Stalin, Volume 1

CHAPTER 13

TRIUMPHANT DEBACLE

Comrades! It is already three years that I am asking you to relieve me of the duties of the general secretary. The plenum has refused me each time. . . . I’ll allow that there was a necessity, despite the known letter of comrade Lenin, to keep me in the post of general secretary. But those conditions are gone now. They are gone because the Opposition is crushed. . . . Now it is time, in my view, to heed Lenin’s instructions. Therefore I ask the plenum to relieve me of the post of Central Committee general secretary. I assure you, comrades, the party will only gain from this.

Stalin, Central Committee plenum, December 19, 19271

STALIN’S APARTMENT WAS LOCATED on the second floor of the Kremlin’s Amusement Palace (Poteshny Dvor), a modest, three-story former boyar residence immediately inside the Trinity Gate. Most recently it had been the quarters of the Kremlin commandant. The apartment had six rooms, including an oval-shaped dining room, two children’s bedrooms, one main bedroom, and an office, as well as a small telephone room. Stalin got the bedroom, his wife, Nadezhda “Nadya” Alliluyeva, one of the children’s bedrooms. Five-year-old Vasily (“Vasya”) and Artyom, the boy born the same year whose father had died in the civil war, shared the other. Stalin’s first child, Yakov, now nineteen years old, slept in the dining room. Nadya’s room had a window that looked out onto the Alexander Gardens and the Kutafya Tower, the Kremlin’s only surviving drawbridge tower.2 But overall the apartment was hardly luxurious. Still, it marked an improvement: This was the family’s second Kremlin apartment, the first having been in a noisy outbuilding of the Grand Kremlin Palace.3 After Stalin had complained to Lenin, Abram Belenky, the chief of the leadership bodyguard detail, suggested Stalin relocate to rooms in the Grand Kremlin Palace itself. Trotsky’s wife, Natalya Sedova, a museum director, had objected, insisting that the palace fell under museum jurisdiction.4 She relented, offering to yield museum offices for the proposed residence, but instead Stalin had displaced the commandant.5 In the aftermath, Belenky tried to indulge Stalin, but it backfired. “In the move to the new apartment, it turns out that someone from the central executive committee business department, perhaps comrade Belenky of the GPU, took it upon himself to order new furniture at state expense for my apartment,” Stalin complained. “This capricious operation was carried out against my decisive statement that the old furniture fully satisfied me.” He asked that the head of the Central Control Commission investigate and punish the culprit, and that the newly bought furniture be immediately removed to the warehouse or wherever it was needed.6 Regime personnel had a hard time navigating the fine line between Stalin’s sincere commitment to modest living and the sycophancy sprouting all around him.

Stalin did not play much of a paterfamilias role. The Kremlin apartment was obviously cramped. The Zubalovo two-story Gothic dacha just outside Moscow had twelve rooms and 5,000 square feet, but Stalin’s Sunday appearances there were irregular, even in summer. His widowed mother, Keke Geladze, continued to live in Georgia and did not visit Moscow; Nadya kept in touch (“We send you greetings from Moscow. We’re living well, all are healthy. The children are growing . . .”).7 Nadya’s parents, Sergei and Olga Alliluyeva, had moved to Leningrad. Stalin’s in-laws from his first marriage to the deceased Kato Svanidze lived in Moscow and saw him on occasion, but how often remains unclear; he barely saw his wife. Stalin’s marital life was hardly bliss. He appears to have loved Nadya, yet he was inattentive, and when he did pay her mind, he often became abusive, shouting obscenities at her, or what may have been more difficult to endure, refusing to speak with her at all.8 She suffered debilitating migraines and isolation. “I decidedly have nothing to do with anyone in Moscow,” Nadya wrote in early 1926 to Maria Svanidze, the wife of Stalin’s brother-in-law from his first wife, who was in Berlin and complaining of boredom. “Sometimes it’s even strange: after all these years not to have a single close friend but, evidently, it’s a question of character. Oddly enough, I feel closer to people outside the party (with women, of course). This is obviously because they are simpler.” Nadya had little interest in indulging the role and perquisites of the wife of the leader. On the contrary, she expressed anxiety that she would not be taken seriously if she did not work outside the home, but at the same time, she wanted to be qualified for any position she obtained. When she wrote to Svanidze, she was in the last stages of pregnancy with their second child and added, “I am very sorry to have tied myself down with yet more family bonds.”9

A daughter, Svetlana, was born on February 18, 1926; her nursery was set up in Nadya’s room. In all the voluminous documentation that Stalin left behind, there is no record of his reaction. He could be very attentive to the children, when he was home, usually at late lunches, and when he had time, asking about their affairs, presenting them with books, sending them to the theater, disciplining them in a way that would impart life lessons. Responsibility for the children and the household largely devolved onto the head servant, Karolina Til, who also retrieved the family’s meals from the Kremlin canteen. However much Stalin may have loved Nadya, the woman whom he had married as a teenager was not the cheerful, submissive hostess he now sought, given his patriarchalism and his position as leader. At least once Nadya whisked herself, Vasily, and Svetlana to her parents’ home in Leningrad.10 Kremlin gossips faulted her for “deserting” him.11 Fatefully, she returned. Yakov’s kindness enabled him to become close to his stepsiblings as well as his stepmother (a mere six years his senior), with whom he shared the cruelty of Stalin’s domestic tyranny.12 When Yakov graduated from an electromechanical high school and, instead of entering university, announced his intention to marry a sixteen-year-old schoolmate, Zoya Gunina, Stalin exploded. Alone, Yakov put a gun to his heart in the kitchen of the Stalin family’s Kremlin apartment in the Amusement Palace, missing that vital organ by inches but wounding himself. Stalin, writing to Nadya, branded Yakov “a hooligan and blackmailer, who does not have and could not have anything more to do with me.”13 Yakov’s act, in Stalin’s eyes, was not a cry of despair at his father’s relentless disapproval, but an effort to exert pressure. Yakov would marry Zoya, however, and Nadya would move the couple into her parents’ apartment. Zoya would give birth to a daughter—Stalin’s first grandchild—but the baby would die in infancy from pneumonia.14

Even Stalin’s absolute power did not delight him absolutely. He exulted in it, yet it roused his self-pity. He thrilled to being the center of attention, the decision maker, the successor to Lenin, the leader, but it ate at him that everyone knew Lenin’s Testament called for his removal. The giddy pleasure and the torment, the long-held ambition and the current burden, the paradoxes of his power, weighed on him. After the rigmarole of staging the huge 14th Party Congress, and much else besides, he was exhausted. “I’m thinking about going on a short holiday in two weeks, I’m really tired,” he had written on February 1, 1926, to Orjonikidze in Tiflis. But Stalin’s boundless power continued to besiege him: meetings with the State Bank chairman, state statistical administration personnel, the central consumer cooperative chairman, the railways, Ukrainian officials, Bashkir officials, Belorussian officials, Dagestanis, Kazakhstanis, Buryat Mongols, the health commissar, managers of state trusts, this local party boss, that local party boss, worker delegations, trade union functionaries, newspaper editors, university rectors, foreign affairs staff, ambassadors, foreign Communists, secret police, military brass, youth organizers, final negotiations for the disappointing treaty with Germany, women’s organizers, the May Day parade and receptions, the first ever general strike in Britain. Finally, however, he escaped. “I’ll be near Sochi in a few days,” he wrote again to Orjonikidze on May 16. “How are you planning to spend your holiday? Koba.”15 Stalin arrived on May 23. Almost immediately he sent a ciphered telegram to Molotov, who was minding the store in Moscow (Monday, May 24): “I got here Sunday evening. The weather is lousy. . . . Belenky told me that 1) Trotsky was back in Moscow [from Berlin] as early as Wednesday morning; 2) Preobrazhensky went to visit him in Berlin (for a rendezvous?). Interesting.”16 Yes, even on holiday.

Some four years after Stalin had been named general secretary his personal rule was secure even when he was far from Moscow. That said, the survival of his power still depended upon maintaining a majority in the politburo. Through January 1926, changes in the composition of the full (voting) members of that body had been rare: Yelena Stasova had served only briefly, following Sverdlov’s death, July-September 1919; Lenin had removed Nikolai Krestinsky in 1921, promoting Zinoviev in his place; Bukharin had taken the deceased Lenin’s place in 1924. As of 1926, Zinoviev and Trotsky were still full members. But in January 1926, while demoting Kamenev to candidate (non-voting) member, Stalin had managed to promote Voroshilov, Molotov, and Kalinin to full members. Stalin’s voting majority in the nine-person body comprised those three, as well as the trio of Rykov, Bukharin, Tomsky. The worn-down Dzierzynski was another of the five candidate members, as were the Stalin protégés Nikolai Uglanov, Moscow party boss, Janis Rudzutaks, a Central Committee secretary on Old Square, and Petrovsky, a Ukrainian state official after whom Yekaterinoslav, the country’s tenth biggest city, was renamed Dnepropetrovsk in 1926. In other words, many of Stalin’s loyalists had non-voting status. True, beginning in the summer of 1926, he would manage to change the politburo composition still more, to his advantage. But it would take him through the end of 1927, when the 15th Party Congress would finally be held, to drive the Zinoviev-Trotsky opposition out of the party entirely and into internal exile. And all the while, the nasty political brawling would go on and on and on, party forum after party forum, dragging in all those around Stalin and impinging on his psyche.

Stalin’s complete political triumph over the opposition in December 1927, moreover, would follow debacle after debacle in his policies. Almost all the problems could be traced to the source of the regime’s strength: Communist ideology. Bolshevik socialism (anticapitalism) attracted and gave meaning to the shock-troop activists, supplied the vocabulary and worldview of millions in the party and beyond, and achieved a monopoly over the public sphere, but this same politically empowering ideology afforded no traction over the international situation or the faltering quasi-market domestic economy. On the contrary, the ideology made those formidable challenges still less tractable. The seizure of power had resulted in a narrow set of options for managing Russia’s power in the world, rendering it orthogonal to the great powers abroad and to the majority population peasants at home. Reinforcing this sense of siege was a personal dynamic whereby Stalin’s political victory only whetted his thirst for vindication. Benevolence was beyond him. Toward vanquished rivals he showed only false magnanimity. Dedicated revolutionaries, longtime comrades in arms, became presumed traitors for questioning his personal rule or regime policies. This demonization inhered in Bolshevism, of course, and it closely paralleled Lenin’s behavior, but Stalin carried it further, applying it to Communists. After Stalin crushed his party rivals, they became alleged terrorists plotting to kill him and collude with foreign powers.

The problems of the revolution brought out the paranoia in Stalin, and Stalin brought out the paranoia inherent in the revolution. The years 1926–27 saw a qualitative mutual intensification in each, which was related to events as well as to the crescendo of the opposition. Insiders arrayed around Stalin, however, appear not to have perceived him as a criminal tyrant. Certainly they had come to understand he tended to be thin-skinned and vindictive, but they also saw a driven, inexhaustible, tough-minded, and skilled workhorse leader of the party and the cause, whose moods and caprice they hoped to contain, using the politburo as their key mechanism. Whether anyone on the inside had genuine insight into the depths of his character even by December 1927, however, remains an open question.

A JAUNT THROUGH THE CAUCASUS

No sooner had Stalin arrived in Sochi than the clever Anastas Mikoyan, the thirty-year-old party boss of the adjacent North Caucasus territory, ambushed him on May 26. Mikoyan, whose letters were intimately addressed “Dear Soso”—the diminutive Stalin’s mother used for her son—had been the one to talk Stalin into trying the medicinal sulfur baths at Matsesta, near Sochi, which had led to these annual holidays down south.17 Now Mikoyan talked Stalin into a romp through his native South Caucasus. They departed the Black Sea coast by train that very day, in the direction of Tiflis. Stalin took along only underwear and a hunting rifle. “First I’ll mess around a bit, then I’ll attend to my health and recuperation,” Stalin remarked.18 Tovstukha telegrammed on May 28 that at a politburo meeting, Trotsky and Molotov had been at daggers drawn over a foreign concession contract that Molotov found disadvantageous; Trotsky had signed it months before, but only now had the details come to light. Well, let Molotov muck it up with Trotsky. That same day, a staff member of Stalin’s entourage wrote back to Tovstukha, “The Master is in a very good mood.”19

“The Master” (khoziain), a patrimonial term derived from a lord of the manor, was more and more becoming a nickname for Stalin, but down south, to his longtime compatriots, he was still Koba, the avenger. He and Mikoyan visited Borjomi, land of famed mineral waters; Kutaisi; even Gori. (One can only imagine the commotion.) At some point during the trip Stalin met up with Peti “Pyotr” Kapanadze, an old friend from the Tiflis seminary whose photograph had hung on Stalin’s wall and who had actually gone on to become a priest.20 In Tiflis, Stalin took in an opera, going backstage, as he liked to do, to greet the performers and director. In the Georgian capital he and Mikoyan stayed at Orjonikidze’s apartment, where Sergo’s elder brother, Konstantin, remembered Stalin singing a bawdy Georgian song.21 Here was Stalin’s preferred company. Only their mutual close friend and honorary Caucasus compatriot Kirov, now in Leningrad, was absent.

In Moscow, in Stalin’s absence, the politburo gathered on June 3, 1926, to discuss the strikes in Britain. Trotsky would publicly argue against continued Soviet support for Britain’s establishment trade unions in order not to strengthen the forces of collaboration with the bourgeois regime, which he argued would weaken the British Communist party and leave the British working class unprepared for the imminent crisis-opportunity for a revolutionary breakthrough.22 The politburo session, with forty-three people in attendance, lasted six hours. The day it met, in a telegram of instructions to Molotov, Stalin correctly intuited that the general strike had been a “provocation by the British Conservatives”—that is, “capital, not the revolution, was on the attack.” He added that “as a result, we do not have a new phase of stormy onslaught by the revolution but a continuing stabilization, temporary, not enduring, but stabilization nonetheless, fraught with new attempts by capital to make new attacks on the workers, who continue to be forced to defend themselves.” He condemned the radical posturing of Trotsky as well as Zinoviev, which, with no revolution in the offing, only threatened to split the British trade union movement.23 Stalin viewed Soviet support for British trade unions and striking workers as a deterrent to renewed aggression against the USSR. Still, he wanted to complete the bilateral trade negotiations of 1924 that had been left hanging. During the general strike, the British charge d’affaires in Moscow had made yet another private plea to London to restart the talks for “a settlement of one kind or another with Russia.”24 But with the Soviet announcement of money transfers to the strikers, on top of clandestine Soviet efforts to spread revolution in the colonies, British government plans to reopen the trade negotiations would be put on ice.25

Neither Genoa (1922), the idea of reintegration of the Soviet Union and Germany into the international order, nor Rapallo (1922), the idea of a mutual rogues’ special relationship with Germany, had delivered a viable Soviet security policy. And now British conservatives spearheaded a vocal public campaign for reprisals against the Soviet Union, even though the general strike was over and had failed. Trotsky, at the politburo meeting, complained that the general strike had never been discussed internally, which was untrue: the politburo had discussed it on May 4, 6, and 14, and formed a dedicated commission, led by the head of Soviet trade unions, Tomsky (Trotsky was not a member of the commission). Those assembled on June 3 rejected Zinoviev’s Comintern theses on the lessons of the British strikes. The already deeply acrimonious atmosphere was worsened by near constant jeering. Kamenev sardonically asked the menacing hecklers speaking while he was speaking: “Why are you all helping me?” Trotsky cut in: “‘Collective leadership’ is precisely when everyone hinders each other or everyone attacks each other.’ (Laughter).” Trotsky may have been trying to ease the tension.26 Collective leadership—ha! Stalin would get a full report.

In the Caucasus, Stalin was on home turf in a way he had not been in a long time. On June 8, he met with a delegation of the Tiflis Main Railway Shops, where more than two decades ago he had been a youthful agitator. “I must say in all conscience, comrades, that I do not deserve a good half of the flattering things that have been said here about me,” he modestly suggested, according to the local newspaper. “I am, it appears, a hero of the October Revolution, the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the leader of the Communist International, a miraculous warrior-knight, and whatever else could be imagined. This is nonsense, comrades, and absolutely unnecessary exaggeration. It is the sort of thing that is usually said at the graveside of a departed revolutionary. But I have no intention of dying yet. . . . I really was, and still am, one of the pupils of the advanced workers of the Tiflis railway workshops.” While maintaining this faux humble posture, Stalin went on to outline how he had risen in the revolutionary underground, from his first workers’ “circle” in 1898, when he became a “pupil of the workers,” to 1917, when he became a pupil of “my great teacher—Lenin.” No fancy-pants intellectual, but a hardworking revolutionary laborer closely linked to the workers and to the Founder. “From the title of novice (Tiflis), through the title of apprentice (Baku) and the title of one of the foremen of our revolution (Leningrad)—that, comrades, is the school of my revolutionary university. . . the genuine picture of who I was and who I became, if one speaks without exaggeration, and in good conscience. (Applause turning into an ovation.)”27

A far cry from the hissing and cursing Stalin had undergone five years earlier in Tiflis, when he had left a meeting hall with his head between his legs. This time, Orjonikidze and his men had evidently pulled out all the stops, taking no chances. But Stalin’s presentation of self at the railway shops that day was not published for a national audience, and neither were his accompanying observations on foreign affairs. Particularly salient were his comments on the coup d’etat the previous month in Poland. He retrospectively, demagogically denounced the Polish Communist party for having supported Piłsudski’s action (against a conservative government), then outlined with precision the political differences between the Piłsudski forces and their domestic rightist rivals, the National Democrats, predicting that although the former were stronger militarily, the latter would win out: Poland would turn further rightist and chauvinistic. In the meantime, Stalin called Piłsudski “petit-bourgeois” but not fascistic, a view he would later change as Piłsudski himself would move in the very direction Stalin had attributed to the war minister’s domestic rivals.28 Thus, while Georgian nationalism seemed on its way to being tamed, national sentiment in independent Poland was another matter entirely.

