Purging God-the Rise and Fall of Stalin's Continuous Calendar

The Bolsheviks had always been great admirers of the 'cult of Ford' and all that it embraced, including the time and motion studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor. The enthusiasm for the 'high priests of capitalism' became evem nore intense after Stalin introduced the First Five Year Plan in 1928. But, of course, the Soviets had to go yet one step further in the pursuit of maximum efficiency.

Although the working day had been reduced from eight to seven hours, what the state gave with one hand it took away with the other. In 1929, not long after the introduction of the reduced working day, all factories were ordered to adopt a three-shift system, allowing them to work day and night. This meant that many had to work at the most undesirable hours. No sooner had this policy been announced than one Yuri Larin devised a scheme for even greater efficiency. All factories were still closed on Sundays. Why not, Larin reasoned, abolish the wasted day by introducing the continuous working week?

When this proposal was first raised at the Congress of Soviets in May 1929 it attracted little support. It was only when Stalin took an interest that matters changed. By June the press was full of articles praising the idea; and in August the Council of People's Commissars decreed that it should be brought into immediate effect.

Simple enough in theory, it proved very awkward in practice. Complex shift patterns had to be introduced, and the number of holidays allowed reduced. Workers in each establishment were divided into five groups, distinguished by a colour code, which appeared on the new Uninterrupted Work Week calendars. The scheme was also used to further the regime's atheist policy, because the bulk of the working population were no longer free to attend church on Sundays. The most serious impact, of course, was on family life; but the state argued that the collective good had to come first. This was the Ideal, and like most Ideals, it was universally hated by those that it effected most-the working population. Husbands and wives rarely had rest days that coincided.

This grass-roots resentment could be, and was, ignored. Not so the deleterious effect on production rates. With complicated rotas, work teams found themselves performing different tasks on successive weeks. Machines were no longer in the continuous keeping of those who knew them best, with the result that breakages became increasingly common, often put down to 'political sabotage.'

Bit by bit the scheme lost favour. In June 1931 Stalin gave a speech, criticising the 'depersonalised labour' brought about by the hasty introduction of the continuous week. This was the beginning of the end. In November of that same year the government ordered the reintroduction of the six-day week, although Sunday remained a working day. But even this last vestage of the 'continuous week' was not to last; and by 1940 Sunday had been restored as the universal day of rest. God is not so easily defeated!

The Greatest Failure since Lenin

It’s now twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wail, presaging collapse of Communism across Eastern Europe. I marked the occasion recently in a piece I called The Woes of Lemonade Joe, focusing specifically on the actions of Mikhail Gorbachev. I’m now beginning to find out even more about the man, about exactly what motivated him. And the thing that motivated him most was the writings of Lenin! I can’t quite believe that; he must have been the only man in the whole rotten system to pay anything bit lip service to that particular monster of Russian history. I’ll say more on this in a bit.

I’ve glanced over The Accidental Hero of 1989, a piece by Victor Sebestyen in the latest edition of Prospect. Some of the details are really quite amusing. The gradual sclerosis of the Soviet leadership in the days before Gorbachev became General Secretary was a source of much sardonic humour. How could it not when a living cadaver like Konstantin Chernenko was wheeled on to the stage? “Comrades,” one joke went, “we will start the congress in the traditional way-with the carrying in of the general secretary.”

Gorbachev, reaching the top of the barbed-wire pole in his fifties, came almost like a schoolboy compared with the gerontocracy that had ruled hitherto. Amazingly he was the first Soviet leader to have been born after the Revolution of 1917. His rise through the ranks of Party and government followed the usual pattern. “We all licked Brezhnev’s ass”, to use his own words. But Lemonade Joe was different: he was an idealist in a world of cynics and placemen-and that was the cause of his ruin and the ruin of the Evil Empire. It must be one of history’s acutest ironies: for what Lenin set up he also pulled down.

