A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End by Peter Kenez

Author:Peter Kenez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

POLITICAL CULTURE

The last years of Stalin were the darkest and gloomiest in all of Soviet history. Families mourned their dead, people lived in grinding poverty, and the Stalinists, instead of relaxing the oppressive features of the Soviet regime, further tightened the screws. “Traitor peoples” who had been deported during the war were not allowed to return, and the concentration camps filled up once again. People who had collaborated with the enemy, or were accused of collaborating, ex-prisoners of war, nationalists who had fought against Soviet power, in particular people who in the Baltic and the western Ukraine had resisted collectivization, and people, just as in the 1930s, who had committed no crimes by any definition but were accused of “anti-Soviet activities,” were sentenced to years of servitude. At a time when those who lived in liberty suffered privations, people in the camps were still much worse off. Men and women weakened by malnutrition and mistreatment, working long days in labor camps, died by the hundreds of thousands. For the first time in Soviet history, the unendurable conditions on occasion resulted in riots and strikes in the camps, which were brutally suppressed.

Communist ideology had long been emptied of meaning, reduced to the repetition of meaningless phrases. Professional ideologists, people of undistinguished intellectual abilities, asserted that the country had already “achieved socialism” and now was building communism. The ideological nakedness of the regime was covered up by the creation of a surrogate ideology of hero worship, which now reached pagan proportions. The leader’s pictures were everywhere, poets sang his praises, painters painted him, his name found its way into every book published, including cookbooks. From the very outset the Stalin cult differed in content and style from Hitler’s cult. Hitler, as long as he was successful, loved to harangue the masses and see himself in newsreels; he was an actor. Stalin, by contrast, had little desire for such satisfaction. A pock-marked little man, speaking poor Russian, and an indifferent orator, he did not like to appear before audiences. After the war he gave only two speeches: one at the time of the election campaign in 1946 and the other at the nineteenth party congress in 1952, when he spoke for five minutes. (He allowed his apparent successor, Georgii Malenkov, to give the main report.) He did not even like to appear in closeups on movie screens. On rare occasions when he did appear, the audience gasped in amazement: this was not the way they had imagined their leader. Instead, Stalin had an idealized image created for himself that bore little resemblance to the historical figure. This imaginary leader fit well into the world of Soviet propaganda, where equally imaginary happy peasants competed to produce more food for happy factory workers. It was grimly appropriate that a mythical leader should head a mythical society.

There is some evidence to show that at least in the early stages of the Stalin cult, the dictator had an ironic attitude toward it. Isaac Babel, the great writer who became a victim of the terror, described an episode to a Hungarian friend.

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