Stalin, Volume 1

CHAPTER 14

A TRIP TO SIBERIA

We cannot live like gypsies, without grain reserves.

Stalin, Central Committee plenum, July 9, 19281

Stalin was an ideological person. For him the idea was the main thing.

Lazar Kaganovich2

STALIN BOARDED a heavily guarded train bound for Siberia. It was Sunday, January 15, 1928.3 He rarely traveled, even domestically, other than to the Black Sea for relief in the sulfur baths from the terrible pain in his muscles and joints. Siberia, however, he knew well from before the 1917 revolution, having been deported there countless times by the tsarist regime, most recently during the Great War. Stalin had fought on the Boredom and Mosquito Front—that is, he had wallowed for years as a political exile in the alternately frozen or thawed swamps of the far north. His 1928 trip would keep him to Siberia’s southerly parts, however: Novosibirsk and the Altai breadbasket of Western Siberia, as well as Krasnoyarsk, in Eastern Siberia, where in early 1917 a tsarist draft board had rejected him, owing to the webbed toes on his left foot and his suppurated left elbow that did not bend properly. Now, eleven years later, he was returning to these remote parts as the country’s ruler, the general secretary of the Communist party. In Novosibirsk, at gatherings with the local higher-ups, Stalin would demand coercive measures to overcome a state grain procurement crisis. He would also declare, unexpectedly, the inescapability of pushing forward the collectivization of agriculture immediately. A few days later he would take a branch line to Barnaul, an administrative center of the richest Siberian grain-growing region, to meet with officials lower down. Compared with the 20 million motorcars in the United States, cars and trucks in the Soviet Union numbered perhaps 5,500, and Barnaul had not a single one. From the terminal, Stalin was ferried to the meeting in a primitive wooden-basket sled, a means of conveyance that suggested the enormity of what would be involved in remaking peasant life and state power across two continents.

SELF-FULFILLING CRISIS

Modern Russian power, in its Soviet guise, too, still rested upon wheat and rye. For all the dreams of modernity, by 1928 industry had barely regained 1913 tsarist levels even with the prolonged recuperation provided by the partially legalized markets of the New Economic Policy.4 By contrast, industry in Britain and Germany was 10 percent greater than in 1913; in France, 40 percent, in the United States, a whopping 75 percent.5 Russia had lost ground. At the same time, the NEP presupposed peasants’ willingness to sell their “surpluses”—that is, the grain beyond what they consumed as food or moonshine—not just to the private traders (NEPmen), but also to state procurement agents at state-set prices. With the agricultural year running from July to June and harvest gathering and state procurements commencing in summer, from July through December 1927 the Soviet state had secured just 5.4 million tons of grain. The target for that interval was 7.7 million tons, leaving a gaping shortfall that threatened Moscow and Leningrad, as well as the Red Army, with starvation in spring. Procurements for November and December 1927 were particularly alarming, just half the total compared with the previous year.6 Panicky reports arrived from as far as Soviet Uzbekistan, where cotton growers with little food were insisting on switching to crops that could feed themselves, and officials began seizing grain, all of it, from anyone who grew it.7 In Moscow, the authorities could scarcely afford major unrest—street demonstrations over a lack of bread had accompanied the downfall of the tsarist regime, and shortages had played a part in undermining the Provisional Government.

Longer-term perspectives were even more troubling. Tsarist Russia had fed both England and Germany and grain exports had reached perhaps 9 million tons in 1913, but in 1927 they constituted a measly 2.2 million tons, delivering a lot less hard currency to finance machinery imports and industrialization. At the same time, Stalin received a table showing a drastic falloff in the percentage of the harvest being marketed since tsarist times, from 26 to 13 percent (of smaller harvests).8 As a result of the peasant revolution, some of the land that had been used for marketed production had been seized and was now occupied by subsistence farming, so that even if the harvests had been of comparable size, less grain would be marketed beyond village borders.9 To be sure, Soviet agricultural levels surpassed that of China or India. But the USSR competed with Britain, France, and Germany, and despite some improvement in implements and machines, credit, and marketing cooperatives, farming remained decidedly unmodern. Three quarters of all grain was sown by hand, nearly half reaped with sickles and scythes, and two fifths threshed with chains or similarly manual devices.10 Russian agriculture was just not advancing, while among the great powers, mechanization was well under way. How to boost overall grain production was a deep concern. After the peak harvest under the NEP of 1925–26 (77 million tons), the 1926–27 harvest had disappointed at around 73 million and the 1927–28 harvest would disappoint, too, also officially estimated at 73 million tons, but likely no more than 70 million.11 These were stubborn facts, and would have challenged any government in Russia, but Bolshevik actions had inexorably undermined the quasi-market of the NEP.12

Private industry in the USSR had been squeezed down to less than 10 percent of total output, and its share continued to fall, but the principal producers, state factories organized as giant trusts, had few incentives to reduce their unduly high production costs or even to manufacture saleable goods. A 1927 decree on trusts had stressed output quotas, not profits, as the guiding criteria, which compounded the already perverse incentives of greater subsidies for worse performance.13 The regime’s inability to resist the urge to finance desperately needed industrial expansion by the printing of money resulted in inflation, which, in turn, elicited further clumsy price controls, worsening the market’s operation. In other words, applying administrative measures to the economy only exacerbated imbalances and fed the inclination for more administrative measures, in a vicious loop.14 “If there is a choice between the industrialization program and equilibrium in the market, the market must give way,” Valerian Kuibyshev, head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, blustered to the party organization in his bailiwick in January 1928. He allowed that the market “could be one current, but a Communist and Bolshevik has always been and is able to swim against the current,” and concluded that “the will of the party can create miracles . . . and is creating and will create miracles despite all these market phenomena.”15 Just a few weeks later, Kuibyshev proclaimed at the presidium of the Supreme Council of the Economy that “the will of the state has smashed the [market] conjuncture.”16 Such idiotic boasts unwittingly exposed the self-inflicted dimensions of the sharply lower state grain procurements.

Some peasants were holding their grain out of fear of a new famine, but experts mostly attributed the diminished marketings to lower per capita production, higher per capita peasant consumption, and above all the gap in prices between grain (low) and peasant-desired manufactured goods (high), those infamous scissors, in Trotsky’s metaphor, whose blades opened in opposite directions.17 Paying peasants substantially higher prices for grain and ruthlessly restricting monetary emissions would have closed the blades, but the former measure would have necessitated charging workers higher prices for bread, while also hurting industrialization (domestic grain purchases at higher prices would reduce earnings from exports); the latter measure would have entailed scaling back ambitions for industrial expansion.18 Stalin was loathe to make these kinds of political concessions to the peasantry again, given that after doing so the regime was again in the same place. Instead, in 1927, the politburo had mandated a substantial reduction in prices for manufactures, whose implementation Stalin referred to as “beating down the markup, reducing the markup, breaking the resistance of the cooperatives and other trading agencies at all costs.”19 Some years before that maneuver had worked, when there had been unused industrial capacity to revive, but now, even at the higher prices, demand had been going unmet because of limited supply, and the price reduction—in summer, no less, when workers went on holiday and production normally suffered—reinforced the trend toward bare store shelves.20 “In some districts,” the secret police reported in a December 1927 survey of the country’s political mood, “the peasants come to the cooperative every day inquiring whether goods have arrived.”21 True, throughout January 1928 textile factories in the Moscow region operated on Saturdays, too, to produce manufactures for grain-growing regions, but the goods famine persisted.22

Rumors of pending war also contributed to the peasant reluctance to part with their grain; the Siberian party organization demanded a halt to “the dim-witted agitation in the press” about imminent foreign invasion.23 On top of everything else, party officials had been distracted. November 7, 1927, brought the revolution’s tenth anniversary, a prolonged drinking bender, then came the elections to and the sessions of the 15th Party Congress through much of December. “Nobody in authority bothers about the purchase of grain,” a German espionage agent, posing as a journalist, wrote of rural officials in Siberia. “All the party bosses, the authorities, are in Moscow for the party congress, for the jubilee celebrations, for the soviet sittings and other things, and the lower party bosses, the youth organizations and the village correspondents have only the anniversary of the revolution in their heads.”24 But right after the congress, the politburo held a special session devoted exclusively to grain procurement.25 And Pravda began to bang the gong. Suddenly, as a reporter in Moscow for the London Times picked up (January 3, 1928), public discussion had broken out on “the most drastic measures to pump the grain from the peasants.”

Stalin ratcheted up the pressure on two tracks. One was the secret police, which had been granted the prerogative of imposing sentences outside judicial channels. On January 4, OGPU deputy chief Yagoda directed all regional secret police branches “to arrest immediately the biggest private grain traders . . . conduct the investigations quickly, persuasively. Send the cases to Special Boards. Communicate immediately the resulting influence on the market.”26 Stalin wanted overt secret police involvement minimized (“Cease publication of communiques regarding our operations in grain collection,” OGPU chief Wiaczesław Mezynski directed Vsevolod Balytsky, head of the OGPU in Ukraine, in January 1928).27 The other track involved the party apparatus: four sharply worded secret circulars were dispatched to all major party organizations over the course of a single month, beginning on December 14 (during the Party Congress).28 The circulars moved up the deadline to remit rural tax payments to February 15, 1928 (from April 1), and insurance payments to January 15 (from January 31), changes that the authorities compelled the peasants to affirm at mass meetings.29 But peasants met their cash obligations by selling meat, dairy, or hides, whose prices were predominantly market driven and high because of demand. Grain, which was readily stored, they held back.30 Internal secret police reports warned of “a strengthening of kulak agitation”—that is, discussions among peasants about holding out until spring in anticipation of better prices.31

Politburo members, mindful of possible spring famine and urban unrest if food supplies failed, as well as harm to industrialization without grain to export, had cautiously consented to Stalin’s insistence on “emergency measures.” His third secret party circular, sent on January 6, 1928, acknowledged that “despite two firm directives of the Central Committee to strengthen grain procurement, no breakthrough has occurred,” and announced the formation of a Central Committee commission for grain headed by himself, which afforded him not just de facto but de jure authority to implement the emergency measures he deemed necessary. With this extra authority, Stalin drove the extension of the antispeculation law wielded by the OGPU against private traders—Article 107 of the criminal code—to grain growers for “not releasing goods for the market.”32 Mere non-sale of privately grown grain became subject to up to three years imprisonment and confiscation of property. Hundreds of publicized arrests took place in Ukraine and the North Caucasus, with published reports of sizable storehouses of “hoarded” grain being discovered.33 In those locales, Stalin relied upon trusted lieutenants such as Kaganovich, party boss in Ukraine, and Andrei Andreyev, another protégé, whom Stalin had just named party boss of the sprawling North Caucasus territory. But even they required him to exert pressure (Andreyev, newly arrived, wrote to his wife in January 1928 that “now, in earnest, I have to issue directives to restrain the zealots,” not exactly Stalin’s message).34 Stalin dispatched Mikoyan to the North Caucasus, but together with Ukraine, these regions were far behind producing their usual two thirds of the country’s marketed grain, and so Stalin looked to the Urals and Siberia as what he called “the last reserves.” On January 9, the politburo resolved to send out his two top associates, Vyacheslav Molotov, who was directed to the Urals, and Sergo Orjonikidze, who was commanded to Siberia. On January 12, however, Orjonikidze was said to have taken ill and his trip was canceled.35 The next day Stalin summoned officials in agriculture, supply, and trade.36 He decided to go to Siberia himself.37

Stalin would not be the only person in motion that January 1928. In a nasty jolt, a former top aide in the innermost sanctum at Old Square, Boris Bazhanov, fled the country, conniving to escape (January 1) just when border guards were still feeling the effects of the New Year’s celebration, and becoming the first major Soviet defector. Bazhanov had gotten reassigned out of Old Square after failing to return borrowed imported sports equipment; he then fathered illegitimate children with two different mistresses, one of whom he took abroad as his “wife” at state expense. He had contemplated trying to sneak across into Romania, Finland, or Poland before conniving to get himself reassigned to Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan, a few miles from the more porous border with Iran. Just twenty-seven years old, Bazhanov carried out secret politburo documents to prove his bona fides. Whether he had help from foreign intelligence services in the act of crossing remains unclear, but once in Persia he was evidently helped over the mountains to India, whence he sailed to Marseilles, leaving behind his mistress, who was caught trying to cross the Soviet-Iran border separately.38 Bazhanov had joined the party as a teenager in his native Ukraine, and managed to leap into the orgburo at age twenty-two. His embarrassing betrayal, kept secret from the Soviet public, showed that the dream of a radiant future was not only the wellspring of the system’s strength but also its principal vulnerability: people could become white-hot with anger at their earlier illusions. Already, from January 2, Georgy Arutyunov, known as Agabekov, an ethnic Armenian and the chief of the Eastern Department of Soviet intelligence, headed a manhunt on foreign soil (until Agabekov himself defected).39 Bazhanov would sit for extensive debriefings by French intelligence, generating hundreds of pages of material on clandestine Soviet machinations to undermine the Western powers and on Stalin’s opaque regime, telling the French, for instance, that Stalin is “extremely cunning, with an unbelievable power of dissimulation and, above all, very spiteful.”40 Soon, Bazhanov published an expose in French, writing that Stalin “possessed in a high degree the gift for silence, and in this respect was unique in a country where everybody talks far too much.”41

Mostly, Bazhanov got Stalin wrong, such as when he asserted that the Soviet leader “read nothing and was interested in nothing” and “had only one passion, absolute and devouring: lust for power.”42 Stalin lived for the revolution and Russian state power, which is what impelled him to return to Siberia. His own power was vastly extended beyond Old Square by the telegraph, telephone, newspaper, radio, and Communist ideology, but those levers barely reached into villages. Nor did that power extend abroad. The Soviet refusal to relinquish internationalizing the revolution by supporting worker and national liberation movements abroad ensured that the core tenet of Leninist foreign relations—intercourse with the enemy—had become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the challenge persisted of somehow obtaining advanced industrial technology from the capitalist powers. Further complicating the Soviet position, global market prices for wheat in 1927–28 cratered, a deflation that also affected other Soviet export commodities (timber, oil, sugar). At the same time, rising tariffs abroad magnified the punch to the gut.43 Here was the short straw that the unsentimental global political economy allocated to all primary goods producers: to obtain the hard currency it needed to buy machines, the Soviet Union would have to sell its commodities at a loss.44 Moreover, despite some successes in securing short-term and some medium-term credits to purchase equipment and cover trade deficits from the Austrian and German governments, the Soviets had failed to obtain long-term financing from Paris, London, or even Berlin. Stalin could not abide the fact that the Soviet regime found itself crawling to the international bourgeoisie, rather than relying on the international proletariat, for a lifeline. Just as the peasants were refusing to sell their grain, foreign capitalists, at a minimum, could aim at the Red regime’s demise by refusing to sell their advanced technology.

Stalin lived immersed in the grim OGPU summaries of the country’s political mood, which his worldview shaped in a feedback loop, and which brimmed with antiregime quotations from eavesdropped conversations and other reminders that the USSR was encircled by hostile forces and honeycombed with internal enemies.45 Soviet borderlands were suspect: in Ukraine, the North and South Caucasus, Belorussia, and the Far East, the police wrote, “We have some elements on which the foreign counterrevolution could rely at a moment of external complications.”46 Tsarist-era specialists in industry and the military were suspect: “The collapse of Soviet power is inescapable as a system built on sand,” former Major General Nikolai Pnevsky, a nobleman and tsarist-era air force chief of staff serving in the Red Army quartermaster directorate, stated in relation to Britain’s rupture of diplomatic relations according to a police informant, adding: “This break is a prelude to war, which should, in light of the low level of USSR military technology and internal political and economic difficulties caused by a war, finish off Bolshevism once and for all.”47 Villages were suspect: “I have talked with many peasants, and I can say straight out that in the event of a conflict with foreign states, a significant stratum of peasants will not defend Soviet power with any enthusiasm, and this is also reported in the army,” Mikhail Kalinin, who posed as the country’s peasant elder, told the politburo.48 The Russian emigre press contained leaked information about the secret inner workings of the Soviet regime.49 For Stalin, his inner circle, too, had become suspect. Without consulting them, and with only the vaguest notion of how it would unfold, he embarked in 1928 upon the greatest gamble of his political life.