It was Gorbachev’s special mission, as he saw it, to return to the ‘pure’ path of Lenin away from the ‘perversions’ of Stalin. Leninist ideology was always there as a sort of background noise, some noticed but mostly tried to ignore, though not Gorby. His idealism is actually quite touching, naïve, yes, but touching. Unfortunately for him it most often ended in disaster. He somehow thought that by allowing the publication of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, by revealing the horrors of Soviet history, that people would somehow become better Communists! The reality, of course, is that they began to hate the foul doctrine even more.

It really is true: Gorbachev’s path to hell was paved with not just good intentions but with truly noble ones. Consider more closely the actions, worthy in every degree, which earned him the nickname of Lemonade Joe. In 1984 more than nine million drunks were picked off Soviet streets. The statistics for premature death, family violence and crime were truly shocking. In the Politburo when Gorbachev proposed a drastic increase in the price of vodka, Vladimir Dementsev, the finance minister, objected that it would have disastrous effect on state finances. “Do you propose to build communism on vodka?”, Gorbachev responded. He simply did not understand that the system had long since abandoned all attempts to ‘build communism.’

The price hike had just the effect Dementsev predicted. What was worse the growth in illegal distilleries and home brewing resulted often in a form of mass poisoning. The death rate shot up even further. Gorbachev took two steps forward and three steps back. And that is more or less how the Soviet Empire was governed in its final years.

He receives hardly any mention now in Russian school texts, which devote much space to the greatness of Stalin. That’s not fair. Gorbachev was by far the greatest Leninist since Lenin; and that is precisely why he was Communism’s greatest failure.

Child 44, Dictatorship, Death, Deceit....and Disappointment

Earlier this year I wrote a blog headed A Forgotten Serial Killer, a brief account of the career of Paul Ogorzow, executed for the murder of a number of women in wartime Berlin, a piece I introduced as follows:

There are certain periods of history, and certain societies, that are, it might be said, defined by criminality. Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany are good examples of systems of governance where law, as it is commonly understood, only serves to demonstrate how little protection people have from the state that follows no objective moral standard.

The Ogorzow case showed how law-enforcement, the ordinary process of law-enforcement, can be distorted and corrupted by entrenched ideological preconceptions. I find this whole area quite fascinating, the way in which ‘normal’ crime is perceived in abnormal societies, societies where crime is viewed chiefly in political terms. It was this interest in this aspect of the pathology of dictatorship that drew me to Child 44, a debut novel by Tom Rob Smith, longlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize.

I have the novel before me, the paperback edition, covered in lavish praises from a number of sources, the usual over-the-top hyperbole that publishers love. The most restrained, I’m pleased to say, is the quote from The Telegraph, which describes it as a “…superior commercial thriller.” And that’s exactly what it is: a superior commercial thriller, nothing more; it does exactly what it says on the tin!

Yes, yes, the usual clichés apply: it’s well-written, fast-paced, a real page turner and so on, and so on, and so on. But-and I genuinely hate to strike a sour note-it simply does not deserve the praise that has heaped upon it; for it opens with high promise and closes on low disappointment. So much reviewing now reminds me of what George Orwell wrote in his essay, In Praise of the Novel. The novel, he said, “is being shouted out of existence.” Child 44 is, I think, probably typical of most of the works that are shouted on to the Man Booker list, long or short: it’s not a bad book; it’s just not a very good one. In a way it’s a pity; for with a little more work it might very well have been a good book, perhaps even a great one. More, anyway, than a superior commercial thriller.

It’s based very loosely on the career of Andrei Chikatilo, an infamous serial killer of Soviet times known as the Butcher of Rostov or the Rostov Ripper, responsible for the deaths of fifty-two women and children. The main action opens in Moscow in early 1953, just before the death of Stalin, and continues to the summer of that same year. The principle character, the hero of the book, is one Leo Demidov, an officer in the MGB, the post-war metamorphosis of the NKVD, the state security apparatus originally set up by that sociopath Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Bolshevik Torquemada, under the Cheka appellation. Demidov is not a policeman as such, for the real police, the militia, those who deal with day to day law and order, have a very low status in the perfect society, a society where crime officially does not exist.

