Stalin

Stalin had made the USSR more vulnerable to its enemies, especially Japan. Collectivization-dekulakization was his policy, which all party officials knew, having been bombarded by extremist directives in his name. They also knew that the right deviation had predicted calamity. Individual efforts to get Stalin to ease up provoked his rage. Officials’ ability to act collectively was limited to Central Committee plenums, but those took place under the watchful eye of his hard-line loyalists, the secret police, and the stool pigeons who chauffeured vehicles and staffed hotels. Conspiratorially, late one night in August 1932, a few veterans of the revolution and the civil war gathered in a private apartment near Moscow’s Belorussia train station that belonged to Martemyan Ryutin (b. 1890), an editor at Red Star, the army newspaper, to discuss the crisis.²⁷⁶ Stalin had promoted the peasant-born Siberian to candidate membership in the Central Committee—the top elite (then 121 people)—but then in 1928 had sacked him for a “conciliatory attitude toward the right opposition.” Not long thereafter, he had Ryutin expelled from the party.²⁷⁷ Now, Ryutin and the party members Vasily Kayurov, a department chief in the state archives, Mikhail Ivanov, an employee of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate, and Kayurov’s son Alexander, a senior inspector in the USSR supply commissariat, had channeled their worries into a seven-page “Appeal to All Members of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks),” which labeled Stalin an “unprincipled intriguer,” “a sophist, a political trickster, and actor,” “theoretically worthless,” “a dictator” like “Mussolini, Napoleon, Piłsudski, Horthy, Primo de Rivera, Chiang Kai-shek,” and “the gravedigger of the revolution in Russia.”²⁷⁸

“Gravedigger” was the epithet that Trotsky had once hurled at Stalin. Ryutin, infamously, had been a Trotsky scourge.²⁷⁹

Secretly, at a hut in a village about forty miles outside Moscow, on August 21, 1932, Ryutin presented the “Appeal to All Members” as well as a much longer document, “Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship,” to perhaps fifteen middling officials in various bureaucratic entities.²⁸⁰ They constituted themselves as the Union of Marxist-Leninists and held elections to leadership posts. One of them hosted a follow-up meeting in his apartment, where it was decided that the documents should be circulated hand to hand. Jānis Stens, an ethnic Latvian professor at the Institute of Red Professors, passed copies to Kamenev and Zinoviev at the dacha they shared outside Moscow. Another conspirator passed copies to Trotskyites in Kharkov. A copy got to the disgraced former Moscow party boss Nikolai Uglanov (Ryutin’s former patron), who was close to Bukharin. (Bukharin would later deny that he had received a copy or knew of the Ryutin group.)

Ryutin’s nearly 200-page “Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship” was a marvel. It condemned the “adventuristic rate of industrialization” and “adventuristic collectivization with the aid of unbelievable acts of violence and terror,” defended Trotsky as a genuine revolutionary despite his shortcomings, and excoriated the rightists for capitulation, yet underscored how “the right wing has proved correct in the economic field.” Ryutin brimmed with rage at Stalin’s muzzling of party members, and with idealism about Marx and Lenin. (“To place the name of Lenin alongside the name of Stalin is like placing Mount Elbrus alongside a heap of dung.”)²⁸¹ He proposed twenty-five concrete measures, from new elections to party organs on the basis of intraparty democracy to a mass purge of the OGPU, from dispersal of coercively formed collective farms and loss-making state farms to ending dekulakization, state procurements of grain and livestock, and agricultural exports.²⁸² Ryutin’s prerequisite for these proposals was fulfilling Lenin’s Testament. He concluded that “putting an end to Stalin the dictator and his clique” was “the primary duty of every honest Bolshevik.”²⁸³

There it was again. Remove Stalin. Lenin’s Testament. The subject of endless party discussions that had prompted Stalin to offer to resign at least six times between 1923 and December 1927.

Ryutin acknowledged that “the removal of Stalin and his clique via the normal democratic means guaranteed by the rules of the party and the Soviet Constitution is completely impossible” and explained that “the party has two choices: to continue meekly to endure the mockery of Leninism and the terror, and wait calmly for the final collapse of the proletarian dictatorship; or to remove this clique by force and save the cause of Communism.”²⁸⁴ But his text, even in the version of the document typed up by the OGPU, made no direct call for assassination. And he undertook no such preparations.²⁸⁵ Instead, having diagnosed the party as the instrument of oppression, he imagined it as the instrument of liberation.²⁸⁶ Two party members with knowledge of Ryutin’s texts sent a written denunciation to the apparatus on September 14, 1932.²⁸⁷ Stalin was informed the next day. Arrests followed. Ryutin was hauled in on September 22. That same day, Kamenev and Zinoviev were summoned to explain why, having read the Ryutin documents, they had failed to report them, a party crime.²⁸⁸