EARTH-SHATTERING SPEECH

Stalin was coming. Siberia’s party boss, Sergei Syrtsov, sped out on a lightning inspection of the Western Siberian breadbasket—Barnaul, Biysk, Rubtsovsk—to ensure that officials were prepared to receive the general secretary.50 As a veteran of Stalin’s inner apparatus in Moscow, where he had passed through a master school of intrigue, Syrtsov had been only in his thirty-third year two years earlier when Stalin had handed him Siberia (in place of the Zinoviev supporter Mikhail Lashevish). On January 17, 1928, just hours before Stalin’s arrival, Syrtsov directed the Siberian party to approve a concrete plan for implementation of the Central Committee’s directive to employ Article 107 against grain “hoarders”: the Siberian secret police would arrest a quota of between four and ten kulaks from each local grain-producing district for “holding large grain reserves and using the bread shortages to speculate and raise prices.” “Start the operation immediately!” ordered Siberian OGPU boss Zakovsky.51 On January 18, some sixty top Siberian officials, representing the local party bureau as well as local grain procurement personnel, found themselves in the presence of Stalin and his phalanx of aides, as well as advance officials he had sent.52 He told them Siberia had had a bumper harvest and laid down an obligation of just over 1 million tons of grain for shipment to the Center, leaving a mere 400,000 tons for Siberia’s own needs.53 He also demanded that they specify by name who would be responsible in each county for implementation, and ensure that the railroads could cope—no excuses.54 As expected, Stalin further insisted that Article 107 be applied to anyone refusing to sell grain stocks. Syrtsov unveiled Siberia’s already-launched antihoarding operation (from the day before).55 Stalin embraced this gift, while softening its appearance, shifting implementation of the measure from the political police to the procuracy, which was to explain the policy in the local press, follow the law (v zakonnom poriadke), and prepare public trials of kulaks with simplified procedures in order to induce the rest of the peasants to market grain.56

Stalin’s aides had assembled a collection of brochures and other materials published in recent years by the Siberian party organization on the village locally, which he read on the long train ride.57 At cities en route, he had demanded fresh newspapers and noted, for example, that the Ural Worker, published in Sverdlovsk, contained “not one word” on grain procurements; farther on, in Tyumen, he found that the local Red Banner had a great deal on grain procurements—in Ukraine. The January 1928 OGPU political mood report for Siberia would brim with what was labeled kulak agitation (“You want to recreate 1920, take grain from the lads with force, but you won’t succeed, we’ll sell a cow, we’ll sell two, but grain we won’t give”). Anti-Soviet leaflets were appended to the extensive report.58 In Novosibirsk, Stalin sat down and read the entire run of January issues of Soviet Siberia and found that only very recently had the region’s flagship newspaper begun to pay attention to procurements. He concluded that the Siberia party was “not conducting a class line.”59 Still, thanks to Syrtsov’s fleet-footed preemptive action, Stalin seems to have come away with a positive impression of that January 18 Novosibirsk meeting.60 In a ciphered telegram (January 19, 8:00 a.m.) to Stanisław Kosior, a Central Committee secretary who was helping mind the shop back on Old Square (and who had once been party boss in Siberia), Stalin wrote: “The main impression of the gathering: nightmarishly late with procurement, very hard to get back what has been lost, can only get back what has been lost via beastly pressure and skill in leadership, the functionaries are prepared to get down to business in order to fix the situation.”61

Wishful thinking? Stalin had issued some threatening secret circulars, introduced a policy innovation (widened application of the punitive Article 107), and made a personal visit (“beastly pressure”), and voilà—grain for the cities and army would roll in? Intimations of trouble were there: one attendee at the Novosibirsk meeting, Sergei Zagumyonny, the recently appointed head of the Siberian branch of the USSR Agricultural Bank, had the audacity to challenge Stalin’s authority. Zagumyonny’s verbal objections were not the sole dissenting voice that day; the chairman of the Siberian union of consumers’ cooperatives called for skillful agitation, rather than coercion.62 But the next day (January 19), Zagumyonny saw fit to elaborate his objections in writing to Stalin as well as to Syrtsov, arguing that if kulaks were arrested for merely refusing to sell the grain in their storage sheds, the middle and poor peasants would view it as an end to the NEP, which would result in the country having less grain—the opposite result of the intended policy. “I do not want to be a prophet,” Zagyumonny wrote, before prophesizing catastrophe. He even asserted superior knowledge to his superiors, Stalin included: “I know the village well, both from growing up in it and from recent letters from my father, a poor peasant.”63 Stalin took his pencil and underscored several passages or appended mocking comments (“ha ha”) to the letter. Whether he fully grasped that Zagumyonny’s thoughts were shared by others in that room of officials, and beyond, remains unclear, but Stalin decided to address the Siberian party bureau again, for a second time, on January 20, in a narrower circle.

Apologizing for divulging the existence and contents of a private letter from Zagumyonny, who was not invited to this gathering, Stalin stressed that “those proposed measures I spoke about the day before yesterday will strike the kulak, the market cornerer, so that there will be no price gouging. And then the peasant will understand, there’ll be no price rise, it’s necessary to bring grain to market, otherwise you’ll go to prison. . . . Comrade Zagumyonny says that this will lead to a decrease in grain procurement. How is that clear?” Stalin’s understanding of “the market” connoted not supply and demand but the state’s ability to get its hands on peasants’ output. In Ukraine, he stated, “they smashed the speculators in the head and the market got healthy again.”64 He denied that he was abrogating the NEP, but reminded those present that “our country is not a capitalist country, but a socialist country, which, in allowing NEP, at the same time retained the final word for the state, so we are acting correctly.” He added that “argumentation by use of force has the same significance as argumentation by use of economic means, and sometimes greater significance, when the market [grain procurements] has been spoiled and they try to turn our entire economic policy onto the rails of capitalism, which we will not do.” Soon, to reinforce his counterargument to Zagumyonny’s assertions that middle and even poor peasants would side with kulaks who came under assault, Stalin and the Siberian party bureau would stipulate that 25 percent of any kulak grain confiscated in the public trials be redistributed to poor peasants and “economically weak” middle peasants, thereby linking the latter to the party’s grain procurement drive.65 Zagumyonny’s defiance had spurred a sharpening of policy, but it may have accomplished far more. Stalin, who usually played his cards extremely close to his vest, offered a look into his deepest thinking.66

Point blank, Stalin suddenly told the circle of Siberian officials that Soviet agricultural development had dead-ended. He recounted how in the revolution, the gentry class had been expropriated and their large farms subdivided, but mostly into small peasant households that failed to specialize, growing a little bit of everything—grain, sunflowers, keeping cows for milk. “Such a mixed economy, the small household variety, is a misfortune for a large country,” he argued, a problem that was immense in scale, because if before the revolution there had been some 15 million individual peasant proprietors [edinolichniki], now the figure approached 25 million. Most of them did not avail themselves of machines, scientific knowledge, or fertilizer.67 “Whence the strength of the kulak?” Stalin asked. “Not in the fact he was born strong, nothing of the kind, but in the fact that his farming is large scale.” Size was how the kulak could take advantage of machinery and modernize. “Could we develop agriculture in kulak fashion, as individual farms, along the path of large-scale farms and the path of latifundia, as in Hungary, Eastern Prussia, America and so on?” Stalin asked. “No, we could not. We’re a Soviet country, we want to implant a collective economy, not solely in industry, but in agriculture. We need to follow that path.” Moreover, Stalin explained, even if the Soviet regime had wanted to develop along the path of individual-proprietor large-scale kulak farms, that approach would fail because “the whole Soviet system, all our laws, all our financial measures, all measures to supply villages with agricultural equipment, everything here moves in the direction of limiting individual-proprietor large-scale farming.” The Soviet system “cuts the kulak off in every way, which has resulted in the cul-de-sac into which our agriculture has now entered.” To get out of the cul-de-sac, he concluded, “there remains only the path of developing large-scale farms of a collective type.” Precisely collective farms (kolkhozy), not the cooperatives used by small-scale farmers: “Unification of small and tiny peasant household farms into large collective farms . . . for us is the only path.”68

The only path—Stalin was not one to utter idle reflections. Inside the Communist party throughout most of the 1920s, the NEP had been savagely attacked by the Left opposition and then the United opposition. Stalin had defended the NEP against these leftist attacks.69 But these matters had been discussed endlessly not just at the formal party gatherings. Many an evening, as the Stalin faction converged on the Kremlin after work—Stalin, Molotov, Orjonikidze, and others down Ilinka from Old Square, Voroshilov down Znamenka—they gathered at someone’s Kremlin apartment, often Voroshilov’s (the grandest), sometimes Stalin’s, where they would chew the cud about the plateauing harvest and dire imperative to modernize agriculture, the plethora of enemies, the absence of allies, the army’s lack of modern weapons. The hard men of the Stalin faction looked to him to figure out a practical way forward. NEP’s dilemma was not merely that the rate of industrial growth seemed too low, making people wonder how long under the NEP it would take before the USSR became a truly industrial country. The dilemma was not merely the unmodernized technical level and small, divided plots of Soviet agriculture, which produced harvests insufficient to support the kind of grain exports necessary to finance imports of machines, including for agriculture. The dilemma was not even just the fact that the regime lacked control over the food supply or the countryside, rendering it hostage to the actions and decisions of the peasantry. All these were profound problems, but the core dilemma of the NEP was ideological: seven years into the NEP, socialism (non-capitalism) was not in sight. NEP amounted to grudgingly tolerated capitalism in a country that had had an avowedly anticapitalist or socialist revolution.

Exactly when Stalin had concluded that it was now time to force the village onto the path of socialism remains unclear. Kalinin would look back and call a politburo commission on collective farms established in 1927, and headed by Molotov, a “mental revolution.”70 But not long before embarking for Siberia, Stalin had told a Moscow organization party conference (November 23, 1927) that “to pursue a policy of discord with the majority of the peasantry means to start a civil war in the village, make it difficult to supply our industry with peasant raw materials (cotton, sugar beet, flax, leather, wool, etc.), disrupt the supply of agricultural products to the working class, undermine the very foundations of our industry.”71 In Novosibirsk, in effect, Stalin was arguing against himself. His was not a lone voice. Karlis Baumanis, an ethnic Latvian known as Karl Bauman (b. 1892) and a high official in the Moscow party organization, had emphatically stated at the same Moscow party forum (November 27) that “there cannot be two socialisms, one for the countryside and one for the city.”72 Still, this was not yet recognized as official policy. True, during the very last minutes of the 15th Party Congress in December 1927, even as the ink was drying on the expulsions from the party of the leftists Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, a resolution on “work in the village” had acquired that revealing amendment about large-scale collective farms being set as the party’s fundamental task in the countryside. The significance of that Stalin-initiated resolution—worded generally, and lacking a timetable—may have escaped the wider party, let alone the country at large. Large-scale collective farms had gone unmentioned in the four alarmist Central Committee circulars on grain procurements that Stalin had dispatched to all local party organizations between December 14 and January 14, the last one on the day before he departed for Siberia.73 Molotov and Stalin had offices that adjoined a common conference room and no one saw or talked more with the general secretary, but Molotov’s long report to the Central Committee (January 25, 1928) concerning his own grain procurement trip to the Urals, and before that to Ukraine, said nothing about forcing wholesale collectivization.74 Out in Siberia, moreover, Stalin’s speech on January 20 had been confined to the narrowest of circles. Even the mere fact of his trip to Siberia was held in secrecy: No mention appeared in any Soviet newspaper.75 Nonetheless, the unpublished Siberian speech was earth-shattering.

Nearly eighteen years before, in August 1910, Pyotr Stolypin, the greatest of all tsarist-era officials, had crisscrossed the Western Siberian steppes, sometimes riding more than 500 miles on horseback away from railheads and rivers to meet with peasants, who turned out to acclaim him.76 Stolypin wrote to his wife, “I have at least seen and learned things that one cannot learn from documents.”77 The tsarist prime minister’s bold reforms—to extirpate what he saw as the roots of peasant unrest by encouraging peasants to quit the communes, consolidate land into contiguous farms, and convert these larger holdings into private property—had sought nothing less than the wholesale remaking of Russia. True, Siberia, unlike European Russia, did not have communes, but because a law to extend private-property homesteading to Siberia (introduced on June 14, 1910) had failed to pass, Stolypin worried that his parallel program to spur peasant migration into open lands of Siberia would end up implanting the commune there.78 He further worried that the strong spirit of peasant egalitarianism he encountered in Siberia would counteract the individualistic yet authoritarian-monarchist values that he sought to inculcate.79 In the published report of his trip, Stolypin recommended that private property in land be secured in Siberia de jure, not merely de facto, and underscored how Siberia needed not just small-scale agriculture (which was flourishing) but “larger private landholdings.”80 By the time his report was published, however, Stolypin was dead—felled by an assassin in the Kiev Opera House.

Stalin did not make it out to the northwestern Altai near Slavgorod, where Stolypin had been cheered by thousands of peasants out in the open, and where in 1912 they had erected a stone obelisk in his memory.81 Stalin would not have seen that Stolypin monument anyway: in 1918, it had been destroyed during revolutionary peasant land seizures that reversed much of the Stolypin wave toward consolidated farms, and strengthened communes with their separated strips.82 But under the NEP, Stolypin’s yeomen had reappeared. The Soviet regime supported conversion into consolidated farms with multifield crop rotation for efficiency purposes, without supporting their conversion into de jure private property. But for the entire USSR’s land reorganization, there were a mere 11,500 surveyors and other technical personnel, reminiscent of the dearth that to an extent had held back the progress of Stolypin’s reforms.83 Still, consolidated, multifield farms accounted for under 2 percent of arable land in 1922, 15 percent by 1925, and around 25 percent by 1927.84 But even when consolidation took place, it was largely without mechanization and with a torrent of complaints that rich peasants who could afford to bribe local officials had tilted the work in their favor. Whether Stalin, out in Siberia, met with actual peasants, let alone large throngs of them, as did Stolypin, remains unclear.85 What is clear is that although Stalin despised Stolypin, he found himself facing Stolypin’s challenges—the village as the key to Russia’s destiny, peasants as a supposed political problem in opposition to the reigning regime. But Stalin was proposing to force through the diametrically opposite policy: annihilation of the individual yeoman farmer, in favor of collectively worked, collectively owned farms.

Scholarly arguments that “no plan” existed to collectivize Soviet Eurasia are utterly beside the point.86 No plan could have existed because actually attaining near complete collectivization was, at the time, unimaginable in practical terms. Collectivize one sixth of the earth? How? With what levers? Even the ultraleftist Trotsky, in a speech a few years back, had called a “transition to collective forms” of agriculture a matter of “one or two generations. In the near epoch we are forced to take account of the immense significance of petty peasant individual farming.”87 As of 1928, peasants were still not joining collective farms voluntarily. Whereas commercial and trade cooperatives encompassed some 55 percent of peasant households, production-oriented cooperatives were rare. Collective farms constituted no more than 1 percent of the total, enrolled on average only fifteen to sixteen peasant households, and each possessed just eight horses and eight to ten cows—economic dwarfs.88 At the same time, administratively, the regime had attained only a minimal presence in the countryside: outside the provincial capitals, traces of the red banners, slogans, and symbols of the new order vanished, and dedicated personnel were shockingly thin on the ground. The 1922 party census had reported that party members made up just 0.13 percent of villagers; by 1928, this percentage had doubled, but it was still just 0.25 percent of rural inhabitants, a mere 300,000 rural Communists out of 120 million people.89 Siberia counted only 1,331 party cells even in its 4,009 village soviets (and far from every village had a functioning soviet).90 Moreover, what constituted a “party cell” remained unclear: one Orthodox Church soviet in Western Siberia denounced the local party cell for its card playing and careerism; another rural party cell was found to be holding seances to communicate with the spirit of Karl Marx.91 Could these cadres, already overwhelmed trying to procure a minimum of the harvest, force 120 million rural inhabitants into collective farms?

Could Stalin even win approval at the top for a program of wholesale collectivization? He would have to outflank not just the pro-NEP opponents in the politburo—such as Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov—but even his own faction of loyalists, who remained uncertain of such a scheme. Stalin himself did not yet know how, or by whom, wholesale collectivization would be carried out. A “plan,” to do the impossible? At the same time, however, Stalin had concluded—as his speech in Novosibirsk demonstrated—that the impossible was a necessity. In his mind, the regime had become caught in something far worse than a price scissors: namely, a class-based vicious circle. The Bolsheviks desperately needed the peasants to produce good harvests, but the better the peasants did, the more they turned into class enemies, that is, kulaks. To put the matter another way, a non-collectivized countryside was politically unthreatening only if the peasants were poor, but if the peasants were poor they produced insufficient grain to feed the northern cities or the Red Army and to export. That is why, finally, scholars who dismiss Stalin’s Marxist motivations for collectivization are as wrong as those who either hype the absence of a “plan” or render collectivization “necessary.”92 Stalin had connected the ideological dots, reaching the full logic of a class-based outlook. Everything would be improvised, of course. But Stalin would not improvise the introduction of the rule of law and a constitutional order; he would not improvise granting the peasants freedom; he would not improvise restricting police power. He would improvise a program of building socialism: forcing into being large-scale collective farms, absent private property. We need to understand not only why Stalin did it, but how.

