We are out to make a revolution on the international scale, and therefore, if circumstances demand, we shall pay no heed to the interests of individual nationalities but shall sweep everything from our path.
Joseph Stalin, 8 December 19171
Cadres decide everything!
Joseph Stalin, 4 May 19352 By the end of the 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin and his allies marginalized his rivals within the All-Union Communist Party and acquired unprecedented power within the USSR.
Now the Stalinists could begin to remake the Soviet present into the socialist future without the political and economic compromises of the 1920s. In order to implement their vision of an internationally strong, internally classless society, they had embraced the radical agendas of collectivization and industrialization, which sparked resistance in the countryside and chaos on the factory floor. These “revolutions from above” sharpened class conflicts and required, in their view, the cleansing of Soviet society of its alleged “bourgeois” past and of all groups and institutions outside the party’s direct control. By constantly highlighting the outbreak of class war within the USSR and the inevitability of foreign interventions, the authorities introduced ruthless measures against all of their perceived enemies: the kulaks, the clergy, private traders and small-scale manufacturers, members of the old (non-communist) intelligentsia, defeated political parties, communist opposition groups, and “foreign agents” in the party’s ranks.Official sponsorship of the Cultural Revolution, as Sheila Fitzpatrick defined this period of militant radicalism, lasted from the early summer of 1928 to June 1931, from the Shakhty trial of “bourgeois engineers” to Stalin’s conciliatory statement in regard to the old technical intelligentsia.3 The central communist authorities launched the Cultural Revolution with the Shakhty trial and the subsequent show trials of the “Industrial Party” (1930) and the Mensheviks (1931) in order to mobilize the masses in support of the sacrifices necessary to implement the plan’s ambitious goals and to justify subsequent hardships and failures by blaming all enemies, foreign and domestic.4 The Cultural Revolution represented not just a “revolution from above,” but also a “revolution from below.”
The party’s hysterical attacks on non-communist engineers and specialists attracted many young people, primarily those who lived in the cities.
Many of these enthusiasts had been too young to fight on behalf of the Bolshevik cause during the Civil War. They matured during the period of the New Economic Policy and experienced rampant underemployment, if not unemployment. When they asked themselves what they had gained from the Bolshevik Revolution, they found little. To compensate for their perceived inferior social status, they directed their venom against all noncommunists and non-proletarians, and even at times against party bureau- crats.5 They embraced the party’s “populist” war against the remnants of the old order with great enthusiasm and pressed the authorities to strike harder and faster against all class enemies. They interpreted the Cultural Revolution, with its uncompromising class war against the “bourgeoisie,” as “a replay of the October Revolution and the Civil War.”6 These men and women wholeheartedly threw themselves into implementing the communist cause in the countryside and in the towns and cities.In addition to its ideological fervour, the Cultural Revolution also provided its young adherents with an important incentive, the possibility to rise above one’s humble station in life. The first five-year plan provided new avenues for mass social mobility “as peasants moved into the industrial labor force, unskilled workers became skilled, and skilled workers were promoted into white-collar or managerial positions, or accepted into institutions of higher education.”7 With its condemnation of “bourgeois specialists,” the party introduced an ambitious preferential policy promoting workers (vydvizhenie) into the ranks of the technical intelligentsia in order to replace these arbitrarily designated “wreckers” and “saboteurs.” In the late 1920s and 1930s, hundreds of thousands of those who claimed the status of “workers” took advantage of this policy and gained a rudimentary technical schooling, if not a watered-down engineering education.8 For them, entry into the party now became easier.
As these new cadres acquired promotions, privileges, and power, they identified themselves completely with the regime and emerged as its “new class,” the main supporters of the Soviet system until its collapse in the late 1980s.9In the course of the Cultural Revolution, the All-Union Communist Party radically expanded the ranks of its supporters. After launching vicious public attacks against the professional “establishment” in the Russian Federation, the Soviet authorities integrated its members to the new order without massive purges.10 Most importantly, the new and enlarged cultural, political, and technical elites throughout the USSR owed their existence to the preferential policies the party introduced. Although Stalin may have called off the Cultural Revolution in 1931, militant radicalism and attacks on the non-communist intelligentsia did not end in the non-Russian republics. Instead, they intensified. In Ukraine, the security organs identified, then introduced repressive measures against those Ukrainians who publicly supported Ukrainization (or more generally their own national identity). In addition to the peasantry, the Soviet authorities unleashed waves of state terror against the Ukrainian intelligentsia, the Ukrainian national communists, and refugees from Poland’s Ukrainian-speaking lands.11