In Moscow the bitterness flowed and flowed. At another politburo meeting on June 14 in Stalin’s absence, when Dzierzynski, back from his trip through Ukraine, asserted that it was a “crime” to record their inner deliberations (a legal request made by the opposition), Trotsky shot back: “We should direct the GPU to stop us from talking; this will simplify everything.”29 Dzierzynski remained in high dudgeon over the death grip of bureaucracy, telling his subordinates at the Supreme Council of the Economy that June that the Soviet administrative machine was “based on universal mistrust,” and concluding, “We must junk this system.” The metastasizing apparatus, he added, was “eating the workers and peasants out of house and home, those who by their labor create real things of value.”30 To Rykov he wrote, “I do not share the policy of this Government. I do not understand it and I do not see any sense in it.”31 To Kuibyshev, he wrote that even good administrators were “drowning in interagency coordination, reports, papers, commissions. The capitalists, each one of them has his means and core responsibility. We now have the Council of Labor and defense and the politburo answering for everything. . . . This is not work, it is agony.” At the same time, Dzierzynski feared that his criticisms might “play into the hands of those who would take the country to the abyss—Trotsky, Zinoviev, Pyatakov. . . . If we do not find the correct line and pace of development our opposition will grow and the country will get its dictator, the grave digger of the revolution irrespective of the beautiful feathers on his costume. Almost all dictators nowadays are former Reds—Mussolini, Piłsudkski.”32

AILMENTS APLENTY

The three Caucasus musketeers wound down their jaunt: Orjonikidze accompanied Stalin and Mikoyan on the return train all the way to Poti, the Black Sea port, and from there, Stalin and Mikoyan took a boat up to Sochi, arriving on June 15, 1926. One gets the feeling that if Stalin could have just stayed the whole year at Sochi, running the regime from there, he might have been content. He read regime documents for pleasure not just work, played skittles (gorodki), and gardened. “He liked to go on picnics,” recalled the daughter of Stalin’s chief bodyguard, the Lithuanian Ivan Jusis. “Usually we headed up the mountains and looked for an interesting spot, and there arranged to stop. We always took along a white tablecloth. We were sure to have kebabs and different open-faced sandwiches: with caviar, with fish—sturgeon, salmon. There were also cheese and herbs, especially cilantro. My father knew how to make sausage out of bear meat, Lithuanian style, which Stalin loved.”33 Jusis appears to have been particularly close to Stalin. In Moscow, he had moved from Varsonefyev Lane (near the Lubyanka), where elite Chekists lived, into the Grand Kremlin Palace, taking one of the apartments formerly occupied by ladies-in-waiting. Dzierzynski lived at the end of the same corridor; the celebrated proletarian poet Demyan Bedny lived one floor up, in a sumptuous dwelling, as did Voroshilov. In Sochi, Jusis was no mere bodyguard but a companion.

Stalin had come down with food poisoning from a rotten fish, and the doctors forced him onto a diet. They also managed to conduct a serious medical examination of him, perhaps the most detailed record of his health up to then. Ivan Valedinsky, newly appointed scientific director of the Matsesta sanitorium near Sochi, and three other physicians examined Stalin in a small room at dacha no. 4, where he was staying. “Comrade Stalin entered from the balcony wing, sat across from us doctors and carried himself very simply,” Valedinsky recalled. “We doctors felt at ease.” Stalin was found to have chronic, albeit non-active tuberculosis. His intestines gave him trouble, as if he had been poisoned. (Actually, in his youth he had contracted typhus, which leaves ulcers on the walls of the stomach.) He suffered bouts of diarrhea. He had chest pain caused by insufficient blood to the heart, which he self-treated using lemons. He complained of pain on the fingers of his left hand. His joints were inflamed and red. The doctors noted the beginnings of muscular atrophy in his left preshoulder. “Myalgia and arthritis of the left upper extremity,” they wrote. (Myalgia or muscle pains, if not caused by a trauma, often results from viral infections.) The doctors also observed eruptions of chronic quinsy (peritonsillar abscess), which produced sore throats and swelling. Stalin’s breathing was heavy, but the cause, pathologies in his right lung (pleural effusion or excess fluid), would not be discovered until many years later. This might have been the cause of the softness of his voice: even after microphones were introduced, he could sometimes barely be heard.

Valedinsky would write that during an objective examination of Stalin’s internal organs, no elements of any pathological changes were found. Still, the examination appears to have led to a diagnosis of Erb-Charcot syndrome—fatigue, cramps, and a progressive wasting.34 Whatever the correct diagnosis, Stalin’s left arm with the suppurated elbow had continued to deteriorate and was barely usable. He also felt a permanent crunch in his knees, as well as in his neck when he turned. His aching muscles showed some signs of dystrophy, perhaps also symptoms of Erb-Charcot, although this might have been a genetic ailment.35 The doctors recommended a dozen Matsesta sulfur baths. “Upon departing from the examination Stalin asked me, ‘How about a bit of brandy?’” Valedinsky answered that “on Saturdays it’s possible to get somewhat stirred up and on Sundays to really relax, but on Mondays to go to work with a clear head.” He added, using a sly Communist code for a convivial occasion, that “this answer pleased comrade Stalin and the next time he organized a ‘voluntary Saturday’ [subbotnik] that was very memorable for me.”36 Stalin clearly took a shine to Valedinsky, the son of a priest who himself had completed seminary, and then, with his father’s permission, had gone on to Tomsk for medical training, after which he’d earned a Ph.D., served in the Great War, and got himself named to the Kremlin sanatorium. Stalin could be spectacularly charming when he wanted to be, particularly with service personnel. And the relief that Sochi-Matsesta brought may well have influenced Stalin’s moods for the better.

Despite the lingering effects of the rotten fish, there was delightful news: the besieged opposition had served up yet another unwitting gift for the dictator they despised. Grigory Belenky, a Left oppositionist who had managed to hold his position as party boss of Moscow’s Krasnaya Presnya ward, organized a meeting at a dacha in the woods around twenty miles outside Moscow. Perhaps seventy people attended. They aimed to organize supporters at the big factories, higher educational institutions, and state agencies.37 “Even if there were only one chance in a hundred for regenerating the Revolution and its workers’ democracy, that chance had to be taken at all costs,” one participated asserted.38 Belenky estimated the support of sixty-two party cells in his ward. “If we can take Krasnaya Presnya, we can take everything,” he supposedly said.39 This was all delusion. Who was going to stick their necks out for them, with OGPU goons sitting conspicuously in party cell meeting halls and voting by means of an open show of hands? To the meeting in the woods, Belenky had invited Mikhail Lashevich, first deputy war commissar, who, when asked whether the oppositionists were organizing in the army, supposedly replied, “Here, the situation is excellent.”40 At least one participant informed on the group, and already on June 8–9 interrogations began.41 A clandestine opposition meeting in the woods, involving the first deputy commissar of war: manna from heaven.

With Tovstukha telegramming Sochi, on June 24, that given Stalin’s continued absence he would put off the Central Committee plenum in Moscow until July 12, Stalin moved to take full advantage of the opposition’s latest “conspiracy,” writing back on June 25 “to Molotov, Rykov, Bukharin, and other friends” that the “Zinoviev Group” must have been involved in this “Lashevich Affair.” Zinoviev had not been present in the woods that day, but, after all, everything was linked. Stalin added some tendentious remarks about how the bounds of “loyal” opposition had, for the first time, been breached, and demanded not only that Lashevich be sacked from the war commissariat but that Zinoviev be removed from the politburo and, by extension, from the Comintern. “I assure you,” Stalin concluded with evident glee, “in the party and the country no one will feel sorry for Zinoviev, because they know him well.”42

Pure joy. One functionary accompanying Stalin reported to his superiors in Moscow that the poet Demyan Bedny “comes by often. He regales us with bawdy jokes.” Still, it was past time to coax the dictator back to the capital. Molotov, on July 1, 1926, wrote insistently, “We consider necessary your arrival on July 7.” Molotov’s correspondence reveals appreciation for Stalin’s strong leadership, and affection. Stalin departed for Moscow no earlier than July 6.43 No sooner did he arrive back in the capital than Dzierzynski wrote asserting that Britain had been behind Piłsudski’s coup in Poland. “A whole host of data show with indubitable clarity (for me) that Poland is preparing a military attack against us with the aim of breaking off Belorussia and Ukraine from the USSR,” Dzierzynski asserted. “All the work of Piłsudski is concentrated on this. . . . In short order Romania is set to receive a huge mass of weapons from Italy, including submarines.” At the same time, he noted “an enlivening of activity of all White Guards in the limitrophe”—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. Almost immediately after Piłsudski’s coup, the Soviet Union had proposed nonaggression pacts to Estonia and Latvia, but neither responded affirmatively.44 Dzierzynski maintained that only domestic political considerations held Piłsudski back and that to mount his invasion, all he needed was to galvanize public opinion. Dzierzynski wanted the Central Committee to check the Red Army’s combat readiness, supply, mobilization and evacuation capability.45 Welcome back to Moscow, comrade Stalin! (The relentless greeting at every encounter which rang in his ear.)

TESTAMENT, AGAIN

The delayed Central Committee plenum opened on July 14 (it met through the twenty-third). On the second day, outside the plenum, Dzierzynski instructed Yagoda to remove local OGPU archives from the frontier regions closest to Poland and Romania. He also suggested transferring out the spies, White Guards, and bandits held in prisons near the western borders.46 To the plenum, Dzierzynski gave a report on July 20. Having recently instructed Yagoda to clear speculators from Moscow and other cities, now Dzierzynski complained that the provincial OGPU “arrested, exiled, imprisoned, pressured, and blackmailed private traders (who meanwhile were prepared to work 14–16 hours a day).”47 He called the Trotsky supporter Pyatakov, deputy chief of the state planning commission, “the single biggest disorganizer of industry.” To Kamenev, who had recruited Dzierzynski into the opposition, he said, “You are engaged in intrigue [politikantsvo], not work.” Dzierzynski stated that had he known about the opposition’s secret gatherings outside Moscow beforehand, he would “not have hesitated to take two companies of OGPU troops with machine guns and settle matters.” Sweating profusely, pale, he barely managed to finish before returning to his seat. Soon he was helped from the hall and placed on a divan outside the meeting hall. Someone administered camphor. Dzierzynski began to make his way back to his apartment in the nearby Grand Kremlin Palace but collapsed. Forty-nine years old, he was dead. He had evidently suffered a heart attack during his plenum speech. The autopsy revealed advanced arteriosclerosis, especially in the blood vessels to the heart.48 “After Frunze, Dzierzynski,” Stalin observed in brief remarks at the funeral on July 22. “‘The terror of the bourgeoisie’—that’s what they called him.”49

The plenum continued. Trotsky read a statement on behalf of himself, Zinoviev, and Kamenev announcing their common struggle against the tyranny of the apparatus, defense of worker interests against the NEP, the need for tax increases on kulaks, collectivization of agriculture, and rapid industrialization. Stalin had the “Lashevich affair” in his pocket, but the opposition was circulating Lenin’s Testament, and without the lines about Trotsky’s non-Bolshevism. Stalin grabbed the Testament nettle and read it aloud, in its entirety. Trotsky later wrote that Stalin was choking back anger, and suffered repeated interruptions calling out his distortions. “In the end he completely lost his equilibrium and, rising on tiptoe, forcing his voice, with a raised hand started to shout, hoarsely, crazy accusations and threats, which dumbfounded the whole hall,” Trotsky claimed. “Neither before nor after have I ever seen him in such a state.”50 But the declassified record of the discussion shows the opposition on the defensive and Stalin on the attack.

“It is incorrect to call Lenin’s letter a Testament,” Stalin noted in a long speech on July 22, going on to observe that “Lenin’s letter mentions six comrades. Of three comrades, Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, it says they had errors of principle that were not accidental. I think it would not be immodest if I observed here the fact that there is not one word in the ‘testament’ about the mistakes of principle of Stalin. Ilich scolds Stalin and notes his rudeness, but in the letter there is not even a hint that Stalin has errors of principle.”51 Stalin added that he had taken the criticisms into account, while Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had ignored them. Trotsky’s method, Stalin asserted, was to attack with rumors, and above all to make everything a matter of personalities. “The letter says that we should not blame Trotsky ‘personally’ for his non-Bolshevism . . . from this it follows that comrade Trotsky needs to be cured of ‘non-Bolshevism,’” Stalin said. “But from this it does not follow that comrade Trotsky has been afforded the right to revise Leninism, that we should nod our heads in agreement, when he revises Leninism.” Trotsky interjected “past” concerning his non-Bolshevism, to which Stalin answered, “The letter does not say ‘past,’ it only says non-Bolshevism. . . . Two different things. The ‘non-Bolshevism’ of Trotsky is a fact. The impossibility of blaming comrade Trotsky ‘personally’ for the non-Bolshevism is also a fact. But Trotsky’s non-Bolshevism exists and the struggle against it is necessary—that’s also a fact, beyond doubt. Lenin should not be distorted.”52 Stalin dismissed Lenin’s “Notes on the Question of Nationalities” as a matter of the leader’s weakening memory, and asserted that Mdivani and the Georgians deserved far more serious punishment than he (Stalin) had meted out: after all, they had created a faction, which was illegal. Stalin conceded nothing but his own rudeness, which, in light of the fight against Trotsky’s seeming non-Leninism, could indeed appear trifling.53

Stalin did not overlook the “October episode” of Zinoviev and Kamenev either, which, echoing the Testament, he called “non-accidental,” an ongoing, chronic, endemic, defining characteristic, like Trotsky’s non-Bolshevism. “The ‘episode’ could be repeated. Do you not think, comrades that a repeat of the October mistakes of Zinoviev and Kamenev, a certain recidivism of these mistakes was demonstrated in front of us at the 14th Party Congress?” Stalin answered his rhetorical question: “This is true. From this the conclusion follows that comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev did not take into account Lenin’s directives.”54 Zinoviev, when he got a chance to respond, admitted, “I made many mistakes. . . . My first mistake in 1917 is known to all. . . . My second mistake I consider even more dangerous because the 1917 mistake was done under Lenin, and Lenin corrected it, and so did we with his help after a few days, but my mistake in 1923 consisted in . . .” At this point Orjonikidze cut him off: “What are you doing, taking the whole party for a fool?” Orjonikidze had allowed himself to be caught up in the summer 1923 cave meeting intrigue and did not want the plenum members to find out.

Thus did Stalin not only neutralize their main weapon—the damned Testament—he flagellated them with it.55 All the while he remained the humble servant, executor of the party’s will. “Delegations of the 13th Congress discussed this question and I do not consider it a lack of humility if I report that all delegations without exception spoke out for the retention of Stalin in the post of general secretary. I have these resolutions right here and I can read them aloud, if you want.” Voice: “Unnecessary.” Stalin: “Despite this fact immediately after the 13th Party Congress, at the first plenum of our Central Committee, I offered my resignation. Despite my request to be removed, the plenum decided, and as I recall, unanimously, that I should remain in the post of general secretary. What could I have done comrades? I am a person not of free will and I subordinated myself to the plenum’s decision.”56

Zinoviev was voted out of the politburo entirely. “Down with factions and factional struggle,” read the resolution. “Long live the unity and cohesion of the Leninist party.”57 And yet, Stalin managed to maintain his pose as the moderate, noting that against the insistence of Zinoviev and Kamenev, he had refused to have Trotsky removed from the politburo.

Stalin had Rudzutaks promoted to full member of the politburo, assuming Zinoviev’s place, while the Caucasus duo Mikoyan and Orjonikidze were named candidate members, along with Kirov in Leningrad, Kaganovich, and Andrei Andreyev. A few days later Stalin informed Mikoyan, party boss in the North Caucasus, that he was being transferred to Moscow to replace Kamenev as commissar of trade. Mikoyan balked, but Stalin forced him.58 As Dzierzynski’s replacement as head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, Stalin named Valerian Kuibyshev, which opened a hole at the party Central Control Commission. Stalin summoned Orjonikidze from Tiflis to head it, warning him “not to buck,” but the transfer required considerable arm-twisting.59 Before the year was out, Stalin would have two new key allies in the capital (Mikoyan, Orjonikidze), to go with his key ally in Leningrad (Kirov).60

Dzierzynski’s office became a shrine to the incorruptible ascetic. “A simple desk, an old screen hiding a narrow iron bed . . . he never went home to his family except on holidays,” one of his old-school colleagues observed.61 The man who had insisted on preserving Lenin’s mummy was honored with a lesser version: an effigy made from the death masks of Dzierzynski’s face and hands was placed in his uniform under a glass case in the OGPU officers’ club.62 A cult of Dzierzynski would buttress the police regime. He was said to pluck flowers while carefully avoiding trampling on a nearby anthill—but woe to enemies of the revolution.63 Mezynski was formally promoted to chairman of the OGPU. “Everyone was surprised that there was nothing military about him,” recalled Raisa Sobol, an operative. “He spoke quietly, and could be heard only because the hall was tensely silent. And his manner of speech was not command-style but contemplative. The chairman, strangely, resembled a teacher.”64 But the physically ailing Mezynski, also depressed by Dzierzynski’s death, went south to Matsesta for six weeks of sulfur baths.

Testament unpleasantries extended beyond the sitting of the plenum. Zinoviev had charged that “in a private letter to comrade Stalin Lenin broke comradely relations with him.”65 Stalin responded in written form. “Lenin never broke comradely relations with me—that is the slander of a person who has lost his head. One can judge Lenin’s personal relations with me by the fact that Lenin, while ill, turned to me several times with such important assignments, the kind of assignments with which he never once tried to turn to Zinoviev or Kamenev or Trotsky. Politburo members and comrades Krupskaya and Maria Ilinichna [Ulyanova] know about these assignments.”66 (Stalin refrained from specifying that these were requests for poison.) On July 26, 1926, Ulyanova lent her authoritative status as Lenin’s sister to Stalin’s defense in the Testament controversy, signing a formal letter to the presidium of the just concluded joint plenum; the archives contain a draft for her by Bukharin (she worked at Pravda, where he was editor). “V. I. Lenin valued Stalin highly,” her letter stated, using her brother’s initials. “V.I. used to call him and would give him the most intimate instructions, instructions of the sort one can only give to someone one particularly trusts, someone one knows as a sincere revolutionary, as a close comrade. . . . In fact, during the entire time of his illness, as long as he had the possibility of seeing his comrades, he most frequently invited comrade Stalin, and during the most difficult moments of his illness Stalin was the only member of the Central Committee he invited.” She allowed that an incident had occurred, “of a purely personal character without any connection to policy,” because Stalin had upheld the doctors’ prohibition against Lenin’s engaging in political matters while ill. “Comrade Stalin apologized and with that the incident was exhausted. . . . Relations were and remained the closest and most comradely.”67

Not long thereafter, evidently feeling pangs of guilt, Ulyanova wrote a second letter, for which no one supplied a draft, noting that she had been reflecting on those days more broadly, not just in the context of blocking the intrigues of Kamenev and Zinoviev, and found her original letter incomplete: Lenin had indeed wanted to curb Stalin’s power, removing him as general secretary because of his personal traits.68 But Ulyanova’s second, private letter, unlike her first, was not circulated to members of the joint plenum. Krupskaya, a member of the joint plenum and thus, presumably, a recipient of Ulyanova’s original letter, does not appear to have moved to contradict her.69 Krupskaya still wanted to publish the Testament, but Stalin had pointed out that only a congress, the party’s highest organ, had the right to remove the prohibition on publication that had been placed by the 13th Party Congress. “I regret that the joint plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission does not have the right to decide to publish these letters in the press,” he stated. “I deeply regret this and I shall get it done at the 15th Party Congress of our party.”70 Mention of the Testament was included in the plenum transcript circulated to party organizations countrywide.71 A dark cloud accompanied every hard-earned advance over the opposition.