EXILING THE LEFT, ENACTING LEFTISM

Stalin’s January 15, 1928, departure had occurred almost simultaneously with Trotsky’s forced deportation from Moscow.93 Each had come to define himself via the other: two very differently capable disciples of Lenin, both from the imperial borderlands, but one self-consciously intellectual, with a degree from a university in Ukraine, the other largely an autodidact, with several years study at an Orthodox seminary in Georgia. Trotsky was living in the apartment of a supporter, Alexander Beloborodov, the Bolshevik who had signed the order to execute Nicholas II, but lately had been expelled from the party as an oppositionist (he was also suffering angina attacks). Initially, Stalin proposed exiling Trotsky to the southern city of Astrakhan, but Trotsky objected because of its humid climate, fearing its effects on his chronic malaria, and Stalin had altered the destination to Alma-Ata, a provincial settlement in arid southeastern Kazakhstan. By one account, Bukharin called Trotsky to inform him of the destination of his deportation.94 By other accounts, Trotsky was summoned to the OGPU, where a minor official read out a decree: internal exile, departure set for January 16, pickup at 10:00 p.m. Either way, he began to pack a lifetime of political activity, filling some twenty crates. “In all the corridors and passages,” wrote a German newspaper correspondent who managed to interview Trotsky on January 15, “were piles of books, and once again books—the nourishment of revolutionaries.”95 On January 16, the thickset Trotsky, his hair almost white, his complexion sickly, waited for the secret police with his wife, Natalya Sedova, and two sons, the elder of whom, Lev, planned to leave his wife and child in Moscow and accompany his father into exile as his “commissar” of communications and foreign affairs.96

The appointed hour passed, however, and the OGPU failed to show. Cristian Rakovski, the recently disgraced Soviet envoy to France and ardent Trotsky supporter, burst into the Beloborodov apartment with news of a crowd that had massed at the Kazan Railway Station, hung a portrait of Trotsky on the rail carriage, and defiantly chanted (“Long live Trotsky!”). Finally, the OGPU called the apartment to say the departure would be delayed for two days. The secret police had comically miscalculated (informing Trotsky of the correct date and time of his departure). It fell to the shop-minding Stanisław Kosior to send a telegram to Stalin’s train (en route to Siberia) to report that on January 16, a crowd of 3,000 had gathered at the train station in Moscow and that they had had to postpone Trotsky’s banishment for two days because his wife had taken ill (Sedova did have a fever).97 Kosior further told Stalin that “the crowd attempted to detain the train, shouting, ‘Down with the gendarmes!’ ‘Beat the Jews,’ ‘Down with the fascists.’” Nineteen people were detained. “They beat several OGPU operatives,” Kosior wrote, as if the armed secret police had come under threat. One demonstrator, according to Kosior, had learned of the two-day postponement and summoned the crowd to reassemble on January 18. This seems to have smartened up the OGPU, for agents showed up at the Beloborodov apartment the very next morning (January 17). Tricked, Trotsky refused to budge, but the OGPU forced his fur coat and hat on over his pajamas and slippers and whisked him to the Yaroslavl Station.98 Kosior added in his ciphered telegram to Stalin that “we had to lift him and forcibly carry him because he refused to go on his own, and locked himself in his room, so it was necessary to smash down the door.”99

The whole Trotsky business had left a nasty imprint on Stalin’s character. Who really appreciated what he had gone through in the prolonged cock fight? The China policy fiasco had been a very close call. But notwithstanding the grief Trotsky had caused, several politburo members had been lukewarm about, or even opposed to, exiling Trotsky.100 To Kosior, Stalin wrote back laconically: “I received the cipher about the antics of Trotsky and the Trotskyites.”101

This time, Kosior and the OGPU had made sure the train station had been cleared utterly; machine-gun toting troops and armored cars lined all approaches. Even so, the moment did not pass in lockstep. “I can’t forget the days when I served under him at the front,” the top-level Chekist Georgi Prokofyev, in charge of the deportation and full of drink at midday, is said to have told a foreign correspondent with Soviet sympathies. “What a man! And how we loved him! He wrought miracles—miracles I tell you. . . . And always with words . . . each word a shell, a grenade.” But now, the once mighty leader had been reduced to a pathetic sight. Trotsky, according to the journalist, held aloft in the arms of a OGPU officer, “had the appearance of a patient taken from a hospital bed. Underneath the fur he had nothing on except pajamas and socks. . . . Trotsky was loaded like baggage aboard the train.”102 A single rail coach with him, his family members, and an OGPU convoy pulled out from Moscow—without the twenty crates of books and papers, many of them Trotsky’s copies of top secret politburo memoranda. Nearly thirty years earlier, a teenage Bronstein had glimpsed Moscow for the first time: from a prison railcar, on his way from a jail in Odessa to exile in Siberia. Now he had his last glimpse of Moscow, also from a prison rail transport.103 Trotsky soon arrived at the last station on the Central Asian rail line, Frunze (Bishkek), in Kyrgyzia; incredibly, the crates with his books and even his archive met up with him. A bus laden with the luggage hauled them the final 150 miles across snowy mountains, and arrived in Alma-Ata at 3:00 a.m. on January 25. He and family were billeted at the Hotel Seven Rivers on—what else—Gogol Street.104

It was not only Trotsky: On January 20—the day Stalin sprung his ruminations about collectivization on Siberian higher-ups—Soviet newspapers carried a notice of the internal exile from Moscow of dozens of oppositionists, “bawlers and neurasthenics of the Left,” as Stalin liked to call them, whom he dispersed eastward (Uralsk, Semipalatinsk, Narym, Tobolsk, Barnaul), northward (Arkhangelsk), or southward (Astrakhan, Armenia).105 Radek, already in Tobolsk, Siberia, sent the first letter Trotsky received in Alma-Ata.106 Stalin did not initially prevent the intra-Trotskyite correspondence, since, thanks to secret-police perlustration, he could read it. Trotsky responded to Radek with some advice: “I strongly urge you to organize a proper way of life in order to preserve yourself. Whatever it takes. We are still of much, much use.”107 Trotsky in 1928 had no inkling that he would be the one to fill the enormous vacuum of information about Stalin, with writings that would profoundly shape all views of the dictator, or that Stalin would discover especially sinister “uses” of Trotsky. Trotsky occupied a vast space in Stalin’s psyche and, eventually, Stalin would enlarge Trotsky to the same scale in the Soviet political imagination, as the cause and incarnation of all that was evil. In the meantime, having just banished the longtime leader of the “bawlers and neurasthenics of the Left” inside the party, Stalin, in Siberia, immediately began forcing the party and the country to the left.

COMMUNIST PARTY ON WATCH

Stalin and his entourage wended their way through Siberia. After his startling speech in Novosibirsk on January 20, he set out the next day—the fourth anniversary of Lenin’s death, a state holiday—for Barnaul, a silver-mining town on the approaches to the Altai mountains that had been founded with serf labor to serve imperial Russia’s military needs. The severe continental climate brought hot, dry winds from Asian deserts in summer and freezing, damp winds from the Arctic during the long winter, with snow drifts that could exceed human height. Ah, but the soil: black-earth or chestnut-brown, it rendered these lands a Russian peasant paradise.108 Barnaul officialdom turned out a sizable party to greet Stalin and Syrtsov on the platform on January 22. (The OGPU’s Zakovsky, overseeing Stalin’s local travels, arrived as well.) Wooden-basket sleds jammed the square in front of the rail station. The one earmarked for Stalin, “insulated with a bearskin and a greatcoat so the leader did not freeze,” as one eyewitness recalled, was pulled by a horse named Marat (for the French revolutionary), and driven by a local OGPU commandant who would go on to become a prize-winning executioner.109 Stalin yielded to the requests for a group photograph, but there would be no banquet. In a speech, he allowed that “one of the causes” for the grain procurement crisis was that “the discussion [with the opposition] diverted our attention, then the easy victory at the congress, the holiday moods of those comrades who went their way home after the congress.” But he was not there to indulge excuses and roundly dismissed popular local reasons for the shortfall—severe snowstorms, lack of manufactured goods for sale, a supposedly smaller harvest—insisting “the cause is in ourselves, in our organizations.” “We’re late, comrades,” he admonished the officials. “Some functionaries are even surprised: ‘How’s that,’ they say, ‘we sent a lot of grain out and, over there in Moscow, they howl.’ . . . No excuses and retreats from the targets can be permitted! . . . Exert pressure on this in Bolshevik style (applause).”110

After Stalin, Syrtsov reinforced the message, stating that the share of “middle peasants” in grain marketings for January 1928 as compared with a year earlier had declined from 60 to 30 percent. In other words, it was not the kulaks alone hoarding grain. That was why Stalin wanted to send a message to the middle peasants by arresting kulaks—holding grain would not be tolerated.111 The next day, at Rubtsovsk, another county seat, to which Semipalatinsk officials had also been summoned, Stalin’s appearance provoked loud applause, to which he replied: “Excellent folk, you Siberians, you are able to clap your hands in concert, but you are not able to work!”112 After the gathering, Stalin did partake of some homemade brandy, the pretext evidently being the severe frosts, according to one participant, who added that despite “a minor blizzard” Stalin “was willing to go on foot” back to his special heavily guarded train, where he spent the night.113

The Soviet dictator had traveled not to engage in fact-finding but to explain the rationale for the coercive measures and ensure their implementation, and yet the trip was proving to be a revelation. He was learning, for example, that the kulak seemed far stronger than even he had understood. Never mind that peasant wealth was cyclical and that very few households remained well-off through generations so as to form a distinct capitalist class; at any given moment, there were kulaks. “The offensive of capital in the Siberian countryside,” one of the better-off agricultural regions, had been an obsession of the Trotskyites. Syrtsov had dismissed such talk as “hysterical bawling,” but the counterstudy he had commissioned showed farm machinery and credit were in the hands of the well-off.114 Now Stalin heard firsthand testimony confirming this point. Moreover, instead of combating such developments, he also learned the party in Siberia seemed contaminated by them, a point that also had been a preoccupation of the Left opposition. Lev Sosnovsky, a Left oppositionist journalist exiled to Barnaul, wrote to Trotsky in Kazakhstan of Stalin’s secret visit to Siberia (in a letter that would be smuggled out and published in the foreign emigre press, becoming the sole public acknowledgment of Stalin’s travels). Sosnovsky concluded that the Siberian party apparatus was “not up to the task of the new approach” (application of coercive measures against peasants).115 Half of Siberia’s Communists had joined the party since 1924, during the New Economic Policy, and one third were still engaged in agriculture, an eye-popping proportion; the Siberian party leadership even viewed industrialization as intended to serve the needs of agriculture, and wanted to prioritize farm implements, grain storage, food processing.116 Oddly enough, having exiled the Trotskyites, Stalin was discovering that his problem was not the small numbers of oppositionists. It was the party as a whole.117

Already the Siberian apparatus was infamous for the bottle. “Drunkenness has become an everyday phenomenon, they get drunk with prostitutes, and take off in their vehicles, even members of the bureaus of party cells,” Zakovsky had told a meeting of the party cell inside the Siberian OGPU, noting that his bosses in Moscow had made this point to him. Zakovsky was himself a lover of the dolce vita, juggling multiple mistresses, rarely far from a bottle, and concluded, “It’s OK to drink, but only in our narrow circle of Chekists and not in a public place” (presumably including driving around in easily identifiable, scarce vehicles with hookers in view).118 Drunkenness, however, was not what Stalin scolded them for. “Is it that you are afraid to disturb the tranquility of the kulak gentry?” he asked menacingly of Siberian officials.119 Many Siberian functionaries, he had discovered, “live in the homes of kulaks, board and lodge with them,” because, they told him, “kulak homes are cleaner and they feed you better.”120 Rural party officials were aching to marry kulak daughters. Such anecdotes ignited Stalin’s class sensibilities: Soviet officialdom was becoming dependent materially, and hence, in his Marxist mind, politically, on the rural wealthy.

Stalin expected that the supposedly widespread and increasing class polarization in the village would be galvanized by his measures. “If we give a signal to pressurize and to set upon the kulak, [the mass of peasants] will be more than enthusiastic about it,” he had privately told Syrtsov during his Siberia trip.121 And superficially, his coercive measures did appear successful. Already on January 24, Siberia’s first public trial under Article 107 (of three kulaks) took place in Barnaul county, and received extensive newspaper coverage the next day.122 In perhaps the most sensational case, the kulak Teplov in Rubtsovsk county, a septuagenarian patriarch of a large family, was said to possess 3 homes, 5 barns, 50 horses, 23 cows, 108 sheep, and 12 pigs, while “hoarding” 242 tons of grain. “Why should I sell grain to Soviet power when they do not sell me machines,” he was quoted as saying. “If they would sell me a nice tractor that would be another matter.” Teplov was sentenced to 11 months and lost 213 tons of his grain; much of the rest rotted.123 All told, nearly 1,400 kulaks in Siberia would be subjected to trials in January and February 1928. Newspaper accounts invariably claimed that courtrooms were jammed with peasant observers.124 From those convicted the authorities would manage to seize a mere 12,000 tons of grain (under 1 percent of that year’s regional grain procurements), but that information was not publicly divulged.125 Meanwhile, the Siberian procuracy was dragging its feet, refusing to approve a majority of Zakovsky’s arrest warrants for individuals on watch lists—former tsarist officers, former Whites from the civil war—under Article 58 (counterrevolution), which brought significantly harsher penalties than for speculation.126 While Stalin was still in Western Siberia, On the Leninist Path, the local party organization’s journal, acknowledged not just a “lack of enthusiasm” but a “flood of protests” by members of the legal apparatus even against the party directive to extend Article 107 to grain growers as a violation of Soviet law. Stalin was quoted as responding that “laws written by Bolsheviks cannot be used against Soviet power.”127

Stalin had far bigger ambitions that application of Article 107, of course. He continued to tiptoe around the fate of the NEP. When asked, he insisted it would continue, much to everyone’s relief. But interlocutors failed to comprehend that he had shifted back to the NEP’s original formulation as a temporary retreat combined with a socialist offensive. The same issue (January 31, 1928) of On the Leninist Path that published the disagreements over the application of Article 107 wrote that “the small-scale, dispersed, individual farm is by its very nature reactionary. On this basis further development of the country’s productive force, which is indispensable for us, is impossible.” The editorial concluded: “Countryside—forward to large-scale collective farming.”128 This may have been the USSR’s first editorial about the momentous turnabout about to unfold.

But if the Siberian party could not even manage to seize grain from kulaks, how could it implement wholesale socialist transformation of the countryside? Siberia’s party hierarchs did put on a vast show of mobilization, reporting an improbable 12,000 meetings of “poor peasants” held between January and March 1928 (supposedly encompassing 382,600 attendees).129 All this culminated in the first ever Siberian conference of “poor peasants,” which opened March 1, 1928, in Novosibirsk, with 102 delegates and Union-wide coverage. “We need to clarify for everyone in the village,” one delegate was quoted stating in Pravda, “that the kulak is an evil horder of grain and an enemy of the state.”130 On the front lines, however, in Siberia’s county-level party organizations, apparatchiks ordered that new “troikas” set up to expedite grain procurement should operate solely on the party premises, without revealing their existence, “so as not to cause misinterpretations among the population and among a part of the lower party masses.”131 Stalin wanted wide publicity for the tough coercive measures; the party in rural districts wanted to hide.

No one embodied the challenge of carrying out a new revolution more than Syrtsov. He had seen Stalin off after a party gathering in Omsk and returned to Western Siberia HQ at Novosibirsk, where on January 31 he reiterated to the Siberian party organization Stalin’s reassurances that the New Economic Policy was not being abrogated.132 Syrtsov was no liberalizer—he had spearheaded the bloody deportation of Cossacks from his native Ukraine during the civil war—but he viewed collectivization as solely for hapless poor peasants who individually just could not get on their feet. At a conference on rural issues the year before Stalin’s visit, Syrtsov had exhorted, “To the middle peasant, the strong farm, and the well off, we say: ‘Accumulate and good luck to you.’”133 Even after Stalin’s visit, Syrtsov voiced faith in the benefits for the state of individual peasant success. As he would tell the Siberian Communists at the next major regional party gathering in March 1928, “When a spider sucks blood from a fly, he also works hard.”134 Apologetics for the kulak, and from a Stalin protégé. Syrtsov was hardly alone. Another top official in Siberia, Roberts Eihe (b. 1890), an ethnic Latvian from a poor farming family who had made his early career in the civil war food procurement commissariat, had echoed Syrtsov’s views at a regional party conference back in 1927 (“Those comrades who in their fear of the kulak think that by ravaging strong farms we will speed up socialist construction . . . are deeply mistaken”).135 Now, however, Eihe began parroting Stalin’s interpretation of pervasive “kulak sabotage.” Officials like Eihe—who not only possessed strong stomachs for bloodshed against their own people, but could shift with the new political winds—would rise higher still. In fact, Eihe would soon replace Syrtsov as Siberia’s party boss. Zakovsky, too, would further advance his brilliant career.136 Soaring ambition laced with animal fear would serve as a formidable instrument in Stalin’s kit. Still, it would take a lot more than opportunistic top officials to carry out a totalizing transformation of Soviet Eurasia.

As Stalin traveled from Barnaul and Rubtsovsk up to Omsk, and then pivoted eastward to Krasnoyarsk (at Syrtsov’s suggestion, but in Eihe’s company), his telegrams to Moscow continued to indicate progress on the immediate aim (“The procurement has livened up. A serious breakthrough should begin in late January or early February”). But rather than citing the serious attitude of local officialdom, as before, he stressed how he had “wound everyone up, the way it’s supposed to be done.”137 In Krasnoyarsk very late on the evening of January 31 he met party higher-ups summoned from around Eastern Siberia—in the district secret police facility. Stalin exhorted them on grain procurements, but also expressly linked the imperative “to curb the kulak” to the circumstance of “capitalist encirclement,” and observed that “the future war could break out suddenly, it will be long and demand immense forces.” The meeting concluded around 6:00 a.m. on February 1. Stalin telegrammed Mikoyan (still in the North Caucasus) to increase the grain targets for February in Siberia from 235,000 to 325,000 tons. “This will spur procurements,” he wrote. “And now it is necessary.”138 On February 2, Stalin set out in the direction of Moscow.139 The next day, Krasnoyarsk newspapers summoned the populace to “strike the kulak.”140 Before he was back in the capital, Siberia’s “grain troika” had raised their own February target to 400,000 tons. What to expect locally in Stalin’s absence, however, remained uncertain. The region’s February procurements turned out to be 1.5 times greater than January’s, but not 400,000 tons. March quotas would be set at 375,000 tons, but Siberia officials were confident of being able to deliver only 217,000 tons a month.141

Stalin arrived back in Moscow on February 6, 1928, after three weeks on the road. Back at Old Square he could follow the repercussions from his trip not just via party channels but also secret police reports. On February 10, for example, the OGPU submitted a political mood summary ominously noting that in Siberia “party members relate to the measures for strengthening grain procurements in many districts almost no differently from how the rest of the mass of peasants do.” Names were named, county by county, of those refusing to take part in the coercive turn, and some were quoted to the effect that the opposition was right: the Central Committee was leading the country to crisis.142 On February 13, Stalin dispatched yet another secret circular from Old Square to party organizations across the Union allowing that “we are exiting the crisis of grain procurement,” but asserting that the party “had neglected the struggle against the kulak and the kulak danger” and had turned out to be full of people who wanted “to live in peace with the kulak.” Ominously, he called them “Communists” in quotation marks. He demanded that they work “not for the sake of their jobs but for the sake of the revolution,” and that top party bosses “check and decisively purge the party, soviet, and cooperative organizations during the course of the procurement campaign, expel alien and hanger-on elements, and replace them with tested party and verified nonparty functionaries.”143 But if the party was so strongly under the influence of NEP capitalism and kulaks, where would the reliable cadres come from?

