Angry Planet - The Apocalyptic Religion of Stalin’s Russia

Episode Date: November 6, 2017

Joseph Stalin’s Bolsheviks were atheists. At least in the traditional sense. But that didn’t mean they didn’t believe in prophecy. In fact, it was prophecy that guided their nearly every action.If people would just obey the rules of communism, peace, prosperity, justice and brotherhood would grow from the soil and be mass produced in the factories.So, what happens when a decade passes and the Bolshevik bible has no answers?Blood.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. You can reach us on our new Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. What did it feel like to sit in a box at the Belchoy Theater, watch a ballet, and then come home and see the suitcase you've packed for your imminent arrest? You know, that's a form of living that thankfully is so foreign to me is to be essentially, unimaginable. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. 100 years ago, Russia's last czar fell. Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks came out on top through political maneuvering and civil war. A great experiment began. Communism went from theory to practice, and it didn't go well.

Joshua Yaffa writes for the New Yorker from Moscow. He's here today to talk about communism as a state religion and the consequences. It's also the subject of his article, Russia's House of Shadows, in the New Yorker's October 16th issue. Welcome, first. Thanks for having me. Once the Bolsheviks took over, what did they try to do to Russia? What was their goal? Their goal was essentially to implement the vision that had motivated them for several decades,

for a generation or more before the revolution. And in the piece I wrote for The New Yorker recently, it heavily relies on a really magnificent and one-of-a-kind book that recently came out by a Russian-American historian named Uri Slowskin. And so a lot of what I'm about to talk about and a lot of what I wrote about in the article is based very much on his historical and analytical view of the Bolsheviks and who they were and what motivated them. I find Sloskin's position compelling and convincing, but it's his particular view of the Bolsheviks and their plans and their programs and so on. In any case, according to Slioskin, which I find convincing, the Bolsheviks were essentially a kind of millenarian cult,

a millinarian sect, that is a small tribe, self-selecting tribe of people united around a common idea, and not just any common idea, but that baked into this idea was the notion that their beliefs, their understanding of the world put them at a kind of automatic opposition to the existing world. Millenarian in the sense, not that they thought the world would kind of literally end, not a literal apocalyptic vision, but a metaphorical one, a kind of, dawning of a new day after which a kingdom of, you know, justice and equality would reign for all after there would be not just revolution in Russia, but, you know, as the early Bolsheviks believed, revolution all over the world. So there was this messianic impulse to Bolshevism that drove it

when it was an underground movement under the Tsar. And after the events of 1917, the revolution through which the Bolsheviks took power. They were the most fervently confident in their own prophecies. There were a number of socialist groups, revolutionary groups in Russia at the time. That was a period of great social and political ferment when there was all manner of groups on the left, on the right, monarchists, social democrats, Bolsheviks, Menjaviks, and other socialist revolutionary group

were all fighting over the direction the country should take. But the Bolsheviks were really marked. by a unique sense of not just believing in their millenarian prophecies, believing that there was a kind of inevitability to their predictions, but also that it was incumbent on them to force them into being. And that's where you see that most sharply in Lenin's decision to essentially overturn the provisional government and take power. It's this not just believing in revolutionary prophecies, but being the agent of them. And that is something that didn't stop when Bolsheviks took power, it continued to motivate their actions, their policies, their visions as now

government officials, not just revolutionaries. Well, let me ask a question about the Bolshevik leadership itself. Did they believe that they were specially chosen? I mean, there was a small core of people that they were chosen to lead this and that there was something special about them? I think that they certainly thought there was something special about their beliefs and their understanding of the world and that Bolshevism was a kind of enlightened way of seeing the world and the power structures in the world. It's kind of like, forgive the terrible metaphor, but maybe there's something nonetheless

instructive in it, how members of the alt-right talk about taking the red pill from the matrix, which as if that gives them some. you know, enlightened, more honest view of the world and the power structures that undergird it and so on. Well, that's not a great metaphor for lots of reasons. Nonetheless, I think there was an element of that in that this was knowledge potentially available to anyone. And the Bolsheviks really thought of themselves as kind of student scholars. They were revolutionaries, but very bookish, theoretical, philosophical revolutionaries. And for them, Bolshevism, communism was a way of seeing the world as it really is understanding some sort of secret code to how politics and power

and economics work. There's nothing Calvinist about Bolshevism in the sense. It was not a movement you had to be somehow born into magically or be selected by some higher power. You very much could yourself through study, through learning, through conversations with existing Bolsheviks be brought into the movement. And it was really a brotherhood. in almost every sense, this kind of underground, persecuted minority of people who were bound to each other by the force of their ideals. If we're continuing the religious metaphor, it almost feels as if history itself becomes the divine animating force of this movement.

