to speed up the review of these cases’. A few days later, on 2 July 1937, Stalin moved to force the West Siberian example on all regions of the USSR. He issued a statement to the local party leaders on ‘anti-Soviet elements’, warning that former kulaks and criminals were returning from exile and were now becoming ‘the main instigators of anti-Soviet and diversionist crimes’. Stalin proposed that all oblast¢, krai, and national republican communist party secretaries (about eighty in all)65 should take action jointly with the oblast¢, krai and republican representatives of the NKVD to calculate how many kulaks and criminals in their


region should be shot or deported. They were given a five-day period within which to form special troiki to administer the cases and to carry out a survey of the numbers to be shot and exiled. This proposal was addressed to the men who, in July 1931, had been instructed to inform the local NKVD representatives that they were subservient to the party. Stalin’s new instruction left unclear who would be in charge of the troiki in the localities. According to the extract (vypiska) on the Politburo decisions of 9 July 1937, at the end of this five-day period, only eight of the fifty secretaries had set up troiki, and of these only five had sent in proposals on numbers to be shot. Such a poor response was quite understandable, given the vagueness of the proposal and the fact that only a few regions had been petitioning for this right. But then Khrushchev, on behalf of Moscow oblast¢, requested permission to execute 8500 prisoners,66 and in the following two days about half of all oblasts, krai and republics sent in their proposals. By 10 July a further 12 had replied (of which one failed to provide numbers) and by 11 July a further 11 (of which three without numbers). At the end of the month, on 30 July, Ezhov issued NKVD operational order no. 00447: ‘On operations to repress former kulaks, criminals and other antiSoviet elements.’ This order was clearly related to the operations that the Politburo had pressed on the oblast¢ and krai party organisations four weeks earlier, but it differed from the original proposal in several important respects. This NKVD operational order made no reference to the involvement of party organs in the planning of the operation. In fact it dealt with the operation as a purely NKVD matter,67 with only a minimal and token involvement of the local party in the troiki. The operations were to be led by Frinovskii, Ezhov’s deputy as head of the chief administration of State Security GUGB in the NKVD. Operational groups under NKVD leadership were to be set up to lead the operations. The operational groups would draw up lists, make arrests, search the premises of those arrested, hold those arrested in ‘punkty’ as indicated by the local NKVD, and carry out investigations. The cases were then to be handed over to the troiki. The decree listed and confirmed these troiki for the separate regions.68 The NKVD had proposed that the chair of each troika should be the head of the UNKVD of the administrative region, and that the other members of the troika should be the first secretary of the regional party committee and the chief of the regional procuracy.69 This would have effectively established the precedence of the local NKVD chief over these matters, and appears to have been resisted by the regional party. According to the operational order the troiki had the right to change the category of the prisoners between those sentenced to be executed and those sentenced to the camps, but not to order their acquittal. The troiki were ordered to send their protocols and sentences directly to the head of the 8th Department of GUGB, NKVD and to send in reports every five days. Those


sentenced to be executed would be handled locally according to the orders of the head of the local UNKVD. Those sentenced to the labour camps would need to await appropriate directions from GULag, NKVD. There was a rather vague reference to the procurator’s office: ‘The republican, krai or oblast¢ procurator may attend sessions of the troiki (where he is not a member of the troika).’ Another significant change was that the second category of dangerous elements who were not to be shot, were now to be sent to the camps rather than exiled. The order set deadlines for the beginning of the operation: 5 August for most areas, but 10 August in Central Asia, and 15 August in the Russian Far East, Eastern Siberia and Krasnoyarsk. Those to be executed (category 1) were to be dealt with first, while those to be transported to the camps (category 2) would be dealt with later, when GULag was ready to receive them. The Politburo approved the NKVD operational order on the following day (31 July 1937), but added the qualification that the operation was to have a finite duration and was to end within four months, that is by midDecember. The Politburo appears to have accepted the NKVD proposal that implied NKVD leadership at the local level. The operations appear to have begun as ordered on 5 August 1937, but within days, and just after the first five-day report was due (on 11 August), Ezhov issued a new order. This new order proposed simplifying the procedure further and allowed for the establishment of ‘dvoiki’ as well as troiki. ‘Dvoiki’ (duos) were to comprise senior representatives of the UNKVD and of the procuracy, but without party representation.70 Presumably this was felt to be necessary in those regions where the local party secretaries refused to provide the necessary support to the NKVD operations. The scale of the operation soon began to exceed the original plans. As Khlevnyuk, Thurston and others have pointed out, ‘local leaders were given the right to request from Moscow “additional” limits, and they readily did so’. On 3 September 1937 Moscow oblast¢ was given a second troika to speed up the sentencing.71 From 27 August to 15 December the Politburo had apparently approved additional limits of a further 22 500 executions and 16 800 imprisonments72 in more than 15 separate decrees.73 By 15 March 1938 the Politburo had approved an additional limit of 48 000 executions and 9200 imprisonments, in 22 areas.74 Overall this would bring the total of planned arrests to over 345 950, with over 143 450 executions authorised (Table 6.7). These Anti-Soviet Element (ASE) mass operations were consequently one of the largest elements in the mass operations of the Ezhovshchina. They were not the only ones, and they were quickly followed by a series of national operations,75 but in terms of the history of the re-emergence of mass killing operations, it is the history of operation 00447 which is crucial.

138 The Stalin Period Table 6.7 Available figures on initial limits and increases in limits for NKVD operation 00447 Executions

To camps

All arrests

% exec/all

30 July 1937 27 Aug.–15 Dec. 15 Mar. 1938 (22 areas only)

72 950 22 500 48 000

177 500 16 800 9 200

250 450 39 300 57 200

29.1 57.3 83.9

All (incomplete)

143 450

203 500

346 950

41.3

Sources: Initial limits of 30 July 1937: Trud, 4 June 1992. Revised limits: Moscow News, 21 June 1992.

6.5 Conclusions This chapter has attempted to cast more light on the specific developments of one of the most important aspect of Stalinist repression – namely, mass killings. It has located the mass killing wave of 1937–38 as the fourth of a series of rising waves of mass killings that were experienced by the Russian and Soviet population in the twentieth century. It has used local reports to provide a detailed monthly chronology of arrests, sentences and executions of those prisoners who were sentenced to death, and to explore what specific security organisational institution prosecuted these cases. It has also used these reports to investigate the changes in the length of imprisonment prior to and after these sentences in the separate years and months. The chapter has used the party archives to uncover the conflict that occurred over granting extrajudicial responsibility for mass killings to local NKVD officials at different times. It has drawn attention to a curiously overlooked reversal in Politburo policy over the delegation of responsibility for such mass killings in July 1931, and has compared it with the Politburo instructions that led to the expansion of that authority and to a resumption of mass killings after July 1937. The chapter has also attempted to chart some of the important departmental rivalries and changes in personnel within the security agencies, changes which appear to have been associated with these shifts in policy. This chapter suggests that the nationwide increases in mass-killing operations in August 1937 were probably preceded by an increase in mass killings in March 1935, which may have been studied and used in the training of operational cadres.76 They also appear to have been preceded by a better documented increase in arrests and mass killings in West Siberia, an area which had habitually been pressing for greater local authority over death sentences. In the wake of widespread disaffection in the middle-level and regional-level party leadership over the increased role of the NKVD in repression, espe-


cially after the Tukhachevskii affair, Stalin may have used the West Siberian case as a pretext for applying emergency procedures right across the country and involving regional party committees in these operations. The mass operations that were planned in July 1937 were remarkable for their noncontroversial nature, at a time when the NKVD was beginning to target highly controversial political and military targets. The victims of the first mass operation (00447) were the traditional enemies of the party: former kulaks and criminals. Party leaders who were likely to have questioned the right of the NKVD to shoot former party, state and military leaders were not likely to question the right of the NKVD to shoot kulaks and criminals. It is tempting therefore to see this operation as a means of bringing the party in line, after doubts had been expressed about the wisdom of granting greater authority over repression to the NKVD. As such it would have been typical of the kind of tactics that OGPU/NKVD had been known to use to maintain their position.77 While this chapter does not claim to explain why the mass killings took place, it does attempt to move closer to laying the basis for such an answer by providing a more detailed description of the nature and form of the repression; its scale, chronology, and incidence; and the changes in the length of the investigative process, as well as a description of how the repression had come to take on the scale that it did when it did, and how this compared to the levels of mass killing carried out elsewhere at this time, and in Russia earlier.78

Notes 1. For a consideration of the overall trends in Soviet repression and an argument about the importance of ‘mass killings’, see Stephen Wheatcroft, ‘The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930–1945’, Europe–Asia Studies, 48, no. 8 (1996) 1319–53. The major survey of developments in the labour camps is provided by J. A. Getty, G. Rittersporn and V. Zemskov, ‘Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: a First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence’, American Historical Review (October 1993) 1017–49. The term ‘execution’ covers both ‘judicial execution’ and ‘non-judicial execution’. The terms ‘non-judicial executions’ and ‘killing’ are used here in the same sense. The Holocaust and the Ezhovshchina were both cases of mass killing, but there was a difference in as much as the Ezhovshchina did involve a kind of execution that was supported by some degree of legal process, although a nonjudicial process. The Holocaust made no pretence at any degree of legal process. 2. Recently there has been some interest in attempting to upgrade the significance of the 1936 harvest failure, as though this were the major cause of the economic problems. See Roberta Manning, ‘The Soviet Economic Crisis of 1936–1940 and the Great Purges’, in J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, eds, Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 116–41. The intention here is possibly to support an economic explanation for the repression.


3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

However, despite the undoubtedly poor harvest of 1936 there can be no comparison with the desperate economic situation of 1931–33. Moreover, the chronology does not fit, because the 1937 harvest was a good one, and the peak of repression in 1937 came in the second half of the year that was influenced by the 1937 harvest, not the 1936 harvest. F. Beck and W. Godin, Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1951), provides a comprehensive survey of the large number of explanations of the repressions that were current at the time. Robert Conquest has written the best known account of the repression, but while his narrative is highly readable, it offers a highly simplified and personalised version of causation; R. Conquest, The Great Terror (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). Oleg Khlevnyuk has recently produced a good account of the repression emphasising its international context; O. Khlevnyuk, ‘The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937–38’, in J. Cooper, M. Perrie and E. A. Rees, eds, Soviet History, 1917–53: Essays in Honour of R. W. Davies (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), pp. 158–76, and ‘The Reasons for the “Great Terror”: the Foreign-Political Aspect’, Annali della Fondazione Giagiacomo Feltrinelli (1998), pp. 159–69. See R. J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1997), pp. 934–5. Of course, these figures for executions exclude the mass killings associated with the Holocaust. These datasets, now available in GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 4157, ll. 201–4, were prepared by Colonel Pavlov, acting director of the 1st Special Department MVD SSSR on 11 December 1953, for Interior Minister Sergei Nikiforovich Kruglov, on the eve of the execution of his former boss, Beriya. Kruglov had been transferred to the NKVD in November 1938 and had served as Beriya’s deputy from 1939–45 and again from March–June 1953. Kruglov and therefore Pavlov had good reason to present as favourable as possible a picture of events in the 1939–53 period. The 1939–53 figures only refer to counter-revolutionary crimes prosecuted by the security agencies and are probably 30–45 per cent lower than the pre-1939 figures. See R. Manning, ‘The Rise and Fall of “the Extraordinary Measures”, January–June 1928: Towards a Reexamination of the Onset of the Stalin Revolution’, The Carl Beck Papers, no. 1504 (2001), pp. 4–9. See R. W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: the Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980). According to Izvestiya TsK KPSS, 10 (1991), p. 81, the OGPU order of 2 February 1930 was followed by a TsIK decree of 3 February 1930. As we will see below, a similar process was to be used in July 1937 when Ezhov was head of the NKVD, to carry out the mass operations of the repression that is associated with Ezhov’s name. See Rasstrel’nye spiski, vyp. 2 (Moscow, 1995), p. 281. Lynne Viola, ‘The Role of the OGPU in Dekulakization, Mass Deportations, and Special Resettlement in 1930’, The Carl Beck Papers, no. 1406 (2000). See O. Litvinenko and J. Riordan, eds, Memories of the Dispossessed: Descendants of Kulaks Tell Their Stories (Nottingham: Bramcote Press, 1998). The six stories were all taken from the Kurgan Region in the Urals. The three eyewitness accounts date their dekulakisation from December 1929 (Viktor M., p. 34), 1928 and spring 1929 (Anna R., pp. 55–6), and simply 1929 (Yevdokia G., p. 67). The other three non-eyewitnesses (grandchildren) report 1929 (pp. 81–2), 1930 (p. 90), and 1931 (p. 98). RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 830, item 49 of protocol number 43 dated 16 June 1931.

S. G. Wheatcroft 141 14. E. G. Evdokimov (1891–1940): party member from 1918, head of Special Department of Moscow Cheka from June 1919, then head of Special Department of South Western and Southern Fronts, and from May 1921 head of Special Department of Ukrainian Cheka. From 1923 special plenipotentiary of OGPU in South East and then North Caucasus krai, where he led the struggle against mountainous rebels in which he was allowed to use emergency extrajudicial procedures. In 1927 his proposal to prosecute an exemplary trial of industrial wreckers in Shakhty was rejected by Menzhinskii and Yagoda, but accepted by Stalin to whom Evdokimov reported directly. In late 1929 the Secret Operational Department (SOU) was removed from Yagoda’s control and handed over to Evdokimov, who began work on the Promparty and Menshevik trials. See A. Papchinskii and M. Tumshis, Shchit, raskolotii mechom NKVD protiv VChK (Moscow, 2001), pp. 208–10. 15. This applies particularly to Pyatakov (the former Left Oppositionist of industrial capitalist background). He had served as deputy chair of VSNKh from 13 July 1923, first under Rykov and then under Dzerzhinskii. When Kuibyshev took charge of VSNKh after Dzerzhinskii’s death, Pyatakov was initially exiled to Paris, but he returned in late 1928 to became deputy chair of Gosbank (16 October 1928), and subsequently chair on 19 April 1929. In October 1930 Pyatakov was brought back into VSNKh as a presidium member under Kuibyshev, a couple of weeks before Ordzhonikidze took over. Ordzhonikidze appears to have found Pyatakov invaluable, and clearly wanted to appoint him as his deputy. It is easy to understand why Kuibyshev and Ordzhonikidze might be united in opposing any attempt to remove people like Pyatakov from VSNKh. 16. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 832, item 5/14 of protocol number 44 dated 20 June 1931. 17. This was on 23 June 1931 when Stalin called for a halt on spets-baiting in his six conditions speech; I. V. Stalin, Sochineniya, vol. 13 (Moscow, 1951), pp. 65–9. 18. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 833, item 10 of protocol 46 dated 30 June 1931. The decision is published as a TsIK decree. 19. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 835, item 2/14 of protocol 48 dated 10 July 1931. 20. Ultimately this would lead to the appointment of Osinskii (the early oppositionist and critic of the security agencies) as his deputy and as head of the new independent statistical agency, TsUNKhU, in January 1932. For Osinskii’s early opposition to the expansion of the Cheka’s authority see V. Brovkin, Behind the Lines of the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); for Osinskii’s later role in TsUNKhU, see S. G. Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies, eds, Materials for a Balance of the Soviet National Economy, 1928–30 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 40. 21. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 837, item 2/10 of protocol 50 dated 20 July 1931. 22. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 840, Politburo resolution of 10 July 1931, whose inclusion in the Politburo protocols was delayed until 5 August 1931, when it appeared as item 45. 23. See O. Khlevnyuk et al., Stalinskoe Politburo v 30-e gody (Moscow: Airo-XX, 1995), p. 203. This was the first Politburo session that Bukharin attended after being stripped of Politburo membership at the 10–17 November 1929 TsK Plenum. Bukharin was to attend Politburo sessions irregularly from 25 July 1931 to 27 June 1936, at first in his capacity as a TsK member, and then, after the XVI Party Congress, as a Candidate TsK member. Arch Getty and (rather surprisingly) Anna Larina (Bukharin’s wife) are clearly mistaken in their assumption that Bukharin could not have attended Politburo meetings at this time. See J. A. Getty, Origins


24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

of the Great Purges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 215, and A. Larina, Nezabyvaemoe (Moscow, 1989), p. 263. Ivan Alekseevich Akulov (1888–1937): born into a family of small traders in St Petersburg; Old Bolshevik with a party stazh of 1907. He was engaged in party work as regional secretary (1917–21), and then in trade union work (1922–29), before becoming deputy NKRKI-TsKK (1929–31). He was a member of TsKK (1923–25 and 1930–34), and a member of TsK (1927–30) and Orgburo (1930–32); A. D. Chernev, 229 kremlevskikh vozhdei (Moscow, 1996), p. 89. Stanislav Adamovich Messing (1890–1937): born in Warsaw in family of a musician; Old Bolshevik with party stazh of 1908. He had held responsible positions within the Moscow Cheka since 1918, had become chair of Petrograd guberniya ChK in 1921, a member of the ChK collegium in 1923, and from 1929 to 1932 had been promoted to deputy chair of OGPU. See Sovetskaya derevnya glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD, vol. 2 (Moscow, 2000), p. 1098. Lev Nikolaevich Bel¢skii (Levin) (1889–16/10/1941) had been appointed OGPU plenipotentiary for Moscow oblast¢ in February 1930. On 5 August 1931 he was transferred out of OGPU and put in charge of the relatively prestigious job of communal catering in NKSnab. He was replaced by Prokof¢ev who had earlier been specialising in economic matters, and who held a dual appointment in VSNKh. Artur Khristianovich Artuzov (Frauchi) (1891–1937): born into a Swiss family of cheese-makers; revolutionary Bolshevik with a party stazh of December 1917. He fought in the Red Army till 1919 and then joined the VChK in 1919. He became deputy head of the OGPU Foreign Department on 1 January 1930 and was promoted to head of the Foreign Department on 1 August 1931, the day after being appointed to the collegium of OGPU. See N. V. Petrov, K. V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD 1934–1941: Spravochnik (Moscow, 1999), pp. 93–4. Yakov Saulovich Agranov (1893–1938): born into a Jewish worker’s family; was a member of the SR party in 1912–15 before joining the Bolsheviks in 1915. He served in the army until transferred as a special plenipotentiary of Cheka in 1919. See ibid., p. 82. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 838, item 3 on protocol 51, dated 25 July 1931. D. A. Bulatov (1889–1941): party member from 1912. Party secretary of Kuban okruzhkom (1929–30), and then transferred to head of the organisationalinstruction department of TsK. Appointed to collegium of OGPU on 31 July 1931, where he headed the OGPU Department of Cadres until 1934. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 840, item 2 on protocol 54 dated 5 August 1931. Akulov had left OGPU in late 1931 to take charge of the Donbass party organisation, but, as we shall see below, he will return. Peter Solomon has pointed out that although there were 22 347 convictions under the law of 7 August in the general courts of the RSFSR in 1932, the total number of RSFSR death sentences in this year was 2686, and that, according to Krylenko, less than 1000 of these had been executed by 1 January 1933. See Peter H. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 117, 126. Solomon (ibid., p. 126), informs us that in the RSFSR convictions under this law in the general courts of RSFSR were 22 347 in the second half of 1932; 69 523 in the first half of 1933, 33 865 in the second half of 1933 and 19 120 in the first half of 1934. In Ukraine they fell from 12 767 in 1933 to 2757 in 1934. Of those convicted under this law, a very low proportion were given death sentences, and of these many were reprieved. See ibid., pp. 113–29, and endnote 32


35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

above. If Krylenko’s estimate that less than 1000 of the 22 347 RSFSR convictions under this law in 1932 resulted in executions were to apply for the 69 523 RSFSR sentences in the first half of 1933, there would have been 3000 executions, and probably twice this for all-USSR. However, the level of execution may well have reduced after the Politburo decree and instruction of 7 and 8 May 1933 (see above). The available data for civil death sentences which begin in 1937 indicate a USSR figure for that year of 3176 (see GARF, f. 9492, op. 6, d. 14, l. 29), and an RSFSR figure of 469 (see Report of B. Khlebnikov, head of Department of Court Statistics of Supreme Court of USSR, reproduced in A. N. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: Dokumenty i fakty (Moscow, 1992) as document 59). RGASPI, f. 17, op 162, d. 14, l. 17 (decision by opros of Politburo members). The troika comprised S. Kosior (Ukrainian party secretary), Redens (Ukrainian OGPU), and Kiselev (Party Central Control Commission). The Ukrainian Central Committee was required to report death sentences to the USSR Central Committee every ten days. RGASPI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 42 (previously f. 3, op. 58, d. 212, l. 1). RGASPI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 43 (previously f. 3, op. 58, d. 212, l. 2). RGASPI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 44 (previously f. 3, op. 58, d. 212, l. 3). RGASPI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 45 (previously f. 3, op. 58, d. 212, ll. 4–5). For some reason the Kruglov figures list no sentences from troiki in 1933 and over 214 000 through the tribunals and courts. It seems highly likely that some of the troiki sentences of the early part of the year were assigned to the composite tribunal and court section. Volkogonov says little about this meeting other than to describe the comments that Stalin scribbled on his agenda: ‘1) Who can make arrests?; 2) What should we do with the White Guards in the Economic Administration; 3) The prisoners need employment; 4) What should be done with those arrested?’. See D. Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire (HarperCollins, 1998), p. 142. It is unclear what body Volkogonov is referring to when he mentions the OGPU Orgburo. RGASPI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 47 (previously l. 6). This secret decree became famous when it was reproduced by Merle Fainsod from the Smolensk Party Archives to demonstrate ‘the ineffectiveness of the procuracy and judicial organs in checking arbitrary arrests and mass deportations of kulaks in the period 1930–1933’. See Merle Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 185. From the Smolensk Archives, cited here from ibid., p. 185. Akulov’s presence continued to be felt within OGPU. When Akulov left OGPU, Yagoda resumed his former place as effective chief of OGPU, but until the organisational changes in 1934, after the death of Menzhinskii and the establishment of NKVD SSSR, Yagoda retained the formal title of second deputy chair, even though there was no first deputy. Note the qualification concerning this expressed below in relation to the claims made in the source referred to in endnote 54. See F. Benvenuti, ‘The “Reform” of the NKVD, 1934’, Europe–Asia Studies, 49, no. 6 (1997) 1044–5. As late as 8 April 1937 these rights were only slightly amended, when permission to imprison people ‘suspected’ of espionage, wrecking and diversionary and terroristic activities was increased from a maximum of five years to a maximum of eight years; RGASPI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 10. See Stalinskoe politburo v 30-e gody (Moscow, 1995), p. 65.

144 The Stalin Period 50. See Stalin/Kaganovich correspondence, document 568. 51. See Stalin/Kaganovich correspondence, document 569 Stalin to Kaganovich, Molotov, Zhdanov, 9 October 1934. 52. RGASPI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 41 opis¢ list only. 53. Akulov became a secretary of TsIK in March 1935 before Enukidze, the other secretary of TsIK, was expelled from the Party in June 1935 for defending ‘class-aliens’ and ‘enemies’ ‘unmasked’ by the NKVD amongst workers. Akulov replaced Enukidze as chairman of the Politburo commission ‘On courts and the procuracy’. See Benvenuti, ‘The “Reform” of the NKVD’, p. 1049. 54. GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 4157, l. 202. 55. A. Papchinskii and M. Tumshis, Shchit, raskolotii mechom NKVD protiv VChK (Moscow, 2001), pp. 29–30. The book was written by two former KGB/FSB workers who had access to the security archives, but, as is typical with this genre, archival references are lacking. 56. See Izvestiya TsK KPSS, no. 10 (1989) 81. 57. Papchinskii and Tumshis, Shchit, p. 30. They claim, without providing any archival references, that F. V. Rogov, the head of the Leningrad UNKVD Department of Cadres, was in charge of this school. According to Petrov and Skorkin, Rogov had become head of courses for the improvement of leading staff in the OGPU Central School in 1931 when he was assistant head of the operational sector of GPU in Ulyanovsk. He was then transferred to the central cadres department in OGPU/NKVD from May 1932 to January 1935, when he was placed in charge of cadres under Zakovskii in Leningrad UNKVD. He headed the Leningrad Intra-Regional School of the NKVD from 7 October 1935 to 13 March 1937, when he took over the First Department of UGB UNKVD in Leningrad oblast¢. In September 1937 he became commandant of the Kremlin, in which position he shot himself in November 1938; see Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, p. 363. 58. RGASPI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 10. 59. Evdokimov had moved on to party administration in 1934 when he had been appointed obkom secretary in North Caucasus krai (Ordzhonikidze krai) and he remained there at this time. If it is correct that several hardliners had been sacked in July 1931 and accused of suddenly becoming too soft when a softer policy was in fact being introduced, it stands to reason that they and their protégés would be unlikely to err on the side of softness once the policy line hardened. 60. One of the characteristic features of OGPU- and NKVD-calculated data is that operational materials are converted into later administrative boundaries so that the data can serve the purposes of that time. The West Siberian data are consequently presented here from the archives in the boundaries of Tomsk oblast¢, which only came into existence in 1939. 61. RGASPI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 48. 62. Tukhachevskii had been arrested on 22 May 1937. He was sentenced by a special court of the Supreme Court on 12 June and executed the same day. The next meeting of the Politburo occurred on 15 June, but with Peters and Yaroslavskii representing KPK instead of Akulov and Yaroslavskii. Akulov appears to have kept a low profile during the 23–29 June TsK Plenum when Pyatnitskii allegedly refused to approve of the growing repression and when Kaminskii and Krupskaya appear to have supported him. Kaminskii was arrested on 25 June 1937. Pyatnitskii appears to have been arrested at some time between 7 June and 7 July 1937, but there is some confusion over this. Starkov claims that Pyatnitskii was arrested


63.

64. 65.

66.

67.

68. 69.

70.

71. 72. 73.

personally by Ezhov on 7 June; see Boris A Starkov, ‘Narkom Yezhov’, in Getty and Manning, Stalinist Terror, p. 36. Pyatnitskii’s wife and son claim that Pyatnitskii’s resistance occurred at the party plenum on 24 June following an attempt by Stalin to give plenipotentiary powers to Ezhov, but Pyatnitskii’s son thinks that some of the dates in his mother’s narrative may be incorrect; see Yuliya Sokolova, ‘Iz dnevnika [1937–1938 gody] (s kommentariyami Igorya Pyatnitskogo)’, in Semen Samuilovoch Vilenskii, compiler, Dodnes¢ tyagoteet, vyp. 1 (Moscow, 1989), pp. 263–85. Medvedev claims that Krupskaya and Kaminskii used this plenum to object to the arrest of Pyatnitskii, which by implication had already occurred; R. Medvedev, Let History Judge (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 199. Akulov was arrested on 23 July 1937 and sentenced to death by the military collegium of the Supreme Court on 29 October 1937. Mironov, the head of the West Siberian NKVD, was awarded the Order of Lenin on 2 July 1937; see Spravochnik: Kto rukovodil NKVD 1934–1941 (Moscow: Zven¢ya, 1991), p. 302. Ezhov was awarded his Order of Lenin on 17 July 1937; see ibid., p. 185. Of course, it remains possible that Mironov was simply following Stalin’s instructions by making such a request; but if this were the case such a lavish award would seem unnecessary. If the initiative had been planned by Ezhov one would have expected that he would have received his award before Mironov. RGASPI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 48. At this time in 1937 there were 5 krai, 42 oblasts, 11 national republics and 22 autonomous republics. The Russian Republic had no separate national party committee. RGASPI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 48. Khrushchev proposed that the Moscow local troika comprise Redens (head of UNKVD for Moscow oblast¢), Maslov (deputy procurator for Moscow oblast¢), and himself (secretary of Moscow party committee) or his deputy A. A. Volkov. Although Redens was listed first it was not specifically stated that he would chair the troika. At one point it states ‘Before the organs of State Security stands the task in the most merciless form of destroying these bands of anti-Soviet elements, to defend the labouring Soviet people from their counter-revolutionary efforts, and once and for all to finish their attempts to undermine the bases of the Soviet State.’ Considerable efforts were taken to keep these lists up to date. All changes in names had to be confirmed by the Politburo. V. Kovalev, Dva stalinskikh Narkoma (Moscow, 1995), p. 240. Like all of Kovalev’s works, these statements, based on privileged access to the documents, were not supported by professional archival references. In fact, in several key areas the oblast¢ party second secretary took up this role. This would have avoided the first party secretary admitting the seniority of the local head of UNKVD. See Izvestiya TsK KPSS, 10 (1991), p. 82. For reasons which are not explained, this order was apparently repeated on 20 September 1937. RGASPI, f. 89, op. 73 contains a mass of documents giving Politburo authorisation to troiki, but no material at all on dvoiki. It seems possible that the threat to establish dvoiki without party representation could have been used as a threat to ensure that hesitant party secretaries participated. See RGASPI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 76. See Moscow News, 21 June 1992, cited in O. Khlevnyuk, Stalinskoe Politburo, p. 163. Those reproduced in RGASPI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 76, total slightly less than this, and there is some uncertainty as to whether the figures given were additional targets or just revised targets (that is, including the earlier targets).

146 The Stalin Period 74. See Moscow News, 21 June 1992. 75. See Repressii protiv polyakov i pol¢skikh grazhdan (Moscow: Memorial, 1997). 76. Unfortunately we currently lack details on Leningrad arrests and executions in 1935. The Leningrad local historians are currently concentrating on publishing separate volumes of a ‘martyrology’ for 1937–38, but have not yet revealed anything about repression in Leningrad in the earlier years. See Leningradskii martirolog, 1937–1938 (St Petersburg, 1995, 1996, etc.). 77. In August 1933 the British Embassy reported a conversation between the veteran Russian reporter Cholerton and Jakov Podolskii of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs concerning the appointment of Akulov as procurator of the Soviet Union. Podolskii is reported to have said that ‘there were many old and influential Party members who had no love for the OGPU and could bring it to heel at any moment’. Cholerton is reported to have said that ‘this was all very well in theory, but experience showed that the OGPU, when threatened, had only to raise the cry of treachery or “the Revolution in danger” for its influence to be fully restored’. M. Carynnyk, L. Luciuk and B. Kordan, eds, The Foreign Office and the Famine: British Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932–1933 (New York: The Limestone Press, 1988), p. 275. Unfortunately Cholerton proved to be correct. 78. While agreeing with Stephen Kotkin that the question of ‘how’ repression occurred is an important preliminary to understanding ‘why’ it occurred, I differ with him concerning his apparent lack of interest in the even more fundamental question of ‘what’ repression was. Kotkin writes as though he knows instinctively what the scale of repression was, and can thus determine who is exaggerating or underestimating its importance. Kotkin does not appear to have interrogated the basis of his own knowledge in this matter, and is prepared to criticise others for attempting to improve their understanding of this. Contrary to Kotkin’s opinion, an understanding of the scale and chronology of the different aspects of repression is of the utmost importance, and the question ‘what’ logically precedes those of ‘how’ and ‘why’. See S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995), p. 285, and his ‘1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks’, Journal of Modern History, 70 (June 1998) 414.

7 The Great Terror: Leningrad – a Quantitative Analysis1 Melanie Ilicˇ

This chapter presents some preliminary empirical findings about the impact of the ‘Great Terror’ in Leningrad. The sheer scale of the purges makes a quantitative analysis of their impact viable, even within a very limited timespan and within a defined geographical region. Leningrad itself offers an interesting case study because of its unique position as the Soviet Union’s ‘second city’ (and former capital). It was an important political and administrative area, located on the borders of the Soviet empire. Its industrial base was relatively advanced, and the local economy had strategic importance for national defence and international trade. The city was surrounded by extensive agricultural regions, which were home to a varied population. The aim here is to offer an insight into the social composition of the victims of the terror, as well as the waves of arrests, trials and executions. As such, rather than attempting to determine who was responsible for instigating and perpetuating the ‘Great Terror’, or examining the impact of mass repression on Soviet society as a whole in the second half of the 1930s, this chapter addresses such historiographical questions as the scope and scale of mass repression and identifies those who were the victims of the purges.

