The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes Page B
Authors: Orlando Figes
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The encounter with the West shaped the soldiers’ expectations of the future in their own country. Peasant soldiers were convinced that with the end of the war the collective farms would be swept away. There were many rumours of this sort in the army, most of them involving promises by Zhukov to the troops. Retold in a million letters from the soldiers to their families, these expectations spread throughout thecountryside, resulting in a series of peasant strikes on the collective farms. Other soldiers talked about the need to open the churches, about the need for more democracy, even about the dismantling of the Party system root and branch. The film director Aleksandr Dovzhenko remembered a discussion with a military driver, a ‘Siberian lad’, in January 1944. ‘Our life is bad,’ the driver had said. ‘And all of us, you know, just wait for changes and improvements in our lives. We all wait. All of us. It’s just that we don’t all say it.’ ‘I was astonished by what I heard,’ Dovzhenko noted in his diary afterwards. ‘The people have a tremendous need for some other kind of life. I hear it everywhere. The only place where I don’t hear it is among our leaders.’ 86
Officers were in the forefront of this army movement for reform. They openly expressed their criticisms of the Soviet system and their hopes for change. One lieutenant wrote to the Soviet president Mikhail Kalinin in 1945 with a ‘series of considerations to put to the next meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet’. Having been to Maidanek, the Nazi death camp in Poland, and having seen the consequences of a dictatorship in Germany, the officer demanded an end to arbitrary arrests and imprisonment in the Soviet Union, which, he said, had its own Maidaneks; the abolition of the collective farms, which he knew were a disaster from what he had been told by his own troops; and a list of other, more minor grievances, which his soldiers had asked him to convey to the president. 87
Party leaders were understandably anxious about the return of all these men with their reformist ideas. For those who cared to look back at history, there was an obvious parallel with the war against Napoleon in 1812–15, when the returning officers brought back to tsarist Russia the liberal thought of Western Europe which then inspired the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Political activists attending a conference at the Second Belorussian Front in February 1945 called for efforts to counteract the pernicious influence of the West:
After the war of 1812 our soldiers, having seen French life, compared it with the backward life of tsarist Russia. At that time the French influence was progressive… The Decembrists came to see the need to struggle against the tsarist dictatorship. But today it is different. Maybe the estates of East Prussia are better off than some collective farms. That impression might lead a backward person to conclude in favour of the landed estates against the socialist economy. But that is regressive. So there must be a merciless struggle against this frame of mind. 88
There was particular concern about the influence of these Western ideas on Party members, more than half of whom were serving in the military by 1945. Their demobilization, the leadership assumed, was bound to infect civilian organizations with dangerous liberal notions of political reform.
In fact such ideas were already spreading among civilians, especially within the political and educated classes. The alliance with Britain and the USA had opened Soviet society to Western influence long before the end of the war. After years of isolation, Soviet cities were flooded with Hollywood films, Western books and goods imported by the Lend-Lease agreement with America. Millions of people got a taste of what life in the West was really like – not the ideal of Hollywood perhaps, but a long way from the gloomy images retailed by Soviet propaganda during the 1930s. Restaurants
The encounter with the West shaped the soldiers’ expectations of the future in their own country. Peasant soldiers were convinced that with the end of the war the collective farms would be swept away. There were many rumours of this sort in the army, most of them involving promises by Zhukov to the troops. Retold in a million letters from the soldiers to their families, these expectations spread throughout thecountryside, resulting in a series of peasant strikes on the collective farms. Other soldiers talked about the need to open the churches, about the need for more democracy, even about the dismantling of the Party system root and branch. The film director Aleksandr Dovzhenko remembered a discussion with a military driver, a ‘Siberian lad’, in January 1944. ‘Our life is bad,’ the driver had said. ‘And all of us, you know, just wait for changes and improvements in our lives. We all wait. All of us. It’s just that we don’t all say it.’ ‘I was astonished by what I heard,’ Dovzhenko noted in his diary afterwards. ‘The people have a tremendous need for some other kind of life. I hear it everywhere. The only place where I don’t hear it is among our leaders.’ 86
Officers were in the forefront of this army movement for reform. They openly expressed their criticisms of the Soviet system and their hopes for change. One lieutenant wrote to the Soviet president Mikhail Kalinin in 1945 with a ‘series of considerations to put to the next meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet’. Having been to Maidanek, the Nazi death camp in Poland, and having seen the consequences of a dictatorship in Germany, the officer demanded an end to arbitrary arrests and imprisonment in the Soviet Union, which, he said, had its own Maidaneks; the abolition of the collective farms, which he knew were a disaster from what he had been told by his own troops; and a list of other, more minor grievances, which his soldiers had asked him to convey to the president. 87
Party leaders were understandably anxious about the return of all these men with their reformist ideas. For those who cared to look back at history, there was an obvious parallel with the war against Napoleon in 1812–15, when the returning officers brought back to tsarist Russia the liberal thought of Western Europe which then inspired the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Political activists attending a conference at the Second Belorussian Front in February 1945 called for efforts to counteract the pernicious influence of the West:
After the war of 1812 our soldiers, having seen French life, compared it with the backward life of tsarist Russia. At that time the French influence was progressive… The Decembrists came to see the need to struggle against the tsarist dictatorship. But today it is different. Maybe the estates of East Prussia are better off than some collective farms. That impression might lead a backward person to conclude in favour of the landed estates against the socialist economy. But that is regressive. So there must be a merciless struggle against this frame of mind. 88
There was particular concern about the influence of these Western ideas on Party members, more than half of whom were serving in the military by 1945. Their demobilization, the leadership assumed, was bound to infect civilian organizations with dangerous liberal notions of political reform.
In fact such ideas were already spreading among civilians, especially within the political and educated classes. The alliance with Britain and the USA had opened Soviet society to Western influence long before the end of the war. After years of isolation, Soviet cities were flooded with Hollywood films, Western books and goods imported by the Lend-Lease agreement with America. Millions of people got a taste of what life in the West was really like – not the ideal of Hollywood perhaps, but a long way from the gloomy images retailed by Soviet propaganda during the 1930s. Restaurants
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