Love and Fear

In seeking to explain the endurance of the Soviet state's power throughout the Stalin era, historians often appeal to one of two schools of thought: the Totalitarian school stresses the regime's invasive and extensive repression of its citizens, whereas the Revisionist school seeks to emphasize the role of genuine popular support in securing the Party's supremacy.

We may contrast the Revisionist school's belief that party loyalty resided in authentic - and perhaps inevitable - revolutionary fervor with the Totalitarian school's interpretation of popular loyalty as mere acquiescence to state power, as submission to fear. With ample support for both theses, this essay argues that neither account alone suffices to explain the regime's staying-power, and instead suggests that the two views are mutually consistent.

Criticisms aside, the Totalitarian school of thought is not lacking in evidence. It is clear that the Soviet state made a monumental effort to regulate both public and private realms of life. Student files, employee cards, internal passports, and even the death penalty for flight abroad were accepted elements of life for Soviet citizens by the 1930s. State-controlled relocation of citizens, frequently to the extensive Gulag camp network, was an official top-down policy; OGPU Deputy Chairman G.G. Yagoda's internal memorandum of 11 January, 1930, for example, asks in chillingly unconcealed terms how quickly the camp network might be expanded and “where people should be removed from first.” Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code allowed punishment for “anti-Soviet” offenses including not only espionage, sabotage, and propaganda against the regime, but also for mere suspicion of disloyalty or disaffection. So extensive is our knowledge of this widespread phenomenon of state repression that it is rarely questioned.

From the Totalitarian historian's perspective, these facts alone account for the sustained dominance of the Soviet regime. The repressive stifling of debate and resulting fear of the consequences of dissent,about which Trotsky warned as early as 1923, had spread from the Bolshevik Party to engulf society as a whole. Newspapers towed the Party line without deviation or dispute. When accused of anti-state activities, citizens often instantly confessed, knowing that it was safer to admit guilt and “recant.” Fear of official retaliation kept citizens superficially loyal, even when they knew they and many of those around them were innocent.

So powerful was this mentality of fear that it defied even logic and common sense. Written in 1948 at the height of Stalin's rule, a disillusioned George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four portrayed a dystopic future society in which “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength,” mirroring the reversal of logic he saw in the contemporary Soviet Union. Inside Stalin's country, too, citizens sensed this paradox. In her autobiographical novel, Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginzburg writes of a “reversal of logic and common sense” that allowed people to accuse others of crimes they knew were absurd.

Her mother-in-law's wisdom, “There's no one so silly as a clever man,” is also indicative of this trend; intelligence was no longer a desirable quality, because it singled one out as potential opposition. So long-lasting was this mental phenomenon that physicist Vasili Nesterenko used it to explain Soviet officials' perilously inept reaction to the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, explicitly comparing their actions to the “criminals [of] 1937.” In a profoundly dangerous situation, illogical leaders “needed to talk about physics, about the laws of physics, but instead they talked about enemies, always looking for enemies… we're still Stalin's country, you know.” To the Totalitarian historian, the Stalinist mentality of fear is the key and genuine loyalty cannot account for the citizens' acquiescence to the regime's will.

However, the Revisionist historian would argue that this very phenomenon - genuine loyalty - seemed to be present in no small quantity throughout the Soviet Union. Examples abound. Reflecting upon her earlier self, Ginzburg writes “in all honesty” that she had “not the shadow of a doubt of the rightness of the Party line.” She obeyed the Party even when she was summoned to Moscow for questioning, for she could not bear to be disloyal. Even in prison, she could not bring herself to say anything against Stalin.

Ginzburg notes a similar attitude in many other communists' minds: her husband adopted the “orthodox attitude” and argued that her innocence was an atypical case; a nurse she encountered could not fathom that she had been arrested for nothing; and a co-worker disowned her husband when he was arrested, crying “My child has no father!” In these cases, citizens seem to exhibit genuine loyalty, to the extent of choosing the Party over loved ones.