7.1 The purges: historiographical debates Historical research into the purges has served to illustrate some of the most highly contested debates concerning the nature of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.2 Conquest’s study of the ‘Great Terror’, published originally in 1968 and subsequently revised in 1990, offered an early and extensive investigation of the purges.3 Conquest set out to expose the ‘immense scale’ of mass repression, the methods employed, specifically in terms of the reliance on ‘the confessional trial’, and the official secrecy surrounding these events.4 Basing his study on published memoirs, oral testimonies, the revelations of the Khrushchev ‘thaw’ and the limited selection of official primary documents available in such collections as the Smolensk archive, Conquest’s 147


monograph drew together previously dispersed evidence and materials about the impact of the purges on individuals as well as a variety of social groups. It also reflected, firstly, the Cold War climate of western antagonism towards the Soviet Union under which much of the research for the book had been conducted, and, secondly, the prevailing political science model of totalitarianism in its Soviet variant, which charged Stalin with despotism and arbitrary rule over a terrorised population. Conquest’s evaluation of the ‘Great Terror’ remained central to western historiographical debates on the nature of Soviet politics and society under Stalin for over a decade. The view of the ‘Great Terror’ as having an extensive and all-pervasive impact on the Soviet regime in the 1930s has been challenged and contested by a series of publications dating from the early 1980s. Various studies have sought not only to determine the limits to which Soviet society as a whole was terrorised under Stalin, but also to investigate the course and direction of the purges at a local level. Research for these studies was aided by the partial opening of the Soviet archives to western historians and the beginnings of the reassessment of the Stalinist past from within the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, as well as a more sympathetic attitude to the goals of the Soviet experiment which underpins much of the social historical school.5 The work of this broadly-termed ‘revisionist’ school of western researchers, in its analysis of Soviet society and politics in the 1930s, distinguishes the more generalised purges (chistka, proverka, obmen) of the late 1920s and early 1930s from the specific events of the show trials and accompanying mass repression of the period 1936–38. Even here, it is argued that the ‘Great Terror’ can be seen as two separate waves, with the first wave focusing almost exclusively on the Communist Party, administrative-bureaucratic and military elites. It was only during the second wave of arrests, starting from the second show trial in January/February 1937 and the February 1937 Central Committee plenum and ending with the January 1938 Central Committee plenum and the final show trial in March 1938, that the terror became truly ‘great’ in character, and even here the mass arrests of ordinary Soviet citizens did not begin until August 1937. The revisionist studies point to the autonomous and often chaotic progress of the purges in the localities and to the extent of denunciation initiated at a grassroots level – such as shop floor workers against industrial managers, for example. From this perspective, Soviet society in the 1930s was not constituted by an homogeneous, repressed and terrorised mass. In contrast, ordinary citizens are identified as active participants in the shaping of Soviet society and politics in the 1930s. More recently, Russian historians have also contributed to the debates on the ‘Great Terror’. These historians sometimes began their research in isolation from detailed knowledge of western historiographical debates. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a less restrained official atti-

Melanie Ilicˇ 149

tude to the reassessment of Soviet history, has afforded them often unique access to archival sources. They have produced studies which investigate such issues as the institutional framework of the purges, which elucidate the motivations behind the terror, and which attempt to calculate the number of victims of mass repression in the 1930s.6 Their research can now be supplemented with the testimonials currently being archived by Memorial and the lists of victims of the terror which have recently been published in Russian newspapers. Oleg Khlevnyuk, in particular, has outlined the different stages of the terror in terms of the targets of the purges, and has offered a more refined periodisation of the actual beginnings of mass repression. He has pointed out that ‘up until the middle of 1937, the main blow of repression was directed against members of the party, mainly those who had in their time participated in the oppositions or who had shown some kind of dissent with Stalinist policies’.7 After this, the purges were directed more generally at ‘anti-Soviet elements’, as well as ‘unreliable elements’ in the frontier regions, and crude biographical data were used as the basis for repression. Khlevnyuk argues that, the Stalinist leadership always considered terror as its main method of struggle with a potential ‘fifth column’. The cruel repression of 1937–8 was above all determined by biographical particulars. The basis for shooting or dispatch to the camps might be an unsuitable pre-revolutionary past, participation in the civil war on the side of the Bolsheviks’ enemies, membership of other political parties or opposition groups within the CPSU, previous convictions, membership of ‘suspect’ nationalities (Germans, Poles, Koreans, etc.), finally family connections and associations with representatives of the enumerated categories.8

7.2 Sources The first two volumes of the Leningradskii martirolog, 1937–1938 (the Leningrad Book of Martyrs), published in St Petersburg in 1995 and 1996, constitute the source base for this study. These are used in conjunction with the results of the 1939 census. From the late 1980s, with the re-evaluation of different aspects of the Soviet past under Gorbachev, various regional studies were undertaken which attempted to identify the victims of the purges in the period 1936–38.9 Early listings were sometimes published in regional newspapers. Employing records collated by the voluntary organisation Memorial, as well as formerly top secret NKVD files, the Leningradskii martirolog provides an alphabetical listing of the victims of the purges in Leningrad city, Leningrad oblast¢ and surrounding districts starting from August 1937, when the terror escalated to unprecedented proportions in both quantitative and qualitative terms.


A multi-volume set is in preparation, but at the time of writing only two volumes have been published. The first volume lists those who were executed in August–September 1937, and the second lists those who were executed in October 1937. It is estimated that these two volumes alone contain something like 8000 entries. According to the census data, in 1939 the Leningrad population (city and oblast¢) totalled almost 6.5 million.10 Each entry in the Leningradskii martirolog contains the following information: full name (surname, first name, patronymic); date of birth; where relevant, details of Communist Party membership; nationality; occupation and place of work; date of arrest; date of trial; state organisation responsible for overseeing the trial;11 statute of the RSFSR criminal code under which the individual was arrested; and date of execution. The second volume of the Leningradskii martirolog is slightly less detailed and contains more errors and inaccuracies than the first. In addition to the detailed information contained in the Leningradskii martirolog, the published findings of the 1939 All-Union Census12 and the more specific unpublished results of the 1939 census for Leningrad city and Leningrad oblast¢ have been used for comparative purposes.13 These census returns provide a picture of social composition in the Soviet Union and the RSFSR, including the Leningrad region, in the late 1930s.

7.3 Methodology From the information contained in the Leningradskii martirolog, two separate datasets have been created with entries based on the original source.14 The larger dataset includes all of the full entries on every tenth page of the listing – that is, not quite 10 per cent of the total – and contains 673 entries.15 It should be noted that this method of selection (as opposed to every tenth entry, for example) has the disadvantage that it may disproportionately reflect surnames applicable to particular ethnic groups. On the other hand, it may be possible to identify familial and kinship relationships from such a sample.16 The second dataset includes all of the women listed in the two volumes and contains 297 entries.17 There is some inevitable overlap between the two datasets. Where applicable, for each of the datasets a separate subset notes the years of Communist Party membership. From the data contained in the original source it has been possible to calculate an age profile of the victims of the purges, as well as the number of days spent in detention, both from arrest to trial and from trial to execution.

7.4 Sex ratios Women constituted approximately 53.7 per cent of the population in the Leningrad region in 1939. However, the victims of the Great Terror were overwhelmingly male. Very few women were victims of the purges. From

Melanie Ilicˇ 151

the larger dataset under analysis here it seems that less than 4 per cent of those executed were women (22 of the total 673 entries). It is important to remember that men were far more likely than women to have been engaged, firstly, in paid employment, and, secondly and more importantly, in political activities, either as functionaries of the Communist Party or by participating in vociferous opposition.18 Men were also more likely to have been regarded as heads of households. Women’s maternal and familial responsibilities may have resulted in them being treated less harshly, even in incidences when they did voice opposition to the regime. Possibly in view of the relatively small proportion of female victims, so far, apart from the roles women played as wives and mothers of male victims of the terror, and the individual memoirs and reminiscences left by survivors of the forced labour camp system, the impact of mass repression specifically on women has not yet received serious academic attention.19 The smaller dataset offers some preliminary information on the female victims of the terror, and we shall return to this later.

7.5 Age profile Based on sample data taken from the Leningradskii martirolog, the victims of the purges ranged from 19 to 78 years of age. According to the 1939 census returns, almost 40 per cent of the Leningrad population (city and oblast¢) as a whole was under twenty years of age (including those where an age was not specified). Discounting these, and more specifically, therefore, in relation to the adult population of the Leningrad region, the purges impacted disproportionately on those over forty years of age, as can be seen from Table 7.1. The average age at execution for the purge victims was 46.34 years for the larger sample and 48.03 years for the women. The age profile of the victims may partly reflect the fact that, for those in employment, older people were more likely to occupy senior positions.20 Although only approximately 40 per cent of the Leningrad population were over forty years of age, almost 70 per cent of all purge victims (according to the larger sample21), and nearer 75 per cent of women (according to the smaller sample), were over forty. It should be noted that women tend to live longer than men, and, therefore, constitute a greater proportion of the older age groups. This fact serves to intensify the impact of the purges particularly on men in the older age ranges. It should be noted also that those who were born and reached adulthood before the October Revolution were more likely to find themselves victims of mass repression.

7.6 Residency By 1939 approximately one-third of the USSR population lived in urban centres and approximately two-thirds of the population lived in rural areas.

152 The Stalin Period Table 7.1 Age profile, in percentage terms, of Leningrad adult population (1939) and victims of the purges (1937) Leningrad population1 20–29 years 30–39 years 40–49 years 50–59 years 60+ years Total

32.33 27.20 16.68 12.03 11.76 100

Sample (= 670)2

Women (= 297)2

6.27 24.33 31.04 22.09 16.27

8.42 16.84 26.26 30.30 18.18

100

100

Sources: 1. Vsesoyuznaya perepis¢ naseleniya 1939 goda: osnovnye itogi: gorod Leningrad, RGAE, f. 1562, op. 336, d. 305, l. 3, and Vsesoyuznaya perepis¢ naseleniya 1939 goda: osnovnye itogi: Leningradskaya oblast¢, RGAE, f. 1562, op. 336, d. 304, l. 3. 2. Estimated from data in Leningradskii martirolog, tom 1 (St Petersburg, 1995) and tom 2 (St Petersburg, 1996).

No distinction has been made in this study between urban and rural residents in the Leningrad oblast¢, where the distribution of the population was similar to that of the USSR as a whole. A selective sample of the residency of purge victims is offered in Table 7.2. Despite the fact that the population of the Leningrad region as a whole was divided almost evenly between Leningrad city and Leningrad oblast¢, only just over one-quarter of the larger sample of purge victims, and around one-third of the women, were resident in the city.22 Outside the city of Leningrad, the victims of the purges were dispersed throughout the region. For one individual in the larger sample, Avgust Georgievich Oll¢, the place or residence is listed as a hospital (Gdovskaya gorodskaya bol’nitsa). Individuals were occasionally listed as ‘homeless’: five from the larger sample and eleven women.

7.7 Communist Party membership In 1939 fewer than 1.5 per cent of the USSR population were either full or candidate members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.23 Women, for a variety of reasons, were far less likely than men to have been Communist Party members.24 Women constituted less than 15 per cent of the Communist Party membership in the later 1930s.25 In contrast to the first wave of the ‘Great Terror’ (from the summer of 1936 to the summer of 1937), the victims of the purges during the second wave (from summer 1937 to spring 1938), in relative terms at least, were far less likely to have been drawn from local and party elites. However, it is important to recognise that, despite the fact that the victims of the terror

Melanie Ilicˇ 153 Table 7.2 Residency of purge victims: Leningrad 1937 (selected sample) Place of residence

Sample 352/673

% of all Sample

Leningrad city

180

26.75

98

33.00

6 15 6 8 9 9 8 17 7 8 8 7 8 8 5 5 9 8 8 13

0.89 2.23 0.89 1.19 1.34 1.34 1.19 2.53 1.04 1.19 1.19 1.04 1.19 1.19 0.74 0.74 1.34 1.19 1.19 1.93

19 1 22 13 2 3

6.40 0.34 7.41 4.38 0.67 1.01

2 4 6 1 3 3 5 12 6

0.67 1.35 2.02 0.34 1.01 1.01 1.68 4.04 2.02

8 2

2.69 0.67

352

52.31

210

70.71

Leningrad oblast¢: Belozersk Cherepovetskii r-n Kirillov Kirillovskii r-n Kirov zh-d Kirovsk Kolpino Lyadskii r-n Murmansk Myaksinskii r-n Ostrovskii r-n Poddorskii r-n Porkhovskii r-n Prisheksninskii r-n Pskov Tikhvinskii r-n Toksovskii r-n Valdaiskii r-n Vinnitskii r-n Volkhovskii r-n Total

Women 210/297

% of all Women

Source: Estimated from data in Leningradskii martirolog, tom 1 (St Petersburg, 1995) and tom 2 (St Petersburg, 1996).

during the second wave encompassed a broader social spectrum, Communist Party members were still purged in a greater proportion than their weighting amongst the Soviet population as a whole. Of the 673 individuals in the larger sample under analysis here, 44 (approximately 6.5 per cent) were, or had been, members of the Communist Party at the time of their arrest. Eight of the 297 women (2.7 per cent) were Party members and they had all joined the Communist Party since the revolution. One of the purge victims, Vladislav Aleksandrovich Pruss, is recorded as having joined the Social Democrats in 1899; Viktor Yakovlevich Baier joined in 1905; and Ignatii Petrovich Nezhinskii joined in 1911. All of the others had joined the Communist Party during or after 1917.26 Seven of the sample had left, or been expelled from, the Communist Party before their arrest. Although no reason is given in the source for leaving the Party, these were all recorded as having relinquished Party membership in either 1935 or 1936 – that is, after the murder of Kirov on 1 December 1934.27


7.8 Nationality While only 58.39 per cent of the entire Soviet population in 1939 was ethnically Russian, the population of the Leningrad region was predominantly Russian (88.79 per cent), as was the case for the RSFSR as a whole (82.5 per cent) (see Table 7.3). The data drawn from the Leningradskii martirolog demonstrate that ethnic Russians were purged in proportion more with their Union-level weighting than their representation amongst the Republican or local populations. Around 63 per cent of the larger sample of purge victims, and just over 69 per cent of the women, were ethnic Russians. Some ethnic groups suffered disproportionately in relation to their weighting in the Soviet population as a whole, as well as in the republican and local population figures. Most notable amongst these are the ethnic Poles, who constituted over 16 per cent of the purge victims in both samples, despite the fact that they formed less than 1 per cent of any of the national, republican or local population figures. This is clearly in line with the order issued by Ezhov ( prikaz 00485) on 9 August 1937 which was directed specifically against the Poles.28 Likewise, Germans, national groups who may have potentially been involved in independence movements (such as Finns and Ukrainians), and the indigenous Finnish and Karelian ethnic groups living in the Leningrad region (such as the Veps and Izhory), also suffered disproportionately.29 This is particularly significant because there was a growing threat of war by the late 1930s. It has been pointed out that the attacks on ethnic minorities were part of a broader campaign against potential ‘fifth columnists’ – that is, those who might support opposing forces in the event of a war.30 The findings of this study would tend to support this. It is interesting to note that despite widespread popular anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, the Jewish population were victims of the purges in a smaller proportion than their weighting amongst the Leningrad population as a whole. In comparison with national and republican figures, however, the Jewish victims of the purges constituted a greater proportion.

7.9 Social composition The social composition of the victims of the purges is a much-debated historiographical issue. For the purposes of this study social composition has been determined using the broad occupational categories utilised in the 1939 Soviet Census:31 1. Rabochie (blue-collar workers) – includes waged workers directly involved in the industrial production process using physical labour in factories and enterprises; waged workers employed in agriculture (such as middleranking supervisory personnel, tractor drivers, etc.); waged workers in forestry, fishing, mining and construction; workers on the railways, water

Table 7.3 Nationality, in percentage terms, of All-Union, RSFSR and Leningrad populations (1939) and victims of the purges (1937) All-Union population1

RSFSR population2

Leningrad population3

Russian Finnish Estonian Ukrainian Jewish Veps Belorussian German Tatar Latvian Izhor Polish Karelian Tsygan [gypsy] Mordovan Lithuanian Chuvash Armenian Bashkir Georgian Kazak Komi Osetian Assiri Moldavian Greek Spanish Azerbaidzhani Udmurty Chinese ‘Sever’ Mariitsy Other inc. Austrian inc. Korean inc. Norwegian inc. Serbian Not given

58.39 0.09 0.09 16.48 1.78 0.02 3.09 0.84 2.53 0.07

82.50 0.10 0.10 3.10 0.90 0.00 0.40 0.80 3.60 0.10

0.37 0.15 0.05 0.85 0.02 0.80 1.26 0.49 1.32 1.82 0.25 0.21 0.01 0.15 0.17

0.10 0.20 0.10 1.30

1.33 0.36 0.02 0.08 0.28

0.00 0.60

88.79 1.78 0.93 1.42 3.41 0.24 0.71 0.36 0.68 0.33 0.11 0.43 0.11 0.08 0.10 0.09 0.05 0.08 0.02 0.03 0.01 0.02 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01

Total

93.48

1.20 0.20 0.80 0.00 0.30 0.40 0.20

0.10

Sample (= 673)4 63.00 2.82 3.27 2.23 2.53 1.04 2.97 2.08 0.89 0.45 16.49 0.15

0.15

Women (= 297)4 69.02 2.69 2.69 0.67 2.36 0.67 0.34 1.68 0.67 1.01 16.84 0.34

0.67

0.30 0.10 0.40 0.30

0.12

0.11

97.90

99.97

0.15 0.30 0.30 0.15 0.74

0.34

100.01

99.99

Sources: 1. 1939 All-Union Census, pp. 57–8, which lists 57 different ethnic groups, plus ‘other’. See also pp. 246–8. 2. Ibid., p. 59, which lists 39 different ethnic groups, plus ‘other’. 3. Vsesoyuznaya perepis¢ naseleniya 1939 goda: osnovnye itogi: gorod Leningrad, RGAE, f. 1562, op. 336, d. 305, l. 6, and Vsesoyuznaya perepis¢ naseleniya 1939 goda: osnovnye itogi: Leningradskaya oblast¢, RGAE, f. 1562, op. 336, d. 304, l. 8. 4. Estimated from data in Leningradskii martirolog tom 1 (St Petersburg, 1995) and tom 2 (St Petersburg, 1996).


2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

transport and other forms of transportation; employees in public catering; other unskilled labour; and also includes ‘domrabotnitsy’ (waged domestic servants or housekeepers); Sluzhashchie (white-collar workers/service personnel): includes waged workers in administrative occupations and service jobs, such as leading party and state functionaries, technical personnel, medical workers, employees in education and training, artists and musicians, judicial personnel, employees in emergency services, communications workers, employees in trade, planning, economics and accounting; and also includes ‘domashnyaya khozyaika’ (unwaged housewife);32 Kolkhozniki (collective farm peasantry) – includes unwaged peasantry working on kolkhozy; Kooperirovannye kustari (artisans working in cooperatives);33 Nekooperirovannye kustari (artisans working independently); Krest¢yane-edinolichniki (independent peasantry); Neykazavshchie obshchestvennye gruppy (that is, those not included in the above) – includes, for the purposes of this study, individuals listed in the original source as bez opredelennykh zanyatii (without definite occupation/‘unspecified’); religious personnel; military personnel; individuals living in Leningrad illegally (such as ‘bezhala s mesta vysylki’ [escaped from place of detention] or ‘prozhivala nelegal¢no’ [illegal resident]); pensioners; and students.

For the purposes of this study, two further categories have been added: 0. No occupation given in the original source; 8. Netrudyashchiesya (unemployed) – as stated in source. Occasionally, the Leningradskii martirolog records two different occupations in one entry. The first listed occupation has generally been used in the analysis undertaken here, except if this is ‘unspecified’. As can be seen from Table 7.4, the social categories most affected by the purges, in relation to their weighting amongst the Leningrad population as a whole, were: firstly, white-collar workers and service personnel (occupation code 2, that is the category to which the majority of Communist party members, and all of the women party members, belonged); secondly, independent peasantry (occupation code 6, that is those who were not accommodated within the state and collective farm system and, therefore, some of those who were possibly former kulaks); and, thirdly, the ‘other’ social groups (occupation code 7, who were more likely to be economically inactive and/or who were, possibly, family relations of other purge victims). Yet this was not simply a campaign against ‘former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements’ as Ezhov’s order (no. 00447) of 30 July 1937 would suggest.34

Melanie Ilicˇ 157 Table 7.4 Social composition of Leningrad population (1939) and victims of the purges (1937) Occupation code

Sample no.1

Sample %

Women no.1

Women %

1939 Leningrad census2 % total

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

7 including: unspecified religious military illegal pensioner student Total

% women

% men

3 177 208 118 14 3 38 112

0.45 26.30 30.91 17.53 2.08 0.45 5.65 16.64

2 19 108 10 3 0 15 139 1

0.67 6.40 36.36 3.37 1.01 0.00 5.05 46.80 0.34

47.32 27.99 19.15 3.90 0.59 1.03 0.03

45.44 29.03 19.65 4.13 0.52 1.20 0.03

49.49 26.78 18.58 3.62 0.66 0.84 0.03

673

100.00

297

100.00

100.00

100.00

100.00

69 31 5 3 2 2

63 66 0 2 5 3

112

139

Sources: 1. Estimated from data in Leningradskii martirolog, tom 1 (St Petersburg, 1995) and tom 2 (St Petersburg, 1996). 2. Vsesoyuznaya perepis¢ naseleniya 1939 goda: osnovnye itogi: gorod Leningrad, RGAE, f. 1562, op. 336, d. 305, l. 9, and Vsesoyuznaya perepis¢ naseleniya 1939 goda: osnovnye itogi: Leningradskaya oblast¢, RGAE, f. 1562, op. 336, d. 304, l. 15. Data are based on ‘all population’ figures (including, therefore, family members and dependants) plus unemployed.

In contrast to the early stages of the purges, ordinary workers, collective farm peasantry and artisans were targeted by the second wave of the ‘Great Terror’, but not in proportions which reflected their representation within the population as a whole. The second wave of the purges, therefore, affected the ordinary peasantry as well as the former kulaks, shop floor workers as well as enterprise managers and Communist Party members, religious personnel and pensioners as well as criminals and high-ranking military officers.

7.10 Dates of arrests, trials and executions According to the samples under review here, arrests started as early as November and December 1936, and a particular spate of arrests appears to have taken place in April 1937. Although a number of arrests predated the wave of mass repression, as can be seen from Table 7.5, arrests did not begin

158 The Stalin Period Table 7.5 Dates of arrests, trials and executions: Leningrad 1937 Arrest sample

Trial sample

Execution sample

Arrest women

Nov. 36 Dec. 36 Jan. 37 Feb. 37 Mar. 37 Apr. 37 May. 37 Jun. 37

0 1 1 6 1 23 10 17

1 0 1 2 2 4 4 3

Jul. 37 1–10 11–20 21–31

6 10 17

4 1 7

Aug. 37 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

7 6 5 3 13 39 21 13 16 16 7 6 11 4 14 6 14 4 6 12 18 9 12 12 7 10 9 14 12 8 9

3 2 0 4 12 7 3 3 8 2 1 2 2 7 8 6 11 0 1 10 8 4 2 1 3 3 2 4 1 3 3

7 0 3 0 1 1 3 0 0 0 1 1 1 19 0 0 11 25 0 14 0 0 10

7 0 0 0 0 3 1 2 0 1 0 8 0 10 0 18 11 0 5 0 14

Trial women

4 0 4 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 8 0 0 2 13 0 7 0 0 1

Execution women

4 0 0 0 0 4 3 0 0 0 0 2 0 6 0 10 2 0 3 0 7

Melanie Ilicˇ 159 Table 7.5 Continued Arrest sample

Trial sample

Execution sample

Arrest women

Trial women

Execution women

Sep. 37 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

10 19 10 5 6 4 12 7 7 6 12 6 8 6 5 5 5 3 3 11 11 7 3 5 8 6 4 1 5 4

0 17 29 7 0 0 0 16 17 16 0 0 11 21 27 0 18 0 0 26 0 17 44 0 11 0 0 17 30 0

0 0 0 0 8 26 0 11 24 0 16 0 12 1 25 7 11 0 0 31 18 1 0 26 0 9 0 58 8 0

5 7 1 2 2 3 2 3 1 1 4 0 1 0 3 1 1 0 2 6 8 2 5 26 9 1 1 2 3 18

0 5 5 1 0 0 0 7 7 5 0 0 1 4 6 0 6 0 0 11 0 9 21 0 5 0 0 10 4 0

0 0 0 0 3 2 0 3 10 0 5 0 1 0 4 0 3 0 0 7 6 0 0 10 0 6 0 30 3 0

Oct. 37 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

2 2 5 3 1 3 2 1 2 4 2 0 2

22 0 0 37 0 0 0 0 7 15 0 16 0

0 0 1 39 0 31 0 0 36 2 3 0 0

6 4 1 6 0 0 1 2 0 1

9 0 0 31 0 0 0 0 3 15 0 9 0

0 0 0 10 0 14 0 0 31 1 2 0 0

160 The Stalin Period Table 7.5 Continued Arrest sample 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Not given Total

1 2 0 0 1

Trial sample 33 23 0 0 11 24 4 13 26 0 0 7 0 12

1

2

673

673

Execution sample

Arrest women

9 9 0 16 6 0 1 48 3 2 11 22 0 0 0 8 54

Trial women

Execution women

8 4 0 0 6 3 1 7 48 0 0 1 0 3

2 13 0 9 3 0 4 4 0 0 6 4 0 0 0 2 58

297

297

1 673

297


in earnest until June–July 1937, and these took on a ‘mass’ character from 5 August. This is clearly in accordance with the date set out in Ezhov’s order, which stated also that the campaign was to continue for four months and set out quotas for the various regions. Trials did not begin until 9 August 1937, with the first executions taking place two days later. Arrests for the samples under review continued until 18 October. Although arrests took place on a daily basis, trials and executions may not have taken place daily. For example, no trials or executions are recorded in either of the datasets for the following dates: 12 August, 23 August, 30 August, 7 September, 12 September, 27 September, 30 September, 2 October, 5 October, 13 October, and 16 October. A more extensive sampling of the original data, however, might indicate that trials and executions did take place on at least some of these dates. According to the data under review here, trials continued until 27 October, though trials continued after this date for those executed in November, for which data are not yet available. The numbers of individuals executed remained high at the end of the month.

Melanie Ilicˇ 161 Table 7.6 Number of days between arrest and trial: Leningrad 1937 Days: arrest to trial sample

%

Days: arrest to trial women

%

2–9 10–19 20–29 30–39 40–49 50–59 60–69 70–79 80–89 90–99 100–199 200–257

33 181 157 110 51 31 31 20 9 5 37 5

4.90 26.89 23.33 16.34 7.58 4.61 4.61 2.97 1.34 0.74 5.50 0.74

22 77 92 33 26 17 8 5 1 1 12 2

7.41 25.93 30.98 11.11 8.75 5.72 2.69 1.68 0.34 0.34 4.04 0.67

No calc.

3

0.45

1

0.34

673

100.00

297

100.00

Total


The bunching of arrests, trials and executions may be indicative of the targeting of particular enterprises, collective farms, ethnic groups or localities during particular phases of the purges. For example, a number of arrests seem to have been made amongst workers on the Kirov railway between 21 and 23 August 1937, and a number of Ukrainian nationals living in Kirovsk were put on trial on 29 September 1937. Such trends are more easily identified by analysing the dataset on women (see below).

7.11 Number of days between arrest and trial, trial and execution From Table 7.6 it can be seen that over 70 per cent of the purge victims were put on trial within six weeks of their arrest. Over half spent between ten days and four weeks awaiting trial. Table 7.7 shows that a small proportion of the victims were executed on the same day as their trial. Over one-quarter of the individuals in the larger sample and almost one-third of women, however, were executed after five days. Nearly 88 per cent of all victims were executed within one week of their trial, and over 94 per cent of women were executed within eight days. Very few of the individuals (between 2 and 3 per cent) from either of the samples survived for more than ten days between trial and execution.35

162 The Stalin Period Table 7.7 Number of days between trial and execution: Leningrad 1937 Days: trial to execution sample 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20+ No calc. Total

43 39 58 81 71 177 74 49 27 13 19 0 0 0 0 11 0 0 0 4 5

%

Days: trial to execution women

6.39 5.79 8.62 12.04 10.55 26.30 11.00 7.28 4.01 1.93 2.82

1.63

0.59 0.74

2

0.30

673

100.00

%

16 11 21 23 28 95 27 9 50 7 4 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 4

5.39 3.70 7.07 7.74 9.43 31.99 9.09 3.03 16.84 2.36 1.35

297

100.00

0.34 0.34

1.35


7.12 State organisation responsible for conducting trials In both datasets, approximately 70 per cent of cases were held before the Special Troika of the Administration of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the Leningrad District (osobaya troika UNKVD LO), and approximately 30 per cent were held before the Commission of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs and Procuracy USSR (Komissiya NKVD i Prokuratury SSSR). Three cases in the larger sample were held before the Military Tribunal of the Leningrad Military District (Voennyi tribunal LVO). Two of these victims had been arrested before the period of mass arrests and all three spent relatively long periods of time between their trial and execution. Efim

Melanie Ilicˇ 163

Evmenovich Dubenchuk was arrested in February 1937, but was not tried until the end of August. He was executed in October, on the same day as Zinovii Efimovich Tsukkert, who had been arrested on 15 August and tried five days later.

7.13 Statute Code During the purges, articles 17 and 19 of the RSFSR Criminal Code were used in cases of individuals charged with actual or attempted criminal offences. Yet, as can be seen from Table 7.8, these statutes constituted only a very small proportion of those used in the trials conducted during the ‘Great Terror’, and they were generally used in conjunction with other charges. According to the preface of the first volume of the Leningradskii martirolog, articles 17 and 19 were used increasingly in the 1930s against those who were innocent of any real crime.36 In effect, the actual statute under which an individual was charged may have had little connection to the underlying reason for their arrest. Article 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code detailed political offences. Article 58–6 dealt with cases of espionage, where individuals were charged with handing over state secrets to foreigners or counter-revolutionary organisations, and such offences (in conjunction with other charges) accounted for over 15 per cent of charges.37 Article 58–7 was used against those who had led attacks on state industry, transport, trade or finance, and again these (in conjunction with other charges) accounted for roughly 15 per cent of cases. Article 58–8 dealt with terrorist activities against Soviet power, but, from the samples analysed here, it appears that this was little used.38 Article 58–9 was used against those charged with ‘wrecking’ on the railways, or other communications networks, and, as can be seen from these samples, was used (though not exclusively) against workers on the Kirov and October railways. These, however, accounted for only a very small proportion of cases. As can be seen from Table 7.8, by far the most widely used statute in the trials of the victims of the purges was article 58–10 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, which was used against individuals charged with conducting propaganda or agitation against Soviet power, or participation in counterrevolutionary activities, or the handling of literature dealing with such issues. This statute also encompassed involvement in religious or nationalist mass agitation. Further to this, article 58–11 dealt with individuals who belonged to organisations which conducted such propaganda. The statutes were loosely worded and widely employed. It was the individuals charged under these articles who were identified as ‘enemies of the people’. During the period of mass repression, these two statutes alone were used in over 50 per cent of cases identified in the larger sample, and over 66 per cent of the trials involving women. In combination with other statutes, articles 58–10 and 58–11 were evident in the vast majority of trials: nearly

164 The Stalin Period Table 7.8 Statute Code used in purge trials: Leningrad 1937 Statute Code

Sample no.

