Stalin

CHAPTER 2 APOCALYPSE

Using deception, slander, and cunning against party members, with the aid of unbelievable acts of violence and terror, under the guise of a struggle to uphold the purity of Bolshevik principles and party unity, and using a powerful centralized party apparatus as his base, Stalin has over the past five years cut off and eliminated from positions of leadership all the best, genuinely Bolshevik cadres in the party and has established his personal dictatorship within the party and throughout the country as a whole, breaking with Leninism and taking a path of the most unbridled adventurism and uncontrolled personal tyranny, bringing the Soviet Union to the brink of the abyss.

MARTEMYAN RYUTIN, Communist party official, August–September 1932 ¹

IN THE FALL OF 1930, Japan celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of its victory in the Russo-Japanese War with fanfare, paying tribute to Admiral Tōgō (who was still active) and other “war gods” and reenacting Port Arthur’s capture at the Kabuki Theater. “As a father,” a general declares in the play, spurring wild applause, “I am pleased with the death of my two sons for the emperor.”² That same fall, as soon as the surprise harvest bounty had been gathered, Stalin renewed his all-out forced collectivization and kulak deportations.³ The December 1930 Central Committee plenum rubber-stamped his extremism, demanding 80 percent collectivization over the course of the next year in top grain-growing areas (Ukraine, North Caucasus, Lower Volga, Central Volga), and 50 percent in the next group (Central Black Earth, Siberia, Urals, steppes of Ukraine, Kazakhstan).⁴ When the Eastern Siberians balked, Stalin replied that 50 percent was “a minimum target.”⁵ The plenum had also formally approved fulfillment of the Five-Year Plan within four years (by the end of 1932), while stipulating that 1931 would see the most ambitious industrial leap yet: a 35 percent rise in GDP, and a 45 percent jump in industry.⁶ Stalin was spearheading a depiction of industrialization as class war, a revolutionary upsurge against a stepped-up offensive by alien elements, which struck a deep chord.⁷ Some contemporaries did note the obvious falseness of the regime’s ubiquitous slogans, but other observers, such as the American journalist Eugene Lyons, would remark that “these boys are geniuses for advertising.”⁸

Mikhail Koltsov, the journalist-propagandist, boasted in Pravda (January 1, 1931) that “we are welcoming this new year happily and joyfully, without vacillations and doubts.”⁹ To enforce that steadfastness amid his distrust, Stalin used the police and party discipline.¹⁰ He also turned to the bully pulpit, decrying the inept factory boss, the consummate red-tapist, the windbag, all of whom were successes at profusions of loyalty but failures at delivering the goods. More ominously, he would warn of deliberate deception, collusion, double-dealing, and sabotage. But the dictator himself would turn out to be the grand saboteur, leading the country and his own regime into catastrophe in 1931–33, despite the intense zeal for building a new world.¹¹ Peasants would speak of the biblical Apocalypse, some saying that the Virgin Mary had sent a letter in golden script warning that bands of horsemen would descend and destroy the collective farms.¹² Instead, the Four Horsemen arrived in the form of the enforcement of the collectives and mass starvation. Rumblings within the party would surface, demanding Stalin’s removal.

BULLY’S MIND-SET

Henry Ford popularized the fact that manufacturing could be revolutionized by large capital investments and superior organization, throwing up a direct challenge for industry throughout the world economy. Mass manufacturing required costly, risky, up-front investments and a large market, but the Soviet statized economy removed competition (internal and foreign) and manipulated domestic demand, enabling industry to take advantage of assembly lines.¹³ During the Five-Year Plan, the USSR would erect from scratch or wholly rebuild more than 1,000 factories, many in Fordist fashion.¹⁴ All the advanced technology, with the exception of synthetic rubber, would be imported from leading foreign companies, and had to be paid for in hard currency.¹⁵ The imports were assimilated with difficulty, and limited to priority sectors, such as steelmaking, chemicals, and machine building. The construction industry continued to use brick and timber rather than concrete; steam, not electricity, continued to power railways.¹⁶ And even where blast furnaces or turbines were installed, auxiliary work was often still performed by hand or with primitive tools. Still, industry expanded significantly, and simultaneously with a plunge in production all across the capitalist world. Tsarist Russia had produced almost no machine tools in 1914; the Soviet Union, in 1932, produced 20,000.¹⁷

Under the slogan “Catch and Overtake” (the capitalists), the regime was on its way to acquiring not just a new industrial base but, finally, a substantial working class.¹⁸ Already in 1930, employed labor nearly reached the plan target for 1932–33. Full employment, a magical idea, resonated globally. By the end of 1930, unemployment had reached 2.5 million in Great Britain, more than 3 million in Germany (it soon doubled from that), and more than 4 million in the United States (it soon tripled). But the disappearance of the unemployed in the USSR gave rise to unprecedented labor turnover—workers had options—which in turn provoked draconian laws such as prison sentences for violations of labor discipline or perceived negligence, and mandatory labor books to track workers.¹⁹ Many workers and some managers fell into the inconsistently applied dragnet, but the excess of demand over worker supply subverted regime efforts to “plan” labor allocation. The flux was staggering: as many as 12 million rural folk permanently resettled in cities or at construction sites that became cities during the plan. (Moscow, which received migrants from other cities, too, swelled from 2 million to 3.7 million.)²⁰ Many tramped from place to place.²¹

