Stalin

Beyond 25,000er mobilization and grudging regime flexibility, local solutions to the chaos emerged. The central authorities had proved unable to settle on how collective farmers would be compensated, but the farmers sowed crops anyway as locales came up with their own compensation formulas.²⁰⁸ Sheer luck made an incalculable contribution in the form of spectacularly favorable weather. “Nature gave us an extra month of spring,” one official rejoiced, and, given how late the sowing campaign had begun, that month was crucial for the harvest.²⁰⁹ With harvest projections suddenly going from doubtful to promising, grain exports to earn hard currency for machinery imports would be increased far beyond what the Five-Year Plan had anticipated for 1930, to more than 5 million tons. Mikoyan crowed at a Moscow regional party conference in early June that “one more year, and we shall not only secure ourselves enough grain, but become one of the largest grain producers in the whole world.”²¹⁰

LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE

In the early summer of 1930, Stalin had sent Nadya to German doctors in Karlsbad for a stomach ailment. “Tatka! . . . What was the journey like, what did you see, have you been to the doctors, what do they say about your health, write to me,” he wrote on June 21. “We open the [party] congress on the 26th. Things are not too bad. I miss you very much. Tatochka, I am at home alone, like an owl. . . . Come home soon. I kiss you.”²¹¹ The 16th Party Congress opened as scheduled, the first since December 1927 and a massive affair, attended by 2,159 delegates, 1,268 of them with voting rights. Yet another purge had expelled more than 170,000 party members, especially in the countryside, for “passivity,” drunkenness, “defects in personal life,” “alien” social origins, or being “concealed” Trotskyites, and intimidated those who sympathized with the rightists.²¹² But because of new recruitment of worker members, sometimes of entire factory shops, membership in 1930 would rise by more than 500,000, to 2.2 million. Still, that was 1.4 percent of a total population of perhaps 160 million. Only one quarter of state functionaries belonged to the party, and in industrial management it was significantly less.²¹³

Stalin’s lengthy political report, over both the morning and the afternoon of June 27, proceeded in his now familiar catechism fashion of rhetorical questions, enumerated points, and key-phrase repetition, in a self-congratulatory tone. “Today there is an economic crisis in nearly all the industrial countries of capitalism,” he gloated. “The illusions about the omnipotence of capitalism in general, and about the omnipotence of North American capitalism in particular, are collapsing.” He deemed the crisis one of overproduction, and asserted that capitalism’s contradictions were sharpening, which goaded the bourgeoisie to foreign adventurism. “Capitalist encirclement is not simply a geographical conception,” he warned. “It means that around the USSR there are hostile class forces, ready to support our class enemies within the USSR morally, materially, by means of financial blockade, and, when the opportunity arises, by means of military intervention.” Stalin bragged, however, that the party’s industrialization tempos were making the Trotskyite super-industrialists of the 1920s seem “the most extreme minimalists and the most wretched capitulators. (Laughter. Applause.)”²¹⁴

Stalin remonstrated that “people who chatter about the necessity of reducing the rate of development of industry are enemies of socialism, agents of our class enemies (applause).” “Dizzy with Success” rural caution was abandoned: “Either we vanquish and crush them, the exploiters, or they will vanquish and crush the workers and peasants of the USSR.”²¹⁵ Because the “socialist sector” had come to dominate the economy, he declared, the USSR had entered “the period of socialism.” Congress delegates enjoyed the right to purchase scarce goods at the restricted OGPU store, including fabric for a suit (3 meters for just 54 rubles), a coat, a shirt, a pair of shoes, two pairs of underwear, two knitting needles, two chunks of regular soap, and one of bath soap. They also received, gratis, 800 grams of meat, 800 grams of cheese, 1 kilo of smoked sausage, 80 grams of sugar, 100 grams of tea, and 125 cigarettes. “This is, of course, a blatant buy-off,” observed Ivan Shitts, a Russified Baltic German (Shutz) and an editor at the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in his diary, noting that despite propaganda trumpeting the “heady growth of production,” the opportunity to buy mundane goods was treated as a perquisite.²¹⁶

Budyonny, the country’s most famous horseman, joked at the congress that “we will destroy the horse as a class.” He had in mind not the peasants’ destruction of livestock, which the regime had provoked, but the introduction of tractors. Just in time for the congress, the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, whose construction had been rushed through the brutal winter, produced its first tractor. Stalin had sent a congratulatory telegram, printed in Pravda on June 18, thanking “our teachers in technology, the American specialists and technicians,” and lauding the plant’s prospective annual tractor output as “50,000 missiles exploding the old bourgeois world, and laying the road to a new socialist order in the countryside.”²¹⁷ This was the USSR’s first conveyor belt plant, but only 60 percent of the machine tools had been installed. Instead of a planned 2,000 tractors in the July–September 1930 quarter, the factory would produce 43, and an American engineer on-site noted that “after 70 hours of work they begin to go to pieces.” Soviet steel was awful, copper ribbon for radiators arrived scratched beyond use, thousands of the assembly-line workers were touching nuts and bolts for the first time. Two of the high-priced American engineers died from typhoid; others begged to go home.²¹⁸ Mastering Fordist assembly lines would take time. But a twenty-five-year-old Pravda correspondent, before he died of tuberculosis, gushed about the “uninterrupted flow of life, if you wish, the conveyor belt of History, the laws of its development in socialist conditions with all its breakdowns, terrible disruptions, savagery, filth, outrages.”²¹⁹