16-59-3 17-58-6; 58-10 17-58-6; 58-10-11 17-82 ch. 2 19-58-7; 58-10 19-58-7-8; 58-10-11 19-58-8-10-11-13 19-58-8; 58-6 19-58-8; 58-6-11 19-58-8; 58-7-10-13 19-58-8; 58-10 19-58-8; 58-10-11 19-58-8; 58-10-13 19-58-9; 58-10-11 19-84; 58-8-10 19-84; 58-10-11; 182 58-1a 58-1a-6-9-11 58-1a-6-11 58-1a-9 58-1a-9-11 58-1a-10 ch 1; 19-58-9 58-1a-10-11 58-1a-11 58-1b 58-1b-1a 58-1b-6-7 58-1b-6-11 58-1b-10-11 58-6 58-6-7-9-11 58-6-7-10-11 58-6-8-9-10 58-6-8-10-11 58-6-8-11 58-6-9 58-6-9-10 58-6-9-10-11 58-6-9-11 58-6-10 58-6-10-11 58-6-11 58-7

Women %

no.

1

0.15

1

0.15

1 1 1 1 1 1 11 4 5 1 1 1 3

0.15 0.15 0.15 0.15 0.15 0.15 1.63 0.59 0.74 0.15 0.15 0.15 0.45

2 4 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 36 4 2 1 2

0.30 0.59 0.15 0.30 0.15 0.15 0.15 0.15 0.15 0.15 5.35 0.59 0.30 0.15 0.30

9 1 1 18 5 5 22 4

1.34 0.15 0.15 2.67 0.74 0.74 3.27 0.59

%

1 1 1

0.34 0.34 0.34

2 3

0.67 1.01

5 2 6

1.68 0.67 2.02

1

0.34

1

0.34

1

0.34

31

10.44

1 3

0.34 1.01

1

0.34

1 2 12

0.34 0.67 4.04

Melanie Ilicˇ 165 Table 7.8 Continued Statute Code

Sample no.

58-7-8-9-11 58-7-9 58-7-9-10 58-7-9-11 58-7-9-11.1a 58-7-10 58-7-10; 19-58-8 58-7-10-11 58-7-10-11; 17-58-8 58-7-10-11-13 58-7-10-13 58-7-11 58-7-13 58-8-10 58-8-11 58-9 58-9-10 58-9-10-11 58-9-11 58-10 58-10 ch. 1 58-10; 82 ch 1 58-10; 82 ch 2 58-10; 84 58-10; 182 58-10; 17-58-8 58-10; 19-58 58-10; 19-58-8 58-10-11 58-10-11; 82 ch 2 58-10-11; 17-58-8 58-10-11; 19-58-9 58-10-11-13 58-10-13 58-10-14 58-13 58-14 109 Not given Total

Women %

no.

1 3 3 1 37 1 38 2 1 7 3 1 4 2 4 5 2 15 232 1 1 3 1 1 4 1 7 112 1 2

0.15 0.45 0.45 0.15 5.50 0.15 5.65 0.30 0.15 1.04 0.45 0.15 0.59 0.30 0.59 0.74 0.30 2.23 34.47 0.15 0.15 0.45 0.15 0.15 0.59 0.15 1.04 16.64 0.15 0.30

3 9 2 1 1 1 1

0.45 1.34 0.30 0.15 0.15 0.15 0.15

673

100.00

%

1

0.34

1

0.34

1

0.34

3

1.01

1 1 1 1 1

0.34 0.34 0.34 0.34 0.34

88

29.63

3

1.01

2

0.67

1 110 1 2 2

0.34 37.04 0.34 0.67 0.67

1

0.34

1

0.34

297

100.00



90 per cent of the larger sample, and over 85 per cent of the cases brought against women.

7.14 Women According to the dataset on women, over 60 per cent of the women who were executed during the period of mass repression were economically inactive, or were not engaged in paid productive employment (occupation code 7, including ‘unspecified’, plus ‘housewives’ listed under occupation code 2). What is immediately obvious from this dataset is that by far the largest single ‘occupational’ category of women who fell victims to the terror were former or active religious personnel, mostly nuns but also a few individuals who were recorded as church elders or psalm readers. These tended to be older women who did not work and, presumably, had no family or maternal responsibilities. The datasets both include a number of striking incidences of campaigns against religious settlements. For example, from the dataset on women it is clear that there was a purge of a former convent in Belozersk on 24 September 1937. The occupants were put on trial on 4 October and executed five days later. Of the 31 women executed on 9 October, 14 are recorded in the Leningradskii martirolog as being nuns or other religious personnel from Belozersk, and a further four from Belozersk are listed as ‘unspecified’. Of the other women executed on this day, two are recorded as homeless, one of whom was a former nun and the other ‘unspecified’. It is not evident from the information cited in the Leningradskii martirolog if any of the women who were arrested were prostitutes, though it is possible that known former or working prostitutes may have been targeted in the purges, as Sheila Fitzpatrick’s recent study of ‘everday Stalinism’ has suggested.39 Prostitutes certainly constituted a significant proportion of women sent to the forced labour camps during this period. The dataset on women also provides evidence that family groups could become victims of the purges. For example, Aleksandra Vasil¢evna Baleeva and her twin sisters Vera and Tat¢yana were all arrested on 5 August 1937. The twins, charged under articles 58–7–10–11 of the Criminal Code, were put on trial on 22 August and executed two days later. Their elder sister, however, charged under articles 58–10–11 of the Criminal Code, was not tried until 20 September and was executed four days later.

7.15 Family ties Family connections, as Khlevnyuk has argued and the example given above demonstrates, also played a part in determining the victims of the terror. The larger dataset includes numerous examples of brothers (sharing the

Melanie Ilicˇ 167

same surname, patronymic and place of residence, as well as place of work on occasions) and fathers and sons who fell victim to the purges. No examples of spouses being arrested together are evident in the larger dataset, though a more thorough sampling would probably reveal such a relationship to be a factor in the purges. Broader kinship relationships are not easy to determine from the limited information provided by the Leningradskii martirolog, but these too can be surmised from the available data.

7.16 Conclusions It is evident from the preliminary analysis of the listings contained in the Leningradskii martirolog, 1937–38 that the second wave of the Great Terror extended far beyond the Communist Party members and other elite personnel in the higher echelons of Soviet power, who had provided the main focus of the early stages of the purges in this period. During the second wave of the terror, the purges impacted more widely than on these elites, and included former kulaks, the national minorities and religious personnel. In this respect, there is considerable evidence to support the argument that mass repression was geared towards the destruction of a potential ‘fifth column’. Yet this does not provide a complete picture. From the preliminary data outlined here, there is evidence to suggest that the second wave of the purges may also be seen partly as a social cleansing exercise. To some extent the purges, possibly in a bid to meet strictly determined quotas in a short period of time, also targeted those who were not actively engaged in actual or potential opposition to Stalin’s policies, or the Soviet regime more generally, but who did not fit into the new Soviet way of life and were, therefore, regarded as easily dispensable by local authorities.40 These were people who could be regarded as ‘anti-Soviet’ elements in only the broadest interpretation of its meaning. They might be classified in other terms as socially marginal individuals and groups, and may have included known criminals. They were often vulnerable and little able to resist arrest, such as the elderly and infirm, vagrants, hospital residents and the otherwise unemployed. The case of the oldest victim in the datasets exemplifies this argument: Aleksandr Aver¢yanovich Bibiksarov was 78 years old and homeless when he was arrested on 10 August 1937 under article 58–10 of the Criminal Code. He was placed on trial on 13 September and executed the same day.

Notes 1. Research for this essay was funded by ESRC project no. R000237388: ‘The Soviet Politburo and Economic Decision-Making and Development in the Stalin Era’. An earlier paper on this topic was presented at the Centre for Russian and East


2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

European Studies, University of Birmingham, Annual Conference, Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, 12–14 June 1998. I would like to thank R. W. Davies, E. A. Rees, O. Khlevnyuk and C. Joyce for their comments on this version of the essay. For an outline of these debates see, for example, E. A. Rees, ‘Stalinism: the Primacy of Politics’, in J. Channon, ed., Politics, Society and Stalinism in the USSR (London: MacMillan, 1998). R. Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (New York: Macmillan, 1968), and The Great Terror: a Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). See also R. Conquest, ‘Small Terror, Few Dead’, Times Literary Supplement, 31 May 1996, pp. 3–5, where Conquest offers a critical review of Thurston’s revisionist thesis and draws on evidence from the first volume of the Leningradskii martirolog. Conquest, Great Terror (1968), p. 11. For example, see J. Arch Getty, The Origins of the Great Purges: the Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); J. Arch Getty and R. T. Manning, Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and R. W. Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934–1941 (Yale: Yale University Press, 1996). See also S. Fitzpatrick, ‘How the Mice Buried the Cat: Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces’, Russian Review, 52, no. 3 ( July 1993) 299–332; S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Workers Against Bosses: the Impact of the Great Purges on Labor–Management Relations’, in L. H. Siegelbaum and R. G. Suny, eds, Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (London: Cornell University Press, 1994); G. T. Rittersporn, ‘The Omnipresent Conspiracy: on Soviet Imagery of Politics and Social Relations in the 1930s’, in N. Lampert and G. T. Rittersporn, eds, Stalinism: its Nature and Aftermath (London: Macmillan, 1991); on the impact of the purges in the military see R. R. Reese, Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers: a Social History of the Red Army, 1925–1941 (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1996). See, for example, B. A. Starkov, ‘Narkom Ezhov’, in Getty and Manning, Stalinist Terror, pp. 21–40; O. Khlevnyuk, ‘The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937–38’, in J. Cooper, M. Perrie and E. A. Rees, eds, Soviet History, 1917–53 (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 158–76; and V. N. Zemskov, ‘Gulag (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt)’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, no. 6 (1991) 10–27. On the institutional framework, see also P. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice Under Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For an example of collaborative work between Russian and western researchers, see J. Arch Getty, G. T. Rittersporn and V. N. Zemskov, ‘Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: a First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence’, American Historical Review, 98, no. 4 (1993) 1017–49. Khlevnyuk, ‘Objectives of the Great Terror’, p. 161. Ibid., p. 169. In addition to the research on Leningrad outlined here, similar studies are currently being undertaken by S. G. Wheatcroft (Moscow) and Yu. A. Dmitriev (Karelia). Vsesoyuznaya perepis¢ naseleniya 1939 goda: osnovnye itogi (hereafter, 1939 All-Union Census) (Moscow, 1992), p. 24. In addition to the special NKVD troika of the Leningrad oblast’ (osobaya troika UNKVD LO), which had been introduced firstly in the 1920s and was resurrected from May 1935, a special Commission, dvoika, of the NKVD and public procurator (komissiya NKVD i prokuratury SSSR) was established in 1937 especially to deal

Melanie Ilicˇ 169

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

with the trials. It should be noted, however, that the Leningradskii martirolog does not employ strictly correct terminology in its designation of the osobaya troika. Osobye troiki were not established until September–October 1938. Before this date the troiki were either militseiskie troiki (established in 1935) or spetsial¢nye troiki (created by order no. 00447 in 1937). See N. V. Petrov and A. B. Roginskii, ‘ “Pol¢skaya operatsiya” NKVD 1937–1938gg.’ in the Memorial publication, Repressii protiv polyakov i pol¢skikh grazhdan (Moscow, 1997), pp. 30–1. I am grateful to Oleg Khlevnyuk for clarifying this point. 1939 All-Union Census. Vsesoyuznaya perepis¢ naseleniya 1939 goda: osnovnye itogi: gorod Leningrad (hereafter, 1939 Leningrad city Census), RGAE, f. 1562, o. 336, d. 305, and Vsesoyuznaya perepis¢ naseleniya 1939 goda: osnovnye itogi: Leningradskaya oblast¢ (hereafter, 1939 Leningrad oblast¢ Census), RGAE, f. 1562, o. 336, d. 304. The population of the region was divided almost evenly between the city and the oblast’. I have made no distinction between these in the calculations and analysis contained in this chapter, though such a distinction may help to refine some of the preliminary assessments made here. The original entries were made in the database programme Access, which allows relational data entry and offers complex search facilities although, it should be noted, only simple searches have been used in the preparation of this essay. The data were analysed using Access and Excel. Referred to as ‘sample’ in the tables. Getty, Origins, p. 173, notes that ‘Many of the arrests seem to have resulted from chains (sometimes family circles) of personal connections. Those under interrogation were always encouraged to implicate and denounce others in a prophylactic attempt to destroy possible circles even remotely connected to the main targets’. Referred to as ‘women’ in the tables. On dissent in general, see, for example, S. Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For example, see E. Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind (London: Penguin, 1989). Ginzburg was arrested in 1937 and spent the following two years in Butyrki Prison in Moscow before being deported to Siberia. She spent the next 18 years in prison camps and exile. She was eventually released, and was rehabilitated before her death in Moscow in 1977. See Getty, Origins, p. 175. Only one of the victims was 19 years of age, and no date of birth was given for two of the 673 entries. The entries in the Leningradskii martirolog include detailed particulars of the place of residence of those living in Leningrad city, but these have not been included for the purposes of this study. T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 52, estimates total CPSU membership on 1 January 1939 at 2 306 973; according to the 1939 All-Union Census the total population of the USSR on 17 January 1939 was 170 557 093. For the changes in composition and structure of the CPSU membership between 1929 and 1941, including commentary on the impact of the purges, see also L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (London: Methuen, 1978), pp. 439–56. For some of the reasons why women were less likely to join the CPSU, see, for


25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

example, G. B. Smith, Soviet Politics: Struggling with Change (London: St Martin’s Press, 1992), p. 98. According to Rigby, Communist Party Membership, p. 361, women constituted 14.8 per cent of the CPSU membership in January 1937, and this had fallen to 14.5 per cent by March 1939. Fewer than 0.4 per cent of the entire Soviet female population in 1939, therefore, were members of the Communist Party. In contrast, almost 2.5 per cent of the male population were Party members. No date for joining the Communist Party is given for eight of the entries. No date for leaving the Communist Party is given for five of the entries. The impact of the purges on the Poles is explored in more detail in the Memorial publication, Repressii protiv polyakov i pol¢skikh grazhdan (Moscow, 1997). See in particular N. V. Petrov and A. B. Roginskii, ‘ “Pol¢skaya operatsiya” ’, pp. 22–43. On the Karelian national and ethnic groups, and the impact of the purges in this region, see T. Vihavainen and I. Takala, eds, V sem¢e edinoi: natsional¢naya politika partii bol¢shevikov i ee osushchestvlenie na Severo-Zapadne Rossii v 1920–1950-e gody (Petrozavodsk, 1998). I am grateful to Nick Baron for this reference. See, for example, I. Takala, ‘Natsional¢nye operatsii OGPU/NKVD v Karelii’, in ibid., p. 161, and Khlevnyuk, ‘Objectives of the Great Terror’, p. 169. See also TsSU, Slovar¢-spravochnik po sotsial¢no-ekonomicheskoi statistike (Moscow, 1944), ‘O chislennosti rabochikh i sluzhashchikh po dannym perepisi naseleniya 1939 goda i po dannym tekushchego ucheta’, RGAE, f. 4372, op. 92, d. 283, ll. 145–8, and ‘Instruktsiya po zapolneniyu perepisnogo lista na kontingenty NKVD pri provedenii vsesoyuznoi perepisi naseleniya 1939 g.’, RGAE, f. 1562, op. 329, d. 276, ll. 1–9. Of which there were three in the larger sample, and 21 in the dataset of women. All kustari and artel workers are listed under 4, unless it is clear from the source that they work independently, such as ‘kustar¢-edinolichnik’ or ‘kustar¢-odinochka’, when they are listed under 5. See ‘Rasstrel po raznaryadke, ili kak eto delali bol¢sheviki’, Trud, 4 June 1992. On the treatment of criminals in particular, see D. R. Shearer, ‘Crime and Social Disorder in Stalin’s Russia: a Reassessment of the Great Retreat and the Origins of Mass Repression’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, 39, nos 1–2 (1998) 119–48. This was clearly in line with the decree introduced in the wake of the Kirov murder on 1 December 1934 in which Stalin urged the judicial authorities to speed up the process between trial and execution of those accused of acts of terror, thus withdrawing any opportunity for appeal. Leningradskii martirolog, tom 1, p. 14. Conquest, Great Terror, appendix G, pp. 741–6, sets out ‘Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR’. Article 58–8 was used against those accused of murdering women in the Far East – women who may have refused to wear a veil, for example. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 126. On the seemingly random nature of arrests during the period of mass repression see also ibid., ch. 8, and especially pp. 203–4.

Part III The Post-Stalin Period


8 The Dissident Roots of Glasnost Robert Horvath

Glasnost is not simply Gorbachev’s present invention, glasnost is the thing that his predecessors feared most of all, because behind the closed doors of the state arbitrary power can rule with impunity. Julia Voznesenskaya, 19891 The Russian word ‘glasnost’ has no precise English translation, a fact which impressed Vladimir Bukovskii on his arrival in the West in 1976: For us there, in the Soviet Union, glasnost was a weapon, a means of struggle with lawlessness and tyranny. Indeed, a means of defence like the safety belt of a mountain climber. Yet the word does not exist in any European language, which substitute the word ‘publicity,’ distorting the sense of the concept. In the Russian word glasnost there is something cold and exact, like a surgical instrument, something very serious and solemn, from which immediately you imagine a duma clerk, bearded and in long robes, declaiming from the Spassky gate a government document. In essence, something like an oath to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.2 The two possible translations of glasnost – ‘publicity’ and ‘openness’ – were essential aspects of dissident activity during the 1970s and early 1980s. By exposing and publicising political trials and the penal system, dissidents made the regime pay a price for repression. By acting openly, dissidents set a precedent for the development of democratic politics and repudiated the idea of underground revolutionary struggle. Both of these activities were understood by dissidents as aspects of glasnost. In the mid-1980s, when the foremen of perestroika began to dispense rhetoric about the need for glasnost, they were employing a term which had been shaped by two decades of dissident struggle. Yet the dissident role in theorising and practising glasnost was virtually ignored by Sovietology. Most accounts of perestroika traced the origins of the 173

174 The Post-Stalin Period

term to the 1860s, and then leapt forward to the Gorbachev era. In a 1989 study of Gorbachev’s glasnost, Walter Laqueur mentioned that dissidents had used the term, but proceeded to argue that the fate of Sakharov was less important for Russians than Brezhnev’s housing policy during the 1970s.3 This marginalisation of unofficial meanings of glasnost within Soviet society helped to reinforce Laqueur’s conclusion that ‘there is reason to believe that the glasnost era has now reached its climax’, and that ‘more dramatic and far-reaching progress would be a near miracle’.4 Nor did the ‘near miracle’ of August 1991 provoke a revision of the accepted wisdom. Archie Brown’s study of Gorbachev did mention that ‘dissidents, including the most famous of them – Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn – had in the past called for glasnost’, but then devoted considerably more detail to Brezhnev’s spurious call for the ‘widening of glasnost in the work of the party’ during a 1974 election speech.5 But the struggle for glasnost during the 1980s makes no sense if we ignore the intellectual context in which Gorbachev made his first calls for glasnost, almost two decades after the first dissident demonstration for glasnost in Pushkin Square. Amongst Russian publicists, the connection between the dissidents and Gorbachev’s glasnost provoked fierce controversy. By the late perestroika period, some dissident émigrés treated Gorbachev as a plagiarist of their ideas. Ludmilla Alexeyeva claimed that ‘we take no offence at Gorbachev and his associates for not citing us as sources. We are happy that our ideas have acquired a new life.’6 In similar vein, Andrei Sinyavskii noted that ‘Mikhail Gorbachev borrowed the term [glasnost], evidently from the dissidents.’7 He added that ‘I am glad of the glasnost proclaimed by “General Dissident” Gorbachev, who has transposed certain of Sakharov’s ideas into the party idiom.’8 At the opposite end of the political spectrum, this thesis was amplified by conservative polemicists, who vilified the architects of perestroika as bearers of dissident ideas. ‘For five years yesterday’s dissidents have been heading up the government’, declared Aleksandr Prokhanov, adding that ‘Gorbachev is the chief dissident.’9 Such émigré triumphalism and conservative ‘stab-in-the-back’ myths obscure the complexity of the relationship between dissident glasnost and the course of perestroika. Gorbachev was no Trojan Horse: he did not ‘borrow’ glasnost from the dissidents. But he did enlist glasnost, a term drawn from Lenin’s works, but already sharpened by decades of dissident protest, in the regime’s attempt to repulse the West’s ‘psychological war’. It proved a double-edged sword. Glasnost was supposed to disarm anti-Soviet broadcasters and critics, and to lay the groundwork for an ideological offensive. In the process, Gorbachev conceded space to intellectuals who were susceptible to the pressure of the dissident example. Long before Gorbachev, these ‘foremen of perestroika’ experienced the anxiety of influence. On the one hand, they feared being tarred by conservatives as bearers of dissident ideas. On the other, they feared dissident reproaches about their oppor-

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tunism and their failure to speak out during the era of stagnation. These pressures produced a surreptitious rapprochement of radical reformists and the dissident tradition, and an ultimate convergence which was symbolised by Sakharov’s role, first as the moral leader of Memorial and the Interregional Group, and then as the icon of the democratic movement. During this convergence, the reformers embraced the dissident notion of glasnost as a synonym for freedom of expression, and repudiated Gorbachev’s Leninist glasnost.

8.1 Leninist sources of Gorbachev’s glasnost The sources of Gorbachev’s glasnost were embedded in Soviet ideology. After the collapse of the USSR, it would have been fashionable for Gorbachev to consolidate his democratic credentials by boasting about some oblique connection to the dissidents. Indeed, shortly after the outbreak of war in Chechnya, Gorbachev sent a telegram to the former dissident Sergei Kovalev, expressing admiration for his courage under Russian bombardment in Grozny.10 But in his own memoirs published a year later, Gorbachev emphasised the profundity of his interest in Lenin and acknowledged that ‘in my own time as General Secretary I was to draw on ideas generated by reading Lenin’s works’.11 Glasnost was one of those ideas. The Bolshevik regime had exploited glasnost as a slogan, even as it was destroying the democratic liberties and the freedom of expression won during the February Revolution. This contradiction shaped the peculiarly propagandist conception of glasnost preserved in the Leninist heritage. On the one hand, such propaganda exercises as the publication of the tsarist regime’s secret treaties, and the announcement of the ‘abolition of commercial secrecy’, were presented as exercises in glasnost. On the other, propaganda about glasnost became a smokescreen for its abolition. Lenin made a famous call for glasnost in 1918, after a series of decrees subjecting the Russian press to rigid censorship.12 It was fitting that the ‘World’s Most Democratic Constitution’, proclaimed on the eve of the terror of 1937, should codify the right to glasnost of the judicial process. Few political defendants of the Stalin era enjoyed judicial glasnost, except for the victims of the carefully rehearsed show trials, who included the author of the constitution’s provisions on civil liberties, Nikolai Bukharin. But there was more to Bolshevik glasnost than hypocrisy. Lenin also envisaged glasnost as a punitive instrument of mass mobilisation and discipline. He maintained that the absence of glasnost in capitalist enterprises was a source of inefficiency that would be rooted out by the use of glasnost under socialism. In the draft for his article on ‘The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government’, Lenin argued that the press would play a crucial role in ‘increasing the self-discipline of the working people’ by exposing ‘shortcomings in the economic life of each labour commune, ruthlessly branding


these shortcomings, frankly laying bare all the ulcers of our economic life, and thus appealing to the public opinion of the working people for the curing of these ulcers.’13 The published version of this article was slightly less menacing, admitting the possibility that success stories might also be subject to glasnost. Thus the regime should introduce ‘accounting and publicity in the process of the production of grain, clothes and other things, of transforming dry, dead, bureaucratic accounts into living examples, some repulsive, others attractive’. On the one hand, the press would ‘give publicity to the successes achieved by the model communes . . . [and] the causes of these successes’. On the other, it ‘must put on the “black list” those communes which persist in the “traditions of capitalism,” i.e. anarchy, laziness, disorder and profiteering’.14 It was this Bolshevik heritage of glasnost as an instrument of propaganda and mobilisation that Gorbachev invoked in his famous speech to an ideological conference in December 1984. Many accounts of perestroika have stressed the anti-totalitarian implications of Gorbachev’s vindication of glasnost as ‘an integral aspect of socialist democracy’. Less attention has been devoted to the militancy of his speech, which was concerned above all with the ‘ideological struggle’ and the needs of propagandists in coping with the West’s ‘psychological warfare’. Certainly for Gorbachev in 1984, glasnost had no connection with freedom of expression: he warned that in the contest with imperialism, ‘political vigilance and implacability toward views that are alien to us, ideological work that is creative and aggressive, businesslike efficiency, boldness and persistence are needed as never before’.15 In this endeavour, glasnost had a special role to play, by exposing abuses and thus disarming ideological adversaries. This agenda was made explicit in Gorbachev’s speech to the 27th Party Congress in February 1986, when he identified ‘openness of information, and the bold and creative nature of our propaganda’ as principal weapons against ‘the ingenuity and unscrupulousness of bourgeois propagandists’.16 Echoing Lenin’s call for a glasnost ‘black list’, Gorbachev warned menacingly that ‘those who have grown accustomed to doing slipshod work, who engage in hoodwinking, will indeed be uncomfortable in the light of public openness, when everything done in the state and in society is done under the people’s supervision and in full sight of the people’.17 The gulf between Leninist glasnost and the idea of freedom of expression was exemplified by the Moscow party boss, Boris Yeltsin, who denounced the slipshod work of the Central Committee’s Cultural Department, blaming its ‘non-intervention’ for the weakening of party influence on the development of literature.18

8.2 The demand for glasnost A different notion of glasnost had been developing in the dissident movement, which was born with a demand for glasnost. The famous 1965 leaflet calling for a demonstration against the Daniel¢ and Sinyavskii trial declared:

Robert Horvath 177

There are reasons to fear violation of glasnost of the legal process. It is commonly known that violation of the law on glasnost [art. 3 of the Constitution of the USSR and art. 18 of the Criminal Procedure code of the RSFSR] constitutes an illegal action. It is inconceivable that the work of a writer should constitute a crime against the state . . . Soviet citizens have a means for resisting capricious actions of the authorities. That method is the Glasnost meetings where participants chant only one slogan: ‘WE DEMAND GLASNOST FOR THE TRIAL OF [followed by the last name of the accused]!’ or where the participants display a corresponding banner.19 This appeal, the founding document of the rights-defence tendency of the dissident movement, was drafted by Aleksandr Yesenin-Volpin. A prominent mathematician and a survivor of Stalin’s camps and Khrushchev’s psychiatric prisons, Volpin was the original theorist of dissident glasnost. According to the dissident historian, Liudmilla Alexeyeva, ‘the word [glasnost] had no political meaning, and until Alek Yesenin-Volpin pulled it out of ordinary usage, it generated no heat’.20 Volpin’s own commitment to glasnost can be traced to his attendance at the 1962 trial of three youths involved in the Mayakovskii Square poetry readings. At the time of sentencing, Volpin was barred from the courtroom because of the secret nature of the trial, which involved allegations about a plot to assassinate Khrushchev. Volpin protested that article 18 of the Code of Criminal Procedure required that sentences be handed down publicly, even in cases that had been tried in camera, and the judge conceded the point.21 In his memoirs, Bukovskii recalled of the sentence: ‘Little did we realise that this absurd incident, with the comical Alik Volpin brandishing his criminal code like a magic wand to melt the doors of the court, was the beginning of our civil rights movement.’22 But the turning-point for Volpin was his slander case against an Ogonek journalist in April 1964, when the prosecutor successfully applied for a closed courtroom, again because secret materials might be revealed. Volpin later recalled: This forced me off the beaten track, because I didn’t expect it. But my legal consciousness underwent a very important shift, since previously I had underestimated the role of glasnost in court proceedings. I had understood its importance, but it was one point out of several, yet here everything depended on it. This court could not threaten me with anything, but they won everything.23 Volpin’s advocacy of glasnost was closely bound up with the legalism that was so central to the notion of the pravozashchitnik, a defender both of inalienable rights and the letter of the law, which guaranteed glasnost during court proceedings. Demands for ‘glasnost of the judicial process’ were fuelled by the closed trials of the late 1960s, where courts were packed with a ‘selected public,’


whilst the defendant’s friends and relatives waited outside behind police cordons. In an open letter to the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Galina Gabai, the wife of a defendant in the 1967 trial of Pushkin Square demonstrators, derided the pretense of the authorities about ‘open courts’: The trial was officially described as a ‘hearing in open court’ and the ‘public’ – consisting of these young men – was there . . . To the best of my knowledge, a hearing in open court is one which any citizen of our country – not to mention relations and friends – has the right to attend. And deliberate restriction of this right is intolerable.24 Indignation about such restrictions on glasnost reverberated in the series of petitions against the impending ‘Trial of the Four’. In November 1967, 115 Soviet intellectuals, including Volpin, Bogoraz and Litvinov, signed an appeal stating their desire to attend the trial and criticising the practice of admitting people according to special lists and passes: ‘In this way, formally open trials have been turned into closed ones, and the principle of publicity of legal proceedings, guaranteed by the Constitution, has in fact been violated.’25 One week later, many of the same signatures appeared beneath a declaration that demanded glasnost for the trial and explained its paramount importance: The crucial significance of the publicity of judicial proceedings lies in the fact that publicity is the basis of all other judicial guarantees, and for that reason we cannot tolerate even isolated violations of the principle of publicity. If exceptional circumstances justifying a closed examination of certain matters should crop up in the impending trial, respect for the principle of publicity requires that all the other matters be examined in open sessions and that the entire trial be organised in such a way that the public should be able to attend it.26 The authorities ignored these appeals, and a protest signed by General Petr Grigorenko and 11 others denouncing ‘the illegal transformation of a judicially open trial into one that is closed’.27 Undeterred by official hostility, the dissidents addressed others about the lack of glasnost at the trial. After the verdict had been handed down, Pavel Litvinov and Larisa Bogoraz released their famous appeal to international public opinion to protest against the trial in which ‘the courtroom is filled with specially selected people . . . who give the appearance of an open public trial’.28 This theme was taken up by General Grigorenko, who warned, in an open letter to the Budapest Conference of Communist Parties, that ‘the possibility of a renewal of Stalinism exists as long as there is no glasnost of the judicial process, which was not present in Stalinist times’.29 Another appeal to the same conference