No central decree explicitly outlawed private trade, but Stalin incited attacks against NEPmen (traders).²² The number of shops and kiosks shrank from more than 600,000 in 1928 to 140,000. Party-state pressure also squeezed out individual artisans. (Molotov then decried the severe scarcity of wooden spoons at factory canteens and the sheer impossibility of having clothes or shoes mended.)²³ Many NEPmen disappeared back to villages, but a large number found employment in supply departments, enjoying privileged positions in the new socialist order.²⁴ Meanwhile, with rationing for bread and other staples already introduced in major cities, Stalin had placed the Achilles’ heel of worker provisioning on the December 1930 plenum’s agenda. The gathering endorsed a practice, initiated at some factories, to form “closed” cooperatives inside the gates to distribute groceries and clothes. The larger factories would soon establish their own farms, granaries, and goods warehouses, an unplanned yet foreseeable result of the suppression of legal private trade and private enterprise.²⁵

Simply by virtue of its monopoly over politics and the public sphere and its dynamic mass organizations, the Soviet party-state stood out from other contemporary authoritarian regimes, but piecemeal introduction of a socioeconomic monopoly, too, added another major dimension to fulfilling the aspirations of totalitarian control. Centralized procurement and distribution imposed a nearly impossible administrative burden, and vast corruption and everyday ingenuity afforded people space to maneuver. Still, the Soviet state now asserted sway over not just people’s political activities and thoughts but also their employment, housing, children’s schooling, even their caloric intake—effectively, their families’ life chances.²⁶

The state itself was in upheaval, undergoing headlong expansion, thanks to elimination of private property, and political purging.²⁷ Skilled workers were promoted to fill many of the vacancies created by expansion and arrests.²⁸ This altered the demographics of the apparatus (but not its behavior) and of the working class, pushing the ratio of workers in large-scale industry aged twenty-two and under up to one third; the percentage of female workers rose as well.²⁹ New managers and engineers would have far more hands-on experience than tsarist-era ones, but for now, competence was in short supply and, combined with the frenzied pace, caused an epidemic of accidents and waste.³⁰ Some high-profile projects had to be shelved. Orjonikidze opened an All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry (January 30–February 4, 1931) with a speech that defended quantitative output targets but called for controlling costs, supplementing centralized allocation with direct factory-to-factory contract relations for additional supplies, and holding managers accountable for financial results and output quality. Further, he defended the “bourgeois” specialists, who for eighteen months had been subjected to withering public denunciations and trials for wrecking.³¹

But on the final day, Stalin arrived in the hall. “It is sometimes asked whether the pace can be reduced a bit, and the speed of development restrained,” he stated. “No, this is impossible!” His reasoning was revealing: “To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beat up. But we do not want to get beat up! One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten up by the Mongol khans. She was beaten up by the Turkish beys. She was beaten up by the Swedish barons. She was beaten up by the Polish-Lithuanian pans. She was beaten up by the Anglo-French capitalists. She was beaten up by the Japanese lords. All beat her—because of her backwardness, her military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. Such is the law of the exploiters: beat up and rob the backward and the weak, capitalism’s law of the jungle. You are backward, you are weak—and therefore you are wrong; therefore you can be beaten up and enslaved. You are mighty, therefore you are right, therefore we must handle you carefully.” He concluded: “We are a hundred years behind the advanced countries. . . . We must make good this gap in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.”³²

The dictator tapped into Russia’s perennial torment over relative weakness vis-à-vis the West, and more recent fears of foreign forces ganging up on the socialist motherland. One participant would recall that Stalin “literally opened a valve through which the steam could be released.”³³ But he challenged bosses to get out of their offices. “There are many people among us who think that management is synonymous with signing papers,” he said. “This is sad, but true. . . . How is it that we Bolsheviks, . . . who emerged victorious from the bitter civil war, who have solved the tremendous task of building a modern industry, who have swung the peasantry on to the path of socialism—how is it that in the matter of the management of production, we bow to a slip of paper? The reason is that it is easier to sign papers than to manage production.” He enjoined them to “look into everything, let nothing escape you, learn and learn again. . . . Master technology. It is time Bolsheviks themselves became experts. . . . Technology decides everything. And an economic manager who does not want to study technology, who does not want to master technology, is a joke and not a manager.”³⁴

