Stalin

3 HIS REVOLUTION

By the end of 1928, the crushing of the “left opposition” had been transformed into Stalin’s personal victory. Cohesion among the Politburo majority, which had been easy to maintain during the fight against Trotsky and Zinoviev, began to deteriorate. The growing socioeconomic crisis was paralleled by a crisis at the upper echelons of power, a volatile mix that put the system of government in peril. This political kindling was finally ignited by the state’s failure to collect sufficient grain supplies in 1927, one of many signals that the NEP was not working.

The NEP model of development was doomed by a range of factors. Allowing market forces to govern the relationship between the peasants and the state violated fundamental Bolshevik doctrine. Despite the tragic experiences of War Communism, the ruling party continued to preach radical socialism and punish private economic initiative. Furthermore, Soviet agriculture was simply incapable of immediately producing the resources the government needed to support industrialization. Every camp within the ruling party—rightists, leftists, and everyone in between—was aware of the need to adjust the NEP and spur industrialization. The problem was finding how to best modify the system. The fierce battle for power severely limited the available options. The economy was once again falling victim to political conflict and the need to adhere to dogma, and no one was more guilty of putting political expediency before the needs of the economy than Stalin.

The reasons for the crisis of late 1927 were perfectly familiar to the country’s leadership. Pricing policy errors and a disproportionate investment in industry, among other factors, had undermined peasant incentives to sell grain to the state and disrupted the overall economic balance. In previous years, the leaders had found successful recipes for overcoming similar crises. Such a recipe was needed again. At first the Politburo searched for solutions as a unified collective. Although they considered economic stimuli, on this occasion members decided to try intensifying pressure on the peasants through “administrative” means. This meant a campaign to expropriate grain by force, and a key component was visits by the country’s leaders to grain-producing regions to inspire greater effort on the part of local officials. Molotov, who was sent to Ukraine, reported to Stalin on the first day of 1928:

Dear Koba! I’m in my 4th day here in Ukraine—and people say I’m doing some good. I’ve pumped up the lazy khokhols [derogatory term for Ukrainians].… I managed to get Ukraine’s “chiefs” and “centers” to travel around to local sites and to promise to work hard. Now I’m hanging around Melitopol (a gold mine!) and also arranged a pogrom here with all the usual swearing that goes with grain collection.… Lots of new impressions; I’m really glad to be able to touch earth. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. Regards to all.¹

The tone of Molotov’s letter—more lighthearted than hard-line—partially reflected the relatively peaceable mood that still prevailed in the Politburo. Molotov was not yet “unmasking opportunists” or branding “kulaks” and “wreckers.” He asked Stalin to give Ukraine a bonus out of its grain collections to enable the purchase of farm machinery abroad: “This is urgently needed for encouragement (plus to push production) and is expedient in all regards.”

Stalin was not so jovial: he was spending his time thinking up ways to institute extreme policies. What prompted Stalin to take a sharp turn that placed him far to the left of Trotsky and Zinoviev? What drove his sudden opposition to the NEP: a belief that an ultra-leftist course was truly inevitable or self-serving political calculations? The evidence suggests a complex of motives. Some of the NEP’s contradictions were indeed gradually drawing the entire top leadership leftward and leading to a restructuring of the NEP that favored more rapid industrialization. Stalin was among those who were most eager for this new direction. His political and managerial temperament inclined him toward violent measures. Furthermore, he had no expertise whatsoever when it came to dealing with the economy and probably sincerely believed it could be forced into whatever mold politics dictated. The extreme economic measures he mandated served obvious political purposes. In staking his wager on a radical course, Stalin was intentionally destroying the system of collective leadership. The battle within the Politburo that ensued permitted him to create a new majority faction that was unambiguously his to control.

In essence, Stalin was adopting Lenin’s revolutionary strategy, which called for maximally spurring leftist excesses, undercutting “moderates,” and mobilizing radicals with extremist policies. To launch his revolutionary push, Lenin had had to come to Petrograd from emigration in April 1917. Stalin set out for Siberia in early 1928 with a similar purpose: to turn this distant and enormous region into a proving ground for new upheavals. The trip seems to reflect some scheming on his part. The plan had been for the Politburo’s top troika—Stalin, Rykov, and Bukharin—to remain in Moscow to watch over the government, but Stalin took advantage of Ordzhonikidze’s ill health to take his place on the trip to Siberia. He probably assigned Siberia to Ordzhonikidze in the first place realizing that he would not be able to go, given his poor health in late 1927. The very fact that Stalin—who did not like to travel—made such a long trip shows the seriousness of his intentions. After 1928 his official trips were few. He made some stops on the way to his southern vacations; in July 1933 he visited the White Sea–Baltic Canal; and he made one trip to the front during World War II and three to meet with Roosevelt and Churchill in Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam. Clearly, he had his reasons for going to Siberia in 1928.

It took three days to reach Novosibirsk by train. The general secretary spent a total of three weeks in Siberia during the latter half of January and the first days of February. Most of this time was spent in meetings with the aktiv (local bosses and party stalwarts). Stalin extracted from them a pledge to fulfill an ambitious plan to supply the country with Siberian grain. He told the Siberian officials just how they would achieve this challenging objective, rolling out his plan to bring down the full force of the police state on the kulaks and charge them with the crime of “speculation.”² In essence, this plan represented a return to War Communism. Many Siberian leaders objected. The change of course was so sudden that some even permitted themselves to argue with him. On 19 January the head of the Siberian branch of the agricultural bank, Sergei Zagumenny, wrote to Stalin to voice his concerns, saying he doubted the effectiveness of treating peasants like criminals for refusing to sell grain to the state. Peasants would see this as a return to the policy of mandatory sales of surplus grain to the state practiced during the early years of Soviet rule. It could make matters worse. “It seems to me that we are making too sharp a turn,” he wrote. Stalin’s many notations on Zagumenny’s letter (underscorings and derisive comments) attest to his irritation.³

Stalin continued to pressure the Siberian officials and insisted that repression would be effective. At the same time, he maintained a certain restraint in his interactions. In talking about the failures of grain procurement, he stopped short of making threats and combined confident and decisive authority with displays of comradery. At a meeting in Novosibirsk, in response to a statement that he had caught krai officials making mistakes, Stalin answered with a conciliatory “No, I wasn’t trying to catch anyone.” Even the criticism leveled against Zagumenny was fairly gentle.⁴ This combination of ruthlessness toward “enemies”—in this case grain-hiding kulaks—and amiability toward his party comrades is one aspect of the strategy that helped him climb to the top of the political hierarchy. It undoubtedly made a favorable impression on local party officials and was an effective way for Stalin to reassure anyone who might have doubted the changing nature of the party under his leadership.

Through pressure and persuasion, Stalin got what he wanted. Dressed in a new sheepskin coat made for him in a local workshop, he spent several weeks crisscrossing the vast expanses of Siberia. Everywhere he demanded the same thing: give us grain. As he put it in a telegram to Moscow, he “got everyone good and worked up.”⁵ In a subsequent telegram sent on 2 February, the eve of his return to Moscow, he triumphantly reported that “A turnaround in grain deliveries is beginning. During 26–30 January, 2.9 million poods [approximately 52,400 tons] of grain was procured, instead of the norm of 1.2 million. This is a major turning point.”⁶ Stalin also expressed hope that the pace of grain collection would continue to grow. In a single month, Siberia had supposedly fulfilled more than a third of its annual grain quota.

Behind these figures was escalating brutality in Siberian villages. Bands of agents empowered to use an iron fist in demanding the turnover of grain swept through the countryside. Disdaining even to pay lip service to legality, these agents followed a principle openly expressed by one of them: “What kind of bureaucratism is that? Comrade Stalin gave us our motto—press, beat, squeeze.”⁷ The countryside was gripped by searches and arrests. Such large quantities of grain were confiscated that peasant families were ruined. Under Stalin’s influence, Siberia received more unsparing treatment than the country’s other grain-producing regions, although probably not by much. Pressure from Moscow and the active involvement of highly placed emissaries subjected villages everywhere to violence and lawlessness. But the precedent for extremism set in Siberia had special significance. Coming straight from the general secretary, the order to wage war against the kulaks was seen as a universal license.

As political theater, Stalin’s Siberian trip had a complex subtext. The first thing it did was change the ideological framework of the crisis. Ignoring the official line that the government had made mistakes (a point reiterated in numerous Politburo directives), Stalin shifted the emphasis onto exposing the hostile actions of kulaks and anti-Soviet forces, thus opening the door to the broad use of repressive measures. At his suggestion (his creative contribution to the 1928 grain requisitions), confiscation was not, as previously, conducted on an extraordinary basis but as part of an ongoing effort to enforce the criminal code. “Speculators” were handed over to the courts for refusing to sell grain that they themselves had planted, tended, and harvested. Such actions made a mockery of justice, but they gave extraordinary measures a legal footing and made them routine and permanent. In essence, Stalin was proposing to jettison the principles that, under the NEP, had governed interactions between the state and the countryside. Finally, Stalin’s trip across Siberia confronted the government’s economic apparat—and Rykov, as premier, personally—with a serious challenge. The party, embodied by Stalin, was taking charge of the country’s most important political and economic problem and thus asserting its primacy.

Stalin knew that some of his colleagues would raise objections to the strong-armed measures he instigated in Siberia. He was provoking conflict with careful calculation. The Siberian trip allowed him to confront his fellow leaders from a position of strength, as an energetic leader who had succeeded by applying revolutionary methods to pressing problems. The results cast moderation in an unflattering light and made radicalism look more effective. Fissures in the Politburo started to show immediately after he returned to Moscow in February 1928. But he was apparently not quite ready for all-out war. To an outside observer it might seem that by failing to force a showdown, he was letting an exceptional opportunity slip by, but Stalin probably did not see it that way. At the time, there was no clear evidence that he would emerge victorious. This was a pivotal moment in his campaign for sole power, and he turned it into a guerrilla operation, using deceit, patience, and subversion.

 A SHIFT TO THE FAR LEFT

Circumstances prevented Stalin from quickly and openly asserting primacy over his Politburo colleagues—and preventing them, in turn, from calling him to account for his recklessness. From the standpoint of his political interests, the leadership could be divided into two groups. The first consisted of potential adversaries, leaders who enjoyed a degree of independent power and influence and would oppose his rise to power. This group included Aleksei Rykov, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (the country’s premier); Nikolai Bukharin, the party’s chief ideologue and editor of Pravda; Mikhail Tomsky, the leader of Soviet trade unions; Nikolai Uglanov, Moscow party secretary; and Mikhail Kalinin, chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s parliament.⁸ These leaders, proponents of collective leadership and a gradual transformation of the NEP, were not happy about Stalin’s ambitions or his extreme policies. The second group—only a minority of the Politburo—had close personal ties to Stalin: Vyacheslav Molotov, Central Committee secretary; Kliment Voroshilov, chief of the military commissariat; Grigory Ordzhonikidze, head of the party’s Central Control Commission; and Anastas Mikoyan, head of the trade commissariat. They had looked up to Stalin and followed his lead since the revolution and Civil War. Even his friends, however, were not likely to unquestioningly support his efforts to break down the party’s collective leadership and proclaim himself sole leader. In early 1928 the “Stalin faction” could be rallied and counted on only in time of war.