Ryutin was not alone. In its September 1932 issue, Trotsky’s Bulletin published a “draft platform” (missing the first page) attributed to unnamed members of a “left opposition” underground in the USSR. It declared a “crisis of the Soviet economy” and called for fixing (in Marxist terms) the imbalance between industry and agriculture by reducing expenditures on industry to ease inflation, dispersing nonviable collective farms, ceasing the coerced liquidation of kulaks, and attracting foreign capital through the old practice of leases (or foreign concessions). Quixotically, the authors even offered to cooperate with “the faction that is ruling at present,” as part of a shift from “the current obviously unhealthy and obviously nonviable regime to a regime of party democracy.”²⁸⁹ That same month, a traveling Soviet official passed a second text, by Ivan Smirnov, a onetime Trotsky supporter who worked as deputy head for transport equipment in the state planning commission, to Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov, in Berlin, who amplified it and published it in the Bulletin. It consisted of selected material from an internal state planning commission report on the first six months of 1932. “In view of the inability of the present leadership to extricate itself from the economic and political blind alley,” the published article concluded, “the conviction is growing in the party that it is necessary to replace the leadership.”²⁹⁰

Sedov wrote to his father—in invisible ink—that a “bloc” had formed inside the USSR of “Zinovievites, the Sten-Lominadze group, and Trotskyites,” an apparent reference to the small Ryutin conspiracy. But Trotsky fretted that the “left” was incorrectly throwing its lot in with the “rightists” and instructed Lev that, with the émigré Constitutional Democrat “Milyukov, the Mensheviks and Thermidorians of all sorts” demanding Stalin’s removal, “we may temporarily have to support him. . . . The slogan ‘Down with Stalin’ is ambiguous and should not be raised as a war cry at this moment.”²⁹¹

THE FOUR HORSEMEN

In September 1932, back from his three-month holiday, Stalin quietly softened his August 7 law: no death penalty for theft of tiny amounts of grain, just sentences of ten years.²⁹² The 1932 harvest was coming in at fewer than 60 million tons, and possibly as low as 50 million, which was close to the horrific result in the famine year of 1921.²⁹³ Reports to Stalin would peg the harvest as bad but much higher than reality, up to 69 million tons, a discrepancy he never came to appreciate.²⁹⁴

Half of all Kazakhs—as many as 2 million—had picked up their tents and remaining herds and fled the collectives. Half of the party functionaries in that republic were said to have deserted their posts.²⁹⁵ One official report to Stalin in August had noted that the Kazakh autonomous republic now counted 6 million head of livestock, down from 40 million in 1929.²⁹⁶ Finally, on September 17, he presented a decree for a politburo voice vote that loosened the form of collective farms in Kazakh territories, allowing each household to own eight to ten cattle, up to 100 sheep and goats, and three to five camels, but still insisted that forced settlement would continue “to eradicate economic and cultural anachronisms.”²⁹⁷ He also authorized reductions in grain collections for the Kazakh regions (47,000 tons), along with food assistance (33,000) and postponement of repayment of seed and food advances (98,000)—which together totaled more than one quarter of their original procurement plan.²⁹⁸ Quotas had already been reduced for Ukraine, but “it is completely incontrovertible that Ukraine will not deliver this amount of grain,” the Ukraine official Mendel Khatayevich had courageously written to Stalin, who underlined this passage in red pencil.²⁹⁹ At the end of September, the North Caucasus received a massive 660,000-ton grain procurement reduction, albeit to a level still unattainable.³⁰⁰

Exports cratered. In 1932, the regime would export just 1.73 million tons of grain, down from 5.06 million in 1931 and 4.76 in 1930. Tsarist Russia in 1913 had exported more than 9 million tons of grain.³⁰¹

With the country in famine’s death grip, Stalin convened a joint Central Committee–Central Control Commission plenum (September 28–October 2, 1932) devoted to trade, consumer goods, and ferrous metallurgy. With the harvest over, he aimed to reduce the spring concessions to household plots and private markets. The plenum also condemned the Ryutin group “as traitors to the party and to the working class who, under the flag of a spurious ‘Marxism-Leninism,’ have attempted to create a bourgeois-kulak organization for the restoration of capitalism and particularly kulakdom in the USSR.” Ryutin, under OGPU interrogation, had claimed sole authorship, to shield his comrades. The plenum adopted Stalin’s resolution calling for immediate expulsion of all who knew about but did not report the group.³⁰² Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Uglanov, who visibly wept, repented yet again, but they were nevertheless kicked out of the party yet again and sentenced to internal exile for three years (Zinoviev to Kustanai, Kazakhstan; Kamenev to Minusinsk, Eastern Siberia).³⁰³

Several tons of meat, sausage, chicken, and fish, 300 kilos of caviar, 600 kilos of cheeses, and large amounts of fruit, vegetables, and mushrooms had been ordered up for the plenum, some of which the attendees were allowed to haul home.