DROUGHT AND REGIME SABOTAGE

Who, precisely, was a kulak—an owner of three cows? Four cows? Criteria could be murky. But centrally imposed quotas forced answers.³⁵ Naming “kulaks” often involved preemptively denouncing others to save oneself or settling old scores. “Socialism was a religion of hatred, envy, enmity between people,” a group from Kalinin province (formerly Tver) wrote to Socialist Husbandry (March–April 1931).³⁶ Some peasants were motivated by class-war sentiments, but the quotas could be met only if many middle and poor peasants suddenly got classified as “kulaks.” Those who refused to join the collectives became “kulaks,” no matter how poor. The designation “kulak henchman” made anyone fair game, and ambitious secret police officials exceeded their quotas.³⁷ According to the OGPU’s own classifications, many of those swept up in antikulak operations were petty traders, “former people,” priests, or random “anti-Soviet elements.”³⁸ The haste, arbitrariness, and wanton violence facilitated the operation by inciting chaos and fears of things slipping out of control, spurring further harsh measures.³⁹ Stalin ordered a second wave of internal deportations beginning in late May (through early fall 1931), which proved nearly twice as large as the previous year’s.⁴⁰ He relied on local party bosses but especially the OGPU, and on the barbed rivalry between Yagoda and Yevdokimov for his favor.⁴¹

All told, around 5 million people were “dekulakized”—by the police, by their fellow peasants, or by choosing to flee, with an untold number perishing during deportation or not long after. Up to 30,000 heads of households were summarily executed. OGPU operatives improvised colonization villages, soon rechristened “special settlements,” which were intended to be self-sufficient, but despite a torrent of decrees, actual settlements with housing would be formed only belatedly.⁴² The dispossessed who survived the journeys in cold, dark cattle cars to the taiga had to make it through the first winter in tents or under the open sky.⁴³ They helped build the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine, the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant, and other Five-Year Plan showcases. The self-dekulakized and peasants who were dispossessed but not internally deported sought livelihoods at the same construction sites, provoking accusations of “infiltration.”⁴⁴ The deputy OGPU plenipotentiary to Eastern Siberia reported mass flight from the special settlements, too, because of “severe living conditions and the food situation,” as well as “epidemic diseases and high mortality among children.” People, he wrote, “were completely covered in filth.”⁴⁵

All the while, the regime was supposed to be facilitating the planting for the next harvest, the first in which the collective and state farms would predominate.⁴⁶ The Five-Year Plan had originally envisioned a 1931 harvest of 96 million tons, and as late as the end of 1930 the harvest was estimated at 98.6 million, far larger than the best prerevolutionary harvests.⁴⁷ But in 1931, a cold spring followed by a summer drought—a fatal combination—struck the Kazakh steppes, Siberia, the Urals, the Volga, and Ukraine.⁴⁸

Stalin got warnings of lagging harvest preparation as well as locust infestation and ordered some actions, but the regime seems not to have perceived the danger.⁴⁹ Kalinin wrote to the holidaying Avel Yenukidze (May 27, 1931), the secretary of the central executive committee of the Soviet, about the “unprecedented weather” in Moscow (“It’s just like the hot south; rain is rare and brief”) yet still asserted that “by all data the harvest should be good.”⁵⁰ He made no mention of the devastating loss of draft animals (slaughtered animals do not consume grain, but they do not pull plows, either).⁵¹ Matters were most dire in Russia’s Kazakh autonomous republic, where the regime had decided that, in order to overcome “backwardness,” it would force-settle nomads.⁵² This region was the country’s main meat supplier, but it was made a destination for several hundred thousand deported kulaks, further diminishing land for herds and increasing claimants on local food. State procurements took such a large proportion of the grain grown here that herders and their animals were effectively left to starve.⁵³ Reports reached Moscow of significant deaths among Kazakhs from famine and of mass flight to Uzbekistan, Siberia, Turkmenistan, Iran, and China in search of food.⁵⁴ Only the mountain territories of Dagestan matched the depth of starvation and epidemics seen again in 1931 in the Kazakh autonomous republic, a territory larger than Western Europe.⁵⁵

Urban rationing, meanwhile, was mired in bureaucracy, while investment in housing, health care, and education took a backseat. Stalin attended both days of a conference of industrial managers (June 22–23, 1931).⁵⁶ In a rousing closing speech, he stressed no-excuses fulfillment of plan targets, while enumerating six conditions for industrial development, such as promoting higher-education graduates and factory workers into administration, and observed that “no ruling class has managed without its own intelligentsia,” a euphemism for the emerging Soviet elite. His other conditions included expanding trade and differentiating workers’ wages to stimulate productivity. “Socialism,” Stalin concluded, “is the systematic improvement of the position of the working class,” without which the worker “will spit on your socialism.”⁵⁷

“SPRINGTIME”