RUSSIA’S NEW RULER (EYE ON AMERICA)

Zinoviev was still, nominally, chairman of the Comintern, but the days were long passed when Stalin conducted Comintern affairs with him. Kuusinen, the Comintern secretary general, who referred to Zinoviev behind his back as the satrap, had been reporting all serious business to Stalin.72 Stalin had Kamenev named ambassador to Italy. The short-lived trade commissar surreptitiously brought 600,000 gold rubles to finance the Italian Communist party. In the one known meeting between Kamenev and Mussolini, the duce was disgusted to receive as an envoy a man who was not only a Communist but disgraced by his own government. Kamenev, for his part, told Mussolini he was “grateful to get away from Russia and from Stalin.”73 The day before exiling Kamenev, Stalin granted an interview—his first ever—to an American journalist. The interviewer, Jerome Davis, was a former YMCA leader in Russia, a labor activist, and a professor at Yale University’s Divinity School who arrived in the USSR on an American delegation of some twenty self-described progressives. Davis managed to obtain his audience with Stalin on the pretext of being able to assist with U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Soviet state.74 Davis would publish a sensational essay, “Russia’s New Ruler,” as he called Stalin, in the New York American, owned by the conservative William Randolph Hearst. “After a hearty handshake,” Davis wrote, “I turned out to be seated at a table across from a powerful, magnetic personality with curly black hair, manly moustaches, brown eyes, and a face with visible marks of smallpox, and a welcoming, friendly smile.”75

Davis filled a vacuum. But the Hearst exclusive passed largely without commentary in the rest of the American press, a circumstance, according to the director of the New York bureau of TASS, that would not have happened had it been the property of the Associated Press or the New York Times—a passage Stalin underlined.76 Still, whatever the disappointment over the dearth of international resonance, the published interview offered something to both sides: it rendered Stalin very articulate (a Soviet plus); it contained interesting details about his life and apparent political views (a Davis achievement).

During the interview, when Davis requested a copy of Stalin’s biography, the dictator had handed him a photograph, with a short note. “That’s so little,” Davis responded. “How did you become a Communist?” Stalin: “That’s difficult to say. At first people go over to opposition, then they become revolutionaries, then they choose for themselves a party. We had a lot of parties—SRs, Mensheviks, Anarchists, Bolsheviks.” Davis pressed: “Why a Communist?” Stalin: “We had so many Communists because Russian capitalism was the most savage. . . . We had the most severe political system, so that even the most peaceable types went into opposition; and because a simple opposition could not help the oppositionists. From the rich to the laborers, they were sent to exile in Siberia, [so] they strove to create a party that was the sharpest in standing against the government and acted the most decisively. Therefore all those inclined to opposition sympathized with the Bolsheviks and looked upon them as heroes.” Stalin related the story of how he had allegedly been expelled from the seminary for reading Marx. He also offered a theory of rule, explaining that the Communist party had 1 million members—a fighting organization, not a discussion club—but an organization even with 1 million could not rule such a large country: once decisions were taken, they had to be implemented. For that, a regime needed a shared sense of mission. Davis pointed to the conspiratorial nature of Bolshevism, and Stalin referred to “shadow committees” in British politics, and asserted that the politburo was newly elected every year.77 When Davis touched on the peasants, Stalin said, “You cannot do anything with propaganda alone. We hope that we’ll attract the peasants because we create the material conditions for pushing the peasants onto the Bolshevik side.” Peasants needed affordable consumer goods, credit, aid during famine. “I would not say that they are in ecstasy over the Bolsheviks. But the peasants are practical and, comparing the capitalists, who did not want to talk to them and exploited them, and the Communists, who talk to them, persuade them, and do not rob them, they come to the conclusion that it’s better with us. They do not take us for the ideal, but they consider us as better than the others.”78

While strenuously trying to soften the image of the Soviet state, Stalin’s main subject was the puzzle of securing American diplomatic recognition, trade, and foreign investment to advance the Soviet economy. He complained that it remained unclear what more, concretely, he could do; the USSR had made abundant public pronouncements of its desire for normal relations. Davis indicated that for state recognition, Stalin should consider acknowledging tsarist and Kerensky government debt; compensating the majority of Americans who suffered from confiscations; and refraining from using Soviet representatives abroad in propaganda work. Stalin retorted that any agitation against the United States stemmed from its failure to recognize the Soviet state, unlike the other powers. On the commercial side, he pointed to the profits obtained by Averell Harriman in the Lena goldfields, thanks to the Soviet Union’s internationally low wages. Davis asked Stalin if the Soviets lived up to their agreements. “Concerning the Bolsheviks, sundry myths are propagated, that they do not eat, do not drink, that they are not people, that they have no families and that they do nothing but fight with each other and depose one another (and then it turns out they are all still there), that night and day they send out directives to the whole world,” he responded. “Here that only induces laughter.” Stalin did not allow that the United States government might refuse to truck with Communism on moral grounds; after all, when did imperialists have morals? “Germany stands below the United States in technical level, culture, yet Germany takes more leases [concessions], it knows the market better, it engages more. . . . Why?” Stalin asked. “Germany extends us credit.” Stalin craved the same from the United States. “In view of American technical skill and her abundant surplus capital,” he said, “no country in the world is better fitted to help Russia. . . . The unsurpassed technology of America and the needs and tremendous population of Russia would yield large profits for Americans, if they cooperated.”

What Stalin saw in the United States is not hard to grasp: America’s share of global production would soon reach a breathtaking one third. Consider Henry Ford’s Model T, whose supply could not keep pace with demand. When Ford had opened a new plant in Highland Park, he had taken advantage of mechanized conveyors to send the automobile frame along a line, along which each worker was assigned one simplified, repetitious assembly task to perform in a system known as mass production. It involved standardization of the core aspects of products and reorganized flow among shops, and allowed replacement of manual labor by machinery. At Ford’s River Rouge factory near Detroit, a finished car rolled off the assembly line every ten seconds, and the effects were felt throughout the economy and thousands of communities. River Rouge alone employed 68,000, making it the largest factory in the world, but more than that, its cars required millions of tons of steel alloys, as well as vast amounts of glass, rubber, textiles, and petroleum. Cars also needed roads and service stations. Altogether, nearly four million jobs were connected directly or indirectly to the automobile, in a labor force of 45 million workers. U.S. production and business organization mesmerized the world.79 And it was only half the story. Already in 1925, one of every six Americans nationally had a car, and one of every two in Los Angeles, a result of the fact that standardization enabled a drop in the price of the Model T to $290, from $850. Ford had further expanded the market for his cars by paying his own workers $5 per day, approximately twice the country’s average manufacturing wage. “The necessary, precedent condition of mass production,” Ford wrote, “is a capacity, latent or developed, of mass consumption, the ability to absorb large production. The two go together, and in the latter may be traced the reasons for the former.”80 In the 1920s, average household income in the United States rose by 25 percent. Eleven million families owned their own homes by the middle of the decade. Stalin understood little of the transcendent might of this consumer republic. And the benefits for the USSR of American industrial modernity remained elusive.

GRAVE DIGGER OF THE REVOLUTION

With Stalin in Moscow that August 1926, people from every imaginable sphere queued on Old Square: local party bosses, party Central Control Commission members, the head of the central consumer cooperative, functionaries from the labor and trade commissariats, the Soviet envoy to Persia, an editor from Bolshevik, the acting head of the Communist Youth International, the deputy war commissar, even Filipp Ksenofontov, the original author of Stalin’s “Foundations of Leninism.”81 And on and on it went, until in late August, through late September, Stalin returned to his beloved Sochi. There he expressed dismay about the delays in receiving newspaper reports from Britain on the miners’ strike. In Moscow, a British delegation was about to arrive, and on August 27, Stalin telegrammed that the striking British miners be supplied a substantial sum, as much as 3 million rubles.82 Molotov informed Stalin on September 5 that the USSR had dispatched 3 million rubles, which came out of the wages of Soviet workers at state trusts, as a purported act of solidarity, and fed the anti-Communist uproar in Britain.83 But Stalin would not be intimidated by “finance capital.”

Trotsky at this time jotted down some reflections. He wrote that “the slogan of party unity, in the hands of the ruling faction, increasingly becomes an instrument of ideological terror,” suppressing internal criticism. More than that, he detected an explicit strategy of “complete destruction of that nucleus which until recently was known as the Leninist old guard, and its replacement by the one-man leadership of Stalin relying on his group of comrades who always agree with him.” Trotsky foresaw that “one-man rule in the party, which Stalin and his more narrow group call ‘party unity,’ demands not just the destruction and removal of the current United opposition, but the gradual removal from the leadership of the more authoritative and influential representatives of the current ruling faction. It is utterly clear that Tomsky, Rykov, Bukharin—by their past, by their authority, and so on—cannot and are incapable of playing the role, under Stalin, played by Uglanov, Kaganovich, Petrovsky, and others.” Trotsky predicted a coming phase in which Kaganovich and the rest would go after Rykov, Bukharin, and Tomsky. He even predicted that “opportunistic elements in the party would open fire on Stalin, as too infected by ‘left’ prejudices and hindering of their quicker, more open ascent.”84 Remarkably, Trotsky proved able, almost uniquely, to discern the direction of the political dynamic, but more remarkably, he failed to understand Stalin as the autonomous driver of a personal dictatorship, seeing him as a mere instrument for larger social forces in a bureaucratic aggrandizement.

Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had belatedly formed what they called the United opposition, and by early October 1926 were gathering once more at Kamenev’s Kremlin apartment, to discuss strategy, now with Zinoviev expelled from the politburo. Trotsky continued to question Zinoviev about his previously vicious attacks on “Trotskyism,” which had generated enduring bad blood.85 But the threesome, looking at the correlation of forces, decided to offer Stalin a truce, promising to desist from oppositional activity.86 He dictated the terms: they were to affirm that all Central Committee decisions were binding, publicly repudiate all factional activity, and disavow their supporters among foreign Communists (Ruth Fischer, Arkadi Maslow, Boris Souvarine). Pravda published their joint statement, signed also by Sokolnikov and Pyatakov, on October 17.87 The very next day, however, Max Eastman happened to publish the full Lenin Testament in the New York Times, a bombshell that, the USSR excepted, was reprinted in newspapers worldwide.88 On October 19, Stalin resigned yet again, this time in writing. “A year and a half’s joint work in the politburo with comrades Zinoviev and Kamenev after the withdrawal, and then the death, of Lenin have made utterly clear to me the impossibility of honest and sincere joint political work with these comrades in the confines of one narrow collegium,” he wrote in a note to the upcoming Central Committee plenum. “In view of that I ask you to consider me to have left the politburo.” He added that because a non-politburo member could not head the secretariat and orgburo, he should be considered to have left those posts as well. He asked for a two-month holiday, after which he wanted a posting to godforsaken Turukhansk, Siberia, where he had been stuck in prerevolutionary exile, or remote Yakutia, or maybe abroad.89

Stalin gave a pretty good impression of feeling sorry for himself. From his point of view, the New York Times Testament publication reinforced his jaundiced view of the oppositionists as traitorous enemies. Of course, neither his politburo majority—including those Trotsky had privately predicted would soon be eclipsed—nor his Central Committee majority accepted his written request to resign. On the contrary, on October 22 Pravda published Stalin’s “theses” denouncing the opposition, just in time for the 15th party conference.90 The next day he had the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission meeting to finalize the party conference’s agenda, insert a “special report” on the opposition to be delivered by himself: the truce, not a week old, was dead.91

The 15th party conference opened on October 26 (it lasted until November 3) and was attended by 194 voting delegates, plus 640 non-voting, a substantial audience. It was now that Trotsky, belatedly, denounced Stalin’s “socialism in one country” as a “betrayal” of the world revolution and guarantee of capitalist restoration in Russia.92 Zinoviev, too, erupted on this theme. “The theory of final victory in one country is wrong,” he stated. “We will win final victory because revolution in other countries is inevitable.”93 (Of course, Stalin had said final victory was impossible in one country.) Krupskaya kept silent, evidently abandoning the opposition cause. On November 1, Stalin delivered his report, rehearsing the entire history of the opposition from his viewpoint, and mocking the supposed musicality of Trotsky’s writings. “Leninism as a ‘muscular feeling in physical labor,’” Stalin quoted, dripping with sarcasm. “New, original, profound, no? Did you understand any of it? (Laughter.) All that is very beautiful, musical and, if you want, even grand. It is only missing a small thing: the simple and human touch of Leninism.”94

Trotsky rose, turned to the Georgian, pointed his finger and exclaimed, “The first secretary poses his candidacy to the post of grave digger of the revolution!” Stalin flushed with anger and fled the room, slamming the door. The session broke up in uproar.

At Trotsky’s apartment in the Cavalry Building, his supporters, arriving before him, expressed apprehension at his outburst. Pyatakov: “Why, oh why, did Lev Davidovich say that? Stalin will never forgive him unto the third and fourth generation!”95 Trotsky had gotten under Stalin’s skin, but whatever satisfaction he might have savored was short-lived; the next day, when the party conference resumed, Stalin had the votes to have Trotsky expelled from the politburo. Kamenev was removed as a candidate member of the politburo, and Stalin put Zinoviev’s sacking as Comintern chief on the agenda for the next meeting of that body’s executive. Zinoviev and Kamenev turned on Trotsky for having raised Stalin’s ire. They all tried to defend themselves against the dictator’s calumnies, but they were relentlessly interrupted. Yuri Larin pointed to what he called “one of the most dramatic episodes of our revolution, . . . the revolution is outgrowing some of its leaders.”96 Bukharin’s speech was especially vicious, even by his standards, sarcastically quoting Trotsky’s “grave digger of the revolution” phrase to turn the tables.97 Stalin was so delighted with Bukharin’s frothing remarks that he interjected, “Well done, Bukharin. Well done, well done. He does not argue with them, he slashes!”98

Ah, the sweet satisfaction of violent recriminations. Stalin had the conference’s final word, on November 3, and ridiculed Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky at length, eliciting peals of laughter.99 In the meantime, a new electoral law of November 1926 deprived still more kulaks and private traders of the right to vote, in a sharpening tilt against the NEP, and several speakers at the party conference warned of a war on the horizon.

PARSING THE STRATEGIC SITUATION

Nothing whatsoever guaranteed Soviet security and, notwithstanding the regime’s pugnacious rhetoric and often aggressive actions, it felt vulnerable. Soviet theories behind a likely casus belli varied, from Moscow’s refusals to pay back tsarist-era loans or supply sufficient raw materials to a burning Western desire to continue the breakup of Russia, separating Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Because a supply blockade could choke the Soviet Union, rumors circulated that the imperialists would not even need to launch an attack, but merely blackmail the regime into concessions.100 A real war, though, could not be excluded and the OGPU reported it could take the form of an allied Polish-Romanian aggression, provoked into attack and supported by Britain and France, which would likely draw in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland, too—the full “limitrophe.”101 Chicherin repeatedly warned the Baltic states that willingly serving as pawns of the Western powers in an anti-Soviet coalition would one day result in loss of their independence. He warned Poland similarly.102 The OGPU was also convinced hostile foreign powers planned to rally disaffected elements inside Soviet territory—after all, the Entente had used proxies before (the Whites during Russia’s civil war).

It was no secret that even without British prodding, the dictatorship in Warsaw coveted those parts of historic Ukraine and Belorussia it did not yet control.103 Stalin read secret report after secret report about Polish infiltration of Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belorussia and preparations for sabotage operations on Soviet territory. He had instituted a much-publicized Polish national region inside Belorussia to blunt anti-Soviet sentiments among the Soviet Union’s ethnic Poles, but whether that would help at all remained uncertain.104 To test Piłsudski, in August 1926, the Soviets revived the talks started earlier in the year for a non-aggression pact, but negotiations went nowhere. Poland had planned parallel balancing agreements with Moscow and Berlin, but did not even launch talks with Germany. Rumors were rife of a Polish invasion of Lithuania, where a leftist government had emptied the prisons of political prisoners, including Communists, and on September 28, 1926, signed a non-aggression treaty with the Soviet Union, adding to the outcries of “Bolshevism.” Never mind that the previous rightist Lithuania Christian Democrat government had launched the negotiations with Moscow. The Soviet-Lithuanian pact had an anti-Polish edge to it.105 Over on the USSR’s eastern flank, Soviet military intelligence continued to beat the drums about a likely renewed military intervention by Japan. Japan had quit their civil war‒era military occupation of Soviet territory later than any of the other interventionist powers. It had annexed Korea and eyed Manchuria and even Mongolia, the Soviet satellite, as its sphere of influence. In August 1926, Tokyo refused Soviet offers of a neutrality pact. The chief of the Siberian OGPU, Henriks Štubis (b. 1894), an ethnic Latvian who used the name Leonid Zakovsky, reported to Mezynski that “Russian White-Guardist circles in China have become significantly enlivened,” which, to him, testified not to the emigres’ dynamics but to Japan’s plans for a northern aggression. Zakovsky recommended preparing partisan warfare units on the Soviet side of the border to counter a Japanese military occupation.106

Britain, however, was the greater preoccupation, as always. The British military attache was throwing banquets at its Moscow embassy for the Red Army brass, as the OGPU reported to Stalin, using hospitality to take advantage of “our chattiness, loose their tongues . . . our comrades often get drunk at these banquets.” Inebriated Soviet officials talked of secret assignments carried out in China, which incited the already hypersuspicious British like the proverbial red flag before a bull.107 In London, the Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest catalogued Bolshevik intrigues in Turkey, Afghanistan, China, Persia, and the jewel in the crown, India.108 On December 3, 1926, the Manchester Guardian, a British newspaper, making use of leaked information, exposed the clandestine German-Soviet military cooperation in violation of the Versailles Treaty. Two days later, the German Social Democrat newspaper republished the report.109 An uproar ensued in the Reichstag, where Social Democrats denounced the illegal activities of the German army. Chicherin happened to be in Berlin on medical leave and he and Ambassador Krestinsky called on German Chancellor Wilhelm Marx on December 6 to smooth matters over. Pravda belatedly acknowledged the scandal on December 16, blaming the leak on “the German Social Democratic lackeys of the Entente.” The Soviet newspaper confirmed that the Germans, on the basis of concessions (leases), had helped build facilities on Soviet territory for the production of airplanes, poison gas, and ammunition, but reasserted a Soviet right to defense.110 Britain internally contemplated severing diplomatic relations, which the Foreign Office opposed for now on pragmatic grounds: such an action would fail to alter Soviet behavior and encourage those in Berlin who wanted an “eastern orientation.” Still, British-Soviet relations were on a knife’s edge. “The Soviet to all intents and purposes—short of direct armed conflict—is at war with the British empire,” one British Foreign Office official wrote on December 10, 1926. “Whether by interference in the strikes at home or by fomenting the anti-British forces in China, in fact, by her action all the world over, from Riga to Java, the Soviet power has as its main objective the destruction of British Power.”111

A week later the military in Lithuania overthrew the democratically elected government—a left coalition of Social Democrats, Peasant Popular Union, and small parties of ethnic minority Germans, Poles, and Jews. The putschists installed a rightist dictatorship of Antanas Smetona, whose Lithuanian National Union had a membership of 2,000 countrywide and a parliamentary representation of three seats. The Christian Democrats, in the elections that had brought the leftist coalition to power, had failed for the first time to obtain a majority and supported the putsch. Martial law was declared and hundreds of Lithuanian Communists swept up in arrests. Lithuanian-Polish enmity now had to compete with anti-Communist solidarity.

