Past historiographical literature
has viewed the 1930s Stalinist state as an all-powerful entity capable of mass
arrests and deportations. Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the
opening of the Russian archives, historians began portraying a different image
of the country. Central to this new focus was the statistical evidence of
Soviet failed state enterprises and records of committee discussions. From the
data three revisionist historians, Lynne Viola, David L. Hoffman, and J. Arch
Getty each explain the organizational failures of the Stalinist state. Viola
discusses the poorly managed kulak special settlement. Hoffman places emphasis
on the changing nature of gender relations. Getty illustrates a fearful Bolshevik
party with a complex web of political interactions. James C. Scott, a political
scientist, takes a different approach and studies the issue as one of state
authority. The overall evidence proves that the Soviet state of the Stalinist
1930s was a disorganized and paranoid weak state.
In
The Unknown Gulag, Lynne Viola illustrates the Stalinist
state’s ineffective bureaucracy to emphasize the its weakness. She first
focuses on the chaos of dekulakization. Dekulakization was meant to be a fatal
blow against counterrevolutionary forces impeding collectivization. However,
the Soviet regime was seeing kulak conspiracies where there were none. These “counterrevolutionary
forces” against collectivization were actually a wide array of peasant farmers
without conspiratorial aims.[1] The
Soviet state’s policy of removing kulaks was, in fact, more about removing troublesome
or uncooperative peasants. This viewpoint helps to explain why the Soviet grain
requisition brigades sent out to the countryside arrested many innocent
peasants. Anyone could be viewed as uncooperative if they did not comply with
orders. The power imbalance and lack of supervision encouraged pillaging and indiscriminate
arrests. Commands from up high were not reaching the local cadres. Despite
specific instructions from the Politburo not to touch poor, middle peasants and
families of Red Army soldiers, officials still arrested them.[2] Every
local official was too busy trying to please their superiors by over fulfilling
quotas. This “race for arrests” was symptomatic of the weak bureaucracy present
in rural areas.[3] The
tragic result was the incarceration of thousands of peasants.
The
next phase of dekulakization was the deportation of those arrested. Like the
earlier phase, the transport of kulaks to their exile regions was fraught with
confusion. The problem was that the Stalinist state did not have any
significant plans prepared for the detained peasants. Only at the last second
did Genrikh Iagoda of the OGPU propose to use the kulaks for slave labor in his
new project of “colonization villages.”[4] The
ad hoc nature of this proposal meant that the nothing was prepared ahead of
time to accommodate the exiled peasants. The deportees were often without the
basic provisions of sustenance for the entire train ride. So bad were the food
shortages that the OGPU “ordered regional bosses to ensure requisite food
supplies.”[5] Worse,
families were often left without an able-bodied worker. Not even the destination
of exile was adequately mapped out. The “planned” colonization settlements were
“little more than pencil points on a map, made by an official hard pressed to
find places for his kulaks.”[6]
Aside
from the catastrophe brought onto the peasants, the Stalinist state was
unquestionably inept in dekulakization. The excessive arrests place a huge
drain on manpower and transportation. Arresting the soldiers’ families put the
state at jeopardy of a military revolt. Not only were the forced labor slaves
inadequately maintained, but also partially useless without able-bodied
workers. Even the housing was not developed, resulting in further time wasted
in constructing the settlements. Viola states the most important indictment of
the dekulakization when she says, “the special settlements had proven far too
costly and unproductive.”[7] Time
and effort spent on arresting, deporting, and maintaining the special settlers
were all for naught. The losses from this colonial enterprise cost the state
more than it gained.
David
L. Hoffman’s Stalinist Values takes
the unique approach of analyzing state involvement in gender relations to prove
the its weakness. After the Bolshevik revolution the institution of marriage
was placed in state hands.[8]
The early years of Bolshevik rule saw an ease in divorce procedures. This change
was accompanied by a championing of new relationships between men and women.
