Stalin

Stalin played the victim (“Let them abuse me. I’m used to that”) and sought to accentuate the seriousness of the affair.³⁰⁴ “School pupils gathered, fancied themselves big politicians, and decided to playact as the politburo—is it worth it for us to waste time on these pupils?” he asked. “In another time and under different circumstances, one could agree with that assessment. But in the current conditions, when the class struggle has sharpened to the ultimate degree, when every factional sally against the party leadership strengthens the front of our class enemies, and double-dealing of unprincipled people is transformed into the most dangerous evil of interparty life—in such conditions, such an assessment of the ‘left’-right bloc would, at the least, be careless.” He characterized talk that blamed him as an invitation to “a host of terrorists.” Before closing, he turned his fangs on Rykov: “Your post does not exist for ceremonial purposes, but for implementing party orders on a daily basis. Is this the case now? Unfortunately not. . . . Such a state of affairs cannot last long.”³⁰⁵ When it came to the decision on Syrtsov and Lominadze, Stalin sought to appear the moderate, as usual, proposing only their demotion from full to candidate status. But a vote for expulsion from the Central Committee had already passed.³⁰⁶

SELLING OUT TO THE CAPITALISTS

Soviet newspapers (November 11, 1930) published lengthy indictments of prominent scientists and engineers accused of establishing a clandestine Industrial Party. It was said to contain more than 2,000 members who had worked undetected for years to wreck Soviet industry and transport and, ultimately, overthrow the regime with the assistance of foreign military intervention (by half a dozen countries), thereby delivering Ukraine’s wealth to Poland and France, and Caspian oil to Britain. “If the enemy does not surrender,” Gorky, from Italy, obligingly wrote in Pravda (November 15), “they will be annihilated.”³⁰⁷ Under klieg lights in the chandeliered House of Trade Unions (the former nobility club) on November 25, in front of scores of Soviet and foreign correspondents, eight engineers stood in the dock. Meetings at Soviet factories and the Academy of Sciences approved resolutions demanding the death penalty. Columns of workers were marched through snow in Moscow and other cities carrying banners: NO MERCY FOR THE CLASS ENEMIES.³⁰⁸ Thirteen days of delirium and treason tales ensued, with blanket coverage. The politburo decree specified the headlines, including “Our answer to the class enemy—millions of workers in the ranks of shock workers.”³⁰⁹

The problems faced by Soviet workers were all too real. An internal report (November 10) from a secret OGPU survey of cafeterias noted that half were being patronized far beyond capacity, and that “in all cafeterias (even in restricted ones) there are long queues, which causes worker dissatisfaction and negatively affects labor discipline.” The OGPU found rats (dead and alive), cockroaches, and flies (including in the soup), a lack of spoons, forks, and knives (forcing long waits for their reuse), lunches far below daily caloric norms, theft by employees, and filth beyond description.³¹⁰

Just as in the Shakhty trial two years earlier, the only “evidence” in the Industrial Party trial consisted of confessions recorded in secret police custody, which were repeated at the proceedings. (The published indictments had noted that one arrested engineer had “died under questioning.”) No witnesses were called. All eight defendants pleaded guilty. Leonid Ramzin, director of the All-Russian Thermal Engineering Institute, confessed to leading the underground “party,” and spoke of foreign panic at Soviet successes and of a pending invasion by Romania, to be joined by Poland, then France, and supported by the British Royal Navy, with émigré collusion.³¹¹ Two of the émigrés named had died before the supposed meetings took place. Also, Ramzin named as the prospective head of a replacement “bourgeois” republic a Russian engineer who admired Herbert Hoover (as an engineer) but who had already been executed, without a public trial, in a previous case.³¹² Never mind: Nikolai Krylenko, the prosecutor, hinted at veiled links between the “bourgeois specialists” and rightists in the party. All in all, the published trial transcript might be the best extended record to date of the workings of Stalin’s mind: the possible and the actual were fused into a narrative that could be—must be—true.³¹³