When the head of Soviet military intelligence, Jan Berzin, summarized the international position of the USSR as of the end of 1926, he acknowledged an increase in tensions but deemed an anti-Soviet “military action in 1927 unlikely.”112 But beyond cultivating friendly relations with Turkey, Persia, and China, Berzin’s recommendations were almost wholly reactive: hindering Polish-German settlement of Danzig and Upper Silesia, subverting a Polish-Baltic alliance, keeping Germany from passing over to the West, aggravating the tensions between Britain-France and Germany and between Britain and France themselves, as well as between the United States and Japan.113 Communist boilerplate about the “fragility” of capitalist stabilization, about the gathering revolutionary movement in Europe and the colonial world, was face to face with hard reality. Soviet military expenditures in fiscal 1926–27 reached a mere 41 percent of the 1913 level.114 The Red Army essentially had no tanks, other than the ancient Western-made ones it had captured from the Whites during the civil war.115 Red Army soldiers rode bicycles in the holiday parades across Red Square and during war games. One third of the conscripts did not even have uniforms.116 Neither did the country even have a comprehensive war plan covering the various contingencies in 1926, according to Voroshilov.117 On December 26, 1926, Deputy Defense Commissar Mikhail Tukhachevsky, as part of the work toward producing a war plan, underscored that in the event of hostilities, “Our miserly combat resources for mobilization would barely last through the first stage of combat.” Tukhachevsky was jockeying to be named head of the state planning commission’s defense sector and given to dramatization. Still, he was correct. “Our situation would only deteriorate, particularly in the event of a blockade,” he continued. “Neither the Red Army nor the country is ready for war.”118

Suddenly, Stalin resigned again. On December 27, he wrote to Rykov, “I ask you to release me from the post of Central Committee general secretary. I affirm that I can no longer work at this post, that I am in no condition to work any longer at this post.”119 Precisely what prompted this latest fit of self-pity remains unclear. Just four days earlier, Stalin had written to Molotov, who was on holiday down south, “You don’t have to hurry back—you could easily remain another week (or even more). . . . Things are going pretty well for us here.”120 Stalin’s moods were becoming almost as difficult to parse as the intentions of the Soviet Union’s external enemies.

STATE OF SIEGE

Soviet grand strategy, absent a real military or a single alliance, amounted to a wing and a prayer (intracapitalist war). With the external situation apparently worsening, Voroshilov, in early January 1927, stated at a Moscow province party conference, in a speech carried by Pravda, “We must not forget that we stand on the brink of war, and that this war will be far from fun and games.”121 Rykov and Bukharin made similar speeches around this time, conveying that war could come within days, or by spring, or autumn.122 Such alarms sprang not from specific intelligence but deepening anxieties, combined with a tendency to group disparate events and attribute conspiratorial causes to them.123 “It becomes clearer every day,” a British diplomat in Moscow observed in early 1927, “that the panic that now exists, which is audible in every utterance of public men, and legible in every press leader, is not ‘faked,’ . . . but indeed represents the feelings and emotions of the Communist party and Soviet government.”124

Not everything talked about in the Soviet Union related to capitalist encirclement. In mid-January 1927 through late March, Sergei Prokofyev returned from Parisian exile for an exhausting concert tour in Moscow, Leningrad, and his native Ukraine (Kharkov, Kiev, Odessa). He had left in 1918, married a Spanish singer, and become internationally acclaimed, though in Europe he never dazzled quite like Stravinsky. (Stravinsky thought Prokofyev Russia’s greatest composer, after himself.) Back in his homeland—Prokofyev had kept his Soviet passport—he heard a twenty-year-old Dmitry Shostokovich play his own First Piano Sonata at a young composers’ evening. The music scene in the USSR proved lively, intense, and Prokofyev’s opera Love for Three Oranges thrilled Soviet audiences. At the same time, his phone was tapped; he failed to obtain the release of an arrested cousin (a childhood playmate); and became worn down by rehearsals, performances, admirers, impresarios, and swindlers (“If that’s how things are,” he told a clothes cleaner, “perhaps you can tell me why the whole of Moscow isn’t ironing trousers for a living?”). Isaak Rabinovich, a stage designer, told Prokofyev that “Moscow looks absolutely disgraceful,” and, given how long full reconstruction would take, divulged a personal plan to paint “one street entirely in blue, another one that crosses it in two colors.” On the way out to Poland, even the Soviet customs official recognized Prokofyev, asking, “What is in the trunk, oranges?”125

Stalin did not receive Prokofyev. Indeed, no musicians, actors, directors, dancers, writers, or painters are listed in the logbooks for his office in 1927. Certainly he had a strong interest in the arts, especially the music world, but only later would he acquire the authority to summon artists at will. For now he saw them when he went out to their performances. Stalin loved attending live theater, where an astonishing run of plays followed one after the other: The Forest and The Mandate by Alexander Ostrovsky and Nikolai Erdman, respectively, which Vesvolod Meyerhold produced; and Days of the Turbins by Mikhail Bulgakov, Stalin’s favorite playwright. Stalin also occasionally went to the famed cinema on the roof pavilion of the Nirnzee House, then the tallest building in Moscow, located at Bolshoi Gnezdnikov Lane, 10, up Tverskaya Street from the Kremlin.126 (Also seen there: Bulgakov and other luminaries in Moscow’s beau monde.) During Prokofyev’s tour, Stalin did find time to meet Konstantin Gerulaitis-Stepuro, an acquaintance from the prerevolutionary exile days of Turukhansk who did not belong to the party but came to Old Square during office hours on a “personal matter.” He was unemployed, a life trajectory that put Stalin’s ascent from the same frozen Siberian swamps into stark perspective.127

Diverting activity was a luxury, however. Stalin knew that Britain was encouraging Germany to take control over Danzig and the Polish Corridor, compensating Poland with part of (or even all) of Lithuania.128 Germany was his great frustration. The German military brass, on the very day that the Manchester Guardian had exposed clandestine German-Soviet cooperation, gave final approval to sign an agreement in Moscow to open a secret joint tank school in Kazan. For Moscow, however, this fell far below hopes. Unszlicht, in a pessimistic overview, outlined for Stalin all dimensions of the cooperation—the aviation school (Lipetsk), the Tomko (a code name) chemical warfare testing facility (Samara), the Dreise machine guns, the Bersol company’s chemical devices, the Junkers airplane concession (Fili), and the tank school (Kazan)—but concluded that “our attempts to attract German investments in our military industry through RWM have failed.” Unszlicht recommended “continuing our joint work in the tank school and aviation school and in chemical warfare tests.”129 Others in the Soviet establishment clung to the exchanges. “Every comrade, without exception, who has come here for maneuvers or to attend the academies has found the display of the technological innovations of the Germany army very useful,” Krestinsky from Berlin argued to Litvinov on January 18, 1927. “What we are offering to the Germans does not cost us anything, because they pay for everything, while there is no problem finding in the depths of the USSR secret locations for their schools and other smaller military establishments.”130 The goal of strengthening the Red Army’s material base, however, remained elusive.131

Soviet counterintelligence, meanwhile, intercepted a Japanese document titled “General Strategic Measures Against Russia,” which was translated into Russian on February 7. It called for sharpening “the racial, ideological and class struggle in the Soviet Union and especially the internal tensions in the Communist party,” and for unifying all Asian nations on Soviet territory against European Russia. As targets it listed non-Russian soldiers in the army, from whom secret information could be obtained about Soviet military plans and operations in the Far East. It also suggested inciting the states on the Soviet Union’s western and southern border to preempt the Soviets’ ability to shift troops eastward, and sabotaging the USSR’s transport and infrastructure, and telegraph and telephone connections.132

Stalin was on edge. Maxim Litvinov had delivered remarks at a meeting of the foreign affairs commissariat collegium in mid-January 1927 that were roundly critical of Soviet international posture, and an informant secretly wrote to Stalin with details. Litvinov was said to have argued that “English policy toward us is hostile because we ourselves conduct a hostile policy toward them,” and that “England is a great power and in England’s foreign policy we play a relatively insignificant role.” Litvinov’s greatest heresy, as reported, consisted in asserting that “our interests in Europe do not conflict with English interests and it is a great mistake to see the ‘hand of England’ everywhere.” His case in point: the Piłsudski coup in Poland. This contravened Stalin’s entire worldview. Even in Asia, noted the informant, Litvinov deemed bilateral British-Soviet interests compatible, and dismissed Soviet policy toward Britain as self-defeating noise making and the Soviet military intelligence and foreign intelligence reports he saw as up to 99 percent Soviet disinformation or agents’ fantasy. “Comrade Litvinov kept emphasizing that he was stating his personal opinion, which is in contradiction to our official policy,” noted the informant, adding that the deputy foreign affairs commissar even warned that the USSR was blundering toward war.133 At a Central Committee plenum of February 12, 1927, Voroshilov presented on Soviet military preparedness; the politburo criticized his draft theses: “too little said on adaptation of all industry and the economy in general to the needs of war.”134 Litvinov delivered an assessment of the international situation. Stalin, who of course already knew what Litvinov had been saying, penciled a note to Molotov during the plenum about the advisability of making a corrective statement. Molotov responded that some ironic commentary might be in order, but advised to just let the matter pass. Rykov wrote that “Stalin should make, possibly, a cautious statement.”

Litvinov, however, pressed the case, addressing a letter on February 15, 1927, to Stalin, with copies to all politburo members, in which the deputy foreign affairs commissar boldly asserted that the foreign affairs commissariat collegium agreed with his analysis “at least 95 percent, maybe 100, including Chicherin.” Litvinov acknowledged there was no threat of war from the East, only a certain vulnerability of the Soviet eastern rear in the event of war in the West, and that the Western threat emanated from Piłsudski, Poland’s ally Romania, and all the limitrophe states except Lithuania (Poland’s enemy). But he emphasized that Poland was an independent actor, not a plaything in the hands of the West, yet avowed that it might seek to take advantage of Soviet-Western hostilities. Therefore, Soviet policy should strive not just to prevent a Polish-Baltic alliance but also to avoid creating general conditions for war, such as an artificial British-Soviet conflict, which would also cost the USSR economically. Further, because France had great influence over Poland, Litvinov urged redoubling efforts to secure an agreement with Paris via concessions in the matter of repudiated imperial Russian debts. On additional pages that are not part of the original letter (at least as assembled in the archival file), Litvinov made further comments on Germany, underscoring the likelihood and adverse consequences of Germany’s moving away from its expedient flirtations with the USSR more closely toward the West. He copied his letter to some but not all members of the foreign affairs collegium (Boris Stomonyakov, Teodor Rotstein, Rakovski, Krestinsky). “I urge the politburo to discuss the above and to point out to the foreign affairs commissariat which conclusions are incorrect,” Litvinov brazenly concluded—as if he had himself just conducted an across-the-board policy review.

Evidently white hot with fury, Stalin drafted a multipage memorandum for the politburo, dated February 19 and finalized four days later, entirely in red pencil. He began by pointing out that, contrary to Litvinov, he (Stalin) had refuted him at the plenum not in his own name but on behalf of the entire politburo, and that Litvinov’s assertion of 100 percent support in the foreign affairs collegium was contradicted by the remarks at the plenum by Lev Karakhan (to whom Litvinov had not sent his letter). On substance, Stalin reiterated that the number one enemy was the “English financial bourgeoisie and the conservative government,” which “was conducting a policy of encircling the USSR from the East (China, Afghanistan, Persia, Turkey) and from the West (the limitrophe states and so forth).” He mocked Litvinov’s assertion “that if relations deteriorate it is primarily the fault of our party press and our party orators, as if it had not been for these sins (extremism of the press and the orators) we would have a pact with England.” Britain vigorously worked against the USSR’s revolutionary forward policy in China, which, Stalin insisted, was essential for Soviet security and for world liberation. Stalin further argued that Litvinov misunderstood Soviet policy toward Germany, “lumping into one pile all bourgeois states and not differentiating between Germany and other ‘great powers.’” Stalin himself seemed to do just that, noting that the Central Committee was abundantly clear that Soviet economic development would spark inevitable conflict with the capitalist states. “We cannot harbor illusions about the possibility of establishing ‘good’ and ‘friendly’ relations with ‘all’ bourgeois states,” he wrote. “At some point serious conflict will arise with those bourgeois states that are known to be the most hostile toward us, and this inevitability cannot be obviated either by a moderate tone in the press or by the sagacious experience of diplomats.” A socialist state, Stalin concluded, “must conduct a socialist foreign policy,” which meant no shared interests “with the imperialist policies of so-called great powers,” only “exploiting the contradictions among the imperialists.”

Unsurprisingly, the politburo, on February 24, approved its leader’s statement on Soviet foreign policy’s assumptions and aims, and resolved to compel the foreign affairs commissariat to follow Central Committee’s directives as well as to desist from pursuing the debate questioning the British as “the main enemy.” As if on cue, that same day the British foreign minister passed to Moscow a sharply worded note, replete with excerpts from Soviet leaders’ speeches, demanding the USSR immediately cease anti-British propaganda and military support for revolution abroad. Mirror-image “propaganda” comments on the Soviet Union could have been assembled from the speeches of British political figures, yet, as Litvinov warned, relations were on a knife’s edge. Still, the foreign affairs commissariat, following the thrashing by Stalin, responded to London with threats.135

Stalin, apparently unintentionally, was driving the USSR into a state of siege. As it happened, the day after the British note, workers at several Leningrad factories went on strike, and the disaffected staged a demonstration on the city’s Vasilyev Island demanding freedom of speech and the press, and free elections to factory committees and soviets. Instead of seeing this as an expression of worker aspirations, the regime saw proletarians offering themselves up as accomplices to a foreign intervention by the international bourgeoisie.136 Amid a swirl of defeatist talk in society reported by the OGPU, Stalin began to try to tamp down the rumormongering. “War will not happen, neither in spring nor fall of this year,” he stated to the workers of the Moscow railroad shops, in words carried in Pravda (March 3, 1927). “There will be no war this year because our enemies are not ready for war, because our enemies fear the results of war more than anyone else, because the workers in the West do not want to fight against the USSR, and fighting without the workers is impossible, and finally because we are conducting a firm and unwavering policy of peace, and this hinders war with our country.”137 But reports he was getting continued to raise questions about the Soviet homefront. “In the event of external complications,” a top official of the central consumer cooperative wrote to Stalin and the politburo that spring, “we do not have a secure peasant rear.” His main point was that the current level of exports of agricultural products and raw materials—“less than half the prewar level”—could not pay for the necessary industrialization.138

IMPLOSION

Lenin had taught that capitalism would be weakened, perhaps fatally, if it could be cut off from its colonial and semicolonial territories, from which it extracted cheap labor, raw materials, and markets. He also deemed the colonial peoples a “strategic reserve” for the proletarian revolution in the advanced countries of Europe.139 Therefore, Soviet strategy would not rely solely or even primarily on Communists in Asia, but befriend the class enemy, bourgeois national parties, and restrain foreign Communists from forming soviets. When the Indian Communist Roy rebuked Lenin and demanded the formation of soviets in the colonial world, too, Lenin continued to insist that on the whole, workers in colonial settings were too few and too weak to seize power, but he conceded that soviets would be appropriate in some cases. Thus, both the prevention of soviets and their formation were fully Leninist.

Stalin’s thinking on Asia evolved within the Leninist mold. He believed that Communist parties and workers in colonial settings should support consolidation of independent “revolutionary-democratic national” states against “imperialist forces,” a struggle analogous not to the Bolshevik revolution but to Russian events of 1905 and February 1917. “In October 1917 the international conditions were extraordinarily favorable for the Russian revolution,” he told the Indonesian Communists in 1926. “Such conditions do not exist now, for there is no imperialist war, there is no split between the imperialists. . . . Therefore, you must begin with revolutionary-democratic demands.”140 But Stalin also advised that the proposed colonial-world alliance with the bourgeoisie had to be a “revolutionary bloc,” a joining of “the Communist party and the party of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.” His model was China.

China in the 1920s was still rent by the chaos that ensued after the downfall of the emperor and creation of a republic in 1911. In Peking, the capital, a quasi-government was internationally recognized. But it was really just a local warlord, one of many holding regional power around the country. In the south, a rival capital in Canton (Guangzhou) had been established by the Nationalists or Guomindang, a movement that sought to appeal to the lower orders, but not on the basis of class; rather, the Guomindang was an umbrella supraclass Nationalist movement, which held significant appeal but was diffuse. At the same time, large numbers of Soviet advisers in the country helped transform a loose collection of militant intellectuals into the Chinese Communist party, which became linked to an urban labor movement at cotton mills, docks, power plants, railways and tramways, printing, and precision machine building that spread a political vocabulary and worldview of class alongside nationalism.141 When the Chinese Communists held their founding congress in July 1921 at a school for girls in the French concession of Shanghai, present were two Comintern officials, one special envoy of a leading Chinese Communist who could not attend, and twelve delegates, representing fifty-three party members in total.142 (Mao Zedong attended as a delegate from Hunan province in the interior.) By mid-1926, the Chinese Communist party had grown to perhaps 20,000. A mere 120 full-time apparatchiks were on the rolls as of July 1926, mostly in Shanghai, Canton, and Hunan.143 Still, within one year of July 1926 the party would triple in size to nearly 60,000.144 But Soviet advisers also helped transform the loose personal webs of the Guomindang into a similarly Leninist-style hierarchical, militarized party. The Guomindang had perhaps 5,000 more members than the Communists, and they were better educated: one fifth had been to a university. But membership in the Guomindang often amounted to a mere status marker: in answer to a questionnaire about their party-related activities, more than one third answered “nothing.” Another 50 percent claimed to have engaged in some propaganda work. Only 6 percent had participated in mass actions.145 The Communists were a party of activists. That said, neither party was a genuine mass party: China had nearly 500 million people.