At pre-congress meetings in educational academies, factories, and major party organizations, sharp attacks had been leveled at party policy.²²⁰ But rather than attempt to lead this widespread sentiment—that is, behave like an opposition—Rykov and Tomsky had traveled to party gatherings and warned of attempts by “petit bourgeois elements” in the village and the “bourgeoisie” abroad to take advantage of divisions inside the party. Their reward was to be rebuked at the congress for insufficient zeal in repudiating their potential followers.²²¹

Bukharin, ill with pneumonia—what Trotsky contracted while under political assault—had gone to Crimea, where he hooked up with Anna Larina; she was sixteen, he was forty-one.²²² Rykov was left to shoulder the burden and, through vicious heckling, once again admitted his errors (“of tremendous political significance”) but denied that he was part of any opposition.²²³ During the proceedings, Stalin wrote to Nadya (July 2) in Germany, “Tatka! I got all three letters. I could not reply immediately, as I was very busy. Now at last I am free. The congress will end the 10–12th. I shall be expecting you, do not be too long coming home. But stay longer, if your health makes it necessary. . . . I kiss you.”²²⁴ The congress dragged on to the 13th. Tomsky, Bukharin, and Rykov were reelected to the Central Committee, which returned Rykov to the politburo. But Tomsky was left out of the politburo, and his people were systematically purged from trade union positions. “It could be said that this is a violation of proletarian democracy,” Kaganovich told the congress delegates, apropos of the firings, “but comrades, it has long been known that for us Bolsheviks democracy is no fetish.”²²⁵

Kaganovich was “elected” to full membership in the politburo. Voroshilov and Orjonikidze departed the capital immediately for holidays of around two months. On July 17, the Stalin loyalist Sergei Kirov reported on the party congress to the Leningrad party organization he oversaw. “In a word, do not be in a hurry,” he said, mocking the rightists. “If the question arises that it is necessary to press the kulak, why do it? We are building socialism anyway, and sooner or later the kulak himself will disappear. . . . If we need to conduct grain collections, if the kulak must hand over his surplus, why squeeze him when the price paid could be raised and he will then give it over himself. . . . In a word, the rightists are for socialism, but without particular fuss, without struggle, without difficulties.”²²⁶

Two days later, state bank chairman Pyatakov, the recanted Trotskyite, who had been talking heart to heart to Orjonikidze, wrote to Stalin detailing a fiscal crisis and runaway inflation from lack of attention to costs and promiscuous printing of money. He proposed radically streamlining imports, curbing exports of animal products, raising prices on many goods, and tightening expenditures at the wasteful iconic construction projects.²²⁷ It was, effectively, a belated post-congress brief for a course correction. Stalin did not immediately respond.

AN ANTICAPITALIST SYSTEM IN EMBRYO

Stalin’s personal dictatorship—known as the party’s “secret department”—got a new director on July 22, 1930: Alexander Poskryobyshev (b. 1891), whose father, like Stalin’s, had been a cobbler and who had trained as a nurse before the revolution. “One day,” the shaven-headed Poskryobyshev would recall, “Stalin summoned me and said, ‘Poskryobyshev, you have a frightful look about you. You’ll terrify people.’ And he engaged me.”²²⁸ On July 23, Stalin departed for his annual southern holiday, taking Poskryobyshev with him. Molotov was left to mind the store in Moscow. Nadya, after visiting her brother Pavel Alliluyev, the Soviet trade representative in Berlin, had returned from Germany and joined her husband. On July 26, Stalin’s Rolls-Royce, exiting the territory of the Puzanovka dacha, crashed into a car from the nearby resort Red Storm. Nadya, Budyonny, and Stalin’s main bodyguard, Ivan Jūsis, were also in the vehicle. A piece of flying glass cut Stalin’s left eyebrow.²²⁹

