Popular Perceptions of Soviet Politics in the 1920s

Disenchantment of the Dreamers

O. Velikanova

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137030757
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie politique

This is the first study of popular opinions in Soviet society in the 1920s. These voices which made the Russian revolution characterize reactions to mobilization politics: patriotic militarizing campaigns, the tenth anniversary of the revolution and state attempts to unite the nation around a new Soviet identity.

1

The Foreign Threat: Leadership and Popular Perceptions in 1923 and 1924

They have no need of external critics, for as it is said, they carry their enemies and their opponents lodged in their hearts and they take the nagging internal voice . . . wherever they go.

Plato, Sophist

1.1 The Spectre of War in Russia and the World

On March 1, 1927, the population of the village of Ivantsevo gathered to elect the local soviet. A Communist Party member came from the city of Ivano-voznesensk to supervise the elections and addressed the peasants with calls to work hard and to defend the USSR in case of war. In response, he heard threats from the peasants: Report [to those on the top] that when military action begins and we get weapons, the end will come to the Soviet power, [because] we’ll turn the weapons against you.’ These threats were met with applause and cries of ‘that’s right!’ from the majority.¹

Among the range of political themes discussed in the 1920s, one narrative became extremely sensitive for both the rulers and the populace: that of a foreign threat. After the end of the Civil War and the foreign intervention of 1918–20, belief in a looming new war was part of political and everyday life in the USSR. This belief crystallized in the official mobilization campaigns of the war scares of 1923, 1924, 1927, and 1930. A careful study of popular reactions discloses that the public and the government internalized this threat differently. In the following three chapters, I discuss the perception of a foreign threat – first, at the level of political leadership, and second, on the grassroots level.

The expectation of war occupies a central place in the origins of the new political system known as Stalinism. It was the raison d’être of the Soviet state.² Stalin and his team justified all major Soviet policies, including modernization, industrialization, and repression, by the threat of imminent intervention: ‘Considering the possibility of a military attack against the proletarian state by capitalist states, it is necessary during the development of the five-year plan to pay maximum attention to the rapid development of those branches of the economy, [which secure] the defense and economic stability of the country.’³ It is in the context of a foreign threat that the leadership perceived a danger of internal disorder. According to Oleg Khlevniuk, fear of an internal ‘fifth column’ in the event of foreign intervention was the major motivation for the Great Purges of 1937–38.⁴ Thus, in the context of its role in the origins of Stalinism, the ‘threat’ factor and its perception by both the rulers and the population deserves much more attention from scholars.

Social psychology tells us that imagined rather than real threats often have a stronger influence on human behaviour. Mass societies and mass movements are especially prone to the sense of a threat. Elias Canetti saw a feeling of persecution as an attribute of the masses: ‘The masses are like a besieged fortress . . . The enemy stands by the walls and the enemy is entrenched in basements.’⁵ Erik Hoffer also found frustration and hypervigilance to be common features of mass movements.⁶ A sense of threat is a natural concomitant of periods of social cataclysm. Scholars of the French Revolution noticed that anxiety and hope were the most characteristic features of the revolutionary mentality. The first revolutionary scare in history was France’s Great Fear in 1789, during which fear that aristocrats were conspiring with foreign powers against the revolutionary people spread throughout countryside.⁷ In 1928 Stalin expressed his insecurity: ‘We have enemies inside, we have enemies outside. We must not forget it, not for a moment, comrades.’⁸ However, the threats during the 1920s were not as obvious as in the 1930s.

Was the foreign threat in the 1920s real or imagined? How was it perceived by Stalin, by other leaders, and by state institutions? Was the alarm spontaneous, or artificial and manipulative? How was it perceived by the common people? What were the roots and outcomes of Soviet scaremongering? What was the place of war imagery in politics? These questions are at the centre of the following three chapters.

To examine the reality of the threat, let us look at the post-war world and the Soviet interpretation of it. In international affairs the decade was marked by insecurity. Foreign relations between European countries were strained after the First World War; governments looked with suspicion on a humiliated and possibly resurgent Germany and an unpredictable, newly constituted Soviet Russia. The experience of total war with the mobilization of all national resources led to a shift of balance between the civil and military sectors of national economies in favour of a higher level of militarization. The comprehensive mobilization of people for war, while limiting their political participation, was a common feature of all the major belligerents.⁹ The USSR contributed to these international tensions with its vacillating foreign policy and, most of all, through Comintern activities that aimed to destabilize ‘imperialism’. Mistrust and military or conspiratorial scares were regular occurrences in a world divided into two camps. In 1919–20, a ‘Red Scare’ of imminent communist revolution spread in the United States, resulting in the arrest of 6000 suspected socialists and anarchists. The subversive activities of the Comintern caused a similar red scare in Great Britain in October 1924, contributing to the downfall of the Labour Government and increasing tensions in Anglo-Soviet relations. A more artificial war scare followed the statement of US Secretary of State, F. B. Kellogg, on January 24, 1927, that Bolshevik agents stood behind the Liberal revolution in Nicaragua. This short-term international crisis¹⁰ coincided with the beginning of a war scare in the USSR. The alarmist statements of politicians found willing ears in the population during moments of instability and crisis. In a world polarized by antagonistic ideologies, governments and people watched every moment for hostile agents and real, or imagined, enemies.