Still more confounding to the regime, rural conflict was turning out to be not class based but mostly generational and gender based; the regime indirectly admitted as much by complaining that what it called the middle and even poor peasants were “under the sway” of the kulaks.144 Fomenting major “class warfare” in the village looked like it would require forcing in outsiders. Already in connection with Stalin’s Siberia trip, about 100 worker-Communist militants from Moscow and Leningrad had been mobilized to Siberia to galvanize shakedowns of the kulak. Union-wide, Stalin soon mobilized into grain procurement some 4,000 urban party officials from the provincial and county level, “the staunchest and most experienced Bolsheviks,” as well as 26,000 “activists” from the lowest levels.145 Those sent in found some local counterparts, too. Oleg Barabashev, an Odessa-born Communist Youth League activist and journalist (b. 1904) who had been relocated from Leningrad to Siberia, wrote in the newspaper Siberia (which he edited) that “Stalin is right in saying that the party is ready for the slogan of dekulakization.” Barabashev meant the worker elements in the party. Observing a party cell meeting at a railroad junction near Omsk, he wrote of working-class fear in the face of shortages and price inflation, and of their yearning to see arrests of “kulak speculators.”146 Barabashev might have also pointed out a strong appetite for the heads of tsarist-era engineers and specialists who continued to enjoy conspicuous privilege and power. To indulge these resentments, for Stalin, proved irresistible, and his policy opponents proved unable to stop him.

RYKOV’S DILEMMA

Alexei Rykov, who ran the government on a day-to-day basis, did not travel out to a region to forcibly collect grain. (Neither did Tomsky or Bukharin.) Rykov regarded the NEP, for all its shortcomings, as preferable to what he viewed as the destabilizing alternative. Of peasant stock and an ethnic Russian from Saratov, where Stolypin had served as governor, Rykov (b. 1881) had never been other than a Bolshevik and occupied the position that Lenin had, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. (Uncannily, Rykov had failed to complete the same course of studies for a law degree at Kazan University as Lenin had.)147 Rykov was nearly Stalin’s age and a resident of the same building in the Kremlin, but the two did not really socialize. Rykov had never wavered during the infighting against the opposition, but although he had gone along with Stalin’s coercive measures to fill state grain coffers, he was taken aback at Stalin’s post-Siberia-trip inclination to maintain the “emergency-ism.”148 After all, Trotsky and the United opposition had just been eviscerated, was Stalin now going to implement their program?149 In arguing for repeal of the coercive measures, Rykov could point to Stalin’s own energetic actions, which had averted the immediate crisis: procurements for February would turn out to be the highest ever for a single month (1.9 million tons), allowing overall procurements for the 1927–28 harvest to leap ahead of the previous year’s. Rykov similarly fought the increasingly unrealistic industrialization goals pressed by Kuibyshev. On March 7, 1928, following a politburo meeting at which Molotov, a proxy for Stalin, attacked Rykov’s draft industrial-financial plan for 1927–28 as insufficiently ambitious, Rykov took a page out of Stalin’s book: he sent a letter of resignation to Stalin, Molotov, and Bukharin. Rykov asked to be reassigned to the Urals, the way Stalin had asked to be sent to godforsaken Turukhansk, Siberia, where he had once been an exile. The same day Rykov sent a second letter, to show he meant business.150

Stalin did not try to seize upon Rykov’s resignation to rid himself of an ostensible potential rival. Stalin relied greatly upon Rykov, particularly in managing the economy, no small assignment. Rather, just as Rykov had done for him, Stalin sought to mollify the government head. “One cannot pose the issue like that: we need to gather, have a little to drink, and talk heart to heart,” he wrote in response to Rykov’s resignation letter. “That’s how we’ll resolve all misunderstandings.” Not only Bukharin but even Molotov rejected the possibility of Rykov’s resignation. Rykov, it seems, had made his point.151 His authority was not going to be flouted on the big economic decisions, particularly regarding industry and the budget—or they could find themselves someone else to shoulder the immense responsibilities of the chief executive. Rykov’s political weaknesses were many, however, beginning with the circumstance that a crucial member of his voting bloc, Bukharin, was not a person of strong character or perspicacity, and ending with the fact that Stalin had many ways to watch over and checkmate Rykov, but Rykov, other than by threatening to resign, had no real levers over Stalin.

Despite the politburo’s decision-making power, none of its members had the wherewithal to ensure that Stalin was implementing its formal decisions (and not implementing others). Between meetings, Stalin had formal responsibility for most important matters, such as supervision of all party organizations and state bodies; in practice, his prerogatives were actually far wider, given the regime’s geography of power, communications system, and hypersecrecy.152 Mikoyan relates an incident from the late 1920s when he fought Stalin over a course of action: the politburo backed Stalin’s position, yet the decision was never implemented, apparently because Stalin had changed his mind; the politburo, however, never repealed the formal decision.153 On another occasion, Stalin had chosen not to inform Rykov of riots in the Caucasus, which lasted several weeks, until after he had put them down.154 Stalin dominated all official channels and established informal sources of information, while his personal functionaries performed tasks often not formally specified.155 No one else could verify which materials had been received or gathered by the Central Committee yet not made available for politburo members or what instructions had been given to various agencies in the name of the Central Committee. Above all, Stalin alone had the means to secretly monitor the other top officials for their own “security” and to recruit their subordinates as informants, because he alone, in the name of the Central Committee, liaisoned with the OGPU.

A TOWN CALLED “MINE SHAFTS” (SHAKHTY)

The police connection detonated just three days after Rykov’s rejected resignation, on March 10, 1928, when Pravda, in an unsigned front-page editorial, trumpeted how the OGPU had unmasked a counterrevolutionary plot by “bourgeois specialists” trained in the time of the tsar who were said to be working on behalf of the prerevolutionary “capitalist” mine owners now living abroad, aiming to sabotage Soviet power and restore capitalism.156 Their alleged sabotage had occurred in a small mining settlement known as Shakhty, or “mine shafts,” population 33,000.157 But Shakhty’s collieries were adjacent to Ukraine’s strategic Donetsk basin and the “investigation” would embroil top economic officials in Ukraine and even Moscow as well as relations with Germany. Rykov, in an overview of the Shakhty case in Pravda (March 11), stood behind all the charges, but he also warned against excessive “specialist baiting.” He further wrote that “the question of the grain crisis has been taken off the agenda.” But for Stalin, Shakhty and the “emergency-ism” in the village were of a piece. He was unleashing a new topsy-turvy of class warfare to expand the regime’s social base and his own political leverage in order to accelerate industrialization and to collectivize agriculture. Shakhty’s origins had come to Stalin at Sochi, on the cliffs overlooking the Black Sea, the one place he managed to relax, in the company of fat packets of top secret documents and his male service personnel. One person Stalin saw there was the long-standing North Caucasus OGPU boss, Yefim Yevdokimov, who bore responsibility for the dictator’s security cocoon during the annual stays down south, a mouth-watering opportunity.

Yevdokimov was a phenomenon. He had been born (1891) in a small town in the Kazakh steppe with two churches and a mosque, where his peasant father served in the tsarist army, but had grown up in Chita, Siberia, where he completed five years of elementary school. He had gone on to become an anarchist syndicalist, then made the leap to Moscow, participating in the protracted revolutionary coup there in fall 1917. The next year, after the regime moved the capital to Moscow, Yevdokimov joined the Bolsheviks and the Red Army. In summer 1919, Dzierzynski named him head of all police Special Departments in the Red Army. Yevdokimov was soon dispatched to civil war Ukraine, where he distinguished himself in massacres of White Guards. At the banquet meeting upon his departure, Vsevolod Balytsky, Yevdokimov’s replacement, toasted him as the “Republic’s first secret department operative” and handed him his second Order of the Red Banner for “energetic combat against banditism.”158 Yevdokimov praised those present as a “well-organized machine,” calling himself merely “a lever of that machine, regulating its operation.” When transferred to the vast North Caucasus territory in 1923, Yevdokimov had taken with him to Rostov a brother band who worshipped him as a benevolent godfather or Cossack chieftain (ataman).159 Unlike at those desk jobs back at Lubyanka headquarters, in the North Caucasus the civil war had never ended and Yevdokimov’s life entailed relentless, atrocity-laden campaigns against “bandits” in the rugged mountains. After “mass operations” to confiscate some 20,000 rifles in Chechnya, a similar number in Ingushetia and Ossetia, and more than 12,000 in Karachaevo-Cherskesk and Balkaro-Kabarda, Yevdokimov had written to Yagoda that “the people are armed to the teeth and profoundly dark.”160 The North Caucasus trained a generation of GPU operatives, as well as rank-and-file border guards, in hellacious counterinsurgency techniques against civilians.

Yevdokimov had brought a gift to Stalin in Sochi back in summer 1927. Stalin “as usual, asked me how things were,” Yevdokimov would later recall at a big meeting in Moscow. “I told him in particular about this affair”—the tale of a “counterrevolutionary plot” in the city of Vladikavkaz. “He listened carefully and asked detailed questions. At the end of the conversation I said the following: ‘For me it is clear that we are dealing with people who are consciously undermining production, but it is not clear to me who their leader is. Either it is the general staffs [of foreign powers], in particular the Polish general staff, or it is the company that in the past owned these enterprises, and that has an interest in undermining production, i.e., the Belgian company.’” Stalin, according to Yevdokimov, “said to me, ‘When you finish your investigation, send the materials to the Central Committee’”—meaning bypass normal OGPU channels. “I returned, assembled the underworld gang [bratva]—I apologize for the expression—that is, the comrades [laughter], and I said, get moving.”161 Emboldened by his face-to-face sessions with Stalin, Yevdokimov compiled a photograph album with mug shots of seventy-nine civil war “White Guardists” who lived in the North Caucasus territory, which he sent to the local party boss requesting authorization to liquidate them, not because of anything they had done, but because of what they might do. It was “very important to annihilate them,” Yevdokimov wrote to the party boss, because they could serve as “a real force against us, in the event of an international conflict.”162 Yevdokimov’s photo-album approach to fast-track executions just in case constituted an innovation. He won a nearly unprecedented third Order of the Red Banner. Meanwhile, the city where Stalin had staged his own discovery of a counterrevolutionary plot by “class aliens” and executed nearly two dozen “spies” and “saboteurs” in 1918, Tsaritsyn, had since been renamed Stalingrad.

Yevdokimov’s concocted Vladikavkaz case fizzled, but he delivered to Stalin another case, the one from the coal town of Shakhty, which had originated in the atmosphere of the 1927 war scare, when the OGPU reexamined industrial mishaps with an eye toward possible sabotage. This time, some “confessions” were forthcoming.163 Shakhty case materials fell into Stalin’s hands not long after he had returned from his trip to Siberia and confirmed his suspicions that the kulaks were running wild and the rural Communist party was in bed with class enemies.164 On March 2, 1928, the same day he received a long report on Shakhty with a cover letter from Yagoda, the dictator received Yevdokimov, in Yagoda’s presence.165 On March 8, the politburo approved a public trial.166 The next day, a group of the politburo examined the draft indictments, which they completely rewrote (much of the document is crossed out), altering dates and other alleged facts. After the public announcement of the accusations, Nikolai Krylenko, the USSR procurator general, would be dispatched to Rostov, the third biggest city in the RSFSR, and Kharkov, the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, and given no more than a month to finish all work.167 The regime would settle upon fifty-three defendants, a majority of whom (thirty-five) were mining engineers educated before the revolution; others were mechanics or electricians. The trial was ordered transferred from the Donetsk coal region to Moscow for maximum effect.

Shakhty represented a jumble of fact, fabrication, and twisted laws. An investigation of Shakhty’s party organization found it inattentive to industry (its main assignment) and preoccupied with infighting between factions from the Don (ethnic Russian) and Kuban (ethnic Ukrainian), with the latter predominant.168 Still, by 1927–28 the Donetsk Coal Trust, headquartered in Ukraine’s capital, had managed to extract 2.5 million tons of coal, exceeding the 1913 levels, an impressive recovery from the civil war collapse. While mechanized extraction accounted for 15.8 percent of coal output Union-wide, the proportion reached 45 percent in the Shakhty-Donetsk district. These were significant achievements, possible only thanks to skilled engineers and managers as well as workers. At the same time, expensive imported equipment was often used improperly, partly because it fit poorly with existing technology or because skilled installers and operators were lacking. The single-minded drive for coal output, alongside incompetent organization, meant that safety procedures were being violated, mines improperly laid and flooded, and explosions occurring. Some Shakhty defendants admitted lowering worker pay and raising work norms—which was regime policy—and there were links to the former mine owners: the Soviet regime had recruited them, in emigration, to lease their properties back and revive them. One accused mining engineer admitted having received “foreign funds” to blow up a mine, but the mine in question (Novo-Azov) had been detonated in 1921 by directive of the Coal Trust, which had lacked sufficient capacity to restore all the mines and sealed some for safety reasons. Rumor and gossip lent additional credence to the charges. The Polish ambassador was convinced German specialists were conducting espionage (information gathering) on behalf of Germany, albeit not sabotage, but the Lithuania ambassador told his German counterpart that a large Polish-financed organization had carried out sabotage near Shakhty.169

Sabotage under Soviet law did not have to be deliberate: if someone’s directives or actions resulted in mishaps, then counterrevolutionary intent could be assumed.170 But in Shakhty the regime was alleging intent, which meant the OGPU had to get the defendants to confess, a high-order challenge for which the secret police employed solitary confinement on unbearably cold floors, forced sleeplessness for nights on end (“interrogations” by “conveyor” method), and promises of lighter sentences. This produced comic pirouettes: when one defendant who confessed to everything predicted to his defense lawyer that he would be imprisoned for just a few months, the lawyer informed him he could get the death penalty, which induced a recantation. But the “investigator” refused to record the change of heart, while a codefendant worried the recantation would end up destroying them both. (The defense lawyer resigned.)171 Stalin insisted that the evil intent was on orders of international paymasters, which raised the interrogators’ challenge still higher, for the trial was going to be public and visible to foreigners. OGPU chief Mezynski, suffering intense pain as well as bouts of flu, would soon depart for Matsesta to undergo sulfur-bath treatments; it was not his problem.172 Yagoda had to take charge in Moscow. Neither he nor Yevdokimov were stupid: they understood there was no deliberate sabotage.173 Still, Stalin’s pressure was intense, and Yevdokimov and Yagoda gave Stalin what he wanted, from stories of “a powerful counterrevolutionary organization operating for many years” in the Donetsk Coal Trust to “the collusion of German and Polish nationals.”174

FOREIGN “ECONOMIC” INTERVENTION

Five German engineers, four of whom were employees of AEG who installed turbines and mining machines, had been arrested in connection with Shakhty. (The politburo had decided English specialists were to be interrogated but released.) Soviet accounts explained that the European working class, impressed by Soviet achievements, held bourgeois warmongers back from a military invasion, but the imperialists had turned to invisible war—economic counterrevolution or “wrecking” (vreditel’stvo), a new method of anti-Soviet struggle.175 On March 10, the chairman of AEG’s board telegraphed Ambassador Brockdorff-Rantzau in Moscow from the foreign ministry in Berlin asking him to convey that AEG would cease all operations and withdraw all personnel unless their people were released; the next day the ambassador read the telegram to Chicherin. On March 12, Deputy Foreign Affairs Commissar Litvinov telegrammed Stalin and Chicherin from Berlin regarding the terrible impact on Soviet-German relations of the German arrests.176 Chicherin had tried to limit the damage by giving the German ambassador in Moscow advance warning about an imminent disagreeable event, which, he hoped, could be jointly managed.177 But for Germany, the timing was surreal. Just one month before the announcement of the “plot,” the Soviets had opened new bilateral trade negotiations in Berlin, promising firm orders of 600 million marks, among other inducements, in exchange for a 600-million-mark credit as well as long-term loans. The Soviets were also requesting that German financial markets handle Soviet government bonds.178 German industrialists and financiers had their own list of demands, but now, all that seemed for naught. Stalin had lost the French credits in the fiasco over Soviet envoy Cristian Rakovski’s behavior, but now he was deliberately poking the Germans in the eye. In the March 2, 1928, note to the rest of the politburo, Stalin, along with Molotov, wrote that “the case might take the most interesting turn if a corresponding trial were organized at the moment of elections in Germany.”179

Germany, on March 15, 1928, indefinitely suspended bilateral trade and credit talks, blaming the provocative arrests of its five nationals.180 TASS blamed Berlin for the breakdown in negotiations, and the Soviet press, goaded by Stalin’s apparatus, had a field day spewing broadsides against German perfidy. Nikolai Krestinsky, Soviet envoy to Germany, sent Stalin a letter from Berlin on March 17 (copy to Chicherin) asking for the release of one of the arrested German nationals, Franz Goldstein. An infuriated Stalin responded four days later, with copy to Chicherin, accusing Krestinsky of disgracefully abetting the German efforts to use the arrests “to pin the blame on us for the breakdown in negotiations.” The dictator added: “The representative of a sovereign state cannot conduct negotiations in such a tone as you consider it necessary to do. Is it difficult to understand that the Germans in the most insolent manner are interfering in our internal affairs, and you, instead of breaking off talks with the Germans, continue to make nice with them? The matter has gone so far that the Frankfurter Zeitung has published your disagreements with Moscow on the question of the arrested Germans. There’s no further to go than that. With Communist greetings. Stalin.”181