Yes. I don't think the Bolsheviks themselves would have seen it that way or would have described their mission as such. But Bolshevism, communism as an ideology, you know, made claims to being a kind of master narrative for how the world works and also providing some universal answers for how both an individual and a society should navigate the world and should behave in the world and how what a just structure for both societies, individuals should be in that world, much like religion provides, you know, instructions for codes of behavior and relations and even architecture of states and society. So in that sense, Bolshevism, a fervently anti-religious movement, did play the role of what religion had historically done, not just in Russia, but throughout the centuries around the world. Not long after the Bolsheviks had won and finally defeated the royalists and ruled the whole country,

Lenin himself died and Stalin took over. It's all within a few years. So what changed when Stalin took over? A lot changed when Stalin took over, you know, both on the kind of ideological front and certainly on the kind of political operation and running of the state. But, you know, the Lenin revolution, the revolution of 1917, which brought the Bolsheviks to power, was followed by something that historians have come to call the Stalin Revolution, and that is an era of great and rapid and forced. That's a key part of this, modernization and industrialization. This is the era of the first five-year plan when Stalin was going to and set out to and did in many ways turn an agrarian peasant society into a urban industrial one in a phenomenally short amount of time.

And that was done from the top, and it required a lot of ugly, bloody, kind of horrific execution of that plan, especially in places like Ukraine and some of the southern and western reaches of Soviet territory where collectivization of land from the peasants turned into something that many historians say approaches genocide, at very least the number. of people left dead from starvation and that campaign were staggering. But the Stalin revolution, where it, in the sense it added to or in some ways, separated itself or even contradicted the Lenin revolution, is that it was about, quote,

socialism in one country, that is, retreating, if not rejecting the notion of permanent worldwide revolution and instead turning the Soviet Union itself into a, kind of functioning model socialist country building communism building was the operative metaphor of the time and there really was this fury of construction mines power plants factories the Moscow metro the canal millimore canal in the north of the country it was a period of intense and incredible construction that both was meant to turn agrarian Russia into an industrial country, therefore retroactively fulfilling the prophecy of Marxist revolution, which of course held that revolution should be carried out in countries with a proletariat. Russia was going to essentially

after the fact build an urban proletariat to make that prophecy retroactively true, while it also meant a kind of bureaucratization of the state. It was when the state went from being a revolutionary state interested both in revolution abroad and kind of revolutionary, that is, experimental avant-garde forms in art, design, architecture to a much more routinized, statist, bureaucratized state, which, of course, the Stalinist Soviet Union became with quite bloody efficiency. One question about, well, actually, I'm sorry, it's more of a comment. What Stalin built in Moscow, at least, is literally monumental. right? I mean, the subway system, I got a chance to ride it a couple of years ago. It doesn't look like any other subway system I've ever been on. And I'm from New York originally. And I take the Washington Metro every day. I mean, the scale of what they built seems like it was incredible. Yeah, that's exactly right. And the Moscow Metro was meant as one of the chief symbols of the era, the palaces for the proletariat. You know, if before palaces were where the aristocracy and the,

the Tsars lived, now there would be underground palaces with marble and chandelier for the workers who were going on their way to work every morning. And the kind of almost theatrical pomposity of those construction projects, especially the metro, like you mentioned, was very much purposeful. There was not an accidental manifestation or attribute of the projects from that time. Their soaring monumentality was the point. All right. So what happened when Devonement. policies, quote unquote, didn't quite get expected results because not all of this stuff worked out, right?

Of course not. You know, there was this promise in the Soviet Union that what Soviet society was doing was building communism, building socialism. And the early rhetoric from the Bolshevik leaders, Lenin into Stalin and those around him, they were in this process, this constant process of building communism. It wasn't something that happened overnight in 1917, not at all. That only gave the Bolsheviks the accent. to the instruments of state power so as to then fully implement the communist vision.