Stalin’s truculence, too, was evident. If in the Shakhty case he had willfully put several German citizens in the dock during negotiations for a Soviet-German trade agreement, now he targeted France, which he had recently called “the most aggressive and militarist country of all aggressive and militarist countries of the world.”³¹⁴ France had imposed restrictions on Soviet imports; the Soviets had countered with reductions in imports from France.³¹⁵ Krylenko elicited laughter by reading out French news accounts of Russian émigrés in Paris gathering in protest of the proceedings: grand dukes, clergy, merchants—that is, “former people.” But Ramzin testified at trial that he and other plotters had cooperated directly with none other than the former French president and prime minister Raymond Poincaré. The latter’s office issued a denial, which was adduced at trial as “proof” of the plot.³¹⁶ A foreign affairs commissariat official tried to render the charges credible, giving a briefing for foreign representatives that waved off necessarily simplistic propaganda of an imminent military intervention but insisted that influential anti-Soviet circles in capitalist countries were inciting war through provocations such as assassinations of Soviet foreign envoys, seizure and publication of secret Soviet documents, and press campaigns about Soviet kidnappings abroad.³¹⁷

Stalin needed no further evidence of such Western plots, but he had received a copy of a transcript of a recent confidential conversation between Winston Churchill, the former chancellor of the exchequer (out of office following the Labour party victory), and Prince Otto von Bismarck, a grandson of the famous chancellor. Churchill was recorded as telling the prince, who served in the German embassy in London, that “the growing industrialization of the Russian state presents all Europe with an extremely great danger, against which we can manage . . . only by creating a bloc of all the rest of Europe and America against Russia.”³¹⁸ Behind the scenes, Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister, Edvard Beneš, had sought to ingratiate himself with Moscow by telling the Soviet envoy in Prague (September 1930), “Confidentially, not long ago in Geneva, the French strongly insisted on action by Poland against the USSR with the active support of all members of the Little Entente” (an alliance of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, which the French hoped to direct against Germany and the members saw as directed against Hungary). Beneš shocked the Soviet foreign affairs commissariat by adding that if a military intervention against the USSR by France, Britain, and Italy took place, Czechoslovakia was “a member of the European states and will do the same that they do.”³¹⁹

Presiding judge Andrei Vyshinsky, as per instructions, read out guilty verdicts, sentencing three to prison terms and five, Ramzin included, to death. This came without right of appeal. The hall erupted in an ovation. Two days later, the regime announced that Soviet power was strong and had no need for revenge: the executions had been “commuted” to eight- or ten-year terms.³²⁰ The morning after sentencing, Ramzin was spotted at his institute office cleaning out his desk, without apparent guard.³²¹ He was permitted to continue scientific work while serving his prison term.³²² Some Soviet workers saw through the “wrecking” burlesque.³²³ But the leniency might have provoked the greater fury.³²⁴ Even émigré enemies of the USSR acknowledged that a majority of workers accepted the guilt of the “bourgeois” specialists. “They got 3,000 [rubles per month] and traveled in cars, while we live on bread and potatoes,” the well-informed Menshevik Socialist Herald quoted Soviet workers as saying. “They sold themselves to the capitalists.”³²⁵

Lurking in the background was Stalin’s long-standing personal nemesis, whose pen was once again prolifically engaged.³²⁶ Now forty-eight years old, Trotsky in 1930 published My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, in Russian, German, English, and French, aiming to document how he was the true Leninist. He also wrote a stirring three-volume History of the Russian Revolution, in which his own and Lenin’s roles were uppermost and Stalin’s nonexistent; the book’s preface was completed on Prinkipo on November 14, 1930. As it happened, that same day, Stalin returned a devoted young apparatchik of uncommon diligence to the central party apparatus as department head for economic personnel. His name was Nikolai Yezhov (b. 1895). Stalin received him on November 21, the first of what would be hundreds of private audiences connected to rooting out sabotage and treason.³²⁷