Gossip in Moscow had Stalin tendering his resignation, only to have it rejected.³⁰⁴ In fact, the inner circle closed ranks behind him. “Now,” Kirov stated in a report (October 8, 1932) on the plenum to the Leningrad party, published in Pravda, “everyone can see that we were utterly correct, that the further we proceed on the path of constructing socialism, the more manifest is the counterrevolutionary character of every oppositionist tendency.” Ryutin got ten years. He was remanded to the prison near the large Urals village of Verkhne-Uralsk, joining Trotskyites he had once condemned.³⁰⁵ On November 7, 1932, the revolution’s fifteenth anniversary, in the first of Ryutin’s many letters from prison to his wife, Yevdokiya—aware that any correspondence was read by the authorities—he wrote, “I live now only in the hope that the party and the Central Committee will in the end forgive their prodigal son.” He added, “You will not be touched. I have signed everything.”³⁰⁶

A PERSONAL BLOW

For someone building a new world, Stalin’s home life was unremarkable. As only insiders knew, he lived in an apartment on the second floor of the three-story Amusement Palace, the Kremlin’s only surviving seventeenth-century boyar residence, with vaulted ceilings and wood-burning stoves. He slept on a divan in an undersized bedroom. Nadya had her own, more ample room, with an oriental carpet of distinct color, a Georgian takhta (divan) on which she placed embroidered pillows, as well as a bed, desk, and drawing table. Her window opened onto the Kremlin’s Alexander Garden and scenic Kutafya Tower. Between the couple’s bedrooms was the dining room, “large enough to have a grand piano in it,” their daughter, Svetlana, would recall. Down a hall were bedrooms for Svetlana and Vasily; Svetlana shared hers with a nanny, Alexandra Bychkova. (“If it hadn’t been for the even, steady warmth given off by this large and kindly person,” Svetlana would later write, “I might long ago have gone out of my mind.”)³⁰⁷ Vasily bunked with Artyom, known as Tom (also the nickname for the boy’s deceased father). Stalin’s grown son from his first marriage, Yakov, no longer lived with them. Farther down the same hall, the governesses had a room, as did Karolina Til, an ethnic German from Latvia who oversaw the household. The children could see their father everywhere—on posters and newspaper front pages—but not so much at home.

Most visitors to the Kremlin apartment were regime officials. Stalin had no surviving siblings, and his father was deceased. Keke, his mother, lived alone in Tiflis; Nadya, in letters, expressed regret that Keke could not come to Moscow because of the severe climate. The one surviving letter from Keke to her son, from the 1920s, has her wishing him complete annihilation of his enemies.³⁰⁸ Eighteen of Stalin’s letters to her (in Georgian) have survived, containing a word about his health and the children and wishes for her health and long life, all brief and signed “Your Soso.”³⁰⁹ They invariably included an apology for their rarity (“I, of course, am guilty”).³¹⁰ Stalin had nothing to do with his mother’s or father’s relations. Relatives from both of Stalin’s marriages would stop by the Kremlin apartment: Alexander Svanidze (the brother of Stalin’s deceased first wife, Kato) and his wife, Maria, a former opera singer from a well-off Jewish family; Kato’s sisters, Mariko and Sashiko; Nadya’s father, Sergei Alliluyev, and mother, Olga; Nadya’s brothers, Fyodor and Pavel, and the latter’s fetching wife, Yevgeniya (Zhenya); and Nadya’s sister Anna, who had married Redens (they lived in Kharkov).³¹¹ Several of them lived at the Zubalovo dacha complex, where the Stalins had a dacha that they had remodeled, adding a balcony to the second floor and an outdoor bathhouse. He planted an orchard, and raised pheasants, guinea fowl, and ducks, and liked to lie down on the warm tiled stove in the kitchen to alleviate the pain in his joints.³¹² He also liked to wind up the player piano or gramophone and sing. While Kirov, Voroshilov, and even Molotov danced, he watched.³¹³

Nadya made occasional use of her husband’s position, but she refused to play the smiling wife of the leader, an opportunity other Kremlin wives would have killed for.³¹⁴ “We spoke among ourselves, and many times to Nadya, that she was not a match for him,” recalled Galina Serebryakova, the spouse of a regime official. “He needed a different wife!”³¹⁵ She attended the Industrial Academy under her maiden name, Alliluyeva, and it remains unclear whether her fellow students knew she was Stalin’s wife.³¹⁶ (Nadya belonged to the party, and Nikita Khrushchev, the academy’s party secretary, learned her husband’s identity.) The effects of her exposure to the student milieu—young women in the city selling themselves to make ends meet; students with ties to the famine-stricken countryside—remain difficult to gauge. She kept an emotional distance.³¹⁷ She dressed simply: a white blouse, navy blue skirt below the knee, low-heeled shoes, little jewelry, no perfume. “There was nothing striking about her,” recalled Irina Gogua, who worked in the Kremlin. “In Iosif’s presence she seemed plain; it was obvious that she was tense.”³¹⁸ Svetlana would later try to recollect moments of tenderness, or even attention, from her mother but could not.³¹⁹ “A woman of very strong character,” Karl Pauker, the head of regime bodyguards, was said to have told a Kremlin doctor. “She is like a flint. The Master is very rough with her, but even he is afraid of her sometimes. Especially when the smile disappears from her face.”³²⁰