Stalin had been suffering occasional dizziness and a flaring of nerves, and doctors confirmed a diagnosis of neurasthenia.^{230, 231} His medical record for 1930, signed by Usher Leib “Lev” Levin, a top Kremlin physician who had taken care of Lenin, characterized the ruler’s living conditions (“good”), diet (“good”), work conditions (“intellectual, significant, interesting, indeterminate number of hours in the day”), drinking (“rare”), and smoking (“a lot”). It listed his appendectomy, which had left a scar, and illnesses over the years (chest pains, flu, polyarthritis, chronic tonsillitis, coughing). Stalin’s outward appearance was noted as “fatigued”; his liver and spleen as not enlarged. He was said to have frequent pain in his left shoulder muscles, which were atrophying, a result of a childhood contusion. Down south, he had his usual joint and muscle aches and undertook sulfur baths at Matsesta, near Sochi, which worked wonders. “After the course of baths, K. E. Voroshilov came over for a walk, and they drank cold, naturally carbonated water,” Stalin’s physician, Ivan Valedinsky, recalled. “After the walk Stalin’s throat hurt, [and he developed] so-called follicular sore throat with attacks and flaring.” Stalin’s temperature reached 102. It took four days to drop. After that, he complained of pains in his left leg. Valedinsky saw his patient every day for three weeks, and the dictator appreciated his company, speaking to him on a wide variety of topics: labor discipline, collective farms, the intelligentsia. When it was time for Valedinsky to depart, Stalin inquired how he could recompense him. “I asked for help in changing my apartment, which was a former merchant’s horse stable,” the doctor recalled. “Stalin smiled after this conversation. When I returned to Moscow, I was called by the Central Committee and told they would show me an ‘object,’ which turned out to be a five-room apartment.”²³²

Stalin cherished his recuperative time on the Black Sea. On August 13, 1930, he notified Molotov, back in Moscow, “P.S. Bit by bit I’m getting better.” Exactly one month later, he would write, “I’m now completely recovered.”²³³ But, as always, this was a working holiday, and he received ciphered telegrams every day, and fat packets of longer documents eight to twelve times a month. Many of the far-reaching changes to the country and the regime he set in motion the previous winter and spring were now consolidated.²³⁴ The secret police enjoyed a further ballooning in personnel.²³⁵ Strangely, there had been a reversal of fortunes between agriculture and industry. Meat and dairy production had fallen off a cliff, but the grain harvest—ultimately fixed at 77.2 million tons—turned out to be the best in Soviet history to date.²³⁶ With the agricultural cooperatives that had been marketing peasant products transformed into collectors of grain, and machine tractor stations also facilitating collections, the regime would procure a whopping 22 million tons at state-set prices. (The peasants ate or sold the rest on the market.)²³⁷ All the while, however, from July through September 1930, critical metal-producing and fuel industries declined, undermining industry as a whole. Labor supply became tight, railways devolved into bottlenecks, and inflation proceeded unabated. Glaring underproduction of tractors compared with plan targets and mass loss of livestock cast doubt on agriculture’s future, too.

Already in the summer and fall of 1930, while luminaries such as H. G. Wells, the British science fiction writer, were lauding the Five-Year Plan as “the most important thing in the world today,” the “planlessness” of Soviet planning was exposed in an incisive analysis by the Menshevik émigré newspaper Socialist Herald, which pointed out that setting maximal quantitative targets and goading each factory to meet them, where some would succeed and others not, and where even successes would be at varied levels, rendered coherence impossible. Overfulfilling the output target of nuts only led to waste if they exceeded the production of bolts; an increased supply of bricks provided no extra utility with insufficient mortar.²³⁸ Hoarding and wheeling and dealing via illegal markets—a shadow economy—became indispensable to the working of the “planned” economy but rendered shortages and corruption endemic. “We buy up materials we do not need,” noted the head of supply at Moscow’s electrical engineering plant, “so that we can barter them for what we do need.”²³⁹ With no legal market mechanisms to control quality, defective goods proliferated. Even priority industrial customers suffered anywhere from 8 to 80 percent defective inputs, with no alternative suppliers, and one factory’s poor inputs became another factory’s low-quality output.²⁴⁰

Stalin was well informed about the problems.²⁴¹ But he understood next to nothing of the structural pathologies he had embedded by eliminating private property and legal market mechanisms. Unaccountable regional party machines, meanwhile, were consumed by skirmishing. After a collective denunciation had arrived from Western Siberia against Roberts Eihe, Stalin wrote to Molotov (August 13, 1930) that Siberia had just been divided into two regions, west and east, and that no one had complained about Eihe when he had run all of Siberia. “Suddenly Eihe turns out to be ‘unable to cope’ with his assignments? I have no doubt this is a crudely masked attempt to deceive the Central Committee and create ‘their own’ artel-like regional committee based on mutual protection. I advise you to kick out all the intriguers and . . . put full trust in Eihe.”²⁴² Convoluted infighting near his holiday dacha, in the South Caucasus federation, involving Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan party bosses, was giving Stalin fits.²⁴³

The dictator also kept a close eye on Mikhail Kalinin, who enjoyed a high profile because of his peasant origins and his role as ceremonial head of state (chairman of the Soviet central executive committee).²⁴⁴ At the politburo, Kalinin occasionally allowed himself to vote against Stalin (as in the case of closing the cafeteria for the Society of Old Political Prisoners). Orjonikidze, at the party Control Commission, had received materials from the tsarist police archives to the effect that Kalinin, as well as Jānis Rudzutaks, had squealed while under arrest, leading to incarceration of other comrades in the underground.²⁴⁵ Then, individuals accused of belonging to a fabricated “Laboring Peasant Party” testified in prison about their plans to include Kalinin in a replacement government. Molotov hesitated to circulate the extracted testimony. “That Kalinin has sinned cannot be doubted,” Stalin insisted (August 23), intent on narrowing Kalinin’s scope to act independently. “The Central Committee must definitely be informed about this in order to teach Kalinin never to get mixed up with such rascals again.”²⁴⁶