Waging such a war would be complicated and risky. The fevered four-year standoff with the opposition had created a deep desire for unity. The oppositionists had been castigated as schismatics who had put their personal political ambitions before the interests of the party. Any leader who openly threatened the party’s newfound unity would find himself in an unpopular position. How could Stalin fight for dominance without undermining unity? There was only one solution: to surreptitiously provoke a split and then cast himself as an injured adherent of unity and his enemies as schismatics. That is the script Stalin followed.

Another concern was that the radical measures Stalin was proposing, measures close to the hearts of party leftists, had huge destructive potential. Two dangers were immediately evident. First, the peasants, knowing that their harvest would be confiscated, might simply plant less. Second, there were worrisome signals coming from the Red Army. Letters from relatives back home complaining of mistreatment were stoking anti-government sentiment in the barracks. Young peasant recruits underwent military training at bases not far from home, and emissaries streamed from the villages to the bases pleading for help.

Lacking sufficient political strength to simply sweep such realities under the rug, Stalin was forced to bide his time. Evidence from the period after his return from Siberia shows him ready for compromise. Resolutions adopted around that time, while expressing approval for the extreme measures already taken, condemned “distortions and excesses.” Stalin’s handling of objections to tactics used in Siberia foreshadowed the brand of political warfare he would favor in subsequent years, before he achieved complete victory. In essence, his approach was to “agree and ignore.” Wishing to avoid a showdown, he put his faith in stealthy manipulation of the bureaucratic machine and a strategic reshuffling of personnel.

Everything depended on the alignment of forces within the Politburo. In 1928, with help from political intrigues, Stalin managed to weaken the Rykov-Bukharin group and strengthen unity among his friends. He also benefited from the foolish mistakes of his opponents—especially Bukharin—and likely from the use of blackmail. He may have made use of recently discovered compromising evidence against Mikhail Kalinin and Yan Rudzutak, unearthed in prerevolutionary police records in 1928 but never brought to light. A transcript of a February 1900 police interrogation has Kalinin stating: “Having been called in for interrogation as a result of a request I submitted, I wish to give frank testimony on my criminal activities.” The transcript shows that Kalinin gave the police detailed information about the operations of his underground organization. Police records also showed that Rudzutak, who was sentenced to ten years’ hard labor in 1909, apparently gave interrogators the names and addresses of members of his organization. The police then conducted searches and seized weapons and propagandistic literature.⁹ Similar compromising materials Stalin could have used against other members of the top leadership may remain to be found.

Although there is no hard evidence to show that Stalin used these discoveries in his quest for loyal supporters, his relationship with the secret police was such that he would almost certainly have been informed about them, and his using the crude but powerful tool of blackmail would have been entirely in character. Even his friends on the Politburo understood the reasons for the split within its ranks. Stalin’s pontification on the “rightist threat” did not mask his intention of achieving dominance within the Politburo. The war he was waging was starkly personal. In an attempt to reconcile the sides, Stalin’s old friend and loyal follower Ordzhonikidze wrote a frank letter to Rykov amid clashes in the fall of 1928:

Any more fighting within the party is bound to lead to unbelievably bitter upheavals. That has to be our starting point. I am absolutely convinced that we’ll get over this. In terms of grain and other such issues, we can argue and decide, but it shouldn’t lead to fighting.… There are no fundamental disagreements, and that’s the most important thing. … It seems that the relationship between Stalin and Bukharin has really deteriorated, but we need to do everything possible to reconcile them. It can be done.¹⁰

It is unlikely that Ordzhonikidze was attempting to deceive Rykov in order to help Stalin. He was merely describing the moods and views then held by the majority, including many of Stalin’s supporters. The Politburo’s collective leadership was still a viable and functional institution. Even as authoritarian a Bolshevik as Ordzhonikidze understood that it was better to “argue and decide” than to engage in political name calling. All Soviet leaders recognized the need to revise economic policy in favor of accelerating industrialization. Only the details were in dispute. There was no reason friction within the Politburo had to lead to a complete rupture—so long as no member of the collective leadership harbored ambitions of achieving sole power.

Attuned to the prevailing mood, Stalin paid lip service to unity while using others to undermine his opponents. In 1928 he organized rebellions within Tomsky’s trade union apparat and Uglanov’s Moscow party organization. By orchestrating upheavals within these organizations, Stalin managed to deprive both leaders of their “patrimonies.” Furthermore, his opponents were weakened by a fatal political misstep by Bukharin, who in July 1928 secretly met with the disgraced Kamenev and gave him a candid account of conflicts roiling the Politburo. Kamenev’s written account of this conversation was stolen and sent to followers of Trotsky, who, despising both Stalin and Bukharin, were only too glad to print it up on leaflets and distribute them publicly. The true story is still not entirely clear, but even if Stalin and the secret police, which was already under his control, had nothing to do with the theft of the notes, there is no doubt that he did everything he could to ensure that the leaflets were broadly disseminated.¹¹ Bukharin and his supporters were hopelessly compromised.

While branding Bukharin a schismatic who fraternized with the crushed opposition behind the backs of his Politburo colleagues, Stalin prepared his heavy artillery. In mid-1928, engineers from a Donetsk coal mine were subjected to a show trial based on fabricated charges—the so-called Shakhty Affair. They were charged with sabotage, and their trial was accompanied by a powerful propaganda campaign. Meanwhile, as the 1928 grain collections were again turned into a war against the kulaks, Stalin proclaimed a new theory (which he made sure was borne out): the farther socialist construction progressed, the more heated the class war would become as the enemies of socialism intensified their resistance. They would also, he warned ominously, exert influence over the party. Persistently and methodically, he introduced into party documents and propaganda the idea of “danger from the right” and from agents of hostile influence within the party. Keeping constant pressure on “the enemy,” destroying him and his “rightist” allies within the party—that was how the victory of socialism and the long-awaited overcoming of difficulties and conflicts would finally be achieved. These sinister theories may have appealed to poorly educated party functionaries, but they are not consistent with what was happening in the country.

Once he had isolated the Bukharin-Rykov group, Stalin cast his final blow by blaming the two men for the “right deviation” within party ranks. In an atmosphere of political hysteria and growing radicalism, the more moderate forces within the party were compelled to remain silent. When forced to take sides, most Politburo members—each for his own reasons—chose to support Stalin. The entire Politburo became a sort of Stalin faction. One after another in 1929 and 1930, Bukharin, Tomsky, Uglanov, and Rykov were expelled from the Politburo and relegated to the status of second-tier functionaries. None survived the Terror.

Stalin’s victory in the Politburo was due to political intrigues and errors by his opponents. The general secretary made good use of the vast experience building and wielding power and influence he had acquired during the years of struggle against Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. Of no small importance was Stalin’s power, as general secretary, to influence appointments. He knew how to manipulate people, how to wait for the right moment and strike with just the right amount of force to avoid scaring off potential supporters or waverers. Masking his true intentions, he presented himself as a reasonable politician and loyal member of the party community, implacable only toward enemies. In a few short years, everything would be completely different. Many who supported Stalin bitterly repented their choice once their turn for destruction came. This was Stalin’s genius: to ensure that his victims developed regrets only after it was too late.

One result of the Stalin faction’s victory was the approval and implementation of the Great Leap policy. Largely due to Stalin’s influence, “class warfare” and “revolutionary spirit” were introduced into the economic sphere. Socioeconomic constraints were discarded as so much rubbish. No objective limits were placed on industrial plans or on capital investments in manufacturing—whatever industry needed, it would get. A tremendous wager was placed on large-scale purchases of Western equipment and even entire factories in the hope that these resources would be quickly up and running, producing an abundance of goods. The historical circumstances were propitious. With their economies languishing from the Great Depression, Western countries were more inclined to cooperate with the USSR than they might have been in times of plenty.

The ambitious five-year economic growth targets adopted in April 1929 were almost immediately rejected as too modest. Targets were increased by 50 percent, then doubled and tripled. The Five-Year Plan was changed to a Four- and even Three-Year Plan. Trying to outdo one another in this frenzy, party and economic functionaries pulled ever higher numbers out of the air. “In ten years at most,” Stalin exhorted, “we must make good the distance that separates us from the advanced capitalist countries.… Some claim that it is hard to master technology. That is not true! There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot capture.”¹²

Treating the economy as a fortress to be captured plunged the country back into the War Communism of the Civil War period. Political campaigns, an enthusiastic minority, and the compulsion of the majority almost completely took the place of economic incentives and proven practices of manufacturing and labor management. A disordered financial and commercial system and skyrocketing inflation were explained away as predictable obstacles on the path toward socialism, toward the withering away of commodity-money relations and the introduction of product exchange between cities and the countryside. As foreseen by the more moderate party leaders, this mad race to industrialize left no place for the tracking of basic economic indicators. In December 1930 the new chief of Soviet industry, Grigory Ordzhonikidze, reported that even such key industrial sites as the Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk Metallurgical Works, the Nizhny Novgorod Automotive Plant, and the Bobrikov Chemical Works were being built without finalized blueprints. In many cases, he wrote in a memorandum, “money is being spent without any budget.… Accounting is exceptionally weak and muddled. No one has yet been able to say how much construction of the Stalingrad Tractor Factory has cost.” Stalin read this memorandum; his perfunctory notations demonstrate no desire to change the way things were being done.¹³ Such an extravagant pumping up of industry needed material resources and workers. Both were taken from the countryside.

 THE WAR ON THE PEASANTS

Stalin’s costly leap forward was paid for by a sharp reduction in the entire population’s standard of living, but the pain inflicted on rural populations was particularly severe.¹⁴ The countryside was treated like a conquered colony to be exploited rather than the country’s mainstay. At first no one doubted that in a primarily agrarian country, the peasantry would have to foot the bill for industrialization. The only disagreements had to do with the size of the bill and how payment would be exacted. The Bolsheviks did not like the peasantry—they considered it a dying class—but during the NEP, cognizant of the economic importance of agriculture, the government tried to maintain reasonable relations with the countryside, even if that meant turning a blind eye to such politically unsavory phenomena as the expanded use of private plots. In the late 1920s, however, the government abandoned such liberalism. The increase in capital investment in industry—a policy the entire collective leadership supported—required changing the relationship between the state and the peasantry. In late 1927 and early 1928, the still unified Politburo continued its leftward drift, mixing repression and strong-armed tactics with the economic incentives that had already been put in place to encourage agriculture. How well this mixed approach might have worked will never be known since Stalin took the initiative and turned the leftward drift into a sudden leap. The radical expropriation of grain began to look very much like the confiscations carried out under War Communism.

As Stalin’s opponents had warned, these measures yielded immediate but unsustainable results. The confiscations took away the peasants’ economic incentive and led to a drop in production. Each harvest was worse than the one before, leading the grain collectors to resort to increasingly ruthless methods. This vicious cycle of extraordinary measures was fraught with political crises, including mass unrest among peasants that spilled over into the army. Those dealing with these problems on the ground looked to Stalin, who had by then taken a leading position within the Politburo, for a way out of this cycle.