Nadya was diagnosed with a defective heart valve, angina, and general exhaustion and suffered from migraines, evidently from a cranial impairment that the best doctors could not alleviate. (Some observers thought she had clinical depression or schizophrenia.)³²¹ Regime intimates witnessed shouting matches between her and Stalin, laced with his obscenities. But there were episodes of affection, too. “Once, after a party at the Industrial Academy, where Nadezhda was studying, she returned home severely ill from having drunk some wine, and she felt badly,” Vladimir Alliluyev, the son of Anna and Stanisław Redens, recalled. “Stalin laid her down, comforted her, and Nadezhda said, ‘Anyway, you love me a little bit.’”³²²

Nadya rarely revealed the stress of their almost parallel lives. “Altogether, we have terribly little free time, both Iosif and I,” she had written to Keke. “You have probably heard that I have gone back to school (in my old age). I do not find studying in itself difficult. But it is pretty difficult trying to fit it in with duties at home. . . . Still, I am not complaining, and so far I am coping with it all quite successfully. Iosif has promised to write to you himself. As far as his health is concerned, I can say that I marvel at his strength and his energy. Only a really healthy man could stand the amount of work he gets through.”³²³

In November 1932, Nadya was weeks from graduation and facing exams.³²⁴ On November 7, Svetlana, Vasily, and Artyom watched the Revolution Day parade on Red Square. Nadya marched with the Industrial Academy delegates. “It was cold, and Stalin was on the Mausoleum, as always, in an overcoat,” recalled Khrushchev, who marched with her. When the wind gusted, she said to him, “Look at mine: he did not bring his scarf, he’ll catch a cold and again be sick.”³²⁵ After joining her children, according to Artyom, Nadya complained of a headache and went home early. The children were taken to the Sokolovka dacha, another state facility used by the family, where they could ski. On November 8, Stalin was in his office between 2:30 and 8:05 p.m., which resulted in a menacing circular to Ukrainian officials that cut off all consumer goods until grain flowed again, and a telegram to the Kazakh leadership accusing it of providing low harvest numbers aimed at “deceiving the state.”³²⁶

Nadya was in the apartment, preparing for the customary holiday banquet that evening in the Voroshilov residence in the Grand Kremlin Palace.³²⁷ She put on an unusually stylish (for her) black dress of fabric imported from Berlin, with embroidered red roses, and placed a red tea rose in her dark hair. She was thirty-one years old; her husband was turning fifty-four.³²⁸ Stalin, it seems, sat across from her and drank more than usual. Some witnesses say he flirted with Galina Yegorova, the thirty-four-year-old actress wife of his military crony Alexander Yegorov. There had been much talk of dalliances (a hairdresser; a pretty woman who worked in protocol).³²⁹ Voroshilov tried to ease the tension, but an eruption occurred. Stalin threw something at Nadya (a bread crust, an orange peel, a cigarette butt).³³⁰ She stormed out. Molotov’s wife, Pearl Karpovskaya, known as Polina Zhemchuzhina, followed her. Witnesses mostly cite Stalin’s rudeness; Molotov faulted Nadya. “Alliluyeva was already something of a psychopath at that time,” he would recall. “She left the gathering with my wife. They took a walk on the Kremlin grounds. It was late at night, and she complained to my wife: ‘I do not like this, I do not like that. . . .’ She spoke about the young female barber Stalin saw. It was all simple: Stalin had drunk a little too much, he made some jokes. Nothing special, but it had an effect on her.”³³¹

On the morning of November 9, Karolina Til found Nadya in a pool of blood in her room, near a small toy-sized pistol. (It fit into a lady’s handbag; her brother Pavel had brought it from Germany as a gift.) When Stalin emerged from his room into the dining room, Til evidently told him, “Nadya is no longer with us.”³³²

Nadya had shot herself in the heart.³³³ A call came in to the Sokolovka dacha to prepare the children for return to Moscow; apparently, Voroshilov went to pick up Vasily and Artyom and tried to talk to Svetlana, who was six and a half, but he kept breaking down in tears. Svetlana appears to have remained behind with her nanny.³³⁴ Nadya’s open casket was placed upstairs in a nonpublic section of the State Department Store (GUM), across from the Kremlin on Red Square, where the central executive committee presidium, run by Yenukidze, had offices. “Early morning for the ceremony of bidding farewell, we climbed the second floor of GUM,” Artyom recalled. “Vasily and I climbed the stairs ahead of Stalin. He moved in silence. He was glum. I remember: as soon as Iosif Vissarionovich approached the casket, he began simply to cry, he broke down in tears. . . . Vasily literally hung on to him and said, ‘Papa, don’t cry, Papa, don’t.’”³³⁵ Molotov recalled, “I had never seen Stalin weeping before, but as he stood there by the coffin, tears ran down his cheeks. She loved Stalin very much—that is a fact. . . . He went up to [the coffin] and said, ‘I did not take enough care of you.’”³³⁶