Control over the military is always an issue in a dictatorship. OGPU special departments continued to maintain watch lists for officers with tsarist pasts. Anti-Soviet émigré organizations, in parallel, strained to perceive tensions within the Red Army and infused their correspondence with fantasies about an officers’ anti-Communist putsch. But the OGPU had infiltrated émigré groups and created front organizations to intercept their correspondence, track agents infiltrating from abroad, and entrap disaffected military men at home.⁵⁸ Many former tsarist General Staff Academy graduates would have been glad to see the Communist regime evolve into something else, but, having been relegated to administrative or teaching posts, they were in no position to work for an overthrow.⁵⁹ The smarter ones feared a foreign military intervention, precisely because the regime would round them up as presumed traitors (or, conversely, the occupiers would not forgive them for serving the Reds).⁶⁰ Voroshilov, the only quasimilitary figure in Stalin’s politburo, beat back the OGPU provocations to dredge up “enemies,” including against his own aide-de-camp.⁶¹ Still, dossiers accumulated.⁶² The central special department, in a kind of military equivalent to the Industrial Party trial, brought together initially disparate arrests, alleging a plot for a putsch in coordination with a military attack by the old Entente powers in spring 1931. Hence, the counterintelligence operation was code-named Springtime.

Mężyński certainly knew how to please Stalin, but he might have received direct instructions.⁶³ Stalin suspected Red Army commanders, few of whom were proletarians, to be “rightist” sympathizers secretly opposed to collectivization who would prove “opportunistic” in the event of an aggression from without. The roots of the “plot” were placed in Ukraine, even though the head of the Ukraine OGPU, Balytsky, had initially not taken to the task—until Mężyński reminded him that Ukraine’s Chekists had missed the Shakhty Affair (a “discovery” of the North Caucasus OGPU).⁶⁴ Balytsky telegrammed Moscow (February 15, 1931) about a “counterrevolutionary military organization” in Kharkov. “Ivanovsky talked about the existence of a general operational plan for an uprising in Ukraine,” he wrote of extracted testimony. “The plan was sketched on a map, which Ivanovsky destroyed during the Industrial Party Trial.” Ivanovsky was also said to have corresponded with a parallel Moscow organization; that correspondence, too, had been burned.⁶⁵

More than 3,000 former tsarist officers in Kharkov, Kiev, Moscow, and Leningrad were charged with conspiracy and espionage.⁶⁶ Shaposhnikov, the chief of staff of the army, whom Stalin had recently allowed to enter the party without the mandatory period of candidate status, was made to confront an arrested staff officer who accused him of belonging to the clandestine “organization.” Shaposhnikov exposed his accuser as a slanderer, avoiding arrest but suffering demotion, in April 1931, to commander of the Volga military district.⁶⁷ Several score officers were not merely intimidated but executed. The sixty-six-year-old tsarist major general Andrei Snesarev—who, despite having joined the Reds, was Stalin’s old nemesis during the Tsaritsyn days of 1918—was already in a labor camp on a death sentence commuted to ten years. Now he became one of the alleged plot’s “leaders” and was resentenced to death in summer 1931, although, once again, the dictator commuted his sentence (“Klim! I think, for Snesarev, we could substitute ten years instead of the highest measure”).⁶⁸

Tukhachevsky’s name, yet again, had surfaced in the “testimony” of those arrested. But Soviet intelligence had intercepted and decoded a telegram sent March 4, 1931, by the Japanese military attaché in Moscow, Lieutenant Colonel Yukio Kasahara, to the general staff in Tokyo, belittling the Red Army’s capabilities, and urging “a speedy war” before the propitious moment passed.⁶⁹ After four discussions of Japan at the politburo, on June 10, in a surprise for the brass, Stalin returned Tukhachevsky from the Leningrad military district and promoted him to replace the head of armaments, Uborevičius (who went to the Belorussian military district).⁷⁰ As a deputy defense commissar to Voroshilov once more, Tukhachevsky made a summer inspection tour of strategic regions. Thus was the sweeping Springtime operation wound down, for now; the collection of compromising materials on Tukhachevsky and others did not cease.⁷¹

Stalin, in parallel, kept a watch on military technology. In mid-June 1931, with Voroshilov in tow, he visited the central aerodrome, in Moscow, to inspect Soviet aircraft, climbing into the cabin of the new Polikarpov I-5 fighter, under the direction of Alexander Turzhansky (b. 1898), of the Air Force Research Institute. “Listening to my explanations, Stalin suddenly asked, ‘Where’s the radio?’” Turzhansky recalled. “‘On fighters there is no radio yet.’ ‘And how do you fight an air battle?’ ‘By maneuvering the aircraft.’ ‘That is unacceptable!’” A radio engineer hastened to the rescue, reporting that there was a prototype plane with a radio, but it awaited testing. Next up for inspection was a French Potez aircraft. Stalin asked, “‘And the French plane has a radio?’” Turzhansky answered in the negative. “‘Aha!’ said a surprised Stalin. ‘All the same, we need a radio on our fighters. And before them.’”⁷²