Even as he attended to his personal power, Stalin drove the financing of industrialization. “We have one and a half months left to export grain: starting in late October (perhaps even earlier), American grain will come onto the market in massive quantities, and we will not be able to withstand that,” he warned Molotov (August 23). “Once again: we must force through grain exports with all our might.”²⁴⁷ Stalin insisted on sales even though world grain prices had fallen 6 percent in 1929 and would fall another 49 percent in 1930. (The equivalent of a year’s grain exports were being stockpiled across countries.) Prices for industrial machinery remained more or less stable, meaning that in 1930, twice as much Soviet grain had to be exported per unit of machinery imported than had been the case in 1928.²⁴⁸ “Some clever people will come along and propose holding off on the shipments until the price of grain on the world markets rises ‘to its ceiling,’” he cautioned Molotov in the August 23 letter. “There are quite a few of these clever people in trade. They ought to be horsewhipped, because they are dragging us into a trap. In order to hold out, we must have hard currency reserves. But we don’t have them. . . . In short, we must push grain exports furiously.”²⁴⁹

The Soviets would export just over 5 million tons of grain at an average price of only 30 rubles per ton (half that of 1926); they would earn 157.8 million foreign-currency rubles, equivalent to a bit more than $80 million.²⁵⁰ But whereas Soviet cereals had effectively accounted for zero percent of world market share in 1928, before 1930 was over the USSR would capture fully 15 percent.²⁵¹

Stalin continued to insist that the economic troubles in the capitalist world had only reinforced the dependence of Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states on the imperialist powers, which eyed these states as platforms for attacking the Soviet Union. In fact, the Polish government had secretly rebuffed the urgent entreaties of the Ukrainian national movement in Poland to invade the Soviet Union, evidently deterred by Soviet military measures on the frontier.²⁵² Still, Stalin warned Molotov about likely provocations by Poland or Romania and about Polish diplomacy. “The Poles are certain to be putting together (if they have not already done so) a bloc of Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Finland) in anticipation of a war against the USSR,” he wrote (September 1, 1930). “To repulse both the Polish-Romanians and the Balts we should prepare to deploy (in the event of war) no fewer than 150 to 160 infantry divisions, that is, (at least) 40 to 50 divisions more than are provided for under our current guidelines. This means that we will have to bring our current army reserves up from 640,000 to 700,000 men.” Otherwise, Stalin asserted, “we are not going to be able to defend Leningrad and the right bank of Ukraine.”²⁵³

CONSPIRACY OF LOGIC

The bulkiest papers in Stalin’s holiday mailbag had become OGPU reports of plots and accompanying protocols of interrogation. Thousands of specialists had been sentenced.²⁵⁴ From Sochi, Stalin had instructed Molotov to circulate to Central Committee members new “testimony” extracted from specialists in two agencies (food supply and the statistical administration). That same day, in a belated and indirect response to Pyatakov’s devastating memo on state finances, Stalin wrote to Mężyński demanding a report on “the struggle” against speculators.²⁵⁵ He had also written to Molotov “that two or three dozen wreckers from the [finance commissariat] must be executed.” He wanted them linked to the rightists, adding that “a whole group of wreckers in the meat industry must definitely be shot and their names published in the press.”²⁵⁶ Pravda (September 3) duly publicized arrests of prominent specialists. Executions would follow.

Privately, Stalin acknowledged his didactic purposes. “By the way,” he wrote to Molotov, apropos of a “Menshevik Party” trial, “how about Misters Defendants admitting their mistakes and disgracing themselves politically, while simultaneously acknowledging the strength of the Soviet government and the correctness of the method of collectivization? It would not be a bad thing if they did.”²⁵⁷ A scapegoat dimension was also manifest: on September 13, he wrote that supply commissariat “wreckers” had plotted to “cause hunger in the country and provoke unrest among the broad masses and thus facilitate the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”²⁵⁸ Pravda announced the executions of forty-eight “food wreckers,” and the OGPU reported worker approval and intelligentsia disapproval of the sentences. (“In tsarist times there were also executions, but they were rare; now they look at people as if they are dogs.”)²⁵⁹ Stalin issued instructions for a trial of a “Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine,” which was staged in Kharkov’s Opera House with forty-five defendants: writers, theologians, philologists, schoolteachers, a librarian, medical personnel. “We ought not to hide the sins of our enemies from the workers,” he wrote to the bosses of Soviet Ukraine. “In addition, let so-called ‘Europe’ know that the repressions against the counterrevolutionary part of the specialists who try to poison and infect Communists-patients are completely justified.”²⁶⁰