Comintern policy compelled the Chinese Communists to become the junior partner in a coalition with the Guomindang, in order to strengthen the latter’s role as a bulwark against “imperialism” (British influence). To that end, beyond creating two parallel, deadly rival parties in forced alliance, Soviet advisers also built a real, disciplined army in China.146 The Soviets had declined the request of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Guomindang, to send Red Army troops to Manchuria as dangerously provocative, possibly summoning “a Japanese intervention.”147 But the Soviets did furnish him with weapons, finances, and military advisers. The Soviets sent perhaps $100,000 annually, a substantial subsidy, to the Chinese Communist party, but more than 10,000,000 rubles annually in military aid to the Guomindang.148 Part of that went into the Whampoa (Huangpu) Military Academy near Canton, opened in 1925, which was led by the Sun Yat-sen protégé and chief of staff, Chiang Kai-shek (b. 1887), who had been trained in Japan.149 After Sun Yat-sen died of liver cancer on March 12, 1925, at age fifty-eight, Chiang won the succession struggle. A Soviet adviser deemed him “conceited, reserved, and ambitious,” but nonetheless thought him useful, provided he was “praised in a delicate manner” and treated “on the basis of equality. And never showing that one wants to usurp even a particle of his power.”150 In truth, Soviet advisers on the ground, while overestimating the value of their own expertise and advice, tended to look down upon Chinese officers, and often usurped the positions of Chinese nominally in charge. Still, the Whampoa Academy helped conjure into being the strongest army in China, which Chiang Kai-shek commanded.151

Ideologically, Leninism conflated anti-imperialism with anticapitalism, but many Chinese intellectuals, including those who had become Marxists, concluded that the depredations China suffered at the hands of foreign powers made anti-imperialism the bedrock task.152 Trotsky, in a note to himself, wrote that “the main criterion for us [in China] is not the constant fact of national oppression but the changing course of the class struggle,” precisely the opposite of the sentiment in China.153 Stalin held that world revolution needed the supposedly “bourgeois” Guomindang to defeat the warlords and their imperialist paymasters, thereby uniting China, and that the Communists were to enter an alliance with the “revolutionary bourgeoisie,” but prepare for eventual independent action at some point.154 For Stalin, therefore, the Chinese Communist alliance with the Guomindang presupposed betrayal: Communists were to win positions at the base of the joint movement, and then apply leverage, as in mechanics, from the bottom up.155 This would enable the Chinese Communists to capture the “revolution” from within. Soviet policy called the Communist alliance with the Guomindang a “bloc within.”

Compared with the debacles in Germany, Bulgaria, and Estonia, China long stood out as the Comintern’s shining success.156 Under the surface, however, the multiple Comintern advisers supported their own protégés, fragmenting the Chinese political scene, and competed to undermine each other. “The other day, in the course of a lengthy conversation with Stalin, it became evident that he believes the Communists have dissolved into the Guomindang, that they lack an independent standing organization, and that the Guomindang is ‘mistreating’ them,” Grigory Zarkhin, known as Voitinsky, complained to Lev Karakhan, the Soviet ambassador to Peking, on April 25, 1925. “Comrade Stalin, expressing his regrets over the Communists’ dependent condition, evidently thought that such a situation was historically unavoidable at the current time. He was extremely surprised when we explained that the Communists have their own organization, more cohesive than the Guomindang, that the Communists have the right of criticism within the Guomindang, and that the work of the Guomindang itself to a great degree is being carried out by our comrades.” Voitinsky attributed Stalin’s misinformed views to the reports of Mikhail Grusenberg, known as Borodin, a Belorussian Jew educated in Latvia who had worked as a school principal in Chicago.157 But Voitinsky, who was supposed to uphold the bloc-within alliance, instead pushed for independence of the Communists. Events also pulled in this direction.

Perhaps the greatest underlying conflict was Chiang Kai-shek’s distrust of the Communists, even as he coveted Soviet military aid. Chiang had headed a mission to Moscow on Sun’s behalf in 1923. “Judging by what I saw, it is not possible to trust the Russian Communist party,” he had written in a private letter. “What they told us in Soviet Russia we can believe only about 30 percent.”158 On March 20, 1926, he forced the arrest of all political commissars attached to military units, who were mostly Communists, placed Soviet advisers under house arrest, and disarmed worker strike committees. Chiang wanted to suppress trade unions and use punitive expeditions to put down peasant unrest (and seize their rice stocks to feed the army). He also had his security forces torture Chinese Communists to extract information about plots. Communists in China again formally sought Moscow’s authorization to withdraw from the bloc within and strike back at Chiang, but Stalin refused. In May 1926, Chiang had the Guomindang Central Executive expel all Communists from senior posts, though he did release the interned Soviet advisers. In Moscow, a politburo commission on May 20 heard a report on Chiang Kai-shek’s “coup.”159 But Stalin upheld the bloc within.160

Trotsky had paid scant attention to China.161 He did chair a committee that proposed preempting a feared British-Japanese alliance by declaring Manchurian “autonomy,” effectively bribing Japan with the offer of a satellite, the same way the Soviets had obtained Outer Mongolia.162 But Trotsky went on medical leave to Berlin and publicly remained silent on China. Zinoviev ignited an uproar, however, which infuriated Stalin. Zinoviev had long been the main Comintern spokesperson for the bloc-within policy and had even called the Guomindang “a workers’ and peasants’ (multiclass) party.” As late as February 1926, Zinoviev had been urging acceptance of a Guomindang request to be admitted to the Comintern.163

In July 1926, Chiang Kai-shek launched the Northern Expedition against the warlords to expand Guomindang rule over all of China with the planning support of Vasily Blyukher, the chief Soviet military adviser attached to the Guodminang government at Nanjing. While pressing the unification offensive between July and December 1926, the Guomindang split: a leftist faction established its own army at a base in the central city of Wuhan, an agglomeration of Hankow and other cities, in the Yangtze basin, west of Shanghai. During the Northern Expedition, Chiang decided to advance eastward on Shanghai, against the urgings of Borodin. As his army stood outside the city, its Communist-influenced trade unions called a general strike and mobilized their pickets in their third bid to seize Shanghai from its warlord ruler. By the end of March 1927, 500,000 workers had walked out, in a city of nearly 3 million. The uprising in Shanghai was outside the “bloc within” policy; some local Chinese Communist leaders aimed to form a governing soviet. But the Comintern ordered the Communists in Shanghai to put away their weapons and not oppose Chiang’s army, which, as a result, entered Shanghai on April 1 unopposed. “Chiang Kai-shek is submitting to discipline,” Stalin told some 3,000 functionaries assembled in Moscow’s Hall of Columns in the House of Trade Unions on April 5. “Why make a coup d’etat? Why drive away the Right when we have the majority and the Right listens to us?” Stalin conceded that “Chiang Kai-shek has perhaps no sympathy for the revolution,” but added that the general was “leading the army and cannot do otherwise against the imperialists.” The right wing of the Guomindang, Stalin underscored, had “connections with the rich merchants and can raise money from them. So they have to be utilized to the end, squeezed out like a lemon, and then flung away.”164

Portents of disaster were everywhere, however. On April 6, 1927, at 11:00 a.m., crowds attacked the Soviet embassy in Peking and the metropolitan police, having solicited the consent of the wider foreign diplomatic corps, entered the Soviet compound and hauled off incriminating documents about Soviet-supported subversion in China.165 In Shanghai, meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek’s head of special services was arranging with the leading gangsters to mount an assault on the Reds. On April 12, irregulars recruited by the gangs as well as Guomindang forces smashed the Shanghai headquarters of the Chinese Communists. Over the next two days, in the pouring rain, they used machine guns and rifles to massacre Communists and labor activists in key Shanghai wards. Several hundred people were killed, perhaps more; thousands of rifles were confiscated from workers; and Communists were rounded up in house-to-house searches.166 The Comintern ordered workers in the city to avoid conflict with Chiang’s forces—who were slaughtering them. The order was not implemented, but it endured in infamy.167 Communist survivors fled to the countryside.

On April 13, a previously scheduled three-day Soviet Central Committee plenum opened in Moscow. Most of the nasty debate concerned the economy. But a Zinoviev ally proposed that a review of policy on the Chinese revolution be added to the agenda; Stalin kept interrupting him, but then promised discussion. Zinoviev then ambushed the plenum with fifty-plus pages of “theses” condemning Stalin’s mistakes on China, arguing that China was ripe for a socialist revolution and the Guomindang under Chiang Kai-shek were fated to become an antisocialist dictatorship such as Ataturk in Turkey, while China’s workers and peasants were being forced to fight the Guomindang with the equivalent of bamboo.168 Trotsky and Stalin, at the April 15 session, exchanged barbs over Chiang’s assault:

TROTSKY: So far, this matter has proceeded with your help.

STALIN (interrupting): With your help! . . .

TROTSKY: We did not advance Chiang, we did not send him our autographed portraits.

STALIN: Ha, ha, ha.

In fact, Chiang Kai-shek was an honorary member of the Comintern executive committee, and only a few days before his April 12 launch of attacks on Chinese Communists, the Bolshevik upper crust had received autographed photographs of him, distributed by the Comintern (soon letters would arrive requesting that the photos be returned).169 Stalin’s faction shouted out to suspend stenography of the plenum, which adjourned without answering the opposition’s charges. Stalin did permit Zinoviev’s theses to be appended to the minutes, but a secret circular from the Central Committee press department warned that the plenum had forbidden open discussion of events in China; at the same time, in several provincial party newspapers, articles appeared attempting to refute the opposition’s arguments about a debacle in China.170

In the terms of the Marxist-Leninist straitjacket, Chiang and the bourgeoisie had “betrayed” the Chinese revolution and thrown in their lot with the feudals and the latter’s imperialist paymasters. In fact, he had not succumbed to money interests: he was just anti-Communist. Chiang did allow Borodin and Blyukher to “escape,” and continued to seek Moscow’s good graces even after his massacre. And truth be told, for Stalin, the strong Guomindang army still seemed the best bet for the unification and stability in China. Chiang continued his drive northward, at great cost, to defeat the warlords and drive out the imperialists. On May Day 1927 Chiang’s portrait was carried through Red Square alongside those of Lenin, Stalin, and Marx. But Stalin was accused of standing by the “reactionary” bourgeois and betraying the Chinese revolution. Trotsky, who had made his first public criticisms of China policy only on March 31, 1927, began to argue, mostly retrospectively, that the USSR should have allowed Chinese Communists to exit from the bloc within and form soviets.171 But it had been only during the Nationalist Northern Expedition to overcome the warlords and unite China that the Chinese Communist party had belatedly become something of a national political force. Still, the opposition critique, even if belated and pie in the sky, highlighted how the bloc within, which had presupposed a Chinese Communist takeover from within, had instead permitted a Guomindang takeover. Thanks to the Soviet Union, the Guomindang had an army; the Chinese Communists did not. No Communist party cells existed in the Guomindang army until very late, and even then they were pathetic.172

Stalin had boasted that an eventual betrayal was built into the bloc within, and he was right—but he was not the one to do the betraying. Chiang Kai-shek had beat him to the punch and, in the meantime, Stalin was still wholly dependent on Chiang as the instrument against British influence (“imperialism”) in China.

Soviet foreign policy appeared trapped in a cul-de-sac of its own making. Chicherin, on extended medical leave on the French Riviera and in Germany, seeking treatment for his ailments, not all of them psychosomatic (diabetes, polyneuritis), wrote to Stalin and Rykov that Bukharin’s idiotic anti-German tirades in the Soviet press had done so much damage that “I am returning to Moscow in order to request that I be relieved of the foreign affairs commissariat position.”173 The more immediate worry, however, was Britain. On May 12, 1927, the British police in London began a massive four-day raid on the premises of the All-Russia Cooperative Society (at 49 Moorgate), which operated under British law; the same building housed the official Soviet trade mission offices. Safes and strongboxes were cracked open with pneumatic drills and documents hauled away.174 Cipher personnel were beaten and codes and cipher books confiscated; Lenin’s portrait was defaced.175 A similar incident several years earlier had severely damaged Soviet-German trade; this time, too, Moscow did not “show weakness.” On May 13, the politburo resolved to launch a belligerent press campaign and public demonstrations to assail Britain for warmongering.176

Around this time Japan declined renewed Soviet feelers for a non-aggression pact.177 As if this were not enough for Stalin to worry about, Chiang Kai-shek’s actions had breathed new life into Trotsky’s rants. “Stalin and Bukharin are betraying Bolshevism at its very core, its proletarian revolutionary internationalism,” Trotsky complained to Krupskaya (May 17, 1927). “The defeat of the German revolution in 1923, the defeats in Bulgaria and Estonia, the defeat of the [1926] general strike in England, and of the Chinese revolution in April have all seriously weakened international Communism.”178 The next day, the extended eighth plenum of the Comintern opened, with Stalin determined to have his line on China reconfirmed.179 In his speech on May 24, he ridiculed Trotsky, asserting that he “resembles an actor rather than a hero, and an actor should not be confused with a hero under any circumstances,” adding, in reference to the British prime minister, “There comes into being something like a united front from [Austen] Chamberlain to Trotsky.”180 Trotsky shot back: “Nothing has facilitated Chamberlain’s work as much as Stalin’s false policy, especially in China.”181

Stalin was on the back foot. The Comintern plenum, unsurprisingly, voted a resolution that “declares the proposals of the opposition (Trotsky, Zinoviev) to be plainly opportunist and capitulationist.”182 But on May 27, the conservative Tory government in Britain stunned the Soviet dictator by breaking off diplomatic relations.183 Stalin was infuriated: The imperialists gave refuge to anti-Soviet emigre organizations, financed anti-Soviet national undergrounds on Soviet soil (in Ukraine and the Caucasus), sent in swarms of agents, then got on their high horse about alleged subversion by the Comintern?! It was a blow, however. Britain had become one of the Soviet Union’s top trading partners.184 And it looked like the British conservatives might be ginning up their working class for a war against the Soviets. The Soviet press filled with warnings of imminent war and mass meetings were held to discuss war preparations, which unwittingly fanned defeatist talk.185 Stalin, knowing Britain was not preparing to invade, nonetheless was convinced the imperialists would incite proxies into fighting. Rykov appears to have believed the same.186 Britain was known to be busily building a broad anti-Soviet bloc out of Romania, Finland, and the Baltic states, while working to reconcile Germany and Poland.187

Under immense pressure, Stalin began an about-face on China, sending a long telegram on June 1, 1927, to the Comintern agents in Wuhan at the left Guomindang base, instructing them to form a revolutionary army of 50,000, to subject “reactionary” officers to military tribunal, to outlaw all contact with Chiang Kai-shek—the commander in chief of the existing army, to which all the soldiers and officers had sworn an oath—and to curb peasant “excesses.”188 There was no way to carry out such an order. Manabenda Rath Roy, a recipient, showed the telegram to the left Guomindang leader, who was already inclined to seek reconciliation with the right Guomindang at Nanjing, and now saw evidence of Moscow’s own treachery.189

TERRORISM

Notwithstanding the gravity of developments, on June 5, 1927, Stalin began his summer holiday in his beloved Sochi, this time at the grander dacha no. 7, known as Puzanovka, named for the former owner, on a bluff between Sochi and Matsesta. “When we doctors arrived at the dacha, Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva greeted us, a very dear and hospitable woman,” recalled Ivan Valedinsky. “That year I examined Stalin three times: before he began the course of Matsesta baths, during, and at the end. Just as in the previous year, Stalin complained of pain in the muscles of his extremities.” Stalin also underwent X-rays and an electrocardiogram. Nothing abnormal emerged. Even his blood pressure measured normal. “This examination generally showed that Stalin’s organism was fully healthy,” Valedinsky recalled. “We noted his jolly disposition and attentive, lively look.” The warm baths were followed by extended lounging naked, except for a wrap, to allow the blood to flow up to the skin, muscles, and extremities. “This therapeutic device brought warmth to Stalin’s hands and feet,” Valedinsky noted. Following the course of medicinal baths, Stalin invited Valedinsky and the other physicians on Saturday for a “brandy,” which lasted until the wee hours on Sunday. Early in the gathering, Vasya and Svetlana appeared on the terrace. “Iosif Vissarionovich was enlivened, began to play soldiers with them, fired at a target, in fact Stalin fired very accurately.”190

The day after Stalin began his holiday, a new law on counterrevolutionary crimes was incorporated into the RSFSR criminal code. Counterrevolutionary offenses were already sweepingly and vaguely defined but now they were expanded. Merely trying to “weaken,” not overthrow, the Soviet system became counterrevolution; “terrorist acts” against regime personnel or representatives of the workers’ movement were placed on a par with an armed uprising, incurring the death penalty; and the penalty for failure to report foreknowledge of a counterrevolutionary crime was raised from one to ten years.191 This was Stalin’s initiative, spurred by exposure of the OGPU double game to entrap emigres, known as the Trust, and a resulting attempt on June 3 by double agents who were forced by emigres to set off a bomb in Moscow at a OGPU dormitory (at Lesser Lubyanka, 3/6), which failed.192 But on June 7, a compartmentalized emigre terrorist outfit that was unknown to the OGPU did manage to detonate a bomb in Leningrad’s central party club at Moika Canal, 59, wounding at least twenty-six people; one died of the wounds. The three terrorists involved managed to get back to Finland.193 An even more spectacular terrorist act occurred that very same day on the platform of the Warsaw train station: a journalist for a Belorussian-language newspaper in independent Lithuania, Boris Koverda, shot the Soviet envoy to Poland, Pyotr Voikov. Émigre monarchists had had their eye on Voikov because he had been the chairman of the Ural soviet that had murdered the Romanovs.194 But how the nineteen-year-old son of an anti-Communist emigre evaded the plethora of uniformed and plainclothes police at the station remains mysterious; indeed, how Koverda knew Voikov would be at the station that morning remains mysterious as well.195 (Voikov was there to see off the Soviet diplomatic personnel passing through on their way to Moscow after their eviction from London.) The thirty-nine-year-old Voikov died an hour later in a Polish military hospital.

For Stalin, the suspicious assassination on Polish territory followed hard upon the British raid in London, the British-initiated break in relations, and the blowup in China, where Soviet policy was geared to denying a foothold to the imperialists. “I feel the hand of England,” he wrote on the back of a ciphered telegram from Molotov on June 8 regarding Voikov’s murder. “They want to provoke (us into) a conflict with Poland. They want to repeat Sarajevo.” Stalin recommended staging one or two trials of English spies, and in the meantime ordered that “all the prominent monarchists in our prisons and concentration camps should immediately be declared hostages,” with “five or ten” to be shot, accompanied by announcements in the press.196 Molotov had Stalin’s directive formulated as a politburo decree. That day the OGPU received additional extrajudicial powers, including the reintroduction of emergency tribunals, known as troikas, to expedite cases (formally approved only in some provinces to aid counterinsurgency operations).197 Molotov wrote back on June 9: “A few comrades hesitated over the necessity of publishing the government communique” on retaliatory repressions, “but now everyone agrees that it was time.”198 On the night of June 9–10, some twenty nobles, who had recently been arrested as part of a monarchist “organization,” were accused of plotting “terrorist acts” against Soviet leaders and executed without trial. Five were said to be agents of British intelligence.199 Party organizations mobilized meetings at hundreds of factories to affirm the executions, and workers were quoted approvingly: “Finally the Cheka got down to business.”200

“My personal opinion,” Stalin wrote from Sochi in a telegram to Mezynski: “the agents of London here are buried deeper than it seems, and they will still surface.” He wanted Artuzov, of counterintelligence, to publicize the arrests so as to smash the efforts of the British to recruit agents and to entice Soviet youth into the OGPU.201 In July, Pravda would report the executions of a group of “terrorist-White Guards” supposedly under the direction of a British spy in Leningrad.202 In Siberia, where not a single espionage case had been initiated in the second half of 1926, many were launched in 1927.203 Mezynski secretly reported to the politburo that the OGPU had conducted 20,000 house-to-house searches and arrested more than 9,000 people Union-wide.204 “A big black cloud, fear is suspended over the whole society and paralyzing everything,” a Swedish diplomat reported to Stockholm.205 Stalin’s mind and the country’s political atmosphere were melding.

EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES

Persistent war rumors incited runs on shops, hoarding, and boasts of refusals to fight or sabotage in the event of conflict that were fixed in the OGPU political mood reports, echoes of the regime’s deepest fears.206 Chicherin returned to Moscow from his extended medical holiday in Europe around June 15. “Everybody in Moscow was talking war,” he would tell the American foreign correspondent and Soviet sympathizer Louis Fischer. “I tried to dissuade them. ‘Nobody is planning to attack us,’ I insisted. Then a colleague enlightened me. He said, ‘Shh. We know that. But we need this against Trotsky.’”207 Chicherin’s efforts to defuse international tensions are understandable, but the war scare emerged directly out of the inbuilt structural paranoia of the revolution (capitalist encirclement) combined with the regime’s defiant foreign policy.208 Relations with the enemy (the capitalist powers) could never amount to more than expediency; internal critics, whatever their professed intentions, broadcast disunity, weakened an encircled USSR, and incited external enemies. And party officials, not all sufficiently schooled in Marxism-Leninism, were susceptible to siren songs.

When Stalin wrote to Molotov from Sochi (June 17) that “in order to strengthen the rear, we must restrain the opposition immediately,” he was not merely self-serving and not cynical.209 The struggle with Trotsky was now even more a matter of state security for him, even as it continued to be obsessively personal. After reviewing the transcript of a punitive Central Control Commission session, Stalin angrily wrote to Molotov (June 23) that “Zinoviev and Trotsky, not the commission members, did the interrogating and the accusing. It is odd that some of the commission members did not show. Where’s Sergo? Where has he gone and why is he hiding? Shame on him. . . . Will Trotsky and Zinoviev really be handed this ‘transcript’ to distribute! That’s all we need.”210

Orjonikidze, in fact, had been present: Trotsky had directed a long soliloquy partly at him. “I say that you are set on a course for the bureaucrat, for the functionary, but not for the masses,” he stated, through repeated interruptions. “The organization operates as a vast internal mutual support structure, mutual protection.”211 Orjonikidze nonetheless hesitated to bring down the hammer. He remarked of Zinoviev and Kamenev, “they have brought a good deal of benefit to our party.”212 The votes for and against expulsion were more or less evenly divided. Orjonikidze, Kalinin, and even Voroshilov argued that the matter of expulsion of opposition members from the Central Committee should be deferred to the upcoming Party Congress. Stalin insisted that his vote be counted in absentia, while Molotov got Kalinin to switch sides, providing the margin for expulsion.213 Orjonikidze, however, would substitute a reprimand instead. Trotsky told him all the same that “the extirpation of the opposition was only a matter of time.”214

Stalin found time to exchange letters from Sochi with a young schoolteacher, Serafim Pokrovsky (b. 1905), who had entered into a written argument with the dictator over whether party policy in 1917 had favored an alliance with the whole peasantry or just the poor peasantry. “When I began this correspondence with you I thought I was dealing with a man who was seeking the truth,” the dictator wrote testily on June 23, 1927, accusing the teacher of impudence. “One must possess the effrontery of an ignoramus and the self-complacency of a narrow-minded equilibrist to turn things upside down as unceremoniously as you do, esteemed Pokrovsky. I think the time has come to stop corresponding with you. I. Stalin.”215 Stalin hated to be contradicted on matters of theory.

The China debacle had the potential to dominate the upcoming 15th Party Congress, which is why Stalin pushed for expulsion beforehand. On June 27, Trotsky wrote to the Central Committee: “This is the worst crisis since the revolution.”216 Supporters of Stalin’s line clung to the left-wing Guomindang faction in Wuhan, where Communists held two portfolios (agriculture, labor), but that same day, Stalin wrote to Molotov, “I am afraid that Wuhan will lose its nerve and come under Nanjing” (i.e., Chiang Kai-shek). Still, Stalin held out hope: “We must insist adamantly on Wuhan not submitting to Nanjing while there is still an opportunity to insist. Losing Wuhan as a separate center means losing at least some center for the revolutionary movement, losing the possibility of free assembly and rallies for the workers, losing the possibility of the open existence of the Communist party, losing the possibility of an open revolutionary press—in a word, losing the possibility of openly organizing the proletariat and the revolution.” He proposed that Wuhan be bribed. “I assure you, it is worth giving Wuhan an extra 3–5 million.”217 But Molotov, uncharacteristically, had become panicky. “A single vote will wind up being decisive,” he wrote to Stalin on July 4. “I’m increasingly wondering whether you may need to come back to M[oscow] ahead of schedule.” Molotov tattled to Stalin that Voroshilov, the definition of a Stalin loyalist, “is going so far as to express sweeping disparagement of ‘your leadership over the past two years.’”218

Stalin had appointed the provincial party bosses who composed two thirds of the voting members of the Central Committee, but that body could still act against him if he manifestly failed to safeguard the revolution.219 And yet he showed a lack of alarm. “I’m sick and lying in bed so I’ll be brief,” he wrote to Molotov from Sochi sometime in early July 1927. “I could come for the plenum if it’s necessary and if you postpone it.” Then the left Guomindang Wuhan government disarmed the workers in its midst, which caught out Stalin a second time. Still, he continued to pose as nonplussed, writing on July 8, “We used the Wuhan leadership as much as possible. Now it’s time to discard them.” Was he delusional? “I am not afraid of the situation in the group [his faction]. Why—I’ll explain when I come.” But the next day, perhaps with the news sinking in, Stalin flashed anger, accusing Molotov and Bukharin of deceiving him (not providing the full bad news about Wuhan) and Voroshilov of seizing a pretext to stop sending defense commissariat funds to Wuhan. “I hear that some people are in a repentant mood regarding our policy in China,” he wrote on July 11. “When I come, I will try to prove that our policy was and remains the only correct policy.” By July 15, even as the Wuhan regime, too, unleashed a terror against the Communists, Stalin refused to admit mistakes. To do so would in effect be acknowledging that the demonized opposition had a point, that their policy views went beyond personal hatred for him and were not tantamount to treason. Stalin was contemplating making Trotsky disappear by sending him abroad to Japan, evidently as ambassador. But this would have handed Trotsky an opportunity to capitalize on Stalin’s failures in Asia policy and the dictator quickly forgot the idea.220 Still, Stalin was desperate to rid himself of his longtime nemesis.

ABOUT-FACE

Voroshilov in spring 1927 had reported grimly that existing Soviet industry just could not meet the needs of the Red Army even in rifles or machine guns, let alone advanced weapons.221 But knowing that fact hardly required a security clearance.222 “How can we compete with” the imperialists, one Red Army conscript was overheard to say, according to a secret police report. “They have battleships, planes, cannons, and we have nothing.”223 Small wonder that in July 1927, with Stalin still in Sochi, Unszlicht traveled yet again to Berlin to try to win an agreement for joint industrial production, telling the Germans the USSR expected to be attacked by Poland and Romania. The Soviet proposals had grown to staggering scale, and the Germans were wary. The break in British-Soviet relations had sparked an internal debate in the German foreign ministry over, as one participant wrote, “whether Germany’s ties with Russia are worth enough to our present and future political interests so that it pays to assume the political expenses and risks involved in maintaining them.” Some Germans sensed desperation. “The Soviet government is reckoning with a catastrophe in the near future,” a usually sympathetic Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, Germany’s ambassador to Moscow, reported.224 Berlin demurred on Unszlicht’s proposals. Germany had emerged as one of the USSR’s two top trading partners (the other being Britain), a circumstance analogous to tsarist times, but this was far below Soviet desiderata, and politically, Moscow proved unable to pry Berlin from London and Paris. The Soviets could not afford to see bilateral relations with Germany come wholly unglued, too, however.225 And Stalin, even now, would not give up on German help for Soviet military industry. Still, the party press lashed out at Germany.

Stalin returned from holiday early, reaching Moscow on Saturday, July 23.226 The plenum was scheduled to open six days later. On its eve, July 28, Pravda published a long-winded attack by Stalin on the opposition at this time of peril. “It is hardly open to doubt that the basic question of the present is the question of the threat of a new imperialist war,” he noted. “It is not a matter of some undefined and intangible ‘danger’ of a new war. It is a matter of a real and genuine threat of a new war in general and of a war against the USSR in particular . . . there is a struggle for consumer markets, for capital export markets, for seas and dry routes to these markets, for a new division of the world.” What held the imperialists back, he averred, was fear of mutual weakening, in the face of the revolutionary possibilities represented by the Soviet Union and the international proletariat. “Soviet people will never forget the rape, looting, and military incursions that our country suffered just a few years ago thanks to the kindness of English capital,” Stalin continued. “But the English bourgeoisie does not love to fight with its own hands. It always preferred to conduct a war with others’ hands,” finding useful idiots to “pull its chestnuts out of the fire.” Accordingly, he concluded, “our mission is to strengthen the rear and cleanse it of dross, including ‘nobleman’ terrorists and incendiaries who set fire to our mills and factories, because the defense of our country is impossible without a strong, revolutionary rear.” The British, Stalin asserted, were subsidizing an anti-Soviet underground, in Ukraine and the Caucasus, Leningrad and Moscow, financing “bands of spies and terrorists, who blow up bridges, set fire to factories, and commit acts of terrorism against USSR ambassadors.”227 That was the context in which to view the opposition.

At the plenum, Molotov accused Trotsky and Kamenev of disorganizing the country’s rear while the external enemy marshaled troops, and stated that such people “should be imprisoned.” Voroshilov gave the sharpest speech, turning at one point to Zinoviev to state, “You know absolutely nothing.” Trotsky immediately reacted: “This is the one correct thing you can say about yourself.” Trotsky accused Voroshilov of having participated in the demotion of military men who were superior to himself (Primakov, Putna). Voroshilov replied that Trotsky had executed Communists during the civil war. Trotsky: Voroshilov “lies like a dishonorable scoundrel.” Voroshilov: “You are the scoundrel and the self-styled enemy of our party.”228 And so it went, for days on end. Thirteen members of the Central Committee submitted an “opposition platform” they wanted discussed at the upcoming 15th Party Congress, but Adolf Joffe and others in the opposition objected that the document had been issued without consultation among themselves, behavior resembling the very “apparatus” Trotsky had long criticized.229 Despite Stalin’s vehement insistence that Zinoviev and Trotsky be expelled for factional activity, the plenum accepted the proposal of Orjonikidze, head of the party Central Control Commission, whereby the pair were allowed to declare their loyalty and remain.

China policy remained the greatest thorn in Stalin’s side. In late July, Pravda had stated, “The slogan of [forming] soviets is correct now.”230 The Comintern now authorized a series of armed actions in China, what would be called the autumn harvest uprisings. Trotsky’s critique that Stalin had assumed the bourgeoisie in China could lead a revolution when it was counterrevolutionary stung. In his speech to the joint plenum, Stalin had denied that he had instructed the Chinese Communists to kowtow to the Guomindang or to restrain the peasants from agrarian struggle.231 During the Moscow plenum, on August 7, the Chinese Communists met in emergency session in Hankow; Stalin had dispatched the Georgian Communist and Youth League functionary Beso Lominadze to rescue the situation. Bukharin had wired instructions to criticize the Chinese Communist leadership for “opportunistic mistakes.” The whole thing was a terrible muddle: the outgoing Chinese Central Committee was accused of failing to anticipate the Guomindang betrayal in a bloc within that these same Chinese Communists had detested but been forced into by Moscow; the Chinese Communists who had not been allowed by Moscow to form soviets were accused themselves of having disarmed the workers and peasants. Strangest of all, the Chinese Communists’ annihilation by the Guomindang was said to have accelerated the bourgeois-democratic stage of the Chinese revolution.

The decimated Chinese party now had to prepare for suicidal mass insurrections.232 The Soviet politburo—which no longer included Zinoviev, Kamenev, or Trotsky—quietly directed the Comintern to smuggle $300,000 in hard currency to the Chinese Communists, and Stalin ordered a shipment of 15,000 guns and 10 million cartridges.233 As Mao Zedong (b. 1893) observed at the Hankow session presided over by Lominadze, “power comes from the barrel of a gun.” But the Guomindang, thanks to Stalin, still had far more of them.

THEATER OF THE ABSURD

Shortages had become endemic and the rift in the understanding of socialism between the masses, for whom it meant freedom, abundance, and social justice, and the party regime, for whom it meant tighter political control and sacrifices for industrialization, filled police surveillance reports. “We need butter, not socialism,” workers at Leningrad’s Putilov factory demanded on September 6.234 Two days later, a joint session of the politburo and Central Control Commission presidium was held in connection with the opposition’s plan to submit its own “platform” to the upcoming Party Congress. Trotsky and Zinoviev were summoned to the politburo from which they had been expelled. Zinoviev pointed out that at the party plenum, when Kamenev had suggested they would introduce a platform, no one had objected but now it was denounced as a criminal act. After Zinoviev and his former minion Uglanov got into a shouting match and Stalin interrupted again, Zinoviev said to him, “Everything bad that you could do to us you’ve already done.” Molotov bitingly asked Zinoviev if he and Kamenev had been “brave in October 1917?” Zinoviev reminded them that not just Trotsky but Bukharin had opposed Brest-Litovsk in 1918, to which Kaganovich interjected, “Bukharin will not repeat his mistakes.” Nikolai Muralov, the Trotsky supporter, called the resolution condemning the opposition for its platform a feuilleton and challenged them to allow all party members to read the platform and decide for themselves. “Mothers come [to party meetings] with babies and the sound of the reader is interrupted by the sound of the baby sucking at the breast,” he noted. “Babies with their mother’s milk suck in this hatred of the opposition.” Bukharin blamed the victims: “I consider that it is the party that is subjected to systematic attacks and aggression by the opposition.” Zinoviev: “You are not the party.” Bukharin: “Thieves always shout, ‘Catch the thief!’ Zinoviev is always doing this. (Commotion in the hall. Chairman rings the bell. Inaudible exclamation from Zinoviev.)”235

Trotsky showed that he, too, could be vicious. When the Stalin loyalist Avel Yenukidze was given the floor, Trotsky interrupted to point out that in 1917 Yenukidze “had been arguing against the Bolsheviks when I pulled you into the party.” After Trotsky persisted, Yenukidze exploded: “Look, I have been in the party since its formation and was a Bolshevik 14 years earlier than you.” Later in the meeting, when Rudzutaks took the floor, Trotsky interrupted to point out that behind his back Stalin expressed a low opinion of his administrative abilities. “You saw that in your dreams,” Stalin cut in. Rudzutaks responded: “I know you, comrade Trotsky. You specialize in slandering people. . . . You have forgotten the famous telephone that Stalin allegedly installed in your apartment. You have been like a little boy or a school pupil telling lies [about wiretapping] and refused to allow a technical inspection.” Trotsky: “That the telephones are eavesdropped is a fact.” When Bukharin spoke, Trotsky interrupted as well, stating that Bukharin had wanted to arrest Lenin during the 1918 Brest-Litovsk negotiations with Germany. “Wonderful,” Bukharin responded. “You say that that time was ideal, that during the Brest Treaty there was wide discussion and freedom of factions. And we consider that a crime.”236 Trotsky got the floor and went after Stalin, too, bringing up civil war episodes. “Lenin and I twice removed him from the Red Army when he conducted an incorrect policy,” Trotsky stated. “We removed him from Tsaritsyn, then from the southern front, where he conducted an incorrect policy.” When Stalin interrupted, Trotsky referred to a document he possessed from Lenin: “Lenin writes that Stalin is wrong to speak against the supreme commander, he carps, is capricious. This happened!” Stalin interrupted again. “Comrade Stalin, do not interrupt, you will have the last word, as always.” Stalin: “And why not.”237

When Stalin took the floor, he denied he had been twice removed from the front, alleging it was Trotsky who had been recalled, prompting Trotsky to interrupt him. Stalin: “You speak untruths, because you are a pathetic coward, afraid of the truth.” Trotsky: “You put yourself in a laughable situation.” When Trotsky pointed out that because the party had made and kept him the head of the Red Army during the civil war, Stalin was effectively slandering the party. “You’re a pathetic person,” Stalin said again, “bereft of an elemental feeling of truth, a coward and bankrupt, impudent and despicable, allowing yourself to speak things that utterly do not correspond to reality.” Trotsky: “That’s Stalin in entirety: rude and disloyal. Who is it, a leader or a huckster.” Stalin’s allotted time ran out, and Trotsky proposed he be given five more minutes. Stalin: “Comrade Trotsky demands equality between the Central Committee, which carries out the decisions of the party, and the opposition, which undermines these decisions. A strange business! In the name of what organization do you have the right to speak so insolently with the party?” When Zinoviev responded that before a congress party members had the right to speak, Stalin threatened to “cleave” them from the party. Zinoviev: “Don’t cleave, don’t threaten please.” Stalin: “They say that under Lenin the regime was different, that under Lenin oppositionists were not thrown out to other locales, not exiled and so on. You have a weak memory, comrades from the opposition. Don’t you recall that Lenin suggested exiling Trotsky to Ukraine? Comrade Zinoviev, is this true or not? Why are you silent?” Zinoviev: “I am not under interrogation. (Laughter, noise, the bell of the session chairman.)”238

And then, out it leapt again. Trotsky: “And you hide Lenin’s Testament? Lenin in his Testament revealed everything about Stalin. There is nothing to add or subtract.” Stalin: “You lie if you assert that anyone is concealing the Testament of Lenin. You know well that it is known to all the party. You know also, as does the party, that Lenin’s Testament demolishes you, the current leader of the opposition. . . . You are pathetic, without any sense of truth, a coward, a bankrupt, insolent and impudent, who allows himself to speak of things utterly at variance with reality.”239

One wonders why Stalin subjected himself to this exchange by summoning Trotsky and Zinoviev to the politburo. The politburo resolution, once again, called the opposition platform an effort “to create a Trotskyite party, in place of the Leninist party.”240 To Zinoviev’s repeated requests to publish their platform, Stalin’s answer was patently feeble: “We are not prepared to turn the party into a discussion club.”241