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from 12 dissidents, including Bogoraz, Litvinov, and Grigorenko, denounced the fact that political ‘trials occurred with gross violations of legality, the most important of which is the absence of glasnost’.30 The trial later that year of the dissidents who protested in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia was marked by Ilya Gabai’s famous samizdat article ‘Before the Closed Doors of the Open Court’: a phrase that captured the hypocrisy of the Soviet judicial process, and that would become a leitmotif in accounts of subsequent dissident vigils outside political trials.31 Whilst these early protests had focused upon closed trials, glasnost had far wider implications for the Soviet regime. On the eve of the December 1966 Constitution Day demonstration, Volpin had advised Yurii Dobrovol’skii to carry a banner with the slogan, ‘Glasnost is needed not only in courts’, implying that it was also needed to address cases of extrajudicial repression, such as psychiatric abuse.32 Volpin elaborated this thesis in a lengthy essay titled ‘Glasnost of court proceedings’, which was published in the autumn 1970 issue of Valerii Chalidze’s samizdat journal Social Problems. Here he reiterated his conviction that glasnost in the judicial process was ‘a guarantee of legality’, and that a defendant who insisted upon his innocence had ‘in glasnost the first guarantee of the success of his struggle’.33 But Volpin also emphasised the importance of glasnost during the preliminary investigation, in defamation cases, and in addressing the problem of bureaucracy.34 A government could not diminish its authority more effectively, he argued, than by unfounded limitations upon glasnost.35 For a small circle of rightsdefenders, Volpin’s theories played an important educative role, but his wider impact was limited by his scholarly tone. Far more resonant was Solzhenitsyn’s emotive call for glasnost in his 1969 open letter to the Secretariat of the RSFSR Writers’ Union, which had just expelled him in absentia and was preparing to punish his supporters. Recalling the unfulfilled promises of the Bolshevik Revolution, Solzhenitsyn scorned the claims of official secrecy: Were we not promised fifty years ago that never again would there be any secret diplomacy, secret negotiations, secret and incomprehensible appointments and transfers, that the masses would be informed of all matters and discuss them openly? ‘Enemies will overhear’ – that is your excuse . . . As if there were no enemies when immediate glasnost was promised . . . Glasnost, honest and total glasnost – this is the first condition of the health of any society, including our own. And he who does not want glasnost for our society, he is indifferent to the nation, he thinks only of his own profit. He who does not wish this glasnost for his nation does not want to purify it of its diseases, but only to drive them inward, there to fester.36


The demand for ‘honest and total glasnost’, rather than selective disclosure, was the enduring distinction between dissident glasnost and the official glasnost that Lenin formulated and Gorbachev reiterated during 1984–87. The other giant of the dissident movement, Andrei Sakharov, made glasnost a recurrent theme in his public statements. In his early works, he argued that glasnost was a precondition for technological progress. This idea was implicit in his Reflections, which aimed to encourage ‘open, frank discussion under conditions of glasnost’.37 It was elaborated upon in his 1970 Memorandum to the Soviet leadership, coauthored with Turchin and Medvedev, which argued that there was a close link between ‘the problems of technical-economic progress and scientific methods of management, on the one hand, and questions of information, glasnost and competition on the other’.38 Restrictions on freedom of information made it difficult to control the leadership, and also meant that ‘our leaders receive incomplete and edited information and are prevented from using their power effectively’.39 Sakharov repeated this demand in his March 1971 Memorandum to Brezhnev, where he argued that ‘glasnost facilitates the social controls safeguarding legality, justice, and the rightness of all decisions taken, contributes to the effectiveness of the entire system, makes for a scientific and democratic system of government, and promotes progress, prosperity and national security’.40 Sakharov’s evolution from socialist to liberal reformism was echoed by Yurii Orlov’s letter to Brezhnev, written in September 1973 as a response to the slander campaign against Sakharov. Orlov suggested that a first step for reform would be ‘the abolition of censorship of the press, free exchange of information [and] glasnost’.41 This proposal was extended in the reform programme set out in Sakharov’s 1975 essay, ‘My Country and the World’. Article Six of that programme was ‘legislative guarantee of glasnost and public control over the taking of important decisions’.42 The unofficial Committee on Human Rights, established in November 1970 by Sakharov, Valerii Chalidze and Andrei Tverdokhlebov, made glasnost a central tenet of its theoretical and practical work. In his first major report to the Committee, Chalidze emphasised the connection between human rights and glasnost: We must strive for publicity in all matters pertaining to the defense of rights. Open court proceedings, public discussion of administrative decisions on rights, press coverage of the problem of rights, only when all this becomes customary can we hope for increasingly effective protection of human rights.43 In the absence of legally enforceable glasnost, Chalidze saw dissident activism as ‘an important element in the system for the protection of human rights in individual cases’. According to Chalidze, ‘individuals have suffered many hardships but they have never ceased to speak out publicly express-

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ing their views on violations of the law and on human rights’. As a result, ‘society has found out about the most important court proceedings and about extralegal violations of human rights’.44 The extension of glasnost to new spheres of public life was a central theme in Sakharov’s outspoken statements during 1973, which ignited a massive vilification campaign in the Soviet press. Sakharov contended that emigration restrictions were a tragedy not merely for refuseniks, but also for those who wished to remain, because ‘a country from which it is not possible to leave freely . . . is a country that is defective, a closed volume where all processes develop differently from those of an open system’.45 He proceeded to emphasise that ‘we need first of all greater openness in the work of the administrative apparatus’.46 The interview provoked a summons to the office of Deputy General Prosecutor Malyarov, who threatened Sakharov with criminal sanctions because foreign anti-Soviet organisations had published his statements. Sakharov responded that he would have been glad for the interview to have been published in Literaturnaya gazeta, because ‘I consider openness of publication of great importance’.47 When Malyarov criticised Sakharov’s statements in defence of prisoners of conscience, Sakharov responded with a defence of glasnost: ‘When proceedings are not public, when political trials are consistently held under conditions allowing for violations, there are grounds for doubting the fairness of the court’.48 Defying Malyarov’s warning, Sakharov called a press conference where he made the case for glasnost on the international stage. Détente on Soviet terms was dangerous, he argued, because ‘it would mean cultivation and encouragement of a closed country, where everything that happens may be shielded from outside eyes, a country wearing a mask that hides its true face’. 49 Three weeks later, he reiterated this argument in his open letter to the US Congress in support of the Jackson Amendment: For decades the Soviet Union has been developing under conditions of intolerable isolation, bringing with it the ugliest consequences. Even a partial preservation of those conditions would be highly perilous for all mankind, for international confidence and détente.50 The importance of glasnost in international affairs was emphasised in Sakharov’s 1975 Nobel Lecture, where he argued that ‘détente can only be assured if from the very outset it goes hand in hand with continuous openness on the part of all countries, an aroused sense of public opinion, free exchange of information, and absolute respect in all countries for civil and political rights’.51 Ironically, the prominent role played by dissidents on the international stage during the 1970s diminished the clamour for glasnost. The Helsinki groups formulated their documents and demands in terms of the Helsinki Final Act, not in terms of the provisions of the Soviet Constitution or Criminal Code. But Sakharov continued to agitate for glasnost, and


his opposition to the closed society was probably intensified by his exile to the closed city of Gorky. Shortly after his banishment, Sakharov insisted that ‘my position remains unchanged. I am for a pluralistic, open society, both democratic and just.’52 In his 1983 essay on the dangers of thermonuclear war, he concluded with a list of preconditions for genuine international security that included ‘openness and pluralisation in the socialist countries’.53 In November 1984, less than a month before Gorbachev’s first landmark speech on glasnost, Sakharov protested that the refusal of the authorities to permit him to attend his wife’s trial was ‘a violation of the principle of glasnost’.54

8.3 The weapon of glasnost Dissidents did not only petition for glasnost from the authorities. They also used glasnost as a weapon against repression. References to its potency abound in the history of the dissident movement. General Grigorenko wrote of a 1974 trial that the ‘investigative organs didn’t count on the light of glasnost and didn’t give enough time to purify the case of dangerous witnesses’.55 Two years later, a Radio Liberty interviewer asked Andrei Amal¢rik, just arrived in the West, about the suspected murder of the writer Konstantin Bogatyrev: ‘And hasn’t that powerful sword that has been used before in the struggle – the sword of glasnost – turned out to be dull in this case?’56 The most consistent advocate of the sword of glasnost was Sakharov. In the beginning, it was a means of defending himself against intimidation. ‘The world will save me’, he told a western journalist at the height of the September 1973 vilification campaign, adding that ‘the whole world is watching me’.57 When a prominent academician tried to persuade western scholars that public statements in defence of dissidents were counterproductive, Sakharov released an open letter in which he avowed that ‘I am convinced that my position, my rights and the safety of members of my family . . . can be effectively protected only by open and decisive interventions.’58 In a commentary to the letter, the Chronicle noted that ‘Sakharov again emphasises the necessity of publicity in all matters that are of social importance’.59 As he became the most prominent spokesman for the human rights movement, Sakharov theorised its use of glasnost as an aspect of its repudiation of the heritage of revolutionary violence. Setting out the movement’s priorities in his message to the 1979 Sakharov Hearings, he emphasised that ‘only non-violent means should be used as a matter of principle, with publicity being the main weapon in the defence of human rights’.60 In 1980, during his first year of exile, Sakharov bolstered his claim that the human rights movement did not pursue ‘political objectives’ by declaring: ‘Glasnost is our only weapon.’61 The potential of that weapon was massively enhanced by the spread of

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communications technology, which undermined the Soviet dictatorship’s total monopoly over the mass media. During Stalin’s terror, this control enabled it to mobilise its subjects and to manipulate their perceptions far more effectively than ever before. During the ensuing decades, the balance shifted in favour of society. The ownership of shortwave radios in the Soviet Union soared from 3.5 million in 1950 to more than 60 million in the 1970s, creating what Solzhenitsyn called ‘the mighty non-military force which resides in the airwaves and whose kindling power in the midst of communist darkness cannot even be grasped by the Western imagination’.62 Certainly it was grasped by the Kremlin, which devoted immense resources to jamming western broadcasts, and to diplomatic campaigns against the West’s ‘information imperialism’. That ‘kindling power’ existed in a vacuum until the dissident movement supplied it with the oxygen of information. Without abundant testimony from people living in the society to which western radio stations were addressed, the airwaves would remain a source of distrusted foreign propaganda: an assault from outside rather than a debate within society. The gathering of this testimony began with the appearance of a series of exposés of major political trials in samizdat during the 1960s. The prototype was Frida Vigdorova’s record of the Brodskii case, in early 1964.63 It was followed by Aleksandr Ginzburg’s White Book on the Daniel’ and Sinyavskii trial (1966), Pavel Litvinov’s The Demonstration in Pushkin Square (1967) and The Trial of the Four (1968), and Natal¢ya Gorbanevskaya’s Noon (1968). Perhaps the most explosive work of this early samizdat was Anatolii Marchenko’s My Testimony, a record of camp life that demolished Khrushchev’s claim that there were no more political prisoners in the Soviet Union. In his preface, Marchenko made it clear that glasnost was a fundamental motive behind his work: The main aim of these notes is to tell the truth about today’s camps and prisons for political prisoners to those who wish to hear it. I am convinced that publicity is the sole effective means of combatting the evil and lawlessness that is rampant in my country today.64 These early records of repression represented glasnost in its purest form: no editorialising, no political opinions, only information and documents, which spoke for themselves. This style became the hallmark of the permanent journal of the human rights movement, The Chronicle of Current Events, created in April 1968. For 15 years, the Chronicle’s expanding network of correspondents would provide information about repression from Ukraine to the Baltic States and the Caucasus. The spectrum of its sources ranged from Jewish activists and Marxists to Russian nationalists and Pentecostalist Christians, all united by the common experience of repression. As this information network proliferated, the ‘kindling power’ of the airwaves became a tangible factor in the GULag. No sooner had a prisoner’s


rights been violated, than the details were being passed to western journalists in Moscow and then broadcast back to the USSR. Camp administrators now had to worry that details of violence or torture would leak out within weeks, and that their own names would be broadcast across the world. Such exposure might mean official disfavour in Moscow, and the dispatch of an investigative commission. Vladimir Bukovskii, involved in a series of hunger strikes in camps and prisons during the period 1972–76, described the calculations that confined his gaolers: If you overdid it a fraction, or put a bit too much pressure on, you had a hunger strike on your hands. And you had London, Munich, Washington [ie, the BBC, Radio Liberty and the Voice of America] kicking up a stink again, which meant a Moscow commission on your backs within a few weeks. For that reason, the prison guards and officers also listened to the Western radio stations . . . asking one another the next morning: did you hear anything?65 Even psychiatric prisons were pervious to western radio broadcasts. General Grigorenko recalled that the chief of his ward at the Chernyakovsk special psychiatric hospital responded to all his protests against beatings and mistreatment of patients: Evidently he feared glasnost. He was afraid that I would tell my wife stories she would in turn pass on. All the patients remarked that the atmosphere in the ward had changed since my arrival.66 Glasnost remained Grigorenko’s only weapon after he was transferred to an Ordinary Psychiatric Hospital. When the deputy head of the forced treatment section, A. Kozhemyakina, warned him of her power to determine his fate – ‘If by your conduct you manage to get sent back to a Special Hospital, you’ll never get out again’ – he passed the news to his wife Zinaida. Soon Kozhemyakina’s name and threats were broadcast on the BBC, Deutsche Welle and the Voice of America. The affair concluded in a reprimand for Kozhemyakina, after which, noted Grigorenko, ‘she left my family in peace’.67 The regime waged a continuous struggle against the flow of information from the camps and prisons. The censorship of letters was tightened, meetings with relatives and lawyers were postponed, and prominent activists were resentenced before the expiry of their terms. After 15 years of publication, the Chronicle of Current Events was suppressed in 1983, although its function was partly assumed by Vesti iz SSSR, a fortnightly human rights bulletin based in Munich. But the crackdown was too late: dissident glasnost had already done its work. The repressive apparatus and its abuses were common knowledge. Many had believed Khrushchev’s claim that there were

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no political prisoners, but few would have taken Gorbachev seriously when he made the same claim in his interview with L’Humanité in early 1986. Not only the camps and prisons of GULag, but also the fates of individual political prisoners had been publicised by two decades of glasnost. Even as he denied the existence of political prisoners in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev was forced to respond to a question about the health of Andrei Sakharov.68 That journalist’s impudence was in itself a tribute to the reach of dissident glasnost. Such means of addressing the Soviet leadership had long been contemplated by dissidents. At his 1978 trial, Yurii Orlov traced the work of the Moscow Helsinki Group to the realisation ‘that approaching our own government through the governments of other nations was more effective than a direct approach’.69 Such interventions reached a level of intensity during the early 1980s that preoccupied Soviet diplomacy: this was the ‘psychological war’ that Gorbachev promised to defeat, when he made his early clarion calls for glasnost as a weapon against ‘the ingenuity and unscrupulousness of bourgeois propagandists’.

8.4 The practice of glasnost Glasnost was not only a weapon against repression, but also a basic principle of the rights-defence movement’s own operation. Dissidents acted openly, advertising their addresses on samizdat documents, sending their protests to Soviet institutions. Of course, many activities, such as the production of the Chronicle or the collection of donations to support the families of political prisoners, continued without publicity, but such covert enterprises were inextricably connected with the existence of a dissident public sphere. For Soviet citizens outside the original core of Moscow dissidents, public figures like Sakharov and public associations like the Moscow Helsinki Group were vital contact points, conduits between society and the information network of the Chronicle. But the practice of glasnost represented more than a tactical innovation. It was also an ethical rupture with the Bolshevik heritage. It meant the abandonment of the underground as the principal arena of political activity. This fundamental change in the methods of resistance occurred in the mid1960s. It was symbolised by General Grigorenko’s slogan, ‘In the underground you meet only rats.’ In his memoirs, he added that ‘those who have power now in the USSR are rats who emerged from the underground’.70 Grigorenko spoke from experience, as the founder of an underground ‘Union of True Leninists’, which had been easily crushed by the authorities. His conversion to glasnost began with his first meeting with Vladimir Bukovskii, a 22-year-old Volpin protégé, in the spring of 1966. Asked whether he favoured open or underground struggle, Bukovskii replied:


Open struggle! Why should we hide? The law is on our side. People will hear public statements and the honest and the brave among them will join us. What methods could one use for underground conspiracy? Given the corruption of our morality, I am convinced that from the very first one would encounter a provocateur.71 If Volpin was the original theorist of dissident glasnost, Bukovskii was its pioneering practitioner. A few months earlier, he had organised the first glasnost demonstration in Pushkin Square, though the KGB had detained him before it took place. In January 1967 he organised another demonstration in the square, this time in protest against the arrest of four youths and the tightening of the Criminal Code. Bukovskii’s ‘open struggle’ continued at his trial, where he defied the prosecutor and judge at every juncture, and vowed that ‘when I am free again, I shall organise other demonstrations’.72 At the same time, a more modest form of protest, the annual dissident demonstration in Pushkin Square, had become part of the dissident calendar: for the first decade on Constitution Day, and from 1977 on International Human Rights Day. According to the ritual, dissidents would gather around the statue of Pushkin, remove their hats, and share a few minutes of silence in honour of the victims of repression. The same desire to demonstrate open solidarity produced the traditional vigils outside the trials of dissident defendants, who would be showered with flowers whilst being led away to captivity. Despite their symbolic importance, it was less in public demonstrations than in samizdat that the practice of open struggle was institutionalised. When Aleksandr Ginzburg compiled the White Book, his collection of documents on the trial of Daniel¢ and Sinyavskii, he sent copies with his address to the KGB and the Chief Prosecutor’s Office. This decision marked a fundamental transition, for the White Book recounted the trial of writers incriminated for publishing under pseudonyms. Ginzburg’s precedent was followed by Pavel Litvinov’s subsequent trial records, The Demonstration in Pushkin Square and The Trial of the Four. As a result of the publication of his address by foreign radio stations, Litvinov received an avalanche of letters and visitors from across the Soviet Union. Litvinov’s sudden celebrity status coincided with the wave of the podpisanty, public (as distinct from confidential) petitions against political trials, which receded under the impact of dismissals from work and expulsions from university during the spring of 1968. The culmination of this public ferment came in 1969, when 14 prominent activists founded the Initiative Group on Human Rights, the first dissident public association. It was followed a year later by the Committee on Human Rights. Despite their short-lived activity, these experiments in public collective activity set a precedent for the far more successful Moscow Helsinki Group, its counterparts in Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia, and

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associated initiatives such as the Working Group to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes and the Christian Committee for the Defence of the Rights of Believers. Not every dissident was an advocate of glasnost as a basic principle of activism. After the crushing of the podpisanty in 1968, there was a brief efflorescence of pseudonymous samizdat, in which the notion that emancipatory change could be achieved by secret dialogue was a persistent theme. This thesis evoked derision from Solzhenitsyn in From Under the Rubble: For a brief period, a profusion of journals and more journals sprang up in samizdat . . . all of them strictly clandestine, of course, and all of them offering the same advice: just don’t reveal your face, just don’t break the rule of secrecy, but slowly spread a correct understanding among the people . . . It seemed so easy: philosophise in one’s burrow, hand the results over to samizdat, and the rest will happen automatically! But it won’t.73 The debate was renewed in September 1978, when Roy Medvedev accused Aleksandr Ginzburg, the recently-sentenced manager of the Prisoner’s Aid Fund, of having exposed himself to ‘what in revolutionary groups is called “having one’s cover blown” ’ and insisted that instead of joining the Moscow Helsinki Group, Ginzburg should have shunned ‘publicity’ and gone as far as possible ‘underground’.74 One of the recipients of Medvedev’s open letter, the novelist Georgii Vladimov, responded with a polemical defence of glasnost, arguing that the Fund had won a significant moral victory over the authorities by acting openly: By refusing to go underground, it has left this to the persecutors and oppressors, and a miraculous transformation has taken place before our own eyes: the people working below ground are those who once banged on the table with their revolvers, who towered over us so dramatically in their heroic tight black leather jerkins.75 The dissident public sphere was slowly destroyed by the wave of systematic arrests that began in late 1979, which targeted dissidents who acted openly. The implications for glasnost were analysed in a 1981 interview by Ivan Kovalev, a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group and the son of Sergei Kovalev: Overt protest – publicity – is one of the basic traits, perhaps the principal trait, of the human rights movement as it now exists. Overt actions by individual human rights advocates led eventually to the creation of overt human rights groups and associations. Now the authorities are destroying them. I do not believe that even if all such groups are elimi-


nated, overt human rights actions will cease. But in such circumstances it is clear that new human rights associations will be quickly suppressed in their early stages before they gain strength.76 Yet like Vladimov, Kovalev found hope in the reversal of roles, in the struggle between public dissidents and the clandestine state: At almost every political trial the ‘illegal activity’ of the defendant is discussed. And this is done with respect to people who have publicly spoken out against tyranny! But really, the concept of ‘illegal, underground activity’ is more applicable to the actions of the authorities themselves and their organs. How else can you describe the existence of secret decrees, instructions and directives? Or political trials which consistently violate the principle of public disclosure?77 Certainly that principle was violated at Ivan Kovalev’s own trial in April 1982, when he was sentenced to five years in the camps and five years’ exile for his commitment to glasnost.78 Repression also intensified against dissidents who acted openly in the cultural sphere. Their most visible achievement was the samizdat journal Poiski, edited by an eclectic combination of elderly reform communists and young non-communist intellectuals. The demise of this experiment was heralded by the arrest of one of the editors, Valerii Abramkin. In a final statement, the editorial board denounced the arrest as a reprisal for Poiski’s attempt ‘to break through the blockade against dialogue, for being open about our names and actions’.79 An even more explicit affirmation of the practice of glasnost came in April 1982, when Mikhail Gefter, one of the journal’s guiding spirits, responded to a summons with an open letter to the General Prosecutor: My involvement in Poiski is no secret. And not because something earlier hidden has been uncovered. No, there was nothing hidden from the very beginning. Moreover, secrets were repudiated as such from the beginning – by everyone, who decided to found Poiski, [and] made open thought and the dialogue of convictions (limited neither in the composition of questions, or the composition of participants) the basis of their principles . . . Today it is necessary again to underline that precisely adherence to the principle of openness and systematic dialogue can unite people of different generations and viewpoints, who participated in Poiski.80 It was a significant statement from an intellectual who would play a prominent role during perestroika and the early post-Soviet period. An eminent historian, Gefter had headed the Sector of Methodology of the Institute of History during the late 1960s, and drifted into dissidence after his enforced retirement in 1976.81 His connections as an institutional intellectual and his

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moral authority as an outspoken dissident would facilitate his rapid return to public debate in the autumn of 1987, when Vek XX i mir published his interview with Gleb Pavlovskii, a former Poiski colleague.82 For the revival of civil society during perestroika, the legacy of the dissident public sphere cannot be underestimated. Dissidents demonstrated that it was possible to act openly even under conditions of extreme persecution, and their courage was a reproach to those who conformed. The pressure experienced by institutional intellectuals was exemplified by Sakharov’s March 1981 essay on ‘the responsibility of scientists’, which concluded with an exhortation to his colleagues to join the struggle for glasnost by expressing their dissent openly: Velikanova, Orlov, Kovalev and many others have resolved the question of responsibility for themselves, setting out on the path of active and selfless struggle for human rights, for glasnost . . . Others amongst their colleagues have not found the strength for such a struggle. Is it not time for these scientists, who to a small circle frequently show much understanding and non-conformism, to show their feeling of responsibility by more socially significant means, more openly, at least in such questions as the open defence of repressed colleagues, the open control over the real observance of the laws of the country and its international obligations.83 This circle of institutional intellectuals, who practised ‘kitchen glasnost’ and public hypocrisy, would find the courage of their convictions only during perestroika, with the rise of figures like Lev Ponomarev, a mathematician who had visited Yurii Orlov in exile and then became a member of the initiative group that created Memorial. From the same milieu came ‘the group of activists, employees of an array of Institutes of the Academy of Sciences’ whom KGB chairman Kryuchkov blamed for Sakharov’s radical role in Soviet politics during 1989.84 For them, and many others, the dissidents’ repudiation of the underground and their practice of glasnost was an example and an incitement.

8.5 Official glasnost versus dissident glasnost It was inevitable that Gorbachev’s campaign for glasnost should provoke a reaction from the dissidents. After two decades, a key word in the dissident lexicon had become government policy. But the dialogue of official reformers and the dissidents was slow in maturing. It was inhibited by entrenched patterns of repression and resistance, by the official stereotypes of dissidents as ‘cut off from the Soviet people’, and by the dissident tradition of non-collaboration with the regime. Bitterness was exacerbated by the continuing persecution and press vilification of dissidents after Sakharov’s


return from Gorky and the release of political prisoners. The most enduring blind-spot of official glasnost was the history of dissent during the years of stagnation. As spokesmen for the regime expounded the imperative of glasnost, they fastidiously avoided mentioning those who had endured persecution for proselytising the cause of glasnost during the past two decades. The first open clash between official and dissident glasnost erupted when a group of ten prominent émigrés released a manifesto titled ‘Let Gorbachev Give Us Proof!’ The signatories included such pioneers of dissident glasnost as Vladimir Bukovskii and Yurii Orlov, as well as cultural figures like Yurii Lyubimov and Vasilii Aksenov. The manifesto was widely published in the western media, but became a sensation when it appeared in Moscow News, a flagship of perestroika.85 Never before had dissidents had such an opportunity to challenge the regime and its ideology in an official forum. The gulf between the ‘official campaign’ and dissident glasnost was a major item of their critique: Glasnost essentially implies some public discussion where everybody can take part without fearing reprisals irrespective of the views expressed. Glasnost should include both the right to receive information and the right to spread information because both are inseparably linked in the single process of society’s control over the government. Rather than the official campaign of criticism of Soviet reality there should be free access to copying equipment to promote greater glasnost as we understand it. If the Soviet leaders wish to enjoy trust among the public, it is necessary for them to recognise at least several independent publishers not subject to Party control. In this connection the publication of this letter in the Soviet press would be the most convincing proof of the sincerity of pronouncements about glasnost.86 But the appearance of the letter was far from a ‘convincing proof’. Whilst Moscow News achieved a milestone in official glasnost, it also demonstrated its limits and pitfalls by unleashing a vitriolic propaganda campaign against the signatories. The very act of publication was used as a refutation of dissident arguments, not as an attempt to enter into dialogue. Echoing the vilification of dissidents during the Brezhnev era, Moscow News provided tendentious biographical notes about the signatories, who were exposed as terrorists and spies. But what was most surprising about this eruption was the eagerness of eminent ‘foremen of perestroika’ to join the chorus of vituperation. In an ascerbic and malicious dialogue, the theatre director Oleg Efremov, the playwright Mikhail Shatrov, the actor Mikhail Ul¢yanov and the journalist Len Karpinskii speculated about the treacherous motives, the hypocrisy, the moral degradation, the delusions of grandeur, and the political blindness of the ten émigrés.87 But the spirit of the moment was best captured by Yegor Yakovlev, the editor of Moscow News, who accused the ten

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of suffering from ‘personality-cult’ thinking and reproached them for referring to ‘our’ history, since ‘with your position regarding our latest history, you have nothing to do with it’. Deploying a metaphor that would become a leitmotif in attempts to define the limits of the permissible, Yakovlev concluded that ‘they have chosen the opposite side of the barricades’.88 The wording of Yakovlev’s anathema was not accidental. Only weeks earlier, Gorbachev had affirmed the need for dialogue and consultation, explaining that ‘in our country, all of society is on the same side of the barricade’.89 On the other side, alongside the imperialist ‘special services’, were the dissidents, supposedly ‘cut off from society’, and administratively excluded from the expanding arena of public debate. For most of 1987, the official press ignored Sakharov’s public statements, including his complaints about ‘the continuing detention of those who had spoken out too soon for glasnost’.90 But no one questioned the right of conservative ideologues like Yurii Bondarev to lash out at the proponents of glasnost from the tribune of the RSFSR Writers’ Union Congress: The pseudo-democrats in literature have lit the lantern of openness, stolen from justice and truth, at the edge of the abyss. This stolen openness has been presented by our mass media and press in only one aspect – as aggressive, destructive, and opening the gates wide for mediocrity, ambitious people, false Jacobins and untalented, newly made geniuses.91 As campaigners for glasnost during the past two decades, the dissidents were less vulnerable to reproaches about having ‘stolen openness’, but they were on the wrong side of the barricades. The result was a debate that favoured the enemies of freedom of expression. The continuing vilification of dissidents was both a demarcation of the limits of the possible, and a salutary warning about the potential consequences of violating those limits. Despite the humiliating pardoning procedure and continuing harassment, dissidents used glasnost as a rallying point, much as they had exploited the Kremlin’s short-lived enthusiasm for the Helsinki Accords a decade earlier. The first major dissident initiative after the releases of political prisoners was the launching of the journal Glasnost, under the editorship of Sergei Grigoryants. A literary historian, Grigoryants had become a dissident because of his refusal to betray his friend, Andrei Sinyavskii. Entrapped by the KGB, Grigoryants was sentenced to his first term at a closed trial, in violation of the glasnost provision of the Code of Criminal Procedure, as the Chronicle pointed out at the time.92 Radicalised by five years in the camps, he replaced the arrested Ivan Kovalev as editor of Bulletin V, an internal publication of the human rights movement. For this recidivism, Grigoryants was sentenced in 1983 to a decade of incarceration, which may have shaped his scepticism toward Gorbachev’s rhetoric about glasnost. Until Grigoryants’ release in 1987, he was not allowed a single meeting with his wife.93


Grigoryants’ Glasnost quickly established itself as the most important manifestation of the ‘new samizdat’. It benefitted from the existence of dissident information networks, and in particular from the participation of former contributors to Bulletin V. By April 1988, the socialist informal activist Boris Kagarlitskii would complain about the widespread impression that ‘Glasnost is the only serious bulletin, samizdat today is Glasnost.’94 Although the title of Grigoryants’ new journal was frequently described in the western media as an homage to Gorbachev’s glasnost, many articles contested the official version of glasnost and derided the reformists’ silence about dissidents. Typical was an article by Sasha Bogdanov, who questioned the lineage of ‘the girl named glasnost’: Why do our journalists with indomitable speed expose everything, except the fact that it is not their all-world service and honour, that the girl by some miracle remained alive, but thanks to some zeks, who are slandered and ignored by the newspapers, journals, radio and television? Why are we instead given judicial-medical expert opinions, that the girl named ‘glasnost’ was born two years ago, that she’s in excellent health, has outstanding food, and has caring parents, well-disposed and dignified, namely these same ideologically-mature comrades?95 Grigoryants also practised glasnost in the operation of the journal: he sent copies to the CPSU Central Committee, and requested permission to open a business bank account, rent office space and hire press time at a printing plant.96 After an initial period of restraint, during which local officials even visited Grigoryants’ apartment to enquire about his plans and offer advice about how to apply for authorisation, the authorities ran out of patience in August 1987.97 The newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva invited Grigoryants for an interview, but only in order to provoke him with questions about the criminal case that the KGB had fabricated against him in the 1970s. Publishing these details without Grigoryants’ response or any mention of his 1983 conviction for human rights activism, the newspaper noted that ‘Sergei Ivanovich shouldn’t complain about our publicising these pages from his biography, pages that he has been hiding so carefully’, because ‘openness is openness’. But openness did not include discussion of the Soviet human rights record: With maniacal malice, the authors of Glasnost drag out the same old irritating fabrications about human rights violations, about ‘political prisoners’ in the USSR, and about ‘activists in the movement for free emigration’ who are supposedly being kept in psychiatric hospitals. Such preoccupations marked Grigoryants’ venture as a relic of the past: the typescript pages ‘give off a musty odor . . . as if one had picked up a calen-