And in fact, communism is something that never actually got built. If you look at the rhetoric of Soviet leaders over the course of their almost century in power, first it was something that they were in the process of building, and that required sacrifice in the here and now so as they could enter this kind of to the promised land, as it were, later of communism. And at a certain point, after the war, by the time Brezhnev came, to power. They just stopped talking about it entirely until Brezhnev declared, oh, yeah, by the way, communism was built. Already, we did that without announcing it. We're living in communism.

Though, of course, by then, Soviet citizens could see for their own eyes that, as long-promised, heaven on earth, was far from it in everyday practice. But I'm getting ahead of myself there, and we can go back to the period you're asking about, which is where, you know, the lived reality the Soviet Union started to obviously differ from and not live up to the prophecies. And here I want to Slowskin and his very persuasive writing on the subject where in his book, he really chronicles the history of failed prophecies and failed prophecies particularly of other millenarian movements. And there's a rich history of groups who promise either literally the end of the world or promise it in a kind of metaphorical sense. Here Sloskin references the quote, great disappointment, which is a term he

borrows from the story of William Miller, who was a farmer in Massachusetts, who first in 1843, promised the apocalypse would occur. He gathered a fairly large movement around him. Of course, the apocalypse didn't happen, thankfully, in 1843. He shifted the date to a year later in October 1844, that didn't happen either. And the failure of the prophecy became known as great disappointment, which is a metaphor, or maybe even more than metaphor, more literal than that, that Slozkin borrows to describe what happened in the Soviet Union in the 20s and really 30s, when, you know, now more than a decade, almost two decades, after the revolution, this promised communist heaven on earth with plenty for all and justice and equality and no class

distinctions and so on had not come into being at all. And in fact, really the opposite for many people. It was a continue to be a time of deprivation and scarcity and hardship. And people lived in communal apartments. You know, there were ration cards for food. And this didn't look at all like. this virtuous and miraculous society that had been promised. And this is the moment of the Soviet great disappointment, as Slyoskin describes it, which set in motion a kind of inevitable

process of looking for scapegoats, as often happens in these moments as Sliuskin describes in his book with other historical examples. And the way that the Stalinist Soviet Union, or Stalin in a very particular and personal way dealt with and decided to overcome this moment of disappointment was to set in motion purges, essentially create a maniacal hunt for scapegoats. And after which this hunt for scapegoats was announced any and all deviations from the plan, any in all kind of mistakes or areas in which the Soviet state did not live up to its promises, is nothing was accidental and nothing was a failure of the system or the ideology. Everything was the fault of these so-called enemies of the people, saboteurs,

wreckers, people who wanted to undermine the Soviet state from within. And that kicked off this very furious and horrific and bloody cycle of purges in which millions or tens of millions were killed. All right. I'm going to stop you right there. We are going to pause for a break from our sponsors. You are listening to War College. My name is Matthew Galt. My co-host, as always, is Jason Fields, and we will be right back after this. We are back.

I am Matthew Galt. This is War College. My co-host is Jason Fields, and we are talking about Joshua Yaffa's recent article for The New Yorker, Russia's House of Shadows. Jason, I think you had a question. Did Stalin believe it? Do you think that was actually his motivation that he wanted to fix communism, and he thought that the people were actually trying to mess it up?

You know, I don't want to speak specifically to Stalin so much, and others have written with great expertise, and quite fluently on that, Stephen Kotkin's biography of Stalin comes to mind as to other works. What I can say, based on reading Stilowskin's book, who quotes at length from people close to Stalin, there's long passages with letters written by Nikolai Bukharin, an original Bolshevik revolutionary who was, very close, if not to Stalin, at least to the initial leadership around Lenin, who carried out

the revolution. Bukharan was killed himself in the purges. And by reading Bukharan and also reading other diary entries and letters that Silosken narrates and references in his own book, you see that oftentimes up until the very end, even victims of the purges, people who were essentially being sent to their deaths, still believed. They still believed in the virtue, correctness of the Soviet project and the blind. Bolshevist mission, and they're even ready to sacrifice themselves for the success of that mission. And there's extremely painful letters from Bukharen written to Stalin that Sliuskin references,

where Bukhaden essentially says he goes from protesting his innocence and appealing to Stalin for his release, appealing to Stalin to recognize Bukhaden's kind of true his love for the party in the Soviet Union, that he's no enemy at all. And as his detention grows longer, and the moment of his trial and ultimate execution grows nearer, his tone shifts. And Bukharan essentially tells Stalin, I'm ready to sacrifice myself for the party and for the mission of the party. But just tell me all he wants from Stalin is a recognition that Stalin is aware of and accepts his sacrifice. He just wants essentially to go to his death, knowing that Stalin, the leader of the party that Bukhaden still very much believes in, acknowledges and accepts his sacrifice, but it doesn't seem that Bukhaden ever loses faith in the