Stalin’s options were limited, however, by the various ultra-leftist policies he had advocated during his political battles against the rightists. He chose what for him personally was the simplest and safest path, however ruinous it might be for the country. The fight against kulaks and the expropriation of peasant property were taken to their logical conclusion: lands were confiscated and the peasants were transformed into workers in agrarian enterprises managed by the state. The method by which these changes were achieved, labeled “collectivization,” involved the large-scale forcible movement of peasants to collective farms—kolkhozes. Nullifying the party’s previous decision to make such a transition gradually, in November 1929 Stalin proclaimed that collectivization would be universal and immediate. In December came his call to destroy the kulaks as a class.

In essence, the victorious vozhd was intentionally provoking a new and deadly wave of revolution in the countryside. By brandishing slogans about the urgent need to crush the kulaks, he gave local stalwarts a free hand. A fevered and violent collectivization effort gripped the countryside even before the new kolkhoz project could receive serious discussion or be embodied in specific directives. In a signature Stalinist move, the party was confronted with a fait accompli. Collectivization supposedly began “from below,” leaving no alternative but to support and expand the kolkhoz movement, whatever monstrous forms it might be taking. Many party careerists and radicals, sensing Stalin’s strength and decisiveness, responded enthusiastically to his call. Reports of collectivization’s successes poured into Moscow.

A finalized plan for collectivization was adopted in early 1930, during a special meeting of Central Committee commissions established to work out the details. Commission members—functionaries fully obedient to Stalin—at first expressed a certain hesitance. While they were in principle ready to support Stalin’s push for wholesale collectivization, they urged that it take place over several years. Despite the atmosphere of class-war hysteria in the country, the commissioners tried to ease the fate of millions of kulaks, believing that while they were, of course, enemies of the entire kolkhoz system, they should not be driven into a corner. Repression should be reserved for those who actively resisted. The rest should be accepted into kolkhozes, albeit with certain restrictions. Taking this relatively moderate approach, the commission members made important organizational suggestions—for example, that instead of the total confiscation of property, peasants should be allowed to keep small plots for their own use.¹⁵

The proposals made by the Central Committee commissions were of great practical importance and probably the best that could be achieved given the political realities of 1930. They somewhat appeased party extremists while conceding something meaningful to the peasants. As the subsequent history of the Soviet Union has shown, allowing kolkhoz workers to keep their own personal plots saved the system, the peasants, and the entire country. In essence, the arrangement returned peasants to the status of serfs in pre-emancipation Russia, paying feudal homage to the state through their work on collective farms but able to retain some land for personal use. It allowed them to feed themselves—and much of the country—despite the poor performance of the kolkhozes.

Stalin preferred a different model: his idea was to turn the peasants into slaves of the state, fully dependent on their state jobs. He favored the total expropriation of peasant property and the incorporation of villages into a state economy where market forces would be allowed no influence. He subjected the commissions’ conclusions to harsh criticism and undertook to correct their many errors.¹⁶ By the time he was done, the collectivization plan resembled a military campaign against the traditional peasant way of life. First, Stalin drastically cut the timeline for carrying out collectivization. In several of the most important agricultural regions, the task was to be completed by the fall of 1930, and the tone of his directives made it clear to local functionaries that there was not a moment to lose. Second, he put a quick stop to all talk of integrating kulaks into kolkhozes. Such a step was categorically forbidden. Kulaks and their families were to be exiled to remote areas of the USSR, arrested, placed in camps, or shot. Finally, he put an end to all proposals that kolkhozes coexist with private peasant plots. Provisions for peasants to keep any land whatsoever were adamantly deleted from the draft directives. Ultimately, “communes”—agricultural and social utopias, the brainchild of socialist fanatics—were proclaimed to be the ideal form and goal of collectivization. In the Soviet embodiment of this ideal, peasant property became the property of the community, right down to family chickens and personal items.

These insane and inevitably bloody plans fully reflected Stalin’s ideas and intentions. By pushing the pace of collectivization and annihilating the most prosperous and influential segment of the peasantry, Stalin was pursuing several goals at once. Kulak property would provide land and equipment for the collective farms, and the kolkhozes themselves would serve as conduits through which resources could be rapidly and efficiently pumped out of the countryside and into industry. One factor in Stalin’s calculations was his belief (shared by many party functionaries) that a moneyless form of socialism based on the exchange of goods was right around the corner. Under forced industrialization, money would cease to be an economic regulator—good riddance, thought the party leftists.

Stalin was emboldened to wage this perilous war against the peasantry partly because he believed this population segment, despite being the country’s largest, lacked the strength to pose any serious threat to the state. This assumption was only partly borne out. The peasantry really was no match for the totalitarian state, but it did offer serious resistance to collectivization and caused Stalin a good deal of trouble.

In order to fulfill Stalin’s vision of a massive system of kolkhozes, the party leadership mobilized and empowered tens of thousands of people dispatched from cities, as well as local stalwarts. Spurring competition among the regions, party newspapers (Pravda first and foremost) voiced one demand: as quickly as possible and by whatever means necessary, drive the peasants into kolkhozes. Despite official optimism, the leadership was under no illusions that collectivization could be achieved voluntarily. One of the main instruments propelling it forward was the arrest and exile of kulaks. Fearing the fate of their repressed fellow villagers, peasants gritted their teeth and joined the despised kolkhozes.

Brandishing the threat of “dekulakization” and arrest, the authorities quickly achieved stunning collectivization results—at least on paper. While 7.5 percent of the country’s peasant households belonged to kolkhozes as of 1 October 1929, by 20 February 1930 that percentage had reached 52.7.¹⁷ Underlying this statistic was a horrific and tragic reality. People sent from the city or mobilized from the local population to carry out collectivization behaved like conquering hordes toward a defeated enemy. Anyone who refused to enter the kolkhoz was arrested and beaten. The plundering of “dekulakized” property and the raping of women were standard. Churches were closed and clergy members arrested. “Fervent” members of the Komsomol—the Communist Youth League—desecrated churches and pranced about in church vestments.

This abuse and humiliation drove the usually docile countryside to rebellion. A wave of peasant militancy swept across the country. In all of 1926–1927, the authorities identified just 63 incidents of large-scale anti-government unrest in rural areas. In 1929 there were more than 1,300 such incidents, involving 244,000 participants. In January–February 1930 alone, there were approximately 1,500 incidents with 324,000 participants.¹⁸ Stalin, though undoubtedly informed of the growing unrest, did not immediately respond. He was probably confident that the wave of rebellion was simply the inevitable resistance of an “obsolete class.” By late February, however, he began to think again.¹⁹ First came a report on 26 February from Kharkov, then the capital of Ukraine, containing news of unrest in the Shepetovka District, near the border with Poland. Crowds of peasants were demanding the reopening of churches and the abolition of the kolkhozes. Party activists were beaten. Other reports reaching Moscow around the same time described similar incidents in Kazakhstan, Voronezh, and even near the capital. Unrest broke out on 21 February in the Pitelinsky area of Riazan District outside Moscow. Peasants removed their livestock and family stores from kolkhozes and returned property to kulaks. Church bells were rung and delegations sent to neighboring villages to rally others to the cause. Peasants armed with stakes tried to prevent the arrests of kulaks. A policeman was killed and eight activists were wounded. OGPU agents responded with firearms, as a result of which three peasants were wounded and six killed, according to official reports.²⁰

The escalating disturbances and the threat that the spring sowing could be disrupted forced the authorities to pull back. On 28 February 1930 the Politburo adopted a resolution calling on Stalin to address collectivization in the press.²¹ The famous article “Dizzy with Success” was published on 2 March. It contained an optimistic assessment of the “huge strides” made in collectivization and proclaimed “the countryside’s radical turn toward socialism.” At the same time, Stalin condemned individual “anti-Leninist inclinations”—the spread of communes; the expropriation of all peasant property for communal use; violations of “the principle of voluntarism and accounting for local circumstances”; and the removal of church bells—placing the blame for these excesses at the feet of local officials. On 10 March, secret Central Committee directives were sent out demanding the return of some expropriated property to peasants (poultry, livestock, the lands immediately adjacent to their homes), the correction of “mistakes” made during dekulakization, and a halt to the creation of communes and the closing of churches.²² This was a temporary retreat intended to calm the peasants and allow them to plant their crops.

Stalin’s article and the Central Committee directives did little to calm tempers. Both failed to provide what was most sought: an explanation of what would be done with the kolkhozes that already existed. The peasants took this problem into their own hands. They forcibly destroyed the collective farms, took away confiscated property and seeds, and restored abolished property lines. The contradictory signals from Moscow only fanned the flames of anti-kolkhoz sentiment and provoked further disturbances by peasants, leaving local activists unsure of how to proceed. March 1930 marked the apex of the war in the countryside: there were more than 6,500 instances of mass unrest, almost half the total for the entire year. In all, approximately 3.4 million peasants took part in acts of rebellion in 1930.²³ Based on that number, it can be presumed that 1.5–2 million revolted in March. The higher figure is more likely since the political police had an incentive to underestimate participation in anti-government unrest. Some incidents were well organized; the peasants formed detachments and took over significant territory.

Uprisings were especially widespread in Ukraine, the site of almost half of the March disturbances. The authorities were particularly alarmed by rebellions in border regions. As of 16 March, fifteen out of Tulchin District’s seventeen administrative areas were in a state of revolt. Representatives of the Soviet government were driven out of fifty villages and replaced with starostas, traditional village elders. Kolkhozes were abolished in most of the district’s villages. Rebels beat members of the Communist Party and Komsomol and banished them from villages. In some places, armed rebels engaged in gun battles with OGPU punitive detachments.

For Moscow, the unrest along Ukraine’s western border raised the specter of Polish intervention. On 19 March, Stalin gave Ukrainian State Political Directorate (GPU) chief Vsevolod Balitsky a dressing down, demanding that he stop “making speeches and act more decisively.” The wounded Balitsky replied that he was personally traveling to “the sectors under threat” and was not just overseeing the fight “from a train car.”²⁴ But he did carry out Stalin’s orders. Ordzhonikidze, who traveled to Ukraine for an inspection, wrote that the disorders in border areas were being put down with “armed forces using machine guns and in some places cannons. There are 100 killed and shot and a few hundred wounded.”²⁵

Having very little weaponry, the peasants could not withstand well-armed OGPU detachments and mobilized Communists. Their isolated attempts to join forces—by sending messengers and delegations to neighboring villages or sounding the alarm using church bells—were ineffective. The uprisings remained fractured and uncoordinated. Such weaknesses made the task of mobile punitive detachments easier and permitted them to control large areas at once. Mass arrests of the uprisings’ ringleaders, kulaks, and the rural intelligentsia, along with the demonstrative brutality of government forces, undermined the resistance. Furthermore, the peasants’ behavior was much more civilized than the government’s. They generally did not kill their tormentors but merely drove them out of their villages. As a result, the government forces suffered few casualties, partly due to false promises. Another important factor in the diminishing disturbances was the spring sowing. The peasants had little time for rebellion when there were crops to be planted. The fall harvest—on which life itself depended—would not come unless they dropped what they were doing and headed to the fields. By the time the 1930 harvest came, ruthless collectivization had resumed, and the majority of peasants had been forced into kolkhozes.