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dar from 10 or 15 years ago’.98 The same might have been said about the Vechernyaya Moskva article, whose real author, Anatolii Rusanovskii, was a veteran propagandist. What was new was his readiness to invite western journalists to an interview, where he denounced Grigoryants’ venture as ‘immoral and unnecessary’, and scorned the notion that unofficial publications might be legalised: If the process continues and goes on in depth, what need is there for an unofficial press? There will be no need for any other glasnost. There will be just one – one honest, one broad and one single glasnost . . . There is no need for competition.99 Rusanovskii’s prognosis about the fate of the unofficial press was prescient, though his conviction about the triumph of one single glasnost was wishful thinking. The struggle between the meanings of glasnost, between the Leninist blacklist and the idea of freedom of expression, would outlive the Soviet regime. Even within dissident ranks there was competition over glasnost. In July 1987, Lev Timofeyev, Larisa Bogoraz and Sergei Kovalev established a discussion forum called the ‘Press-Club Glasnost’. Its opening declaration made an explicit connection between glasnost and freedom of expression: The goal of our publicistic press club is to offer the opportunity for the open expression of public opinion about the real problems of any group, any citizen of our country – a possibility which until now has been denied to a significant stratum of our population, all those whose views on the events of our time are more or less different from the officially accepted viewpoint.100 This group organised the Human Rights Seminar held in Moscow in December 1987, which Timofeyev presented as an attempt to create a favourable atmosphere for the holding of a proposed CSCE human rights conference. Although the organisers were politely received at the Foreign Ministry, a Central Committee report described the seminar as a ‘provocational action’ undertaken by ‘anti-social elements supported by imperialist special services and foreign subversive centers’.101 The ‘provocation’ was ignored by fifty prominent institutional intellectuals, who failed to acknowledge their invitations. In exasperation, Timofeyev used his samizdat journal Referendum to conjure up a nightmare scenario of one of the Perm¢ corrective camps filled with Soviet reformers: ‘ “Come here, Gorbachev!” would say the lieutenant commandant, explaining that there could not be a crisis situation in our society, that such a claim is anti-Soviet and that unless [Gorbachev] repudiated it, he would not be released at the expiry of his term.’ The moral of the story was that the continuing persecution and ostracism of dissidents


was a threat to reform: ‘Remember, our esteemed, bold intelligenty, you repeat alien words, whilst continuing to hold under lock and key those who pronounced those words, those who pronounced them at the right time.’102 Two months later, Timofeyev’s warning was given credence by the publication of Nina Andreyeva’s anti-reform polemic, ‘I Cannot Give Up My Principles’, which dramatised the fragility of the liberalisation process. Rejecting Gorbachev’s contention that glasnost was a potent weapon in the ‘psychological war’, Andreyeva argued that it had become a Trojan Horse for the ideological enemy: Openness, candour and the disappearance of zones closed to criticism . . . are frequently manifested in the posing of problems that, to one extent or another, have been ‘prompted’ by Western radio voices, or by those of our compatriots who are not firm in their notions about the essence of socialism.103 As evidence for the exploitation of glasnost by anti-socialist forces, Andreyeva pointed to the rise of ‘extremist elements capable of provocations’ to the leadership of informal groups, and the resulting ‘politicisation of these grass-roots organisations on the basis of a pluralism that is far from socialist’.104 Ten days later, the attack on ‘pluralism that is far from socialist’ was intensified by Iona Andronov, the New York correspondent of Literaturnaya gazeta, who was closely linked to the KGB.105 Andronov published an ‘exposé’ claiming that Grigoryants’ Glasnost was a tool of the CIA and that it was fomenting ethnic unrest.106 These allegations were based upon an article in The Nation by Kevin Coogan and Katrina Vanden Heuvel, who argued that the Center for Democracy (CFD), the New York publisher of Glasnost, had conducted activities that ‘recklessly endanger and potentially discredit dissidents and independent political activity in the Soviet Union’.107 Despite the authors’ perfunctory expression of concern that ‘it would be tragic if Glasnost were silenced’, and their accusation that the Center for Democracy had given ‘ammunition’ to Soviet conservatives, their own incautious claims were potent ammunition indeed. For the CFD, the incident was a case study in Soviet manipulation of western journalists, but Vanden Heuvel was unapologetic. ‘Anybody who says that it takes an article in the American press for the Soviets to victimise people’, she declared, ‘doesn’t understand the Soviet system, which is capable of harassing anybody it wants without any help from outside.’108 Nor would Grigoryants have been reassured by the belated reformist response to Nina Andreyeva. A counter-manifesto in Pravda acknowledged that democracy ‘is impossible without freedom of thought and speech’, but proceeded to identify the opponents of perestroika with the hostile view of socialism propagated by ‘foreign antagonists’.109 In May 1988, the limits of

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‘socialist pluralism’ were tested by a group of former dissidents and informal activists, who established the Democratic Union at the dacha where Grigoryants produced Glasnost. The KGB retaliated by raiding the dacha, arresting Grigoryants for a week, and confiscating his equipment. Whilst Gorbachev was silent about Nina Andreyeva’s polemic, he lashed out at Grigoryants in an interview with western journalists. When asked how to reconcile his fine words about glasnost and tolerance with the persecution of Grigoryants, Gorbachev boasted that perestroika had shown that ‘our people . . . have firmly expressed the view that changes should happen only within the boundaries of socialism’. Grigoryants’ failure to grasp this simple truth put him outside ‘our people’: People here know that the Grigoryants ‘organisation’ in quotation marks is tied not only organisationally but also financially to the West, that his constant visitors and guests are Western correspondents. This happens – it happens in nature too. There are such parasites living off healthy organisms and attempting to harm them . . . The importance of Gorbachev’s insight about parasites was underlined by the reprinting of this part of the interview in the Soviet press, provoking Grigoryants to lament that ‘Gorbachev is declaring his solidarity with the worst forces in our society.’110 Reformist intellectuals, who were less enthusiastic about declaring their solidarity with Nina Andreyeva, now turned to the dissidents. In March 1988, Sakharov was approached about contributing to the reformist anthology Inogo ne dano, which was to be released during the impending Party Conference.111 Amid mounting fears about the fate of perestroika, Sakharov signed a petition in April with nine prominent reformist intellectuals, who warned against attempts by the party machine to stack the conference, and called for ‘all the bright and active minds from across the country’ to be brought into the debate. Whilst the leadership sought to enforce a ‘socialist pluralism’ that included Nina Andreyeva but excluded Grigoryants, the petition emphasised the magnitude of the gulf within the regime: ‘We are facing the reality of differences of view in the party and in the Central Committee, different views about the nature of Soviet history are being expressed, and we do not all expect the same from the future.’112 In Memorial, Moscow Tribune and the Interregional Group, these differences would radicalise the reformist intellectuals, who would abandon Gorbachev for Sakharov, the rhetoric of perestroika for that of democracy, glasnost as a weapon of psychological warfare for glasnost as freedom of expression. A parallel convergence of reformers and the dissident heritage marked the struggle to create institutional safeguards for glasnost. The most prominent figure in the preparation of the proposed law on glasnost was Yurii Baturin, who published an anthology on glasnost which opened with extensive


quotations from Marx and Lenin.113 When Baturin spoke on Soviet television about the draft, he even discussed the origins of glasnost in the 1860s, but carefully avoided mentioning dissidents.114 This reticence was prudent, for one of Baturin’s principal colleagues was Mikhail Fedotov, an eminent academic jurist, and deputy chairman of the Professional Ethics Committee of the Journalists’ Union. But in his student days, Fedotov had participated in the genesis of the dissident movement. At a commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1965 glasnost demonstration, he would share a table at Moscow Memorial with prominent dissidents and recall his participation in the Pushkin Square protest on 22 January 1967. ‘I was never a leader or even close’, he acknowledged, ‘I was always a person from the dissident mass.’115 For his involvement in the ‘dissident mass’, Fedotov had been expelled from Moscow State University in 1968, and he was only able to finish his degree by studying at night school. Whilst working as a journalist in the 1970s, he also completed a postgraduate degree at the All-Union Law Correspondence Institute, where he became a member of the academic staff.116 Fedotov’s three careers – in dissidence, the media and the law – would shape the central preoccupation of his research: the problem of ensuring press freedom. In June 1988, two decades after his experience of persecution for exercising his right to freedom of expression, Fedotov was offering his ‘specialist opinion’ to Moscow News about the creation of institutional safeguards for an independent press.117 Several months later, the Estonian press published the first drafts of the Law on the Press and Other Mass Media, which had been drafted by Baturin, Fedotov and V. Entin.118 This draft, which outlawed censorship and established a registration procedure that freed the press from party tutelage, was ultimately the basis for the Soviet law on the press, passed in June 1990. The same principles were enshrined in the corresponding Russian Federation legislation, which Fedotov played a vital role in enacting and enforcing, as deputy minister for the press.119 The institutionalisation of ‘total and honest glasnost’ evoked little enthusiasm from Mikhail Gorbachev. At the first Congress of People’s Deputies, the hysterical collective denunciation of Sakharov had demonstrated the unpopularity of pluralism amongst the party’s ‘aggressively obedient majority’. Resistance to the formal abolition of preliminary censorship resulted in the postponement in September 1989 of the publication of the Law on the Press. Instead of supporting glasnost, Gorbachev chose this moment to attack the liberal press. At a meeting with media bosses on 13 October 1989, he denounced a variety of eminent reformers ‘who, in their chase after popularity, are ready to speak out against their own mother’.120 The main offender was Vladislav Star¢kov, the editor of Argumenty i fakty, who had published a readers’ survey that showed Sakharov as the most popular politician at the Congress.121 Gorbachev’s tirade was enthusiastically applauded by the editors of Molodaya gvardiya and Moskva, standard-bearers of the

Robert Horvath 197

National-Bolshevik tendency that was fomenting a campaign against ‘Russophobia’ in the media. One month later, its orators would use the RSFSR Writers’ Union Plenum to demand the resignation of Anatolii Anan¢ev, the editor of Oktyabr’, for publishing works by Vasilii Grossman and Andrei Sinyavskii. The timely adoption of the press law in June 1990 was the crowning triumph of the struggle to institutionalise glasnost. Under the provisions of the new law, Anan¢ev and Star¢kov registered their publications as independent entities, and were thus shielded from the vengeance of the party apparatus, as it mobilised its forces in the parliament and the security apparatus.122 But Goskomizdat officials refused to register Grigoryants’ Glasnost, claiming that it was a ‘local’ Moscow journal that should seek registration from the municipal authorities.123 At the same time, the Central Committee reasserted the claims of Leninist glasnost by launching a new weekly titled Glasnost, which came to epitomise the glasnost that Gorbachev had unveiled in 1984: glasnost that was combined with ‘political vigilance and implacability toward views that are alien to us’ and ‘ideological work that is creative and aggressive’. Deriding the new venture, Grigoryants revealed that a Polish politician had complained to him, ‘I paid big money for a subscription, and I was sent some rubbish instead of your journal.’124 As perestroika entered its terminal crisis during the winter of 1990–91, glasnost was under attack on many fronts. In Moscow, the liberal current affairs programme Vzglyad was taken off the air, whilst the evening news resumed the pattern of the Leninist glasnost of the mid-1980s, once again reporting ‘on things like a railway situation in Murmansk failing to unload freight cars, due to some official’s fault, or some conscientious workers in the Kurgan region who have done a good job of bringing in the potato harvest’.125 In Vilnius, there was bloodshed when the television centre was stormed by OMON troops. The democrats’ outrage at these events offended Gorbachev, who in turn vented his anger upon glasnost.126 On 14 January 1991, Gorbachev proposed to lawmakers that ‘a decision could be taken right now to suspend the Law on the Press’ and suggested that ‘the Supreme Soviet will ensure complete objectivity’ in the media. This capitulation was reformulated by parliamentary speaker Anatolii Luk¢yanov as a proposal that the Commission on Glasnost be commissioned ‘to work out concrete measures for the coverage of events in the country’.127 According to Nezavisimaya gazeta, that session marked ‘the end of the era of glasnost’.128 Certainly it marked the end of Gorbachev’s reputation in democratic circles. In a joint appeal, Elena Bonner and Sergei Kovalev castigated Gorbachev’s striving ‘to retain power at any price’, and lamented that ‘the events in Vilnius, the pressure on glasnost, the recent declaration of the resignation of minister Shevardnadze . . . show the sharp reactionary turn of the head of the state and the parliament’.129


The aspiring theorist of that ‘reactionary turn’ was Gennadii Zyuganov, ideology secretary of the new RSFSR Communist Party. Within months of the passage of the press law, he had lashed out at official glasnost as ‘a psychological war against the [Soviet] people’, and added that ‘this spreading pseudo-glasnost . . . with its refined masochism and servility, is part of the realisation of plans worked out by overseas [American secret] services decades ago’.130 He would elaborate this thesis in a notorious open letter to Aleksandr Yakovlev, whom he blamed for the fact that ‘glasnost has already broken down into hysterical cries and has become a weapon in the psychological war against the people’.131 This was the ultimate negation of Gorbachev’s programme: glasnost, launched as a rebuff to the West’s ‘psychological warfare’, was now exposed as an instrument of that warfare. Zyuganov’s conspiracy theory would be pressed with increasing vehemence by the leaders of the emerging red-brown coalition in the Russian Federation parliament and in the streets of Moscow, after the collapse of the Soviet Union confirmed their suspicions and freed them from any residual loyalty to Gorbachev. In early 1993, former KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov announced that ‘personally for me no doubts remain’ that Aleksandr Yakovlev was a CIA agent.132 At the same time, Gorbachev reached the logical culmination of his protracted evolution from the punitive glasnost of Lenin’s writings to the glasnost of the dissidents, to the idea of freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Almost giving credence to the insinuations of Zyuganov, Gorbachev joined the dissidents Andrei Sinyavskii and Sergei Kovalev in the ‘Free Press’ Foundation, headed by Nezavisimaya gazeta editor Vitalii Tret¢yakov.133 A few months earlier, he had reflected upon the progress of perestroika, and asked: ‘And the whole dissident movement – was that not really the wish for reform? These are all stages in one process.’134 That process was complex and contradictory. The dissident impact upon perestroika would have been impossible without the percolation of their ideas or the lustre of their example, which was a source of considerable anxiety for reformist intellectuals. But for the leadership, for Gorbachev and Aleksandr Yakovlev, it was the very struggle against dissidents that enabled them to break out of the straitjacket inherited from the Brezhnev years and to unleash glasnost.

Notes 1. Julia Voznesenskaya, ‘Introduction’, to her Letters of Love: Women Political Prisoners in Exile and the Camps (London and New York: Quartet Books, 1989), p. i. 2. Vladimir Bukovskii, Pis’mo russkogo puteshestvennika (1981), in I vozvrashchaetsya veter (Moscow, 1990), p. 327.

Robert Horvath 199 3. Walter Laqueur, The Long Road to Freedom: Russia and Glasnost (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 23. 4. Ibid., p. 311. 5. Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 125. 6. Liudmilla Alexeyeva, The Thaw Generation (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), p. 7. 7. Andrei Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990; Russian edition, 1988), p. 238. 8. Ibid., p. 270. 9. Central Television, 1 June 1991, cited in John Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 174. 10. Mikhail Gorbachev, Letter to Kovalev, 29 December 1994 (Moscow: Memorial). 11. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (London: Doubleday, 1996), p. 148. 12. Vera Tolz, ‘A Chronological Overview of Gorbachev’s Campaign for Glasnost’, Radio Liberty Report, 66/1987, p. 1. 13. V. I. Lenin, ‘Original Version of the Article “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government” ’, Collected Works, vol. 27 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), pp. 203–4. 14. Ibid., p. 260. 15. Pravda, 11 December 1984, pp. 2–3; translated in CDSP, 1984/5, p. 4. 16. Pravda, 26 February 1986, pp. 2–10; translation in CDSP, 1986/8, p. 36. 17. Ibid., p. 26. 18. Pravda, 27 February 1986, pp. 2–3; in CDSP, 1986/9, pp. 4–5. 19. Alexeyeva, The Thaw Generation, p. 120. 20. Ibid., p. 109. 21. A. Volpin interview with N. Kravchenko (1994), Memorial Oral History Programme, p. 112. 22. Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle (London: André Deutsch, 1978), p. 131. 23. Volpin interview with N. Kravchenko, p. 111. 24. Pavel Litvinov, ed., The Demonstration in Pushkin Square (London: Harvill Press, 1969), p. 41. 25. Pavel Litvinov, ed., The Trial of the Four (New York: Viking Press, 1972), p. 37. 26. ‘Declaration’, 8 December 1967, ibid., pp. 37–8. 27. Times (London), 10 January 1968, p. 1. 28. Times (London), 13 January 1968, p. 8. 29. Arkhiv samizdata (AS) 132, p. 11. 30. ‘Letter to Consultative Meeting of Communist Parties in Budapest’, 24 February 1968, cited by A. E. Levitin-Krasnov, Rodnoy Prostor (Frankfurt: Possev-Verlag), p. 166. 31. Ilya Gabai, ‘Before the Closed Doors of the Open Court’, in Natalya Gorbanevskaya, ed., Red Square at Noon (London: André Deutsch, 1970), pp. 237–53. 32. Volpin interview with Natalya Kravchenko (Moscow: Memorial Oral History Programme, 1994), p. 133. 33. A. S. Volpin, ‘Glasnost’ sudoproizvodvsta’, Obshchestvennye problemy, no. 7 (September–October 1970), AS. 657a, p. 15. 34. Ibid., pp. 25, 34, 41. 35. Ibid., p. 6. 36. Solzhenitsyn, letter to Secretariat of RSFSR Writers’ Union, 12 November 1969, reprinted in The Oak and the Calf (London: Collins/Fontana, 1980), p. 494.

200 The Post-Stalin Period 37. Andrei Sakharov, ‘Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom’, Sakharov Speaks (London: Collins, 1974), p. 113. 38. Andrei Sakharov, ‘Manifesto II’, ibid., p. 117. 39. Ibid., p. 123. 40. Ibid., p. 143. 41. Yurii Orlov, ‘Pis’mo Brezhnevu’, 16 September 1973; reprinted in Ogonek, no. 35 (1989), pp. 20–1. 42. Andrei Sakharov, ‘O strane i o mire’, in Trevoga i nadezhda (Moscow: Inter-verso, 1991), p. 145. 43. Valerii Chalidze, ‘Important Aspects of Human Rights in the Soviet Union: a Report to the Human Rights Committee’, in Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shragin, eds, The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian Samizdat (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1977), p. 218; Russian text in AS. 657b. 44. Ibid. 45. ‘Interview with Olle Stenholm’, 3 July 1973, Sakharov Speaks, p. 175. 46. Ibid., p. 176. 47. ‘Interview with Mikhail P. Malyarov’, 16 August 1973, Sakharov Speaks, p. 183. 48. Ibid., pp. 186–7. 49. ‘Interview with Western correspondents’, 21 August 1973, ibid., p. 205. 50. ‘A Letter to the Congress of the United States’, 14 September 1973, ibid., p. 213. 51. Andrei Sakharov, ‘Peace, Progress, and Human Rights’, in Alarm and Hope (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 11. 52. Andrei Sakharov, ‘Statement of January 27, 1980’, Memoirs (London: Hutchinson, 1990), p. 675. 53. Andrei Sakharov, ‘The Dangers of Nuclear War’, published in Foreign Affairs (Summer 1983); and Memoirs, pp. 669–70. 54. Andrei Sakharov, ‘Nadzornaya zhaloba’, dated 9 November 1984, AS.5501, p. 2. 55. Petr Grigorenko, Memoirs (London: Harvill, 1983), p. 2. 56. Amal¢rik interviewed by Mel¢nikov, Radio Liberty, 1976/368, p. 3. 57. Times (London), 8 September 1973, p. 5. 58. Andrei Sakharov, ‘Open Letter to Academician V. A. Engelgardt’, Chronicle of Current Events, 32, p. 101. 59. Ibid. 60. Chronicle of Human Rights, 35, p. 50. 61. ‘Time of Anxiety’, Chronicle of Current Events, 57, p. 78. 62. Kenneth Adelman, ‘Speaking of America: Public Diplomacy in Our Time’, Foreign Affairs, 59, no. 4 (Spring 1981) 914. 63. Excerpts from the transcript in Efim Etkind, Notes of a Non-conspirator (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 94–104, 247–63. 64. Anatoly Marchenko, My Testimony (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 19. 65. Bukovskii, To Build a Castle, p. 31. 66. Grigorenko, Memoirs, p. 414. 67. Ibid., p. 425. 68. Izvestiya and Pravda, 8 February 1986, pp. 1–2; translation in CDSP, 1986/6, pp. 8–10. 69. Chronicle of Current Events, 50, p. 15. 70. Grigorenko, Memoirs, p. 451. 71. Ibid., p. 318. 72. Pavel Litvinov, The Demonstration in Pushkin Square (London: Harvill Press, 1969), p. 95.

Robert Horvath 201 73. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘The Smatterers’, in From Under the Rubble (London: Collins & Harvill Press, 1975), p. 257. 74. Roy Medvedev, ‘Open Letter to Raisa Lert’, in ‘Controversy: Dissent among Dissidents’, Index on Censorship, 1979/3, p. 34. 75. ‘Controversy: Dissent among Dissidents’, p. 36. 76. Chronicle of Human Rights, 42, p. 11. 77. Ibid., p. 7. 78. New York Times, 3 April 1982, p. 5. 79. Chronicle of Current Events, 56, p. 108. 80. Cited by V. Abramkin, ‘Netraditsionnoe chelovecheskoe deistvie’, Vek XX i mir, nos 1–2 (1994) 42. 81. Roger Markwick, ‘Catalyst of Historiography, Marxism and Dissidence’, EuropeAsia Studies, 46, no. 4 (1994) 581–7. 82. Vek XX i mir (August 1987). 83. Andrei Sakharov, ‘Otvetstvennost’ uchenykh’, in Sakharovskii sbornik (Moscow, 1991), p. 40. 84. Vladimir Kryuchkov, report to Gorbachev, ‘O politicheskoi deyatel’nosti A. D. Sakharova’, 8 December 1989, n.2482-k/ov, KPSS, published in Literaturnaya gazeta, 14 December 1994, p. 11. 85. See, for example, ‘Is Glasnost a Game of Mirrors?’, New York Times, 22 March 1987, IV, p. 27. 86. ‘Let Gorbachev Give Us Proof’, Moscow News, no. 13 (1987), p. 10. 87. Moscow News, no. 15 (1987), pp. 8–9. 88. Yegor Yakovlev, ‘To the Point of Absurdity’, Moscow News, no. 13 (1987), p. 11. 89. ‘Conviction is the Bulwark of Restructuring’, Pravda, 14 February 1987, pp. 1–2; translation in CDSP, 1987/7, p. 6. 90. On Sakharov’s statements, see his Moscow and Beyond (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 5; on the KGB transcripts, fond 89, p. 18, d. 114, especially p. 12, Centre for Contemporary Documentation, Moscow. 91. Literaturnaya Rossiya, 27 March 1987; translated in CDSP, 1987/21, p. 19. 92. ‘Trial of Grigoryants’, Chronicle of Current Events, 38, pp. 98–9. 93. Tamara Grigoryants, ‘Obrashchenie k M. S. Gorbachevu’, 24 October 1986, AS. 5849. 94. Khronograf, 1988/1, AS. 6315, p. 5. 95. Sasha Bogdanov, ‘Glasnost¢ i kon”junktura’, Glasnost, issue 8, p. 76. 96. New York Times, 11 August 1987, p. 3. 97. Ibid. 98. Vechernyaya Moskva, 7 August 1987, p. 3; translated in CDSP, 1987/37, pp. 5–6. 99. Washington Post, 11 August 1987, p. 17; Washington Post, 23 May 1988, p. 19. 100. Glasnost, issue 2, p. 10. 101. ‘On Measures for the Localization of the Provocational Activity of the So-called Seminar on Human Rights’, 28 December 1987, n.2594-Church, f. 89, p. 18, d. 121, Centre For Contemporary Documentation, Moscow. 102. Lev Timofeyev, Referendum, issue 3, January 1988. 103. Nina Andreyeva, ‘Ne mogu postupat’sya printsipami’, Sovetskaya Rossiya, 13 March 1988, p. 3; translation in CDSP, 1988/13, p. 1. 104. Ibid, p. 6. 105. On Andronov’s links to the KGB, see ‘Maski Iony: o deputate, kotoryi v svoe vremya byl naznachen korrespondentom v svyazi “s neobkhodimost¢yu usilit¢ rabotu po linii KGB” ’, Izvestiya, 29 May 1993, p. 5.

202 The Post-Stalin Period 106. Iona Andronov, ‘Peshki v chuzhoi igre: “Glasnost” iz orkestra podryvnykh golosov’, Literaturnaya Gazeta, 23 March 1988, p. 14. 107. Kevin Coogan and Katrina Vanden Heuvel, ‘U.S. Funds for Soviet Dissidents’, The Nation, 19 March 1988, pp. 361–81. 108. New York Times, 12 April 1988, p. 22. 109. Pravda, 5 April 1988, p. 2; Translation in CDSP, 1988/14, pp. 5, 20. 110. For both Gorbachev’s denunciation and Grigoryants’ comment, see Washington Post, 23 May 1988, p. 1. 111. Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond, pp. 51, 56. 112. The Guardian, 11 May 1988, p. 8. 113. Yu. Baturin, ed., Glasnost¢: mneniya, poiski, politika (Moscow: Yuridicheskaya literatura, 1989). 114. Viktor Yasman, ‘Law on Glasnost in Preparation’, RL 151/88, pp. 1–3. 115. Press conference, 5 December 1995, Moscow Memorial (author’s recording). 116. ‘Yeltsin Nominates Fedotov for Constitutional Court’, OMRI Daily Report, 14 February 1997. 117. ‘Mnenie spetsialistov’, Moskovskie novosti, 19 June 1988; reprinted in Baturin, Glasnost’, pp. 86–8. 118. Ibid., pp. 341–64. 119. Mikhail Fedotov, ‘Media Law for Russia’, Moscow News, no. 22 (1991), p. 4. 120. New York Times, 17 October 1989, p. 1. 121. Vera Tolz, ‘The Implications for Glasnost¢ of Gorbachev’s Attack on Reformists’, RL 490/89. 122. V. Vologdin, ‘First Summer of the New Oktyabr’, Izvestiya, 2 August 1990, p. 3; in CDSP, 5 September 1990. 123. Vera Tolz, ‘USSR: the Impact of the New Press Law’, Radio Liberty Report, 29 October 1990. 124. ‘Dolgii srok apolitichnogo cheloveka’, Stolitsa, no. 17 (1991) 14. 125. ‘Glasnost Tumbles Down on TV or a “New Course” towards an Old Objective’, Moscow News, no. 3 (1991), p. 14. 126. On Gorbachev’s enduring resentment about the liberal press’s coverage of the Baltic crisis, see Gorbachev, Memoirs, pp. 580–1. 127. ‘Time to Send Glasnost on a Well-Earned Rest: President Wants to Suspend the Law on the Press’, Moscow News, no. 4 (1991), p. 6. 128. ‘Chto znaet M. Gorbachev takogo, chego ne znaem my’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 17 January 1991, p. 1. 129. Elena Bonner, Sergei Kovalev, ‘My – s vami, bud¢te – s nami!’, Russkaya mysl¢, 25 January 1991. 130. Sovetskaya Rossiya, 26 August 1990; cited in Radio Liberty Daily Report, 9 October 1990. 131. G. Zyuganov, ‘Arkhitektor u razvalin’, Sovetskaya Rossiya, 7 May 1991, p. 2; see also the discussion in Nezavisimaya gazeta, 12 May 1991, p. 1. 132. Vladimir Kryuchkov, ‘Posol bedy’, Sovetskaya Rossiya, 13 February 1993, p. 1. 133. A. Ginzburg, ‘Nas priglashayut k razgovoru’, Russkaya mysl¢, 29 January 1993, pp. 1–2. 134. ‘Mikhail Gorbachev: Andropov ne poshel by daleko v reformirovanii obshchestva’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 11 November 1992, p. 5.

9 Rethinking Yermolov’s Legacy: New Patriotic Narratives of Russia’s Engagement with Chechnya Julie Elkner

In September 1996, the following anecdote was recounted in the Russian journal Ogonek: at some point in the late 1970s, two round-the-clock Soviet militia posts appeared in the main square of Grozny. The Soviet authorities had been tipped off about plans to dynamite the statue of Lenin which stood in the square, and one of these militia posts was intended to guard the Lenin statue. This concern for the likeness of the founder of the Soviet state is understandable, but the second militia post had a more surprising function. Reportedly, the nearby statue of General Yermolov, the man traditionally regarded as the mastermind of nineteenth-century Russian military expansion in the Caucasus, was being ‘blown up on a regular basis’ at the time. The Soviet authorities, evidently despairing of ever putting a stop to these attacks, instead adopted a curious policy of damage control: the new 24hour militia post housed duplicate statues of Yermolov, which enabled the statue to be replaced at dawn, before the streets began to fill with people who might notice its absence.1 It is of course possible that these duplicate statues never existed, and that this story originated in rumour and speculation. But it is certainly the case that the Yermolov statue in Grozny was laden with symbolic meaning, both for the Soviet regime and the Chechen people. According to Avtorkhanov, this same statue, which had been erected by the tsarist government after the nineteenth-century Russian conquest of the Caucasus, was removed by the local population after the 1917 Revolution. But the Bolsheviks, despite their international and anti-colonialist rhetoric, later gave orders that it be replaced, holding a formal ceremony to mark the occasion.2 Yermolov’s statue was clearly intended to send a strong signal to those living under its gaze, and the Soviet commitment to keeping the statue upright points to Yermolov’s importance as an emblem of Russian power in Chechnya. The story of Yermolov’s statue recalls Fanon’s characterisation of the colonial world as: 203


A world divided into compartments, a motionless, Manichaeistic world, a world of statues: the statue of the general who carried out the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge; a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with its stones the backs flayed by whips.3 This is a world that is also created and sustained by history-writing, and, like monuments, historical figures can be toppled and rebuilt in order to further political causes. In historical narratives of Russian–Chechen relations the figure of Yermolov looms just as large as his statue did on the Grozny landscape, and carries an equal political charge. When Russian federal troops invaded Chechnya in December 1994, the history of Yermolov’s nineteenth-century campaign in the Caucasus returned to the forefront of attention. The 1994–96 Chechen war was paralleled by a bitter struggle in the Russian media over the right to narrate the shared Russian–Chechen past. This struggle has intensified since the renewed outbreak of conflict in August 1999. It is widely acknowledged that the 1994–96 war was a public relations disaster for the Russian military, and this experience fuelled a new determination to win the ‘information war’ this time around. The battle on the historical front was characterised by an extreme degree of polarisation between the ‘democratic’ and ‘patriotic’ camps in Russia. I use the term ‘patriotic’ here to refer to those commentators who define themselves in opposition to so-called ‘Russophobic’ views, and who set out to debunk what one patriotic writer has called ‘the myth of “the Russian boot on the neck of the long-suffering Chechen people” ’.4 In this sense the patriotic discourse pervades a wide range of publications, from extreme nationalist newspapers and journals like Zavtra and Nash sovremennik to the official government and military press. This chapter examines the public education programme on the history of Yermolov’s campaign which has been conducted in the Russian patriotic press since the mid-1990s, as well as examining some of the ways in which Yermolov’s legacy continues to resonate in present-day Russia and Chechnya. The figure of Yermolov is associated with ongoing tensions and ambiguities. In July 1995, Russian General Anatolii Kulikov was hailed as ‘the new Yermolov’ at his inaugural press conference as minister for internal affairs. But this epithet failed to please Kulikov: ‘dissatisfaction and awkwardness were reflected on . . . [his] face’, reported the patriotic newspaper Zavtra in its coverage of the event. Zavtra correspondent Colonel Karpov attributed this negative response to the fact that: ‘In our time, a comparison with the terrifying pro-consul of the Caucasus seemed to the most worthy and valiant general to be not so much flattering, as dangerous for the political reputation of a military man.’ Karpov went on to lament the fact that Yermolov and the values that he represents were not currently in

Julie Elkner 205

vogue, and to recommend that present-day Russian generals nevertheless ‘re-read thoughtfully and thoroughly’ the literature on Yermolov, hinting that a revival of the Yermolov tradition might be precisely what the Russian Army required to overcome the current crisis.5 The reasons why comparisons to Yermolov would be offensive to Chechens are obvious. But for Russians, too, Yermolov remains a problematic and highly symbolic figure. Karpov’s allusion to the ‘danger’ in being associated with Yermolov is surely a reference to what many patriotic commentators of the time perceived as a climate dominated by a new brand of ‘pro-Chechen’ political correctness, handed down by the Russian and international mass media and human rights activists. Criticism of the Russian military’s actions in Chechnya formed the background to the patriotic rehabilitation of Yermolov, and was certainly foremost in the minds of patriotic writers like Karpov. In an important sense, the new patriotic approaches to Yermolov to be examined in this article can be seen as strategies that have emerged largely in response to such criticism. You should see and hear it when he [Yermolov] gathers the Kabardinian princes and others from here, or the other side of the Caucasus . . . how he frightens [their] coarse imaginations with sticks, gallows, all types of punishment, fires; this is in words, and in actual fact, too, he represses the disobedient by force, hangs them, burns their villages. Russian writer and diplomat Griboedov, 18196 Yermolov was commander-in-chief in the Caucasus from 1816 to 1827. During this period he effectively functioned as governor of the region, enjoying wide-ranging powers which have seen him often referred to as ‘the proconsul of the Caucasus’. Yermolov introduced a range of innovations to Russian policy in the Caucasus, largely on his own initiative, and the period of his command marked a watershed in the history of Russian military engagement in the region. Yermolov famously characterised the Caucasus as a ‘huge fortress’ to which one must lay siege.7 This statement epitomises the so-called ‘Yermolov system’ that he put in place. In effect, Yermolov waged a nineteenthcentury version of total war, designed to give the local population no alternative but to submit to Russian rule. To this end, Yermolov organised the construction of new fortresses and military settlements, and the mass resettlement of Cossacks and other loyal subjects of the empire into the region. He deliberately cut off the local population’s access to vital food supplies and trading routes. Local agriculture and culture was systematically destroyed, and forests were cleared. Villages suspected of sheltering rebels were put to the torch, and their inhabitants massacred by Yermolov’s troops. The ‘Yermolov system’ was a euphemism for the calculating and widespread use of terror and violence.