actual, in the underlying project in communism in the Soviet state, in the original Bolshevik prophecies. He goes to his death still believing in that. And it seems from reading other diaries and letters that Slyoskin references that that was common. I remember Siloskin quotes a diary entry from a woman named Julia Pietnitska, whose husband was a high-ranking official in the Soviet government and an original Bolshevik revolutionary. He was arrested in 1937 at the height of the purges at the same time their teenage son had also been arrested as supposed or alleged enemy of the people. And Sliuskin quotes her diary entry from the time where Pietnizka is really torn between two competing images of her husband. And she doesn't really know which one is true.

On the one hand, she thinks of him as an honest revolutionary, and she says, that version of my husband, I feel sorry for him and I want to fight for him to the end. But she also can't get out of her mind the second notion, which maybe he really is an enemy of the people. Maybe he really did work to undermine the Stoviate state. And about that version of her husband, she writes, quote, I feel tainted and disgusted, and I want to live in order to see all of them caught and have no pity for them. I think that shows you the kind of fevered pitch of the times and the extent to which belief in the virtue of the Soviet project didn't necessarily end with the appearance of the purges. You know, it's easy for us in 2017 with the benefit of hindsight and knowing kind of the fuller richer story to look at all of this stuff and think that it's just nuts, for lack of a better word, but you live in Moscow and you live in a very specific apartment building. And I'm wondering if you'll first tell the audience a little bit about, where you live and if living there you get kind of a sense of of the grandeur that they were seeing

at all I live in a building that is most commonly referred to as house on the embankment at the time that it was built in the 1920s and residents first started moving into it in the 1930s it was called the house of government and it was the first purpose built building to house the first generation of Bolshevik elite it's an enormous building there's over 500 apartments in it. It overlooks the Kremlin. It's across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. And it's really a city within a city. When it was built, it was designed to provide for all the aspects of top Bolshevik officials' life from a cafeteria inside the building where they could take all their meals to a laundry room where their clothes would be washed and pressed, a school,

a gym, a theater, a club, and it was meant to serve as a kind of transitionary point away from bourgeois family life to collective living. So the transition meant that people lived in individual apartments, lived with their families, lived with their children, but they were meant to do all these other things collectively, you know, eat, go to the theater, go to the gym, and so on. What ended up happening over time is that, you know, family life won out and that the transition that the building was meant to facilitate never really happened. If anything, the transition went in the opposite direction and, you know, what had once been this underground sect of really kind of ascetic revolutionaries who lived without

in great hardship, the building, my building served as a kind of metaphorical turning point in which that underground revolutionary movement turned into a kind of exalted. priesthood of quite pampered elites who never gave up on their essentially bourgeois lifestyles in their very spacious and comfortable apartments. But one of the dreams of these apartments sort of turned into, if I can be dramatic, a nightmare. The way you described it, people disappeared from these bourgeois apartments on a pretty regular basis. What do you think it was like to actually live there once the purges began?

It's a fascinating and terrifying question to which I don't really have an answer. I talk about in the New Yorker article, one of my better and closest friends in the building, a man named Tjole Golubovsky, who's now 60 years old. And he lives in the apartment that first belonged to his grandfather, who was a top literary official and effectively literary censor under Stahl in a certainly high ranking in reverse. revered Bolshevik. And he survived the purges. He survived the purges in a particularly macabre way, which is he actually had a heart attack in 1937 and was checked into a series of hospitals and rest homes. And this is obviously way before the internet, way before Twitter

or anything like that. And as Tolia tells it, you know, that was, he wasn't necessarily aware of what was going on in the capital as he was recuperating in his hospitals and rest homes out of town. And he returns home to the House of Government and sees that all but one of his colleagues, other deputy ministers in what was then called the Ministry of Enlightenment, which is a kind of propaganda and educational body. They had all been arrested and shot. And moreover, his upstairs neighbor had also been arrested and shot. So he comes back, having recuperated from this heart attack to see that an overwhelming amount of a number of his colleagues and friends are dead, essentially.