Suddenly, however, Goldstein as well as Heinrich Wagner, both of whom worked for AEG, were released. Goldstein, according to a note counterintelligence specialist Artur Artuzov wrote for Mezynski, had ingratiatingly told his OGPU interrogators that he knew of three White Guard emigres who worked for AEG in Germany in the Russian department and were extremely anti-Soviet and that he had seen them with a large sum of money. In a further attempt at ingratiation, he indicated his willingness to return to work in the USSR.182 Debriefed back in Berlin by the foreign ministry, however, Goldstein dismissed the Soviet claims of sabotage, attributing the breakdown of equipment to worker disinterest, non-party specialists’ fear of arrest, inept party overseers, and general disorganization. Publicly, he voiced anger at having been arrested on trumped-up charges while trying to rescue Soviet industry, warned other Germans not to make available “their knowledge and ability” to the Soviet regime, and detailed the horrid initial conditions of his confinement in a provincial Soviet prison (Stalino), creating an uproar.183 Meanwhile, three Germans who had not been released—Max Maier, Ernst Otto, and Wilhem Badstieber (who worked for the mining company Knapp)—were being held incommunicado, in violation of bilateral treaties specifying that German consular officials had a right to see them. That was not all: Chicherin had passed a note from Yagoda to Brockdorff-Rantzau detailing the alleged crimes of a German national whose name matched no one who was in the Soviet Union; someone whose name was close to that of the accused had last been in the USSR in 1927, which reinforced German doubts about the OGPU’s “case.”184

The arrest of German nationals redounded onto Franco-Soviet relations as well, confirming many there, too, in their view that Moscow was not a place to do business. Like France, Germany stopped short of severing diplomatic relations, but some German companies began to pull the rest of their engineers.185 Stalin continued to hunger for German specialists, German technology, German capital—but on his terms. AEG decided on March 22 to continue its multiple construction projects in the Soviet Union. A week later, twenty-two days after the arrests, the Soviet regime informed the German embassy that the consul in Kharkov could see the German nationals (confined in Rostov); the German ambassador insisted that someone from the Moscow embassy be allowed to visit them, which was granted. The audiences, on April 2, lasted ten minutes per prisoner, in the presence of three OGPU operatives.186 Five days later the three Germans were relocated to the Butyrka prison in Moscow in preparation for trial.

INCITING CLASS WARFARE

Stalin was playing with fire. The entire Soviet coal mining industry had perhaps 1,100 educated engineers, and putting 50 of them on trial in just one case was economically perilous, especially as it frightened many others into inactivity and incited workers to verbal and physical attacks.187 “I know that if there’s a desire, one can accuse the innocent, such are the times,” read the note of one engineer with no connection to the Shakhty case who committed suicide after being called a “Shakhtyite” and threatened with arrest. “I do not want defamation, I do not want to suffer while innocent and have to justify myself, I prefer death to defamation and suffering.”188 All industry in Leningrad had just 11 engineers per 1,000 workers; Moscow 9, the Urals 4.189 With the exception of Molotov, the hard-core Stalin loyalists who supported coercion against the peasantry worked to rein in the hysteria Stalin was stirring over Shakhty.190 Orjonikidze, head of the Central Control Commission workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate, told a group of recent graduates on March 26 that the Shakhty engineers were atypical, that engineers were vital to Soviet industry, that foreign specialists should be allowed to work in Soviet industry, and that Soviet specialists should go abroad.191 Kuibyshev, who had been a Left Communist in the civil war opposed to employing tsarist “military specialists,” now, as chairman of the Supreme Council of the Economy, told a gathering of industrial managers, in a speech published in the Trade-Industrial Gazette, the newspaper of his agency, that “every wrong assertion, every unjust accusation that has been exaggerated out of proportion creates a very difficult atmosphere for work, and such criticism already ceases to be constructive.”192 On March 28, he assured a group of Moscow engineers and scientists that the Shakhty case did not herald a new policy vis-à-vis technical specialists, and that “the government will take all measures to ensure in connection with the Shakhty case that not a single innocent engineer will suffer.”193

While Stalin’s faction opposed Shakhty, his politburo opponents opposed to his coercive peasant policy supported the wrecking accusations. Voroshilov wrote (March 29) to Mikhail Tomsky, head of trade unions, who had just returned from the coal region, expressing alarm: “Misha, tell me candidly, are we not walking right into a board with the opening of the trial in the Shakhty case? Is there not excess in this affair on the part of local officials, including the regional OGPU?” Tomsky, a former lithographer, short and stocky, with horrendous teeth, deaf in one ear, a man who drank to excess and suffered depression, but was also gruffly charming and caustically witty, was the sole pure worker in the politburo (the peasant Kalinin had also worked at factories) and genuinely popular among workers, far more than Stalin.194 Tomsky had long been gung ho for “workerification” of the apparatus to combat bureaucratism and a regime summons to worker activism was grist for his mill.195 Tomsky informed Voroshilov that the bourgeois specialists “are running rings around us!” Soviet mining construction plans were being “approved by the French,” as a result of the engineers’ foreign ties. “The picture’s clear,” he reassured Voroshilov. “The main personages have confessed. My view is that it would not be so bad if half a dozen Communists were imprisoned.”196 Bukharin, in a speech to the Leningrad party organization (April 13, 1928), not only endorsed the Stalin line on widespread wrecking in the coal industry, but also the likelihood of finding similar “organizations” sabotaging other industries, and seconded the need for “proletarian democracy” in the form of production meetings. Bukharin underscored the correctness of Soviet vigilance by the fact that after the Germans’ arrests, a vociferous anti-Soviet campaign had broken out in Western Europe and relations with Germany had deteriorated sharply.197 Bukharin, as he had written with his coauthor Preobrazhensky in The ABC of Communism, was long predisposed to view “bourgeois engineers” as traitors. Bukharin was also looking to avoid giving Stalin a pretext to accuse him of schism and factionalism. But Shakhty was less about a political attack on the party’s defenders of the NEP than about Stalin’s outflanking his own loyal faction.

Stalin was also appealing directly to the workers, seeking to win them back and mobilize them for industrialization and collectivization. Wage earners in industry, who were spread over nearly 2,000 nationalized factories, reached 2.7 million in 1928, finally edging past the 1913 total (2.6 million).198 (Another half million workers were employed in construction.) But proletarians were still stuck in cramped dormitories and barracks, and not a few were homeless. Daily life necessities (food, clothes, shelter) consumed three quarters of a worker’s paycheck, when he or she had a paycheck: unemployment had never fallen below 1 million during the NEP, and approached 20 percent of the able-bodied working age population. One in four industrial workers even in the capital was unemployed, a shameful circumstance that cried out for explanation or scapegoats.199 An expensive whoring nightlife, meanwhile, took place right in front of workers’ eyes—who was that for, in the land of the proletariat?200 What had happened to the revolution? Had the civil war been fought and won to hand power over to NEPmen and speculators? History’s “universal class” went hungry while kulaks could hoard immense stores of grain with impunity? Workers were sent into mines that collapsed on them—and it was all just accident? “Bourgeois specialists” and factory bosses lived luxuriously in five or more rooms, with running water and electricity, servants and drivers?201 What was the self-proclaimed workers’ state doing for workers? Doubts about the proletariat’s steadfastness had induced party officials to look to themselves, the apparatchiks, as the social base of the regime, an awkward circumstance even without the Trotskyite critique of “bureaucracy.” Moreover, a vicious public campaign had been depicting workers as shirkers and self-seekers, drunkards and deserters, while “production meetings” with workers organized by trade unions were actually serving as a way to impose higher output quotas. In 1928, however, party committees seized control of these meetings, which now became opportunities for workers from the shop floor to expose mismanagement, waste, and self-dealing.202

Shakhty case materials effectively announced that bosses might be traitors.203 Pravda’s revelations also asserted wrecking had been going on for years “under the very noses of ‘Communist leaders.’” Thus prodded, younger party members seized the opportunity to harness the pent-up class resentments and class ambitions of young proletarians, not to mention their own. According to police mood summaries, workers following the Shakhty case often pointed to similar phenomena at their places of work. “At our factory there is enormous economic mismanagement, good machines are thrown into a barn,” a worker at the Leningrad factory Bolshevik was overheard to say, according to a report dated March 24, 1928. “This is a second [Shakhty].”204 Such sentiments reached into the countryside. “Where were the party, the trade union forces, and the OGPU such that for ten years they allowed us to be led by the nose?” one village correspondent wrote in a letter to Peasant Newspaper, appending complaints about local investigating organs similarly failing to punish “red tapists” and “alien elements” who persecuted peasants.205

Worker efforts to form independent organizations continued to be ruthlessly suppressed, but worker resentments would now be stoked, and not just occasionally but in a clamorous campaign against enemies both abroad and at home.206 Meeting after meeting was convened to “discuss” wrecking in the coal industry and beyond, and some workers at the events demanded the “wreckers” be put to death; engineers and managers who called Shakhty a cynical manufacture of scapegoats reinforced suspicions that the specialists who had not yet been accused might be guilty, too.207 In places where no scientific-technical intelligentsia existed, such as the backward Mari Autonomous Province on the Volga, the OGPU targeted the humanist intelligentsia (mostly of peasant origin) for the crime of studying and teaching the history of their region and people.208 Class warfare was back. Forget about Lenin’s wager on poor peasants, let alone Stolypin’s wager on prosperous peasants, Stalin was going to wager on young, male strivers from the urban lower orders to spearhead a socialist remake of the village many of them had only recently left behind. Here was a manifold technique of rule: a “struggle” not only against grain-hoarding kulaks in the village, but also against the class-alien “bourgeois” specialists in the cities, and against the party officials who willingly colluded with enemies or were complacent, which amounted to collusion. It was a mass mobilization whose message was seductive: the regime would not allow worker dreams to be surrendered, lost in a lack of vigilance, sold for Judas coins. But the campaign risked immense disruption, for an uncertain outcome.209

TACTICAL RETREAT (APRIL 1928)

Stalin was no more worried about the ill effects of coercion against peasants than he was about the ill effects of arrests and suicides among engineers in industry. He had written to Kaganovich in Ukraine on the day before he had departed Moscow for Siberia warning that no one should be afraid of using the stick. “Many Communists think they cannot touch the reseller or the kulak, since this could scare the middle peasants away from us,” he explained. “This is the most rotten idea of all the rotten ideas that exist in the minds of some Communists. The situation is just the opposite.” Coercion promised to drive a wedge between kulaks and middle peasants, Stalin argued: “Only under such a policy will the middle peasant realize that the prospect of raising grain prices is an invention of speculators, . . . that it is dangerous to tie one’s fate to the fate of speculators and kulaks and that he, the middle peasant, must fulfill his duty as an ally to the working class.”210 But even by the OGPU’s own statistics, actual kulaks were a minority of those who were arrested, and arrests of non-kulaks generated significant pressures against the coercive policy.211 Justice Commissar Nikolai Yanson had issued a circular categorizing the extraordinary measures as “temporary,” indicating they would expire at the end of the current agricultural year (June 1928).212 But many officials, not just Rykov, wanted the “emergency-ism” terminated immediately. Such was the background to a joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission held between April 6 and 11. On the opening day, the regime announced the “Sochi affair”: for three years, party and soviet leaders in the Black Sea resort town were said to have been embezzling state property, wielding official positions for personal gain, and engaging in drunkenness and moral debauchery. The investigation led to a startling 700 expulsions, nearly 12 percent of the Black Sea party organization. Some of the expelled were civil war heroes.213 Peasants were not the only target of Stalin’s intimidation.

On the plenum’s agenda were reports on grain procurement (Mikoyan) and the Shakhty case (Rykov), and the combination of these two subjects testified to Stalin’s sly strategy. Rykov, on April 9, sought to allay doubts about Shakhty, pointing out, for example, that Nikolai Krylenko of the procuracy had checked into the work of the OGPU (the organizations were rivals) and that Tomsky, Molotov, and Yaroslavsky had gone to the Donbass to check in person. “The main conclusion consists in the fact that the case is not only not overblown, but larger and more serious than could have been anticipated when first uncovered,” Rykov noted, adding that some defendants had already confessed: after fighting for Denikin, they had worked for Soviet power, but two-facedly, while enjoying enormous privileges. Whether he believed in Shakhty or merely thought it had use value is unknown, but he was trying to manage it. “We cannot achieve industrialization of the country without specialists,” he added. “Here we are unusually behind, and our attention to this question is unusually weak.”214 Sixty people signed up for the discussion during which Kuibyshev spoke against the specialist baiting and Molotov answered with Stalin’s hard line.215

Stalin took the floor on the morning of April 10 and asserted that bourgeois specialists in the Shakhty case had been financed by the Russian emigration and Western capitalist organizations, calling such actions “an attempt at economic intervention,” not industrial accidents. With the opposition smashed, he stated, the party had wanted to get complacent, but it needed to remain vigilant. “It would be stupid to assume that international capital will leave us in peace,” he advised. “No, comrades, this is untrue. Classes exist, international capital exists, and it cannot look quietly at the development of a country building socialism.” The Soviet Union faced two paths, he said: either continue conducting a revolutionary policy and organizing the world working class and colonial peoples around the USSR, in which case international capital would obstruct them at every turn; or back down, in which case international capital “would not be against ‘helping’ us transform our socialist country into a ‘nice’ bourgeois republic.” Britain had proposed dividing Persia, Afghanistan, and Turkey into two spheres of influence, could the USSR make such a concession? “Uniform voices: No!” The United States had demanded that the USSR renounce the policy of world revolution—could the USSR make such a concession? “Uniform voices: No!” The USSR could establish “friendly” relations with Japan if it agreed to divide Manchuria with her—could the USSR agree to such a concession? “No!” And on Stalin went. Terminate the state monopoly over foreign trade, pay back the imperialist war debts of the tsarist and Provisional Government? “No!” The USSR’s refusal to make such concessions, Stalin averred, had spurred the “economic intervention” by international capital using internal enemies—ergo, Shakhty. It all made sense somehow.

Stalin mentioned that he had seen a play, The Rails Are Buzzing, by the young “proletarian” playwright Vladimir Kirshon (b. 1902). The protagonist was a Communist factory director, promoted from the workers, who, when he tried to reorganize the giant factory, discovered that he needed to reorganize people, including himself. “Go see this play, and you’ll see that the worker-director is an idealist martyr who should be supported in every way,” Stalin advised, adding that “The NEPmen lie in wait for the worker-director, he is undermined by this or that bourgeois specialist, his own wife attacks him, and despite all that, he sustains the struggle.”216

The plenum voted a resolution in verbatim support of Stalin’s Shakhty line on foreign “preparation for intervention and war against the USSR.”217 The party police machinery fell right in line: Ukraine OGPU chief Balytsky secretly wrote to Yagoda that the Shakhty interrogations had fully substantiated “the conclusions of comrade Stalin in his report to the plenum” concerning “preparation of an intervention.”218 Kaganovich, party boss in Ukraine, conveyed the same conclusion to Stalin, and urged that the party “strengthen the role of the GPU” in the industrial trusts by inserting “OGPU plenipotentiaries, something like the [self-standing] GPU organs for transport.”219 Kaganovich knew Stalin only too well.

Stalin, Leninist to the core, pressed his offensive relentlessly on Shakhty, but on grain procurements executed a tactical retreat.220 His position still depended on holding a majority of politburo votes, and he made concessions to Rykov—who after all, accepted Shakhty—in order to retain the votes of Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, and Kalinin. The plenum’s resolution on the village mentioned “kulak influence” on procurements but stipulated that “at the bottom of these difficulties lay the sharp violation of market equilibrium”—Rykov’s line. Complaints were pouring in about excesses related to the emergency measures: by mid-April, arrests totaled 16,000 Union-wide, including 1,864 under Article 58 (counterrevolution), and the plenum resolution terminated application of Article 107 to farmers for not selling grain.221 More than that: officials who had punished non-kulaks (“violations of the class line”) were themselves to be punished; some were tried and even executed.222 It was a stunning reversal.