Pravda (November 10, 1932) announced the death of Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva in what was the first mention in the Soviet press of Stalin’s marriage.³³⁷ No cause was given.³³⁸ She had been diagnosed with acute appendicitis but had put off the operation until after her exams, and this became the unofficial cause of death, spread by the secret police.³³⁹ Rumors that Stalin shot her over political disagreements were instantaneous. Some people claimed they heard from a Kremlin doctor or a servant that Nadya’s screams for him to stop had been heard by neighbors (through impossibly thick walls).³⁴⁰ Others whispered that he had driven her to suicide.³⁴¹ Still other rumors had Stalin marrying Kaganovich’s sister Rosa (no such person existed).³⁴² Kirov and Orjonikidze, Stalin’s two closest comrades, were said to have stayed in the Kremlin apartment with him the night of her death. Bukharin, who used to visit Nadya in the apartment, would offer to exchange Kremlin apartments with Stalin. Stalin accepted. Soon, however, he and the children instead moved into the Imperial Senate, to an apartment one floor below his Kremlin office. It comprised seven rooms on a long corridor, with rooms for servants and bodyguards at each end and windows looking out onto the Arsenal.³⁴³

The casket was placed on a white catafalque for an unhurried procession to the Novodevichy Cemetery on November 12. The newspaper had announced the schedule, and Moscow’s streets were lined with people (many of them plainclothes police). Stalin exited the Kremlin on foot, behind the horse-drawn hearse. Whether he marched the full four miles, through many narrow and winding streets, is uncertain.³⁴⁴ TASS announced that grave-site eulogies were delivered by Bukharin (for the Krasnaya Presnya ward party committee, Nadya’s primary party organization) and Kaganovich (Moscow party boss). “We are burying one of the best, most loyal members of our party,” Kaganovich stated. “Raised in the family of an old Bolshevik proletarian, going forward after the revolution for many years in a state of the greatest loyalty to the cause of the working class, Nadezhda Sergeyevna was organically linked with the worker movement, with our party. . . . We, close friends and comrades, understand the severity of the loss of comrade Stalin, and we know what duties this imposes on us with respect to comrade Stalin.”³⁴⁵

After Nadya was lowered into the grave, “Stalin threw a handful of dirt on it,” Artyom recalled. “He told Vasily and me to do likewise. Returning home, we had lunch. Stalin sat silently, contemplatively. Soon he left for a meeting of the government.”³⁴⁶ Pravda published a grace note from the dictator (November 18) offering “heartfelt gratitude to all organizations, comrades, and individuals who had expressed their condolences on the occasion of the death of my close friend and comrade Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva-Stalina.” He exhibited remorse and self-pity, fury and his sense of victimhood.³⁴⁷ Svetlana’s subsequent account, unreliable in most respects, rightly surmised that her father “was too intelligent not to know that people always commit suicide to punish someone.”³⁴⁸

ENEMY WITH A PARTY CARD

Secret reports were now mentioning a threat of starvation even for Moscow and Leningrad.³⁴⁹ Military intelligence estimated that Japan had a standing army of 1,880,000, Poland 1,772,000, Romania 1,180,000, Finland 163,000, Estonia 75,000, and Latvia 114,000.³⁵⁰ Absorbing his personal loss, his subjects starving, his eastern and western borders facing formidable enemies, Stalin could have been moved to carve out a breathing space. But the spring 1932 concessions had failed to produce a harvest miracle, and now he ratcheted up the repression again to squeeze blood from a stone.³⁵¹ He had formed a commission to purge the party in the North Caucasus, sending Kaganovich there to bang heads, and returned Yevdokimov to its capital, Rostov, ordering that villages that failed to fulfill grain quotas be deported in their entirety. (Their houses and fields were to be taken by “conscientious Red Army collective farmers who have too little land or bad land in other regions.”)³⁵² Molotov was dispatched to Ukraine, whence he complained to Stalin (November 21) that in the “opportunist, bourgeois, kulak situation,” local functionaries were urging that farmers’ consumption needs be met before more grain went to the state.³⁵³ That same day, Stalin accused the party boss in the Kazakh republic, Filipp Goloshchokin, of having surrendered despite “a maximal reduction” in procurement quotas, and ordered him to “strike those Communists in counties and below who are in the hands of petit bourgeois anarchy and have slid onto the rails of kulak sabotage.”³⁵⁴

The Soviet agricultural press in November 1932 carried headlines of peasants dying from starvation in Poland (“It is not a crisis; it is a catastrophe”), Czechoslovakia (“dying villages”), China (“hunger despite a good harvest”), and the United States (“poverty and ruin”).³⁵⁵ Not a word about the famine in the Soviet Union.

Once again, the party “opposition” played into Stalin’s hands: he received a denunciation (on or before November 19) against two officials, Nikolai Eismont, commissar of food for the RSFSR, and Vladimir Tolmachev, head of road transport for the RSFSR, who, in connection with the Revolution Day holiday, had been drinking in Eismont’s apartment. They gathered again the next day with Alexander Smirnov, a former agriculture commissar who had been demoted to a position in forestry, and criticized anew Stalin’s destructive policies. Smirnov had become a Central Committee member back in 1912, the same year as Stalin. Eismont had been on the recent commission to the North Caucasus led by Kaganovich and had seen the swarms of starving refugees at railroad stations. Under the influence, the trio had discussed possible replacements for the general secretary: Voroshilov, Kalinin, even Smirnov.