Yermolov himself welcomed any opportunity to reinforce his reputation for brutality, which he saw as essential to the maintenance of order in the Caucasus. In fact, he believed that his reputation would cast a spectral presence over the region which would endure through history: ‘Your Imperial Majesty, I want the fear [inspired by] . . . my name to defend our borders more faithfully than the fortresses on those borders.’8 The trope of Yermolov as continuing to influence the course of events in Chechnya from beyond the grave is a common one, and can be linked to the motif of his having left an indelible mark on the Chechen landscape, as in the Russian poet Domontovich’s image of Yermolov being destined ‘to carve his name with the bayonet on the mountains’.9 In Chechen and Russian accounts alike, Yermolov emerges as a figure of epic proportions,10 whether as the ‘executioner of the Chechen people’,11 overshadowing even Stalin, Beria and Yeltsin in the Chechen historical consciousness,12 or as the brilliant military strategist whose genius went unrecognised and whose sacred mission in the Caucasus was ultimately betrayed after he fell victim to petty court intrigues. One can read further traces of Yermolov’s presence in the name of Chechnya’s capital city, Grozny. The name is derived from that of the fortress which Yermolov built there, called ‘Groznaya’, meaning ‘Threatening’ or ‘Awesome’ – a permanent reminder of the site’s bloody history, and of the coloniser’s claim to the right to name and encode the landscape. Yermolov gave similar names to other fortresses built in the region, such as ‘Vnezapnaya’ (‘Sudden’, in the military sense, denoting a surprise attack) and ‘Burnaya’ (‘Stormy’ or ‘Violent’).13 Yermolov’s legacy of violence, what one historian called ‘the gloomiest side’ of Russia’s expansion into the Caucasus,14 presented particular problems for Soviet historians, who (at least from the early 1950s onwards) were required to emphasise the benevolent, civilising role played by the Russian people with regard to non-Russian subjects of the empire. Soviet historiography on Yermolov largely circumvented the issue, focusing instead on other aspects of Yermolov’s biography, such as his reputed links with the Decembrist Movement. While it was generally acknowledged that the Russian incorporation of Chechnya had been achieved by means of force, this admission was heavily qualified by the emphasis placed on the ‘objectively progressive’ nature of this annexation.15 Moreover, Soviet historians were careful to distinguish Yermolov from the Russian soldiers serving under him and from the Russian people as a whole.16 Even in the high Stalinist period the regime does not appear to have celebrated Yermolov unequivocally as a hero: his use of terror against civilians, while often downplayed, was not condoned. To a large extent, recent patriotic attempts to hold Yermolov up as a hero to be glorified and emulated, are something new, representing a break with

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Soviet historiography. These new accounts of Yermolov’s campaign by and large do not shy away from the violent aspects of this history; in fact, they seek not only to justify and on occasion to applaud Yermolov’s violence, but also to recommend it as the only rational and effective solution to the present-day ‘Chechen problem’.

9.1 Seeing the Chechen through Yermolov’s eyes There has never been a more insidious, criminal and evil people under the sun than the Chechen people, and therefore it has deserved its fate. Yermolov17 One of the reasons why Yermolov has been taken up by the patriotic camp in Russia is that he was a prolific memoirist, and left a voluminous written record of his campaign in the Caucasus. This has provided apologists of the current military conflict with a valuable propaganda tool. Patriotic commentaries on the contemporary situation in Chechnya draw heavily on Yermolov’s writings, which have to all intents and purposes been elevated to the status of a canon – at least as far as the Chechen national character is concerned. Yermolov’s authority as an expert on the Chechen mentality is frequently underlined. He is presented as having possessed a unique understanding of the Caucasian psyche. For example, we are told that upon arriving in the Caucasus, Yermolov ‘grasped the particularities of the national mentality in an instant’,18 and that he was ‘one of the few Russian chief commanders in the Caucasus who had a good understanding of psychology of the mountain people and of Moslems’.19 Yermolov’s ‘knowledge’ of the Chechen national character helped to shape his policies, with tragic consequences for the local population. In his writings, Yermolov habitually singled out the Chechen people as the most barbaric and worthless of the North Caucasian peoples. Yermolov’s memoirs and correspondence contain numerous pronouncements in this vein, and these have been the main focus of the extracts from his writings published in the Russian press since the beginning of the 1994–96 war. Excerpts from Yermolov’s correspondence were published in the Russian government newspaper Rossiiskie vesti a few months after federal troops invaded Chechnya in 1994. The accompanying commentary raises the question of why the Transcaucasian nations were so eager, even desperate, ‘begging to be taken under the Russian wing’ in the nineteenth century, while the Chechens were so fiercely opposed to Russian annexation. ‘At any rate,’ the author goes on, ‘his [Yermolov’s] epistolary legacy will, it seems to us, help contemporary readers to gain a better understanding of what is


occurring in Chechnya today.’ The essence of that ‘better understanding’ is epitomised by the letters themselves, one of which begins ‘It is common practice to talk about vile things first, and therefore I will move on directly . . . to the Chechens.’20 The Rossiiskie vesti article is a typical example of the way in which Yermolov is called upon to articulate and often to bear responsibility for the most potentially hazardous assumptions underlying the Russian patriotic stance on Chechnya. Citations from Yermolov’s writings, which are validated by virtue of their status as historical documents, enable the adoption of an ostensibly neutral and objective standpoint. The documents are said to ‘speak for themselves’, yet the very absence of critical commentary amounts to an endorsement of the views expressed therein. Here, as elsewhere, the reader is implicitly invited to identify with Yermolov, rather than with the victims of his policies, and to accept Yermolov’s version of events as an authoritative and reliable source of knowledge about Chechnya, past and present. One of the passages cited most frequently from Yermolov’s writings runs as follows: Downstream along the Terek live the Chechens, the meanest of all the bandits [razboinikov] who attack the [Caucasian Military] Line . . . In all fairness Chechnya can be called the nest of all bandits . . . Those villages calling themselves peaceful . . . are no less full of bandits than the rest.21 In emphasising such pronouncements, patriotic commentators seek to demonstrate the eternal, unchanging nature of Chechen depravity and recalcitrance, with a view to justifying the frequently brutal methods used by the Russian military in Chechnya. But their statements highlight the extent to which patriotic representations of the Chechens remain grounded in long discredited nineteenth-century ideas about innate racial characteristics. The notion of the Chechen national character as inherently aberrant, distinguished by an innate propensity for treachery, violence, and crime, is the cornerstone of patriotic narratives of Russian–Chechen history. The extent to which this stereotype of the Chechen has passed into acceptable Russian political discourse is illustrated by numerous public statements made by high-level Russian officials. In early 1996, for example, the then Russian Federal Security Service Chief General Mikhail Barsukov found it possible to state at a televised press conference that ‘The Chechen can only be a murderer, or at least a robber, or at least a thief. There is no other Chechen.’ On this occasion Barsukov claimed to be citing ‘an anonymous respected Chechen’.22 More commonly, as we have seen, it is to Yermolov that proponents of this stereotype turn for support.

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9.2 Yermolov’s tragedy The ‘Chechen national character’ is the leitmotif in a favoured patriotic narrative which portrays Yermolov’s campaign as a well-intentioned, but ultimately doomed civilising mission. This theme also appears in the patriotic fiction on Chechnya. Goncharov’s ‘The Caucasians’ is a 1997 work of historical fiction comprising a series of quasi-historical vignettes set in both nineteenth-century and late-twentieth-century Chechnya. One of the main characters, Major Yermashev,23 an officer serving in contemporary Chechnya, is contemptuous of what he sees as the naïveté and ‘softness’ displayed by Russian troops in nineteenth-century Chechnya: ‘The Russians came to the Caucasus, they pushed their war into this dreary, elemental, almost bestial life with their stupid soldierly optimism and said: Catch up with our civilisation, our thousand-year-old culture . . . The Chechens are the worst of all [of the Caucasian peoples]. No poets, no composers, no scholars, not even any skilled craftsmen. Zero spirituality. All they care about is money! . . . The simple fact is that a great cause proved too great for such a petty little nation . . . And then you know yourself, they’re amazingly lazy . . . We protected our “little brothers” from all hardships, but what we should have done was smash their faces on the table, to make them remember it, and value us.’24 According to this reading of Russian history, the primal error of Russian imperialism was a fatal overestimation of the empire’s non-Russian subjects. Some Russian patriots contend that Yermolov’s civilising mission in Chechnya should never have been undertaken. Not only did it place too heavy a burden on Russia’s resources, but it was a doomed enterprise because the Chechens were incapable of rising to the challenge. A recent defence of Yermolov by Colonel Aleksandr Pronin (the deputy chief editor of the Russian Defence Ministry publication Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal) presents Yermolov primarily as a tragic figure. Pronin begins by establishing Yermolov’s liberal credentials – his ‘freedom-loving views’, his friendships with Pushkin and Zhukovskii, his clashes with Count Arakcheev and Tsar Nikolai I. This portrayal of Yermolov as an enlightened liberal should be seen as a response to contemporary criticism of the Russian military’s actions in Chechnya – a connection which is further reinforced by Pronin’s preoccupation with Yermolov’s having been dogged by ‘slander’ throughout his life. Pronin proceeds to summarise the tragedy of Yermolov’s misplaced hopes of bringing peace and enlightenment to the Caucasian peoples: Yermolov, arriving in the Caucasus in late 1816 and at first sincerely believing that he would succeed in guaranteeing the security of Georgia


and of the Russian border, in protecting the mountain people from the devastating raids, by civilised methods, was soon forced to go over from peaceful, quite calm treatment [of the mountaineers] to ever harsher measures . . . The tragedy of General Yermolov lay in the fact that by the will of the emperor,25 it fell upon him to bring to submission peoples who recognised only the laws of the mountains, who respected only one right – the right of force.26 This notion that Chechens or Caucasians ‘only respect force’ is perhaps the most insidious of the myths circulated in Russian patriotic discourse. Given the Chechens’ inherent lawlessness, the argument goes, there was no alternative to the use of extreme measures. The point was made succinctly by Yermolov himself, who wrote in 1820 that ‘Good deeds do not get you very far in this wilderness!’27 The patriotic claim that nineteenth-century Chechens brought this violence upon themselves, or even deserved it by virtue of their malevolent nature, is clearly aimed at legitimising Russia’s more recent military campaigns in Chechnya. This line of argument serves to displace guilt for the atrocities and devastation inflicted by Russian forces, projecting it onto the victims. These strategies of displacement and projection are particularly convenient in handling what is by far the most controversial aspect of the recent wars: the Russian military’s treatment of Chechen civilians.

9.3 Punishing civilians If we were to recognize that there is no civilian population in Chechnya, we could finish the war in two weeks . . . Sergei Dorenko, current affairs commentator for the Russian government-controlled television broadcaster ORT, March 200028 Punitive operations against civilians were a trademark of Yermolov’s methods in the Caucasus. While the Stalinist deportation of the Chechen people in 1944 is (at least outside Chechnya) the most well-known historical case of such operations, the underlying principle can be traced to Yermolov.29 The assertion of the principle of collective responsibility for individual acts of opposition to Russian rule in Chechnya was perhaps the single most important tactical innovation introduced by Yermolov. Yermolov publicly threatened to destroy those villages whose residents sheltered rebels.30 He instituted the practice of sending out punitive expeditions in response to all acts of disobedience or resistance. These were the notorious operations in the course of which numerous villages were burnt down and their inhabitants massacred indiscriminately by Yermolov’s troops.31 Suspicion or rumour that a particular village was harbouring rebels was deemed sufficient

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cause for retribution; indeed, anything short of active opposition to the rebels was considered proof of disloyalty.32 Yermolov’s introduction of mass reprisals against civilians was a pivotal moment in the history of Russian–Chechen relations. The conscious shift in policy towards the active and systematic terrorising of civilians did more than any other action to escalate the violence in the region. The first deputy head of the Russian General Staff, Yurii Baluevskii, claimed recently that this policy was effective in deterring a significant section of the local population from actively supporting the anti-Russian resistance in the nineteenth century.33 In fact, Yermolov’s track record in deterring resistance is questionable. The introduction of this policy marked the beginning of the Caucasian War, sparking the formation of the first organised anti-Russian Muslim resistance movement in the region. Yermolov’s principle of collective responsibility has been enthusiastically revived by contemporary patriotic publicists. Starikov cites Yermolov’s complaint that even those Chechens who had taken an oath of loyalty to Russia continued to harbour these ‘predators’ (Yermolov’s favoured term for the Chechen rebels) and to help them to pass safely across the Caucasian line.34 This charge is echoed in Romanov’s claim that: [E]ven the so-called peaceful valley-dwelling Chechens . . . usually did not take part in raids but helped the raiders, pointing to the weaknesses in Russian defences, providing the raiders with information and hiding them, if necessary. This is how it happened in the past, and this is how it still happens, to our regret.35 A direct parallel can be drawn here to the rationale underlying the methods used in the more recent wars to punish villages suspected of sheltering rebels. In April 1995 the Russian military refused to accept assurances from the Samashki village elders that all Chechen fighters had left the village. Russian troops subsequently launched a massive artillery bombardment in which, according to Russia’s Memorial Society, several hundred civilians were killed.36 General Kulikov, who was commander of Russia’s interior troops at the time, consistently denied reports of Russian atrocities in Samashki and elsewhere, fuelling media comparisons of Kulikov with Yermolov. Kulikov took a particularly harsh line towards human rights activists speaking out against the war, labelling Sergei Kovalev a ‘political prostitute’.37 A more recent massacre of civilians occurred at Alkhan-Yurt in December 1999, when troops extrajudicially executed at least 14 people in the village, as well as reportedly committing rapes and looting and burning homes.38 The Russian human rights group ‘Common Action’ described this massacre as unprecedented, insofar as it represented the first time that the military commanders involved effectively acknowledged the specifically punitive nature of the operation.39


The commander of the Alkhan-Yurt operation was General Vladimir Shamanov, the darling of the patriotic press for his outspoken defence of Russian military honour. Shamanov apparently views himself as the heir to Yermolov’s legacy. Shamanov’s website contains several allusions to Yermolov. It paraphrases, for example, Pushkin’s famous epilogue to the poem ‘The Prisoner of the Caucasus’, ‘Submit and bow your snowy head, / O Caucasus, Yermolov marches!’, inserting ‘Shamanov’ in place of ‘Yermolov’ and substituting Bamut (the site of one of Shamanov’s battles) for the Caucasus.40 During the 1994–96 war Shamanov, like Kulikov, was frequently hailed in the Russian press as the ‘new Yermolov’.41 Like Yermolov, Shamanov actively courts a reputation for cruelty and ruthlessness,42 and reportedly issued public threats that civilians would be held directly accountable for any Chechen attacks on federal checkpoints.43 Shamanov has been highly vocal in his opposition to any civilian oversight or criticism. When a group of Alkhan-Yurt residents tried to obtain an audience with Shamanov while the abuses were still ongoing, Shamanov reportedly threatened to shoot them. He also threatened journalists and human rights activists investigating the massacre, and warned them: ‘Don’t you dare touch the soldiers and officers of the Russian army. They are doing a sacred thing today – they are defending Russia. And don’t you dare sully the Russian soldier with your dirty hands!’44 The Russian regime’s response to the accusations made against Shamanov in the wake of the Alkhan-Yurt massacre was to award him the Hero of Russia medal later in December 1999.45 Several weeks later Shamanov was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-general after Putin stated publicly that ‘Russia’s not going to be abandoning generals like these; what we are talking about is promotion.’46 Shamanov is an active proponent of the application of the principle of collective guilt to the Chechens. In June 2000, for example, he stated in an interview with Novaya gazeta that responsibility for the crimes of Chechen bandits should be extended to their wives and children.47 Shamanov made these comments at a time when his close friend and direct subordinate Colonel Yurii Budanov was facing criminal charges for unlawfully arresting, raping and murdering a Chechen girl (alleged by Budanov to be a sniper) in March last year – a case which has become a cause célèbre. Shamanov publicly defended Budanov on several occasions, writing to Budanov’s parents that they had no reason to be ashamed of their son, and supporting Budanov by personally attending his trial.48

9.4 Conclusion In very real ways, Yermolov’s spirit does continue to haunt both Chechnya and Russia. In recent patriotic rewrites of the shared Russian–Chechen history, past and present are telescoped into a single moment, in which the

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Chechen and the Russian are frozen in their nineteenth-century attitudes. Yermolov is an iconic figure, who has come to embody the Russian military presence in Chechnya. A number of broad themes can be seen to emerge in the new representations of Yermolov. Perhaps most importantly, the rehabilitation of Yermolov in the post-Soviet patriotic press is about restoring moral certainty to Russia’s current position in Chechnya. Yermolov is a comforting figure, supremely confident of the rightness of his beliefs and actions, and capable of holding his head high in the face of criticism. Yermolov is also a significant figure in the broader patriotic identity-building project, with the national traits which he ascribed to the Chechens serving as negative referents against which the Russian national identity can be defined. Many of the patriotic writers cited in this chapter claim to be motivated by a desire to set the historical record straight in the interests of Russian– Chechen reconciliation. For example, Baluevskii goes so far as to present the ‘distortion’ of the history of the nineteenth-century war in the Caucasus as the cause of the 1994–96 war,49 while Pronin claims that negative historical evaluations of Yermolov can ‘obviously . . . bring nothing but the incitement of hatred towards Russians’.50 Yet it is impossible to imagine any scenario of reconciliation that would require Chechens, or indeed Russians, to embrace Yermolov as a positive role model. In general, the patriotic camp’s professed belief in the irredeemable aberrance of the Chechen people would appear to forestall any possible future of stabilisation in the region, other than one that involves the continued use of ‘extreme measures’ against the civilian population.

Notes 1. V. Umnov, ‘Chechenskii mir’, Ogonek, no. 38 (1996). Chesnov refers to similar attacks on Yermolov’s statue in Grozny; Yan Chesnov, ‘Byt¢ chechentsem: lichnost¢ i etnicheskie identifikatsii naroda’, in D. E. Furman, ed., Chechnya i Rossiya: obshchestva i gosudarstva (Moscow: ‘Polinform-Talburi’, 1999), p. 89. 2. Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, Memuary (Frankfurt/Main: Posev, 1983), p. 17. 3. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 40. 4. E. Volodin, ‘Russo-chechenskii sindrom’, Molodaya gvardiya, no. 6 (1995) 28. Volodin blames the creation of this myth on human rights activist Sergei Kovalev and the Russian democratic media. 5. B. Karpov, ‘Nashi v Chechne: generaly. Zametki voennogo publitsista’, Zavtra, no. 50 (1996) 4. 6. A. S. Griboedov, letter to S. N. Begichev, 30 January 1819, in A. S. Griboedov, Sochineniya (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1988), p. 293. Elsewhere Griboedov wrote that the actions of Yermolov and other tsarist generals in the Caucasus only strengthened his ‘revulsion towards ranks and honours’; see A. L.


7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

Narochnitskii et al., eds, Istoriya narodov Severnogo Kavkaza (konets XVIIIv. – 1917g.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), pp. 38–40. Cited in Vitalii Azarov and Vladimir Marushchenko, ‘Pravda i vymysli o Kavkazskoi voine’, Krasnaya zvezda, 20 January 2001; and Yu. N. Baluevskii, ‘Uroki kavkazskikh voin’, Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal 6 (November–December 2000) 10. Cited in Avtorkhanov, Memuary, p. 16. This oft-cited quote comes from Yermolov’s famous letter to Aleksandr I, written in response to concerns expressed by the tsar in connection with the extreme measures being applied by Yermolov in the Caucasus. Cited in John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1908), p. 92. Yermolov is in fact the subject of numerous historical epics in Caucasian folk literature and song; see V. G. Gadzhiev et al., eds, Istoriya Dagestana, vol. 2 (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), p. 318. Ya. Akhmadov, ‘Kratkii ocherk istorii’, in Yu. A. Aidaev, ed., Chechentsy: istoriya i sovremennost¢ (Moscow: ‘Mir domu tvoemu’, 1996), p. 142. Georgii Derlug’yan, ‘Chechenskaya revolyutsiya i chechenskaya istoriya’, in Furman, Chechnya i Rossiya, p. 203. Some patriotic commentators dispute the nature of the message carried by these fortresses. A 1997 Molodaya gvardiya article, for example, asserts that ‘For the mountaineers, these fortresses became peaceful towns, spreading their protective calm over the blue mountains of the Caucasus’, and that, contrary to Yermolov’s own testimony, these fortresses ‘were by no means built against the Chechens . . . but against the age-old foe, Turkey’; A. Goncharov, ‘Kavkaztsy. Teatr voennykh deistvii’, Molodaya gvardiya, no. 3 (1997) 188–9. A more recent article reads the ‘obvious’ message in the names of the fortresses as ‘we have come here forever, we will not allow the peoples who have put their trust in us to be robbed’; Vladimir Denisov, ‘ “Ot natsional¢noi rozni do natsional¢noi rezni.” Kak zrel chechenskii naryv’, Nash sovremennik, no. 6 (2000). These assertions exemplify a particular strand of patriotic thought which aims to present Yermolov’s campaign as bringing peace to the Chechens, saving them not only from neighbouring Turkey but, just as importantly, from themselves. Lanshchikov, an earlier proponent of this line, argues that Yermolov’s campaign was aimed at containing the local tribes, stopping them from tearing one another to pieces; see A. Lanshchikov, ‘Russkie na Kavkaze’, Literaturnaya Rossiya, no. 51 (1992) 4, an article published at a time of growing tensions between Chechnya and the federal centre. Narochnitskii et al., Istoriya narodov Severnogo Kavkaza, p. 40. Thus, for example, in a 1960 historical text, Fadeev describes Yermolov’s civilising mission rhetoric as hollow and hypocritical, and characterises the North Caucasus as the most clearcut example of the brutal nature of tsarist expansionism, but concludes that these events must nevertheless by viewed first and foremost as progressive; A. V. Fadeev, Rossiya i Kavkaz pervoi treti XIXv. (Moscow, 1960), pp. 318 and 373–4. For example, criticism of Yermolov’s brutality in a 1988 text is followed by the statement that ‘The facts show that cruelty was not at all characteristic of the simple Russian soldier . . . There were well-known cases where abandoned babies turned up in the auls [villages] and the soldiers looked after them’; Narochnitskii et al., Istoriya narodov Severnogo Kavkaza, pp. 40–1. Cited in Avtorkhanov, Memuary, p. 16. Aleksei Ryumninskii, ‘Net narodov plokhikh. Est¢ narody . . . drugie’, Ogonek, 23 February 2000.

Julie Elkner 215 19. Petr V. Romanov, ed., Chechnya. Belaya kniga (Moscow, 2000), available via the Rosinformtsentr website (www.infocentre.ru). This book was produced by RIA Novosti in conjunction with Rosinformtsentr, a body set up within the Russian Ministry for Affairs of the Press, Television and Radio Broadcasting and the Mass Communications Media by government decree in December 1999 with the purpose of filtering information on the conflict in Chechnya. 20. A. Vorontsov, ‘ “Chechenskie pis¢ma” generala Ermolova’, Rossiiskie vesti, no. 40 (1995), p. 6. 21. Cited in Viktor Starikov, ‘Fenomen “chechenskoi” voiny’, Molodaya gvardiya, no. 3 (1997), p. 179. Sections of this passage are also cited in Baluevskii, ‘Uroki kavkazskikh voin’, 7, and in Azarov and Marushchenko, ‘Pravda i vymysli’. The innate criminal tendencies of the Chechen people are further reinforced by patriotic accounts of the Chechen role in the anti-Russian resistance movement led by Shamil¢ later in the nineteenth century. Starikov, for example, notes that the movement failed to take root among the Transcaucasian peoples, and only took off when it reached Chechnya and Dagestan, where it found ‘fertile soil’ among the ‘criminal margins’ of those societies. He asserts that it was precisely criminals who ran the movement and provided the base for the armed struggle against Russia; Starikov, ‘Fenomen “chechenskoi” voiny’, 173. Goncharov concurs in viewing the Chechen involvement in Shamil’s movement as essentially ‘criminal’, and hence rejects the classification of the movement as a Holy War. For Goncharov, this was just the familiar Chechen banditry dressed up as a Holy War. He elaborates: ‘The Chechens, having acquired a taste for blood [under Sheikh Mansur in the late eighteenth century] . . . continued their sporadic “Holy War,” although this was the usual bandits’ anarchy of the mountaineers, who would not obey anyone or anything’; Goncharov, ‘Kavkaztsy’, 192–3. 22. The Jamestown Foundation Monitor, 23 January 1996. 23. Yermashev’s name may be intended to suggest an affinity with Yermolov. 24. Goncharov, ‘Kavkaztsy’, 222. 25. Pronin’s article contains implied criticism of Aleksandr I for wishing ‘to appear a humane ruler in the eyes of Europe’, and thus allowing Yermolov to take the blame for policies which the tsar had underwritten – a possible allusion to the present-day army’s sense of having been betrayed and used as a scapegoat by Russian political leaders. 26. Aleksandr Pronin, ‘Tragediya generala Ermolova’, Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie, 15 October 1999. Another article describes Yermolov’s tragedy as that of a European ‘gone native’ in Asia: ‘. . . a representative of a European state, Yermolov was increasingly becoming an eastern ruler . . . As one historian has noted, “Yermolov was conquering the Caucasus, the Caucasus was conquering Yermolov” ’; Dmitrii Oleinikov, ‘Bol¢shaya Kavkazskaya voina’, Rodina, nos 1–2 (2000), p. 52 (the historian cited here is not identified). 27. Cited in Vorontsov, ‘ “Chechenskie pis¢ma” ’, p. 6. 28. Cited in Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘Guerrilla War Can’t Be Won’, Moscow Times, 9 March 2000, reprinted in CDI Russia Weekly, no. 92, 10 March 2000. 29. Numerous patriotic articles applaud the 1944 deportation. Denisov draws a direct link between the 1944 deportation and Yermolov’s understanding of collective responsibility, and argues that Chechens should view the deportation as a blessing, because it preserved Chechen families and because the Chechen deportees were treated less harshly than Russian kulaks had been. Denisov concludes that ‘Rather than cursing Stalin, the former Caucasian deportees should mention him in their prayers!’; Denisov, ‘ “Ot natsional¢noi rozni” ’.

216 The Post-Stalin Period 30. Narochnitskii et al., Istoriya narodov Severnogo Kavkaza, p. 36. See also in this connection extracts from Yermolov’s memoirs reproduced in Romanov, Chechnya. Belaya kniga; and Shakhrudin Gapurov, ‘Metody kolonial¢noi politiki tsarizma v Chechne v pervoi polovine XIX veka’, in Furman, Chechnya i Rossiya, p. 120. 31. On these punitive expeditions see, for example, Narochnitskii et al., Istoriya narodov Severnogo Kavkaza, pp. 34–5, and Khadzhi Murat Ibragimbeili, ‘Narodnoosvoboditel’naya bor’ba gortsev Severnogo Kavkaza pod rukovodstvom Shamilya protiv tsarizma i mestnykh feodalov’, Voprosy istorii, no. 6 (1990) 157–8. According to Starikov, Cossacks and other Russian settlers in the region were also granted special rights and powers to independently hand down retribution to the local population; see Starikov, ‘Fenomen “chechenskoi” voiny’, 172. 32. Oleinikov, ‘Bol¢shaya Kavkazskaya voina’, 52. 33. Baluevskii, ‘Uroki kavkazskikh voin’, 9. 34. Starikov, ‘Fenomen “chechenskoi” voiny’, 179. 35. Romanov, Chechnya. Belaya kniga. 36. See Open Media Research Institute (OMRI) Daily Digest, 11 April 1995. 37. See L. Belin, ‘Gorovukhin Urges Criminal Proceedings against Samashki Critics’, OMRI Daily Digest, 20 April 1995. 38. See Human Rights Watch, ‘Memorandum on Domestic Prosecutions for Violations of International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Chechnya’, 13 February 2001; and ‘Rasprava v Alkhan-Yurte’, Za mirnuyu Rossiyu, no. 1 (January 2000). The Alkhan-Yurt massacre is only the most well-known of several massacres reported to have taken place so far in the 1999–ongoing conflict. 39. Cited in ibid. 40. See http://www.shamanov.ru/. Continuity between Yermolov and modern-day Russian generals serving in Chechnya is also emphasised in Aleksandr Prokhanov, ‘Slava generalam chechenskoi voiny!’, Zavtra, no. 8 (February 2000). 41. See G. Troshev, Moya voina (Zapiski okopnogo generala) (2001), available at http://lib.ru/MEMUARY/CHECHNYA/troshew.txt 42. See, for example, his interview with Anna Politkovskaya, ‘Ya – Shamanov’, Novaya gazeta, no. 24, 19 June 2000. 43. See ‘Mirnoe naselenie otvetstvenno za deistviya banditov?’, Voina i prava cheloveka, no. 130, 30 January 2000. 44. Cited in Human Rights Watch report, Russia/Chechnya. ‘No Happiness Remains’: Civilian Killings, Pillage, and Rape in Alkhan-Yurt, Chechnya (2000). 45. In his speech at the ceremony then President Yeltsin described the army’s conduct in Chechnya as ‘faultless’; see ibid. 46. See Vladimir Pribylovskii, ‘Nachalas¢ predvybornaya “zachistka” Shamanova’, Russkaya mysl’, 7 September 2000. Shamanov subsequently launched a political career and is now governor of Ul’yanovskaya oblast’. 47. Cited in Politkovskaya, ‘Ya – Shamanov’. In the same interview, Shamanov also stated that ‘If bandits do not understand our morality, they must be destroyed.’ 48. See Vladislav Shurygin, ‘Polkovnik Putin i polkovnik Budanov’, Zavtra, no. 10, 5 March 2001; and Anatolii Shishkin, ‘Budanov raskaivaetsya, Shamanov – net,’ Grani.ru, 28 February 2001. 49. Yu. N. Baluevskii, ‘Uroki kavkazskikh voin’, Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 5 (2000) 4. 50. Pronin, ‘Tragediya generala Ermolova’.