The entire country, it seemed, was honeycombed with wreckers—including in the Red Army command: on September 10, 1930, Mężyński sent Stalin interrogation protocols incriminating Tukhachevsky and other high-placed military men in a conspiracy against the regime.²⁶¹

Tukhachevsky had been demoted from chief of staff to commander of the Leningrad military district. He remained a polarizing figure, a former nobleman who mixed prominently with tsarist general staff types, even though he had never gone to the general staff academy. Many people deemed him, as one put it, “smart, energetic, firm, but vile to the last degree, nothing sacred besides his own direct advantage.”²⁶² At a public book discussion, he had been the target of resentful shouts in the hall (“You should be hung for 1920,” a reference to the Polish-Soviet War debacle).²⁶³ Recently, he had submitted a fourteen-page memorandum to Voroshilov calling for massive increases in military industry. Tukhachevsky argued that no modern army could prevail without tanks, aircraft, chemical weapons, and parachute infantry for greater mobility. He called for annual production of no less than 50,000 tanks and 40,000 airplanes (which would rise in the future to 197,000 tanks and 122,500 aircraft). This unsolicited program had put Voroshilov—already anxious about Stalin’s fondness for Uborevičius, another modernizer—on the spot.

Voroshilov had had the memo vivisected by the new chief of staff, Shaposhnikov. Although Tukhachevsky had not specified the size of his proposed standing army, Shaposhnikov reckoned it at a preposterous 11 million, fully 7.5 percent of the Soviet population.²⁶⁴ Then the defense commissar had sat on these materials for weeks.²⁶⁵ Immediately after “Dizzy with Success” was published castigating excesses, Voroshilov had sent the original and Shaposhnikov’s damning assessment to Stalin, noting that “Tukhachevsky wants to be original and . . . ‘radical.’”²⁶⁶ Stalin had answered, “You know that I greatly respect comrade Tukhachevsky as an especially capable comrade,” a remarkable admission. But Stalin, too, dismissed Tukhachevsky’s “‘fantastic’ plan” as out of touch with “the real possibilities of the economic, financial, and cultural order,” and concluded that “to implement such a ‘plan’ would entail ruining both the country’s economy and the army. It would be worse than any counterrevolution.”²⁶⁷

Stalin’s letter had deemed Tukhachevsky a victim of “faddish ‘leftism,’” but in Mężyński’s September 10, 1930, letter, he was accused of harboring “rightist” sentiments as the head of a military plot. Collectivization had provoked hints of wavering in the Red Army (something Voroshilov denied), and Stalin was preternaturally given to seeing an ideological affinity between the party right deviation and the tsarist-era officers. Police informants who suffused the military milieu reported gossip, on the basis of which the OGPU had arrested two military academy teachers close to Tukhachevsky.²⁶⁸ At first their “testimony” was vague, involving his Gypsy lover (who might be working for foreign intelligence), but under police direction they began to “recollect” Tukhachevsky’s possible links to “right deviationists,” until soon enough they spoke of a monarchist-military plot to seize power.²⁶⁹ “I reported this case to comrade Molotov and asked for authorization, while awaiting your directives,” Mężyński wrote in his letter to Stalin, asking whether he should immediately arrest all the top military men named or await Stalin’s return, which, given the alleged existence of a coup plot, could be risky. Stalin instructed Mężyński to “limit yourself to maximally careful surveillance.”²⁷⁰

Had Stalin believed in the existence of a genuine military plot, could he have suggested waiting to arrest the plotters and remained on holiday, far from the capital, for another month? It is impossible to establish his thinking definitively. Still, it appears that for him the “coup plot” derived not from facts per se, but from Marxist-Leninist logic: criticism of collectivization ipso facto meant support for capitalism; support for capitalism meant colluding with the imperialists; furthering the cause of imperialism meant effectively plotting to overthrow the Soviet regime; plotting an overthrow perforce entailed assassinating Stalin, since he embodied the building of socialism.

Elections in Germany on September 14, 1930, meanwhile, delivered a sensation: the National Socialists received 6.37 million votes, 18.25 percent of the total, and increased their parliamentary deputies from 12 to 107, becoming the second-largest party in the Reichstag, after the Social Democrats, at 143. Communist deputies increased from 54 to 77. Pravda (September 16) deemed the vote a “temporary success of the bourgeoisie,” even while noting that millions of those who had voted for the Nazis had rejected the existing order.