MYSTERY MAN

Rumors that Stalin had been killed were being spread out of independent Latvia, where many governments ran their intelligence operations against the Soviet Union, and on November 22 Eugene Lyons, a Belorussia-born, New York–raised UPI correspondent in Moscow and a Soviet sympathizer, suddenly got summoned to Old Square for a seventy-minute audience. Stalin had last granted an interview four years earlier, to the American Jerome Davis, and was still pursuing the same aim of normalizing relations with the United States, which had become the USSR’s third-largest trading partner, after Germany and Britain, but remained the only great power that withheld diplomatic recognition. In Stalin’s office, Lyons noted portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin on the wall. “My pulse, I am sure, was high,” he would recall. “No sooner, however, had I stepped across the threshold than diffidence and nervousness fell away. Stalin met me at the door and shook hands, smiling. . . . He was remarkably unlike the scowling, self-important dictator of popular imagination. . . . ‘Comrade Stalin,’ I began the interview, ‘may I quote you to the effect that you have not been assassinated?’ He laughed.”

Lyons established for a foreign audience that Stalin had a wife and three children (the Soviet populace did not know), and that he could be charming. “Commenting on the fact that he is called Russia’s Dictator,” Lyons wrote, “Comrade Stalin exclaimed with another hearty laugh: ‘It is just very funny!’”³²⁸ Lyons was treated to tea and sandwiches in an adjacent room while typing his dispatch. Russia’s dictator approved the typescript (“in general, more or less correct”), allowing it to be transmitted to New York, where the scoop created a sensation. Lyons returned to the United States for a twenty-city lecture tour. “One cannot live in the shadow of Stalin’s legend,” he observed, “without coming under its spell.”³²⁹

The Soviet-friendly New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty erupted at his handlers over Lyons’s scoop. Belatedly, Duranty, too, was granted an interview, also of seventy minutes, on November 27. He wrote that Stalin believed that the current global crisis in capitalism would deepen but not mark its demise, and yet the result would be a war over markets in the future, and the downfall of the the Versailles settlement.³³⁰ “Stalin is the most interesting personality in the world,” Duranty enthused in his telegram to the United States, which passed Soviet censors. “But of all national leaders he is the least known, he remains removed from everyone, mysterious, like a Tibetan Dalai Lama.”³³¹

A friend of Duranty’s, H. R. Knickerbocker, got his own scoop: an interview with Stalin’s mother, Keke Geladze, in Tiflis, for the New York Evening Post (December 1, 1930). “Revolutionary posters and the eternal appeal for harder work on the Five-Year Plan reminded one that all the way from Siberia to the edge of Persia the Soviet Union is dominated today by a single purpose, and a single will,” Knickerbocker wrote. Keke, speaking through an interpreter of Georgian, took responsibility for Stalin’s failure to finish the seminary: “He was not expelled. I took him out on account of his health. He did not want to go. I took him out. He was my only [surviving] son.” She pointed at a pile of periodicals, all mentioning Stalin. “See how he works,” she said. “All this he has done. He works too hard.” The article was titled “Stalin Mystery Man Even to His Mother.”³³²

STOUT INNER CIRCLE

All authoritarian regimes require a sense of being under siege by sinister “enemies.” The inhabitants of the USSR found themselves exhorted to relentless vigilance against class enemies, supposedly longing for foreign military intervention to overturn the Soviet regime, restore capitalism, and exact revenge. Under such a vision, even diehard socialists could be denounced as “White Guards”—as Lenin and Trotsky had denounced the Kronstadt sailors in 1921—if they opposed the Soviet regime. Pervasive domestic difficulties rendered the treason tales plausible, press reports gave them life, and Stalin afforded them great intensity.³³³ During the proceedings against Syrtsov and Lominadze, he had interrupted Mikoyan to say of his Communist party critics, “Now they are all White Guards.”³³⁴ Working intimately with the obliging Mężyński, he had elaborated a comprehensive scenario: a right deviation, a right-left bloc, “bourgeois specialist” wreckers, and a military conspiracy with right-deviation links, all of them with foreign ties, aiming to bring on war, reverse collectivization, sabotage industrialization, and remove him.³³⁵ He was the fulcrum.