UPHEAVAL

Some OGPU operatives looked askance at the primitive fabrications against what were unthreatening military administrators and teachers already on a short leash. Additionally, although Yagoda liked to advertise his office on the third floor of Lubyanka, 2, as open, many operatives despised him. Messing, the second deputy chief and head of foreign espionage, teamed up with Olsky, Yevdokimov, and Abram Levin (who oversaw the regular police and was known as Lev Belsky), to accuse Yagoda and Balytsky of artificially “inflating” cases.⁷³ The rebels were hardly strangers to fabrication (Yevdokimov and Olsky had recently framed a group of microbiologists).⁷⁴ But they saw Yagoda as walking on eggshells over alleged ties to the right deviation. Mężyński’s continuing ill health helped spur the intrigue as well. His weight had ballooned to more than 250 pounds, exacerbating his heart condition, bronchial asthma, and endocrinal deficiency, and he had been reporting to work at Lubyanka perhaps twice a week for a few hours, before finally being sent to Crimea.⁷⁵ (He evidently spent time studying Persian, dreaming of reading the verses of the medieval polymath Omar Khayyám in the original.)⁷⁶ Mężyński returned to work only on June 8, 1931, and not at full strength.⁷⁷

Stalin could have seized on the intrigues to promote a favorite, such as Yevdokimov. The latter knew Stalin had no fondness for Yagoda, but he had miscalculated the dictator’s appetite for disorder in the organs, and for having Chekists force personnel decisions on him. On July 15, 1931, Stalin had Yevdokimov sent on holiday to the spa town of Kislovodsk and, ten days later, installed Ivan Akulov (a deputy head of the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate) as first deputy chief of the OGPU. Yagoda nominally fell to second deputy. Stalin also advanced Balytsky to third deputy, a new post.⁷⁸ Akulov’s appointment from outside was Stalin’s response to the criticisms of OGPU illegalities.⁷⁹ Balytsky’s spot in Ukraine was given to Stanisław Redens, Stalin’s brother-in-law (through his first wife). Yevdokimov was assigned to run the OGPU in Leningrad in place of Filipp Medved (who was reassigned to Belorussia), but then the politburo reversed itself.⁸⁰ Medved stayed; Yevdokimov ended up in Central Asia.⁸¹ The regime warned those transferred not “to bring along any functionary at all close to him from the regions they were leaving when transferring from one place to another,” an entrenched practice of cliques that no decree could halt.⁸² A clique was how Stalin had achieved and exercised power.

Global financial shocks were spiraling, but how much Stalin understood or paid attention remains uncertain. France and the United States together held two thirds of the world’s gold, but their monetary authorities intervened to hold down the money supply, thereby failing to check the inflows of gold and causing global deflation. On July 6, 1931, France reluctantly accepted Herbert Hoover’s proposal for a one-year moratorium on intergovernmental payments, including Germany’s reparations. Hoover was concerned that Germany would default after the failure, in spring 1931, of Creditanstalt, Austria’s largest bank, founded by the Rothschilds and considered impregnable (but lacking liquidity because of efforts to sustain the country’s old industrial structure). That, in turn, had provoked bank runs in Hungary and Germany, too, and attacks on sterling. On July 8, strict controls were imposed on all German foreign exchange transactions, but five days later, one German bank collapsed. British officials fumed over France’s perceived intransigence vis-à-vis Germany’s hardship. “Again and again be it said,” British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald confided to his diary (July 22), “France is the enemy.”⁸³ British recognition of the need to “fix” the Versailles Treaty had only become more acute.

Despite the intense pressure on him, Stalin’s flashes of anger were rarely seen, although at the politburo on August 5, 1931, he exploded in full view at a fellow Caucasus comrade for not removing a skullcap.⁸⁴ The next day, evidently his last in Moscow, he convoked an ad hoc politburo “commission” to draft a party circular on the OGPU events. It explained that the dismissed operatives had “conducted a completely intolerable group struggle against the leadership of the OGPU” by spreading rumors that “the wrecking case in the military was artificially ‘inflated.’”⁸⁵ New rumors spread about what had really transpired.⁸⁶ Yagoda dispatched his own secret circular, approved by Stalin, admitting that “some individual operatives” had “forced the accused to give untrue testimony,” but Yagoda denounced accusations of systematic falsification as slander by “our class and political enemies.”⁸⁷

HOLIDAY MAILBAG

Voroshilov traveled for more than two months in the summer of 1931, stopping in Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Blagoveshchensk, Ulan Ude, Chita, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, and Magnitogorsk, and writing to Stalin about the benefits. “You are right: we do not always take into account the colossal significance of personal travel and firsthand familiarization with people, with business,” Stalin answered. “We would gain a lot (and the cause would especially gain a lot) if we traveled more frequently to locales and got acquainted with people at work.” But the dictator did not follow his own advice, leaving Moscow only for Sochi: “I did not want to leave on holiday, but then I surrendered (I got tired).”⁸⁸