And Tolia and I talked about that, what that realization must have been like. And Tolia talked about his grandfather as someone who was a really kind of strong-willed man, a revolutionary man of great ideas, powerful intellect. In fact, he took on the sort of Bolshevik nom de Guerre of Wollen as an acquired last name. He became Boris Wolin. He was actually born Yosef Friedkin. And Wolin is a, Wolin as a last name, is a kind of play on the Russian word Volia,

which connotes both willpower and freedom. And I think that gives a sense of at least his own self-image. But Tolga talked about him as being turned into a kind of terrified mouse. This man of very strong ideas, very strong will was left essentially mute with terror. And he and his wife, Tolia's grandmother, can only think about their own survival. And as Tolia told me forth in York article, as I quote him saying, they weren't able to intervene to control things in the slightest. The forces they were up against were biblical, like fighting nature itself. And I think, as Tolia sees it, as Tolia understands his own grandfather, the kind of overwhelming,

omnipotent horror of the purges left individual. is essentially impotent. And Tolia talks with great drama about his grandfather being a very cultured person, someone who loved to go to the theater, and he and his wife, Tully's grandparents, would go to the Balshoy Theater to see

ballet, which they regularly did, and then they would come home and there would be a suitcase packed with warm clothes in the case that that was the night when the secret police came for Tullia's grandfather. And it's that paradox that I think is so

terrifying and it's just difficult for me and difficult for even tolia to understand what does it mean what did it feel like to sit in a box at the belshoy theater watch a ballet and then come home and see the the suitcase you've packed for your imminent arrest you know that that's a form of of living that thankfully is so foreign to me is to be essentially unimaginable and for toliah who's connected obviously by to his grandfather in much more direct and immediate way also is ultimately at a loss to understand what that felt like. What does it feel like to live in that place, to live surrounded by these memories,

and to research it willfully? You know, it would be an unfair literary exaggeration for me to say I feel some sense of mysticism about this building. You know, I want to say that, and I know that that in a way is kind of the correct emotion to feel, to talk about, you know, I walk into the courtyard of the building and I feel the weight of history. And I really don't. And what's interesting is that people like Tolia or Tolia in particular also doesn't. Tolia made a point of telling me he's not a, quote, mystic about the building. And I think I understand what he means just because I feel it myself, which is, for me, the building exists in two parallel worlds that rarely actually intersect, that really meet you.

other. And there's the historical side of the building which is deeply, deeply fascinating. And there's an endless, an infinite supply of rich, tragic, horrific, but all in their own way, fascinating stories in this building that I spent the summer, much of the summer researching, but I could do it for another year. Slioskin, as I understand it, spent several decades working on his book, which shows in the depth of the research and the quality of the final project, which runs to well over a thousand pages. So there's the side of the building that is its history, which I understand intellectually and find deeply compelling and kind of infinitely interesting. But there's also the lived experience of being here in the here

and now. And as I write about in the piece, there's this kind of pan-Asian noodle bar in the first floor of the building that opened up a couple of years ago. There's a design and architecture school down the road. There's a bunch of nightclubs behind the building on the opposite side of the the embankment. And it's those things that really give the flavor of the building in 2017 more than its history. And the history is something you have to kind of consciously access, and I'm happy to consciously access that I'm very interested in it. But you have to force yourself to engage in that side of the building's character. If you don't, if you just walk past the building or even live here, come home every day, that's not.

front and center, you're not forcibly confronted with that. And it's very possible. And maybe this is ultimately healthy and in some way correct to live here without being literally haunted by ghosts, as many Russian friends ask about my experience here is, you know, do I see ghosts at night? And the answer is no. But I also, in a kind of metaphorical sense, don't see ghosts here in that I'm able to live here and have this be my home and have friends come over for dinner and do all the things one does in one's apartment without it feeling like I'm in a kind of haunted museum. Joshua Yafah, thank you so much for talking to us today.

It was a wonderful conversation. Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this week's show. If you enjoyed it, tell the world by leaving a review on iTunes. It helps other people find it. Listener Daisy, if you do, had this to say. I really enjoy their long-form style of interviews. I'm often impressed with how interesting the guests are,

especially when the topic is something I wouldn't be attracted to initially. Well done. Thanks, Daisy, if you do. You can find more War College on Twitter. We're at War underscore College. On Facebook, we're Facebook.com slash war college podcast, and a complete archive of the show is available at acast.com slash war college. We'll be back next week.