The next day, September 9, 1927, Stalin received a delegation of American worker representatives. They wanted to know whether Lenin had revised Marxism in some way, whether the Communist party controlled the Soviet government and trade unions, how they knew whether the Communists had mass support in the absence of party competition. “The delegation apparently does not object to the proletariat of the USSR depriving the bourgeoisie and the landlords of their factories and workshops, of their land and railroads, banks and mines (laughter), but it seems to me that the delegation is somewhat surprised that the proletariat did not limit itself to this, but went further and deprived the bourgeoisie of political rights,” Stalin responded, challenging them: “Does the bourgeoisie in Western countries, where they are in power, show the slightest magnanimity towards the working class? Do they not drive genuine revolutionary parties of the working class underground? Why should the proletariat of the USSR be called upon to show magnanimity towards their class enemy? You must be logical.” The Americans also asked about the differences between Stalin and Trotsky. Stalin answered that the differences were not personal and had been outlined in publications.242

On September 12, Trotsky departed for a rest in the Caucasus, but that very evening Stalin sprung a nasty surprise on him. The opposition had decided to distribute their platform for the upcoming Party Congress without permission and a few of them secretly had it typed out with carbon copies, but OGPU informants and provocateurs had infiltrated the group and, on the night of September 12–13, raided the “underground printing press.”243 One of those involved had been an officer under Baron Wrangel, a “White Guard” connection with military officer status, which facilitated insinuations of a planned putsch.244 Another of those caught in the “printing press” scandal conveniently “confessed” that his intention had been a military coup, along the lines of Piłsudski in Poland. Stalin had the central apparatus distribute multiple copies of these OGPU materials on September 22 for a meeting of the politburo and the Central Control Commission, after which the “confessions” were sent to all Central Committee members, the Comintern executive committee, and provincial party secretaries.245 Some members of the Central Committee would remain unconvinced about accusations of a military coup, despite arrests having been made.246 Moreover, as Mezynski and then even Stalin would admit, the White Guard officer was the OGPU informant.247

Trotsky interrupted his southern retreat and returned to Moscow to combat the provocation, but what awaited him was a Comintern executive session on September 27, at which the Stalin-appointed goons of all the foreign Communist parties verbally eviscerated and then expelled him from that body. Bukharin, without irony, said to Trotsky’s face: “For you there is no Communist International, there is Stalin, or at most Stalin and Bukharin, and the rest are hirelings.” Stalin summarized that “the speakers today have spoken so well, especially comrade Bukharin, that there is nothing for me to add,” to which Trotsky interjected, “You’re lying.” Stalin: “Keep your strong words to yourself. You are discrediting yourself with this abuse. You’re a Menshevik!” Only Voja Vujović, the Yugoslav who headed the Communist Youth International, sided with Trotsky, and he, too, was expelled.248 In late September, Pravda reported on a case of unmasked “monarchist-terrorists” directed by British and Latvian intelligence services: here was the new meme.249 Soviet military advisers, led by Vasily Blyukher, returned from China, having had a firsthand look at what could happen to a supposedly revolutionary struggle that had been bungled—seizure by a military figure, like Chiang Kai-shek.250 After Chinese Communist army units had begun to conduct guerrilla actions against the Guomindang, Stalin formally shifted policy away from supporting the “bourgeois” phase of the revolution. Pravda in an editorial (September 30, 1927) welcomed the establishment of a “revolutionary army of Chinese workers and peasants.” This looked like an unacknowledged embrace of the defeated opposition line.251 What effect it might have in China, if any, remained to be seen.

FRANCO-SOVIET RIFT

Sergei Witte, as tsarist finance minister, had financed Russia’s 1890s industrial boom (Western machinery imports) by means of foreign borrowing (long-term loans), which he paid for on the backs of the peasantry (grain exports), and which was undergirded by a political alliance with France (the main supplier of credits), but in 1918 the Bolsheviks had repudiated tsarist-era debts, making propaganda out of necessity (an inability to pay).252 Subsequently, in nearly every negotiation with the capitalist powers, the need to make good on those debts came up. From 1926, Moscow had entered secret negotiations with Paris offering to pay an indemnity of 60 million gold francs (approximately $12 million) each year for sixty-two consecutive years, in exchange for $250 million in credits now. France’s government was keen on bondholder compensation, sale of French capital goods, and imports of Soviet oil, but not on using taxpayer money to finance a Communist regime. French conservatives raised hell. After the French coalition government fell for unrelated reasons, its successor added a demand for compensation of French owners of property in Russia that had been nationalized. In April 1927, French counterintelligence, in a widely reported sensation, rolled up more than 100 Soviet military intelligence agents whose handlers had relied on French Communists, who, of course, were under close police surveillance. “Documents found,” the French authorities stated, “show that there is in existence a vast espionage organization, far greater than any discovered since the war.”253 Such was the fraught state of play when scandal erupted over the Soviet envoy to Paris, Cristian Rakovski, who had written a short book on the statesman Prince Klemens von Metternich but had obtained the ambassadorship, a form of exile, for supporting Trotsky.254

While back in Moscow for consultations in August 1927, Rakovski had signed an opposition declaration that summoned “every honest proletarian of a capitalist country” to “work actively for the defeat of his government” and “every foreign soldier who does not wish to serve the slave masters of his country to cross over to the Red Army.”255 Usually, ambassadors do not publicly call for mass treason among their hosts. But the act went well beyond Rakovski’s personal foibles to the heart of the Soviet foreign policy’s pretzel logic—simultaneously participating in and working to overthrow the capitalist world order.256

Rakovski quickly disavowed the applicability to France of his summons to treason (it still applied everywhere else), and promised a mutual “non-interference” pact, but French opponents of rapprochement fulminated. “Does a house guest promise not to steal the silverware?” the press asked.257 In September 1927, trying to rescue the situation, the Soviets went so far as to propose a full-fledged non-aggression pact, just shy of an alliance, and even informed the Soviet public of the offer to pay large sums to private French holders of tsarist bonds. “We buy the possibility of peaceful economic relations with one of the capitalist countries in Europe, and France sells us this possibility,” Pravda explained.258 But nothing worked. Rakovski was declared persona non grata and, in mid-October, he got in his car and drove back to the USSR.259 Moscow had vigorously supported its representative while he was in Paris, but at home promptly expelled him from the party for Trotskyism. “The French expelled me from Paris for having signed a declaration of the opposition,” Rakovski, wearing a smart Western sports jacket, explained to the French writer Pierre Naville. “Stalin expelled me from the foreign affairs commissariat for having signed the same declaration. But in both cases they let me keep the jacket.”260 (Upon return, Soviet diplomats were required to hand over all goods acquired while abroad, except clothing.) The protracted Franco-Soviet negotiations collapsed. France stopped short of severing diplomatic relations, unlike Britain, and a replacement Soviet ambassador would arrive in Paris, but prospects remained dim for a credit agreement, let alone a Franco-Soviet pact.

FINAL FACE-TO-FACE

The nasty September 1927 politburo confrontation was repeated at a joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission that took place October 21 to 23. Trotsky, in response to a proposed resolution to expel him as well as Zinoviev from the Central Committee, quoted Lenin’s Testament, “Remove Stalin, who may carry the party to a split and to ruin.” Stalin loyalists shouted him down: “Liar,” “Traitor,” Scum,” and of course “Grave Digger of the Revolution.” Trotsky stretched out one arm and read his text through the insults. “First a word about the so-called Trotskyism,” he said. “The falsification factory is working at full steam and around the clock to construct ‘Trotskyism.’” He added: “The rudeness and disloyalty about which Lenin wrote are no longer simply personal qualities; they have become the hallmark of the leading faction, they have become its policy and its regime.”261 He was right. When Trotsky revealed that the former Wrangel officer associated with the opposition “printing press” was in fact an OGPU agent, someone shouted, “This is outside the meeting agenda.” Kaganovich called out, “Menshevik! Counterrevolutionary!” The chairman of the session rang and rang the bell.262 One person threw a doorstop volume of economic statistics at Trotsky; another flung a glass of water (just as the right-wing Purishkevich had done at liberal constitutionalist Miliukov in the tsarist Duma). The stenographer recorded the following: “Renewed whistling. A constantly increasing commotion. Nothing can be heard. The chairman calls for order. More whistling. Shouts of ‘Get down from the dais.’ The chairman adjourns the session. Comrade Trotsky continues to read his speech, but not a single word can be heard. The members of the plenum quit their seats and begin to file out of the hall.”263

Stalin had prepared thoroughly. He opened his speech on October 23 with his by now customary self-pity: the opposition was cursing him. “Anyway what is Stalin, Stalin is a little person. Take Lenin. Who does not know that the opposition, headed by Trotsky, during the August bloc, conducted a hooligan campaign against Lenin.” He then read Trotsky’s infamous private letter from 1913 to Karlo Chkheidze denouncing Lenin. “Such language, what language, pay attention, comrades. This is Trotsky writing. And he’s writing about Lenin. Can one be surprised that Trotsky, who so unceremoniously treats of the great Lenin, whose boot he is not worthy of, could now vainly curse one of the many pupils of Lenin—comrade Stalin.”

Mezynski had spoken about the opposition’s criminal activity, citing the testimony of the arrested Wrangel officer as well as non-party intelligentsia about the opposition’s illegal printing press and their “bloc” with the anti-Soviet elements, and Stalin referred back to Mezynski: “Why was it necessary to have comrade Mezynski speak about White Guards, with whom some workers of the illegal antiparty printing press were associated? In order to dispel the lie and slander that the opposition is spreading in its antiparty leaflets on this question. . . . What are the takeaways of comrade Mezynski’s report? The opposition, in organizing an illegal printing press, tied itself to the bourgeois intelligentsia, and a part of this intelligentsia, in turn, proved to be connected with the White Guards contemplating a military plot.”

Stalin turned to the Testament, reminding everyone that it had been read out to the delegates at the Party Congress, and that Trotsky had published a repudiation of Eastman’s claim that the Testament had been concealed. He read from Trotsky’s own 1925 repudiation: “Clear, it would seem? Trotsky wrote this.” Stalin then read aloud the damning Testament passages about Zinoviev and Kamenev and Trotsky. “Clear, it seems.” He commented that “in reality, Lenin in his ‘testament’ accuses Trotsky of ‘non-Bolshevism,’ and in connection with Kamenev and Zinoviev during October says that their mistake was not an ‘accident.’ What does this mean? It means that politically one can trust neither Trotsky . . . nor Kamenev and Zinoviev.” Then Stalin read the Testament passage about himself. “This is completely true. Yes, I’m rude, comrades, in connection with those who rudely and treacherously destroy and split the party. I did not and do not hide this.” Stalin’s rudeness was in service to the cause. His rudeness was zeal. As for the Testament’s call for his removal, “At the first Central Committee plenum after the 13th Party Congress I asked to be released from my duties as general secretary. The congress itself discussed this question. Each delegation discussed this question, and all delegations, unanimously, including Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, obliged Stalin to remain at this post. What could I do? Desert my post? That is not in my nature. I have never deserted any post, and I have no right to do so. When the party imposes an obligation upon me, I must obey. One year later, I again submitted my resignation to the plenum, but again they obliged me to remain.”264 Yes they had: as ever, the loyal, humble servant. When Stalin asked if the time had not come to acquiesce to the many comrades demanding the expulsion of Zinoviev and Trotsky from the Central Committee, those present erupted in ovation. Pravda would publish Trotsky’s speech, in garbled form. The same day it would also publish Stalin’s, including the passages he had read aloud about himself from Lenin’s Testament.265

Stalin and Trotsky’s first direct confrontation at a party forum had been exactly four years earlier; October 23, 1927, would turn out to be the last time they saw each other. The next day, handed a copy of the “transcript” with the right to make corrections or additions, as per party policy, Trotsky complained: “The minutes do not show . . . a glass was thrown at me from the presidium. . . . They do not show that one of the participants tried to drag me off the podium by my arm. . . . While I was speaking Comrade Yaroslavsky threw a book of statistics at me . . . employing methods that cannot be called anything but those of fascist hooligans.”266

Hundreds of regime personnel, from regional party bosses to military men and ambassadors abroad, were shown the transcripts of such meetings. These officials, in turn, were to discuss the contents with subordinates, for the transcripts were meant to be didactic. But what could officials trying to clothe and feed the workers, coax the peasants to sell grain, or defend Soviet interests abroad make of the substance of these top-level meetings? Who was running the country? Of course, whatever thoughts officials might have had, given the webs of mutual surveillance and the hyper-suspicious atmosphere Stalin increasingly accentuated, they had to be careful not to express them. The plenum, meanwhile, had approved resolutions at Stalin’s behest calling for “a more decisive offensive against the kulak” as well as “the possibility of a transition to a further, more systematic and persistent restriction on the kulak and private trader.”267 The 1926–27 harvest had come in lower than 1925–26 by several million tons as a result of poor weather, which caused crop failures in some regions. Worse, that October 1927 saw a sharp drop in grain procurements to less than half the amount taken in by this time the previous year. Peasants were diverting grain to fodder for livestock and dairy farming, both of which yielded higher prices, but they were also hoarding grain stocks amid the uncertainty of the war scare. They had enough money on hand to pay their taxes and to wait for agricultural prices to rise. Without more grain, the regime faced possible starvation in the northern cities and in the Red Army by spring. The main journal for trade predicted in October 1927 that “a regulated distribution, rationing, extended to the entire population” might be necessary.268

TENTH ANNIVERSARY: PRETEXT FOR REPRESSION

Stalin had advanced the theory that because the opposition’s actions demonstrated internal disunity and weakness, they were objectively traitors, willy-nilly inviting foreign intervention, but now a new and sinister twist was added. On November 1, 1927, Molotov, in Pravda, called the opposition’s “persecution” of Stalin a mask for malicious attacks against the party. “To exacerbate the struggle by personal attacks and denunciations against individuals,” he wrote, with no sense of irony, “may serve as a direct incitement to criminal terroristic designs against party leaders.” This article might have been the first denunciation of the party opposition as would-be assassins. Further channeling Stalin, Molotov added on November 5, also in Pravda, that “a certain Left SR odor exudes from the opposition cesspit.”269 The Left SRs, in the Bolshevik narrative, were coup plotters.

That same day, as the revolution’s tenth anniversary approached, Stalin received an eighty-person delegation of sympathetic foreigners from multiple countries, only to have them question him about Soviet secret police powers. He defended the OGPU as “more or less equivalent to the Committee of Public Safety created during the Great French Revolution,” in words carried by Pravda, and suggested that the foreign bourgeoisie was engaged in slandering the Soviet secret police. “From the point of view of the internal situation, the state of the revolution is secure and unwavering, so we could get by without the OGPU,” he allowed, but added that “we are a country surrounded by capitalist states. The internal enemies of our revolution are agents of the capitalists of all countries. The capitalist states offer a base and a rear for the internal enemies of our country. Battling against internal enemies, it turns out we are conducting a struggle against the counterrevolutionary elements of all countries. Judge for yourself whether we could get by without punitive organs along the lines of an OGPU in such conditions.” The foreigners were said to have applauded vigorously.270

The political regime had tightened appreciably. When Kamenev and Rakovski attempted to address the Moscow party organization, they were shouted down. The orchestrated vote against them was reported as 2,500 to 1.271 That was the context in which, on November 7, 1927, the revolution’s tenth anniversary, Stalin and the rest of the leadership ascended the cube mausoleum at 10:00 a.m. for the annual parade. Film cameras were rolling as first the Red Army units and then workers from the biggest factories marched by in prearranged columns. Inner Moscow was an armed camp, in anticipation that the opposition would try to mount a counterdemonstration on and close by Red Square. Opposition marchers that day were not numerous, and Stalin and the OGPU had readied plainclothes operatives and others to pounce on any opposition banner or speech. A few oppositionists who marched in the ranks with their work collectives tried to hoist portraits of Trotsky as well as Lenin. Some of them briefly managed to disrupt the official proceedings on Red Square, in a corner of the large public space, with impromptu speeches and banners (“Down with the Kulak, the NEPman, and the Bureaucrat!”). But vigilantes guided by plainclothes OGPU officers pummeled and took them into custody.272 How many marchers knew what was happening remains uncertain. No non-regime newspapers existed to broadcast the opposition’s actions.273 Trotsky and Kamenev toured Moscow’s streets by motor car, but on a side street near Revolution Square, they were greeted by disapproving whistles; shots were fired into the air. Regime vigilantes smashed the vehicle’s windows.274 That night Stalin previewed Sergei Eisenstein’s film October about 1917, and forced him to remove the frames depicting Trotsky and to make alterations in the portrayal of Lenin (“Lenin’s liberalism is not timely”).275

In China, the Guomindang picked this Red holiday to raid the Soviet consulate in Shanghai; a week later, the government in Nanjing would sever diplomatic relations. In Moscow, Stalin moved quickly to capitalize on the opposition’s quixotic counterdemonstrations, which empowered him to press his repression of the party opposition over the objections of others in the inner regime. At a joint plenum of the Central Committee and party Control Commission on November 14, 1927, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party for incitement to counterrevolution; Kamenev, Rakovski, and others were ejected from the Central Committee.276 The next day friends helped Trotsky move out of his Kremlin apartment, settling him in with a supporter just outside the Kremlin walls on nearby Granovsky.277 Beginning on November 16, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, and others were evicted from the Kremlin. The citadel was soon completely closed to non-regime personnel, and tourism was discontinued.278

Later that night, in the wee hours of the next morning, Adolf Joffe, the Soviet diplomat, shot himself. Joffe’s wife, Maria, who worked at the editorial offices of the newspaper Signal, took the call. He had been bedridden with polyneuritis contracted in Japan and although he had previously gone to Austria for medical treatment, more recently the politburo had refused his request to finance treatment in Germany; when Joffe offered to pay for the trip himself, Stalin still refused to let him go. Joffe had known Trotsky since 1910, had joined the Bolsheviks with him in summer 1917, and had signed the telegram, in Lenin’s name, appointing Trotsky war commissar. Joffe left a ten-page suicide note, the thrust of which was “Thermidor has begun,” which Maria Joffe passed through trusted intermediaries to Trotsky.279 “My death is the protest of a fighter who has been brought to such a state that he cannot in any way react to such a disgrace,” Joffe wrote, adding about Trotsky, “you were always right and you always retreated. . . . I always thought that you did not have enough Leninist immovable obstinacy, his readiness to remain even alone on the path he chose in the creation of a future majority, a future recognition of the correctness of the path.”280

Funerals of comrades lost in the struggle had been a sacred ritual of the old revolutionary underground, but this was now under their own regime. Joffe’s interment took place on November 19, drawing a sizable crowd on a workday. Chicherin, Litvinov, and Karakhan of the foreign affairs commissariat, as well as Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Lashevich of the opposition accompanied the cortege to the Novodevichy Cemetery, a place of honor second only to the Kremlin Wall. “The composition of the funeral demonstration also made one stop and think, for there were no workers in it,” one eyewitness recalled. “The United opposition had no proletarian support.”281 Among the many eulogies, Trotsky spoke last, and briefly. “The struggle continues,” he stated. “Everyone remains at his post. Let nobody leave.” These words proved to be his last public speech in the Soviet Union. The crowd surrounded Trotsky, blocking his exit for a long time, trying to transform the funeral into a political demonstration. But they were dispersed.282 That same evening, in a letter from Rykov, Trotsky was relieved of his last official administrative post (chairman of the foreign concessions committee).283

The next day, Rykov spoke at the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party of Ukraine and complained of the opposition’s usage of the terms “Stalin the Dictator,” “Stalinist methods.” “All this is an evil and vile slander against the entire party and against comrade Stalin,” Rykov stated, adding that in the politburo “not a single question is decided unilaterally by one member.”284 His statement was both true and false. In the politburo, which Rykov had joined the same day Stalin became general secretary, Rykov was a core member of a solid majority. But as he knew better than almost anyone, Stalin predecided a great deal outside the politburo—on Old Square, at his Kremlin apartment, at his Sochi dacha, over the phone with the OGPU.