On December 1, 1930, Syrtsov became the first politburo official expelled by the method of merely polling Central Committee members over the phone, without a plenum.³³⁶ During the whole year, not a single multiday Central Committee plenum had taken place. One had been postponed, perhaps because Stalin had to cajole members into accepting the sacking of Rykov.³³⁷ Now Stalin wrote to Gorky in Sorrento, divulging Rykov’s imminent replacement by Molotov, calling it “unpleasant business” while championing Molotov as “a bold, smart, utterly modern leader.”³³⁸ As for Bukharin, Stalin wrote to him on December 13, in his now customarily put-upon fashion, that “I have never refused a conversation with you. No matter how much you cursed me, I have never forgotten that friendship that we had. I am leaving aside the fact that the interests of the cause require each of us unconditional forgetting of any ‘personal’ insults. We can always talk, if you want.”³³⁹

Finally, on December 17, 1930, the delayed plenum opened, and at the last minute it became a joint session of the Central Committee and the punitive Central Control Commission.³⁴⁰ On the third day, after Rykov’s report had been lacerated by all and sundry, Kosior suddenly proposed relieving Rykov of his post and nominated Molotov to head the government. No one could doubt who stood behind the move. The vote was unanimous.³⁴¹ “Until now I have had to work mostly as a party functionary,” Molotov told the joint plenum. “I declare to you, comrades, that I go to the work in the Council of People’s Commissars as a party functionary, as a conductor of the will of the party and its Central Committee.”³⁴² Bukharin, in a speech also delivered on December 19, mocked himself and his allies and joked about executions of rich peasants and the shooting of party oppositionists, eliciting laughter, while still managing to score points about Stalin’s wild-eyed industrialization and collectivization—a bravura performance. (“This is turning into an incoherent discussion. I am deeply sorry for this fact, but it is not my fault.”)³⁴³ Over repeated interruptions, Bukharin had finally just told Molotov that they would do whatever they wanted, since “all power and authority are in your hands.”

Molotov had no prior experience in government, but he would prove himself up to the task. Born the ninth of ten children, in 1890, to a shop clerk in central Russia, under the name Skryabin (he was a nephew of the composer and pianist Alexander Skryabin), he had joined the Bolshevik faction in 1908 while a teenager, and in 1912 took the name Molotov (“Hammer”). Bukharin, speaking to Kamenev, had fumed about “that blockhead Molotov, who tries to teach me Marxism,” but Molotov had attended the St. Petersburg Polytechnic and edited Pravda before Bukharin did. Molotov’s underground hardening and diligence had attracted him to Lenin, who called him Comrade Filing Cabinet. An underling recalled that “everything he was given to do was done faultlessly, in time, and at any price.”³⁴⁴ Another observer, who described Molotov as “fully conscious of his importance and power,” noted that he could sit for long hours of hard work and was informally called Stone Ass.³⁴⁵

On the final day (December 21), Rykov was expelled from the politburo; Orjonikidze assumed his spot on that supreme body.³⁴⁶ Kaganovich assumed Molotov’s place as Stalin’s top deputy in the party. Whereas Molotov had been methodical and wooden, Kaganovich was dynamic and showy. The Menshevik Socialist Herald rightly judged the latter to be “of quite exceptional abilities,” with an excellent memory for names and faces, “a quite exceptional ability to deal with people,” an immense capacity for work, and willpower.³⁴⁷ Kaganovich ran the orgburo, which oversaw personnel and ideology, but Molotov, as head of government, would now chair politburo meetings, by tradition going back to Lenin. Molotov had known Stalin since 1912, and Kaganovich had known Stalin since 1919.³⁴⁸ “He was generally personally always against me,” Molotov recalled of Kaganovich later in life. “Everybody knew this. He would say, ‘You are soft, you are an intelligent, and I am from the workers.’” Molotov added, “Kaganovich, he is an administrator, but crude; therefore, not all can stand him. He not only pressurizes, but is somewhat personally self-regarding. He is strong and direct—a strong organizer and quite a good orator.”³⁴⁹