Kollantai perceived the new relationship to be “a comradely heartfelt union of
two free, independent, wage earning, equal members of communist society.”[9] However,
backlash from more conservative members of the Communist Party such as Lenin
prevented the realization of Kollantai’s vision. These more conservative
members were quick to denounce sexual liberation as a form of sexual
gratification. They described sexual activity as a waste of energy that should
have been spent on “proletarian creativity and production.”[10] Why
was the state so preoccupied with controlling the private sexual activity of
its members? Excessive sexual activity became associated with moral and
political degeneration. Even masturbation was seen as “an individualistic act
that detracted from one’s collectivist spirit.”[11]
Such acts were feared to be detrimental to society and the state as a whole because
they weakened the citizenry. These fears about moral degradation revealed a
weak state incapable of adapting to solve or alleviate societal woes.
Further
evidence of being unable to deal with societal woes is evident in the state’s
treatment of the “evils of capitalism.” The Bolshevik state was so idealistic that
it believed the “evils of capitalism,” venereal disease and prostitution, would
vanish under socialism.[12] Unfortunately
for the Bolsheviks, prostitution did not disappear. In fact the poor economy
led to a rise in prostitution, an embarrassing situation for the people who
believed in the remedies of socialism. Efforts to fix these evils with
education and support groups were poorly funded just like the state’s other programs.
In the end the state decided to just arrest prostitutes and send them off to
labor camps.
On
top of the Bolshevik fear of sexual gratification was the Stalinist state’s
harebrained scheme to increase the birth rate. The desire to increase the birth
rate was not an anomaly at the time. The need for a larger population was
evident to many throughout Europe as preparations for World War II began. Stalin
understood the dangers of another war and pursued a pronatalist agenda. Strong,
permanent families were the focal point of the new social policy. Therefore,
the state revised laws to make divorce more difficult to obtain and encouraged
marriage as a benefit on behalf of the collective. Furthermore, the Soviet
state banned abortion and withdrew contraceptives in 1936 to prevent the
decrease in number of children.[13]
Of course, the entire campaign to raise the birth rate featured a flood of
propaganda celebrating motherhood and cohesive families. The carrot for mothers
to bear more children was the financial reward of annual ruble bonuses.[14] Nevertheless,
Stalinist pronatalism brought more harm than good. The state brought the triple
burden of child rearing, domestic chores, and full time work to women.[15]
To give birth to many children was not enough. State maternity care was
woefully underfunded and consumer goods were scarce in a command economy.[16] In
an effort to chase after the dreams of productivity, the Stalinist state had
forgotten the realities of women burdens. Unsurprisingly, the campaign to
increase the birth rate did not succeed in the long run.
Viola’s
The Unknown Gulag and Hoffman’s Stalinist Family Values both attribute
the failed state policies to organizational weakness. Viola proves the state’s
weakness in its failure to accomplish highly detailed plans. Iagoda from the
OGPU imagined a system of colonization villages that would help to extract
resources from Russia’s far off frontiers. These special settlements would
suppose to be built with Moscow protocols and blueprints. Instead the entire
process from start to finish was a bureaucratic nightmare that was never quite
able to live up to the ideal of self-sufficiency. Viola even directly comes out
in her conclusion and says, “The Soviet Union was an infrastructurally weak,
agrarian state.”[17] Unlike
Viola, Hoffman indirectly refers to the Stalinist state as weak. For Hoffman weakness
came in the form of unfulfilled promises, failed policies, and over reactive
fears. She criticizes the hypocritical Bolshevik and Stalinist ideals of gender
relations. The Bolsheviks at first argued for the women’s liberation, but reversed
when they feared that sexual activity was detracting from the socialist cause.