Collectivization was the cornerstone of Stalin’s dictatorship, and all the other features of the Stalinist system can be seen as deriving from it. Wholesale violence against the country’s largest class required a large apparatus of oppression, complete with a system of camps and places of exile. Beyond making it clear that terror was the primary instrument of government, collectivization completely and almost instantly severed countless traditional social connections, accelerated the atomization of society, and made ideological manipulation much easier. The rampant and merciless pumping of material and human resources out of the countryside enabled the pursuit of insanely ambitious economic goals.

Forced collectivization and ineffective industrialization dealt the country a blow from which it never fully recovered. In 1930–1932, hundreds of thousands of “wreckers” and “kulaks” were shot or imprisoned in camps, and more than 2 million kulaks and their family members were sent into exile.²⁶ Many of those exiled were just as doomed as those who were shot. Kulak families were sent to live in barracks not suitable for habitation and sometimes simply dropped off in open fields. Terrible living conditions, backbreaking labor, and hunger brought on mass fatalities, especially among children.²⁷

The situation for peasants who were not arrested or exiled was hardly better. The Soviet village, ravaged by collectivization, was seriously degraded. Agricultural production plummeted, and the livestock sector was hit hard. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses dropped from 32 million to 17 million, heads of cattle fell from 60 million to 33 million and pigs from 22 million to 10 million.²⁸ Despite such declining productivity, the state pumped an ever-growing share of its yield out of the countryside. And yet throughout the Soviet period, the kolkhozes were unable to adequately feed the country. Most Soviet citizens survived on meager rations. Many periods were marked by famine. One of the worst was the famine of 1931–1933, the predictable result of Stalin’s Great Leap.

 FAMINE

When the time arrived to announce the results of the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin had to be creative. Exercising the privilege of power, he did not cite a single actual figure but simply proclaimed that the emperor was indeed wearing clothes. The Five-Year Plan, he said, had been fulfilled ahead of schedule!²⁹ Of course the investment of vast resources and tons of equipment purchased from the West did yield results. Many modern factories were built, and industrial production did increase significantly. But there was no miracle. The unachievable five-year targets were, predictably, not achieved. The actual production figures were not even close: 6.2 million metric tons of cast iron in 1932 instead of the desired 17 million; 21.4 million tons of petroleum instead of 45 million; 48,900 tractors instead of 170,000; 23,900 automobiles instead of 200,000.³⁰ The state of consumer goods manufacturing was particularly lamentable.

But the main problem with the First Five-Year Plan was that it established a ruinously inefficient approach to industrialization. Vast sums and resources were poured into undertaking construction that was never completed; into equipment for which no use was ever found, purchased from abroad out of Soviet gold reserves; into wasteful redesigns, the inevitable result of excessive haste; and into goods so poorly produced as to be unusable. The task of arriving at an approximation of these losses rests with historians. Much better known are the statistics from another tragic result of the Great Leap—the toll taken by the Great Famine.

This famine, which reached its peak over the winter of 1932–1933, took the lives of between 5 million and 7 million people.³¹ Millions more were permanently disabled. In a time of peace and relatively normal weather, agriculturally rich regions were ruined and desolated. Although the famine was a complex phenomenon, posterity has every right to call it the Stalin Famine. The Stalinist policy of the Great Leap was its primary cause; moreover, it was Stalin’s decisions in 1932 and 1933 that, instead of easing the tragedy, made it worse.

The famine was the inevitable result of industrialization and collectivization. From a productivity standpoint, the kolkhozes were a poor substitute for the destroyed farms of those who had been branded “kulaks.” The only advantage of the kolkhozes was that they gave the state a convenient means of channeling resources out of the countryside. The exceptional exploitation of peasants had two effects: agricultural workers were physically weakened by hunger, and they were deprived of any incentive to work, leading to despondency and apathy. They knew in advance that everything they grew would be taken by the state, dooming them, at best, to semi-starvation. Several years of this policy led to a gradual decline in output. In 1932 the crops did not grow well and were also poorly harvested.

The state’s interests and those of the peasants were diametrically opposed. The state was extremely aggressive in taking from the countryside as many resources as possible. The peasants, like famine victims all over the world, used “the weapons of the weak.”³² They sabotaged the fulfillment of their obligations to the state and tried to stash away stores to feed themselves. Stalin was well aware of the hostility of the forcibly collectivized countryside, but he placed the blame fully on the peasants’ shoulders. They had declared war, he proclaimed, against the Soviet government.

The looming crisis was obvious to everyone, including Stalin, long before the famine entered its most critical phase. There were obvious steps that, if they did not prevent the famine altogether, could at least have diminished its impact. The first would have been to establish set norms for grain deliveries to the state—in other words, a move from a system of confiscation to a system of taxes. This step would have given the peasants an incentive to boost production. Stalin, however, rejected this approach.³³ He preferred to take as much as possible from the countryside without any constraints. Another step to alleviate the famine might have been to reduce grain exports or even buy grain abroad. Such purchases were made on a limited basis during the spring of 1932, so they were in principle possible.³⁴ But Stalin refused to make further purchases. Any concessions that hinted at the misguidedness of the Great Leap were contrary to his nature and politically dangerous to his dictatorship. To alleviate the pressure on the peasants there would have to be a reduction in the pace of industrial growth. Reluctantly, Stalin did agree to such a reduction in 1933, but his slowness to take action cost millions of lives.

By the autumn of 1932, critical delays, stubbornness, and cruelty had led Stalin himself into a dead end. No good options remained. The harvest produced by the devastated countryside in 1932 was even worse than the poor harvest of 1931. Meanwhile, industrialization continued apace, and the Soviet Union’s foreign debt for purchases of equipment and raw materials reached new heights. Given these circumstances, there was only a little room to maneuver. The government could mobilize all available resources, or dip into reserves, or appeal for international aid, as the Bolsheviks had done during the famine of 1921–1922.³⁵ These measures came with economic and political costs, but they were possible. Stalin probably did not even consider them. Instead, the state intensified pressure on the countryside.

Documents discovered in recent years paint a horrific picture. All food supplies were taken away from the starving peasants—not only grain, but also vegetables, meat, and dairy products. Teams of marauders, made up of local officials and activists from the cities, hunted down hidden supplies—so-called yamas (holes in the ground), where peasants, in accordance with age-old tradition, kept grain as a sort of insurance against famine. Hungry peasants were tortured to reveal these yamas and other food stores, their families’ only safeguard against death. They were beaten, forced out into sub-freezing temperatures without clothing, arrested, or exiled to Siberia. Attempts by peasants dying of hunger to flee to better-off regions were ruthlessly suppressed. Refugees were forced to return to their villages, doomed to slowly perish, or be arrested. By mid-1933 some 2.5 million people were in labor camps, prisons, or exile.³⁶ Many of them fared better than those who starved to death “in freedom.”

At its peak in late 1932 and early 1933, the famine afflicted an area populated by more than 70 million people: Ukraine, the North Caucasus, Kazakhstan, and some Russian provinces. This does not mean that the remaining Soviet population of 160 million was eating normally. Many in regions not officially in a state of famine lived on the edge of starvation. The entire country was hit by epidemics, primarily typhus. Millions suffered serious illnesses, were left disabled, or died several years after the famine from the damage it had inflicted on their bodies. And no statistics can measure the moral degradation it caused. Secret OGPU and party summaries (svodkas), especially during the early months of 1933, are filled with accounts of widespread cannibalism. Mothers murdered their children, and deranged activists robbed and tormented the population.

While the entire country suffered from famine and mass repression, Ukraine and the North Caucasus were the most affected.³⁷ It was in these two important regions of the USSR where the policy of punishing grain requisitions and terror were most brutally applied. Two interrelated reasons explain Stalin’s focus on these areas. The first could be described as economic. Ukraine and the North Caucasus supplied as much as half of all grain collected by the state. But in 1932–1933 they turned over 40 percent less than the previous year. While this decline was partially compensated by Russian grain-producing areas, which despite going hungry had significantly overfulfilled their plans, they could not completely make up the shortfall. In 1932 the state collected almost 20 percent less grain than in 1931.³⁸ These figures partially explain the demands Stalin placed on Ukraine and the North Caucasus. He wanted “his” grain and was infuriated that they were not providing it.

Second, Stalin saw the crisis of 1932 as the continuation of the war against the peasantry and as a means of consolidating the results of collectivization, and he had a point. In a letter to the Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov on 6 May 1933, he wrote: “The esteemed grain growers were in essence waging a ‘quiet’ war against Soviet power. A war by starvation.”³⁹ He undoubtedly considered the peasantry of Ukraine and the North Caucasus to be at the forefront of this peasant army battling the Soviet government. These regions had always been hotbeds of anti-Soviet sentiment, and Ukraine had been at the forefront of the anti-kolkhoz movement in 1930. Repeated incidents of unrest flared up in both Ukraine and the North Caucasus in 1931–1932. A further cause for concern was Ukraine’s border with Poland. Stalin feared that Poland, in its hostility toward the USSR, could exploit the Ukrainian crisis.⁴⁰ Overall, as Hiroaki Kuromiya points out, Stalin was suspicious of all peasants, but “Ukrainian peasants were doubly suspect both for being peasants and for being Ukrainian.”⁴¹

By proclaiming grain collection to be a war, Stalin was untying his own hands and the hands of those carrying out his orders. The ideological basis for this war was the Stalinist myth that “food difficulties” resulted from acts of sabotage by “enemies” and “kulaks.” Any suggestion of a link between the crisis and government policy was categorically rejected. By blaming all food shortages on “enemies” and on the peasants themselves while also promoting the idea that the scale of the famine was being maliciously exaggerated, Stalin relieved himself and the central government of any obligation to help the hungry. A statement by the general secretary in February 1933 at a congress of kolkhoz shock workers shows the depth of his cynicism: “One of our achievements is that the vast masses of the poor peasants, who formerly lived in semi-starvation, have now, in the collective farms, become middle peasants, have attained material security.… It is an achievement such as has never been known in the world before, such as no other state in the world has yet made.”⁴² This statement came at a time when thousands were dying every day.

Stalin could not deceive everyone. In May 1933, as the famine raged, he met with Colonel Raymond Robins, an American progressive who sympathized with Soviet Russia. Robins was famous for his meetings with Lenin as a member of the Red Cross mission to Russia in 1917–18. Counting on Robins’s help in strengthening relations with the United States, Stalin was friendly toward the American and adopted a tone of sincerity and candor. He knew that Robins was well informed about Soviet realities and did not dare deny that his country was afflicted by famine. In response to a direct question about the poor harvest of 1932, Stalin, after some lengthy equivocation, did admit that “some peasants are currently starving.” The reasons he gave for the famine exhibited impressive inventiveness and imagination. Parasitically inclined peasants, he argued, who had joined the kolkhozes late and were not earning anything through them, were the ones starving. Independent peasant farmers who did not work on their own plots but lived by stealing grain from kolkhozes were also “going terribly hungry.” They supposedly were left with nothing to eat after the introduction of harsh penalties for theft.⁴³ To top off these lies, Stalin assured Robins that the state was helping the victims of famine, even though the kolkhoz members themselves were against such aid: “The kolkhozniks are really mad at us—you shouldn’t help idlers, let them die. That’s how they are.”⁴⁴ Robins was probably not convinced, but as a true diplomat, he did not press Stalin.