When it comes to the politics of Soviet security, the brutality, the indifference to life, the moral decay, the fear induced and corruption involved Smith has mastered his brief with commendable skill. There is little to fault the historical setting and the mood he sets. I have to say, though, that I personally found Demidov, as a character, just a little too naïve, not really the sort of man one would expect to advance very far through the ranks of the cynical and the sickening. Quite frankly he’s too much of an empiricist; he doubts where only faith is required

Refusing to denounce Raisa, his own wife, as a dissident, Demidov is demoted, transferred to the lowest grade of the militia and sent with her from Moscow to Voualsk, a bleak industrial town in the Soviet Urals. This process is spurred on by the malevolent Vasili, his second-in-command, who acts partially out of ambition, partially out of hatred.

Anyway, bit it by bit Demidov is forced to question the assumptions on which his life and career has been based when he investigates a series of gruesome murders, where the state refuses to recognise that a consistent and abnormal pattern is emerging. In his new post, and with the eventual help of his chief, he uncovers more and more bodies, all killed in the same fashion. The first case he dealt with in Moscow, the death of a child of a colleague, quickly dismissed as an accident, turns out to be the fourth-forth in a series, hence the title of the book.

So far the story has been reasonably well structured. The reader is quickly carried along by the plot, one that does no great harm to history, geography or believability. But now, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, Brown turns from drama to farce.

We know from information uncovered by the militia chief that the murders, which take place along the Russian railway network, are most heavily concentrated in and around Rostov-on-Don. Demidov and his wife go back to Moscow with false papers, hoping to obtain a description of the killer from a woman who may have seen him with the little boy murdered in the city. Here he himself murders one Ivan, a friend of his wife, who turns out to be a snitch, although the MGB never seem to connect him with the crime. He and his wife are arrested on returning to Voualsk, sent to the Lubyanka in Moscow for interrogation (it turns out that Leo is not Leo at all) and then packed off to Siberia for discrediting the Soviet state. They manage to avoid being murdered on the train-a plot devised by the evil Vasili-, escape by digging up the floorboards of their cattle-truck carriage and dropping on to the line. Yes, that’s right!

Once free they make their way from the east down to Rostov, a huge distance, with the help of benign peasants along the way, avoiding all of the efforts of the MGB to intercept them, avoiding being denounced in a society where fear and denunciation were modes of survival, as the author made clear at the outset. The express rushes on; Smith is in a hurry to finish; Midsummer Murders clashes and blends with Nineteen Eighty-Four by way of Emmerdale Farm ( and who would have thought that a kolkhoz could turn into that!). It’s chaotic, breathless, unbelievable, schoolboy stuff; a tale of the wild east!

No, I’m not going to tell you who the murderer is, though the more perceptive who read the book will have guessed by reflecting back on the opening pages, set in the Great Famine of the early 1930s. Let me just say that the whole case, murder after murder, grim in every degree, turns out to be no more than a grand form of attention-seeking! When the perpetrator is finally tracked down he says-and I had already anticipated this-“What kept you?” Oh dear! Demidov triumphs, Vasili is disposed of, and the criminal turns out, at least according to the authorities, to be an aberration, a man operating under the influence of the decadent capitalist powers. Please, be warned: this is not Gorky Park!

I understand that Ridley Scott, the director of Gladiator, has obtained the film-making rights to Child 44. I’m glad, because I suspect it will turn out to be a far better movie than a book, much like All Quiet on the Western Front and Remains of the Day.

Look, I’m pleased that I read it and I really hope that I haven’t put potential readers off by what I’ve written here, more negative, I think, than I had intended. Never mind me; go with The Independent, which shouts at you that this book “...has everything you could wish for…and more.” All I will say is that I did wish for more…and didn’t get it. The author has promise, but the promise needs to mature. Please, Tom, don’t be seduced by the hype.