Stalinists propagandized about women’s equality only to triple the burden of
women with childcare, housework, and full time labor. Deficient consumer goods and
lack of sufficient housing further exacerbated women’s toil in Soviet society. New
work opportunities did not equate to equality either. Women were delegated to
low status agriculture labor or low paying white-collar jobs.[18] The
Stalinist pronatalist policy to increase the birth rate was also unsuccessful,
resulting in a birth rate “below the 1936 level.”[19]
Outlawing abortion in 1936 “only drove women to seek illegal abortions,”
increasing possible harm to mother.[20] Another
sign of weakness was the state’s fears of sexual activity distracting from the
overall socialist goal. The state overreacted and attempted to control procreation
through marriage, in turn causing more suffering for women. This image of a
fearful Stalinist state particularly clashes with historiography of the Soviet
Union being a “Bast Leviathan” and will be analyzed again by J. Arch Getty.[21]
J.
Arch Getty’s The Road to Terror characterizes
the weak Stalinist state of the 1930s as fearful regime substituting repression
for administration. The monograph centers on The Great Terror and explores
different factors that led to its development. Of prime importance for our
discussion is the factor of fear. According to Getty, “The Stalinist never felt
that they really controlled the country.”[22] This
lack of control is reasonable considering that the rural bureaucracy was
stretched thin across a country that extended from the Baltic Sea to the
Pacific Ocean. However, for Stalinists intent on employing state control over
both private and public matters the lack of control was unnerving. Uncontrolled
areas were equivalent to uncharted sections of the battlefield where enemies
may be lurking. Therefore to gain control over these vast territories, a heavy
censorship policy was imposed to monitor any writing and publications within an
area. In addition, repression in the form of “spasmodic mass violence” was to
keep the area sanitized of opposing elements.[23] These
approaches were extreme and are clear indications of “weakness disguised by
brute force.”[24]
When
actual conspiracy groups were discovered, the Stalinist state flew into a repressive
overdrive trying to disguise the weak state as outwardly strong one. The three conspiracy
groups Getty presents are the Riutin group, Trotskyist organization, and
Eismont–Tolmechev–Smirnov group. The Riutin group represented opposition to the
Stalin regime from the right. The Trotskyist organization represented opposition
from the left. Different from the other two, the Eismont–Tolmechev–Smirnov
group illustrated how a simple slip of the tongue could result in harsh punishment.
Mentioning any possibility of the removal of Stalin was considered
counterrevolutionary. Both the Riutin group and the Trotskyist organization
were clearly seditious. However, the arrest of the top members of both groups
left the lower ranks untouched, contributing to Stalinist fears of fifth column
elements within the Soviet workforce. The regime’s response was to purge the
workforce of possible enemies. The problem was that the regime was not really
efficient at organizing massive operations. With other factors such as the threat
of local cadres and ritualize apologies at show trials, the purges exploded
into a storm of chaos that enveloped the country. Getty refers to this phase of
the Great Terror as “blind mass terror” and draws an analogy to a psychotic
mass killer shooting blindly into the crowd.[25] The
blind Terror was a perfect example of the state’s weak grasp on authority; the
Stalinist state was on a full rampage killing any one that dared to oppose it.
James
C. Scott opposes the view of the other historians mentioned thus far. He
proposes that the Stalinist state was a strong state that pressed forward its
agenda without any reservations. In Seeing
Like a State, Scott classifies the Stalinist Soviet Union as an
authoritarian high modernist state. This authoritarian high modernist label is
a combination of three elements: an aspiration for the administrative ordering
of society, unrestrained use of power, and a weakened civil society. The second
element, “unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument
for achieving designs” depicts the Stalinist state as a strong entity.[26] Scott
further elaborates in chapter 6, “Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams” that
the Stalinist state aimed for an ordered society capable of maximum
productivity. The primary focus on these organizational efforts was the
countryside and its agrarian produce. Stiff resistance from the peasantry led
to a war in the countryside that resulted in the victory of Bolsheviks and
their collective farms, kolkhoz. Regrettably,
the ideal of industrialize agriculture did not live up to the reality of the
situation. Soviet crop yields fell to “inferior levels recorded in the 1920s or
levels reached before the Revolution.”[27] However,
the state’s silver lining was that it had successfully transformed the rural territories
into one easier to govern and monitor. It was the strength of the Stalinist state,
not weakness, which brought “state-sponsored calamity.”[28]
The
Soviet Union of the 1930s was a weak state stuck in a precarious position. Ravaged
by a Civil War, the country had to rebuild itself from the bottom up. Bolshevik
doctrine called for a complete eradication of class enemies. Stalin following
Bolshevik directive planned a massive dekulakization campaign in conjunction
with collectivization. Viola captures the chaos on the ground as administrative
officials struggle to organize the deportation of thousands of “kulaks.” The
following administration at the special settlements was “anything but planned.”[29] A
similar story is heard in Hoffman’s account of the women’s equality movement
under Stalin. Instead of being raised to an equal level as men, women were
given more responsibilities to deal with. Programs designed to promote
motherhood and equality fell short of their goals. These strong accounts disprove
the narrative of an organized and high modernist state. However, Scott’s narrative
counter argues by pointing out the “victory” of the Bolsheviks in collectivism.