While it is difficult to know how much Stalin believed of his own explanations, his conversations with Robins tell us something about his thinking. First, he apparently knew about the famine and recognized it as an actual fact, not a fiction made up by “enemies.” Second, he does not appear to put much store in his own accounts of underhanded plotting by enemies and wreckers. He does not mention this “problem” once in his talks with Robins, which may suggest an awareness of the true causes of the famine and its ties to collectivization. It is doubtful, however, that he ever admitted any mistakes, even to his closest associates. Only mythic explanations of reality served his purpose. Claims about enemies, sabotage by peasants, or mistakes by local bosses permitted him to deflect guilt and doom millions without wavering.

Stalin’s comments do not reveal exactly what he knew about the famine. What did he have in mind when he admitted to Robins that some peasants were “going terribly hungry”? Did he see in his mind’s eye images of walking skeletons; desperate people foraging through buried animal remains; mothers, mad from hunger, murdering their own children? Probably not. He only encountered ordinary people at orchestrated events, and Moscow, which he regularly saw from his car window, was the relatively well-fed façade of Soviet power. OGPU reports that have recently come to light offer a detailed description of the famine, of cannibalism, and spreading anti-Soviet sentiments among the populace.⁴⁵ But we do not know whether Stalin read these reports. One compelling document we do know he read is Mikhail Sholokhov’s letter of 4 April 1933.⁴⁶ In horrific detail, the appalled writer described what was taking place near his home in Veshenskaya, in the Northern Caucasus:

I saw things that I will remember until I die.… During the night—with a fierce wind, with freezing temperatures, when even the dogs hide from the cold—families thrown out of their homes [for failure to fulfill their grain quotas] set up bonfires in the lanes and sat near the flames. They wrapped the children in rags and placed them on ground that had been thawed by the fire. The unceasing crying of children filled the lanes.… At the Bazkovsky kolkhoz they expelled a woman with a baby. She spent the night wandering through the village and asking that she and the baby be allowed inside to get warm. No one let her in [there were severe penalties for aiding “saboteurs”]. By morning the child had frozen to death in the mother’s arms.

Sholokhov’s letter describes how suspected hoarders were coerced into handing over their grain: mass beatings, the staging of mock executions, branding with hot irons, and hanging by the neck to induce partial asphyxiation during interrogations, among other methods. The writer did not attempt to whitewash the fact that the criminal abuses being perpetrated in the Veshensky District were part of a purposeful campaign by the regional authorities—not “deviations” by local zealots. But for obvious reasons, he did not press this point.

Stalin took the news in stride. He ordered that the Veshensky District be given additional grain assistance and that an investigation be conducted into the abuses Sholokhov described. Overall, however, he supported the local authorities. In a response to Sholokhov he accused the writer of taking a one-sided view and of covering his eyes to sabotage by peasants. The local leadership, some of whom were at first condemned to harsh punishment for abuses, were ultimately acquitted. On Stalin’s orders they were simply removed from their posts and given reprimands. They were not even expelled from the party.⁴⁷ Stalin had no intention of retreating from his war against the peasants, however many innocent lives were taken in the process.

 THE “MODERATE”

The victory over the peasants had all the hallmarks of defeat. Despite the campaign’s extreme ruthlessness, the grain procurement plan was not fulfilled. And the 20 percent decline in grain collections between the meager harvest of 1931 and the disastrous one of 1932, bad as this was, paled in comparison to the decimation of the livestock sector. If ruthless measures could not squeeze food out of the countryside, what should be done next? Continuing a policy of confiscation—prodrazverstka—would only kill off the population. Furthermore, the policy of forced industrialization was proving untenable. The mad surge of capital investment in heavy industry had reached its limit. Trotsky’s call to make 1933 “a year of capital repair” resonated with Stalin’s opponents, who called on him to reduce the pace of growth.⁴⁸

Even the relentless terror machine was beginning to falter. By 1933 the large network of camps and prisons could not handle the growing flood of arrestees. The government took urgent steps to create remote settlements capable of accommodating 2 million internal deportees, but this program failed because of a lack of resources. In the end, only about 270,000 people were sent into internal exile.⁴⁹ The seemingly limitless capacity for destroying and isolating “enemies” apparently had its limits. And while the execution, arrest, and deportation of vast numbers helped the government maintain control, even Stalin could see that these tactics were doing as much to undermine the smooth running of the system as to bolster it.

All this dysfunction weakened the USSR at a time of escalating international tension. One of the first signs of looming war was Japan’s occupation of Manchuria in late 1931. “The Japanese are certainly (certainly!) preparing for war against the USSR, and we have to be ready (we must!) for anything,” Stalin wrote to Ordzhonikidze in June 1932.⁵⁰ An urgent buildup of military forces was begun in the Soviet Far East. But trouble was also brewing in Europe. In January 1933, while the Soviet Union was in the throes of famine, the Nazis came to power in Germany. The Bolsheviks’ European strategy, which was centered on building relations with Weimar Germany, had to be immediately revamped. Faced with growing threats from east and west, Stalin was forced to seek alliances with Western democracies. On 19 December 1933 the Politburo adopted a top secret resolution concerning the USSR’s possible entry into the League of Nations and conclusion of a regional mutual defense pact against Germany with a number of Western countries, including France and Poland.⁵¹ Stalin understood that this new foreign policy would not be possible unless he sent clear signals that the Stalinist USSR was a “normal” country and not simply a convenient enemy of fascism. The Soviet regime would need to improve its reputation. Soviet leaders did not have to exchange their military service jackets for tailcoats, but they at least needed to button up.

Stalin had led the Bolsheviks into a dead end. The resources that had made the First Five-Year Plan possible had been used up. Too late for countless victims of his policies, he agreed to measures that could and should have been taken years before.

First among them were some minor but critical concessions to the peasantry. Although the Stalinist state continued to rely primarily on compulsion in the countryside, there were important changes. Essentially recognizing the tremendous harm done by limitless confiscations, in January 1933 the government introduced set quotas for grain deliveries (a food tax or prodnalog, in official Soviet parlance). The peasants were promised that predictable quotas would be set for the amount of produce to be taken and that they would have the right to sell the surplus. The resolution mandating this change was never put into practice, but it was a milestone in the transition from the Stalin-era War Communism of the First Five-Year Plan to the Stalin-era NEP of the Second. It was within the framework of this transition that other, more practical and effective, decisions were adopted.

Stalin grudgingly allowed peasants to have small private plots that they were allowed to cultivate for their own benefit, a concession of great importance to the survival of the countryside and the country overall. At the first congress of “kolkhoznik-udarniks” (collective farm shock workers) in February 1933, he promised that the state would help each kolkhoz household acquire a cow over the coming two years.⁵² Laws guaranteeing ownership of farm plots were gradually put into place. This expansion of private agriculture was critically important, paving the way toward a new compromise between the state and the peasants. The peasants, who earned almost nothing working on collective farms, would now be able to make ends meet by farming their private plots. Despite being subject to exorbitant taxes, these plots were exceptionally productive. Although private agriculture took up a miniscule amount of land compared with the kolkhozes, official statistics from 1937 show that it provided 38 percent of the country’s vegetables and potatoes and 68 percent of its meat and dairy products.⁵³ When yet another famine hit after the poor harvest of 1936, it was private agriculture that helped the country survive, once again underscoring how flawed the original collectivization plan had been. If the mad rush toward total collectivization had been adjusted to allow private plots, peasants (and Soviet agriculture) would not have been utterly ruined overnight.

Also long overdue and unavoidable were changes to industrial policy. The first limited signs that the state was being compelled to pull back from the destructive policy of forced industrialization and repression against those running the Soviet economy came in 1931–1932. During the Central Committee plenum of January 1933, Stalin provided a new set of slogans to go with the new policies. While proclaiming new class battles ahead, he nevertheless promised that the pace of industrial construction during the Second Five-Year Plan would be significantly reduced. Unlike many other slogans, this one did not prove empty. Alongside reduced growth for capital investment in industry, in 1934–1936 various experiments and reforms were introduced aimed at enhancing enterprises’ economic independence and reviving financial incentives for labor. By this time, the idea of an economy based on the exchange of goods had been definitively rejected as “leftist,” “money” and “commerce” were no longer dirty words, and the need to strengthen the ruble was a hot topic. That Stalin was reorienting the economic signposts became apparent in his remarks during a discussion on abolishing the ration system at the November 1934 plenum:

Why are we abolishing the ration system? First and foremost it is because we want to strengthen the cash economy.… The cash economy is one of the few bourgeois economic apparatuses that we, socialists, must make full use of.… It is very flexible; we need it.… To expand commercial exchange, to expand Soviet commerce, to strengthen the cash economy—these are the main reasons we are undertaking this reform.… Money will start to circulate, money will come into fashion, which hasn’t been the case for some time; the cash economy will be strengthened.⁵⁴

Underlying this liberalization was a recognition of the importance of personal interests and material incentives. The sermons on asceticism, calls for sacrifice, and hostility toward high salaries that had characterized the First Five-Year Plan were replaced by a focus on “culture and a prosperous life.” Instead of the mythic images of a future of abundant socialism that had been promoted with the First Five-Year Plan, the Soviet people, especially the urban population, were now offered the prospect of tangible creature comforts: a private room, furniture, clothing, a tolerable diet, and expanded leisure. The possibility of an improved standard of living was being deliberately used to motivate the workforce.

The improved quality of life after the successful harvest of 1933 was, of course, remarkable only in contrast with the previous years’ mass famine. The full store shelves seen in major cities came as some rural areas continued to starve. But compared to 1932–1933, these pockets of hunger were “nothing,” just as the ongoing arrests and deportations could be seen as “nothing” compared with previous years. For a while, state terror continued at a low and predictable pace. The pullback began with a special directive Stalin signed in May 1933 calling for the release of some of those arrested for “minor crimes” from overcrowded prisons and prohibiting the secret police from conducting mass arrests and deportations.⁵⁵

Stalin continued to demonstrate adherence to “socialist legality.” It was on his instigation that in February 1934 the Politburo voted to abolish the odious OGPU and place the political police under the newly formed People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), blending it with the more innocuous branches of law enforcement and public safety. On paper, people’s rights in the regular judicial system were expanded, and the power of extrajudicial bodies—the instruments of mass terror—was reduced.⁵⁶ The handling of certain legal matters in which Stalin clearly had a hand was especially significant. Within the Soviet political system, it was these signals from the vozhd that showed the way forward for government officials.

