Oprichnik of socialist competition – Newspaper Kommersant No. 242 (7443) of 12/28/2022

The publishing house “New Literary Review” published a book by Oleg Khlevnyuk, dedicated to one of the most unusual scams of the Stalin era – a private organization that, first on the fronts of World War II, and then in peacetime, was engaged in construction under the guise of a state one. About the case of Nikolai Pavlenko tells Alexey Mokrousov.

In November 1954, in the tribunal of the Moscow District Military Court, a process began that was not covered by the press – the trial of Nikolai Pavlenko and the Military Development Department he led, a private-state company that had been operating for almost ten years. Meanwhile, it was one of the most unusual trials in the USSR. On the one hand, the economic model alien to the state of workers and peasants was under trial, and on the other hand, the career of a lone adventurer. The most detailed, as far as possible, the monograph of the historian Oleg Khlevnyuk is devoted to this process.

Khlevnyuk tells the story of the most unusual imposture in the space of the Soviet empire in eight chapters. Created on false documents, the Directorate (the organization changed its name more than once, remaining essentially a construction trust) began to work during the war years, moving along with the front and reaching Germany. It also worked after – on the territory of Moldova and Ukraine, the Baltic states and Belarus. The quality of the roads, they say, was better than those made by “real”, state-owned enterprises. There were enough violations of the law – the chapter “Excellence in socialist competition” is followed by a chapter on “cartridges”, acquaintances and bribes. Unpaid taxes and the self-assigned rank of colonel of the engineering troops are still half the trouble, but the possession of weapons, unauthorized executions in war conditions is already the assumption of the functions of the state. In 1955, Pavlenko was sentenced to death, accomplices received long sentences, but someone escaped punishment because they did not know about the criminal nature of the organization.

After perestroika, the figure of Pavlenko, the founder of a semi-underground empire, attracted the attention of journalists and documentary filmmakers, they wrote about him, made films, his biography became the basis of the Black Wolves television series. Everyone was fascinated by the possibility of a parallel reality in the Stalin era. But history differs from mass media in that it sees signs of general processes in a particular case.

Fictitious, from the point of view of the state, the Department of Military Development worked really, concluded contracts and usually carefully carried them out. Between 1948 and 1952, the Office, which numbered hundreds of people, built in 32 cities, its predecessor, the Office of War Works, from 1942 erected facilities at airfields and field hospitals.

The difficulties that Khlevnyuk encountered during the reconstruction of the investigation are expected: part of the material deposited mainly in the GARF is available, and the military archives are not available. Nevertheless, the picture has developed, and even in the most important, perhaps, part of it. Usually the accusation prevails in history, but in this case, more votes of the accused themselves survived – thanks to their appeals. In Pavlenko’s statements, “his corporation appeared as an ordinary capitalist enterprise mimicking a socialist one,” writes Khlevniuk. “In its work, the corporation relied on economic independence and profit, which it preferred to use at its own discretion. Numerous violations and crimes were largely (although not completely) the result of going beyond the strict framework of state regulation of the economy, and not the criminal intentions of the members of the corporation. Pavlenko believed that out of the 25 million rubles officially withdrawn from the accounts of the State Bank and imputed to it as a crime, in reality 1.5-2 million were stolen from the state, the rest was spent on salaries, the purchase of equipment and other necessary things.

During the investigation, Pavlenko and his accomplices were tried to “sew on politics”. The author of the book, citing archival documents, recalls the atmosphere that prevailed in the country in the last years of Stalin’s rule, and what awaited those who were too talkative. So, in July 1951, a homeworker from an artel in Moscow, E. Pestel, was sentenced to prison for retelling to her friends the plots of the broadcasts of the radio stations Voice of America (included in the register of media-foreign agents) and the BBC; A. Yevtushenko, station duty officer on the South Donetsk railway, was also convicted for this, he quoted Truman about the responsibility of the USSR for the outbreak of the Korean War and argued that “the leaders of the Soviet government are waiting for the fate of Hitler and Mussolini and that the Russian people themselves will help to do this” . Considerable terms were given: in October 1952, a combine operator from North Ossetia, a participant in the war, E. Babich, received ten years in the camps, he argued that “in America there is real freedom of speech, everyone can speak and write there. But we, in the USSR, do not have real freedom of speech, it is clamped down … “

As a result, in the process of Pavlenko, political articles gave way to economic ones – a thaw was coming, times seemed to soften, but the state perfectly felt where the threat of ideology came from. During the years of stagnation, Pavlenko’s experience flourished in the vastness from the Baltic states and Central Asia to the Transcaucasus and the Far East, the “shadow economy” took on various forms, from fartsovka and postscripts to clothing production and illegal fishing. As a result, it became one of the most important components of a society of general scarcity, precisely because it helped fight this scarcity and established the missing connections of the official economy. And thus prolonging her life. It is a pity that Nikolai Pavlenko himself, a man who turned out to be of the same blood as the children of Lieutenant Schmidt, did not manage to find out about this, but Ostap Bender was still the scale, and not Shura Balaganov.