The state, regardless of its poor performance in agricultural production,
succeeded in placing the rural territories under its jurisdiction. He
mistakenly attributes the Stalinist state’s victory over the peasants to “unrestrained
use of power.”[30] Saying
that the authoritarian state solely acted in a top down manner upon the people glosses
over the complexities of the situation. Getty directly counters “James Scott’s
terminology … of control” when he states that the “mass operations were
unplanned, ad hoc reactions to a perceived immediate political threat.”[31] The
truth of the matter is that there were multiple restraints on the power of
Soviet officials as each played the game of politics to stick to the ever-ambiguous
party line. Getty says that even Stalin, the man of steel, has to play his
cards carefully in order to stay in power. The aura of power around a dictator
does not grant them invulnerability for no one rules alone. A complex bureaucratic
web with key players at different levels is what translates a written policy
into action.
The
works of Viola, Hoffman, and Getty challenge the top down view of Russian
society where the state acts on its population of subservient people. The population
has been shown to push back on the state, each category of people in their own
way. Special settlers fled or refused to work on the special settlements. Women
continued to search for abortions, even after the procedures were criminalize. Local
cadres deflected purges down onto lower level party members to preserve their
own connections. Ultimately, the Stalinist state was not an omnipotent,
omniscient, omnipresent entity. The state was faced with chronic shortages on
just about everything and was on a paranoid constant lookout for class enemies
it feared. Plans on paper rarely came to fruition and commands to different
administrators were jumbled up in the chaos of the times. In the end, the
fabled all-powerful state was a newcomer trying to mask its weakness with physical
force.
[1]
Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost
World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press,
2007), 13-14.
[2]
Ibid., 22, 27.
[3]
Ibid., 26.
[4]
Ibid., 4.
[5]
Ibid., 41.
[6]
Ibid., 75-76.
[7]
Ibid., 165.
[8] David
L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity,
1917-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2003), 90.
[9]
Ibid.
[10]
Ibid., 93.
[11]
Ibid.
[12]
Ibid., 95.
[13]
Ibid., 99-100.
[14]
Women granted 2,000 rubles annual for each child over 6 years old. Refer Ibid.,
101.
[15]
Ibid., 109-110.
[16]
Ibid., 114-115.
[17]
Viola, The Unknown Gulag, 188.
[18]
Hoffman, Stalinist Values, 116.
[19]
Ibid., 114.
[20]
Ibid.
[21]
Viola, The Unknown Gulag, 188.
[22]
J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The
Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 15.
[23]
Ibid., 43.
[24]
Ibid.
[25]
Ibid., 189.
[26] James
C. Scott, Seeing like a State : How Certain Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Agrarian Studies (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1998), 88-89.
[27]
Ibid., 202-203.
[28]
Ibid., 89.
[29]
Viola, The Unknown Gulag, 189.
[30]
Scott, Seeing Like a State, 88.
[31]
Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror,
189.
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