Voroshilov and Orjonikidze were closer to Stalin personally (the former had known him since 1906, the latter since 1907), and while Voroshilov continued to oversee the military, Stalin appointed Orjonikidze head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, in place of the faltering loyal dog Kuibyshev, who was transferred to the state planning commission.³⁵⁰ Kuibyshev had gone from voicing skepticism about lunatic plan targets to promoting them zealously; now Orjonikidze went from sharply criticizing industrial cadres to being their protector, and gathered around him capable “bourgeois” experts, even if they had been imprisoned for a time.³⁵¹ Sounding a bit like the sacked state bank chairman and former Trotsky supporter Pyatakov, whom Orjonikidze would make his deputy, he pointed out, in a long memorandum on industry in December 1930, that “money is being spent without any budget. . . . Accounting is exceptionally weak and muddled.” Stalin made only superficial notes on the memo; these were Orjonikidze’s worries now.³⁵²

None of the men in Stalin’s faction had the revolutionary profiles of Zinoviev or Kamenev, let alone Trotsky, but the Stalinists were hardened Bolsheviks and, under the pressure of events, strove to enforce his line and resolve problems, sometimes presenting him with solutions.³⁵³ He confided in them, writing scathingly about everyone else in the regime, and to an extent he allowed them room to work, reserving the right to reverse any of their decisions; they acknowledged his power to do so, knowing the burdens he shouldered. The heart of the regime remained awkwardly divided between party headquarters on Old Square, where Stalin had his principal office, and the Imperial Senate in the Kremlin, where the government had its offices but where the secret department of Stalin’s apparatus had moved, the politburo met, and Central Committee plenums were held. Voroshilov, in his letter concerning Rykov’s replacement, had noted that “having the headquarters and main command point” on Old Square was “cumbersome, inflexible, and . . . organizationally problematic,” adding that “Lenin in the current situation would be sitting in the Council of People’s Commissars” in the Kremlin.³⁵⁴ Clara Zetkin’s empty apartment in the Kremlin had served as a kind of transition to a permanent move to the Kremlin by Stalin, but this transition would be gradual; he continued to use his top-floor Old Square suite.³⁵⁵ In any case, as Kaganovich had mentioned, the regime was now wherever Stalin’s person happened to be.

• • •

INTO 1929, his seventh year as general secretary, Stalin had continued to enlarge his personal dictatorship within the Bolshevik dictatorship, and by the end of 1930 he had amassed still vaster power. This process of acquiring and exercising supreme power in the shadow of Lenin’s supposed Testament calling for his removal and the criticisms in the party made Stalin who he was.

Around the time of the December 1930 plenum, Iona and Alexander Pereprygin, two of the six siblings of Lydiya Pereprygina—the orphaned, scandalously young teenager with whom Stalin had had a long cohabitation during his last Siberian exile—were arrested for long-ago White Army service. They wrote an appeal to Stalin, reminding him of the “former friendship you nourished with us.”³⁵⁶ The brothers did not mention the son (Alexander) whom Stalin had allegedly fathered with Pereprygina and abandoned, but it is possible that one of Pereprygina’s sons was Stalin’s. (“Ёsif was a jolly fellow, singing and dancing well,” Anfisa Taraseyeva, of Kureika village, would recall. “He desired girls and had a son here, with one of my relatives.”)³⁵⁷ Pereprygina, who had married a local fisherman, was now a widow with numerous children; Stalin never assisted her. What action, if any, he took in response to her brothers’ letter remains unknown.³⁵⁸ When doodling, Stalin would sometimes draw wolves, but his days in a remote eight-log-cabin settlement among the indigenous Evenki on the Arctic Circle—where he almost died in sudden blizzards while hunting or fishing through holes cut in the ice—were a world away.