Lower-level party officials who scoured newspapers for subtle differences in the published speeches of top leaders had begun to whisper about a schism between Stalin and Rykov. “I think that oppositionists (concealed), who always infiltrate meetings of party actives, write of Rykov and Stalin factions,” Stalin wrote on a note to Voroshilov at a politburo meeting in April 1928.223 That may have been the same meeting (April 23) at which Stalin pressed the issue of forming giant “state farms”—new farms where there had been none before—on virgin lands in northern Kazakhstan, the Urals, Southern Siberia, the North Caucasus, even Ukraine. He took as his model the large-scale mechanized farm (95,000 acres) of Thomas Campbell in Montana, perhaps the largest and most productive single farm in the world.224 When Kalinin, a state farm proponent, observed that they would be supplemental to existing farms (which would eventually be collectivized), Stalin interjected his approval (twice).225 Stalin’s retreat, in other words, was only partial. He had gotten the plenum to recognize the party’s right to reintroduce emergency measures, should the situation call for them. After the plenum, he told the Moscow party organization (April 13) that although “the crisis has been surmounted,” if “capitalist elements try again to ‘play tricks,’” Article 107 would be back.226

Stalin did not have long to wait: April grain procurement numbers would be just one fifth those of March and one tenth those of February; peasants were avoiding state officials and selling at the bazaars for five times the state-offered price. The margin for error in the Soviet economy had diminished as a result of regime missteps and the larger contradiction between a market economy and a socialist regime. Some regions—especially Ukraine and the North Caucasus—had suffered drought and crop failure. In northern Kazakhstan poor weather and a poor harvest had induced many households to try to obtain food for their own consumption at markets, which pushed prices up; but when the harvest collection began, grain for sale disappeared from the markets. Checkpoints had been established on the roads to block grain from being brought into these poor harvest regions, while better-off peasants—the ones who had grain—refused to sell at the low set prices, but they were afraid to sell it at the market high prices. Some poor peasants were asking why kulaks were not being squeezed more.227 A series of conferences was hastily convened with provincial party bosses, beginning on April 24, with Molotov and Mikoyan chairing and orchestrating: some regional bosses called for renewed application of Article 107 and a reduced definition of kulak from someone who possessed thirty-six tons of grain to twelve or even seven, and criticized proposals for peasant amnesty and prosecution of officials who had managed to secure grain. One provincial secretary demanded an end to the press discussions of “excesses,” which he claimed had produced “a demobilized mood.”228 Molotov, parroting Stalin as ever, told them that “often kulaks write Moscow in the guise of poor peasants. You see, kulaks know better than anyone else how to maneuver around Moscow.”229 Not all fell in line: some regional party bosses expressed well-founded skepticism that the required grain was out there for the taking, while behind the scenes a fight was on to steer policy away from coercion.230 But under the pressure of falling procurements already on April 26, the politburo voted to reinstate the application of Article 107 to growers.231

The year 1928 was the year of hoping against hope that Stalin would back down, but evidence of his resolve continued to be visible everywhere. Secret police country mood summaries, right on cue, increasingly moved away from mentions of a price scissors, a manufactured goods deficit, or other facts, to evocations of “sabotage” and “class enemies.”232 Sometimes the signals of Stalin’s muscle flexing were comically unintentional. For example, local branches of the OGPU sent some political mood summaries to party committees and soviets in their regions, but on May 16, 1928, Yagoda sent a circular designated “absolutely secret” lamenting how “in the political mood summaries circulated to local institutions, some referred derogatively to functionaries by name,” which created the “false impression” that these functionaries were under close surveillance for what they were saying and to whom. “It is necessary to remove not just all mention of functionaries in the external mood summaries but to avoid this even in those summaries of an internal character.”233 Regime functionaries under surveillance by the secret police—a false impression, obviously.

SHOW TRIAL

Nothing had ever erupted in the Soviet Union quite like the spectacle of the Shakhty trial, which opened on May 18, 1928, in the marble-walled Hall of Columns of the House of Trade Unions and lasted forty-one days.234 It was the first major Union-wide public trial since 1922 but far exceeded that affair. Other trials in 1928 that were also designed to instill political lessons, such as a military tribunal hearing about an alleged Anglo-Finnish “spy ring” in the Leningrad border zone, failed to acquire anything remotely resembling Shakhty’s intensity and significance.235 It was staged in Moscow for maximum exposure; nearly 100 handpicked foreign and Soviet journalists reported on the proceedings.236 More than 30,000 Soviet inhabitants would be led through the red-draped courtroom (the party would claim 100,000)—workers, Communist Youth League activists, out-of-town delegations. “Crowds poured in noisily and jockeyed for advantageous seats,” wrote one American foreign correspondent. “The boxes gradually filled with diplomats, influential officials and other privileged spectators—much bowing and hand-shaking.”237 Andrei Vyshinsky, the chief judge, stood out in his suit and pince-nez; Nikolai Krylenko, the chief prosecutor, wore a hunting jacket, riding breeches, and puttees. Shakhty was filmed for newsreels and a stand-alone documentary, and Krylenko’s shaven head glistened under the Jupiter lights.238 Radio broadcast the proceedings. Shakhty electrified the country.

Capitalists were gone, of course, so the prerevolutionary engineers and managers had to assume their roles.239 Of the fifty-three defendants, twenty pleaded guilty, eleven admitted the accusations partially, and the rest maintained their innocence. Those who denied the charges did not conceal their distaste for the Soviet regime, or their disbelief in the dream of building socialism but argued that being professionals, they could still perform their work conscientiously; their admission of hostile views, however, was taken as proof of engagement in sabotage. Krylenko quoted purported worker statements about abuse suffered at the hands of “vampires of the working class.”240 He “played to the gallery from start to finish,” one pro-Soviet foreign correspondent would later recall. “He never missed a chance to harangue the police-picked audience and draw their applause. There were times when some of the defendants applauded along with the cheering crowd.”241 But details in the confessions offered different dates for the establishment of the counterrevolutionary “organization.” The choreography was further disturbed when the German technician Max Maier (b. 1876) told Vyshinsky that he had signed his confession only because he was exhausted from the nightly interrogations and did not know Russian (so he did not know what he signed). When Vyshinsky asked Maier to confirm the guilt of the Soviet inhabitant Abram Bashkin, Maier called Bashkin the most conscientious engineer he knew in the Soviet Union, absolutely devoted to the fate of the imported turbines; Bashkin, sitting in the defendant cage, suddenly shouted out that his own earlier confession (minutes earlier) had been a lie. Vyshinsky declared a recess. Some forty minutes later, Bashkin reconfirmed his earlier self-incrimination.242

No one who was innocent would confess, it was widely assumed. Underneath the manipulations, moreover, lay concerns that were partly verifiable. Back in March 1927, the head of the foreign concession department for the air force was arrested, accused of deliberately buying poor-quality airplane parts from Junkers, and at inflated cost, netting the German firm a handsome excess profit, pocketing a hefty kickback, and damaging Soviet security. The official also was accused of divulging the state of Soviet aviation industry to German personnel in his private apartment, something that among professionals might look like shop talk but did cross the line over to espionage. Two months after his arrest, the air force foreign concession head was executed along with alleged accomplices. Merely out of mundane pecuniary motives, tsarist-era specialists, colluding with foreigners, could take advantage of the technical ignorance or bribability of poorly educated Soviet supervisory personnel. Of course, a preternaturally distrustful Stalin assumed that hostile class interests, too, motivated them. Either way, bourgeois engineers wielded potentially far-reaching power, and Stalin saw little recourse other than severe intimidation.243

The central figures of what was dubbed the Moscow Center were Lazar Rabinovich (b. 1860); Solomon Imenitov (b. 1865), the Donetsk Coal Trust representative in Moscow, who was accused of failing to report his knowledge of counterrevolutionary activity; and Nikolai Skorutto (b. 1877), an official in the Supreme Council of the Economy who was returning from the United States via Berlin and read about the arrests of his colleagues yet had continued on to Moscow anyway. Skorutto informed the court that he had confessed, but, according to a journalist witness, “the courtroom was electrified by an unearthly shriek from the box where the relatives of prisoners sat. . . . ‘Kolya,’ the woman cried, ‘Kolya darling, don’t lie. Don’t! You know you’re innocent.’” Skorutto collapsed. Vyshinsky recessed. After ten minutes, Skorutto spoke again, stating that he had decided to withdraw his confession. “I had hoped that this court would be more lenient with me if I pleaded guilty and accused the others,” he stated.244 Rabinovich, like Imenitov, denied the charges. “I am absolutely not guilty, I repent for nothing, I shall beg for nothing,” he stated. None other than Lenin had tasked Rabinovich, as head of the entire Soviet coal industry, with restoring the civil war‒ruined coal mines. “I have behind me fifty years of complete trust, respect and honor, as a result of my public and private life. I have been open with everyone. To the extent of my strength, I served the cause of the proletariat, which has viewed me with full trust and helped create a good working atmosphere for me. My work was conscientious to the end. I knew nothing of sabotage.”245 But Rabinovich had graduated from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute and begun his career in 1884; he was also a former Cadet deputy to the tsarist Duma—prima facie evidence of inimical class interests. Rabinovich requested a death sentence. He got six years: “I sleep as soundly in prison as in my own bed. I have a clear conscience and I have nothing to fear.”246 (He would die in prison.)

German ambassador von Brockdorff-Rantzau, whose height was said to help make him the “most conspicuous” dignitary in the foreigners’ section, was suffering from throat cancer, but he refused to depart Moscow for urgent medical treatment (he did give up cognac).247 The count was angry that no French or Polish nationals, only Germans, were in the dock, and lamented that his own advocacy for maintaining relations through thick and thin had made possible such abuse of his country for Soviet ends. Still, Izvestiya (May 29), at least, tried to ratchet down Stalin’s aggressiveness, writing that “the German Reich does not sit in the dock, neither does German industry nor German companies as such, only individual German citizens.” The German elections that Stalin had eyed when he approved the Germans’ arrests took place during the trial. The Social Democrats emerged the top vote getters at 9.2 million (30 percent of those cast), while the German Communists also gained, taking 3.2 million, cracking the 10 percent barrier, and coming in fourth place. The Beer Hall Putsch ban against the Nazis had been lifted, but they polled just 2.6 percent. On May 31, Voroshilov wrote to Stalin that the German high command was recommending that eight Soviet officers again this year visit for studies; the Germans would also want six observers at Soviet maneuvers, including General von Blomberg. Voroshilov interpreted this as a desire on the part of Germany to maintain surveillance over the growing power of the Red Army, and wrote that “the Germans consider the Red Army powerful enough to manage a confrontation with Poland and Romania.” He recommended accepting the German offer, and appended a list of proposed Red Army officers for reciprocal travel. Stalin agreed.248 None of this brought him any closer to acquiring financing for industrialization and state-of-the-art technology.

BULLY PULPIT (MAY–JUNE 1928)

Spring’s renewed wave of coerced grain procurements provoked sharp price increases, long queues, and pockets of starvation. Rationing loomed for the big cities.249 Trying to convey the despair and anger when armed squads, for the second time in a short period, had come looking for “hidden” grain, an official in the Urals reported the story of an old man who had hung himself: “His son had showed the commission all their reserves. They left them, 14 people, just 2 poods [72 pounds] of grain. The 80-year-old decided he would be one mouth to feed too many. . . . I am worried most about the children. What will be their impression of Soviet power when its representatives bring only fear and tears to their homes?”250

The OGPU directed its village informants—who numbered 8,596 Union-wide—to pay close attention to “anti-Soviet agitation” at private village pubs and any queues of women.251 Some localities had begun improvising rationing of what food they had to hand. Syrtsov was writing from Siberia (May 24, 1928) that peasants had no more grain and that Siberia’s own cities might face starvation.252 Stalin dispatched Stanisław Kosior, who took along his aide Aleksandr Poskryobyshev—soon to become Stalin’s top aide—to Novosibirsk. At the June 3 Siberian party committee’s “grain symposium,” for which officials had been summoned from every Siberian region as well as Kazakhstan and the Urals, Kosior emphasized the need to keep pressuring the kulaks with Article 107.253 Country-wide, grain procurement in the agricultural year through June 1928 would end up down only slightly from the previous year (10.382 instead of 10.59 million tons).254 But the late April resumption of “extraordinary measures,” on top of the drought, had further disorganized internal grain markets.255 By June, the regime would again begin to import grain. Most troubling, many farmers were unable to acquire seed grain to sow.256 Others were simply refusing to plant, despite secret circulars and press exhortations.257

Stalin would not be deterred. On May 28, 1928, he appeared at the Institute of Red Professors, located in the former Tsarevich Nicholas School, at Ostozhenka, 53; invites had also gone out to select students of the Sverdlov Communist University, the Russian Association of the Social Science Research Institute, and the Communist Academy, with no mention of the name of the lecturer, which heightened anticipation. In preparation, “cleaning women had given an extra wash and polish to the floors, workmen had cleaned up the courtyard, the librarians had displayed the best books, chimneysweepers had climbed on the roofs, and professors had lined up at the barber’s,” according to one young Chechen Communist at the Institute, who added that authorities had hung a full-length oil portrait of Stalin in the hall, but “the head, crudely cut out with a blunt instrument, was lying nearby on the floor.” The vandals had stuck a sign to Stalin’s painted chest, composed of letters cut from a newspaper: “The Proletariat has nothing to lose but Stalin’s head. Proletarians of all lands, rejoice!”258

A replacement portrait of Stalin seated next to Lenin at Gorki in 1922 was quickly installed. It is unclear who had perpetrated the vandalism. Trotsky and the Left had been enormously popular at the Institute; most student leftists had been expelled. What the students may not have realized, however, was that Stalin was about to make the most aggressive leftist speech of his life. Titled “On the Grain Front,” Stalin’s lecture reprised the heretofore unknown brave new world of his January 20 peroration in Novosibirsk.

Stalin again outlined a stirring vision of an immediate, wholesale agricultural modernization to large-scale farms—not of the individual kulak variety, but collectivized. Where no farms currently existed to collectivize, there would be newly founded massive scale state farms. “Stalin spoke quietly, monotonously, and with long pauses,” the Chechen Communist recalled. “Of course, Stalin had a Georgian accent, which became especially noticeable when he got nervous.” He “spoke for about two hours without stopping. He frequently drank water from a glass. Once, when he lifted the carafe, it was empty. Laughter erupted in the hall. A person in the presidium handed Stalin a new carafe. Stalin gulped down nearly a full glass, then turned to the audience and said, with a mischievous laugh: ‘There, you see, he who laughs last, laughs best! Anyway, I have welcome news for you: I have finished.’ Applause broke out.” After a ten-minute recess, Stalin answered written questions, some of which were irreverent: one student evidently inquired about the suicide note of the Trotsky supporter Adolf Joffe, another about why the OGPU had informants in the ranks of the party (these went unanswered). The assembled students also asked about the implications of Stalin’s speech for the NEP; Stalin answered with reference to Lenin’s dialectical, tactical teachings. “It turned out we were present at an historic event,” the Chechen Communist, in hindsight, would note. “Stalin for the first time set out his plan for the future ‘collective farm revolution.’”259 The speech was published in Pravda (June 2, 1928).260

Youth, alongside the working class, constituted Stalin’s core audience for the accelerated leap to socialism. Membership in the Communist Youth League had risen from 22,000 (in late 1918) to more than 2 million (of nearly 30 million eligible), making it a mass organization. About one third of party members by the late 1920s had once been Youth League members.261 Stalin’s apparatus was dispatching armed Youth League militants, among others, to villages, where they measured “surpluses” by the eye, smashed villagers on the head with revolvers, and locked peasants in latrines until they yielded their grain stores. In parallel, police arrests under Article 107 and Article 58 spiked again in May and June, provoking the onset of a spontaneous “dekulakization.” Many peasants fled to nearby cities or other regions; some even joined collective farms, fearful they would starve otherwise. But some peasants began to organize resistance. “The grain reserves in the village will not be turned over to the government,” resolved a group of peasants in Western Siberia’s Biysk county, where Stalin had secretly visited earlier in the year. Party officials began to try to prevent peasants from meeting, but in Biysk a poor peasant went to the rural soviet and told the chairman, “Give grain to us poor peasants. If not, we will take it by force. We will go first of all to the party secretary, and if he does not give us grain voluntarily, we will kill him. We must take all the grain and establish a clean soviet power, without Communists.” Elsewhere others were reported to say, “Let’s get our pikes and become partisans.”262 Rumors spread of a foreign invasion, and the return of the Whites. “The peasantry is under the yoke of the bandit Stalin,” read one letter received by Rykov’s government in June 1928. “The poorest peasant and worker is your enemy.”263

The siege Stalin was imposing generated evidence of the need for a siege, as the OGPU reported spreading “kulak” moods, Ukrainian “nationalist” moods, and “peasant” moods in the army.264 The general crisis that Rykov feared was unfolding.

