TOTAL CONTROL

Totalitarian regimes are based on controlling the flow of information and are suspicious of any independent channels of information. When military officers, state officials, or ordinary citizens exchange information, they can build trust. If they come to trust one another, they can organize resistance to the regime. Therefore, a key tenet of totalitarian regimes is that wherever people meet and exchange information, the regime should be there too, to keep an eye on them. In the 1930s, this was one principle that Hitler and Stalin shared.
On March 31, 1933, two months after Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis passed the Coordination Act (GleichschaltungsgesetZ). This stipulated that by April 30, 1933, all political, social, and cultural organizations throughout Germany—from municipalities to football clubs and local choirs-must be run according to Nazi ideology, as organs of the Nazi state. It upended life in every city and hamlet in Germany.
For example, in the small Alpine village of Oberstdorf, the democratically elected municipal council met for the last time on April 21, 1933, and three days later it was replaced by an unelected Nazi council that appointed a Nazi mayor. Since the Nazis alone allegedly knew what the people really wanted, who other than Nazis could implement the people' s will? Oberstdorf also had about fifty associations and clubs, ranging from a beekeeping society to an alpinist club. They all had to conform to the Coordination Act, adjusting their boards, membership, and statutes to Nazi demands, hoisting the swastika flag, and concluding every meeting with the "Horst Wessel Song," the Nazi Party' s anthem. On April 6, 1933, the Oberstdorf fishing society banned Jews from its ranks. None of the thirty-two members was Jewish, but they felt they had to prove their Aryan credentials to the new regime.with the "Horst Wessel Song," the Nazi Party s anthem.[81]
Things were even more extreme in Stalin' s U.S.S.R. Whereas the Nazis still allowed church organizations and private businesses some partial freedom of action, the Soviets made no exceptions. By 1928 and the launch of the first Five-Year Plan, there were government officials, party functionaries, and secret police informants in every neighborhood and village, and between them they controlled every aspect of life: all businesses from power plants to cabbage farms; all newspapers and radio stations; all universities, schools, and youth groups; all hospitals and clinics; all voluntary and religious organizations; all sporting and scientific associations; all parks, museums, and cinemas.
If a dozen people came together to play football, hike in the woods, or do some charity work, the party and the secret police had to be there too, represented by the local party cell or NKVD agent. The speed and efficiency of modern information technology meant that all these party cells and NKVD agents were always just a telegram or phone call away from Moscow. Information about suspicious persons and activities was fed into a countrywide, cross-referenced system of card catalogs. Known as kartoteki, these catalogs contained information from work records, police files, residence cards, and other forms of social registrations and, by the 1930s, had become the primary mechanism for surveilling and controlling the Soviet population.[82]
This made it feasible for Stalin to seek control over the totality of Soviet life. One crucial example was the campaign to collectivize Soviet farming. For centuries, economic, social, and private life in the thousands of villages of the sprawling Tsarist Empire was managed by several traditional institutions: the local commune, the parish church, the private farm, the local market, and above all the family. In the mid-1920s, the Soviet Union was still an overwhelmingly agrarian economy. About 82 percent of the total population lived in villages, and 83 percent of the workforce was engaged in farming. [83]But if each peasant family made its own decisions about what to grow, what to buy, and how much to charge for their produce, it greatly limited the ability of Moscow officials to themselves plan and control social and economic activities. What if the officials decided on a major agrarian reform, but the peasant families rejected it?
So when in 1928 the Soviets came up with their first Five-Year Plan for the development of the Soviet Union, the most important item on the agenda was to collectivize farming.
The idea was that in every village all the families would join a kolkhoz—a collective farm. They would hand over to the kolkhoz all their property land, houses, horses, cows, shovels, pitchforks. They would work together for the kolkhoz, and in return the kolkhoz would provide for all their needs, from housing and education to food and health care. The kolkhoz would also decide based on orders from Moscow— whether they should grow cabbages or turnips; whether to invest in a tractor or a school; and who would work in the dairy farm, the tannery, and the clinic. The result, thought the Moscow masterminds, would be the first perfectly just and equal society in human history.
They were similarly convinced of the economic advantages of their proposed system, thinking that the kolkhoz would enjoy economy of scale. For example, when every peasant family had but a small strip of land, it made little sense to buy a tractor to plow it, and in any case most families couldn't afford a tractor. Once all land was held communally, it could be cultivated far more efficiently using modern machinery. In addition, the kolkhoz was supposed to benefit from the wisdom of modern science. Instead of every peasant deciding on production methods on the basis of old traditions and groundless superstitions, state experts with university degrees from institutions like the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences would make the crucial decisions.
To the planners in Moscow, it sounded wonderful. They expected a 50 percent increase in agricultural production by 1931[84]And if in the process the old village hierarchies and inequalities were bulldozed, all the better. To most peasants, however, it sounded terrible. They didn' t trust the Moscow planners or the new kolkhoz system. They did not want to give up their old way of life or their private property. Villagers slaughtered cows and horses instead of handing them to the kolkhoz. Their motivation to work dwindled. People made less effort plowing fields that belonged to everyone than plowing fields that belonged to their own family. Passive resistance was ubiquitous, sometimes flaring into violent clashes.
Whereas Soviet planners expected to harvest ninety-eight million tons of grain in 1931, production was only sixty-nine million, according to official data, and might have been as low as fifty-seven million tons in reality. The 1932 harvest was even worse.[85)
The state reacted with fury. Between 1929 and 1936, food confiscation, government neglect, and man-made famines (resulting from government policy rather than a natural disaster) claimed the lives of between 4.5 and 8.5 million people.[86]Millions of additional peasants were declared enemies of the state and deported or imprisoned. The most basic institutions of peasant life the family, the church, the local community were terrorized and dismantled.
In the name of justice, equality, and the will of the people, the collectivization campaign annihilated anything that stood in its way. In the first two months of 1930 alone, about 60 million peasants in more than 100,000 villages were herded into collective farms.[87]In June 1929, only 4 percent of Soviet peasant households had belonged to collective farms. By March 1930 the figure had risen to 57 percent. By April 1937, 97 percent of households in the countryside had been confined to the 235,000 Soviet collective farms.[88] In just seven years, then, a way of life that had existed for centuries had been replaced by the totalitarian brainchild of a few Moscow bureaucrats.
The Soviet attempt to control the family was reflected in a dark joke told in Stalin' s day. Stalin visits a factory undercover, and conversing with a worker, he asks the man,
"Who is your father?"
"Stalin," replies the worker.
"Who is your mother?"
"The Soviet Union," the man responds.
"And what do you want to be?"
“An orphan." ［102］
At the time you could easily lose your liberty or your life for telling this joke, even if you told it in your own home to your closest family members. The most important lesson Soviet parents taught their children wasn't loyalty to the party or to Stalin. It was "keep your mouth shut." [103]Few things in the Soviet Union were as dangerous as holding an open conversation.