Stalin at this time seems to have been more fixated on his nemesis Rykov, complaining to Molotov (September 13) that “the Council of People’s Commissars is paralyzed by Rykov’s insipid and essentially anti-party speeches. . . . Clearly, this cannot continue. Radical measures are needed. As to what kind, I shall tell you when I get to Moscow.” But Stalin could not wait, writing again from Sochi, “Rykov and his lot must go as well. This is now inevitable. . . . But for the time being, this is just between you and me.” By September 22, Stalin was urging Molotov to take Rykov’s place as head of government. “With the arrangement I am proposing to you,” Stalin noted, “we will finally have a perfect union between the top levels of the state and the party, and this will reinforce our power.” Stalin instructed Molotov to discuss the idea “in a tight circle with close friends” and report any objections. He appears to have written the same to Kaganovich.²⁷¹ Stalin also showed deep frustration over circumvention of central directives, despite newspaper exposés. In the same letter, he proposed “a standing commission established for the sole purpose of systematically checking up on implementation of the center’s decisions.”²⁷²

From reports of eavesdropped conversations, Stalin could read that the populace was unhappy with the consequences of wholesale collectivization, dekulakization, and accelerated industrialization—which was why Rykov was especially dangerous: he was a leader who could rally the disaffected and the opportunistic. It was not Rykov alone, moreover: at a politburo meeting on September 16, 1930, the Stalin protégé Syrtsov, head of the Russian republic’s Council of People’s Commissars, had agreed with Rykov, head of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars, regarding an accumulation of problems not being addressed, and supported Rykov’s proposals to sell scarce goods, such as sugar, at market prices to stabilize state finances.²⁷³ Molotov told the dictator that at the politburo meeting, Syrtsov had spoken “with frantic right-wing opportunist claims that it is not possible to solve acute economic problems with repressive ‘OGPU’ methods.”²⁷⁴ Despite Stalin’s impatience, the removal of Rykov—an ethnic Russian with a peasant background, who had worked with Lenin, occupied Lenin’s former position, and refused to embrace the role of opposition—would be no simple matter.²⁷⁵

Stalin forwarded the OGPU interrogation protocols incriminating Tukhachevsky to Orjonikidze on September 24. “Read without delay the testimony,” he suggested. “The material, as you see, is utterly secret, and Molotov, myself, and now you are the only ones to know about it. I do not know if Klim knows. It turned out that Tukhachevsky is a captive of anti-Soviet elements and was thoroughly worked over by anti-Soviet elements from the ranks of the rightists. . . . Is it possible? Of course, it is possible, since it is not excluded. . . . It seems the rightists are prepared to embark on the path of military dictatorship if only to escape from the Central Committee, collective and state farms, Bolshevik tempos of industrialization.” Here, again, was that objective “logic” of conspiracy. And yet, Stalin concluded the letter ambiguously: “We cannot end this affair in the usual way (immediate arrest and so on). We need to think this through.”²⁷⁶

On October 2, 1930, Mężyński sent Stalin interrogation materials relating to a clandestine Industrial Party. “To the OGPU, comrade Mężyński. In person only. From Stalin,” the dictator wrote back, specifying the exact content of the conspiracies and demanding corroborating testimony, which, if extracted, “will be a serious victory for the OGPU.” Stalin either believed or made it appear that he believed in the fabrications, instructing Mężyński’s interrogators to ascertain: “1) Why was the [foreign military] intervention in 1930 put off? 2) Is it because Poland was not ready? 3) Perhaps because Romania was not ready? 4) Perhaps because the Baltic states and Romania have not yet come to terms with Poland? 5) Why have they put off the attack to 1931? 6) Might they put it off to 1932?” Stalin added that the confessions would be made available to “the workers of the world. We shall launch as broad a campaign as possible against interventionists and thwart them in their attempts for the next one or two years, which is of great significance to us. Everything understood?”²⁷⁷

RUN THE GOVERNMENT?

Nadya had already returned to Moscow in August. “How was your travel?” Stalin had written with tenderness (September 2, 1930). “Write about everything, my Tatochka. I’m getting a little better. Your Iosif.” Writing again, he asked her to send his textbook for English.²⁷⁸ On September 8, he had written her about his difficult dental work. He sent peaches and lemons from his Sochi orchard. But something was amiss. “The Molotovs scolded me for leaving you alone,” she answered him (September 19). “I explained my departure by reference to my studies, but that of course was not the real reason. This summer I did not feel that you would like me if I prolonged my stay; quite the contrary. Last summer I felt very much that you would, but this time I did not. Of course, there was no point in staying in such a mood. Write, if my letter does not make you cross, but as you like. All the best. A Kiss. Nadya.” Stalin (September 24) denied that her presence had been undesirable (“Tell the Molotovs from me that they are wrong”) and assured her that, despite having had eight teeth filed down in a single day, “I am healthy and feel better than ever.” On September 30, she wrote that she had required an operation on her throat and had been bedridden for days. On October 6, she complained that “for some reason I am not hearing anything from you. . . . Probably you are distracted by your quail-hunting trips. . . . I heard from a young, interesting lady that you are looking fantastic—she saw you at lunch at Kalinin’s. She said that you were exceptionally jolly and gave no rest to everyone taken aback by your personage. I am glad to hear it.”²⁷⁹