There it was, yet again. Remove Stalin.

The Central Control Commission, now overseen by the Stalin minion Jānis Rudzutaks, deemed the lubricated conversations a “counterrevolutionary grouping.”³⁵⁶ Stalin added the disgraced rightist Mikhail Tomsky (head of the state publishing house) to the “conspiracy,” and summoned a joint session of the politburo and the Control Commission presidium on November 27. “These people,” the attack dog Yemelyan Yaroslavsky fulminated, “are like the Ryutin group, only in a different form.” By now, though, the crisis under Stalin’s rule was pervasive and even some arch-loyalists shrank from full-throated condemnation of their loose-tongued comrades. Kuibyshev referred to Smirnov by his nickname (“Foma”) and recalled their long association, dating back to Narym exile. (Stalin had been there, too, and Smirnov had fed him.) Mikoyan, who used to be Eismont’s boss, awkwardly said almost nothing (until the very end).³⁵⁷

Rumors again circulated that Stalin had verbally offered to resign, and that after an awkward silence Molotov had spoken up to reassure him he had the party’s confidence.³⁵⁸ Be that as it may, Stalin found himself defending his policies.³⁵⁹ He grumbled that the conspirators “represent matters as if Stalin were guilty of everything” and warned that the choice was between becoming a victim of the imperialists—the fate of China—or a socialist industrial power that could defend itself. “What matters is not Stalin, but the party,” he concluded. “You can remove Stalin, but things will continue just as they are.”³⁶⁰

Eismont and Tolmachev were the ones expelled from the party, and Smirnov from the Central Committee, although they were not arrested.³⁶¹ Stalin had a transcript of the proceedings made for circulation to party organizations. He sent another vituperative telegram (also signed by Molotov), this one to officials in the Urals (December 7, 1932), condemning as “unpersuasive” their explanations for local state farms’ failures to fulfill procurement quotas. “The provincial leadership cannot escape its responsibility,” it said, asking for names of the state farm directors. “Announce to the directors that a party card will not save them from arrest, that an enemy with a party card warrants greater attention than an enemy without a party card.”³⁶²

SHARPENING THE CLASS STRUGGLE

On December 12, 1932, the Soviet Union restored diplomatic relations with Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Nanking. The next day, Japan belatedly replied to the Soviet offer of a nonaggression pact in a note to Soviet envoy Alexander Troyanovsky with a rejection.³⁶³ The Japanese leaked distorted versions of the exchange; the Soviet press published the originals, aiming to demonstrate Japan’s belligerence.³⁶⁴ Stalin, meanwhile, decided to widen the party purge he had imposed on the North Caucasus: on December 11, Pravda had carried a resolution in the name of the Central Committee announcing a multiregion party cleansing for 1933.³⁶⁵ His mood was captured in his greeting to the secret police on the fifteenth anniversary of their founding, December 20, which Pravda printed that day—“I wish you success in your difficult task of extirpating the enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat!”³⁶⁶

Stalin also took the time to repudiate Thomas Campbell, an agricultural expert from Montana who several years earlier had been afforded an audience, and had now published a book about his experiences and meeting with Stalin (“piercing black eyes which concentrate on you even while talking through an interpreter”). It was mostly sympathetic, but on the touchy subject of Comintern subversion, he wrote that Stalin had “unhesitatingly admitted, with disarming frankness, that under Trotsky there had been an attempt to spread Communism throughout the world. He said this was the primary cause of his break with Trotsky. . . . He explained that they had neither the time nor the money to try to communize the whole world, even should they wish to do so.” In his published repudiation (December 23, 1932), Stalin denied that Trotsky’s name had come up, and noted that Campbell’s book mentioned a transcript of their conversation but shrank from including it. Stalin’s rebuttal contained a purported transcript, which had him stressing the need for diplomatic recognition to normalize trade relations and had Campbell mentioning meeting with then President-elect Herbert Hoover prior to setting out for the Soviet Union and promising to convey the Stalin conversation back to Hoover.³⁶⁷

Before the year was out, Stalin pushed through a decree on an internal passport system to purge urban areas of “alien” and “non-laboring elements.”³⁶⁸ Recipients were to include permanent residents aged sixteen or older in cities and towns, and at construction sites, as well as transport workers and state-farm laborers, but not collective farmers. He aimed to diminish the pressure on the urban food supply and force peasants back into the collectives.³⁶⁹ On December 29, 1932, a furious directive in the name of the politburo threatened collective farms that failed to meet procurement quotas with a compulsory early repayment of credits, a cutoff from machine-tractor-station equipment, and confiscation of “all the grain they had, including the so-called seed funds”—the basis for the spring sowing campaign.³⁷⁰