Stalin took full advantage of his southern holiday, writing to Yenukidze about having spent ten days in Tsqaltubo, in central-western Georgia, twelve miles from Kutaisi, where he had once sat in a tsarist prison. Its radon-carbonate springs boasted a natural temperature of 91 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. “I took twenty baths,” he observed. “The water was marvelous.”⁸⁹ But field couriers delivered regime business in staggering volume: OGPU reports about Japan’s aggressive behavior, fuel problems, foreign currency expenditures, forestry, nonferrous metals, politburo minutes.⁹⁰ Functionaries often sat paralyzed until he responded. His mailbag was the nexus of what normally would be called the policy-making process. He chose what to read (or not), and his preferences and habits profoundly shaped state behavior. He tended to go on holiday during harvest season and inquired often about grain procurements while paying little attention to the cultivation of crops or animal husbandry.⁹¹ Stalin’s non-holiday mail was also voluminous. In the six months leading up to August 1931, the apparatus processed 13,000 private letters in his name—enumerating each writer’s identity, social origins, and employment and appending summaries of every letter, transferring most to the archives, sending some to government agencies for response, and forwarding 314 of them to Stalin.⁹² His aides tended to pass him letters purporting to be from former acquaintances (requesting material aid or seeking the status of association with him); any that took up Marxist-Leninist theory; and those proposing scientific inventions (one letter from Egypt was forwarded with the annotation “not particularly trustworthy proposal for invention of ‘death rays’”).⁹³ Another type concerned allegations of abuse by officials. Stalin usually forwarded this filtered correspondence to responsible functionaries, expecting an answer. (In May 1931, a member of the Young Pioneers scouts group had written back to report that local officials had finally come through with a pair of boots, making school attendance possible, thanks to Stalin’s intervention.)⁹⁴ “You are now all-powerful,” wrote one correspondent. “Your word determines not only the life but even the freedom of a person.”⁹⁵

The holiday correspondence revealed that Stalin knew of the terrible food situation. “Now it is clear to me that Kartvelishvili and the Georgian Central Committee secretariat, with their reckless ‘policy of harvest gathering,’ have brought a number of regions in western Georgia to famine,” he wrote to Kaganovich (August 17, 1931), using a word the regime would not publicly allow. “They do not understand that the Ukraine methods of harvest gathering, necessary and expedient in grain-growing regions, are not expedient and harmful in non-grain-growing regions that in addition lack any industrial proletariat. They’re arresting people by the hundreds, including party members openly sympathizing with those dissatisfied and not sympathizing with the ‘policy’ of the Georgian Central Committee.”⁹⁶ Stalin directed Mikoyan to send emergency grain to western Georgia.⁹⁷ One could never know which denunciation might catch Stalin’s eye.⁹⁸ He could even rise to officials’ defense when he perceived them to be victims of a vendetta.⁹⁹ Word reached him that one of his old Tiflis Theological Seminary teachers, seventy-three-year-old Nikolai Makhatadze, was imprisoned. “I know him from the seminary and I think he cannot present a danger for Soviet power,” Stalin wrote to Kartvelishvili in Tiflis. “I request that the old man be released and that I be informed of the result.”¹⁰⁰

Kaganovich was now Stalin’s top deputy in the party, and for the first time, the thirty-eight-year-old was managing affairs in the dictator’s absence. Stalin took pride in what he called, to Kaganovich, “our leading group, which was formed historically in the struggle with all forms of opportunism,” and reacted angrily to quarrels among them.¹⁰¹ “I don’t agree with you about Molotov,” he wrote to Orjonikidze (September 11, 1931). “If he’s giving you or the Supreme Economic Council a hard time, raise the matter in the politburo. You know perfectly well the politburo won’t let Molotov or anyone else persecute you or the Supreme Council of the Economy. In any event, you’re as much to blame as Molotov is. You called him a ‘scoundrel.’ That can’t be allowed in a comradely environment. You ignore him, the Council of People’s Commissars . . . Do you really think Molotov should be excluded from this ruling circle that has taken shape in the struggle against the Trotsky-Zinoviev and Bukharin-Rykov deviations? . . . Of course Molotov has his faults. But who doesn’t have faults? We’re all rich in faults. We have to work and struggle together—there’s plenty of work to go around. We have to respect one another and deal with one another.” Soon, an exasperated Stalin would reprimand Orjonikidze yet again: “We work together, come what may! The preservation of the unity and indivisibility of our ruling circle! Understood?”¹⁰²