One of the first such signals had to do with the conviction of Aleksei Seliavkin. During the witch hunt of the early 1930s Seliavkin, a senior heavy-industry official and decorated Civil War veteran, had been sentenced to ten years for selling classified military documents. In a petition sent from labor camp, Seliavkin stated that his interrogators had dictated a false confession and forced him to sign it under threat of being shot.⁵⁷ This petition came at an opportune time. Stalin (without whose consent Seliavkin would never have been arrested in the first place) now signaled leniency. Not surprisingly, an investigation showed that the secret police had fabricated the evidence. On 5 June 1934 the Politburo annulled Seliavkin’s sentence and demanded “attention to serious deficiencies in the handling of the case by OGPU investigators.”⁵⁸

The annulment of Seliavkin’s sentence was just the start. In September 1934 Stalin ordered the Politburo to establish a commission to investigate several other cases that had been brought against “wreckers” and “spies.” He called on the commission to free the innocent, purge the OGPU of perpetrators of certain “investigative techniques,” and punish them “without favoritism.” “In my opinion,” he wrote, “this is a serious matter and it has to be pursued to the end.” Surviving documents show that this commission actually took its work seriously, assembling evidence of secret police abuses. There was no shortage of cases.⁵⁹

Then came the murder of Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov. The commission never completed its task.

Had it not been for Kirov’s murder, would there have been a serious effort to put an end to secret police abuses? The evidence suggests otherwise. Although there were fewer arrests in 1934, the victims of repression still numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Stalin himself sent contradictory signals. In September 1934, at the height of the campaign for “socialist legality,” the Politburo sanctioned the execution of a group of employees of the Stalin Metallurgical Factory in Siberia who were accused of spying for Japan. It was Stalin who instigated the roundup, writing: “Everyone caught spying for Japan should be shot.”⁶⁰ There were other examples. The foundation of Stalin’s system of oppression was never dismantled. The “moderation” of 1934 was nothing more than a temporary adjustment in the level of terror.

Although this moderation was inconsistent and limited, it did imply recognition that the Great Leap policy had been misguided. In theory, this forced change-of-course might have cast an unfavorable light on Stalin and prompted dissatisfaction with him. Such apparently logical inferences have inspired historians to posit the existence of plots and intrigues against Stalin among the party ranks. One focus of these theories is Sergei Kirov, a close Stalin associate and the Leningrad party boss. The confusion surrounding the circumstances of Kirov’s murder and the crackdown that followed it have led some to conclude that Kirov was actually behind the new political moderation, making him someone an anti-Stalin movement might rally around. This speculation, of which there has been a great deal, is based solely on the memoirs of people with only a second- or third-hand knowledge of the central facts in the matter.⁶¹

Setting aside the many discrepancies in these “eyewitness” accounts, we are left with the following picture. During the Seventeenth Party Congress a number of senior party officials (various names are mentioned) discussed the possibility of removing Stalin as general secretary and replacing him with Kirov. Kirov rejected this proposal, but Stalin got wind of the plans. According to some accounts, Kirov himself told Stalin what others were plotting. During Central Committee elections at the congress, many delegates supposedly voted against Stalin. On learning about this, Stalin allegedly ordered the removal of any ballots where his name was crossed out. Ten months later, he organized Kirov’s murder in order to remove a dangerous rival. These contradictory accounts have never inspired much confidence, and now that the archives have been opened, they appear even less convincing. A number of painstaking searches have failed to turn up even circumstantial evidence of a plot against Stalin.

The details of Kirov’s party career offer scant evidence that he enjoyed an independent political position and much to suggest that he did not. Like other Politburo members in the 1930s, Kirov was a Stalin man. His initiatives were confined to the needs of Leningrad—requests for such items as new capital investment and resources or for the opening of new stores. He rarely came to Moscow to attend Politburo meetings or participated in voting on Politburo resolutions or the polling of its members. Not only was Kirov not a reformer, but the available documents do not even show that he took any serious part in developing or implementing high-level political decisions. He was Stalin’s faithful comrade-in-arms and remained so to the end. Within the party he was never regarded as a political leader on a par with Stalin, and he did not promote any political programs that differed from Stalin’s.⁶² His death had an incomparably greater effect on the country’s development than his life. As often happens, it was his death that turned Kirov into a legend.

 THE MURDER

Kirov was killed on 1 December 1934 in Leningrad’s Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolny Institute, a neoclassical building that formerly housed Russia’s first educational institution for girls. In the seven decades between the 1918 attempt on Lenin’s life and the end of the Soviet regime, this was the only successful assassination attempt against a senior Soviet official. But that is not what has drawn the attention of historians. The shots fired in the Smolny Institute were followed by a new intensification of repression that is often treated as a step toward the Great Terror of 1937–1938 and the ultimate consolidation of Stalin’s dictatorship. The obvious political benefit that Stalin derived from Kirov’s murder has led historians to suspect he had a hand in bringing it about. Such suspicions even became part of official propaganda during Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization effort and Gorbachev’s perestroika. Although it is rarely helpful when politicians involve themselves in the interpretation of past events, this case may be an exception. The numerous commissions established by Khrushchev and Gorbachev compiled and studied a great body of evidence, which gives us a rather full picture of what occurred in Leningrad on 1 December 1934 and during the murder’s aftermath.⁶³

On the evening of 1 December, a meeting of party stalwarts was scheduled to take place in Leningrad’s Tauride Palace. Kirov was to give a speech on the outcome of the Central Committee plenum that had taken place in Moscow the previous day. The topic at hand was the upcoming abolition of the ration system, a change that would affect virtually the entire population of the country. An announcement of the meeting had already been published in newspapers, and Kirov spent the entire day preparing his speech. At approximately four o’clock he summoned a car and headed to his Smolny office. Using the building’s main entrance, he climbed to the third floor, where his office and the offices of the oblast committee were located. He walked down the third floor’s main corridor to a smaller corridor to the left that led to his office. It was the job of his bodyguard, Mikhail Borisov, to keep watch over the party boss inside the building. Borisov followed Kirov at a slight distance. When Kirov turned into the small corridor leading to his office, Borisov continued down the main corridor. Kirov remained out of his sight for some moments.

Leonid Nikolaev, a party member and former employee of the Leningrad Oblast Committee, was preparing to shoot Kirov that evening at the Tauride Palace. To gain entry he needed an invitation card, and he had come to Smolny to get one, counting on help from acquaintances who worked there. Because he had a party membership card, he had no trouble entering the building. While wandering its corridors, Nikolaev unexpectedly saw Kirov walking toward him. Nikolaev turned away and let Kirov pass. Since there was nobody between him and his target, Nikolaev decided to carry out his plan immediately. He followed Kirov into the corridor leading to his office, ran up to him, and shot him in the back of the head. Nikolaev then attempted to shoot himself in the temple but was prevented from doing so. Borisov and several Smolny staff members had come running at the sound of gunfire and saw Kirov lying bloody on the floor. It was all over in an instant.

Doctors and the heads of the Leningrad NKVD were summoned to Smolny. Stalin was telephoned at his Kremlin office. As soon as he was told of Kirov’s death, the general secretary convened a series of meetings. Early the following morning, on 2 December, he arrived in Leningrad on a special train. That same day he joined other members of the team from Moscow in interrogating Nikolaev. Stalin could hardly have failed to notice that Nikolaev was not a typical ideologically motivated terrorist.

In December 1934 Leonid Vasilyevich Nikolaev was 30 years old. He had been born into a working-class family in St. Petersburg and lost his father at an early age. His family struggled with poverty, and rickets prevented Leonid from walking until the age of eleven. The record of his recruitment for military training provides a detailed description of his physical features at age twenty: long arms that extended to the knees, an elongated torso, and a height of approximately five feet. Nikolaev was often ill and had a quarrelsome disposition, but his early professional life was nevertheless fairly successful. Since his social origins were of the “correct” sort, he was able to get a job working for the Komsomol and join the party, steps that opened the door to other advantageous positions, including working for the Leningrad Oblast Committee in the same building where he later killed Kirov. But being prone to conflict, he could not hold any job for long. He was unemployed during the months leading up to the murder and spent his time filing grievances with various institutions and plotting revenge. The numerous diaries, letters, and other writings that were confiscated after his arrest show him to have been mentally unstable. His letters of grievance recounted various perceived injustices, demanded a job and a resort voucher, adopted a threatening tone, and assumed the pose of a hero whose name would go down in history alongside the great revolutionaries of the past.

Another factor contributing to Nikolaev’s state of mind was his relationship with his wife, Milda Draule, whom he met when they both worked for the Komsomol. Draule, age thirty-three in 1934, appears to have been an attractive woman whose career, unlike Nikolaev’s, was advancing successfully. In 1930, long-standing connections led to a secretarial job at the Leningrad Oblast Committee offices. There were rumors before Kirov’s death that Draule was having an affair with him, and speculation about an affair has persisted ever since.⁶⁴ There is reason to believe that Kirov’s childless marriage was an unhappy one. His wife, four years his senior, was often ill and spent months at a time away from home in sanatoriums or rest homes. Although there is no hard evidence to prove that Kirov and Draule were intimate, the possibility has to be recognized. Even if Nikolaev did not believe the rumors, one can only assume that they fostered animosity toward Kirov.

Such was the man brought before Stalin at Smolny on 2 December. The vozhd was undoubtedly briefed on Nikolaev’s less than sterling work and party history and may even have been discreetly informed of the rumors about Kirov and Draule. Nikolaev’s appearance tended to support the idea that the shooting was the act of an embittered loner of questionable mental competence. He was brought before the Moscow commission shortly after a severe hysterical fit brought on by the murder and his own failed suicide attempt. Molotov, who was with Stalin, remembered Nikolaev as follows: “Mousey.… Short and skinny.… I think something must have made him angry … and he looked like something had offended him.”⁶⁵

What Molotov remembers is probably what Stalin saw too, but treating Nikolaev as an unstable loner did not suit his purposes. Even before he left for Leningrad, an official account of Kirov’s murder had been crafted. The following day, Soviet newspapers reported that Kirov had died “at the treacherous hand of an enemy of the working class.” This interpretation was entirely predictable. At who else’s hand could a Politburo member perish? Something as mundane as murder by a jealous husband was unthinkable. Only a devious enemy of the people would fit the part. Any other interpretation cast not only Kirov but also the entire regime in an unfavorable light, making it look incapable of protecting its leaders from deranged loners. The agreed-upon narrative fit Stalin’s extreme suspiciousness and hunger for power.