In the USSR, the proclivity to see the threat of war was founded on the traumatic experiences of the 1914–22 period. The memory of 1918–20, when internal peasants’ revolts and Civil War were combined with foreign intervention, still haunted the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. It became a formative experience for the generation of revolution. R. Pethybridge demonstrated that the militancy and tolerance of violence ‘outlived the Civil War and became part and parcel of the Soviet system. . . . The adult Soviet population was conditioned by earlier memories of violent social disruption and foreign intervention.’ Even in peacetime, this experience structured the governing methods of the ruling elite and the population’s acceptance of wartime methods. Veterans occupied numerous positions in the Soviet bureaucracy down to the local level,¹¹ and the myth of revolutionary war became a foundation of official ideology with its own specific language. It infiltrated everyday life at all levels of society with its military-style clothing, songs, and children’s games.¹² A warlike mentality pervaded both politics and everyday practices long after the end of the Civil War.

Official representations of the outside world after the revolution were dominated by the myth of universal hostility. This point of view was not new to Russian political leaders. The monarchy had also regarded itself as the stronghold of Holy Russia, besieged by enemies both foreign (Germany) and domestic (the revolutionary underground). Xenophobia, attenuated during the First World War by official doctrine, received eloquent expression in the propaganda of the nationalistic Black Hundred movement. The revolutionary underground was depicted as the result of foreign influences or an international Jewish conspiracy. In their study of pre-revolutionary Russia, Figes and Kolonitskii identified a sense of hostile surroundings as the common element in the structure, imagery system, and demonological vocabulary of both the state ideology and the revolutionary underground.¹³ The Soviet state myth reproduced a similar view of hostile surroundings.

Even before 1917, Lenin foresaw that revolution would produce internal civil war as well as international strife. After the Bolsheviks’ victory, the premise that capitalism and socialism were incompatible found expression in the assertion that capitalist countries would attack the Soviet Union as soon as a favourable opportunity presented itself.¹⁴ This paradigm became the foundation of party mentality, as evidenced in the memoirs of the writer Konstantin Simonov and Nikita Khrushchev:

Thoughts of the Red Army and the Five-Year Plan were welded into one by the fact of capitalist encirclement: if we could not build everything we had decided to, then we would be defenseless, and we would go under if anyone attacked us.¹⁵

The most important thing for us was to turn the USSR into an unassailable fortress. We remembered the words of Lenin, that after ten years of Soviet power the country should become unassailable, and we lived by and for that idea alone.¹⁶

In reality the international state of affairs of the 1920s did not represent any serious military threat to the USSR. The West had other priorities and seemed far from ‘conceiving crafty plans to strangle the USSR’ by means of war. By the mid-1920s, the USSR was recognized by all the major powers except the United States. In 1926–27 the USSR signed a number of treaties of friendship with neighbouring states. Nevertheless, the perception of the outside world by many Soviet leaders was influenced primarily by ideological constructions and phobias.

The Soviet state based its international and domestic policies on the idea that sooner or later war would be imminent. Born in the middle of war, the new revolutionary regime relied on international revolution for its survival. When revolutionary dreams were realized nowhere but Mongolia (1921) and revolutionary movements receded, Soviet foreign policy drifted toward pragmatic national priorities set by Stalin in his concept of ‘socialism in one country’, which aimed at securing the state for future wars. However, in the absence of agreement among the Bolsheviks, the Soviet foreign policies of the post-revolutionary decade were uncertain and wavering. The Comintern, organized in 1919, became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy directed at revolutionary expansion. Its undermining activities in other countries produced international crises in 1923, 1924, and 1927 and often ruined the efforts of the pragmatics aiming at insuring the national survival of the USSR through trade agreements and diplomacy. Haslam called this dualism ‘the Janus faces of Soviet foreign policy’.¹⁷ Expecting war, the USSR in the diplomatic sphere concentrated efforts on postponing the conflict, while the focus of the country’s internal affairs was to prepare for war. All major Soviet policies – industrialization oriented at building a military complex, purging the ‘rear’ by repressions, surveillance, mobilization through propaganda, and centralization in politics and administration – were founded on the mentality of the besieged fortress.

1.2 The War Scare of 1923

The whole decade saw constant expectations of war at all levels of society. In this chapter I explore the war scares of 1923 and 1924, first from the authorities’ and then from the public’s perspectives.

One of the first scares in the peaceful period was the government’s panic in 1923 when Lenin became ill.¹⁸ As soon as Lenin was paralysed on March 10, 1923, and his death thought imminent, a sudden overpowering fear spread among the officials. The tone of the Politburo’s secret decisions allows us to feel the atmosphere of fear among the ‘orphaned’ party. Communist leaders were frightened, expecting to be expelled from power by both internal revolts and foreign intervention as soon as Lenin died.

On the home front, leadership felt like invaders in captured territory. Party documents, marked ‘Top Secret’, show that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Photographs and Figure
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Foreign Threat: Leadership and Popular Perceptions in 1923 and 1924
• 2. The War Scare of 1927: Power Discourse
• 3. The War Scare of 1927: Popular Perceptions
• 4. Rural Consolidation against Soviet Politics: The Peasant Union Movement in the 1920s
• 5. The Crisis of Faith: Popular Reaction to the Tenth Anniversary of the October Revolution
• 6. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index