In Sochi, Stalin was staying up high at the Zenzinovka dacha and measuring temperature differences with the lower Puzanovka dacha, in a reprise of his youthful days as a weatherman at the Tiflis observatory. Nadya had again departed early; her fall classes were resuming. “Everything is according to the usual: a game of gorodki, a game of lawn bowling, another game of gorodki, and so on,” he wrote, addressing her affectionately as “Tatka!” (September 9, 1931). Nadya replied that she had gotten safely back to a dreary capital. On the 14th, he wrote again: “I’m glad you’ve learned how to write substantive letters. There’s nothing new in Sochi. The Molotovs have left. They say Kalinin is coming. . . . It’s lonely. How are you doing? Have Satanka [Svetlana] write something to me. And Vaska, too. Continue to keep me ‘informed.’ I kiss you.” Nine-year-old Vaska (Vasily) wrote to his father (September 21) about how he was riding his bike, raising guppies, and taking photos with a new camera. Stalin wrote to Nadya about a visit from Kirov. “I went one time (just once!) to the seaside. I went bathing. It was very good! I think I’ll go again.” Nadya wrote back, “I’m sending the book by Dmitrievsky (that defector) On Stalin and Lenin. . . . I read about it in the White press, where they say that it has the most interesting material about you. Curious?”¹⁰³

MANCHURIAN SURPRISE

Instigator of mayhem at home, Stalin received a jolt from abroad. On the morning of September 18, 1931, an “explosion” just outside Mukden, on the South Manchurian Railway, disrupted a few yards of track; it did not even prevent the arrival of the latest train.¹⁰⁴ But within an hour, Japan’s Kwantung Army had begun massacring Chinese garrison soldiers sleeping in their barracks in northern Mukden, and by September 19 the Japanese flag already flew over the Chinese city. Japan’s military quickly seized other Chinese cities, revealing a premeditated plan.¹⁰⁵ Manchuria had long been a kind of Balkans of the east, a battleground in successive clashes dating back to the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95). Now, Japan claimed to be restoring stability following the supposed vacuum opened up by the Red Army withdrawal after its 1929 military confrontation with China over the Chinese Eastern Railway.¹⁰⁶ Half the world’s soybeans were grown in Manchuria, which found a hungry market in Japan, while exports of Manchuria’s iron ore enabled Japan to become the top steel producer in East Asia. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in Nanking, which faced opposition from Chinese Communists and a breakaway Nationalist faction in Canton, ordered no retaliation by the Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang, and sought recourse in the League of Nations.¹⁰⁷

Soviet-Japanese relations had been tense, but Soviet exports to Japan had doubled between 1925 and 1931, while Japanese exports to the USSR, from a very low base, had increased tenfold. Still, Japan’s actions in Manchuria violated the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth, which recognized a Russian sphere of influence around the Chinese Eastern Railway. Tokyo pressured Moscow to allow it to use that rail line to move its troops against Chinese forces and, when Moscow refused, arrested some of the Soviet employees; one died in custody (from typhus, Japan claimed), another from supposed suicide. Belatedly, the Soviets acquiesced in Japan’s use of the railroad to chase down Chinese resistance—right to the borders of the Soviet satellite Mongolia and the Soviet Union itself.¹⁰⁸ And so, after all the propaganda about looming “imperialist intervention” and the fabricated crimes of Red Army officers supposedly lying in wait to commit treason in the event of an external attack, an “imperialist” power had acted.

Stalin was preoccupied with the limitrophes, the former tsarist lands on the western frontier.¹⁰⁹ Soviet war plans took as their point of departure an enemy coalition of neighboring states, above all Poland (P) and Romania (R), which would be incited and supported by the Western imperialist powers. This “PR series” of contingency plans, drawn up in 1931–32, envisioned advancing in the Baltic region to protect Leningrad and the right flank, but mostly defending the presumed main axes, the center and the south, even retreating as far as the Dnieper River until full Soviet mobilization enabled a counteroffensive.¹¹⁰ But Stalin was well aware of Soviet vulnerabilities in the Far Eastern theater, too. By 1931, Japan’s Kwantung Army numbered 130,000, with another 127,000 Manchurian soldiers, out of a total Manchurian population of 30 million, versus fewer than 100,000 troops in the Soviet Far Eastern Army and a total Soviet Far East population of just 800,000, of whom one quarter were ethnic Koreans and Chinese.¹¹¹ Soviet rail capacity there was perhaps no more than four or five trains per day, too slight for mass reinforcements.¹¹² The Soviet Far Eastern Army had yet to acquire a fleet, air force, or storehouses in case the Trans-Siberian artery was cut off by enemy air strikes. Japan’s military did not need to read the secret OGPU reports to know that collectivization and dekulakization had undermined Red Army morale. The Kwantung leadership judged the USSR incapable of real war, so that if the Red Army did engage, the Japanese would pounce—and if the civilian government in Tokyo opposed a full-scale clash, then let it fall.¹¹³