10 Stalinism and the Fall of the Soviet Union* Graeme Gill

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought to an end the key defining characteristic of what has been called the ‘short twentieth century’,1 the competition between western liberal capitalism and eastern state socialism. This is, of course, not the only way of conceptualising the fall of the USSR, but by highlighting the fact of competition it focuses attention on what it was about Soviet state socialism which, ultimately, made it unable to compete with its liberal capitalist opponent. A significant part of this answer lies in the nature of the system itself as it emerged from its Stalinist origins, because it was in the creation of the Stalinist system that the key enduring facets of the Soviet regime were formed. Many aspects of the Stalinist phenomenon may be identified as having played a part in the demise of Soviet socialism. The large-scale social mobility associated with industrialisation created the urban white-collar ‘middle class’ that was important as a social base for perestroika and whose alienation from the regime ultimately was to prove crucial. The command economy possessed structural rigidities which clearly inhibited economic performance quite apart from mistakes in the policy arena, and thereby contributed to the economic crisis which was instrumental in the fall of the USSR. Stalinist economic priorities were also important in helping to explain popular disillusionment with the regime, while the controls over cultural development and information flow were significant in the generation of the intellectual narrowness and rigidity that played its part in the unravelling of the Soviet Union. But while these elements of the Stalinist experience were significant for the fall of Soviet socialism, probably most important was the nature of the Stalinist power structure. The significance of this aspect of Stalinism lay not just in its own direct implications for the system itself, but in the way in which it fundamentally inhibited the capacity of the regime to respond effectively to the challenges emerging from other sources. Any understanding of the collapse of Soviet socialism must therefore embrace its Stalinist roots. The principal task of the Soviet power structure was the exercise of control, 217


while the essence of this was the projection of power throughout society. Power projection is a central aspect of the activities of all state structures; indeed, a state that is unable to project its power is unlikely to retain its position for long. But what is important for our purposes is the way in which that power can be projected. One theorist has distinguished between two different types of power – infrastructural and despotic.2 Infrastructural power is the capacity of the state regularly and consistently to have its orders carried out in society. It is able to do this because it has penetrated civil society, established regularised patterns of control and interaction with civil society actors, and has a stable continuing presence within that society. In short, it has an infrastructure which embeds the state firmly within the society. Despotic power does not have this regularised character. It refers to the exercise of power over society, through extraordinary methods rather than routine channels. It is the sort of power which has not been negotiated with society as a whole through the latter’s acceptance of the continuing presence of state institutions within itself. The exercise of despotic power tends to be both short-term and episodic while infrastructural power tends to be regulated and continuing. For any state structure seeking to exercise stable control over the society and territory over which it rules, the strengthening of infrastructural power and the weakening of despotic power would be a sensible course. The reverse situation, where despotic power overshadows infrastructural power, is a recipe for the weakness of continuing central control and the consequent relative independence of lower-level officials.

10.1 The emergence of the Stalinist power structure The Stalinist power structure was built at the time of massive upheavals in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s and in the early 1930s when Stalin pushed through his programme of social and economic transformation under the aegis of the first Five Year Plan, and was rounded out with the terror of the latter half of the 1930s. This does not mean that the new politico-administrative structure that emerged at this time had no links with what had gone before. The structure that emerged in the 1930s was clearly built upon elements of the regime that had been formed in the early years of Soviet power – the closing off of democracy in the party and country, the generation of a sense of insecurity in the regime and of the omnipresence of enemies, the development of centralising organs in the form of the Politburo, Orgburo and Secretariat, the growth of a personnel system based on appointment and formalised with the creation of the nomenklatura in June 1923, and the growth of a leader cult as a form of legitimation – all these factors provided significant building blocks for the Soviet power structure that was to emerge in the 1930s. But these building blocks did no more than provide the potential for what was to come. It needed the hand of

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Stalin and his supporters to turn this potential into the power structure that dominated the system by the end of the 1930s. The story of the development of that structure has been told in many places and will not be repeated here.3 What I am interested in is the form that structure took, and the tensions that emerged within it. The power structure that emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1930s involved the creation of a new type of politico-administrative system. This was formally an organisationally integrated system in which all spheres of life – political, economic, social and cultural – were tied together by organisational bonds. As a result, no sector of life was to be independent, with all subject to control by central authorities. This structure was, in principle, totalist, with all of the key questions and issues reduced to matters of administration and management; all independent forces were to be subordinated to political imperatives. A combination of hierarchy and discipline was to lock all of these diverse parts into the one overriding structure wherein power would reside. The mechanism whereby this sort of totalist control was to be realised was the interlocking structure of the Soviet party-state. The central element of this structure was the Communist Party. Despite fluctuations, by the end of the 1930s, the party had double the members it had in 1930: membership increased from 1 677 910 in 1930 to 3 872 465 at the end of 1940,4 while the number of PPOs increased from 54 000 in mid1930 to 113 060 in 1939.5 This expansion in the party was meant to result in the extension of a party presence into all spheres of life. The party was to be the lynchpin of the system, its tentacles firmly tying all parts of the diverse country and its burgeoning politico-administrative structure into the one integrated and disciplined apparatus. The principles of democratic centralism, which had since the beginning of the 1920s emphasised centralism over democracy, were meant to ensure that party discipline could be exercised by the centre over the extremities of this structure with a minimum of fuss and effort. To this end the party had seen a strengthening of its central organs during the 1920s. The formal establishment of the Politburo in 1919 marked the institutional recognition of the way in which effective decision-making power was being concentrated in the hands of comparatively few party leaders at the top of the party structure, while the creation of the Central Committee Secretariat and Orgburo at the same time was meant to provide the leadership with institutional mechanisms for the implementation of its policies within the party (and through that the wider) structure. However the model of a smoothly efficient hierarchical structure was a myth; infrastructural power remained weak. From the outset, the emergent Soviet politico-administrative structure was plagued by problems. The structure of organisational controls was insufficiently developed to be able to ensure close, continuing central monitoring of the activities of party bodies lower in the hierarchy. The communications


network was primitive throughout much of the country, with some rural areas in contact with party organisations in nearby towns only through the irregular visits of party instructors and plenipotentiaries. The telephone and telegraph systems did not serve large areas of the country, while the absence of surfaced roads rendered many areas effectively isolated. This meant that Soviet local officials often had to struggle on with only intermittent direction from the centre. The maintenance of Soviet power in rural areas was thus often much more a function of the dedication, drive and initiative of local officials than it was of influence flowing remorselessly from the Moscow centre. Furthermore, the central institutions were finding it difficult to cope. The effectiveness of the Politburo as a decision-making organ was hampered by the factional conflict that was a feature of elite relations throughout the 1920s, while both Orgburo and Secretariat found themselves swamped by the task they confronted. They had great difficulty in creating standard office procedures during this time, a problem exacerbated by the reorganisations of the Orgburo and Secretariat in 1921, 1924 and 1930, and of the nomenklatura in 1925. These central staffing bodies were unable to establish a comprehensive and accurate central register of party workers. This was in part due to the problems of lower-level party organisations in keeping accurate membership records, but it was not helped by the enormous flux in party membership; not only did the party expand significantly during the 1920s, but between 1919 and 1930 in every year except 1923 there was a party campaign being waged involving the checking of party membership and the expulsion of those found wanting. These pressures increased during the 1930s. The dramatic expansion of the party during that decade, and the extension of its reach into the countryside with collectivisation, compounded the difficulties the centre had in monitoring developments at local levels. Although the communications network may have improved with the industrialisation of the 1930s, it could not keep pace with the needs the centre had to maintain supervision over the vast range of politico-administrative bodies that developed at this time. These problems were exacerbated by the continuing fluidity of personnel. The increase in party membership during the 1930s has already been noted, but it must be recognised that this took place against a background of almost continuous forced effluxion from the party: the 1929–30 purge followed by the effects of the trials of the early part of the decade, the purge of 1933–34, the 1935 verification of party cards, the 1936 exchange of party documents and the 1936–38 terror all resulted in significant membership change and therefore in continuing pressure on party record-keepers. Further reorganisations at the centre in 1934 and 1939 did not assist this process of attempting to acquire and maintain an adequate central membership record. The essence of the problem was that the politico-administrative structure was unable to secure for the centre the sort of continuing capacity for monitoring developments at lower levels. Certainly there were hierarchies of

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accountability within the party, reflected in the notion of regular reporting to superiors about local organisations’ activities. A control apparatus was developed to provide the sort of verification of the implementation of central decisions that the centre demanded. The security apparatus was a potential weapon that could be used to assert central control. And there was the personnel mechanism, embedded in the principles of the nomenklatura and residing in the Orgburo and Secretariat. But all of these suffered from a basic flaw that stemmed from the incentive structure embedded in the system. The incentive structure in the Soviet hierarchy encouraged officials to mislead their superiors. Lower-level officials were in a very difficult position. The policies of massive change introduced at the end of the 1920s caused widespread hardship within a population a large part of which was opposed to the Bolsheviks. Those officials had to implement the policies and maintain regime control in an atmosphere that was frequently more hostile than supportive. Of course, there were also significant elements in local populations which would have supported the changes and would therefore have lent support to officials, but the legacy of a sense of popular hostility stemming from the periods of War Communism and NEP continued strongly during the 1930s. But what complicated this situation for local officials was the nature of the demands coming from above. In the period prior to the war, but especially during Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’, the centre continually made heavy demands upon lower-level officials. High levels of performance were expected in realising the plans and directives that issued from the centre. The most famous instance of this was the highly exaggerated target levels of the agricultural collectivisation campaign in late 1929 and early 1930, but this was simply one instance of a general phenomenon. The centre demanded that its officials carry out its directives. However, those directives were often impossible to fulfil. The levels of economic production demanded, for example, often exceeded that which was possible; targets were frequently impossible to achieve. Furthermore, in many cases, the instructions given were ambiguous, were internally inconsistent, or were so vague as to permit varied interpretations. Alongside this combination of high demands and often uncertain criteria about how those demands could be met was an ambiguous attitude to formal rules and regulations. The Soviet system was characterised by a plethora of rules, regulations, directives, decrees and instructions. Many of these were uncoordinated and conflicting, thereby giving little effective guidance. More importantly, the approach to such rules and regulations was essentially contingent, in the sense that if there was conflict between following rules and achieving plan targets, the latter was preferred. Officials could not protect themselves from criticism for failure to achieve what was expected of them by pointing to their adherence to official rules and regulations.


High demands, unclear criteria and the lack of a firmly entrenched normative, regulatory environment constituted an uncertain policy-making sphere for officials. This was rendered even more uncertain, and dangerous, by the heavy penalties that were seen to apply to those who failed to satisfy central expectations. Officials whose performance was judged to be unsatisfactory were likely to lose their jobs, face demotion, and perhaps in the latter part of the decade, even lose their lives. The costs of perceived failure were therefore very high. One consequence of this was the imperative to ensure that the picture the centre had was that performance was satisfactory. This resulted in local officials engaging in a wide range of informal measures designed to boost the performance of their particular region and, by implication, themselves. The acquisition of extra (outside plan) resources to boost production was one common strategy. But also important was misreporting to the centre. Exaggeration and distortion of performance and achievement were common, as reports to the centre consistently tried to put the best possible face upon reality. Throughout the 1930s this was a continuing strategy used by lower-level officials,6 reflecting the truism that a high coercion system is a low information system. But this situation of high demands, unclear criteria for fulfilment, lack of protection and heavy penalties also contributed to the development of a crucial feature of the Soviet mechanism of power, the primacy of the personalist principle. From the earliest years of Soviet rule, there had been a tendency, in the building of political authority at all levels of the structure, to rely upon personal connections, acquaintances and allies. The most obvious instances of this occurred at the elite levels, where historians have for long concentrated upon the shifting factional alignments that structured elite political debate during the first decade and a half of the Soviet regime’s life. But this practice of reliance upon essentially horizontal personal connections was even more marked at lower levels of the structure, where it effectively became institutionalised as the principal means of structuring local politics. The main vehicle within which the personalist principle of organisation was embedded was the so-called ‘family groups’.7 These were locally based groupings, usually centred on the local party leader and including the principal organisational notables in the district; among those who could be included were senior party figures, the leaders of the local soviet, the head of the security apparatus, local editors and the bosses of the chief production units (factories or farms). Some of these people were appointed to their positions because of prior association with the party secretary, but even those who did not have such links, usually soon developed a close working relationship with the secretary and the other members of the group. The dominance of local administration by such groups was encouraged by two factors. First, given the problems confronted by local administrators, the underdeveloped state of the bureaucratic apparatus, the high expectations from above and the potential penalties for failure, working with people

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one knew and trusted was a logical response. Personal connections were a way of limiting reliance on the inefficient structure, and thereby of increasing the likelihood of decisions being implemented. Second, if despite this, local performance did not meet central expectations, and local failures had therefore to be concealed from the centre, the existence of an unofficial local network of leaders would facilitate this. If such a network remained solid and could control the upward information flow, the chances of poor local performance being reported to the centre were reduced. The generation of family groups was thus a realistic response to the situation local officials found themselves in; it promised a means of overcoming some of the difficulties they faced in meeting expectations from above, as well as a potential way of avoiding the consequences of perceived failure. The personalist principle was also evident in the link between the different levels of the Soviet power structure. Many students have pointed to the importance within the Soviet structure of chains of patrons and clients. The notion of the ‘circular flow of power’ which has been used to explain the rise of Stalin8 has at its heart a conception of patron–client relations, while the nomenklatura system was a perfect instrument for the construction and strengthening of such relationships. In practice, what this meant was that political leaders at each level looked to people higher up the structure for support and protection. But such considerations rested less on coincident policy views than on personal contacts and loyalties; the currency of the patron–client tie was personal association and the aim mutual benefit. Such personal ties were crucial in the structuring of political life. The personalist principle was therefore central to the way the power structure functioned. It shaped administrative processes at each level of the structure and moulded relations between those different levels. The importance of this principle for our purposes is the effect it had on the overall functioning of the Soviet power structure and its capacity to project central power throughout the hierarchy. The weakness of the infrastructural power of the politico-administrative apparatus,9 and the heightened levels of uncertainty officials faced as a result of the successive campaigns of the 1930s, strengthened the personalist principle as individuals sought to bolster their personal positions. However, this strengthening of the personalist principle was matched by opposing pressures within the politico-administrative structure. These were pressures for the strengthening and systemisation of organisational norms. This took the form of pressure for the official rules, regulations and procedures to be strengthened and for officials to abide by them. Calls for official organs to meet at the regular intervals specified in formal documents, for the implementation of decisions and the verification of such implementation to be conducted through the channels established to achieve these ends, for full reports to be submitted on time and to the proper authorities, and for officials to structure their behaviour according to the rules were the sorts of demands reflecting these organisational pressures.


The central organs’ continuing attempts to regulate the personnel system clearly reflect such pressures. The essence of these pressures was that the formal provisions whereby the structure was meant to function should have normative authority and should actually determine how it functioned. The source of these pressures was the organisational structure itself. Those parts of the structure with the role of supervising the essential housekeeping functions of the organisation (for example, the Orgburo and Secretariat, Central Control Commission) were important sources of such pressures. But so too was the basic structure itself. The various parts of the organisational structure, simply through their existence and functioning, generated pressures for the institutionalisation of political life on the basis of their organisational norms. Pressures for regular meetings and the routine flow of business, for the conducting of politico-administrative affairs through proper bureaucratic channels, and in accord with bureaucratic norms, were the inevitable result of the organisational structure’s operation. The tension between the personalist principle and pressures for organisational norms was a major factor shaping the way in which the power structure functioned. It created an ambiguity within the structure’s operating regime by complicating the questions of authority and functioning – which should be more important in the definition of politico-administrative life, personalist principles or organisational norms? In principle, there could be no compromise between these. If the personalist principle was supreme, what was important was the decisions of the key individuals rather than the views of collective party-state bodies; if organisational norms were supreme, the behaviour of individuals should be subordinated to them. However, in practice, what was achieved was a messy combination of personalist principles and organisational norms. The danger of having this sort of combination is that the whole structure could become bogged down. There was also the likelihood that this would be a real barrier to the effective exercise of central control and direction. During the Stalin period the tension between personalist principles and organisational norms was ameliorated by a combination of three factors: (i) The generation of a sense of enthusiasm and commitment which carried all the politically active along and smoothed over the contradictions. The source of this enthusiasm and commitment was ideology and the sense of building a new world that was implicit in Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’. The widespread enthusiasm for the Soviet experiment reflected in the mobilisation of the early 1930s and the conviction that what they were doing was right, injected a fervour and willingness to sacrifice which meant that the tensions within the politico-administrative structure were less significant. They could be overcome by the force of popular effort and popular will;

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(ii) The presence of an extra-bureaucratic or organisational threat in the form of the terror. With the unrolling of the terror in 1936–38, the different elements of the Soviet regime (party, state, trade unions, military) were subjected to purging by one component of that regime, the security apparatus. These individual components were thus purged from outside their own boundaries. When the terror had finished, its legacy remained both in the form of the strengthened position of the security apparatus vis-à-vis the other institutions, and of the collective memory of the terror, with the implication that it could be repeated. The Leningrad Affair and the Doctors’ Plot at the end of Stalin’s rule were potent reminders of this. Thus what the 1936–38 terror did was to institutionalise terror, or the possibility of it. This notion of external threat encouraged officials to strive to function effectively and thereby to overcome the effects of the tension between personalist principle and organisational norms; (iii) Stalin’s personal dominance. The projection of Stalin as the supreme leader whose word was law and whose judgement was infallible established a fixed point of authority and direction which cut through the confusion caused by the personalist-principle–organisational-norms tension. When Stalin spoke, there could be no ambiguity about the source of direction (although there could be differences over what he meant), while his position of dominance constituted an affirmation of the primacy of personalism over organisational norms. This was reinforced by the practical dominance he exercised – personally at the centre and through his own private apparatus throughout the system10 – and was strengthened by the cult. These three factors were all intrinsic parts of the Stalinist regime as it functioned in the latter stages of the 1930s and much of the 1940s. But while they may have ameliorated the effects of the tension between personalist principle and organisational norms, they could not eliminate it.

10.2 Reform of the power structure? When Stalin died, the Soviet power structure faced a crisis. The three factors which had ameliorated the tension within the system’s operating regime now ceased to function. The enthusiasm and commitment that had been evident in the 1930s had dissipated as a result of the hardship of the war and the economic rebuilding that followed. The perception that they were building a bright new society became humdrum as revolutionary transformation gave way to routine administration. The notion of external threat to officials was removed with the arrest of Beria and the downgrading of the security apparatus following Stalin’s death, and by the reduction in pressure introduced


by the new regime. The death of Stalin added to the public reaffirmation of the principles of collective leadership by the new Soviet leaders by removing from the structure the position of dominant leader. The weakening of these three elements left the tension in the system’s operating regime both unresolved and unregulated. The personalist basis of power continued to structure political life at all levels of the hierarchy, but the pressures for a strengthening of organisational norms also continued to operate. Indeed, the latter seemed to be significantly strengthened by the emphasis placed by the initial post-Stalin leaders on the notion of collective leadership and on the greater regularity of meetings of official organisations and bodies; the policy of destalinisation provided a further stimulus to this. With these affirmations of the importance of a shift away from the primacy of an individual leader and of the regulating of political institutions, along with the shift from revolutionary transformation to routine administration, conditions seemed to favour the strengthening of organisational norms and thereby of infrastructural power. However, in practice this did not happen. The principal reason for the failure in strengthening organisational norms is to be found in the modus operandi of the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Two aspects of this are important. First, Khrushchev’s leadership style and many of his actions undercut organisational norms and strengthened the personalist principle. An important part of this leadership style was the lack of concern Khrushchev showed for the integrity and coherence of leading political institutions. This is clearly reflected in his attempts to circumvent the party Presidium and thereby get around opposition he faced within that body. He sought to do this by publicly announcing policy before it was discussed by this body, as in the cases of the Seven-Year Plan and the Central Asian Bureau, announced in January 1959 and October 1962 respectively. He also appealed to the Central Committee over the head of the Presidium, and although this may have been consistent with the party’s formal rules, it clearly breached a long-standing convention of party life. The most important instance of this was the case of the anti-party group in 1957. With regard to the Central Committee, at times Khrushchev flooded its meetings with ‘specialised experts’ who were not committee members, thereby eroding the power and prestige of the institution in the eyes of its members, and opened its deliberations up to public scrutiny by publishing its proceedings. In addition, Khrushchev became increasingly reliant upon a circle of advisers drawn from areas other than the apex of the party leadership, with his son-in-law Adzhubei as the most egregious example, who could be seen to be displacing party leaders from their proper roles. This sort of pattern is consistent with the way in which Khrushchev was able to project an image of himself as the dominant figure in the Soviet leadership. Indeed, this was more than image, as Khrushchev did become at least the first among equals. By establishing a position of personal primacy, Khrushchev was able to disregard the prin-

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ciples of collective leadership, and thereby reconfirm the importance of the personalist principle in Soviet politics. Khrushchev was also insensitive to the institutional integrity and prerogatives of bodies below the national level. The tendency to seek the answer to problems by reorganising institutional structures, reflected most clearly in the establishment of the sovnarkhozy in 1957 and the bifurcation of the party apparatus in 1962, illustrates an attitude which saw institutional boundaries and capacities as less important than the resolution of shortterm policy issues. While this judgement may have been correct in principle, in practice it both alienated many who worked in those structures and was a positive statement of the lower priority placed on organisational norms and institutional structures. This reinforced the same teleological message that had applied earlier – that formal bureaucratic procedures and structures were less important than the achievement of policy goals. This sort of insensitivity to the integrity and coherence of the component parts of the power structure can only have undermined the development of organisational norms. The second aspect of Khrushchev’s modus operandi was that, after reducing the sense of threat to lower-level officials by reining in the security apparatus, he reintroduced that threat in other ways. The principal means of doing this was through the exercise of an intrusive personnel policy. Under Khrushchev the powers of appointment and dismissal were used actively both to punish opponents and reward supporters, and more generally to shuffle regional party leaders around. Levels of turnover were high.11 The problem for regional leaders was that such moves were not always related to performance, with the result that they were unable to defend themselves from this by performing well at their jobs. A similar problem applied to Khrushchev’s measures limiting the tenure of party officers introduced in 1961. To many of them, the personnel moves appeared arbitrary, and therefore were impossible to take rational action against. This personnel pressure was also reflected in Khrushchev’s frequent criticism of the performance of lower-level officials. At times he was unrestrained in his criticism of the way in which they sought to deceive the centre, were dishonest, were tolerant of shortcomings and failures, and were guilty of localism.12 The sense of threat was also revived by Khrushchev’s emphasis upon popular participation in the political process, a form of involvement which was explicitly associated with keeping a check on abuses by officials. By emphasising the role the general populace could play in such bodies as the soviets and trade unions, and even in the party, Khrushchev exposed officials to popular scrutiny and denied them a special role in the regime’s decision-making. The possibility of coming under popular criticism increased the complexity of their lives and raised levels of uncertainty. While the threat to local officials may not have been of the same severity as it had been under Stalin, it was nevertheless real.


Khrushchev thus undercut the pressure for a strengthening of organisational norms. Through his modus operandi he provided a perfect model of the leader who was willing to ignore and override institutional provisions that were inconvenient. His personal style ensured that the primacy of the personalist principle over organisational norms was maintained. This was reinforced by the effect of his sponsorship of a mounting threat against officials. Under such circumstances, there was little officials could do to defend themselves except confirm the salience of family group control. While their local cliques could not prevent the centre from making personnel changes at the local level, they could at least continue to help to cover up poor performance (as the famous case of Ryazan in 1959 showed13) and hopefully to control the activity of those mobilised to participate in the political organs. As under Stalin, the threat from without encouraged family group activity, and thereby strengthened the salience of the personalist principle in the structuring of political life below the national level. Thus despite the improvements in technology and communications that occurred during Khrushchev’s rule and the lack of the sort of mass disruptions that had characterised the 1930s, the process of the strengthening of infrastructural power through the development of organisational norms was undercut both by the reaffirmation of the personalist principle by Khrushchev and the strengthening of defensive family groups at lower levels. In the period following Khrushchev’s ousting, under Leonid Brezhnev, and in part in response to the personalist role of Khrushchev, formal organisational norms appeared to be strengthened. There were three major elements in this development. First, the greater regularity with which official bodies met. Under Brezhnev, the official timetables governing meetings for political bodies were on the whole adhered to. This regularity and predictability engendered a greater sense of stability and of routine functioning in the political structure, and thereby created a perfect situation within which organisational norms could develop a real normative quality. If the system is functioning in a regular fashion, without the disruption caused by the independent activity of individual political figures, it is easier for its organisational principles to settle into a constant pattern and thereby to become more widely accepted as the norm. Second, the reaffirmation of the principle of collective leadership, in both rhetoric and reality. Like the post-Stalin leadership, that of Brezhnev openly affirmed its commitment to collectivism and opposition to the primacy of a single leader, but unlike its forebear, the post-Khrushchev elite took some concrete steps to try to prevent one of its number from becoming dominant over the others.14 Although these measures had some early success, it is clear that by the mid-1970s Brezhnev had been able to raise himself above his colleagues into a position of primacy. But he never became the dominant, and domineering, leader that Stalin or Khrushchev had been. This was in part due to the consensual decision-making style that the oligarchy adopted.

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Emphasis was placed upon the achievement of consensus on issues, not only among the members of the immediate political elite, but among all major interests in the society involved in the particular area of policy.15 This approach, which involved seeking views of interested parties before a decision was made,16 inevitably led to a system of brokering and compromise, which was inconsistent with the style of operation of a dominant leader. So although Brezhnev was the most powerful individual in a leadership position, the style of leadership remained consensual rather than personalist. This should have reinforced the importance of the formal organisations of the regime, as the right of collective organs to make decisions was not usurped, and should thereby have strengthened institutional coherence and integrity at the expense of personality politics. Third, regularisation of the personnel system. The implementation of a policy of ‘stability of cadres’ constituted a commitment to move away from the sort of arbitrariness that was evident in the personnel policy of Khrushchev. In practice, stability of cadres meant that the centre would operate a non-intrusive personnel policy, and effectively guaranteed officials prolonged (in many cases even lifetime) tenure of their posts, almost regardless of performance. By removing the Khrushchevian arbitrariness, this policy created the conditions within which an increasingly routinised and regulated personnel system could develop. The regulating of personnel matters in this way, or at least the operation of a less intrusive personnel policy, also removed the sense of threat lower level officials had experienced under Khrushchev. As a result of these policies, the regulating of bureaucratic functioning and the stability of personnel, favourable conditions were created for the growth and strengthening of organisational norms. The longer these policies lasted, the stronger the pressures for the strengthening of organisational norms should have been. However, in practice, the growth of such pressures was counteracted by the further entrenchment of the personalist principle below the national level. The operation of a non-intrusive personnel policy and the effect of the policy of ‘trust in cadres’ (which was the underpinning of ‘stability of cadres’) was to leave lower-level officials substantially free to run their regions as they wished. Without the fear of arbitrary removal or the consequences of poor performance, local officials were able to structure their political lives with comparative freedom. For many, the easiest and most effective way of doing this was continued reliance upon family group control of local political machines. This was often not an individual decision by local party leaders, but a simple acceptance of the culture of political life at this level; this is how it had functioned in the past and, without a concerted effort to prevent it, it would continue in the future. The effects of the earlier development of this pattern of functioning were evident in its consolidation in the absence of any attempt to check its advance from the centre.17


As family group control at lower levels was consolidated as the Brezhnev period wore on, the capacity of the centre to steer the political apparatus was reduced. A non-intrusive personnel policy and a consensual decisionmaking style in which all interests were accommodated left the centre with little capacity to give decisive instructions and ensure that they were obeyed. As a result, the major means left to the Brezhnev centre for guiding events at lower levels was to appeal to the self-interest of lower-level officials. At the rhetorical level, the discussions of ‘developed socialism’ and improved standards of living were part of this. But more importantly, the growth of corruption, and of high standards and styles of living on the part of officials, and official tolerance of this, represents the centre’s recognition that it could do little to combat the reality of personalised power throughout the major organs of the system. In this sense, although there may have been a strengthening of organisational norms at the official level, at the practical level the effect of these was often undercut by the continuing primacy of personalism, and now it was a personalism tainted with corruption.