Stalin had stopped speaking to Bukharin, just as he often refused to speak with his wife, Nadya—a silent treatment, which, in Bukharin’s case, too, baffled and infuriated someone who thought he was close to Stalin.265 In May and again in early June 1928, Bukharin sent letters, addressed to “Koba,” trying to get through. “I consider the country’s internal and external situation very difficult,” he wrote, adding that he could discern no thought-through plan of action, whether on taxes, manufactured goods, prices, or imports, nothing. Already the next harvest was upon the country. Incredulous, Bukharin stressed what he regarded as the scandalous fact that Jan Sten, a respected Marxist theorist, was saying that “the 15th Party Congress had been mistaken, that the Trotskyites had turned out to be right and were vindicated by history.” In fact, Bukharin wrote, “our extraordinary measures (necessary) are, ideologically, already being transformed, growing into a new political line.” He concluded by suggesting that after the upcoming Comintern Congress and Chinese Communist Party Congress in Moscow, “I will be ready to go wherever, without any fight, without any noise, and without any struggle.” Bukharin’s letter revealed that he just could not believe that Stalin would irrevocably alter the entire strategic landscape in a sharp leftist direction. “Collective farms, which will only be built over several years, will not carry us,” Bukharin wrote. “We will be unable to provide them with working capital and machines right away.”266

Stalin did not respond.267 But a row broke out at a politburo meeting on June 27 when Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov declared party policy in rupture, and Molotov denounced their declaration as “antiparty,” an ominous formulation.268 At this or perhaps at the follow-up politburo meeting, where Stalin formed a compromise commission with himself and Rykov, the worst confrontation yet between Stalin and Bukharin may have taken place. Stalin finally had deigned to receive Bukharin in his office. “You and I are the Himalayas—the others are non-entities,” Stalin flattered him, according to the memoirs of Bukharin’s wife. Then, at a politburo meeting, when Stalin laced into Bukharin, the latter divulged Stalin’s flattery of him, including the line that the others were “non-entities.” Livid, Stalin shouted, “You lie. You invented this story to poison the other members of the politburo against me.”269

SECOND TACTICAL RETREAT (JULY 1928 PLENUM)

Peasant anger continued to smolder. “The highest level of government is based on swindling—that’s the opinion of everybody down below,” one peasant wrote on July 4, 1928, to the Peasant Newspaper, adding, “The death of Comrade Lenin was a shame. He died early, unable to carry this business through to the end. So, you government comrades, in the case of war, don’t rely on the peasants too much. . . . Our grain goes to feed England, France, and Germany, while the peasants sit and go hungry for a week.”270 That same day another joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission opened, with its first few days given over to Comintern affairs. Then, on July 6, Mikoyan delivered a grim report. Foreign trade was in “an extraordinarily strained situation, more strained than in the last two years,” he observed. Oil production substantially exceeded domestic consumption, but oil exports could not generate the revenues that grain had (nor could timber, furs, sugar, and cotton exports). Grain exports had undergirded the tsarist industrialization spurt. Mikoyan grimly noted that perhaps no more than one third of tsarist export levels might be realistically attainable, unless Soviet harvests miraculously grew by leaps and bounds. 271 Disquiet coursed through the upper party ranks.272

Later that night, at 1:30 a.m. on July 7, Andrei Vyshinsky read out the Shakhty trial verdicts in the Hall of Columns. Four of the fifty-three defendants were acquitted, including the two Germans Ernst Otto and Max Maier. Four more were judged guilty but given suspended sentences, including Wilhelm Badstieber (who was acquitted under Article 58 but convicted under Article 53 for bribery). Otto and Maier, released within two hours, went to the ambassador’s residence; Badstieber, also released, had been fired by Knapp and refused to return to Germany. Count Brockdorff-Rantzau finally departed Moscow; no one from the foreign affairs commissariat showed up at the station to see him off.273 Procurator General Krylenko had demanded twenty-two death sentences, exclaiming “execution” after each name during his summation; in the event, eleven death sentences were pronounced, but six were commuted to prison terms. Altogether, nearly forty people went to prison, the majority with terms of four to ten years, though many got one to three years. Staging such public trials even under censorship and an invitation-only foreign audience had turned out to be no mean feat: the regime never published a stand-alone transcript of the imperfect spectacle.274 Still, a pamphlet summarizing the trial for agitators spotlighted how the wrecking was ultimately thwarted because the proletariat was strong, and exorted the party to bring the workers closer to production, enhance self-criticism to fight bureaucratism, become better “commissars” watching over bourgeois specialists, and produce new Soviet cadres of engineers.275 Stalin would assert that the Shakhty trial had helped “to strengthen the readiness for action of the working class.”276

At the plenum on the evening of July 9, Stalin gave no quarter to critics. The politburo, he stated, had resorted to extraordinary measures only because there had been a genuine emergency—“we had no reserves”—and he credited the coercion with saving the country. “Those who say extraordinary measures are bad under any circumstances are wrong.”277 Then he turned bluntly to grand strategy. Whereas England had industrialized thanks to its colonies, Germany had drawn upon the indemnity imposed as a result of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and the United States used loans from Europe, the USSR had no colonies, indemnities, or long-term foreign loans, leaving solely “internal resources.” On this point no Bolshevik could readily disagree. But Stalin sought to draw the full logic of the Bolshevik position. The peasants “pay the state not only the usual taxes, direct and indirect, but they also overpay in relatively high prices for industrial goods, first of all, and, second, they underreceive in prices for agricultural produce,” he explained, matter-of-factly. “This is an additional tax on the peasantry in the interests of raising industry, which serves the whole country, including the peasants. This is something like ‘tribute’ [dan’], something like a supertax, which we are forced to take temporarily, to preserve and advance the present tempo of the development of industry, to provide for industry for the whole country.” Stalin did not seek to prettify: “This matter of which I am speaking is unpleasant. But we would not be Bolsheviks if we glossed over this fact and closed our eyes to this, that without an additional tax on the peasantry, unfortunately, our industry and our country cannot make do.”278 Despite his apparent iron logic, however, his use of the term “tribute”—an expression not published at the time—provoked people in the hall.279

Stalin rejected other policy options, such as the calls by Sokolnikov, a plenum member, to raise the price paid to peasants for grain (by 25 percent). “Is it necessary to close the ‘scissors’ between town and country, all these underpayments and overpayments?” Stalin asked, in his now signature style. “Yes, unquestionably, they should be eliminated. Can we eliminate them now, without weakening our industry and our economy overall? No, we cannot.”280 Such, ostensibly, was the brutal “logic” of accelerated industrialization: “tribute” extraction trumped market concessions, at least for now. Might “tribute” become permanent? Stalin did not say. He did, however, portray the road ahead as still more arduous. “As we advance, the resistance of the capitalist elements will grow, the class struggle will become sharper, and Soviet power, whose forces will increasingly grow, will carry out a policy of isolation of these elements, . . . a policy of suppression of the resistance of the exploiters,” he asserted. “It has never been seen and never will be seen that obsolete classes surrender their positions voluntarily, without attempting to organize resistance . . . the movement towards socialism must lead to resistance by the exploiting elements against this movement, and the resistance of the exploiters must lead to an inevitable sharpening of the class struggle.”281

Lenin during the civil war had hit upon the idea of escalated resistance by implacable foes as their defeat approached.282 And before that, before anyone had ever heard Stalin’s name, Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Marxism in Russia, had noted that once capitalists realized they were a historically doomed class, they would engage in greater resistance.283 That said, Stalin’s assertion of a “sharpening of the class struggle,” like his use of the term “tribute,” struck many in the hall as unorthodox. But Stalin pointed to the peasant decision not to sell their produce to the state at low fixed prices as a “grain strike,” nothing less than “the first serious action, under the conditions of NEP, undertaken by the capitalist elements of the countryside against the Soviet government.”284 More than any other figure, Stalin for years had banged hard on the circumstances of capitalist encirclement, the hostility of the capitalist class elements inside the USSR and the dangers presented by the new NEP-era bourgeoisie (kulaks), the linkages between external and internal enemies, the threat of a renewed “intervention”—in a word, Shakhty. Shakhty was a colossal fait accompli, no smaller than the trip to Siberia. And in one of those uncanny coincidences that always accompany a well-executed strategy—that is, an improvisation in a certain strategic direction—the five Shakhty death sentences were carried out the very day of Stalin’s plenum speech.

Still, the Shakhty trial was over and a road back from “emergency-ism” remained. Immediately after Stalin, on the morning of July 10, Bukharin got the floor. Bukharin was still so afraid of falling into the trap of allowing Stalin to accuse him of “opposition” to the Central Committee line that he refused to air his differences, essentially failing to appeal to the large, top-level audience, upward of 160 people, including guests.285 Bukharin had admitted that kulaks were a threat and needed to be pressured, even expropriated—in other words, that coercion in the countryside was appropriate, up to a point. He had admitted that it was necessary to build socialism, necessary to industrialize the country, necessary to combat wrecking with vigilance. And Stalin, the tactician, had blunted Bukharin’s critique by his retreat at the April 1928 plenum, which Stalin took credit for without even having to follow through, thanks to a combination of induced events (coercion producing diminishing returns) and manipulations (Shakhty). Hounded by Stalin loyalists as he tried to speak, Bukharin insisted that the plenum discuss facts, and he told of some 150 major protests across the country, mentioning “a revolt in Semipalatinsk, violence at the Leningrad and Moscow labor exchanges, an uprising in Kabardiya”—all of which, and more, had indeed taken place.286 In fact, between May 20 and June 15, 1928, thirteen violent conflicts were recorded at labor exchanges in various cities.287 He cited letters from village and worker correspondents, evidently received by Pravda, where he was still nominally editor in chief, but Bukharin also claimed he had only just learned many of these disturbing facts of social unrest, and only because he had gone in person to the OGPU and sat there for two days, reading through the political mood reports (which, normally, were supposed to be presented to the politburo). Kosior shouted out, “For what did you incarcerate him [Bukharin] in the GPU? (laughter).” Mezynski answered: “For panicmongering. (laughter).”

Bukharin insisted, based on the evidence of discontent and social instability, that the extraordinary measures had to be stopped. “Forever?” someone shouted. Bukharin allowed that extraordinary measures might be necessary at times but should not become permanent, otherwise “you’ll get an uprising of the peasant, whom the kulak will take on, will organize, will lead. The petit bourgeois spontaneity will rise up against the proletariat, smash it in the head, and as a result of the sharpest class struggle the proletarian dictatorship will disappear.” At Bukharin’s picture of social crisis and peasant rebellion, Stalin shouted out, “A terrible dream, but God is merciful (laughter).”288

Amid the bullying, on July 11, Kalinin reported on state farms, and objected to the forced exile of kulaks, which risked the loss of their grain before new sources came on line. “Will anyone, even one person, say that there is enough grain?” he stated. “All these conversations, that the kulak conceals grain, that there is grain, but he does not give it up—these are conversations, only conversations. . . . If the kulak had a lot of grain, we would possess it.” Here was a politburo vote that Rykov-Tomsky-Bukharin might recruit for repeal of the emergency measures. But Kalinin also agreed with Stalin to an extent, calling the grain shortfall a consequence of a “productivity deficit,” which “pushes us into the organization of state farms.”289

Stalin spoke again that afternoon, polemicizing with other speakers, especially Tomsky. (After observing Stalin verbally assault Tomsky, Sokolnikov had another private meeting with Kamenev at which he said Stalin had appeared “dark, green, evil, irritated. A forbidding sight. . . . What struck us most was his rudeness.”)290 Tomsky, like Bukharin (and Rykov), had proposed stepping back from the brink. “You retreat today, retreat tomorrow, retreat the day after tomorrow, retreat without end—that’s what he says will strengthen the alliance” between workers and peasants, Stalin said. “No comrades, this is not true. . . . A policy of permanent concessions is not our policy.”291 And then, in a shock, Stalin capitulated: the plenum, unanimously, repealed the “extraordinary measures.”292 Grain prices were soon raised.293 Unauthorized searches and arrests in pursuit of grain and the closing of bazaars were made punishable offenses; Article 107 cases against poor and middle peasants were discontinued, and those peasants behind bars were released under an amnesty.294 Stalin’s multiple interventions at the plenum could leave no doubt about his deep-set commitment to the line announced in Novosibirsk and reprised at the Institute of Red Professors.295 But for the second time, he undertook a tactical retreat. Perhaps he wanted to avoid being the one who had forced a split vote and “schism.” Stalin also must have known that Bukharin had conducted conversations with other politburo members, including Orjonikidze, Voroshilov, and Kalinin, about removing him as general secretary at the plenum, which called for caution on Stalin’s part.296 That said, it was easier to retreat knowing he could just go back to Old Square and ring the OGPU.

INTRIGUE OF INTRIGUES?

The short-lived United opposition of Zinoviev and Kamenev with Trotsky had achieved little more than exacerbating their already extreme acrimony.297 Stalin had exiled Zinoviev and Kamenev internally to Kaluga, about 110 miles from Moscow, in early 1928. Zinoviev continued to beg for reinstatement in the party, writing an abasing article in Pravda in May 1928, inducing a pitiless Trotsky to observe, “Zinoviev resembles a wet bird and his voice from the pages of Pravda sounds like the peep of a sandpiper from the swamp.”298 Finally, in June 1928, Stalin had allowed Zinoviev and Kamenev, along with about forty oppositionists, to be reinstated.299 But Stalin’s minions appear to have deviously set in motion a false rumor that Bukharin and his allies had voted against Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s readmission, whispers that, predictably, sent Bukharin into a tizzy. Grigory Sokolnikov was reasonably close to both Kamenev and Bukharin, and it appears that Kamenev, during a trip from Kaluga to Moscow, told Sokolnikov about the rumor and Sokolnikov separately mentioned this to Bukharin, who in turn asked Sokolnikov to act as a peacemaker. Sokolnikov sent a letter to Kamenev in Kaluga, providing his Moscow phone number; when Kamenev called on July 9, Sokolnikov summoned him to the capital for a meeting with Bukharin.

How much this episode was fully planned by a supremely cunning Stalin, and how much was happenstance he managed to turn to his advantage, remains unclear. What is clear is that Stalin did nothing to tamp down the divisive rumor. Also clear is that any contact with Kamenev in exile would have been perlustrated or tapped by the OGPU. Sokolonikov, however, was scarcely the type willingly to participate in one of Stalin’s master intrigues. But Kamenev? He was able to travel unhindered to Moscow. Stalin had not even taken away his Kremlin apartment, where, on the morning of July 11, with the plenum still under way, Kamenev received another call from Sokolnikov. “The matter has gone much farther, Bukharin has had a final break with Stalin,” Sokolnikov stated. “The question of Stalin’s removal was posed concretely: Kalinin and Voroshilov went back on their word.” Here was a bombshell, related—over a tapped line—by a Central Committee member to a non-member, recklessly, fearlessly. Sokolnikov and Kamenev shared a bond—the only two people ever to call for Stalin’s removal as general secretary at a Party Congress, and Sokolnikov might not have abandoned that quest. Kamenev likely held on to that dream as well, but he also seems to have been eager, like Zinoviev, to return himself to favor and resume a high position commensurate with his self-perception and past. Shortly after the second phone call, Sokolnikov showed up at Kamenev’s apartment with Bukharin. (Sokolnikov would leave before Bukharin.) Kamenev, who had written notes of his conspiratorial conversation with Sokolnikov, did so again, depicting Bukharin as erupting in an emotional rant of disloyalty to Stalin.

“We consider Stalin’s line fatal for the whole revolution,” Bukharin told Kamenev, according to the notes. “The disagreements between us and Stalin are many times more serious than they had been with you. Rykov, Tomsky, and I unanimously formulate the situation as follows: ‘it would be a lot better if in the politburo we had Zinoviev and Kamenev instead of Stalin.’” Bukharin added that he spoke about this openly with Rykov and Tomsky, and that he had not spoken with Stalin for weeks. “He is an unprincipled intriguer, who subordinates everything to the maintenance of his own power. He shifts theory on the basis of who at any given moment he wants to remove.” After all these years together, Bukharin still did not know that Stalin was a hard-core leftist and a Leninist of flexible tactics. Bukharin did at least understand that Stalin “had made concessions” at the July plenum “in order to put a knife in us” and that Stalin “was maneuvering to make us into schismatics.” Bukharin also revealed that Stalin “had not suggested a single execution in the Shakhty case,” instead sitting back while others did it for him, appearing the moderate, while also making ostensible concessions in all negotiations. Still, Bukharin mocked as “idiotic illiteracy” Stalin’s two major plenum formulations: “tribute” from the peasantry and the sharpening of the class struggle as socialism grew. Kamenev asked Bukharin to elucidate the extent of his forces, and Bukharin named himself, Tomsky, Rykov, Nikolai Uglanov, some Leningraders, but not the Ukrainians (whom Stalin had “bought off” by removing Kaganovich), adding that “Yagoda and Trillisser”—of the OGPU—“are with us,” but that “Voroshilov and Kalinin went back at the last minute.” He also said that Orjonikidze “is no knight. He came to me and cursed Stalin, but at the decisive moment he betrayed us,” and that “the Petersburg [Leningrad] people . . . got scared when the talk got to the possibility of removing Stalin . . . there is a terrible fear of a split.”300

What in the world was Bukharin doing spilling his guts out to Kamenev, a non-politburo member and internal exile, about such top secret, weighty matters? Bukharin was hardly naïve. He flat-out warned Kamenev not to call him on the phone, which he knew was eavesdropped (Stalin had evidently once shown him a transcript of an intimate exchange between Zinoviev and his wife).301 He also told Kamenev they were being tailed. But Bukahrin appears to have been goaded by desperation. Kamenev noted that Bukharin’s “lips sometimes shook from emotion. Sometimes he gave the impression of a person who knows he is doomed.”302 And so, Bukharin had taken the risk. But his act also shows he had not abandoned hope. His main purpose appears to have been to deny the rumor that he had voted against Kamenev’s reinstatement in order to preempt Kamenev and Zinoviev from being recruited by Stalin against Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov. The notion that Stalin would have reinstated the two Kaluga exiles because he needed them boggles the mind, but Bukharin evidently assumed that Stalin could not rule the country by himself.303 Bukharin also did not believe Stalin’s faction contained people of stature (to Kamenev, he referred to the “moron Molotov, who teaches me Marxism and whom we call ‘stone ass’”). Thus, if Stalin, moving demonstratively to the left, was going to jettison Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov, it seemed to Bukharin that the Georgian would have no choice but to recall Zinoviev, Kamenev, and perhaps even Trotsky. The meeting was based upon sad misapprehension.