Despite the greater repression, procurements as of January 1, 1933, had reached only 17.4 million tons, 3.7 million fewer than collected by the same time the previous year (and 3 million below the plan).³⁷¹ On January 7, Stalin opened another joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission, boasting that “we had no iron and steel industry. . . . We now have one. We had no tractor industry. We now have one. We had no automobile industry”—and so on, through aircraft and more. He admitted that the first Five-Year Plan prioritized heavy industry but baldly asserted that living standards had improved. He had reduced industrial growth targets for the second Five-Year Plan to a more realistic 13–14 percent per annum.³⁷²

Stalin’s most important declaration concerned a sharpening of the class struggle as the country got closer to socialism, a cudgel he had used against Bukharin in 1928 (and a concept Trotsky had articulated a decade earlier). “We need to keep in mind that the increase in the power of the Soviet state will strengthen the resistance of the last holdovers of dying classes,” Stalin asserted. “Precisely because they are dying out and in their last days, they will switch from some forms of striking to other, sharper forms, appealing to the backward strata of the population. . . . On this soil, smashed groups of old counterrevolutionary parties of SRs and Mensheviks, bourgeois nationalists of the center and periphery, may stir and come to life, shards of counterrevolutionary elements of Trotskyites and right deviationists may stir and come to life.” He added: “This, of course, is not scary. But all this needs to be kept in mind if we want to do away with these elements quickly and without especially large numbers of victims.”³⁷³

Opposition, according to Stalin, now worked “on the sly,” masked behind simulated loyalty. In a second set of remarks to the plenum (January 11), he asserted—in line with the reports he received—that “our harvest was not worse, but better than in the previous year.” He blamed any problems on “anti-Soviet elements” and concealed “nests of counterrevolution.” “They sit right in the collective farm, holding positions as storemen, business managers, bookkeepers, secretaries, and so on,” he averred. “They will never say ‘Down with the collective farm.’ They are ‘for’ the collective farm.”³⁷⁴

Trotsky was ever present—his writings had been demanding that 1933 be the year of the major overhaul, an otherwise obscure proposal condemned at the plenum as “slander.”³⁷⁵

The politburo closed ranks around the dictator, and the others fell in line. “We, as members of the Central Committee, vote for Stalin because he is ours. (Applause.),” declared Rudzutaks. “You won’t find a single instance when Comrade Stalin hesitated or retreated. That is why we are with him. Yes, he vigorously chops off what is rotten, he chops off what is slated for destruction. If he didn’t do this, he would not be a Leninist.” Similarly, the disgraced Bukharin stated, “We have won dazzling victories in the building up of the Five-Year Plan. We are currently at war and must exercise the strictest discipline. . . . That is why such groupings must be hacked off without the slightest mercy, without being in the slightest troubled by any sentimental considerations concerning the past, concerning personal friendships.” Smirnov, in futile self-defense, denied that he or any other party member could have uttered the words about the need to “remove comrade Stalin”: “I think that only someone drunk out of his mind or insane could ever say such a thing.”³⁷⁶

At the plenum’s close (January 12), the regime announced suspension of recruitment into the party and the pending purge. That same day, Stalin permitted the politburo to approve, in a poll vote, another reduction in the yearly grain procurement for Ukraine, of 457,000 tons; other regions got smaller reductions. Twelve days later, the dictator sacked the party bosses in Ukraine’s Dnepropetrovsk, Odessa, and Kharkov provinces.³⁷⁷ He did the same to the party boss of the Kazakh republic.³⁷⁸ Yagoda reported that eighty-seven “Trotskyites” had been rounded up or soon would be.³⁷⁹ Regime decision making was becoming more and more informal, with most key matters adjudicated in Stalin’s office.³⁸⁰ Secret police reports were claiming an ever greater share of his paperwork.³⁸¹ He floated the notion with the OGPU of deporting another 3 million peasants, a target soon sliced to 2 million, then 500,000, and finally only half of that.³⁸²

The OGPU, in any case, was consumed with forming local detachments to enforce a draconian decree, on January 22, 1933, ordering interdiction of peasant flight from grain-growing regions and blaming local authorities for allowing an exodus, which had helped spread epidemics and become a weapon for discrediting regime policies.³⁸³ Railway ticket sales were suspended and dragnets set up from the Caucasus to the Urals on one side and along the western borderlands on the other.³⁸⁴ Perhaps Stalin feared an unraveling of the collective farm order. In any case, the decree showed that he was very anxious to prevent the spread of further discontent to the urban socialist core. He also had to feed the cities, which could become death traps. Overall, the number of fleeing peasants captured and sent back would be relatively small (low hundreds of thousands, when there were 17 million peasants in collective farms in Ukraine alone). Many farmers were already trapped in regions without adequate food.³⁸⁵

Molotov, meanwhile, gloated to the central executive committee of the Soviet on January 23, 1933, that more and more capitalist states were recognizing the Soviet Union. “Some clever ones still consider further ‘study’ of the USSR necessary (i.e., to delay recognition),” he stated. “It should not be difficult to guess how Soviet might has increased, how our economy is expanding, how much the international weight of the USSR has grown. Those who are full of useless and empty phrases about further study of the USSR are the ones who have the most to lose from the absence of diplomatic ties.”³⁸⁶ Stalin sent a congratulatory note: “The confident-contemptuous tone with respect to the ‘Great Powers,’ the belief in our own strength, the simple spitting in the pot of the swaggering ‘Great Powers’—very good. Let them ‘eat it.’”³⁸⁷