15TH PARTY CONGRESS (DECEMBER 2–19, 1927)

The 15th Party Congress was the largest party forum yet with 1,669 delegates (898 voting). Trotsky and Zinoviev were not among them. The opposition lacked even a single voting delegate.285 After the ceremonial opening, Stalin delivered the main political report for only the second time as general secretary. At the mere announcement of his name the delegates erupted (“stormy, prolonged applause; an ovation of the entire hall, shouts of ‘Hurrah’”). “Our country, comrades, exists and develops in a condition of capitalist encirclement,” he began. “Its external position depends not only on its internal forces but also on the state of this capitalist encirclement, on the condition of the capitalist countries that encircle our country, on their strengths and weaknesses, on the strengths and weaknesses of the oppressed classes of the whole world.” Accordingly, he presented a detailed assessment of the world economy, trade, and external markets, and what he called the preparations for a new imperialist war to redivide global spoils. “We have all the signs of the most profound crisis and growing instability of world capitalism,” he concluded, calling the capitalist stabilization “more and more rotten,” and anticolonial movements and worker movements “growing.” Stalin then analyzed the USSR’s economic development, in industry and agriculture, the expansion of the working class, the rise in the country’s overall cultural level, concluding, “Soviet power is the most stable power of any in the world. (Stormy applause.)”286 After a break for lunch, Stalin returned to the dais and went into high dudgeon over the opposition. Altogether, he spoke for four hours.

The day of Stalin’s report (December 3), Kamenev submitted a petition with the names of 121 oppositionists who were slated for expulsion but promised to abide by party decisions.287 Stalin mocked them and, as Zinoviev had once demanded of Trotsky, demanded of them: “They must renounce their anti-Bolshevik views openly and honestly, before the whole world. They must openly and honestly, before the whole world, brand the mistakes they committed, mistakes that became crimes before the party. Either that or they can leave the party. And if they don’t leave, we’ll kick them out!” Pandemonium.288 During the discussion, the few members of the opposition given the floor, such as Grigory Yevdokimov and Nikolai Muralov, were jeered relentlessly, then, after they left the dais, verbally smeared. “No confidence can be placed in these deceivers of the party,” intoned Kuzma Ryndin, a delegate from Chelyabinsk (and the future party boss there). “Enough of this mockery of the party: the party and the proletariat will not stand for it. . . . All those who want to prevent us from working—out of the party with them!” Filipp Goloshchokin stated: “If we pussyfoot around with the opposition, we’ll be cutting our own throats.” When Kamenev observed that opposition members had been imprisoned for their political views, Rykov responded, “despite the situation the opposition has tried to create, there are only a few in prison. I do not think I can give assurances that the prison population will not have to be increased somewhat in the near future. (Voices from the floor: ‘Correct!’).”289

Kamenev had been allowed to attend as a non-voting delegate, and his remarks, again, were memorable, though utterly different from two years earlier when he had denied Stalin’s ability to unite the party. “Before us stands the question of choosing one of two roads,” Kamenev now explained, through near constant interruptions and accusations of Trotskyism, lying, and worse. “One of these roads is a second party. This road, under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is ruinous for the revolution. This is the road of political and class degeneration. This road is forbidden to us, excluded by the whole system of our views, by all the teachings of Lenin. . . . There remains, therefore, the second road . . . to submit completely and fully to the party. We choose this road for we are profoundly convinced that a correct Leninist policy can triumph in our party and through it, not outside the party and against it.”290 It turned out that Stalin had united the party after all: Kamenev’s abasement was the proof.

In remarks on December 7 to close out the discussion of his report, Stalin triumphantly stated, “I have nothing of substance to say about the speeches of Yevdokimov and Muralov, as there was nothing of substance in them. The only thing to say about them is, Allah forgive them.” The delegates laughed and applauded. He labeled Kamenev’s capitulatory speech that of a Pharisee. Stalin called the party a living organism: “The old, the obsolete falls off (applause), the new, grows and develops (applause). Some leave the stage. . . . New forces grow up, at the top and at lower levels, carrying the cause forward. . . . And if now some leaders fall off the cart of revolution, not wanting to sit firmly in the cart, then in that there’s nothing surprising. This will only free the party from those who get their legs crossed and prevent the party from moving forward.” To those who “fall off from the cart—then that way is their road! (Rousing applause. The whole congress stands and gives comrade Stalin an ovation).”291

A resolution condemning the opposition was put to immediate vote and passed unanimously. Then the damnable Testament popped out, yet again.

Stalin had challenged his critics, back in July 1926, to demand at the next Party Congress (which was now) that Lenin’s Testament be published. On December 9, Orjonikidze made a formal proposal to that effect, to reverse the decision of the 13th Party Congress. Rykov proposed that the full gamut of late Lenin dictation be published, not solely the part known as the Testament, and that the Testament be included in the 15th Party Congress proceedings. Rykov’s proposals passed unanimously.292 But the Testament did not appear in the published proceedings.293 Instead, Stalin had it issued during the congress as a separate bulletin “for members of the party only,” in a print run of 13,500, nine times the number of delegates. The method of distribution and the number of people who read a copy remain unclear.294

Much was glossed over at the congress. Alarming reports were pouring in via secret police channels of a “goods famine” and widespread popular anger. “Queues for foodstuffs and material for clothing have become an everyday phenomenon (the Center, Belorussia, the Volga valley, the South Caucasus), along with crushes and fighting,” the OGPU reported. “There have been cases when women have fainted.” The police paid special attention to women in food lines, based on historical precedent, and overheard them lamenting it took an entire day to procure flour and that their husbands were coming home from work to find nothing to eat.295 To appease workers, the regime had announced a seven-hour workday, which did not sit well with peasants already starved for manufactured goods. “Even now there are no goods in shops and with a seven-hour working day there’ll be absolutely nothing,” one peasant stated, according to the December 1927 country mood report by the OGPU. One “kulak” was reported to have stated, “If the peasants were organized in some kind of organization and could say with one voice that we will not sell you grain at such a price, then the workers would sit with their goods and croak from starvation, then they’d forget about a seven-hour day.”296 The Bolshevik revolution was more and more looking like a triumphant debacle.

Stalin’s China policy had not finished imploding. During the Party Congress in Moscow, on December 11, 1927, the Chinese Communists did finally form a soviet in Canton (Guangzhou); it lasted sixty hours before Guomindang forces annihilated its adherents. All told in 1927, the Chinese Communist party had lost perhaps 85 percent of its membership. “The revolution could not develop in Canton, Shanghai, Tientsin, Hankow, or any of those regions where industry was most developed, because there imperialism and the Chinese bourgeoisie held stronger positions,” reasoned the Soviet China expert Mikhail Fortus, who went by the name Pavel Mif. He called for a retreat to the remote northwest, where the Communists could gather forces for a subsequent assault on “imperialist strongholds.”297 Mao Zedong had been urging the need to build a rural base and peasant armies rather than try to seize the cities. But it was Chiang Kai-shek who drove the Communists, an urban movement, into the countryside. Soviet peasants listening to newspaper reports being read aloud of the catastrophic Communist defeat in China in December 1927, meanwhile, according to the OGPU, interpreted this to signify the defeat of Communists in Moscow. Wishful thinking.298

The United opposition split. On December 10, Kamenev and the Zinovievites Yevdokimov and Bakayev repeated their written appeal for reinstatement, promising to disperse their faction and requesting release of oppositionists who had been arrested.299 But that same day, the Trotsky supporters Muralov and Rakovski, while announcing their agreement with the impossibility of forming a second party, maintained their right to continue to defend opposing views within the single party.300 Stalin decided not to accept the Zinovievites’ surrender. Instead of merely requiring that they remain silent, as he initially had demanded, now he ordered that they recant publicly and grovel for the rest of the week. On December 17, the expulsions of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and others from the party, which had been voted back at the previous plenum, were confirmed.301 Two days later, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others, twenty-three people in total, signed a degrading petition to the congress—which they were not even allowed into the hall to present in person—renouncing their “wrong and anti-Leninist views.” Stalin again refused to reinstate them.302 Orjonikidize engaged in negotiations over the disposition of the highest-profile Trotskyites who sought to continue working in some capacity, but Stalin soon scattered them into internal exile.303 Whereas in the politburo back in mid-1924, Great Russians accounted for 46 percent, with a third having been Jews and the remaining three a Pole, Latvian, and Georgian, now the politburo became two-thirds Russian (and would retain a Russian majority thereafter).304 The talk around the congress was that “Moses had taken the Jews out of Egypt, and Stalin took them out of the Central Committee.”305

The day before the congress adjourned (December 18), the Soviet secret police celebrated their tenth anniversary with a parade of mounted troops and armored vehicles through Red Square, received by First Deputy Chairman Yagoda, the de facto chief, and a gala evening at the Bolshoi showcasing the revolution’s “sword and shield.” Workers of Moscow’s Dynamo factory had fashioned a huge metal sword that was displayed on stage, and workers at the ceremony asked that it remain unsheathed until “all that remains of the bourgeoisie is a memory.” On that morning, Pravda had declared war on “whoever does not stand on the path of proletarian revolution—the speculator, the saboteur, the bandit, the White Guardist, the spy, yesterday’s comrade, today’s most vile traitor and enemy.”306 At the Bolshoi, Voroshilov and Bukharin delivered speeches. Kaganovich observed that the “class struggle” was assuming new forms, especially economic pressure, and that NEP had produced classes hostile to the proletariat.307 The head of the OGPU, Wiaczesław Mezynski, still very ill, offered brief remarks. Photographs and stories of secret police exploits were splashed across the front pages of the newspapers for three days running. “If there is anything to be regretted now,” one old-time Chekist wrote, “it is not that we were too cruel, but that we were too lenient to our enemies.”308 Celebrants were distributed around the capital’s elite restaurants at the National, the Grand Hotel, and the Savoy, and at each venue Yagoda made a short appearance to be toasted as “the Great Chekist.”309 Orders of the Red Banner, the state’s highest award, were awarded not just to him but to nearly every upper member of the caste; about the only one overlooked was Artuzov, Yagoda’s bête noire, who lost control of counterintelligence.

Stalin’s victory could scarcely have been more total, yet he indulged his feelings of victimization and self-pity. On December 19, at the inaugural plenum of the Central Committee newly confirmed by the congress, he again brought up the Lenin Testament call for his removal as general secretary. He allowed that there may have been reasons that the party had not heeded Lenin’s call previously: the opposition had existed. But no longer. “Never before has the opposition suffered such a defeat, for it is not only crushed, it is expelled from the party,” Stalin declared triumphantly. “Now we no longer see those bases whereby the plenum would have been thought correct in refusing to honor my request to relieve me of the duties of the general secretary. And moreover we have Lenin’s instructions, which we cannot not take into account and which, in my view, it is necessary to put into effect.” The orgburo functionary Alexander Dogadov cut in to suggest voting on Stalin’s proposal without discussion, perhaps protecting everyone from having to compete in their panegyrics. Voroshilov immediately recommended rejection of Stalin’s request. Rykov, who as head of the government chaired these meetings, implemented Dogadov’s proposal. Hands went up—Who was in favor of retaining Stalin as general secretary? Who was against?The vote in favor was unanimous, with a single abstention, unidentified.310

Rykov had skillfully maneuvered to tamp down the eruption. But then Stalin made a new proposal: “Perhaps the Central Committee will consider it expedient to eliminate the institution of a general secretary. In the history of our party there was a time when that post did not exist.” Voroshilov again cut in. But Stalin answered with a quick history of the party before the introduction of a general secretary above the other secretaries serving the Central Committee. “I don’t know why it is necessary to preserve this dead institution,” he stated. “While at the top no special rights or special duties in practice are connected with the institution of the general secretary, in locales there are deformations and in all provinces there is a brawl because of this institution among comrades who are called secretaries, for example in the national Central Committees. A lot of general secretaries have been introduced and in locales they have special rights. Why do we need this?” He asked that the position be eliminated. “It’s easy to do, it is not in the party statute.”

Again it fell to Rykov to manage the situation. He stated unequivocally that the Central Committee would keep its post of general secretary, which Lenin had created, and which Stalin had been granted by the votes of everyone, including oppositionists now expelled from the party. Rykov averred that Stalin had fully justified this appointment by his work, both before Lenin had died and after. This time the vote was unanimous. Rykov’s actions, like his remarks at the recent Ukrainian Party Congress, indicated that either he was supremely confident he could manage Stalin or that he understood the only option, even for titans like himself, was to stay in Stalin’s good graces and hope for the best. Or perhaps Rykov was no more discerning of Stalin than Kamenev had been when he had let slip the chance to remove him. Stalin’s menace was far more evident now. But Stalin’s menace was also fully enveloped within the regime’s vocabulary and worldview—capitalist encirclement, ubiquitous enemies, vigilance, mercilessness—which Rykov shared and himself had been enacting toward the opposition, while conciliating the peasantry, except for the kulaks.

• • •

NO ONE COMPELLED STALIN to submit his resignation time and time again. He had resigned so often the ritual could well have become tiresome for those subjected to it. Not including the private hints in the August 7, 1923, letter to Bukharin and Zinoviev, in connection with their initial awkward disclosure of “the Ilich letter about the secretary” following the cave meeting, there had been clear resignation statements on six known occasions: on the eve of and then immediately after the 13th Party Congress in May 1924; in an August 19, 1926, letter to the Central Committee; in a December 27, 1926, letter to Rykov in the name of the Central Committee; and now again, on December 19, 1927. Of the three party congresses since the Lenin Testament had surfaced, Stalin had not resigned only at one (the 14th), which, however, had devolved into shouting matches over his “boundless power.” And now, at this first plenum after the 15th Congress, even after Rykov affirmed the existence of position of general secretary, Stalin was not done. “Comrades, during the first vote, concerning my release from the duties of the secretary, I did not vote, I forgot to vote,” he interjected. “I ask that you consider my vote against.”311

What was this, the expression of a deep well of resentment? The voicing of his darkest fears, his removal by the Central Committee? A provocative test of the inner regime? An odd way that Stalin savored his triumph and the opposition’s expulsion? A gesture of false modesty by a man who treasured posing as the humble, albeit indispensable, servant of the party? It was perhaps all of the above—supremacy and siege, elation and self-pity, the paradoxes of Stalin’s power.

Stalin had attained a position of power that would have exceeded anyone’s wildest dreams, except perhaps his own, but power for him entailed responsibility for advancing the Communist victory at home and abroad. No war had broken out in 1927, but rumors spread that this was solely because the Soviet regime had secretly made concessions: turning over grain, gold, horses, ports, coal mines, territory. (Some wags surmised the Western powers refrained from unseating the Soviet regime to give socialists around the world more time to see the full folly of their delusions.) The 15th Congress passed a resolution on industrialization calling, in classical Marxist terms, for production of the means of production, and in the meantime, imports of machinery not being produced in the USSR.312 How would this be financed? The secret police were reporting increased attacks, up to murder, against Soviet officials, while state grain acquisitions were failing. On December 12, 1927, the Left Communist Valerian Obolensky, known as Osinsky, had addressed a letter to Rykov and Stalin in reaction to Rykov’s congress report indicating the lack of a general crisis, only a partial crisis in grain collection. Osinsky, who worked in the Central Statistical Administration and knew agriculture well, called the grain collection process already “completely lost” for this year—stunning words—“even if procurement prices were to be raised. Such an increase is already a defeat, particularly since it could provoke a further withholding of grain in calculation of further price increases.” Osinsky had been urging Mikoyan and other top officials, time and again (January 1927, summer 1927, fall 1927), to raise procurement prices and lower prices of industrial goods for peasants. “I believe that the more fundamental causes of the falloff (so far by half) of our procurement campaign, a falloff that will develop into deep general difficulties, is the ratcheting up of our production to tempos, and in a direction, that do not correspond to the real possibilities of our country.”313 Osinsky’s letter implied that something drastic would have to be done about grain procurements, or industrialization would become a pipe dream.

Sokolnikov, the former finance minister, again insisted that “American tempos” of industrialization were possible only by developing agriculture, and deemed it idiotic to evaluate peasant reserves of grain as an expression of some kind of kulak war against Soviet power. He called for using economic levers without a return to requisitioning.314 In the end, the 15th Party Congress had voted up a resolution at Stalin’s behest “on work in the countryside,” which called for “employing the whole power of economic organs, and relying, as before, upon the poor and middle peasant masses, to develop further the offensive against the kulaks and to adopt a number of new measures limiting the development of capitalism in the countryside and leading the peasant economy along the road to socialism.”315 What those “new measures” entailed remained unclear. But during the vote on the final resolution regarding the countryside, in the waning moments of the congress, an amendment appeared: “At the present time, the task of transformation and amalgamation of small individual farms into large-scale collective farms must be set as the party’s fundamental task in the countryside.” 316 Collectivization, at the present time? The transcript records “Noise in the hall,” when the amendment was read; the session chair noted that only twenty minutes remained until the close of the congress and asked delegates to remain seated. The amended resolution was said to have passed unanimously.317

After the rebuff of his resignation, Stalin on December 21 celebrated his official forty-eighth birthday.318 Nearly half a century should have been more than ample for observers to figure him out, but he revealed himself no better than the dark, vast Siberian taiga forest. Even the great biographical scoop of the American YMCA director Jerome Davis was put in doubt: Stalin forbid its republication in the original Russian and, in December 1927, had a foreign commissariat functionary try to get the Associated Press to discredit the Davis interview as a fabrication.319 Still, in connection with the birthday milestone, Stalin’s top aide, Ivan Tovstukha, reworked the biographical material that had been collectively gathered in the central apparatus and, this time, managed to elicit Stalin’s assent to publish it—under just Tovstukha’s name—in the Granat Encyclopedia of some 250 revolutionaries in 1927. The Stalin material also came out as a stand-alone pamphlet in an initial print run of 50,000. Finally, a Stalin biography. It reverentially catalogued his passage through the revolutionary stations of the cross: his discovery of Marx, the organizing in the underground, the various early congresses, the bouts of exile and other political punishments. The text ran fourteen pages, in large, bold type.320