Kamenev, for his part, may have entertained similar delusions about Stalin needing his services in the shift to the left, but in Kamenev’s case Bukharin could well have been a means to an end.304 Bukharin told Kamenev that “Stalin knows only one means: revenge, and he puts the knife into your back. Let’s recall the theory of ‘sweet revenge.’” The latter referred to an anecdote about Stalin, retailed by Kamenev, said to be from a group picnic in the early 1920s, when someone asked what was the best thing in the world, the kind of question posed in a drunken state. Kamenev had supposedly answered “books,” Radek, “a woman, your woman,” Rykov, “cognac,” and Stalin, revenge against one’s enemies.305 Conspicuously, each person in the anecdote—which exists in many variants—was stereotyped: the bookish Kamenev, the womanizing witty Radek, the alleged alcoholic Rykov, the vengeful Stalin. But what if Kamenev was indulging a tinge of revenge himself against Bukharin, who, after all, had venomously ripped him at the 14th and 15th Party Congresses? What if Kamenev was ingratiating himself with Stalin? Kamenev was an intriguer of the first order. He had worked hand in glove with Stalin many times, including on the virtuoso intrigue against Mirsayet Soltanğaliev and the Muslim Communists. It is possible Kamenev set Bukharin up. Kamenev not only wrote down notes of a conspiratorial meeting but mailed them to Zinoviev back in Kaluga.306

Kamenev would later claim that he had planned to stay in Moscow awhile, and did not want to wait to tell Zinoviev in person. Perhaps this was true. And yet, could someone like Kamenev, who had spent fifteen years in the Bolshevik underground and who knew intimately the practices of the Soviet secret police, have doubted that such a letter—to Zinoviev—would get through without being intercepted and reported? Then there is the matter of the exceptionally damning portrait Kamenev painted of Bukharin. Bukharin would later complain that Kamenev’s notes “are written, to put it mildly, one-sidedly, tendentiously, with the omission and garbling of a number of important thoughts.”307 More precisely, Sokolnikov would observe that Kamenev’s notes “represent a specific interest in the sense of an assessment of the sharpness and sharpening of internal relations.”308

We may never know whether Kamenev meant to avenge himself against Bukharin and rehabilitate himself with Stalin by means of such a bizarre, tendentious document. Be that as it may, it was not Kamenev who had initiated the cockamamie tête-a-tête in the territory of the tightly watched Kremlin. Bukharin’s conspiracy with Kamenev—which he evidently undertook without the knowledge of his allies Rykov and Tomsky—handed Stalin a gargantuan gift. Bukharin had divulged politburo secrets to a non-member, and admitted an effort to remove Stalin, naming names. Rykov, summoned to a private audience with Stalin, found out that Bukharin was negotiating over secret politburo matters with the disgraced former Trotsky coconspirator Kamenev, in an effort to remove the general secretary. Rykov headed for Bukharin’s Kremlin apartment, lacing into him for being a “silly woman, not a politician.”309 Stalin could rely on Molotov and secondly Kaganovich, capable, thuggish organizers and executors of his will; Rykov had what? Tomsky, a tough but overmatched fighter, and Bukharin, who woefully lacked sufficient political calculation for the crucial regime position he occupied. Bukharin, thanks to Kamenev’s notes, had also managed to implicate Orjonikidze, perhaps the one Stalin loyalist who did not detest him. Orjonikidze was forced to explain himself before Koba. Yagoda, too, had to submit a written explanation to Stalin concerning Bukharin’s mention of OGPU support for removing the general secretary. All that from one false rumor about Bukharin’s opposition to Kamenev’s and Zinoviev’s reinstatement.

FUTURE BRICKS, PRESENT MALEVOLENCE

Signs of a world turning upside down were unmistakable. On July 12, Molotov closed out the Soviet party plenum with a report on the training of new specialists, pointing out the backwardness of the Soviet science laboratories and technical learning, giving examples of one Moscow school with equipment dating to 1847 and textbooks to 1895. He divulged that the vast Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic had a mere 117 students studying for Ph.D.s in technical subjects. Of course, the secret police and press, with Molotov’s rabid collusion, were hounding the few genuinely qualified bourgeois specialists.310 But Stalin was not going to remain beholden to these class aliens. During the Soviet plenum, the Sixth Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party came to a close in Moscow, the first Chinese congress convened outside of China. Eighty-four delegates attended (Mao stayed home). Moscow formally acceded to the formation of separate Chinese Communist army units, a process already under way, but Stalin still insisted they had to be under the Guomnindang flag, despite Chiang Kai-shek’s massacres. Chiang, for his part, had continued his military unification campaign, seizing Peking on July 6 from an ex-bandit and warlord (Zhang Zuolin, expecting Japanese protection, had retreated to Manchuria but was killed by a bomb en route). Stalin found himself still stamping out Trotskyite views inside the Chinese Communist party, even as he was now forcing through a version of Trotskyite views at home.311

Only the absolute keenest Kremlinologists could penetrate the fog of the regime. After reading the published version of Stalin’s speech to the Communist Academy, which recapitulated what the dictator had said in closed session in Siberia, Boris Bakhmeteff, the deposed Provisional Government’s ambassador to the United States, wrote in August 1928 to a fellow Constitutional Democrat in exile, Vasily Maklakov, that “the dictatorial regime cannot feel firmly planted and tranquil because the main sphere of the country’s economic life—agriculture—depends in the final analysis on the good will of the many millions of individual peasant proprietors.” Bakhmeteff deemed Stalin “one of the few remaining incontrovertible fanatics . . . despite the fact that the majority of foreign writers are inclined to see in him only an opportunist, leading Russia back to capitalism,” and noted that Stalin had “recognized that Soviet power must have the source of agricultural production in its hands,” just as it did industry. Bakhmeteff further pointed out that the farmers who were designated as kulaks—“even though in essence they are just lads possessing two horses and two to three cows and are not exploiters”—had gradually come to perform the function of old gentry agriculture, producing the surplus desperately needed by the governing authorities. Bakhmeteff laughed off Stalin’s earlier mid-1920s polemics with Trotsky and others over the NEP because now Stalin himself had begun to strangle these producers-kulaks, and noted that such actions were correct from the point of view of “Marxist logic and Communist doctrine,” which in place of private proprietors needed “bread factories, i.e., collective and state farms” that would “render sufficient grain to emancipate the regime from the whims and sentiments of the peasant masses.” Bakhmeteff even understood that “inside the party one can detect a current, which is much fiercer and faster than I thought, against Stalin’s new course.”312

But not even Bakhmeteff, indeed not even regime insiders, foresaw that Stalin’s momentous turn to force collectivization and rapid industrialization became centered upon a drawn-out, painstakingly sadistic humiliation of Bukharin. On July 17, the Sixth Comintern Congress opened in Moscow (it would run through September 1), with more than 500 attendees from more than fifty Communist parties around the world. No Comintern Congress had met since 1924, an embarrassingly long hiatus. Never mind: Stalin reached for yet another truncheon against his duumvirate partner. Already on the heels of Stalin’s return from Siberia, a plenum of the Comintern’s executive committee had already unmasked what was called a right deviation. Tomsky, a target, observed of the dirty campaign, “Every day a little brushstroke—here a dab, there a dab. Aha! . . . as a result of this clever bit of work they have turned us into ‘rightists.’”313 Bukharin had stopped turning up at Comintern headquarters, despite still being its de facto nominal head. Now Stalin’s agents spread rumors in the corridors of the congress that Bukharin’s days in the leadership were numbered, that he was next in line for internal exile to Alma-Ata. Trotsky, from there, made a contribution to paying Bukharin back for all his years of vicious slander, observing that the number of hours Bukharin spoke at the congress was in inverse proportion to his decision-making power.314 With the congress dragging on through the summer, in August 1928 Stalin inserted Molotov into the Comintern executive committee to ramp up the pogrom against “rightist tendencies.”315

Stalin did not take kindly to Bukharin’s efforts, dating back to the 1923 cave meeting, to curb his powers or even remove him as general secretary, but this was not Trotsky, where the enmity had been ferocious from the moment Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks in summer 1917 and grew to hatred. Stalin had been treating Bukharin like the younger brother he never had, or even like a son, despite the mere decade that separated them.316 When Bukharin lived in three rooms at the House of Soviets No. 2, that is, the Hotel Metropole, with his widowed father (a retired math teacher), and the residence became a gathering place for young acolytes and political allies, Stalin visited, too. In 1927, Stalin had moved Bukharin into the Kremlin. Esfir Gurvich, Bukharin’s second wife, a Latvian Jewish woman with a degree from St. Petersburg, continued to live separately from him back at the Metropole, but she had become close with Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin’s wife. The couple’s daughters, both named Svetlana, became boon companions at the Zubalovo-4 dacha. Bukharin rode to and from Zubalovo with Stalin in his Packard, an unheard of privilege. True, Bukharin and Gurvich observed Stalin’s abuse of Nadya firsthand, and later rumors circulated that because Gurvich was too well informed about Stalin’s private life, he drove a wedge between her and Bukharin. (The couple would soon break up.)317 But the causes here were significantly deeper, and entailed strategy over the building of socialism. Still, the malice was extraordinary. Stalin compelled Bukharin, the “theorist,” to write up the congress program documents, then humiliatingly crossed out and rewrote everything from top to bottom. The declaration of a Comintern surge to the left came out in Bukharin’s name.318 Stalin’s malevolence was palpable.

The irreconcilable schism cum civil war of the global left was also on gruesome display. The Sixth Comintern Congress fully institutionalized the slander of socialist (non-Communist) parties as handmaidens of fascists. Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist party, who had no love for social democracy, nonetheless viewed its class base (the working masses) as distinct from that of fascism (petite bourgeoisie and haute bourgeoisie) and objected to the “social fascism” slogan (“We think this formulation is absolutely unacceptable. Our delegation is decisively opposed to this bending of reality”).319 Bukharin, too, stated that “it would be a mistake to lump social democracy and fascism together.”320 But in the menacing atmosphere, where Molotov and other Stalin stooges held sway, “social fascism” was forced through for the rest of the left, the complement to the “right deviation” inside the Communist party.321

Stalin had delayed his regular Sochi holiday, originally scheduled to commence June 10, until August 2, during the Comintern Congress. His 1928 holiday is not well documented.322 We do know that Dr. Valedinsky brought in the renowned neuropathologist Vasily Verzilov and therapist Vladimir Shchurovsky, but we have no record of their diagnoses. Stalin appears to have voiced the usual complaints, pain in his muscles and joints, which was alleviated in the warm sulfur baths. He also talked with the physicians about agriculture and the need to strengthen state farms, clearly matters on his mind.323

Kamenev met with Bukharin at least three more times, although whether for his own purposes or as Stalin’s double agent, or both, remains uncertain.324 Kalinin, a state-farm proponent, in the end had sided with Stalin at the plenum, spurring rumors that Stalin held compromising material over his head (Kalinin’s liaisons with ballerinas were infamous). Stalin learned that Tomsky was vigorously trying to win over the general secretary’s wavering protégé Andreyev, among others. Stalin evidently wrote to Molotov in August 1928 that “under no circumstances should Tomsky (or anyone else) be allowed to ‘work over’ Kuibyshev or Mikoyan.”325

Because of the renewal of grain imports between July and September 1928, the USSR had begun to hemorrhage gold (145 million rubles’ worth) and other precious metals (another 10 million rubles’ worth). Foreign exchange reserves fell some 30 percent, down to just 330 million rubles. No one would lend money to the USSR on a long-term basis, so the growing trade imbalance could only be financed by short-term credits, whose renewal was costly and unassured. Soviet external debt rose to 370 million rubles.326 German banks began to question the advisability of rolling over short-term financing; Germany suffered its own decline in the flow of U.S. capital. “Difficulties are observed on two dangerous fronts: foreign-currency/external trade and grain procurements,” Mikoyan wrote to Stalin (“Dear Soso”) in Sochi on August 23, 1928. He claimed there was an incipient “credit blockade” against the USSR on the part of Germany, the United States, and France, with political and industrial circles agitating against doing business in the USSR because of uncertainties. “This dictates the necessity of cutting down the plan for imports; we’ll have to cut where it hurts,” Mikoyan wrote. “This year there will be large reductions in our pace of development as far as imports are concerned.” He called for greater attention to other exports besides grain. As for the “grain front,” he characterized procurements as very tense.327

The sense of general crisis was palpable. The geochemist-minerologist Vladimir Vernadsky (b. 1863) recorded in his diary in August 1928 that “when one returns from abroad, the expectation of war and the corresponding press propaganda astonish,” and that “in villages they say: war is coming, we’ll take revenge: the Communists, the intelligentsia, in a word the city.”328

Stalin lived in his world. “I think the credit blockade is a fact!” he wrote back to Mikoyan on August 28. “We should have expected this in the conditions of grain difficulties. The Germans are especially harmful to us because they would like to see us completely isolated, in order to make it easier for them to monopolize our relations with the West (including with America).”329 A few weeks later (September 17), in a better mood perhaps, Stalin wrote to Mikoyan again: “I was in Abkhazia. We drank to your health.”330 Whether Stalin appreciated the full seriousness of the alarming information Mikoyan was communicating remains unclear. Mikoyan also wrote to Rykov—who was on holiday away from Moscow as well—on September 19 about the incipient international financial blockade and the resulting forced reduction in imports. Mikoyan reported that long queues had formed in Leningrad as peasants descended upon the city looking for food, and that the partially failed harvest in Ukraine was causing ripples in all neighboring territories, too, as people roamed in search of provisions. The long letter concluded that Orjonikidze’s health had taken a bad turn and the doctors could not even agree on a diagnosis.331 Orjonikidze was sent to Germany for medical treatment.332 Rykov, before the month was out, would go to Ukraine to examine food relief efforts in connection with the crop failures there. “For over four years we have been fighting drought in Ukraine,” he stated at a speech carried in the local press. “The effectiveness of our expenditures obviously cannot be considered sufficient.”333

But also on September 19, Valerian Kuibyshev, the zealous super industrializer, told a meeting of the Leningrad party organization that a five-year plan for industry would go forward, and in ambitious fashion. “We are told that we are ‘over-industrializing’ and ‘biting off more than we can chew,’” he remarked dismissively of critics like Rykov. “History, however, will not permit us to proceed more slowly, otherwise the very next year may lead to a series of even more serious anomalies.”334 An irate Bukharin responded in Pravda (September 30, 1928) with a broadside titled “Notes of an Economist,” which was ostensibly directed at unnamed “Trotskyites”—meaning Kuibyshev and the party’s general secretary who stood behind him. Demanding balanced, “crisis-free” industrialization, Bukharin predicted that total elimination of the market alongside forced collectivization of the peasantry would produce unfathomable red tape, overwhelming the party. Of the industrialization “plan,” Bukharin mockingly wrote that “it is not possible to build ‘present-day’ factories with ‘future bricks.’”335

Building now with future bricks, however, was precisely Stalin’s proposition. He began but never finished a written response to Bukharin’s “Notes of an Economist.”336 Perhaps he thought better of granting Bukharin a public discussion. Once Stalin returned from Sochi, he had the politburo, over the objections of Rykov, Tomsky, and Bukharin, reprimand Pravda for publishing the article without Central Committee authorization.337 Nothing Bukharin had pointed out softened Stalin’s position. “No matter how well the grain procurements might go, they would not remove the basis of our difficulties—they can heal (they will heal, I think, this year) the wounds, but they cannot cure the disease until machinery raises the productivity of our fields, and agriculture is organized on a new basis,” Stalin had written to Mikoyan from Sochi on September 26. “Many thought that removing the extraordinary measures and raising grain prices would be the basis of eliminating the difficulties. Empty hopes of empty Bolshevik liberals!”338

A third wave of coercive procurements struck villages that fall of 1928 with greater force than the first (January-February) or second (late April-early July) waves.339 The pressure sparked peasant protests on a scale the regime did not foresee. Before the year was out, the regime formally announced the introduction of bread rationing in the major cities.340 The higher yields anticipated from improved seeds, fertilizers, tractors and other machinery, as well as the assumption that collectivized farming would outperform private, individual work, were nowhere in sight. Stalin continued to rebuff Bukharin’s murmurs about resigning, while publicly smearing the rightists as a grave danger to the party. “Instead of simply telling me, ‘We do not trust you, Bukharin, it seems to us that you conduct an incorrect line, let’s part ways’—which is what I proposed be done—you did it differently,” Bukharin would soon surmise. “It was initially necessary to smear, discredit, trample, then it would no longer be a question of agreeing to my request to resign but instead ‘removal’ ‘for sabotage.’ The game is absolutely clear.”341

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PEACEMAKER ORJONIKIDZE, back from medical treatment in Germany, wrote a long letter in November 1928 to Rykov, who was downcast and again contemplating resigning. “A conversation with you and with others (Stalin) persuades me that there are no fundamental differences, and that’s the main thing,” Orjonikidze wrote, absurdly. Still more absurdly, he added, “I am frankly imploring you to bring about reconciliation between Bukharin and Stalin,” as if that were within Rykov’s powers. What must Rykov have thought? Orjonikidze was a hard Bolshevik, a Georgian steeped in Caucasus customs, a person who had grown up without a father or mother, a man notoriously prickly and hot-tempered, yet he exhibited none of Stalin’s extreme vindictiveness. Orjonikidze, moreover, although as close to Stalin as anyone, seemed not to understand, or want to understand, him at this moment. He attributed the lingering bad blood inside the politburo merely to the recent grain procurement campaign, without acknowledging that such heavy coercion was the new permanent reality, and that Stalin perceived critics of this policy as enemies.342

Stalin went after Nikolai Uglanov. A onetime protégé whom he had promoted to boss of the Moscow party machine, and an indispensable persecutor of the Trotskyites, Uglanov had sided openly with Bukharin and was replaced by the all-purpose Molotov in late November. That month, Bukharin finally managed to obtain a long-sought audience with Stalin, which lasted six hours. According to Mikoyan, Bukharin told Stalin that he did “not want to fight, because it will harm the party. If a fight starts, you’ll declare us renegades from Leninism.” Bukharin added: “But we’ll call you organizers of famine.”343 Stalin, however, was immovable: on his Siberia trip he had declared his intention to force the country toward anticapitalism, and since returning to Moscow, he had additionally indulged a chilling malevolence toward close political allies and friends.