GEOPOLITICAL CATASTROPHE

The Nazis had lost thirty-four seats in Germany’s November 1932 parliamentary elections, seeing their vote drop by 2 million—to 33.1 percent, from 37.4 percent in July 1932.³⁸⁸ The party, an amalgam of territorial organizations and divergent interests, was wracked by dissension and defections, partly triggered by Adolf Hitler’s refusal, even after the electoral reversal, of any post short of chancellor.³⁸⁹ A key driver of Nazi support, the Depression, had bottomed out, and a slow recovery was under way. And yet, traditional conservatives desperate for stability and order proved unable to fashion a parliamentary majority that achieved their goal of excluding the Social Democrats and defanging the trade union movement and the Communists.³⁹⁰ The maladroit octogenarian president, former field marshal Paul von Hindenburg, had appointed defense minister Kurt von Schleicher, another soldier turned politician, as chancellor in early December 1932, elbowing aside the ambitious archconservative Franz von Papen. But when Hindenburg refused to declare a state of emergency and allow Schleicher to dissolve the Reichstag to avoid a no-confidence vote, the chancellor resigned. Schleicher colluded with Hitler to try to stop the return of his nemesis von Papen, while the latter persuaded Hindenburg to appoint Hitler, even though the field marshal had trounced the Nazi in elections to the presidency and mocked him as a mere corporal.³⁹¹ Traditional conservatives imagined that they could “tame” Hitler and the radical right while achieving a broadened anti-left coalition. On January 30, 1933, von Papen—having secured the vice chancellorship for himself—escorted the Nazi ruffian into the Chancellery, for the oath of office, through a rear door.³⁹²

“A stubby little Austrian with a flabby handshake, shifty brown eyes, and a Charlie Chaplin mustache,” wrote the world’s best-selling daily newspaper, the London Daily Herald. “What sort of man is this to lead a great nation?”³⁹³

Nazi ranks were electrified. “Hitler is Reich Chancellor,” marveled Joseph Goebbels. “Just like a fairy-tale.”³⁹⁴ Goebbels improvised a torchlight parade through Berlin, playacting a seizure of power, even though Hitler had come to power legally (just like Italy’s Mussolini).³⁹⁵ Success had not come out of nowhere, however. By 1929, the Nazis had 3,400 party branches around the country and were mounting countless public rallies, sponsoring concerts, putting up Christmas trees and maypoles, spotlighting local heroes. They spoke to German people’s fears and prejudices, but also to their aspirations and interests, promising a reckoning with the disgraceful recent past and a future of national unity and rebirth.³⁹⁶ Paramilitary Nazi Brownshirts, known as the SA, engaged in street brawling with the Social Democrats and the Communists (who fought each other as well). The Nazi leadership encouraged violence and lawlessness, just as the Bolsheviks had on their path to power, but the Nazis accused the Communists of fomenting the chaos and called for order.³⁹⁷ Organized opposition to the Nazis was either irresolute or at loggerheads.³⁹⁸ The Reichswehr was focused on rearmament.³⁹⁹

There was one political force that could compete with Nazi storm troopers in the streets—the Communists—but they proactively subverted Weimar democracy, even knowing that this facilitated Nazi aims. Through the Comintern, Stalin was enforcing a struggle to the death—with Social Democracy. “The Nazi tree should not hide the Social Democrat forest,” the German Communist leader Ernst Thälmann had warned.⁴⁰⁰ The catastrophe of the Comintern policy of “social fascism” was vividly brought home in the November 1932 elections, when German Communists had garnered nearly 6 million votes, and the Social Democrats more than 7 million, as compared with the Nazis’ 11.7 million. In no free and fair election did the Nazis ever win more votes than the Communists and Social Democrats combined.⁴⁰¹

Many Communists imagined Nazism, which they labeled “fascism,” to be the terminal stage of the crisis of “monopoly capitalism,” so that the turmoil in Germany would eventually redound to them, which meant they needed to make themselves ready by outbattling their rivals on the left.⁴⁰² Some Communists even welcomed the Nazi accession to power. Stalin did not.⁴⁰³ Still, he appears to have underestimated Hitler, as many—but not all—contemporaries did. He interpreted Hitler and Nazism as creatures of finance capital, a class-based analysis, and assumed that German militarists would continue to shape state policy.Secret German-Soviet military cooperation had been failing.⁴⁰⁴ But Stalin hoped it would be renewed.⁴⁰⁵ Werner von Blomberg, who had played a hand in Hindenburg’s appointment of Hitler and stayed on as war minister, would pass on to the Soviet embassy that “a change in Soviet-German relations is out of the question under any circumstances.”⁴⁰⁶ But Nazism’s appeal to German workers was manifest, and its intense ideological radicalism was directed at the Soviet Union.⁴⁰⁷

RADICAL REALIGNMENTS