Before returning to Moscow on the evening of 3 December, Stalin ordered that a case be fabricated to show that Nikolaev belonged to an organization comprised of former oppositionists, followers of Zinoviev, who had wielded power in Leningrad in the 1920s as head of city government. This task was assigned to Moscow-based NKVD investigators and Stalin’s political commissars—Nikolai Yezhov and Aleksandr Kosarev, who remained behind in Leningrad. Two years later, at the February–March 1937 plenum, Yezhov said the following about the task assigned him: “Com. Stalin … called me and Kosarev and said, ‘Look for murderers among the Zinovievites.’”⁶⁶ This assignment would, of course, require creativity and law breaking. Not only had Nikolaev never belonged to any oppositionist group, but the NKVD had also never turned up the slightest evidence of oppositionist sympathies. The only way to link Nikolaev and the Zinovievites was to manufacture evidence, so under Stalin’s watchful eye, this is what the chekists did. During the investigation, Stalin was sent approximately 260 arrestee interrogation protocols and many reports. He met with senior members of the NKVD, the procuracy, and the Supreme Court’s military collegium to discuss the investigation and trial. The historical record shows that he personally orchestrated the court sessions and assembled the groups of defendants in the Kirov case.⁶⁷

In accordance with Stalin’s orders, a series of trials was held in late 1934 and early 1935. Dozens of former oppositionists, whom investigators claimed had links to Nikolaev, were sentenced to be shot or imprisoned.⁶⁸ Political and moral responsibility for Kirov’s murder was placed on the shoulders of the former opposition leaders Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were also put on trial. The evidence on which they were convicted was blatantly fabricated. Stalin was settling scores with his old political rivals and charging them with crimes they had not committed.

Stalin’s exploitation of Kirov’s murder has prompted a great deal of suspicion over the years. Many have accused Stalin of organizing the shooting itself. The first serious attempts to look into such accusations were undertaken during the Khrushchev thaw and continued with small interruptions into the early 1990s. These investigations have turned up some circumstantial evidence of Stalin’s involvement but no proof. At this point, it is unlikely any will be found.

Until the early 1990s, most theories about a plot by Stalin against Kirov adhered to the same basic storyline. Displeased by Kirov’s growing popularity, Stalin decided to deal with the situation and then use the murder as a pretext for mass repression. With this goal, the general secretary either directly or implicitly assigned Genrikh Yagoda, then NKVD chief, to handle the matter.⁶⁹ Yagoda sent a trusted protégé, Ivan Zaporozhets, to serve as deputy in the Leningrad branch of the NKVD, where he could lay the groundwork for this supposed “act of terrorism.” Nikolaev was chosen to carry out the deed and was armed and taken under Zaporozhets’s wing. When he was arrested by NKVD agents after trying to carry out the assassination before 1 December, Zaporozhets arranged to have him released. After Kirov’s murder, those involved in the conspiracy killed the bodyguard, Mikhail Borisov, because he knew too much. On 2 December he was killed in a staged accident while being taken to Stalin by truck for questioning. Such is the basic narrative proposed by those suspecting Stalin of complicity in Kirov’s death.

This narrative does not stand up to careful examination. First of all, it is unclear why Stalin would enter into a conspiracy so fraught with risk, given that Kirov was a faithful client rather than a political rival. The evidence is also not convincing. To start with, the argument that Nikolaev would not have been able to get a firearm without help is flawed. The restrictions on gun ownership that were introduced later in the decade (partly in response to the Kirov murder) did not yet exist. Nikolaev acquired his revolver in 1918, when the country was awash in firearms, and had legal possession of it for sixteen years.⁷⁰ Such ownership was nothing out of the ordinary, especially for a party member.

As for Nikolaev’s multiple detentions by the NKVD before 1 December and his “miraculous” release, records show only one such incident, not the several that some authors claim. On 15 October 1934, Nikolaev was detained by NKVD agents near Kirov’s home but released shortly thereafter after his documents were checked. According to Nikolaev’s own testimony, on that day he ran into Kirov and several companions and followed them to Kirov’s house but did not work up the nerve to speak to Kirov. “Back then I was not thinking about committing murder,” Nikolaev stated during his 2 December interrogation. After the murder, this incident, which was recorded in the NKVD incident log, was specially investigated. The NKVD agents who freed Nikolaev had a simple and convincing explanation: he had produced his party membership card and also an old identification card showing that he had worked at Smolny. His desire to approach Kirov to ask about the possibility of a job was “natural and did not arouse suspicion.”⁷¹

A cornerstone of the theories that Kirov’s murder was part of a plot is the death of the bodyguard, Borisov. During the second half of 1933, Kirov’s security team had grown to fifteen people, each with his own job. Borisov was charged with meeting Kirov at the entrance to Smolny, accompanying him to his office, waiting in the reception area while Kirov worked, and accompanying him out of the building when he left. One other member of the team—an NKVD agent like Borisov—was N. M. Dureiko, who watched over Kirov as he moved around the third floor of Smolny.⁷² When the shot was fired, Dureiko was walking toward Kirov in the small corridor leading to his office. It could be argued that Dureiko was just as culpable in not preventing the murder as Borisov. Nevertheless, those promoting the idea of a plot have never taken an interest in Dureiko. If the plotters felt they had to do away with Borisov, why did they leave Dureiko alive?

Much importance has been assigned to the fact that Borisov did not follow Kirov when he turned toward his office, thus allowing Nikolaev to carry out his assassination, but Borisov’s behavior is not as sinister as the conspiracy theorists have made it out to be. If we put ourselves in the shoes of this fifty-three-year-old bodyguard who had been protecting Kirov since he had arrived in Leningrad in 1926, his behavior seems entirely normal. All those years, day in and day out, he had to stick close to a man who, by many accounts, was not easy to guard. Kirov was reportedly annoyed when his bodyguards remained too close, and at times he even escaped from them. With his long experience working for Kirov, Borisov was surely sensitive to his boss’s moods and tried not to irritate him. On 1 December in Smolny he kept his usual distance. Furthermore, as he walked down the corridor, Kirov stopped several times to have short conversations. Discretion demanded that Borisov step aside at such times. There was nothing unusual about this behavior.

On 2 December, the Moscow commission decided to question Borisov. He was escorted to Smolny by two other NKVD agents. Because no cars were available (not surprising given how many officials had suddenly descended on Leningrad from Moscow), Borisov was brought in a truck that turned out to be in disrepair. The driver lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a building. Borisov’s head hit a wall of the building, and he died in the hospital without ever regaining consciousness. This is the sequence of events established by investigations and expert assessments conducted at various times, and there is no evidence to the contrary.⁷³ Proponents of a plot reject the idea that the vehicle crashed by accident and claim that Borisov was murdered.

The idea that Stalin was behind Kirov’s murder has all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory. Such theories tend to rest on the idea that if an event benefits some sinister person, he must have brought it about. They tend to deny the possibility of random occurrences and ignore the fact that chance events happen all the time. The idea that Stalin conspired to kill Kirov has received far too much attention. Even if he did have a hand in Kirov’s death, this possibility hardly changes our understanding of him or his era. In the annals of the dictator’s crimes, Kirov’s murder would have been one of the least heinous.

 REHEARSAL FOR THE GREAT TERROR

According to Stalin’s relative Maria Svanidze, he was extremely upset by Kirov’s murder. “He became pale and haggard, and there was a hidden suffering in his eyes.” “I feel so alone,” he reportedly confided to his brother-in-law, Pavel Alliluev.⁷⁴ There is no reason to doubt these accounts. Tyrants often combine exceptional cruelty and complete indifference to the deaths of millions with extreme sentimentality toward those near to them. In Stalin, Kirov’s murder brought out both extremes. The way he used his friend’s death as a pretext for a new campaign of terror is beyond cynical. Oppositionists falsely accused of plotting Nikolaev’s crime were not the only ones swept up in the Kirov tributary of what would become the raging river of the Great Terror. Many thousands of Leningraders (so-called “formers”—former members of the nobility and clergy and former tsarist officials and military officers, among others) were sent into exile and to camps. The party was purged and articles of the penal code providing for the arrest of anyone suspected of “counterrevolutionary activities” were put to energetic use.

For a long time it was believed that this campaign marked the beginning of the wave of repression that came crashing down on the country during the second half of the 1930s. But a closer look at the sequence of events suggests a slightly different picture. In 1935 and 1936, terror coexisted with remnants of “moderate” policies. On 31 January 1935, at the very height of the “Kirov repression,” the Politburo, on Stalin’s instigation, adopted a decision to pass a new Soviet constitution.⁷⁵ A central feature of this document was the granting of voting rights to numerous groups previously unenfranchised as “alien elements.” Now elections were to be direct and ballots secret rather than open, as they had been. These changes suggested the adoption of a more democratic constitutional model to replace the “revolutionary” one that excluded people with suspect class credentials. In a memorandum accompanying the draft Politburo resolution on the new constitution, Stalin wrote:

In my opinion, this matter of a constitution for the Union of SSRs is a lot more complicated that it might seem at first glance. First of all, the electoral system has to be changed not only in the sense of making voting more direct. It also has to be changed in the sense of replacing open voting with closed (secret) voting. We can and must see this matter through to the end and not stop halfway. The situation and alignment of forces in our country is such that we can only benefit politically from this. I am not even talking about the fact that the need for such a reform is dictated by the interests of the international revolutionary movement since such a reform will definitely serve as a mighty weapon in the fight against international fascism.⁷⁶

This memorandum suggests that even after Kirov’s murder, Stalin counted on exploiting the advantages of the “moderate” course in both domestic and international affairs. International considerations were probably the main force driving his interest in liberalization. The growing threat from Germany and Japan was bringing the USSR closer to the Western democracies. In May 1935 the Soviet Union signed a treaty of mutual assistance with France and Czechoslovakia. The Seventh World Congress of the Comintern, held that summer, allowed for cooperation with socialist governments and endorsed the idea of an inclusive popular front against fascism. Hoping for leftward movement by the West European countries and a growth in pro-Soviet sentiments, Stalin saw a need to enhance the image of the “motherland of socialism” as a prosperous and democratic country.

The promise to restore the voting rights of those labeled socially alien was the centerpiece of a policy of reconciliation. In Stalin’s mind, in addition to the vast numbers he considered true enemies in the country, there were also many more or less innocent victims of the bitter class struggle. Young people in particular had to be brought over to the regime’s side. Continuing to discriminate based on family background threatened to expand the ranks of the government’s potential opponents. An important signal in the reconciliation campaign was a piece of political theater Stalin performed at a meeting of combine operators in early December 1935. When a Bashkir kolkhoznik by the name of A. Tilba proclaimed from the podium, “I may be the son of a kulak, but I will fight honorably for the cause of workers and peasants and for the building of socialism,” Stalin interjected a phrase that became famous: “The son does not answer for the father.”⁷⁷ In fact, sons and daughters did answer for their fathers, and fathers for their children, but “alien elements” now had a better prospect of making their way in Soviet society. The promise of equal voting rights was accompanied by other liberalizing campaigns. For example, hundreds of thousands of people convicted of nonpolitical crimes were released from prison or rehabilitated.

A degree of social stability was needed to secure and promote the positive economic trends that began to appear in late 1933 and continued into 1934. The miserable experience of previous crises had taught Stalin the economic price to be paid for each new campaign of repression. In 1935 he made the most significant concession to the peasantry since the beginning of collectivization: the right to farm private plots was enshrined in law and somewhat expanded. This step enabled an improvement in the country’s food situation. Similar improvements could be seen in industrial sectors in 1935–1936. In November 1935 Stalin invented a new slogan: “Life has become better, life has become more cheerful!” That year, the ration system began to be phased out, and certain limitations on salary increases were abolished. Financial incentives boosted productivity. These were good years for the Soviet economy.