10.3 The collapse of the power structure? The centre’s inability to exercise effective leadership and control over the Soviet power structure and the weakness of infrastructural power had become crucial by the mid-1980s because of the economic crisis that Soviet society experienced. It may be that a politico-administrative structure that had merely to preside over the continuation of existing policies and processes could have afforded the lack of central capacity for direction that characterised the USSR, but when a significant change of policy was needed, such a weakness was crucial. It was clear by the mid-1980s, at least to some elements in Soviet leading circles, that if the system was to survive, important change was necessary. It also soon became clear to the reformers that part of the problem lay in the structure of power itself. As part of the general reform process of the perestroika period, Gorbachev sought to restore the capacity of the centre to steer the politicoadministrative apparatus. There were two main ways in which he sought to achieve this. First, the revival of enthusiasm for and commitment to the reform/reconstruction of the Soviet system. Initially his approach to reform was informed by his assumption that all that was required was a change in the psychology of officials. The problems of stagnation could be overcome by a heightened work ethic and a more demanding approach to their jobs on the part both of party and state officials and of the populace more generally. The demand that officials in particular become more honest about their performance and creative in the fulfilment of their tasks was premised on the assumption that the structure was basically healthy and the difficult economic situation could be overcome through the so-called ‘activation’ of the human factor. The basis of this attempt to stimulate enthusiasm and

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commitment was essentially the same as the one that had applied during the Stalin period: ideology. For Gorbachev, the aim was the revival of socialism, just as for Stalin it had been the creation of the socialist future. However, it soon became clear that the attempt to generate enthusiasm was unable to bring about the sorts of improvement in economic performance that were required. Structural change was necessary. Recognition of the need for this type of change did not mean that the generation of enthusiasm and commitment were no longer seen as necessary. Rather the emphasis now shifted principally onto the populace at large rather than officials. This shift was linked to the second way in which Gorbachev sought to restore the centre’s capacity to direct. The key aspect of this was the way in which Gorbachev promoted a sense of uncertainty among lower-level officials. Part of the way in which he did this was traditional. As Stalin had been, Gorbachev was very critical of the poor performance of many lower-level officials.18 Early in his tenure as General Secretary Gorbachev criticised the way in which many local officials were behaving, including the way in which personnel policy was based on ‘personal loyalty, servility and protectionism’.19 Over succeeding years, Gorbachev maintained his criticism of lower-level officials, with official criticism becoming increasingly sharp in late 1986 and early 1987.20 This theme was taken up in the official press and became a major feature of political life into 1988. During his first three years in office, Gorbachev explicitly attacked lower-level officials in language that was even more threatening than Khrushchev’s had been. This criticism was given teeth by the significant levels of removal of officials during this period – by mid-1988, 11 of the 14 republican first secretaries had been replaced since Gorbachev came to power, while the levels of turnover of lower-level officials was also high.21 The criticism emanating from the centre was reinforced by the effects of one of the principal elements of Gorbachev’s reformist program, glasnost. This emerged as an important theme in Soviet political life in the second half of 1986, in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Following this disaster, Gorbachev and his supporters encouraged the press to become more open and critical, even of officials who did not perform satisfactorily. Indeed, glasnost was initially seen, in part, as a means of keeping a check on lowerlevel performance. As the general programme of change became increasingly radical, the levels and range of criticism in the media rose, bringing even greater pressure to bear on officials. This pressure took an institutional form with the policy of democratisation. This policy, although blunted in its initial stages by opposition at all levels of the structure, constituted a potent and direct threat to the continued dominance of their affairs by local officials. By making them subject to competitive election and by abolishing the nomenklatura,22 democratisation sought to rework the way in which the organisational principles of the system functioned, and to remove the basis


upon which the local power of individual officials rested. This was the most potent attack on the personalist principle that had been seen during Soviet times. It was also a powerful attempt to strengthen the authority of organisational norms, albeit norms which were being conceived differently from how they had been understood prior to Gorbachev.23 The effect of this was reinforced by the changes to the state structure introduced at the XIXth Conference in mid-1988 which established an alternative structure of power to the party-state apparatus which had dominated since 1917. This new structure of popularly elected soviets threatened the basis of personalist power. The creation of an executive presidency, and the associated decline in importance of the Politburo in the last years of Soviet power, was a clear reflection of the potential for sidelining Gorbachev’s changes involved for the traditional Soviet power structure. If this attack had been pressed to its conclusion, it would have completely recast the power structure within the Soviet system. It would have eliminated the personalist principle, at least in the form in which it had hitherto functioned, and would have changed fundamentally the way that the organisational norms whereby that structure actually operated functioned. It could also have strengthened the infrastructural power of the regime by linking all parts of that structure more effectively with the centre. However, those changes were not allowed to run their course. Those forces which had been unleashed by the radicalisation of glasnost and the reforms to the political structure, principally nationalist movements and republican state elites but also a variety of civil society organisations, escaped control and drove the agenda in an increasingly radical direction. Conservative opponents of reform became alarmed at this, with a section ultimately resorting to a coup attempt to prevent the realisation of their worst fears. Faced with these threats, the power structure collapsed. The organisational norms embedded in it were insufficiently robust to be able either to accommodate the changes required or to maintain central control over the emergent independent political forces, while the personalist principle was the direct antithesis of the aims of the reform program. As a result, neither of these two aspects of the traditional Soviet power structure could sustain the reform programme. Divided in this way, the official structure was unable to withstand the pressure, and collapsed. However, the collapse of that structure does not mean that all aspects of it disappeared. Although the personalist principle was embedded in it, that principle, resting as it did upon the imperatives arising from the demands of local administration and the uncertainty stemming from above, remained relevant in the eyes of many officials in the early days of the post-Soviet period. So although the formal structure may have collapsed, in many parts of Russia and the former union, the personalist principle continued to structure local political affairs.

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The essential dualism in the tension between organisational norms and the personalist principle has been an important feature of the Soviet power structure from the time that structure reached its developed form at the end of the 1930s. That dualism, while kept in check under Stalin through his personal dominance, the terror and popular enthusiasm, imposed a severe constraint upon the capacity of the system to stabilise itself once those factors disappeared. This instability was obscured throughout the long Brezhnev period by the lassitude of the regime and its refusal to take seriously the problems that were accumulating. By the time Gorbachev came to power, the accumulated policy problems increased the difficulties created by this tension. Radical reform was needed, involving the strengthening of infrastructural power (and the transformation of its institutional channels) at the expense of the personalist principle. However, this could not be achieved because, in part, of the continuing strength of personalism within the structure as a whole. The result was that central power disintegrated, and with it the Soviet Union.

Notes *A version of this chapter was presented as a paper at the Mechanisms of Power in the Soviet Union Conference, Copenhagen, 29 April–1 May 1998, and is to appear in the conference proceedings. 1. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Abacus, 1994). 2. Michael Mann, ‘The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results’, in John A. Hall, ed., States in History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 113. For a more extended discussion than that to be found here, see Graeme Gill and Roderic Pitty, Power in the Party: the Organization of Power and Central– Republican Relations in the CPSU (London: Macmillan, 1997), ch. 1. 3. This has been recounted and analysed in many places. For my interpretation, which underpins much of the first part of this chapter, see Graeme Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 4. T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR 1917–1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 52. The actual flow of members into the party was much greater than these figures suggest due to the loss of party members as a result of successive campaigns in the mid-1930s and the terror later in that decade. The increase in membership over the decade thus hid a pattern of growth which saw membership rise to a peak in 1933, decline until 1938, and then rise again into the 1940s. 5. XVII s≤ezd vsesoyuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b) 26 yanvarya–10 fevralya 1934g. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1934), p. 555; XVIII s≤ezd vsesoyuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b) 10–21 marta 1939g. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1939), p. 29.

234 The Post-Stalin Period 6. For frequent reports, and criticism, of this, see the issues of Partiinoe stroitel¢stvo during the 1930s. 7. For discussions of this, see Gill, Origins. 8. For the original explanation of these terms, see Robert V. Daniels, ‘Stalin’s Rise to Dictatorship, 1922–29’, in Alexander Dallin and Alan F. Westin, eds, Politics in the Soviet Union: 7 Cases (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1966), pp. 1–38. 9. For example, see the continuing central complaints about the inadequacy of the lower-level implementation of central decisions in Partiinoe stroitel¢stvo during the 1930s. 10. For studies on this prior to the opening of the archives, see Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, Knowledge and Power: the Role of Stalin’s Secret Chancellery in the Soviet System of Government (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1978), and N. E. Rosenfeldt, Stalin’s Secret Departments: a Comparative Analysis of Key Sources (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 1989). For one early reminiscence of life working for Stalin, see Boris Bazhanov, Vospominaniya byvshego sekretarya Stalina (France: Tret¢yaya volna, 1980). 11. For some comparative figures with the Brezhnev era, see Gill and Pitty, Power in the Party, p. 126. 12. For a discussion of this, see ibid., pp. 102–14. 13. Although ultimately, of course, this was uncovered. On Ryazan see Pravda, 7 January, 13 and 14 February, 2 July 1959. 14. For a contemporary discussion of these measures, which included the separation of the offices of party leader and prime minister, the balancing of appointments, and the restrictions on the opportunity to use patronage (‘stability of cadres’ – see below), see T. H. Rigby, ‘The Soviet Leadership: Towards a Self-Stabilizing Oligarchy?’, Soviet Studies, XXII, no. 2 (October 1970) 167–91. 15. This is the basis for one scholar’s description of the Brezhnev regime as corporatist. See Valerie Bunce, ‘The Political Economy of the Brezhnev Era: the Rise and Fall of Corporatism’, British Journal of Political Science, 13, no. 2 (1983) 129–58. On the decision-making style, see Erik Hoffman, ‘Changing Soviet Perspectives on Leadership and Administration’, in Stephen F. Cohen, Alexander Rabinowitch and Robert Sharlet, eds, The Soviet Union Since Stalin (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 71–92. 16. Although there were exceptions to this, such as the invasion of Afghanistan. 17. For a view that the party had broken into regional fiefdoms over which the centre could exercise little control, see Yu. Davydov, ‘Totalitarizm i totalitarnaya byurokratiya’, Nauka i zhizn¢, no. 8 (1989) 44–51. 18. In this he was picking up where Andropov had left off. See Gill and Pitty, Power in the Party, pp. 127–9. 19. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘O sovyve ocherednogo XXVII s≤ezda KPCC i zadachakh, svyazannykh s ego podgotovkoi i provedeniem’, Pravda, 24 April 1985. 20. Gorbachev’s speech to the January 1987 Central Committee plenum was particularly important in this regard. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘O perestroike i kadrovoi politike’, Pravda, 28 January 1987. See also Gill and Pitty, Power in the Party, pp. 129–32. 21. For some figures, see ibid., p. 132. 22. On the abolition of the nomenklatura, see Pravda, 15 October 1989, and Izvestiya TsK KPSS, no. 11 (1989) 4. 23. Put simplistically, this was an attempt to promote the democratic over the centralist principle in the party’s formal organisational principle.

Name Index

Abramkin, V. 188, 201n Adams, Bruce 28, 30, 39, 42, 44, 51n, 52n, 53n Adelman, Kenneth 200n Agranov, Yakov Saulovich 95, 98, 103, 123 Aksenov, Vasilii 190 Akulov, Ivan Alekseevich 123, 127–8, 142n, 143n, 144n, 145n, 146n Aleksandr I, Tsar 214n, 215n Alexeyeva, Liudmila 174, 177, 199n Al-Istakhri 11 al-Mas¢udi 11 Amal¢rik, Andrei 182, 200n Anan¢ev, Anatolii 197 Andreyeva, Nina 194, 201n Andronov, Iona 194, 201n, 202n Andropov, Yu. 234n Artamonov, M. I. 7, 11, 22n, 23n, 24n Artuzov, Artur 123, 142n Attila 11 Avdeenko, A. O. 111n Averbakh, Leopol¢d 97, 98 Avtorkhanov, Abdurakhman 203, 213n, 214n Babel 98, 110n Babichenko, D. L. 111n Baddeley, John F. 214n Baier, Victor 153 Bailes, Kendall 55, 63n Baluevskii, Yurii 211, 213n, 214n, 215n, 216n Balzer, Harley 56, 63n Barsukov, Mikhail 208 Bartol¢d, V. V. 24n Baturin, Yu. 195–6, 202n Bauman, Karl 100 Bazhanov, Boris 234n Bel¢skii, Lev Nikolaevich 123, 129, 142n Benvenuti, F. 143n, 144n Berelovich, A. 115n

Berai, L. P. 99, 140n, 225 Bibiksarov, Aleksandr 167 Bogatyrev, Konstantin 182 Bogdanov, Sasha 192, 201n Bogaroz, L. 178–9, 193 Bondarev, Yurii 191 Bonner, Elena 110n, 197, 202n Bouis, Antonina W. 109n, 110n Bradley, Joseph 63n Brezhnev, Leonid xix, 95, 174, 180, 190, 228–30, 234n Brown, A. 174, 199n Budanov, Colonel Yuri 212 Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich 92, 94, 95, 102, 104, 116, 123, 141n, 175 Bukovskii, V. 173, 177, 184–6, 190, 198n, 199n, 200n Bulatov, D. A. 123, 142n Bulgakov, Mikhail 95, 101 Carstensen, Fred 56, 63n Catherine II, Tsarina 29 Chalidze, V. 179–80, 200n Chekhov, Anton 51n, 52n Chesnov, Jan 213n Chizhevskii, Professor A. L. 97 Christian, D. xvii, xviii Chudov, M. S. 99 Chukovskii, Kornei 96, 109n Clark, Katerina 96, 109n, 111n Cohen, Stephen F. 234n Conquest, Robert xxn, 42, 69, 90n, 140n, 147–8, 168n, 170n Coogan, Kevin 194, 202n Cooper, J. M. 89n, 140n, 168n Curtin, P. 24 Dallin, Aleksandr 234n Daniel¢, Y. 176–7, 186 Danilov, V. P. xvi, 89n, 115n Davies, R. W. xvii, 72, 89n, 90n, 140n, 141n, 168n, 169n Davies, S. 169n Denisov, Vladimir 214n, 215n 235

236 Name Index Dolukhanov, Pavel Markovich 23n, 25n Dorenko, Sergei 210 Dostoevsky, F. 51n Drobizhev, V. Z. 108n Dugan, A. N. 143n Dunbenchuk, Efim Evmenovich 160–1 Dunlap, Thomas J. 23n, 25n Dunlop, D. M. 23n, 24n Dyakin, V. S. 56, 63n Edwards, P. 25n Eikhe 126, 128, 134, 135 Elagin, Yurii 103, 108n, 109n, 110n, 111n Elizabeta Petrovna, Tsarina 29, 52n Elkner, J. xviii Ellis, Stephen Charles 56, 63n Entin, V. 196 Enuikidze, Avel¢ 99, 103, 105, 111n, 144n Ermanskii, O. A. 98, 109n Evans, R. J. 30n, 114n, 140n Evdokimov, E. G. 122–3, 129, 141n, 144n Ezhov, Nikolai I. 95, 98, 99, 105, 111n, 117, 126, 129, 136, 140n, 145n, 154, 156, 160 Fadeev, A. V. 99, 214n Fainsod, Merle 143n Fanon, Frantz 203, 213n Fedorov, Lt General 61, 64n, 65n Fedotov, M. 196, 202n Fitzpatrick, Sheila xviii, xixn, 108n, 110n, 168n, 170n Fock, V. A. 99 Ford, Henry 55, 64n Foucault, Michel 51n Frank, Stephen 40, 53–4n Franklin, Simon 18, 22n, 23n, 24n, 25n, 26n Furman, D. E. 213n, 214n, 216n Gabai, Galina 178 Gabai, Ilya 179, 199n Gadzhiev, V. G. 214n Gatrell, Peter 53n, 55, 63n, 64n, 65n Gefter, Mikhail 188 Gellner, Ernest 108n

Gerasimov, Aleksandr 98, 102 Gerasimov, Sergei 98 Germonius, General 57, 60–1, 64n Gernet, M. N. 28, 40n, 51n, 52n Getty, Arch. J. xxn, 111n, 139n, 141n, 145n, 168n, 169n Gill, Graeme xix, 107n, 108n, 233n, 234n Ginzburg, A. 183, 186–7, 202n Ginzburg, E. 169n Godin, W. 140n Goehrke, Carsten 23n, 24n, 25n Golden, Peter B. 23n, 24n, 25n Goncharov, A. 209, 214n, 215n Gorbachev, M. S. 148–9, 173–6, 180, 182, 185, 189, 191–2, 194–7, 199n Gorbanevskaya, N. 183, 199n Gorbunov, Nikolai 100 Gorky, Maxim 96, 98–101, 103–4, 109n Grabar¢, Igor¢ 98 Green, Donald Webb 56, 63n Griboedov, A. S. 205, 213n Grigorenko, General Petr 178, 179, 182, 184, 185, 200n Grigorenko, Zinaida 184 Grigoryants, Sergei 191–4, 197 Grigoryants, Tamara 201n Gronskii, Ivan 99, 104, 106, 110n, 111n Grossman, Vasilii 197 Gruev, Colonel S. 61, 64n, 65n Gumilev, L. N. 22, 23n, 26n Haimson, Leopold H. 63n Hall, Anthony 108n Harasymiw, Bohdan 108n Haslam, Colin 63n Helgi/Oleg, ruler of Rus¢ 20 Heraclius 9 Hobsbawm, Eric 233n Hogan, Heather 55, 63n Holquist, P. 53–4n Horvath, R. xvii Hounsell, David A. 62n, 64n Howard, John 27, 51n Hudud al¢Alam 10, 24n Ibn Khurdadhbih 17, 24n Ibn Rusta 3, 11, 14, 18, 32n

Name Index 237 Igor¢, ruler of Rus¢ 20 Ilicˇ, Melanie xviii Ivnitskii, N. 70, 89n, 90n Jenkins, R. J. H. 26n Jones, Gwyn 22n, 26n Josephson, Paul 110n Joyce, C. 168n Kaganovich, L. 81, 85n, 88, 95, 128, 144n Kalinin, Mikhail 95, 103 Kamenev, L. B. 95 Kaminskii, G. N. 144n, 145n Kapitsa, Petr 98–100, 109n, 110n Karpinskii, Len 190 Karpov, B. 213n Karpov, Colonel 204–5 Kennan, George 39, 44, 51n Khlevnyuk, Oleg xvi, 137, 140n, 141n, 145n, 149, 166, 168n, 169n, 170n Khodasevich, Valentina 109n Khrabrov, General Nicholas 60–1, 64n, 65n Khrushchev, N. S. xix, 69–70, 84, 95, 102, 110n, 136, 147, 177, 184, 226–9, 231 Kirov, Sergei M. 95, 96, 124, 126, 170n Koestler, Arthur 7, 23n Kondrashin, V. V. 82, 91n Kotkin, Stephen xxn, 146n Kovalev, I. 187–8 Kovalev, Sergei A. 175, 187, 189, 193, 197–8, 202n, 211, 213n Kovalevskii, A. P. 23n, 24n, 25n, 26n Kropotkin, Petr 51n Kruglov, Sergei Nikiforovich 140n, 143nn Krupskaya, Nadezhda 95, 144n, 145n Kryuchkov, Vladimir 189, 198, 201n, 202n Kuibyshev, V. V. 85n, 101, 122, 141n Kulikov, General Anatoli 204, 211 Kuperta, Yu. K. 121 Lahusen, Thomas 110n Lampert, Nicholas 55, 63n, 168n Lanschikov, A. 214n Laqueur, W. 174, 199n Larina, Anna 111n, 141–2n

Ledeneva, Alena 106, 107n, 108n, 111n Lenin, V. I. 96, 174–6, 180, 195, 197–9n, 203 Levitin-Krasnov, A. E. 199n Lieu, S. N. C. 24n Litvinenko, O. 140n Litvinov, P. 178–9, 183, 186, 199n, 200n Louis the Pious 3 Luk¢yanov, Anatolii 197 Lunacharskii, Anatoli 96, 108n Lysenko, T. D. 98 Lyubimov, Yurii 190 Makarenko, Anton 96 Maksimov, A. A. 98 Malenkov, G. M. 95, 110n Malyarov, Dep. General Prosecutor 181, 200n Mandelstam, O. 92, 104 Mandelstam, Nadezhda 93–4, 104, 107n, 108n, 111n Manikovskii, General 59–61, 62, 64n Manning, Roberta T. 116, 126, 139n, 138n, 145n, 168n Marchenko, A, 183, 200n Margolis, A. D. 31n, 52n Markwick, Roger 201n Marx, Karl 196 Masudi 18, 24n, 26n Medvedev, R. 145n, 180, 187, 201n Menzhinskii, V. R. 122–3, 141n Messing, Stanislav Adamovich 123, 142n Meyerhold, Vsevolod 98, 100, 111n Mezhlauk, Valerii 98–100 Mikoyan, A. I. 95, 99, 110n Minorsky, V. 24n Molotov, Vyacheslav M. 81, 85n, 88, 94–5, 97–100, 102–4, 109n, 110n, 127, 144n Montgomery, David 58, 63n, 64n Moshkov, Yu. A. 90n Narochnitskii, A. L. 213–14n, 216n Nekrasov, Colonel 65n Nezhinskii, Ignatii Petrovich 153 Nicholas I, Tsar 209 Nicholas II, Tsar 34, 36

238 Name Index Nolan, Mary 63n Noonan, T. S. 22n, 24n Obolenski, V. V. 32, 32n see also Osinskii, N. N. Oleinikov. Dmitri 215, 216 Ordzhonikidze, G. K. 95–6, 98–9, 101, 104, 122–3, 141n Orlov, Yuri 180, 185, 189–90, 200n Orlovsky, Daniel 94, 108n Osinskii, N. N. 71, 141n see also Obolenski, V. V. Overy, Richard 56 Palsson, H. 25n Papchinskii, A. 141n, 144n Pavlov, Colonel 127, 140n Pavlovskii, A. 189 Perrie, M. 140n, 168n Peter the Great 29, 52n Petrov, N. V. xvi, 142n, 144n, 169n, 170n Pil¢nyak, Boris 98, 99, 110n, 111n Pipes, R. xixn, xxn, 42–4, 54n Pitty, Roderic 233n, 234n Pletneva, S. A. 22, 23n, 24n, 25n Podolskii, Jakov 146n Podosenov, O. P. 52n Pogrebinskii, Matvei 96 Popov, A. D. 103 Pritsak, Omeljan 19, 24n, 26n Prokhanov, Aleksandr 174, 216n Pronin, Aleksandr Colonel 209, 213, 215n Pushkin, Alexander 209, 212 Putin, Vladimir 212 Rabinowitch, Alexander 234n Raikh, Zinaida 99 Ransel, David 92, 108n Rawson, Don 28, 30n, 40n, 51n, 114n Rees, E. A. 140n, 168n Reese, R. R. 168n Rigby, T. H. 107n, 108n, 169n, 170n, 233n, 234n Rittersporn, G. T. xxn, 139n, 168n Rogger, Hans 62n, 63n Roginskii, A. B. 169n, 170n Romanov, Petr V. 215n, 216n

Rudzutak, Y. E. 122 Rusanovskii, Anatolii 193 Ruslanov, L. P. 103 Rykov, A. I. 99, 141n Sakharov, A. 133, 174–5, 180–2, 185, 189, 191, 195–6, 200n, 202 Samosudov, V. M. 133 Sapozhnikov, General 57, 59–60, 64n Sats, Natal¢ya 93, 100–1, 103, 108n, 110n, 111n Schapiro, L. 169n Scott, James C. 108n Sellin, Thorsten 51n, 52n Shafran, Mark 99 Shaiakhmetov, Zhumbai 103 Shamanov, General Vladimir 212 Shatrov, Mikhail 190 Shaw, A. G. L. 30n, 114n Shcherbakov, Aleksandr 100, 101 Shentalinskii, Vitalii 108n, 109n, 110n Shepard, Jonathan 17, 18, 22n, 23n, 24n, 25n, 26n Shevardnadze, E. 197 Shishkin, Anatolii 216n Sholokov, Mikhail 84, 110n Shostakovich, Dmitrii 98, 102, 107, 109n, 110n Sidorenko, Nikolai 97 Siegelbaum, Lewis 107n, 168n Sinyavsky, A. 174, 176–7, 186, 191, 197, 198, 199n Skorkin, K. V. 142n, 144n Skvortsov-Stepanov, Ivan 99 Slezkine, Yuri 107n, 108n, 111n Solzhenitsyn, A. 42, 44, 174, 179, 183, 187, 199n, 201n Stalin, J. xix, 69, 74, 79–82, 84, 85n, 88, 95–6, 98–101, 104, 110n, 111n, 112, 116, 122–3, 126–8, 135–6, 138–9, 140n, 141n, 143n, 144n, 145n, 148, 167, 170n, 175, 177, 183, 215n, 218–19, 221, 225–8, 231, 233, 234n Starikov, Victor 211, 215n, 216n Starkov, B. 144–5n, 168n Starkov, Vladislav 196 Stolypin, P. 39 Suny, R. G. 53–4n, 168n

Name Index 239 Tarnovskii, E. 33, 52–3n Taylor, Frederick Winslow 55 Theophilus, Emperor 3–4 Thurston, R. W. 137, 168n Timofeyev, Lev 193–4, 201n Tolstoi, Aleksei 101 Tolz, Vera 199n, 202n Tret¢yakov, Vitalii 198 Trotsky, L. D. 95, 98, 111n, 117 Tukhachevskii, Marshal 98, 102, 105, 135, 139, 144n Tumshis, M. 141n, 144n Turchin, V. 180 Tverdokhlebov, A. 180

Vyshinskii, Andrei 9

Ul¢yanov, Mikhail 190 Umnov, V. 213n

Yagoda, Genrikh G. 95, 98, 104, 122–3, 127, 141n Yakovlev, Aleksandr 198 Yakovlev, Yegor 190–1, 201n Yeltsin, Boris 176, 216n Yermashev, Major 209 Yesenin-Volpin, A. 177–9, 185–6, 199n Yudin, P. F. 98

Vaksberg, Arkady 108n, 110n, 111n Vanden Heuvel, Katrina 194, 202n Vavilov, S. I. 94, 99 Velikanova, T. 189 Vernadsky, G. V. 22n, 26n Vertinskii, Aleksandr 102 Vigdorova, Frida 183 Vinius, Andrei 29, 52n Viola, Lynne 117, 140n Vladimir, ruler of Rus¢ 22 Vladimov, G. 187–8 Volkoganov, D. A. 126–7, 143n Voronskii, A. K. 98 Vorontsov, A. 215n Voroshilov, Klim E. 95–6, 99, 102–4, 122 Voznesenskaya, J. 173, 198n

95, 99, 102, 127–

Waterbury, John 108n Weissman, N. 40, 53n Westin, Alan F. 234n Wheatcroft, Stephen G. xvii, xviii, xxn, 53n, 70, 72, 77, 89n, 90n, 139n, 141n, 168n Williams, John 63n Williams, Karel 63n Williamson, Jeffrey G. 62n Wolff, Larry 51n Wolfram, Herwig 23n

Zaliubovskii, General 60, 64n, 65n Zavadovskii, B. M. 97 Zelenin, I. 70–1, 90n Zemskov, V. N. 139n, 168n Zharov, A. 97 Zhdanov, Andrei A. 99, 109n, 144n Zinoviev, G. E. 111n Zuckerman, C. 11, 22n, 23n, 24n, 26n Zuckerman, Frederick R. xvii Zyuganov, G. 198, 202n

Subject Index

agitation 163 Americanism 55, 57, 62, 62n anti-Semitism 7, 22, 154 bandits 208 BBC 184 Belomor 96 blat 92–3, 102, 106, 108n Bolshevik regime 175–6 Bolsheviks 221 Bulletin V 191–2 byt 94 Census, All-Union, 1939 150–1, 155, 157, 168n, 169n Central Committee 148 Central Control Commission 224 Chechen people 203–13 Chechen people, deportation of 210 Chechnya xix, 203–13 Cheka 44 see also OGPU and NKVD Chernobyl 231 Chief Prison Administration 32, 34, 54n cholera 36 Chronicle of Current Events 183–5, 191 civil war 44, 96, 112–14 Cold War 148 collective leadership 226, 228 collectivisation 44, 113 Committee on Human Rights 180 Communist Party 148, 151–3, 156, 167, 170n, 219 correctional system 34 Criminal Code 150, 163, 166–7 Criminal Procedure Code 177, 181, 191 cropping systems 73–5, 88 cultural patronage xviii Decembrist movement 206 Dekulakisation 73, 113, 117 Democratic Union 195

deportation 210 détente 181 Deutsche Welle 184 dissidents xviii, 173–4, 179, 182, 185, 187, 189–90, 193, 195–6 Doctors’ Plot 225 exile 27–8, 36, 46, 48–9, 112 extrajudicial executions 113, 124, 129, 211 Eymund’s Saga 16, 25n Ezhovshchina xviii, 44, 115, 129–38, 139n see also purges, repression, mass killings, the Great Terror famine 36, 69, 83, 86–7, 113 1931–33 xviii fifth column 149, 152, 167 First World War 44, 56 Five-Year Plan 73 Germans 149, 154 glasnost xviii, 173–96, 198, 231–2 grain collections 78–80, 82, 87–8 grain balance 71–2, 72, 74, 76, 82, 88 Great Terror 147–8, 150, 152, 157, 163, 167 see also Ezhovshchina and mass killings GULag 39, 85, 137, 183, 185 Helsinki Accords 191 Helsinki Final Act 181 human rights movement 182–3, 191 Human Rights Seminar 193 Initiative Group on Human Rights International Harvester 56 Interregional Group 175, 195 Jackson Amendment Jews 154 240

181

186

Subject Index 241 Kaghanate of Rus¢ 3–4, 14–19 katorga 29–30, 32–6, 41, 45, 50 KGB 186, 194–5, 201n Khazar Empire 8–12 Komsomol 96 kulaks 156–7, 167 labour camps 112, 126 Law on the Press and Other Mass Media 196–7 Leningrad Affair 225 livestock 73, 75, 79 local administration 222 Main Artillery Administration (GAU) 57, 59–60 mass killings 112–13, 118–21, 123–4, 137–8, 139n see also Ezhovshchina, mass repression and the Great Terror mass repression xviii, 147–9, 151, 157, 163, 166, 170n Memorial 149, 175, 189, 195–6 Ministry of Justice 32, 52, 53n Moscow Helsinki Group 185–7 Moslems 207 Murmansk railway 42 national minorities 149, 154, 167 nationalism xviii Nazi Germany 114 neo-NEP 78 NEP 221 New England Westinghouse 58, 61, 64n New Remington Company 61 new samizdat 192 NKVD 95–6, 98, 105, 111n, 128–9, 135–9, 140n, 149 see also Cheka and OGPU nomenklatura 218, 220 Novaya Gazeta 212 Ogonek 203 OGPU 82, 85–6, 116–28 see also Cheka and NKVD organisational norms 225–6, 228–9, 232–3 Orgburo 218–20, 224 Otis Elevator 56

party membership 220 patronage 92–7, 104, 106–7, 107n, 111n, 234n patrons 97–106, 108n, 111n peasant migrations 6–8 penal mortality 36–9, 41–2, 50 penal reform 28 penal system xvii penal systems Russian 27 Western 27, 29, 31, 43 perestroika 173–4, 176, 188–90, 194–5, 197, 217, 230 personalist principle xix, 223–4, 226–7, 229, 232–3 plant diseases 75, 88 podpisanty 186–7 Poiski 188–9 Poland 38, 42, 50 Poles 149, 154, 170n Politburo 95, 103, 106, 218–20 political prisoners 185 politico-administrative structure 218, 219–20, 223–4, 230 Pravozashchitnik 177 Primary Chronicle 8–9, 17–18, 21 prisoners of conscience 181 propaganda 163, 175–6, 190 Provisional Government 61–2 punishments capital 27, 30, 39–40, 113–16, 125 corporal 27–8, 30, 35 extrajudicial 30, 32 purges 94, 96–7, 104–5, 147–50, 154, 157, 163, 166 radio broadcasts 183–4 Remington Arms Company 58–61, 65n repression 112, 122 revisionist school 148 revolution 1905 34–5, 39, 42–3, 54n, 113, 115 Bolshevik 62, 179 February 61, 175 October 56, 151 Russian xixn Rossiskie vesti 207–8 RSFSR Writers’ Union 179, 191

242 Subject Index Russian Artillery Commission 57, 64n, 65n Russian scholars xvi Russian Supply Committee 57, 60, 63n, 64n Russian technical intelligentsia 55 Russian technology xvii Russo-Japanese War 39 Russophobia 197 Sakhalin Island 31–2, 34, 39, 51n, 52n Samashki 211 samizdat 95, 179, 183, 185–6 Second World War 112 Secretariat 218–20, 224 semeistva 94, 104, 108 show trials 112, 148 Singer Sewing Machine 56–8, 64n Social Democrats 153 socialist democracy 176 Soviet Communism xvi Soviet elite 92 Soviet regime 179 collapse 217, 225 Soviet society 148, 174 Sovietology 173 Sovnarkhozy 227 stagnation 174, 230 Stalinism xxn, 178, 217

technology 56 terror 218, 225, 233n totalitarianism 148 traction power 73, 75–6, 88 trade expansion 12–13 transportation 27, 36, 45–6, 50 troiki 117–21, 125, 134, 136–7 Ukraine 69, 74, 77, 80–3, 86 Ukrainians 154, 161 USSR Constitution 177–8, 181 Vek XX I Mir 189 Vesti iz SSSR 184 Viking traders 15–18, 19–21 Voice of America 184 Volga Bulgaria 13–14 War Communism 221 weather 73, 76–8, 88 Westinghouse Electric Company 58–61, 64n Yngvar’s Saga Zavtra 204 zemstvo 73

15, 25n

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