What Stalin forced through all across Eurasia was flabbergasting, using newspaper articles, secret circulars, plenipotentiaries, party discipline, a few plenums, a party congress, the secret police and internal troops, major foreign technology companies and foreign customers for Soviet primary goods, tens of thousands of urban worker volunteers and a tiny handful of top politburo officials, and the dream of a new world. Trotsky perceived him as an opportunist and cynic, a representative of the class interests of the bureaucracy, a person bereft of convictions. With Rykov’s expulsion from the politburo, Trotsky even predicted, in his Bulletin of the Opposition, that “just as the rout of the left opposition at the 15th Party Congress [in 1927] . . . preceded the turn to the left . . . the rout of the right opposition presages an inevitable turn to the right.”³⁵⁹ Others in the emigration knew better. “Stalin is acting logically in the new peasant policy,” Boris Bakhmeteff, the former Provisional Government ambassador to Washington and a civil engineering professor at Columbia University, had observed of collectivization to a fellow émigré as early as February 12, 1929. “If I were a consistent Communist, I would be doing the same.” No less shrewdly, he added, “Stalin is capable of adapting, and, in contrast to other Bolshevik politicians, possesses tactical gifts. But it seems to me wrong to think that he is an opportunist and that for him Communism is a mere name.”³⁶⁰

The Soviet state, no less than its tsarist predecessor, sought control over grain supplies to finance imports of machinery to survive in the international system, but Stalin ideologically excluded the “capitalist path.” His vision was one of anticapitalist modernity. The perpetual emergency rule required to build socialism afforded free rein to his inner demons as well. Stalin’s persecution of his friend Bukharin in 1929–30 revealed new depths of malice, as well as self-pity.³⁶¹ At the same time, his deft political neutering of Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov had demanded considerable exertion.³⁶² The rightists possessed an alternative program that—whether or not it could possibly work to achieve socialism—commanded support. Indeed, it is striking how much potential power the right wing of the party had possessed within the politburo, and how Stalin crushed them anyway.³⁶³ They were hard pressed to match his cunning, and immobilized by their own aversion to schism: amid the mass peasant revolts that Rykov himself had predicted, the rightists shrank from too public a challenge to the party line.³⁶⁴ Tactics aside, the rightists were handcuffed by party structures and practices: they had no way to capitalize on the deep disillusionment in the army and the secret police, except via a conspiracy, even when they were still members of the politburo. Rykov was respected but had made no friends throttling army budgets, and, unlike Stalin, had not earned plaudits at the front in the civil war.³⁶⁵

Stalin had adroitly positioned himself as the incarnation of the popular will and historical necessity, but his resounding political triumph of 1929–30 had demonstrated a certain dependency, beyond even the luck of the harvest. His power rested on Mężyński and Yagoda, who were in operational command of the secret police and not personally close to him, though keen to demonstrate their loyalty—but could Stalin be sure? Not for nothing had he promoted Yevdokimov. More fundamentally, Stalin’s power rested upon just four fellow politburo members: Molotov, Kaganovich, Orjonikidze, and Voroshilov. The first two seemed unlikely ever to waver. But Orjonikidze and Voroshilov? Had they acted on their knowledge of the dangerous muddle Stalin had created with his “Great Break” and embraced the well-founded critiques put forward by the Stalin protégé Syrtsov and the Orjonikidze protégé Lominadze, the two authoritative figures in the politburo could have taken Stalin down. Of course, the question would have been, Who could replace him? No one in Stalin’s faction appeared to consider himself the dictator’s equal. Still, what if, going forward, they changed their minds? What if further difficulties arose, and this time foreign capitalists selling their state-of-the-art technology, and the peasants and the weather delivering a bounteous harvest, did not come to Stalin’s rescue?