On October 7, Molotov, Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, Kuibyshev, Mikoyan, and Kaganovich—but not Kirov (in Leningrad), Kosior (in Ukraine), Rudzutaks, or Kalinin (both away on holiday and outside the innermost circle)—met without Stalin to discuss his proposal that Molotov replace Rykov.²⁸⁰ The next day, Voroshilov wrote to Sochi that “Mikoyan, Molotov, Kaganovich, in part Kuibyshev, and I think that the best resolution would be unification of the leadership.” He left out Orjonikidze. Voroshilov added that “as never before, the Council of People’s Commissars needs someone with the strategist’s gift.” Stalin’s episodic interventions in day-to-day government operations had a disruptive quality, and regularizing them could be beneficial.²⁸¹ It is also possible that they reasoned that having Stalin shoulder responsibility for the details of government could diminish his dictatorial behavior, for someone else would have to run the controlling party apparatus. Voroshilov admitted in his letter that “the most important, the most, from my point of view, acute question in the combination under discussion would be the party leadership.”²⁸²

Mikoyan, in a separate letter, affirmed his support for “a consolidated leadership,” “like what we had when Ilich was alive.” Kaganovich wrote to Stalin (October 9) leaving it to him to decide, noting that “the most important strategic maneuvers in the economy and politics were determined, and would be determined, by you, wherever you might be. But will things get better if there is a change? I doubt it.” He concluded that this argued for Molotov’s appointment. Molotov wrote that same day, listing the reasons he was unsuitable and encouraging Stalin to take the post, but acknowledging that party work and the Comintern would suffer. Unsurprisingly, Stalin decided to hold on to the party apparatus, which afforded him the final word on policy and personnel without the day-to-day burdens of the government. Orjonikidze had ascertained from private conversations that Stalin felt it was “inexpedient at the current time to have a complete (including externally, in front of the whole world) merger . . . of the party and Soviet leadership.” Orjonikidze, perhaps the other obvious choice to replace Rykov, agreed with Stalin that Molotov should be the one. “He [Molotov] expressed doubts about how much authority he would hold for the likes of us,” Orjonikidze wrote to Stalin, “but of course all that is nonsense.”²⁸³

FICTION

Stalin returned to Moscow and, on October 14, 1930, received the OGPU hierarchs Mężyński and Olsky (the newly named head of the special department for the army).²⁸⁴ That same day, Bukharin phoned him on Old Square, requesting a face-to-face meeting. Stalin had forwarded to Bukharin some Industrial Party interrogations that mentioned a terrorist plot against the dictator, with connections to the right deviation. On the phone, Stalin accused Bukharin of fostering an atmosphere for terrorist acts by criticizing the party line. Bukharin exploded that day in a private letter: “I consider your accusations monstrous, demented slander, wild and, in the last analysis, unintelligent.” Stalin circulated the missive to the other politburo members.²⁸⁵ On October 15, the politburo removed Pyatakov from the state bank but postponed a decision on Bukharin until he could appear in person.²⁸⁶

Formal politburo sessions continued to take place, as in the time of Lenin, in the rectangular meeting room on the third floor of the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate, in front of Lenin’s preserved corner office. But officials were bypassing formal structures to obtain Stalin’s approval. Back from holiday, in his Old Square office, he received economics officials, the head of the railroads, a professor who had founded the Soviet biochemical industry, and the new head of foreign trade, Arkady Rosenholz (known as Rozengolts), in tandem with the foreign affairs commissar.²⁸⁷ On October 17 and again on the eighteenth, Stalin received Vissarion “Beso” Lominadze, recently appointed South Caucasus party boss, whom he did not trust, and Ruven “Vladimir” Polonsky, newly appointed Azerbaijan party boss. The second day’s tête-à-tête to sort out the Caucasus infighting lasted three and a half hours.²⁸⁸

The politburo assembled again (October 20) and, with Syrtsov reporting, ordered the designation of several priority regions—Moscow, Leningrad, the Donbass, Baku—with higher norms of supply for workers.²⁸⁹ The body also directed the OGPU to continue investigations of wrecking by alleged underground parties; decided to move the secret department of the central party apparatus from Old Square to the Imperial Senate, instructing Voroshilov to clean out undesirables still living in the Kremlin; and obliged Stalin to cease walking on foot in Moscow.²⁹⁰ Bukharin seems to have asked what more was demanded of him, accused Stalin of violating their truce, and stormed out of the session. The politburo ruled that Stalin had been correct in refusing the one-on-one meeting. The dictator supposedly said, “I wanted to curse him out, but since he has left, there’s nothing to say.”²⁹¹