One might think that the fruits of moderation would have inspired Stalin to try more of it. They did not, and a new wave of terror became increasingly evident. Historians are still trying to understand his motives for expanding repression at a time of social stability and an improving economy. Did Stalin truly believe that the country was threatened by terrorist conspiracies? Did he actually fear for his life? There is a fair amount of evidence to the contrary. Stalin commanded the NKVD to find proof that former oppositionists had gone underground and formed terrorist organizations, but try as it might, the NKVD was unable to do so. The cases that were brought did not have the ring of truth, and Stalin must have understood that they were fabricated. In any event, he did not make any changes in his daily life that would indicate a concern for his own safety. He adhered to his daily work schedule, traveled south for vacations, and occasionally went out among the people to demonstrate his solidarity.

On the evening of 22 April 1935, some of Stalin’s relatives and fellow Politburo members gathered at his Kremlin apartment. Stalin was with his children. His daughter Svetlana asked permission to take a ride on the metro, which had recently opened. Stalin, in a good mood, decided to organize an excursion. Since no preparations had been made for this outing, he and his companions were surrounded by crowds of passengers at each station. Maria Svanidze wrote in her diary: “There was an unimaginable commotion and people rushed to greet the vozhds, cried ‘Hurray,’ and ran after us. We were all separated, and I came close to being crushed against a column.… It was a good thing that by then the police and bodyguards had arrived.” Stalin’s fourteen-year-old son Vasily “was the most agitated of all.” But Stalin “was cheerful and asked the construction supervisor, who appeared out of nowhere, endless questions.” At the next station Stalin again went onto the platform, but his relatives, including his daughter Svetlana, stayed in the metro car, “frightened by the unrestrained delight of the crowd, which in its excitement toppled a cast-iron lamppost not far from the vozhds at one station.” After visiting the metro, Stalin went to his dacha. Vasily, traumatized by the crowds, “threw himself onto his bed and cried hysterically” as soon as he returned home. The adult relatives took sedatives.⁷⁸

Would a man living in serious fear of attack venture—let alone relish—such an excursion? The intensification of repression that came in late 1934 was prompted by more complex calculations. Kirov’s murder provided an ideal pretext for action of the sort any dictatorship relies on to promote its central task: solidifying the power of the dictator. Admittedly, by late 1934, Stalin was already a dictator, but dictatorships, like any unstable system of government, depend on the constant crushing of threats. During this period, Stalin faced two such threats, which at first glance appear unrelated. The first was the remnant of the system of “collective leadership” within the Politburo, and the second was the survival of a significant number of former oppositionists. These threats belonged to what might be called Bolshevik tradition. They hung over Stalin like a sword of Damocles, reminders that there were alternatives to sole dictatorship. His fellow Politburo members enjoyed significant administrative, if not political, independence. They ran the various branches of government and had a host of clients from within the party and state apparats. The bonds of institutional and clan loyalties, along with the vestiges of collective leadership and intraparty democracy, were the last impediments to sole and unquestioned power.

In a speech given in early 1937, Stalin divided senior officials into several categories. He labeled one “the generals of the party” (the three or four thousand most senior officials) and another “the party’s officers” (thirty to forty thousand mid-level officials).⁷⁹ Until the mid-1930s, the party’s old guard had held a place of honor within these two groups, but Stalin had reason to distrust these respected figures. Whatever they might say from the podium, however earnestly they swore allegiance to him, he knew: these party elders well remembered that Lenin’s testament at one point almost brought Stalin’s political career to an end, and he had held onto power only through the support of Zinoviev and Kamenev; that in the late 1920s Stalin had managed to defeat the Rykov-Bukharin group only with the support of the Central Committee; and that party policy in the 1930s had brought about catastrophic failures. By 1937, party functionaries had every reason to regard Stalin as “first among equals,” but not so long ago he had been one among many jockeying for position. Stalin knew that the old guard had the clearest memory of that time.

Over long years of collaboration, the Old Bolsheviks had established close relationships with each other. Stalin periodically shuffled the deck, but it was hard to disrupt the networks of personal loyalty that had formed around officials at various levels. Leaders took “their people” with them from job to job. The people in these networks had divided loyalties: they served the dictator, but they also had their own patrons within the Politburo or other high-level bodies. Of course all of these groups lacked formal cohesion and political power. No one has yet found evidence of a serious effort by them to oppose Stalin. At most, they expressed their dissatisfaction privately. But like any dictator, Stalin assumed the worst. He anticipated being stabbed in the back the moment the domestic or international situation worsened. Replacing the old guard with absolutely devoted younger stalwarts was a critical aspect of his program to solidify his position. The growing threat of war provoked the vozhd’s anxiety and desire to secure his power in case the unexpected happened. “The conqueror’s peace of mind requires the death of the conquered.” This phrase, attributed to Genghis Khan, was underlined in one of the books in Stalin’s library.⁸⁰

The conquered—the repentant and humiliated former oppositionists—were indeed a worrisome subgroup within the community of Old Bolsheviks. Although the secret police kept a close watch over them, the former oppositionists were still party members in good standing. Many held posts within the government and even the party apparat, or they had senior positions in major economic enterprises. Most Old Bolsheviks remembered the role the oppositionists had played during the glory days of the revolution. Kirov’s murder and the fabricated case alleging that followers of Zinoviev and Kamenev were involved in a terrorist plot changed everything. The former opposition was transformed overnight from comrades who had once committed political indiscretions into “enemies” and “terrorists.”

The former oppositionists were not the only ones affected by this sudden transformation. Among the old guard it was hard to find anyone who was not in some way tied to them. A significant proportion of Soviet generals had served under Trotsky, who had founded the Red Army and led it for many years. Many up-and-coming functionaries had “erred” in their youth. In the 1920s, either because they were not yet sure which way the winds were blowing or were simply following their hearts, many had at some point supported the opposition. Others developed friendships with future members of the opposition during their years underground and during the revolution or when they fought side by side during the Civil War. Some had recently collaborated with repentant oppositionists. In short, in striking a blow against the former oppositionists, Stalin launched a huge shake-up in the party ranks. It allowed him both to take care of political opponents who might have been lurking in the shadows and to purge the apparat overall, including getting rid of some of his Politburo comrades.

Between 1935 and early 1937, the persecution of former oppositionists was accompanied by shake-ups at the highest echelons of power. The Kirov murder strengthened the position of three enterprising young men: Nikolai Yezhov, Andrei Zhdanov, and Nikita Khrushchev. Yezhov’s promotion was especially significant. It was on his shoulders that Stalin placed direct responsibility for conducting the purge. After acquitting himself well in fabricating cases during the Kirov Affair, Yezhov was entrusted with a new assignment—the Kremlin Affair. In early 1935 a group of support staff working in government offices located in the Kremlin—maids, librarians, and members of the Kremlin commandant’s staff—were arrested and accused of plotting against Stalin. Among those arrested were several relatives of Lev Kamenev, who was charged with hatching the plot.⁸¹ The arrestees came under the authority of Stalin’s old friend Avel Yenukidze, who oversaw the running of all Kremlin facilities, and he was accused of abetting the plot.⁸² Stalin took a great interest in the Kremlin Affair. The archives show that he regularly received and read arrestee interrogation protocols, made notations on them, and gave specific instructions to the NKVD.⁸³

Although Yenukidze was not a member of the Politburo, he was an intimate part of the system of collective leadership insofar as he was close friends with many top officials, including Stalin himself. Stalin in essence used Yenukidze to test the durability of the collective leadership system. This was the dictator’s first significant strike against his inner circle. The test was successful. The Politburo offered only weak resistance, and Yenukidze was fired, arrested, and shot. For a while Stalin trod carefully, taking the operation one step at a time, but gradually the cleansing of the top nomenklatura picked up steam. A turning point was the first Moscow show trial of former opposition leaders in August 1936. After being extensively tortured, the defendants, who included Kamenev, Zinoviev, and other prominent party figures, were proclaimed terrorists and spies and then shot.

The August trial took the hunt for enemies to a new level of hysteria. Stalin appointed Yezhov to take over the NKVD, and under the vozhd’s guidance, he began preparing new trials and intensified the purge of the party and state apparats. In January 1937 a second show trial was held, this time of former oppositionists who held senior positions overseeing the economy and industrial enterprises. They were charged with wrecking and espionage. Stalin’s close associates, compromised by ties with supposed enemies, gave in. Only Ordzhonikidze would not allow his underlings in the heavy-industry sector to be arrested, sparking a conflict with Stalin that ended with Ordzhonikidze’s suicide.⁸⁴ This desperate act shows how helpless the Politburo members felt before Stalin, whose control of the secret police made him an indomitable force. The vozhd’s long-standing comrades-in-arms, to say nothing of middle-level functionaries, were a fractured force. They fell all over one another in an effort to ingratiate themselves with Stalin, each hoping to save his own skin.

Such was the state of affairs when the already thinned ranks of the nomenklatura convened for the February–March Central Committee plenum of 1937. During the plenum, Stalin ordered that repression be continued, and Yezhov made a speech calling for a case to be brought against the leaders of the “right deviation,” Nikolai Bukharin and Aleksei Rykov (their fellow “rightist,” Mikhail Tomsky, had already killed himself in August 1936). The plenum of course approved Yezhov’s proposal. Bukharin and Rykov were arrested, and in March 1938 they were convicted to be shot at the third Moscow show trial. Like the other trials, this one was followed by a wave of spurious convictions across the country.

The repression that roiled the party and state apparats came down with particular force on the “power structures,” the NKVD and the army—organizations that Stalin thought posed the greatest threat to his dictatorship. Once Yezhov took over the NKVD, he destroyed his predecessor, Yagoda, and many of his associates. In June 1937, after being tortured, a large number of senior military officers, including the deputy people’s commissar for defense, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, were given death sentences based on trumped-up charges of belonging to an “anti-Soviet Trotskyite military organization.”⁸⁵ Soon afterward, a wave of arrests swept through the entire army. Scholarly investigation of recently opened archives can now set decades-long debate to rest: the Tukhachevsky Affair and the entire anti-military campaign was based on evidence fabricated by the NKVD under Stalin’s direct supervision. The charges brought against the military leaders had absolutely no basis in fact.⁸⁶

At first, repression was primarily targeted at key members of the government, party, state security services, and military and had little effect on ordinary citizens. If the terror had been limited to the party-state nomenklatura, one might agree with those who have argued that Stalin’s main goal was to destroy the party’s old guard and install a new generation of functionaries blindly devoted to him. He did undeniably pursue this goal. But in the second half of 1937, the terror was brought to bear on a much larger swath of the Soviet population, and this expansion is what made it “the Great Terror.” In terms of their scale and the number of victims, these later operations greatly overshadowed those primarily targeted at officials. After shooting a significant fraction of the nomenklatura, Stalin brought his terror to its logical conclusion. Having solidified power at the top, he undertook to purge the country of a suspected fifth column. The threat of a major war exacerbated Stalin’s paranoia. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people paid the price.