Stalin chose not to hurry back to Moscow. At the politburo, some officials demanded resolute action to uphold Soviet administration of the Chinese Eastern Railway, just as in 1929, but Stalin suspected other countries would take advantage of a Soviet-Japanese clash, especially after Kaganovich and Molotov informed him of the lack of reaction by the British and the French. “Most probably, Japan’s intervention is being conducted by agreement with all or some of the great powers on the basis of the expansion and strengthening of spheres of influence in China,” he speculated to his minions (September 23, 1931). “Our military intervention is, of course, excluded; even diplomatic involvement is now not expedient, since it would only unite the imperialists, when it is advantageous to us for them to quarrel.”¹¹⁴

On October 1, 1931, the Council of People’s Commissars quietly raised the investment plan for armaments. Production had barely increased in the first nine months of the year.¹¹⁵ Stalin finally left Sochi for Moscow on October 7. Ten days later, the regime created a “committee of reserves” charged with stockpiling grain in anticipation of war. The ambitious export plans to pay for imported industrial machinery remained in place.¹¹⁶ But heavy rains were hitting drought-stricken areas, ruining part of the harvested grain that had been stacked. Across the Union, the larger-than-expected bulge in the urban labor force had pushed the number of people on rations to 46 million by fall 1931, from 26 million at the start of 1930.¹¹⁷ The army and the growing prison population, not to mention the bureaucratic hydra responsible for distribution of grain, had to be fed, too.¹¹⁸ Grain stocks in the entire Soviet Far East amounted to a mere 190,000 tons.

GLOBAL EARTHQUAKE

On Monday morning, September 21, 1931—nearly simultaneously with the Japanese aggression in Manchuria—Great Britain stunned the world, abandoning the gold standard, even though it had not run out of reserves.¹¹⁹ Within four weeks, eighteen countries followed the UK off gold. Stocks on the New York exchange lost half their value, the second crash in eighteen months. The pound’s resulting devaluation had global consequences, because Britain, along with the United States, served as the world’s principal short-term lender.¹²⁰ Soon London would embrace “imperial free trade,” meaning free only for British dominions, alongside protectionist tariffs for other countries, and would improvise a sterling bloc. This effectively ended a long epoch of Britain upholding an open global economic order.¹²¹

Pravda (September 22, 1931) triumphantly deemed the gold-standard démarche “not only a weakening of Britain, but a weakening of international imperialism as a whole.” Marxists like Stalin assumed the crisis inhered in the functioning of capitalism. In fact, human decisions transformed structural problems into what came to be known as the Great Depression. Central bankers and their acolytes had long believed in the necessity of convertibility between currencies and gold, but a fixed-exchange-rate system works only if there is convergence in the macroeconomic performance of the participants (similar levels of wage and price inflation, public and private deficits, competitiveness) and an absence of shocks. Now, confronted with a shock, monetary authorities chose to raise interest rates, exacerbating the problems. And finances became unglued anyway. By year’s end, nearly 3,000 banks in the United States, the citadel of world finance, would fail or be taken over as confidence and GDP cratered, accompanied by deflation in asset and commodity prices, disruption of trade, and mass unemployment.¹²²

The Depression’s impact proved worse in Eastern Europe than in Western, because largely peasant countries were whiplashed by the commodity price crash while their governments (Czechoslovakia excepted) depended on foreign financing, which dried up. Most Eastern European countries hesitated to depreciate their currencies, for fear of a repeat of hyperinflation, but they closed banks, imposed foreign-exchange and trade controls, raised tariffs, and postponed or suspended foreign debt payments—moves toward autarchy that magnified arbitrary bureaucratic power at the expense of markets and imparted further impetus to authoritarianism, right-wing populism, and xenophobia.¹²³ The USSR was also a predominantly peasant country, and although capitalist economic troubles initially had allowed Stalin to enjoy nearly unfettered Western technology transfer, now he was caught out, dependent on commodity prices and foreign financing for those industrial purchases.¹²⁴

Stalin had been preoccupied with a possible French-led collective boycott that could cut the Soviets off from all advanced technology, and Orjonikidze had bent over backward to a delegation of German industrial luminaries, while Stalin restrained the insurrectionist impulses of the German Communists.¹²⁵ Berlin, for its part, faced shrinking foreign markets and rising unemployment—and was coming around to the idea that Stalin’s crazy building of socialism might work. A bilateral trade agreement had been signed that extended German government-guaranteed credits to the USSR for a period of twenty-eight months, longer than the usual. The Soviets were to use the funds to purchase an additional 300 million marks’ worth of German industrial goods, at favorable prices.¹²⁶ The deal was supposed to underwrite the wild industrial leap of 1931 and put to rest, for now, the feared anti-Soviet boycott. German exports to the USSR would jump to double the level of 1929. But the agreement had not resolved the severe Soviet balance-of-payment problems.¹²⁷ The Soviets even failed to reap the benefits of the pound’s devaluation because of their renewed economic reliance on Germany.¹²⁸