Stalin was not the only one engaged in provocations. On October 21, Boris Reznikov, a student and party organizer at the Institute of Red Professors, who had worked under Syrtsov in Siberia as a deputy newspaper editor and had joined Syrtsov’s group of intimates in Moscow, sat in the office of Lev Mekhlis, a Stalin aide and editor at Pravda, and wrote a denunciation of “factional activities” by Syrtsov as well as Lominadze. According to Reznikov, Syrtsov’s “group” foresaw a collapse of Stalin’s regime as a result of economic catastrophe. Mekhlis forwarded Reznikov’s denunciation to Stalin that evening.²⁹² Reznikov, who nursed his own grievances against the dictator, played the role of agent provocateur, initiating a second informal meeting on October 22, in a private apartment, where he and Syrtsov again made critical remarks about the Stalin regime. Reznikov had aggressively solicited secret information from Syrtsov about the recent politburo meeting, and proposed that they link up with the right deviation, which profoundly worsened Syrtsov’s indiscretions.²⁹³ That same day, Stalin summoned Syrtsov to Central Committee HQ, on Old Square.²⁹⁴ Those present when Syrtsov had spoken, summoned to a confrontation with Reznikov, repudiated his accusations, but all the same, they were expelled from the party and arrested, and they confessed. As Orjonikidze would put it, “They did not want to speak the truth to the Central Control Commission, but when they were imprisoned in the OGPU they bared their souls in front of comrade Mężyński (laughter).”²⁹⁵

Reznikov further claimed that Syrtsov had said that if push came to shove, a number of party secretaries, including Andrei Andreyev (North Caucasus), Nikolai Kolotilov (Ivanovo-Voznesensk), and Roberts Eihe (Western Siberia), “might turn on Stalin.” Syrtsov had also stated, according to Reznikov, that “a large share of party activists, deeply dissatisfied with the current policy and political regime, still believe a tradition of collective leadership exists in the politburo. . . . We need to dispel these illusions. The ‘politburo’ is a fiction. In reality, all decisions are made behind the backs of politburo members, by a small clique of party insiders, who meet in the Kremlin or in the former apartment of Clara Zetkin.”²⁹⁶

The next day, Stalin forwarded the written denunciations by Reznikov against Syrtsov and Lominadze’s factional group (“essentially right-deviationist”) to Molotov—now the one away on holiday—commenting, “It is unimaginable vileness. Everything goes to show that Reznikov’s reports correspond with reality. They played at staging a coup; they played at being the politburo.”²⁹⁷

Meanwhile, Tukhachevsky, in the presence of Stalin, Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, and other politburo members, had been made to confront his two accusers from the military academy, and he, in turn, accused them of lying. It seems that Jan Gamarnik (head of the army political department), Iona Yakir (commander of the Ukrainian military district), and the latter’s deputy, Ivan Dubovoi, were also present and vouched for Tukhachevsky.²⁹⁸ Whether Stalin intended merely to intimidate the military men or had really wanted to incarcerate them remains unclear. In the October 23, 1930, letter to Molotov, he wrote, “As for the Tukhachevsky affair, he turns out to be 100 percent clean. This is very good.”²⁹⁹

Syrtsov and Lominadze would not get off as easily. “I considered and consider Stalin’s unwavering firmness in the struggle against Trotskyites and the right opposition an enormous historical service,” Lominadze wrote in his defense (November 3, 1930). “But at the same time I thought that Stalin has a certain empiricism, a certain lack of ability to foresee. . . . Further, I did not like and do not like that sometimes (especially during the days of his 50th jubilee), in certain speeches in the press, Stalin was placed on the same plane as Lenin. If memory serves, I said this to comrade Orjonikidze and pointed to the corresponding places in the press.” Lominadze’s admission put Orjonikidze in a bind.³⁰⁰

Their cases were adjudicated at a joint session of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission presidium (November 4), where Lominadze and Syrtsov both confessed to engaging in political discussions with the other. Syrtsov did not back down from claims that politburo decisions were pre-decided.³⁰¹ “I did not doubt for one minute the need for the liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” he stated. “But I believe that, in addition to slogans, it is necessary and correct to have a detailed discussion of the implementation of these measures in a Central Committee plenum or a detailed meeting of the politburo. It seems to me we could have avoided many of the costs by doing so.” For stating the achievements of regime policy but also the problems—the precipitous drop in workers’ real wages, the shortages of goods (“an enormous counterrevolutionary danger emanates from queues”), the mass loss of livestock, inflation, budget shortfalls—and for suggesting the reintroduction of market mechanisms such as free trade, Syrtsov was accused of being a right opportunist and pro-capitalist, like Rykov.³⁰²

Stalin in his remarks denied using Clara Zetkin’s unused Kremlin apartment in the Grand Kremlin Palace—except maybe a little, to avoid distracting phone calls as he composed his report to the party congress. “While I was working in this apartment at different times, Molotov, Kalinin, Sergo, Rudzutaks, and Mikoyan each came to see me once,” he further divulged. “Did we, certain politburo members, occasionally meet? Yes, we did, mostly in the Central Committee building [on Old Square]. What is bad about that?” In a passage Stalin would edit out of the transcript, he inadvertently confirmed Syrtsov’s charge, elaborating how the regime actually worked: “Sometimes a question arises, you phone Voroshilov: Are you home? Home. Come over, let’s talk.”³⁰³

So Syrtsov was right: the “politburo” had become a kind of fiction.